Warming Up

If someone told you they ate (on average) one Solero every four days (when they were trying to stop eating ice cream and all sugary/crispy treats) would you say they had an issue? 

I am at least doing well on avoiding all the other foodstuffs that I’d started scoffing too much in lockdown. I am trying to start every morning with a nectarine. Back in the before times (before Brexit, before Covid, but most tellingly before children) my wife and I had holidayed on the Amalfi Coast and I’d eaten a fresh peach most mornings and thought it was the height of decadence. 

If only I could start every morning like that.

Recently I thought, why can’t I? They sell peaches and nectarines in the supermarket in packs of four and though I don’t quite go to the supermarket often enough to make that a daily event I can do it four days out of seven (way more nectarines than Soleros incidentally, yet no one is going on about my nectarine problem are they?).

Although eating a nectarine in my kitchen whilst trying to stop my kids hitting each other is not quite the same as overlooking that blue sea as a man brings me cappuccinos, it’s still not bad. For most of my adult life it would have been a luxury that I might find difficult to afford (though Jesus, they are less than a pound each - I probably wouldn’t have baulked at buying a more expensive bacon butty) or maybe just a bit too indulgent. But it makes me feel happy, it makes my hands sticky with the juice of an exotic fruit and it’s good for me. It is associated enough with that lovely holiday to mine my memories and let me bask in them again. It makes me feel like a lucky man, lest I forget how lucky I am to have all that I now have.

Today I wondered if this might be one of the things I looked back on post-Brexit and thought, remember when it was relatively easy to eat a non-indigenous fruit for my breakfast. That may be overly dramatic - my nectarine might just cost me over a pound instead, a difference that might not make much difference to me. But I do wonder about the impact that this self-inflicted wound is going to have on us. 

I have always had difficulty enjoying things in the moment without worrying about the future and 2020 has been the worst ever for this as I consider all the things that may go wrong (even as many are going right) and it’s hard to banish those thoughts when you’re in the middle of a pandemic that looks like wrecking our economy for many months to come."Rich, you’re being hysterical. Things are OK, they don’t just suddenly go wrong.”

“Um, have you noticed this virus that showed up and has screwed everything?”

“I refuse to acknowledge it. It’s over. And I won’t wear a mask.”

“Looks like I am right to be pessimistic.”

We had a lovely walk with the kids today, trying to harvest the last of the autumn blackberries (though we’d nearly left it too late). My family are wonderful and the sunlight shone in their hair and made them look like angels and they were being funny and fun and hardly hitting each other at all. And even in these perfect moments all I can think is, this is exactly the kind of thing that happens in a TV drama just before everything goes wrong. And I imagine all the terrible things that would make these last memories turn bitter and poignant and slightly revel in the many tragedies that I have conjured up. Can’t I just enjoy the moment? 

Never, it seems. I can’t live in the moment. Not at the moment. Or indeed ever. 

Except for the Amalfi peaches. If Covid and Brexit take those from me then I have nothing.