Another in the series, reading in public.|Waiting for my friends who take me shopping at Sainsbury's on Sunday morning, I watch people packing their purchases into bags as they come off the conveyor. Slaves of consumption, the shoppers are paced by the bleeping of bar-code readers and the pressure of the queue behind them. You could call it a consumption line. There is no respite for each shopper until the bags are full, the trolley reloaded and the credit card registered and returned. to purse or wallet. The bleeping is remorseless and the commerce continuous and strangely accelerated like a film speeded up.
In The Grove this morning, as I stop to watch a pair of magpies hopping across the the grass among the autumn leaves, I hear the voice of a man behind me. He is wearings a leather jacket and jeans. "Nice, i'n 'it," he says over his shoulder and with a smile, as he walks on.
1 comment:
If you had written that in the mid-twentieth century it would have been taken for science fantasy of the dystopic kind. Now it is a finely observed experience that everyone recognises, even though at the time they are only half-aware of how unnatural it actually is.
Post a Comment