Shopping at the Supermarket

I went to my local shopping centre on Saturday morning to collect my visas. It was rainy so the shopping centre was very crowded; I’ve never seen it so crowded before, even in the pre-christmas madness that takes over peoples sanity crowdedness was eclipsed.

I had to park on the roof; the only access from the roof to the centre is via the one elevator. It is a very big elevator and can fit four fully loaded Woolies trolleys in it plus a dozen or so children and their slave parents. The down side is that the elevator is slow to travel and slow to arrive, so you spend more time loitering with strangers shuffling their feet than you would normally do in a crowded shopping centre.

After I had completed my errands and commenced the return to my car, I had to join the group doing the head bent, foot shuffle dance of the loitering around the elevator. My enthusiasm for this dance was wavering, until I noticed a rather tense and emotional conversation being carried out beside and a little to the front of me. There was a couple, with a fully laden trolley and boy about 10 looking bored attached, chatting. The one doing most of the talking was in her 40s, fully made up, with blow dried short bottled blonde hair which seems the norm of a certain set of middle aged women, she had the crisp white shirt, white pants and chunky fake pearl necklace with glasses perched on her head look - think Kerry-Anne.

She was perplexed and seemed worried about a financial muddle they currently had found themselves in, it seems that they were about to put an offer on a house that they both really loved, but their current financial situation was such that for various reasons it would be two or more weeks before they could comfortably put an offer on the house and she was fretting because she didn’t want to loose the house. She kept on coming up with suggestions as to how they could juggle their finances around to come up with an offer so they wouldn’t loose this house. The suggestions were going into quite alot of detail about their financial portfolios, things that I think most people would like to keep to themselves. I gathered that it wasn’t their first house either.

Each suggest was made with a whine, some earnest intent and a little clutching at straws desperation, her partner was at first gently rebuking each suggest with a calm but progressively more tense ‘lets talk about this when we get home’, ‘we will be home soon’, ‘lets go through this when we get home’.

The blonde was not taking any notice of her partners calmer suggestions as she had what seemed like an insistent need to deal with this problem right here and right now and didn’t seem to notice that she was standing in the middle of a busy shopping centre where quite a few people including Ned could hear every word she was saying.

The blonde’s partner was well aware of this, and was slowly loosing patience with the blonde as she continued her problem solving exercise. It was the blondes partner that started to take my attention now, as the blonde kept on talking, her partner was getting more and more embarrassed as to what was being said, you could see that she was only a minute or two away from yelling at the blonde to get her to stop but she was holding it in, it would not of been an angry yell, more of a frustrated yell that means, just stop and listen to for 30 seconds. She seemed to know somehow though that the blonde would probably burst into tears, if she did, so was showing a great deal of restraint and was trying to bear the rising embarrassment she was feeling.

The blondes partner was about the same age, but she was more of a blokey woman, with no make up, short cropped hair, solidly built, wearing a non-descript set of t-shirt and jeans (are we even allowed to call her the man in the relationship?).

The kid was ignoring everything and everybody as kids often do.

Lesbian couples in their forties are common around Marrickville / Newtown so PDAs from same sex couples barely rate a whiplash.

What caught my attention was the ordinariness of this couple, the deeply personal and private conversation and the embarrassed facial expressions and body language of the partner. The partner seemed to know the blonde well, they’d obviously been together for a long time, and she knew that the blonde was too caught up in the worry of loosing the house to be aware of her surroundings or anything she could say.

I felt sort of sorry for the partner as she seemed to be the more private of the two and wasn’t at all comfortable with the blondes high maintenance public way of dealing with this issue.

I gathered that was not the first time.

Listening: Merriweather Post Pavilion
Reading: My insurance policy (its two more sleeps).