There was a time when I, in a bid to eat less and exercise more, ate tinned soup every day for lunch instead of sandwiches.
That meant five cans a week, 20 a month. And then my local supermarket started doing insane offers on soup like buy 10, get five free. Maybe it was a coincidence, maybe it was because your supermarket tracks your every move through your club card. I’m a paranoid weirdo so I’m probably the wrong person to ask.
And then me and my wife reproduced. And when I went back to work, the combination of new responsibilities, old work responsibilities and chronic exhaustion meant that sometimes we would just run the heck out of soup and I would find myself heading to work without any lunch.
So to avoid that whole situation I ended up getting into the habit of buying all the soup every time I went to the shop. Just all the soup. Because, listen, otherwise I can’t take advantage of this ridonkulous soup offer. At lunchtime I would leave the office, go to the boot of my car, and take a can of soup from the cache of dozens I had stashed in there.
I would get one of those big shopping trolleys and just fill it with forty cans minimum of Heinz soup, Ted Cruz style. I gathered as much as I physically could because it was cheaper that way and I knew in two months those soup cans would be gone, and because I didn’t know when I was going to be lucid enough to come back for more.
So this led in turn to your humble cartoonist standing bleary-eyed and sallow-checked at the checkout with as much soup as would fit into the boot of my car.
Makes you wonder what people thought I was preparing for.
Do you ever have that little chat with the lady at the checkout where she asks you friendly questions about your purchases? Just smalltalk stuff. Like you’re buying two dozen beers and two different flavours of Dorito and she says “Are you throwing a party?” and then you say “No, I’m an alcoholic.” Or is that just me? Actually, I’m more likely to volunteer the fact that I am having a party so she doesn’t think I’m an alcoholic. Maybe they’re not allowed to ask anymore because of people like me.
Anyway, the point is if the lady had asked why I was buying all the soup, I would of course have cleared things up straight away, obviously, and said “Because the Son has been born and so we must stockpile resources while we still can. Mushroom is my favourite flavour.”
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