On the shop that sells parsley by the quarter-pound, and a small defence of the weekly menu.

There is a greengrocer on the corner of my road. I know the owner's name — Colm — and I know that his father ran the shop before him, and his grandfather before that. None of this is distinctive; many streets in Dublin still have shops like it. What is distinctive is that Colm sells parsley in bunches the size of a man's fist, tied tight with plain kitchen twine, the stems cut to a single length.

The bunches are £1.20. They have been £1.20 since 2019, which I mention only because most things on my shopping list have not. He sells them alongside coriander, in slightly smaller bunches at the same price, and a loose heap of chives that he weighs when you ask.

I have been buying one bunch of parsley a week from Colm for about thirteen years. When I started, I was cooking out of reflex — I had moved into the flat, I needed to feed myself, and parsley was one of the three or four herbs my mother had used often enough that I recognised it by smell. Thirteen years later, I cook out of planning; I have a weekly menu that rotates through five or six dinner shapes; parsley appears in three of them. The bunch is for the week.

What I want to defend today is that weekly menu. I notice, reading the food press, that the concept of a weekly meal plan has drifted into disrepute — it is associated with a kind of suburban defeat, with frozen portions, with anxious notebooks on the fridge. I understand the suspicion. My own menu is suburban and has been written out on the same clipboard since 2016. It has defeated some things, including the Tuesday night on which I used to buy, out of dull exhaustion, a pork pie from the Spar across the road.

The menu has the effect of making a week's cooking cheaper, calmer and more various than a week's spontaneous cooking would be. It has the effect of letting Colm's parsley last exactly six meals before it turns at the stem. It has the effect of making me notice, on Sunday evenings, what is left over, and — more importantly — what is not.

I am not proposing that you adopt my menu, which is Dublin-specific and leans heavily on cabbage. I am proposing that you adopt some menu. Six meal shapes on a clipboard, assigned to days of the week, revised once a season. If you cook for someone other than yourself, they will notice within a month; they will complain for a week and then forget to mention it again.

Colm, meanwhile, will keep selling parsley by the quarter-pound, which is what the bunch works out to, though I have never asked him to confirm it and I do not want to. Some shops it is enough to be a regular at.