Another Monday.

Some years ago I wrote about a woman who used to manage one of the charity shops in Uttoxeter. She always impressed me for several reasons, most notably the strength of her eyes, her air of authenticity (she was plain in every respect and never wore make-up), the fact that she always looked stylish in clothes which were transparently inexpensive, her general helpfulness which sometimes went a little beyond the norm, and her random acts of kindness. In short, she was a rare example of the sort of person who impresses me.

I never said anything to her, but today I was sitting in my car eating my lunch when I saw her approaching with her little girl. She was carrying a bag of shopping and was accompanied by an elderly woman who I assumed to be her grandmother. Not so. They stopped at a car parked in the next bay to mine and I heard the gist of the conversation. It seemed the young woman had spotted the old lady struggling with a walking stick and a heavy bag, and had offered to carry the bag to the car, thus going some distance out of her way in the process.

A few minutes later I saw her in another shop and couldn’t resist the urge to compliment. I went in and said ‘I hope you won’t mind a personal comment, but I want to tell you that I’ve observed your acts of kindness several times down the years and I have to say that you are a good person. And incidentally, I’ve also noticed that you always manage to look stylish no matter what you’re wearing.’ She presented an apparently bemused stare throughout my little speech, and then said ‘thank you’ very quietly. And that was that.

And there was a third thing I wanted to say to her. I’d seen her in another shop earlier. She’d been bending down to pick something up and her skirt had been made of some kind of lightweight material which showed a vague profile of what was underneath. And so I’d wanted to say: ‘So glad to know that you wear proper knickers instead of those awful thong things. They really are quite sordid, don’t you think?’ I didn’t, of course. It struck me that three compliments in one day might be too much for a sensitive and self-effacing soul to bear.

*  *  *

Meanwhile, I realised today that the Costa coffee shop has only three tables by the window since its revamp a few weeks ago. It used to have four, and so I complained. I didn’t complain that the Costa girl was absent again, though, because it seemed pointless.

You wouldn’t think I crossed the Atlantic twice, would you?