Trolley 30

Captured outside Wetherspoon's on my way to buy some pudding wine from Waitrose, having learned over the years that Waitrose is a bit stronger than M&S when it comes to wine in the £10-20 bracket.

Which I still find a bit of a surprise, having since a child viewed M&S as a place which sold rather expensive food and drink. I remember a time when they did more money on food than Sainsbury's, while doing a fraction of the volume. Also that as a child, our M&S was remarkable for selling clean salad stuff, stuff which some housewives preferred to that covered with organic goodness from the fens. I suppose that the marketing chaps had not, at that time, invented the idea that organic was good.

Carrots which were particularly clean as they had been grown in sand in the Netherlands (Holland, as we called in then), more or less hydroponically, with the result that they had poor texture and little taste. But they were clean and reliable.

Presumably the person or persons who left the trolley there were then taking refreshment in the Wetherspoon's, surrounded by a sea of plastic bags. Proper bag people, people who were, perhaps, going to be a bit annoyed to find their transport missing when they emerged.

But I had no thought for them, being on a mission to return trolleys, in this case to aforementioned M&S. At the stand at the back of the shop there were, on this occasion, two eager senior partners on their own missions, disappointed that I was not bringing two in.