Workington Asda is stripped of tinned marrowfat peas and rich tea biscuits, the online store says. No ETA on stocks, either. Cumbria is prepping. I ponder the merits of tinned mushy peas instead – always a touch tasteless – then wonder if I can placate with fig rolls. My mother, in her 80s, is being guarded like a rare Fabergé egg, albeit a furious egg that finds this enforcement ridiculous. House arrest is a very strong term, but I am not above a rugby tackle. “No marrowfat peas in west Cumbria?” she gasps down the phone.
Now this is a dire situation. This week’s column was meant to be about a jocund lunch at The Dorchester Grill in Mayfair. Oh, wasn’t the lobster thermidor tart delicious? Boy, life came at me fast.
It came for millions and millions of people, now bombarding supermarket online sites and hoping, praying, for a delivery slot. Each time I try to amend the order, the website falls over, punch-drunk and exhausted. For a few terrifying minutes, it flounders. Then it stands up again and refreshes, suggesting frozen petit pois and mint Viscounts as alternatives.
Seven hundred people died in Italy today, another window on my laptop says. A whole generation is fading. “Don’t worry, they were probably all auld bodies,” mother says. “It’s done a lot of us buggers a favour.” I check out her order quickly, adding some Cornettos, which we used to eat together in the 1970s when the ice-cream van came before Corrie. My order being accepted is a tiny glint of positivity in what has been a very odd day.
Millions will be in my position right now, choosing groceries for the isolated. It’s a delicate process. What we eat at home, behind closed doors, is personal. Our secret snacky peccadilloes do not bear scrutiny. When I was young enough to work at the Guardian Guide, we once covered our go-to TV dinners; my love of cheap tinned soup with marge-slathered Ryvita and mini pickled onions was shameful to admit.
Similarly, it takes days of gentle questioning to reveal the things the isolated actually want, once they’ve got over refusing help or being grateful. “A jar of beetroot, sliced, not whole,” she says eventually. “Some microwave meals for the freezer, but none with fish. Heinz chicken noodle soup, but not cream of chicken.” “No fish,” I write on my whiteboard, where, via columns of to-do lists, I aim to ride out this planetary blip.
I began gathering three weeks ago, in tiny stages, surreptitiously, ashamed of being seen as dramatic. Some chickpeas here, some rice pudding there. I bought these as they quarantined Lombardy. By the time they closed Spain, I was shredding and freezing spring greens and putting individual anchovies in ice-cube trays, which felt incredibly proactive but was, I know now, merely displacement activity. “I’ve never really liked fish,” my mother tells me on one of our now twice-daily phone calls. “But I do like sardines in tomato sauce.” This is totally new information. What else do I not know about her?
When the madness passes, which it will, because all things do, I hope we remember how the supermarket staff really served us. It’s ironic how many of us slagged off these places for decades, told the masses to avoid them. Let’s all eat risottos of foraged acorns made with small-batch artisan butter from our bi-weekly farmers’ market! And then this happened, and the Aldi car park is full of Audis jam-packed with Super Noodles. It’s almost as if River Cottage never happened.
I hope we remember the selfless hard work of the till workers and midnight shelf-stackers, the people on self-service checkouts who sort our unexplained item in the baggage area problems without maintaining a safe distance. Forever touching the screens we’ve just touched, keeping the queues moving and, by default, breathing in our germs. As shoppers ransacked the pasta and fought over UHT, they had no time to plan for their own families or to watch rolling news or to think too hard if their sweat was the mark of hard work or a fever. I would hug, if I could, the team at my Sainsbury’s Local, who open at dawn every day, always jolly, with the shelves restocked with small amounts of almost all vital items. I’m especially indebted to the drivers whom I’m trusting to get to my mother. They’re taking up the slack on what is now my biggest life problem. I’m trusting total strangers to feed her, not upset her, not frighten her, to keep their distance and to leave the boxes somewhere handy. And to explain to her why there are no rich teas. I wouldn’t call that job unskilled at all.
