Life in the time of Coronavirus

I like to keep travel diaries, but now flights have been cancelled, borders closed and people advised to stay indoors. I might not get the chance to travel at all this year. So I decided to keep a diary with notes on how the Coronavirus epidemic affected me and what I did that made my day memorable during the subsequent pandemic and lockdown.

• Friday 7 February: cancelled my flight to Hong Kong 3 days before it was due to take off.

• Monday 8 February: the office stocked up on anti-bacterial hand gel and wipes.

• Monday 16 March: cancelled a work trip to London when the Prime Minister advised people to work from home.

• Tuesday 17 March: first day of working from home due to the virus. The office does not have a microwave or windows that can be opened, so it was nice to eat a hot, home-cooked lunch and open windows to let fresh air in for a change.

• Thursday 19 March: cancelled my driving lesson along with my hopes of taking the practical test in May, and stopped going to the supermarket. Preferred to shop at the fishmongers (Southern Head Fishing Co.), grocers, and smaller stores like Tesco Express, Co-op and ethnic food stores. Dairy products, garlic, ginger, fresh vegetables and fruit, canned food and sliced bread were rare, but cauliflower was always in stock.

• Friday 20 March: borrowed books from the library after a message went out saying we could borrow up to 30 books and not return them until 30 June. Unlike what happened when the National Trust opened its parks and gardens to people free of charge, there were no crowds at the library.

• Tuesday 24 March: the PM announced the start of a three-week period of strict lockdown, where all bar key workers had to work from home, shops and restaurants etc. had to close, people aged 70 and above were advised to stay indoors for three months, and people were allowed outdoors just once a day, for necessities such as groceries, medicine and exercise.

• Wednesday 25 March: received a care pack from ThoughtShift with essentials like batteries, post-it notes, a notebook, and also hand cream, lip balm, pink and purple pens, erasers in the form of a cabbage, seal, and maize, and a Wispa bar.

• Thursday 26 March: gained a new Instagram follower called eddie_longdog, otherwise known as Ed, Dark Rogue Ed, or Edmund Blacksausage. Love the Blackadder reference, Ed!

• Friday 27 March: received a package of homemade rich dark chocolate brownies, baked and sent by Heather, my colleague and fellow blogger at Make Mess Mend.

• Saturday 28 March: started regrowing vegetables. First up was a leek from Waitrose. Later I’d try Romaine lettuce, spring onions, green pak choi and Chinese cabbage.

• Sunday 29 March: started painting watercolours of landscapes in Morocco, aiming to paint one a week, from holiday photos.

• Monday 30 March: followed the singing exercises set by Gareth Malone in his live vlog The Great British Home Chorus. The week’s song was ‘I’m Still Standing’ by Elton John.

• Thursday 2 April: made an embarrassing visit to the local Tesco Express for milk, where we came out with a lot of junk food because what we’d originally wanted, fresh fruit, vegetables and meat, were cordoned off for re-stocking, and we didn’t want to leave the shop nearly empty-handed.

• Friday 3 April: received a pack of sunflower seeds from the office and scouted a spot in the sunshine for my doomed entry into ThoughtShift’s sunflower growing competition.

• Saturday 4 April: visited the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose by watching a free video tour. Having watched the film starring Helen Mirren, it was cool to see the actual building! It has over 150 rooms and oddities like a staircase that leads to the ceiling and redwood furnishings painted in a lighter woodgrain look. The sun never shines through the house’s most expensive window because the window was built on the wrong side of the house. In the evening I took myself online to the Metropolitan Opera in New York for the first time – it was offering one new, free opera to stream every 24 hours!

• Sunday 5 April: watched a musical on the YouTube channel The Shows Must Go On, set up by Andrew Lloyd Webber to offer one new, free musical to watch every week.

• Monday 6 April: the start to a frustrating week, where I had bad times at work, concluded that I had drowned my sunflower, burnt the simplest biscuits in the oven, and missed a call with a friend by getting the day of the week wrong. Calmed my nerves by staring at the pink supermoon (more like burnt amber, I know it’s named “pink” after the spring blossoms) until my eyes couldn’t stay open any longer.

• Thursday 9 April: spirits up again after (winning) my company’s first virtual pub quiz. My friend Noel and I started our weekly Ghibli Netflix Party evenings, which I followed up by listening to the Ghibliotheque podcast.

• Friday 10 April: strolled beneath the pink and white blossoms in my neighbourhood, but could not identify the flowers.

• Saturday 11 April: tried out some games on Houseparty and went on a virtual ex-prisoner guided tour of Robben Island.

• Sunday 12 April: celebrated Easter with chocolate and cherry hot cross buns for breakfast, rosemary and garlic roast lamb for lunch, and ThoughtShift gifts of Easter eggs for dessert. Walked it off at sunset, when I saw a pheasant! Watched the film L’Odyssée in the afternoon, about the diver, explorer and filmmaker Jacques Cousteau who was largely responsible for the preservation of Antarctica, and followed up by visiting Antarctica in the evening: Scott’s Hut and a spot of civilian research, counting penguins.

• Monday 13 April: had to lie down and rest after suffering from space sickness when exploring the International Space Station. It took me ages to find the sleeping quarters as it was difficult to orientate when at many junctions you can go forward, backward, left, right, up and down. The station is a maze of corridor spaces and looks a mess at first sight. From every surface, wires hang, laptops rest, cameras are suspended, and tools, pens, or photos are secured. Storage bags and tanks line the floor area of some corridors, through which I guess astronauts float. The most common equipment is the laptop and camera, so if someone said “can you pass me the laptop” I would ask “which one of the 6 laptops in this room?” To add to the confusion, labels in quite a lot of areas are dominated by Russian. Food drawers are labeled in English though, and one of the largest food drawers is labeled ‘Dessert’.

• Tuesday 14 April: discovered a bluebell bank near my home.

• Wednesday 15 April – was asked by someone heading to the South Downs with a portable barbecue whether I could take a photo of him and his girlfriend, to which I replied “I’d rather not” and my Mum commented afterwards, “you should report them!” In the evening, I watched the Bolshoi’s production of Le Corsaire, a swashbuckling ballet loosely based on a poem by Byron that was first performed in Russia by the Bolshoi in the Kamenny Theatre. It dragged on, but had an exciting ending which involved the female lead dancing en pointe on a moving ship with very little space and that was also being wrecked.

• Thursday 16 April: the government (the PM was recovering from Coronavirus) extended the lockdown by three weeks.

• Saturday 18 April: did a 5k Run For Heroes, during which I passed through a swarm of midges which occupied my attention so that one section of the run passed by quite easily, and felt my heart soar as I rounded the last doable slope, which was flooded with daisies. And didn’t collapse.

• Sunday 19 April: toured round the Cranach: Artist & Innovator exhibition at Compton Verney in the morning; Cranach, whom I’d never heard of, was a seminal Renaissance artist! In the afternoon I discovered the first of Eastbourne’s three golf courses on a walk off the usual path from the Downs. It only took a pandemic and 15 years of living here! Also discovered Heritage Eastbourne’s blog, through which I am redressing my ignorance of local history. In the evening I watched the BBC’s redacted version of One World: Together At Home.

• Tuesday 21 April: saw that my leek had developed a bud overnight, received a colouring book and pencils from work, joined Guide Dogs UK in their attempt to break the Guinness World Record for the largest tea party Found out on 5 May that we did it, we broke the record which previously stood at 200 but now is 4.020 people in a virtual tea party!

• Wednesday 22 April: sniffed some pine trees at the golf course on Earth Day’s 50th anniversary.

• Thursday 23 April: watched Marriage Story on Netflix. A bit like the Japanese film After the Storm, which The Guardian reviewed as “actually taking place before the storm, during the storm – or maybe instead of the storm”, Marriage Story charts neither the marriage nor the breakdown. Rather it starts at the end of the marriage. Having managed to keep my cheeks dry, I then visited the Museum of Broken Relationships, where there are stories from people sharing their break up’s from all over the world, and which my colleague Anne-Charlotte had suggested to me. Then the tears came.

• Friday 24 April: watched Broken Wings by the English National Ballet, the first of several ballets I watched by this ballet company.

• Saturday 25 April: went to the National Theatre to see their 2017 production of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. This was the first of many Shakespeare plays I watched during lockdown, and the first of many National Theatre productions.

• Sunday 26 April: visited the Tate Modern and Tate Britain via the Tate YouTube channel in the morning, for the exhibitions on Andy Warhol and Aubrey Beardsley respectively. Brighton-born Beardsley produced a thousand works (which made me think of the Vienna Secession and Toulouse-Lautrec) and established his personal brand as a dandy and found fame before being shunned after fellow dandy and inspiration Oscar Wilde’s arrest and dying in financial insecurity in France at the age of 25 from the tuberculosis that he had inherited from birth. Continued the art theme by watching Becoming Matisse on BBC iPlayer in the evening and thought how similar Matisse and Van Gogh’s backgrounds (upper middle class) were, how they both had red beards and were drawn to bright colours, but yet how differently their lives turned out (one found fame and recognition during his lifetime and died in 1954, the other struggled throughout his life and committed suicide in 1890).

• Monday 27 April: joined in the National Theatre At Home Quiz, which was very difficult, and scored a poor 3 points out of 19.

• Wednesday 29 April: learnt that Waitrose’s Leckford Estate chestnut mushrooms taste like Chinese straw mushrooms.

• Saturday 2 May: discovered The Victorian Way, a YouTube series by English Heritage on Victorian recipes that Avis Crocombe, the head cook at Audley End House in the 1880s, would have used. Learnt where Saffron Walden got its name from, how much butter goes into macaroni cheese, about the three stages of butter churning, and that Christmas cake takes 6 hours to bake!

• Monday 4 May: joined in the #RAdailydoodle this week.

