Not Going Home

I'm not actually cooking tonight, so this is a bit of a cheat. I have a series of photos of things which I have cooked and fully intended to blog, but didn't for whatever reason - and tonight's dinner is one I've blogged before anyway. Tonight it's being cooked by my husband, mostly because I was supposed to be doing a kickboxing class 6-8 and it takes an hour in the oven, so me cooking it wasn't entirely sensible in terms of timing! In actual fact, it's just as well that I wasn't meant to be doing it because I did one hour, not two, then spent some time lying on my living room floor crying (why not somewhere more comfortable? Who knows) and am generally not feeling like cooking at all - so he'd have had to do it anyway.

One of my relatives died yesterday, she was in her 90s and it was a short illness, my dad had been able to see her recently in person, so it could all have been a lot worse. But in the last 18 months four other family members of the same generation have passed away and my dad has lost two brothers, a sister, a sister in law and a brother in law. None of this is pandemic related. I'm several hundred miles from family, I haven't seen my parents since 2019, and I'm scared of what it will be like when I do see them. Mortality is closing in, but in a way that's somehow different from the pandemic. That was something that we could hopefully avoid by staying home, by being careful, by getting vaccinated. This is not. The sense of powerlessness is exacerbated by not being able to go Home, and that's where being confined kicks in. I can leave my house, but I can't go Home. Much as I love living in London, this is quite hard.

But there is dinner that I didn't have to cook, and a lot of Easter chocolate, and so we carry on. One day (soon?) we will be able to go places again - I have a long list of destinations, but Home is at the top.