Mr Peter Dawson has been shopping and as he leaves his local supermarket he has a big smile on his face. In the cloth bag swinging from his left shoulder are two lamb steaks (Welsh), two baking potatoes (organic) and a bag of karela (on special offer). He has never come across karela before, but he feels sure that the small warty cucumber-like vegetables will impress Miss Pollyanna Jenkins, to whom he intends to propose marriage on the evening of this very day, when she comes round to his modest abode, invited to supper.

Mr Peter Dawson stops on the threshold of the shop, and, looking across at the snow-capped summit of the mountain above the town, takes a deep breath and sighs in anticipation of his future contentment. Mrs Judy Frost, following close behind, nearly bumps into him, for her head is down and she is thinking about how she might cook the karela in her plastic shopping bag. She’d wanted courgettes but they hadn’t got any. She turns abruptly to her left and in doing so has a minor collision with Mr Tod Wilson, who is just about to enter the food emporium in search of something tasty for his tea. “I’m so very sorry....but if people will stop without warning they have to be responsible for the consequences,” she says. Loudly, for she wants the man with the cloth bag to hear her.

At that moment Mr Peter Dawson, deaf to Mrs Judy Frost’s expostulation, takes another happy breath and steps onto the pedestrian crossing outside the shop doors. Mrs Trixie Barley, who is driving her maroon VW Passat for the first time since her unfortunate accident on the ice, applies her foot to the brake as she approaches the crossing. That is just as well, for another accident at this time would not have been welcomed by either party. In fact Mrs Trixie Barley is not going to know how this drama plays out, for at the checkout five minutes previously she had overlooked the packet of karela in the bottom of her supermarket trolley and there, for the moment, it remains. In another twenty minutes time Mr Keith Timms, Trainee Shop Assistant, will have completed his round of the supermarket shelves with the goods which, for one reason or another, customers have this morning carried as far as the checkout and no further.