This is a bit of an odd subject, but I have just witnessed the most fascinating display of human behaviour. My local supermarket, of which I am very fond because it is so close to my home, has decided to rearrange all of the shelves and place items in different locations around the store.

This change is evidently causing shoppers one or two ‘issues’, and at first I must admit that I found the new layout to be somewhat tiresome. Food shopping is something that I suppose none of us really want to do, but it is one of the necessary evils of life. So there I was, trying to hunt down the last few items on my list, and I began to form the opinion that it should be made illegal for supermarkets to change their layout without first applying for the retail equivalent of planning permission. I’d not considered something that ludicrous before, but the more I thought about it the more it seemed like a good idea. Just think about it for a minute – supermarkets could be made to register their wish to change their shelving layout, the proposal could be advertised, and then shoppers would have a reasonable period of time to submit their objections to the plans, or at the very least study the new layout in cartographic form so that they would know where to find things. I personally think that it would be a much better system than the one I have just witnessed; namely a few hundred people each armed with an overloaded trolley, moving around the store in a fashion approximating that of Brownian motion, with utterly confused looks upon their faces and progressively making themselves more and more angry. The manager must have been receiving rather a lot of complaints because the staff were issuing regular public address announcements, offering their apologies for the confusion and inconvenience.

At one stage I was beginning to get irritated by the changes, but then fortunately I was rescued by an unexpected bout of schadenfreude. I noticed that wherever I looked I could see people getting extremely upset indeed that they couldn’t find things, and the realisation hit me that the adverse public reaction to something so trivial was really quite pathetic. What made the situation even funnier was that as I started to listen to the various conversations around me, I could hear people uttering in panic-stricken tones sentences such as “Oh, why can’t I find the sugar?!?”. Glancing down into my own trolley I noted that I had already found the sugar, which only served to heighten the pleasure of the situation.

However what I couldn’t work out was why people were looking in my direction, pausing, and then suddenly a sense of relief would drift across their faces and a wry smile would immediately replace it. It baffled me for quite some time but it wasn’t until the checkout queue that I realised what was going on. I had completely forgotten that I was wearing a new T-shirt which is based upon the motivational message devised by the British government at the beginning of World War II. The slogan was never actually published or released at the time, but it has since been adopted as a brand …