I’m honestly not sure my fridge is doing anything anymore, and people who know what they’ll want to eat far enough in advance to defrost it are a strange species to me, so I’m buying things fresh the night I eat them these days. Tonight I was exactly on time for a bus, which is exactly the wrong time if you need to go shopping first, and it was freezing, so I did that which I do not like to do: I lingered in Somerfield.

There’s no Earthly reason I can’t just go back to the office and write for a few minutes, except that I feel defeated going through the whole leaving ritual again. There’s the shutting down, the standing up, the deciding which if any of my many bags I should take and what if anything a) is and b) should be inside it, the lingering idly waiting for myself to remember something I’m forgetting, the thanking of the cleaners as they suspend their cleaning to let me by, straight across the bit they’d been cleaning, underlining the ultimate futility of their work, the sudden remembering of the thing I was forgetting, the return, the thanking of the cleaners, the obtaining of the thing, the leaving again, the increasingly apologetic thanking of the cleaners, the subconscious pre-scouting of who is manning reception to see if it’s a) the one I never know whether to say “See you” to, b) the nice one who always says “See you” and to whom I always say “See you”, and whom I suddenly remember talking to at the Christmas party, God maybe even dancing with? Certainly giving my hat to, or c) the nice security guy who always says “See you mate”, but whose friendliness is always overcast by the implication that I am now in the building late enough that anyone entering it needs to be secured by security rather than received by reception, and thence that I either i) work too hard, ii) have too little else to do, or iii) steal. It’s not an unpleasant process, but it’s not one you feel like repeating just after you’ve gone through it.

Somerfield is bleak. Until recently they had these little flyers at the checkouts with photos of various people in Somerfield uniforms and quotes about how much they liked working at Somerfields, and the contrast between the textual joy and the unbreakable misery of those actually working the tills in front of them was way past comic and deep into tragic territory. The old couple were saying that Somerfield had given them the best years of their lives, the lanky young guy was saying he had more of a laugh here than at university, and somehow neither claim – next to those slightly vacant grins – seemed to suggest that working at Somerfield was at all worthwhile or pleasant, merely that the kinds of people who would describe it in those terms were exclusively those who’d been entirely deprived of anything that was either. Those are gone now.

Tonight I listened to what I initially mistook for a joking exchange between two- what, stockists? While pretending to be struck by indecision about which particular pair of sirloins I fancied from the two on offer. When one of them – who I would later come to refer to as ‘the sane one’ – said “I’m doing you a favour here, I’m on your side,” I realised that it was actually the middle of a fairly serious reprimand, the significance of which was entirely lost on its recipient. After a while I decided he was disabled in some way – he couldn’t take anything his colleague said seriously, even as he appeared to comprehend the words, and everything he said started with “Can I ask you a question, Duncan?” He was clear on the point that his immediate superior was going to present him in a sympathetic light when he reported to his ultimate superior, but after that was established he asked if he would be getting a bonus, which seemed to take the whole conversation back to square one. I surmised that his mistake had been to label a thing or several things as being 2 pence, which in retrospect he found pretty funny, but in explaining the humour – itself an unusual step – reasoned that they wouldn’t sell if they were only 2p. When confronted with the likely reality – that the problem was they would sell extremely well – he conceded that well, yes, they would, but very cheaply, as though this was basically the same thing as not selling at all. I didn’t get a very clear picture of the internal politics of our local Somerfield tonight, but I could see why this guy could be a problem.

Pretty much everyone who works in this Somerfield is broken in some way; some benign, some malignant. It used to depress me, then just sadden me, and now I feel nothing at all. I just want to not be there anymore.