• Friday 8 May: walked around the neighbourhood to see how people were celebrating VE day, and was offered a slice of cake. Baked a lemon chiffon cake that would have used up almost 3 months worth of a British adult’s wartime egg rations.

• Saturday 9 May: learned how to Lindy Hop with English Heritage, and thanks to today’s Google Doodle I discovered that the first non-white football player to represent England did so during WWII and was half-Chinese! Frank Soo helped Stoke City rise to its highest position yet in the English Football League divisions, and it was his performance at this club that led to his selection for the national team. Frank was also the only football player to date of Asian heritage to have represented England. He lost his best playing years to the war, in which as a member of the RAF he sustained injuries that led to him having to pull out of what would have been his first fully official England game in 1946. After the war, he switched between a few English clubs as a player before becoming a manager for several clubs in Scandinavia, and managed Norway’s football team in the 1952 Summer Olympics.

• Sunday 10 May: the government in England, with the devolved national governments going separate ways, announced that from Wednesday there will be no limit on how many times you can leave home during the day, picnics and sunbathing in public will be allowed, drives from one place to another will be allowed for distances beyond 5 minutes drive away as long as return home is possible within the same day, and social distanced meetings with 2 people not of the same household will be allowed. In the meantime, I spent the last day of the bank holiday weekend virtually walking among the tulips in the Keukenhof gardens in Holland.

• Tuesday 12 May: my collector’s edition, anniversary issue of Country Living magazine came through the post today! One of 2,000 free giveaway copies if you signed up in time in April. This May, Country Living celebrates 35 years.

• Thursday 14 May: after reading that chickpea water could be used to make vegan meringue, I tested this using leftover water from a can of chickpeas that had gone into a curry two nights before. I also used leftover egg whites from eggs the yolks of which had gone into a hollandaise sauce three nights before to make a traditional meringue. The result was that the chickpea meringue turned out perfectly – it had a needle-thin crust on the outside and was airy and light as a feather inside – while the egg white meringue I think needed longer in the oven – it was bigger, and came out like a sticky sweet white foam with a peach-coloured top.

• Friday 15 May: continuing to cut down on food waste right from the prepping stage I roasted cauliflower leaves today, which tasted like cauliflower flavoured cabbage.

• Sunday 16 May: discovered that many of the songs I like come from Stephen Sondheim’s musicals after listening to Take Me to the World: A Sondheim 90th Birthday Celebration on YouTube (the composer’s birthday was back in March).

• Thursday 21 May: finally experienced the weekly Clap for Carers as we happened to be on a post-supper stroll at 8pm. No one claps where I live, but on the street we were on at 8pm, people were clapping outside their homes, ringing a bell, or banging on their balcony railing, and passing cars honked. It was timely as on that very day, Annemarie Plas, the woman who came up with the idea, said that people should stop clapping next Thursday, on the 10^th week.

• Friday 22 May: the most calming thing I did during this Mental Health Awareness Week was to watch Moon Water at the Sadler Wells Theatre.

• Saturday 23 May: met up with Amelia, my only friend who lives in the county, for the first time since the lockdown for a socially distanced walk on the hills.

• Sunday 24 May: did a #VirtualSketch in Riga with my friend Qi. The PM announced that from 1 June schools, colleges and nurseries are set to open to more children.

• Monday 25 May: made lentil bolognese for the first time, and it tasted exactly like the original spaghetti bolognese! Only the texture is a little different. Joined the National Theatre At Home Quiz, and got higher results but that was because the questions were easier this month. Today the PM announced that high street shops, department stores and shopping centres across England can reopen from 1 June once they are COVID-19 secure and can show customers will be kept safe. Meanwhile the government showed how not seriously they were taking the virus by allowing the advisor to the PM, Dominic Cummings, to give a statement in the Downing Street rose garden explaining why he drove to Durham from London during lockdown and why he would do it again instead of apologising for breaking lockdown rules.

• Thursday 28 May: the PM announced that groups of up to six will be able to meet outdoors in England from Monday 1 June, provided strict social distancing guidelines are followed.

• Saturday 30 May: I missed seeing the International Space Station in today’s night sky, as I only found out about it when I returned to work on Monday. Tried to watch Glyndebourne’s production of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, but couldn’t get into it. I did, however, become hooked on Voi che sapete che cosa è amor, which is now one of my favourite arias.

• Sunday 31 May: went to the seafront for the first time since the lockdown began with Amelia for a socially distanced walk. We had a look at a junk sale happening a street down from my home. She brought her puppy with her, Mr Binksy – do follow him and make him an Instagram star!

• Tuesday 2 June: for dessert, I opened the jar of tayberry jam that we had bought from a yard sale we passed on one of our walks and had it with Rodda’s clotted cream and a scone, cream tea at home! On our post-supper walk we saw an incredible sunset from the golf course, and came away with a golf ball that had been left behind in the grass.

• Thursday 4 June: masks were declared mandatory on public transport by the government.

• Friday 5 June: I put the beheaded top of a pineapple in water to see if anything would re-grow from it. The answer, a week later, was “no”.

• Sunday 7 June: chatted with an elderly couple in Meads village while dog-walking with Amelia, after which I want to try kayaking upstream from Lancing and back downstream with the tide as the gentleman likes to do! It helps to have a friendly naturalised Canadian as a walking companion.

• Wednesday 10 June: for supper today I lazily flavoured pasta by frying the toppings in garlic and orange zest soaked oil, and mixing the zest in completely. The pasta ended up tasting sweet, and I had to open a tapenade to make the dish palatable. Today the government announced that from Monday non-essential shops could open.

• Thursday 11 June: I applied to renew my new passport via the Post Office, hoping that it would arrive in time as HM Passport Office had stopped promising turnaround times and discouraging people from applying. Today the government announced that people who lived alone by themselves could choose another such person to be in a bubble with; they can then meet with and go inside the houses of one another without keeping distance.

• Saturday 13 June – tried out a face mask that my Mum had sewn for the first time, on our weekly trip to the supermarket.

• Thursday 18 June: went to Brighton to pick up the rest of my belongings from the office and saw a mannequin wearing a face mask, came across the Real Junk Food Project where you “pay as you feel”, saw a Rick and Morty graffiti, spotted a pretty letterbox with the relief of a horse and rider, saw a seagull eating the wing of another seagull carcass, and came across a bouldering wall. My favourite Chinese supermarket in Brighton for non-fresh food was closed (only open Mondays and Fridays) so we made use of our cool bag and money that we’d brought especially at another inferior place, where they had very few Nissin noodles and only strawberry flavour Pocky sticks: so I bought Nongshim noodles and Pepero.

• Friday 19 June: watched Romeo and Juliet: Beyond Words, which was the iconic ballet set to Prokofiev’s music but filmed on a Verona-like location in Hungary. The weather, the use of space that was not limited to a bare stage, made the choreography feel more contemporary and less classical.

• Wednesday 24 – Friday 26 June: had a mini beach holiday outside of working hours, which involved getting a Harry Ramsden fish and chips to takeaway for lunch, the first non-home-cooked meal I’d eaten since lockdown, eating it on the pebble beach, starting a new book while sunbathing on the beach, coming back to a chilled beer before resuming work, taking post-prandial strolls on the promenade, submerging myself in the cold sea, and investigating the rock pools where I found a dead crab. I also saw someone else lose their ice cream to a dive-bombing seagull. During these days I learnt ‘Country Road, Take Me Home’ and ‘Red River Valley’ on the recorder after hearing the songs in Whisper of the Heart and From Up On Poppy Hill during my weekly Netflix Party nights. I also received my passport on Thursday, well within HM Passport Office’s usual turnaround time of three weeks, meaning I could actually go on holiday now once air corridors have been set up.

• Saturday 4 July: while reading about the history of Madagascar, I came across Welsh missionaries David Jones and David Griffiths, which made me think of my fellow Brasenostril David Jones-Griffiths. Almost binge-watched all of ‘The Luminaries’ on BBC iPlayer. It was like a cross between Les Misérables, Dracula, and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

• Sunday 5 July: walked all the way from my home to Sovereign Harbour and back, from points 1 to 11, an over-4-hours walk. Found an ice cream kiosk that is hygienic enough (they give you the soft serve cone wrapped in a napkin). Bumped into my primary school classmate Joy and her family. On the way back, in the residential closes an ice cream van tinkled along. Opposite Princes Road we saw a man was clapping as if it were Clap For Carers evening. Turns out it was the 75th anniversary of the NHS.

• Tuesday 14 July – Thursday 16 July: feasted for 3 days on Morliny Berlinki Párky, cold sausage, Morliny sauerkraut and mushroom pierogi, and meat croquettes with the intention of ‘holidaying’ in Poland through Netflix and food. Found a thrilling TV series called 1983 to watch, and found that the Poles on screen ate Vietnamese noodles most of the time! The dystopian alternative history drama was too realistic to what probably Russia and China are like today, too close to present day affairs for comfort. The series’ creators very clearly intended for there to be more episodes but another series has not been confirmed yet, and it aired in 2018! So we may have watched it for nothing, but at least I learnt that Poland is very similar to the Czech Republic in that it has a large Vietnamese population and shares similar words for ‘good’ and greetings (the extent of my Czech).

• Saturday 25 July: watched the first ever play to be live-streamed from the Theatre of Epidauros in Greece. I had visited the theatre twice in my life, but never seen a play there. The stage was impressive as always, but the play disappointing – how much better it would have been if it had been performed in ancient Greek, with more adherence to tradition! The play performed was Aeschylus’ Persians, the oldest extant play in the history of mankind. But there was nothing old about the performance, the cast spoke in modern Greek wearing modern, minimalist clothes and the rhythm of the original script only shone through now and then.

