I have been shopping.
This has always been on the timetable for today. Mark will be home on Friday, and in the process of scrubbing out the kitchen over the last weeks it has become very obvious how many of the shelves had become empty since the last time I went, and I can tell you that Mark takes some considerable feeding. Empty shelves are not a good strategy.
It is so long since I last went shopping that’s I can’t remember when it was.
I do not mean general daily shopping, of course, for things like lettuce and apples and yoghurt. I go to Booths for those, where everything is safe and ordered and ethical and middle-classly predictable. Booths is Dignified Shopping.
Today I went to Asda, for things like pesto and tomato purée and loo roll and soap powder, and it was a hideous noisy nightmare scrum that made me very much want to run away.
I do not like shopping even when I have got enough money, which I hadn’t, quite, today, although by the time I had got to the checkout I was past caring.
I got myself into such a shocking flap that I picked up all sorts of wrong things, like light soy sauce instead of dark soy sauce, and low fat yoghurt instead of the stuff I actually eat.
I do not like low fat anything. It costs the same as the stuff with the fat and so I jolly well want my money’s worth. I do not want to buy yoghurt with a bit missing, and so I was cross with myself.
Mark said to throw it away and buy some more, but that would be too reckless so I will just have to eat it. I don’t eat soy sauce at all really, unless I am making sushi. It is Oliver who eats it, practically with everything, as a sort of legacy from his jetsetting adventures across the Far East. I do not know if he will like Light Soy Sauce, so I will have to just hope that he doesn’t notice.
I might have to start buying soap powder in Booths, but it is so ethical that it is really expensive, although it comes in beautiful middle-class packets with pictures of flowers, and it looks very desirable and sweetly-scented.
The stuff from Asda comes in a two-colour box and smells of lye, but it does not do a bad job on Mark’s oily overalls.
I like the idea of desirable soap powder, perhaps I should start saving up.
After Asda I went into Kendal because we need some new towels. All of our towels have become frayed and disreputable. Our own special towels, mine and Mark’s, have become so threadbare that you can see daylight through them without even needing to hold them up to the window, so the Time Had Come for replacement.
Kendal does not seem to have any shops any more. The market has gone and there seems to be a very lot of cafes. The only shops that are left were selling ladies’ clothes, which I didn’t want.
I trailed round TK Maxx feeling hopeless.
I got some in the end, they promised to be Super Soft and Absorbent. I would be glad to discover that they are telling the truth about that. Our current towels have got the texture of sandpaper and the absorbent qualities of a piece of kitchen roll, which is to say, they become sodden in moments.
I bought us some more handkerchiefs as well. My mother keeps promising that we can have my father’s old handkerchiefs, but we have not been there for ages and ages, and I when I emptied Mark’s coat pockets to wash it I discovered that he has been blowing his nose on a dishcloth.
In the end I could not bear any more retail, and abandoned my shopping list halfway down it. I got home with some relief.
The dogs, who had not moved from the conservatory sofa during the whole of my absence, welcomed me back with joy, which I almost reciprocated, because I had given them a bath this morning before I went, and they didn’t smell nearly as bad as they usually do. I had dragged the cover off the sofa and hurled it into the washing machine, and then refused to allow the dogs anywhere near it again until they had been thoroughly shampooed, not once, but twice.
The residual fox-poo pong has now disappeared from the conservatory, and hopefully from my life for a while.
At least until Mark comes home, I hope.
