My brain is picking at this now like a wobbly tooth.
I condensed the interaction, above, but it actually went like this:
The bloke was elderly, between 70 and 75 at a guess, with his wife. He was buying a copy of the Mail On Sunday (a right-wing shit-rag), a couple of other bits, and was in front of my in the queue. As he put it down on the belt, he glanced behind him and clocked me. His eyes went to my mask and gave me some kind of "look" that I can't describe other than "lol look he has a mask".
Ok, fine.
He then whispered something to his wife, which had all the hallmarks of a "don't look, but.." conversation.
Ok, fine.
After a bit, when the belt had progressed, I put down what I was buying - a bottle of white wine, and a bunch of bananas.
So far so good.
He then performatively stared at my bottle of white wine, looked at me and said something like "That looks nice."
Me, smiling: "Yeah. It is, should get me through the rest of the weekend, am I right?"
"I see you're still wearing a mask? Still scared, are you?"
Me - now, here's a thing. I'm tall. If I need to, if I haven't properly heard something, I sort of lean forward and down, right?
I can do this in one of two ways - it's difficult to describe, because I've been doing it unconsciously for decades, but one involves turning my head a little, and is very non-threatening, and it is literally a "I'm really sorry, I didn't quite hear! What was the question again? "
The other isn't. The other is a much more deliberate "I don't believe I caught that. Go on, say it again, now that you *know* I'm listening."
So, I leant in and said "What do you mean by scared?" using my second voice and manner.
And, you could sort of see that his cockiness drained??
To his credit, he still came back with "Of, you know, the 'bad' disease!" with appropriate wavey wavey hands to indicate that the bad disease was...made-up.
At this point I did the "Yes. I am." etc as per my post above, with a big confident grin - which shows in the eyes, masked or not, and watched him deflate.
And, like, what the fuck?