218. Found in Tasmania
The first Down Under edition of my occasional ‘lost list’ series.
In which Rebecca explores an island, meets Banjo’s bread and wonders just how much interpretation a shopping list can withstand.
Dear Reader,
My friend in Tasmania, Prue Batten – award-winning writer, puppy parent and the brain behind one of my favourite Substack newsletters,
– tempted me into another opportunity to explore a lost list with this comment on one of my recent posts:
Reader, I jumped at the chance!
📝 The list low-down
🏡 Location of find
Outside a holiday house in a low-density street in a little coastal village in Tasmania, Australia.
Tasmania – whose slogan is ‘Come down for air’ – is both the smallest state and the largest island of Australia. It has an area of 26,410 square miles (68,401 square km), making it almost a third of the size of the whole of Great Britain! 😲🌵 Recent weather conditions in the area
Months and months of what Prue describes as ‘the big dry’, followed by a small amount of rain in the week before the find.
🗑️ Potential circumstances around the losing of the list
A recent visit to the street by the truck emptying recycling bins.
Ditto the truck emptying garbage bins.
📃 A portrait of the piece of paper
I had a think about the list’s physical properties. Shopping lists aren’t generally intended to be long-lasting, and as such the paper their writers choose isn’t typically top-notch so might discolour easily. Prue had told me that the list had been lit for the photograph by her husband’s head torch, and ‘…no matter where he stood, he got a shadow.’
The shadow of the phone is clear to see, but I wondered whether the darkness at the bottom of the list was also due to the light conditions, or was a characteristic of the paper itself. I quizzed Prue accordingly.
The brown stain was definitely at the bottom – from lying in sun? Age? In gutter? In rain? God help us, I hope it wasn’t dog pee!!!!
🫣
In the photograph, both the pavement and the list look dry. The paper is crisp and uncrumpled, with a pattern of creases which suggest to me that the list had been stowed unfolded in the loose and not-quite-big-enough-for-it pocket of a coat or jacket, rather than folded to fit.
🖊️ Handwriting in a hurry
Like many, this list had clearly been written in haste. I’m no graphologist, but I find it interesting that on a list showing the handwriting of just one person the -l at the end of cereal is leaning to the left, whereas the uncrossed -t of yoghurt is completely different, heading the other way. 🤔
There is some variation in the style of -o, too. The -o in box is squashed almost to an asymmetrical oval; a narrow egg lying on its side, whereas the one in Banjo’s is much rounder. Oranges and yoghurt each have a curly -o, and it is this delightful little curlicue which got me wondering whether the list writer had written them clockwise instead of the more typical anticlockwise.
I tried to replicate the shapes by indulging in some -o-ing of my own in both directions:
Like most people – according to Google and Reddit – who use the Latin alphabet to write from left to right, I like to form every -o anticlockwise. And after my -o-ing (and aaaah-ing) in the margins of my newspaper I found it impossible to tell which -o had been formed in which direction.
🧐
🥶 It’s winter down there and summer up here! 🥵
The list had been found in June, the beginning of winter Down Under. Given that Google reveals in Tasmania June is ‘…one of the wettest and coolest months, with average temperatures ranging from 5°C to 12°C (41°F to 54°F)’ and that one should ‘…expect potential snowfall in higher elevations’, I am heartened that our list-writer is already looking to prepare for spring in their own garden by seeking out a seed box and plant trays. Perfect!
In contrast to the current temperatures in Tasmania, over here in UK we’re between our first two heatwaves of the year. After all the rain we’d had last month, the new warmth has sent the plants into overdrive. The grass needs cutting way more often than is reasonable, and my parents are picking armfuls of sweet peas and harvesting salads, strawberries and new potatoes from their garden hand over fist.
Like them, Prue loves and nurtures her own garden, telling me ‘…because we live in a small village with limited supplies, a lot of folk have their own small veggie patch in their back gardens, allowing for fresh veg through the summer.’
Prue tells me that although there is a small grocery store in the village, our list-maker seeking planting supplies or Banjo’s bread, the only non-generic item on the list, would need to travel around 70km (over 40 miles) to the nearest stockists for either.