• Saturday 1 August: walked from Pevensey to the Sovereign Harbour, passing houses that face onto the beach, including one with a front yard where stood a fake but life-size and very realistic horse. Stayed near the harbour there to wade in the shallow water on the beach as the tide went out, and found a razor clam! Amelia said I could have found more by sprinkling salt onto the sand.

• Monday 3 August: my Mum and I took advantage of the Eat Out to Help Out Scheme to dine at the first of many cafés and restaurants we’d never been to before.

• Saturday 7 August: went down to the beach to swim and stayed there until the tide was out at almost its furthest.

• Saturday 15 August: we boiled a lobster for supper! One each, and it was much easier to get stuck into at home than in a restaurant – I’ve been known to send bits of shell flying halfway across the room.

• Sunday 16 August: an impending thunderstorm, Amelia’s puppy duties the night before and my recovery from food poisoning meant that Amelia and I stayed local. Binksy met a part-wolf-dog named Bear on the Eastbourne promenade. I had been there for Binksy’s first walk in a rainstorm, and now I was honoured (though Binksy probably wasn’t) to be present for his first walk in a thunderstorm. We were walking Binksy when the torrential rain started, followed by thunder and lightning. The sky had cleared again by the time we were in Lewes, where I got to see Amelia’s new (temporary) home for the first time! She showed me round the nature reserve, we bumped into a man walking his greyhound-cross(?) 3 times, and Binksy met another (blonde) long-haired dachshund named Bruce! We ended the afternoon by trying the Flowerpot dessert at Bill’s, a passionfruit cheesecake in a ruby chocolate flower pot with chocolate soil, strawberries & edible flowers. It looked better than it tasted, but it did look stunning.

• Thursday 20 August: ate my first soft serve ice cream of the year, and was sensible enough to bring more coins as the original £4 in my purse would have only paid for 1 regular ice cream (costs £2.20, a lot more than the 99p they used to be) and my Mum and I would have had to share! We were happy to see that the cone was served in a napkin. Watched the seagulls like a hawk while we ate standing on the beach. On our walk back home, we stopped to watch a group playing beach volleyball, with a volleyball that looked like Wilson from the film Castaway.

• Friday 21 August: learnt that if you mix carrot water (leftover from boiling the carrots) with lobster water (leftover from boiling the lobsters) and leave the bowl in the fridge overnight you get something approaching the colour of the Innocent drink, Bolt From the Blue.

• Saturday 22 – Monday 31 August: staycation at The Barleycorn Inn for 9 nights, my first and only holiday of the year. You can read about it in another post of mine.

• Sunday 20 September: walked to Birling Gap, where Pixipixel was setting up to film for the upcoming TV drama Grace, and back.

• Thursday 24 September: the NHS COVID-19 contact tracing app launched, but my iPhone was not a high enough version (13 and above) for me to use it. So much for nationwide tracing.

• Monday 12 October: the PM introduced a 3 tiered system of local COVID Alert Levels in England.

• Thursday 5 November: this year’s second period of national lockdown ‘Stay at Home’ started.

• Wednesday 2 December: the second national lockdown ended and the UK returned to tiered COVID restrictions. Eastbourne was in Tier 2.

• Tuesday 8 December: the first person in the UK received the Pfizer jab.

• Wednesday 23 December: 2 cases of a new SARS-CoV-2 variant, which originated in South Africa, were identified in the UK.

• Saturday 26 December: most areas of the UK moved up a tier. Eastbourne moved up to Tier 4.

• Friday 1 January: watched Big Ben ring in the New Year and new decade on TV and watched the fireworks and light display on the Thames. The news reel announcements of events in 2020 and the absence of the singing of Auld Lang Syne made the occasion sombre rather than lighten our spirits for 2021.

• Monday 4 January: the first people received the Oxford University/AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine.

• Wednesday 6 January: the UK began its third national lockdown, we were under ‘Stay at Home’ orders and the COVID threat level moved from level 4 to level 5.

• Saturday 9 January: watched Skyscraper, which I found to be like Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, with shabbier villains and a cooler hero – Tom Cruise needed special kit to climb up the world’s tallest building, but Dwayne Johnson climbs an even taller fictional skyscraper, with an artificial leg…and just needs rope and duct tape.

• Wednesday 24 February: had my first free flu jab and found to my shock that I wasn’t offered it because the surgery had jabs to spare but rather that I was on the at risk register. All nations in the UK were moved from COVID threat level 5 to 4.

• Saturday 27 February: saw a Snow Moon rise out of the sea at sunset, so big that it could be mistaken for a second sun.

• Monday 8 March: schools reopened and we were now able to meet one other person not in our household for recreation as well as for exercise, the first step on the road out of lockdown.

• Wednesday 17 March: made my first donation to Brasenose College, some days after being contacted by Shreyasi, a fellow Brasenose Classicist of colour. She enlightened me on the history of non-Caucasian Classicists at Oxford University, and introduced me to the Christian Cole Society, named after the said ‘first’ student.

• Monday 22 March: went for a walk at lunch saw that I could officially fit 7 daisies in my footprint, one of the indicators of spring. I could, which made sense, as the Spring Equinox was on Saturday.

• Monday 29 March: the Stay at Home rule ends.

• Wednesday 31 March: saw what looked like a cliff rescue for the first time. There were two helicopters and two coastguards, one of whom had been abseiling (he was just coming up the cliff face of Beachy Head when I walked past). I didn’t go to the edge of the cliff so I didn’t know what was happening below. It was ironic, to have a crowd standing at the edge of the cliff top looking at what might’ve been an unfortunate result of someone standing too close to the edge.

• Good Friday 2 – Easter Monday 5 April: filled in the cracks in a door at home and added a fresh coat of paint on it, to prepare for a couple that viewed our flat on Saturday, was gifted an Easter egg in a nest by our neighbour (whom we had helped with the groceries the year before), roasted a lamb shank, went out to admire the daffodils, watched the Oxford Cambridge Boat Race which was rowed on the river Ouse in Ely this year due to the pandemic, played some games and watched some videos from the Cambridge Festival, and found that the Traveler IQ game I loved to play when I was school-age no longer works.

• Friday 9 April: on my lunch break, Joy took me to see the ‘Holy Well’, a pool of freshwater that is fed by water trickling down the chalk cliff from above. There were two men sitting by the ‘well’ talking to a third, with shovels laid down near by. What in summer last year was a pile of pebbles had now been excavated and large chalk rocks had been placed around the pool to keep the water in. Joy showed me a video of the first re-opening of the ‘well’ back in 2010.

• Sunday 11 April: went to the UpCountry Stone Cross garden centre and walked to see the Stone Cross windmill. Along the busy car road there are large, messy hedges. On the way back we saw a whole tribe of what I think are blue tits flitting to and from and amid the branches. And one solitary robin holding the best lookout position in his hedge. His song was loud and clear, and it’s a marvel that a tiny bird can cut through the noise of the traffic where a human voice struggles.

• Monday 12 April: non-essential stores are allowed to open.

• Sunday 18 April: signed up to BritBox.

• Saturday 1 May: walked the Chasm Explorer trail at Devil’s Dyke. The difference from my first visit, which was in summer, was that this time there were Dartmoor ponies, rain, and a perilous scramble to the last turnstile.

• Sunday 9 May: walked Christopher Somerville’s circular walk from Rodmell to Harvey’s Cross and back, which had been published in The Times on July 4th 2020.

• Monday 17 May: we’re able to meet up to 6 people or another household and visit and dine in places indoors in England. Outdoors, we can gather in groups of up to 30.

• Sunday 23 May: seventeen years after first living in Eastbourne, I finally saw the Seven Sisters from the east, at Seaford Head.

• Wednesday 26 May: attended the Opening Gala of the 11-day virtual Hay Festival.

• Friday 28 May: signed up to the Sussex Wildlife Trust’s 8-day beginner’s course on the Butterflies of Sussex.

Books I read

• Our Man in Hibernia: Ireland, The Irish and Me, by Charlie Connelly made me nostalgic for my past holidays in Limerick and Dublin. The two Irish phrases I liked the most were (1) Tá mé ar mhuin na muite (lit. ‘I’m on the pig’s back’, meaning I’m doing well), and (2) Tóg go bog é (lit. ‘take it easy’), which is the Irish wording for the STOP sign. Though it is written in a lighthearted manner, there are sombre and sorrowful paragraphs about the psyche of Irish immigrants in England.
• Mamushka: Recipes from Ukraine & beyond, by Olia Hercules. From this recipe book I made Ukrainian soup (borscht) to serve 8 while the recipe specified only 4. Ukrainians are hearty eaters! I also baked medovyk, or Ukrainian honey cake, twice. The acidity from the lemon flavoured sour cream and bitterness from the pecans cuts through the sweetness of the honey beautifully.
• How to Hide an Empire: A Short History of the Greater United States, by Daniel Immerwah (yes, he’s related to Clara Immerwahr!). This book really changed my perception of the U.S.A. and I had to revise some of my perspectives on modern American history. At school, were I had studied American history from the Civil War onwards, all the emphasis was on civil rights on the mainland, narrowed down to the campaigns of women, African Americans and Native Americans. We did not learn about all the other peoples that the U.S.A. affected and often times exploited and wilfully ignored.
• The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, by Suzanne Collins. The prequel to The Hunger Games, which was fine, but the ending spoiled what I saw as the whole point of the book, to show that a villain can have more dimensions to their character. Serves me right for reading books that are categorised as young adult.
• The Testaments, by Margaret Atwood. It was my second ever audiobook, and I though the reading was superb. Only realised at the end, in the writer’s note, that the person reading the chapter titles was Margaret!
• A Beginner’s Guide To Japan, by Pico Iyer, a journalist expat who is married to a Japanese woman and had been living in Japan for several decades before this book was published. I got to know a little bit about Japan (where I’ve never traveled) through his carefully considered observations.
• Tiny Histories: Trivial Events & Trifling Decisions that changed British History, by Dixe Wills. I particularly liked the tiny history of (1) all the things that happened because Robert Clive’s pistol, with which he tried to commit suicide, was unreliable, (2) how and why mayonnaise was invented, (3) the squeezy lemon’s role in trademark infringement legislation, (4) custard powder that’s also a love story, (5) how Charles Dickens very didn’t get to board the HMS Beagle, (6) how Edward Jenner very nearly did sail with Captain Cook and didn’t find the cure for smallpox, (7) and how an MI5 officer forgot his passport on a chase to stop 2 members of the Cambridge Five spy ring escaping justice in Britain.
• The Conqueror historical fiction series, by Conn Iggulden. The story of Genghis Khan and those who inherited the empire he created is told in a sometimes sweeping, oftentimes intimate, cinematic style. Iggulden writes the most epic battle scenes, and no character that he gives a name to in the series is ever token or, worse, unnecessary (or I am too lazy to know the plethora of characters in Russian novels with their triple names plus nicknames that may or may not feature in their entirety and are almost guaranteed to have a part that’s identical to another character’s name). The Mongols were unbelievably resilient and ruthless, and dangerously effective. If only the super-rich out there could see that by possessing extremely little you can own the world, and the politicians of today could see that by not concerning yourself with image and legacy you can fulfil your potential and go down in history.
• The Remains of the Day, by Kazuo Ishiguro. The idiosyncrasies of an English butler are hard to relate to or feel anything about! Though Mr Stevens has a habit of overthinking things and that I do tend to do. At the start of the book, I found him rather annoying, then was annoyed at myself because I’m a bit like him. Still, I got through the last quarter of the book in one sitting, so something just “clicked” for me at the 3-quarter mark. “Indeed – why should I not admit it? – at that moment, my heart was breaking.” has to be one of the most potent, unquotable sentences in literature.

