I am having a life-changing moment.
It is All Going To Be Different.
I am not going to go to Asda any more.
I have been shopping in Asda for years, ever since before Kendal invented Sainsbury’s and Morrisons. They still have not invented Tesco, and so it does not currently form any part of my deliberations.
It has been a very difficult decision, and one which might yet be revised, but nonetheless, at the moment, it is my resolution.
It all began to go wrong a couple of weeks ago when I went there for shopping and chucked a couple of pairs of flip-flops in the trolley.
I wear flip-flops all summer, and usually just get them in Asda. This is because I am parsimonious and mean, and as long as you don’t want the sort with plastic stick-on diamonds, they are only two quid a pair.
I like the look of the stick-on diamonds, but the thread scratches my feet, so I don’t want those.
Neither pair of this year’s flip-flops lasted longer than a day.
One pair was so rubbish that I actually put them in a dustbin at the garage and drove on without.
This was because they were made of a foam which was so insubstantial that by the end of the day it had compressed to absolutely nothing, leaving the rubber knobbly bits at the back sticking into my feet.
After less than a day they were excruciating to wear.
I was not pleased about this.
We discussed Asda over coffee-in-bed.
We thought that an awful lot of the stuff that you buy in Asda has become like that. I would not, for instance, have bought a sausage roll in there, because they are made of grease. I do like a box of Spanish wine that they sell, but since despite my pretensions, I am not a very discriminating wine drinker, and tend to favour ‘cheap’ and ‘doesn’t give me a hangover’ over ‘heart notes of oak and subtle flavour of cherries’ I am sure that I will manage to find other wines that will satisfy my palate.
We decided that today we would go to Morrisons.
This was a very troubling decision.
The thing about a new supermarket is that everything is in the wrong place. You have got to remember things all by yourself, because you do not have all of the familiar triggers of once-you-remember-chicken-then-sausages-are-next. Also you do not know if you will like their stuff. What would happen, for instance, if their pizzas have got distasteful cheese on the top, or if their teabags taste soapy? You would have wasted £2.88 on teabags that nobody will use, and then you have got to choose between drinking soapy tea or crawling back to Asda with your tail between your legs and blowing yet more precious cash on the teabags that you should have bought in the first place had it not been for your stupidly misplaced sense of adventure..
You can see why my heart was in my mouth today. It is a troubling experiment.
In the end it turned out that Morrisons did not sell flip-flops, and we had to go into TK Maxx in the middle of Kendal for those.
They sold pretty much everything else, though.
We were jolly impressed.
We thought perhaps that it was a shaving more expensive, but we might have been making that up.
It took absolutely ages and ages. We trailed backwards and forwards, squinting up at the signs over the aisles, and wondering about different varieties of pasta and whether we would like mango flavoured soap powder.
We must have trekked the length of the shop about four or five times, and still forgot to get wine anyway. I am not very worried about this, because we are bound to go past Asda for something one day next week.
Aldi was across the road so we went to look in there as well but I shall never go there again. You had to put a pound in the trolley and it was like going back to Fine Fare in the nineteen seventies. I like my supermarkets with tastefully packaged olives and crusty bread arranged by the front door. Slipping stacks of Mother’s Pride in the back corner are not nearly middle class enough for my aspirations.
We have not tried the teabags yet, but I shall let you know how we go on.
The picture was sent by Number Two Daughter last night. It is her dumper truck. It can carry forty tons and she is not tall enough to see over the bonnet.
