There are times when you find
yourself lying on a beach with a good book and a cooling breeze drifting in
from the sea that you can think that you are a million miles from the real
world with its hustle and bustle and suffocating consumerism. The truth is that
it is hiding on the other side of the sand dunes.
I was about to settle into a
midday snooze when a text message summoned me to the other side of town with an
urgent request to procure ice creams for three thirsty kids. I ambled slowly
towards the car and with a very satisfying yawn set off for the shops.
I should point out that I find
myself this year in Pauanui on the Coromandel Peninsula on the east coast of
New Zealand. It is a beautiful spot, favoured by Auckland dentists and Waikato
farmers who grew rich when the Chinese discovered milk. The houses go for
millions and the vehicle of choice is anything capable of towing a large boat.
It’s fair to say that you don’t get any riff raff and there is no edgy side of
town where you can buy drugs or move into a squat.
It does have a small supermarket
which is quiet and well run for 51 weeks of the year. At New Year, however,
when the hordes decamp from the city to the beach, it takes on the appearance
of Macys on 5th Avenue on the morning of Black Friday.
I had clearly missed the memo
that said that the world was about to end and that we should urgently stock up
on bottled water and paraffin. I knew where the ice cream fridge was but it
still took me twenty minutes to navigate the kids staring goggle eyed in the
chocolate isle as though Christmas had never happened and old ladies with isle
blocking trollies that contained a loaf of bread and a packet of pain killers.
After a Marco Polo-esque trek I
made it to the ice cream fridge which miraculously had not been cleaned out by
the hungry ants who were grabbing everything else as though their money was
about to become worthless at midnight.
I found myself at the end of one
of the queues for the tills and being a lazy sort and a believer that these
things even themselves out in the end, I decided to join and spurn the
opportunity to find a shorter or faster line.
How wrong I was.
Small supermarkets in New Zealand
are like Spars or Centres in Ireland. They don’t just sell the staples of bread
and milk, they act as an off-licence, dispenser of lottery tickets and probably
undertaker and shipping agent as well.
The first thing I noticed was
that I had joined the queue that also contained the lottery machine. Like most
countries, New Zealand runs its national lottery on a Saturday night. This
being Monday, there was a long line of mainly elderly patrons anxious to see if
they had become millionaires, or multi-millionaires in most cases as most of
them were rich already. The checkout girl was gamely trying to cater for these geriatric
requests while scanning the purchases of other customers. She did this by
feeding the tickets into a machine that read the numbers and issued a short
yelp if a prize was forthcoming. The tickets of course had spent the new year
crumbled in the bottom of shorts pockets and had to be carefully unwrapped
before loading into the machine in a process that reminded me of those Iranians
who put together the hastily shredded messages they found in the American
Embassy in Tehran in 1979.
I stood watching this as the ice
creams slowly melted in my hand but was comforted by the knowledge that I was
now three places from the front. Alas, the person at the front wanted to buy a
ticket for the following week’s lottery, no doubt figuring that getting in
early is the key to success. This involved charging up two space age terminals
that were clearly beyond the technical abilities of the girl on the till. She
gamely pressed all the available buttons with no success. She rang a bell which
was obviously designed to summon assistance and we stood there silently fuming
while we awaited the manager. She turned up after an age and pressed one button
on the machine and a ticket was duly issued.
It was then that I noticed that
the guy in front of me was clearly the most popular person in Pauanui. Every 30
seconds or so he would be greeted with fulsome New Year wishes and a request if
he would mind awfully if his friend could add a small item of shopping to his
basket in order for the friend to avoid joining the back of the queue. He didn’t
mind, but I did. He had gone from a simple bread and milk purchaser to having
an overflowing basket.
It would be some time before he
got to the front, because lordy me, the lady who had finally made it to the
scanning phase had just realised that she had picked up full fat milk instead
of skimmed. She set off on a mission to fight her way through the milling crowds
while we twitched and tutted. The ice cream was now running slowly down my
clenched hands.
At last I’m at the front and thinking that I
can at least save the chocolate coating on the melting desert. But it seems
that the checkout girl, while being clueless in the operation of lottery machinery
is the go to expert for everything else. One of the other check out girls
pushed in front of me to ask if she could accept an Australian drivers licence
as proof of age for the purchase of alcohol. The licence she held indicted that
it’s owner was in her mid-forties, but you can never be too safe I suppose.
The kids at least enjoyed the ice
creams, even if they did have the consistency of yogurt by the time they
consumed them. Next year I’m going to buy a lottery ticket and if I win I’ll
spend the money employing a little man who can do my shopping for me.