Met operas I watched

• The first production I saw at the Met Opera was Bizet’s Les Pêcheurs de Perles, and it was the first to be performed there in 100 years. Bizet was just 24 years old when the opera premièred! I loved the opening scene with the pearl divers in the visual effects created ocean. The opera is set in what was then Ceylon (modern day Sri Lanka), and is about love and friendship. This was the third opera I had ever seen, after Elektra (at the Wiener Staatsoper on a trip to Vienna) and Carmen (on YouTube after visiting Seville), and between Strauss and Bizet, I prefer Bizet.
• Aida was the opera at the top of my short watchlist (I am not a fan of opera) and is my favourite opera. It is set in Ancient Egypt and is about forbidden love, unrequited love and patriotic duty. The production I saw had the most amazing stage sets, live horses, and even some ballet (now this I am a fan of). According to the leading ladies, Verdi’s music and lyrics are perfect, and all you must do to stand out from previous interpretations is to be more diligent than past performers in following the composer’s instructions.
• Mozart’s Così fan tutte was fun to watch for the circus; it was set on Coney Island!
• Puccini’s Madama Butterfly featured puppets, sky lanterns and a fan dance, and I liked that traditional Japanese elements were incorporated.
• Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier I had never heard of prior to reading about it in Haruki Murakami’s novel Killing Commendatore earlier this year. The stage set and special effects were the least interesting out of all the operas I had watched on the Met’s website so far, but the post-performance interviews were the most interesting and included the wig designer who was cast as the Marschallin’s hairdresser, the mature female lead who played a teenage boy who pretended to be a girl at one point (Octavian), and the animals that have graced the Met’s stage.
• Britten’s Peter Grimes I would not have endured had it not been a matter of the newspaper’s recommendation (I read an article a while back about music that people who wanted to visit the countryside during the lockdown but couldn’t should listen to), the opera’s cultural significance (it is the English composer Benjamin Britten’s most famous opera), and my pride (this production’s director lived Hastings, the next town along from my second hometown of Eastbourne, and the stage set is based on the wooden fishermen’s houses there). The backdrop never changed and the all characters were hard to like and hard on the eye. Yet it stood out from the other operas I had watched so far, in that it was ambiguous throughout (opera plot lines in my experience are always resolved) and in the interviews section with cast and crew they also skipped to Aldeburgh in Suffolk where the story is set and gave us an introduction to Britten and the museum there that houses a complete collection of his music, which is said to be the largest museum collection in the world for a single composer (nearly 800 manuscripts).
• Nabucco was written by Verdi when he was 28 years old, and being of almost the same age, I applaud that. But I was not enraptured by the opera. It is set in Jerusalem, where Fenena is prisoner at the start of the opera, and Babylon, where Nabucco, Fenena’s father, is king. So far, so good. However, the delivery I’d seen before: as seen in plays at the National Theatre in London, the revolving stage backdrop was split into two halves, one set in each city; and the plot was similar to King Lear.
• I did not think I would like any opera more than Aida, but Puccini’s Turandot surpassed it for me in the grandiosity of the music, which also incorporated some oriental elements; the story, which showed the power of love better than any other opera to date; and the scenery, which depicted imperial China in all its glory and barbarity. Also, one of my favourite arias, Nessun Dorma, is from this opera!
• Bizet’s Carmen is the opera that I’m most familiar with, and this production of it was hot! The leads I had already seen in Nabucco, and Anna Netrebko is my favourite singer out of all the operas I had watched so far, she brings out the fire in female passion. They had the Seville amphitheatre on stage, contemporary dance and flamenco. This was the most sensual opera I had seen and still my favourite opera.
• Puccini’s Le Bohème I think must have inspired Moulin Rouge the film: both stories feature a girl from the Latin Quarter who chooses a rich lover and dies of tuberculosis. They sheer number of people they got to fill the streets of the Latin Quarter made the opera look like a film set, it was the first opera at the Met that used all 3 of the stage wagons available, and the crew numbered around 100! It had another one of my favourite songs, Quando m’en vo sung by several lovers intertwining with each other. In the interview at the end, one man commented that this was the one of the rare operas by Puccini that had characters you could actually feel sorry for. The interview with the “supers” was also interesting, one of them was Tosca’s stuntwoman who leapt to her death from the Castel Sant’ Angelo.

Musicals I watched on YouTube

• Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, starring Donny Osmond, brought back memories of my time in primary school and starred many now-famous actors.
• Jesus Christ Superstar, at the O2 and starring Mel C. and Tim Minchin, I watched over Easter. If you don’t watch it, play it for the songs. ‘Jesus’ hits some really high notes and has the hairstyle, frown and torso akin to Poldark.
• The Phantom of the Opera plot was unfamiliar to me after many years of neglect.
• Love Never Dies was a good sequel to the Phantom of the Opera in terms of plot but not in terms of music, of which I only remember the twelve notes (“so beautiful”).
• The YouTube channel branched out beyond musicals written by Andrew Lloyd Webber which meant I got to watch the NBC production of Hairspray, starring Ariana Grande. Hairspray was the second to most recent musical I’ve watched live at the theatre (I haven’t for many years), I remember we the audience getting up and dancing for the final song, rather than just applauding. The NBC version made me feel the beat too!
• The Wiz was not what I expected. Where was “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and “Follow The Yellow Brick Road”? But as it turned out, this adaptation of The Wizard of Oz was fun too, with some just as catchy songs, including one that I had first heard and fell in love with in the TV series Pose (“Home”).
• I would not recommend watching Peter Pan. I was not used to a middle-aged woman playing Peter, and I found the character of Peter annoying. The musical reversed my childhood wonder at Neverland and the only redeeming thing about it was Smee.
• 42nd Street may be outdated in terms of the plot and sentiment, but it is a tap dancing extravaganza.
• Kinky Boots has a ballad called ‘Not My Father’s Son’ that made me think of Pose, the drama. The struggles the musical portrays are the same as those the characters in Pose goes through, namely of being shunned and abused for being different, or of wanting to change but not yet knowing exactly what you want to achieve.
• The Olivier award-winning adaptation of The Railway Children from York Theatre Royal. The play reminded me that when life is tough, children can be the most resilient and resourceful members of the family.

