Messages

I've never really cared for going the messages. (I know people who aren't from my neck of the woods are going to be wondering why I'd go for texts, or bits of paper, but in Scotland - or at least Glasgow - it was always "the messages", not "shopping".) As a child, living in a Glasgow West End top flat, I dreaded being handed the leather shopping bag and sent for whatever sudden need arose. Potatoes were the worst, because I had to take an old newspaper in the bag and make sure the grocer tipped the spuds from the bowl of his scales into the folded paper and not straight into the bag. I never had the guts to insist on this, and the bag got full of earthy dust ... And then there was the time I had to fetch the newspapers for the whole close (why?) and it was windy ...

When I was teaching, I saved up the horror of the weekly shop for a Thursday, and I was often so tired I couldn't think about food and had to force myself to buy anything. At least we used to get fish & chips on a Thursday. 

All this might go some way to explain why after my pandemic hangover hideously early trip to the supermarket every Thursday I return home feeling like the successful hunter returning to the cave with a couple of wild boar and a rabbit (or something suitable) after an epic hunt. I feel euphoric, and Thursday evenings feel like the start of a wee holiday, as if I can relax for a while because the larder is stocked. It's not as if anyone was horrid today, though there were more people - men, mostly - without masks on. Usually tradesmen in orange boiler suits rootling among the sandwiches at the end of the vegetable aisle - do they feel it doesn't apply to them?

The rest of the day seemed unwontedly busy: we had to go to the church to record an anthem (and a reading, which unfortunately wasn't recorded for some reason and will need to be done again), and a vestry meeting on zoom in the afternoon. Meanwhile the weather went steadily downhill (I'd even seen five minutes of sun in the supermarket car park) and as I sat at the meeting I could see the firth blowing up once more into white horses. I could also see messages popping up on my phone - this person and that fleeing Downing Street, Larry the Cat deciding not to quit as he is the permanent resident there ...

And now we're going to have to pay half a pension's worth on heating our tall, windblown house. Maybe we should see if we could get a wee supply job back in school and be heated by public funds. But in the meantime, some signs of the insanely early spring: the snowdrops in the graveyard at Holy Trinity Church. Nil desperandum ...