Care in the Community

We are looking after a daughter's flat in London. It is near a huge supermarket complex where you can buy almost anything you want to eat, provided you don't mind buying food that may have come from anywhere and, in the case of meat, from animals whose husbandry may not have been especially kind, or, in the case of fruit and vegetables, may have been picked from trees and bushes while half ripe and then chilled in a vast warehouse for ages so that what you buy actually has virtually no flavour. You also have to square with your conscience the great heaps of hard plastic most things in the shop are packaged in.

Leaving those drawbacks aside, it is very convenient, this supermarket. Shopping for the week can be done very quickly. There is an attraction to that, particularly when there seem to be fewer and fewer hours in the day. My hunter gathering approach to life in Budapest, walking daily to the old markethalls near our place and buying things from several different individual stalls, plus towards the end of the week from the gardeners who come into the city with the things they have surplus from their gardens, is time consuming.

But then, wandering through the part of London where we lived for a few years, I came round a corner and spotted the fishmonger I used to buy fish from. At the same moment, he saw me, and his face lit up.

"Hello", he cried, "I haven't seen you for a long time. Where have you been?"

He followed this up with the speculation that it must have been five years since I'd last been there, which was particularly gratifying as it has actually been ten years and I have the distinct impression that every last one of those years is pretty visible in the lines on my face and in my thoroughly grey hair.

I caught up with the course of his life since we'd last met, bought some fish and went away feeling like Kurt Vonnegut did after buying some stamps and envelopes. Perhaps I'm wrong, but I don't think if I went back to the megastore near my daughter's ten years after shopping there on a weekly basis, I would stand even the faintest chance of a similar experience. Corporate and community do not seem to be words that can ever go together. Which is one of the many reasons I hate the corporatisation of the world.