April 28th Food, Glorious Food!

What do we do when we can no longer calibrate time by commitments etched into the diary? Diaries, like those of Pepys or Alan Bennett, used to be for capturing the present in order to preserve and then re-present it as insight into the past. Now they only serve the purpose of determining our future, instructing us what we must do, what we cannot do, when, and how not to double-book ourselves. What was once a form of nostalgia has become a tyranny, even making us feel guilty for blank spaces. Some people have the discipline of putting lines through whole days, to preserve time for themselves, and sticking by it. For those of us less well steeled the lockdown has done it for us. A few days ago I published in this blog a rather light poem about mask making, a poem dealing essentially with ephemera, an issue that would pass. But someone has already asked for a copy as a documentary record of a time in history. A little bit of aggrandisement, me thinks.

But the matter is this. I undertook to create a blog for every day of the lockdown and expected nothing more than subtle shifts in mood and equally subtle movements in patio pots and bird feeding. Hardly the sort of drama that would earn film rights. That’s why meals have become so important. They define the structure of the day and pace out the passing of time from breakfast through to supper, dividing the day into sub-divisions demarcated by tea breaks and coffee breaks in between. Sometimes these are enhanced by a much anticipated chocolate, a biscuit or a handful of mixed nuts. This chronology helps make time that is otherwise unremarkable, manageable. We have something to look forward to and then something to digest. Because those of us over 70 can no longer do our poking and prodding of goods on the shelf and get in the way of younger shoppers, we cannot impulse buy or experiment, so our eating has to be more systematic and less spontaneous. Nor can we suddenly decide on a takeaway or pub lunch or slice of cake at a garden centre. Thus, old recipes are revisited and their ingredients carefully listed for whoever is doing the buying. There are chances for experimentation, however, as when we ordered an unspecified box of vegetables and received an enormous turnip which seemed to plead for some sort of exotic Baldrick cuisine. Or there was the occasion when we appeared to have only random items for lunch, but tinned mackerel, orange segments, water cress, feta cheese and olives made for a remarkable repast, which probably, in the best Mediterranean restaurants has a name.

Then there are the special meals like a 70th birthday lunch on Zoom where we all admired what each other was eating, or the shared pizza from the Loaf and, today, the meeting of the Peak Boys’ Breakfast Club. This is a coterie of worthy gentlemen all dedicated to the Full English Breakfast. Woe to he who nibbles at an asparagus tip, an Egg Benedictine, granola and yogurt or blueberry pancakes with maple syrup. Even hash browns or cappuccino are suspect. These savants of fried bread and black pudding traditionally meet on the last Tuesday in the month. Once a year we award the Order of the Golden Sausage to our highest scoring breakfast and were about to present it to Fuel at Holloway for the second year running when something, not on the Full English menu struck – Covid-19. Being gentlemen with certain technological deficiencies nothing more adventurous is required than emailing a picture of our home-cooked breakfasts. We are not exclusive or misogynistic in any way – spouses who cooked the breakfast are invited to join us.

Meals then, have become special. However you see them, they complete a section of the day and arrest the marching of the hours. Time is unrationed and ample amounts of it can be set aside for a leisurely, hedonistic feast. Forethought and logistics have been involved in planning the menu and sourcing the ingredients. In consequence it is appropriate to open a bottle of wine, maybe even light a candle and sit at a table, rather than dribbling down your front over a lap tray in front of the TV. And of course I like a little knob of Stilton to accompany the last of the red wine.

“I have measured out my life with coffee spoons,” laments T.S.Eliot’s J.Alfred Prufrock. Elsewhere I’ve written about measuring out our weeks with wheelie bins. But it is food, glorious food that measures out and celebrates our hours and days in lockdown.

(My use of personal pronouns in this essay might be misleading. Where I have written ‘I’ or ‘we’ in connection with shopping, preparation and cooking, it is actually Deirdre. Similarly I've sometimes used the passive voice, when in actuality, Deirdre is the agent. So "their ingredients carefully listed" is actually, Deirdre carefully lists the ingredients.)