If you’re reading this, then it represents third time lucky.

Last week, you may remember, I cunningly constructed a very brief post out of an abject and depressed confession that I was, for the first time, failing to produce a post. This had the desired dual effect: it both elicited sympathy from my many kind-hearted readers who assured me that I should not be downcast: my unbroken run until last week was, in itself, a magnificent tribute to my perseverance and dedication; at the same time it technically constituted a post, so, as I shall claim in any court of law where the issue is raised in some as yet unclearly delineated future legal dispute, my run is still unbroken.

Yesterday (which was Sunday), having decided already last week what I planned to write about, I diligently locked myself in the office and began pecking away at the laptop. After a couple of hours of fairly tough slog, and stuck in an inability to locate an article I had planned to reference, I ground to a pathetic halt, broke for lunch, and then spent the rest of the day, and a decent chunk of today (Monday), avoiding resuming.

I have spent the last hour wondering how I am ever going to complete this week’s post, and I have only just now realised that, for one reason or another, I am simply not ready to write what I planned to write about. There are probably several reasons for this. My intended subject, which I was going to approach a little obliquely, was Israel’s position as a pariah state, but I am ambivalent about choosing this subject. Preaching to the choir seems a little like a waste of effort, particularly when the writers who set me thinking are so much more eloquent and better informed than I am. I’m not sure I have anything new to add to the conversation, and the one idea I have, which may possibly be something you haven’t already encountered twenty times this month, is still in a process of gestation. In addition, of course, anything I write that is even vaguely topical runs the risk that news journalism always faces: today’s paper is only fit for wrapping tomorrow’s fish. I don’t want to risk being a hake hack.  

On this note, friends brought back from their recent visit to the grandkids in the States, a copy of Douglas Murray’s new book, and kindly lent it to us. As it sits accusatorily on the table in the middle of the salon, Bernice and I have spent a couple of days edging round it, wondering whether we really need to read another 250 pages of Douglas Murray telling us, with whatever clarity and grasp, the depressing truth we already know.

In the same way, Melanie Phillips, through her almost daily majestic appearances in my Gmail inbox, is beginning to feel like a stalker, or one of those lost souls who used to stand on streetcorners, their feet wrapped in newspaper, their torn trousers held up by string, and rant about the impending apocalypse.

So, in the end, and third time lucky (Oh! I do hope so), I have opted to write about what I arguably do best, which might be described as half a yard of assorted wittering.

I don’t, in the normal run of things, spend much time thinking about greengrocers, but today it struck me forcefully how sorely I miss them. In stark contrast to much of our disorganised daily life, Bernice and I have supermarket shopping down to a military operation, at whose heart lies the division of duties: our printed shopping list, with its checkboxes for marking off what we need this week, is designed to be torn vertically in two, once filled in. The left half, whimsically headed “His”, lists the fruit and vegetables, in the order in which they are shelved in Rami Levi, and also flour, wine and cooking chocolate, for reasons lost in the mists of antiquity. This represents my objects in the weekly scavenger hunt. The right half, headed, as you may have guessed, “Hers”, represents Bernice’s challenge. She brings to this both the topological knowledge of exactly where Canola oil, salted butter, bleach and night lights are located in the store, and the youthful energy to put in the extra miles of doubling back and criss-crossing the store. She also has the people skills to navigate the cheese counter.

All of which is relevant only to explain why, for me, Rami Levi is our greengrocer. I remain largely unaware of what else he has to offer.

Back in the day, in the old country, the greengrocer’s was located at the end of the street. (The apostrophe in the previous sentence is, I hardly need point out to you, a distant relative of Schrödinger’s cat , being simultaneously a greengrocer’s apostrophe and not emphatically not a greengrocer’s apostrophe.) The greengrocer himself was a friendly soul, in his white coat and, if you are buying into the de luxe nostalgia edition, straw boater. He greeted you warmly, and, where relevant, urged you to sample the cherries which were “just perfect, this week”, or advised you against the melons, which had been harvested too early.

