Wandering aimlessly around the supermarket last week – is there any other kind of supermarket wandering, men? – incontinence pants were the very last thing on my mind. Actually, they weren’t even in my mind. Ahead of them, if this was a list, would have been Thinking about how attractive Margaret Thatcher might have been many years ago when she hadn’t developer her war face, and What kind of ratio of concrete to water do they use to make curbs which flank English roads? See what I mean? It wasn’t even registering. Not until I stepped forward and knocked an old man with a zima frame.
“Oy, chocolate moron!” he yelled, and it was aggressive and I did not expect that from this frail old man.
“What? I’m sorry, ok, it was an accident,” I replied. You’ll notice that I didn’t answer back on the “chocolate moron” insult. The answer to this is simple: I was carrying a load of chocolate in my arms – those big bars of Galaxy which you never actually see people buy but they must, because otherwise why would Galaxy continue to go to the trouble of making them? – and this must have added considerable weight to my knocking into him, so he had every right to be angry.
“I used to be like you, chocolate idiot,” said the man, shaking his head, attempting to pick up what would transpire to be pants to hold back the flow of you know what.
“Very good,” I said, “now look I’ve said sorry, so do you think we could drop the chocolate based insults now please?”
He nodded and introduced himself, and then he started telling me about the days before he wet himself in public and I felt it was only morally right to listen to him. And listen I did, until I was myself panicking about when my public-wetting-myself time would come.
Eventually I got away from him, but there was also something else there then: a reminder that I was getting older and that we weren’t that dissimilar (apart from age and urinal status). And also a reminder that if you carry that much chocolate around then you do invite insults...
