Before coronavirus I was eating out around 10 times a week. Sometimes more, if I felt like I was wasting away, or less, if my doctor sister had texted me about diabetes again. It wasn’t just gluttony. I write about restaurants. And it wasn’t always the grande bouffe. Sometimes just soup. Sounds defensive, doesn’t it? It looks excessive from our new vantage point.
That lifestyle came shuddering to a halt at the start of March. Our daughter Lily was born on 11 March. Then the lockdown began. I haven’t been to a restaurant for nearly two months. Other critics have written heartbroken paeans to their former sweethearts. Not me. In fact, the longer the lockdown goes on, the more I wonder whether I miss them at all. The past few weeks have been a crash course in an old-fashioned version of sustenance. We plan meals, shop for ingredients, cook them ourselves. I feed wife, wife feeds daughter, nobody starves, I get to feel useful.
We are working our way through recipes we’ve been meaning to try. Fuchsia Dunlop’s Sichuan recipes couldn’t have been easier. There was an hour’s wait to get into Waitrose, but no queue at the Asian supermarket down the road.
We always knew the baby would mean a change of gear. Lockdown has made it more intense. We are cocooned, the three of us, in our new world. If it weren’t for the virus I would be leaving the house during the daytime, getting my parenting in at nights and around the edges.
Instead, the three of us are around all the time, orbiting each other in a small space; working, walking, cleaning, feeding, changing nappies. It should probably be more fraught. But it is a peaceful life, where the choices are basically reduced to “what would you like to eat today?”, a vision of a quieter existence that will end soon. I know we are lucky. When so many people are enduring such hardship, it’s awkward to admit I will treasure these strange days, when food is just food but much more than that, too.
