You must be off your trolley to fall for this survey
Maurice O'Brien • Published 20 Aug 2010 13:30
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SHE looked like a live one; an attractive, determined woman of a certain age bearing down on me behind her shopping trolley. Was this my moment?
Alas, a drop of the shoulder, flick of the wrist and she’d steered round me, snatched a curly lettuce and was gone, clearly in search of fresh pastas.
Of course nobody really believes those lifestyle surveys, especially the ones wheeled out on quiet news days in mid-August.
But this one from the Potato Council was in all the papers and reckoned women weigh up potential partners with nothing more than a 10-second glance in a bloke’s supermarket shopping trolley. Making sure the bag of spuds was prominently on view (apparently a potato man’s a solid citizen capable of looking after himself), I shrugged off the disappointment of lettuce lady and ploughed on. Ironically, I only had the spuds in the first place because of a woman; the practice nurse who does my annual cardiac check and tells me I’m too heavy and that my waist is several inches above and beyond where I believed it was.
Baked potato is her answer to my irregular, late-night eating habits, albeit I’m still pondering what the rest of the meal should consist of!!
Anyway, on to the next aisle and another encounter. This one never gave the spuds a glance, but looked me straight in the eye until, with a sigh, I backed down and allowed her priority to pass the kneeling shelf stacker.
I even gritted my teeth and pretended I couldn’t hear that new born baby screaming top-decibel blue murder. Its mother was doing the same. Imagewise, there’s no harm in appearing paternally tolerant, is there?
Along with the spuds, a good bottle of red is supposed to catch the female imagination, and it was evident that a few fellow Friday night solo shoppers had shunned their regular Pinot Grigio or Chardonnay for something darker in colour. How fickle, eh?
Instant soup, tomato ketchup, vodka and cans of lager seemingly mark you down as a waster with the fairer sex, but I had none of them.
Instead there were my apples and nectarines, which are supposed to be winners, and it’s patently obvious that I only had that four-pack of Guinness for medicinal reasons.
But, if you’re expecting a happy-ever-after ending, forget it. My heartfelt advice? Lest there’s an admirer lurking by the meats, don’t blow it by forgetting your PIN and causing an embarrasingly major checkout tailback.
This article appeared in Reading Chronicle 20 Aug 10
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