Well, there you go: Blog 50, or 15 missives and countless grumbles, observations and adventures since Covid 19 started to impinge on our lives and liberties. Who would have thought that I could have lasted this long without her killing me (though I have felt a pricking between my shoulder blades a few times, and there was that rebellion with the television remote control). Perhaps we should celebrate my survival by a visit to the shops, which opened in England on 15 June? Or is that a little premature: perhaps we should wait for the 50th blog post-lockdown instead? They do say that life will never be the same again, so maybe 35 weeks from now, in February 2021, we will still be dreading the supermarket, standing in 500 metre queues, veering around strangers in the street, dressing like bandits and scrubbing our hands to the tune of “God Save the Queen”. With the exception of the last, I hope not. I think that, in a few years time, life really will be as before and this will all be a like a bad dream, mostly forgotten. Forgotten, that is, along with our history: every statue of a famous person will have been removed, every Blue Plaque on a famous building will have been changed, street names will be different, history books will have been re-written, banned or burnt and many decent people, living or dead, will have been vilified. For this is the new order: all inconvenient events and outdated beliefs (perceived or otherwise) are to be expunged from the record. Far worse than the coronavirus has been the hysteria, violence and attacks on the institutions and very fabric of our society that have developed in the last two weeks. The world has gone mad and increasingly it seems that the lunatics are running the asylum. One thing is for certain: we will not forget 2020 in a hurry.
But there you go, that’s life: each hour a new challenge, each day a new adventure and each sunrise a blessing. I have found that the secret of a stress-free life is simply not to watch the TV news; to keep your head down; and to listen avidly to everything your wife says to you. Gin also helps.
It is interesting to note that the current flavour of the month, “taking the knee”, has a historical – though notorious – naval precedent. It led to a mutiny in Portsmouth in 1906. At that time the Royal Naval Barracks (then called HMS VICTORY, now called HMS NELSON) had only been built three years – previously, sailors without ships had been accommodated in hulks in the harbour. On a sleepy Sunday afternoon in November the men were mustered for Evening Quarters at 1600 as was usual, but a group of stokers were noisy when the parade was dismissed in heavy rain and so they were ordered to re-muster in the gymnasium. The officer in charge, a lieutenant, ordered the front rank “on the knee”: a command common in gunnery instruction, but possibly unfamiliar to stokers. The order was greeted with indignation and derision and initially was refused. The order was repeated, the stokers obeyed, they were admonished, and the parade was dismissed. The lieutenant thought the matter was closed. However resentment fermented and, later that evening in the barracks canteen, a riot erupted. The guard was called out, the barracks gates were locked, the trouble spilled out onto the parade ground and the commodore of the barracks was booed and harangued when he addressed the men. Eventually things calmed down and three men were arrested. The next evening, Monday, extra guards were mounted and the barrack gates were again locked, without explanation. This prevented returning libertymen from getting back to their quarters and a crowd developed outside, swelled by civilians. The mood became ugly and stones and bricks were thrown at the barracks and the wardroom building across the road. Within the barracks a crowd of stokers again rioted, tried to overpower the guard, and started smashing up their accommodation; outside, the crowd had grown to a mob of about 1,000 men bent on trouble. At midnight, landing parties had to be mobilised from ships in the harbour and two companies of Royal Marines from Eastney Barracks were called out to quell the riot. Eventually the crowd was dispersed and twelve men were arrested. The repercussions of this appalling and badly mishandled incident were considerable: eleven stokers were charged with mutinous assembly and the ring-leader was sentenced to three years of penal servitude; the commodore of the barracks and two commanders were dismissed their ship; the lieutenant who lit the fuse with his order of “on the knee” was tried by court martial, but acquitted for using the legitimate order in the gymnasium though, oddly, he was reprimanded for improper use of a similar order a year earlier (he later rose to flag rank so it did his promotion prospects no harm). The country as a whole was horrified by the incident, there were considerable recriminations in the Press and the Royal Navy did not come out of it smelling of roses. So nothing is new. And as for the present day gesture: I won’t be kneeling for anyone except God and the Queen, and certainly not for a mob.
