 Friday, 21st Dec 2012 19:11 by Awaydays An early arrival in Wigan, a cake to mark a year without an away win, and a northern man deported from Switzerland. The LFW world tour continues apace. Now, I don’t get out much admittedly, but when did the concept of the shop change? Has it been a radical thing, or has it just been allowed to creep in? You see, we’re all familiar with how a shop works. You go in, a little bell on the door rings to let the shopkeeper know you’ve arrived, you pick up what you went in for from the shelf, you take it to the shopkeeper, money changes hands, and you leave. That’s a shop. Or at least it was, until W H Smith got involved. I remember the first time it happened, in the W H Smith branch at Sheffield train station one very cold Saturday morning on the way to a QPR home match. I wanted two newspapers, a packet of chewing gum and a bottle of water for the train so I walked into the shop, picked up two newspapers, a packet of chewing gum and a bottle of water and went to the checkout. But instead of ringing my goods through and taking my money the vacant-faced teen behind the counter instead asked me if I’d like any Dairy Milk for a pound, and gestured at a pile of them by the till. And now I was confused, because I didn’t want any Dairy Milk, I hadn’t picked any Dairy Milk up from the shelf, I’d never mentioned Dairy Milk, and who wants to eat a massive bar of Dairy Milk at seven in the morning anyway? Had I wanted a bar of chocolate I’d have picked one up and presented it at the till – because that’s how a shop works. So anyway I refused and walked away with the goods I actually wanted. But it didn’t end there. A few weeks later, in W H Smith again, the till monkey asked me if I wanted a copy of the Daily Telegraph because it was only 10p that day with the brand of water I was buying. Well, again, I didn’t. I don’t read the Daily Telegraph because a paper that believes so passionately that people want to read eight broadsheet pages about international Rugby Union friendly matches isn’t really my kind of paper. I don’t buy one and it keeps writing about Rugby Union so we seem to get along fine, but suddenly here was W H Smith asking if I wanted one for 10p. Again I refused, but the monkey persisted: “I can’t see why you wouldn’t for just 10p,” she scoffed and so I bit back and ranted on for seven or eight minutes about how it was my 10p and my life and I’d spend it on whatever the fuck I liked and whatever the fuck I liked wasn’t the Daily bloody Telegraph and its sodding Six Nations pull out. Anyway a queue had formed by that stage and they were getting quite uppity in a sort of mumbly British sort of a way so I was allowed to escape with the goods I wished to purchase and no bastard Telegraph. But this continued. One week I was told that if I bought a different brand of water I could have a copy of The Times for free. This would of course mean I had a brand of water I didn’t want to drink and a newspaper I didn’t want to read but the checkout monkey batted this concern aside, grinning inanely and repeating “but it’s free.” Again the queue of people behind grew weary and impatient as I launched into something along the lines of: “But I don’t want it. I don’t care if it’s free or 10p or a hundred thousand pounds you’re offering me something I don’t want. I could offer you a kick in the bollocks for free if you’d like, but you don’t want a kick in the bollocks do you? So you say no.” And then the British Transport Police rocked up. And now it’s spreading. I go to pay for my shopping in Sainsbury’s but first have to answer several questions about my Nectar Card status: Do I have a Nectar card? Would I like a Nectar Card? Do I realise that I can keep the receipt, sign up for a Nectar Card later, and add the points at a future date? “Please,” I sob, leaning over the conveyor belt, holding the checkout girl by the lapels and shaking her backwards and forwards, “please just let me pay for my shopping and leave. Please.” I go to Boots and answer the same questions about their advantage card and then just when I think I’ve successfully bought the bloody overpriced replacement heads for my electric toothbrush and escaped, they present me with seventeen different slips of paper by way of a receipt offering me massive discounts off more shit that I don’t need, don’t want to buy and will never have any use for. I thought I’d had a breakthrough when W H Smith introduced some self service check outs. “At last” I thought “I can bypass the ‘Dairy Milk for a pound’ saga and just buy what I came here to buy” but they were way ahead of me. Completely defying the point of introducing self service checkouts, in the same way football clubs now need to station two stewards on either side of their barcode operated turnstiles, the W H Smith self service checkouts light up and call an assistant over when you scan something (anything) through, put anything (anything) in the bagging area either expectedly or unexpectedly (British Transport Police rocked up again recently when I kicked one of the bloody machines shouting “how is it an unexpected item in the bagging area when I scanned it in and you told me to put it there?) and at the end when, wouldn’t you just know it, it asks if you’d like to buy any of their promotional items for a pound and an arrow appears directing you to a nearby pile of fucking Dairy Milks. Always with the Dairy Milks. Perhaps the Mayans were right. Perhaps the world has ended and I’m in hell. I bet my brother’s in heaven. Jammy little git. ****