The shop was designed to enable the proprietor to reach all of his stock with minimum movement. He would glide around the premises, placing your produce into proper brown paper bags that never ripped or split when in use, and did not strangle turtles when disposed of later. They could be used multiple times at home, and then made excellent spills, or firelighters, for those long evenings we spent smoking our churchwardens or lighting our coal fires.

Rami Levi offers a rather different shopping experience.

This morning, it offered a very unsettling shopping experience. After Bernice and I corralled two stray shopping trolleys, we separated. While she entered the store, I went to waste five minutes at the side, where a machine has been installed to accept, read the barcode of, and credit the customer for, returned deposit bottles, This is a fine example of progress in reverse. 50% of the time the machine is out of action. When it is working, it routinely refuses to accept several types of bottles, including ones definitely purchased at that branch of Rami Levi. The process is not fast, involving feeding the bottles one at a time through an orifice onto a conveyor belt. Today’s experience was better than usual. I did not arrive just after a Russian who had just carried out his twice-yearly clearance of the cupboard under the sink (50 vodka bottles) or a young adult who had just had a weekend-long barbecue party (200 beer bottles). Mind you, our stock of wine bottles piles up shockingly quickly – and there’s only two of us.

Anyway, having posted two-thirds of the bottles, and handed the rest in at the main desk to receive the small change owing to me, I went round to the entrance, where Bernice told me she had been approached by one of the staff encouraging the use of barcode laser guns. We have, until now, avoided getting sucked into this revolution, which, I suspected, saved the customer no time, and was basically just another cunning way Rami Levi gets the customer to do the job of the staff (weigh, tag and scan purchases) without being on the payroll. After a three-minute training session (“Ah! The death ray comes out of that little hole? I see.”), we both felt good to go. First, of course, we had to declare how many shopping bags we were going to fill. How on earth I am I supposed to determine that before I have started shopping?! I realised, at this point, that this meant Bernice would be packing her own shopping. Now, we all know that packing supermarket shopping, like dishwasher stacking, is a job that should only be done by a man. Women simply don’t realise the seriousness of the decision-making processes involved. However, I took comfort in the fact that at least the greengroceries would be separate from the dry goods.

For me, weighing and printing price labels for the fruit and veg was a little frustrating, until I realised that the quickest way to locate an item on the screen was to type in the first two letters of its name. (I have never noticed how many produce items begin with an aleph, or, rather, dammit, an ayin, or is it an aleph after all – agvaniya, avocado, ananas, anavim, agas, afarsek – tom’s, avocado’s, pineapple’s, grape’s, pear’s, peache’s/peach’s/peaches’ respectively, complete with their grrengrocer’s apostrophes).

While I was facing up to this spelling bee challenge,an eager young salesman with a tablet approached me to offer a Rami Levi credit card. When I explained that my wife had one, he pointed out that, since it was an old one, she was paying a monthly fee on it. If we took a new card, we would receive a Rami Levi gift card equal in value to the registration fee, our first year would be free of charges, and, at the end of the year, we would be able to request a second year free of charges (which, of course, we could not do with our existing card, because it was so-o-o old). I told him to wait a moment, located Bernice, discussed it with her, and, since she didn’t need to be involved in the bureaucracy, she agreed we should go for it. This was, I should add, the third time I had been targeted in this way in as many visits oto the store, and my resistance had been worn down.

For the next ten minutes, the salesman talked me through the intricacies of applying for, using, and unlocking the benefits of, the card. The speed of his delivery put me in mind, at times, of Leroy van Dyke, for those of you who go all the way back to 1962. At the end, I was only too happy to sign the tablet, and wait for the credit check.

After all this high-end tech stuff, both Bernice and I had our trolleys rejected by the weighing station, and yet another member of staff had to come over and beat the machine about the head until it submitted.

In short, I have seen the future, and it doesn’t quite work yet. Bring back the straw boater and the brown paper bags, I say.