The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
Forget banana bread, mushrooms are the latest cure for lockdown boredom
Just when we thought the end was in sight and it might – just – be safe to start thinking about going back in the water, we slowly realise that throwing Covid caution to the winds is, to put it mildly, somewhat premature.
In spite of the Johnson administration riding high on the successful vaccine wave (as opposed to the third one promised and/ or threatened over the summer if we don’t behave ourselves, tut-tut), it seems that life, Jim (even if not quite as we know it) is still going to be on hold for some time to come.
Living with Covid has become more and more like the running scene along St Andrews’ West Sands in Chariots Of Fire – eternal slow motion that never really gets anywhere and never seems to end.
We reach out to grasp the nettle of the all-conquering inoculation, clutch at the straw of Nicola’s instructions to “stay local” or Boris’s promise of a “semblance of normality” while sitting outside wrapped in all our available clothes to sip a coffee and shivery bite with a pal we hardly recognise under all those layers and after all those months.
But to no avail.
“I have thee not and yet I see thee still”, as Macbeth once remarked about a phantom dagger leading to dark deeds and doom, proving that expecting sharp objects to solve all your problems in one fell jab is, indeed a triumph of hope over experience.
Especially if the clots we appear to be dealing with are of the human rather than the medical variety.
So how do we keep going, apart from chanting the mantra: “Slow and steady wins the race”? If you don’t die of boredom or go mad with frustration first? Forget banana bread.
It turns out we should all have been growing mushrooms.
Put the fun into fungus? Enough, already. Leaving aside the ironic aptness, in the current context, of being kept in the dark and fed a load of old manure, mushrooms are cheap, nutritious and easy to grow as long as you don’t find yourself cultivating those whose effects on your system make the worst excesses of Covid look like a mild case of the sniffles.
I just have visions of those far-off days when it was no end of a wheeze to brew your own beer, either with kits from Boots, the Knit-It-Yourself Wholefood Shoppe or do-it-yourself recipes involving packet yeast and runny honey, resembling nothing so much as bomb-making equipment, often with similar explosive effect, internal and external.
Mind you, combine the effects of leftover Chateau Semtex ’77 and micro-organisms from the shroom room and you could end up as the next Louis Pasteur.
Or, with luck and a following wind, and the odd spurious claim of distant acquaintance with a government minister, with your own contract to provide medical services to the gullible…
GETTING TO THE BALD TRUTH
I read a survey a couple of weeks ago (I was bored, what can I tell you?), stating that Prince William is the world’s sexiest bald man.
Actually, I originally typed sexist bald man, but that’s another story, if Meghan and Harry are to be believed. Which is a big if.
Now, the admittedly seriously tonsured heir (there but for a typographical error) to the throne has always struck me as a rather pleasant-looking if unremarkable young man whose wider appeal would do little to disturb the nightly slumbers of others in the Sexy Bald Hall of Fame, like Jason Statham, Vin Diesel or Mike Tyson, not to mention the shade of Shir Sean Connery.
But like many who perhaps possess depths so well hidden that they are invisible to the rest of us, he had enough about him to be able to snare a very attractive and, amazingly in the 21st Century, highly suitable wife.
As, I suppose, did the equally un-hirsute Prince Albert of Monaco, except that his bride apparently made a bid for freedom before the wedding.
It’s just a pity that William had to choose himself a spouse whose bobbing and bounteous blow-dry garners (Garniers? Other hair products are available) more column inches than any plethora of dull good works and is only outshone by the antics of the aforementioned Sussexes, him with his thinning but not yet gone ginger thatch and her with her trademark messy bun.
If it secretly bothers him, of course, the otherwise level-headed prince could always follow in the footsteps of James Nesbitt and Jimmy Carr and go for the plug transplant, if he could cope with the other kind of fallout from the press.
Hair in public life has a huge fascination, given the tonsorial eccentricity of political leaders the world over. But maybe there’s a nice selection of bespoke toupees carefully packed away against the day when he has to schlep down the aisle at the Abbey to the strains of Zadok The Priest.
Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown, after all, especially if there’s a dodgy syrup underneath it…
It turns out we should all have been growing mushrooms