As some of you may be aware from my recent posts, I’ve been having a bit of a wobble with my eating disorder. To make things worse, I recently found out that my local Marks and Spencer Foodhall is closing.

To most people, it probably sounds ridiculous to be upset about a food shop. The thing is, it was never really about the shop.

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This is Not Just Any Recovery, It’s a Marks and Spencer Recovery

Marks and Spencer** food played a huge role in both of my recoveries. Some of the foods I still find the most comforting today came from there.

Comfort in food is something I’ve always struggled with. In fact, I’m not entirely sure I understand the concept of comfort eating. The best example I can think of is that for years I wouldn’t eat popcorn when I watched a movie because “I’m not hungry”, genuinely believing hunger was the only reason anyone ever ate food.

Throughout almost my entire last recovery, and for years afterwards, I ate mechanically. Most of the time I ate because I needed to stay in recovery. I rarely experienced joy or comfort from food.

Except, of course, when it came to Marks and Spencer food.

Whenever I was struggling with weight gain, my mood, or any of the other HORRORS that come with recovery and refeeding, I’d think to myself:

“Well, at least recovery means I get to eat Marks and Spencer food.”

The thing is, I wasn’t saying it into the void. I wasn’t writing it in a blog post, or leaving a review saying how it saved my life on Marks and Spencer’s website, or muttering it to the self checkout machine. I was saying it to someone who agreed entirely with me.

Someone I bonded with over Marks and Spencer food.

“Well, that’s true. It’s important to have hope,” my best friend WeeGee replied.

When she died, it was hard to even walk into the store.

As silly as it might sound, so many of my memories of her live in the aisles of Marks and Spencer. Grief is strange like that. You hold on to every little thing you can. Sometimes the beacon of light you’re searching for isn’t found in the stars, but in the sandwich fridge of a Marks and Spencer on a random Wednesday afternoon.

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The Grief of Sandwiches

The first Christmas after WeeGee died, I willed myself into Marks and Spencer. I knew it was going to hurt, but I was determined to keep our little Christmas tradition alive.

Even well into our recoveries, we both found Christmas difficult owing to the fact it revolves so heavily around food. I have always, however, loved the Christmas sandwich. Specifically, the pre-packaged British supermarket Christmas sandwich.

I’d been friends with WeeGee for a little while. We were WordPress blog friends first, but eventually took our friendship over to Facebook, where we spent hours talking at a time, often in ALL CAPS.

It must have been around 2013, and it was definitely November, when I bought my first Christmas sandwich of the season and posted about it on Facebook. I probably said something very me about not being particularly fond of Christmas, but at least the annual festive sandwich had returned.

WeeGee was delighted, “Omg I LOVE those too!”

After much EXCITED discussion about the brilliance of the corporate festive sandwich, we decided to rate every supermarket’s entry and crown the ultimate Christmas sandwich champion. We took it very seriously.

WeeGee loved MasterChef and always wanted to be a contestant, so we judged each sandwich as if it had been presented to us in the MasterChef final. We scrutinised everything: the mayonnaise, the stuffing, the ratio of cranberry sauce to turkey, the quality of the bread and whether the whole thing actually worked together.

Pret a Manger often won for her. For me, Marks and Spencer almost always came out on top.

I looked forward to those sandwiches every Christmas. I even ate them on her behalf during the Christmas she was undergoing chemotherapy for Triple Negative Breast Cancer, and again the following Christmas when she was too ill to enjoy them herself.

Unfortunately, that was all I could think about when I walked into Marks and Spencer in December 2020.

I saw the Christmas sandwiches in the fridge and immediately burst into tears. At the same time, I felt intensely angry that she wasn’t there to eat them with me. It’s not the first time I’ve cried in a Foodhall, but it was certainly the worst.

I left the store without buying them, and I continued this avoidance of festive sandwiches for the next few years. In fact, I avoided many of the foods we’d talked about. I still shopped there, but every visit felt heavy. I’d see a new product and feel sad that I couldn’t tell her about it.

I couldn’t hear her get excited about it. I couldn’t message her saying, “I saw this and thought of you.” Memory recall is so painful when you’re initially grieving.

I feel bad admitting this, but after failing to buy a festive sandwich I tried very hard to put her aside in my head. My son was dealing with GCSEs, AS Levels, A Levels and eventually getting into university. He needed me, and I wanted to focus on helping him achieve his goals.

For a while, it worked. I convinced myself she was still somehow out there somewhere. Not gone exactly. Just absent.

Then my son achieved those goals. He did SO WELL. And suddenly there was nothing left distracting me from the fact that WeeGee was gone. The grief I’d spent years carefully avoiding caught up with me all at once.

I grieved harder than I ever had before. It eventually contributed to the relapse I’m trying to recover from right now. For the first time, I stopped finding ways around it and allowed myself to fully acknowledge what had happened.

I was heartbroken. Properly, consistently, heartbroken.

However, the thing about grief is that it improves, even if you don’t exactly want it to.

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There’s No Beginning, There’ll Be No End

I’ve written before about some of the things I did to work through my grief. There was the rather rubbish grief therapy, but there were also the grief workbooks, the books I read, and perhaps most importantly, finally allowing myself to grieve.

