A LOT OF NOISE IN THE SUPERMARKET

There was a little girl screaming her head off today in Sainsbury’s. I mean top-of-the-lungs, high-pitched, opera-volume, belting.

How does such a little person produce so much noise? It’s like hearing a monster-truck engine growling out of a Nissan Micra.

The mum, embarrassed and exasperated, stopped her trolley and tried to manage: her screaming daughter, her son (an older child who didn’t seem too surprised by the caterwauling) and a Nan-type, who looked a bit bewildered. She tried shouting at the girl to stop.

That never really works, does it? But then, I don’t know exactly what does in that situation. I can’t imagine it really happening to me - which might be a little naive, I agree, but I can’t. Sammy, a hugely experienced teacher, had more insight. She’d spotted that the real problem was the phone currently being clutched by the little boy…

Phones eh. She wanted it; he had it. Maybe she had had it before they got the trolley, maybe it was snatched, maybe it was removed unfairly. It seemed that the ear-piercing noise was the cry of injustice - and perhaps, fair enough.

Sammy went to get the coffees and I tried my best to watch the drama unfold without really watching. I was intrigued about how it would end. Would she run out of steam, get bored of shouting, descend into whimpers, or just bawl around Sainsbury’s like a tiny megaphone.

Well. The mum solved the problem by giving her the phone back.

The kid, now sort of perched in the arms of her mother while the Nan pushed the trolley, tapped away on the phone over mum’s shoulder. Distracted, quiet, acquiesced, and crucially, not wailing through Sainsbury’s like a tiny banshee.

It made me wonder. Is it easier to prevent a problem like this from occurring than it is to solve it? I think it is. The phone was the problem, the phone was the solution, but the phone might have been the cause of the thing way before they ever got to Sainsbury’s. What if there had been no phone?

But then there things like that in all our lives. For example: terrible dramas happen when people buy things with someone else’s money, not realising that they won’t be able to pay it back. Even worse things can happen to men who go for ‘just one’ coffee with flirtatious ladies who aren’t their wives. Sometimes we’re so clouded by the short-term gratification a thing can bring us, we just can’t see the long-term danger.

I’m including myself in that by the way. I need great wisdom. And in the moment where your wisdom has let you down and you are where you are, how do you stop the screaming?

I think I would have sent Nan out with the little girl, either to the car park or to the in-store Starbucks to calm down and take the heat out of the situation. But hey, I’m really no expert, and I appreciate that I can’t possibly know how difficult parenting is.

I just know what I’m like. And when my own silly decisions in the past ripple into the present to give me one of those ‘uh oh’ moments, I too feel a bit like that Mum, and maybe even a bit like the little girl too - burning with the cry of injustice, and letting the entire world know by screaming at the very top of my lungs. The mature bit, I suppose, the wise learning, is understanding how to prevent it.