Surviving Lockdown
People ask if I am surviving lockdown.
I am lucky in several ways.
Housing
I live in a spacious house, which is comfortable.
Although, it does have problems.
- It was built by a Turkish Jerrybuilder, who bought fixtures and fittings at the cheapest price possible.
- It gets too hot.
- The plumbing is suspect.
- The air-conditioner is broken and the service company, have had my money to fix it, but won’t come.
- The smoke detector above my bed is just hanging there, as I wrote in A Design Crime – The Average Smoke Detector
Hopefully, when we beat COVID-19, I’ll be able to move.
Finances
My investments give me enough to live comfortably. If you call, living in two rooms, never talking face-to-face with anybody living comfortably.
Exercise
I am still fit and can exercise as much as I need and is recommended.
I have a workout that I do twice a day, which includes movements like press-ups, stretches and single-leg stands.
I can do two dozen press-ups straight off or walk three miles, if I need to.
Health
My health is good, despite being a coeliac and suffering a serious stroke ten years ago.
- I test my own INR.
- I seem to have survived my fall of a month ago.
- I only go to the surgery for B12 injections, drug reviews and the odd problem.
Other than that I just suffer from the problems of a healthy man of 72, like arthritis and hay fever.
I do have a strange skin, that leaks a lot of water and doesn’t bleed, when I have an injection or a doctor or nurse takes blood. I never have a plaster after either procedure.
Food
I am a reasonable and very practical cook, or so my son and various friends tell me. These are some meals, I’ve been cooking under lockdown.
Pasta With Yogurt Sauce For One
Goat’s Cheese, Strawberry And Basil Salad
Smoked Haddock And Curried Rice
I shall add more here.
I won’t starve!
Shopping
A Marks and Spencer food store is fifteen minutes walk away, so I can get all the food I need.
I also got plenty of Adnams 0.5% alcohol Ghost Ship beers direct from the brewers delivered last week.
Their beers have been a lifeline, as they are gluten-free, thirst-quenching and don’t get me drunk. Even in quantity!
I also have safe delivery without any contact, as the couriers just ring my bell, we chat through the window about three metres away and they leave the goods on the step.
I didn’t think about lockdown, when I bought this house, but it is ideal for safe COVID-19-free deliveries.
Lockdown Practice
There can’t be many people, now going through the COVID-19 lockdown, wo have locked themselves away so many times in their life as I have.
- At the age of about six, I spent three months or more, in isolation because I caught scarlet fever.
- For the summer before A-Levels, my parents went to their house in Felixstowe. For part of the time, I locked myself in my bedroom and read up on my A level Physics.
- A couple of times at ICI, I self-isolated with a computer to get important jobs done. How many have used an IBM-360 as a PC?
- I self-isolated to write Speed, my first piece of independent software.
- Pert7 and other software for Time Sharing Ltd was written overnight sitting in the window of their offices on Great Portland Street.
- Artemis was written in an attic in Suffolk, with no-one else around for most of the time.
- The special PC version of Artemis, that was a combined project management, database and spreadsheet program, was also written under lockdown.
- After Celia died, I wrote Travels With My Celia(c) under lockdown. You can download the pdf file here.
Lockdown has almost been a way of life for me.
But on past form, I certainly have the mental strength to get through lockdown unscathed.
Conclusion
There must be a lot of others in much worse situations than myself.
Fruit And Veg Self-Sufficiency Ahead Thanks To Heat From Sewage Farms
This headline caught my eye on an article in today’s Times.
This is the introductory paragraph.
Britain will become far more self-sufficient in tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers and other produce under plans to tap heat from sewage farms and pipe it to giant greenhouses.
The idea of using waste heat to grow fruit and vegetables is not new.
The technique is used at Drax power station and at various Scottish distilleries.
Low Carbon Farming just intend to do it with heat from sewage works.
- They have identified 41 sites in the UK.
- The greenhouses will be larger than the O2.
- The first two sites are in East Anglia and are being built near two of Anglian Water’s sewage works.
- Fully developed, they could make the UK self-sufficient in tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers and for most of the year.
- It would be a £2.67 billion investment, that would create 8,000 jobs.
