apologies for the french – i’m channelling my inner bedbug.
A lieu de mémoire (French for “site of memory”) is a physical place or object which acts as container of memory
Sabine Marschall, 2013
There’s one lecture that I remember most clearly from my time at university, about memory and place. I don’t remember a lot of the specifics – I remembered the module correctly, but I forgot the rest of the seminar discussion; I remember the lecture theatre but I forgot the lecturer; but there is one subsection of the session that I remember. I think it sticks so clearly in my mind just because of the absurdity of it. Studying human geography was three years of “what do you mean, are you sure that counts as geography?’’, and this lecture really did follow that same curve. The bit I remember is talking about places that have attached meaning for you. The example I had was the old Morrisons supermarket in Newquay. (Yes, really. My lecturer had questions for me too.)
For me, Newquay Morrisons became a container of memory because it was so deeply associated with my childhood. Every summer, we’d drive down south (not something you do often, growing up in Devon) until we hit the outskirts of the town. It was traditional to then divert to Morrisons for the pre-holiday supermarket shop. It was the kind of shop where Mum had a focused list of essentials – and in later years, bought those in advance and sat with a coffee instead – while my dad, sister and I wandered around, throwing into the trolley all the things we definitely wouldn’t eat at home, in quantities we definitely couldn’t consume before we had to pack up and head back home again. It’s really not a groundbreaking memory, but it was such an ingrained part of our holiday routine that even now it evokes nostalgia just thinking about it.
At the time of this lecture – February 24 2020, according to my old uni Notion doc – I didn’t think I’d be forming many strong connections to supermarkets in the next few years. Little did I know, the next eighteen months would change my relationships to supermarkets and create new associations with them in a way I couldn’t even have imagined.
This all seems a bit far-fetched, I know – but think back to March, April, May 2020. Coronavirus happened, lockdown happened, social distancing and endless queues to go and do the weekly shop happened. Suddenly I had a new family tradition with the supermarket – in lockdown back home from uni with my family, every week one of us would do the weekly shop. Often my dad, who would come back with rogue gems such as multigrain roast chicken Pringles (my parents are vegetarian) and Creme Egg ice creams (they stayed in the freezer for eight months before ending up in the bin). The nominated shopper would queue up outside, duly standing two metres from the person in front and behind, before eventually being let loose down the aisles. They’d pay via Perspex sneeze screens, then lug everything home to be sprayed and wiped down and rinsed before it could even see the inside of a cupboard. It’s easy to forget this ritual, a blip on daily life as it seems when I think back on it now, but it was a reassuringly regular staple in the weirdness that was lockdown life, right next to daily exercise and government briefings.
Unbelievably, that isn’t even the clearest connection between coronavirus times and supermarkets that I have memories of. When I finally made it back to university around October 2020, I suddenly had to navigate third year of university without being able to get within a metre of any friends I didn’t happen to live with. Confined to Zoom lectures and socialising with housemates only, supermarket shops quickly became the loophole allowing me to maintain those relationships (and quite possibly stopping me from completely losing my sanity in that final year haze of panic). My best friend and I would arrange a weekly trip to Morrisons (a serendipitous callback to those holiday shops), a ritual that would allow us to catch up with each other, feigning some form of normality, while also discovering that the Morrisons playlist at 6pm on a Monday is a surprisingly good night out substitute (we were quite desperate at this point). While we were lugging overweight baskets or pushing trolleys around those aisles, scoping out the beacon of yellow reduced stickers and idly exchanging the gossip and drama that inevitably grows from being trapped with a small group of people you may or may not have wanted to live with, things felt almost normal. The masks were strange, the one way systems were new, but the comforting ritual of following your meal-planned shopping list and then going entirely off piste in the bakery aisle hadn’t changed from first and second year.
We joked about it at the time, but looking back those trips are a defining part of my Covid university time. It was a truly shit time to be at uni, and in hindsight I can see that we were clutching at straws for a sense of normality. Turning the branch of Morrisons on the edge of Selly Oak and Stirchley into our defacto social hub would’ve been very strange under any other circumstances, but it made sense in those whirlwind, unstable months. I never thought that such a mundane activity would become so characteristic of my final year, but I guess it acts as a microcosm of the whole survival of that ten months – the prosaic became exciting, because it had been off limits for so long. Remember – this was the year that staying out past 10pm became illegal. The bar was low.
Reading back through those lecture notes and finding that reference to lieux de mémoire struck a chord with me. A lieu de mémoire is typically a site that is a container of memory, and then is memorialised for the historic and public significance of that memory. A branch of Morrisons – whether it be in Newquay or Birmingham – may not quite reach the heady heights of public significance, but I do wonder what the less publicised lieux de mémoire from the pandemic era could be. Not the statues and the plaques, but the sites full of association and memory from the rules and regulations and strange behaviour they were witness to. The supermarkets, the pavements that had never seen so many footsteps until the introduction of daily walks, the pavement café seating you couldn’t have dreamed of prior, the pubs serving Scotch eggs with a pint. So many strange day-to-day changes that are already fading from memory, but which no doubt are still having a lasting impact on the way we live and the decisions we make now, three years on from that first lockdown.
and additionally 