I Went To The Temporary M&S for Cakes and Left With Mild Trauma

If you’re looking to offload your offspring somewhere chaotic where you could lose them on purpose and make it look like an accident, I suggest a trip to the temporarily rearranged M&S in Douglas.

The store is currently undergoing a major refurbishment, with much of the old Foodhall and café closed off. What’s open now is a smaller, temporary version – a kind of M&S-in-progress – while the revamp continues behind the white sheets.

Little time has passed since the demise of the M&S café (RIP), and already the rest of the store has moved on faster than Leonardo DiCaprio on his girlfriend’s 21st birthday. I went the other day for a packet of Welsh cakes and left with mild trauma.

I’m blessed to have never been in a war zone, and I hope never to be. Although, the way things are looking globally, that might be optimistic thinking. Before me, though, was a scene from Apocalypse Now. Hundreds of panicked faces hurtled past, coming from every direction. Half looked like they had no clue where they were going; the other half looked like they had no idea where they’d just come from. Anguish was etched into the faces of people who had been in the store three minutes looking for semi-skimmed milk and were now lost in a labyrinth of aisles placed at unpredictable angles, shifting like the staircases in Harry Potter.

The self-service machines had also moved. Not far, but just enough that it felt unnerving that machinery could move like that without having Dalek tendencies. Taking in the scene before me, I felt like one of those poor souls on Changing Rooms who’d had the blindfold removed only to see their house transformed into something unrecognisable. A hushed ‘Good God… what have you done?’ escaped my lips.

Unable to find a way out, let alone what they came in for, some shoppers were on the phone to their loved ones, letting them know they weren’t going to make it back. Others rocked gently on the floor. The rest had turned feral; charging around with trolleys, using those on the ground as human speed bumps and screaming ‘I just want to find the peas! In heaven’s name, WHERE ARE THE PEAS?!’

I took a breath and stepped into the chaos. All my senses were immediately attacked. Aisles pointed in every direction – horizontal, diagonal, octagonal – with a few leading to dead ends where the skeletal remains of an old couple lay. Likely, the couple had been young when they entered, naively looking for a shortcut from town to the Premier Inn through M&S. Then got lost and died of old age.

In life, it’s human nature to look for patterns. It makes us feel safe. There were no patterns here. Usually, shoppers can gauge where things are likely to be. For example, if you’re looking for toothpaste, it’s unlikely you’ll find it next to the turkey rashers – unless someone’s decided they don’t care about dental hygiene and tossed it there for someone else to deal with. Here, that logic is gone. This was the Wild West: a place where the layout appeared designed around the lazy-shopper technique and Jurby Junk combined.

The cornflakes stood next to the Birkenstocks. Bathroom cleaner beside the cauliflower cheese. Broccoli by face cream. GREEK YOGURT BY THE CASHMERE. The unpredictability of everything meant keeping your eyes peeled and head on a swivel, like being on the TT fair Waltzers.

A din of bewildered conversations filled the air.

‘I don’t understand where anything is.’ ‘Why have they done this?’ ‘WHY ARE THE PEAS IN THE UNDERWEAR SECTION?!’

I overheard one woman ask a member of staff where the gluten-free bread was. That employee tried and failed to find it, then had to ask another member of staff, who disappeared and never returned – likely swept away in the sea of people searching for hummus. One of M&S’s new aims is to reduce food waste, something I completely agree is needed. I just wasn’t aware the tactic would be to make it impossible to find where the food is.

That was when the looting started.

Amid the confusion, people entered freeze, flight or fight mode. Those frozen stood aimlessly in the middle of aisles, trolleys and prams facing sideways, blocking the way like a human dam. Among the wreckage were distressed-looking graduate employees trying and failing to fight their way through the stampede. Stock in hand, staff looked just as lost as the customers – which might explain why there were plimsolls next to the coleslaw.

An elderly woman approached me like that extra in Titanic who goes pleading to the captain: ‘Captain, please, where should I go?’ And like the Captain, I ignored her. Instead, I turned away in shock and walked in the general direction of where I thought I’d come in. But something was wrong. The self-checkout machines had moved. AGAIN. I was being gaslit by machinery. They had been roughly where they used to be back in the old days, and now they were further into the store, standing in front of white sheets. I saw the elderly lady wander behind them and heard what sounded suspiciously like a gunshot.

Crumpling to the ground, I crawled in no particular direction, hoping for a miracle. Days turned into weeks. I lost all concept of time – all I knew was that it was passing. Finally, I emerged from the store seven months later like Andy Dufresne at the end of The Shawshank Redemption: exhausted, bewildered and in need of a good cup of tea.

But oh wait – the café’s gone.