The Lockdown League

Like so often, it wasn’t a conscious decision but as if someone had flicked a switch in my mind and from one moment to the next, I just knew.

I was sitting on a bus back from Upstate New York, when I knew I was going to fly home to spend the Corona Virus time with my family. Just an hour before I had bought groceries and was perfectly happy with the idea of sitting the crisis out in New York, but then I suddenly knew that I would go crazy working from my apartment all day long, not being able to see anyone or go anywhere.

So I made my way home to spend the COVID months with my family and this may well have been the best non-decision I’ve made in the past year. Home has always been a place where I can spend days on end without wanting to see anyone or go anywhere and this makes it just the perfect place for a global pandemic.

Four months flew by in a flash and as I was sitting on the empty plane back to New York, I was wondering what I would remember from this period. A few things came to mind:

• Ruby and her babies: My desk (aka a table for garden parties) was in the living room overlooking the garden. Birds, squirrels and hedgehogs were regular visitors and some mornings I spent more time looking through my binoculars than at my screen. Half-way into the pandemic, a little robin decided that our garage was a good place to nest. Ruby instantly stole our hearts and I dare say we went to check on her and her tiny babies at least hourly… some of us even more often.

• One plus two: I was not expecting for COVID-19 to go on quite as long as it is and was not at all prepared to spend months in Germany. I had brought a couple of clothes in case one could leave the house, but didn’t even end up taking them out of the suitcase. Instead, I spent the months in a blue pair of sweat pants and a red or purple cardigan. I can’t say I missed wearing other clothes...

• The Babylonian Confusion: My family is rather silly and some (most?) of the conversations we have should never be repeated outside our home. In addition to all the usual nonsense, we seemed to have lost our words in Babylonian confusions and ended up saying things that made no sense at all: “Take a look in the salad” instead of the menu, “can you look after the strawberries” instead of the boiling potatoes… oh dear. 

• The Rosetta Stone: We finished THE puzzle of all puzzles: a true-shaped version of the Rosetta Stone with the Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, Ancient Greek and a third script I always forget. Suddenly conversations along the lines of "Okay, I'm now looking for dot-r-squared-wiggle" made all the sense in the world.  

 

But what I will remember most of all is our little Lockdown League. Full of spring-cleaning energy, we not only got rid of hundreds of books, tested half a dozen of old lilos, went through a library full of old school and university notes… but were also determined to eat everything that we had at home and that had been ignored or forgotten for the past years.

We “ate” 400 vitamin tablets that no one remembered buying, used up half a dozen glasses of savoy cabbage and countless Knorr Fix products from the last century. We emptied four deodorants that no one admitted to having bought and five bottles of shower gel that had just appeared. We applied face masks and used hair oil, found and finished Nutella from four years ago, enjoyed a jar of beetroot that had been in the fridge for months, tried a handful of ready-made sauces that didn’t taste good at all, finished some baby food and tinned roulades that were definitely out of date, and enjoyed soups that were so special that they hadn’t been eaten in ten years.

And because our shopping tours through the kitchen and the cellar got so wild and fun, we introduced a point system as added incentives for eating the house empty: One point for food from the fridge that needed to be eaten, two points for dry good we had in the kitchen, and three points for anything from the cellar.

One day I came back from the cellar with my pickings and realised the soup which I was going to eat was still within the best before date. My sister and I quickly discussed the situation and both agreed that technically I really shouldn’t eat it and rather wait until it was out of date… 😉