Bread, milk and cheese

How a grocery list can lead to an existential revelation.

Today, I braved the minus six Celsius temperatures to sally forth from my coddled condominium apartment and venture to the major supermarket that is now resident at Toronto’s Maple Leaf Gardens with the goal of restocking my fridge. My partner, who is nominally in charge of replenishing the groceries has abandoned me for a fortnight’s cruise around the Caribbean, and I have, perforce, been left to my own devices.

Saison d'octobre by Jules Bastien-Lepage (1878). Image couretsy of Wikipedia.

Being a man of almost fifty-five—two weeks to go now!— I suffer from the occasional infirmity of plantar fasciitis, a painful condition of the feet which precludes my walking long distances at the present time; and my car is in the workshop having repairs done. So, in fear of deprivation, I made the five-minute trip to Loblaws. Such is the tone and tenor of modern middle-class urban existence in the West.

After perusing the unfamiliar shelves, I reduced my shop to the absolute basics, and proceeded to the self-serve check-out, only to gape at the grand total displayed on the screen in front of me. Twenty Canadian dollars has bought me milk, bread and cheddar cheese; and no bag to take them home in, because I’m absolutely not about to spend ten cents on a damned bag. I walk back home with my comestibles under my arm.

As a university professor with a six-figure salary I shouldn’t gripe, but, strangely, I still feel ripped off. And I can’t even begin to imagine how the vast majority of Torontonians are coping in this climate of rampant inflation, one where a cost-of-living crisis coupled to a remorseless and dire housing shortage has delivered an economic double-whammy to every single Canadian. Once regarded as a utopian metropolis—New York run by the Swiss, according to actor and raconteur Peter Ustinov—that fond idyll has long since died a miserable and ignominious death.

Of course, all of this can be laid at the feet of Justin Trudeau, Canada’s current Prime Minister, the errant snowboarder and one-time drama teacher who has for almost a decade eroded Canada’s once robust economic prowess to the point of utter emaciation. This is truly a profound achievement, bearing in mind that this country is one of the most resource-rich nations on planet Earth.

Well done, then, Justin.

Under a new and presumably (if not inevitably) Conservative government, though, the Great White North can still be revived. I truly hope so. Because if not, there’s a snowball’s chance in hell for the United Kingdom—we have nothing at all in the ‘resource’ department. And since I plan to shortly return to that country, the land of my birth, I am quite reasonably concerned.

Now, as a middle-aged academic I have chosen to take early retirement. In a short few days from now, on 13th January, my decision will become irreversible, and the path I have opted for, the road that I have elected to follow will stretch out before me, and no deviation or second-guessing will be permissible. As J. R. R. Tolkien so poetically phrased it, “The road goes ever on and on, down from the door where it began.”

I will depart with a pension, of course: the reward for almost twenty years of service to the University of Toronto, that institutional behemoth, that corrupt monstrosity of Canadian higher education. But not one that is sufficient to live off.

Why go then? Why not continue in a “job for life,” as American philosopher Peter Boghossian has so often called it? Well, for good reason. I was brought up with principles. The Revers’s are a proud clan whose history stretches far back into the Cotswold hills of my ancestors, a family who handed down by means of genes or wisdom an instinct for scenting crookedness, for identifying the inauthentic. My mind is not about to be perverted or overthrown by the absurd rhetoric, the insane ideological beliefs of a raft of deranged academics who style themselves as knowledgeable and then narcissistically cast themselves as members of an unimpeachable elite class. They can fuck right off.

Panoramic view from Dover’s Hill across the Vale of Evesham. Today, the hill still hosts the annual Cotswold Olimpick Games. Image courtesy of Explore the Cotswolds.

Fortunately, I am a man of some—if not entirely and wholly—independent means. I am the joint beneficiary of my forefathers’ foresight, the inheritor of the accumulated assets that are the pecuniary reward for the hard work and graft of two generations of my family. My grandfather began it, and my father grew and nurtured it. As I say farewell to my academic life—already calcified by the rapid departure of all of those contemporaries in my orbit who see me as a toxic influence on the educational enterprise—I reflect on my good fortune.

I am not, by virtue of my parents’ wise planning, a thrall to intellectual conformity, unlike so many of my peers. You see, their living, and their continued well-being is entirely dependent upon their acquiescence to the neo-Marxist ideology that has infused and co-opted our institutions. But I am free. I can still cleave to truth and not be enslaved. And that is a huge privilege.

I will walk home and make myself a cheese sandwich; and will reflect on what I have experienced since the world turned and a new vision was embraced by a huge democratic decision taken in the West. Change is in the air, and a new world can now be glimpsed, one that will expunge the injustices of the recent past. Bring it on!