John Walker's Electronic House

Only in this shithole country can it be this stupidly cold and still piss down torrential rain without a hint of snow.

And only in these weather conditions does the British public pull out all the stops of their fully extended idiocy. Not just being a bit dozy, but the sort of stupid that gains sentience and starts running around knocking things over.

Having hidden in a coffee shop for an hour and a half, struggling with some horrid GBA game I’m reviewing, and reading a relaxing chapter of a book about substance abuse, I thought the despicable weather must have calmed a little. I ventured outside, and while not pleasant in the least, it had at least slowed its fury. Until I stepped out of the doorway.

Now, this is probably just a me-thing, but when it’s raining droves of barely-thawed icicles, what I don’t want to do is stand around aimlessly on the pavement, staring into space. I’m a maverick. I live life on the edge. In fact, I live life just off the edge, with my feet perpetually in the skiddle-de-skiddle-de moment one adopts before plummeting to the bottom of the ravine. I want to, as strange as it must seem, go where I’m going.

But that’s just me. And I mean that literally. Every single person – EVERY SINGLE PERSON – in the whole of Bath, had slowed down to the most moronic trance-like stasis. Attempting to walk down the pavement was somewhat like running down a corridor in Tomb Raider, with the spinning blades, crumbling walkways and wall-fired spears replaced with slo-mo zombies. What I wanted to do was be over there, in the distance, very very soon. But I had to stop every two to three steps as yet another glacial cretin decided to grind to a complete halt in the middle of everything for no reason at all. I imagine if I were to wander back to the same place now, they’d still be there, just staring, all stopped. It was as if the mechanical cogworks of Bath’s dullards had collectively wound down all at once.

Getting inside Waitrose was no better. Now, supermarkets are the natural habitat of the phlegmatic, and one should never enter without being at least prepared to endure viscous inanity. As a guide, I find that the volume of stupidity is usually indirectly proportional to the price of cheese in the shop. Enter a fine cheese specialist, and you’ll meet only the most polite and intelligent clientele. Go to ASDA, and you can fully expect to need protective clothing and a weapon. Waitrose, being so ludicrously middle class and overpriced, should at least afford some sort of protection.

One man. ONE MAN, didn’t walk into me, step out in front of me, hit me with a basket, randomly stop in front of me, block all possible routes from the exact spot I was standing on, stand in front of the shelf I needed to get to, facing outward, as if dead and carefully propped up there… One man. And I remember, because it was while negotiating the route between about nine DNA-deficient shoppers who had parked their trollies, baskets and arses in a slalom positions down the aisle. I was already running this gauntlet, edging crabwise between their obstacles, and saw a man at the other end needing to get through. In every other circumstance in today’s delightful outing, that person’s response would be to march directly at me, until I had to lunge out of their way. This man saw the situation, assessed it in a split second, and stepped to the side so I’d be out of his way as quickly as possible, and he’d not be in mine. I thanked him with a look on my face that would have been fitting if he’d dived into a frozen lake to rescue my own child.

What scared me most was how, after enduring an endless barrage of this insanity for about ten minutes (I was only buying a couple of things – I can’t afford to shop at Waitrose – but that’s how incredibly slowly the whole bloody place was moving), my external tolerance snapped, and my arms began cartwheeling around in furious frustration with the 305th person to randomly stop and stare without giving a crap about a single other person near them. Out-stretched limbs of rage, waved IN THEIR FACES, and nothing. Not the angry glare you can normally expect from idiots like this, who when they ram their trolley into your legs (that are already pressed against the frozen items counter in ASDA with nowhere to go) for the THIRD TIME, look at you with indignant disbelief because you’d been so shockingly barbaric as to say “OW!” at them. But today, blank nothing. Not even the flicker of a pupil at the moving colours in front of them. Comas. It’s the only explanation. Some sort of motion-capable coma induced by cold rain.

When earlier attempting to cross the pavement (all six foot of it) to get to the Waitrose entrance, a clearly highly trained team of synchronised dipshits managed to arrange themselves into a horseshoe around me, meaning I had nowhere to go but back into the road I’d just stepped out of. Incredulous that so many people weren’t noticing how they were in the way of everyone else IN THE WORLD in that remarkably selfish crescent, my mouth fell agape, my arms flew into the air in complete disbelief. And over the other side of the pavement, a man, a different man which gives me some hope, saw my situation, and smiled a pitying smile of understanding and sorrow.

I now understand how God felt when he decided it was necessary to kill everyone in the world. Those two guys who offered me the slimmest glimmer of faith in the species shall be chosen, plus a couple of girls which I’ll trust them to pick themselves, and the rest of you will die. Just so you know.