I need a superstore just for me

I SEE Sainsbury’s in Newcastle is trying out a “slow shopping” session to help elderly and vulnerable customers.

This is a brilliant idea. So brilliant I think it could be extended to having special sessions for all the other people who get on my nerves in the supermarket.

Like pairs of middle-aged couples who stand with their trolleys in the middle of the aisle gossiping to each other for minutes on end without making any attempt at buying anything and shooting you dirty looks if you ask politely if you can squeeze past them to, well, you know, get on with your ruddy shopping which is what we’re all supposed to be there for in the first place!

Like children. Well yes, I do, in small doses. But not when they insist on pushing their mother’s trolley when they’re so small they have to reach up at full stretch to get a grip on the handle and consequently have no control over its direction of travel – although it does seem to have an unerring knack of finding my ankles – and then screech at full volume if mummy so much as

As a philosopher once said, hell is other people

suggests that they might not after all be fully equipped to carry out this task and would be better off sitting in the trolley along with all the other things mummy once believed would enhance her lifestyle but now sees mostly as a huge drain on her finances.

Like people who don’t realise that you get a better view of what’s on the shelves if you stand well back and scan them panoramically rather than getting in as close as you can and inching your way along thereby making it impossible for smarter people – who by deft use of the wide-angle method have already spotted the position of the thing they want – to get in to the shelf to pick it up, put it in their basket and move on to the next exciting purchase.

Like people . . . well, as you can tell, the list is verging on the infinite because, as a famous philosopher once said while the woman in front at the check-out rummaged in her purse for a coupon, hell is other people.

So perhaps what supermarkets really need is a session just for me. Nobody else. No one.

I think it’s called online shopping.