Food In my life there have been two significant Spar shops. The first was on Victoria Street in Liverpool City Centre, a haven during late evening shifts at Liverpool Direct, the then council call centre. Breaks would be at around 8pm and I'd toddle up Sir Thomas Street for an emergency Yorkie bar if I was feeling especially desperate. It was the closest shop open at that time and I could be there and back in the fifteen minutes allotted from the phones.
The other is just nearby in a service station and for the most part its been a godsend during the pandemic. Mum was an avid reader of the Liverpool Echo but when the pandemic hit, the idea of going out just to buy a paper seemed untenable, so we signed up for it to be delivered. Except as we discovered, the company handling such also catered for the newsagents and so would drop the paper off as part of their route in the middle of the night.
That would have been fine for anyone living in a house, it'd just be waiting for them when they woke up in the morning. But we live in a flat, with a front gate, front door and a lift before a visitor can reach the letter box. So every night I'd end up going to bed, knowing we'd be woken up between 2pm and 6pm to let the newspaper delivery person through and I'd meet them at the glass partition just before the lift to catch them so that the letterbox didn't bang and wake the neighbour opposite.
This went on for three months, always woken in the middle of the night, Monday to Saturday to collect the paper. Well, after a while this became impossible. Mum knew and often said that I didn't have to, but it felt like a duty to make sure she received her newspaper each day even if I only slept through on Sundays. Eventually though, with my anxiety being the way my anxiety so often is, it began to effect my health, so she convinced me it was ok to cancel.
How then to make sure Mum got her paper safely? Most of the local newsagents were out of the question. The clerks or most of their patrons wore masks and didn't have protective barriers so that was too much of a risk. For a while I visited the local Co-op, but for this or that reason I still didn't feel safe but somehow we still managed to get a paper most days. Eventually I began walking to a convenience shop on Kingsley Road which also happened to stock papers.
But that was a longish walk away and sometimes we'd need other shopping as well and they didn't have a big enough selection. Fortunately my filling fell out and I had an answer. After phoning around all of the local pharmacies, the only place stocking Toofypegs was a couple of miles away and although I was fine walking there, I inevitably decided to try a shortcut on my way back and ended up going through Prince Park and exiting opposite the garage.
Which I now discovered had a Spar shop, less than ten minutes walk away from my house, which I didn't previous realise existed. Walking through I may have sobbed. There were foods Mum, Dad and I all loved which we hadn't seen since the start of the pandemic and there they all were. Dr. Oetker Mozzarella Ristorante Pizza , Dad's St. Agur cheese and my, well, everything. Stuff which hadn't been available for home shopping for months right in front of me.
As the weeks went on and the pandemic became dicier, the visits became infrequent. Although the staff were masked for the most part, patrons rarely were as they'd decided that since they were just walking in from their and back again it wasn't work the bother. It didn't feel safe, so I mostly kept going to Kingsley Road for the paper and the Spar early in the morning. But now things have eased, I'm back in their quite a lot.
It's where I bought today's sandwich, the Festive Feast. The packaging promises "turkey, smoked back bacon, cranberry sauce and stuffing on malted wheat grain bread" and none of those items were missing. On opening the packet, you get a pungent, pleasantly sweet smell of bacon, which is the proper stuff not streaky. The turkey is thinly sliced and large enough pieces that they flopped outside the boundaries of the bread.
Biting in there's a decent flavour combination although the cranberry sauce is most prominent, although not so much that you can't taste anything else. The bread's not too dry considering its been in the fridge overnight. Honestly it was a pleasure to eat, which is surprising because a lot of the sandwiches from Spar, especially the chicken salad are deeply disappointing. Was it worth the £2.95 and 467 calories? Yes, yes I think it was.
