I pass a monumental Turkish restaurant in its fifth year of renovation, followed by the local grocery shops with their bruised fruit, empty clothes outlets and gambling dens with frosted glass fronts. Gambolling up the first hill I slalom around the dog poo bags. These days I walk instead of drive, since I won’t have much to carry home later. If the Big Shop is a shadow of its former self then maybe I am too. Whereas my original trip took me to what you might call a normal supermarket, the current, scaled-down version is merely for my “bits”, those overpriced non-essential groceries from Waitrose or M&S. It has become the Little Shop and I don’t know how I feel about it. Very little exists that does not have a pre- and post-lockdown version. It has been, in the true sense of the word, uncanny. The comfort of our routines was broken and dread felt more imminent than we had previously pretended. Plenty were tragic, but mostly they were imperceptible little scratches. The pandemic and the lockdowns that bookended it left scars everywhere. But Covid ruined that, along with a whole lot of other stuff. It was more a way of cutting a cord, a moment of re-engagement and paradoxically, amid the fight for discounted sea bass and the prangs of dodgem trolleys, genuine peace. It was never an excuse to just be alone, nor was it some unconscious hunter-gatherer machismo. I invariably left feeling upbeat and thankful. The supermarket was where I could let my mind down tools. My wife would say, “Why are you still doing this when we can get a delivery?” She reminded me how often I forgot the shopping list and politely suggested I do something useful with my Saturday mornings instead. I even wrote about it for a magazine: the headline was ‘Zen and the art of supermarket shopping’. I would drive to a local supermarket and spend an hour dumping item after item on my trolley. A trip to the supermarket with Dad can’t compete with TikTok or Roblox.īefore the lockdown I used to relish the Big Shop every Saturday morning. My wife knows it, even though she asks me that question every week. It’s not that I don’t adore my daughters, but this is the only moment in which I can meditate between the vice grip of the week that’s been and the one to come. “Why don’t you take the girls with you?” is the cry from upstairs as I put my coat on.
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