Shopping, being out in the public sphere, coming across strangers and on occasion sharing little hints, tips, observations can bring about an interesting experience in civility and exposure to revelations about human contact. As occurred yesterday as I was filling my supermarket shopping cart with the week's groceries.

Over at the frozen fish glass-encased shelving unit there were those nice large slabs of half-sided steelhead salmon that are my absolute favourite fish to prepare for Thursday-night dinner. I am a creature of habit, aren't most of us? Thursday night we usually have fish. Sometimes it's haddock, breaded and baked. Along with oven-baked potato chips; my husband has ordinary potatoes cut into chips and I have sliced yam done in the very same way as his potatoes. Along with a fresh vegetable salad.

He prefers either white fish or the round, oily type of mackerel we became accustomed to eating when we lived in Japan, and I far prefer the salmon, and for me, steelhead salmon is really the best tasting. Even though I am aware that this type of fish is really a rainbow trout, with a genetic connection to salmon. Most people recognize it as salmon.

I had bought a number of those frozen pieces on an earlier occasion when the price was good. Now, as I looked among the offerings checking their price, they had doubled, not in value but in price. A very tall, robust man watched me, observing with surprise that he hadn't realized this supermarket carried salmon. Which they don't always, not in that form, in any event. And he looked at the prices and grimaced.

He said he loved fish, but that was too steep a price to pay. I mentioned they weren't really salmon, but rainbow trout, and there was salmon in another case, processed into small card-sized pieces. He drew himself up to full height, towering over me, and gruffly said he was a Newfoundlander, and knew salmon when he saw it, and that was salmon. I drew myself gently into a smile topping my five feet in height and said my son is a fish biologist and he had informed me that steelhead salmon was really rainbow trout.

My new friend beamed, said fish is fish, and good to eat and nutritious, and if I'm at all interested the new oriental market a few minutes' drive away sells the same product for far less than the supermarket. I said I'd check it out. Then he drew my attention to the haddock, but it was processed, breaded and ready for the oven. I enjoy haddock too, I said, but prefer buying it in a more elemental state where I can bread and season it myself.

Unperturbed, he went on to demonstrate to me by selecting each one and pointing to their prices, the processed haddock that bore the store's trademark name brand and a national name brand, telling me he much preferred the quality of the store brand to the national brand, and at one-third less cost.  We parted genially, each of us having satisfied within ourselves the need to communicate and to leave a little bit of our personal history with the other.

Ships of individual personality and experience manoeuvring past one another in the large sea of the public arena, courteously acknowledging the common human trait of friendly contact through civil discussion.

How amusing it is to reflect that when young, children have a tendency to boast of their superior connections, falling back on the comfort of a big brother to support their views, and once taking the turn into old age, it is the parent falling back on the assurance that their children aid their boastfulness of especial knowledge.