standards

Finally it happened. Someone complained about Pets With Tourettes. To me. It shouldn’t be on display at the front of the shop, was her comment, to which I gave the standard company response: ‘Piss flaps’. No of course I didn’t, and neither did I argue that Pets With Tourettes, like The Naked Lunch before it, is a work of genius that transcends conventional morality. I merely said that I’d ‘pass on her comments’, without specifying to who - or what. She strode out looking dissatisfied. ‘It’s like this on every page’, she’d said. As though it would have been better if pictures of cute fluffy kittens saying ‘I love you’ had been randomly dispersed among the hamsters telling you to fuck off. Oh yes, we could give that to Grandma.

There’s a lot of shift work happening at the moment. The other evening I emerged from my cubby hole to discover that for I was the only senior left in the shop. I was ‘in charge’. Naturally things had already deteriorated. Paul and Esme, the other remaining staff members, were playing hangman behind the counter. Paul asked me to suggest a letter and I said e. ‘I’ve done e’, said Esme, laughing hysterically. It did seem that the place was falling apart. Then someone left a note on the counter saying that ‘you may have shoplifters in your shop.’ Who had left it? One of the ‘shoplifters’ themselves? A cry for help? Stop me before I take something else? There were three loud young men in at the time - too loud, you’d have thought, to be up to much. Or perhaps they were there as a distraction from the real shoplifters, in one of those elaborate scams you see on BBC3’s The Real Hustle. And never in real life.

It was too hard to care. The young men left not obviously burdened down with extraneous bulges and I went back to my lair, where Phoenix FM was still broadcasting. ‘Community radio’, they call it. It sounds like a punishment and sometimes, it is.