Friday 10th April 2020

I suddenly fancied a penitential Birds custard for afters at lunch. Food on Good Friday isn’t supposed to be nice. I opened that tin of peaches as well and they turned out to be the true cling although a brighter orange than I remember.

So that meant the milk carboy was finished dead on time. Indeed I had to start the next milk for the Good Friday custard.  From the carboy, I had about 4 custards, two chicken rechauffés (one with mushrooms, one with broccoli, both nice) and one layered soufflé (horrid, but I didn’t do it right). It was a rubbery mattress with wet layers of tasteless leeks. Forgot the bacon which is just as well in one way because I didn’t have any.

Having horrid food is the last straw as the less important things often are when the strain is immense.

No wine, chocs or cakes on Good Friday, please. Hot Cross buns for tea, although the Lairdess in Usk has somehow managed to have hers for lunch. Not right. I haven’t been in London on Good Friday since 1992 at the least, not since my father died in October of that year. Normally I would be in the drawing room in the Far West with the Gay Mother where we would be finding the Hot Cross buns lacking. They always seem to have been lacking, never enough saffron and often none at all, not even yellow.

I’m worried that people aren’t eating the right food on Good Friday or even taking much notice of the Agony of Our Lord on the Cross at all. This year, please, whether you believe in him or not (me: I love the attitude of Devotion, and the hymns) spare a thought for Jesus and hope that after he Rises Again on Sunday he will save us and take away this terrible pall that lies over us.

Joshua Baring whatsApp-ed yesterday. Finally someone in favour of a layered soufflé, especially with smoked haddock. He said it’s so Edwardian and they knew how to eat. Rich and creamy. I’m trying to think of other Edwardian recipes. There’s a whole turbot cooked in a kettle but what sauce? I think the Queen Mother’s table was essentially Edwardian. Eggs Drumkilbo, which is lobster, prawns, mayo, eggs, tomatoes, Worcester Sauce, ketchup (?), anchovy essence, all set with gelantine (very complicated) – that might be Edwardian in origin. It was Her Late Majesty’s favourite 1st course (not starter). All those cold mousses and dishes in aspic, ices and things like Charlotte Russe…. Edwardian, possibly.

This morning I managed to include a visit to Joshua Baring’s windowsill in my morning exercise routine (Please note, some days I don’t use my exercise quota). He projected a tape measure from his front door and discovered we were 3 metres apart in fact. He looked radiant and so young although his pyjama top was moth-eaten and a solid baby-blue while the pyjama bottoms were tartan. There was a heap of newspapers and post just inside the door. ‘Why do they keep shoving this stuff through my letter-box?’ Joshua Baring said. ‘I don’t want the Evening Standard and it carries the virus for 24 hours so I can’t touch it.’ I wondered if he could set fire to the toxic junk but he thought that might be unwise. Possibly pyromania will spring up in some people later on during lock-down. Oh the cleansing power of fire.

His lockdown is at the luxury end – Neal’s Yard and a Shoreditch butcher are delivering. Leila is also obliging. Geranium Cream and Tarte aux Pois Mousseline have featured. As Joshua Baring says, ‘Just for one. If only you could invite someone round…’ Well, yes, but entertaining was shattering, when we used to do it, I reminded him.

I’ve been taken up with ‘Good Friday, Riding Westward’… It’s by John Donne. Good Friday 1613 which was 3rd April that year.  So wrenching and upsetting, even though the Lord Jesus might never have lived: ‘O Saviour, as thou hang’st upon the tree/I turn my back to thee…’ The whole thing is rhyming couplets, but so stretched and blasted for most of the time you don’t notice. Then suddenly there’s a clear rhyme and it’s devastating: ‘Could I behold those hands which span the poles/And turn all spheres at once, pierced by those holes?’

