Laura Craik on supermarket snobbery

Also the GoT fans who think they can do better and life under a pigeon dictatorship
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Laura Craik30 May 2019

I always assumed my love for M&S had been inherited from my mother, a woman brought to ecstasy by a two-pack of its cream horns.

But when my own daughter developed an inexplicable love of Sainsbury’s, I realised things weren’t that simple. ‘Sainsbury’s is peng. You get a Meal Deal for £3. Everywhere else is a rip-off,’ she pronounced. In the sort of publicity that money can’t buy, Rihanna — who quietly moved to London a few months ago — also revealed that she’s a Sainsbury’s fan, after its Bag for Life was spotted in one of her Stories. Meanwhile, another queen, The Actual Queen, visited Sainsbury’s 150th anniversary pop-up and tried a self-service till. ‘And you can’t cheat it, then?’ she asked innocently, clearly never having graced my local Lidl.

Making sweeping assumptions based on people’s supermarket choices is our national sport. You shop at Aldi? Middle class, self-employed, wildly fluctuating income. Morrisons? Yorkshireman. Asda? You had more kids than you meant to. Sainsbury’s? Liberal. Waitrose? Better off than you pretend to be. Whole Foods? Heiress. Nisa? Student. Costcutter? No idea, but the light has gone out of your eyes.

In the pantheon of supermarkets I have known and hated, Costcutter is my worst, the most erroneously named business since Sam & Ella’s Chicken Palace, since most things can be bought for less elsewhere. Happily, I live in a city which gives me little excuse to shop there. Every postcode has its delicious non-chain secrets, such as The People’s Supermarket in Bloomsbury, or Best Supermarket on Kingsland Road, both stumbled upon by accident during my lifelong quest for ever more obscure, exotic crisps. My own postcode has Frank’s, recently downsized but still thriving. Wide-aisled and gleaming it might not be, but Frank’s sells a roll of black bin bags for a quid, as well as ingredients to

make every kind of curry known to man. Diverse communities deserve diverse food on their supermarket shelves, keenly priced and checked out with a smile. Rihanna would love Frank’s. Although given her proven ability to move among us incognito, maybe she shops there already.

The Nonsense of an Ending

It’s almost two weeks since the Game of Thrones finale aired, and still people are complaining about the ending. Petitions have been signed for it to be remade. Someone has gone to the trouble of plotting the ratio of male to female dialogue. The cast have weighed in, with Sophie Turner branding the criticism ‘disrespectful’. What is it with these Ending Refuseniks? Whingeing about the final episode of GoT, Line of Duty or Seinfeld (even though it ended 21 years ago) is the ultimate in snowflakery: can the Me Generation really not countenance any other narrative than their own? Here’s an idea. There are more TV channels now than ever. If you’re so s***-hot at plot, characterisation and dialogue, why not write your own script? Just sayin’…

Daenerys Targaryen in Game of Thrones
Game of thrones

Box Challenged by Bird

My Sky box stopped working, forcing me to watch TV on my laptop via the Sky Go app, which doesn’t let you forward the ads. So I was delirious when the engineer arrived. Up he went on to the roof. The problem? Twigs. The cause? Pigeons trying to build a nest in the Sky dish. ‘Luckily, it was only a few twigs,’ said the engineer, gravely. ‘Because if it had been a nest, I couldn’t have touched it. You’re fined £1,000 for destroying a nest.’ So what would I have done? I asked, wondering how my life had come to such an impasse that I was having my leisure pursuits dictated by a pigeon. ‘You’d have had to call the RSPCA,’ he said. Words fail me. If anyone knows of any effective yet humane pigeon-scaring devices, hit me up. Actually, they don’t even have to be humane.

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