Trolley Dolly

It always seems to happen like this.
One moment I am sashaying round the supermarket fairly vacantly. If push came to shove, and an impertinent soul were to ask, then I would admit to being perfectly proud of the trolley.
For glance at it – a-bulge with organic produce showing the world that I am, contrary to rumblings in the chorus, not a bad sort of person. Spilling over indeed it is with impressive fare: bunched carrots, and peppers, fairtrade bananas, 2-4-1 raspberries, half price strawberries … (ok, the halo’s slipping, the parsimony starting to show, but the principle is still good: it’s fruit, it’s veg and we are Getting Away With It, even though, yeah yeah, I should have gone to the greengrocer with my hempen trug. Begone.).
Let it be said, through gritted teeth, that at this stage the trolley is most certainly 100% impressive, and yet not any soul to admire it.

So that is One Moment, and the next?
Ah, the next is my undoing, being me coming upon the Bargain: Reduced section, turning self almost upside down in a greedy rummage, elbowing pensioners out of the way in pursuit of a cheap pie, snorting like a piggy at the trough, tearing desperately at cut price Cornish pasties, possibly made in Slovakia, possibly involving knees and beaks; unwanted cheap cheeses; and a random pud.

And it is shortly after that love-in fest with bargains (from which I emerge triumphantly grateful and pink in the face), and a random Supermarket Sweep grab at the wine shelves, that I bump into a mother from school, The Healthiest Nurse in the World.
She is also the only person I have ever met who can segue any conversation – whether ostensibly regarding boilers, the weather or a parking slot – into sex, in fewer than 3 moves. But that is incidental to this blog and perhaps I need to meet more people.

(you encountered her here first: //http://milla-countrylite.blogspot.com/2008/03/huffing-and-puffing.html, read down to Andy, penultimate para, see! Earthquake to sex without blinking an eye).

(I neglected to report a time I played tennis with her. One sniff of a hangover on the part of your scribe, and she was into resuscitation mode. “Oh Milla,” she said, in very caring tones, “you can’t exercise” (don’t guffaw reader) “and recover.”
“Recover,” the cow actually said “recover.”
Then she said, “That’s how heart attacks happen,” or something unnecessary and medical like that. Heart attacks indeed. Well Really! How slippery and alcoholic and near death on a daily basis does she have me?
Pause for anxious thought.
Does she really believe all that insensitive guff about a mere 14 units a night? I mean week. How, as F9 says so very frequently, how offensive.)

Anyway, she came upon me when her trolley was spanking fresh out of the vegetable aisle and therefore still impressive, while mine had tussled with bargains and booze and lost.
I spotted her but was too slow to slide, a la teeny tiny binkin over porcine bum, one small packet of organic oats across a massive family pack of crisps, nor did I have time to conceal a virtual shelf full of yellow stickered Green and Black chocolate bars with the few small packets of sesame seeds I must have snatched up by mistake. There’s only so much a girl can do.

The conversation was awkward: I felt exposed, vulnerable, and found wanting. I realise that I am a horrible control freak and do not like being exposed or found wanting.
Mrs HNW was chortling about her holiday. Just back from Florida, the stocks in their freezer had melted, thanks to a power cut.
“Oooh, I see you’ve found plenty of goodies for your” (inference: sub-standard) “freezer,” she said in the congratulatory terms one might use when a toddler managers a turd near the pot.
“Mmmm,” I said, defensive of my piggy-grub.

Later, much later, too too late, when I had done penance with some aduki beans and – get this, black turtle beans – I saw HNW in the distance hovering by the DVDs and, en speedy route to encounter her casually with a happenstance transformed trolley, I suffered the gross misfortune of banging into Whispering Mother instead. She who is in permanent search of prey having someone’s private details to divulge, a secret tumbling from her lips at any given moment even, I imagine, when asleep.
Being merely a vector for her conspiratorial germs, I could have been anyone, anyone whose initial secret it wasn't, that is. But it held me up and meanwhile HNW, from whom I was still fretfully hell bent on retrieving nutritional brownie points, was on her way out of the store and I was stuck nodding at something idiotic and judgemental regarding party invitations.

The need casually to smuggle “as I was reaching for the aduki beans” to indicate my on-going au faitness with fibrous goods, into any conversation which might lurk in the future with HNW was bothering me. I’m yet to suss how she masters it with sex. Shamelessly, it goes without saying.

My chance came later. And inevitably it was due to go tits up.
I was rolling out some pastry, using a wine bottle so to do, for we still haven’t unearthed the rolling pin since moving here 2 years ago.
The doorbell went and in a frenzy of flour I went to the door, wine bottle in hand. Well, it might have rolled on the floor. Reluctant to leave the dog in charge of the chocolate was still on the side, I shoved them from the edge, 2 slid, I snatched up the errant bars. Temptation is a cruel thing and rarely resisted by Lolly.
“Ah, Milla,” said the waiting HNW, uniformed and prim, and perfect. "About this tennis ..." a leaflet was in her hand.
She looked me up and down, frowning at my mid-afternoon drink of choice, taking in my snack of choice, processing for later dissection my marriage to the bottle, that wine was my comfort rag, chocolate my prop, necessary both even to answer the front door.
I fish-opened my mouth.
A whispery little “aduki beans” was in there somewhere, chums with “black turtle beans,” but just … wouldn’t come out.