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Aug 18, 2023

Lockdown killed the Big Shop

A solo trip to the supermarket used to be where I regained my peace of mind –

A solo trip to the supermarket used to be where I regained my peace of mind – now, it's a shadow of its former self

"Why don't you take the girls with you?" is the cry from upstairs as I put my coat on. It's not that I don't adore my daughters, but this is the only moment in which I can meditate between the vice grip of the week that's been and the one to come. They don't want to go anyway. They know it. I know it. My wife knows it, even though she asks me that question every week. Let's not kid ourselves. A trip to the supermarket with Dad can't compete with TikTok or Roblox.

Before the lockdown I used to relish the Big Shop every Saturday morning. I would drive to a local supermarket and spend an hour dumping item after item on my trolley. It was all very 20th century. I even wrote about it for a magazine: the headline was ‘Zen and the art of supermarket shopping’.

My wife would say, "Why are you still doing this when we can get a delivery?" She reminded me how often I forgot the shopping list and politely suggested I do something useful with my Saturday mornings instead. All fair comment. But I hung on to the Big Shop. It was useful to me. The supermarket was where I could let my mind down tools. I invariably left feeling upbeat and thankful. It was never an excuse to just be alone, nor was it some unconscious hunter-gatherer machismo. It was more a way of cutting a cord, a moment of re-engagement and paradoxically, amid the fight for discounted sea bass and the prangs of dodgem trolleys, genuine peace. But Covid ruined that, along with a whole lot of other stuff.

The pandemic and the lockdowns that bookended it left scars everywhere. Plenty were tragic, but mostly they were imperceptible little scratches. The comfort of our routines was broken and dread felt more imminent than we had previously pretended. It has been, in the true sense of the word, uncanny. Very little exists that does not have a pre- and post-lockdown version. The Big Shop is the same. It has become the Little Shop and I don't know how I feel about it.

Whereas my original trip took me to what you might call a normal supermarket, the current, scaled-down version is merely for my "bits", those overpriced non-essential groceries from Waitrose or M&S. If the Big Shop is a shadow of its former self then maybe I am too.

These days I walk instead of drive, since I won't have much to carry home later. Gambolling up the first hill I slalom around the dog poo bags. I pass a monumental Turkish restaurant in its fifth year of renovation, followed by the local grocery shops with their bruised fruit, empty clothes outlets and gambling dens with frosted glass fronts. Once I’m beyond the church and library I’m over the growling North Circular and moving down towards the entrance of the supermarket like a dyspeptic Mr Ben.

What I noted about shopping before the pandemic was that the superabundance of food was a fundamental pleasure of life. Endless choice symbolised freedom. Healthy, good quality and occasionally expensive food suggested I had moved on – that I had escaped the food, and therefore the problems, of the past.

As many reading this will recall, a lot of family food used to be awful. Everything savoury was a salty oven-baked cardboard slab and everything sweet came out of the freezer or began its life as life as fluorescent powder. Added to that, there was a period in my childhood when had it not been for the industry of my mother, I might have gone without entirely.

In what I’m certain will be the only time I ever associate with a Coco Chanel quote, she said "Some people think luxury is the opposite of poverty. It is not. It is the opposite of vulgarity." That is how I came to think about my food shopping. And by luxury I don't mean caviar or lobster, but rather decent wine, decent bread, decent fish. Decent is luxury to me. The vegetables look greener, the deli counter more extravagant and the fruit shinier than an old man's shins.

I always dally too long by the herbs and spices on the lookout for anything new, obstructing the aisle for tutting comrade shoppers. I look at a £20 bottle of Greek olive oil and work out the wine I could buy for the same amount. In London you are never more than 10 feet from a podcaster, so I wonder if there is a podcast dedicated to crisps and if not why not. "Posh" crisps, along with olives, salami and pastries are all classics of a "bits" basket.

Since this is a tokenistic experience, I make the most of the fact that this is the best supermarket for tokenistic food: I zoom in on mushroom ketchup, membrillo, samphire and ketjap manis. But there are limits to such wanton madness. I know we live in a salted caramel world, but who decided we needed it in a flavoured gin, surely the most non-essential product since Robbie Williams’ swing album.

Even before the routine of shopping became important, choosing what to cook for my family – and the luxury of choice itself – had significance. But amid inflation and a cost of living crisis in which food bank collection boxes stand guiltily open-mouthed by the exits of every supermarket, fetishising food looks even more superficial than it did before anyone had heard of Chris Whitty. Shame on me.

Supermarkets are pretty much the only places where gangs of teenagers are habitually helpful and polite. There are one or two on the checkouts who can't make eye contact or even speak, but that's not their fault. They are too young to authorise the sale of alcohol (or "daddy's red and white calming juice" as an old colleague used to call it) let alone exhibit emotional maturity. A lonely man snatches some much-needed conversation in the bagging area, a woman produces coupon after coupon from her purse like a magician's handkerchief. Another, chaperoning her deaf mother, finds her bank card doesn't work, then can't remember her pin number. It's all gravy. We all have needs and I’m in no rush.

On the pandemic's scale of suffering I come close to last. Yet even for those whom Covid was unsettling rather than appalling, there remains a sense that things aren't what they used to be. Covid didn't so much turn my life upside down, as turn it on its side. That's why the empty shelves of panic buying and broken supply chains are so disconcerting. Most of us were spoilt and in denial. I’ve always felt this, which is why the novelty of being able to afford the food I want, to be able to indulge myself and my family, retains its thrill.

I can always remember a worse time than now, though maybe not a stranger one. The big difference is that what I did before had a practical function as well as intangible benefits. Now it has no purpose other than to serve my mental health and I can't be sure it's even doing that anymore. I’m playing at shopping. This is a suburban ghost dance.

In the past, whenever anyone said they felt like they were living in The Matrix I reached for my pistol, but increasingly I have to resist the thought that reality is somewhat less concrete than it once was. My Saturday mornings are an attempt to offset the feeling that a spell has been broken, a simulation of what it felt like before everything fell out of synch. The walk back passes me by completely. It may not have even happened.

The trouble with getting "bits" is that you are, by definition, buying things you don't need, which means whatever you had planned for dinner in the morning – say, roast chicken or pasta – has been scrapped by lunchtime. "Darling I’m home and I’m going to try to make laksa and dumplings." A moment of silence follows, and the head shaking is more in disappointment than anger.

"But did you get the milk?"

"Oh for God's sake," I sigh. I should have taken the girls with me. They would have remembered.