I was just trying to disengage the Billa supermarket trolley and searching for the requisite €0.10 when I turned and saw him. An outstretched hand, dark eyes under a hooded parka to keep out the cold. Bulgaria bring so digitally advanced that you can pay for everything with the chip in your brain – or at least an Apple Watch – I have very little cash on me. He speaks to me in English more broken than the steps leading up to my building, but I can’t help him, other than to shake his hand and offer a grimace of apology. He looks my age, though is probably 20 years younger. I’ve seen his face a thousand times, from India to Eastern Slovakia. Lined, much travelled, careworn. I’ve even worn that expression of despair myself, albeit in a slightly paler shade.

Inside the brightly lit building, I fill my trolley with comestibles, noting with interest that some of the shelves and cabinets are subtly local: lots of salami, a whole section devoted to yoghurt, enough dark bread to feed the five thousand.

There are two kinds of check-out: the evil kind where you beep your stuff and interact with a machine that replaced someone’s livelihood, and lined the pockets of some tech bro high on ketamine, or the old-fashioned kind, with a human being.

This time, she’s fair-skinned, with the kind of deep-set green eyes that speak of centuries of intermingling. Hair scraped back into a bun. No make-up. And she is exhausted. It’s 10.30 already and she has another hour to go. There are two or three people behind me with equally laden trolleys. As she scans my items, it seems one of them won’t activate the machine. She leans forward with a heavy sigh, tries again. No luck. So she stands up and I think she’s going to ask her supervisor, but no, she returns with a pair of green-framed glasses. Rather than donning them, she holds them and squints through the lens at the tiny number on the bar code. She moves the item closer, then further away from her. It’s not working. Another deep breath. Finally, she gives up and gives me an apologetic shake of the head. She just can’t do it. I tell her in Bulgarian that it’s not a problem, and earn a weary smile, tinged with surprise.

I pocket my receipt and nod my own apology to the man still waiting by the trolleys, giving him the princely ten cents. Just three people sharing a language of weary gestures, the biting wind howling through the brutalist landscape, and lives differentiated only by strokes of luck and circumstance.