Rabbit Foot Spasm Band frontman and devoted working class dad at odds with Oxford . . . and the world

Destiny occasionally calls me to the supermarket checkout. Once I’ve selected the shortest queue I occupy my time by nosing at other people’s shopping. Take the robust man opposite me who carefully arranges avocados on the conveyor belt. The question is why? What do you even do with an avocado?

Prepare a fancy prawn cocktail? Paint a still life to impress your arty friends? Maybe this chap swallows them whole the moment he squeezes back into his Jeep.

The avocados do a little dance between two boxes of crackers which he has strategically placed to stop them rolling onto the floor.

He also purchases a selection of salad vegetables and a pot of fresh coriander. There’s a pack of actual coffee beans – the real ones which your kids can fire at you out of a pea-shooter.

Finally, two bottles of red clink their way towards the till. He packs those last. Toasting his weekly shop he can say hey, look at my shopping – I’m a superior kind of a dude.

Or more likely he can grovellingly inform his wife that he got everything on her list.

The person in front of me exhibits two frozen pizzas on a plinth, above which a pack of potato waffles and a box of fish fingers can be seen to sway nervously.

There’s salad here too of the variety that is ready-made, then fired into a bag amid inedible shards of red cabbage. The ensemble says “I am on a budget”. It reminds of how my own shopping looked on that day in 2012 while I slowly contemplated suicide in an East Oxford bedsit. The pizzas, however, look delicious. I suspect I’m not the only person engaged in checkout surfing. The Mass Observation organisation, set up in 1937, even issued directives to observe the nation’s shopping habits. Today my own groceries also loudly proclaim budget status. But let’s throw the stats. We can twist what our shopping says about us.

Imagine the Prince of Wales laying out a two-litre bottle of strong cider, a microwave hot dog and half a dozen scratch cards. Instant chav. Imagine Nigel Farage lining up nine litres of Beaujolais, a piece of Brie and a baguette. “Bonjour” he might yell to the guy working on checkout, who’s seen it all before.

Naturally, you can’t really judge people by their shopping. We’re constantly told to fill up with fresh fruit and vegetables. The sad truth is that healthy eating can cost a fortune. Fish fingers are cheap, last for months and will be better received than a plate of boiled leeks, marinated in a raspberry jus and individually tossed.

So let the rich look into my larder and laugh.

My stock of mangos may be replenished in the next economic boom. Meanwhile, this spaghetti on toast tastes good enough to raise the dead.