Well, this evening I’ve reached the end of my first month in quarantine, 28 days, 4 weeks. It seems peaceful. I love my house a lot more than I did, which was a lot. Happy to have the two of us here and not to be alone, though we are both introverts and have to use the bath tub as our second office so we can spend some time apart and keep well. He wears headphones and sings and it makes me laugh for joy. I feel grounded and sane and interested in life. Have worked my way through a foot-high stack of Seventies romance novels and embarked on some real reading. I don’t know about you but I am trying to prepare for ten months of this so if it turns out to be less, that will come as a glorious surprise. And: we are making rocket fuel. Today my first rocket seeds sprouted in the windowsill and I would just love to have a garden.
I wonder when I’ll ever see the seaside, or my mother, who is eighty-two so that may be just never. Hope everyone is keeping well and if you would like to share your quarantine story, I will listen. Good night.
Tag: comfort food
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like there’s no tomorrow
I’d like to say I’ve been baking but the truth is, only about half the mixture ever hits the heat. Last night I made a self-saucing lemon delicious with around one third too much butter and sugar, so that I could eat the butter sugar and lemon mix off the back of a wooden spoon. The night before it was apple tea-cake, creamy and satiny in the bowl. I started with a bullied gingerbread recipe, almost every spice within reach crammed into it, including black peppercorns and cardamom pods which I ground down in a pestle, just so that I could lick the mixture off the back off a… well, you get the picture. I mix, I grind, I beat, I slurp. Then I pour the remainder into a tin, put it in the oven and walk away. The rest of the household have to monitor, test with a straw, slide it out and serve it, and then the next morning I find crumb-clung baking tins stacked in the sink half-filled with water. Either I will turn into a human sofa and have to turn sideways to enter a doorway, be unable to leave the house and eventually fill it with my lardlike balloons of flesh, or I will die young of a preventable illness, or I’m soon going to have eaten so much cake mix I will never bake again. Damn you, red clothbound bachelor cookbook with your enticingly pineapple-ring-lined black and white recipe illustrations! Damn you, free range eggs!