I was dispatched to Sainsbury’s on Saturday afternoon to get some food for that evening’s experiment (a Jamie Oliver 20 minutes iPhone app recipe) and — of course — to get ‘treats’ for the begging hordes of Chiswick. Because it was Old Hallows Eve. And instead of warding off evil spirits, the majority of the nation was eating rubbish.
I’m of the opinion that living in this area, not having ‘treats’ ready for the visiting children knocking at our door would be tantamount to keying somebody’s car. Bad form. We haven’t been living in our road for long so we don’t know many people but we know there certainly are children around. Young. 4-7ish ages. But you never know if the mothers and fathers will unexpectedly troop them round the street. Only being able to offer a few quit, a banana and a smile wouldn’t fit the expected service level. How serious do they take this stuff in Chiswick? Well the photo above is of the ‘fun size’ ‘treat’ section at Sainsbury’s at about 4pm on the day. Mothers and fathers were cruising the aisles with trolleys packed to the brim of fun-size-Mars-Bars. When I got there, they’d raided the place. You’d think Sainsbury’s would have some kind of capacity planning operation in place. Or a fun-size distribution and metering system. I had to smile as a harassed mother screamed at her husband next to me. He’d made the mistake of suggesting they buy a job lot of large size packs of chocolate buttons. “Don’t be so stupid Colin,” she screamed, “What are the children meant to do? Use fingers?” Colin hung his head in response whilst I knelt down and located three errant bags of fun-size packs of twix/malteeser/mars bar combos. They were stuffed at the back. I placed them into my basket with a satisfied ‘plonk’ whilst the woman stared at me, openly seething. I smiled at Colin and walked away. Unfortunately nobody came calling for wads of twixes. I think there must be some kind of tacit unspoken arrangement between parents about who’s house the children visit. And we’re not on the list it seems. Which is all perfectly fine — until we don’t bother next year and end up sending children away in floods of disappointed tears. Couldn’t someone develop a google maps/eventbrite appointments booking system mashup for next year?