The Wisdom of Crowds

I don’t have a passive-aggressive girlfriend. When she said “you don’t have to come with me” when she announced she was going to have a wander around the shops it meant she didn’t necessarily expect me to accompany her. It would be nice, I thought, if I did. It would be nice. And there is no issue with me being in a building that sells coats/jackets when I clearly have an addiction to buying clothes and jackets. So I went.

Going to the sales is a bit like seeing Ewan McGregor’s cock: we’ve all been seen the sales a million times but we can’t help having another gander when it’s there again.

Immediately it became very clear that it might be a mistake (going to the sales, not Ewan McGregor’s wang). Surely everyone came yesterday? Loads of people are back at work today so it couldn’t be that bad….How wrong can you be? I have never parked that far away from the TC before and I have been at sale time before AND we were lucky to get the space we did. People were parked everywhere, they really don’t care about rules some people do they? Especially when it comes to parking a car. If it means not parking 20 metres further away from where they are going they will park anywhere. Given that it was raining the proverbial rain (like hard) this meant that people were (practically) just parking in the middle of the road. Ok, if you want to be literal about it they weren’t; they were parking on the little bits at the end of parking rows with the odd person parking on pavements.

That is life.  People complaining about crowds when they are a component of the crowd is a but hypocritical; the kind of hypocritical we are all happy to ignore/happy to classify as ‘NOT hypocritical’. People often confuse my anger at certain people in crowds as a suggestion certain people should be killed. This could not be further from the truth. Be it today at the Trafford Centre or at tourist spots in London last week then yes I do get annoyed by slow people and people not controlling their kids. BUT that’s not the same as thinking they have done anything wrong, I accept that my patience is not something that is ever going to be admired by others. This said – some people are right annoying, selfish bastards who don’t take other people in to account as they dodder about busy places letting their children do what they want, letting your kids express themselves is brilliant but letting them run about in a very busy part of a shop is just asking for someone to accidentally fall over them and then feel guilty about having walked in to a child. Asking for it.

Too Many Keiths

One thing – actually one of the things I have too many of is coats…are coats? Whatevs. I have lots. Loads. Many.

Clearly what was required was two more. Welllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll…I was at the fucking sales. Why go to the sales if you are not going to buy things for less than the price they were before the sales started? In many ways if I hadn’t bought two Adidas Classics jackets I would have been insulting Devon from Canterbury, Maureen from Croydon and Deltron from Cambridge and all the other people whose jobs depend on the boost to the economy caused by the sales (by selling things at a more realistic price).

Killing time in Marks and Spencer I overheard a very fat man tell his son that it was hard for him to wear a coat as they made him too hot; but he was stilling shopping for  a coat. Here lies a man who is so bewildered by convention that he wears coats even though the primary reason for a person to wear coats renders him uncomfortable. But because other people wear coats he spends time overheating is core temperature just to fit in. And maybe to keep dry when it rains. Is he so different from me being crushed by the pressure of the sales to buy two more jackets? Well yeah, really he is now I think about it; he is the complete opposite of me as I was buying more coats when I already have load because I love them and he was NOT buying coats and doesn’t like them.

Not to make it seem like everything is about me but I am sure this was a message from God telling me to make sure I never got as fat as this man so I could always maintain the ability to wear a jacket and not be like the useless, too fat for a coat mother-fucker in Marks and Spencer trying to explain to a child why his father wasn’t like all the other coat wearing dads.

If I did end up like that there is an easy solution: just move to Newcastle where coats are considered ridiculous unless temperature drops below 0°K thus rendering me like all the other coatless people. Pretty fucking simple really (or ‘simples’ if this was February).

Whatevz

Phil