All this time in lockdown has led to a lot of overthinking. Here's a small insight into the issues that are currently on my mind. (As I type, the children are trying to build a swing from an old car tyre, a bicycle lock and a suspiciously thin looking tree branch, so please excuse the brevity.)
Has anyone else developed Coronoia?
Touch wood, we’re not a particularly sickly family. (Famous last words.) The odd cold, stomach bugs that whip round the whole family over 36 hours, but nothing much more serious. And whether it was because I was raised by a school teacher or not I don’t know, but I’m not one to pander to illness. Complaints of a headache are met with ‘have a drink of water’, tummy ache ‘go to the loo’ and anything else ‘why not go and have a lie down’, which is chiefly so they stop complaining near me. I know, they’re so lucky.
But then Coronavirus hit and I have become ridiculously aware of every last bodily function that is not entirely ‘normal’. If I cough more than once in succession I will start being hyper vigilant about how many more times I cough within the hour and will desperately look for any cause besides Covid-19. Remember when we used to cough and not have a panic attack at the same time?
If I’m shattered at the end of the day it isn’t because I’ve not sat down since 6am, it’s because I have probably picked up The Virus from my trip to Sainsbury’s last Thursday, which is the only time I’ve been near Other People in three weeks.
Last week Andy felt simultaneously tired, achy and cold. And I got a bit nervous. Then we realised he had been up since 4.30am with Xander, he’d done a week of Joe Wicks with the kids, and the back door had been open all day. So not a pandemic. Just life.
Paranoia about Coronavirus. I’m calling it Coronoia.
How badly can out of date food and drink harm you?
I’m not talking chicken or milk (gag), this is more about other things that taste ok but should probably have been consumed three Prime Ministers ago (which, when you think about it, isn't all that long).
So far we’ve eaten pearl barley best before 2016 (a bit stodgy but no side effects that I could tell), I’ve made hot cross buns with strong bread flour that went out of date in January 2018 (they’re still proving but it’s not looking hopeful) and we've cracked open a mini keg of beer that Andy was given for his 40th. Which, you’ll be alarmed to hear, wasn’t in the last couple of years. I’m not sure what it was meant to taste like but we had to wait a full 10 minutes for the head to evaporate before we could take a sip.
I’ve also served soft cheese biscuits for lunch, used stale cornflakes to make crispy cakes and tried to give some depressed dried apricots a bit of zing by soaking them in water.
So lockdown is a lovely chance to clear out some of the odds and sods at the back of the larder - it just involves a spot of Russian roulette as we try to avoid food poisoning - or worse. The irony of us dying from mouldy redcurrant jelly as we shelter from a killer bug would surely not be lost on anyone.
How do you get the smell of spilt booze out of your fridge?
Thanks largely to living on a hill (which Andy’s dad was always thrilled about as he has a mild obsession with flood risk) we are the proud owners of an undercroft, a space dug out under the patio. It is dark and dank and home to a lot of wood, rusting paint tins, at least three knackered paddling pools and the chest freezer Andy bought and filled in January as he clearly experienced some strange premonition about what was about to unfold.
However, it is also home to several racks of Old Booze - bottles of Cava that have been brought to parties, lots of weird liqueurs won on tombolas (the bottle of Ouzo with the raffle ticket still attached) and the aforementioned keg of beer.
Andy has been clearing out the undercroft in the last couple of weeks (of course) and more than once has produced a bottle of questionable fizzy wine (for want of a better word) and suggested we put it out of its misery that evening. He did this on Wednesday and we ‘enjoyed’ a couple of glasses of pretty sweet Cava. It took everything I had to resist a second glass so it went back in the fridge with a champagne stopper in, ready for us to ‘enjoy’ further the following day.
Except when he went to get it out of the fridge the stopper exploded off it and covered the entire contents of the fridge in fizz.
Despite emptying every last thing out of the fridge, washing every shelf, rinsing every jar, wiping down every single interior surface, it still stinks of an old boozer. It’s pretty grim.
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I'll keep you posted on the progress of all of the above as and when but I've just looked out of the window and Bella is up a ladder about to launch herself into a world of broken limbs, so I had better go and parent.
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