Some of you reading this will already be in 2015 – Happy New Year all! Having spoken to a good friend in Brisbane this morning at 10am my time, she was only 4 hours away from 2015 …. it’s an odd sensation and perhaps serves to help me understand my jet lag when I arrived in Brisbane on 29 January at 7am having left the UK at 2pm on Monday 27 January this year, with very little sleep in between times.
Today has been an odd end of 2014 for us here at FWL. After de-icing the cars for the third time this week, ten certificates arrived in the mail this morning – great start! Recycling bins emptied (by the lovely ‘bin men’), Skype call to ‘Down Under’ and proof reading down, case cracking was well underway but a trip to the local supermarket was needed. I decided to pop out at what I deemed ‘the best time’ on New Year’s Eve. Hahahaha! I was well and truly WRONG. Car park full, hardly any baskets to put the few shopping items I needed in and exceedingly challenging to dart around the store quickly and avoid the walking sticks, trolleys and mobility scooters – now you are getting a good picture of the kind of town I live in. Purchasing the crucial alcoholic beverages for this evening, I decided to steer clear of the self-service checkouts so that ‘approval needed‘ wasn’t shouted out at the top of Mrs Self-Service Till’s voice, thus announcing to the entire world that I was purchasing alcohol! I plumped for a small-ish queue (it is wrong that we Brits love to queue, by the way) behind a little old lady and immediately, started up a conversation with the lady who set her shopping down behind mine about her cottage pie purchase (I now know that you really can Taste The Difference!). 
We seemed to be a little slower moving than the next line so I turned to see what the hold-up was. I was amazed to find the cashier sitting twiddling her fingers waiting to be paid for the shopping she had just scanned, with the elderly lady in front of me struggling to put her shopping into carrier bags. I counted to ten. I counted another five. I couldn’t count any more. Not because I had lost count, or couldn’t get past 15 but because I couldn’t believe my eyes. So, I took a few steps forward and offered to help the lady pack her shopping. She was so grateful, it was like I had offered her £1,000,000, or the crown jewels. Just a few items, into two plastic bags and I’d made her day. [Let’s not consider what the cashier should have been doing in this instance….]
After I paid for my own shopping, I caught up with the lady to check that her bags were secured on her walker and wished her a Happy New Year – she beamed back at me and wished me a wonderful New Year too. I consider myself to be a pretty kind person most days of the week but I have now resolved to be even nicer in 2015 and try to put a smile on someone’s face, each and every day of the year.
