{"id":1779,"date":"2020-03-31T13:40:00","date_gmt":"2020-03-31T13:40:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/?p=1779"},"modified":"2021-06-24T23:35:36","modified_gmt":"2021-06-24T23:35:36","slug":"a-slice-of-life-in-lockdown","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/2020\/03\/a-slice-of-life-in-lockdown.html","title":{"rendered":"A Slice of Life in Lockdown"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"
A pre-lockdown magazine feature<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The Amazon delivery guy rang the bell, then scampered off to\nsafety behind the garden gate, a good distance, but not so far that he couldn\u2019t\nhear and acknowledge my \u201cthank you.\u201d My wife is so far coping with her duties\nas a Parish Counsellor by attending meetings online. I am writing, as usual \u2013 all\ntoo-regular obituaries, entries for the Oxford<\/em> Dictionary of National\nBiography<\/em>, and occasional book reviews, or working on the book whose\ndeadline my publishers have so kindly been ignoring for so long. My reviews of\nthe performing and visual arts have been put on hold by the closing of the\nopera houses, theatres, museums and galleries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our two grown-up daughters have decided to \u201cisolate\u201d in the rural surroundings of the dusty 18th<\/sup> century farmhouse where they were born and educated, before being sent off to their boarding schools, gap years spent, respectively, in Chicago and London, their universities in Chicago and Leeds, their jobs in London and Brisbane, and ultimately their careers in Britain. During the current lockdown, our family\u2019s fistful of UK, US and Australian passports won\u2019t get us anywhere but here in the Oxfordshire foothills of the Cotswolds. Our British\/Aussie son-in-law isn\u2019t home with us. He has been designated a \u201ckey-worker\u2019 and is on call to the Ministry of Transport in London.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 His wife, Tatyana, is managing to work online, clocking in at the regular time for her admin job with the classical music agency, Harrison Parrott. Georgia, her younger sister,\u00a0has also been affected\u00a0by the inevitable recession. One of her part-time gigs\u00a0is\u00a0 developing and testing recipes for other chefs. Her more steady job is as a\u00a0recipe developer\u00a0for a well-known food importing company, which also has a caf\u00e9.\u00a0The firm\u2019s chief customers are the chefs of London\u2019s best restaurants. Georgia\u00a0has decided to focus on\u00a0developing\u00a0a daily recipe for Instagram and her own website.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

         We know the recipes work, because our family of four sits down every evening to dine on the results (after they\u2019ve been photographed, of course \u2013 Georgia is now sufficiently skilled at this that she\u2019s started putting up videos on Instagram). We have had chicken Kiev with the wild garlic butter, kale and plum white haricot beans; a timbale<\/em> of eggplant (aubergine), surrounding pearled spelt and spinach, flavoured with \u2019nduja, and a Napa cabbage salad; braised, tomato-y lamb shank with only the fragrance of chilli, and a sort of cole slaw with wisps of radish, fennel and cabbage; minestrone with carrot, potato, borlotti beans and wild-garlic infused oil; mild curried monkfish tails with french beans; cavatelli with shaved broccoli; banana and nut \u201cbread\u201d (cake by another name); and babka<\/em>, marbled with deep, dark chocolate and walnuts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

         Thank heavens\nthe UK Wine Society (a cooperative, from which I try to buy most of our wine)\nwas still delivering a week ago; and their last plague-time order, two mixed\ncases of alluring Austrian wine got here under the wire. I try to request my\nwine, as I do our prescription drugs from our local National Health Service\nDispensary, at least two weeks before we run out. My wife now prefers her wine\nto be white and under 12% alcohol by volume. I\u2019m not so fussy, but adore the\nthree Austrian reds whose acquaintance I\u2019m just making \u2013 and have a few dozen\nbottles of claret ageing quietly in the cellar if things really get rough.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

         Of course, the\nreal problem is deciding what to watch on the television, a source of constant and\ngenuine disagreement. As the news gets stranger, worse and more depressing, we feel\ncompelled to watch it \u2013 and have discovered that the BBC rolling news network\nis the most reliable, and carries Trump\u2019s rants live. Family dynamics are easy\nto predict, but hard to manage. Job tensions are difficult to forget; and there\nis rent and mortgage payments for the younger generation. After the glorious nightly\nmeal, grumbling begins about the apportioning of the domestic tasks. Having put\na token plate or two into the dishwasher, I slink out of our long\nkitchen\/dining room to read in bed, not really complacent, but leaving my wife\nand daughters to make their own entertainment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Amazon delivery guy rang the bell, then scampered off to safety behind the garden gate, a good distance, but not so far that he couldn\u2019t hear and acknowledge my \u201cthank you.\u201d My wife is so far coping with her duties as a Parish Counsellor by attending meetings online. I am writing, as usual \u2013 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[4709,4708,4703,4710,4705,4707,4706,4702,4704],"class_list":{"0":"post-1779","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"tag-brisbane","8":"tag-chicago","9":"tag-georgia","10":"tag-harrison-parrott","11":"tag-levy","12":"tag-london","13":"tag-odnb","14":"tag-penelope","15":"tag-tatyana","16":"entry","17":"has-post-thumbnail"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbv6zV-sH","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1779","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1779"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1779\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1872,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1779\/revisions\/1872"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1779"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1779"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1779"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}