Hot and Cross

I feel as though I’m one of a very small and deprived group of people this Easter, one of the few losers who didn’t get a hot cross bun.
My FB feed is awash with stellar hot cross bun baking efforts from all over the place- it’s no wonder there is no flour in the supermarkets. Even my non-baking daughter managed a fairly passable batch.

I feel very hard done by and grumpy about it in my little uni-bubble. No hot cross buns and no one to eat them with. No one to comment on the thrill of the dough rising perfectly, no one to comment on the delicious fragrant yeasty aromas wafting through the house, no one to sit down with and admire the perfectly risen, fruity, spicy perfection with lashings of melting butter. Talk about grumpy and glass half empty!

And that seems to be such a big part of this isolating thing- how you look at it. For many families it will be a unique and pleasurable time to have real “quality family time”, a term Brian and I used to use ironically to describe various little family nightmares- but for many, the isolation now brings introspection and self-reflection which is not always all it’s cracked up to be.  An opportunity to discover yourself without any distractions can be very wearing and confronting. The energetic tone of many of the interactions I have been having seem to be waning a bit. Perhaps we are getting a bit sick of ourselves. I am most certainly my most boring house mate. There is no circuit-breaker for that internal dialogue.

All this alone time provides an opportunity to discover how truly weird you really are, weird outfits notwithstanding. I’m using this time to wear all those terrible outfits that you can’t get rid of but you really should. The strawberry pink culottes, glitter tee-shirts – after all, no one gets to see you. Absolutely no pics of that!!!

My concentration seems to be completely shot too. Am I the only one?? I hope not and fervently hope it’s the isolation not the incipient dementia of old age. I also don’t seem to be able to settle to anything- flitting from one silly little activity to another but never tackling anything that requires more than a minimum of brain power. 

And I have this terrible FOMO. It feels as though something must be happening somewhere, but not here. This is not helped by all the videos of lovely families learning dances, lots of creative family fun and all those hot cross bun posts. 

But grumpy and bored though I may be, it’s yet another hypnotically beautiful day here. My imaginary sore throat turns out to have disappeared- obviously an Easter miracle cure and maybe missing out on hot cross buns has a silver lining - I might still fit in to my jeans after this.

The photo is the hot cross buns we made at Easter a couple of years ago - it seems a lifetime ago.

Love Lesley