I have an issue with Shopping Trolleys.
"An" issue.
Yes, this really is just a singular thing, but it is essential to the working of the trolley. No, it is not the fact that I am forced to delve into what Tesco presumes is a bottomless pit of one- pound coins just to use one of the damn things, meaning that that packet of crisps remains beyond reach for another week. And no, this is not about the three different sizes of trolley I am forced to choose from, each seeming to be simultaneously more useful and less useful than the last.
No, this is a much bigger issue, and it all relates to walking.
I like to walk about. Walking, you build up speed until you reach a maximum velocity...and you slow again, until you reach a nice steady pace.
Not with a shopping trolley, oh no.
I'm walking with one of these things -- pushing it, not just striding alongside it, asking it about its holiday to Waitrose like some bizarre hairdresser -- and I feel my legs getting faster without me realising it. It is then I realise; the trolley has taken over. It drags me through the aisles, I push with one hand, and shove the products in with the other, shoveling food into the trolley as if it was a metallic Eric Pickles. I'm getting faster all the time, and I feel fine; none of the panting, sweating or tiredness of the standard fast walk.
And this is where it all goes wrong.
You don't slow down again.
Oh, you can stop, but why would you ever need to stop in any supermarket? You know what you're there for, you buy the same things week-after-week, that's how it works. SO you speed up, and speed up. Aisles are a blur, your shoes are smoking, feet burning, but no fatigue. The trolley takes care of that. You lean into the trolley and time slows down around you, like you're in a Michael Bay film. But you don't turn to look, just in case you are, and you run and run and run and run. Boom. Sound barrier broken. People are thrown back, products shattering and breaking.
Whoosh.
You blink and the supermarket is there no longer. Instead, you seem to be in ancient Greece, surrounded by the class of Plato; you broke light speed and travelled back in time. For some reason, you gain the ancient Greek language and explain to them their situation. Oh, you think this could be good? Oh no. They are millenia away from the shopping trolley! But not anymore, I've given them the trolley now. "Tesco" becomes like a new messiah, and the first store is opened over 2000 years earlier.
This may seem like a good idea, but it really isn't. Think about it. Time travel. They've got all the tech I'd have on me. Granted, they're probably only a decade or so from making my shit phone anyway, but now they have the tools to make it earlier! They have an early industrial revolution, two thousand years earlier! But this doesn't matter, because with this technology, weapons follow. Spartans with AK-47s attack the shores of Athens, who defend with organised drone strikes on Sparta, reducing it to rubble.
And finally, as the world descends into a militarised chaos-pit, 1066 rolls around. The Battle of Hastings, the war of kings. Fought with swords, sheilds, arrows and nuclear warheads.
With Shopping Trolleys remaining how they are, the world will be obliterated by William of Normandy in the year 1066. While some could argue that as a positive -- probably depressed emo kids with delusions of how they'd be better at dying than they are at living --, I don't think it would be, because I would never have been born to start all of this palava, leading to a paradox that creates a rift in space-time which swallows up everything that ever was, and ever will be.
And that is my issue with shopping trolleys.
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