Lockdown - Week 7: May 5th - 11th

It feels like this week has just been one long exercise in waiting - for cold nights to finish threatening frost so I can start the next seasonal phase of gardening, and for Boris's big announcement on Sunday.

Meanwhile I've been re-discovering my interest in cooking and baking. For a while I haven't been making much effort. When she lived at home, my younger daughter had become the main cook. When she left, first to university, then to live in Manchester, I drifted about making little effort (at first I even forgot dinner-time), then my parents fell ill, and microwaving a frozen meal became the norm. My husband seems to show the same enthusiasm for a dinner that's taken straight from the freezer as he does for one that takes an hour or so's effort. It's taken over a year, and this enforced quiet time, for me to have any real interest in what I cook, but now I'm finding my inner domestic goddess, and cooking to please myself.

A lot of what I'm baking is essentially comfort food - muffins and cakes - but following on from my home-made tapas of the other week, I'm experimenting with new recipes, generally centred on allotment produce, or last year's frozen version of it. So this week's menu has included blackberry and white choc chip muffins, cake and jam with rhubarb from the allotment and garden, and tray-bake and risotto to use up the last of last year's leeks.



It's been another busy 'out and about' week - Sophie Okonedo and Ralph Fiennes in the National Theatre Live's brilliant production of Antony and Cleopatra, another Frank Turner gig, and a So Many Sundays gig from Isolate Live, featuring Morning Crush, Tom Dulieu, then a gap for Boris's speech, and back to see Joe Tilston.
Another regular feature of Sunday is our family quiz. This week was a music quiz and we mostly proved we didn't know anything, but it was great fun, and the most I've laughed all week.

Otherwise, I'm losing myself with online jigsaws. I said they'd prove to be addictive, and they are. In part they may be a form of mindfulness, and they certainly calm me and stop me overthinking things, and the [pieces make a delightful 'click' as they fall correctly in to place.



The warm weather came back again briefly, the roses, laburnum, fuchsias and peonies all began to flower, and I spent a contented afternoon or two mainly just sitting in the garden

But despite getting my hopes up, the promise of summer didn't stay around, the frosts are still with us (so my newly planted peas and sweetpeas are swaddled in bubblewrap), and Boris didn't really have much to say apart from 'Go back to work, you lazy lot' which was of no relevance to me, so it's back to another week or more of waiting around.