Jonola14

OLD BAGS

Has it really been nearly three months since my last entry? That is a despicable effort on my part and I apologise once again. However, one story that does stick out is the one about the old bags in the post office.

It was a warm afternoon earlier this summer, just after lunch in fact, and I had wandered down to the post office to send off some e-bay items. But, as is almost always the case, there was a queue. Three people serving behind the counter and there’s still a bloody queue, typical. So there I stood, packages in hand, waiting patiently in an enlarging queue for my turn to be served when I realised the cause of the delay. There was a woman, about 60, at the counter, blathering on about nothing in particular and holding up the rest of the queue. Only she wasn’t blathering quietly. OH NO. She was announcing her conversation like she had a megaphone to her mouth and the entire queue, all the serving staff and even the guy at the lottery counter over the other side of the building were forced to listen to her latest personal crisis.

Two minutes passed and my tapping foot was beginning to kick harder and harder at the metal pole blocking me from the counter. Eventually, the woman broadcasts the fact that she had “better go now because there’s a queue” and she collected her things from the counter. But it is what she added to that sentence that is so bizarre. Taking half a pace towards the door, then turning back to the counter again, she proclaims to the assistant “and if you’re wondering why I’ve got plastic bags on my legs, it’s because I’ve got a skin disease”, at which point everyone in the queue looked further than the bottom of her dress to her feet where, sure enough, there were two Tesco carrier bags quietly rustling away.

Some were stunned, most didn’t know where to look and I just grinned in disbelief. She had been standing there for several minutes, jabbering and babbling away without a care in the world and nobody had noticed the fact that she was wearing a pair of carrier bags around the bottom half of her legs. Only when she announced it did everyone actually take stock of that fact and why she aimed the comment at the assistant who couldn’t see her legs anyway because there was a COUNTER IN THE WAY, I’ll never know.

Besides which, why didn’t she bloody well just wear trousers?