Finding happiness at the supermarket checkout

This little supermarket doesn’t have a fancy cheese section or a bottle shop attached, but it has everything I need - a worker whose infectious joy exalts.

‘This little place doesn’t even have automated checkouts and I do not miss them, for this world forces you down to a slower, more contemplative pace.’

She’ll never know she is this, a tuning fork into joy, for so many of us. Or perhaps does, and it keeps her full-throated at work in this supermarket, which is not one of the big chains. I’ve had it with that lot. With their obscene profits and proliferating checkout automatons – what fresh and wily impersonality have they got for us now; and with the way they roll in their paws our crop cockies and cow cockies, bullying them off. This little place doesn’t even have automated checkouts and I do not miss them, for this world forces you down to a slower, more contemplative pace.

And there she is, the woman of high glee behind the checkout, almost every time. Tiny, bird-like, Filipino, of indeterminate age. Late forties, fifties. Her generosity, with all of her customers, shines. And her smile, the memory of which seems wider than her face itself. She seems inured from the world outside, from the fractiousness of everyday life. She girdles our frazzled existences with buoyancy. Outside are cars bullish with wanting to zip in or out to get on with their day, the tension of a busy carpark. Tight squeezes, affronted horns. But inside, with her, you forget. She gathers to her the light.

She’s heard before seen. Her laughter, her curiosity, geeing everyone up. I’m not the only one, surely, angling from the single queuing line to get to her till. Her hands are swift, practised, and she doesn’t take any longer putting groceries through, but she gets so much out of that crammed moment of connection. Talk is of small things – the day, kids, weather, star signs; I don’t understand that world but go along with it, just for the lift she bestows. She sends you out into the world with a winging soul. Her plate is people in the rich feast of life; she gives everyone the energiser of attention.

She never does an idling, she is full rev. All of us wanted, whatever we throw at her, as she unlocks even the churliest into smile. She is the fisher dipping her rod into all our lives, drawing up brief, silvery catches of who we are. And she remembers. “Ah, Scorpio!” her face lights up. “How are the kids?” I don’t know her name, nor she mine; that’s an intimacy too far. It would crack the small, rich cup of this into something else.

George Eliot wrote of a similar soul in Middlemarch. “Her full nature … spent itself in channels which had no great name on the Earth. But the effect of her being … was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

I have stood behind an ex-prime minister in this supermarket’s checkout queue, a remarkable person with a remarkable career; yet I see this tiny woman as remarkable too. By living her hidden life exuberantly, and taking delight in the world, she is teaching us all. The sages tell us that the way to get people to like you is by showing a genuine curiosity in others. A Harvard study has found that the asking of questions, and follow-up questions, dramatically increases one’s likability. It’s her, personified. On her feet during the exhausting tide of the days, during quiet times and busy, morning scrambles and evening rushes, she maintains an infectious euphoria at the sheer wonder and variety of life. She makes others happy, which keeps her happy, in a self-perpetuating cycle.

This little supermarket doesn’t have a fancy cheese section or a bottle shop attached, but it has everything I need. Memories of supermarkets from simpler, more gracious times, and a worker whose infectious joy exalts. Settles you, rights you, as you head off into your day, or night; makes you walk a little taller into the big combative world.