Here we are, still, eating pasta

I sounded pretty calm in yesterday's post. Amazing. I am not particularly calm at all just now. My lovely mentee (who sometimes reads this blog, Hi F!) mentioned her work is saying nobody's rushing back till August, because dangerous - and I think that's very much where my office is now, though timescales tbc. Definitely going to be spending a lot more time in the flat, anyway, judging by the photos of how few people we can fit in with 2m social distancing. And Big Meeting today (although a lovely chance to see some faces that aren't the Zoom faces I see every week, some CKers among you) underlined for the umpteenth time just how much all our worlds have been destroyed, not just paused. Just because you're sitting on your sofa watching House of Games repeats doesn't mean the world hasn't shifted track. My Dad sent me his 12 May Mass Obs diary for vetting before submission (for anonymity rather than style points), and although it's calm and funny most of the time it's also impossibly bleak about being 80, and with cancer, and seeing the rest of your life likely spool out in confinement.

Meanwhile downstairs and next door have decided lockdown is over and I'm having to disinfect the hall every time I do the bins as suddenly there have been ten people in this space after it just being the two of us for two months. And I've been to the supermarket in a mask for the first time. Marvellous because Liz made and posted the mask, from gorgeous fabric and with wire across the nose for glasses-avoidance. But awful, because it's alien and claustrophobic and makes you terribly aware of the danger we're in if it all goes tits up again - while almost no one else got the memo, and a drunk pregnant woman was sitting on the freezers singing happy birthday to someone on Snapchat. (#LoveSouthLondon) Oh, and all the supermarkets are out of eggs again, and the one plain flour restock I saw last week seems to have been a miracle or hallucination (tbc).

I want my LIFE BACK. *kicks stuff, gingerly*

But anyway. Here we are, it's Thursday, I have opened some pink wine and eaten some taralli. I'm also on the good antihistamines now, which probably does explain the calm a bit. (The wine is courtesy of Unwined, who I completely recommend to you if you drink. They are cheering my lockdown no end.)

I have done the second parental drop of the week (pharmacy visit variation), and in return for my care package, brought back with me some loot from their veg box - garlic, rhubarb and asparagus, all of which apparently they have too much of. Blimey.

On that walk I also saw a fox put to flight down a peaceful backstreet, by nothing that I could spot. It's near a park, and as I watched the distanced families taking the air it made me realise why lockdown is half-comforting, half-unbearable. Doesn't it feel a bit like summer holidays as a kid, the bit when your best friend was away at a different time from you and you were just... at home? Endless hours, lots of sun, and though there is a hell of a lot of work happening for a lot of adults, it's sort of hidden in the way that official commuting doesn't hide it. So many of us are tired and screen blurred and we're still walking round the park in the sunshine, potentially forever, which feels like utter surrealism. Meanwhile, the people who aren't working are alienated in a different way, made invisible by all that homeworking.

In the real world, I have also made some pasta sauce (we do have pasta now, and mostly tomatoes too, so the apocalypse continues to be unpredictable in ways novelists would find too tedious to enumerate). I did not have any posh tuna, which was my mistake. I stockpiled it for Brexit but I seem to have eaten it, while remembering only that I'd bought plenty. Tsk. Ordinary tuna and a gloop of good olive oil it is. Don't worry, posh tuna is back on the shopping list, along with vanilla beans.

Sadly quotidian tuna

The recipe is yet another Kitchen Basics - tuna agrodolce sauce, which is mostly veg in fact.

Chop an onion (AGAIN OH MY GOD IT NEVER ENDS). Soften it. Then add a tin of tomatoes, a chopped aubergine (recipe says 2 for 4 people otoh I had one aubergine the size of a pony, so I feel it was probably overdone). Also add plenty of garlic, chili, and capers or green olives. I do have capers (lest Jo worry; I was regarded with some bafflement in our late 90s student house for always having capers, but I stand by them), but I've got some of those cheap green pitted olives for a different recipe and bitter experience tells me they grow mould quite fast. So, those. Then add a hefty pinch of sugar, and 2 tbsps vinegar - agrodolce, see?

Recipe says cook for 30 minutes covered until rich. I did that, but it was a bit runny, and longer is always better, and anyway I had pink wine to drink, so I gave it an extra 20 mins uncovered, which helped. Then add at least one can of tuna in oil if possible (I slurped in some proper oil along with my Ordinary Fish), with loads of parsley and pine nuts (or, as it turns out, the end of a packet of almonds, chopped).

Add to pasta, scoff. I wouldn't say it's wildly sweet n sour, but there's something a bit more to it than just tuna and tomato. Which is about as exciting as life gets here, without disturbing the doped surface.

Not it doesn't go with asparagus, but what are you going to do when your housebound parents hand it over?

And then I had brownies, sent by a kind donor, with raspberries, which is the kind of thing that makes life about seventeen steps more bearable.




And now I shall do the Clapping, and then watch the NT at Home stream of the Barbershop Chronicles, which is one I missed and rued. Not everything about lockdown is awful. But oh my god, I want my LIFE BACK nonetheless.