It is a source of some amusement to various friends and relatives of mine that my closest supermarket these days is a Waitrose. Not that there is anything wrong with Waitrose, you understand; it’s more expensive, granted, but for the odd pop (OK, a bit more than an odd pop, never let it be said that I am a paragon of domestic organisation) it’s not bad. The main trouble, for me anyway, is not so much that it is expensive, but that you always come out with more than you had intended, and a load of stuff you hadn’t realised you needed.
There are things about it that make me feel out of place though. If you happen to run out of essentials on a Saturday afternoon, the car park is enough to have you creeping through it as if you were seventeen again and you happened into an exclusive boutique when you were exploring the shops one day. My tatty little old banger doesn’t really match the long-nosed shininess that will be parked there. And, as well as feeling not unlike an Eliza Doolittle at the races, there are a number of things there (and in all supermarkets, to be fair) that irritate me.
The constant supply of strawberries and other out-of-season fruit and veg. That annoys me. (Food miles and the loss of seasonality). The sheer amount of food on display (I try not to think about the waste). The packaging (yes, I know that certain kinds of packaging prolongs food life). The ranks of tomatoes, carrots, bananas or apples, all perfect and not a blemish to be seen. The fake, pre-packaged, divorced from the real world, hygienic nature of it all. If I stop too long to actually think about what I am doing, I go from serene (well, sort of) to stampy in a flash.
The thing that really bugs me though, every single time, are those charitable tokens. I can never work out what the rules are for a start. Do you get one for every so many pounds you spend? Does it depend on how many children you have with you and how likely a fight looks like it is about to ensue? Why don’t you get them if you use the self-service check out? So many questions I don’t have time for.
And then, when you’ve got one in your sticky paw, you have to decide where to put it. I guess I could just take pot luck, but I can’t help myself. There’s a sign and I have to read it. If one or other of my kids are with me, I have to encourage them to think about where they would like to put it.
And then I find myself with all sorts of awkward questions. Such as, why are schools raising money to replace their kitchens? Why are all manner of things that surely ought to be publicly funded, vying for a fraction of a donation? When did charitable giving turned into some sort of popularity contest? Have we really gone so far down the road of individual responsibility that what should be paid for through taxation is instead provided through some sort of sense of guilt or judgement of worthiness, either us or them?
This can’t be right, can it?
The Diary of a Not So Ordinary Boy 