Trolley Bag Quotes

Think of me as the porter . . . and consider the possiblity that life might be less exhausting if you unloaded some of your bags on to my empty trolley.

I escaped out of the pitch-black customs area, and in the darkness everybody merged with their bags and suitcases, fusing together like shadows worn thin; they looked like ghosts, passing through a station to the other world. Carrying backpacks and pushing trolleys, as though the weight and bulk of their luggage were a final, definitive record of who they had been in life, like a funeral guestbook.

I make my way back whistling. Gerry nods towards Mrs Brady who is standing beside the trolleys. Morning, Mrs Brady, I say cheerfully. I push her provisions out to the car. Things are something terrible, she says. You can't trust anybody. No. It's come to a sorry pass. It has. There's hormones in the beef and tranquillizers in the bacon. There's men with breasts and women with mickeys. All from eating meat. Now. I steer a path between a crowd of people while she keeps step alongside. Can you believe it - they're feeding the pigs Valium. If you boil a bit of bacon you have to lie down afterwards. Dear oh dear. Yes, I nod. The thought of food makes me ill. The pigs are getting depressed in those sheds. If they get depressed they lose weight. So they tranquillize them. Where will it end? I don't know, Mrs Brady, I say. I begin filling the boot. That's why I started buying lamb. Then along came Chernobyl. Now you can't even have lamb stew or you'll light up at night! I swear. And when they've left you with nothing safe to eat, next thing they come along and tell you you can't live in your own house. I haven't heard of that one, Mrs Brady. Listen to me. She took my elbow. It could all happen that you're in your own house and the next thing is there's radiation bubbling under the floorboards. What? It comes right at you through the foundations. Watch the yogurts. Did you hear of that? No. I saw it in the Champion. Did you not see it in the Champion? I might have. No wonder we're not right. I brought the lid of the boot down. She sits into the car very decorously and snaps her bag open on her lap. She winds down the window and gives me 50p for myself and £1 for the trolley.

This idea, however, came to nothing: the corridors, which were packed with people on the lookout for the lunch trolley, were impossible to negotiate while wearing the Cloak. Harry stowed it regretfully back in his bag, reflecting that it would have been nice to wear it just to avoid all the staring, which seemed to have increased in intensity even since he had last walked down the train. Every now and then students would hurtle out of their compartments to get a better look at him. The exception was Cho Chang, who darted into her compartment when she saw Harry coming. As Harry passed the window he saw her deep in determined conversation with her friend Marietta, who was wearing a very thick layer of makeup that did not entirely obscure the odd formation of pimples still etched across her face.

We were like, ‘Hey, what are you doing!?’ but soon twigged they were trying to give us a proper Japanese welcome by carrying our bags for us. Great. This was the life. Then we looked round and saw Gillian still struggling with hers. Turns out that in this culture they don’t help a woman. We got her a trolley.

Do you know there is a circle in hell where I will probably end up which is one huge supermarket? The shopping trolleys always go sideways, the children always scream, I always have at least one item of shopping which doesn’t have the bar code on it and so I wait and wait until someone goes and finds one with the bar code and the people in the lengthening crowd behind me hate me. Or when I get to the check-out at the Express Lane, Nine Items Only, three people in front of me have at least twenty items and I haven’t the courage to protest. Or the woman at the till who knows everyone in the line except me indulges in long and happy chit-chat and when it gets to me she decides to change the roll of paper in the till. Or the woman in front of me watches all her groceries sliding along and stares at them without packing them, and then she slowly takes out her cheque-book and slowly proceeds to write a cheque and then insists on carefully packing her plastic shopping bags according to type of grocery. And then, when it’s all over and I get to the revolving doors and see daylight outside, I suddenly find myself back at the beginning to the whole process.

There’s nothing quite like a perfectly stocked maid’s trolley early in the morning. It is, in my humble opinion, a cornucopia of bounty and beauty. The crisp little packages of delicately wrapped soaps that smell of orange blossom, the tiny Crabtree & Evelyn shampoo bottles, the squat tissue boxes, the toilet-paper rolls wrapped in hygienic film, the bleached white towels in three sizes—bath, hand, and washcloth—and the stacks of doilies for the tea-and-coffee service tray. And last but not least, the cleaning kit, which includes a feather duster, lemon furniture polish, lightly scented antiseptic garbage bags, as well as an impressive array of spray bottles of solvents and disinfectants, all lined up and ready to combat any stain, be it coffee rings, vomit—or even blood. A well-stocked housekeeping trolley is a portable sanitation miracle; it is a clean machine on wheels. And as I said, it is beautiful.

When the shopping trolley was first invented, it was a complete failure - people were used to either carrying a basket around with them, or asking the grocer to fill their bag with their chosen items. The shoppers didn’t seem to want to try this new method, so the inventor, Sylvan Goldman, hired dummy shoppers to walk around his store with trolleys, and had an employee offering one to patrons as they entered - and yet it still took a long time to catch on!

overcompensated and next thing the buggers aren’t dropping far enough, so they’re hanging there strangling!’ He waved a dismissive hand. ‘Gave the Yanks their cards, packed them off home, and Albert and me took over their quota.’ ‘What’s the most you ever done in a session at Nuremberg, Harry?’ someone asked. We were all quiet as we watched him and waited for his answer. ‘Mmmm, one afternoon we did twenty-seven in two hours forty minutes.’ ‘Bloody hell! So they weren’t left to hang for very long.’ ‘No, hadn’t the time. As soon as we put four down, the doc would go underneath the scaffold, ’ave a listen with his stethoscope, feel for a pulse. “Right, okay,” he’d say. We had these soldier orderlies. They’d go underneath and lift them up, take the weight, we’d take the ropes and bags off, the soldiers would put them onto trolleys and whisk them away to the temporary morgue. A couple of minutes later the next four were marching in.’ That had been the craic last night. As Ken and I sit having breakfast with the hangmen, I can’t rid myself of the contradictory feeling that, somehow, I’m letting Russell down by breakfasting with the men who are about to hang him. ‘How was he last night?’ Allen looks rather bleary-eyed. He’s on his second mug of hot, sweet tea. And at least his third cigarette. We tell him. He takes a deep draw. ‘I think this lad will go without any bother.’ As he speaks, the blue smoke spills out of his mouth. Just after ten to eight, from the kitchen door at the end of the mess, Ken, the two hangmen, Teddy Bear and I, watch as the Governor, Lord Lieutenant of the County and other official witnesses file quietly into the block. They enter the empty execution chamber. At three