This afternoon when I head to the supermarket I shall peel off that Post-it note and stick it to the side of my wallet for reference. It’s a system all my own but you are welcome to adopt it without acknowledgement or fee.
The only drawback to it is that I often make the notes in haste while cooking and without bothering to don glasses, and the resulting scribble can resemble the printout from a seismograph.
(When will we realise the cellphone is the Trojan horse we have voluntarily hauled into our lives? It’s crammed with enemy agents that will do us harm. Indeed our fate is probably already sealed. Ah well. Let us return to shopping lists.)
We crave an understanding of this world. We look for insights into our condition. But often we look too deep. The truth is in the everyday. The truth is written on a Post-it note. In its entirety, here is my shopping list for Tuesday Jan 7 2025: Coffee; Marmite; Scotch; Hayfexo.
Yes, yes, I know, it’s poetry. And more than that, it fits exactly to the tune of Bobby Shafto, a song we learned at primary school and that I found mournfully erotic.
But beyond its musical beauty, this brief and simple shopping list is both a window into one man’s needs, and a biography of our species.
Coffee derives from a fruiting bean. I don’t know who was the first to dry and roast and grind that bean and souse the grounds in boiling water — some Inca witch doctor perhaps, Aztec apothecary? — but whoever it was he did our species good.
The borders of our consciousness are harsh and ragged places, and every day for more than half a century, I have relied on coffee, that muddy gentle stimulant, to ease me from the blur of recent sleep into the light of common day. Coffee is the wit of man exploiting fruit to soothe his psyche.
It is beyond the power of language to describe the taste of coffee, but even more beyond its power to deal with Marmite. Marmite derives, apparently, from yeast, and yeast is a form of fungus, which may perhaps explain why Marmite looks to have been scraped from under toenails.
But what to say of its fierce and savoury flavour? I eat the stuff on toast each morning. It sharpens the taste of bread, cuts through the fat of butter. Bravo to Justus von Leibig, the German chemist who improbably discovered it and shared it with us all.
Bravo as well to the Scots for cannily cornering the whisky market, although Scotch doesn’t need to be Scottish.
Every civilisation has worked out how to make booze. Scotch is just booze at its most compressed. It’s the flip side ofcoffee.
Coffee hauls us out of sleep; Scotch helps us go the other way. Scotch silences the voices in the head, the nags and worries, and lulls us to oblivion. It is the adult teddy bear to hug, another balm that we have fashioned from the living stuff around us.
For whereas coffee is a berry, and Marmite fungal, Scotch is made from seeds of grass, barley to be precise. So if we discount the bottles and the packets and the branding and the supermarket shelves, we haven’t travelled far from when we foraged on the ancient plains of Africa as hunter-gatherers.
And vulnerable hunter-gatherers at that, prone to illnesses, but good at finding cures.
For Hayfexo, as you may have guessed, is a specific against hay fever, which is induced by pollen. We are such clever creatures, but contingent still upon the natural world.
Still foraging, still gathering, still making and taking drugs. And still incurable fantasists.
Bobby Shafto’s gone to sea
Silver buckles on his knee
He’ll come back and marry me
Coffee Scotch Hayfexo.
• Joe Bennett is a Lyttelton writer.
