Shopping for dinner

The normal things that create the most vivid memories

An encounter with some roses on the way to the shops

Last week I watched Blue Road, a beautiful documentary about Edna O’Brien’s life, and work. I know I was gripped because I didn’t look at my phone once. At the end of the film (and also very near the end of her life) O’Brien was asked what had made her laugh, or made her happy. She mentioned drink, trifle (‘that lovely taste’) and the particular tenderness between a mother and child.

That tenderness is something I’m experiencing all the time at the moment. I watch Ray shriek with delight as I sing Incy Wincy Spider, Wind the Bobbin Up, and a number of Pet Shop Boys, Madonna, Scissor Sisters and Erasure tracks from a playlist called ‘Ray’s Gay Anthems’.

When Ray’s hungry, he closes his eyes and opens his mouth like a bird. When he wants comfort, he wraps his little fingers around my gold necklace, and tugs, tugs, tugs gently to keep me close. I am his raft, and he is mine. We move through our day together, his experiences and encounters with life nearly always entirely fresh, mine mostly re-lived but thrilling nonetheless as I experience them anew with him.

Near the end of The Blue Road O’Brien talks about encounters. It’s clear she enjoyed the glamorous ones (with politicians, film stars, and musicians). But the memories that have stayed with her most vividly are startingly simple images, everyday encounters that one might not bother to make mention of to anyone else, even.

Now I’ve reached middle age I can see why these normal encounters deliver the clearest memories. I find there is such a lot to love about simple actions, interactions and experiences. In doing, in observing, in remembering.

My eldest son leaves home in September. He’ll be back for stretches of time in the future, no doubt. Children, like good ideas after a dry creative spell, always return when we least expect them to. Still, I’m already thinking about what I will miss most about seeing him every day; of the things I will remember most of this past singular year at home together, with his younger and youngest sibling, and Joab.

We spend a lot of the day at home, as often my eldest son’s music classes are late in the evening. Days, therefore, are for meal planning. My son and I decide what we want to eat, and then we put the baby in the pram and go to the shops. To Sosos, the Cypriot greengrocer, who works 7 days a week and sells the best fresh herbs, Greek olive oil, and giant tinned beans in tomato sauce.

We go to the expensive butcher for their just-about reasonably-priced pork chops, chicken thighs, or Italian spicy sausages.

We go to the slightly suspect looking ‘organic’ shop, which seems to charge more than double the amount for standard herbal tea-bags than all the other shops, and where most of the vegetables look unintentionally dehydrated. I only allow us to buy the jarred pickles there, small, spicy light-green ones, and longer, milder ones that go in every type of sandwich.

On bread days, which are mostly every day as we all love toast in this house, we’ll stop at Mayas at the bottom of Tulse Hill. It’s hard to resist all the baked delicious things in there, and mostly, we don’t. When our mortgage advisor recently asked for a breakdown of our monthly outgoings, I did honestly wonder whether I should create a column for “BUNS”.

Tesco Express is usually our last stop for beer and crisps, and I feel virtuous as I tap my Clubcard at the checkout and the cashier shares my joy. “That’s saved you £2.25!.” (I know, I know, the Clubcard thing is all a massive con, as prices are usually inflated before the saving, but the magic works on me.)

Dinner, it seems, is the reason that I get out of the house most days, and the daily shopping lists dictate what shops my son and I go to. These encounters prompt decision making, thinking out loud, discussions with the shop-owners. Will Joab eat 3 or 4 sausages? Does Sosos know that his vine tomatoes are the tastiest in town? Will the woman in the Organic shop get one step closer to working out whether I’m Ray’s mother or grandmother, by asking the right questions without asking ‘the question’?

Last night, my eldest son wasn’t here and my younger son was camping. There had been no earlier shopping trip, no conversation of what Joab and I would have for dinner, and that was fine because in the balmy heat we sat under a tree in the park with the baby, listening to music. We were lost on what to eat later, though.

At home we pulled Bird’s Eye bags from the freezer. A fish finger sandwich with spicy mayo and jarred peppers for me, and a plate of chicken dippers with two dips for Joab. No healthy accompaniments. We were both quite happy though, (UPFs are occasionally delicious, no?) but it was clear that our plates were missing the usual finesse of a Friday-night dinner. Still, tonight my son will be home and we will dine like queens again, I’m sure. (On the note of Friday nights, I loved this from Christina Patterson: A prescription for a lovely Friday night.)

Apropos of nothing, I made these last week and they were delicious, if a little claggy. I also made these cookies a couple of days ago and they were disgusting. Soggy, tasteless, and lumpen. Everything you don’t want a cookie to be. And yet I’ve eaten almost half of them because I hate waste, yet I couldn’t even bring myself to feed them to the birds.

I’ll leave you with this from Edna O’Brien.

“...I had so many encounters, many of them are still with me. A woman driving cattle across the field, and the sound of the cattle and the woman thwacking the cow with a stick. My mother’s call. The way my life turned out. Those memories stayed more vividly and more poignantly than the more glitzy things. And yet I pursued the glitz for a while, and I don’t regret it. But I know it wasn’t the real thing. It wasn’t the real thing.”

What are some everyday encounters or images that have stood the test of time in your memory?