Silly sausage

Was it worth a half-hour round trip to retrieve a two euro thirty-four cent sausage? Columnist Peter Edgerton has been weighing up the pros and cons

Peter Edgerton / www.peteredgerton.com

Malaga

Friday, 12 July 2024, 15:23

How far should a man go for a sausage? That wasn't a question I expected to be rattling around my head when I woke ... up this morning but by 1pm it was, astonishingly, the only thing on my mind.

In the supermarket, twenty minutes earlier, on a whim, I'd bought some salchichón along with a few other bits and bobs. At the checkout , there was a kerfuffle involving the woman before me quibbling forcefully with the girl at the till about the price of tinned tomatoes. The fifteen cents difference seemed to be of the utmost importance to her and she argued her corner vociferously. It was only the volume of the tutting from other customers that kept me from getting the full facts. Anyway, after trying the old 'oh-and-can-I-have-a-plastic bag, too' trick after everything had been resolved, hoping to get it for free (she didn't), Mrs Quibble pottered off, presumably to count her savings by candlelight.

Amid this flurry of plastic bags and forthright recriminations, I had left my cherished salchichón somewhere in the wreckage. At least, that was the conclusion I reached when I got home and emptied my sausageless bag. Now, here was the all-important question: should I go back for the missing item? There are eighty-six billion neurons in the human brain and, at one o'clock this afternoon, every single one of mine was being employed to weigh up the pros and cons.

There were so many factors: had I actually left the sausage there? Had someone else swiped it? Was Mrs Quibble's quibbling an elaborate distraction tactic employed for that very purpose? Was it worth the half-hour round trip to retrieve a two euro thirty-four cent sausage? What's the minimum wage and how does it compare to the time spent/money lost ratio? How badly did I want the sausage? In the end, partly to stop the room filling with smoke bellowing from my ears and partly because I was now craving salchichón like I'd never craved anything in my life, I went back. The check-out girl nodded towards the fridge and smiled. Phew! I grabbed my prize, saluted the girl with it as if it were an Olympic torch and scurried home to enjoy the spoils.

One of the questions I'd battled with before deciding on a return trip to the supermarket was whether I could spare the time to do so, given that I had an article to write for this newspaper and hadn't even thought of a subject yet.

Well, fancy that – two birds with one stone.

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