73. A lost list
Unexpected access to another householder’s shopping list and meal plan – with my (conjectured) insights!
Dear Reader,
At the end of a very long day on Wednesday, which Jim had spent shooting a family-orientated event during the busy school half term holiday, I walked across the empty lawn to fetch some gear that I needed to pack away. Earlier in the day the location had been packed: there had been fairground rides, sideshows, circus skills workshops and all manner of exciting things to grab the attention of children and adults alike. For most of the afternoon the lawn had been full of families enjoying their picnics, but in the early evening sunshine all of the punters had left, and a keen wind had begun to stir the fabric of the abandoned deckchairs. A scrap of paper blustered towards me, and I picked it up, intending to pop it into the nearest bin.
I glanced at it. No, actually this discarded piece of paper was something special: it needed harvesting, analysing, not throwing away!
Reader, it was a lost list.
What does the list look like?
It’s a small piece of paper, measuring 3” x 4”, torn from a promotional notepad from wemoto.com, a company which I am assured is ‘Serious About Motorcycle Parts’. The firm, it seems, had had these notepads printed to mark the ‘Isle of Man Festival of Jurby’, an annual occasion which I gather sees over 10,000 enthusiasts descend on Jurby Motordrome on the island for a full day packed with motorcycling entertainment. The phone number at the bottom of the list is a Brighton one: perhaps that’s where the list-maker is from, too?
That’s where the piece of paper originated, but I’m going to take you through the list itself, and tell you what information I’ve been able to glean from it. I am going to refer to the list-maker as ‘Sam’, and – not for gender-sterotyping reasons, but simply because I am a female list-maker – Sam is she/her.
Okay, the scrap of paper is small, but it’s bursting with information that’s compartmentalised into different sections.
What does the piece of paper itself tell me?
Sam doesn’t need a great deal of space for her lists.
Sam has a connection with motorcycling. 🏍️
What’s on the list?
In pole position is something that features on most households’ shopping lists: ‘Milk’. Its prominence – the fact that this is one of the few words starting with a capital letter, and that it’s at the top of the list, with a deep space left beneath it – tells me that buying milk had been important to Sam on the day she had written her list. Maybe it was simply low tide in her fridge.
The space between ‘Milk’ and the next item on the list denotes a change of section.
The following items:
picnic bits
pasta bake
yogurts
Wraps
crisps
pack up bits
Mayo
Corn on cob
feta
lamb kebab
show me two things:
1. That a picnic is planned
‘Picnic bits’ haven’t been itemised, which is interesting. Perhaps Sam’s household has its dyed-in-the-wool favourite picnic items, meaning that those don’t need to feature separately on the list, or maybe, as the picnic was going to be part of a planned day out during the school half-term holiday, the circumstances for this supermarket shop deem a detailed list for ‘picnic bits’ unnecessary? I wonder.
For instance:
Sam might be going to cruise the aisles simply picking up things for a picnic that take her fancy on the day.
The family group might be going grocery shopping en masse, with each member to be tasked with choosing one thing for the picnic. There’s no way that those things could be listed in advance!
2. That school lunches need taking care of
The item ‘pack up bits’ suggests to me that Sam’s household includes children at school. In my family we called the food we took to school either our ‘packed lunch’ or our ‘lunchbox’, but there are many families with other vocab for these, ‘pack up’ being just one common example. It’s interesting that the ‘pack up bits’ aren’t itemised, but again, I’m thinking that Sam is well-versed in what her family members like to take to school for their lunch, so listing those items individually is unnecessary.
It’s not just a shopping list!
The right-hand column isn’t a shopping list, but a meal plan. Reader, I love a meal plan – you might remember my post ‘The Kitchen Page’ (includes a free download, no strings – do check it out!) in which I described how one side of a single side of A4 paper houses such crucial information as the use-by dates of everything in the fridge, an itemised list of everything in the freezer, my shopping list and my meal plan.
I love that Sam has put her meal plan adjacent to her shopping list, rather than on the other side – or, shock, horror – on a different piece of paper! 😲 At the top of her meal-planning column is the title ‘4 meals’, and below that, a numbered list:
1. Burgers
2. lamb kebab + Greek salad
3. pasta
There’s a space below ‘pasta’, and then the word:
coriander1
Now, whether ‘coriander’ has leapt sideways from where it truly belongs on the shopping list side, or whether it’s meant to be part of meal number three containing pasta, I don’t know.
