The NeverEnding Story

During those long-ago days, when Lockdown first began, I—and almost everyone else in Britain—began a Lockdown Diary.

For me, this wasn’t a big change. I have been keeping a journal since the age of eleven and the only difference between the Journal and the Lockdown Diary was that I proposed to update the Journal every day and number the entries accordingly. Therefore, I am, as of today, up to Lockdown Day plus 117 (reminiscent of the WWII designations of D-Day plus ##).

Initially, I determined to keep the daily lockdown entries going until normal life returned. After a few weeks, however, I realized this was never going to happen.

The earliest entries in the Diary contain accounts of the peculiar qualities life had taken on, followed by the repeated chronicling of events before the shutters came down — the period I now think of as The Before Time — and the unbelievably rapid unravelling of normal life. Accordingly, for a week or so, I obsessed over The Last Time I… 

• went to the cinema
• had a drink in a pub
• got a haircut
• visited a tea shop
• browsed a bookstore
• rode on a train
• etc... 

It was, I see now, my method of mourning for a life that, deep down, I knew was never going to return.

After that, it became a record of how we, and the rest of the world, were coping.

But then things began to open up and, gradually, the entries became more (for want of a better word) normal: we were allowed a second walk, we had a cup of tea in the park, we could go to a different park, we could drive to another part of the county…

It was then that I thought the Diary had gone on long enough, but I wanted a clean way to cut it off, so I decided on an event that would act as a bookend, of sorts, and signify that Things Had Returned to Normal. That event was to meet up with my friend in a pub for a pint.

I didn't take any photos in the pub, so I had to steal this.

It had been one of the final normalities in that eventful week before Lockdown, so the ability to revisit the event would, I supposed, confirm that Lockdown was over. Only, as the day approached for our planned meeting, I began to have doubts. We might be meeting in a pub for a pint, but things were far from normal.

First of all, I had to make a reservation. For a drink. In a pub. Then, I was shown to my table by a staff-member wearing a facemask. I ordered food and drink from an app on my mobile phone and the items were brought to the table by other staff members, also wearing facemasks. Could I really claim that this was enough like The Before Time to allow me to call an end to my Lockdown Diary? I didn’t think so.

But as we sat and chatted, certain things began to occur to me. While it might not have been Normal when compared to The Before Time, it was as normal as it was going to get for now. Also, I rather enjoyed the idea of having a time slot rather than just showing up and hoping I could find a table. And ordering via the app was kinda fun: you press a few buttons on your phone and someone comes and gives you food. What’s not to like? Finally, the pub, although not full, was buzzing and busy and a lot less surreal than the original visit I was comparing it to, where my friend and I were, for the most part, the only two customers, and the bar staff clustered around a container of hand-sanitizer worrying about not having any jobs.

What the pub pretty much looked like the last time I was there.

That visit, back in March, during those twilight days just before Lockdown, was much more surreal, and laced with foreboding, than the visit I was currently enjoying. Therefore, I felt it met—and, indeed, exceeded—the criteria.

And so, what I am calling Lockdown Diary #1 has—instead of becoming a never-ending story—finally come to an end.

Let us all hope I do not have occasion to begin Lockdown Diary #2.

Adventures in Baking

I’ve always had a fondness for baking bread. It was a nice winter pastime, something to do on a snowy afternoon when I had no place to go and nothing else to do. I hadn’t done it in a few years, mostly because I’ve been too busy. But then came a lot of free time, and my thoughts turned to baking—along with about 47 million other people’s. (I’d say 60 million but I assume some people must not be baking, though I have no proof of that.)

Consequently,… but you already know this; there was no flour to be had. Anywhere.

Remember the Great Flour Shortage? It came right after The Great Toilet Paper drought.

The odd thing was, despite the empty shelves, there was not a flour shortage, there was simply a shortage of flour in 1.5 kg bags. So, I went on-line and ordered a 16 kg bag. Problem solved.

Yes, 37 pounds of flour, delivered by Amazon.

Sort of. But after we found a place to store it, things went a little easier.

And so, for the past two months, we have not bought any bread. I am making two loaves and a dozen rolls every week. With mixed results. Thing is, I’m a numbers guy; I believe in formulas and precision, and the notion that, if you follow the instructions and do it the same way every time, you will get the same results, sort of like those chemistry experiments we did in high school.

Turns out, baking isn’t science as much as it is art—and a dark art, at that.

Not sure what caused this...

The variables are too numerous to track and on-line advice needs to be treated like anything else you read on-line: with suspicion.

For example: prior to buying 37 pounds of plain, white flour, I did my research to make sure I could use it for bread making. The alternative was to have one 37-lb bag of bread flour for me and another 37-lb bag of plain flour for my wife (she manages the cakes and scones baking division). That wasn’t really an option, but I was assured—on several bread-baking websites—that you could make bread with plain flour. Bread flour, they told me, was optional. And it was—the same way that wearing underpants with your new blue jeans is optional: you don’t need to, but you may experience unanticipated outcomes if you don’t.

This resulted in several disappointing weeks of attempting to make sandwiches between slices of bread with the consistency of battenberg cake. (This, however, was an improvement on the loaves I baked that had the consistency of a breeze block.)

Fortunately, I discovered that you can make plain flour into bread flour with just a bit of wheat gluten. The downside was I could only buy it in 1 kilo bags, so I now have enough wheat gluten to make 25 kilograms (55 pounds) of bread flour.

Unfortunately, this did not solve all of my loaf-consistency issues. Too much flour, too much kneading, too much moisture in your oven—all of these things (and many more) contribute to the stability of your loaf (no, that is not a euphemism).

And then, stable or not, crumbly or not, cake-like or not, you have to cut it. Whoever said, “the best thing since sliced bread,” knew what they were talking about, and being a generation or two away from the era where a bread-knife was in daily use, trying to obtain an actual, store-bought-loaf-sized slice of bread is something of a challenge, especially with those aforementioned stability issues.

Seeing as how we are committed to eat whatever results from my weekly bread-making fiestas, lunchtimes might have become a gruelling exercise, had it not been for the buns. Oddly, happenstancially, and thankfully, I make really good bread rolls. And I don’t mean in comparison to the disappointing loaves, I mean I’d rather have the ones I bake than the ones we used to buy in the store. They are that good.

Given that, if my experiments with loaves don’t yield better results after another few weeks, I at least have the option of switching exclusively to rolls.

They’re easier to cut.

Dodgy loaves; nice buns!