Four of us in turn in the queue at the supermarket last night had multiples of bright yellow things: a bottle of detergent and a stack of sponges, a bunch of soup packets, bottles of lemon juice, and my hand of bananas. I felt very colour co-ordinated! Wouldn’t it be funny if you had to queue by item colour?

To introduce the system you could have people swanning around in appropriately brightly-coloured body suits helping shoppers sort their shopping and find the right checkout lane. Banana Man, for instance, would show yellow. Should the aisles be stocked by item colour? And the checkouts and lanes be demarcated by item colour? I think so.

This Banana Man is by Hilda Boswell, taken from Enid Blyton’s Marigold Story, from the 50’s. In the story the golly decides to go to a fancy dress party in a real banana skin. He asks the baby doll to sew up the skin around him but after much giggling in a corner of the toy cupboard… she can’t do it because the cotton slips through the skin. So they call on the elf who puts zips in with a bit of magic. Golly wins the fancy dress prize, but then can’t undo the zip magic to get out. I always felt sorry for him.

I could do with a bit of zip magic making the big body suit I’m working on at present.