- by Owen Morton
The other day I had the pleasure of a quick wander through Fareham’s shopping mall. I’m not going to tell lies: Fareham’s shopping mall is not equivalent to Bluewater, the Bullring or that massive mall in Sheffield, the name of which temporarily escapes me. In all honesty, Fareham’s shopping mall is not even equivalent to Kabul’s shopping district. It’s a boring depressing place, full of chain stores, passport photo machines, and large Barney the Purple Dinosaur rides designed to tempt children too young or stupid to realise they’re being conned. And no record store, obviously. And on one wall, there’s the abandoned husk of what looks like it was once the mother of all Woolworths. (Obviously, if said Woolworths was still open, this would not be a problem – Woolworths is where I got most of my He-Man figures in those heady days of 2004-2005, and thus it held a special place in my heart. It was among the saddest days in my life when I heard Woolworths was closing.)
But anyway, Fareham’s shortcomings as a shopping destination are not the subject for my discourse today. Frankly, it’s so obvious that Fareham would be deficient in this department that it would be pretty stupid to write an article whinging about it. But what I can most definitely discuss with you today, my dear reader, is one of the customers of the Fareham shopping mall.
I was using Fareham’s shopping mall as a thoroughfare more than anything else, a speedy means of getting from my place of employment to the hairdresser’s, and was enjoying the walk – well, enjoying is perhaps a little strong, but I was certainly not having a bad time – past H Samuels or the other jewellers, whatever it’s called, when I became aware of a gentleman on a direct collision course with me. Not wishing to be a snob or anything, but this was the sort of gentleman that you wouldn’t want to collide with, because he’d almost certainly decide it was your fault, and bury his fist in your face for the trouble.
What was mildly alarming was that he had also obviously noticed me on this collision course, and appeared to be relishing the prospect of the oncoming battle. My cousin Joseph once informed me of a game called Loyalty, in which if you find yourself in the situation in which I now found myself, you see who veers off course first. If you move to avoid the other person, you then become loyal to them; if they move, they are loyal to you. It struck me as a silly game. Besides the obvious problem of inevitable painful collisions, there’s the problem of what to do with all these people who are loyal to you. Do you have to house them and feed them, like a medieval army? Or do they simply go away, but are at your beck and call as and when you need their assistance? And how do you summon them?
Well, anyway, there was no question in this particular situation – I was going to be loyal to the gentleman approaching me, since he was clearly not going to be loyal to me. As we passed, I was momentarily afraid that he was going to walk into me anyway (since he had seemed to be looking forward to it rather too much), but he contented himself with a distinctly sarcastic, “Nice bag!”
This caught me off guard, to be honest. It was quite clear that he didn’t mean that I had a nice bag; there was no mistaking his tone of voice. He was definitely insulting my bag. Now, if my bag were not nice, then this would be understandable, but I think my bag is quite nice really. I mean, it’s not amazing, but it’s certainly passable. It’s a backpack, and it’s relatively large, and it’s red, and it says North Face on it. Before you ask, it doesn’t have anything sewn on it (like pictures of Skeletor’s face, for example) that specifically marks me out as a loony, so I don’t really know why this individual decided to have a go at my bag.
If I’d been him, I’d have chosen pretty much anything else about my appearance to insult. “Nice trousers!” would have caused me momentary panic, as I might have assumed they’d fallen down or something. “Nice haircut!” would have successfully taken me back to the days of Year 7, when I felt that to have a haircut like Mr Spock’s was in actual fact very cool, but no one else did. Even “Nice face!” would have been a better insult, because I don’t have a very nice face, especially when I’m feeling worried about what’s going to happen to me in Fareham shopping mall. But “Nice bag!” didn’t really cut it.
Now, you are doubtless all wondering what I did about it. Nonsensical insult it may have been, but I obviously couldn’t stand for this sort of abuse. Unfortunately, I may come across on the internet as a delightfully quick-witted fellow, who would have a million stinging retorts just falling from his tongue in such a situation; however, in real life, I don’t have quite as much thinking time, and as a result, when I need to come up with a really nasty putdown, I often come up a little short. In this case, the best I could think of was, “Thank you.” Now, the observant among you may have noticed that this isn’t actually a putdown at all, but seeing as that half of my brain was considerably behind the half that thought it was a great idea to say it, this didn’t occur to me at all until the words were already past my lips.
The antagonist of this little story thought that my retort was pretty darned funny, and laughed his head off. I skulked off to the hairdresser’s, which had been my destination all along, and consoled myself with the fact that my haircut would hopefully disguise me sufficiently if I ever met the bag-hating bastard again.