A shopping experience like no other...

The rain is slicing through the car park, people and cars play chicken as they go about their business, in the 1970s shopping precinct.

A huge queue for three cash points just inside entrance to Asda mingles and tangles with the queue for the Coinstar machine (usually a silent beast in the corner of a supermarket, an avert for being poor, which changes the pennies and 5ps you have been putting in an old bottle into real money, at a price) I have never seen a queue for a coin star machine in my life.

The cheapest brands of cigarettes dominate the cigarette and lottery counter, which has an equally unruly and confusing gaggle of people and push chairs queuing to pay their tax on hope.

The supermarket is Saturday-busy, crawling with dusty, pallid complexions, the lines on their faces telling stories you wouldn’t want to hear; women with hair, greying and thinning before its time, matted with grease and hair grips; more pushchairs than parents, grabbing at anything on the clearance shelf; track-suited groups of lads, shouting across the aisles as they ignore the frailty of old and young around them and jostle each other towards the checkouts.

A sea of modern poverty, surrounded by things to consume.

There is mild comedy at the self serve tills as products are waved in the vague direction of the bar code scanner many times before the bleep; a young mum with pushchair fails to scan a plastic toy and is told she can keep it by the acne ridden supervisor; behind him a security guard bungles a old wizened man into a back room for the booze he has hidden in his jacket.

Behind us a man lies on the ground, unable to control his legs, arms or speech, fitting and tripping in the middle of the weekend shopping rush, surrounded by shop staff and paramedics and holding all the till queues up as the till girls crane their necks to see the drama. A little girl with an afro asks her grey-skinned grandmother why the man is on the floor shouting. Gently but with a disturbing resignation, the grandmother explains the man has had something that made his brain go funny but that he will go to hospital and have some tablets and then he will be better. The girl seems satisfied and turns her attention to the sweets by the checkout.

We go back into the blustery rain and drive away as another ambulance screeches into view.