It’s about three weeks since I did any proper cooking. It was very tricky cutting veg, even with my big knife and various ingenious techniques.  I hve confined myself to a few convenience meals and ringing for takeaways. I think I said that even the act of buttering bread or stirring cheese sauce was challenging – that’s how bad it’s been.

Today I am cooking roasted vegetables with belly pork. It’s so simple it’s hardly cooking but the cutting of vegetables makes it easy to compare with three weeks ago. It is so much easier I am cautiously forecasting a return to normality in the next few days. My main qualification for saying that is optimism rather than science, but what is faith without hope? Or charity?

Here’s a diversion for you. It’s always a surprise to think that the Gloster Gladiator what was basically a design from WW1 fought the Luftwaffe in WW2. For those of you who don’t follow links – this comes from Faith, Hope and Charity being the names given to three Gladiators that defended Malta. It was a bit more advanced than the Great War designs, but it really did belong to a different age, fighting with the RAF over France in 1939, in the Battle of Britain, Norway, Malta and the Mediterranean.

One of the pilots using the Gladiator, was Roald Dahl.  I’m tempted to ask a serious question here, but I won’t. I will just mention that it just shows how complicated it can be to sit in judgement of people. Roald Dahl, anti-Semite and author i need of rewriting, as we are now told we must see him, was also Roald Dahl who risked his life many times to bring down the Nazi regime. Two of the earliest RAF casualties of WW2, by the way, were members of the British Union of Fascists.

Life is complex when you try to sort it out into good people and bad people.

“C’est la vie”, say the old folks, it goes to show you never can tell.

I enclose the quote because you never can tell, and because you don’t often get a chance to quote Chuck Berry in a post about anti-Semitism and the BUF.