It's just past midnight so thank God it's Friday. And here's a hearty thank you to all my contributors - Bill, Richard, Pete, John, Sue, Tim, Malcolm, Tony and Julian (look to your left for links) so far - for making Covid-19 Diaries so fascinating. One or two others are considering offering their thoughts so there is no immediate plan to wind down the series.
The response has been encouraging, too. Salut! goes through occasional spells of inactivity and therefore toddles along on very low "hit rates" until I publish something, plug it as best as I can on social media and watch the readership levels grow again.
For overwhelmingly regrettable reasons, Covid-19 Diaries has proved a success. Daily visits have risen to a current average of well over 300 and yesterday's figure alone climbed above 500. Thank you, too, readers; "enjoy" seems an inappropriate verb in the generally bleak circumstances but I hope you have found the series interesting and at times entertaining - and been tempted to explore the various archive links to the left or right of this and all other main posts.
Malcolm Dawson, one of the contributors, has come across a quiz to help keep people occupied. E-mail him at this link if you'd like to have a go and he will send you the questions. And no cheating.
Plenty of people are heard to say that rather like those who have retired, they cannot imagine how they ever had time to work, so much have they found to occupy them during Covid-19 confinement.
I have edited this series - rather more work than the odd piece I've had to do for newspapers - and managed a bit of low-level gardening. I binge-watched season two of the Netflix series Sunderland 'Till I Die and created and fitted a small shelf for the little boiler room, hardly impressive as DIY goes but it pleased me. In fact, I made two but then couldn't find a suitable space for the second. I also reverted to 1970s cuisine and cooked coq au vin.
This is not much of a culinary challenge and I've produced it well enough in the past. It was a disaster. A brief outing for shopping (locally in South Ealing, not supermarket) yielded the wrong king of almost everything so I ended up using bigger than button mushrooms, ordinary spuds instead of new potatoes, shallots instead of small onions ... worst of all, the chicken I'd defrosted, which should have been a whole bird, was a trio of skinless breast fillets. Mme Salut's intermittent attempts to steer me away from failure met with misplaced "let me do it my way" pomposity. At least the sauce was half-decent.
More to the point is not what I've been doing in confinement but what I have not. What you see in the image above hangs on the wall in our small arrière-cuisine. It was seen and bought at a shop in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence a year or two ago and reasonably sums up my thoughts, if not always my actions, on mealtime.
For the past six days, every meal has been breakfast. I had a tooth extraction when an x-ray found an abscess and, after initially putting it off, had to resort to antibiotics - metronidazole, the one that doesn't even allow you a sneaky half unless you're happy about throwing up afterwards.
The course ended in time for me to mitigate the worthlessness of the coq au vin ...
Cheers!
Recent Comments