Saturday is always a shopping day for me - has been for years. I do the small local shops of wherever I live to get food and treats for the days/week ahead. It was the same when I lived in Hertford, Wallsend and Worcester, so no different now.
However was a sad day in some ways. For the past 15 years, I have walked up to the boulangerie about 200 metres from my front door and have bought pastries, bread and sometimes cakes made by the very talented Bruno Pellé, and sold with charm and a caring word by his lovely wife Arlette, or one of their three children. But today was the last day - health reasons dictate that he stops working the fierce hours expected of a baker (2:30am to 11am 6 days a week, Christmas included, and sometimes an afternoon shift too), and they have not been able to find anyone prepared to take the business over. From tomorrow, we have to seek our bread elsewhere, and further away (not so easy in the time of confinement).
But we do not live on bread alone, and as the outdoor markets are still open, it was into Baugé for the usual purchases - fish, fruit, vegetables, raw milk, desserts, thick cream, crèpes and galettes, and delicious but unspellable things from the totally charming Moroccan family. The market was heaving. By the time I got to the milk products chap - Didier - all yoghurts, all bar 3 rice puddings and all bar 1 milk pudding had been carried off by others. As he sorted out milk and cream for me, we pondered on the phenomenon - "they will never eat all they bought from me over the next week, it's impossible!" Well, his stuff is delicious, but clearly there was some panic buying going on too. "The psychologists are watching" was another clear message! By the time I got back to the vegetable stall, they had run out of carrots. Carrots!!!!
For all we are restricted in our outings, and people had to wear masks, there was some insouciance among those in the market - for the first time in ages my bottom got bumped several times by the basket of the lady behind me in the fish queue. She also didn't understand Paddington stares, so I guess she was a Parisian taking advantage of her second home. Hopefully she will go home tomorrow if that is how she is going to behave.
In all this, one of the key gripes is not lockdown itself, but the existence of unfair competition from the super and hypermarkets (last week it was between restaurants (allowed) and bars (closed)). One good meme doing the rounds today wondered if Covid might not be better controlled if we closed the super/hypermarkets and other big stores and let the small shops run the economy for a couple of weeks. Provided I had a good stock of cat food in, I would so totally support that!
Remember if you have small local shops open, use them, even if it costs a few pence/centimes more! Because once they have gone, they won't come back.
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