When I was alone in the house I did an inventory. The right side of the road is the wrong side for me and since I am hoping not to have to drive for a week or two I wanted to see when I next need to go off Island to shop.

There are three refrigerators and three freezers here. I find dozens of hamburgers (good for feeding Fluffy), eight pork roasts, five chickens, fifteen lamb chops, four steaks, several bags of fish, a dozen or so chicken breasts and at least as many thighs, two boxes labelled “sausage patties”, and among several nameless, dubious cuts of meat there is one that I am quite sure is a beef tongue.

In the back bathroom, still in boxes, are sixteen tins of chopped tomatoes, five and a half pounds of spaghetti, a ten pound bag of rice, eight cans of chicken noodle soup, a case of Gatorade, some “brownie bites” and enough capers to see me through a decade or two. Also 1500 square feet of plastic wrap, 1000 square feet of aluminum foil (that’s aluminium to my British computer), 300 zip lock bags, 100 garbage bags, 3 gallons of bleach, a gallon of washing up liquid (I’ve forgotten what the Americans call that, but I don’t need to worry because I won’t be buying it), 36 rolls of toilet paper, 12 boxes of Kleenex and more than a 1000 napkins.

I realize that I have fallen amongst survivalists – of the particularly tidy eater sort. I begin to worry that the supply toilet paper and Kleenex is dangerously low.