205. Sunday's list, Monday's list
Shopping for specifics or just going with the flow.
In which Rebecca compares two found lists and looks at how they’re so very different.
Dear Reader,
We’d taken the campervan out early one Sunday morning to enjoy our breakfast at the seaside. By the time we’d finished our scrambled eggs and slurped the last of our tea the prom was already busy, with dog walkers, joggers, ambling families, rollerbladers and cyclists all out and about enjoying the early pre-spring sunshine.
I spotted a piece of paper scudding in the breeze along the ground away from me, and sent Jim to scuttle after it.
‘It’s one of those lists you keep coming across.’ Reader, I knew. I ❤️ a list, as a couple of my previous posts show.
On one side of the folded paper were four words:
PAPERS
BREAD
BUTTER
VEG.
This Sunday morning seaside list represented a very simple and relatively unspecific shopping scenario. I wondered who’d written it, and their thinking behind what to put.
When I was a child we would refer to the newspaper we’d get on the way home from Sunday school ‘the Sunday papers’, plural, presumably because the thing was such a generous mass of folded multi-sectioned newsprint that it counted as more than a newspaper. Although the daily equivalent, The Times, switched from broadsheet to tabloid format in the early 2000s, The Sunday Times has always been a large-format newspaper, its folded sections making up a multistorey slab of stacked-up stories.
PAPERS, then, on that Sunday morning list, probably means just the one newspaper.
As for BREAD and BUTTER, Reader, I’d say that the bread and butter of many meals, at the weekend or otherwise, is bread and butter. If bread and butter are needed on a Sunday, though, I wonder whether they’re for making sandwiches for school packed lunches – or work lunches – for the early part of the week ahead? Or perhaps a traditional roast is planned for lunch, with leftover meat destined to be sliced for a round of sandwiches for a light Sunday supper?
VEG, too, makes me wonder about Sunday lunch. I can imagine the scene in the last-minute listmaker’s kitchen that morning, with on a pair of dried-up carrots and the scrag end of broccoli stalk having been found languishing in the bottom of the fridge.
Imagined conversation between two people. Stage directions are in [square brackets].
[The family dog is whining impatiently for its walk. Dog and one person are both desperate to head out – one for exercise, one for some peace.]
‘…..Aaaaaand we need veg for lunch!’
[Fridge door slams]
‘Any particular sort?’
[Grudging eye roll]
‘No! Just whatever they’ve got! Just something.’
[Corresponding eye roll in response]
[Exasperated sighs x 2]
Impatience shows here. No punctuation is required on a list, but there’s a full stop straight after VEG. I don’t think it’s there to indicate that VEG is an abbreviation, either; I think it is to give some finality to the list. A kind of ‘right, that’s it!’ kind of thing.
So much for side A. I unfolded the piece of paper to discover that I’d actually been looking at the reverse side of a leaf from a lined pad decorated rather sweetly with a design of eight rather jolly-looking sheep. The perforated page had been torn off by a right-handed person in a hurry, I’d say, judging by the missing part on the top corner, and the beginnings of another list, this one in pencil, is written near the top.
This side strikes me as a more standard ‘add stuff as I think of it’ kind of list; the sort that’s on hand all the time in anyone’s kitchen. And given that the list that had first caught my eye had been written on the outside surface of a folded previous list makes me think that the household had already purchased coffee and sunflower oil, or that getting hold of these items wasn’t a today thing.
Today’s things were the papers, two very household basics and some doesn’t-matter-what veg.
Sunday shopping: sorted. ✔️
Next morning I found myself in a very unRebecca location: the entrance to a supermarket, a relatively new addition to our smorgasbord of local food-shopping venues, M&S Food. We’d popped in to buy some cut daffodils for a gift, and the first thing I saw between the front door and the flowers was an abandoned list.
This one had been pulled off a gummed notepad, its printed border providing a pretty frame for what had been written on the page:
Just like its Sunday seaside counterpart, this Monday list includes punctuation, with a full stop appearing after many of the items. I can imagine the list being written in stages, with a full stop marking each pause in the process.
Raspberries, blueberries, nuts. [stop]
Bread x 2, potatoes, green veg, bacon. [stop]
Intriguingly – and presumably because the list had been written in stages, rather with much thought having been given to the aisle locations of the products needed – bacon appears between green veg and cucumber. Green salad topped with crispy bacon, anyone? Perhaps I should show this serving suggestion of a list to the person responsible for the supermarket shelf layouts? Interleaving bacon on the shelves with, well, leafy greens might lead to more sales of both!
I’d found the list in February, and was pleased to notice that Brussels sprouts had put in an appearance. It’s the end of March now, and sprouts are gone, but my sadness at having now waved goodbye to my favourite winter vegetable is at least assuaged by my giddy anticipation of the start of the asparagus season on St George’s Day, 23rd April.
[hurrah]
Some words in the English language have various yet equally-valid spellings. Yoghurt is one of them. I spell it yoghurt, but our listmaker calls it yogurt. And although not recently, I have even seen it spelled yoghourt.
As well as food, it seems that our listmaker was after cleaning supplies, personal care items and over-the-counter medication. These, though, are listed on the reverse side of the page, under the heading Home Bargains.
The strapline for that business – a branch of which is located right next door to the supermarket – is Top Brands, Bottom Prices, and it sells a variety of household items including food, clothing and games.
Shopping is a necessary chore, and there are plenty of ways in which to accomplish it. One could send out one’s housekeeper or valet1 to do the job on one’s behalf 😉 although in the absence of any household staff in my own life I choose to avoid the supermarket by shopping almost entirely online for weekly delivery. My list is of the ongoing kind, and I write down items I need whenever I think of them.
Having said that, we use the Village Stores several times a week. If I take a list with me down there it resembles the Sunday seaside list far more closely than the one I’d found at M&S Food, being far more generic than specific.
‘We need some green veg for the weekend,’ I told Jim this morning, once I’d realised we had only broccoli in the fridge. ‘Could you see if they’ve got a courgette or something? Anything, really.’
The Sunday seaside list had been a laidback, laissez-faire affair. The Monday M&S one, on the other hand – planned, organised, containing sets of things – had been much more organised, even deliberate.
The act of writing a list – any list, whether it’s Sunday’s list or Monday’s list – demonstrates intention. Whether it’s the member of a household in a seaside town grabbing a few essentials along with the Sunday papers, or a well-organised weekly grocery shopper with her equally well-organised lengthier lineup, when it comes to lists there is always method in their make-up.
Love,
Rebecca
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I employ neither. Obviously.
Love other people's lists and letters!
And postcards...last summer, on the beach, we found a pile of someone 's holiday cards, all written and addressed. I took them home, bought stamps (!) and posted them - but not untill I had read and copied each one, and mentally made a whole story out of them 😀
Whenever I find a discarded shopping List, I Circle the spelling and grammatical errors (in red), give it a mark out of 10, and then put it back where I found it.