There has been a development in the treatment of CV19 by researchers at Oxford University. After extensive trials it has been found that the steroid dexamethasone can reduce fatalities in 30% of seriously ill patients. This is a tremendous breakthrough, with the additional benefit of the treatment being a well-established drug and cheap. With any luck a vaccine will be next. On the school front in the UK, 40% of pupils are not in regular contact with their teachers, 20% are doing no work or less than one hour a week of study and 90% of students are getting less than two days a week at school. Mainly because of opposition by the teaching unions, a full return to school will not now happen until September at the earliest; as a consequence, a retired naval officer in Barsetshire has threatened suicide, but no-one has taken any notice. The number of cases of CV19 in the UK continues to fall, as does the number of deaths. The daily fatality figure currently stands at 184. As predicted, “non essential” shops opened on 15 June in England and face coverings are mandatory on public transport. There is now some debate about whether to reduce the safe personal distance from two metres to one (a standard common in mainland Europe) in order to make the opening of pubs and restaurants on 4 July more viable. Someone in the government must have been reading my blog, so that is at least two readers.
You will be pleased to know that the memsahib’s birthday went well, despite the weather. She was allowed to sleep in for as long as she wanted: no piercing bosun’s call, no throwing open of the curtains, no gratuitous tea. But, ironically, she woke of her own accord early and rang down to the kitchen, where I was scrubbing the floor and blackening the range, for a cup of the refreshing oolong. It must have been the excitement. Her breakfast, lovingly prepared by moi was enhanced with a small glass of champagne, with which she was delighted. She was halfway through the second gulp before she realised it was chilled ginger ale – I reasoned that she would consider champagne for breakfast to be wasteful and far too intoxicating at that hour of the morning. Jane did not do much for the big day, but there were many birthday cards from friends and admirers and she spent a leisurely time opening them and arranging them tastefully on the windowsills. The weather being so dull and occasionally wet (as predicted), the birthday girl spent the morning pottering in her garden and the afternoon indulging herself with all her favourite television programmes that I don’t like, gripping and manipulating the remote control with great satisfaction and contentment. Sliding unobtrusively into and out of the royal presence, I brought her an occasional glass of water that had been filtered through charcoal, chilled with ice, and flavoured with a slice of fresh lemon. I was, of course, occupied elsewhere for the Evening Feast Preparation was well under way. The twice-baked soufflés were already defrosted, but the fillet steak needed slicing up and then there was the pudding: a vanilla panna cotta with raspberries, dressed with a potent raspberry and Kirsch sauce. I approached the preparation of that pudding like Alfred Nobel inventing dynamite; judging by the amount of Kirsch I sloshed in I was right to be cautious.
There is something about accomplished cooks and chefs that they seem not to recognise their talents and assume, modestly, that everyone else can match their standard. So it is with Jane. I had to interrupt her televisual extravaganza to ask her about the quantities and ingredients for the cheese sauce that would anoint the twice-baked soufflés, and she replied,
“Some cream and some blue cheese”.
“Yes, but how much?”
“Just as much as you need”.
Baffled, I poured half a carton of cream into the pan.
“Crikey, not that much!”.
I poured half back. The quantity of cheese was equally vague and finally had to be established by trial and error. I did get there in the end, but I remain puzzled as to why she couldn’t just say, “100 millilitres of single cream and five grams of Dolcelatte cheese”. You see, I do my cooking like a chemistry experiment, measuring out solids to the nearest gram as if using a laboratory beam balance, and liquids as if conducting a boiler water purity test with phenolphthalein; she just comes along and throws the stuff together and it comes out perfectly.
Disappointingly, Jane did not change into an evening dress, high heels and diamond necklace for the Grand Feast but chose, instead, to remain in her day clothes. It being her day, I declined to comment; indeed, so as not to embarrass her, I rejected the bow tie, the shirt with the double cuffs, and the Royal Navy cufflinks that I was originally going to wear for the evening and chose something more casual so that she would feel comfortable. The food prepared and ready to go, we opened a bottle of champagne as an aperitif and indulged ourselves with a FaceTime meeting with some friends. The conversation flowed like the Ganges, the level of champagne in the bottle sank like the TITANIC and, before long, it was time to sign off and proceed to dinner. Jane declared herself “a bit squiffy” as I seated her in the Dining Room, which was laid out with the polished Queen Anne table, the white starched napkins, the best silver and the crystal glasses. I did think that I could see a few bluebirds circling her head and twittering, but that might just have been my imagination. Certainly she appeared to be anticipating dinner with great relish. The soufflés with that vague cheese sauce went down well, then I had to leave her to cook the bœuf stroganoff, my speciality. I checked first that she could not slide under the table – an occurrence that seemed not impossible.
