“Seventy-two baps, Connie – you slice, I’ll spread,” said Victoria Wood, denoting the arch stoicism of a British woman facing the enormity of death. It’s a line I’ve loved nearly all my life, not least because it reminds me of big ladies in smock dresses at Dent family funerals in the 1980s. Up at dawn to make a tipsy cake, then turn two pounds of chicken breast “coronation” via the application of curry powder and jam, and wave off the corpse.
I’d like to say that “Connie slicing baps” has been my personality throughout lockdown thus far, but that’s not the full story. Perhaps, like me, your Covid-19 crisis persona shifts through several gears each and every hour, from calm to terrified to brave to depressed to jolly, via gallows humour and so on. The only constant has been working out what to eat at a time when many ingredients we once took for granted are scarce.
In my most Connie moments, I’m frankly far too busy for Covid-19. Cook, cook, cook. Bleach this, sterilise that. I’ve got the Magimix out for the first time in years, trying to do a rudimentary banana bread with strong flour, having not found, during this war, the correct GI to have sex with in order to procure a 1kg bag of self-raising. The judder of the blades pulverising sweetly decaying bananas drowns out morbid thoughts about my friends potentially dying in the vast Whittington Hospital down the road. It also nulls the thoughts of my other half’s much-loved rabbi dying suddenly last weekend, after appearing unwell in shul and then quickly gone, or my brother’s friend with Parkinson’s dying in intensive care.
The silver lining to this – glimmering ever so weakly – is that I have not wasted those decaying bananas. Oh no. Bananas ticked off my list. For my next trick I will be making a cheering set of scones using the wrong flour and a box of Trex cooking fat that predates Siobhán’s first time in the Sugababes.
“How are you doing?” my friends ask each other constantly on WhatsApp, checking in, our friendship meaning more than it ever has before. In my case, it depends on when you ask me. Yesterday, I was in my Covid-19 mode where I would be played by Nicola Walker: subdued, bubblingly furious, underslept with eyes that have seen so much, breakfasting and lunching on Maxwell House sachets stolen from hotel rooms and Nutella out of the jar with a dessert spoon, all while trying to weigh up what will kill one of my family members first: the lack of chemo or the Covid-19 they catch while having it? This decision feels above my pay grade. Where can I buy a hazmat suit online? “Can we drive them to the front door wrapped in clingfilm, and I’ll sit in the boot?” I suggest to my brother at one point. It felt, in that moment, a reasonable question. Afterwards, I had freezer-bread toast and cracked open my emergency raspberry jam.
My favourite lockdown persona, which I save especially for supermarkets, is Tina Turner as Aunty Entity in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. Sure, this dystopian world is upon us, but I will survive. I’ll be pivotal in Earth’s rebuilding, as well as glamorous and Amazonian. Asda is my Bartertown; if I move before dawn, under cover of darkness, I can stock up on couscous and even hand sanitiser.
My most nauseating lockdown hours, meanwhile, are the ones I spend channelling Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop newsletter, because, like, if you think about it, maybe Covid-19 is, like, a chance to totally emotionally recentre and focus on nourishment and healing. During this time, I listen to my Tara Brach “radical acceptance” guided meditations while shredding cauliflower leaves before sauteeing them with shallot and carrot, adding a handful of barley and simmering in low-sodium Marigold vegetable bouillon. Immunity is so important. “Jesus Christ, it’s a good job you’re self-isolating alone,” one friend says. “Maybe sleep with a window ajar.”
Because of my other half’s high-risk job, we are apart for the foreseeable, but then many people all over the world right now are in peculiar situations. Homes split, mealtimes fractured. Alone, apart, but also, at the same time, together. On last night’s Zoom chat, an anniversary, he was sitting in his pants after work, eating some godforsaken cut of an animal he’d found in his freezer, drinking a beer and listening to the awful, trumpet-heavy jazz that he likes and that I loathe because it makes me feel as if I’m being chased by bees. He was planning on watching a Jason Statham movie.
“Are you missing me?” I asked.
“Yes,” he replied, “I am having a terrible time.”
“This could go on for months,” I said.
“I know,” he said, a small flicker of bliss dancing about his lips. We’re all in a dire situation. But look out for those silver linings.
