I have been shopping.
We have not been shopping for weeks and weeks, because of just living on home made soup and bread, but we needed some urgent things, like cheese and coffee, and so it had to be.
It was a trauma.
Lucy came with me, because she has got to go home in a few days, and the cupboards in her little Northamptonshire house will be empty. She went in her own car, and I went in mine, in case you are not allowed to go to Asda in pairs, and also because we thought we should both get fuel.
Fuel is very cheap indeed.
Everything else is an upsetting apocalypse.
You can’t just go in to a supermarket any more. You have got to walk quietly and patiently around the outside edge of the car park, in a line of other quiet patient people, like being in communist Russia in the nineteen seventies, but quiet and patient. It is One Way Walking only, and there are lots of upturned trolleys to deter you from walking in the wrong place, as if the whole thing were a My Play Supermarket belonging to an enormous frustrated toddler.
Once you get to the door they give you a trolley which has been freshly squirted with something that smells of the waiting room at the doctor’s, and which made my hands itch terribly. There are security guards on the doors. Lucy knew them, because of having had a brief career as a security guard before becoming a policeman. They were not searching us for drugs and knives, which was what Lucy did when it was her job, so perhaps Asda customers are less rascally than the ones at Glastonbury Festival.
Inside the supermarket it is hushed. There is no cheery music to encourage you along at exactly the right jaunty pace at which you will probably impulse-buy lemon flavoured olives. There are just quiet people, some of them in gloves and masks, moving sedately around the one-way system, which operates inside as well.
I got confused in the one-way system and kept having to go back and start bits again. Lucy said that I was very wicked, so it is a good job she is not still a security guard, or we would have been out on our ears.
It was very difficult to follow. I have got my own personal internal map of Asda, and the way I think you should go round it was completely different to the plan that they had produced. You had got to go up one aisle and down the next, and when you got to the end there was not a proper way of changing your mind and going back for the things you had forgotten or were not sure if you could afford. You had got to be defiant or do without.
Lucy rolled her eyes but I was not going to manage without golden syrup.
There were lots and lots of empty shelves. There is loo roll, but still no flour, and hand wash, but no chai tea. There is an International Chai Tea crisis, a young man with a uniform and a stack of cardboard boxes informed me. There will be no more.
I was upset about this and went to Booths afterwards, where I had to do the whole queueing thing all over again, but did manage to get some bread flour and chai tea, so that was a happiness.
I couldn’t get yeast at all anywhere. I looked online afterwards and discovered that it is selling on eBay for £15 for a small tin.
I am not that desperate.
When we got home we had to unpack it and sort it all out. I was in a terrible post apocalypse-shopping flap, and dropped a jug of cream in a bowl of soup in the fridge, which made a shocking mess, and worse because when I got it all out I held the cream the wrong way up, and it went everywhere, in a soupy sort of way. I was so upset that I left the stock cubes in the fridge by accident, and spent ages hunting for them before they turned up later.
I am very glad that it is over. I do not want to have to do that again, and will be much happier to carry on with the bread and soup, especially if one day we can get some yeast from somewhere. I have still got some left, but it will not last for ever.
I hope the apocalypse will be over before it runs out.
