I braved Tesco this morning. After the amount of food and drink I bought last week you would not think we could possibly have needed any more, but friends are coming to lunch tomorrow, and we were running out of cat food. (To clarify that last statement, the cat food is for the cats. The friends are getting Sussex steak and raspberry shortbread out of 'At Elizabeth David's Table'). It was the first time I'd started my car for a week, and damp still shone in patches on the floor mats from the last time I went out, so I was rather pleased that it did start, though the brakes had gone sticky and it took a positively boy-racerish quantity of revs to persuade the car to move off. The traffic going up the final hill to Colchester was extremely light, and I wondered where everybody was, and why they were not all going to the sales. Tesco promised to be a doddle.
It was not a doddle, but a thoroughly unpleasant experience. I still haven't learnt where everything is in the new revamped store, which is my fault for not going there more often and paying attention. However, the main problem today was not my tendency to circle the vegetable and dairy sections like an aircraft waiting for permission to land at Heathrow, searching in vain for where mushrooms and creme fraiche have got to. No, it was the music that was playing throughout the store, a disjointed medley of top hits of the past decade. I don't like quite a lot of what's been in the charts since about 1978. I do like the Kaiser Chiefs, but I don't want to listen to them played tinnily over a sound system that was designed for calling all till qualified staff to the checkout or a cleaner to aisle 17, while I'm trying to work out which things on my list I still haven't got. There were gaps between the songs, leading me to hope that the music might have stopped, and to suspect that it was being played on an ad hoc basis by someone who was a bit slow to start a new track when the previous one ended. With any luck that means it was a Christmas season festive one-off, and that come next week it will cease. If it is part of the new-look Tesco then I'm not shopping there any more.
As I made my escape I realised that I'd forgotten to pick up one of the five pound orchids I'd been eyeing up on the way in. I was still so cross by the time I got home that I e-mailed customer services to let them know how much I'd disliked my trip to their store. There was no category for complaints about horrible shopping experiences on the website in the Contact Us section, and I had to file my message under Other. Initially my attempt to submit my comment was blocked because I hadn't included my mobile phone number. That's not good. Not everybody has a mobile phone, my father for instance. Are they not supposed to contact Tesco? I only give my number to personal friends and professional contacts, and had no desire to give it to Tesco customer services, who would then presumably start sending me texts on it, so I made one up. The website wouldn't accept 0799 9999999 and I had to choose something that sounded more random. If it happens to be a real number then the owner may receive a message from Tesco about why distorted broadcasts of I Predict A Riot are an appropriate accompaniment to post-Christmas grocery shopping, followed by unwanted marketing texts.
After lunch I cleaned the kitchen and the downstairs loo, fired up by my resolution to have a cleaner and tidier house. I have been trying to follow the technique described by Guardian psychologist Oliver Burkeman as Adjusting My Defaults. His article addresses the question of how to take more exercise, which is not particularly an issue when you have a large garden and only a part-time job in which you almost never get to sit down. However, I thought I could adjust my defaults to be more tidy just as well as more active. So after breakfast I am trying to remember to empty and rinse the teapot, instead of leaving it standing by the kettle until lunchtime or supper time or the next time I want a pot of tea, and when I see used mugs in the sitting room I am trying to fall into the habit of taking them to the kitchen and washing them, instead of leaving them to deal with later, or half dealing with them by taking them to the kitchen but not washing them, or hoping that the Systems Administrator will do it if they are the SA's mugs. Unwanted sales leaflets from several mail order companies have gone straight into the paper recycling basket instead of spending several weeks piled on top of the ice cream maker. That sort of thing. It has worked up to a point, though by this morning I did have two gardening socks living on the telephone table, which I'd stuffed into my boots when we got in from our walk, and then taken out of the boots because I wanted to slip the boots on to do the chickens and couldn't be bothered with the socks, plus a packet of suet for the birds that wouldn't fit in the crock of bird food by the front door and that I hadn't bothered to take down to the garage.
Tidiness is all very well, but the kitchen and hall floors still needed washing, which is how I come to be stuck in the sitting room waiting for them to dry. They probably have by now. I'm not sure I'm going to manage to keep this up throughout 2013, but Oliver Burkeman assures me that it will start feeling automatic.
No comments:
Post a Comment