Lockdown in Paris : Day Forty-Three
9h15 : Don’t watch Medici Don’t watch Medici Don’t watch Medici Don’t watch Medici Don’t watch Medici Don’t watch Medici. I think one of the most unpleasant mundanities in life is having to taste warm milk to see if it’s gone off. It was definitely on its way out - it didn’t taste right - but it hadn’t yet fully committed to being off, so into the tea it went and I made porridge with it because it’s basically on its way to being cream, right? Wrong. But whatever. The mini fridge has been despatched!! So that’s something. As have my German Gap Lederhosen, and the new screening for the balcony. Who knows where all of these things will end up in the great lottery of the French postal system. The game is on.
10h : Decided that if I was going to watch something today it absolutely had to have some kind of educational purpose. Decided to continue with the jolly documentary about the inner Nazi circle on Netflix, which I have watched before and this time want to actually learn the bare bones of, so I take notes. Yep, I know that sounds mental, but I find it really ridiculously enjoyable. And also useful, when you want to know your Hesss from your Himmlers and your Goebbels from your Göhrings, which for some reason I really do. It’s called The Circle of Evil, or at least it is in French (the documentary itself is in English), and I recommend it. It’s good.
11h46 : Pause the documentary to make another dodgy cup of coffee with the dodgy milk. I think about the suggestion that was made in light of the Fridge Situation that I buy UHT milk, which puts me into a familiar train of thought about the paradox of the French and their Milk. Oh good I’m glad you asked. See, the French are really very, very savvy about their food. We know this. They protect its brilliance with rules and regulations and a forest of hoops through which every Camembert, every Champagne and every poor doomed duck with an oversized liver must jump. They’re fantastically snobbish about food but they deserve to be - their food is really very, very good. I will even admit that I myself have been turned into a snob by their own justifiable snobberies. Back in the UK I find myself eating “bread” and deciding just - not to eat it again until I get back to France. I open a fridge and I see margarine instead of butter and I feel genuinely sad about it. Like actually sad, that people are spreading this dreadful imitation of the beautiful, delicious thing that is salted butter onto their “bread”. Crumpets deserve so much better than terrifyingly neon margarine. The French are all about the ingredients - the quality of the thing. But fresh milk? Milk is apparently where they got bored with being fastidious. In supermarkets, entire shelves are given over to dastardly bottles of room temperature UHT “Milk” (pffft) while in the fridge section you find one bottom shelf with perhaps only a dozen bottles of the stuff that’s actually recently seen a cow. This is something I have puzzled over for years, literally years, and discussed with French friends who make tea with this weird, sweet, it’ll-never-go-off excuse for the real deal (yep, I’m looking at you Estelle). I don’t get it. It doesn’t fit. How can they not care about this? How do they reconcile it with their innate French Finickiness for terroir and bon qualité and all that stuff that sounds totally pretentious but is (all things considered) just - it pains me to say it - kind of true? This is what I thought about while I made my dodgy coffee with my dodgy milk, and I was no more enlightened, but I definitely resolved that no lack of fridge would induce me to buy a bottle of something pretending to have something to do with milk, and there’s an end to it.
12h37 : On to the third episode of the documentary. Turns out a helluva lot happened before the war actually happened. Did you know Rudolf Hess just went a bit mad and decided to fly to Scotland in a Messerschmitt in 1941? I did not know that the Deputy Führer parachuted into a field near Glasgow thinking he could single-handedly get the UK to sue for peace. Apparently though he was also once caught trying to stop a chair from falling over with the power of his mind, so he was obviously one sandwich short of a picnic.
14h10 : Made some boring pasta because I couldn’t face the amount of washing up I couldn’t be bothered to do in order to make anything else.
15h : Put some music on and washed up. Today is a damn sight more constructive than yesterday, I’m amazed. The general consensus between friends is that we’re all starting to crack up ever so slightly.
16h : The other day via Leonie-of-Leek I discovered an online course - An Introduction to the Medieval Age - online for £29 and given that I’ve very little else to do I bought it. That was about two weeks ago. Today I finally wrestled my brain into a learning kind of place via note-taking on the Nazis and so I finished the first module, which was fun. More notes were taken. I think I’m just getting in on all this home-schooling action, however given my current capacity for being consistent in absolutely anything, I anticipate embarking upon Module 2 during the summer of 2022.
20h00 : Finally roast a load of vegetables that have been making me feel guilty for days. Removed something that I think used to be cheese from the fridge, and discovered a lemon that had its own microclimate.
