5. Forbidden fruit
Getting back out there.
Dear Reader,
Having been living in a household made up entirely of the clinically vulnerable and extremely clinically vulnerable since the start of the pandemic I have been very reluctant to get back out there now we’re not under any Covid restrictions. Frankly, it’s been a while, and it’s still taking time. In fact was only last month that I braved the Village Stores for the first time since March 2020, and wow, it felt so weird yet so normal. And the normality itself felt weird.
Is that weird?
I’ve not shopped further afield yet, but I’m working up to it. I had a little practice in my head this week.
Sitting in a hot car waiting for my husband on a sunny day in town, the High Street was as crowded with folk going about their business as I’d remembered in freer times. The summer dresses, vest tops, straw hats and wide-legged linen trousers sported by assorted passers-by were very different from the uniform of winter woollies they’d been wearing when the world changed.
I wondered what it must feel like to be these people, to be nipping in and out of shops. Were they on commonplace errands like fetching milk or bread, perhaps a birthday card or a gift, or were they after something more in the ‘one-off’ line like a handbag or a chest of drawers?
How would I feel if I were going about these sorts of things again? Would I still be feeling trapped by risk and worry? Or would I feel I’d rightly qualified for the same precious freedom to be out again in this new just-get-on-with-it world, filling my basket and bags both with goodies and gay abandon, drinking in the liberty which the world around me has seemed to be enjoying for some time?
In our Covid world I’ve only ever shopped online. Cash is now an old forgotten friend. It feels so unfamiliar. And these days I have the additional worry that shopping in person will put paid to my new lockdown-developed budgeting skills, in which my virtual basket is only permitted to contain items up to a certain value. In my head I win prizes for both self-satisfaction and relief every time the number lands on the side of the line I’ve trained it to.
The thought of being able again to access shop shelves stocked with tempting treasures taunts my anxious brain. Like a child in a toy shop I know I’d be drawn in by the colourful and the shiny, yet it wouldn’t be toys in my sights, but stationery. Sleek, glossy hardback notebooks in an array of can’t-do-without sizes, coloured pencils, index cards, post-it notes, ink cartridges. While I’m there, maybe the latest bestseller in paperback, and a hiking magazine…
What would this bounty cost? Now, there’s real financial security in hypothetical shopping – nothing ventured, nothing spent! But the pleasures of a real-life shopping trip are wrapped in the process, the haul, and of course the freedom exercised in snagging it. The imagined treat of deliberating over something I need – yes, stationery and books fit into this category – and conjuring up the smell of new plastic pencil cases and the glossy pages of the latest cookbook are things that placed me not in the hot car where I was sitting waiting for my husband but right there in Sussex Stationers, cool and airy, jam-packed with all my favourite things. I could almost feel the weight, texture and promise of my not-to-be purchases.
Reader, that not-shopping trip was all I needed to harvest the joys of forbidden, unbudgeted fruit as I handled in my head the things on the shelves I used to plunder on my pre-Covid shopping expeditions.
This was shopping joy without Covid anxiety. Or, indeed, expenditure!
I’m nearly back out there, really I am. Yet I’m still not quite sure whether I’ll ever know spontaneous shopping in quite the carefree way I used to.
Love,
Rebecca
If you enjoyed this post, please let me know by clicking the heart. Thank you!
How’s your Covid confidence? How did you feel when you first got back ‘out there’?
Thank you for reading! If you enjoy ‘Dear Reader, I’m lost’, please share and subscribe for free.
I am experiencing the same thing. I think many of us are. I am accustomed now to shopping on line. It is not ideal, but it is a comfortable habit now and hard to break. The grocers is only three miles away. There is no need to continue with delivery. I could pop in there any time. I went this week to see if I could get back to the "normal" routine and it was like a free-for-all. I spent $130 on food instead of my usual set limit of $80! I felt like I was in wonderland. So I will definitely have to re-think.. Thanks for letting me hear YOUR post-covid experience.