I found a can of soup (cream of chicken and mushroom, no less) in the kitchen cupboard the other day. It wasn’t even originally mine and the person whom it used to belong to’s been gone for over a year. So it’s pretty old soup (and cream of chicken and mushroom, no less), but I was feeling in a particularly self destructive mood.

Even so I wanted to make it a worthwhile dining experience, so I walked over to Coles and got half-baguette (and the Sterrah can tell you a funny story about half-baguettes) and started to queue at the deli counter for some grilled and marinated artichokes.

And so I’m next in line and all of a sudden a wave of old people show up, and have they qualms about jumping queues? Not one. Of course the counter people are no help either; either they just go up to the nearest old person, or they say “Who’s next?” and some other old person puts their withered and spotty hand up.

At this stage I had to leave because I was really quite livid. Not just because of the old people at the deli counter, but because once again the only tomatoes available were hard, unripe, orange and dented.

Why didn’t I abuse the rude and inconsiderate old people? Do they deserve respect just because they are old? Perhaps they think so, and this is why the ignore me when I’m obviously waiting in line for artichokes. Sometimes I think that maybe they should be allowed to jump queues, not because they seniority deserves it, but because their lives will soon be over and they shouldn’t have to spend what’s left of it standing in line so that they can hurry home and torment their grandchildren.

Sigh. Sometimes old people suck.

And then when I got home and called Matthew, he said that soup in a can probably has a use-by date, and 2 years was probably pushing it a little. Just the baguette after all.

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before i had a “blog”, i used to write a sporadically updated letter on the front page of my website. this is one of them. i am consolidating it into these archives, because i can.