20 Aug 2020 - Amazon Fresh Grocery Order

While I’ve been shopping online since 1998 and have placed several thousand orders in the intervening years, less than half a dozen of them have been grocery orders. I’ve ordered deliveries to a couple of remote countryside rentals and when Manon moved from France I placed a Tesco order to validate her decision to leave primitive Paris for the technologically superior London. But living where we do - literally a stone's throw from Waitrose and a stone’s catapult from Morrisons - shopping for our groceries online would be embarrassingly lazy, environmentally irresponsible and practically uneconomical.

As spring turned into summer, Britain was emerging from what Boris Johnson called our ‘national hibernation’, a strange phrase evoking an enjoyable, snuggly nap rather than the awful, tense enforced isolation the country had endured. ‘Non-essential’ shops, pubs, restaurants and hairdressers were reopening and for a few weeks, before face coverings in shops and supermarkets became mandatory, things seemed to be returning to some kind of normal.

We weren’t around for Eat Out to Help Out - disappointing the children who had been looking forward to a Nando’s fix for weeks - because on 3 August, the day the scheme launched, we set off for France where we planned to spend the month seeing friends and family and enjoying Manon’s favourite ice creams on the St Cyr sur Mer beach.

After a week in Manon’s family house in the woods of the Loire Valley we had driven south to join friends in their holiday home near Pezenas. France’s mask laws were much stricter than those in the UK - I’d been ejected from a shop for wearing a soft fabric mask rather than the proscribed N95 version - but otherwise France seemed relatively relaxed about everything. We sat on the terraces of bars and ate at beachfront restaurants and on the beaches themselves social distancing already felt like a fading memory. We even went go-karting, not dissuaded by the fact that we were made to don helmets that had enclosed dozens of faces already that day.

We were enjoying skipping the Downing Street daily covid briefings and the twitter doomscrolling, settling into the holiday vibe of feeling untouched and untouchable by world events. But we couldn’t ignore the messages reaching us from home, telling us to check the news about a dramatic rise in Covid cases in France. As it turned out, we were only a few miles away from a major hotspot - Le Plage Naturiste de Marseillan - but all over the country infections and hospitalizations were on the rise and on 12 August France was removed from the travel corridor list, throwing our holiday planning into disarray. The idea of cutting our holiday short by a fortnight and hotfooting it to Calais to return home before the requirement to quarantine came into law was too depressing to contemplate. But stay too long and who knew if we’d be allowed back into the UK at all? So we compromised, cutting our holiday short by a week and accepting that we’d have to quarantine for fourteen days back in London.

On the evening before the long drive home I sat on my phone while the others enjoyed a last ice-cream, adding items to my first and only Amazon Fresh grocery order. Hummus and pita bread, apples and table salt, a twin pack of Jaffa Cakes and a case of 24 Schofferhofer Grapefruit beers. Broccoli and blueberries and a white bloomer. Not enough for two weeks of quarantine, but enough of a token to suggest we’d be taking quarantining seriously and allow us to stay at home at least for two or three days. There would be no Eat Out to Help Out for us, but at least we had had some sort of holiday, a break from the routine of that relentless year.