Winter and Shopping
I only just yesterday asked Atlas to collapse the Winter Table—that which stands over the hellhound crate and eliminates what remains of my kitchen for the duration, but, with a plastic garden sheet over it, gives me somewhere to stash plants in pots hiding from sudden frosts.
And there’s the threat of a frost tonight. Okay. The more fool me for taking the Table down in April. But . . . I get tired of not having a kitchen. Meanwhile the hibiscus, half a dozen gone-over hippeastrums beginning recovery from their exertions, the cardboard box of geranium plugs that arrived in the post yesterday and haven’t been dealt with, and the dahlia that survived the winter in my sitting room are all perched in and around the kitchen sink.
It’s pretty crowded in there. It’s going to be challenging making a cup of tea, let alone washing an apple for breakfast.*
And I’d better go past Third House on my way home tonight and get the chocolate cosmos under cover again, the pelargoniums, the fuchsias, and the outdoor begonias. That there are begonias is almost as exciting as the dahlia—begonias also go dormant in the winter**, and I never know which ones are planning to start up again in the spring and which aren’t, so pretty much anything that has a firm tuber I make some attempt to save. With varying degrees of success, mostly low to nil. But they liked the green/summerhouse*** and I’ve got way more than usual coming up again this year. Which is great, but . . .
Sigh.
* * *
I took Peter to Tabitha again this afternoon for extreme kneading and decided that rather than sit and knit† while she employed the hob-nailed boots and the wooden mallets, I would go explore the joys of a Waitrose that opened in this area a few years ago and which I’ve never got round to visiting. Of the monster food chains in this country Waitrose is supposed to be greenest, and when we lived at the old house I used to go to the one in Prinkle-on-Weald, but from New Arcadia it’s in the wrong direction. Then I developed a dislike of Waitrose when I tried to use their internet shopping site and they wouldn’t let me join unless I gave them a mobile phone number. Are you frelling joking? So far as I know it is not yet a requirement of modern life to have your ID code tattooed on the back of your neck or to have a mobile phone. I even tried the ‘0000000’ trick which will shut most web phone ultimatums up. Not this one. Whereupon I lost my temper. I also wrote their ‘contact us’ a (relatively) polite email on the subject of requiring a mobile phone number from someone who merely wants a few groceries delivered. They didn’t answer. And we get almost all our food from a mash-up of two organic grocery delivery companies and the health food store in town†† so recolonising Waitrose hasn’t been important.
Which is a good thing. On a scale of one to ten this glossy new store gets about a one. Maybe one and a half.
You can see the store itself from the next frelling county, but as you approach you discover that actually getting to it is one of those video game scenarios where if you don’t make your decision fast enough you are eaten by zombies. The road that looks logical takes you relentlessly past your goal††† and the road you need to take springs up at you suddenly, having been hidden by a pedestrian bridge, and furthermore there’s now a roundabout in the way, and of the three exits, you want the one that looks least likely.‡ This will lead you into the bowels of the earth where there is a large faceless, frontless, backless, signpostless and clueless parking space where you are welcome to leave your car somewhere you will never find it again. Most parking garages have helpful bay numbers or letters. Not this one.‡‡
I managed to park reasonably near the entrance to the store. There is a narrow walkway and two lifts. The staircase is beyond the lifts. If you want to use the stairway you have to barge through the people waiting for the lifts, because there is only a tiny pan in front of the lifts, hemmed in by the car park, and the alley is one person wide, so if you meet someone, let alone someone carrying groceries, one of you has to back up . . . into the people waiting for the lifts. The stairs, just by the way, are cheap and nasty. Clearly no one is expected to use them, because no effort has been made to put the approaching customer in a mood to part with some of her hard-earned money. She’s already working on a bad attitude, caused by the necessity for trampling little old ladies underfoot to get to the stair, and the likelihood that she won’t be able to find her car again.
The stairway dumps you out facing the wrong way. You’re already disoriented from having been underground and you blink in the sunlight‡‡‡ and wonder where the hell you are. Oh. There’s the store. I walk in and look around for the standard little loo sign.§ I don’t see it. I approach a clerk. Do you have a public loo? I say.
No, she says.
No? I say. You could train for the marathon doing laps around this store it’s so frelling gigantic. And it doesn’t have a customer toilet?
—But there’s a loo at Caffeine Frenzy next door, she adds.
Yes. There is. The coffeeshop is tiny, with about a dozen tables, and there is exactly one toilet in a large all-things-to-all-people room which means both badly designed disabled and a nappy-changing table that I suspect you have to be a contortionist to use, although I did not explore this option carefully. There wasn’t even a hook on the frelling door for your coat. There was, however, a queue, when I came back out again—and I recognised the polka-dot sweater on one of them: it had been coming through the Waitrose door as I was going back out again, in pursuit of the only public loo available.
The experience went downhill from there. Green? I’ve never seen such a dismal organic section—Tesco, the Evil Empire, does a lot better, and even the tiny downtown Sainsbury in Mauncester has about as much selection as this airplane hangar. They’re also over-supplied with large, tastefully arranged posters about Waitrose’s commitment to Treading Gently on the Earth . . . one of which glares down at you as you stare disbelievingly at their organic broccoli, swathed in miles of plastic wrap.
The crowning achievement of the architect’s art and empathy for the customer experience was when my two handfuls of heavy shopping bags§§ and I arrived at the bottom of the ugly staircase and found a sign on the door to the parking garage: please pull it says.
I was telling myself that I hadn’t wasted most of an hour of my life§§§, it was too cold for sitting outdoors in Tabitha’s garden and KNITTING. I was wrong. I got back with about ten minutes left and . . . there was a lovely piece of warm sunlight waiting for me. Obviously wondering where I’d been.
Sigh.
* * *
* Put the plants outdoors again before the first cup of tea in the morning? Are you kidding? Before the apple, maybe.
** There are also house-plant begonias that seem to flower pretty well constantly till they die after a year or two or three but the outdoor ones, tiresomely tender as they nonetheless are, don’t like windowsills. Well, they don’t like my windowsills.
*** Which is a whole other issue. There is clearly a lot more to a greenhouse than hanging a gro-light on the ceiling of your summerhouse and adding a heater.
† Knitting post soon, I promise. Or threaten, depending on your point of view.
†† Which is about to close. The owner, having reached retirement age, wants to retire and can’t find a buyer. Know anyone who wants to run an organic food, vitamins and take-out sandwich shop in darkest Hampshire?
††† Toward the rotating knives. Think of the tourist trade. http://www.ibras.dk/montypython/episode17.htm#1
‡ I hear the zombies chortling. Or whatever it is zombies do.
‡‡ More zombie chortling. It won’t be long now.
‡‡‡ Yes. There was sunlight. I could have been at home, potting up geraniums.
§ I’ve been shopping hard. I may even tell you about it. But not tonight.
§§ They had some champagne on sale. Ahem.
§§§ No, champagne on sale was not worth it.
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