One of my first memories of going shopping was when I was about five, going to do the weekly grocery shop with my father. By the end of the mission, he'd virtually had a psychotic episode, was frothing at the mouth, and really quite scary. I've disliked shopping since then - and it's only getting worse.

Now I find myself (courtesy of some very rough guesstimates) at the same age my father must have been on that fateful day, and while shopping doesn't leave me looking like someone who chews Alka-Seltzer for fun, it doesn't leave me calm, happy and prepared for the journey home either. Thankfully, medical science hasn't figured this out yet, otherwise they'd wire me to a blood-pressure monitor, and try to analyse the physiological effects of shopping on the human body. Well, until the blood-pressure monitor exploded, anyway.

Now, I'm no more stressed than your average brand-aware psychotic, but supermarkets really do it to me. If there's one place where the UK gun laws should be relaxed (in fact, obliviated completely), it's while wandering the aisles of the local Tesco, Asda, Morrisons, or whatever the hell else there is. Here's why...

First of all - you walk into Fuckwits R Us, your local happy supermarket. You need money. Where are the cashpoints? They're placed (for your convenience) behind the rows of shopping baskets, and there's 4 retards milling around either trying to remember how to use new-fangled things like cash-machines, failing to remember which page of their diaries they wrote the PIN number on, or just stood there, watching. And then there's one person, just waiting for the other morons to get the fuck out the way. and the stress is going up already. Yes, that person is me.

I can't deny it - I'm Type A all the way when it comes to shopping. I know what I want (pretty much), I know where it all is (unless they've moved it all arounbd again - a joyous marketing ploy to make morons see what else is in stock at the store, and custom designed to piss off those of us who wanted to shop quickly), and I simply want to go in, get money, put the stuff I need in a trolley, take it to a retard at a till, exchange money for goods, and get out. Rapidly. Is that too much to ask?

Obviously, the answer to this simple question is "Yes.". Because it never happens. By the time I've finally managed to get to the cash-points - and before you ask, no, there isn't another one on my route between home and nearest supermarket - all the retards who preceded me, as well as all the ones who were already prepared with money, are in the store. The day is going downhill - rapidly.

First - fresh veg. If I were a conspiracy theorist, I'd start wearing a tinfoil hat to block my brainwaves, because there is always some coffin-dodger who's parked his trolley in front of the veg section I want, and is away weighing his onions, or counting cloves on garlic bulbs or something. And as soon as you move their bloody trolley, you can hear the "tut" from over your left shoulder - all of a sudden I can see what Eliot meant about the bloody raven croaking "nevermore". I start to wish the old bugger would croak, but then I might feel guilty as I stepped over them to carry on with my shopping.

And so it goes on - and on and on and on. The bread counter is populated by morons who either a) can't remember what sort of bread they like or b)can't work out whether 2 loaves for 99p is a better deal than buying a white one for 44p and a brown one for 55p. (I couldn't make this crap up - I've seen it happen, and been forced to listen to the ensuing conversation, and all without resorting to ripping their tongues out), In the dairy section, there are people who still haven't worked out the colour coding on milk, nor how to read the labels on the shelves beside the milk. "Is the green label semi-skimmed, or fullfat?" I hear them ask. And I know they've asked this many times - because I've seen them many times, always in the same place, always asking the same bloody thing.

Invariably, there's a screaming brood of kids somewhere in the shop, and I find myself praying for them to walk into a shelving unit, and die under a rain of falling tins. But no, it never happens. Instead, they just wander the aisles, screaming like recently departed lost souls in some particularly vile purgatory. Dante was wrong - the ninth level of Hell is populated by people who think supermarkets are great places to take kids. Personally, I think that we should fence off a couple of the trolley parks, and leave toddlers out in the rain, chained to the railings the same way people have to leave dogs outside shops. They can't run away, and they'll still be there when you come back for them.

There's always some pair of coffin-dodging weirdos, who have to walk side-by-side down the aisles. it's like they're symbiotically attached, siamese twins joined at the shopping trolley. They have no knowledge of the other people in the store, most of the time I'm not sure they even really know they're in a store, but they successfully manage to block the traffic flow for half the store.

In along with all the customers, there's the staff as well. Just to make life more fun, they haul around cages full of stock, and then leave it in the aisle - just far enough out from the side that it makes life more difficult to get past them when you're shoving the trolley.

Finally, the tills. There's some poor conveyor-monkey sat there, whose whole life consists of sweeping other people's good over the laser, listening to it beep for each item. The entire process is scripted to a tee, from saying "Hi" in the world's most bored voice and asking whether you need help with packing your purchases, through the beeps and straight into handing over the cash - it's all just a process, fuelled by dangerous levels of tedium, boredom and retardation.

And the worst of it is - there's none of the other stores that are any better. They all seem to have a policy of employing people who think that working for superstores is the best that they can aspire to. They're all just as bad - they all attract the same kinds of people, both as customers and employees. There is one way of avoiding most of this crap - not all of it, but most of it - it involves shopping at about 3 in the morning, at the local Spanner Retail superstore...