# A shopping list is the only list written in two places > Three items struck off an envelope prove this list went to a shop and back. One more line, double-underlined, was never a shopping instruction at all. August 19, 2026 · https://justog.club/stories/shopping-list-on-an-envelope The back of an opened envelope, written on at a slight uphill angle. MILK, struck through. BREAD. 6 EGGS, struck through. TEA. ONIONS. SOMETHING FOR SUNDAY, double-underlined. BATTERIES AA. STAMPS, struck through. Three lines have a stroke through them and five don't, which means this piece of paper has been to a shop and come home again. ## What is this list actually recording? Two places and the gap between them. Most of what ends up on a shirt from a kitchen was written in one spot and stayed there — a recipe card on a shelf, a label on a jar. A shopping list is written at a table, carried out of the house, and finished somewhere else entirely, with a pen that probably isn't the one it started with. The strikes through MILK, 6 EGGS and STAMPS are the only marks here that happened in a different building from the rest of the writing, roughly forty minutes and one aisle away from where the list was started. ## Why do some items get struck through and others don't? Because the ones without a line through them are the ones the shop didn't have, or the shopper forgot, or decided against on the day. A completed line is a small, private piece of information: it means someone stood in an aisle, found the thing, and picked it up. An uncompleted one just sits there, ambiguous, which is why BREAD, TEA, ONIONS and BATTERIES AA read differently from the three that got struck off — they're still open questions about a trip that's otherwise finished. ## What makes SOMETHING FOR SUNDAY different from the rest of the list? It isn't an instruction to buy anything. It's a decision somebody hadn't made yet. Every other line names a specific object — milk, eggs, batteries of a stated size. SOMETHING FOR SUNDAY names nothing, which is exactly why it's double-underlined: the writer knew they'd forget what it meant to remind themselves about unless the line looked more urgent than the rest. Whatever gets decided will probably end up as its own document later, the way [a roast dinner ends up as a timing plan taped to a cupboard](/stories/oven-timing-chart) once the deciding part is over. It's the one item on the list that was never going to get struck through in the shop, because the decision was going to be made afterwards, probably in front of a fridge. ## Who owns a list like this? Nobody. Milk, bread, eggs and batteries aren't anybody's words, and neither is the format of a list scrawled on whatever paper was nearest. There's no licensing question buried in an envelope back — nobody invented "shopping list", and the specific items named here are as generic as household objects get. The only thing that makes this particular list worth printing rather than any other is that it's this household's own paper, in its own hand, with its own three items struck off. ## Does this work for a list that never made it to the shop? Yes, and it's a slightly different document if none of it is struck through. An unstruck list is a plan; a struck list is a record of what actually happened. Both are honest — one is aspiration, the other is history — but a list with strikes through it carries more evidence, because it proves the paper travelled. [A fridge note held down with a magnet](/stories/fridge-note-and-the-magnet) is the other end of that same idea: a piece of paper written for a short, specific window of use and then, usually, thrown away. ## Isn't this just paper that happened to be lying around? That's exactly what it is, and that's the point. An envelope gets written on because nobody keeps a proper notepad by the phone, and the back of an opened one is the first flat surface within reach. The uphill angle in the hero image is what a list looks like when it's written standing up, against a kitchen counter, in the time it takes to think of five or six things before you forget them. A list made on stationery bought for the purpose would be a slightly different, more self-conscious object. ## Does it print well? Yes — the strikes are the whole graphic interest, so they need to survive as clean, deliberate lines rather than smudges. Two inks do the whole job: charcoal for the writing, and a flat red for the strikes and the double underline, which keeps the two kinds of mark distinguishable at a glance and matters here because the strikes are carrying the story. Kraft brown as the ground reads as the actual paper rather than as a printed illustration of one. ## How do I get one made? Describe the list at [JustOG](/) — what's on it, and which lines are struck off. Pick a direction, drag the crop frame, see it composited on the real garment, and it's made to order and shipped. Designs other people have published are in the [shop](/shop). SOMETHING FOR SUNDAY is still double-underlined. Whoever wrote it still hadn't decided what it was.