Yet Another Tale of Three Women.

I met Ellie today. She’s the new girl in Costa Coffee. ‘Do you do banter, Ellie?’ I asked her (there’s a disturbing lack of banter between the staff and customers in Costa these days. So sad.) ‘Yes,’ she replied, and that was the last time she spoke. Make of it what you will.

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And then there was the woman who seems to find me huggable for some reason. ‘You look well today,’ she said. ‘Just the sun on my face,’ I offered. ‘Yes, but it’s an improvement. You usually look like a little ghost.’ (She’s several inches shorter than me, I might add.) ‘Ghost’ I can take…

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But the pièce-de-resistance: The senior high school girl in Sainsbury’s: tall, slender, pretty, disturbingly short skirt, long dark hair flowing down to the middle of her back, and legs so long that they might well have had a statue of Lord Nelson at the top for all I shall ever know. She was on her phone and standing in the middle of the aisle. I made to walk behind her; she stepped back. I changed direction; she moved forward. Repeat. Eventually the forward ploy worked and I looked up (!) into her face. She was completely oblivious to my presence, being engaged in talking gooey stuff with a simpering smile on her young mouth. No doubt the other side of the conversation was occupied by the captain of the school First XI cricket team whose approbation she had successfully courted – or something similar.

We never had girls anything like that at my high school. But then, we didn’t have mobile phones either. Come to think of it, we didn’t even have Sainsbury’s.