Mama Said

Since I left home for college, my mom has given me a lot of advice, much of it concerning food and cooking. One of the ones that I always remember is to keep tot he perimeters of the grocery store - all of the essentials are there, and once you go in towards the center you'll find all of the gunky junk food and useless objects.

Well, today, I ignored that rule, and it came back to bite me.

I was almost done doing my re-stocking shopping trip, having returned to Middelburg only hours before, but I waited to get greens - located in the front of the store just as you enter - so I could check and see if the frozen spinach selection had improved.

It hadn't.

I did all of my other shopping in between, and got to the freezer section at the end, to find that there was still your regular assortment of chopped spinach and creamed spinach, all in cardboard, not plastic, and doubtless freezer-burned.

So I doubled back to the produce section to grab a bag of organic mixed greens for salad and - the key mistake - cut through the center aisle of the store.

"cut through" might be a little misleading, though, because I was actually lengthily distracted not halfway across the store by an enormous table with seven or eight "BONUS!" signs.

Usually, these don't get me, but today, I saw the object on bonus was books.
Books! In the Netherlands! For only 2.50!

Since I'm moving in less than six months, I KNOW I should not be adding to my already rather large library. But I can't resist a deal when it concerns books.

I shuffled through, and found a thinnish, silly, trashy-looking novel, but one that was written in Dutch. (The others were mostly translated.) That might do me some good; I'm taking advanced French this semester but I really need to work on maintaining and improving my Dutch at the same time. Just your typical chick-lit, really; two girls trying to lead decent lives in the big city, only in this case, Nicki and Petra live in Amsterdam, not New York. So I put Yoyo van Gemerde's "Sushi & Chardonnay" in my basket.

With considerable will power, I set the translated copy of The Nanny Diaries back on the stack (reminding myself that I HAD already read it, and even if I didn't remember it very well, there was probably a reason for that).

Moving on, the next part of the table caught my eyes. CDs! After another few minutes spent shuffling through these, I finally pulled myself together with the intention of bee-lining it to the produce section...

...only to find that the end of the table housed the DVDs.

Mostly BBC miniseries, for the low price of 5.99. But good luck keeping me away from the classics.

I skimmed over Pride and Prejudice (1980 version, not '95), Great Expectations, He Knew He Was Right (though I considered that one), and Persuasion. Then I saw The Barchester Chronicles.

Bingo.

What's not to love? I loved Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now, as well as the relatively recent mini-series of the book. So the Barchester Chronicles can't be bad. And second: It stars Alan Rickman. One of the best actors around. Who I especially love in period pieces (such as "Sense & Sensibility").

The fact that it's a 385 minute miniseries, not a two-hour movie, sealed the deal. Once my subtotal had ballooned to an uncomfortably high price (I had to buy phone minutes and I treated myself to the fresh-squeezed orange juice and some parmesan cheese for my pasta; that seems reasonable), I packed everything into my "Ga Rode Sokken" bag (thank you thank you Franny!), and headed home.

Now I just gotta find enough time for a lot of television-watching.