Friday 14^th March 2008

I had a bit of a tired and ineffectual day today. By seventeen o’clock, this had developed into a dull, thudding headache and a total inability to have rational thoughts. The last place I wanted to go was Sainsbury’s, but unfortunately we were short a few ingredients for tea and the only options in central Oxford are Sainsbury’s or Sainsbury’s Local. Anyone who says that supermarkets operate local monopolies on grocery shopping clearly doesn’t understand the world of difference between these two entirely separate institutions. ‘Local’, far from being a vacuous, meaningless suffix because locality is surely a relative concept anyway, is in fact making use of a definition of local not yet recognised by major English dictionaries; it means ‘expensive’.

I was browsing the rubber gloves in Sainsbury’s Normal when an attractive Chinese girl walked up to me clutching a bottle of sparkling wine. This kind of thing happens to me all the time, so I didn’t pay her much attention. Then, she spoke to me, in slightly faltering English.

‘Hab you got…fiber?’

I looked at her, a little confused. I think she may have said it again. ‘A fiver?’ I asked, quizzically. I am not in the habit of giving strangers money in supermarkets no matter how attractive they are. She wasn’t going to work her wily oriental charms on me and mug me. She would have to draw a weapon more threatening than some faux-champagne before this deal could go down.

Then, I realised: ‘Oh, a fiver! Have I got change for a fiver? Err…maybe.’ I got my wallet out of my back pocket, but she started gesticulating and making noises. Evidently this wasn’t what she wanted.

‘Fiber?’ she implored.

My fuzzy, tired brain scanned through its verbal spellchecker, trying to work out what she could possibly mean by ‘fiber’. It evidently wasn’t ‘fiver’. Nor, I suspected, was it ‘fibre’, because I very much doubted that her bottle of cheap plonk would contain any of that. Time was ticking away. My face was slowly screwing up. This was rapidly becoming more socially awkward than the last time I bought rubber gloves.

‘Can I ask, faiber?’ she paraphrased.

Then, I realised again: ‘Can you ask a favour?! I see! Well, maybe, what is it?’

She proffered the booze at me and explained that she didn’t have any ID with her; she was prepared to give me the money if I could buy it on her behalf, and give it to her outside the shop. (I was just as surprised as you that she managed to communicate this after the stilted thirty-second-long opening gambit.) Now it really had become socially awkward. Apart from anything else, arrangements like this are just plain annoying, turning a simple transaction between me and J. Sainsbury into a complicated three-way change nightmare. Throw in the fact that anyone asking this is probably underage anyway and so you’d be breaking the law, and the fact that I was knackered and just wanted to get my groceries and get to the till, and this was rapidly developing into the worst browsing of rubber gloves I’d ever been involved in.

My mind was racing, in infuriating tired slow-mo, to think of a viable excuse. I’m clearly over eighteen (it’s the beard which clinches it—that’s a tip, hairy male seventeen-year-olds: write it down), so that excuse won’t work; she’d offered to give me the money, so a tight budget could not be my excuse… ‘I…’ I started, ‘Err…’

‘Oh, you have no got ID?’ she offered helpfully.

‘Oh, sorry, no I haven’t,’ I replied, glad that her wild gesticulations had prevented me from opening my wallet and revealing my driving license back when I thought the conversation was something to do with a fiver.

She smiled and walked off. I was incredulous. After all the trouble she had gone to to make herself understood (or all the trouble she had gone to to provide the image of a helpless pretty foreign girl, stranded by language and lack of proof of age, depending on how manipulative she was), she had provided me with the simple excuse that I was too tired to think of myself.

I paid for my parmesan and rubber gloves and made off with them for an evening of spaghetti alla carbonara and washing up. I cannot recommend a better headache cure. But then I am not a doctor.

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