Question: what do the following items have in common?:

Ebooks, blueberries, self-assembly kitchen wall units, children’s electronic educational toys, packaged stir-fry vegetables, daily disposable contact lenses.

Answer: they are all to be found in the ‘shopping basket’ that the UK’s Office for National Statistics uses to calculate the current rate of inflation. These items have all just been added to the basket, and are taken to indicate emerging consumer priorities. They replace an equally random assemblage of outmoded goods, including  digital TV boxes, round lettuces, champagne (those days are gone), basin taps and soft contact lenses. Ebooks have been singled out in newspaper reports as the most striking new addition–they accounted for roughly 14% of all book sales in 2012 by volume, and roughly 7% by value.

As a devotee of what the critic Umberto Eco calls the infinity of lists, I love it when books turn up in shopping baskets like this–brain-food jostling with body-food, words alongside the lenses you need in order to read them, electronic books ghosted by electronic educational toys. Of course it’s only a virtual shopping-basket and a series of chance connections; these items are unlikely ever to come together in one place. Still, it’s hard not to fantasize about such meetings. Would they be (to quote the Comte de Lautréamont, prophet of surrealism) ‘as beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table’? Or would they be more like this?