On one of my frequent jaunts around Brighton, I was shopping through the South Lanes when I happened upon a modest store with T-shirts plastered all over the windows.
Naturally I gravitated towards the door and within seconds I was rifling through the hangers on the rails, looking for inspiration. What I found was layers of lavish T-shirt illustrations, each with equally lavish price tags.
I also found a small Pomeranian dog sitting at my feet. It appeared so suddenly that I was convinced it had fallen from the rail as I was whipping through the garments.
I looked at the dog.
The dog looked back at me.
I looked over to the elderly owner of the shop.
The elderly owner of the shop was looking at her book-keeping.
I looked back at the dog.
The dog was still looking at me.
I looked at the clothing rail. There was definitely no bare coat hanger upon which to reattach a fallen dog.
Just then, and I'm not sure why, a thought crossed my mind.
Should I ask for one?
"Excuse me, I'm terribly sorry, but I appear to have knocked this dog down from its hanger and I also seem to have lost the hanger and..."
The shop owner looked back at me. She was not remotely amused.
She made a sharp hissing sound- sort of like how a sneeze might sound through a cardboard tube - and the dog immediately blundered as fast as it could behind the counter to join the owner, away from all the would-be dog-hangers in room.
Satisfied that there was little else I could do to make things more uncomfortable for everyone involved, I purchased whichever T-shirt I had in my hand at the time. Desperately I hoped the design on it was the very sentence I'd uttered moments ago; that way I could have claimed to be merely reading aloud. Instead the design was a bunch of deregistered grubby cassette tapes laid out across the front, with some inside-out seam detailing around the shoulders. Not a dog-hanging anecdote in sight.
I have yet to return to the store.
