Mayday Mayday!

I don;t get Bank Holidays off, so I was at work today. And, it being Monday, it was my day for doing the weekly shop. With it being a bank holiday, however, band wasn't on (because the centre we use was shut), so I went to Tesco an hour early... and found that it, too, was shut! Horrors!

Still, it wasn't as if I actually desperately needed anything. But the dilemma remained: did I wait a day for the weekly shop, or did I go over to the big branch in Cumbernauld, which would probably be open? In the end, my desire to go see Spiderman tomorrow won out, and so off I went to Cumbernauld.

Still, it had its advantages. First amongst these was the vastly wider selection at the big store, which allowed me to purchase a carton of Tropicana's "Raspberry and Mandarin" juice, thus completing the set (although they've introduced three new varieties since I started trying them all, so I think there's a ways to go yet...). I also bumped into a young man I knew from my days in the BB. It seems Kai now works in Tesco, although I presume that's not the sum total of his activities.

But you never gain a benefit withou a downside, it seems. The key to a nice, quick, efficient weekly shop is a carefully crafted list, with all the items ordered in a circuit from the entry point around the store, so that you circle it exactly once and pick everything up as you go past. (There are other arrangements that work, of course. There's also a zig-zag pattern where the shopper traverses each row exactly once, but I find the circle pattern works better for me.)

Of course, a carefully ordered list only works if the items are in exactly the expected places and order within the store, which obviously isn't the case when you're in an entirely different store.

Disaster!

If you've read this far, I have no doubt you are impressed that I have used so many words to say "Tesco was closed, so I went to another branch." I promise my next post will be boiled down to the barest essense of what needs to be said.