How shopping made me lose my marbles

I do like shopping but not at the same time as everybody else. It all starts at home. I am frantingly looking for that last slice of bread which is not too stale or too moldy. Just when I found one that has not yet gone the same color as my lawn I realise that I have nothing to put on it. Some eggs but I think they are about to hatch a dodo because I do not know how long they are there yet and that is it...

It's 11 pm and all I have is a not-so-green piece of bread an almost empty jar of jam and a baby dodo....all the shops are closed and the only ones that are actually open are these so called "night shops"...Especially designed for people like me...hungry, cold and alone in a kitchen. I went to one once...big mistake...I thought I was in St-Tropez or some other place where the jet-setting crowd lives.... Not because it was so beautiful that Versailles looks like a garden shed after a nuclear attack but because of the prices... How come hungry people at night are seen as stupid? Do they really expect me to pay 8 million Euro for a jar of jam the size of that tiny guy of Big Brother? I do not even have a small enough spoon to get to the jam in the first place...a loaf of bread...also astronomical...I wonder if they sell by the slice...

And the reason why I am being ripped off at night is old people....Whenever I try to go to a shop during normal hours the place is packed with old folk. Now before I go along, I do like old folk...really...especially when they are all in 1 place...I think it's called old folks home or something...Old folk don't move like Michael Jackson, even not now he is dead they don't move like Michael Jackson...Just to say they are slow... After a long day all I want is to pop into the shop, whiz around with that lovely trolley which has 4 wheels, all with a mind of their own making the thing harder to control then a moon landing buggy driven by a monkey juggling 5 flaming hamsters.

When you finally learn to control the thing all you want is to speed up, throw a loaf of bread into it, find a decent size jar of jam and get out of there... No go...why? 2 Reasons. Firstly the nice old folk...while using the trolley as a free walker they tend to stop unexpectedly almost causing you to create a pile-up in isle 7. Then they start reading the label of whatever they would like to eat only to find that the last E something something causes them to have an animated night filled with gas and trips to the bathroom...So they trot along. All that time you were standing behind them, blocked in front by a reader and behind you, guess...another one who found something to read...

At an end of an isle I usually try to make a run for it and on autopilot I go left, right and left again....only to bring myself to reason 2 why a shopping trip is never just a whiz around.... After the autopilot move I look up only to find myself between the big-ladies underpants....Why? Because the nice Marketing people found it funny to move the bread to the other part of the shop..again.. It's like landing on that "go to jail" spot at the Monopoly game...you try to avoid every difficulty on your journey and with 1 role of the dice you are back to square 1. For me it was again queuing behind old folk reading labels and making a run for it, this time in the opposite direction.

When finally, you are happy that you got your loaf of bread and your jam and you did not park that out of control trolley into a "buy 18 get 1 free" custard can pyramid and decide to stroll to the register. But what do you see there, always to my disbelieve...the same old folk in front of you as the ones you so frantingly were trying to outrun in the shop... Counting those microscopic copper euro coins as if their lives depend on it, only to find after 15 minutes of counting and re-counting with the friendly shop lady, they can't eat beans after all and wonder off without actually having bought a thing...

And that ladies and gentlemen is how shopping made me lose my marbles,