Grrrrr.

It all started going horribly wrong when they started letting men into shopping centers.
If a man was supposed to grocery shop, he would be born with a second head hidden in his neck ala-Zaphod-Beeblebrox, female of course, which would at the very least scream out directions like, "LEFT!", "RIGHT!", "STOP!" and the very necessary, "STOP PARKING YOUR TROLLEY IN THE MIDDLE OF THE AISLE YOU DIMWIT!"

It's bad enough that platteland shops are filled with a myriad shoppers who have never been in a shop bigger than the local corner cafe and whose idea of a fun-filled morning with the kids is letting them run amock amongst the pilchard tins freely attempting the decapitation of toes all around them.  Add to this a couple of old people from the local aged home allowed out for a morning to restock their wafer shelf, and any attempt of reaching for a tub of biscuits to make a baking crust for cheesecake is thwarted by a row of wheelchairs racing in slow motion and a clicking maze of walking sticks. 

The worst is that I really do go out of my way to buy only the unperishable essentials at such stores.  But this means that I am left with three packs of braai wood, one roll of puff pastry and a tub of gelato in a trolley in a queu for 10 items or less that is a hundred people strong, with four people the size of small cars jostling for the single spot in the row in front of me, all buying ELEVEN items for the same household.

I heard a single, solitary, "Excuse me.  ....Sorry..." behind me as a young lady tried to pass through my row and into the hoardes behind me.  I nearly wept at her politeness, turned and caressed her face lovingly and asked her to introduce me to her parents.
Somewhere in this mad hive of battered chicken making buyers exists a young woman with manners.  One.  And she has shown me up.  Because the hive mind is infectious and I too have spent the last hour (45 minutes of it in the 10 item or less queu) with a steely face, not saying a word but instantaneously combusting people with my eyes, boring holes into the back of their heads.  And here is someone whose actions are, I imagine, on some cosmic level, an opportunity to inspire me to be a better person in the midst of the adversity of Saturday morning grocery shopping.

Screw that.  I think my lesson of choice is:  either chop your own wood or never braai again, get a cow to make your own gelato and learn to make puff pastry from scratch. 

-Soba