Distancing diary 1

In an effort to keep active and happy while indoors for months, I bought a dance mat for the PS2. I cannot dance... yet.

My selection of dance games is as follows:

Flow Urban Dance Uprising

Dancing With The Stars

Dance Dance Revolution Extreme

Dance Dance Revolution Max

Dance Dance Revolution Max 2

Dance Dance Revolution X

Dance Dance Revolution Supernova

Dance Dance Revolution Supernova 2

I eagerly await the release of Dance Dance Revolution Insane Overdrive Genocide 3.

I Plugged in the dance mat, thrilled at my own stupid/genius idea, and started playing. The first song was Always on My Mind by the Pet Shop Boys.

I missed every. single. step.

I continued nonetheless, thinking that this was a good starting point. A clean slate. By the end of the pandemic I’ll be... someone good at dancing. I can’t say Michael Jackson these days, so maybe one of the lads from Diversity.

I moved onto another song and scored nothing again. This was clearly going to take a lot of practice. It then dawned on me that the dance mat wasn’t working. Turns out I had bought an XL dance mat that is potentially compatible with only one game: the confusingly named Dance UK XL Lite. I don’t have that game.

When the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse arrive at my house they will find a man alone with a massive pointless dance mat and an 8MB PS2 memory card which shows that he has a consistent high score of zero.

And then I will invite them to play Singstar with me.

Stay safe everyone x

Distancing Diary 2

The first day of lockdown has turned me into the kind of person who wants to dob in the ice cream man. What is he thinking? It’s like a gritty reboot of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. The Child Catcher roams the empty streets, luring in the children just to infect them with a covid-covered Mr Whippee.

People round here know not to go to the ice cream van, because if they’re hungry they can always go to Shah’s Fast Food. Presumably Shah is still open because his 3/5 hygiene rated cuisine is considered a key service.

There is only one sensible person in the neighbourhood. As I cycled back from the shop I saw a beardy old man with long hair and aviator shades standing on his balcony. He was peacefully gazing out across the street and sipping a tinny. I waved to him. He waved back and told me to stay safe.

Don’t be like Ice Cream man, don’t be like Shah, be like Tinny Man.

Stay safe x

I’ve been cycling around Nottingham during my 1x exercise a day. I’ve been seeing all the sights: The melancholy of an empty Toby Carvery in prime roast hours, the sad silliness of the deserted ‘Diddyland’, the imaginative genius that named a road “New Row”.

The streets are sparsely populated by occasional cyclists and runners. You only see multiple people when they’re queuing outside food shops or exercising around green spaces and waterways. The city has essentially become a Centre Parcs that you’re allowed into even if you’re not middle-class. For the first week it’s novel and fun. You’re enjoying the quiet and the new activities. By the second week it’s starting to get a little tedious and you’re annoyed by the limited stock at the shop. On the Sunday evening you find a big packet of mung beans from a forgotten recipe and have soaked them overnight and now there are too many of them and you’re just going to have to eat a metric tonne of mung beans over the next few days and they’re not even that tasty why did you do that? Or maybe that’s just me.

On the third week you finally get your dance mat working (TBC).

Stay safe x

Despite talk of ‘war time spirit’ and the country using its legendary resilience to weather this storm, the most British thing I’ve seen is a man sitting in a deck chair, with no top on, in his front garden, on a main road. He is my Churchill.

Now, some lists:

After my last entry I was left with a metric tonne of mung beans to eat. I made:

- Mung bean bolognaise (decent)

- Mung bean curry (decent)

- Roast mung beans (fine)

- Mung bean salad (questionable)

- Mung bean soup (gruel)

- Burned mung beans (looked like rabbit droppings and presumably tasted the same - possibly an improvement)

List of friends’ descriptions of my long-haired and fully-bearded quarantine appearance:

- A roadie for Creedence Clearwater Rival

- A Bolshevik poet

- Joe Exotic (when combined with a cap, the hair does take on a mullety aesthetic)

List of cats I have tried to befriend:

- The ginger and white cat

- The black and white cat

- The black cat that hides in the bird house but whose bird impression is frankly appalling

List of cats I have successfully befriended:

At the start of lockdown, my Dad said to keep an eye on the post. He’d very kindly bought me a present, but he wasn’t sure when it would arrive because he’d ordered it cheap off a dodgy looking Chinese website.

Weeks went by, then months went by. Nothing arrived. It looked like he’d been scammed.

