The mad alien lady (or “keep watching the skids”)

Recently I was in town, sitting outside the bank waiting for hubby when I saw something quite odd. It was an old lady who I am sure was quite insane. She had a shopping trolley with her (as many old ladies do) – you know one of those fetching items in a perfect shade of grubby tartan - a bit like this, only more careworn. That in itself, does not make her mad, far from it – to be laden down with 16 shopping bags full of bricks rather than using a trolley, now that really would be mad, but I digress. Actually, at the risk of digressing some more, I don’t think you could put many bricks in a shopping bag and she was much too skinny to carry 16 of them anyway, but I’m just trying to illustrate a point here*.

So – and here’s the odd bit – the trolley was upside down – not handle downwards, but stand downwards and wheels pointing skywards. She walked and dragged it behind her and it scraped along on the stand over every bump in the street making quite a racket. I wondered if she was deaf or simply mad. Maybe she was trying to get her daily exercise and wheels would have made it too easy. Perhaps she was an alien who had only ever seen shopping trolleys in pictures and had no idea how they were used, but was trying to blend in with the local population – who can tell…

So, what do you think I did? Did I stop her and say excuse me please madam, you are mad? Or perhaps I should have just tapped her on the shoulder and tried to politely point out the error of her ways. Maybe I should have just kicked the trolley deftly so that it flipped over onto the wheels and made her journey that much easier. In the end I did none of these things. I was so flabbergasted by the whole thing that she was round the corner before I could comprehend what I had seen. At least that’s my excuse, but really it was just that I was too scared that she was going to turn into a real life character from a ‘Men in Black’ film!

*Please note I have already been told a million times not to exaggerate!