Far be it from me to pontificate about family life: my experience is limited in scope, if not in depth. However, (weren’t you just expecting that word?) after my recent extensive involvement in hoovering, cleaning, washing and dusting I have been looking more closely at others as they go about their quotidian existence.
Shopping is the great sexual divide, and the one aspect of life which does give itself to generalisations. The majority of men really do hate it; why, I have never understood. My early training by my mother in the more professional aspects of shopping has never left me, and I regard my liking for shopping as an elegant memorial to the woman who, placed blindfolded in the centre of the warren of linked shops that is Howells in Cardiff, could orientate herself within a nano second and march towards any given destination with a determination that made the Darleks look dithering. Also the importance of Wedgwood was imprinted on my young consciousness by being the area of the store that was always our meeting point when I was allowed a brief foray into other parts of the shop. No wonder glass plays such a large part in my snobbishness!
Anyway, some men obviously reject the domestic and have to find ways to assert their perceived masculinity while still conforming to the dictates of necessary shopping. This is seen at its most poignant when utilizing the supermarket shopping trolley.
I suppose considered dispassionately the shopping trolley is an iconic artefact of the twentieth century; not only for its ostensible utility, stark stripped down beauty and purpose but also as a symbol of urban desolation as exemplified by its appearance, upended and forlorn wallowing in canals, rivers, puddles and standing erect and proud, alone on a promontory in the middle of some waste ground. It is used (and stolen) by tramps and millionaires, by intellectuals and idiots; it is a true example of egalitarianism.
Its use is what distinguishes the users. Let’s face it; there is no real skill in navigating a supermarket trolley: you just push it. The wheels are specially designed to be free and easy, in spite of the stories most supermarket trolleys just glide, effortlessly. I know that this is important so that unsuspecting customers will not be able to tell just how much they have bought by his difficulty of pushing a vast weight around the store; they only realise the extent of their purchases when they have to carry them from the car to the house. But it is this very lack of effort needed to push the trolley which causes problems for men. If anyone (including kids) can push the things, how can a real man show that he is The Man?
The Wonky Wheel syndrome in early models at least allowed Him to show his technical virtuosity by viciously kicking the offending wheel when the machine did not do The Wife’s bidding. But now, now they just glide! The trolley as a symbol of emasculation: imagine.
If the simple effort of pushing is not the key, then it has to be the way that it is pushed, and there is the real invention.
Some men use the trolley as they use the car: an extension, metaphorically, of bodily parts. Pushing the thing as if they are the only customers in the aisles, and everyone has to keep out of their way. There is also the little freewheel push, so that they can claim, not only the space taken up by the trolley, but also a chunk of the space in front. The Road Is Mine Syndrome. That syndrome also accounts for the Transverse Blocking Manoeuvre which means that whenever you are stopped you place the trolley at ninety degrees to the facing shelf, thus effectively stopping any overtaking.
There are those that drag, presumably so that they are not thought to be regressing to the time that they had to take their turns pushing the kids in their prams or ‘buggies’ as they are called today. Pah!
The best technique I’ve seen was demonstrated today by an ageing, athletic, tight jean wearing, bandy little man who obviously resented being in the store and was following the written list of requisites with the stoic resignation of a Holy Week pilgrim on the Via Dolorosa. He was one of those men on whom you look, instinctively, for the medallion; he was, you might say, out of his metier.
He, therefore, had a problem: too many things to carry without help, but using the trolley was an admission of collaboration with the whole concept of shopping. He solved this dilemma by keeping the trolley at his side, his left hand on the right hand side of the trolley, almost as if the trolley was following him like an obedient dog. But it was a naughty mutt, because it kept bumping into his feet and doing its own thing. Bu did he adopt the simple push approach, did he buggery. I met him at various points throughout the store and, with a scowl playing about his features and growing bruises on his feet and legs, he manfully (and that surely is the point) kept to his rugged approach. Bless him.
I feel this is a subject which deserves more study and, there is a nagging thought at the back of my mind, that, were I to put ‘The Supermarket Trolley: a sociological approach’ into Google I would be greeted with a substantial number of hits. So I won’t do it.
Today was the first real autumn day, the end of the day dark and depressing. It does not bode well for the selling of the house and I begin to think that I will be here for the Christmas period. Come on Cardiff, buy my house!
No comments:
Post a Comment