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‘Being locked away has permitted many of us to eat without the annual creeping tyranny of how we should look in time for summer’
Although many Brits stampeded into the supermarkets in late March, in the fear that we were going to starve due to food shortages, by May some of us have found that the opposite is the case. Pulling, or rather heaving, on my Lycra this week, I noted that, in profile, I resembled a snugly stuffed Cumberland sausage, perhaps because my lockdown stash of “delicious things bought to sit out dystopia” – Choco Leibniz biscuits, Doritos, Super Noodles, tinned macaroni cheese – is now somewhat depleted. I’ve observed the government’s Stay At Home mantra obediently, with a mere 160 steps in 24 hours being my personal best so far. Not one single, non-essential journey did I make that day, other than a mooch to the kitchen to graze subliminally on delicious, non-perishable items that I’d bought to see me through the end of the world. Dystopia, I reckoned, calls for stuff you can eat with one hand while sat on your roof waving to the army to pick you up. That’s why I had, albeit temporarily, an eight-pack of Mini Cheddars.
Dystopia, however, did not come. Or at least not how I’d envisioned it. In its place there’s a relentless drip of disconcerting news: redundancies, recession and, of course, the endless dying. Matt Hancock’s press briefings, I’ve found, go well with small mug of Baileys and perhaps a finger or two of Highland shortbread. And during week five, when I stopped replying to WhatsApp messages because I had run out of words to say, I ate no actual meals at all. Just lots of semi-pacifying things: fistfuls of Kellogg’s Krave straight out of the packet, the last of the marzipan Christmas tree decorations… Subliminal grazing. Life is short, so have a KitKat. The feeling of my thumbnail sliding through the silver paper was ever so comforting. Continue reading...