Hello HedgeEnders.  Week four, and nothing much to say.  Nothing much has happened, really.  I think writing a weekly column’s going to be beyond me.  Let’s face it, not a lot really happens around here.  Not in my experience, anyway. 

Last Wednesday, for instance, just before midday, a dog of a day, raining, throwing it down, I found myself in Sainsbury’s.  Don’t worry, I wasn’t in my pyjamas; I was wearing black shoes, faded 501 jeans, a ragged old t-shirt, a black coat that’s losing its ability to keep out the rain.  I’d bought some toothpaste, some deodorant, two tins of soup (spicy parsnip and mushroom, since you ask), a pack of Tassimo Latte and no alcohol at all. 

Around me, the store was heaving. absolutely packed.  (Where have all the people come from?  Weekday mornings used to be so dead): The self-service and ten-items-or-less checkouts down by the dry-cleaners looked like the scene from the end of Titanic, before the one single lifeboat goes back, all those dead people bobbing up and down, so I did my usual trick and walked towards pet-food and nappies, where the smarter shoppers queue.  It was a bit calmer up there, just five or six people at each check-out, all waiting nice and orderly, the way God intended queuing to be. 

I joined the end of the queue and prepared to mentally switch off until it was my turn at the chip’n’pin.  (I’m not going to tell you what I think about in check-out queues because this is meant to be a mainstream column, not overly shocking or depressing at all, but it was along the lines of – if God exists, why this?).  The woman directly in front of me was a young mother; she had her little boy wedged into her trolley; he was happily dropping toys and shopping onto the floor; she was unhappily putting it all back in.  The bloke behind was in his fifties, heavily overweight, and reeked of wet cigarettes; I could hear every breath he took.  The rest of the queue was just a line of bobbing heads and I-pod percussion.   I stood and watched the rain run down the huge plate windows and thought what it was I was thinking.  After five or so minutes, though, I became aware we’d ceased to move forwards.  Wondering what was happening I peered past the young mother and her little boy to see what the hold-up was.

It was a little old lady, and I do mean little, and I do mean old.  She must have been at least ninety, possibly as old as a hundred, withered down to less than five feet tall, her silver hair all ragged and shiny from where she’d been out in the rain.  She was wearing an old brown Mac that swamped her shoulders. The sleeves came down over her hands.  She was struggling to get her items into her Bag for Life, but each time the checkout girl tried to help she smiled and said, No, you’re alright, love, then went back to struggling alone.   The checkout girl kept sitting back and trying not to scan things in too fast for the little old lady to keep up with, but she also kept glancing along the line of bottle-necked shoppers stacking up fast behind the little old lady as if she was scared someone was about to kick-off. 

None of us did, though:  We were all transfixed by the little old lady; even the toddler wedged into the trolley in front had stopped chucking stuff about and was staring at her with awe-struck blue eyes.  She was truly something to behold.   It was like watching death unfold.  Pick up an item.  Transport it towards bag.  Hold it – trembling – over bag.  Lower it into bag.  Place it down.  Release.  Withdraw arm.  Reach out for next item.  Hesitate.  Change mind.  Choose another.  Transport it up towards bag.  Again.  Again.  Again.  And, every few items, the checkout girl was like, Are you sure I can’t help you with packing?  And the little old lady was No, you’re alright, love, and on she went, a vision of slowness that seemed to transform all around her into grainy black and white footage, until, finally, the bag was packed.

In the queue stacked up behind her, everyone, without fail, released breath.

The man who smelled of wet cigarettes did so with a shuddering wheeze.    

Still, though, she had to pay.  She had one of those purses that was almost as wide as the mouth of her handbag.  It took her forever to get it out.  Then she couldn’t undo the little gold clasp.  The young mother was itching to help her.  You could see it in the way her hands kept clenching, unclenching.  The checkout girl was the same when the little old lady produced her credit card and moved it ominously towards the chip’n’pin – she sort of leant forwards, then made herself lean back.  Give the little old lady her credit though (no pun intended); she might have been slow, but she knew what she was doing.  Her bony old fingers were surprisingly nimble as she tapped out her pin, and her eyes were surprisingly bright as she peered at the display as if the four little hashes could confirm she’d typed it in right.    Amazing, really.  I mean, even if she was only eighty – and she really did look a lot older – she’d have been coming up ten when World War Two broke out, in her teens as it ended; she saw the Queen’s coronation, Churchill’s funeral; she’d have been alive for Ghandi’s visit, a young woman when Cliff Richard came on the scene.   Telephones weren’t everyday household items until she was in her fifties.  She was roughly the age I am now when man first walked on the moon.  When she, herself, was the age I am now, I was younger than the toddler in the trolley before me, if I’d ever been thought of at all.  The supermarket she was standing in was just a farmer’s field.  For the vast majority of her life, there were no credit cards for the likes of us; no bathrooms, no indoor toilets, no cars.  There were no home computers, or office computers.  No PC World.  No internet.  There were no mobile phones.   There were no superstores:  For the items in her Bag for Life, she’d have had to have gone to three or four different stores, small little places, in High Streets, run mostly by families who lived above them and laid out in such a way that the goods were behind the counter and you had to ask for what you wanted.  Back in her day, when she was the same age I am, most of these shops would have been shutting for lunch right about the time we were all watching her in that queue.  In fact, in the town I grew up in, as recently as the late seventies, only the Co-op re-opened on a Wednesday afternoon; the rest of the place stayed shut to compensate for the fact they had to work Saturday mornings.  On Sundays, High Street was dead, whereas the branch of Sainsbury’s we were all standing in wouldn’t be shutting again till midnight Saturday.  One day soon, it won’t even shut then.  

Finally, before us, the little old lady paid and put her credit card back in her purse.   Then she got her purse back into her handbag.  Then she got her handbag up her thin little arm and settled on her old, gnarly shoulder. 

Thanks, love.  Cheerio.

Thank you.  Have a nice day.

What’s that?  I’m a little bit deaf.

THANK YOU.  HAVE A NICE DAY.

Oh, thanks love.  Bye then.  Bye.

Her Bag for Life looked heavier than she was.  She hefted it up and stepped into the stream of shoppers moving towards the exit.  She moved so slow they seemed to speed up around her.   She disappeared among them within seconds.  The wheezy bloke behind me let out another sopping wet sigh. 

Poor old dear.

    Yeah, I thought, poor old dear.

Hope they shoot me before I get to that age.  

Mate, I thought, listening to the sound of your breathing, I don’t think they’re going to have to.

But, still, I knew what he meant.  God knows what life’s going to be like for us if we’re still around in another forty or fifty years time.  It’s changed so much in the last ten years alone.  I dread to think how much faster it’s going to be, how much change we’ll have to get our heads around.  It’s like there’s not enough going on to write a weekly column about, and yet, all the time, hardly anything at all stays the same.  

So I’m with the wheezy bloke behind me on this one: Even if it does mean I’ve only got another thirty odd years left in me, I’m sort of hoping I won’t be around for much longer as well.