ON AN internet language forum recently, I noticed a Polish person seeking help with a phrase he or she had met in an English short story. The full sentence read: "He was working in a grocery store, doing the messages after school." What was "doing the messages", the Polish person wanted to know, writes Frank McNally
Of course I knew exactly what it meant. Or I thought I did. My mother has been doing the messages - from the opposite side of the grocery counter to the example stated - all her life; and tens of thousands like her.
As far as I'm aware, the process involves going into the local town and buying food and other household necessities. But it's not confined to groceries. Doing the messages can embrace everything from the hardware store to the haberdashers; maybe even a visit to the bank. By contrast, you can't do messages at the hairdresser's, or the doctor's. I think.
But you could certainly understand the Polish reader's confusion. To foreign ears, "doing the messages" must sound like covert, even sinister, activity.
I briefly wondered if my mother was part of a vast underground movement whose members communicate with each other under the guise of shopping errands. A bit like Michelle Dubois, the beret-wearing resistance leader in Allo Allo, going from place to place, saying: "Listen very carefully. I shall say this only once." To a Pole, the phrase must evoke the Cold War: spies posing as shoppers while gathering and passing on intelligence. It wouldn't be that far off the mark either. Many of these secret agents do eat their messages, after all, rather than let them fall into enemy hands.
Anyway, the language forum eventually enlightened the questioner as to the term's meaning, although an even more startling possibility emerged during the discussion.
An Irish member referenced an article on the Athlone.ie website in which a writer reminisces about growing up on the Connacht side of the river, where the rest of town was known as "the far side". As a child, the writer loved being sent into town on shopping errands. Or, as he put it, being "sent over to the far side to do the messages". It's not just in Athlone that there is a lucrative trade in far-side communication. A Google search for "doing the messages" points - among many other things - to the site of a psychic who operates a sort-of call centre for "angels". For a fee, the service provider will contact your angel (or your pet's) and transmit or receive messages.
The site includes an explanation of why, reluctantly, the psychic has to charge: "When I first started doing the messages for friends, I believed it should be for free. At the end of a session, however, I was left depleted and with a great headache. Even the next day I would have a lack of energy. I later learned that this was due to a lack of mutual energy exchange. Money is a means of achieving mutual energy exchange." Fair enough, I thought - although giving the psychic a good thump would be an energy exchange too.
YOU CAN'T do the messages in Lidl, I'm pretty sure. It's true the company's stores have the perfect atmosphere for Cold War-style intrigue, with the spare décor, the many eastern European customers, and the allegations of covert surveillance of staff (which the company denies). Even so, supermarkets in general are not conducive to doing messages.
Yes, you can order all your groceries online now and, when you hit the "send" button, that is incontrovertibly a message. But it's not the messages.
People don't talk in supermarkets. Only the cash registers talk, and in coded language. To humans, it sounds like the same "beep" over and over. But you know it's not, because on those occasions when the machine is rendered speechless by a product, the till person has to tap in a secret number the length of the human genome instead.
Each beep means a different thing to the machine. And if you have a "loyalty card", every beep is another contribution to your customer profile, allowing the store to target you with offers.
It's not the humans who do the messages in supermarkets, therefore. It's the tills. Some of those beeps mean: "Hmm, I see a certain person has a new baby in the house. That's three they have now. Must remember to post them some €2-off-your-next-packet-of-Pampers vouchers." No. You can only do the messages in small shops — if you can still find any these days. Butchers have always been crucial to the operation, in my understanding (this may just be the lingering influence of that brilliant French cult film, Delicatessen: set in a post-apocalyptic world where meat is scarce and a sinister butcher delivers his customers messages comprising former members of the vegetarian underground movement). But at any rate, the shops must be human-scale and, preferably, independent.
Long before computers or even telephones, such businesses were central to the flow of information in a community. Shoppers flitted from one to another like bees pollinating flowers. For the benefit of younger readers, it was a crude version of the internet, with the shops as terminals and the customers - mothers, typically - as phone lines.
This must be where the concept of doing the messages arose. Unfortunately, since then, supermarkets have inherited the earth. The small shops are disappearing, and the phrase "doing the messages" is disappearing too. Come to think of it, maybe there really was a war. Maybe the good guys lost.