Salt and corrosion

When I went into Coles Supermarket yesterday, Mel & Kim's 'Respectable' was playing for our listening pleasure. Mel & Kim! I haven't thought about them in years. This was followed up with 'Hold On' by Wilson Phillips, and I thought, whoever is programming Coles' shopping music playlist must be a woman about my age, because, really, that is niche music right there. I wasn't there long enough for a third song, but I'd like to think it was, what, maybe a bit of 'Flashdance' by Irene Cara?

All the checkout assistants were wearing red t-shirts that said FIRST I HAD A TASTE, NOW I'M A BELIEVER. It's some sort of promotion for Coles' home brand products. This line fills me with dread that they've got their hands on the Monkees' back catalogue. On the one hand, that will be sweet relief after the Status Quo-related torture they've been subjecting us to for the last few years. On the other hand, I like the Monkees.

Anyway, I said to the teenage checkout chick, 'So what are you a believer in?' and she said, 'Oh, um, er, oh... the Coles brand! The whole brand. You know, like, in general. Coles.'

I said, 'I admire your obvious sincerity and dedication to your job,' and she said, 'Do you know what's really stupid? There's a poster for the new peanut butter ice cream right there. I could have just read that.'

So we agreed that now she's got a plan for next time someone asks.

It's hard to believe that Karl Lagerfeld is seventy-seven years old, gushed the Sunday supplement yesterday. I'll say. He doesn't look a day over 103. I don't think that's what they meant, though.

In the supermarket queue today, the woman in front of me had two little girls. As she was unpacking her trolley, she looked at her list and sighed, then said to the elder one, 'I forgot apples, run and grab two pink ones, quick.' The little girl ran off and came back with the apples. Her little sister watched this and announced, 'Oh, I forgot something, I'll go and get it.' She ran off and came back with not one, not two, but five full-size blocks of Cadbury. Her little hands barely fitted round them. It was worth a try, I suppose, although her mum made her take them back, accompanied by her sister.

Such excitement last night! Getting ready to make dinner, I realised I didn't have any soy sauce for my stir fry, so I went to the supermarket nearest my house to get some. That's not the exciting part. I know which one is nearest to me because I don't have a life last year I measured the distance between the two closest supermarkets, so that in situations like last night, I could get my emergency soy sauce ten seconds quicker. That's how I know that the eastern Coles is about 450 metres closer to me than the city Coles; but the new Woolworths supermarket that opened a couple of weeks ago is right next to the eastern Coles on my way there, ergo, it's now the closest.

Anyway, I went to the new Woolworths and found the soy sauce and went to pay and that's when I found that they have the City by the Sea's first ever self-service checkouts. So that was an unexpected thrill.

I have had an outbreak of... something... in my chives. Little black insects. I can't really convey just how many of them there are. Lots of them. Lots and lots and lots of them, whatever they are. I want to call them thrips, but the internet is calling them aphids. I don't suppose it really matters as long as they know.

I looked up ways to get rid of them that don't involve unleashing chemical armageddon, and found a couple of suggestions. One was to spray them with a solution of onion, garlic, chilli and soap, fermented for a couple of days. I'd certainly be persuaded to leave if someone sprayed me with that. So I've got that on the go, and in the meanwhile I'm trying the other suggestion, which involves putting a white bowl of water, detergent and yellow food colouring in the garden and waiting for them to jump in. I was dubious about this, but, gosh, it works. It turns out that aphids love yellow.

Happy news! After an international aid mission, I have finally managed to open the jar of marinated capsicum strips. I'm sure you've all been on tenterhooks waiting to know that.

The MasterChef Australia final is on tonight. I am not as enthused as I was this time last year. I've been watching, though, which means I have seen more advertising for Coles (the supermarket chain that sponsors the show) than is good for a person. The ads show staff and customers roaming the supermarket, waving giant red hands and singing. Singing badly. And what they are singing badly is Coles' slogan about its prices being 'down, down', to the tune of either 'Downtown' or 'Down Down Deeper and Down'. If the end of MasterChef means I never have to see this again, it can't come too soon. (There was a little boy singing it as he followed his mum around the supermarket today. There's no escape.)

( Photos of the day )

All day I have been trying to remember something I wanted to write, and it comes and goes. I will suddenly think, yes, there it is, and then it's gone before I can grasp it. I sat down and closed my eyes, going back over what I was doing last time this idea skated by me and, finally, finally, I managed to hold on to it. Are you ready? Here it is:

The other day I saw a shop selling bags and posters that were parodies of Keep Calm and Carry On. One of them was Keep Calm and Stop Carrying On, which, it occurs to me, means the same thing as Keep Calm and Carry On, even though it sounds like it shouldn't.

Wasn't that was worth spending a whole day trying to remember?

Grocery shopping today. Coles has new uniforms for its staff: beige-brown short-sleeved rugby shirts. I was served by an older lady, who was not happy about this development. She didn't like the colour, she didn't like the fabric, she had heard that the shirts shrank, she thought they would be too hot in summer and she hadn't had a single customer who liked them. One customer even filled in a complaint form about them and another was going to text the editor of the local paper about how horrible they were. I mean, I wasn't keen on the colour, but I don't care enough to file a complaint. I can think of better things to complain about than that. For one thing, why did they stop stocking Kambly's Mont Choco biscuits, but keep their horrible Choc Moons? Hmph.

There were mystery bananas in the supermarket today. They were on the conveyor belt and the woman whose groceries were being scanned had a minor tizzy about how they weren't her bananas, and the checkout operator had a corresponding tizzy about how did those bananas get there, and they both went on and on and on about what a mad mystery it all was, and cool was not being kept all round. They even tried to involve me, asking accusingly if they were my bananas, but I help up the bananas that were still in my basket to show that they were nothing to do with me. They eventually solved the problem by taking the bananas off the conveyor. Crisis over.

