Tales of the Hunter-Gatherer: Marking Time
Posted: 6th April 2021
Marking time is never a good feeling, especially when you are getting on in life, but when I look at my children I note that it can’t be any fun at their age either and it is possibly even worse for my nonagenarian mother, for whom life now has no sense at all. Even the smallest things are banned while the plague lurks on every corner. Life is on hold for most of us but where she lives the pandemic is making new strides and claiming more lives.
I sit and wait for news of three or four things, just as I have waited for an upturn for months. Otherwise days slip by more or less unnoticed. I am reading the wrong book (which I am not enjoying and find any excuse to put it down), I pick up a gouge, a pen or a brush, then discard it. The pandemic is perfectly uncreative.
There is just the shopping to do, and then dinner to cook, a film and bed, and an awful lot of time wasted on social media in between.
So what do the shops yield? The pumpkins have gone. I was getting fond of pumpkin puree and it was popular with the troops. Abundant cauliflowers are still turned into fritters with lots of variant spicing and I have been making courgette fritters too using feta, but that is work in progress and the bore about courgettes is squeezing out the excess fluid. One thing I have discovered in the local ethnic markets is the Bavarian radish or ‘mouli’, which is delicious braised. For a quid I can get one about two feet long. There are fewer cheap pears, and the good oranges are over. So far no rhubarb has appeared in the local shops and it is far too early for soft fruits.
The butcher Paul continues to provide us with good cheap beef, and when roasted it is dressed up with homemade horseradish made from Styrian roots bought from the local Turks. Leftover beef goes into pies with onions and fresh ginger. Lamb on the other hand is getting hoggety and the price is way too high. There are 34 million four-legged sheep in this county and the carcasses have nowhere to go but the home market. What’s more lots of lambs were born at Christmas, so why is there no new season’s lamb about? Most of the stuff on offer is too old to be used for anything other than for highly spiced koftas, neck curries or Irish stew. Paul had some very good wigeon too, which were quite a delicacy, but these are now gone.