The Carboy of Milk: Completed Dead on Time: Let’s Hope it Augurs Well 

Penitential Good Friday Custard with Cling Peaches and Her Tin

Seated Good Friday Tea for One: No Cake Allowed. It’s Not Easter Yet

Thursday 9th April 2020

The ghost of Easter remains so shops busy today as if there were going to be a ‘holiday’. Going shopping is like going to a funeral in gangster land: the silent queues with the threat of being gunned down by a fellow human being at any moment.

Shopping took the whole morning. Cousin Monica says it isn’t necessary to wash your shopping and she should know and if it were she’d be the first to tell you. But I’m doing it anyway. Merle Barr says cats are to be sequestered but later she found out it’s only if you’ve got symptoms. It’s all getting a bit incredible really.

In the afternoon I telephoned. Couldn’t be bothered to get on with my home. Royston King has been following the news. There won’t be any mass gatherings for years, apparently, and President Trump gives 2 hour press conferences every day. His idea is to put off the Presidential election in November and remain in office possibly indefinitely. The Mayor of New York or Governor of New York State (not sure which) is making a good impression and people think he should be the Democratic candidate. He’s only 61 which is a good start.

It’s true. At the moment there seems to be no way out. But something’s got to turn up. And it will.

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.

Tuesday 7th April 2020

Only 4 hours sleep – so worried about the Prime Minister and our Nation. Now, do we dare to hope?

Laura Malcolm, cleaner-less in lockdown, said she didn’t know how to wash the floor. She looked in the cupboard but could see nothing to clean it with. Maybe just water would do?

Text from the bank, supposedly. Unusual activity on Debit Card. Pls ring. All the bleach-wiping of the card, I should think.

Angus Willis will not, will not grasp the layered soufflé. Don’t add anything to the Soufflé, he goes. It will be watery. But the Gay Mother’s tomato and spagetti soufflé and her leek and bacon and her smoked haddock have triumphed all through the years. But no, Angus Willis isn’t having it.

I had a layered soufflé last night. It was horrid through my error and the Prime Minister going into Intensive Care. I told Angus how horrid it was which was why he came out and condemned the entire genre.

Merle Barr and Angus listened to Woman’s Hour today. Angus thought nothing of Mary Berry’s ideas for lock-down cooking. Pasta with frozen peas and how to ice a cake. He said the Nation needs to know how to plan to minimise shopping outings and what to do when you can’t cook, which is most people.

In the night I was dreading Ottolenghi Roasted Romanesco Salad with Lemon, Garlic and Toasted Hazlenuts. But it was quite nice actually.

The Birds’ Custard mania has rather waned. It’s awfully bloating. I wonder now if I’ll ever open those cans of tinned fruit. Maybe the Food Bank, if I can find one.

I feel snowed under with food. The vegetable box delivered from the Farmers’ Market – well, I don’t want to have carrot soup when it’s not winter. Nor Biked Pootaato for 8 nights. I’ll have to give some of it away. The food box was how I got condemned to the Romanesco.

Tomorrow another box is coming. But more selective this time.

I can’t keep up with the eating and the menu-ing.

Harry Rollo said that if you go to a certain square half way down Roseberry Avenue, you can see Grayson Perry cleaning out his own fireplace through the window. Mercury Mr Kitten got wind of it somehow and went to investigate. Just so extraorder.  Even he is shut up. But I suppose he could get extra time out by adopting some of his other persona – like the Milk Maid with the bonnet or the Marge Proops version. The Police would never know it was the same person.

Who now remembers Marge Proops? Long gone.

Monday 6th April 2020

In the back garden I’ve got Synaeda Amore (funny name) and Light and Dreamy (silly name). Shirley to come. Graphs don’t show how charming the dotted planting of the tulips is in real life – just looks like a lot of bare earth. The idea was to get a tulip resembling Arabian Mystery which is a really evil mauve – but has become unavailable. Idea not quite realised. But I like Synaeda Amore, seen at Chelsea last year.  Top terrace is Sunny Prince. Don’t know what’s happened to Abu Hanza and Armani, both red. Seem to be tons and tons Sunny Prince. Plus perennial wallflower (Sweet Sorbet: apply in person for cuttings).

