Your correspondent has spent the morning in Godalming, where the automatic doors of the Waitrose now bear a laminated notice, taped at a slightly apologetic angle, informing the public that Starships are strictly four per customer. Beneath it, a smaller sheet advises that the limit applies per transaction, per household, and per any attempt to return later wearing a different hat. The suburban middle classes were bickering by the customer service desk over reusable launch stages, and your correspondent took a medicinal nip of amontillado from the mackintosh, as is her custom, and observed.
A dreadful scuffle in aisle four
At Petersfield, a retired surveyor named Alistair Preece was detained at the self-checkout attempting to conceal a fifth stainless steel booster behind three crates of Satsumas and a stack of kindling. The store manager, Mr Timothy Frayne, was obliged to summon assistance with a tannoy call for ‘a colleague to the bakery corridor, regarding an unauthorised orbital stage’.
“We have had people try to buy fourteen, we have had people try to buy them in pairs and claim one was a hat stand, and we have had one gentleman who attempted to pay with a book of Green Shield stamps,” said Mr Frayne, who has worked in grocery for twenty-six years and now keeps a laminated diagram of a Raptor engine behind the till. “I did not train for this. I trained for a nice bit of cheese.”
The British Retail Consortium has defended the cap as a necessary measure to prevent syndicates in Surrey hoarding interplanetary hardware behind their potting sheds. A spokesperson, Mrs Davina Cropley, insisted the four-unit limit was ‘proportionate, temporary and entirely consistent with the spirit of the weekly shop’.
“We are not, repeat not, rationing aspiration,” said Mrs Cropley, Head of Ambient Logistics at the Consortium. “We are rationing the number of 5,000-tonne reusable launch vehicles a single household may reasonably require before Sunday. Nobody needs five. Nobody has ever needed five. My own mother managed perfectly well with two.”
Asda has converted the overflow car park at its Horsham branch into a cryogenic staging facility, though customers complain that the lower loyalty price requires a functioning smartphone app, a QR code, and 3,000 Morrisons More points, which is a different supermarket entirely. The Department for Transport has quietly reminded motorists that strapping four heavy-lift boosters to the roof rack of a Nissan Qashqai remains an offence under the Road Traffic Act, and that the matter of the methane tanks is ‘under review’.
The vulgarity of the loyalty scheme
One is asked, to-day, to consider the price of things. A 165-foot rocket vessel is eighty million pounds to the casual shopper, a figure which at least has the honesty of grandeur. It is reduced, however, to fourteen pounds fifty if one permits the supermarket to harvest one’s domestic data through a small plastic fob, which is the most humiliating transaction in the history of commerce. Your correspondent has seen the collection bays. She has seen the customers queuing in the drizzle with flatbed trailers, hauling methane tanks past the trolley park, their faces lit by the cold blue glow of a self-service screen that has already forgotten them.
“I queued for three hours to collect a second stage and when I got to the front they told me I had to download the app, and I said I have a Nokia, and they looked at me as though I had brought a dead badger to a christening,” said Mr Preece, who was later released without charge and given a complimentary bag for life. “I only wanted one. Then I thought, well, while I’m here. Then I thought, well, they’re doing a deal on the boosters if you buy the methane separately. It escalates. That is the thing nobody tells you. It escalates.”
One notes that the entire county of West Sussex now smells faintly of oxidiser, and that the parish council has scheduled an emergency meeting for Thursday to discuss the noise. The noise, your correspondent can confirm, is considerable. It is the sound of a nation that has stopped believing in anything taller than a patio heater, briefly believing in something considerably taller than a patio heater, and then being told it may have four of them and no more.
A slight revision of the facts
Your correspondent retired to the motor-car with her pocketbook and a second small sherry, the better to compose her contempt, and it was while consulting her receipts that a certain difficulty presented itself. She had, it transpired, purchased four Starships herself on Tuesday afternoon, having mistaken the display near the seasonal bulbs for an unusually sturdy brand of zinc dustbin. The heat shield tiles, she now finds, are rather handsome. They catch the light. They will do splendidly for keeping the neighbours’ spaniel off the asparagus patch.
“We have had a number of customers make this exact error, and we are working with the manufacturer to make the packaging clearer,” said Mr Frayne, when reached for comment. “Although frankly, madam, at some point one has to ask how a person mistakes a rocket for a bin. Four times. In one afternoon. With a trolley.”
One is now informed that the four objects in the driveway are not, in fact, entirely legal to keep in a residential area, that the methane tanks constitute a fire risk under the 2005 Regulations, and that a man from the council will be calling on Friday. Your correspondent has decided she rather likes them. They lend the property a certain gravity. The spaniel has not been seen since Tuesday.
The rain falls equally upon the stainless steel
The four gleaming rockets stand in the Sussex damp, rusting gently, which is what stainless steel does when it is left out, which nobody warns you about. None of this technological triumph matters in the slightest. The local council will refuse planning permission for orbital launch on the grounds of light pollution, the post will still arrive at half past two, and the entire county will shortly be consumed by an unyielding November sleet that does not care what a thing cost or who queued for it. Your correspondent shall finish her sherry, and then she shall have another, and then, in all likelihood, she shall have the last of it, because the nights are drawing in and there is nothing whatsoever to be done about that.
