The flip side...

... to all this culture, wonderful walks, and whatnot is that England can be really, really frustrating. Particularly when it comes to shopping, which is not my favorite activity anyway. Earlier this morning, I ventured into Marks and Spencers  aka Marks and Sparks, purveyors of all sturdy underwear and much more besides. There I encountered the attitude sometimes known as " job's worth" as in "it's more than my job's worth to help you one bit". And also a line ten women deep just to get into the changing room. Needless to say, I didn't need the articles I had in my hand badly enough to wait that long. Hello, M&S you lost quite a bit of business there.

My foray to Sainsbury's grocery store was somewhat better, the shelf fillers there have obviously been schooled in how to notice if shoppers are looking for something, and they're very polite too. But the lines were very long and one man in the self service ( don't even get me started about that) checkout had a problem with a leaky bottle. It was dripping all over the floor, and he was asking for help. None of the check out operators paid a blind bit of notice, no -one called for someone else to come. The man was shouting by now and said,"It's your shop, don't you care if there's stuff all on the floor?" Someone eventually came, clearly rather disgruntled at being asked to do something that must not have been in his job description.

Julie and I had  a couple of similar experiences on our days out in Lincolnshire when we tried to get some food at a pub that clearly had a sign that said food would be served on Mondays. They were adamant that no food, not even a sandwich, could be served, but happily sent us to somewhere that "might" be able to feed us. At one pub, we ended up having a Kit-Kat with our afternoon coffee because the kitchen couldn't produce the desserts it was advertising it sold.

I'm not saying that Kroger and Publix are perfect, but you do at least come away with the feeling that they do want to sell things to you.

Oh, and I forgot to add that as I was leaving the Mall that Sainsbury's in in, a child in a stroller lobbed a chunk of whatever he was eating at me, hitting me full on. Delightful.