Ghibli (style) films I watched

• The Tale of The Princess Kaguya is a painstakingly hand-drawn animation in which you can see the pen marks. It’s set in the Heian period and I learnt some things through watching it, for example that Japanese noblewomen painted their teeth black. It is the most expensive Japanese film ever made!
• Princess Mononoke features gods and demons, a magical forest, strong female characters, and a surprising amount of gore. This princess couldn’t be more different from Kaguya. I discovered Hedgehog in the Fog afterwards, one of the inspirations for Princess Mononoke and Hayao Miyaziki’s favourite film.
• Kiki’s Delivery Service was relatable, and had a funny black cat called Jiji that brought to mind Salem from Sabrina the Teenage Witch and Luna from Sailor Moon. Kiki’s leaving home recalled Paddington Bear. I wish it didn’t end so abruptly, the excitement from the final scene barely settles before the credits roll!
• Castle in the Sky involves a quest to find a kingdom in the sky called Laputa by the military, pirates, and a boy named Pazu (who has fingers of steel). It was Studio Ghibli’s first film, and though it wasn’t a strong start for the studio it became a TV staple; even though I hadn’t seen the film I recognised the music straightaway.
• Howl’s Moving Castle was my favourite film so far with regards to the story (the most creative Ghibli film I think I’ll see, though undercut by uninspired place names), the characterisation and the sound effects. I complete agree with Ghibliotheque that this film is jukebox Ghibli, there are so many iconic moments.
• Spirited Away is an enchanted forest (clearing) type film. It felt to me, a Classicist, like a mixture of classic ancient Greek myths, but Noel found a great video about the Japanese folklore that Miyazaki might have been referencing, and also told me about the theory that the bathhouse was a brothel and the protagonist Chihiro a child slave.
• My Neighbour Totoro features one of anime’s most recognisable characters, Totoro. Many elements of the story and even a character – I didn’t know soot could be cute – made it into Spirited Away over a decade later. What I did not know that this sweet tale might have been inspired by the Sayama Incident, a murder case…
• Arrietty is a retelling of The Borrowers. I liked the music, but the Ghibliotheque presenters hated it! It was bittersweet, reflecting the “emo” influence of Yonebayashi (this was his directorial debut at Studio Ghibli) to an otherwise Miyazaki-flavoured film. I most enjoyed spotting the details inside Arrietty’s home.
• Whisper of the Heart captures well what it feels like to be in love for the first time and got me singing Country Road all week. I spotted the reference to Porco Rosso (grandfather clock) and Kiki’s Delivery Service (witch on a broomstick decoration) but not My Neighbour Totoro (book in the library). I still think Miyazaki can’t end films.
• The Cat Returns was bizarre and completely the opposite of Whisper of the Heart: clumsy, rough, slapstick. The reward the protagonist gets for saving a cat from being run over made me never want to save a cat. I thought it was a childish, simplistic cartoon, which none of the Ghibli films I’d watched so far were and was my least favourite.
• From Up On Poppy Hill was another high school romance, directed by Hayao Miyazaki’s son, who overcomplicated the plot and didn’t make the animation come to life as well as his father does. I loved the students’ clubhouse, but felt like reading the story in a manga would have been no different to watching the film.
• Ocean Waves was my second least favourite film. It had a manipulative girl and two hanger-on boys who had a bit of a saviour complex. I liked the girl’s bun, which had a ribbon entwined in it, and the bento boxes they ate at school. Mainly it just made me wonder and shudder at what boys find attractive in girls.
• Only Yesterday was about a 27 year old woman who goes to the countryside to pick safflowers and reminisce on her childhood. Only the animated character looked much older than 27. The presenters of Ghibliotheque liked the experimental almost documentary style of the film, but the story (or lack of) was too mundane for my liking.
• When Marnie Was There was like From Up On Poppy Hill, a gorgeous and romantic film with an unnecessary convoluted relationship reveal. I preferred how it focused more on the emotions of the protagonist, an awkward girl with anxiety, and less on the explanation. As expected, the backdrops were sensational.
• Tales from Earthsea was my least favourite film. Watching the film did not make me want to read Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea fantasy series, even though the books have the clout of Narnia and Lord of the Rings in Japan. The landscape is beautiful enough, but the characters plain and 2D and the dialogue poor and unexciting.
• Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind had my favourite heroine. Only she could inspire me to love creatures that look like giant insects crossed with the sandworms from Dune. This film predated the founding of Studio Ghibli, but echoes of it are clearly visible in the Studio’s first film, Castle in the Sky.
• Ponyo is a retelling of The Little Mermaid, in a more creative way, a more accessible way for boys, and an even more child-friendly way than Disney’s version. The gorgeous flooded world Miyazaki created in Spirited Away is reprised here. You’ll want to cook yourself ramen à la Ponyo and visit Tomonoura after watching this.
• Pom Poko features shapeshifting anthropomorphic racoons that use their testicles as a weapon, and has a serious point to make about protecting the environment. Can you believe it, the two go together very nicely. It also features an incredibly fantastical and complicated parade that, if real, would be on a must-see-before-you-die list.
• Porco Rosso had a jazz score that I adored and ended up in my top 5 list. Its plot had a bit of everything: romance, action, comedy, tragedy, fantasy, historical references. And it felt just the right length. I’m ashamed to think how I judged the film by its cover, thinking “I wouldn’t enjoy a film about a pig-man so I’ll leave it ’til one of the last.”
• The Wind Rises was the Ghibli film that I most recently watched prior to this Ghibli marathon. I was fascinated by the history of it when I first watched it, but this time I found it too melodramatic. What is enjoyable is Miyazaki’s homage to aeronautics, present throughout his career but which reaches a pinnacle in this film.
• The Castle of Cagliostro has a plot that reads like a James Bond film, featuring a casino, a car chase, a damsel in distress, and a booby-trapped villain’s lair. Except our hero Lupin isn’t a lonely, broody spy but a cheeky master of heists whom you – and the Interpol inspector in this film – can’t help but love. This is, again, a pre-Ghibli film.
• My Neighbours The Yamadas is a film-length compilation of comic strip episodes about the Yamada family, with that kind of humour. I like Calvin and Hobbes comics, so I enjoyed this. Because it was about East Asian family life, it was relatable. Which is perhaps why western film critics didn’t find it funny but I did.
• Mary and The Witch’s Flower was the first film to come out of Studio Ponoc, the breakaway studio formed by Ghibli alumni. British in feel rather than the typically Pan-European setting for Ghibli films, it was like a mash up of the Castle in the Sky, Kiki’s Delivery Service and Harry Potter.

If you’re not sure which film you’d like the most, the BBC has bitesize introductions to the Ghibli films on Netflix. My top 5 are Whisper of the Heart (bar the ending), My Neighbour Totoro, Spirited Away, Porco Rosso, and Pom Poko.

If you’re hankering for a Ghibli staycation when the lockdown relaxes, head to Wales. Howl’s Moving Castle is based on the story of the same name by the Welsh author Diana Wynne Jones, and it was during Miyazaki’s stay in Wales in 1984, when he witnessed the miners’ strikes, that he got the inspiration for the opening scene in Castle in the Sky and the resilience of Pazu (this boy has determination, grit and stronger fingertips than Ethan Hunt).

“I was in Wales just after the miners’ strike. I really admired the way the miners’ unions fought to the very end for their jobs and communities, and I wanted to reflect the strength of those communities in my film. I saw so many places with abandoned machinery, abandoned mines – the fabric of the industry was there, but no people. It made a strong impression on me.”

Director Hayao Miyazaki on his inspiration for Castle in the Sky

If you want to extend your Ghibli staycation with a Ponoc staycation, then visit the gardens in Shropshire that are listed in the National Garden Scheme: it’s what Hiromasa Yonebayashi did as part of his research for Mary and The Witch’s Flower.

“Clouds in Britain were very different from Japanese clouds. They seemed very close and they went on forever. They really stirred the imagination. I felt like those clouds had been an inspiration for British writers to create lots of fantasy works. It looked as if some hidden castle were about to emerge from them.”

Director Hiromasa Yonebayashi on the inspiration for the clouds in Mary and The Witch’s Flower

Shakespeare plays I watched

• The National Theatre’s 2017 production of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, directed by Simon Godwin, was best performance of a Shakespeare play I had ever witnessed to date. It starred Tamsin Grieg as Malvolia – changed from Malvolio and reinterpreted as a more sympathetic character, contrary, some might say, to Shakespeare’s intention. I thought that in turning other male characters into female character, the director accentuated the intensity and range of female infatuation, wit, guile and malice in Shakespeare’s writing, which I think the flirtatious but ruthless and notoriously single Elizabeth I would have recognised in herself. This production also included Hamlet’s most famous lines transposed into a drag queen’s song. I always used to prefer Shakespeare’s tragedies and didn’t find his comedies so funny, but this play made me laugh a lot and I learnt some witty exploration related similes:

“You are now sailed into the north of my lady’s opinion, where you will hang like an icicle on a Dutchman’s beard.”

“He does smile his face into more lines than is in the new map with the augmentation of the Indies.”

from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night

• The National Theatre’s 2018 production of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, directed by Simon Godwin, starring Ralph Fiennes and Sophie Okonedo, was not one I enjoyed. Antony is not as eloquent as other main characters of Shakespeare’s is he? He couldn’t even kill himself properly. Rather, it is other characters who have the best lines:

Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety.”

Enonbarbus on Cleopatra, in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra

“The breaking of so great a thing should make a greater crack.”

Caesar reacting to the news of Antony’s suicide, in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra

“Give me my robe, put on my crown; I have Immortal longings in me.”

part of Cleopatra’s last soliloquy, in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra

