Today I am going to Glasgow, on a train much earlier than originally planned. (I left it too late in the day and all the ones at a humane hour were sold out). It’s a weird journey: both placid and a little anxious, both because I slept pretty poorly the night before and scramble to make up the lost hours on the train itself, but it’s also overbooked at different bottlenecks, around Wigan and Carlisle, so wind up contorting myself into different positions in each of the three undesignated seats I periodically shuffle between. I do this both to try and catch forty winks, as well as ease the ache in sacrum; a hangover from the wholefood warehouse. I squirm in 62 - Aisle, 55 - Window, and snatch a trepidatious hour’s nap in the too-warm embrace of 51 and 52. I become a flat bap, a croissant, a dumpling.
At half 6 this morning I finally killed off the loaf. It was too early to eat, and I wasn’t hungry, but I wanted to give as little of my money as possible to the slightly depressing inevitability of Pret, and also because I wasn’t prepared to get home a couple of days later and be greeted by the now-inedible husk of it’s last sixth – defeated. I toasted it on high, like a penance, (turns out the toaster wasn’t dead, the electricity box had just tripped out) and, now both brittle and chewy, just beginning to burn, I lugged cold butter into the airy warrens of its surface before dunking it in scalding coffee. The butter immediately began to melt on contact with the coffee, leaving a trace, an oily glaze, about the rim. It tasted better in that moment than at any other point this week.
Next? Not much: an almond croissant (from Pret, ofc) bought in the flurry of a rush-hour transaction so quick I can’t remember the face of the guy behind the till. Also pocketed a ginger shot juice, a loose banana, and a packet of freeze-dried yoghurt cranberries (unpictured for sneakiness). Whatever was in reach, really. As with any commodity setting, but in Pret especially, the sheer volume and rampant availability of everything on offer – with every shelf always stocked to the brim, cartloads of sandwiches wheeled in and out, heaps of pastries right underneath the noses of the cashiers, the weird shelves in the middle with all the tiny packets of snacks on – inextricably draws your mind to the conclusion that everything in front of you is pretty much worthless. When you couple that with the fact that Pret’s often busy in a way which completely obscures everything below the neckline, and because I’m wearing my favourite jeans my mate Pia made (they have the deepest pockets going; the website description reads ‘Both back pockets carry two tinnies each. I checked’) – this Pret is open season.
Shoplifting is a fact of life. I’ve talked about it a bit already in an earlier dispatch. The most shoplifted items are food, last time I checked. Cheese and meat sit pretty in first and second, with booze coming in a close third. Obviously, spirits are electronically tabbed. Cheese isn’t. But I bet some sicko in a high-rise office is concocting a shatterproof security case for Red Leicester as we speak. I’m not trying to suggest that I need to steal food to live – I’d squeak by without and I definitely buy more grub than I raise – so I absolutely belong to that ethically dubious (and yet majority) category of people who don’t need to steal, but do; and do so by intentionally leveraging privileges not necessarily available to those who don’t steal, but may desperately need to. I’m white. I can affect foppish befuddlement on command. I have no dependents. I have floppy hair. I steal food because it’s easy; because I live in a context where it’s easier for me to steal than others. Sometimes I steal food for other people – rump steak for the unhoused woman outside my local Sainsburys, because I can steal more readily than her, but admittedly I steal mainly for myself. I don’t know why I do it. Maybe it’s because something for free feels better than almost nothing for something else. Maybe it’s because I know the markup the supermarkets and lunch rush chains are making is insane; that the stranglehold they have on high streets and communities (especially rural ones) is disastrous; that they actively limit people’s access to food, not grant it. Because I don’t want to give them an inch. Because it’s a little addictive. Maybe it’s because security guards don’t work Sundays; because the idea of food being guarded and detained, or wasted needlessly at the end of the week in bins that they now padlock up, will never not be disgusting on a human level. But these are all qualifiers I’m heaping up to try and cover my own arse. Ultimately I know that in stealing food I am taking advantage of, and leaning into, a privilege that could be better put to use, that should be in the service of other people. But I’m also left, without any material reconciliation between these meandering thoughts and the immediacy of the act, at the open door of the nagging knowing that to play this world only by the rules of those who own it is an impossible act of self-constraint. But again – it’s easy for me to say that.
***
Some lingering fragments from the day, in no particular order, for this shorter, travelling dispatch:
- The Pret-liberated banana hanging in the elasticated net at the front of my seat, alongside my Nalgene which looks – aptly, I suddenly realise – like a litre of Irn Bru.
- Me and L share two Kit Kats, one each; we’re a little pissed that they’ve got rid of the classic foil and paper packaging, and the thick ridge of chocolate that you used to be able to sink your teeth into on either end of the bar. Earlier, we talked about how weird it is that everything that tasted amazing when we were kids is now a washed-out, E-number-less stand-in; a litigated husk of its former, gloriously calcium-corroding self.
- A miraculous, two-second harmonisation when three people blow their noses at the same time.
- Ran out of time to have dinner: Instead, the silvery carcasses of four-to-six crisp packets, torn open for communal enjoyment. Among them, an incongruous and slightly bereft looking packet of Aldi’s Honey and Oats Protein Oat Bites; a few final crumbs make reverberations in the foil as I shake it, testing to see if any remain un-devoured.
- Finally, a savoured half-sandwich, saved for me by H, from Glasgow CCA. Artichoke and baby spinach and black olive tapenade but the bread is thick, salt-crusted rosemary focaccia. I forgot to take a picture of this too. Probably the second saltiest thing I’ve ever eaten, but in that slightly sour and lingering way that comes from olives, rather than the scorched-earth attrition of raw salt rub or swill.
Wes Knowler is a writer living in London. @otter_cobra