Day 47: Beer o’clock

The Americans celebrate every day of the year with some bizarre thing or other and today believe it or not is Home Brewing Day. Fortuitously this year it falls on a Saturday. In those long-forgotten days BC this was a day for going out with friends or eating out. We should all therefore embrace home-brewing day to bring some fun to our weekends once again.

If my father were still alive, he would no doubt already have a thriving moonshine business going. This is after all the man who ran his own whisky still in Saudi in the 70s and on retirement invented ‘beer o’clock’ and ‘zonkas’. Crucially, those daily milestones were sacrosanct. He may not have needed a watch, but slippage would not have been tolerated. Standards, after all, must be maintained.

Quarantinis should therefore be restricted to “locktail hour”. Resist the temptation for this to creep earlier with each passing week. If you’re hitting the sauce in the presence of Phil and Holly or the BBC Breakfast team, it’s time to step away from the bottle and put the kettle on instead. And no, a ‘vodka tea’ is not acceptable.

Nowadays everyone seems to spend far more time planning menus, and thinking and worrying about food more generally. Release the pressure by instigating Supper Roulette.

Rummage through your cupboards and search for the most intriguing tins or jars – those without labels are always fun. You could play a game of ‘guess the dinner’. Make sure all tins and jars have gone past their expiry or best before date but it’s even better if they have none of that information on them because that means they are pre-1996 I think. The food inside may have lost its texture and flavour so don’t panic and think you have the Corona just because you can’t taste anything: it’s just old food. If the food looks and smells fine then it probably is, despite all the claims of ‘putting your health at risk’ by eating it. As if that matters. These days after all we take our lives in our hands on a daily basis just by breathing.

My daughter has just subscribed to one of those recipe box services. And incidentally is getting a variety of fresh food delivered far faster than the 18 week waiting list for Tesco. She tells me the challenge in her house is to stop her boyfriend from taking all the perfectly pre-portioned ingredients and inventing his own ‘pot luck’ dinners by throwing everything into the same pan. TV chefs have a lot to answer for in the days of Corona.

Talking of which, if you find yourself spending 6 hours rustling up a five course Michelin starred dinner while pretending to host your own cookery show, take it from me – you are going mad!! Put a frozen pizza in the oven and have a nice lie down. Not long now til tomorrow’s zonkas.