Window cleaner and frozen peas

A new head of sport turned up.  I showed her around the school and noticed that where ever I took her there was instant silence and, quite extraordinarily, a feeling from the pupils that was almost akin to respect.

After we got back to HB’s domain and I left her with our acting head, I told Janice.  She gave me one of those curious looks she reserves for when I am being particularly dense.   “You don’t know who she is, do you?” she said, and I admitted that apart from being our new acting head of sport, I had no idea who she was.

It turns out she is a woman who runs some sort of keep fit programme on television, in which instead of telling everyone not to eat so much she emphasises the need to exercise far more.  I had never heard of her, but I wondered what effect she might have on the female teachers all of whom seem to be on diets all the time, but none of whom ever talk about taking more exercise.

After work I went to Tesco to replenish the rather depleted stocks in my house, and saw a new promotion of small local brand smoothie bottles.  Buy four get, collect some coupons, get a free TV licence or something like that.

It was only when I was removing the bottles from my trolley and putting them on the moving tray that carefully delivers them the two yards to the check out girl that I realised one of the bottles was cracked.  But I realised too late for as I went to put it down again it fell apart, hitting the side of the conveyor belt before breaking and spraying its contents partly over my shoes but mostly over the lady standing next to me.

I apologise profusely, of course, and the lady (who I guess was in her early 40s, and whom I was sure was a parent of one of the pupils at school) started to get rather annoyed.  We both turned to the check out girl, but she just looked at us.  “Can’t you get some materials to help clean this up?” I said, but she just said that she had been told not to leave her station.

In the face of such inaction I was ready to walk back to the entrance lobby where the supervisors tend to gather in clusters, when the woman whom I had sprayed began shouting and demanding action.   A large security guard ambled over to her and asked what all the noise was about.  Despite him being six inches taller than her and looking extremely large and tough she moved within inches of his face, shouting all the time, demanding full compensation for her outfit and threatening legal action.

Two senior members of staff turned up, but the woman would not back down.  Far from it in fact, as she started to offer to take them all on there and then.

I turned away and looked for a way to pay for my goods and get out when a quiet voice behind me said “Toxoplasmosis”, and there was Havoc Blythe creeping up on me again.  (How does he do that?)  He had a shopping basket (not a trolley) with window cleaner, two pears and a packet of frozen peas.  “It generates aggression along with the risk taking.”

He led me to another checkout, and we proceeded through.

This entry was posted on 25/11/2008 at 12:21 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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