shopping for memories

This afternoon, I found myself strolling through the London suburb of Southall, out in the fringes of town. Though still safely inside the collar strung by the M25, this was farther out than I would normally venture, even on a sunny summer day with a picnic lined up in a fresh green park.

Today it was sunny, but not particularly warm, and the parks did certainly not look inviting. The ground was wet – not from straightforward rain but a curiously persisting moistness in the air redolent of Halloween, November and the closing of the year.

I was walking down the high street, muscling my way through dense throngs of colorful people. It was Diwali, the Hindu Festival of Lights, one of the brightest days in the calendar of anyone with subcontinental inclinations, affections or traditions. People were out in their finest suits and saris, buying sweets, lamps and firecrackers from the small shops that lines the street.

As I was there in the afternoon, it was only a party in the making, not the party in progress that I had come to see. My camera, excited to do some street photography after such a long time, stayed in its bag and didn't get a chance to show off its skills. My fingers were truly relieved about this because they could stay inside themselves, buried in the warmth of my pockets.

It would have been an uneventful afternoon, entirely devoid of anything worth reporting, had I not stopped at the local Lidl before boarding the bus back to the Bush. For those who don't know it, Lidl is a German chain of hard discounters, selling a small range of mostly own-brand food items at cut-throat prices.

In Germany, there are a handful of these chains, and they define the grocery market. Small, cheap (not necessarily in a good way), messy, and powerful are words that come to mind. While there are other kinds of grocery stores in the country, enormous boxes at the peripheries of towns and posh traders with immaculately presented selections, nothing says more about the way Germans like to shop than the fact that Wal-Mart entered the market, was beaten badly, and left in a hurry. Twice. They were too expensive, too big, too confusing.

At Lidl, cardboard boxes are haphazardly strewn in the narrow aisles, goods spilling from them in anger. The customer must dig up the product he desires and match it to the price tag stuck to some shelf above. This is not my way of shopping. Also at Lidl, employees are treated despicably, without much respect or consideration. This is not my way of doing business. And yet, I entered the store.

I needed cheap TP, simple as that, but found a world I thought I had left behind a decade ago when I left Germany. Lidl has been trading in the UK for fifteen years, but it has adapted to the market in only the most paltry of ways. Many products are the same you can buy in Germany. Many products are even named and labeled in German. Their prices might endear them to the local shoppers, but their indifference of the costumers won't.

I wandered through the aisles, prudently avoiding the littering junk, and saw, on shelf after cluttered shelf, things that brought back memories. Yogurts we used to have in the fridge, juices we used to drink, chocolate I used to buy when I needed a cheap fix. I also saw the cornerstones of a honeyed Christmas: Lebkuchen, jelly-filled hearts, Dominosteine, and racks upon racks of Stollen. It's too early in the year for me to buy any of this, but come December I'll be back, and for the first time in countless years, I'll go into Advent abundantly supplied with the treats that defined the sweetest days of my childhood.