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Monday 10 January 2011

Winchester Woman

In Dundee they have a wonderful women's choir called Loadsaweeminsingin, but here in Winchester we have Loadsaposhweeminshouting.  There is a breed of woman, peculiar to Winchester, which seems to think that the world revolves round them, and them alone.  You meet them everywhere, and you can hear them before you see them.  You see, they shout a lot: "Cassandra, come back to mummy now", "Tarquin, put down that stone, it might have been touched by a common person". 

Supermarkets are one of their environments - Waitrose, followed by Sainsbury's, and if Piers has lost his job in the City, maybe, in extremis, Tesco.  These are essentially kept women.  Their mode of transport is a four-wheel drive, generally black with tinted windows, which they struggle to park, so they generally leave it diagonally across two or three spaces.

If one of them comes towards you on the other side of a swing door, beware, because they'll barge through without a moment's concern for whoever is on the other side.  Never, ever hold a door open for one of these women as the phrase 'Thank you' is one that isn't in their vocabulary.

One of their especially annoying habits is to put their shopping on the check-out conveyor belt, and then shout, "Oh, I've forgotten a couple of things, I won't be long, you don't mind, do you?" - the final question is, I assure you, entirely rhetorical.

On Saturday in Waitrose I finally cracked.  One of these Winchester women pulled the check-out stunt and tottered off on her heels to look for the pickled lemons that Gordon Ramsay's latest recipe demanded, leaving two of us standing like pickled lemons in the queue.  I took my trolley to the cashier and asked that he scan my shopping through.  This he gleefully did, but then Winchester Woman came back, and exploded!  "You pushed in - that's so rude" was how it started, but when I simply smiled and declined to get involved, she went on and on, becoming ever more abusive, and making a complete plonker of herself - though I suspect she saw it rather differently.  What I could see, but she couldn't, was that the rest of the Waitrose staff, and the other customers in the queue, were all smiling, and were clearly thinking 'Gotcha!'.

It would have been so easy to have a slanging match: I could have mentioned her bum, which did look big in her black leggings, or that she seemed to have mistakenly dressed in her 14-year old daughter's clothes, or her clearly dyed blonde hair, or the excessive amount of make-up she was wearing at 08:35 on a Saturday morning, but years of experience have taught me that nothing annoys Winchester Woman more than being ignored.  I restricted myself to a smile and "You have a good day, madam" as I was leaving and I tell you, she hated it!  She was last heard trying to call the manager to complain about the poor check-out lad, and probably about the fact that she'd briefly come into contact with reality.

Next time you're in Winchester, watch out for these creatures - there are plenty of them so you shouldn't have too much difficulty spotting one, or at least hearing her call.

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