Trolley Rage: A Bastard's Barge Through the Tesco Inferno
By Owen Croft - The Shopper Who Can't Squeeze the Last Squirt from His Colgate-Smeared Soul
Step aside, Dante. Hell has been repossessed by Tesco on a wet Tuesday in October, and Owen Croft is your foul-mouthed, cagoule-clad Virgil.
This is not a shopping trip. This is a full-scale military fuck-up with a wonky trolley for a chariot, a bus shelter for purgatory, and a queue at the checkout that stretches clear to the seventh circle of frottage. From the moment the rain starts pissing down like God's got a grudge against the working class, to the final, soul-crushing unpack where the beans fight back and the ice-cream commits suicide on the lino, Trolley Rage is the blackest, bleakest, funniest descent into British supermarket hell ever committed to paper.
Picture it:
- Pensioners weaponising handbags like medieval flails
- Toffs eye-fucking each other over organic courgettes before vanishing to shag in the Beamer
- Toddlers hurling Cornettos like fragmentation grenades
- The same slab-faced Slav bus driver who hates you personally
- And you - soaked, skint, and slowly losing the will to live - just trying to buy a packet of own-brand digestives without committing homicide.
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Written in a Mancunian snarl of pure, uncut bile, Trolley Rage is Irvine Welsh on a bad kebab, Martin Amis on benefits, and Jeremy Clarkson if he ever had to get the 43 to Wythenshawe. It's a love letter to the great British public written in pure hatred, a tragicomic odyssey of puddles, prams, and processed poison that will make you laugh so hard you'll snort lager out your nose - then immediately delete the Tesco app forever.
If you've ever stood in the rain clutching a split carrier bag full of leaking Branston and wondered why the universe has singled you out for ritual humiliation, this book is your war memoir.
Warning: May contain scenes of graphic trolley rage, unsolicited groin contact, and existential despair in the frozen pizza aisle. Reader discretion - and a strong stomach - advised.