What they always say about cats – indeed, one of the reasons I prefer dogs – is that they don’t like moving house. You have to trap them inside for the first week after you relocate or they’ll make your life a misery, going back to the old house, getting into mischief on the way. I’ve always thought less of them for their inflexibility, their prima donna nose-twitching, their refusal to go with the flow. Always, that is, until someone remodelled my local Lidl.
It is hell: they haven’t just moved all the stuff, they’ve reversed half the aisles, so they run across instead of along. I’m baffled by the physical space before I’ve even started looking for anything I want. It feels weirdly fake, like I’ve walked into a trick supermarket, for the purposes of … who knows, kidnapping? Reality TV?
The fruit is where the vegetables used to be, and God knows where the vegetables are. I’ve made my peace with only eating frozen peas. I can’t find the mini pizzas, the giant marshmallows, the iced tea, the windscreen defroster. I never used to buy any of that stuff, but it seems I was much more attached than I realised to walking past it, seeing who else was buying it, knowing it was there. They used to sell coal, and air fryers, and pans, and pot plants, and I never bought those either, but the unknowability of their whereabouts, if indeed they still exist, is weirdly vexing, as if I’m playing the video game of Lidl, and I’ve stalled on level 2.
They’ve reversed the person-checkouts and the self-checkouts, forcing the realisation that, on some subconscious level, I used to decide how to pay based on how sociable I was feeling. And this is taking me ages to adapt to, so I routinely arrive at a machine looking for a chat, and arrive at a checkout person with my headphones still in. I hate people who interact while wearing headphones even more than I hate cats. Sorry, that’s way too strong. I do not hate cats. I have a lot more in common with cats than I thought.
