SUPERMARKET CHAT

What are you supposed to do when you meet someone you know in the supermarket?

I don’t know what the statistics are but it seems to me to be highly likely, given the number of people you know and the inevitability of you all living in the same town. I reckon barely a shopping trip goes by for me and Sammy without a friendly mid-aisle chinwag with someone or other.

I’m glad I’ve got her. She excels at that awkward boundary between small and medium-talk. Within seconds she’s remembered the important thing to ask about that person’s family, the last conversation they had, and the eye-rolling camaraderie of ‘doing the weekly shop’. She laughs in all the right places. I often stand there just drifting next to the marmalades, wondering whether or not I should say anything. 

I do big-talk. Or at least deep-talk. That feels like where I come alive - not in the shallows. Funnily enough, people in Sainsbury’s aren’t usually in the mood for philosophy and existential debate. They need quick, light, frothy and considerate. Without Sammy, I’m in trouble.

“Hello, doing your shopping?” I might garble artificially. It’s a better opening gambit than, “Hey, do you think mathematics was invented or discovered?” but unfortunately the inanity of the doing-your-shopping question also makes my eyes flick rudely around their trolley, as though judging their choices, and then of course, sheepishly around my own.

“How’s the family? Everyone alright?” I might say. They might be in a rush to get out of here, says my whirring brain. Last thing they want or need is you, jabbering on.

I wonder if I can take any cues from their body language. Do they keep the trolley gently moving? Are they distracted by the tins of custard just over my left shoulder and is that why they’re in this aisle in the first place? Or are they giving me good eye contact and thoughtful gestures?

“Excuse me,” says another shopper, a stranger, trying to get past. She’s irritated, I suspect. We part our trolleys like the Red Sea so she can rattle through towards the eggs. I raise my eyebrows.

And how do you end a mid-supermarket chat?

“Well, I’d better get on I suppose…”

“Nice to see you, anyway.”

Gesturing: “This dinner won’t cook itself, after all.”

“Hey have a think about why the luxury items might be near the entrance, and what that says about human behaviour, won’t you?”

“Lol,” I might add as they vanish round the corner.

Then, even when you’ve used up all your small-to-medium talk and you’ve done your goodbying like a pro, you’ve still got the added (and mildly terrifying) problem of running into that person again while you trawl the shop. With no small-talk left. Awkward. At least in the street, you’re usually headed in different directions! In the supermarket, you’re weaving around a network of paths in different configurations, and before you know it - there they are again, stocking up on toilet rolls!

Nervous wave and half smile. Move on.

And again! This time surveying the cereals.

I might go in with a “We really must stop meeting like this,” line, but that doesn’t deflate even half the awkwardness, funny as it might have been in the 1970s and 80s.

I’ll say it again: Sammy is about a thousand per cent better at this. It’s almost as though she’s been going to Sainsbury’s daily for years…

I find myself walking about in a sort of daydream, wondering whether the store is forcing me to circle anti-clockwise for a reason, and whether the words ‘food glorious food’ (which are emblazoned across the wall behind the checkouts) need a comma, oh and how ‘10 items or less’ should definitely be ‘10 items or fewer’…

It’s so weird how nobody in the store ever seems to have time to talk about those things.