I read an interesting article in the Guardian this week talking about “lockdown habits we’re going to keep”, another of what feels like an almost infinite number of thinkpieces about “the new normal”, or whether anything will ever feel normal again, or whether the old normal was all wrong and will need to change. I know a lot of people reckon that this should prompt a huge rethinking of how society functions – that we should pay key workers what they’re worth, fund our health service properly, have a universal basic income, the list goes on.

Perhaps I’m too pessimistic, but I can’t see it happening. I could have spent my time stuck at home reading Proust, learning a foreign language or making myself a better human in countless different ways, but I haven’t done that either. I’ve eaten breakfast regularly. I’ve done more cooking (not very well, most of the time). I’ve watched a lot of Seinfeld, I’ve managed to finish about three paperbacks and I’ve finally seen The Shining. It doesn’t, I think, even remotely resemble the path to true enlightenment.

I’m not even certain, in truth, whether we’re even in lockdown any more, because I find the stage we’re currently in very strange indeed. Far too many people are still dying, there are still plenty of new coronavirus cases daily, we still can’t see our friends, hug our family or go round anybody else’s house, and yet all the rhetoric is about things slowly going back to – that word again – “normal”. Lots of Reading’s independent restaurants and cafés have reopened or are reopening, shops are reopening, and some kids will soon return to school.

A friend of mine is married to a teacher and she goes back to work next week. She’ll be behind a perspex screen, but if she wants any PPE she’ll have to supply it herself, because apparently it’s not needed. This morning I watched a clip of the Flaming Lips on Colbert, performing Race For The Prize: each member of the band was literally in a bubble, as if they were zorbing, and each audience member was in a bubble too. Nothing normal about that: it felt like the stuff of science fiction, and not necessarily in a good way.

I think, quite aside from the growing disquiet on this side of the world and the other side of the world – wherever you stand on throwing statues into the harbour, or JK Rowling’s latest remarks, or any of the other ways the universe has found to polarise us all – this is one of the reasons why plenty of people have hit a wall this week. The cognitive dissonance between feeling scared, or lonely, or deprived, and things in the world outside our front doors looking, if not exactly “normal”, a little more like they did before is hardly good for the soul.

Someone told me on Twitter today that they’d had to pull over by the side of the road on the way home to “have a little weep” and I couldn’t say I was surprised. It doesn’t help, either, to look at pictures from France or Italy or Spain and see that they are so much further ahead on the road to recovery than we are: real success beats apparent success, hands down, every time.

Anyway, the Guardian‘s list of lockdown habits was surprisingly un-Guardian, with no sourdough starters or podcasts to be seen anywhere. One person had decided to embrace going grey, another had started having communal dinners with the people in her shared house (although she also said “we’ve got to know everyone’s partners”, which suggests that her lockdown hasn’t necessarily been as strict as everyone else’s). There were people starting album clubs, or getting into pot plants, among other miniature life makeovers.

What do I want to keep doing once this surreal chapter in our lives comes to an end? Here’s one: every fortnight, usually on a Friday morning before this piece goes live, I have a FaceTime conversation with my two oldest friends. One is Mike, who began lockdown living a spartan existence in the French alps (I wrote about him in the very first of these diaries) but reached a tipping point a few months ago where his own company got to be a little too much. So he got in his car and drove back home to the UK to spend the rest of lockdown with his parents, who are in their seventies. “It’s my joker” he said, “and I know I can only play it once.”

Much as he loves his family, I imagine he sometimes misses the solitary life: he used to have fully Trappist days – one in every three – where he didn’t look at his phone or the internet for twenty-four hours. I struggle to spend twenty-four minutes away from mine, so I envy his superhuman restraint. But then in our conversations Mike often seems ignorant of huge swathes of popular culture, so I’m not sure he’s paying a huge amount of attention the other two days: we nearly got him to Google “two girls one cup” on one of our most recent conversations.

The third of our merry band is Ivor, who moved to New Zealand a few years back and now lives there happily with his wife and two small children. We talk in the morning UK time, so I am nursing my first coffee of the day while Ivor, sitting in his home office in front of some disturbingly jazzy curtains, is usually knocking back a couple of beers once the kids have gone to bed. It’s safe to say that he can’t believe his luck to be living where he is at a time like now: “we have one Covid case left in the whole of New Zealand” he told us on our last FaceTime call. In total just over twenty people in New Zealand have died.

I’ve known Mike and Ivor for over thirty-five years, and our conversation is a mixture of talking about old times, putting the world to rights, comparing disgusting memes – or rather, sending them to Mike who never seems to see any of them – and just shooting the breeze about everything and nothing. Ivor has been awake all day, Mike has usually just come back from a jog and, if truth be told, I’ve usually not long stumbled out of bed, but as a conversational trio it just works.

