However, I was recently forced to question my liking for old ladies whilst queuing to put myself through the inevitably rubbish experience of using the supermarket self-service cashier machines (in case you’re unaware of these, this is where several members of staff attempt to teach a machine that you’re old enough to legally purchase cheese). Just before this tedious experience, an old lady directly behind me leant under my right armpit (she was quite small) and half whispered:

“Excuse me dear, would you mind moving forwards because you’ve left a big gap. Someone could come along and fill it.” The gap that I had failed to fill was apparently putting the whole queue at risk of youths coming along and pushing in, she explained.

I lost my mind. Turning around quickly I punched this frail, half-whispering old woman hard in the face. I laughed out loud as she collapsed to the ground and I laughed out loud even louder as blood began to pour freely from her mouth where a piece of shattered denture had embedded itself into her gums. Cowering over her, menacingly, I said:

“You listen to me you mangy old trout. I left this gap so that anyone who may wish to pass through the queue with their trolley can do so without being impeded by us imbeciles waiting to use these bloody ridiculous automated shopping tills that have come straight from the devil’s arsehole. If some spotty youth comes along believing that the gap is an open invitation for them to fill it, we’ll just have to ask them to kindly take their place at the appropriate position in the queue as and when that occurs, OK? Might I politely ask you to stop interfering in my queuing technique and keep your gap filling anxieties to yourself, you ugly, smelly, wart-nosed old hag!”

With that, she managed to raise a thin wrinkly hand to point at a spotty youth who, typically, had come along at that moment and filled the gap by pushing in. I glared at the youth who then realised his small ignorant mistake and without any further prompting, made his way to the back of the queue where he quite rightly belonged (with the other spotty people).

As the old lady lay there on the floor in the bowels of my imagination (for this was where the action was really taking place), slightly unconscious and muttering something about spotty youths in ‘her day’, I felt a strange feeling of foreboding. It was not until I had been party to a ten minute farce in which I played the leading role taking orders from a machine that told me to pick up and then put down a bread loaf several times before requesting I hand it some money as a ‘thank you’ for the experience, that I realised the old lady was on her feet and staring at me with what could only be described as a look of utter contempt.

I was fairly sure that the old lady had psychic powers and knew what was in my head, but the paranoia thankfully dissipated, taking with it the immediate guilt generated by my slightly disturbing imagination. In reality what I had actually done to was to ignore her completely. For all I knew, this gentle, soft featured old lady may have single-handedly prevented the Germans from bombing Morrison’s during the Battle of Britain and it was a sad fact that all I had done to show my gratitude was to ignore this brave woman’s every word. Of course, the opposite may have been true. She may have killed her husband fifty years ago in a sordid fit of sexual depravity using a leather bound spanking paddle and pot of anti-burglar grease. Maybe she was on parole – maybe she was on heroin – who could tell?

Either way, I have since concluded that the only logical reasons for my behaviour are that I am a) mentally ill, or b) that this was my first subconscious attempt at selective deafness. Yes, that’s right, I said it was my first attempt at selective deafness. Hello – is there anybody there? I said it was my…oh, I see…crap.

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