Jess and I are in very much of a set routine doing the shopping for multiple households now. Although Jess sometimes says that she would rather spend her time doing something more interesting, she really enters into the spirit of the day and we have a lot of fun and laughter on shopping day. To get us in the mood, she tries to select music to play in the car to jolly us along. We listen to many ABBA tracks and songs from the musical soundtracks.
Yesterday we started shopping for a new client, referred by the Rotary Club volunteer scheme. So for me it was 3 people in one trolley to shop for, and just 2 for Jess. The first thing that went wrong was that, when we arrived at Waitrose, I realised that I had left all of the special bags behind – those nice trolley bags with cardboard sides and more of a structure for loading in the trolley. Disorganised or what?! Well, you have to bear in mind that we have spent the last few months transferring shopping bags and excess bags of recycling from one car to the other. There has been very little access to the community tip. This week for the first time in ages, we braved the tip on our appointed day and got rid of quite a few bags. However, to make space in the car, Jess had moved the Waitrose bags into Paul’s car and not put them back into hers! It really was not her fault; I should have checked!
Luckily my mother and one of our friends provide their own jute bags, and I had picked up one large shopping bag other than the designated Waitrose ones. I decided that I definitely needed to hand over shopping in a proper bag, so I found one bag for our new client and hung the big Sainsburys bag onto the trolley for our other friend. My shopping I just had to load up loose in the trolley. With five lots of shopping to do, it was quite a task keeping it all segregated and organised.
I also had the usual round of queries and wondering if to go for substitutes or not. My mother had asked for some items from ‘The Saucy Fish Company’ which we just could not find, so that meant a ‘phone call checking what she would like instead. Then I spent ages trying to find crisps with no added salt! After about 10 minutes of searching I established that they do not exist!
Once I had paid for the 3 loads of shopping and taken it all to the car, I had to find a sensible way to load the car so that it would not get muddled up again. Our new client was very happy with her first experience of us doing her shopping and would like us to continue. She gave us a gift of some Welsh cakes and some beautiful red roses from her garden. I had to unload her bag so that I could retrieve it and give it back to the friend it belongs to.
When we finally arrived home, over 3 hours after setting off in the morning, we had the task of fishing all of our own shopping out of the boot of the car and getting it into the house. We were all starving hungry by this time, so I usually quickly put the food into the fridge which really cannot wait, whilst Paul and Jess lay the table for lunch. We usually have home-made bread, cheese and ham on shopping days. Just as we were about to eat, my mother rang needing some help with sending and receiving e-mails in the car; she wanted to drop some books off to a friend locally. Explaining the complexities of turning data on and off whilst on the move was a bit difficult, so Jess had to run outside and give her a quick lesson…
Later on I realised that I had missed an e-mail from one of our friends asking for an extra item to be added to her shopping list! Oh well, there is always Saturday, when we have a little trip out to buy the Saturday Telegraph for my mother. How would they all manage without us?!
