Читать книгу Eating for England: The Delights and Eccentricities of the British at Table - Nigel Slater - Страница 14

You wander down the virtual aisles plucking your supper off the virtual shelves and dropping it into your virtual basket. No wonky trolleys, no kids throwing tantrums by the iced low-fat doughnuts, no sleazy music sending subliminal messages to get you to buy two instead of one (not that you even wanted one, anyway), and no one at the checkout fiddling to find the right change (Oh, for God’s sake, just hand over a twenty, will you?) Add to that the fact that there is no one to peer disapprovingly at your fun pack of assorted crisps, or to look down their ecologically superior nose at you because you have chosen Persil over Ecover, and you have the perfect shopping environment.

Once you have found in which section the kitchen foil and cling film lives, and worked out which of the seventeen sizes of bin bag is the one that actually fits your bin, and eventually mastered the checkout process, you could, in theory, save hours, giving yourself more time to spend with the family, or finally to take up pilates. Pity you can’t put petrol in the car online too.

To every up, however, there must be a down, and internet shopping has more than a few. Your inability to find the right dishwasher tablets; the accidental ordering of the wrong colour loo roll (what exactly DO you do with nine apricot-coloured bog rolls?), and the table-thumping, expletive-ridden stress that you suffer when your perfect shopping trip crashes thirty seconds from the final ‘Thank you for shopping with Tesco’ are usually enough to get even the most fervent net-head making for the nearest Sainsbury’s. Add to this the niggling fact that Big Brother now knows how many bars of milk chocolate you get through in a week, or that you haven’t needed to buy condoms for a month, and your twenty-first-century shopping trip begins to look a little less like retail Nirvana.

But it goes deeper than this. The occasional online shopping list won’t do that much damage to the continued existence of your local shops, but the regular delivery of all you need and more to your door will indeed have a disastrous effect on your cheery local grocer’s till. Eventually he will have to shut up shop and move to a cosy flat by the sea, leaving room for a tacky Southern Fried Chicken takeaway to open in his place.

Frankly, you deserve it, and when you come to sell up yourself, you may find your would-be buyers less than keen to move into an area whose local shopping street is littered with polystyrene cartons and tomato-sauce sachets with the corner bitten off. And where do you run to when you need that emergency loo roll?