And, sadly, like everything else, after ten years of the rest of us suffering it, this trend has finally reached Wigan. Not only has it reached Wigan but, like the 2007 craze for wearing a shell suit with the bottoms pulled down to expose one’s arse, they’ve taken it to dangerous new places. The rain sodden walk back from the stadium to Wigan town centre brought us first of all to a conveniently placed off license next to the train station. A stroke of luck, we thought, and somewhere we could stock up for the train journey home. But it seemed we were not alone in this thought, because as we moved closer it became quite apparent that a large group of people had gathered outside, like chavs making a political point by turning over the Clapham branch of Footlocker. Welcome to Wigan – note strategically placed shopping trolleys. I promise you there isn’t a supermarket within a mile of this photograph, but there they are anyway. An off license so busy that people are queuing out of the door? Even for Wigan that seemed a bit Jeremy Kyle. We joined the thronged mass, in need of train beer and curious to see what the situation was. It turns out that Derby Wines (no, me neither) has really taken the concept of a shop to a whole new level by not even allowing the customers in. Instead people requiring alcohol are requested to stand out on the pavement and then shout their order through a small hatch cut out of the front door at waist height. One by one the people came, bent double, and yelled “16 cans of Fosters mate” through the hole in the door at the Indian shop keeper whose only English was “no” and “I don’t understand what you mean.” He did also tell me they’d be open “until 7pm” but given that the shop was very firmly closed and locked at 6.30pm I’ll presume that “7pm” is Gujarati for “no I’m sorry customer who provides my livelihood, we’ll be closed later I suggest you purchase the goods you need now.” I couldn’t help but think if they’d just allowed me to walk into the shop when I first arrived, choose what I want from the shelf, pay for it, and leave, that things would have run a lot more smoothly. ****
This was all in stark contrast to the cake shop on the Bethnal Green Road that I wandered into four days prior to our trip to enquire about a commemorative cake to mark the passing of a year since QPR’s last away win. The kindly woman behind the counter appeared confused at first but was soon joined by an enthusiastic husband happily yelling “QPR? QPR! You remember that time they tried to shoot the chairman? I was there that day man. That bastard Paladini still owes me money you know.” Small world, small city, how lovely. Mmmmm cake They gave me a discount, and promised a three tier affair for the following week if we actually managed to win at the DW Stadium. Of course their cakes were safe - there would be no win, no return to the Bethnal Green Road, no three tiered affair - but given that the cake they did make was absolutely fantastic, and ultimately so large that we had to palm the remainder off on two confused pensioners in our lunchtime pub, we didn’t really mind. That was in Little Fifteen, a trendy little place quite out of keeping with the rest of Wigan town centre where last season we’d spent an entire afternoon watching all manner of sport on a range of foreign satellite feeds. They seem to have dispensed with the sports side of things these days, and consequently half their customers, and although it didn’t really matter on a day when the only live football on at lunchtime was the ninth meeting this season between Kilmarnock and one of the bigoted Glasgow teams – both interchangeable in their loathsome pointlessness as far as I’m concerned – it did feel a bit weird sitting around watching Columbo all afternoon. Andy Hillman cracked just after 1pm, pleading for some ski jumping or fencing or anything passing for sport, but Columbo it was and, seemingly, always will be. We’d started the day (we arrived at 10.20am for cheap train ticket purposes) in The Clarence Hotel which from the front promotes itself as “that proper pub opposite the posh bars on the High Street” and from the back as “Stilettos topless dancing bar.” We only stayed there for a round, fearing for our safety after Neil ordered a tea and was met with a stern “no hot drinks” from a large landlord wearing string vest. We downed our breakfast drinks while listening to a gent at a nearby table recall his recent extradition from Switzerland in a tale where every fourth word was “fook” and every sixth word was “bastards”. Later, after the match, we tried The Last Orders which seemed to be a name inspired by the life expectancy of its clientele more than anything else. Outside, at just after 6pm, two police officers were trying to make sense of a local who tried, and failed, on five separate occasions in quick succession to complete a sentence without vomiting something which strongly suggested the intake of copious amounts of blue WKD into one of the officer’s hats. Inside we found a crowd of buoyant locals singing Daydream Believer (we sang the Peter Reid version) and two old blokes, in shirts and ties as my grandfather always used to wear to the pub, sitting silently together for the duration of our 90 minute stay. They clearly sit there every night – same pub, same seat – and have got to the stage now where there’s nothing left to say: they’ve done their time, earned their crust, and enjoy each other’s silent company. Genuinely lovely blokes. A round of five bottles of beer and two vodka and cokes came to just shy of £9. Redknapp greets the masses as Mick McCarthy (back) wonders what might have been. Tracey ignores arrival of QPR squad, overcome by fury at the off license that closed early and frantically seeking alternatives. Beers retrieved from a nearby Morrisons – which was peddling home brew Vodka under the counter to anybody trying to buy Smirnoff – we headed for the train station and found Harry Redknapp calmly posing for photographs against the desolate backdrop of Wigan at night while the team waited for their 70 minute late train. The QPR fans piled on with them, Andy advised that we waited for the following one and, given that it arrived five minutes later and completely empty, he was right to do so. Back to the land of the £1 Dairy Milks we went, still winless. I’d do nothing else with my Saturdays other than this. On the pitch >>> QPR performance 5/10 >>> Referee performance 6/10 >>> Match 6/10 Off the pitch >>> QPR support 8/10 >>> Home support 5/10 >>> Overall atmosphere 5/10 >>>> Stadium 6/10 >>>> Police and stewards 6/10 In the pub >>> Pubs 6/10 >>> Atmosphere 6/10 >>> Food 6/10 >>>> Cost 9/10 On the train >>> Journey 7/10 >>> Cost 7/10 Total 88/140Tweet @loftforwords Pictures – Neil Dejyothin Photo: Action Images Please report offensive, libellous or inappropriate posts by using the links provided.
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