You'll Understand Once You've Lived A Day At My Checkout

I cannot explain quite why, but I have never liked shopping at Morrisons supermarkets. Perhaps it's "Market Street", where the fruit and veg are arranged in a way that tries to make the whole affair look quaint and traditional but serves only to make life much, much more awkward. After all, supermarket trolleys are famous for not going where they should, which is precisely why other supermarkets stick so rigidly to aisles. The rest of the shop is, admittedly, much more bearable. once you have navigated your way around the "stalls", perhaps with the help of the Old Man of the Mushrooms, you soon discover your precious reward: freebies. Morrisons really is quite good for free samples, particularly if you like quiche.

So, fuelled on by free pastries and a dark warning from the Potato Hermit, you reach the checkout and discover an incredibly convenient little shelf provided that you may pack your bags without having to dodge the deluge of shopping passed down unstoppably by the cashier. As you pack, your glee only increases as you realise that you can simply line the filled bags up along the projection and transfer them to your trolley in one smooth motion. The world, or at least this tiny, stainless-steel part of it, is your oyster. Your, er, stainless steel oyster that beeps every now and again.

This brings me to my whiny, whiny point. You see, I spent six hours of yesterday packing carrier bags at Morrisons as a fundraising event, and so I had to bend over that little shelf and straighten up again, hundreds -- perhaps thousands -- of times, an activity that neither I nor my back appreciated. There are, you'll be surprised to learn, better ways to spend the daylight hours of your Sunday than in a cocktail of boredom and agony. And there are certainly better things to do the following Monday than play rugby on a field that has been frozen utterly solid.