Today's Town Notes.

The strange girl was in the library for the third week running (for regular readers only) but she was very quiet this time. She didn’t accost me and muttered only one sentence in her native language (or it might have been a phrase or even two sentences for all I know.) She did scowl at me, though, twice. Whether that represents an improvement in relations between us remains to be discovered.

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On the way out of the library (where the computers were on the blink, by the way) I spotted a feature for ‘blind awareness week.’ It had a picture with the caption ‘If you have normal sight, you will see a picture of Albert Einstein. If you’re near-sighted, you’ll see a picture of Marilyn Monroe.’ What I saw was Einstein’s face with Marilyn’s hair. None the wiser, then.

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One of the discount stores had a big banner proclaiming:

Jane couldn’t believe how cheap everything was!

… and dominating the banner was a picture of a suitably astonished Jane, complete with speech bubble in which was printed in very big letters:

WOW!

You know, I think it reasonable to assume that whoever designed that piece of mind-bogglingly creative marketing probably has at least a bachelor’s degree in something or other and is receiving a deservedly high salary. What more vindication could you want for a belief in the value of higher education?

(And on that subject, I noticed how well one of the girls in a different store was working, re-arranging shelves and merchandise. She even had the awareness to notice when a queue was building up at the tills and opened another one to get the queue down. She didn’t have to be paged, which is what usually happens. I asked her whether she was being paid the national minimum wage [which is pretty low]:

‘More or less.’

I told her the system should value people like her far more than it does.

‘Thanks,’ she replied,’ ‘but at least it’s a job.’

Maybe we need another Black Death in Europe. I gather the last one forced employers to pay their workers greatly increased wages due to the shortage of labour. (The employers continued to survive well enough.)

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Last and least interesting, I was standing outside a public toilet when a woman came out, stopped, and began tapping around her hips. In retrospect, it seems likely that she was feeling for something in her pockets, but I had an almost irresistible urge to ask ‘Did you forget your knickers?’ But resist I did, which just goes to demonstrate that insanity does not yet hold illimitable dominion over all, as I was beginning to suspect. If you can remember a line from Edgar Alan Poe, you can’t be completely barking. They don’t come much saner than him.

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This blog is becoming too whimsical for its own good.