Strange Town

Ah, Sunday afternoon. The Other Half is asleep on the sofa watching the football so I'm posting in an effort to avoid the washing up. I've just returned from Asda which was, as usual, filled with blank-faced, dead-eyed people and their unwashed unruly children. I suffer from terrible snobbery in these places and feel compelled (although I've managed to stifle the urge thus far) to hand over my card to pay while announcing in a loud, steady voice "I've got a job, you know". It used to be the same when I lived at my old house with the Ex and we had a pre-pay electricity meter. I'd stand in the queue at the post office and find myself saying to Small Person "Oh, darling, but we have to get the electricity card now as Mummy will be at work all week, won't she?". I ask you, as if anyone cared? My protestations of full-time employment would, however, trigger my working-mother guilt and I'd then stand fretting over whether it was better to seem unemployed, or an uncaring parent hell-bent only on financial gratification rather than the emotional well-being of my child. The only solution was to buy wine, chocolate and Heat magazine and spend an evening lost in a happy reverie of Robbie Williams, divorces and new beginnings.

The shopping population of Asda is symptomatic of the town I now call home. Although I like it here (I moved here from Essex - enough said) it's not without its oddities. I suspect that every town has its little pockets of weirdness - places that you walk through with the feeling that all the angles are slightly wrong and that the people have an indefinable not-quite-rightness about them. As I walked to the tattooist on Friday (I'm not having any more tattoos, honestly) I passed a young woman who was (and please bear in mind that this was at 2pm on Friday, in pretty much the centre of town) reclining on a low wall in what can only be described as a suggestive manner. This in itself is not outside the (very edge of the) boundaries of normal behaviour and, had she not been clutching a fairly new-looking, unboxed video recorder I probably wouldn't have walked past trying not to look in the vain hope of figuring out what the hell she was doing. As I passed, she languidly uncurled herself, stood up and strolled off, still nonchalantly gripping her random electrical equipment as she melted into the crowds. Slightly further along the road was a group of three young women, one of whom was carrying a small boy who looked to be around two years old. They were evidently discussing Christmas presents as the woman holding the child said to him "Well, maybe if you're good you might get a bike". I was smiling to myself at the thought of Christmas being a time of peace, goodwill and bribing your children to be good with the threat of telling Father Christmas how evil they've been and therefore restricting potential presents to an orange and a piece of tinfoil when she followed this suggestion up with "So you'll stop saying "bitch" then? No more "bitch"?". Predictably the boy responded smartly with a cry of "bitch!" and they disappeared down into the underpass. It was a relief to find myself in the relative normality of the tattooist's, and as the burly woman with the swallow tattooed on her neck booked me in I finally began to relax.

In case anyone was considering it, I feel duty-bound to tell you that having a tattoo on your foot fucking hurts. Carry on.