THE seasonal aisle in a supermarket is reflecting on the passing of summer into autumn and the inexorable march of time.
As barbecues and school uniforms were replaced by Halloween costumes and tins of biscuits, an aisle in a Reading Asda mused that all things must pass as surely as the leaves fall from the trees.
It said: “It seems just yesterday I was groaning with Easter eggs and but a moment before I gave love my all for Valentine’s Day.
“But now summer is over, the nights draw in, we enter the season of mists and Miniature Heroes tubs for £5, and soon winter will be upon us with its many Chinese-produced decorations even now wending their way to us on vast container ships across a lonely ocean.
“As Marcus Aurelius wrote, ‘In the life of a man his time is a moment, his being an incessant flux,’ and that is truer for the seasonal aisle than anyone.
“My fate it is to mark the days, a calendar of unmissable bargains ushering shoppers to their inevitable, painful end at the tills.
“But at times I yearn to be eternal and unchangeable, like the soups.”
