Hardly a month goes by that my grocery order isn’t lacking in something. I still order groceries on line for pick up. I have always hated grocery shopping, the store is cluttered with things I do not want to buy, and the people are rather rude if you stop to really examine what crap goes into innocent-seeming food. The middle aisles are particularly terrifying, with hundreds of boxes of sugared cold cereals. I only want oats for porridge. Where have they hidden them now?

It was easy to opt out of the insanity of in-person grocery shopping during the height of the pandemic, and I still enjoy the luxury of it. It’s a pity that it is always an adventure of ever-changing shortages.

My parents were familiar with rationing and shortages during the war. My mother was found margarine horrific, and never ate it once butter became available again. Oddly, she embraced tinned milk, and used it for decades after the war. She also said that if you saw a queue outside a shop, you just joined in, even if you didn’t know what was on offer for it was bound to be something good. I know she and her brother indulged in a bit of black market petrol. She and her younger brother shared an automobile, and had only enough legal petrol for them to get to work and maybe visit the shops once a week. But my uncle had a girlfriend who lived in a nearby town, and he wanted to take her out a couple of times a week. So they bought petrol on the black market…

In case you are wondering, it was my preferred brand of yoghurt that was missing from this week’s order. Other weeks it has been a quiche, the dough for a pizza, and cream cheese for several weeks. I know the supply chain is still messed up, but it behooves the stores to keep their online inventory accurate.