I favour the dynamic style of cooking: none of this wishy washy gentle simmering and reducing sauces, far better to have full forcing rate on all burners and lots of tossing pans and leaping flames. Bœuf stroganoff suits this style perfectly and soon it was well under way, with the extractor fan running at full chat and the kitchen full of fumes delicious aromas. I was half way through this brief, but exciting, stage when,
“Damn!”
I realised that I had forgotten to cook the rice.
Well it was too late to do anything about it now, the steak had to be served fresh and just tender. I reasoned that there were two of Jane’s ‘five a day’ in there already, namely mushrooms and onions; that would be enough, surely? Besides, she would never notice in her present state of euphoria.
With a flourish I laid the steaming repast before her on our best Wedgwood Quince crockery.
“Gosh. How delightful”, she said in that cut glass English accent of hers. She picked up her fork.
“Oh. Where’s my rice?”.
Typical. Trust Hawkeye to notice. I explained my reasoning: that it had been a deliberate decision to not have any carbohydrate; that it would be too much anyway; that we were trying to cut back; …I trailed off lamely.
“You forgot to put the rice on didn’t you?”
“Yep”
“Never mind dear, this is delicious”. Praise indeed.
As to the panna cotta with the Kirsch sauce that followed, well, it was lucky that we had no candles lit or the whole place would have gone up.
And so to bed where, at midnight, the golden coach turned back into a pumpkin and the television remote control restored itself, magically, to its rightful place on the left arm of the Command Chair.
Have you noticed that there are more cyclists around now? I don’t just mean the Lycra-clad racers mentioned in Blog 44, I mean the ordinary folk, sometimes as a family, lumbering along on every road and country lane with a queue of traffic behind them. There are a lot more people out walking too, though not all on the main roads. And good luck to them, I say. One of the good things of this lockdown has been the emergence of people actually getting exercise and exploring the great outdoors. These “genteel” cyclists can be a bit of an obstruction sometimes, especially now that people are returning to work and taking to the roads in their cars, but it is a small price to pay for people enjoying themselves. Generally we are quite a tolerant crowd: I remember our Australian friend, Derek, telling me that he was amazed at the British patience with horse riders on the road, for example; he said that the Australian drivers would be sounding their horns and shouting abuse. I was a bit surprised at that and just shrugged: horse riders and (now) genteel cyclists are just part of the social fabric of Britain. I still find the Lycra mob a pain though.
Well, the new ice machine packed in at the weekend. No, it was not because of overuse supplying countless glasses of G+T. It just stopped working on Saturday. To say I was disappointed would be an understatement. But there is a silver lining to every cloud and I must share with you the experience. We had bought the machine online from a firm called Appliances Direct, that company being recommended by the Consumer Association magazine Which?, supported by very good individual reviews. It being the weekend, the firm’s Customer Services department was shut, but there was a form to fill-in on-line for Returns, and I duly completed it. I was told that someone would contact me on the next working day to confirm the problem and arrange a collection. In anticipation, Jane and I spent a lively half hour trying to wrap up and parcel the defective machine in dubious grubby bubblewrap stolen from her greenhouse, the original box having emigrated to the happy recycling centre two weeks ago (no, of course we didn’t keep the original box). I cannot say I was too sanguine about the outcome: taking anything back is a pain and having it collected only marginally better. Then there would be the interrogation: “Have you tried this? Have you tried that? Are you sure it’s defective?”. Finally, there would be the Usual Long Wait to get the refund. Never mind. In the meantime, and desperate for that glass of ice cold G+T, I ordered yet another ice machine – a different model – from Amazon. Grudgingly having signed up to Amazon Prime, I was astonished to receive the new ice machine the very next day: Sunday. Wow! But the surprise doesn’t stop there. On Monday morning, I received an email from Appliances Direct about the defective machine, apologising for my disappointment and stating that they would be refunding the cost immediately. They would not be collecting the item and that I could dispose of it as I wished. That very afternoon, the money reappeared in my bank. Double wow. I confess that I was so shocked when I received the email that I was rendered speechless and had to resort to gestures to convey the news to Jane. So there you go: two heartfelt recommendations, Appliances Direct and Amazon Prime. You see, not everything goes badly. And the ice? Excellent thank you, and a better machine.