🪕 Shopping local 🍞
Banjo’s bakery, a firm whose focus is on providing a bakery café experience rather than selling wholesale to supermarkets and other outlets, was founded in Tasmania in 1984. Working to a franchise model, it now has 29 stores on the island and a total of 51 in Australia as a whole. Every product is made onsite from scratch by Banjo’s bakers, and their website had my mouth watering.
I was impressed to note the opening hours of the Hobart branch. Maybe it’s because I live in a very rural area myself that I can’t imagine a UK bakery café being open for business from 5am to past 6pm seven days a week, so bravo to Banjo’s.
I began to wonder how the grocery shopping opportunities in my own little village compare with the local facilities where the list had been found. Our Village Stores provides, I would imagine, a similarish-sized range of ‘limited supplies’ as the small grocery store local to Prue.
I enjoy walking to the shop, and I’ve been down there this morning to buy locally-made Scotch eggs for lunches over this heatwave weekend. While I was there I picked up a couple of almost overripe, outsized tomatoes and a large tub of Greek yoghurt which I know to be far more unctuous than any brand I can get from my delivery service. As well as supplying provisions I wouldn’t otherwise necessarily seek out, the shop has even seen me through a variety of domestic emergencies over the years. In fact, after a kitchen disaster just last week which showed me that our household smoke alarms weren’t fit for purpose I dashed in for a pack of Brillo pads with which I hoped to save the life of my favourite saucepan.
(Rest assured, dear Reader, that new alarms were on their way the same day. And the pan is fine.)
Although the Village Stores sells sliced Hovis and a small selection of artisan loaves from a local supplier, with such a small population I’m not sure that a village bakery business would generate the regular custom required to sustain it.
Mind you…
👷♂️ 🧱 🏗️
If you build it, they will come.
🧍🧍♀️🧍♂️🧍🧍♀️🧍♂️
That was certainly the case right from the very first Scotch Egg Day.1 A few months on, regular as clockwork every Friday morning forty of these fantastic features of any picnic are delivered to the Village Stores by a local butcher who makes them fresh at the end of every week.
A lovely routine at the Village Stores was duly established, and lo, they most certainly do come: on Fridays there’s a queue on the way in to the shop, and a corresponding stream of shoppers on their way out, all clutching brown paper bags translucent with evidence of their much-anticipated weekly treat.
Happy days!
Back to the list: well, cereal looks like rather an afterthought, don’t you think?
I like my lists to be all in a straight line downwards, or, if I’m needing two columns to squeeze in everything I need to write, well, there will never be a single item like cereal dangling in space on an otherwise empty part of the paper. I can only assume that Banjo’s bread – the item closest to the bottom – had been written before cereal, and had cereal been added underneath Banjo’s bread it might have already been forgotten by the time the list-writer got to the last destination on their shopping trip.
What had that 70km trip looked like? Well, first stop garden supplies, second stop groceries… and then on to Banjo’s, and perhaps not even only for bread. Reader, I like to think that the writer of our lost list had by that time earned a restorative cuppa and a treat.
Maybe even a Scotch egg?
Love,
Rebecca
😄
Huge thanks to
☺️
Prue’s work on Substack can be found at , where both she and her wonderful words will make you feel very welcome. Do have a look!
❤️
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There’s no date in the calendar marked ‘Scotch Egg Day’, but this is what Fridays are called at our Village Stores.
A Scotch egg is a boiled egg wrapped in sausage meat, coated in breadcrumbs and deep-fried.
Oh my gosh, our little island, the pimple on the a**e of the world, is famous!
I’m biased of course, Rebecca, but I loved the way you drew this list out and wound your village and ours (in another hemisphere) together.
I also must add that I’d line up for the Scotch Eggs. Yummo!
And yes, most likely our intrepid Tassie shopper would have had a coffee, tea or hot chocolate (with marshmallows) at Banjo’s and probably some rather overly sweet pastry or cake.
PS: I really think I have to print this post off and keep it for posterity!!!
What an interesting post, Rebecca. I also enjoy Prue Batten’s Knots in the String! I think she’s brilliant and thanks for the insight into Tasmania.