Sky-Blue-Pink With Yellow Dots On

Whenever I am in a hurry, I always encounter delays that normally never happen and they nearly always involve supermarkets. Sod's Law is rife in my part of the world and yesterday it reared its ugly head again.

I had about eighty minutes to get to the supermarket and back so I could play in an online cribbage tournament. Anyway, all went very well, I whizzed round the aisles grabbing this, that and the other (I like grabbing a bit of the other) and reached the check-out with half-an-hour to spare.

I am always careful when I choose which check-out to go to and, oddly enough, I tend to go for one with the shortest line This is what I did today. There were only two people ahead of me, neither of whom was buying very much, but there may as well have been a hundred and two. The woman at the front of the queue was paying with a card and, of course, the card refused to go through. In the end she decided she would have to leave the supermarket and go outside to the hole-in-the-wall to draw some cash out.

I went to another till where there was only one person waiting and what do you know? They decided that they didn't like the hole in their loaf of bread after all, so I had to wait while an assistant went to fetch another one. When I finally reached the cigarette counter, I couldn't believe what I saw. There hadn't been that many people in the supermarket, but suddenly it was absolutely teeming. A school had obviously closed for the morning session because it looked as if an entire classroom was queuing up to buy cigarettes, sweets, drinks - you name it.

There was a slight gap between one group of kids clustered around one of the fridges and the queue, so I slipped in between and hoped nobody would notice, just in case they were really in the queue I was joining. This meant there were only four people in front of me, a group of teenagers who all seemed to be together. One of them was an African girl wearing a pair of beige trousers and the strangest shoes I've ever seen. They had very pointed toes and were white with pink and yellow spots and a bright blue ribbon. To say they looked peculiar with the trousers would be an understatement. I couldn't stop staring at them.

When I finally made my way out, I had to run to the bus-stop. Needless to say, I'd missed the bus I'd intended catching and had to wait for the next one. Miraculously, there was no one on it so it went straight to my destination without stopping. I made it back with four minutes to spare before my tournament started. I needn't have bothered as it happens, I went out in the first round.

What puzzles me is, why is it that when I have time to kill before my bus goes, I find empty check-outs by the dozen and no queues at the cigarette counter? I have never been able to work that one out.