If I could put this one in bold, I would, as it’s possibly the most spectacular thing the Americans have ever done.

To me, landing on the moon was always something humans had done ages ago, and barely even in colour. I knew my parents had lived through the event but they never implied that it was an important part of their lives – it wasn’t nearly as important as, say, that time my great-grandfather drove his car through the back of the garage by mistake.

A while back I read Andy Chaikin’s splendid book, A Man on the Moon. The book is an amazing account of the Apollo programme and the moon landings – Andy Chaikin is British, so it’s pleasantly devoid of chants of “USA! USA!” and trite tales of how Neil Armstrong’s dog fell in love as soon as he landed, or similar such Independence Day-esque bollocks. It’s just an honest account of an extraordinary feat of mankind.

The extraordinary feat, if it can be summarised, was this. In 1959, America had no rockets other than missiles. In 1969, they landed someone on the moon, had them potter around for a while poking at stuff and brought them back again. Of course there are all sorts of technological wonders going on here, but perhaps the most interesting part of this is in the numbers. The moon is 385,000km from earth. That is one fuck of a long way, whether you have a rocket or not. In 2005-dollars, this programme cost the taxpayer $140bn. That is the entire GDP of Pakistan and represents a thousand dollars for every American citizen. One fifth of the world population watched the live transmission of the first moonwalk. At its peak, 400,000 people were directly employed by the Apollo programme.

Every so often, we as human beings need these sort of dangerous, expensive, unjustifiable follies to be brought down upon our country by those in power. We need this to feel like we’re progressing as a species, even if on most days we are more worried about traffic and healthcare. Responsibility to the people through democracy makes things like this harder – my ancestors will sadly not be touring Castle Obama a thousand years down the line – but Kennedy proved that it doesn’t make it impossible. When the people have a genuinely inspirational common goal, a nation can unite behind it and enjoy a collective euphoria and sense of purpose so splendid that they hadn’t realised it existed.

It strikes me that the Kennedy-esque aura that surrounds Obama right now and the downturn of the economy is going to leave a situation ripe for a “grand plan” when America’s finances start to pick up.Once he’s pulled out of Iraq and turned it into a new bloody dictatorship, the American people are going to be clamouring for something less horrific and more exciting to pull together and spend money on. Ten years seems like a good watermark (it worked for Kennedy) but what to do? Tallest building? Man on Mars? Zero dependence on fossil fuel?

Some bright supermarket proprietor, many moons ago, realised that it would be much easier for people to shop at his supermarket if they had some sort of hand-propelled vehicle in which to pile up their shopping. He doubtless came up with a few different ideas and eventually settled on some sort of neo-cuboidal wireframe device with a handle at one end.

But then, something happened. Somehow the world managed to agree on the design so far, but something was to cause something of a schism in the realm of supermarket improvement.

If this was a Discovery documentary, there would now be a commercial break.

Somehow, the mechanism of steering a supermarket trolley in the United States ended up being different to that used in Europe. The Americans opted to have the rear wheels fixed on their vertical axis and the front wheels able to laterally rotate, much like the type of steering mechanism used on a car, or any other goddamned wheeled vehicle. The Europeans, however, elected to have all four wheels steer. This has the great benefit of making the device able to travel sideways, or diagonally, or through time, or across dimensions, with the only side effect that it cannot be deliberately moved in any direction whatsoever. The only way to steer a European shopping trolley is to crouch down behind it, stretch your arms down the entire length of its sides and rotate it using a shuffling motion like some sort of Russian dancer with an early Communist kidney dialysis machine. It is a common site in Europe to see old ladies, drawn and haggard, being led down the street by errant supermarket trolleys on journeys that had originated in a supermarket, sometimes one in the next town.