People with obsessive compulsions that lead them to be excessively cautious about hygiene and cleaning should be given a very special place in this world. I’d have one. Just imagine how clean the house would be.

This thought was prompted as I went to a cash machine to withdraw some money before nipping into Sainsbury’s in Salford this evening. Cash machines must harbour so much disgusting filth and yet we use them regularly without a second thought. I looked around me at the people and thought about the demographic of the area and then I had to enter my PIN and press more buttons to request my cash. It made me feel slightly poorly.

Do the people who maintain cash machines clean them? If not, I might suggest that sanitising stations and hand gel are available for after using them.

But then there’s cash itself. Those notes and coins have been touched by hundreds and thousands of people, some of whom have no idea or simply don’t care about personal hygiene.

Have you ever seen the state of chip and pin machines at supermarket checkouts?

Then there’s the partially or fully exposed “artisan” bread that’s at a level for toddlers to maul and cough and sneeze over, for adults to do the same to.

I could go on.

Everybody should be made to wash their hands thoroughly before entering a supermarket, restaurant or cafe. Any child with a snotty nose should be quarantined for the duration of their visit. In fact, all children should be quarantined in supermarkets, preferably in a sound proof room, with the Childcatcher to look after them while they’re there.

There’s a massive public health disaster just waiting to happen and nobody is doing anything to prevent it.

I might write to the chief executives of all our major supermarkets and ask them to pilot having hand wash areas near the fresh food sections of their stores. I bet Waitrose would be right on board, they and their customers would love that sort of thing. Asda customers would probably think such an area was an open toilet and just pee in the sink.

It’s about time I got my customer service champion hat back on and did something like this. I can see me ending up on the honours list for services to public health, or maybe with a restraining order.

Anyway, you read about it here first. Give it ten years and it’ll be available in every supermarket around the globe. Except possibly in Scotland and France.

Thinner, lighter me
No, not yet, but lifestyle changes don’t take effect overnight! I’m absolutely certain that, once my new way of approaching food kicks in, I’ll be down to my genetically programmed weight within about fifteen years.

I wonder what my genetically programmed weight is. To achieve a “normal” BMI, I’d have to be about 9st.

This is going to take forever. Maybe a dose of typhoid from my local supermarket isn’t such a bad idea afterall.