Being a good housekeeper was once a good thing to be. Something you might take a pride in. Or fail at. But we’ve grown out of all that and value ourselves on much better criteria now. Housewife, housekeeper, nah….
And you’d think we’d all be experts at doing the shopping; we seem to do an awful lot of it. How can we fail?
I fail.
I’m not thinking here about the romping off to the shops and buying extravagant new clothes. I’m thinking of making the Tesco order online and finding that it wasn’t that that wine was an amazing bargain, but that it comes in tiny tiny bottles. Obvious, hey? Or worse, that on arrival half the order is missing, presumably because I forgot to click checkout when I added the extras. Ordering things we’ve already got is ordinary and I’m quite an expert at whisking away the evidence and hiding it.
And it is also ordinary to arrive home, unpack the shopping and before the unpacking is done, start the new list of everything forgot to get.
The puzzle is, not how can I make so many stupid mistakes so often. I expect it’s because I’m human and I’m trying to do too many things as well as doing the shopping. No, the question is, why do I feel ashamed when I do these things? I think that good housewife thing is still there, lurking under the sink, determined to get me.
I also HATE shopping…but I’m lucky…sometimes I’m ‘SOO busy working’ hubby has to do it (tee hee…don’t tell ‘im). He likes shopping anyway, I think.
That’s a good trick……
This made me laugh out loud. I hate shopping so guess what… Sue does it, then I moan when she has forgotten things that I added to the list. I should be made to do it perhaps ? ! Supermarkets are soul destroying chambers of excess. We had a trip to Hay on Wye on Saturday just to buy some bread, rhubarb and ginger jam and some lovely bacon from the butchers. Now I enjoy that kind of shopping. It also involved taking time and having lunch in the ‘Blue Boar’ and no guilt. Sad that somewhere lurking is that guilt thing, not keeping up the standards. I have that feeling but not in relation to shopping. Supermarkets are so dominant – everything there to click on ( if we remember to click !) or to pick off the shelves, but there is so much stuff put there to distract. My excuse is I am a man so I feel no guilt…Oh the joys of being the male of the species.
O, I bet you have an equivalent. Life is full of this stuff…
Yes it is, it is all because of standards that we are supposed to keep but fail miserably at. Thing is these days we are not supposed to make mistakes at all, its worse now than when we believed that we could keep 10 commandments !
O that’s a big one. Wonder if that’s true???
This brought back memories for me too – my first and last experience of online food shopping was fine until I got to ordering bananas… not being a massive fan of bananas I thought 4 would be the perfect amount – alas I didn’t realise it was by weight not quantity. I ended up with the most enormous pile of bananas I have ever seen in my life!
Decided I prefer to fill my shopping basket in store rather than online after that fail.
Nice to read other things from you Anne, keep up the good work.
Rachel x
Yes – that weight rather than quantity thing can be seriously misleading!
Thanks Rachel.
Ah, this rings a bell. I bought some gammon the other day: seemed like a bargain, but when it turned up it was the size of my freezer. Oops. Should have learned my lesson and gone to the local butcher. But he closes for lunch (seriously – it’s very old-school) on a Tuesday, the only time I can get there most weeks. So the online shop it is most weeks, with all its strange problems: like the time the delivery man forgetfully left one of our boxes of groceries sat on the front garden wall: in the morning, passers-by hand half-inched everything, barring one carton of milk.
Kind of them to leave you the milk!
How come I didn’t get yoghurt or blueberries in the last Tesco order?
“Whimpers”