I always find late night shopping a bit of a surreal experience, even when it doesn’t quite count as late night which I think should be sometime after midnight. After putting together the various bits of my new PC, I found myself going down to the local Asda-Walmart for supplies of bread, milk and other essentials.

Driving in to the carpark made me wish I’d had the digital camera and tripod to capture the late night emptiness that comes with 24 hour supermarkets and to feature in this posting. Except it wasn’t quite. Sure, there were about 20 cars in the whole car park, which must take several hundred on a busy weekend afternoon, but two lanes of spaces were cordoned off in the dark. Driving over to park nearby, there were two or three workmen sitting beside stacks of mono-block bricks, relaying in the dim lighting of the carpark. Not a crowd of workmen in fluorescent jackets under floodlights like you have on overnight roadworks, just a couple of white vans and at most 3 workmen. No extra lighting either.

The shopping experience was par the course for that time of night, too many open checkouts for the people in the store (not a bad thing – you don’t have to queue). And aisles full of stock to be placed on shelves, which again is a perfectly understandable activity when the store is quiet. And they played me in to Justin Timberlake and played me out to Avril Lavigne. I can’t remember ever hearing them in my previous visits, perhaps it was too busy to notice?