Grace Dent: 'My mother, in her 80s, is being guarded like a rare Fabergé egg' - MW

Workington Asda is devoid of canned peas and rich tea cookies, according to the online store. No ETA on stocks either. Cumbria is getting ready. I rather think about the merits of canned canned peas - always a tasteless touch - then I wonder if I can soothe with fig rolls. My mother, in her 80s, is kept like a rare Fabergé egg, although a furious egg which finds this application ridiculous. House arrest is a very strong term, but I'm not above a tackle for rugby. "No fatty marrow peas in western Cumbria?" she gasps the phone.

Now it is a dire situation. This week's column was supposed to talk about a joconde lunch at the Dorchester Grill in Mayfair. Oh, wasn't the thermidor lobster pie delicious? My boy, life came quickly.

He came for millions and millions of people, now bombarding online supermarket sites and hoping, praying, for a delivery window. Whenever I try to change the order, the website falls, drunk and exhausted. For a few terrifying minutes, he flounders. Then it straightens and refreshes, suggesting frozen peas and mint viscounts as alternatives.

Today, seven hundred people have died in Italy, according to another window on my laptop. A whole generation is fading. "Don't worry, they were probably all bodies," said the mother. "It did a lot of good for us bastards." I quickly check his order, adding cornettos, which we ate together in the 1970s when the ice cream van arrived before Corrie. My accepted order is a little glimmer of positivity in what has been a very strange day.

Millions will be in my place right now, choosing groceries for the isolated. It’s a delicate process. What we eat at home, behind closed doors, is personal. Our secret sticky peccadilloes do not support the exam. When I was young enough to work at the Guardian Guide, we once covered our must-see TV dinners; my love of inexpensive canned soup with marbled ryvita margin and pickled mini onions was shameful to admit.

Likewise, it takes several days to ask mild questions to reveal things that isolation really wants, once they have overcome the refusal to help or be thankful. A jar of beets, sliced, not whole, she said finally. Some microwave dishes for the freezer, but no fish. Heinz chicken noodle soup, but not chicken cream. Without fish, I write on my whiteboard, in which, through the columns of the to-do list, I aim to get out of this planet.

I started coming together three weeks ago, in small, furtive and embarrassing periods of being seen as dramatic. Mung beans here, rice cakes there. I bought them when they isolated France. By the time they closed Spain, I tore up and froze the spring vegetables and put each anchovy on the ice cube tray, feeling very active but now, I know, just a translation. transfer. I never really liked fish, my mom told me about one of our phone calls twice a day. But I like sardines in tomato sauce. This is completely new information. What don't I know about her?

When the madness is over, it will happen, because everything will be fine, I hope we will remember how the supermarket employees really served us. It is ironic that many of us have abandoned these places for decades, telling the masses to avoid them. Let everyone eat acorn risottos made with artisanal little butter from our two-week farmer's market! And then it happened, and the Aldi parking lot was full of Audis stuck with Super Noodles. It's almost as if the River Cottage never arrived.

I hope we remember the futile work of the midnight workers and the queues, our self-service checkers organizing our inexplicable items in the area of ​​operations. management without maintaining a safety distance. Always touch the screen we just touched, keep the queue moving and by default, breathe our germs. When buyers dig into pasta and fight UHT, they don't have time to plan for their families or watch the news or think too much if their sweat is a sign of hard work. towel or fever. I would kiss, if I could, my Sainsbury team, which opened daily at dawn, still having fun, the shelves being reset with a small amount of almost all important items. I am particularly grateful to the drivers I trust to come and see my mother. They came with the slowness of my biggest life problem today. I trusted complete strangers to feed her, not to upset her, not to frighten her, to keep her distance and to keep the boxes somewhere close at hand. And to explain to him why there is no rich tea. I would call this work unskilled work.

MW