It’s vast. I don’t remember it being this vast. It’s almost empty when I go, midday, but for a few women pushing toddlers in trolleys and some retired couples. As soon as I enter, I am assailed by sugar and fat. Since when did doughnuts come in so many flavours; lemon icing, raspberry icing, salted caramel icing? It isn’t just the doughnuts. I traverse the aisles. Ice cream sauce comes in creamy fudge flavour, Belgian chocolate flavour, raspberry coulis flavour and – my favourite – Alphonso mango, passion fruit and yuzu. What is a yuzu? Is an Alphonso mango significantly different from any other kind of mango – by which I mean, does it actually taste different when it is bottled with passion fruits and yuzus and a shedload of sugar? Will Mrs Barker, when her inspector husband brings home ordinary mango sauce, say, ‘Oh for heaven’s sake, Peter, I can’t possibly put this mango sauce on my ice cream. You know I only like Alphonso mango.’ Or, perhaps, ‘Where’s my yuzus?’

Rice: pure basmati, brown basmati, white basmati and quinoa. Wild rice – I’m presuming that’s a lot more fun than pure rice, and if you tire of wild, you can always go home to aromatic and fluffy. Next to the packets of rice are the packets of microwave rice, which is rice for people who can’t be bothered to cook rice. And next to them are packets of something called Cauli Rice, rice made of cauliflower, for people who not only can’t be bothered to cook rice, they don’t even like rice.

When did all this choice become necessary, let alone normal? It was normal, for me, once. I was once a person who wandered up and down aisles such as these and thought nothing of it. How come our physical needs and desires are catered for in such minute detail and with such infinite variety and yet it is so hard to get help when we feel sad? Where’s the supermarket display for that?

Beyond the low wall made by the magazine rack, there is a cafe area, empty but for a solitary retired couple who sit opposite each other by the floor-to-ceiling windows. On the table in front of them, they both have soup of the day, which today is green soup, and diagonal slices of baguette. They lather butter onto the baguette without speaking, then sit spooning the green soup into their mouths while staring straight ahead, right through each other. Above their heads muzak plays, softly. I watch them for a while, and wonder if they hate each other or love each other – or both, perhaps – whether they are not speaking because they only snarl these days, or whether it is simply that they prefer to sit together in comfortable, companionable silence.

Then I go and confirm my suspicions about carrots: they are, of course, even more orange than I remember.