It’s truly lovely, and one of the things I love most about life right now, and yet before the virus struck I only really saw Ivor when he came home to visit his parents once a year. I would go down the pub with Mike when he was back in the country visiting his family, but I would never have caught up with him every fortnight. Why not? I find myself thinking now: once this phase is over, I hope I still talk to them both, often.

What else? Doing a weekly shop and planning meals, for a start. This change, imposed by lockdown, has suited my other half perfectly: a meticulous planner, Zoë would much sooner know what we’re eating and when we’re eating it. But now that we do know exactly that, I find myself wishing we’d done it ages ago.

Ditto for stockpiling, which is almost a religion to Zoë (“I couldn’t believe the state of your fridge and cupboard when I first moved in” she likes to say. “You lived like a fucking student.”). She’s inherited a passion for it from her dad, the high priest of stockpiling. If the zombie apocalypse ever strikes he’ll never run out of Head & Shoulders or Cerruti 1881, given that he has a cupboard packed to the rafters with bottles of both. At least he’ll be flake-free and smelling fresh as the marauders drag him from the house.

Zoë’s last trip to the shops before lockdown was to our local corner shop, where she spent over thirty pounds on canned goods: surely the only time anyone has ever blown that much cash there without buying lottery tickets or clear spirits of some description. And I hate giving her an opportunity to say those magic words I told you so, but I can now see the benefits of having a cupboard full of chopped tomatoes, chickpeas, tuna, sardine fillets, coconut milk. I’ll just justify it to myself by saying that we’re planning for a no deal Brexit.

I can’t see myself giving up making proper coffee at home, either; using the Aeropress has become a daily ritual. Just in the way that back when I commuted, my day didn’t properly begin until that first latte had happened, I now don’t feel fully human until I’ve fixed myself a coffee. I start to feel a bit antsy when I am running low on supplies, and my friend Tom has lent me a hand grinder, which means that the next tier of coffee wankerdom is surely within my reach. Weaning myself off milky drinks has been another boon, and I now realise that a black filter with a slug of the good stuff – organic unhomogenised full-fat milk, or Channel Islands if I’m especially lucky – makes the flavours sing in a way that drowning them in dairy never can.

I think the list could go on and on. Going for walks with Zoë, for instance. They largely consist of walking past beautiful houses that won’t ever be mine, but they still mean time spent taking in the world and properly paying attention to it and each other, rather than getting lost looking at a screen. Doing the washing up, which has become a happy, companionable milestone every day, even if we only discovered that by breaking the dishwasher. And that’s before we get on to loungewear: Zoë bought me my first set for my birthday three months ago and it’s been a revelation. Why was I sitting round the house in my jeans when I got home from work for all those years? Search me.

I think now I can see clearly the challenge that lies ahead, in the hall of mirrors of “normal”, “new normal” and “should-no-longer-be-seen-as-normal”. Even if the world doesn’t necessarily learn from its mistakes – and god knows, the odds aren’t great – it would be a crying shame if we lost the very real, invaluable ways in which we live better and are better connected. I for one am going to try and give it a go. I might not succeed, but it’s still infinitely preferable to reading Proust.

* * * * *

If you write about food, and review restaurants, for long enough there are a couple of pitfalls that await you. The first is that you become known to the PRs and get invited (or rather, #invited) to openings, or re-openings, or launches of a delicious new vegetarian tapas menu, or cocktail making classes, or some other beano.

I’ve written about this in the past and I’m not going to go over it again, but I hope that post-Covid this kind of thing comes to an end. If you want to support a restaurant, spend your own money there and review it, and help it to survive by spreading the word. Post-Covid independent restaurants won’t have the resources to do that, and reviewers with a conscience shouldn’t expect them to.

The other, more insidious, risk is that you get too close to the world you’re reviewing and you go native. I think many restaurant blogs have to grapple with that problem, but some of them lurch into full chef-worship mode. I’ve always been uncomfortable with this, because it just feels a little unseemly.

When I read reviews that are full of clanging dropped names, or ones where respect starts to mutate into reverence, I find my mouse pointer inexorably marching to the X in the corner of the screen. It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly where the line is, and I’m well aware that arguably my declared friendships with a couple of Reading’s restaurateurs put me close to it. But, as a rule of thumb, if your phone autocapitalises the C in the word “chef”, you’re probably licking the arse rather than the plate.

