Roll on September.

Oh. what joy ! I have just been to Sainsbury’s to do the ‘weekly shop’, only to discover that the school summer holidays have started, and that the place was full of mothers accompanied by their little angels.

So not only did I have to avoid all the usual trolley (cart) zombies blocking the aisles and clogging up the checkouts, but I also had to watch out for the football (soccer) game in the bakery section, the tantrums amongst the fruit and veg, and young ‘Johnny Depp’ slashing at everything in sight with his plastic cutlass. Oh! and I almost forgot, the kid trying to decapitate his little sister with the glass door of a freezer cabinet as she was reaching for the ‘Nobbly Bobblys’.

Now it may be my imagination, but all these young mums seem to have at least three kids in tow, or more likely not in tow, judging by the shouts of .. “Go and find your brother” .. “Put that back on the shelf !” .. “Come back here, or you won’t get a Happy Meal”; but I have to say that I was impressed by many of these women’s ability to shepherd their brood around the store and load their trolleys with one hand, whilst clamping a mobile phone to their ear with the other.

I noticed that the in-store cleaner was much in demand with calls to .. “a spillage in aisle number seven” .. and “Danger ! .. Wet Floor !” signs were much in evidence where someone’s screaming little darling had either “done a tinkle” or dropped their super sized ‘Slush Puppie’.

I suppose that I should have been warned before entering the supermarket by the giant ‘Yogi Bear’ display at the entrance and the number of cars parked in the ‘mother and child only’ bays. Not to mention the ‘shell shocked’ old biddies who were leaving the store muttering things like … “In my young days” .. and .. “clip round the ear”.

Now I never did understand why healthy young women and children needed to park close to the store entrance, so I would suggest that, at this time of year, supermarkets suspend those ‘mother and child only’ parking bays and in their place erect large barbed-wire cages where parents can deposit their ‘hyperactive’ rampaging offspring, but I suppose that the problem would be that many of them would still be behind the wire …

…     when the store closed.    

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