This episode drifts between the Côte d’Azur and the Sunshine Coast, between the cheese aisle and the boat galley, between the deeply ordinary and something that almost feels like magic.

It’s a story about my Coles bag, bright red, bought fresh each year when I’m back in Australia, and how it’s become my crunchy companion through dozens of towns and hundreds of unfamiliar grocery stores.

Every week, in every new place, I do the same thing … I shop. I check every shelf like a curious anthropologist. I buy ingredients for soup, always soup, and something I don’t yet know how to cook. And I carry it all home, wherever home is that week, in the same bag from a world away.

This isn’t a story about food, really. It’s about the small rituals that root us. The items that travel with us. The gestures we repeat that remind us who we are.

Sometimes, home isn’t where you are… it’s the way you shop.

Is there a ritual that grounds you when you travel or when life gets busy?

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