The children stood looking at the flower displays in the supermarket. There was one called Luxury Gift Basket which cost £9.99 and there was a smaller bunch called World's Best Mum Bouquet which would only set them back £4.99. The decision was agonising.
"The basket's much nicer," said the girl, who was about 10 and therefore more experienced in the ways of the consumer society. "But she'd like to be called the World's Best Mum," said the boy, who was seven-ish.
"We could write that on a card and give her the basket." The daughter still wanted to go for quality.
"But she'd know it wasn't really a World's Best Mum bunch," said the boy, who was a stickler for accuracy. "Right," said the girl, "and then we can get her chocolates as well."
"But she's on a diet; she won't eat them," he said, his face round with surprise that such a thing should be offered to his calorie-conscious mother.
Then it dawned on him that, in that case, they might be passed around and he smiled slowly. And somewhere tomorrow a World's Best Mum will get a bedraggled mixed bouquet and some forbidden chocolates and she will tell them that they made the right decision.
The new hair salon in London was a place that wanted to know all about you on a customer card before it would wash your hair: daytime phone number; vague age, like between this and that; whether you were a house owner or a tenant; employed or self-employed; what magazines you read; if you drove a car. Nothing about whether your hair was dry or greasy or if you'd like bits of it dyed or cut which is what you'd think they would be more interested in.
"Building up a profile," explained the beautiful girl at the desk. I hoped that the sooner I answered everything the sooner we'd get on with the job.
"Do you have children?" she asked, hand hovering over a yes/no box. I said I didn't, and wondered would this affect dandruff or dry scalp or anything. "Nothing like that," she said cheerfully. "It's just part of our marketing drive. It's all about identifying who our clients are and establishing ourselves as part of their lives. If you did have children, we would send you a Valued Customer Wonderful Mother card next week, that's all - keeping in touch, showing we're interested."
"And if we don't have children how would you keep in touch?" I wondered.
That's easy, apparently. The next question would be about your birthday.
Years ago you were always meeting people on St Patrick's Day who had got to places and didn't know how they had got there, or who had brought them. There were always additional problems about how they were going to get home, as they often had no idea of where their companions were. In those days we all thought it was part of the rich tapestry of life and muttered darkly about how dull it would be if everything was planned and organised in advance and you knew where you were going and who was going to be there.
Even during the amazingly confusing "Sense Of Ireland" exhibition in London during the 1970s, there were marvellous tales of bewildered English audiences turning up at one venue and the performers saying they should all move to another because there'd be more atmosphere and loading all their bicycles into vans, driving them across London and eventually leaving them, happy but totally lost, at three o'clock in the morning.
Things change, however, and you don't get much of that sort of thing at my time of life. However, at one of the St Patrick's day functions this year, I did meet a man who didn't speak a word of English and who had come on with some people he had met in a pub. And at this stage the reception was breaking up and he had lost the people he arrived with and he was very confused indeed.
Now, I know only too well the advantages of leaving things as they are and the dangers of getting involved and I reminded myself of the million times all of us had got home safe from somewhere. But it was St Patrick's Day and you feel a sense of something about it. I tracked down those who had brought him from the pub where he had been found, and I told them he was bewildered and couldn't speak any language and should we get him back to the pub, at least, and he could start again from there?
"He spoke perfect English in the pub!" they said, indignantly. "He told us all about his country."
"What country was it?" asked the schoolmarm.
No one could remember but they remembered that he missed it. I said he was possibly missing it even more at this stage. "What the hell," said a cheerful man who looked too old to be gathering people up and wandering with them into the night but obviously wasn't. "You're absolutely right; he's a perfectly decent man. We'll take him on to the next place."
And as I saw them happily lurching down the road, I thought that maybe we place too heavy an importance on language and communication. It didn't really seem to matter where the man's country was and what they were saying to each other. They were going to the next place and that was the most important thing.