99 YEARS OLD AND STILL BEFUDDLED BY BAGGING...

POPPING into a supermarket in search of something to nibble with my morning coffee, I was delighted to come across a pack of sea salt enhanced chips reduced in price from £2.09 to only £1.

I flung it into my basket at once, of course. The price drop, I reasoned, meant that I was saving £1.09 and since I was spending only £1, that left me with a clear profit of ninepence.

Most of the suits in my wardrobe at Beachcomber Towers have been acquired through similar reasoning. I am perfectly happy buying anything in a sale that has been reduced to 50 per cent of its original price. In such cases, I am buying it with the money I save, so the net cost is nothing at all. The large number of almost unworn suits in my wardrobe suggest there may be something wrong with this reasoning, but I believe the logic is impeccable.

Back at the supermarket with the crisps, I headed for the self-checkout machines and was dismayed to see they had been rearranged since I was there last. Even worse, they all looked the same, which left me wondering how to find my favourite machine.

I stood still and listened for the voice I have come to love and luckily, after a few seconds, I heard it tell me to start scanning my items. I rushed to the machine, scanned my crisps, saw the £1 price appear on the screen, put the crisps in what I took to be the bagging area and… nothing happened.

I waited and nothing happened again. Then the voice astonished me by saying something about placing the item in a “packing area”.

“What’s going on?” I asked. “What happened to the bagging area? What’s the difference between a bagging area and a packing area anyway? I thought that was where I had put the crisps.”

“Oh Mr Beachcomber,” the machine replied, “I’m so sorry. It’s the new rules, you see. We’re not allowed to say ‘Unexpected item in the bagging area’ any more.”

I was devastated. “You know how much I love it when you say those words,” I said. “Why have they stopped it? Who must I complain to? And where is this ‘packing area’ anyway if it’s not where I have put the crisps.”

“I know,” she said. “It’s all so confusing. Some of the machines want you to scan from left to right, then place the item on the right-hand shelf, but others are the reverse, with the packing area on the left, but we machines are all so close together now, it’s difficult to tell whose packing area is whose. That’s what’s happened to your crisps. They’re in the packing area of the neighbouring machine.”

“Ah,” I said suddenly realising what had happened. That explains it all – except why you’ve stopped using your ‘unexpected item in the bagging area’ catchphrase.”

“There’s a good reason for that,” she said. “It’s to avoid potential confusion with a new script item.” “And what is that?” I asked. “Item in unexpected bagging area,” she said in her didactic tone. “Now just move the crisps to the other side and we’ll get this job done.”

So I did as I was told. But I still miss the bagging area.