Every time I tried to modify my grocery order, the website would crash, drunk, and exhausted. For a few terrible minutes, it struggled. Then it stands up again to refresh

Last modified on Wednesday, July 1, 2020, 13.02 EDT

The online store said that Workington Asda did not have canned bone marrow fat peas and rich tea biscuits. The stock also has no estimated time of arrival. Cumbria is preparing. I thought about the advantages of canned peas paste—always a bit tasteless—and then wondered if I could use fig rolls to soothe it. My mother, when she was in her 80s, was protected like a rare Fabergé egg, despite being an angry egg, thinking that such enforcement is absurd. House arrest is a very strong term, but I did not go beyond rugby tackles. "There are no bone marrow peas in West Cambria?" She hung up.

Now this is a terrible situation. This week’s column is about a delicious lunch at the Dorchester Grill in Mayfair. Oh, are lobster hot mooncakes delicious? Boy, life comes quickly.

It is for millions of people who are now bombarding the online website of the supermarket, and hope, pray, a delivery time. Every time I try to modify an order, the website crashes, gets drunk and exhausted. For a few terrible minutes, it struggled. Then it stood up again and refreshed, suggesting frozen petits pois and mint Viscounts as substitutes.

Another window on my laptop shows that 700 people died in Italy today. An entire generation is in decline. "Don't worry, they may all be old corpses," Mom said. "This helped us a lot of bastards." I quickly checked her order and added some Cornettos. In the 1970s, when the ice cream truck appeared before Corrie, we used to eat together. On this very strange day, the acceptance of my order was a ray of positive light.

Millions of people will now be in my place, choosing groceries for the isolated. This is a delicate process. What we eat at home, with the door closed, is personal. Our secret snack peccadilloes are not reviewed. When I was young enough to work at Guardian Guide, we once reported on our TV dinner; admitting that my love for cheap canned soup with spread Ryvita and mini pickled onions is shameful.

Likewise, once they overcome their refusal to help or gratitude, it takes days of gentle questioning to reveal what the isolated person really wants. "A jar of beetroot, sliced ​​into thin slices, not whole," she finally said. "There are some microwave meals in the refrigerator, but no fish. Heinz chicken noodle soup, but not creamy chicken." "No fish," I wrote on the whiteboard. Through the to-do list, my goal is to get through the planet in a flash. .

Three weeks ago, I started gathering secretly at a very small stage, and I was ashamed of being seen as dramatic. There are chickpeas here and rice pudding there. I bought these when they were quarantining Lombardy. When they closed Spain, I was chopping and freezing spring vegetables and putting individual anchovies in ice cube trays. It felt very proactive, but I now know it's just a replacement event. "I have never really liked fish," my mother told me on the phone we now call twice a day. "But I do like sardines in tomato sauce." This is brand new information. What else do I do not know about her?

When the madness passes, it will pass, because everything will happen, I hope we remember how the supermarket staff really serve us. The irony is that many of us have been hanging out in these places for decades, telling the crowd to avoid them. Let's all eat foraged acorn risotto made with small batches of handmade butter from our bi-weekly farmers' market! Then this happened. Aldi's parking lot was full of Audis and filled with Super Noodles. It's as if it never happened to River Cottage.

I hope we remember the selfless hard work of cashiers and midnight rack stackers, self-checkout staff sorting out unknown items in the luggage area without keeping a safe distance. Always touch the screen we just touched, keep the queue moving, and breathe our bacteria by default. When shoppers ransack pasta and compete for UHT, they don’t have time to plan for their families, watch rolling news, or consider whether their sweat is a sign of hard work or fever. If I can, I will embrace the team at Sainsbury's Local. They are open at dawn every day and are always happy. Almost all important items on the shelves are stocked in small quantities. I am especially grateful to the drivers I trust, they can find my mother. They are solving my biggest life problem now. I believe that a complete stranger will feed her, don't make her upset, don't scare her, keep your distance and keep the box at hand. And explain to her why there is no strong tea. I would never say that the job is unskilled.