A shopping list isn’t just useful, it’s a glimpse into a way of life
The telephone rings. My partner is in the supermarket and he sounds fed up. “What,” he says, “is a gremlin? And what sort of wafers did you mean?” No idea, I say. Why? “Because you put them on the shopping list.” Later, unpacking the shopping, I see he has forgotten to buy gherkins and water. He points at the list, and there they are in my spidery scrawl – gremlin, wafer. How was he supposed to know what they meant? It’s a shopping list, not the Rosetta Stone.
It’s not just him who finds my handwriting illegible. I often find myself peering, flummoxed, at my own hieroglyphics. The publisher Jock Murray once wrote to his author Iris Origo that the only way he could decipher her famously crabbed script was to place her letter on a table, down a stiff whisky, then fall to his hands and knees and scrutinise the offending missive at eye level.
This isn’t (alas) an option in Sainsbury’s, but Amazon has recently patented a techie solution to shopping list tetchiness. It involves augmented reality glasses that make your shopping list appear on your arm, like a tattoo. The patent doesn’t mean that we’ll be shuffling along the aisles any time soon, steering our trolleys with one hand while trying to read “haddock, potatoes, Mr Muscle” emblazoned on our forearm. But if Amazon’s invention becomes a reality, I foresee a couple of issues.
Sleeve tattoos, for a start. Will David Beckham and his inky brethren be able to dodge the supermarket run in perpetuity? Then there’s the loss of the physical shopping list as a cultural artefact. My scrawled list is an ephemeral text, discarded as soon as we have passed the checkout. But go back a few centuries and those ephemeral texts offer invaluable insights into the lives of past generations.
Who can resist the fascination of the provisions list for the Roman garrison at Vindolanda fort on Hadrian’s Wall (20 chickens, 100 apples, a modius of olives)? How strangely familiar is Michelangelo’s shopping list of fennel, anchovies and full-bodied wine (each item with its own tiny, exquisite illustration, lest his servant struggle to read his writing)? And while Jock Murray may have grappled with Iris Origo’s writing, her book The Merchant of Prato was a painstaking exploration of the handwritten domestic records of the 14th-century Tuscan merchant, Francesco di Marco Datini, whose business partner sweetly bought a tambourine for “two lire, 10 soldi, so the little girls may be happy”.
On his website, grocerylists.org, the American journalist Bill Keaggy chronicles discarded shopping lists collected in his home town of St Louis. “One of life’s most banal duties, viewed through the curatorial lens, can somehow seem pregnant with possibility,” he observes of these poignant, overlooked, and occasionally alarming (“knife, cooler, map, cellphone, hunting license, say goodbye to wife, kill deer”) lists.
If Amazon’s patent goes into production, our shopping lists will no longer be private ephemera. Instead, they will be algorithmed into individually curated adverts for gherkins and kitchen roll. Which is good news for those of us with terrible handwriting, but sad for historians, archivists, and foragers of the resonant stories hidden within the scribbled chronicles of our everyday excursions to hunter-gather soya milk, leeks and loo cleaner.