Dear LPG readers,  

I have a story that might make readers smile. 

I live with my mum who is in her early nineties but still very active, and while she does forget this and that occasionally there is nothing wrong with her selective memory. She is usually a very positive person although more recently I have found her visiting a more sombre reflective place which I cannot help her to lift. 

Even though her ninety-year-old legs could do without the extra exercise sometimes, we still go shopping nearly every week and she is a typical West Indian woman of her time.  The supermarket has its place as does the internet when it comes to the tinned and frozen groceries and those huge boxes of washing powder, but she still insists that, when it comes to buying the basic store-cupboard food items, no catalogue or internet picture can substitute for those foods that we all used to choose by touch and smell as well as sight.  Old habits die hard as they say and the two of us have been visiting markets for so long that even if we pass rather than buy, many of the venders greet us with a smile and a few words.  If I find myself passing without my mum or vice versa it is not unusual to be asked about the wellbeing of the other, and over the years I cannot count the amount of times that I have heard, ‘I have just seen your Mother, she went that way’, if we manage to get split up.  

We find ourselves in Catford, Deptford or Lewisham nearly every Saturday buying all those things, the best of which can only be found in the specialist shops and on the market stalls.  She insists that, when there you get a few added bits of value that all the convenience of warm air conditioned supermarkets, and the even warmer computer screens cannot offer, even if you do know how to use them.   

One cold November morning not so long ago, mother was in a particularly ‘down’ mood as soon as we set off, and though the weather was reflecting the greyness of her mood, it lifted somewhat.  We passed one such market stall and the display of avocado pears took her fancy. I am her daughter and I have been around for a good few years myself but I would never have been able to pick the right one.  This is why my job is just to carry the bags and sympathise with all the other long-suffering daughters as they wait around for mums who are doing the real work. 

We bought a lot of other things on the day but we hardly got through the front door before she felt the need to take another look and have another feel of that pear. Any west Indian woman can tell by feel when such a fruit will be ready for eating.  But then, she took it out of the bag only to discover an impalement in one end of the fruit and a knife cut at the other.    

Her mood that day started subdued, advanced to contentment but a bit of anger soon followed.  She had been sold a dud!  She was ready to go back to the shop there and then but it was too late and I spent the rest of the evening listening to the replay of the facts, as she saw them.   

The sales man swapped her pear for a dud, it must have happened while she was looking in her purse, she was not going to accept what had happened, he must think that she was born yesterday!   She was resolved to take the pear to church with her on Sunday so that she could have it out with the tradesman on the way home. The episode had really got her fired up because she made at least three telephone calls that evening, lasting for the best part of an hour each as she relived the experience verbally and, by the time she had got to the end, I could have recited her version of the story word- for-word.    

Sunday came and we went back only to find that the stall was not there.  We were going to have to wait until Monday but when we returned, we went all the way there to find the empty space where the stall should have been.  Tuesday came together with my Mum’s insistence that we should return and as we approached I could see the stall and the resolve for satisfaction that had had a very long weekend to grow.  

Now face-to-face with her version of ‘the accused’ she stated her case but, instead of the reply of innocence that she expected, the stall holder apologised and immediately invited her to pick another from the selection she saw before her.  She did so while mumbling a few things under her breath and we left but I could see that the look of dissatisfaction was still on her face in spite of the perfectly chosen replacement that she had acquired.    

The trip home was subdued but once we had arrived she phoned yet another friend to tell her of the anti-climax she felt having not been given the opportunity to have her say.  I am sure that I don’t have to tell you that her dissatisfaction continues to be her main topic of conversation. 

For more than two weeks now, my Mums subdued mood was completely overturned by her dissatisfaction and the fire it caused gave her something, though negative, to be positive about.  And something equally as trivial will, no doubt, give her a reason to focus on more than those things that get her down if she has nothing else to think about. I call that a case of ‘don’t get sad – get angry!’ being a healthy state of mind for the brain sometimes.  

And my last comment has to be that the subject of the dispute was not really important.  She would have got even less satisfaction had she needed to send something back to a catalogue or return an online item.  The face-to-face nature of doing business with a person rather than a machine is another way to do something that is so important to anyone combatting loneliness.  

They say that one of the most important things is face to face interaction and we lose a lot more of that every time we lose our market stall holders and human shop assistants.  

To conclude, I feel it only right to mention that, when we finally cut it, the Avocado was perfect… 

IK. Lewisham