Cheap Thrills

I'm going to confess that one of my secret pleasures is, wait for it...
going grocery shopping.

This may surprise you, given that I spend a good smack of time complaining about having to do it and putting it off until even the suspicious canned herrings have been incorporated into something*,
but I LOVE shopping.

I have to do the grocery shopping alone. Going with someone hurries me up, stops me meandering up and down the aisles, pausing now and then to marvel over some incredible product I'd never known existed. (It also stops me buying stuff I don't really need, like the 6-pack of votive candles or the plastic Christmas wreath with imitation holly and incorporated lights I only just managed to escape without this morning.)

I like to make a considered choice. I may be a sucker for shiny things, but I like to look beyond packaging, consult ingredient lists and places of manufacture and compare quantities and prices. I love picking out fresh(ish) fruit and stopping to smell newly-baked bread. All in all, humble reader, it takes me AGES to get it done. But it's a form of weekly meditation. I get to slow down, lose myself in my own thoughts as I amble along with my trolley (always the one which seems to have been newly released from some halfway house for wayward trollies). I like the nodding culture that develops between fellow slow-shoppers, the ones travelling in the opposite direction who you meet once an aisle and can't help grinning at. Hello again, I'm still here too. I see that now you have some free-range eggs and you went with pineapple juice in the end. Sound choice. I love driving home in a car that smells of new things, full bottles and bananas and milk straight from the fridge, and tucked safely away in their respective green bags.

I like shopping : )

* ..tasted, and given to the cat, who won't eat it either...