• The Shakespeare’s Globe 2018 production of The Two Noble Kinsmen, directed by Barrie Rutter, had lots of singing and the most complex Morris dance I’d ever seen. It was the last play (co-written) by Shakespeare before his death three years later, inspired by The Knight’s Tale in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. It has the largest number of female main character voices for any opening scene in a Shakespeare play!
• The National Theatre’s 2014 production of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, directed by Josie Rourke and starring Tom Hiddleston. I love listening to his voice anyway, and it was good to see him acting on stage, having seen him only on TV (Wallander, The Night Manager) and film (War Horse, Crimson Peak, and as Loki). The best way I could have been introduced to Coriolanus! While Coriolanus was infuriating at times, I was 100% behind Deborah Findlay’s portrayal of Coriolanus’ mother and would happily watch anything else with her in it.
• The Shakespeare’s Globe’s 2019 production of The Merry Wives of Windsor, directed by Elle While, in which beer was spat at the audience, water emptied from a shoe onto the audience, and a member of the audience was hugged, all by Falstaff, who sported an accent that I thought was Mancunian, which made him rather endearing and softened the sauciness of the script.
• The Shakespeare’s Globe’s 2013 production of The Tempest, directed by Jeremy Herrin, starred Roger Allam as Prospero, Colin Morgan as Ariel and Jessie Buckley as Miranda. The actors captured well the bitterness, the meekness, and the innocence of their characters, and the treatment of Caliban was uncomfortable, as slavery and colonisation should be.
• The RSC’s 2014 production of Much Ado About Nothing at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, directed by Christopher Luscombe, surpassed Twelfth Night and became my favourite play so far. It was set around the WWI period, at Christmastime. I thought it was as if Shakespeare had watched Romeo and Juliet and decided to do one better. There are so many similarities between the two plays – love, best friends, marriage between two houses, poison, pretend death, near duel – but the characters in this play were more interesting, much less foolish, the love between them Beatrice and Benedick more powerful, and the balance between comedy and tragedy in the play was just right. Like WWI, the events that unfold seem to be madness but unlike WWI, despite the rashness of the fathers, the insensitivity of the Romeo-like figure of Claudio, and the tardiness of the constables, the tension was relieved and the everyone came to their senses by Christmas. I especially liked the characters of Beatrice and Benedick.
• The Bridge’s 2019 immersive theatre production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, directed by Nicholas Hytner, was the coolest theatre I’d seen, where aerobatics were performed above the standing audience’s heads and which turned into a dance floor at the play’s end. It was such an adaptation that I had never seen: the language was modernised, the lines of Titania and Oberon swapped, and a selfie snapped. The play within the play was so awful it was hilarious.
• The RSC’s 2015 production of The Merchant of Venice, directed by Polly Findlay. Early parts of the play were uncomfortable to watch, regarding the treatment of Shylock by others, but it only make Shylock more easily to sympathise with. In this play I found my favourite character in all of Shakespeare’s plays: the formidable yet kind, clever yet modest Portia, played brilliantly by Patsy Ferran.
• The RSC’s 2018 production of Macbeth, directed by Polly Findlay, had three little girls play the three witches and a two hour countdown from the moment of Duncan’s murder. Having come across Macbeth at school and acted it out, the play, now very familiar to me, was a bit plain for my liking. However, on watching it in its entirety, I found that the more versions you watch, the more you pick up. How Seyton sounds like Satan. How Malcolm may not be that great a king for the Scots who wish to remain independent. The play has Macbeth forcing through his own interpretation of the witches’ words, which never actually come to fruition without a deliberate act of Macbeth to make it so, right down to surrendering himself to Macduff’s sword at the end when he has not been defeated by Macduff, just because Macduff said he was untimely ripped from his mother’s womb and a servant said that Birnham Wood was moving. This is what I love most about the play. The director read between the lines, and painted Macbeth not as a victim not of fate but a taster of his own medicine. The play ends with Fleance appearing as Macduff is crowned, and the witches wondering aloud when they will next appear, which foretells the fulfilment of witches’ prophecy that Banquo’s heirs will be kings – for James Stewart, descended from Banquo the steward, would become James VI of Scotland for whom Shakespeare wrote the play. The witches are played by little girls, and having watched the 2015 film of Macbeth starring Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard, I noticed that the film’s emphasis on the lack/loss of a child was reprised in the play’s emphasis on the lack of a child and heir.
• The RSC’s 2016 production of Hamlet, directed by Simon Godwin. I had watched John Simm play Hamlet before in Sheffield, and watched David Tennant play Hamlet. The Hamlet mature adults portray is sympathetic; this production had a probably more accurate young adult Hamlet, with all the moodiness, petulance and cruelty that young adults are more likely to display. Paapa Essiedu’s Hamlet I really didn’t like.

National Theatre productions I watched

• Twelfth Night, starring Tamsin Grieg and directed by Simon Godwin.
• Frankenstein, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and directed by Danny Boyle.
• Antony and Cleopatra, starring Ralph Fiennes and Sophie Okonedo and directed by Simon Godwin.
• A Streetcar Named Desire, starring Gillian Anderson – who was nominated for an Olivier Award for her portrayal of Blanche DuBois – and directed by Benedict Andrews.
• The House, directed by James Graham (who also wrote Quiz, the ITV drama about the Who Wants To Be A Millionaire cheating scandal). I thought it was fast-paced, witty, and summed up the workings and quirks of Parliamentary life in an entertaining way.
• Amadeus, directed by Michael Longhurst and starring Lucian Msamati as Salieri and Adam Gallen as Mozart, was the National Theatre’s last ever free play screening on YouTube because of COVID-19. It’s a great way to be introduced to Mozart’s operas in the context in which they were written, and this play does a better job than documentaries I’ve watched at getting across how revolutionary and wacky Mozart was, how he was obsessed with shit (or, put euphemistically, liked scatalogical humour).

Ballets I watched

• Broken Wings by the English National Ballet, a biographical ballet about the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, starring Tamara Rojo as Frida. Having only been able to recognise Frida’s iconic self portraits and known nothing else about her, the ballet helped me to see the pain behind her paintings.
• Moon Water at the Sadler Wells Theatre, a dance production by Cloud Gate Theatre, the first Taiwanese contemporary dance company. Two years ago I had used my company’s “happy you passed your probation” Ticketmaster voucher to buy tickets to see Formosan, the farewell production by Cloud Gate Theatre founder Lin Hwai-min. The dance evolved from tranquility to agitation, reflecting the history of Taiwan, or Formosa as the Portuguese called it. Moon Water was very different in that it was balanced and steady throughout, the control and seamless fluidity of the dancers’ bodies giving the dance a meditative quality. The backdrop reflected the dancers as if they were reflections on water, and near the end the stage was slowly flooded so that we could hear the trickling of water, the splash and drips from the dancers’ movements.
• Swan Lake by English National Ballet from 2018. Easily my favourite ballet, the music is so catchy and I love the contrast between the delicate swans and the sturdy humans.
• La Fille Mal Gardée by the Royal Opera from 2012, starring Carlos Acosta as Colas. It was funny, light, playful and humorous, with clog dancing, dancing chickens, and lots of props such as ribbons, hay bales, and spinner’s yarn. Felt like a pantomime and a ballet in one show.
• La Sylphide by the English National Ballet from 2017, one of the oldest ballets still performed now. It was shorter and had less complex moves compared to more well-known ballets. Surprising to me, the lead was an anti-hero. It’s a great ballet if you like seeing men in kilts, but not if you like the pas de deux as these are few and far between.
• Romeo and Juliet by the Royal Opera from 2019. I had never watched a ballet that required dancers to act as much as this one. Juliet’s dancing really shows off her youth and girlishness, her tiptoe walks backwards like that of an uncertain toddler going behind her mother for refuge. Ballets often end on a triumphant pas de deux and it was interesting to see the final dance of Romeo and Juliet where Juliet was by then lifeless.

Walks I made from Eastbourne

• Atop the South Downs westwards to Belle Tout lighthouse.
• In the golf course in Meads. After work one day, I ventured out to the golf course again for my walk, only to find that the golf club had reopened and was shouted at for accidentally interrupting a golf game. Harassed off the golf course, I discovered a scatter of new walking routes and the Downs’ woodland mountain biking trails.
• Along the beach eastwards to Pevensey, past the Sovereign Harbour.
• Along the beach westwards to Beachy Head lighthouse. I was first guided on this path by my primary school classmate Joy and her mother. The water was so clear that way, and when the tide is out you can wade in the shallow water and walk on the sand. Junk like lobster traps and even motorbike or car wheels and an engine lie beneath the cliffs, and you can see the old worn trails which are too dangerous to walk on now.
• Atop the hills past two dew ponds and the Eastbourne Downs Golf Club northwards to Butts Brow, the site of a plane crash in 1944 and a viewpoint that overlooks the whole of Eastbourne.
• From Willingdon, where the Red Lion pub in George Orwell’s Animal Farm is based, to Jevington, where banoffee pie was invented.
• From Eastbourne to East Dean, Friston, and Crowlink, the hamlet where E. Nesbitt, who wrote The Railway Children, lived in her old age. Picnicked in the valley between East Dean and Friston. The stone wall leading from Friston to Crowlink made me think of the wall in Stardust. Curiously, in Crowlink there was a unicorn shrine and a frame in the shape of a skull with a flower headdress that brought to mind Frida Kahlo. The same wind that carried the sheep’s moulted fleece, which snagged on the hawthorn branches, wore us out on our uphill walk from East Dean back to Eastbourne. The sun was strong, turning the sea white – something you don’t really see in paintings – and my face a little red.

Road trips in Sussex, Kent and Hampshire with Amelia

• Dallington
• Brightling
• Herstmonceux
• Tonbridge
• Chiddingstone
• Buxted
• Robertsbridge
• Hawkhurst
• Battle
• Shoreham-By-Sea
• Chichester
• West Dean Gardens
• Chichester Harbour
• Patchings
• Selsey
• Rustington

On Sunday 12 July I went on the first road trip in a long time, with Amelia, driver and mistress of fun extraordinaire. This kickstarted our Sunday road trips. We visited Dallington and Brightling, where we sat in the bench in the churchyard to ponder on one of “Mad” Jack Fuller’s follies, the MP of East Sussex’s pyramid mausoleum. We did not find the walking route into Brightling Park or the Sugar Loaf (folly) at Wood’s Corner that the Internet’s articles described, though we espied another of his follies, Fuller’s Tower, in the distance. Made our first pub visit since lockdown began, into the Brewers’ Arms in Herstmonceux where I had a half pint of Harvey’s Sussex Best Bitter in the beer garden. In the evening, our hopes of fish and chips to end the day were dashed by our lack of cash, so we bought some snacks and I ate scampi flavoured Smith’s snacks as a substitute.

Amelia and my second road trip on Sunday 19 July was to Tonbridge and Chiddingstone. It was our first time in Tonbridge and also our first time visiting a town centre other than Brighton, Newhaven, Seaford or Eastbourne. On our way up we saw a car that had a BBQ set strapped to its roof. The Tonbridge we experienced was the market town of wharfs, motte and bailey, and nonchalant squirrels. Cars and solo horse carriages drove down the main road, and the trees along the river were festooned with knitted birds and rainbows. I had nominated Tonbridge as the site of the new parliament for a school parliament designing project, and now saw how out of place it would have been (thankfully Ashford was chosen)!

