Last month, I realised that I appeared to have inadvertently built up quite a stash of supermarket magazines – you know the free ones which are positioned around the entrance so you can’t resist their glowing glossy covers?
The growth of the pile was catalysed in the first lockdown when I was rendered sleepless by empty shelves and a completely irrational panic that I would never be able to find pasta, flour, eggs or loo roll, and thus did frequent trips to food shops to see if I picked that special magical moment when a delivery had just arrived and the stock was still in. Or if not, rather than walk away empty handed, I would pick up a magazine. And so the foodie lit built up.
As, at the time of writing (mid Feb), we are almost a year into lockdown-ing, I thought I would take a look back at this period through the lens of these magazines. In ‘normal’ times, I am not good at keeping up with reading them, so I found that my magazines actually dated back to August 2018, allowing me to see how we did things before life went all ‘weird’. So what did I find?
It seems that, from the perspective of this type of literature, lockdown doesn’t really change the themes that crop up. Across all magazines, we are still being told about nice little treats, such as how to make afternoon tea special, how to try our hand at baking, how to focus in on seasonal food, how to avoid food waste and lead more sustainable lives generally. Maybe that’s why I like these mags so much – they are a comfort blanket in times of both normal stress and pandemic stress. But of course in those pre-Covid mags, there were a few signs of a life that is now absent – most notably an advert for a cruise holiday. I’ll pass on that, thank you!
Moving onto to what I had that captures ‘peak first lockdown’ (mags from April-June 2020), we are getting ourselves organised to this new routine – there are pieces about how to have a happy home life, how to do personal fitness in one’s living room, advice for dealing with home schooling, taking advantage of more time indoors to do some hardcore cleaning and so forth.
Here’s a selection which reminds me of what we had to deal with:
And of course, everyone desperate to showing that they were doing their bit
And it reminded me of those odd repercussions of shutting down public life. Did you remember how we were told we had to eat more steaks to support the beef industry who were struggling with lack of demand for those high end products with the closure of restaurants? I tried but never found there was a glut of fillet mignon for the taking….
Moving onto September 2020 when it felt as though it wasn’t quite as bad – we had had a good summer, the spike in cases after all the holidaying wasn’t great, but kids were going back to school and we could do still more than in April, if we were careful. Getting by with fudges.
And then, what of the present? Lockdown living is implicit. We don’t need to mention it but it’s clear it’s feeding into content – the almost frenetic exhortations to make the most of an event (Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day etc); the boosting of an overdone topic (chocolate now described as ‘chocuterie’) and the lush pictures of “unknown” UK holiday spots (read into that – all the best places will definitely be booked up.
And what next? Looking at the big picture, who knows? For me personally, I know what I am doing. Making crumpets. I saw the recipe and can’t resist the challenge. That’s about as much as I can cope with.