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Since day and age I am in the habit of using four sheets of toilet paper. I buy recycled toilet paper in a large discount supermarket outlet which is located in the outskirts of the city; 17 kilometres from the village where I live.
I have to say city because the inhabitants insist. Beyond any doubt they will be offended if you call their beloved city anything less. Although I think it’s more like a town.
Back in my own village, that is the village where I recite at the present time, they do not sell recycled toilet paper. As a matter of fact they don’t do much recycling. Even the glass recycling containers have been removed. We are lucky to have a shop at all.
A neighbouring town has been more fortunate. They have recently been blessed with a large discount supermarket themselves. The new discount supermarket, which stands only a few hundredth yards away from another supermarket, has yet to be opened. They seem to have problems with their liquor licence.
To be honest I do not understand why the shop was built in that particular place. More to the point; do they really believe a shop like that will pay itself off? At the moment nobody benefits from the edifice, except the neighbouring supermarket.
Sometimes I wonder what I would do if those big supermarkets wouldn’t exist. I can vaguely remember that we had a vegetable shop in our village. You had to decent a few steps to get into a kind of cellar where they kept cabbages, potatoes, cauliflowers and other large vegetables. There was no such thing as exotic fruits or vegetables as far as I can recall; except for the occasional oranges and tangerines.
We also had a butcher, who did his own slaughtering and made his own sausages. When I was about eight or nine there were still two butchers in our village; they were the survivors. Once there had been as many as three or four. I can’t really tell because that was before my time.
At the time my brother was working at the bakery; the only one left in the village. They had undergone the same faith as the butchers. The village had gone from five bakers to just the one. Actually there were two; to save themselves they had made a fusion.
Early in the morning before school I would get a loaf of bread for my mother. With the shop still closed at the front I entered the bakery via the back door. Opening the door the aroma of the fresh baked bread entered my nose. Inside the bakery I was usually enthusiastically greeted by one of the owners. He knew what I needed and let me choose one myself.
On the way back home, which wasn’t too far luckily for my mother; I began to eat from the fresh baked bread. Nothing tastes better then a fresh baked loaf of bread. The crust is crunchy but not yet too hard to break your teeth.
Bread sold in any supermarket nowadays isn’t even related to the bread the bakers made in our old bakery. Even the bakery itself doesn’t exist any more. It had to make room for a new shopping centre. That’s what they call progress.
I don’t think it was such a progress. However I don’t think the little grocery shop in our village sold recycled toilet paper, so in a way we have improved. As a matter of fact we have dramatically improved; the large discount shop in the city sells bread machines from time to time.
They have a two and a half month cycle in which products return to the shop, so if you missed the cycle like I did the other day with the multiple USB ports; do not worry, they’ll be back. I wish I had a two and a half month cycle. Unfortunately I haven’t. Sometimes it even comes twice a month.
The discount shops are everywhere now. They’re everywhere in Europe. It’s handy though when you go on a holiday abroad. There is always something familiar, which reduces the chances of homesickness. It also makes the life of our immigrants a lot easier. They can work in their own environment and if their lucky, which they usually are, they can speak their native language while working at the till.
Having those discounts shops around can also give a lot of confusion; for instance some people believe that we eat the kind of food that’s for sale in the discount shops where I come from: they’re close, but it isn’t quite what it should be. Especially the sweats, biscuit (we say cookies) and cheese sections can be improved. However I can’t complain; after all they do sell recycled toilet paper.
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A good selection of story hooks and discussion; you've moved this one onto my reading list.
The skipping stones analogy in your piece this week is perfect for how to know when a piece is finished. I had never thought of it in quite that way before, but what I look for in a finished, polished piece is exactly that: it should read as lightly and easily as a stone skipping across the water...if there are places where the stone suddenly "sinks" -- those are the places I focus on in revision.