Pizza date.

Isolation is not a luxurious place. Restaurants, cafés, country pubs, all of them confirmed victims of Covid-19. Those little midweek treats that we used to take for granted. I mean, sure, its a nationwide police-enforced lockdown, it’s not supposed to be luxurious. And don’t get me wrong, luxuries aren’t top of the list of things that we’re missing right now. We’ve lived at the other side of the country from our families for the past 6 months and its definitely been a challenging experience for us both - we love them all dearly. But we’ve still seen plenty of them. We have been back home to the green and pleasant hills of Yorkshire literally monthly since we moved, be that for work, fun, or mostly a bit of both. We live 4 hours away from home, which is not exactly a pop-round-for-a-cup-of-tea distance, but it’s only 4 hours. And so, as much as we miss a certain geographical closeness with our nearest and dearest, we haven’t really felt too disconnected in the grand scheme of things. What has really hit us these last couple of days is that we couldn’t go see them right now even if we wanted to. The police would quite literally stop me on my way to my Mum’s house and send me back the way I came. That’s kinda weird.

Given that context, maybe the fact that we can’t go out to eat really isn’t a big deal - and it definitely isn’t - but it is another little part of our ‘regular’ lives that we have missed, or maybe it’s just the option to go out that we’ve missed. We couldn’t right now even if we wanted to. Perhaps that’s yet another feature of this modern, whatever you like whenever you like it world, that we could benefit from learning to live without.

Having said that, there’s nothing to stop us creating a bit of luxury for ourselves. Sure, we’ll have the washing up to do after, and we won’t get to choose our wine from a list, but those aren’t the reasons we love to eat out. I think I love the idea that a restaurant is only there to serve food. There’s nothing else to do there (unless you’re under 8 and you’re at a Brewer’s Fayre with an adventure climbing frame). You just sit down, take your time, and savour the whole experience of eating a meal. The food has been really thought about, prepared by someone who’s proud of what they can make. And the real joy, I suppose, is sharing it all with someone you care about.

So that’s what we did today. We took a bit of time to prepare our favourite food (with the help of my old mate, sourdough), we laid out the table cloth, picked some fresh flowers, and sat out in the sun for an hour just to talk and enjoy the fruits of our labour. And we drank white wine at lunch, the height of luxury if you ask me.