He was standing in front of the milk shelves at the top of aisle five in the supermarket. I looked away politely and hung back even though I needed to scrutinise the milk shelves myself.
It's a tricky business milk — no longer a matter of the familiar, creamy white liquid closely connected to the life cycle of the cow. What I select is low fat, watery, almost bluish in colour and, rather damningly I've always thought, 'not suitable as a complete milk food for children under two years of age'. As there are many varieties of this delicacy, all differently priced, it takes some concentration to make a choice.
The reason I delayed, respectfully deferring to the bloke already at the shelves, was that he was horribly contorted. His head was bent over his right shoulder as if being crushed down by an invisible hand. The angle of the head more or less concealed the right ear and enforced a distortion of his mouth and right eye. Moreover, he was talking to himself.
In his left hand he was carrying a well stocked 'Green Bag', plastic bags having been recently banned in this paradise of dissent. With his right hand he selected and grasped a carton of milk and, thus laden, he began to make his painful way to other aisles of wonder and delight.
Well, you don't stare at such afflicted people and so I gazed elsewhere until he was on the move. But, as he passed by me, he put the milk carton in his bag, straightened up and removed the mobile phone that had been pincered between his right ear and his shoulder and into which he'd been speaking as he made his monstrous, doubled-up progress along the aisles.
In an instant, feeling somehow duped and foolish, I allowed my earlier compassion and sensitivity to be replaced by images of Victor Hugo's Hunchback of Notre Dame. 'That small left eye over-shadowed by a red bushy brow ... the right eye [disappearing] entirely under an enormous wart; those straggling teeth ... that leathery lip, the grotesquely twisted shoulder.' That would be how I'd remember him and how I would describe him to rapt audiences as I embellished my account of this bizarre modern monster. Quasimodo comes to Woolworths.
In Quasimodo's time, as evoked by Johan Huizinga in his stunning work The Autumn of the Middle Ages, the affairs of daily life were