Supermarket Blues

I think the supermarket is about as personal as a place can get. A setting you’re in nearly every day where you make ingrained choices. Family ones. Cultural ones. You bargain with yourself, maybe you let yourself get a little frivolous. You limit yourself, indulge. Test your maths, weigh things up, think quite deeply about what’s in store for your immediate future. 

Supermarkets have led me to the least endearing parts of myself. I’m half decent at accounting for the space around me, shoddy at pursuing the contents of a list in any sort of practical order, exceptionally poor at keeping time, and will always overestimate my ability to carry things home. Crucially, I always spend too much money. I’m the sort of person who burdens a financially responsible friend in a foreign supermarket.

And this is all just in the pursuit of a meal for one. Let alone how complex the operation gets when buying for others. Do they like that much spice? Do I even care enough to forsake the recipe I had in mind? It’s a place where you’re constantly reminded of the people you love. You have to call people, put things back, pick up a small surprise. There are endless opportunities to be selfish or to be tender at the supermarket.

I have some very dear friends who are a couple. I once watched them have what must have been a six-minute conversation about one specific cheese in the supermarket. It wasn’t really about the money, or about portion control, it was more about how the block of cheese fitted in with their shared vision for their week and, ultimately, life together. While it was frankly bizarre, it was one of the most romantic things I’ve ever seen. For all my supermarket forays, I had never considered how dairy could act as a vehicle for expressing how much you know about a person. 

It seems mundane, yet it’s a place where intimate knowledge of others comes into play. A pudding you’ll only buy if it’s on deal. The fruit you only want when it’s in season. The most banal and minute preferences you have. When somebody sneaks a weird grab through the self-check-out, I always wonder if it’s for them. A strawberry Müller Corner or a bottle of salad cream. Was their day so dreadful that they had to nab their ultimate comfort food? Perhaps it was bought to pick up somebody else’s mood, or to be eaten clandestinely and at speed en route home. 

My dad was inflexible about buying meat at the butcher, fish at the fishmonger, and veg at the market. We had to traipse to the high road to buy feta from the big ceramic pot of brine at the Turkish supermarket. He revelled in telling everybody that this selection of local vendors were indeed his closest of friends, and that he, no other regular, got the cheapest deal. So the supermarket was a place for rogue and begrudgingly full-priced items. 

Bovril. Reggae Reggae Sauce. Branston pickle. Rose’s synthetically sweet lime cordial. The tall jars of raspberry St Dalfour jam. A six pack of Quavers nobody was allowed to touch. Fruit pastilles but only for the red, orange, and yellow ones. Cough sweets for the car. Illy coffee in the tins that stank up the cupboard. He bought whole, never chopped tomatoes. There were other habits, but I don't really remember the rest. That's what I mean. I don't recall and I can't ask.

The little habits and preferences somebody has all but disappear with them. I’m left trying to piece together trivial details of his routine, but they evade me. The more I try to concentrate on what my dad used to do, the further away the things I know about him seem. 

Then it’s hard to know if his tendencies even meant anything in the first place, whether he even cared why or that he was doing them. As if the more I force memories to reveal themselves, and the more I want them to signify something, the quicker the forgetting comes along. 

I’d like to call my dad and ask what type of rice to buy and how to cook it. And when I think about that for longer than twenty seconds it frustrates me and I become very aware that I will never know and I should’ve paid more attention. I soon feel as though I may actually be the most careless person in the entire world. 

Recently, I called my sister, who reminded me that we religiously used microwave packets of rice with every rice-requiring meal throughout childhood. All the more foolish for forgetting my dad did not prioritise, nor probably had any sort of strong feelings about, rice at all.

I was obsessed with biscuits a few years ago, frantically trying to figure out his favourite, terrified that I might have forgotten the minutiae of the person who raised me. It didn’t really matter that I forgot he was diabetic, yet at the behest of his sweet tooth. If he read this, he would laugh at me and tell me he doesn’t give a shit which kind, he just wants a biscuit.

In any case, some things haven’t really changed. Mum always buys a different pack of biscuits every week. I still only like the green and purple fruit pastilles. We’ll both always be a bit useless at cooking rice.