Monday 16th August

Well I did it. It was pretty touch and go there, especially on Sunday - I have blisters on top of blisters, owing to the incredible amount of walking, and I have to say that whilst the idea of following people was pretty interesting to start out with, it got pretty boring in the execution!
Firstly, people have absolutely no idea that they're being followed. You ought to try it, simply to give you an insight into how oblivious you become when you're shopping. Next time you're in M&S, or wherever, just for five minutes, pick the third person to come in through the door, and follow them. The trick to it is that as you're doing it, you stay a bit back from them, but keep them in your eye line. As you go along, touch, and lift up whatever items are on the rails in front of you, or reach to fiddle with the price ticket. That way you make yourself into an ordinary shopper. The person you're following will simply accept that that's what you are, and you become a part of their wallpaper. When people are shopping, they are looking at whatever's on sale. Other people only impinge on their radar if they become an obstacle to be got around, or if you are suddenly focused on the same thing. Then it's that curious dance of "Oh I'm sorry!" when you brush into each other, that kind of thing. You only come back to the reality of your surroundings when you need to find a sales assistant, or the changing rooms, or go to the checkout. Then you start to take in the whole of the room again. Focus is a weird part of being human, the way we blot out the totality to seek out whatever we want, and must have been a key part of survival back in the dawn of prehistory. How else would we have been able to see a ripe berry or the tiny flower of a particular herb amidst a mass of greenery? Now, we turn focus onto whatever we look for amidst a mass of clothing, or whatever.
I've seen some mighty strange things over the past few days. I've seen two teenage girls hunt out the corner that was out of range of the cctv, bury one jacket deep in the bottom of a bag whilst the other tried the identical jacket on and made a big fuss about whether it suited her or not - talk about displacement activity. I wasn't at all sure what to do about this, but we'd been given strict instructions that we were only there to watch, and shouldn't intervene if we saw something like this. So I didn't and yep, still go a few guilt pangs about it. The only thing I can say is that I have absolutely no idea what either of these girls looked like, I can't remember a single distinguishing characteristic of any of these people, because when I picked them to follow I focused on a characteristic that allowed me to pick them out at a reasonable distance - one woman was tall, another had a very odd hair thing involving a ponytail - someone else had the world's worst jacket (I'd swear it was yellow leather), that kind of thing. And I was so transfixed by what they were doing that I didn't seen them at all. Another day I followed a middle aged man and his wife around a men's clothing department, and I'd swear they examined every single shirt in the place. They took what felt like hours doing this, and my guess is that she wanted him to branch out a bit into something a bit different from what he would normally wear - but what did they end up with? A blue short sleeved shirt. Hours it felt like. I would swear that if she hadn't been with him, he'd have been in and out of there in 15 minutes.

But my overwhelming memory that I'm going to take away from this is going to be my feet. The first day we were at this from twenty to ten in the morning until 8 o'clock at night, and the other days were twenty to ten until 6, and I think it's a miracle that I've managed to get through it - confession here, I didn't manage it at all on Saturday, I could barely walk. Come Sunday, I was back at it, and I'm extremely thankful that its over and done with. I wouldn't be able to do this, I don't think anyone would be able to do it on a long term basis. It's not just the trekking up and down between Buchanan Galleries and St Enochs, it's the miles you walk inside of these shops, and I mean miles. A shop like John Lewis, not only is it what, three floors, but those floors have one heck of a lot of ground space. You follow someone in through the doors say at the back opposite the bus station, then they go up an escalator, spend forty minutes or so trekking around the women's clothing department, then they go on a short trip to the loo, perhaps pick up a pair of shoes before heading back to the clothing department to select a few of the garments they've looked at and have twenty five minutes in the changing rooms. They are perfectly capable of coming out of there and going to fetch another four or five dresses. Then maybe it's back to the shoe department to change their original choice for a version in blue, then they'll go off to the cafe - not me, worst luck, I'm stuck in the area around the cafe entrance waiting for them to come out, then maybe they'll be off to look at the lighting, or the hats... it's interminable, and after say what the third time this happens, stultifyingly boring. The only really interesting thing I've found over the past four days is that there are some rather nice scarves around which I may at some point pop back to pick up. I'm getting fed up of hair in my eyes, and it's either that or a haircut.. no not the haircut!!!

The other big downside of this job was that there was nowhere to go to put your feet up, or eat a sandwich. I had to go to cafes and stuff for lunch, and there aren't that many around in the shopping centre that serve a)decent food or b) cheap food! In fact I have to say M&S's cafe - particularly on Sunday when it's unaccountably quiet - was remarkably good value for money. As for that hellhole in the Buchanan Gallery which goes by some variety of the name "Streat", they are charging the most outrageous prices for the biggest plateful of cr@p I've ever had the misfortune to pay for. I had the allday breakfast at about 3 pm on Thursday. What you get is a huge plate, a simply vast bowl style in which are 'decoratively' arranged two extremely cheap sausages - more filler than meat, a small dessert spoonful of scrambled egg that at my guess where scrambled say at about 8 am, enough time for them to have become set scrambled egg at any rate, and I'd swear they must have started out as powdered, a piece of carbonised bacon - so carbonised, or more probably microwaved, that teeth could not penetrate it, and a large piece of some sort of bread. This was extremely mysterious because I suspect it was possibly some sort of pitta, or flat bread, with those odd green/grey marks on the bottom that are meant to indicate it's been baked on stone. This thing had never seen a stone in the totality of it's existence. How they get those marks there I have no idea, but I suspect that a machine stamps them on. It had then been toasted at some point, because it had the toasting lines on the top of it, but despite this, I'm convinced it was a solid lump of dough in the middle. Vile. I didn't touch it. Anyhow for this ghastly concoction they have the cheek to charge you £3.95, which frankly should be reported to the trades description people, but who's going to go to that much trouble? The staff are nice though, and you feel embarrassed on their behalf. In M&S I got a nice salmon and cucumber sandwich and pot of earl grey tea for about the same amount of money, and it was fresh, and tasty. I don't normally go in for food reviews, but maybe amid the sea of woe that were my feet, the most important thing was I got to sit down for 20 minutes!!!