Intriguingly, if they need more heat, they’ll use a fossil-fuel combined heat and power unit. The carbon dioxide produced will be fed directly to the fruit and veg, as it makes them grow faster.
Another Source Of Heat
In Exciting Renewable Energy Project for Spennymoor, I wrote about a Durham University project to use the waste heat in old coal mines to heat housing.
Could this heat be used to grow fruit and veg?
Queuing For Marks And Spencer In Dalston
I took this picture of the orderly queue waiting to get into Marks and Spencer in Dalston.
It does appear that everybody was obeying the rules and I only took twenty minutes to enter the store.
- The store was well-stocked, although there were very few ready meals with long Best Before dates.
- Gluten-free bread, biscuits and cereals were at near normal levels.
- There were about a dozen bottles of Adnams low-alcohol beer on the shelves, which I reduced by a couple.
- There were no gluten-free cakes. Not that I buy them often.
- Some lines like gluten-free sandwiches seem to have been dropped. Not that I wanted any, as I won’t be travelling.
- The staff were being very professional.
I was able to get enough food in my bag to get me through to the middle of next week.
Short-Notice Spaghetti Trains Organised To get Pasta Across The Alps
The title of this post is the same as that of this article on Railway Gazette.
This is the introductory paragraph.
DB Schenker has organised the transport of several hundred tonnes of pasta by rail from Italy to Germany, enabling 650 Aldi supermarkets to replenish supplies which had been depleted by customers stocking up during the coronavirus pandemic.
I can’t help feeling that this story pays homage to Richard Dimbleby‘s classic April Fool story about the spaghetti harvest in Switzerland.
A Glorious Sight In Marks And Spencer In Dalston
I get through almost a dozen bottles of Adnams 0.5% alcohol beer in a week
Marks And Spencer in Dalston has both varieties.
As my body says the beers are gluten-free, I am grateful for small mercies.
But then, I’ve been drinking Adnams since I was about fourteen!
The Death Of The Duke Of Wellington
I used to use this pub occasionally, as it showed football on a large screen and served reasonable gluten-free pizzas.
But it is closed because of COVID-19!
How sad!
My Essential Foods
These are my essential foods on which I base a lot of my diet.
Note.
- I find most flavours acceptable.
- I prefer honeydew melon, mango, pineapple and strawberry, but hate watermelon.
- The honey and ginger flavour yoghurt is best and makes good pasta sauce.
- Blueberry muffin and cocoa orange are my two favourite flavours.
- Most Marks and Spencer bread is good, but this is my staple.
- I add to the granola – C would be surprised that apricots are on the list.
- With two eggs, a tin makes a good quick meal.
Most of these foods seem to have come from Marks and Spencer
Serial Cooking -Sardines And Baked Eggs
This simple dish is nutritious.
The original recipe recommended sprinkling with fresh parsley!
I cooked it last night in about fifteen minutes.
I always make sure, I’ve plenty of sardines in the cupboard. Last night, I used some French ones from Marks and Spencer.
Conclusion
Could this be the perfect supper for one during COVID-19?
Preparations For War
I always remember a tale told by my mother about her mother, who was born in Dalston in the 1880s.
In 1939, my mother asked her mother, if she was ready for the inevitable war.
The reply was as follows.
I was caught out in the First War and I’m not going to get caught out in this one!
I’ve got a hundredweight of jam and a hundredweight of sugar in the cellar!
Do readers still know what a hundredweight is? – Fifty kilos.
From what I know, my grandmother was rather a forceful woman of very strong Devonian ancestry, with the Yeoman surname of Upcott.
In this war against COVID-19, I may have made a few preparations, but nothing like those my formidable grandmother would have made.
Serial Cooking – Pasta With Yogurt Sauce For One
This is based on a Lyndsey Bareham recipe, which I cooked in Serial Cooking – Quick Pasta For One.
Note.
- There’s a lot of room for error and personalisation.
- I suspect it works equally well with Marks and Spencer’s normal pasta.
- It can be cooked in about ten minutes.
I’ve cooked it perhaps twenty times now and eaten it every time.
The Anonymous Widower 