One afternoon in Erlangen I went to buy mineral water at a big Aldi nearby….My Love, it looked like wartime, or a major crisis. Most of the shelves were half empty or completely empty, and there was no staff anywhere. I went to pay: there was one self-checkout with a long queue, and a regular till where a human was supposed to be serving, which was empty – there was a queue here too, a shorter one, made up of mollies in hijabs. I joined the hijab queue, not wanting to test my German on the self-checkout. I waited about 15 minutes – only because I had drifted off into a reverie – but nobody came…. I was about to leave when a guy finally showed up, running to the till. It was surreal.