Not everything is the weather

A woman in Cairo does the week's shopping, and every visit the bill is higher than the last.

She cannot do anything about that. No amount of grumbling at the till moves the price of cooking oil. What she can do is get good at shopping inside it: knowing which morning the vegetables arrive fresh, which plain pack is the same as the famous one, when to buy two and when to buy none. The people who are skilled at this are not luckier than their neighbours. They have accepted the conditions and learned to move well within them.

But some of what she calls the conditions is not like that at all.

The half loaf that goes stale every Thursday. The second bag of tomatoes bought because nobody checked what was already at home. The sweets the children ask for at the checkout, every time, because every time it works. These feel as fixed as the price on the shelf. They arrive each week with the same certainty, so they get filed under things that simply happen.

They are not things that simply happen. They are habits, made by the people in the house, and what people made, people can remake. Not in one week, and not with a speech at dinner, but bit by bit, with a list on the cupboard door and a different route past the sweets.

The hard part is telling the two apart. Treat the price like a habit and you exhaust yourself fighting it. Treat a habit like the price and you give up on the one thing you could have changed.

A surprising amount of what weighs on the weekly bill is the second kind, dressed up as the first.