big sains
on supermarkets | latest tv binge-watch
Speaking of food, I’m excited to announce that next Thursday, June 12, I’ll be chatting live with
, the chef and writer that is so depended-upon in our household that we just call her AJ. We’ll be talking about cooking sounds, listening and Hark at 1pm GMT - and subscribers will be able to catch-up afterwards.
We have two rooms left of our summer solstice writing + drawing retreat at Pye Corner House, and I don’t expect them to last the week. A reminder: 17-19 June. A 450-year-old manor house in the cotswolds. Swimming pool for dusk and dawn dips. Rolling hills for leg-stretches. Incredible seasonal food from El Kemp and workshops from me and botanical artist Lisa King. Come and join us!
Supermarkets, like owning a car, are something that I thought might have happened to me by now. I’m closer to my late thirties than not. We have a child who runs us out of cheese biscuits and fruit and milk. Life, I’m told, would be easier if we had a running Ocado order or a shopping list looked after by a smart speaker or a traditional Saturday jaunt to a supermarket. But somehow it hasn’t happened yet. We get a veg box. We are enabled by plentiful local shops. I go to the market sometimes, M picks up boxes of pasta from Lina Stores on his lunch break. We make do.
This isn’t a brag so much as a means of unravelling how we’ve avoided this seeming tenet of modern life. Its absence in ours has transformed the supermarket into less of a chore and more of an experience, one undertaken a handful of times a year. In the process it’s become an unlikely subject of delight.
Last week, M and I ended up on a rare, entirely spontaneous date in the Big Sainsbury’s in Sittingbourne.