The Revolution Will Not Use The Self Service Till.

 Was in M&S yesterday. I walked there in the pissing rain, but dry and comfortable in my new walking boots. I looked like a tramp: t-shirt, boots, stubble, glasses and wild hair, the uniform of the serious comics collector, or perhaps a newspaper hoarder. Someone you keep downwind of on the bus. 

I queued for a till. M&S is always busy on a Sunday, but I'd waited out the lunchtime rush, and the rain had probably kept other pedestrians away. I've stopped using the self-service option because I don't work for M&S, and I resent somebody standing at the door checking receipts. I'd not seen that here, but I had seen it in supermarkets, and it fucks me off. Either trust people to check-out their own groceries or admit you don't trust your customers, and pay someone to ring up their goods for them. There's no third way, clowns. 

There was a man in front of me, and the severe looking woman working the till was briskly scanning his assorted dinners. I unloaded my basket: garlic bread, a lasagna, two eclairs, a bottle of Beaujolais, a loaf of sourdough. Hey! The diet starts again tomorrow. In earnest. 

The man bagged his stuff and paid and she removed the checkout divider (I had to google what they're called). 

"Rotten day, isn't it, luv?"

Oh, she was talking to me. I was alright. Better than the last guy. Sweet. Wait till she clocks the accent though. 

"Tell me about it," I said, "It's brutal out there."

"Aye, classic Belfast summer." We chuckle. She scans my wine. My accent's fine. 

"Should have come earlier. It was lovely earlier."

"Aye, but it's Sunday. We wouldn't have been open."

This is true. In Belfast the shops don't open until until one in the afternoon on a Sunday. No, really. The sourdough gets shunted down the conveyor belt. I place it in my tote bag, the one I accidentally paid seven quid for in HMV and am now on a mission to get value for money out of. It's getting used till it looks like a doily. 

"I was talking to my daughter in Edinburgh. She was moaning at me that she started her shift at 10 O'Clock this morning."

"She works in M&S too?"

"Aye."

"It's a family affair!" She, wisely, ignores me. 

"I wouldn't mind opening at 10. It's more money. But it's the bloody DUP."

"Ah."

"I've worked in supermarkets thirty years. They used to open at 10 on a Sunday morning. Like other places."

"Really? What happened?"

She looks incredulous. 

"The bloody DUP!"

"Of course."

"Always, the bloody DUP." I say something about them wanting to tie up the swings so the kids can't play on them*, and we laugh and I pay and she waves me off and we're both beaming. It was a brave thing to do - to slag off the DUP in an M & S in East Belfast. But I suppose it was Sunday - the DUPpers should be off somewhere else, joylessly worshiping their narrow God. But at least we'd had a laugh. 

Definitely not laughing was the man in the queue behind me. Bald head. Thin lips. Glasses. Face like Biblical thunder. He wasn't one bit amused. 

Ha. 

*They used to do this too.