Next to the number 4. is an entirely empty space.
Looking again at the shopping list side, I wonder whether the list contains all of the items needed for Sam’s planned meals?
(Plot spoiler: it doesn’t.)
Burgers aren’t needing to be shopped for, so perhaps Sam’s already got a pack in the freezer.
Lamb kebab is going to be bought as an item, as is the feta for the Greek salad, so assuming Sam has some salad items in the fridge and some olives in the larder already, she’s got her second meal on the list all taken care of.
The fact that ‘pasta bake’ is on the shopping list is interesting: is that something that Sam’s going to buy ready-made? After all, the third item on her meal plan is simply ‘pasta’.
And I’d love to know what meal number four had been destined to be!
Non-food items
On the other side of the piece of paper, just two items are listed:
What does this tell me?
Sam is a list maker after my own heart! She has food items on one area of her list, and non-food items on another. Perfect.
Frequency of grocery shopping
Sam’s list is pretty short. Different households have a different – what should I call this? – shopping cadence. I, for instance, shop weekly. I order my groceries online and have them delivered every Tuesday, but then my parents tend to shop every two weeks, again online. Sam, though, shops more frequently: her list shows me that four meals are planned at a time.
Dating Sam’s list
Reader, how old is this list? Well, I’d say that it had been made early in the week before Sam’s children’s school broke up for its May half-term holiday, so an entire week before the list had blown across my windswept radar on Wednesday.
You see, if ‘pack up bits’ are for her kids’ lunchboxes, they are needed in school term time. If they are to be fresh items, it is unlikely that she is already shopping midweek this week for school starting again next week.
No, she needed those last week.
Had Sam used her list? And what struck me as odd about it?
I am absolutely certain that at the time I found her list, Sam had finished with it. Yet there’s something about it that stands out in regard to this. Nothing has been crossed off.
So why am I so sure that Sam’s shopping had been accomplished? I know that Sam’s kids have been on holiday this week, and Wednesday – list-finding day – was the day out for which a picnic had been planned. By the time I’d found the list, the picnic had been eaten.
The list had already done its job.
The fact that nothing on it has been crossed off is perhaps because Sam’s list is short, and I can imagine, as she was navigating her way around the supermarket, she could easily see in her basket the items she had already picked up, no crossing off required.
Now, I don’t cross out the things on my lists, but I do always mark them. In my case it’s a simple ‘x’ to the left-hand side of each item on the list.
But Sam? Sam’s not like me: she just wings it. Go, Sam!
Conclusions
Sam – or someone close to her – is a motorcycle enthusiast.
Sam is organised in her home life, with a pretty smart shopping list/meal planner system.
Sam has school-age children, and her family enjoys a picnic on a day out in the school holidays.
Although she clearly is a planner, Sam doesn’t always plan too far in advance, shopping fairly frequently to procure groceries for the next four days’ meals.
Sam’s happy not to micromanage her listing life, being relaxed enough about it not to worry about crossing things out as she goes along.
But Sam loves a list. And so, dear Reader, do I.
Love,
Rebecca
If you’ve enjoyed this analys-list, do please let me know by clicking the heart, and share your thoughts in the comments! Does something that I’ve missed stand out to you on Sam’s list?
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Looking for a shopping list/meal planning set-up of your own? I run my own household from one side of a single sheet of A4 paper. You can read how it works – and snag your totally free download of that very same page – below!
In some other places in the world, this is called ‘cilantro’.
I've just been watching Vera and am convinced that you are actually a detective in disguise and that Sam is under investigation. For what I can't yet determine, possibly something to do with motorbikes. My imagination is just trying to give her/him a backstory...
This engaging post confirms the fact that there are stories EVERYWHERE if we just keep our eyes open. It also confirms that you would have made an apt partner to Sherlock Holmes in the absence of Watson. I could really see the way your analytic, organized mind works. An especially beautiful description "...and a keen wind had begun to stir the fabric of the abandoned deckchairs" And who could ever forget your story of The Kitchen Page? Thanks for a jolly morning read -- I needed it.