Supermarket Shopping

Supermarket Shopping ©

By Michael Casey

As you all know I visit Aldi on a daily basis, it’s part of my exercise routine and it gets me out of the house and I get some fresh air. If you are reading this in China you would be so jealous of all the fresh air we have. 40 years ago and more, in 1973 in fact the family house had to give up its open coal fire as Birmingham declared a smokeless zone where we lived. So dad had to get central heating, and it cost a lot of money. Dad also got the guy to rewire our house too by paying him in cash to do the 2 day job on top of installing the new central heating.

So we don’t get smog any more, I can never actually remember a smog event but I’m told they happened and my memory goes back over 50 years. This is just incidental, so I walk up the road to Aldi every day and buy what we need on a daily basis. The girls always want chocolate, and as you know the Cadbury factory is  just a few miles up the road from or house.

Speaking of houses I discounted one from our list today but as if by magic another probable turned up. www.rightmove.co.uk is the site to look at, B17 is my preferred location with a radius of 1 mile, if you can access the site from wherever you live in the world you’ll see just how green Birmingham is, everybody seems to have a tree in their back garden. You’ll also see that I need a lottery win if I ever do get to live in the B17 postcode, but the 1 mile radius is more affordable.

Back to Aldi, my local one is full of bearded men, like ZZ Top revisited, the men were just allowed to have them, so they have all en masse grown beards. In the interests of equality I’m sure Aldi women are allowed to  grow them too but so far none have done so. The staff work incredibly hard and the manager a pretty little Indian girl has a Law Degree or so I am told, she has a great giggle too.

In Aldi I get my chicken and salmon which are my staples post my unplanned quadruple heart bypass. I used to live on frozen food for decades but that is verboten as the Germans say. It could have been my lifetime of frozen food bought from many different stores, with its MSG in it that blocked my arteries, or it could be hereditary, I don’t know the full answer. I just thank God and hope I can live long enough to see my daughters grow up and then see my grand-children. I’m happy so long as they are happy. They say you get 20 years extra time after my op, though considering all my aches and pains from my Arthur, arthritis, and cKd, I am glad I’ve had these 2 years extra time so far to reach my 1,000,000 Words.

Today was another pain day so forgive me for mentioning it. Back in Aldi its fun watching the staff work so hard. I spotted the fact that one was a rugby playing by the way in which has stacked bread on the shelves. Another flicks the customer separator thing as if he plays snooker, and when I  asked I was proved right, he was a snooker player. Yes Michael Casey is the Sherlock Holmes of Aldi, I spot things. It keeps me amused.

It’s also nice trying out a new joke every day while I’m in Aldi, the staff may or may not wish I’d stop or go over the road to Iceland, but 90% of the time they laugh. Though they may just be incredible kind, perhaps their giggling manager gives them giggling lessons each morning before they hit the shop floor. I wrote a play called Shoplife back in 1989, it could have made me rich and famous, instead I am in Aldi trying to make people laugh, one person at a time.

The other reason I shop daily at Aldi is because I cannot carry a ton of shopping anymore, so I do a daily Aldi shop instead. If the staff really hated my jokes I’m sure they’d club together and buy me a shopping trolley with wheels, then they’d only see me once a week. I did have an idea to share my jokes with the Aldi motherland in Germany. A book of 40 stories with 40  facing page translations on facing page plus my audio. I’m still waiting for Aldi to reply, they could roll out the idea all over the Aldi world.

Or maybe Aldi German will just buy a trolley with wheels for me, then they can forget me. I was in Frankfurt for a week back in 2006, it was great, in Offenbach, an old meat factory turned into a hotel. And right next door was a nice little supermarket, I don’t think it was an Aldi but my love of all things German started there. Sert Gudd, forgive the back German, I did try leaning it 15 years ago but it was too hard for me. I can do French and Spanish and I even suffered 5 years of Latin, and my wife is a Shanghai girl, and our two daughter are bilingual. So why can’t Aldi help me get Germans laughing and learning English. I have to go now the Rolling Stones are gathering moss on my hifi, so it’s time for bed. Gutten Nach.