That said, it’s difficult not to be impressed by people who work in hospitality and choose to make a life in that profession. In all the interviews I’ve done so far with people in Reading’s food and drink scene during lockdown, one thing that emerges is the total passion they all have for hospitality. Opening a restaurant, or a café, is a lifelong dream for these people, and they make enormous sacrifices to do it.

They give up lucrative jobs, they move across the country, they identify premises and they put absolutely everything into making them a success. They put up with antisocial hours, they lose their weekends, they toil and they worry and they cajole – and none of them has given up even during this awful period. Their sleepless nights haven’t stopped them feeding Reading, and feeding it in style, taking those risks so we can sit at home and eat phenomenally well. And heaven knows, they’re not doing it for the money: even before all this the margins in the restaurant business were far from gigantic.

That’s the story behind Nibsy’s, and Clay’s, and Kungfu Kitchen, and Tutu’s Ethiopian Table and so many more local businesses than I can list. Even looking at the previous sentence, I feel bad for all the ones I’ve left out: Fidget & Bob; Anonymous Coffee; Double-Barrelled; the Grumpy Goat; Geo Café; Vegivores; Namaste Momo. There are plenty more, I know, and I’ll probably be stricken with guilt later on when I realise who I’ve omitted. I’m not sure I’ll ever descend into chef-worship – I certainly hope not – but I do have to say that I am a little in awe of people who run their own businesses in hospitality. I wouldn’t have what it takes to do that, and I daresay a fair few of you wouldn’t either.

One name that isn’t on that list, but which deserves a special mention, is the Lyndhurst. I’ve been excited about eating their food again since they announced that they were coming back, and I bagged a delivery slot for last Saturday night long before placing my order. Theirs is a clever menu, with a good balance between old and new dishes, but an emphasis on dishes that travel well and lend themselves to sharing. It’s ridiculous value, too, with all but one item south of a tenner.

My bag was dropped on my doorstep bang on time and to say I had an emotional reunion with the Lyndhurst’s food might be a bit of an understatement. I had ordered an old favourite, the katsu chicken burger, and it might have been distance lending enchantment but it was even better than I remembered. I’d so missed it: that huge, crunchy fillet of chicken breast (although from the size it might have been ostrich), the fiery katsu sauce, the tangy Asian slaw I remember well.

But more than that, I don’t think I’d realised how much I missed chips. Proper, beautiful, crispy, skin-on chips, not the pasty pastiche I’d had to make do with, taken out of the freezer and cooked on a baking tray. Eating them for the first time in many months truly felt like eating them for the first time ever.

Even better was a new arrival on the menu – pulled pork piled high in soft blue corn tacos. What really impressed me about the Lyndhurst’s food was that it didn’t feel like takeaway food in any way – that and all the minor details that had been given so much thought. So the tacos were also topped with flash pickled pink onions, more glorious slaw and the crowning glory, an ancho chile relish that was smoky, punchy and so savoury that it almost tasted like it was in high definition. And of course, even that wasn’t the final word – a little pot of stupendous guacamole was included, for you to add at the last minute. This cost nine pounds, and was better than any other tacos I’ve tried, full stop.

The attention to detail extended to Zoë’s fish and chips – more of those terrific chips with battered haddock, firm flaky flesh and light batter with almost no grease. But looking closely I could see tiny traces of dill in the batter – a small, imaginative touch that the Lyndhurst had added, without fanfare, because they just wanted to make every dish as good as it possibly could be, even if people didn’t notice. Ironically the previous team behind the Lyndhurst coined the catchphrase “it’s the little things we do”, but the people running the Lyndhurst now really live and breathe it.

Halfway through our dinner I was already mentally deciding what to order this weekend, because it was so good, but because it was so good I’ve already changed my mind several times this week. I’m very happy to have them back.

The following day, I saw a Tweet from Clay’s who had also grabbed takeaway from the Lyndhurst that weekend. “The best dinner I’ve had since lockdown”, it said. And that’s the other brilliant thing about our food scene here – they support each other, they have one another’s backs. At the end of all this, their competitors won’t be one another, they will be all the chains clamouring to grab our business and bribe us with vouchers. I’ve only eaten food from independents since this all began: that too, I think, is a lockdown habit I may well end up keeping.

I don’t know about you, but when I treat myself – when I buy myself something nice – I don’t like to use it straight away. New clothes stay in the wardrobe waiting for a special occasion (not that there are any of those these days), the posh chocolate is squirrelled away in the basement so I can’t just demolish it on the spur of the moment because it’s been a crappy Wednesday and I need something to graze on while I watch another episode of the West Wing, wishing ardently that it wasn’t fiction. I bought a beautiful leather bag online a few months back, a gorgeous racing green tote: even when lockdown ends and it’s time to go out and about again, I’ll still save its debut for an appropriately fitting event.

