Hamish McShanks

Hamish McShanks Secret Diary w/e 13^th August 2006

I have a question for you. How do you choose your supermarket? We have a choice of four in our town but they all have their good points and their bad points. Do you shop at the store with the greatest range of products? Nice selection but invariably the most expensive and you can’t really justify the free range organic duck milk at a fiver a pop (nice though it is) so do you shop where your cash goes the furthest? Another difficult one, it’s nice to get a weeks shopping for three pounds forty seven but there is only so much chopped ham and pork you can eat in a week and what is ‘Haslet’ anyway? Or do you simply plump for the nearest? Personally I rotate. I have no brand loyalty and I like to see how the other half lives.

This particular evening I was in a hurry so I stopped at the nearest supermarket. The one where ‘every little helps’. A little more width on the parking spaces would have been a good start as I unsuccessfully attempted to prise myself out of the gap between my car door and the vehicle parked next to me ‘It’s no use getting gmnnfff more fecking gnnfmmm spaces in yer car park gnnfmmpff if ye cannay get oot of yer fecking car’ I grunted whilst switching to Plan B and exiting via the sunroof.

My humour was not greatly improved when I found all the baskets were taken and I had to get one of the ‘huge’ trolleys. You know the kind, the ones where some long suffering mum manages to pack in enough food to feed the third battalion of the Grenadier Guards for a month but the plague of locusts that she calls children have practically demolished before she gets to the till. It must be heartbreaking to watch half packets of biscuits and empty bottles getting scanned through and knowing the rest of your three hundred pounds worth of groceries will be guzzled before you even get back to the car.

I watched a weary looking mother herd her offspring away from the sweetie aisle, the dog working hard as it flashed round the display of beans before doubling back behind the condiments aisle to nip at the heels of an errant child. Impressive work. She kept him on the whistle all the way round and there was a smattering of applause from the other mothers when the shrieking youngster was finally ushered back to the trolley. I gave her an approving nod as I pushed my disabled vehicle past the newspaper stand.

I say past the stand, when of course I mean, ‘into the stand’. I’ve given up ever trying to find a normal trolley. I’ve come to the conclusion that they don’t exist. I think they are actually designed to pitch from left to right so that you can’t avoid a collision. I also think a lot of the shelves have spring loaded trigger release mechanisms. It seems even the slightest graze of your trolley will set them off. Pass a micron too close and BAM! The entire edifice collapses and you are engulfed in a landslide of toilet roll or tunnocks tea cakes. All designed for the maximum embarrassment so you quickly stash most of the ‘debris’ into your trolley. Which is fine if its tea cakes but not so great when you arrive at the till to find you’re about to purchase a dozen packets of sanitary towels.

Hence the reason I always try to get a hand basket. I’d rather have a pulled muscle in my side and one arm two inches longer than take a trolley. It was doubly annoying this evening because I was only in for a few things. I’d been sitting at work, packing up my jotters and waiting for the bell to ring when a sudden craving for Jambalaya had come over me? I’ve no idea why, but I just wanted Jambalaya for my tea. Creole take-aways are woefully thin on the ground in Stirling so I was going to have to cook my own. Hence the pit stop for provisions.

Now there are a number of different recipes for Jambalaya but I like to use chicken, chorizo and prawns as the ‘meats’ along with red pepper, tomatoes, onions and corn. Apologies to any Jambalaya aficionados out there if this clashes with your idea of the perfect Jambalaya but this is my favourite. I feel you should always have food the way you like and enjoy it. Not how some prissy ex-footballing tw*t who runs a swanky kitchen in London says it has to be made……….….. sorry …… went off on one there

I did have a bit of a problem getting the chicken. Not because there was a shortage, quite the contrary. There was a rather bewildering array of poultry on offer. Everything from free range, barn fed, tucked in and molly coddled chicken to ‘value’ chicken. Now what’s that all about then? Hmmmm? What may I ask is the difference between ‘value’ chicken and ‘standard’ chicken? I’ve been struggling to answer that. Did the ‘value’ chicken fall on hard times? Did the standard chicken benefit from a proper education prior to getting its head chopped off and eviscerated? Stop me if I’m wrong, but a chicken is a fecking chicken is it not? Exasperated with the choice I did a bit of ‘eany meany miney mo’ and ended up with the corn fed, free range ‘executive’ chicken GTI special.

The fish counter was equally distressing but only because the elderly fishmonger was having problems weighing out the prawns. He was getting rather confused as he juggled the various plastic containers. He was trying to ‘zeroise’ the scales so I wouldn’t be charged for the thousandth of a gram that the container actually weighed. Unfortunately his Alzheimer’s must have been playing up because he kept weighing the container that already contained the prawns then transferring it to a fresh container and weighing it all again. He was getting quite flustered and was trying to make light of the situation as he showed me the containers ‘Is it this one?’, ‘No hold on it’s this one here’, ‘or is that one there, ahaa haa’ I swear it was just like Tommy Cooper. I left him adjusting his fez and went in search of chorizo.

The chorizo at least was not a problem. They didn’t have any. Nor did they have any similar types of sausage. I even went to the butcher’s counter where they offered me half a pound of ‘link sausages’. I glared at the butcher ‘link sausage’ I growled ‘yessir’ he replied happily as if Link sausage was manna from heaven. I don’t like to think of myself as a food snob but if the best description you can come up with for your product is the method of construction it’s not a good sign. By this point my blue touch paper was well past lit ‘Link f*cking sausage for JAMBAFUUUUCKINLAYA!!!’

Apparently attempting to insert a chicken in a member of staff is frowned upon in this supermarket. Worth thinking about before you choose where to shop.

Doei