I pose a suicide risk in Sainsbury's.

I was in the supermarket yesterday and while I was there I had been requested to pick up some mild drugs for an ailing housemate. I was happy to do so, because that's the kind of guy I am, and I was going to the shop anyway to stock up on crisps and coffee and crap-I-forgot-the-apple-juice-again.

The till was filled with the usual passive-agressive taunting of the anti-social elderly drunkard in front who clearly refused to put himself out by stretching the 40cm to get the divider. (Which, by the way, there needs to be a word for. Who deals with that? I need a word for the conveyor belt divider. I've never thought about it before, but there appears to be a humungous gap in the collective vocabulary.) So anyway, you put your shopping so close to his giant bottle of vodka and tiny jar of olives that he starts to get nervous and has to jimmy the thing between the two sets of shopping to make sure he doesn't end up with a load of rubbish he really doesn't want.

My turn. Swipe-bleep, swipe-bleep, and in the shopping goes, into the single carrier bag that has wafted generously down towards me. Swipe-bleep, swipe-bleep, silence. Suddenly I was prevented from buying more than 32 keenly priced caplets of assorted painkillers by a peevish little woman who seized the task with all the relish of guarding the entrance to the underworld. "Ooh, I can't give you more than of these," she said with fire in her eyes. The rest of the queue looked at me with a mix of fear, pity and excitement, as if I was such a high suicide risk I would top myself right there by mangling myself in the conveyor belt. Frankly they should have been more worried about the old guy with the booze and the olives and no grasp of supermarket etiquette.

I put the two miserable packets of tablets in my shopping bag and rammed home my debit card in as defiant a way as one can manage with a chip and pin machine. I went home.