Sainsburys, and why I hate it.

For those of you who are unaware of Sainsburys, it's a large grocery chain in the UK, a bit like Tesco or Walmart.

I wrote this from bitter experience of the one near me for part of the novel I'm still writing. The central character is a bit more bitter and twisted than me, so it's a bit more scathing. It's also just a first draft, so still a bit rough...

I hate this place. It's an asylum, a place where the lost and confused get dumped by uncaring relatives so that they can forget them. Pensioners wonder aimlessly through the aisles, attached to their trolleys like a life support. Single men squeezing melons to find a ripe one, confused looks on their faces. A woman holds a coconut next to her ear and shakes it, God knows why.

The refrigerated aisle is littered with half empty cages of steel wire whilst a man in an orange fleece slowly puts chicken madras for one on an empty shelf, one by one, occasionally checking use by dates and shuffling them around.

That's the worst thing about this place. Worse than the lost pensioners who've been trapped in here for days - zig zagging at a glacial pace in search of an exit, worse than the mothers with their screaming children parking their trolleys sideways across the aisles by the cheese; worse than all of these is the atrocious stock management. Around every corner and down every aisle it's littered with steel cages half full of whatever. People in orange fleeces taking things out one by one, blocking the aisle so only one trolley pushed by a moron with no sense of urgency or the passage of time can meander at their own pace past them. And despite this, the place has the feel of communist Russia; half empty spaces where the bread should be, a drastic shortage of semi-skimmed milk but an abundance of sterilised. I don't know how they manage it, people stocking shelves all day but there's never any food. It's like an episode of the twilight zone, some shelve stacker's own personal nightmare I've somehow been trapped in.

A sign where the eggs should be lies to me. If there's a country-wide shortage of free range, then where are Asda getting there's from? Well?

And we'll end with a funky choon. This just makes me want to jump around the living room:

Some more stuff I wrote

As promised, here's a bit of - wait for it - actual writing!
Wrote this in bed last night, edited for 10 minutes this afternoon, and here you go. Consequently, it's a little thin on plot, however, I wrote this more as a 'mood setter' rather than a story. It's about travelling on the London underground (hence the title), however, I'd also like to point out that the views of the narrator are not mine - I actually quite enjoy it in a weird masochistic kinda way.
Hope you all likey, please feel free to leave comment whether you found it good, bad, or ordinary. As all writers should, I value anyones view whatever it is.

Also - for those of you not living in the UK, Gregg's is a chain of shops selling unhealthy pastry, and a pasty is generally meat and potatoes wrapped in lard filled pastry.

I'll try do 'propper' writing on here more often, in the mean time, you can find the last one I wrote by following this link.


On the tube

Stood next to the door with the box at my feet, I hold onto the rail to steady myself against the random rocking of the carriage, my knuckles white against the red paint that identifies my train as being on the central line.

And I try not to think about the thousands of hands who’ve held this rail before me and how well do they clean these trains anyway?

The pretty girl opposite me in the Blonde hair with the bright pink lips and a dress that looks expensive says ‘I just want our family to move forward as one unit’ to the man at her side who looks annoyed.
Oxford circus and the doors open to the fishbowl world. Prams and bags, old ladies in big coats, foreign students in rucksacks.
The doors close and we all shuffle half an inch – a token gesture to our travelling companions, a hint of solidarity. All jerk forwards, and on our way to Tottenham court road. Above us Oxford street; half a mile of too small shops selling hats wearing union jacks, love London T-shirts, teapots shaped like old red telephone boxes, key chains, fridge magnets, postcards, watches, anything they can put a flag and a funny slogan on whilst 120 watts of sub woofer play a thump thump thump that lasts until forever, spilling out onto the pavement with their dodgy merchandise, polluting the world with their words.

The station arrives and the doors open. A small child with ginger hair in the seat next to where I’m standing says to his mother ‘they’ve done arm transplants from dead people in China’.
Freaks and geeks mind the gap and we all move back half an inch. A fat man stands next to me, sausage fingers wrapped around a Gregg’s pasty. He’s sweating grease, his matted hair stuck down to his head as he chomps away at the carbs in his hand. I wonder for a moment what he’d look like if you sliced him open, if he’d look like a Gregg’s pasty all the way through, just pastry and fat, potatoes and not much meat, all grey. Moments like these are why they invented the ipod. Plug yourself into another world, where you can’t hear the screaming babies or the bad grammar, where the birds sing a pretty song. Loose your thoughts.

And I try not to think of grey hairs, getting fat, getting old, lung cancer and myocardial infarction.

But I don’t have an ipod, just the box at my feet.

Some stuff I wrote

Ok, so this isn't particularly good, but as I promised to post something, and as I can't be arsed to write anything new today, this is what you're going to get.
I wrote it a couple of years ago, only about 500 words so not as long as it looks. Feel free to coment, good, bad, indifferent. As with most of the stuff I seem to write, somebody dies in it.

Amber

She always looked sad when she smiled, like she’d lost something once, and never learned how to get it back. She’d sit by the window and look out, her blonde oh-so-wavy hair down to her shoulders and smile that sad smile. She’d smiled like that since as long as anyone can remember. No one really knew why. Her father died when she was just two, and some folks said she got it from her mother. Others said she smiled just fine.
She was smiling her smile when she was in that bar down by the sea, that trendy one with the stripped wooden floors and barmen who spend all day making cocktails for girls who giggle, flipping bottles and glasses like performing seals in a circus.She worked in the new hotel up on Station road at the reception Pretty enough girl as she was, and only just in her twenties.But it was in that bar, the one by the sea with the performing seals and the giggling girls, where she met the man she’d kill. Not that anyone knew it then, least of all her. Smart looking fella with blonde hair who spoke soft. Spent his days driving around in a suit selling photocopiers or some such like with his blue eyes and white teeth. She smiled her sad smile, and he spoke his soft words, and they got along just fine.
She’d got along fine with lots of fellas before mind you, but she’d always end up breaking their hearts. Some said it was on account of her getting her own heart broke, and now she was taking out her pain on the rest of humanity, but me, I’d say she never really liked any of them enough to care.
Wasn’t long before he’d come around that bar every Saturday, and they’d talk and smile, and he’d walk her home. Folks said they looked like they’d always walked together, like that’s how it was meant to be.
It was in the spring, that day, and the trees were turning back to green. The plants in the gardens that looked so dead were starting to rise and look towards the sky. The grass was starting to grow again; almost ready for the first cut of the year, that day they called to say she’d not been in to work for three days. The crocuses were starting to open and brush the fields with colour when they broke down her door, and found her sitting there on the floor. Lying face down he was, the life all bled out of him across the hall with a kitchen knife in his back whilst the songbirds sang in her garden.
Her hands were all raw they said, like she’d scrubbed them all day, but she said she couldn’t get the blood off.
So they took her away, and everyone talked. Some said she’d killed him out of passion, others, that it was self-defence. Me, I think something’s broke in that pretty little head of hers, and there’s no fixing that. No one knows for sure, because she never spoke after that day. She just sits on the floor with her oh-so-wavy hair and sad smile. And they give her her medicine and ask her why but she never talks, she just stares out the window and smiles her smile.