Got on the bus (21), en route to B&Q. Made it here fine, though I doubted myself for a moment or two.

“Get 2 pounds off when you use your membership card. There’s no place like ASDA”

That overhead as I stroll in the wonderland opened by the allocated puns. In my garbage-lady coat, wolf-hungry and at ASDA’s café, no less. In front of me, precious moment no. 1:

“Two teas please.”

“Two teast!”

A small old lady and a cashier with a strange accent. I turn around to see who the other tea is for and I see a similarly small woman with a head full of my favorite kind reddish-brown hair. They sit there, on the far side and talk. Gossip, I hope.

Lots of old people at ASDA’s café. A tiny woman with a booming voice asks for another set of teas as she makes her way across the place in minimal zig-zags with a wheelie walker. She presents me with precious moment no. 2:

Hers is a virtual baldness; one which would be absolute if not for thin strips of grey-white hair weeding themselves across her scalp. Her other tea is to be taken to her to her husband, head of whom sports tufts of wild blonde hair which resist being stuffed into a plaid cap. His eyes are smooth and round, and as they peer out of thick-rimmed glasses, they focus in and out of a crossword puzzle, lens-like. Amidst a stammering confusion where both are left at the beginning, each embosses the end of a sentence with a unique stamp. Hers:  a slow unfurling of the tongue revealed only in as far as her upper lip discovers it; and his, manifested by a poke on the forehead with a pen, as deep concentration set in making him smaller and smaller until, after the word is found, he brusquely picks himself up and bellows, “Where’s my tea?!” Alert, she grabs her walker with the appropriate determination, and painfully drags herself to the counter to declare, “I want two teas!”. Then she returns her jiggling body, teas on tray, to the table where her expectant husband’s poked forehead has emerged from another word. She places his tea and sugar in front of him and then a kiss. Shaky little kiss. 

My hunger satisfied, I cannot bring myself to write about a very round couple that just sat down.