First fight
Life doesn't get more exciting than this. I'd been promised an outing to the big Tesco store, and that's what I got. Looked forward to it with huge excitement.
They prefer you to shop alone (in that branch anyway) so we took separate baskets and went up separate aisles, gawping at stuff. I was in no particular hurry to get home, so insisted we go through the self checkouts. (If you go through a manned till there's only one person attending to you, whereas on self checkouts it usually requires intensive attention from two, sometimes three, staff members. I like the idea of people having jobs.)
We dutifully followed the exit arrows on the way out. It was sad to go. However, my spirits were immediately lifted by a conflict of opinion between two large alpha males. One of them was wearing a mask, and the other didn't see why he should. The one in the mask was a Tesco security guard in charge of directing mask wearing customers to the hand sanitiser before entering the store. The one without the mask was being denied access, and he didn't like being told what he could and couldnt do. He wasn't prepared to back down. He wasnt going to wear a mask, but he was going to buy goods instore, was the gist of his expressed intent. I think, to be fair, that it was the security man who landed the first punch. It stopped his opponent from calling him the c word AND drew blood. Even so there was quite a lot of language flying about. Other security men appeared when another large male customer tried reasoning with maskless man. Then a woman (not me, honestly) stepped forward to try to calm things down by pointing out that the security man was only doing his job. This seemed to inflame the situation further though. Some of the security men were trying to break up the cluster of spectators, because I admit it, we were getting in the way. We obediiently broke up but reassembled almost at once. There weren't really enough security men to deal with the fracas, the legitimate queue, and the likes of myself who were bent on being entertained. We sidled away when we realised that a number of police officers had somehow muscled their way into the fight as well. Quite a few people had already joined in. It's amazing how quickly people take sides.
I was all for putting the shopping into the car and going back to find an out-of-danger vantage point and watching a bit more. It was awfully exciting. However, I was robustly talked out of further spectatorship with promises of a trip to a garden centre to make up for it. Garden centre customers are a lot more sedate than supermarket customers
They prefer you to shop alone (in that branch anyway) so we took separate baskets and went up separate aisles, gawping at stuff. I was in no particular hurry to get home, so insisted we go through the self checkouts. (If you go through a manned till there's only one person attending to you, whereas on self checkouts it usually requires intensive attention from two, sometimes three, staff members. I like the idea of people having jobs.)
We dutifully followed the exit arrows on the way out. It was sad to go. However, my spirits were immediately lifted by a conflict of opinion between two large alpha males. One of them was wearing a mask, and the other didn't see why he should. The one in the mask was a Tesco security guard in charge of directing mask wearing customers to the hand sanitiser before entering the store. The one without the mask was being denied access, and he didn't like being told what he could and couldnt do. He wasn't prepared to back down. He wasnt going to wear a mask, but he was going to buy goods instore, was the gist of his expressed intent. I think, to be fair, that it was the security man who landed the first punch. It stopped his opponent from calling him the c word AND drew blood. Even so there was quite a lot of language flying about. Other security men appeared when another large male customer tried reasoning with maskless man. Then a woman (not me, honestly) stepped forward to try to calm things down by pointing out that the security man was only doing his job. This seemed to inflame the situation further though. Some of the security men were trying to break up the cluster of spectators, because I admit it, we were getting in the way. We obediiently broke up but reassembled almost at once. There weren't really enough security men to deal with the fracas, the legitimate queue, and the likes of myself who were bent on being entertained. We sidled away when we realised that a number of police officers had somehow muscled their way into the fight as well. Quite a few people had already joined in. It's amazing how quickly people take sides.
I was all for putting the shopping into the car and going back to find an out-of-danger vantage point and watching a bit more. It was awfully exciting. However, I was robustly talked out of further spectatorship with promises of a trip to a garden centre to make up for it. Garden centre customers are a lot more sedate than supermarket customers
