I am in a volunteer WhatsApp group, but something has broken down in the chain of communication, because none of us need anything. We use it to swap aubergines and borrow power tools. We spent the week before Easter discussing which pub we missed the most.
Then a solitary request came through, we all fell on it and I won. It was a very short shopping list from a woman who is blind and in complete self-isolation. It was no trouble at all, but it was bugging me that there was no frivolity on the list. I couldn’t process the existence of a person who only ate things that were good for them. So, I decided that it was actually quite hard to ask a stranger for anything non-essential, and then I decided to overrule her and buy one fun thing as a gift, a shout of shared humanity; to cast my bread upon the water, except instead of bread maybe some orange Clubs.
Yes. That is exactly what I should have got: Clubs or a Viennetta. But supermarkets are high-stress places these days, physically empty but emotionally bursting at the seams. My decision-making collapsed into self-recrimination. Nobody wants an unplanned Viennetta, fool. What about the people whose favourite Club flavour isn’t orange? How could I even understand a person like that? This is how I ended up with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, which in that moment I decided everyone likes, even though it is the single distilled product I won’t drink.
As I got closer to her front door, I remembered a few things: I don’t know anything about this person. She might be teetotal. She might be on a detox. She might think whiskey is immoral. She might be allergic. She might be a Baptist. I genuinely didn’t know anything – where she is from, how old she is, whether she would even know Jack Daniel’s was a drink, rather than a person. This would have been the point at which to quietly take it home, except then I would be back at square one, with this eerily healthy bag of shopping and no shout of shared humanity. So I just popped it on the doorstep and didn’t say anything.
The next time I went, I didn’t mention it – and neither did she. It is likely that we will know each other for a long time and never speak of this.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