Our highlight destination was Chiddingstone, a Tudor one-street village with a beautiful timber framed house. Described by the National Trust as “one of the prettiest villages in Kent, and perhaps England”, it has an oast house at one end and a park with a “castle” at the other, where we had our picnic. In the park was a protected tree that looked like a home for pixies, a lake with white lilies in bloom, an an orangery which conjured images of a bride and groom saying their vows beneath a canopy of flowers. Back home, I learnt that the last owner of Chiddingstone Castle had intended to leave his home to the National Trust but the trust refused as it did not come with an endowment, so instead a private trust was set up to preserve it. In the shop, I bought two packs of Anna’s Original Pepperkaka (Swedish biscuit thins, one almond and one ginger) that had to be looked up in the prices manual. Before we drove away, we had to see the Chiding Stone that gave the village its name. Beneath this stone, presided by Druids, villagers would have been “chided” and judged for misdemeanours.

On the drive back, we stopped for fresh air in Buxted, which also had a park, in which was a tree that looked like it was thunderstruck and giant sequoia (which I had mistook for a redwood at the time).

Amelia and my third road trip on Sunday 26 July was to Robertsbridge, on the East Sussex side of the border with Kent, and Hawkhurst, on the Kent side of the border. The car park at Robertsbridge was strangely numbered, with bays marked either ‘9’ or ‘2’. We were visiting for the 14th and 15th century houses, but hadn’t expected to also see a red butterfly, narrow house, a narrow door to a house, and a cheeky plaque saying “On This Site Sept. 5. 1782 Nothing Happened”. The pub in the middle of the one-street village (typical of a Tudor village, as we’d seen in Chiddingstone last Sunday) was frequented by the Hawkhurst Gang, a group of smugglers.

Our final stop going out of Eastbourne was Hawkhurst, the HQ of the Hawkhurst Gang. It was recorded as belonging to Battle Abbey in the Domesday Book, had a lot of hawks in its wood which is how it got its name, was once in a constituency that was represented by Ann Widdecombe, is home to the largest Barnardo’s home for orphans, was home to the person who led the company later known as Oxo (of the stock cubes), and William Penn, who founded the U.S. State of Pennsylvania, owned an ironworks here. We parked upon entering the village’s fringes, just past the cast iron sign. There was a single picnic table on the green, and we sat down to have our picnic but at that moment the weather took a turn for the worse and gusts of wind almost blew our picnic away. On the green, a father, son and daughter took their kite out to fly.

As well as fresh-looking white clapperboard houses, we passed by a stone toll house, Herschel Place (John Herschel, son of the more famous William Herschel and the namer of 4 moons of Uranus lived in Hawkhurst), and two Chinese restaurants (quite a lot for a village!) before reaching the village centre which I can only describe as the Steveston of England. The main street even had a quaint little library at one end, just like Steveston south of Vancouver. We also wandered inside the front lawn of the almshouse just beyond, and a resident peered out, which made me think of the almshouse I had visited in Bruges, which is also now a residence.

On our return to Eastbourne, we stopped at Battle. I had visited for Battle Abbey but not walked through the town. We saw a toy spider that someone had tucked in to the roof tiles above the front door, which may have given many children a fright at Halloween! The town, I found from my research, was famous back in the day for its gunpowder mill, is the birthplace of the cookbook writer Eliza Acton, and has the oldest Sussex Bonfire Society.

On Sunday 2 August we stopped first in Shoreham, where I got a pomegranate iced tea and Amelia an iced café noisette and she showed me the beautiful houseboats and holiday boat rentals by the estuary. There were some creative DIY boats that looked like they were in fancy dress, and elsewhere someone had left a coffee machine that was free for the taking. We then continued to Chichester, and ate our lunch on the grass looking up at Chichester Cathedral.

Amelia had booked a 3pm entry time to West Dean Gardens for us, and that’s where I discovered the most luxurious temporary toilets I’d ever seen or smelled! It was fragrant, clean and had thick drying towels and bottled hand wash! The gardens themselves were pretty, but it was a shame we could not buy any of the fruit we saw growing, which included nectarines in the greenhouses and purple apple-pears (quinces?). We ended the afternoon walking through multiple carparks in Chichester Harbour, where we think we may have parked too soon after the turning. There Amelia pointed out with her keen eyes that we were walking on the teeniest tiniest spiral shells, and I took a few home. She also spotted a green crab, but no wartime finds (she aims high). We stopped by Shoreham for fish and chips at Blundens, where they have children’s portions! Amelia helped a graffiti artist guard his work while he went off for 5 minutes and I finished my fish. In Seaford we got out of the car just in time to see the supermoon before it was veiled by clouds.

Our Sunday road trip on Sunday 9 August began with a lucky guess on my part, at how much topping up the gas in the car would cost (£56 was my guess and I was correct down to the pound) but also a clothes mishap (I wore mine the wrong way around, then changed and had them inside out). Amelia and I spent the morning in Patchings, walking down a street called ‘The Street’, admiring the scarecrows and, weirdly, a cutout of Boris Johnson in people’s front yards. We continued on to Chichester, and made it into the cathedral just in time to visit the Arundel tomb featured in Philip Larkin’s poem. As evening approached, we took a short walk down the canal, spotting swans, coots, moorhens, and their young on the way, and on our way back to the carpark we passed the Dodo House, named for the sculptures on the steps leading up to the entrance which are supposed to be ostriches but look like dodos.

We then drove to Selsey and watched the beginning of the sunset sitting on the beach; it was a headland from where we could see the Isle of Wight and also what may have been a pod of porpoises (black shapes moving around in the water, a group of kayakers paddled close to investigate). Animal lovers will also like Selsey because it was where Colin Pullinger, the inventor of the humane mousetrap, came from. It turned out to be a lucky day for us both as Amelia found a fully intact spiral seashell next to where we sat down in Selsey and I found one almost intact when scouring the clumps of seaweed on Rustington beach. We passed donkeys (playing football?) and the HQ of Scott Dunn, a client of the agency where I work on the drive back.

Eat Out Help Out café and restaurant reviews

I’ve shouted out 3 of these cafés and restaurants below for their food on social media, but now here are the full reviews, which encompass our whole dining experience from booking to food to service to COVID safety. No two establishments have the same star rating, so you can see which one is more deserving of a visit than the other.

The Pilot Inn in Meads

⭐⭐

Rating: 2 out of 5.

We booked a table in the beer garden, just half an hour before the time we wanted to eat. Due to COVID-19 we sat outside, but there were neat seats inside and the inn had character. My Mum ordered a Pilot Inn cheeseburger – plump, juicy, lots of beef but too much for her taste and not charred – and a cappuccino and I a dressed crab – sea fragrant with hot baked new potatoes and fresh cool salad – and Longman Long Blonde ale. The waitress forgot about us and served a pair of diners who had arrived after us before they even asked us what we wanted from the menu, and our table umbrella was broken, with no attempt made to offer us another table or fix the umbrella (apparently it was not fixable). The wind blew some of our salt and pepper packets off the table, we had to hold down our menus, and I had to defend my meal from a bee.

• Hand sanitisers throughout include ones operated by sensors
• Temperature check just inside the door
• One direction as much as possible
• Laminated menus – not the online menu
• Servers generally wear masks – one man however did not
• Tables outside were not wiped clean in between sittings, not benches
• Phone number and name registration for tracking

More Than Cake on Carlisle road

⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 2.5 out of 5.

On our first visit we had a slice of Oreo cake and iced coffee, with a, pistachio ice cream to go. The cake reminded me of the loaf cake found in the bakeries as you come out of the MTR in Hong Kong. The café had a large selection of cakes, and lots of vegan and gluten free cakes. We returned two weeks later for a coconut and chocolate flapjack and coffee cake.

• Hand sanitiser atop the ice cream counter
• Servers don’t wear masks

Rosetto on Carlisle road

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 4.5 out of 5.

An Italian restaurant with excellent service. We shared a starter of crispy whitebait and had a tagliatelle with crab each. I love it when Today’s Specials really are special, and ‘tagliatelle with crab’ means a whole baked crab!

• Hand sanitisers throughout and wipes in the toilet
• Laminated menus
• Servers don’t wear masks but do keep distance
• Tables outside were wiped clean in between sittings, not chairs
• Phone number and name registration for tracking

Sabaidee Thai on Carlisle Road

⭐

Rating: 1 out of 5.

Though the food was tasty the service was charmless, though it can make dining out safer during this pandemic if servers who don’t wear masks keep their mouths shut and stay back. Mum ordered vegetable spring rolls and Pad Thai, and I had Tom Yum Talay (seafood sour and spicy soup) and prawn red Gaeng Daeng (curry) with coconut rice. Nothing was too salty, even the curry sauce, and the spring rolls were piping hot and crisp. The rice was short and fat and sticky and slightly sweet with the coconut cream.

• Hand sanitisers inside I hope, I don’t know I stayed outside
• Original book menus, I don’t know whether they sanitise them in between sittings
• Servers don’t wear masks but they don’t talk much
• Tables outside may not be wiped clean in between sittings as a woman sat down at a table and left without eating but that table was not wiped before a dining couple sat down
• No phone number and name registration but I had booked a table over the phone

Bistrot Pierre by the Wish Tower

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 5 out of 5.

A new branch of a French restaurant chain which had I think been ready to open in Spring but had to wait until the government eased the lockdown before welcoming its first sit-in diners in Summer. My Mum and I sat at a table overlooking the Western Lawns and the Ferris Wheel that had been temporarily put up there. We shared starters of deep fried brie with plum chutney and calamari that were in large chunks with a thick coating, a bit like the chicken you get in KFC. My Mum had the burger and she liked it more than the one at Pilot Inn as it was slightly charred with a thin crust. I ordered the minute steak with the peppercorn and brandy sauce, which came with a mean looking steak knife, for a very thin steak! The portions were just right, as we were full but not stuffed, and everything was cooked just right, with great texture and seasoning. Our neighbour Guy later told us that the quality of the food had deteriorated during lockdown, but recovered for Eat Out Help Out.

