Hotwiring shopping trolleys
Picture the scene. Me and the missus have just had a cracking night out at our local rock night dive. We have danced like spectacularly drunken monkeys, quaffed pint after pint of ale and pissed almost exactly the same quantity in the quaint but at the same time mingtastic outside toilets. Now, it’s time to go home with the sound of “Whole Lotta Rosie” ringing in our ears and the smell of stale piss and cigarette smoke lingering just that little bit too long in our nostrils.

Is your preferred mode of transport owing to the general knackered state of Tourette’s hips and back after a night of strutting her stuff on the dancefloor:

a) Walk the mile or so back?
b) Drive because you’ve only had six or seven pints, it’s 2:30 in the morning and of course there won’t be any coppers about?
c) Taxi, or
d) Shopping trolley?

We decided to walk but had got only a couple of hundred metres down the street when I spotted it; a lone Kwik Save shopping trolley, abandoned outside a church and bathed under the glow of the flickering street lamp next to it.

“Get in” I slurred to the missus “I’ll push you home and we’ll drop the trolley at Kwik Save in the morning”. Kwik Save at the time was just along the road from us; so I was being community minded as well as a drunken idiot. The process of manhandling Tourette’s into the shopping trolley was not a simple one, hampered as it was by our complete lack of coordination, the shopping trolley’s habit of moving violently to one side every time some weight was applied to it, and the uncontrollable giggling that was emanating from both of us. But somehow we managed it and there she perched, cross-legged in the trolley while I tried valiantly to push her home.

This proved to be more problematic than it had first appeared. I struggled heroically along the back streets, but the surfaces down these streets are uneven to say the least. A shopping trolley outside its natural environment is not going to find this kind of challenge easy, least of all with a completely trousered pilot attempting to steer it smoothly while his better half sits in the basket giggling at the vibrations… it was like off-roading on a pair of rollerskates. The old kind, with the big, chunky stoppers on the front and the metal base that would cut your feet to ribbons if you so much as looked at them funny.

We giggled as the trolley lurched, hit bumps and nearly tipped over several times. We sniggered as we came to corners or junctions and I stumbled 'furtively' ahead to check that there were no police cars patrolling, whilst Tourette’s ‘hid’ by covering her head with her jacket. Didn’t work; the guffawing that was coming from beneath was enough to cause the trolley to shake from side to side like an agitated Dalek. We managed to get home, eventually - getting her out of the trolley was as big a challenge as getting her in, it turned out. Oh, how we laughed between half arsed attempts at extraction and loud "Shhhhh"s to each other.

We were both in our mid thirties at the time.

It transpired the next day, though, that if you have a knackered back and hips, then shopping trolley travel is not really the way to go...
( Davros' Granddad a voice of calm reason in a world of spastics., Thu 17 Sep 2009, 16:16, 2 replies)

this has made me laugh
more than any reply so far this week, especially the bit about tourette's hiding under her coat. class!
*click*
( Smash Monkey lowering the tone of the whole internet, Fri 18 Sep 2009, 0:17, closed)

Hey,
can I go out with you guys next time?
(TDub Nunc id vides, nunc ne vides on, Fri 18 Sep 2009, 4:07, closed)