“I am done with groceries and all associated activities.”

A WHILE AGO, I remember asking a friend — in the kind of way that indicated I wanted an honest answer — “How are you?”

“Bored. Bored. Bored,” she said, looking at me straight, hitting each B hard on the head with a kind of furious resentment. She paused, drank half a glass of wine and said on a sigh, “God I’m bored.”

‘Now that right there,’ I thought, ‘is what you call bored.’ Lots of wine and a drastic change in marital status later, she’s altogether jollier but this is immaterial. My point is, once a week, for the past 24 years I’ve been engulfed by exactly that kind of boredom. However, in my case, it has nothing to do with marital status and everything to do with the weekly shop.