The Top Terrace looks better in graphs rather in actuality, the Back Garden worse.

Daff Decoy, Tulip Sunny Prince and Wallflower Sweet Sorbet on the Top Terrace

Top Terrace: Tulip Sunny Prince, Wallflower Sweet Sorbet

Dotted Synaeda Amore and Light and Dreamy (can you Tell the difference?) in Back Garden

General View of Back Garden. Wallflower Sweet Sorbet and Red Jep with Tulips

Trying to Show the Dotted Effect: Makes More Impact in Real Life

Sunday 5th April 2020

Everything went well in Waitrose – or well enough. No queue and management of distant trolleys better. Wasn’t rammed this time as last Saturday by a man who said, ‘Chill out’ when remonstrated with. Got everything home and wet-wiped all the packets with anti-bac wipe. After conference with Anthony Mottram (in Prague, in bath) yesterday, I’m going to upgrade to washing all packets with hot water and soap from now on. Royston says it’s getting more and more dangerous. Anthony said I could also wash bananas in soap and water.

So easily 40 minutes unloading, quarantining and sanitising the shopping, then out again to the butcher. Just to get a chicken and some eggs. Well, the butcher licked the bag to get it open. I managed to get out of having the bag and just took the chicken in a paper wrapper into my own bag, with the egg box. Plan – to bleach wipe the paper wrapper, then get the chicken out and into a dish and the fridge. Throw away the wrapper. All going quite well, until I reached inside the bag, thinking the chicken was in a further plastic bag inside. But it wasn’t. There was just one of those useless sheets of plastic partly covering it. Guess what! I’d touched the chicken with en-bleached fingers. The only hope was to wash the raw bird in the sink, whereupon I was immediately plunged into a chicken-contamination nightmare on top of the corona. Salmonella leaping all over the place, onto the drainage area, the door knobs.  Very nearly ended up howling on the floor but somehow managed to keep going.

Yesterday was even worse. The baker had a mask but fiddled with it just before serving me. He put in a blue plastic glove to pick up the loaf but which hand? Likely to be the same hand, but who could be sure? Upon return, got the loaf onto the bread board, which happens to be made of stone, without the paper touching it. Huge risk that the bread would bounce on the floor – then what would I do? But it didn’t. I agonised for ten minutes as to the next steps: throw loaf away and get another? Wash it with soap and hot water? The battle was really between war-time parsimony and corona-threat. Plus we’re only supposed to go out shopping the barest min. And can I bear it when I do? The only real hope was to cut all the crust off much of which had to be done mid-air to avoid contamination by contact with crusts already cut off. When I think of all that You Must Eat Your Crusts insistence in childhood and the awfulness of cutting them off. It then took another 20 minutes to de-contaminate the bread area. Which I was determined to do before my afternoon rest.

As a final precaution I’m only having that bread as toast, although I did eat two slices dangerously raw yesterday. Toasting is an extra anti-viral zap.

So that’s another two weeks to wait for the consequences if any. Tomorrow is the two-week anniversary of when the same bakery (but not the same server) handled money then touched the pizza. But Merle Barr said he didn’t. We’ll know by 4pm tomorrow.

My Loaf after Anti-Viral Procedures

Saturday 4th April 2020

NEWS IN BRIEF

Just had an awful time with a loaf of bread: reeking of bleach: Bong!

Custard diet weighing me down: Bong!

Skipped custard at luncheon: Bong!

Having seconds of pomegranate seeds: must finish them by tomorrow: Bong!

Royston says it’s 1940 all over again. Britain not a very efficient country. Poorly prepared. In 1940 it was ‘Let’s invade Norway.’ Didn’t get anywhere. Rather off-beam anyway. Man whose idea that was got made PM – Churchill. British Expeditionary Force hopeless little band, no chance of standing up to Gerry. Had to be rescued by random pleasure craft and fishing boats from Dunkirk, a debacle turned in folk memory into a glorious manifestation of plucky little Britain pulling together. But somehow we came out on top after six years.

