dormouse1953

No queuing at Tesco this morning, either going in or at the checkouts. I was in and out in under half an hour.

And there was pasta. Couldn't get any plain flour, though. (I got some white bread flour last week.)

For the first time since this all started, there was a queue to get into my local Tesco. In fact, I didn't notice it when I got there but the queue went all along the south side of the building (the entrance is on the west side) and then along two further sides of the car park, so the end of the queue was nearly at the entrance to the car park where I came in.

There's always one. Just as I was getting near the entrance, a woman approaching from the north totally failed to spot the queue and went to go in the entrance, where she was stopped by staff. To be fair to her, three people standing two metres apart before the queue turned the corner out of sight does not look much like a queue.

The person on the checkout reckoned they were busier because of the Bank Holiday weekend approaching. I can't see how that makes any difference at the moment, but as someone on Cix pointed out, what has logic got to do with it.

Most of the shelves seemed well stocked and I got everything I was after.

I got a text from Boots telling me my prescription was ready. Then I heard people talking about four-hour queues at pharmacies around the country. Not sure what to expect, I walked into Guildford town centre this morning. Very eery. Almost totally deserted. Malls and shops closed.

And Boots? Also totally deserted. There was a bored guy on the pharmacy counter who immediately found my prescription. He checked my address and post code but didn't ask me to sign for it. Next visit due in eight weeks.

 Some years ago I visited the battlefield of Waterloo.  In the bookshop in the visitors' centre I found a book (in English) about the Napoleonic Wars.  I paid for it by credit card.  The price was in Euros, of course, but I was amused to discover that with the current conversion rate, when I received the credit card bill the price was £18.15.

Yesterday I went to see the new film Peterloo, set mostly four years after Waterloo.  Today I did some shopping in Tesco.  The bill came to £18.19!

(Incidentally, despite what they've been saying about how no-one learns about Peterloo at school, I definitely remember hearing about it in history lessons.)

Well the CD sold by the seller who was not Amazon arrived this morning, two weeks in advance of the estimated arrival time.  I wonder if the inflated delivery date was just arse-covering.

I've just got an e-mail telling me the other CD, the one sold by Amazon, has just been dispatched, expect it by next Sunday.  However, as it was sold by Amazon, it was available from Amazon music as a download if you buy the CD, so I've already listened to it.

I received an Amazon voucher for my birthday so I logged on to order the second part of Philip Dwyer's biography of Napoleon, having bought the first half some years ago.

As usual, there were a number of recommendations on the home page.  The first live of recommendations were due to my having purchased Just Kids, a memoir by Patti Smiith, which my brother wanted for Christmas a while back.  Now, I know that if I'd selected the "This is a gift" option, it wouldn't give me these recommendations.

But what was bizarre was that all the recommendations were for boxes of camera film, apart from one which was for a negative file.

Can anyone tell me the connection?  Has someone done some sort of trick on Amazon to set up this connection?

So I was walking to Tesco just now and I saw a Routemaster bus going down the A3.  According to its destination board, it was a number 21 going to Moorgate.  Moorgate is about fifty miles away in the opposite direction.

(Nothing to do with their financial black hole.)

I was doing some shopping just now and I passed a young woman in the aisles and something about her caught my eye.  She appeared to be wearing an off-white overcoat.  It had been raining earlier and lots of shoppers were wearing coats.  Then I realised this wasn't a coat, it was a dressing gown.  Then I looked again and noticed that the t-shirt and checked trousers she appeared to be wearing were actually pyjamas.

My first thought was that she was a student taking student idleness to a new extreme, but when I got to the check-out she was at one of the other queues, near enough for the check-out assistant to notice her but far enough away for her to discuss this person with one of the other assistants without being heard by her.  They had noticed that she was wearing a dressing on one arm and guessed she was a patient from the near-by hospital.  They objected to her walking around thus not on grounds of decency - she was wearing clothes more covering than many women wear nowadays - but on grounds of hospital hygiene.  They thought it wrong for her to be walking around in Tesco and then to bring germs back to the hospital.  (My thoughts are that that is true of anyone walking in and out of a hospital, not just people in pyjamas.)

Behind the checkouts there was a notice stuck up: "If you allow the printer cartridges to get disorganised, you will cause Cthulhu to rise."  This was above a picture of the creature.

I was buying something in W.H. Smith's on New Year's Day and got a couple of those till vouchers with my receipt.  One was for printer cartridges and the other was for diaries, valid for the first two weeks of the year.

The next day, I was printing something off and I got an ink low warning.  I remembered the voucher.  I also realised I could do with a pocket diary as back up for when my electronic diary was not available.  So I went back yesterday to purchase both items.

When I paid, I got two more vouchers - one for printer cartridges and one for diaries.