did you leave your basket unattended at any time, sir?

there can't be many perks to working in brixton sainsbury's local. not because its a particularly rubbish job - lots of jobs are rubbish. you just ask phillip schofield. but it's very busy, everyone is extremely grumpy and it's blatantly only there to stop people going to the market, which sells much nicer, more interesting food but is fractionally more inconvenient. i don't imagine you get many free tickets to film premieres for example. or xbox360s. or respect from the local community for your frankly vital pasta selling work. but if it were me, there'd be one thing i would definitely enjoy and that's psychoanalysing your customers based on the contents of their shopping baskets.

this is obviously a game you can play without working in the shop. and it works in any shop of course, but i suspect there is a richer soup of human diversity in brixton sainsbury's than almost anywhere else i can think of. on my way home. where i regularly shop. (that's enough qualification. ed)

the joy of casually ascribing wildly inaccurate backstories to ppl based on the particular brand of tinned tuna they have purchased. the horror of seeing what groups of flat-sharing girls will actually call a meal in order to competitively out-under-eat each other. the record so far - 1 x pack of rice cakes 1 x small tub of low fat cottage cheese. for 3 of them. the nervous boyfriend trying to impress his bird with a "taste the difference" ready-meal, some salad, a "gu" pudding and a fearsomely expensive bottle of white wine. what better way to have your prejudices confirmed than by assigning them to random ppl based on the fractionally different configuration of the same old sainsburys rubbish you yourself have bought. what larks, pip.

but then, sometimes, someone comes along who makes you stop and take a good long hard look at them and yourself:


a squeezy bottle of tomato sauce and a bottle of martini cinzano bianco. WTF? what kind of meal could you have possibly prepared where those are the only 2 items you are missing?

is this some new cocktail? am i hopelessly out of touch for not regarding this as a normal combination? what's in the suspicious white bag?


to give you something to go on, this guy was heavily southern european, bordering on native american. fashionable jeans, ubiquitous but expensive "racing-style" motorbike jacket, large but also fashionable woolly hat and fake ray-ban aviators. i am fresh out of ideas. answers on generic supermarket receipt to this address, please.

as an aside, whilst finding a link for martini cinzano i found this fantastic archive of lots of leonard rossiter stuff including the cinzano adverts he did with joan collins. advertising as telling social commentary. with gags. those were the days. hurrah.