This time, Gerry’s got ahead, much better organised, low death rate, massive testing programme  – just as in 1940. But where’s it going to end?

I’ve switched off all newsfeeds, news bulletins, even the stock prices. So I won’t know.

Friday 3rd April 2020

Milk-based cooking… I’ve been straining for inspiration, after snatch-buying what Val calls a carboy of milk – i.e. 4 pints. Because that was all they had in full fat organic. So now under pressure to use it up by its use by date of 10th April.

Nothing to be wasted in this war.

Last night we had Zoom with Merle Barr, Angus Willis and Fergus Strachan. I must mark that Fergus taught me many years ago never to touch my face, especially eyes, if I wanted to avoid infection, which has given me a head-start in this outbreak, for it takes years to develop the discipline of not touching. I do think that eventually the Government will have to lop most people’s hands off, all the same.

Angus was two Negronis down (not sure what they are) and had only got as far as assemblage of his Vietnamese Monkfish and Dill creation by 9.30.  He says Asian is right down. That nam-pla fish sauce stuff slashed in price… Everyone wants pies.  But I was screaming for milk recipes. At last inspiration poured forth – cheese souffle, roast bird with bread sauce, bird rechauffe au sauce veloute vermouth avec broccoli, sole veronique, filets de sole crecy. It really was looking as if, single-handed, I could reverse the whole of modern cooking. Flour-based milk sauce blanketing the culinary landscape once again. But my greatest moment was yet to come. Suddenly it flashed upon me… every day in childhood we had it, when we weren’t having Ambrosia Creamed Rice. With jam, or tinned fruit and as a really manic extravagance, cream drizzled in (except drizzling hadn’t begun then. You just poured). Bird’s Custard…. why on earth hadn’t I thought of it before? Merle began investigating online. Did it even exist still? I thought I had some left over from the 1980s. But Merle had already found it at Sainsbury’s online although worryingly out of stock.

This morning at Waitrose – oh the new dawn. Bird’s stacked to the ceiling and right next to it the tinned fruit. No loganberries sadly, but peaches which have every hope of being ‘cling’ (Val and I have spent so many hours wondering what a ‘Cling Peach’ could be) and prunes in apple juice. I also got bananas and real rhubarb. And Duchy Double Cream.

So I’m set up for puddings for the foreseeable future. Like the epidemic itself. Everything cancelled for the foreseeable future. Had banana and custard at lunchtime today. Absolutely shattering. I was so sleepy all afternoon.

Pudding Scheme for the Foreseeable Future: Birds Back!

First Custard Experience in well over 50 Years. Shattering. So Sleepy All Afternoon

Angus Willis: Last Night’s Supper after Two Negronis: Asian Food Prices Slashed, He Says

Thursday 2nd April 2020

It helps if you went to boarding school – although then you knew when the end of term was going to be. Nearly 9 days ago we were summoned by the Headmaster at 8.30pm (incredibly inconvenient at the dinner hour but I suppose they were thinking of those that dine at tea-time) for a massive rocket. More in sorrow than anger, too many had been lolling in parks at the weekend. So, no choice, you’ve been given your chance, no choice but incarceration. For your own good; then the pep talk phase.

Always dubious to blame the whole class for the miscreant actions of a few. In my actual school days I suffered a crippling anxiety to be good. Although foully behaved at home, at school I had a terror of ‘being in trouble’. Only in the final days, in November 1976, I did tell the Housemaster he was a ghastly little man and to get out of the room. Which he did. Amazing. I can see his awful spongy brown blazer with brass buttons as if it were yesterday. Unfortunately some months later, after I had left, he dropped dead on the football field, despite being small and quite young and springy. Not a just punishment, but his Roman History lessons were excruciating. Matron at Prep – how I’d love to go back and give her a piece of my mind. She was a toxic mass of ignorance, bent like Sycorax, Caliban’s mother, by bogus notions of daintiness and social superiority into a hoop of disapproval and suspicion. Why she was ever allowed anywhere near children I cannot imagine.

