The self-checkout had a camera mounted above it now. A small grey dome, angled downward, watching. Not to help you. Just to watch.

I had already scanned most of my items. Bread, milk, pasta. Then the bottle of IPA, which the machine accepted with a beep before thinking better of it. The screen paused. A message appeared in large orange letters: APPROVAL NEEDED. PLEASE WAIT FOR ASSISTANCE.

I waited.

There was a button to press, to alert a member of staff. I pressed it. A light above the terminal began to flash. The machine went quiet, as if it too was waiting to see how this would resolve.

He arrived after a minute. Young. Spotty. Carrying himself with the particular confidence of someone who has recently been given a lanyard. He looked at my items. He looked at the screen. Then he looked at me — a slow, almost clinical sweep, the kind of assessment that tries to disguise itself as something else. His eyes moved from my face to my jacket to my face again, like he was doing maths he hadn’t been taught.

There was a pause. A small, loaded pause, in which he was clearly deciding whether to ask. He asked.

“Can I see some ID?”

“I don’t know; can you?”

His expression remained the same. I held my ID out toward him. I knew I should have saved my shave for when I returned, instead of before I left

He took it from my hand - not snatched, but taken; plucked from between my fingers with a brisk professionalism, as if it were now evidence. I watched it leave my possession and felt, briefly, that I had been relieved of something.

He looked at the photo. He looked at the date of birth. His expression shifted toward something like acceptance; the cursory nod of a man about to move on.

Then he looked again.

The licence was in two pieces, held together at the back with a strip of sellotape that had started to yellow. The end date on the front referenced a day that now lived in the past, but the plastic was as real as it had been the morning it arrived from the government, slid through the letterbox in a brown envelope, perfectly laminated, perfectly valid.

“This is expired,” he said.

“It is,” I said. “Yes.”

“It’s quite… I mean… it expired a while ago.”

“Right.”

He continued to look at me, as if it were obvious more explanation was required.

I offered one.

“Exactly. That is how old I am; even my ID is old enough to buy beer!”

He looked at the licence. He looked at me. Behind me, the queue had reached five people. I could feel them, that particular London pressure, the silent broadcast of strangers communicating that your existence is an imposition.

“I can’t accept an expired ID,” he said. “It’s not a valid form.”

“But it proves how old I am,” I said. “That’s the only thing it needs to do. And it does it.”

“It’s policy,” he said. “It has to be in date.”

“Right,” I said. “So the issue is that my ID is too old. Not that I am.”

Something moved behind his eyes. Not quite recognition. More like a system receiving an input it hadn’t been trained on.

“I’ll need to take the item,” he said.

The bitter bottle of IPA hopped off from the belt, lifted by the attendant with both hands who carried it to a trolley behind the service desk, where it sat among other confiscated things, other afternoon casualties.

He returned and pressed something on the screen to release the transaction. I paid. The machine printed a receipt, which I took.

I reached for my bag.

I did not have a bag.

“Could I get a carrier bag?”

He produced one from his wrist. They kept them there, looped over the forearm like a sommelier with a cloth - because bags were a theft vector, apparently, and this was the solution. He scanned it and placed it on the counter.

“That’ll be sixty pence,” he said.

I’m sure it used to be ten pence.

I tapped my card again. The machine processed it. It printed another receipt.

I took both receipts and folded them and put them in the bag.

For my records. Because that’s what adults do.

I left the shop. A CCTV camera sat perched above the doors like a voyeuristic pigeon, watching me until I passed out of its frame; at which point, I knew, another picked me up. Then another. My beer-less walk home, documented in full, handed off down the street like a baton.