The days of bulk-buying pasta may be over, but some lockdown habits – setting the table or shopping locally – are worth keeping
Are we there yet? I’m not sure. The cartoonist Adrian Tomine’s latest New Yorker cover, which is titled Easing Back, depicts a small party: a group of friends, or maybe colleagues, drinking and smiling and talking, while in the foreground, a new arrival, about to hang up her coat, opens a cupboard to reveal box upon box of surgical masks, huge bottles of hand sanitiser and an extravagance of loo roll. The question this image subtly asks is: backwards, or forwards? Freedom has lately made a return to our lives, but for the time being the happiness involved in this is still shadowed by the fear that our liberation may not be permanent; that we may yet have to fall back on all the stuff piled up in our cupboards.
Looking at my shelves, I suspect that I have enough pasta, flour and tinned tomatoes to see me to the end of the year – and yet, the habits of lockdown are so hard to shake off. My supermarket order, planned with military precision, is still big enough to last a fortnight, in spite of the fact that we can now go out to eat (and do, with alarming frequency on my part). I fret constantly about the freezer, and how I might ever manage to defrost it, given that I’m so nervous of emptying it – and I worry, too, about shortages, even if the insufficiency in question is only a premium (ha ha) beef crisp for which I developed a nagging craving in lockdown.
What’s the one thing you did in lockdown that you won’t change? I’m sure I’ll always shop more locally now
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