At least once a day, I like to busy myself with a minor task I couldn’t find the time for when I was employed. These can range from sweeping out the dust beneath the TV stand to reading through all of the supermarket offer leaflets that come with the weekly free newspaper, or hamster cage flooring as it is better known.
One recent task was the purchase of chalk, for I am so pretentious that I’ve daubed one of my walls with blackboard paint. It must be some kind of strange, needy schoolboy cry for help. In days of yore, my first port of call would’ve been Woolworths. Of course, Woolworths closed down last year, prompting at least 327 comedians and columnists to forge tales of stolen Pick and Mix. If all of these stories were true, then Woolworths was obviously a breeding ground for theft, the South Waziristani mountain training camp of retail. Perhaps if they’d used that as their tagline the business would’ve survived. To break this rubbish up, here’s a picture I took of Woolworths in Ayr, which people are now using as a car park.
Note how the woman in blue has an extra foot. If I had one of those I’d move it up and down, forming a supplementary auxiliary gob.
Walking past Woolworths, thinking ‘ha, ok, ok, people, I can now confess: I used to, like, steal Pick and Mix from Woolies when I was a kid, didn’t we all?!!!!’, I clapped my eyes upon what can only be described as Poundstretcher. Because I’m so satirical and witty, I imagined what a great headline that would be if the MP for Ealing North was violently killed on a rack. Brenda, 59, shop assistant, Poundstretcher, just didn’t get the joke, and neither did she purvey any chalk.
Three or four shops later – including ‘Kool Kards Korner: We Stock Stationery’ – like a bad pool table in a pub, I remained chalk free. This minor task was rapidly ascending into the Herculean. Finally, and just as I was about to ask the man in a Polski Sklep where he got the chalk for his sign from (imagine the linguistic shenanigans! It’d be like some hilarious, mildly racist Harry Enfield sketch!), my chalk hunt, or chunt, ended. Chalkdown. And so it was that in a small hardware shop on Leith Walk, I found myself buying four boxes (two white, two coloured, for Fridays) of PlayWrite Non-Toxics. I’m glad they’re not toxic because they taste fucking delightful.
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