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Writer's pictureCharlotteWay

Have Your Cake And Eat It


It’s a week of lockdown relaxations, as Bo and Co attempt to distract us from their recent tracing app disaster with hints that pubs could soon be back in business: a tactic which, knowing the British public, actually may well work. The fate of Britain’s school children apparently now rests upon the moral compass of the Manchester United football team, yet we can rest assured that our situation is not quite as embarrassing as that of our friends across the pond; Trump’s latest ‘joke’ that he asked public health officials to slow down Coronavirus testing in order to hide rocketing cases leaves many questioning their own sense of humour.


Back on the home front, my sister’s resort to crochet is the latest sign that things aren’t going well, particularly as a slight issue with short-term memory loss prevents her from getting much further than five stitches into her creation before she forgets which steps she has just taken. Thankfully we’re not the only ones to slowly be going stir-crazy, as a Facebook chat with friends descended into meltdown at 1 o’clock in the morning last week, when we all admitted to each other that 13 weeks of parents cooking for us were perhaps not worth the strain on our family relationships. I’m beginning to wonder whether my friend’s self-sacrificial participation in the Coronavirus clinical vaccine trial is in fact just her seeking an easy way out.


A week of work experience culminated in the definitive interview from hell, and the notorious Panic Masters is now firmly on the cards. Some guys have all the luck, but it’s unfortunately been a week for rejections left, right, and centre; the most exciting part of my lockdown love life is now being mistaken for my 18-year-old brother’s girlfriend by his old classmate whilst the two of us were out on our daily jaunt around town. Said brother has now built up quite the horticultural CV flogging his questionable services to unsuspecting old women in the vicinity, and the budding entrepreneur has recently taken to using his earnings to pay my cash-strapped sister to tickle his feet: a positively nauseating sight to be met with at 11 o’clock in the evening. All I can say to any potential female suitors out there is rather you than me.


Chiropodist appointments aside, my sister’s social life is one to envy, and her night-time ritual of virtual quizzes is fast becoming the go-to excuse for avoiding the washing-up. Whether the programme of soirée entertainment is of any actual benefit to her general knowledge is another question altogether; I was witness to my parents’ exchange of worried glances the other evening as my sister seemed to suggest at supper that Nepal was in South America, before she corrected herself, reassuring everyone at the table that of course she knew the country was in Italy. Say a little prayer for her Geography degree.


Speaking of education, Gavin Williamson’s pledge to have all children back in full-time schooling by September will have undoubtedly come as welcome news to my 6-year-old cousin, whose tuition has bizarrely been entrusted in the last month to our uncle, who boasts a solid total of one GCSE. The decision comes as less of a nice surprise for my panic-stricken grandma, for whom the idea of my cousins running around in a germ-infested playground is the realisation of her current worst nightmare. Unbeknownst to her, however, my grandpa has taken full advantage of lockdown’s opportunity to empty their chest freezer and has spent the last week feeding her 15-year-old lamb stew, and so, I hate to break it to my grandma, but I think there’s more chance of perishing by chronic food poisoning at present.


In the culinary department, the strain on supermarket stock has driven my friends to create a number of dubious concoctions, constituted predominantly of ingredient substitutes, whilst, to my mother’s delight, cooking a Spanish omelette is apparently now the first step to securing an A* in your Spanish A-level. To give credit where credit’s due, the omelette turned out to be surprisingly moreish, but I wouldn’t expect any less, after my brother spent a record total of five hours in the kitchen. My birthday last week was suitably twisted as an excuse for sweet treats and gluttony, although pleasure from my mother’s lemon sponge was tragically short-lived, almost certainly at the hands of my other brother. They say you can’t have your cake and eat it, but this is the third birthday cake to mysteriously disappear during the lockdown period and yet my scavenger of a sibling never seems to put on a single ounce of weight. The answer’s apparently all in his militant work-out routine; ever since I caught him typing the rather aggressive-sounding phrase “How to get ripped” into Google’s search engine, the grunts from the garden have been verging on offensive.


To my father’s horror, BoJo’s reopening of non-essential retail on the 15th meant that the local interior design shop was able to welcome back its favourite customer, and my mother has spent the last week choosing between 30 variations of one shade of linen. This weekend marked a milestone moment in the redecoration of our dining room, and my father is proud to announce that all four walls are now covered in an impressive total of one layer of paint – at least, they were, until I heard my poor mother scream last night as half the plaster came tumbling down to the floor. I must be off now to offer my invaluable advice on which of 20 lamps to hang from the ceiling. Until next time, stay safe, and please subscribe using the button below.


Charlotte x

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