In the mornings, she carried a drawstring backpack, the kind you get free at summer camps or in a sports shop, a simple rectangle of fabric with rope straps that sawed into the fabric of her clothes at the armpits. In the afternoon, she carried a white netted shopping bag. This was well before environmental concerns became a fashionable conversational centrepiece; only old ladies carried reusable bags and no one in Tesco would have guilt-tripped you for not bringing your own. In any case, she did; religiously. Always a single, string bag hanging from the nook of her arm; she never seemed to need a big shop. She let the bag swing in an unselfconscious sort of way, like an old lady would. I liked that. She looked like she was reusing her bag because it made sense financially, or simply because it was less likely to split, or because her mother had told her so, and had done so herself before her, like her grandmother before that and so on and so forth through generations of small birdlike ladies shopping for groceries. I never got the impression that in carrying the bag she was making a statement. It was a practical object, a bag with nothing special about it. Except that it was see-through.

I wasn’t able to make out the objects from my workplace. I shouldn’t have had a clue. But she bought the same things every week. So day by day, week by week, helped by the fact that the small Tesco Metro where I myself bought lunch held a very limited selection of items, I began to piece together the life of this tiny apprentice nurse who lived across the road. I gained an intimate access to her private world. But I still don’t know what took her so long in the shop every day. She was only getting a few things at a time.