Unexpected items in my local area are changing the parish for the worse

Disaster has struck. My local SuperValu has installed three self-service tills. Obviously, I am considering moving house. I appreciate that my obsession with SuperValu — regular readers will be aware that I like to spend my summers happily touring the country and comparing the stores in different towns — is not one shared by everyone, but I can testify that my sense of absolute betrayal and gloom at this latest development is being widely felt throughout the whole community. I tend to exempt my own SuperValu from my national league table of stores for two reasons: one, it’s a very small building and so can’t possibly carry the same range of fabulous things as the Dingle or Clonakilty outlets, and two, it’s kind of a sacred space for me and the last thing I need is busloads of nosy SuperValu tourists clogging up its compact aisles.

On the day we moved into our family home just up the road from this magical place, I queued at the check-out with a basket of provisions, eavesdropping on an extremely technical critique of whatever Harry Potter film had just been released, courtesy of the middle-aged check-out attendant and the woman whose groceries she was scanning. When I looked up again, I realised that although the conversation had continued without any discernable break, it was now a different — though equally middle-aged — customer whose two cents on Harry Potter were now being aired. In that moment, after seven years living in London, I knew I was home.

I have been hanging around down there most days in the 23 years since. The shop actually only became a Super Valu a few years after the start of the affair, but the women, the ethos and the standard of amaThis teur film reviewing remained the same even if the uniforms changed. Up until last week, I had always favoured the checkouts at the off-licence counter because of the speed of the process and the quality of the weather checks and catch-up chats with Barbara or Amy and the other women working there. Sometimes, we would feel each other’s hands in order to gauge which of us was colder. Now though, all is changed, changed utterly.

I wandered in last week with a skip in my step and without any sense of foreboding and there was the off licence counter, gone. And in its place, three forbidding self-service tills, a line of haunted-looking customers and one seriously unhappy attendant who, between exasperated cries of ‘left to right!’ and ‘you have to put it in the bagging area!’ readily agreed with my assessment that this is probably the worst thing that’s ever happened in the parish.

might be my problem now, but selfservice tills are also, it’s fair to say, a universal challenge. There is the initial confusion over the direction the goods move in — ‘left to right!’ I now know; there is the fact that an attendant has to swear an online affidavit if you buy alcohol (which in my case, is most times I’m down there) and there is the frustration that buying unpackaged fruit and vegetables might be good for the planet but it seems to confuse the self-service tills hugely. Already, and we are only a week in, I am just randomly choosing the vegetables that appear on the list first without any real idea if they’re cheaper or dearer than my red pepper and if I’m consequently ripping off SuperValu or myself. Meanwhile, I still haven’t figured out how to swipe my rewards card, everyone at the tills is in bad humour and basically everything is ruined.

If this was the only catastrophe to hit the parish, I might be able to stay. But in an astonishing — and physically sickening — further development, South Dublin County Council is currently in the process of cutting down some of the mature trees to make what looks like a cycle path. As a cyclist, I’m generally in favour of dedicated cycle paths, but on the basis that I am pretty much the only person who cycles up and down this road and it is almost as wide as the Bray esplanade, this seems to me an extraordinarily short-sighted act. Worse, as the lone cyclist that the route serves, I feel as though it’s my fault.

So there it is. All things considered, it might be time to move. As Harry Nielsen nearly sang, I’m going where the sun is shining through the pouring rain, where the women in SuperValu can discuss that unusual weather state of affairs and where they don’t cut down trees on my behalf without even asking. Suddenly, Dingle has never sounded more tempting.