h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Saturdays - are not the highlight of the week.

This is the mundane format, please leave now if you wish to maintain general levels of feeling above par. I'd hate to spread gloom amongst you.

Wake up at exactly 8.45 am when someone rings my father. This is a 'Saturday phone call', and if it doesn't occur then the sky has fallen in. My father seldom reaches the phone before the caller rings off, so has to dial back. I have no idea what occurs during all this button pressing, but it causes the router to reset itself. Every week.

So then, coffee and difficult conversation about shopping. Sometimes we don't need shopping. Often we do, but it's not the shopping that is hard, it is the deciding. There are lists, more than one. Things are duplicated, or not really needed at all. I think mum considers a shopping list to be inadequate unless certain foodstuffs are represented. Carrots, bananas, sugar, butter. The lists bear no relation to meals planned, nor to the vast store of food in the freezer(s) and pantry and food cupboards. This doesn't mean that any food is wasted, well maybe the occasional overripe banana, but it is getting harder and harder to locate packs of frozen fruit we put into the chest freezer in the summer.

So, eventually, when it is nearly lunchtime, we may get into the car. We arrive in the market town, and discover the lack of lists. We buy everything we can possibly think of. We forget the essentials we really did need. We buy all sorts of wonderful impulse purchases. A new silicone baking set? The sort that makes little spherical cakes? yes! how could we possibly manage without?

We walk up and down the high street a bit. We pass the shop that sells cushions, which is where I have a pact with my father to drag my mum quickly past without stopping for her to focus on the window display, or even worse, go in 'just for a look'

If it's not tipping down with rain, blowing a gale, or icy underfoot we might nip into the Butter Market, where mum eyes up the gold and diamonds on the antique jewellery stall and I have to be dragged away from the plant sellers. Sometimes though, we spot a bargain or two and these end up being stashed into the car on top of the food shopping. The old Sikh gentleman who kept a stall selling quality sweaters seems to have retired. We're sad about that, he'd been a regular for decades.

We might have to go into the pie shop, for home made steak pies for my father's lunches. We buy in quantities, for the freezer. Whilst there, we stand right in front of the fresh dairy cream cakes, and end up buying a boxful.

Eventually, when there is little room left in the car for the passengers, we start the return home. We drive to the local petrol station, we get petrol. We remember the important things we needed in town, we buy them in the petrol station shop. It's well stocked and not too priced, considering it serves a remote village. Probably due to the amount of custom from the other villagers, most of whom are also old and likely to forget their shopping lists on Saturdays.

Lunch being late, everyone is really hungry. People start trying to feed themselves while simultaneously filling the cupboards, fridge and freezers. Cushions are admired. (Not each rebuttal of the cushion shop works.) Cupcake baking accoutrements are stacked on top of all the previously bought baking stuff.

We all go for a lie down.


Eventually someone will make a 'nice cup of tea' and we'll start having the difficult discussion of what it was we'd intended to eat for supper.

I should add that there *is* a system, based on a one out, one in. So if a pack of minced steak has been used, another one is bought. It's all stored in freezers. There is enough food in there for about a month. There's a whole lamb for instance, although you could get bored with lambchops after too many meals of the same thing.

That reminds me - *writes on the list* Market stall for fresh local veg.

and that means walking past the shoe shop.....

Love it!

*leaves Lanza a nice and a slice of *

Thank you! I can hear coats being fetched out of cupboards now, so I'd better put on my shoes. See you later

Bittersweet Well worded

I only do lists on a Saturday. Three of them, one for each shop - I quite often lose at least one of them. I needed some small baking cases last week (I'd ran out) I saw some silicone ones in pink, blue and green. Guess what I bought?

Silicone baking cases seem strange to me. we only have metal ones. mum had a large silicone one, but somehow the surface of the cake became quite strange when she used it, so it was decided she should also go back to metal forms.

I went back to metal because silicone seems to insulate dough so well the cakes, pies, tarts and what have you turn out quite wrongly baked

" We buy all sorts of wonderful impulse purchases. A new silicone baking set? The sort that makes little spherical cakes? yes! how could we possibly manage without?" [Lanzababy]



Impulse purchases are the highlight of my day. Thanks for sharing that!

What a lovely, vivid story! I really enjoyed that one.

Shopahiolics of Hootoo, arise. We have nothing to lose but our cash.

It's comforting to know that other people's lives are just as mundane and ordinary as mine. Because I usually feel like I'm probably missing something!

Deb

Shopping with my parents has always been difficult. Dad usually gets bored with it rather fast and so - just when you are not looking for a second - he disappears. The shopping goes on and then quite a lot of time is invested in finding dad again.

I like to shop, but my house is so full of stuff that I can't realistically imagine actually buying much.

I always have a few wonderful ideas, when I go shopping, about buying differnt things, to cook something differnt etc... and always end up just buying the wsame stuff

[Amy P]

My mother is very well organised and shopping is simple and relatively fast. She jots down everything as she notices she needs it, then, before she goes shopping, she re-writes it in the order the things are arranged in Waitrose (where else?). She never really buys anything out of the ordinary, or impulsively, or in fact anything that is not on the list, and sticks to the brand names she has used for decades. Her neighbour, who takes her shopping on a Friday morning, has done the shopping for her on occasions when she's not been well, and laughs that she could do it for her even without a list, as it's always the same!

This may date back to the time when we lived in a village in the sticks and she didn't have a driving licence or a car. Eric from the International Stores came in his van every Thursday, bringing the things from the list she had given him the previous Thursday. Mr Talbot the baker came round twice a week, bringing bread, but also eggs because he had some chickens of his own. So she was always very disciplined as far as shopping is concerned. Having grown up in the 20s and 30s, she is, thrifty, although she does spend larger sums on keeping the house looking nice and doesn't skimp on heating the lounge.

Perhaps it's due to the fact that she had 4 siblings so her mother will have been careful with money, too, and will have taught her to budget.

When my father was alive, he didn't really enjoy shopping, or anything to do with preparing food, but there was never any difficulty communicating with each other as to what would be required when they were out shopping (anything to minimise the time spent in the supermarket with all the riffraff about).

I'm surprised your parents are so haphazard about shopping, Lanza. They probably come from the same era and must have had to count the pennies at some time. Has it always been like that?

for butting in & feel free skip this if you don't care for my but:

People are just different, I guess. People of my parents generation and the generation before that acted very differently when the hardships of WWI and WWII (famine and rationalisation) were followed by the Wirtschaftswunder (booming economy) of the 1960's.

My maternal grandmother always stocked up on basic goods "because you never know". Mind you she was a young girl during WWI, a grown woman during WWII and never learned to trust the end of the cold war. Thank Bob this sweet little frail woman didn't live to see 9/11 but died peacefully a couple of years before that.

My mother has always been very sensible shopping-wise. Always tried not to spend quite as much as she had.

But I have met people who looked back at the 1930's, 40's and 50's and lived as if there was no tomorrow. They believed they had suffered enough and were entitled to as much fun for as long as they might be alive.