I’m British. I know how to queue.

So I was in a supermarket once, in the middle of a queue which went all the way around a corner. A woman came up and pushed in in front of me as I got to the ninety-degree bend.

She didn’t mistake it for the start of the queue, it wasn’t that kind of corner. The wall was actually a waist-high parade of baskets full of impulse-buys, like chocolates and so on, as shops are wont to display near the checkouts.

I could hear mutters and tuts from behind me but of course I couldn’t say anything directly (cf. British) so I started picking things off the shelves every time she wasn’t looking and put them in her trolley.

I started off small, like with a bag of crisps. People quickly cottoned on to what I was doing and I heard a few of the mutters change to noises of approval.

I ended up managing to put an entire umbrella in there. That got widespread laughter from the shop behind me but the woman was oblivious.

I rushed through the self-service tills as she went to a conventional human-powered checkout. She was clearly not paying attention because I was nearly out of the shop when I heard her say, “where the fuck did that come from?”