• Hand sanitisers inside
• Directional flow signs that some people didn’t follow
• Paper menus
• Servers wear plastic screened headgear and the ordering counter had a screen to separate staff from diners
• Tables and chairs were wiped down
• No phone number and name registration but I had booked a table online

The Beach Deck on the promenade east of the fishmonger’s

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 3.5 out of 5.

Does not take bookings during the pandemic so we had to queue for 20 minutes to get a table This restaurant gave us the best view of all the places we’d eaten at, overlooking the beach, where people sailed, kayaked, and waterskied. We shared a main meal that we treated as a starter, of calamari, done the Greek way, in light batter and in rings, and served with sriracha mayo. Mum had the sea bass with Moroccan chickpeas, barley, red onion, apricot, pistachio and green salad, and I had the Moules Frites. All the food was tasty, the portions were too large. The plate of calamari was big, the mussels came with fries and a big hunk of soft white bread, and the fries were served in generous cups as you might popcorn (what Flat Iron does but in smaller cups). The food was moreish but a struggle to finish off. The fries could have been more consistently crispy if maybe they had cooked less of them at a time. I came down with food poisoning starting that evening, with the symptoms coming to a peak on Wednesday night and Thursday morning, and only recovering after lunch on Thursday. It may have been the mussels, as although I was impressed that they were large and plump and juicy and not overcooked, with no closed shells, perhaps they had been slightly undercooked or my stomach just too sensitive.

• Hand sanitiser at the ordering counter
• Laminated menus
• Servers wear masks
• Tables and chairs and menus were wiped down
• Phone number and name registration for tracking

Mugshot Café/Deli in Meads

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Mum had 2 Portuguese egg custard tarts and we shared a vegan roasted vegetable quiche that had been recommended by the single staff member (owner?) there, who made me feel welcome. Mum drank her usual cappuccino and I an iced latte. Everything was delicious! I swam it all off in the sea afterwards before returning to work.

• Hand sanitiser at the order counter and we got given a whole bottle to take to our table
• Board menu behind the service counter
• The server doesn’t wear a mask
• We didn’t see tables and chairs being wiped down, only remnants of other people’s meals being cleared away
• Phone number and name registration for tracking

Café Oriental opposite The Beacon

⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 3 out of 5.

Functions normally as a buffet restaurant but since COVID has served just individual meals. Mum ordered tempura salmon and Singapore noodles, and I an eel bento box. This way of operating has increased the quality of the food – we were not fans of the buffet – and more interaction with the staff, who like us hail from Hong Kong, has led us to feel more welcomed. Still, the food could have been improved: we would have preferred it if the salmon to batter ratio was weighted towards the salmon and not the batter, if the noodles had been the thinnest rice noodles and with the iconic yellow colour, and if the bento had pickled radishes or something cooked rather than prawn crackers in one of the compartments.

• Hand sanitiser at the welcome counter
• Paper menus
• Servers wear masks
• We were sat facing the street, looking out of the window and nearest to the wide entrance for ventilation, so didn’t see whether the tables and chairs behind us were wiped down
• Phone number and name registration for tracking

Roots, Urban Farm Shop on Grove road

⭐⭐

Rating: 1.5 out of 5.

I had a cheese scone and a latte and my Mum a tuna sandwich and a cappuccino. The coffee there is one of the best in Eastbourne, alongside perhaps Nelson Coffee (I haven’t been there in months and my memory is rusty). You can buy groceries and ready meals here too, to try more of their farm produce. We liked the idea of helping out an independent coffee shop but, as with Sabaidee Thai, the service there is not friendly and puts a dampener on the experience of eating out.

• Hand sanitiser at the entrance but not very noticeable
• Board menu behind the service counter
• Servers don’t take mask wearing seriously
• Tables were wiped down but only if the people who sat there had eaten something

Happy THINGS

In the early weeks of the lockdown I listened to a lone bagpipe player making the hills alive with the sound of music while using my “one exercise outing a day” allowance on a walk.

The grass, left to grow on the hills, made the hills a plush carpet for my feet. Songbirds singing in the evening were less frequently punctuated by the sound of passing cars. People decked out their homes or repainted their front gates in rainbow colours, and parents chalked out a Hopscotch on the pavement for their children to play on. Dog walkers greeted us with a friendly wave or “hello”. A young man set up gymnastic rings on a tree branch to practise on the last day that the golf course near us was out of action. On the beach, as well as the usual water-sports painters set up camera tripods as easels, and people fished beyond the rock pools when the tide was out. Walking up from the beach, a man used stone wall for climbing, and on the lawns a father stood ready to assist and throw his leotarded gymnast daughter.

It was nice to reconnect with old friends and classmates as everyone gets more comfortable with and makes more time for virtual meet ups.

Sad things

Though there were fewer people out and about during the lockdown, I saw litter that included many tissues and face masks. Some drivers took advantage of the empty streets and raced past at illegal speeds. Many runners and cyclists didn’t think twice about sneaking up on you and then, dangerously, alongside you. Two days after the slightest relaxing of the lockdown I saw a gathering of over 10 young people picnicking, blasting music and playing football on the Downs, flouting government advice. In the park – Gildredge Park – men relieved themselves in public. When eating out, you’re at the mercy of passers by who may not keep distance when walking past, and other diners who may, as witnessed, sneeze and put their dirty tissues on an uncleared table of another dining group without care for the staff who has to clear the table but may not be sufficiently protected.

The peace I found that on Friday of Mental Health Awareness Week was disturbed when I read the obituary of my primary school history teacher, in The Saturday Times of 25 April. It was his travels and his belief that the West can learn from the East that led up to his brother – and my headmaster – visiting Hong Kong that my mother got to know of St. Bede’s and I ended up growing up in Eastbourne.

I had to cancel my return to Hong Kong to see my Dad twice, as I was prevented from going in February 2020 by the escalation of COVID-19 and in March 2021 by the government’s travel ban and my own fears over the virus.

Other observations

More and more of the South Downs was claimed for cattle, forcing us to walk routes which we never used to take. Trees and shrubbery, let untrimmed, blocked some paths. Many elderly people still left home to get some exercise and fresh air. Teenagers made use of local private schools’ empty sport fields, but when primary schools reopened they did not bring the classroom outdoors. People practised on the golf course, no membership required. The pier was closed even as non-essential shops opened. Though men relieved themselves in the open in the park, the public toilets on Eastbourne seafront were open.

Things I do more of during the lockdown

As well as uploading my first Story on Instagram and Facebook, I also paint more, go out for walks more, watch YouTube videos more, and explore Google Arts and Culture. This is also the most I’ll probably ever use the freezer for things other than wonton pastry, frozen peas and ice cream.

In the neighbourhood I discovered ‘Pop’s Garage’ which houses a Dalek as well as gym equipment, and made the acquaintance of a man and his Dalmatian Jasper, who can walk 15km a day!

During the lockdown I found a love for…

Snøfrisk cheese, a Norwegian part cow, part goats cheese that means “snow fresh” and is younger than I am, having been launched for the 1994 Winter Olympics. I “went” to Norway one week during lockdown, first by watching Twin on BBC, starring Kristofer Hivju from Game of Thrones, then by eating the cheese, and finally by watching Lykkeland (State of Happiness), which is set at a time when the poor town of Stavanger is about to explode into a boom town with the discovery of North Sea oil. I also discovered Capricorn Somerset goats cheese. So light as well, and not strong. Also Kaltback Alpine Floral cheese, which is creamy and fragrant – it is aged in a cave in Switzerland.

Shakespeare. At school, only one English teacher managed to make me love Shakespeare, but he left. The Shakespeare plays I watched during lockdown were the best productions I had ever seen, without which I would not have appreciated the humour, wit and beauty of Shakespeare’s writing. His use of words is unparalleled, and I think the modern comedy shows that I like – Blackadder and Red Dwarf – I like for the same reason.

What I learnt

• The capital cities of the countries on the African continent. So annoyed was I at not getting the answer to ‘the capital of Mali’ in one of my company’s virtual pub quizzes.
• The NATO Phonetic Alphabet. I had plenty of chances to practise this when giving my contact details to estate agents during my house hunt.
• Beginner’s Norwegian. I got the itch to do this after watching Okkupert (Occupied), a Norwegian political thriller about a hypothetical Russian occupation of Norway. Norwegian sounds a little like Scottish, and its grammar and vocab is similar to English and German. Having watched Lykkeland (State of Happiness) before, and Elven (The River), a political thriller that starts off as a crime drama, after I started learning Norwegian on Duolingo, I feel like where the Danes have mastered the crime drama, the Norwegians are masters of the political thriller.
• How to read hiragana. When trying to connect with a friend whom I was finding emotionally hard to reach, I found it easier to explore what they are interested in and talk about that. Plus I get to learn a “useful” language.
• How the concept of Mongolia as a nation was formed. I read my collection of Conn Iggulden’s series of books covering the life of Genghis Khan and the lives of those who inherited the Mongol Empire he founded. Then I started a Cantonese YouTube series that tells of the life of Genghis Khan in the form of a story with more historical accuracy (e.g. it doesn’t spare listeners the confusion of different people having very similar names). Then I looked up the history of Mongolia. Then I listened to some Mongolia throat singing. So you could say I was obsessed.
• How to make pastry. Also that pastry only stays crisp on the day you make it. I’ve tried leaving pastry overnight outside the fridge and inside the fridge. It makes no difference: the pastry is always soft the next day you eat it.
• DIY tasks such as how to replace toilet seats, how to use wood filler and paint to smarten up a door, how to patch up areas where wallpaper has peeled off, how to handle boiler emergencies.
• A lot more about flowers than I did before.