Old Duffers

Arriving at the cricket ground yesterday morning at ten to eleven, I expected to enter the stadium on time but was delayed by an old duffer at the front of the queue for tickets who needed those ten minutes and more to complete what should have been a simple transaction, to the dismay and frustration of the growing line behind him; in the evening, coming home hungry, I took the opportunity afforded by a twelve minute connection at Durham bus station to nip into the Tesco Express and buy a multipack of Mars bars that I took to the self-service checkout, at which point (due I think to the six hours in the sun) my capacity to interact with a machine failed – I had no basket to place one side of the scale and no shopping bag for the other, so got them the wrong way round and, inundated with (to me) meaningless instructions, I was reduced to pushing touch screen buttons at random until, guided by shouted advice from the manned till, I was able to complete the transaction much to the relief of the sizeable queue that had by now built up behind this old duffer.