Wednesday 8th April 2020

Just for one moment I forgot that we’re locked up. I was watching Countess Tolstoy on TV. I sensed a slab falling away to the side. But even as I was watching it fall, I remembered.

Val phoned from Hastings this afternoon. Only one part of our conversation wasn’t about menus, recipes and food shopping. That was when Val said he’d got a cab to go and buy some fags. It was an important part of the complex narration about how there was no cream in the Co-op but I must have missed something.

Val wanted to know how I was getting on with my Birds custard menu feature because there wasn’t any cream in the Co-op and he was thinking of moving in a custard direction. But he hadn’t got any Birds, nor was likely to get any because he was back from the Co-op. The Co-op was in the past. He spoke of having eggs and milk and sugar which hinted at a real custard. So why did he want to know about Birds?

Perhaps getting a cab to buy some fags was the beginning of the narration, although it came in the middle. Val then found the Co-op bare of cream as an off-shoot somehow of having got a cab to buy some fags.

I couldn’t get Val to engage with the layered soufflé concept either. It was as if I hadn’t spoken.

I notice that people still queue with enthusiasm at the hardware shop for their DIY projects even though we’re locked in and might never get out or could die or all our friends could die and, if we do get out, there will be no world left anyway, so it is said. They’re just passing the time really, busying themselves and gaining achievements which they can then have a sense of. This is all we do in the whole of life, now I think of it, whether running a giant corporation or a 3-bedroom home and it isn’t bad because rotting away doing nothing and getting morose is worse. Plus you wouldn’t have any money.