Christmas Shopping

Did you know the shops only shut for 2 days over Christmas, only two days? You wouldn’t know it judging by the queues of people in Marks and Spencer stocking up on supplies. You’d think the shops would be closed for two weeks solid the way they were packing their trollies with food that would soon be packing their garbage cans. Everyone seemed frazzled, at their wits end, desperate for the 2-day shops closed window so they could finally relaxed. Everyone that is, except for the pretty young mum with blacked rimmed glasses, who had caught my eye. She didn’t look particularly stressed, she didn’t look particularly frazzled. In fact, despite having a twin pram and one child toddling along next to her, she looked surprisingly serene. In fact it was that serenity that raised my suspicions. 
I watched her as she walked around the shop placing items into the pram that her babies were sleeping contentedly in. You often see mothers do this, use their prams instead of shopping baskets (I wonder if men would get away with it.) But there was something different about this mother; something that said that those things weren’t going to see the light of day until she was back at home. 

I looked around to see if anyone else was watching her. I know it’s a cliché but the security guards really did look young. They had One Direction haircuts and bum fluffy beards and barely looked strong enough to raise their radios to their mouths let alone apprehend a shoplifter. They chatted away to each other like teenage boys do, oblivious to the actions of the shoppers around them. I’m never sure what the purpose of having uniformed guards around shopping centres is when there are so many cameras watching our every move anyway. I guess they mostly act as a deterrent but these boys didn’t look like they could deter anything standing there like toy soldiers. 

As if to prove the point, the mother didn’t even try to hide her actions. She was as brazen as you like as she pushed the pram out of the shop setting the alarms off as she went. The toy soldiers looked up from their conversation and approached the middle aged man who just happened to be leaving the shop at the same time as the woman. They asked the confused, innocent man to empty his bag, while the mother wandered away nonchalantly, dreaming of a cheap Christmas.