(which were minimal at best) would concentrate on such styles as Kabuki theatre or August Boal’s Invisible Theatre. I just wanted to be in Hollyoaks.
* * *
Not surprisingly, as I was such a social butterfly, my social outgoings were becoming enormous, and my evening journeys to Food Giant for Château Belnor were becoming more and more frequent. The guilt of doing absolutely nothing in term-time began to jar with my conscience. Mum would ring up asking what I’d been up to, and I didn’t have a clue. I’d start making things up just to throw her off the scent, but you could tell in her voice she wasn’t falling for it. I couldn’t act to my own mother let alone an audience of theatregoers, but she was right to be cynical: I wasn’t doing anything. After a while, doing nothing became exhausting, and I thought that it would be best if I got a job. At least then I’d have some money. My flatmate Karen was working part-time at Tesco Brent Cross and said that there were jobs going – would I be interested? At £ 4.80 an hour the money was good, plus it was double time on a Sunday. I was very tempted to say the least.
I went to see the store manager, Carol, a woman with dyed red hair and a pinched expression. The photo of her, near the store entrance, welcoming the customers in to ‘her store’, was sadly, like the food in the discount aisle, past its use-by date. It had been airbrushed within an inch of her life. It was Dorian Gray in reverse. She took me behind the scenes of the shop floor and quizzed me.
‘What attracts you to working at Tesco Brent Cross?’ she asked with a straight face.
‘Er, I love pushing trolleys around a car park in tight grey poly-cotton trousers?’
I got the job. Result! And with a ‘10% off’ loyalty card, I felt like the King of Brent Cross.
The money came in very handy, and I quite liked sitting there gossiping with the customers, scanning their shopping and learning all the different food codes – 7710 for bananas, 10 for a clove of garlic and 3245 for Braeburns. It was fun – well, for about ten minutes it was fun, then it really began to drag. That was before Tesco turned into the monster that we all know today. I’m sure it was a monster back then, but its fangs weren’t quite as sharp and its grip over the high street wasn’t quite so tight.
Tesco was intent on pushing the ideal of ‘customer service’, the belief that the customer is always right, even if said customer is mentally ill. I used to dread Tuesdays, because that would be the day Stan would come to shop. Stan, for some reason, had taken a shine to me, not in a fruity gay sense, but in an OAP/youngster-type capacity. The problem was that he only had one arm, and every time he wanted something offthe shelf he would have to put the basket down, take the product off the shelf, pop it in the basket and then pick up his basket and carry on. As you can imagine, this got very tedious for him, but we couldn’t allow a one-armed pensioner to push a trolley unaided around a superstore.
So every Tuesday I would hold the basket, and he would point with his one good arm, and I would take the product off the shelf and pop it in his basket. This would carry on every week. At one point, I was thinking of sellotaping five fish fingers to the end of a baguette and somehow strapping it to him and a basket to give him a makeshift arm – anything just to leave me in peace. On the front of the horrible grey polyester uniform we were forced to wear we had to pin an oversized badge proclaiming: ‘Here to Help’. I was glad it was oversized because the more polyester it covered, the better. Because you were wearing the badge, customers assumed you were an oracle.
‘What aisle is the desiccated coconut?’
‘How long do you cook a butternut squash?’
‘What would you have with a pan-fried red mullet?’
‘Where can I find the Holy Grail?’ Enough already!
Some people obviously misread the ‘Here to Help’ as
* * *
Not surprisingly, as I was such a social butterfly, my social outgoings were becoming enormous, and my evening journeys to Food Giant for Château Belnor were becoming more and more frequent. The guilt of doing absolutely nothing in term-time began to jar with my conscience. Mum would ring up asking what I’d been up to, and I didn’t have a clue. I’d start making things up just to throw her off the scent, but you could tell in her voice she wasn’t falling for it. I couldn’t act to my own mother let alone an audience of theatregoers, but she was right to be cynical: I wasn’t doing anything. After a while, doing nothing became exhausting, and I thought that it would be best if I got a job. At least then I’d have some money. My flatmate Karen was working part-time at Tesco Brent Cross and said that there were jobs going – would I be interested? At £ 4.80 an hour the money was good, plus it was double time on a Sunday. I was very tempted to say the least.
I went to see the store manager, Carol, a woman with dyed red hair and a pinched expression. The photo of her, near the store entrance, welcoming the customers in to ‘her store’, was sadly, like the food in the discount aisle, past its use-by date. It had been airbrushed within an inch of her life. It was Dorian Gray in reverse. She took me behind the scenes of the shop floor and quizzed me.
‘What attracts you to working at Tesco Brent Cross?’ she asked with a straight face.
‘Er, I love pushing trolleys around a car park in tight grey poly-cotton trousers?’
I got the job. Result! And with a ‘10% off’ loyalty card, I felt like the King of Brent Cross.
The money came in very handy, and I quite liked sitting there gossiping with the customers, scanning their shopping and learning all the different food codes – 7710 for bananas, 10 for a clove of garlic and 3245 for Braeburns. It was fun – well, for about ten minutes it was fun, then it really began to drag. That was before Tesco turned into the monster that we all know today. I’m sure it was a monster back then, but its fangs weren’t quite as sharp and its grip over the high street wasn’t quite so tight.
Tesco was intent on pushing the ideal of ‘customer service’, the belief that the customer is always right, even if said customer is mentally ill. I used to dread Tuesdays, because that would be the day Stan would come to shop. Stan, for some reason, had taken a shine to me, not in a fruity gay sense, but in an OAP/youngster-type capacity. The problem was that he only had one arm, and every time he wanted something offthe shelf he would have to put the basket down, take the product off the shelf, pop it in the basket and then pick up his basket and carry on. As you can imagine, this got very tedious for him, but we couldn’t allow a one-armed pensioner to push a trolley unaided around a superstore.
So every Tuesday I would hold the basket, and he would point with his one good arm, and I would take the product off the shelf and pop it in his basket. This would carry on every week. At one point, I was thinking of sellotaping five fish fingers to the end of a baguette and somehow strapping it to him and a basket to give him a makeshift arm – anything just to leave me in peace. On the front of the horrible grey polyester uniform we were forced to wear we had to pin an oversized badge proclaiming: ‘Here to Help’. I was glad it was oversized because the more polyester it covered, the better. Because you were wearing the badge, customers assumed you were an oracle.
‘What aisle is the desiccated coconut?’
‘How long do you cook a butternut squash?’
‘What would you have with a pan-fried red mullet?’
‘Where can I find the Holy Grail?’ Enough already!
Some people obviously misread the ‘Here to Help’ as
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