This is going to be a long and bitter post. The context: I’m a foodie. A total foodie. Take a look at my Instagram: it’s a monument to gluttony. Cold champagne, boxes of chocolates. Toasted teacakes absolutely gleaming with melted butter. Baked Camembert speared with rosemary and chunks of garlic. Cups of Darjeeling with cucumber sandwiches (no finer sandwich in the world). Macaroni cheese with garlicky breadcrumbs. And the cooking of it all! There are few things I enjoy more than putting on my loungewear, pouring a glass of wine, and preparing a glorious meal for everyone. Fresh pasta, and risottos with heaps of Parmesan. Fluffy, faintly lemony madeleines. The smell of lime zest heralding a Thai green curry. Steamed sponge puddings and custard. Golden pear bourdaloue. Melty cubes of butternut squash sizzling on a roasting tray and giving out wafts of sage. Huge farmhouse cakes with soft chunks of apple and fat sultanas. The rarest steak, pink duck breast, salmon roasted with lemon wedges. Plump plaits of German milk bread. I’ve been on cookery courses, I won my school’s Home Ec. prize, I can see four or five food writing anthologies from where I’m sitting in the living room. I own around seventy recipe books. I honed my wine-nose while au-pairing for a family in the German vineyards, and I was in the blind tasting society at Oxford. (This is when you identify wine without knowing what it is. It is not where you taste wine until you go blind.) And now I’ve got COVID-19 and have lost my sense of taste and smell! NOT. IMPRESSED.
All I can do is delicately salivate over Celebrity Bake Off on Tuesday nights and make lists of what I’m excited to eat when my sense of taste is back.
(Oh Lord, it WILL come back, won’t it? Oh my word. What if it doesn’t?) And it’s not JUST food. I miss cuddling our ancient Border Collie and smelling his cosy, biscuity smell when he’s just emerged from his bed. I realise now that half the fun of elaborate facials is the smell of them. Even walking round the garden isn’t as fun - the steep banking dotted with daffodils that spills out onto fields and woodland, stone pots and long borders of hyacinths, the out-of-control rosemary bush just starting to flower, the garden mint, the orchard of damson and apple trees, pink cherry blossom, the rose bed with its green bench nestled in the topiaried hedge. The damp smell of the neighbouring woodland. The mossy rockeries, the summer house and its vague aroma of wood stain, the patios dotted with huge tubs of lavender. The dusty scent of horses in the adjoining fields. Because OF COURSE now I can’t smell a bit of it. It’s just grass and flowers. Trees and stuff. Birdsong. Ace. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet - WOULD IT? WOULD IT? I WOULDN’T KNOW. Lord above. There are two things you might take away from this post (oooh, could fancy a takeaway): Find the nearest thing you can smell and smell it. ENJOY IT. Stay home!! Please! ** *Disclaimer: I haven’t been tested for COVID. A member of my household was diagnosed with it and I fell ill with the same symptoms shortly afterwards. We are all self-isolating and maintaining social distance and scrupulous hygiene. (Remember those days when you didn’t have to disinfect your shopping?) I haven’t actually been anywhere at all, except for solitary walks, since mid-March. I’m also not making light of this whole crisis. Jolly easy to sit at home moaning poor old me I can’t taste my shortbread while people everywhere are suffering, either from the virus itself or from concern for others. It’s not been a pleasant experience at all for me (are any viruses pleasant?) and has been nerve-wracking - yet so far, touch wood, my symptoms have been comparatively and mercifully mild. My own rants aren’t intended to take anything away from people who are having a tougher time of it than me. I’m just having a moan.
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The official website of Yorkshire-made, Oxford-based writer Isabel Parkinson. Want fewer words and more pics? Follow me on Instagram!
(Header Photo: Radcliffe Camera, Oxford - Isabel Parkinson 2016)
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