When it comes to adventures in retail, nighttime shopping is where it all happens: the unusual and most interesting people, the prime parking spaces, the lack of queues and, best of all, the absence of germy, screamy, bored, needy, naggy children. Shopping at night is plentiful in the sticks where I live – the sticks being that area between the outer suburbs and Home Counties proper. It is where you can find both stretches of heath and woodland and still get a decent coffee, speciality breads, etc. Retail parks are open until 8, 9, or even 10, and two epic 24-hour superstores are a mere zoom away in my old car.
The British public loves an excuse for a laugh, a bit of banter, fleeting but always greasing the wheels of life
The relaxed pace of night shopping and less predictable customers makes nighttime shopping marvellous for eavesdropping. Regulars include loners, the elderly, and students. For me, the experience is part immersive sitcom, part anthropological fact-finding mission. There is also a sense of homeopathic tincture to the social contact of nighttime shopping. I have always depended on the brief conviviality of strangers – the noncommittal, spontaneous exchanges with staff and other shoppers. The warmth without involvement. The British public loves an excuse for a laugh, a bit of banter, fleeting but always greasing the wheels of life. Friendliness for the unfriendly.
For the hardcore hit of extreme night shopping, you need a 24-hour superstore. The nearest is the Tesco Superstore; the other is more of a drive, but worth it. It is a veritable Disneyland of distraction – the Asda near the motorway. If there is a word for female machismo, the girls at Asda display it in their competitive sport: shopping in nightwear, dressing gowns, and slippers. It is not a slovenly enterprise either; the slippers are the fluffiest and the attire the cutest and most bedroomy imaginable. I go with a friend, and we stalk them with our phone cameras to get a photo, though we always wimp out. You have to be careful; they are not as fluffy as they look, these girls.
The best thing about the place, though, is the night staff, who are often admirable older ladies holding down two jobs to feed their families. Joining these stressed-out mothers are the nonconformist types who thrive on the ease of a night shift and like a laugh. Once, at 2 a.m., they took over the PA system, and the enormous, soulless environment became a gigantic birthday party. I have never had so much fun under fluorescent lighting. They also enjoy the customers’ competitive bedroom-wear shopping and told us to come back when it snowed. We did. As promised, the fluffy girls turned up. Arctic conditions had drawn them like emperor penguins to make their way there, and some alpha females even pushed trolleys home in the snow in slippers while we watched, shivering, dressed in winter coats and boots.
There is a darker side to night shopping. I have spent much of my life around Soho and the East End, sometimes seedily and often late at night, especially in my life in comedy. I have mingled in insalubrious environs with ease. I am streetwise. Never would I have imagined the abuse me and four other women once suffered. The incident took place at 9 p.m. at the Tesco Superstore.
It was summertime and I was mooching around, last minute, picking up items for a holiday – travel-sized. I had seen the creepy man before. He reminded me of the male zombie stalking the sister in the simple, so-chilling opening segment of Night of the Living Dead. The sinisterly slow yet inexorable progress, the heavy features, the glazed deep-set eyes, the freakish height. As I traversed the aisles, he seemed to appear; I’d give him the slip, and he would reappear. I thought I had finally lost him; there were staff at a help desk and, I thought, I was safe.
I was crouching down looking for flipflops in a size 6 when I felt a heavy weight press upon me. There is no polite way to phrase this but I was being, what they call, ‘dry humped’. There was even panting. My first thought was that it was a large guide dog. As I stood up, the man staggered back, recovered his towering height. I was transfixed as I gazed at him some four metres away. There was a look of painful reverie on his face. His eyes indicated downwards; mine followed to see him holding his member like he was offering a microphone.
Despite my usual articulacy, all I said – all I could say – was ‘no, no, no, no, no’. I shouted for the guard; he ran. I made my way to the ladies at the desk. There I saw two teenage girls shivering and two women who could not speak English being comforted. All had experienced incidents that night, all five of us. Nobody else had actually been assaulted like me. The perpetrator was caught by security as he tried to flee.
Two likable policemen did their best to interview the two women who spoke little English. What bothered me was that one of the 17-year-old girls was shaking, traumatised. I told the police that the girls should go home as I would give a watertight, detailed statement that would utterly nail him. We went into a small room where I did just that. It was therapeutic. I even managed to amuse my audience, when asked to describe his naked revelation in visual detail: ‘Let’s just say it’s just about the only thing he doesn’t need to be ashamed of.’
I got home late. I felt useful and a little heroic for saving the teenager from the ordeal. In the end, my statement was so comprehensive he was forced to confess. Part of me was disappointed not to be all Marlene Dietrich in Witness for the Prosecution and make the creep squirm. As is often the case, he had previous involving following schoolgirls. I was the only person he had ever accosted. My being there turned out to have been a good thing. As such, I do not regret it.
Of course, this never would have happened in Asda – the scary girls in slippers would have sorted him out. As I say, night shopping is like going on safari. You have to take the rough with the smooth. Even so, heroically, I went back and found the sandals in my size and a few more items after the police left. Unnecessary things. Retail therapy, see?
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