.. tastes embrace the elegant and refined, she still prides herself on being able to spot a bargain. Understandably she’s been hassling me for quite a while about the medieval trackie pants and a few weeks ago she spotted some bargain trackies coming up in Aldi.
Aldi. Aldi was unknown to me before she and I met. True, I had some acquaintances who would furtively mention that they’d got this or that from Aldi, but I wasn’t intrigued enough to actually venture into an Aldi store. After all, there’s Woolies and Coles, what do I need with Aldi?
But eventually it happened and I was taken by the hand and led unwillingly into an Aldi store. I was in a different world. The customers looked haunted. The check-out people looked like they hadn’t seen the sun for years. I left the store dazed and confused. A couple of elderly women were talking outside the store, one holding onto her shopping trolley with both arms. ‘Where’s my walking stick?’ she said to the other woman. ‘On yer arm’, said the other woman. I thought that summed up my Aldi experience and I said I’d prefer not having to go back there ever again.
But after a decent interval it happened again. And then again. And now I’ve become almost used to it. For instance I’ve discovered the customers aren’t haunted, they’re actually hunting. And the checkout persons still haven’t seen the sun for years but now I don’t care.
But, back to the hunting bit. Aldi is different to Woolies and Coles in that it sources bargains of all sorts from around the world and lets its people know that they’ll be in the store at a certain hour on a certain day of a certain week. And the bargains can be anything. Drum kits. Frisbees. Laptops. Bananas. (Recently some Columbian bananas arrived at an Aldi store in Berlin with $21 million worth of cocaine stashed in the boxes – bargain!)
And trackies. So it came about that we hustled into one of the nearby Aldis on Anzac Day looking for a couple of trackie pants for me at the ridiculous price of $8.99 a pair. They were in a bin at the far end of the store and it looked like a bomb had hit it. It took us a good ten minutes of rummaging to find two pairs of pants in the right size, but find them we did and sauntered nonchalantly to the checkout clutching our prizes.
Some woman ahead of us in the queue was harassing the checkout guy about some advertised special she couldn’t find. He wasn’t interested. He looked like he hadn’t slept for a week. He was the same guy I’d seen there the day before when we’d got some bargain green mangoes.
I gave him the correct change and no commentary. He looked slightly relieved and I felt as if I’d done something charitable, so it was a fair exchange.
We went home. She insisted she wash the pants before I wore them. There were shrieks of horror when pants emerged from the washing machine covered in black lint from the lining and had to be brushed and plucked before I could wear them.
When they were dry I put them on. A perfect fit! My guru purred. ‘They actually look quite good’, said the girl who wouldn’t be caught dead in any part of a track suit. ‘Turn round,’ she said.
Something caught my eye. A black sooty thing sat on the carpet at my feet. I moved slightly and more black sooty things appeared on the carpet. I took the pants off and soot fell like dandruff from the inside of my new trackie pants.
It’s a funny thing about bargains. For the next couple of days I left a trail of soot around the house wearing my new trackie pants and it was all forgiven. They were bargains you see and you can expect some minor issues. I felt enough compassion to volunteer to do the vacuuming.