Supercilious Self Righteousness


There I was yesterday, at Coles Supermarket in Firle, shopping list in my hand and eagerly checking out the blueberries and strawberries. They looked great, were in abundance and most importantly, were on special.

After grabbing my share (punnets of blueys can be frozen - yee hah - that's the kind of excitement I'm into these days), I finished wandering through the vege section which peters out into the bakery and deli areas.

Idly eyeing off the Cherry Bakewells, pink iced donuts and peanut butter cookies, I was full of internal self congratulation when I elected not to put any of them in my trolley and reached for the wholemeal pitta, multigrain sliced and crumpets instead.

Next to me, a woman as wide as she was tall was chatting happily to her husband as she eagerly seized a 12-pack of day-old cinnamon donuts, marked down in black texta to $1. "I can have these you know, because I've been good all week and eating my Weight Watchers stuff, and I've designated Fridays as my sugar days."

Her husband, taller but no less wide, considered this logic for a moment. He stopped pushing the trolley towards the onions and potatoes and looked at her face; so happy with her badness bargain. "Um, but won't you undo a lot of your hard work if you eat that?"

It was then that her inner Nigel Tufnel came through. "But this speaker goes up to eleven," she said. Actually she didn't say that. What she did say was, "But for six days I've been really good, so today I can eat whatever I want."

He remained puzzled but unsure how to tackle this. Perhaps more than one thought was swirling inside his head at that moment - Do I discourage her efforts so far; Will she share those sugary buggers with me; Isn't she now talking about those cheese-n-bacon scrolls over there; Perhaps she's right- one out of seven isn't such a bad risk after all. In the end, he took the packet from her, and placed it gently on top of the four 2-litre bottles of coke that were already in their trolley.

I smiled at them vaguely, to let them know I might have heard some of their discussion but wasn't judging them for it in any way and wheeled on towards the tinned tomatoes.

My smugness at my own trolley's contents stayed with me, increasing exponentially as I noted that I'd finally remembered to bring in the green shopping bags and had already been for a run that morning and eaten an orange. I was David St Hubbins - not quite as dim as Nigel and at least trying to develop a new stage show (Stone 'enge) and try hard.

That is, until I got home, put the fresh stuff in the fridge and remembered, in the third-to-last aisle just before the dairy but after the dry dog food - that I'd snatched up these little beauties:

....because they were on special. It was then I realised that I was but two stone and ten years away from having the exact same conversation - albeit in the confectionery aisle and not the bakery section - with Love Chunks. Or the doctor monitoring my glucose and cholesterol levels.