Credit where credit is due, the BBC has just produced a three-part documentary drama about the nerve agent attack in Salisbury in 2018 and, for once, they have made a good job of it and it is quite accurate. If you missed it, it is called The Salisbury Poisonings and you can catch up on BBC iPlayer if you live in the UK. If you are a non-resident then I recommend you look out for it on your networks. For the benefit of those unfamiliar with the event, a defected Russian intelligence agent living in the sleepy Wiltshire cathedral city of Salisbury was targeted with the lethal nerve agent novichok and both he and his daughter were taken very seriously ill, narrowly escaping with their lives. Two investigating police officers also became infected, one came very close to death and has still not fully recovered. Huge areas of Salisbury had to be decontaminated, the contents of houses, a restaurant and a pub had to be destroyed as did 24 emergency vehicles. The nerve agent remains active for over 50 years and, three months after the initial event, two innocent members of the public found the original container used for the nerve agent, became seriously ill and one died. The citizens of Salisbury were traumatised and in fear of their lives; the city’s economy and tourist industry suffered terribly and has still not fully recovered. In the subsequent murder enquiry, the perpetrators were identified as probably two military intelligence agents working for the Russian state. They have never been brought to trial.
We went down to our Big City on Monday, the shops now being open, with the intention of visiting a privately-owned bookshop that we frequent. It was a real treat and the first tentative step back to normality. We parked without any problem and just wandered the streets, taking in the beautiful architecture and the sunshine, and exploring parts that we had not visited for months. Very few people wore masks and most passed us as normal without falling into the gutter to avoid us. The bookshop provided gloves and hand sanitiser, but otherwise the experience was no different to pre-lockdown. We bought a bumper bundle of books, partly to support the shop and partly for the sheer joy of being able to browse and buy in a shop again. Energised, we went on to the indoor market and found our favourite second-hand book stall open, so we bought yet another batch of books. We were on a roll – it is difficult to describe what a pleasure these mundane tasks brought us. Still floating on a cloud, we drifted round one of the parks and ate ice cream in the sunshine. The park was quite busy, with families having picnics and students playing games. It was all lovely. Mind you, we avoided the big stores like Marks and Spencer and the short queue outside TK Max, so I cannot comment on what the full shopping experience would have been like. Nevertheless, it was a bit of an adventure, a glimmer of hope after at a long and worrying time.
Right. So what is this thing of wearing a facemark in the car when you are on your own? Is it an extension of wearing a baseball cap in the car or indoors (another weird practice)? Are these people afraid of contaminating the dashboard or giving their infotainment system a computer virus? It is bad enough that they walk around looking like gloved Bandidos from a 1950s episode of the Lone Ranger or extras from Dr Kildare; now they seem to want to wear the hold-up gear in the privacy of their car as well. We have masks, but we do not intend to wear them unless we are compelled to or when we are in close confinement with others, such as on public transport. We certainly don’t see them as an essential part of our outfit as these car drivers seem to do. Mind you, Charles Tyrwhitt, the shirt-maker, does offer facemarks in cotton twill and a variety of colours for the discerning gentleman and I have been tempted.
I was reflecting on that meal I had cooked for the memsahib. I was particularly amazed by the success of the panna cotta which (literally) turned out perfectly and was enhanced by the highly volatile sauce. Finding a comfortable laurel bush, I lay back and commented to Jane with some wonder and, perhaps, just a touch of smugness how well it had all gone: maybe there was a culinary future for me after all?
“Oh, there’s nothing to a panna cotta. It’s dead easy to do”, she replied offhandedly.
It is said that the Roman emperors always had a slave standing behind them to whisper repeatedly in their ear that they were not a god as they passed through the streets and their subjects cried, “Hail Caesar”. Two thousand years later, I just have a wife to bring me down to earth. Long may it remain so.
18 June 2020
"A Very Vintage Chap..." 