Loving Your Fellow Man

We've just been to Lidls. I'm not sure what was going on, but it feels as if we've just escaped from an interplanetary convention on Omega Four. There was a man in a suit shop-shadowing us as he blethered loudly into a mobile about breach of contract, and everyone seemed to have brought their entire families, with several generations blocking each aisle arguing about which brand of burger was best and whether to buy stick-on safety corners for their furniture.

But the star turn was a family of chavs. There seemed to be about 19 of them, although it may have been as few as six. There was a squat mother in a tracksuit, children from the mid teens down (none of them resembling each other) and a screaming infant. They looked misshapen, smelt appalling and shouted at each other at the tops of their voices, launching a multi-pronged attack on one's sensory system. In fact they were so environmentally unfriendly they should have required planning permission. They were also very hard to escape, doubling back on their tracks with sudden forays into cheese and yoghourt from nuts and crisps, or dividing to surge down two lanes at once. At one point we got caught in an unexpected pincer movement between frozen foods and toiletries. It was no accident that at the end one of only two available check-outs was occupied by them, and the other by a queue stretching halfway down the shop.

The children should have been at school anyway, but I suppose that would have been a waste of time.