Grunt 12 September 2012

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Grunt 12 September 2012

I’m not a great fan of mall-crawling on Saturdays – the tribes are loose, congregating with their extensive familial entourages and blocking up the aisles and alleyways – but sometimes it has to be done. Especially if you’ve just arrived back from a few days away and there are simply no comestibles in the house. I mean, you really don’t want to die of thirst or starvation in your own home because you’re allergic to mall-crawling. So off we go. Obviously, we expected queues, and that’s where it all began. One place had particularly long queues, but we shuffled onto the tail end, moving forward with speed of a sloth on anti-depressants. Suddenly, my legs and ankles were being brutally assaulted by a child’s pushchair, driven by a grandmother built like a well-upholstered three-seat sofa. After she indulged in another two or three smacks at my anatomy, I turned around and glared. She apologised lamely, blaming the pushchair. There was no child in it. I turned back. As I did so, she tried to manoeuvre the child-wagon past me sneakily as the queue had yet to be confined by the guiderails. She bellowed like a water-buffalo, to attract her daughter’s attention. She didn’t. Happily, the guiderails thwarted her attempted overtaking manoeuvre but did not prevent her thumping the pushchair into my ankles yet again. Ahead of us was a female with three boys. One stood almost catatonic with the trolley; the two younger ones treated the entire shop like an outward-bound obstacle course. They ran, shouted, crawled under, and scrambled over trolleys, customers, and shelves. The mother did what many mothers would do in such circumstances – nothing. We were more than halfway towards the tills. The kids were in the shop, and now they wanted to get to mother. After wheedling their precarious way past the sofa-lady, one boy prodded my wife in the ribs, and signalled that she must move out his way. I exploded genteelly; his mother made him apologise. Some parents really shouldn’t have children – and vice versa. And no more Saturday mall-crawling for us either.

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