A book jumped out at me from the library's Just Returned shelves the other day, a coffee table book about interesting hotels around the world. Glass igloos in Finland, giant baubles hanging from trees in Canada, a seashell in Mexico, a giant beagle in the US. Same old, same old.

I liked the German entry best. A bed in a garden! As far as I can tell, it costs €42* for a night in the garden and €46 for a room indoors. (My brain doesn't do euros. Does that seem like a fair thing?) Anyway, looking at the photos, there seems to be a door in the garden. Just a door, not attached to any walls. I really like that.



* Or is it 42€?

Do you know what today is? June 30, the last day of the Australian financial year. Financiers will be out on the town celebrating Financial New Year's Eve tonight, letting their hair down before settling down to the business and busyness of July. I wish I was making that up, but, sadly, I'm not. Accounting firms will gather for a night of, oh, wild shenanigans and compulsory fun. And comparing data quality issues in the Xlon (pronounced 'excel on') tax software, because no-one knows how to party like tax accountants. Ahem. Thankfully, I don't have to go these days, but I might have a piece of celebratory cake as sustenance for the gruelling month ahead.

You know those Stages of Man charts that show apes gradually standing upright and ending up as human (culminating in Sam Neill, according to an advertisement that used to be on TV)? The magazine rack at the supermarket checkout yesterday was like that. The left hand side had the kids' magazines, which were plastered with Toy Story, er, stories, then there was Dolly and Girlfriend for the tweens, and Cosmopolitan and Cleo for the slightly older, the gossip rags for general consumption, That's Life for... actually, I don't know who reads That's Life, then Family Circle and Australian Women's Weekly for the women who are just waiting to die. The thing that I really liked was Cosmopolitan's headline THE SEX STORY TOO SEXY TO PUT ON THE COVER right next to the Women's Weekly's unobtrusive suggestion Make your own curtains. Such a vast gap there. The curtain story is so low-key it didn't even rate capitals or bolding.

'I've been here three hours so far,' said the checkout girl at the supermarket, 'and I haven't had a stupid customer yet.' That's always a good start to the day. I hope I wasn't the first.

I was thinking last year that I was a bit sick of looking at the picture on my wall at work, and today I thought, new year, new decoration, and went to Bunnings and bought a living stone plant. There was a tiny cactus there with a label saying it might flower in 30 to 100 years, so I went with the one that said it might flower in autumn. That seemed a better bet.

Strolling through the shopping centre to get to the supermarket today, I passed a couple of school holiday activities. In one empty shop a group of Tibetan monks were making a sand mandala. They've been there for the past couple of weeks and the mandala now takes up nearly the whole shop floor. It's not a very big shop, but still, that's a lot of coloured sand. They normally have a couple of onlookers; it's a nice diversion for passersby. Today, though, there wasn't anyone watching as I went past, and I found out why when I turned the corner.

Set up in between the Wendy's and Muffin Break outlets was a small stage, from which a man in an Irwin-esque khaki shorts and shirt ensemble was telling a large group of children, parents and assorted stickybeaks like me about the taipan: 'There are two types of taipan. There's the inland taipan, that's the deadliest snake in the world. This here is the coastal taipan,'- he lifted a long brown snake from a box to delightedly horrified 'oohs' from the goggle-eyed kids in the front row - 'and it's only the second deadliest snake in the world.'

I left after that, passing a large glass box containing three scorpions. I thought, wouldn't it be fun to see them running around the supermarket? So I let them out. (I didn't really.)

Googling to find that picture of a taipan I linked to above, I discovered that the man was wrong on two counts: there are three types of taipan (the third species was discovered only recently) and the coastal taipan is only the third deadliest snake in the world (the eastern brown snake - guess what colour it is! - takes the silver medal). So, pah... not very scary at all.

Headline of the day: Exotic disease threat in woman's undies (about a Czech woman attempting to smuggle three Samoan banana plants through customs in her underwear - as in, that she was wearing, not just carrying in her suitcase - thus potentially exposing Australian bananas to black sigatoka disease, fusarium wilt or moko disease. I hate it when my fusarium wilts.).

I stopped at the central city supermarket on the way home from work last night. While I was waiting at the checkout a group of moody-looking teenage boys wearing hoodies slouched through, using the supermarket as a shortcut from the street to the car park. One of them pushed a trolley out the way as they came in, making a loud crashing sound, and from then on everyone in the front of the building slowed down, watching-but-not-watching their progress. There was a palpable sense of relief as they left. The women the queue behind me started talking about 'boys in hoodies' in clucking tones. I was as relieved as anyone, and then I thought how sad that was.

Going back to my car, I passed one of the local police, obviously on his way to the gym, stopped to talk to someone. He had a hoodie on (and hood up) too, but he was so clean-cut and straight-backed that no innocent supermarket shopper would have been afraid of him. And that's when I realised: it's not the hoodie that's the problem, but the slouch. If those boys had looked determined and purposeful in their walk to the car park, we wouldn't have paid them any attention. I wish I'd thought of that to say to the women behind me.

Last night on Collectors they were discussing what, in fifty years, would be the collectible things from this decade: they suggested mobile phones and one panellist suggested those huge barbecues, which, yes, I can imagine someone in 2058 inviting friends round for meal made on the vintage barbie. No-one said iPods, though, which surprised me.

Then they veered off onto what would be the clothing that characterise the 2000s, in the same way that seeing flares or huge shoulder pads or hypercolour t-shirts set the scene for their decades. Given earlier events, I immediately thought of the hoodie; they suggested low-rise jeans (one of them said it as: 'Muffin-top jeans and a whale tail'.) Any other ideas?