Elastic, low cost airlines and the New Messiah

The prospect of a summer's day spent pounding the sandstone pavements of Bath, grimly crossing items off a shopping list seemingly more populous than the Great Oort Cloud, holds about as much appeal as pushing a pencil up my knob in pursuit of sexual gratification.

Other than trips to Waitrose to buy oven chips and curry, I go shopping only once or twice a year and try to compress the entire loathsome experience into as few hours as possible. This is essentially an exercise in logistics that requires a terabyte-crunching supercomputer or a human female to solve on any timescale measured in units shorter than aeons.

If the findings of evolutionary psychologists are to be believed, womens' brains (even those of identity feminists) are hard-wired to find and remember the location of tubers in the African savannas of human prehistory, whereas mens' brains are hard-wired to hunt giraffe. Women are therefore superbly adapted to negotiate unfazed the maze of a contemporary retail environment whereas men in the same situation are apt to deliquesce in a puddle of sweat and cortisol. I am currently bereft of a willing female accomplice and my Mac is on the blink (see below), so it was with a heavy heart that I parked my Land Rover under the new Southgate shopping centre and sallied forth with the following list in hand.

1. Take two broken laptops to the Apple Store for diagnosis.
2. Have photographs for flower show laminated.
3. Buy extra large sheet of pink cardboard, elastic, glue, glitter, poster paints and brushes.
4. Buy minibar, microwave and espresso machine.
5. Buy heavy duty bread knife with extra long blade.
6. Buy 25 scalpel blades (also extra long).
7. Buy jeans to replace pair with large split in crotch.
8. Buy boots to replace pair with soles largely detached from uppers.
9. Buy 250 plain wage envelopes, several notebooks and printer paper.
10. Buy ice-lolly making machine.

Unlike its equivalent on London's Regent Street, which is a stinking sump crawling with callow adolescents mistakenly convinced that an iPhone will make them cool, the Apple Store in Bath is a place of calmness and peace, which is why it was first on my list of destinations. I had made an appointment at the ingeniously named 'Genius Bar', where you go when the on button on your computer fails to elicit more than a quiet moan and then silence from the useless hunk of metal you paid a thousand quid for in the not very distant past. A helpful bloke with more piercings than limbs led me to the bar and, while we waited for the genius to show up, I mentioned that I was in the market for a large monitor on which to display and work on photographs, a task for which my laptop is not suited. There followed an eloquent disquisition on the 27 inch monitor, with particular reference to the thunderbolt port which allows I forget how many gigabytes per second of data to flow in both directions simultaneously to and from the monitor. I said I'd think about it.

While I'd been listening to the list of ways in which a 27 inch monitor would transform my life I had taken my two laptops from their cases and opened them up. "Oh," he said, glancing at the smaller and newer of the two machines, "that doesn't need much diagnosing." Since the screen is splintered into a jigsaw of barely coherent shards, this remark was strictly speaking redundant. "What's wrong with the other one?" he asked, referring to the old laptop that I had recently replaced. "It won't boot up. When I turn it on it just moans," I said. "Oh." He said. "That's not good." He speculated on possible explanations before confessing to a lack of expertise in the area of non-booting laptops. "I'm just an evangelist, really." He added, before disappearing in search of the missing genius.

When the maestro arrived I explained the issue with the splintered screen. Now, when it comes to rage against the machine, I have previous. Every home I have ever lived in has telephone-shaped holes in the walls, usually the result of some cretin in a call-centre in Cardiff pushing me across the sanity event horizon, from which reason can escape only in the form of Hawking radiation and flying phones. The holes were larger in the days before cordless telephones. On this occasion, however, I am blameless. What happened is that I had packed my laptop, in its case, in my hand luggage for a short trip to Spain. I was flying Easyjet and, not having purchased the "Speedy Boarding" option, which confers on its bearer the right to be at the front of the scrum before boarding begins, I was one of the last on board. "Sorry, we'll have to put that bag in the hold." I was told. Unlike the Spanish woman behind me, who engaged in a long, loud and totally futile argument, I shrugged, took out a book and handed over the bag. When I extracted my laptop at the end of my first day in Spain, the screen was in its current sorry state and I can only think that some wanker at Stansted gave my bag a friendly kick as he threw it into the hold. When I returned to Stansted a few days later, I thought that I should probably report the incident to Easyjet, not in the hope of getting an apology or a new laptop, but with an insurance claim in mind. There is, however, no Easyjet desk on the arrivals side at Stansted, because they have nothing to sell you when you are returning home, so I gave up.

The genius listened to this tale of woe sympathetically. "When did you buy this machine?" he asked. "I can't remember exactly - about three months ago." I replied. "I'll tell you what, as a goodwill gesture, we'll replace the screen free of charge." Now I found this absolutely amazing and still do, reflecting upon the experience several hours later. Not only was this guy offering to repair for nothing a fault for which Apple bore no responsibility whatsoever but he didn't have to defer to a superior before making the offer. "What's the problem with the other laptop?" He asked. I explained the issue. He pushed a few buttons, took the laptop away for a few minutes and came back with bad news. Unfortunately the mother board has failed, he told me, and it would cost about £600 to replace. Then he typed the serial number of my machine into his hand-held pad and brightened. "There's a known fault with the mother boards on these laptops, so we'll replace it for free. This is your lucky day."

