• What's the bleakest shop you've ever been in? Like a shop, and you go in there, but you're not sure if you're having a bad dream or not?

    TELL ME.

    But I think you'll have to go a ways to beat mine. I has travelling around Wales last month, and I heard that Toni Collette and Damian Lewis were filming a movie in the next little town along the valley, so I LEGGED IT over there with the intention of getting selfies.

    Got there, and --Blaenavon is indeed a bleak-looking little town. NOT THAT THERE'S ANYTHING WRONG WITH THAT: hell, I live near Swindon and I bludy love that place. Having a dour, industrial town doesn't necessarily mean the people and the shops will be bleak or dour. However, as I loitered among the catering wagons, and the milling extras, and the fussy 'second unit' directors ...I realised I had to do something to fill my time until the sheila and the ginger turned up.

    I looked around the industrial museum (REMEMBER INDUSTRY, DO YOU, BRITAIN? I-I-I THINK IT WAS LIKE BETAMAX TAPES OR SOMETHING), I looked along the high street. A supermarket that had wire baskets outside selling ex-rental DVDs. A charity shop that sold mainly incongruous women's fashions and DVDs that had been given away free with magazines.

    But I thought my boredom was OVER when I saw a secondhand BOOKSHOP. How can you go wrong with a bookshop? Inside, the densely-packed shelves were spaced just widely enough to allow 'elbow' room, but not much more. And there was a barking 'husky' dog --but he wasn't really ferocious; that was just his style, and I loved him.

    Here's the problem: I walked in, and one of the old women was like, "Do you want a cup of tea? All books are £1. We don't get many visitors". Now, being needy, and over-familiar -- that's fine. That's part of the human condition. What drove me a little bit mad was that I was DESPERATE to buy a book, but all the books were RUBBISH. 95% hack thrillers, 5% biographies of personality-vacuums like Gloria Hunniford and Ian Botham. The closest thing I could possibly think of buying was a door-stop 600-pager about Sufism, but bearing in mind that literally all I had with me on holiday was a tiny ruc-sac ...how was I meant to carry this thing around? And so I just ducked out of the place.

    In retrospect, the moral thing would've been to buy £5 worth of books at random, then just dump them somewhere. But I can't think of everything. I'm only human. The only thing that made the whole thing bearable was the thought that, later on, I'd be able to use it as anecdote-ammunition in some kind of social media post.

    And I never did get to see Damian Lewis or Toni Colette.

    Nightmare.

    bleak.jpg


  • @Indrid-Cold okay I am not going to read all of that but one time I went to a sex shop to buy a vibrator and the cashier guy kept looking at me weird and when I was buying it he took it out the box and put batteries in it to make sure it worked but the whole time he did it he was making a scared face and he was handling it like as if I already deep throated it and shoved it up a swine, anyways that's about as interesting as my shopping stories get. But my favorite one is when I walked into a pet store and some loud bird started dancing and making cute little sounds to impress me, I think it wanted to mate. I almost fell for the serenade too! that's a joke by the way please take it with salt 😂


  • Kudos for buying a vibrator in a shop, rather than the internet. With that level of confidence? @OliveOlivia ur gonna take over the world, pal.

    Viz-a-viz nothing, you just reminded me: the other day in the park, by where people feed the ducks, there was the business end of a sybian. Weird, huh?