Retail Flagellation

Sitting in the coffee shop in Border's bookshop in Chermside with Nicole today - my day off - I found myself experiencing a perverse enjoyment at my situation.

From the endless, desperate tour of the huge subterranean car park trying to find a space to negotiating the sagging crowds of flabby exposed flesh and faintly bored or miserable pram-pushers in the hermetically sealed other-world of plasma posters and perfect images to the endless racks of "ladies' wear" and XXL cargo shorts to the vague half-hearted struggle to remembering what we were actually there for, it was a deeply, subliminally, soul-destroying experience.

We saw a sign offering nice, guided walks around the safe and comfortable environment of the shopping centre, would you believe, just to get some exercise, for a mere three dollars.

We saw a "gentleman of size" roll up to a counter in the bookshop on his motorised chair/buggy/bike thing, ask what exactly a 3 for 2 offer was, before hopping off, walking merrily to the coffee shop counter before gaily returning to his buggy to extol the delicious virtues of the obviously wonderful milk-shake he was half-mouthedly draining, bright and lurid pink in its plastic straw.

I saw some mothers pushing a pram around Target comparing offers for a few cents off some irrelevant nothing and then getting a Coke from the vending machine outside.

So I suppose I was feeling pretty damned self-righteous to be such a well-adjusted morally correct bastion of non-class and balancing that with a small measure of catholic guilt at the contempt in which I held my fellow human being and the fact that, as opposed to them, the majority of my time is not spent in adding value to anything in any way that can be measured in pounds shillings or pence, an activity which these people seemed to indulge for the sole purpose of being able to exist in that very space precisely in order to perform the exact reverse.