A plan you have to drive to the shop for is not a plan. Almost every time this has failed for me, it failed because the thing I meant to reach for was somewhere else.
So this is the least inspiring article on this site: an inventory. Three places, because those are the three places I have ever actually been when it started.
The car
The car is the hardest one, and if you only sort out one of these, sort out this one.
It is the gap between the day and the house. Nobody needs anything from you for twenty minutes. It is also, for a lot of people, the stretch of road with the shop on it.
Keep in the car: a bag of hard candy in the door, not the glovebox. The glovebox requires a decision and a reach; the door is where your hand already goes. Mints are good here because they last and because they are unremarkable if somebody is in the passenger seat.
Keep it topped up. An empty bag in the door on the wrong day is worse than nothing, because you had made the decision and the decision was not honoured.
The desk
The desk craving is a different animal. It is not about the day being over, it is about the day being long, and it comes with restlessness rather than relief.
Keep at the desk: something that occupies your hands as well as your mouth. Individually wrapped is better than loose — the wrapper is three seconds of something to do, and at the front of a wave three seconds is not nothing.
A glass of water within reach, filled, so that drinking something is available without standing up. Half of what I used to call a craving at my desk turned out to be an ordinary want for something in my hand.
The pocket
This is the one that covers everywhere else: the supermarket queue, the school pick-up, somebody’s kitchen, the twenty minutes before you leave a place you did not want to be at.
Keep in the pocket: two or three, wrapped. Not a bag — a bag stays home. The whole point is that it is on you without you having thought about it that morning.
If you smoke as well, this is the one that does double duty. Somebody offers me a cigarette, I say no, and I have a piece of candy instead. Same hand, same mouth, same three seconds.
Choosing what goes in the three places
Some of this is preference and you will work yours out. The rules that seem to hold:
Hard, not soft. Chocolate is four bites and you are back where you started. Hard candy you cannot rush, and the fifteen or twenty minutes is the point.
Sweet, not salty. This is the one I would not have guessed. It is what the women I met while I was locked up told me, and they had worked it out by trial and error over a lot more bad afternoons than I had.
Strong flavour on the worst days. One of the women I still talk to swears by cinnamon. Cinnamon, for whatever reason, works when nothing else does.
Something you would eat anyway. A replacement you have to be talked into is one more thing to argue with yourself about.
Restock day
Pick one day and top up all three. I do it when I do the shopping, because attaching it to something that already happens means I do not have to remember it as its own task.
Every bag on the shop page is something I keep in one of these three places. That is the whole selection criterion — it is not a catalogue, it is my car door, my desk drawer and my coat pocket.
