Normally I don’t like to bore you with the stuff that goes on in my not very interesting life. Getting up, going downstairs and eating cereal might be good for me, but it doesn’t make a good blog. I know of one internet blogger called “Faceless” who makes a daily post about what she does. Which isn’t much. Imagine big brother, but more repetitive, and without any weird challenges to break the endless monotony.
But occasionally something happens that is worth telling you about, such as my adventure in the dangerous and hostile land that is Wandsworth Primark.
I of course knew things weren’t going to go well from the start. I had a budget of £5 to buy someone a Christmas present; I won’t tell you who in case she reads this and yells at me for being a cheap bastard. Anyway, I therefore knew that the present was either going to have to come from the pound shop, which sells big bags of sweets, or Primark, which sells T-shirts. Primark it was.
But when I got there things looked pretty bleak. Everything seemed to be above budget, or socks. But after some scavenging I managed to find the £3 table. Great, I thought, I can buy 2. Except I couldn’t.
Everything was for guys. There were the inevitable Ché Guevara shirts, random plain t shirts, and of course our favourite, the random drummer one that isn’t intended for anyone and only comes in extra extra large. But it seems that it isn’t only the drummer tops that come in XXL, whenever I found anything that might be good for this person, it was in the wrong size. I can only assume every girl who buys from Primark is 6 foot 4 and weighs 18 stone. At the 5 minute mark I was starting to panic, if Primark had failed me on cheap things, that would mean I would have to find the even backer back end of town (which in Wandsworth, is not hard to find at all) and hope that they sold novelty female Christmas gifts. But my inner perseverance meant that I was eventually able to find something good.
It was a space invaders shirt. I was immediately wary of getting this, even though it did have a lot of pink on it. Space invaders is of course a video game, which I never really thought girls liked. But no matter, it was in my hand, in a good size, and ready for buying.
So I went to find the queue. Which was enormous.
I counted and it was almost 16 meters long. That’s huge. It was like everyone in Wandsworth has suddenly decided that they needed cheap Christmas gifts and had flocked to the only good shop (relatively speaking, it’s Wandsworth) in town. It was stupid.
But with a keen ear I even managed to make this (vaguely) interesting. I kept note of other customers, who had clearly been flown in from mars.
Take the people in front of me in the queue (I had plenty of time to listen in) and there was a family of 3. Fine. But there was inevitably something messed up about them. Take the teenager. He was wearing jeans that had huge holes in. While this is supposed to fashionable apparently, it was -2 degrees. Who gets up on the second coldest day in the month, -2 degrees, and thinks “I know, I’m going to put on jeans that let the cold in”. I mean what the hell. He also had 2 earrings, which in itself is stupid enough, but someone had obviously forgotten to remind him that he had 2 ears, so he had put them both in the same one. What a fucking pillock.
Then there were the people behind me, stereotypical black people. The mother had a fit (I think) when her son wandered off, and she shouted in the way only a black person could “Don’t you run away from me boy ‘cos I will chase you around the whole of pree-maaarrrk”.
At this point I was starting to think that it wasn’t worth it, ditching the shirt, just to get out of pree-mark alive.
But my sanity lasted just about long enough to get me to the till. Where a sour faced Lithuanian woman served me. Except she was plainly part of the spetznaz, and had taken much time out her life to learn the cruel KGB stare we’re all terrified of. I wish I was joking here but I’m not. It really freaked me out.
But at last, after all that, I managed to escape. Christ that place was messed up. The only thing that kept me going was the knowledge that I could come home, write this, and hope that they read it so that it makes their life miserable. On an end note, I saw the earring pillock later that day with a dazed look on his face. He didn’t have a Primark bag. Seems he didn’t last as long as I did.
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