He revealed that he’d ordered me a Lego Millennium Falcon - something to keep me busy and entertained in lockdown. He chased it up with the company and they actually offered a partial refund - looks like it was less of a scam than we thought.

Finally, about 4 months later, something arrived today. A parcel from China. A parcel from China small enough that it could fit through my letterbox... It was addressed to Dad. I FaceTimed him, thinking it would be really funny to see his reaction when I opened the package to reveal that he’d accidentally bought a miniature Millenium Falcon.

I opened the package to reveal... two pairs of Gucci socks.

I can only assume that, when Dad applied for a refund, the company were concerned that he’d got cold feet.

Every two weeks I do the Big Shop. On one such trip into the disease ravaged wasteland of Outside My House, I bought a big ol’ bag o’ spaghetti. Perfect. It’s better value and I don’t have to go spaghetti shopping as often. So I disinfected my spaghetti packet when I got home, and put it away.

Later in the week, I was cooking up some tomato-based dish and I reached for the spaghetti. I opened the big ol’ bag and realised I had mistakenly bought an experimental new kind of green, stinky, fur-covered spaghetti. Half of the pasta had clearly gotten wet in the disinfecting process and had gone mouldy. But the other half was ok. Half of a big bag o’ spaghetti is still enough to feed 5 Italian orphans for a week. And the great thing about living alone with no visitors allowed is that there’s no one to judge you. I set about snapping all the spaghetti in half to remove the mouldy end, putting some of the remnants into a pan of water, and storing the rest in various smaller containers.

I was a little apprehensive that the spaghetti may not be the best thing to eat, considering its proximity to mould. This apprehension was overwhelmed by the relief at having saved some of the precious harvest that I’d fought through fogged-up-glasses and aisles full of idiots to acquire. As I went to drain the cooked pasta, there was a loud splat as the colander flipped itself upside down and emptied all the fresh spaghetti into a sink that I’d just cleaned some paintbrushes in. I stood there, looking glumly at my fresh, undercoat-marinaded pasta, in a kitchen where each different cupboard now contained a jar or takeaway box full of loose, snapped, potentially mouldy spaghetti.

It might be a metaphor for 2020. Or it might be a harrowingly mundane tale about a spendthrift and his dutty pasta jars. I’m going to go with the former.

While reaching for the toastie maker, I smashed the llama plant pot. My elbow knocked it onto the floor and it shattered. I was about to sweep up the pieces and bin them when I remembered seeing a picture of ‘kintsukuroi’ - the Japanese art of repairing something using gold lacquer so that the repaired item becomes more beautiful than the original. It was difficult to imagine how the £5 Lidl plant pot could be any more beautiful, but I like a challenge.

I was fresh out of gold lacquer so I started the job off with superglue. Initially, it didn’t want to come out of the tube. Then it poured out all over my hand, glueing my fingers together. I’m just glad it wasn’t gold lacquer, because that didn’t end well for the lady in that Bond film.

After half an hour of separating my fingers and peeling glue off my hands, I returned to the llama. I washed the pieces and placed them all on a piece of paper. It was like a 3D ceramic jigsaw puzzle. Slowly, I began to assemble the pieces, applying the glue, and holding them together for 30 seconds so the glue could set. Now I know why jigsaw puzzles aren’t generally made of ceramic or any other sharp material. After sealing the llama’s head in place, I removed my hand to find that I was bleeding. Now that the llama was streaked with blood, I only needed to add sweat and tears. Due to the temperature, the sweat wasn’t very forthcoming.

I washed the cut and returned to the partially reconstructed llama to continue the surgery. When the superglue ran out, I turned to the next best thing: Wilko’s contact adhesive. The adhesive did have more of a gold colouring, but it also went all stringy when it got stuck on my hand, so it was more like I was following an ancient Italian tradition of repairing things with mozzarella. It also wasn’t as strong, which was a good thing, because I had to re-break parts of it that were skewwhiff the first time round. Thank god we don’t live in the world of Toy Story.

Now it stands on my kitchen side. The contact adhesive makes it look like it’s oozing pus from its wounds, it has dandruff caused by bits of a letter about my pension that got attached to the superglue, and there’s a hole in its arse. But I was still happy to have it back.

Choose your own allegory:

- Life after the pandemic

- The post-Trump USA

- Paul Chuckle’s heart following the death of Barry