Ever since I wrote my PhD thesis on a primitive communal Mac in the Cambridge Zoology Department, I have been a fan of Apple. My enthusiasm for the brand has grown over the years to the point where nothing you can say will convince me that a PC is anything other than a clunky piece of silicon shit in comparison with the lowliest Mac. Over lunch in the next door Pizza Express I mulled my conversation with Mr Piercings and realised that his choice of the term "evangelist" to describe his role was most apt. The adjective "messianic" is the first that pops into many minds when Apple CEO Steve Jobs' name is mentioned but while chewing my "Etna" pizza I understood for the first time how accurate this label is. Jobs has done something to me that no religion has achieved. He has made me a true believer, inured against contrary evidence, programmed to spread the message and, like the victims of any religion, ripe for exploitation. Good job, Jobs![1]

Next stop, the laminating shop, where I left my materials and pressed on to item 3 on the list. My daughter has set her heart on a set of fairy wings that she saw in a book and she asked me last weekend whether I would help her make them. Lest I leave the wrong impression here I should make it clear that I am in most respects an absolutely dreadful father and I am sure that Elsje will in the distant future waste a fortune on attempting to exorcise the ghost of my memory. For now, however, she loves me and I love her and I am prepared in her behalf to endure retail hell to obtain the materials for making fairy wings. What I didn't appreciate is that I would have to visit four separate shops, dispersed across at least a square mile of central Bath, to obtain these materials. The first shop was able to supply the large sheet of pink cardboard but nothing else. I soon discovered that cardboard in a breeze acts much like a sail and so I tacked rather than walked for the rest of the day.

Attempting to engage the logistical centre of my brain, I visited Gap en route from the cardboard shop to the glue shop. Although heterosexual men in the early 20th century are almost redundant, we are still called upon to "do something" when our wives have a puncture, which mine did yesterday evening. In the course of changing the tyre I was forced to assume various unnatural positions that eventually resulted in a rending sound and a welcome but surprising breeze around my genitals. Hence my visit to Gap. The jeans were neatly arranged, by waist size, starting at 28 inches. How it is possible to contain a full set of adult viscera in a torso that thin I cannot begin to explain. Ten inches to the right, the options stop, at 38 inches, two inches short of my girth, on a thin day. "Where do fat people buy their trousers in Bath?" I asked, a reasonable question that was met with (barely) polite laughter but nothing in the way of a helpful response. As I was leaving, I noticed a rack of shorts with elasticated waist bands, reduced in price to £7.99. I bought an extra large pair.

Several shops later I found myself in "Joules", whence I had been directed by a man in Jack Wills, who said that was where his dad bought his jeans. Same story. The biggest pair of trousers in the shop had been cut to fit snugly around a waist two inches shorter in circumference than mine. Again I deployed the "F" word. More, I am certain, out of embarrassment than honest appraisal the young shop assistant said "Come on! You're not that fat!", graciously omitting the implied "in comparison, say, with Dawn French." She pointed me in the direction of a jeans warehouse which, she assured me, catered for persons of my build. By the time I got there, it was closed.

Defeated and dehydrated, I stopped for a smoothie, an amazingly refreshing combination of pineapple, mint and ice. Feeling better, I tackled items 4, 5, 6, 8, 9 and 10 in a half hour blur that left my debit card smoking and my feet aching in a new pair of boots that I had found on special offer in Blacks. The bloke in the kitchen shop insisted on giving me a large plastic bag in which to carry my bread knife (destined to be used dividing perennial rootstocks, not slicing loaves of wholesome brown bread) and advised me that the receipt would probably be enough to convince the rozzers that it didn't constitute a concealed weapon.

It was 6pm and most of the shops were closing but I knew that Currys on the edge of town would be paying its dismal employees the minimum wage to wait aimlessly for customers until at least eight. Three wonderful women, Kerry, Penny and Rachel, help me maintain a semblance of order in my garden. I pay them a lot more than the minimum wage but still less than they are worth and I had decided that I should outfit the potting shed where they spend much of their time with a small fridge, a microwave and a really good coffee machine. The first cup of coffee in the morning is one of the highlights of my day and there is no longer any reason to endure the powdered filth pushed on us by Nestle now that Nespresso machines (made under license to Nestle) are relatively cheaply available.

My last stop was Sainsbury, where I bought a couple of cases of wine and some avocado pears. Also, on impulse,  a bulb of fennel. I noticed that each bulb was individually labeled "fennel", presumably so that both customers and check-out staff can distinguish it from, say, artichokes. I was reminded of my first job, stacking shelves in the local supermarket to earn money to go traveling. As part of my induction program I was required to complete a questionnaire booklet that contained questions such as "Which of the following is a banana?", followed by line drawings of a bunch of grapes, an apple, a pineapple and a crescent shaped yellow fruit, the name of which I forget. Presumably such questions are regarded as too challenging for the GCSE generation, further evidence that the world ain't what it used to be.

I didn't do an MBA, which probably explains why I find it odd that companies which treat their customers like pond scum (Easyjet) or mannequins (Gap) and their employees like retards (Sainsbury) are surprised when both groups come to despise them. Apple - and here I am going to deploy a word that I'd thought I would never again find a use for - empowers its employees, who reward this trust by proselytising with genuine enthusiasm and treating the company's customers with respect.

1. Since I wrote and published the first draft of this piece a friend has drawn my attention to recent evidence that viewing the Apple logo causes in fans of the brand the same areas of the brain to light up as in people undergoing religious experience. See here.