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Food again. It's all over.
Yesterday I didn't post anything. Why? Too depressed. After dreaming about Chinese food and Chinese supermarkets (Supermercado Asia in Carre Uetam to be exact), thinking, nay, fever dreaming about how I could wangle the curfew by sneaking over there at 4am, hiding out in a nearby skip or recycling bin for plastics and metal until opening time, dash in, grab as much as I could carry and take a taxi home - or maybe just take a taxi there and back - I finally had a brilliant idea: I could call them! Of course they would deliver when lives were at risk.
Of course! Except: They are closed. Or "resting" as the owner called it. Nooooooo! The Chinese supermarket is essential to, well, life itself! That's it, I'm officially pissed off with the whole curfew.
Yam cha means "Drink tea" but it's really all about food: Chinese tapas if you like. It's a southern Chinese thing that is spreading all over the country and world and rightly so. Oh, when all this is over, I will, etc. On a positive note, I have stopped yearning for my lost and misspent youth. Now I yearn for my lost and misspent February this year! Oh how we just went to restaurants and bars without a care in the world, sitting there as close or far apart as we liked; talking even! Remember February? No, me neither...
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Tips for living in genteel poverty 3
My gaff (house) is as beautiful as can be, I think, but there's no denying that it is high maintenance. Not only is its temperature normally set on 'English boarding school January 1902', it's also like Pigpen in the cartoon Peanuts - it can just stand there quietly minding its own business and WHOOSH! Dirt and dust just attach themselves to it, seemingly effortlessly. Having a super sheddy dog (sheddy means sheds a lot) doesn't exactly help. No vacuum cleaner can beat a pillowcase full of ginga hairs every bloody day.
But! The electric internet comes to the rescue as usual. It was as if it could look into my head (it can) when it started putting ads on Facebook for the Ionic Brush. I ordered one and: It works!
Benefits:
1. It picks up all dog hairs and other small objects. The photo shows a small part of the daily haul.
2. Unlike with a vacuum cleaner, with the brush I can more easily collect flammable materials and put them in empty Nespresso sleeves to make fire starters
3. Sweeping the floors is good exercise
4. I save on electricity
Talking of saving money, when all this is over, I will dedicate a whole week to having two meals and several drinks every day in my neighbourhood cafés, restaurants and bars. I'm putting some of the money I save aside each day for this purpose. The rest is for the apocalypse, which won't be for another couple of months.
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Finding joy in the small things
Sunday! Today has been a good day. First I found a tree this morning. No, it wasn't "standing in the forest", it was lying on the pavement. I dragged it home, cut off the branches and spent a good hour cutting it up. That will keep me warm for a couple of hours tomorrow, for although spring is here (see below), bugger me if we're not going to have another cold snap. Which isn't very cold, don't get me wrong; it's just that my gaff is on average a good 15 degrees colder than outside.
Then I saw on FB that the latest edition of Swedish lifestyle magazine Ön ('The Island') was out, available from Palma Bread, which is open on Sundays and allowed to bake! Having run out of proper food (lotus root among other things) I thought I might as well get me some comfort food: Swedish crispbread. Armed with a hat, turtleneck jumper, painter's dust mask, latex gloves, dog and proof of address, I set out on the perilous trip to the shop, weaving in and out of backstreets, adding several kilometres to the trip.
At Palma Bread I found the affable Lena, and had the first face to face conversation with a living human since, oh, I don't know. February? It was wonderful. She said people act responsibly and wait outside on their own volition when they see customers inside the shop. Of course! We are adults, right? But I still took her advice and kept the receipt for the crispbreads as "proof" that I'm "allowed" to go out. How did it come to this, etc. Across the street, oh glory, the news agents' was open! And had the Sunday Times! Now I could hold this venerable paper aloft as another proof. SORTED.
Following on an even more positive note, spring is here
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Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.
I like to go to bed early and get up early, although so far it's only made me healthy. I'm still waiting for wealthy and wise. However, one good thing about being a lark is the vivid dreams I have between about 4 am and 5:30. This morning it was corona related, that's why I mention it here. It was about Chinese food, how I would get from El Terreno to my favourite (only) Chinese supermarket in Pere Garau without detection and subsequent imprisonment for - horror! Going out!
In the end (in the dream) I just went there and when I got into the shop it had become a huge kind of sunny meadow, a bit like Tuscany but with the occasional shelf thing with more Chinese foodstuffs than you can shake a stick at. It was paradise.
What brought it on was the horrible realisation that I'm running out of lotus root. Oh, lotus root, king of tubers! If I were forced to choose one vegetable to have with every meal for the rest of my life, I would choose the lotus root. Crunchy, versatile, full of holes and, in certain lights, quite beautiful, I need it in my life. Before moving to Mallorca I went on a reconnaissance trip to Pere Garau to see if they had it there. They did! But now this?
The situation is becoming unacceptable.
Has it only been two months since I cooked a Chinese New Year dinner for 18 people? It seems like several years, but the endless days of quarantine have been bearable as long as I have had lotus root. Now? Not so much.
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Old
Friday already! Has it been two or three days since my last big highlight of almost talking to someone: My big trip to Mercadona? Oh yes, Tuesday. But yesterday I started thinking about that momentous trip again. As I mentioned, I had my dog Koldbrann with me to really show the world that I had a right to be outside my house, dammit. When I got to Mercadona, I came in through the car entrance, not the main one where two or three people were waiting in line, the required one metre between each. I tied Koldbrann to a post, and the security guard waved me in. What, before everybody else? No, no, that's not right. There are people waiting in line! Yes, yes, he waved. I thought, aw! he let me go in first so Koldbrann won't have so long to wait.
But yesterday a thought struck me. What if it wasn't because of Koldbrann at all, but because I'm, er, OLD?!? Ahrrghhhhhhghhhh. Kill me now! But not before I get to the end of the DVD I borrowed from another Luddite.
In another corona-related news: Yesterday I discovered that my watch had completely fogged over from the inside because of all the damned handwashing. Oh no! My favourite watch, a Calvin Klein I bought on a British Airways flight from Hong Kong (remember flights?) probably 20 years ago. We have been through a lot together, including it being sent on two three-month trips to Switzerland for repairs. Would this bastard Corona be the end of it? Then I remembered some advice floating around in my head, something I had vaguely stored away during the early days of the magnificent mobile phone. Rice! I put my watch in my rice container and like magic, a few hours later all the droplets were gone. Wooow!
Then I put the rice in my rice cooker together with some innards and chopped carrots, and cooked a lovely meal for Koldbrann. You see? Would an OLD person with Mercadona privilege have thought of that? I think not.
