Despite their enlightened social policies, I am, of course, aware of this well of criticism, and that Tesco verges on Evil Corporation status. Colin, whose family have farmed in the village since about 489 BC, stringently boycotts them due to their perceived shabby treatment of the farming community – and there is the very real problem of local shops and businesses being forced to close whenever a Tesco moves in nearby, despite the store’s protestations that its presence increases consumer choice. On a wider level, the ‘food miles’ issue is a serious one, the extra packaging used by supermarkets contributes to our landfill surplus, and the ‘big brand’ mentality is a key factor in the homogenisation of Britain. But you have to balance all these factors with the fact that you get points whenever you shop there.
Personally, I have a rule that governs my Tesco use – I try not to buy vegetables, as I can get nicer and better and more local and cheaper ones elsewhere, and for ethical reasons I don’t buy meat there, unless it is heavily reduced in price. Tins, frozen stuff, drinks, cereals – they are OK. And cleaning products. Cleaning products.
It is not as if I had never been in a supermarket before – it’s just that I could not remember ever having been in one on my own. On sabbatical day one I had no idea that I would eventually become close friends with the Eastern European Shelf Stackers, New Middle-Aged Lady, or Man With Glasses Who Supports Spurs, the Rosa Parks of the Tills. It was not my comfort zone at the time. The second sexual revolution was all very welcome and overdue, but you cannot overturn millennia of evolution in eighteen episodes of a thirty-minute situation comedy featuring a girl vicar.
I stared at my list.
‘Cleaning products,’ read the item.
‘Cleaning products.’ Cleaning products. This was typical. How was I supposed to know exactly what to buy? The rest of the list didn’t simply read ‘food’ and ‘drink’ – it was broken down properly, by item. Lettuce. Tomatoes. Low-sugar lemon squash.
‘Cleaning products.’ I noted with irritation that the list wasn’t even properly arranged. When you walk into a Tesco, the first thing you get to is the fruit and veg, and then, after you turn left and progress from aisle to aisle, there are the household items (including ‘cleaning products’), then general groceries, followed by the frozen stuff and, finally, soft drinks and alcohol. Therefore, that is the logical way to structure the shopping list. Yet ‘Branston Pickle’ was right at the bottom, ‘beer’ was in the middle, and salad items were sort of dotted all the way through. I made a note to talk to her about this. No wonder the CD collection was in such a state.
The cleaning products aisle was colourful and shiny and absolutely full of choices. I wandered up and down the planet Og, amazed and enthralled by the options available.
There were things that would clean wooden surfaces, and things that were good for stainless steel. Kitchen dirt was obviously different to bathroom dirt or living-room dirt, so there were different products for each of those rooms. There was special stuff for the windows, for the shower, for the inside of the dishwasher, for the oven, for wooden floors, for vinyl floors, for floors (unspecified), for those difficult-to-reach surfaces, for putting down the plughole to remove blockages, for putting down the plughole to remove stale odours, for putting down the toilet to remove both blockages and stale odours, and for ‘all general cleaning tasks’.
It was difficult to quell my panic. If I inadvertently effected a spillage of, say, coffee on the dining table, some would be likely to drip over onto the floor. I would then get it onto my hands, and need to wring a cloth out down the sink. Several products displayed a ‘helpline’ number, but I was not entirely convinced that their help would be truly impartial.
There were Cif cleaning products. There was Mr Muscle. There was Fairy and Domestos and Tesco’s Own and Weirdy Beardy Ecological Brand that doesn’t cause the creation of grotesquely mutated hybrid monsters in your toilet pipe. I realised that I had never bought a cleaning product before in my life. They all looked super, like they would get things really, really, really clean.
I swung my head from side to side, casting my eyes up and down the aisle. From what I have read in the magazines, if you look a bit lost and helpless when you are on your own in the cleaning products aisle of your local supermarket then an attractive divorcee/single mother will probably sidle up to you and start giving you advice, and before you can say ‘Bang! And the Dirt is Gone!’ you are having sex on her kitchen floor in the half-hour between dropping off for playgroup and morning yoga class. I swung my head and cast my eyes for ages and ages, but nothing whatsoever like this happened. Perhaps I looked too on top of things. That can intimidate women occasionally.
Being a countryman, what I really wanted was something that was very good for the environment. But this would need to be combined with a formula that I could just spray on and it would dissolve every single bit of dirt there, without me having to touch it with my fingers or do any scrubbing or wiping. I got a portfolio of Mr Muscle in the end, as it seemed to fit my lifestyle profile more than the Cif or the Fairy.
I was cleaning-products-upped; primed with detergent and ready to go.
My mobile phone bursts into life! I fumble in the pockets of my jeans as I survey the land intended for chickens. The name flashes at me from the dainty LCD display. It is Unlucky John.
‘Mate!’
‘Mate!’
‘Mate.’
‘How are you, mate?’
I grew up with Unlucky John. We went to the same school and then, when the time came, got jobs in the same sort of professional areas, in the same city, sharing the same sort of experiences that any young men do when they taste freedom for the first time. Of all the people in the world aside from the LTLP, I am probably closest to Unlucky John, which is why we try without fail to speak to each other on the telephone at least twice a year. That is the male way.
He’s never played bowls, but I was in a band with him once. To expand my musical horizons, I put together a group of local musicians, to play at birthday parties and other functions. Every serious musician should spend part of his life in this sort of outfit. You learn so much about songwriting and arranging by working out exactly how to play other people’s material to an audience, and it’s a good way of making you think about what an audience wants to hear and learning how to construct a coherent set list. We learnt ‘Hammer to Fall’ and ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ and ‘Deeply Dippy’. Covers bands also teach you discipline, and force you to adopt a professional attitude.
So Unlucky John became the singer and frontman of Brian Cant and the Flaps. He wasn’t actually a singer, and had never been a frontman, but none of the rest of us was either, and he was a friendly, popular chap, who we thought could work an audience. It was my birthday party coming up, and we were awarded that gig, after which bookings dried up. I wanted to persevere, but the others sort of drifted away to do other things – perhaps discipline and professionalism was not for them. Unlucky John had unfortunately got a bit pissed off that the dried peas had fallen out of the adapted plastic cup we’d given him for the shaky bits in ‘Sympathy for the Devil’, so his enthusiasm had waned also.
It was their loss. Their musical projects elsewhere came to nothing in the big scheme of things, whereas I went on to support the Sultans of Ping. I wouldn’t gloat about my success if I saw the guys again – I’m a bigger man than that. And I don’t want to live in the past.
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