What I haven’t written about as much are all the little things.

There was the WeeGee Memorial Journal I made, filled with her favourite things. Her favourite book. Her favourite songs. Photos of her cat. I wrote letters to her in it too.

There was talking to my little penguin, Jellytot, as though she was still here. Poor Jellytot has been absolutely everywhere with me. There was trying to find comfort in food during this recovery, something WeeGee always wanted for me.

I’ve also started reading her blog every day. I still haven’t quite braved looking through all of our messages yet, but one day I will.

The strange thing is that all of this grief work actually did something. That surprised me, because I didn’t really want it to. Part of me believed that if I became less devastated, if I became healthier, if I recovered, then somehow it would mean I loved her less.

But it didn’t. Instead, it brought her back to the forefront of my mind without destroying me in the process. And that’s where she was always supposed to live.

It meant I could do the Christmas sandwich competition again. It meant I could read her blog. It meant I could think about her and smile instead of immediately falling apart. It meant that I started naturally bringing her up in conversations and felt surprised because it felt so automatic.

Now, when I walk into Marks and Spencer, I’m no longer surrounded by anger and despair. I’m surrounded by memories. Love. Laughter. Excitement.

And yes, a little bit of sadness too. That sadness runs through all of it, but it no longer destroys me. That’s not to say I don’t cry or struggle. I do.

The strange thing is that all of this grief work helped me reconnect with WeeGee, but it didn’t magically fix everything. I still miss her. I still feel the emptiness she left behind.

I still find myself wondering who I am now, in a life that no longer contains someone who was such a huge part of it. The WeeGee part got easier. The Rhio part is still a work in progress.

I dreamt about her and it really got to me for a few days. Finding places on her blog where she’d mentioned me made me cry huge, ugly tears.

Despite still not knowing exactly who I am anymore, I’ve still been so thankful. Because when I walk into Marks and Spencer now, I feel like I’m about to burst into a Wet Wet Wet song because Love Is All Around.

Which is why finding out it was closing upset me so much.

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Well, M&S Actually Ended. But the Memories Won’t.

Today, I decided to go to Marks and Spencer one last time and just take it all in. To wander around and let myself be surrounded by the memories.

I stopped by the sandwich fridge where I cried after WeeGee died, and where years later I found love instead of despair.

I laughed when I remembered the year Marks and Spencer got particularly adventurous and added sprout salsa to their Christmas sandwich range. That decision gave us far more entertainment than it probably should have. We spent an absurd amount of time discussing their apparent attempt to revolutionise the festive sandwich.

I stopped by the ready meal fridge too. We used to discuss every new meal they released. Their ready meals were incredibly helpful during recovery, and during periods when either of us was dealing with a broken brain.

When cooking feels impossible, it’s comforting to know there’s food that tastes homemade waiting in a fridge.

I stopped by the Yorkshire puddings as well. WeeGee’s favourite was the chicken one. Mine was the beef. She used to insist I was completely wrong about this. Naturally, I refused to admit she might be right.

Then after she died, Marks and Spencer ran out of the beef ones for weeks. Eventually I gave in and bought the chicken. Unfortunately, this turned out to be a terrible mistake because she was right all along. The chicken one IS better.

I bought all my favourite foods, and my son’s favourites too. He loves Marks and Spencer food almost as much as I do.

Along with a £1 tub of pistachio crème, several varieties of chicken, pistachio and almond cookies, my son’s favourite chicken products and some fish and chips, I also bought a tin of Peanut Butter and Jelly Munch.

Not for the snack itself. For the tin. I wanted something small to keep afterwards. A little piece of Marks and Spencer that could stay that I could put little notes in or something.

On the way home, I walked along the river for a while and stopped to watch the water. I’ve felt quite critical of myself for being so upset about a store closing. It sounds silly when I say it out loud.

Shops close. It happens. It happens so often that my city is now approximately 90% identical vape shops. I know that Marks and Spencer closing doesn’t mean losing the memories.

I know I won’t lose WeeGee.

I still have all the little gifts she sent me scattered throughout my house. I still have the penguins, the candles, the cards written in her unmistakable handwriting, our messages, her blog, and all the memories that have absolutely nothing to do with Marks and Spencer.

But it still feels like I’m losing one of the places where I could visit those memories. A little piece of her. A place where recovery, friendship, laughter and grief all somehow existed together in the same building.

I’ll miss that so much. Especially on the difficult days. Especially when I’m struggling with my eating disorder.

And especially when I’m forced to eat Lidl food for a treat instead.

My longing for WeeGee song :-

**For my American readers, I’ll explain what M&S is. Imagine if Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods had a British baby, then gave it an obsession with sandwiches, ready meals, Percy Pigs and Christmas food.

Then imagine the TV adverts for that store were so sultry that you briefly wondered whether you were still asexual as the camera slowly panned across a profiterole while a narrator whispered: “This is not just any food. It’s Marks and Spencer food.”

If you’re still not getting the cultural significance, there was a period in Britain where recordings of Marks and Spencer adverts were being kept in sock drawers.