Ass Discount Store
.. was how the fruit and veg shop was known after Southport rioters had picked the appropriate letters off the shop front. In university breaks (when I wasn’t laid up in bed on unpaid sick leave for a bad back sustained moving cardboard boxes of rotten cabbage from one side of the shop floor to another) one of my key duties was to maintain The Trolley.
The shop was too small for regular trolleys, rendering single Trolley as the high altar of ASS. Here Mr ASS would attempt to recoup precious pennies by selling pawfuls of rotting fruit for 10p or less. It was my sole duty to top-up Trolley throughout the day, selecting only the foulest fruits for the happy shoppers of ASS to purchase at a knockdown price.
Standing by Trolley, scooping up putrefied handfuls of gunk in my stained turquoise tabard, I’d wait as one “mate” after another took their turn to come in and laugh at me bag up the treasures for human consumption. This was the only light relief from the tragic pensioners who would regularly fight me and each other for the choicest items, while doggedly claiming the fruits were “for the birds”.
Helen Monks
helenm@centaur.co.uk
"An idle mind is a questioning, sceptical mind. Hence it is a mind not too bound up with ephemeral things, as the minds of workers are. The idler, then, is somebody who separates himself from his occupation: there are many people scarcely conscious of living except in the exercise of some conventional occupation."