I was in the newsagent’s this morning buying milk and Mrs Mishri was berating me for not paying my bills.
‘You owe us for six months of Daily Mails, Steve. Dearie, dearie me, I’m not a charity you know.’
‘But as I have told you and your husband before,’ – he was looking very sheepish behind the counter, apparently trying not to get involved in the argument – ‘I don’t read the Daily Mail; you deliver to my house by mistake – I think they are number twenty-nine’s newspapers.’
‘Number twenty-nine never gets his papers, Steve.’
‘No, because it gets delivered to my house instead and I bring it back here.’
Mr Mishri looked at his wife and coughed.
She went on: ‘England people very naughty, Steve. You must pay for your newspapers. Daily Mail isn’t cheap.’
‘Well, that’s a matter of opinion,’ I told her. I looked at her husband. ‘And if this carries on, I shall be forced to take my custom elsewhere.’
She looked me straight in the eye and almost spat at me: ‘You know what, Steve, I just don’t care any more.’
I have decided that for whatever depressing reason, Mrs Mishri is a very cynical and bitter individual. I suspect she has reached that stage in a woman’s life where nothing is a surprise and everything is a disappointment.
But, I suppose, she does have a point; customers can be very infuriating – a fact of which I am only too aware. If I had a shop like Mishri’s News and Booze I would be very selective and serve only pretty girls with big smiles.
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