Never Online Grocery Shop When You are Sleepy & Frustrated

Have I mentioned that the last few weeks have been gruelling, tiresome, wince-making and generally infuriating? No? Well let me tell you that the last few weeks have been all of the above with the added woe of having neither Mister nor Older Sis around to stroke my head, make me food and tell me that all my enemies will be smote by angry hornets of wrath.

So in my defence, given that I was tired and cranky and fresh from a boxercise class where the inside of the gloves smelled like rotting cheese and also hungry, I cannot be held responsible for what I did. What did I do? I decided to partake in some online grocery shopping. Because although I live oh, about 7 minutes from 3 major supermarkets, my bed was comforting me in ways that you cannot even begin to imagine and my laptop was laptoppping on my duvet and somehow I meandered to the corner of the Internet reserved for another major supermarket and low and behold this happened:

And you know, I think I might have blocked it out of my mind and totally regressed the memory of this until Monday evening when I got a call from a friendly delivery driver letting me know that my things were en-route and should be with me in the next hour. “No biggie,” thought I, “this just means I am the epitome of awesome and have thought ahead so that I don’t have to grocery shop this week.”

I waited for my delivery and it came and I humped all the bags into my kitchen.

I then examined the printed shopping list, screwed up my face in incredulous shock, examined the contents of the bags and thought I should document this so that I know NEVER TO MAKE THE SAME MISTAKES AGAIN.

Here is what I bought:

Okay. So this isn’t too bad. Shreddies are actually good for you. Wholegrain. Slow release of energy throughout the morning. Keep you regular. Reasonably priced. But you know what’s interesting? I bought three boxes of this cereal. Three. Boxes. Like it isn’t just me that will be crunching through these crosshatched squares for the next 5 weeks. Regular out the ying yang.

Ginger beer. Also not too much of an issue because Ginger beer flows through Mister’s veins and he will dispatch both the bottles with an alacrity that will make my head spin. But appleade? What am I, 7? I can’t even remember the last time I drank appleade. It certainly wasn’t this year or last but yet something possessed me to buy two bottles of this filth.

Seeing that I bought bread filled me momentarily with hope. I held the bread in my hand. I squeezed it. It was the right kind. I was, for the briefest of seconds, convinced that the Shreddies and the appleade were just mistakes on the supermarket’s part. Then I saw that I had bought three sachets of Maggi So Juicy. If you don’t know what this magical culinary invention is then allow me to explain: you place chicken in the magic Maggi bag, empty the sachets of seasoning over the chicken, seal with magic Maggi sealing thingy and place in the oven and you get glorious garlic chicken or paprika chicken on herb chicken or sweet and sour chicken. You’re all thinking “so what’s the problem?” Well, dear friends, the problem is I already have 10 sachets of Maggi So Juicy so where the hell was my sense of reason when I added three extra ones to my online basket? And why three?

NO COMPLAINTS HERE.

Do you know what’s in these pretty foil bags? Fish. Salmon. Sea Bream. Sea Bass. Shrimp. Mackerel. I don’t even like mackerel. Who was I trying to impress/punish? Plus, did I even have room in my freezer for this fish? No I did not. I had to throw away my Birdseye potato waffles to make room and cram the sea bream in a very, very disturbing position that PETA might still call me on.

That on the left? That’s meat. Because we carnivores up in here. But also I am now going to have to eat the equivalent of a 14-legged chicken and an entire turkey in the next few days because I have no freezer space. This is what sharing your house with tenants gets you – multiple chicken appendages and no room to store them. I have no explanation for the Texan beef ribs. I don’t even remember ordering them. They look horrifying. Apparently, I ordered two portions but I was only provided with one. I think the supermarket was trying to save my arteries.

You know what? I’m glad I bought this pesto and this tomato and mascarpone sauce because it means that my brain was working enough to know that I needed delicious pesto. It wasn’t working enough to know that I had no need of approximately 10lbs of fish but it knew I needed something to make my pasta taste good. Kudos to you, brain.

THIS WAS THE ONLY GREEN THING I BOUGHT! Three mangos. I didn’t buy broccoli or asparagus. I didn’t buy grapes or salad leaves. I bought three mangos and called it a fucking day. Thank God for frozen vegetables or rickets would be all up and through here. But you know what? Calcium deficiency wouldn’t stand a chance because something told me to buy 10 pots of low-fat yoghurt (two of which were in flavours I don’t even like) which I now have to get through before they reach their expiration date.

You know what goes well with three boxes of Shreddies? Milk! And despite the colossal brain fart that was this entire shopping experience, I managed to order it! The good kind too! -insert praise here-

I can’t eat these. I might want to eat these because individually, they are like crunchy, tasty, nuggets of joy and all that is good in the world and when mixed, they combine to make the sort of foodgasm that makes you grip the table for support and call your priest to repent. But I cannot eat them because despite them being the Beyoncé of cereals, they have like 29797389763g of sugar per bowl so it perturbs me that I bought two boxes of them. I have placed them in my cupboard where they will mock me until Mister gets back or Big Bro decides he feels like stealing some of my food. Also, at what point did I think to myself “gee, those three boxes of Shreddies already sitting in my online basket simply will not suffice my consuming appetite for cereal. You know what I need? MORE CEREAL.”

Alright. The next photo is troubling. Very troubling. I have a sweet tooth. That much is common knowledge. But I have been making a concentrated effort to limit all the things I’d like to eat because sugar isn’t the best thing in the world for you. I gave up chocolate and candy for Lent. I haven’t touched either for about 3.5 weeks. I haven’t even been craving it as such. So I have no explanation for this. Baffled and disturbed as I already was having put away my puzzling collection of groceries, I noticed two final bags nestling in the corner of my kitchen.

I lifted them, tipped them out and this is what they held:

But wait! There’s more.

I screamed. And ran. I snapped these photos. Then bundled them all back into their bags and put them in my ironing pile because they frighten me.

Friends, let all of the above serve as a lesson to you to NEVER online grocery shop when you are emotional and tired and hungry. Red mist will descend before your eyes and when you come to, you won’t know what you have done and there will be no way to remedy this.

Heed my words.

PS. I thought I might take the sweets and chocolate outside and distribute them to the kids in my neighbourhood but those little hoodlums can kiss the fleshier part of my ass and buy their own damn confectionery.