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A Surreal Garden Blether Ever have a 'surreal' day? A grand idea. Now there's a Garden Superstore a mile or so out of town, at the retail park. Not been there for a while, I mused, so this would suffice. Do some food shopping at the same time, buy a CD from the music shop ('Bruce MacGregor' or 'Blazing Fiddles'), a bag of chewy dog bones from the pet shop and maybe - just maybe - substitute my earlier notion of coffee and cake for a burger and chips from one of the fast food outlets instead. Handy, aren't they, these retail parks? Very convenient. Everything on tap, all in the same place. So I parked the 'people carrier' (very
posh, I know, but ideal for transporting goats, hay, plants, children and
gardening equipment) and headed for the Garden Superstore. Now while I was
pottering about, checking the price of compost, inspecting the perennials,
that sort of thing, I was approached by an elderly lady who engaged me in
conversation, a conversation that went something like this: A short while later - having returned to
the shop - an elderly gentleman laid a hand on my shoulder (very
impertinent) and engaged me in a conversation as well: something along the
following lines: And then the penny dropped. I was wearing faded jeans and a dark green t-shirt, the same as the staff here except for a barely visible logo below the right shoulder. As the irritable old gentleman took off in the direction of the hand-decorated pots, I chuckled quietly to myself. After this experience, I decided, I wouldn't fancy being a shop assistant, not if this was the attitude regularly adopted by the customers. Undoubtedly a thick skin and a sense of humour are necessary pre-requisites for this sort of job. My stomach told me that it was time for food, so I traversed the car park to one of the places that sold burger and chips - a 'Burger and Chips' place - where I was pleasantly informed by a man in a brightly coloured hat that today was 'Special Offer' day - simply collect four cereal packet tokens, recite The Lord's Prayer backwards, stand on one leg with a finger up your nose (all at the same time, mind) and qualify for a free donut with accompanying toffee sauce (but only between the hours of nine and ten in the morning - something called a 'happy hour'). Alternatively, present an empty packet of non-biological washing powder (5.4kg size) and a receipt for a well known brand of toilet roll (nine pack, quilted) at the counter to receive a free 'Demented Harry' (a soft drink apparently). Surely this was a wind up?
Obviously it was time for home, time for a cheese and lettuce sandwich in the sanity of my own kitchen, then a dignified retreat to the polytunnel to contemplate my navel. So that's what I did - home, sandwich,
polytunnel, navel. [back to Articles / Article Archives]
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A 5.4kg packet of washing powder is very
large, is it not? Not the sort of thing that you would normally buy
for the average family, and most definitely a reinforced trolley item, not
a basket one? Now I know that gardener's are prone to exaggeration -
aren't we all? (Cucumbers the size of cricket bats, tomatoes as big as
footballs, grapes like melons, that sort of thing). But this was taking
things a bit too far if you ask me. Ridiculous in fact.