Anyway, massive whoops and banana skin when, only a few days after the rocket, the headmaster goes down with it himself, bringing all the senior boffin beaks and the other crucial master teaching coughs and temperatures with him. What have they all been up to? Not washing their hands after touching the door knob? Now they’re pretending to be ‘working from home’ while trays of food are left outside their rooms and nobody will go near them without a can of DDT on tap.

So this time I’m thinking of, how shall we say, not exactly being bad, but standing up to them, just a bit. Apart from anything else, I don’t always use up my ration of daily exercise. But I don’t suppose the prefects will believe that if encountered. ‘What are you doing out of lessons?’ they’ll say. I’m allowed to pedal, though. What if I should just happen, while pedalling, to meet a friend? Gatherings of two, at social distance, confusingly are allowed. Meeting up with friends not allowed. So with whom does one gather? Any old toxic refugee from a home without a bleach-spray routine? People who spit? If the prefects enquire I can just say,’I don’t know this person. It’s a random encounter with a view to sexual congress once current restrictions are lifted.’ They can hardly object. In fact they have no choice but to hugely approve. Unlike the old days, when that sort of thing was clamped down upon. Now they’ll have to be all for it.

The Milk situation will have to wait until tomorrow. You see – there’s so much going on.

My Carboy of Milk: Use by 10th April

Wednesday 1st April 2020

Wednesday already! Half the week gone by lunchtime.

When Harry Rollo phoned on Monday he said, ‘How are you?’ I said, ‘I’m locked in.’ He said, ‘Locked-in syndrome.’ I said, ‘It helps if you’re a gardener. Mystery viruses attack plants – but they don’t get all of them.’ I recalled as well how Beth Chatto, great gardener of our Nation, and highly strung, would get in an awful state about the bullfinches attacking her fruit trees (she and her husband had a commercial fruit farm at one time). But her husband, Andrew, always said, ‘They don’t get all of them.’

On the other hand, it doesn’t help if you’re a Poor Little Rich Gay. Poor Little Rich Gays just can’t bear everything not being right. I’ve dreamed for years of eight staff working full-time in my 3-bedroom residence. Then at last I could scratch the surface of everything that needs to be done. And rest.

Well, nothing’s right now, is it? Disease raging through the whole world.  Every week some new scheme to set it to rights – then hope dashed. We’re going to have a lot of this. A glimmer of hope and racking anxiety lifts, then dashed again. Down, down. It’ll go on and on… Poor Little Rich Gays just can’t bear everything not being perfect.

Some years ago a leak sprang in my first floor front bedroom. Bruce McBain and the entire Polish army of builders were marshalled. Nothing worked. Every time it rained water poured in. Weeks and weeks. My nerves were shredded, then minced. It was the same scenario last summer when I had a new boiler installed. Again and again it seemed to cause the leccie to fuse on the lower floors. And so cruel because I’d longed for a new boiler and the old one was touch-and-go twice a day in the winter whether it would come on, as far as I was concerned. So for the fusing, all known electricians in attendance. Still the same, fusing, fusing, me raving. But finally in both cases, after much struggle, much agony, the leak stopped and the leccie stayed on.

So we must endure and hope.

I have a horrible feeling that awful letter from the Prime Minister has arrived. I haven’t had mine. Have you? Maybe it won’t come. I think he’s died.

No it hasn’t come. Just an appeal for corona money from Save the Children.

That stained duvet cover to finish with. Four days of treatment, culminating in Nitramors, which is paint stripper. See graphs below. What do you think? I had to look quite hard to find it. I know it’s there – that’s the thing.

Don’t say one’s life isn’t crowded with incident.

Stain after 4-day Assault with Products

General View: Do you Think It shows?