Carpet

I am feeling very excited.

I have purchased a new carpet for the new living room that I haven’t even started painting yet.

When I say ‘purchased’ I don’t mean that I have actually parted with any money, because of course I haven’t, because we haven’t got any. Well, we haven’t got enough, anyway. Neither do I mean that I have actually got a carpet in my possession, because I haven’t. They are a bit big and unwieldy to lug about with you, even if you have remembered to bring a shopping bag.

I mean that I have been to a carpet shop and chosen the most beautiful carpet. It will look perfect with the pink and yellow and gold and cream stripes that  haven’t quite painted on the walls yet.

Also it will not show dog paw prints or red wine stains.

I love it, and am saving up like mad.

To begin at the beginning.

After I had finished dashing around tidying up this morning, my unwanted Job Of The Day was to go to Asda.

This was hateful. I mean utterly hateful. It was hateful in a way that shopping never used to be hateful, and I hated it even then.

I forgot the stupid plastic screen thing that I have got for occasions when I absolutely have to wear a muzzle, and so I had to wrap a scarf round my face. Fortunately it was a silk scarf, so not like wearing lambs wool or cashmere or anything unpleasantly hot. This was a good thing, because the sun has shone today after weeks and weeks of endless dreary rain, and the Lake District is like walking through a bath of hot steam.

All the same it was horrible.

To add to that, these days shopping in Asda is like taking a trip to the Communist bloc in the nineteen seventies. The shelves are half empty, and everybody shuffles along drearily, looking hopeless behind their masks.

Today they had no flour again. Just lately when they have not had flour they have been selling it out of their own bakery, and so I trotted along to see if they would part with any.

They would not. The bakery manager told me that they were not allowed to do this any more because they do not have a label for it which lists any allergens that might be present.

I said that I am not allergic to anything but needed flour and wondered if they might sell me some anyway.

She declined.

I went to the front desk to see if they had any more flour secreted anywhere, and when it turned out that they had not I asked to speak to the manager.

It is not a nice feeling, trying to snarl with a muzzle on. I couldn’t breathe properly because of the stupid scarf, and my words would not come out properly.

The manager told me, with supreme indifference, that they did not have flour, and although they might get some again, she did not know when, and I would just have to keep coming back every day until some turned up.

I said that I couldn’t do this because we live too far away.

She shrugged without much interest and asked what I expected her to do about it. I said that I thought perhaps the supermarket might make an effort to meet local demand, and she shrugged again and turned away.

The thing is, she was right. Something seems to have broken in the food supply chain these days.

It is a terrible helpless feeling, to go shopping now. I had been as courteously civil as it is possible to be in a place that requires you to wear a bag on your head, but I do remember the time when supermarkets knew that every customer would spend thousands of pounds there during their lifetime. They used to consider that some effort should be made to encourage them to continue doing so.

I paid and left. I have only been going there for the flour for ages anyway, nowhere else has had it at all all summer. I can go to Morrison’s next time. If I have got to go to a shop with no flour, I like their cheese better. 

I came out feeling so grim and depressed that I thought I might do something cheerful on my way home, and stopped to look at a carpet shop.

I am not going to tell you which one it was, because it was brilliant in every way, and I do not want to get them into trouble.

Nobody was wearing a mask, and they did not ask me to wear one.

From that point on I knew that I would buy one of their carpets even if they had all been hand woven out of bits of old T-shirts.

They were helpful and chatty and friendly and stood next to me to talk, and were perfectly accommodating when I told them that  would be paying cash.

They were my favourite shop in the whole world ever.

They were booked up for carpet fittings for months and months and months. I was not at all surprised about this.

We hunted through the calendar and eventually found a couple of hours when they thought they might squeeze it in.

I said that I would pay them when  had got some money. They said that this would be fine, because carpets were expensive and people generally had to save up. They booked the fitting and ordered the carpet, and said that it would be there in a few weeks.

I have attached a picture of the carpet I have chosen. The man got cross when  took the picture because he said I had got the carpet upside down, and made me take it again. He said that there is a right way to look at a carpet and I was not doing it.

They were the most wonderful shop in the world.

If only they sold flour.