If none of that sounds ridiculous, try this: it’s only recently that I’ve started wearing the prescription sunglasses I bought last year. Sod’s Law dictated that I got round to buying them just as the summer came to an end, but even so they stayed packed away in a drawer during the bright, sunny days of autumn and winter and finally ended up on my nose a couple of weeks ago, when the weather properly got beautiful and I began to take my afternoon walks at the height of the sunshine.

I couldn’t believe what a difference they made – I’ve never owned a pair of sunglasses before, and to see such definition in the sky, in the wisps and layers of cloud, in the splendour of every single leaf of the grand trees that tower in the cemetery or line Kendrick Road, made me feel strangely emotional. I could have had that experience so much sooner, if I wasn’t so stubborn. I wish I’d done this years ago, I thought to myself, adding “owning prescription sunglasses” to the long, long list of things that, as a frustratingly change-averse bugger, I wish I’d done years ago.

Three weeks ago, I decided to treat myself to a new fragrance from a company called Perfumer H, based in Marylebone. I’d always meant to go and visit their store, on one of my trips to London with friends, but I never got round to it and then it became impossible. I so miss those trips now, of taking the train with my friends, heading to Covent Garden to shop in the brilliant Bloom – where they have the genius idea of arranging fragrances by what they smell like rather than who made them – and then going for a long boozy lunch somewhere. I miss so many things, but I especially miss that.

Part of the appeal of buying something from Perfumer H in lockdown was just how difficult they made it. They have no online store, no other UK stockists, just an impenetrable website listing the current season’s fragrances. There’s a link you can click that takes you to a list of all their other fragrances – all for sale, although you could be forgiven for thinking they’re not. If you want one, you email them and they send you a Paypal invoice. Old school doesn’t quite do it justice. It’s funny: I am sometimes frustrated that Reading’s food businesses don’t do more online, aren’t active on social media, and here I was eagerly purchasing something from a company which, to put it lightly, was playing hard to get.

My fragrance arrived a couple of weeks ago, in a beautiful powder-blue box, swaddled in a tweed wrap. The bottle was handsome and plain, with a hint of the laboratory about it. It looked so beautiful that I couldn’t bring myself to start wearing it straight away. So I did what I often do, and saved it for later.

I’d first smelled it at an exhibition at Somerset House three years ago, where they had designed ten rooms around modern fragrances, like installation art. The aim was to show how modern perfumery had moved away from trying to smell “nice” into more complicated territory, evoking memories or atmospheres a long way from roses or lilies, the obvious choices of scent, the equivalent of rhyming “moon” and “June”.

One room, styled to look like a confessional booth, showcased a fragrance which uncannily replicated the thick clouds that billow from the censer at a Catholic mass. Another room contained a Tracey Emin-style unmade bed covered in rags soaked in a fragrance that had been designed to smell of “sex” or, more specifically, bodily fluids. Not “nice”, a million miles from what I’d choose to wear myself, but fascinating none the less.

A third aimed to recreate the feeling of going on a log flume ride at a theme park. It smelled dank, of stagnant chlorinated water, and you grabbed a tacky cuddly toy infused with the perfume, stood in a booth clutching it and posed for a tourist photograph. If you bought a bottle in the exhibition shop it came in a mocked-up VHS cassette case, for an extra whack of nostalgia.

The fragrance I bought a few weeks ago, gladly, didn’t smell of bodily fluids or chlorine. It’s called Charcoal, and it was created by the perfumer as a way of capturing a client’s childhood memories, and influenced by the perfumer’s memories of her Scottish grandfather. It smells of woodsmoke and leather, and greenery after rainfall, of dark wintry holidays in this country. To my nose at least it’s stunning, simultaneously lush and austere. I finally took the bottle out of the box and placed it on the mantelpiece in the bedroom this week, finally put it on and all day it followed me around like a fuzzy, deep green hug. I may never get out of my comfies all day, some days, if it’s too miserable to go outside for a walk, but that’s no reason not to make an effort.

I have adored fragrance for the best part of fifteen years, and the collection of boxes and bottles under my bed shows no signs of diminishing: at last count I think I had just shy of thirty. It’s sobering to think that I could stop buying them now, and the ones I own might even see me out. But I can’t see myself stopping. Wearing a scent is one of the simplest, most beautiful ways of dropping a filter in front of the lens through which you see the world, and making everything slightly different. I really don’t understand why more people don’t do it, when it’s such an easy way to spark such joy.

And they can spark so many different flavours and colours of joy. On any given day I could smell of rich orange blossom, and be transported to Andalusia, or pick something with the honey and vanilla tones of Turkish pipe tobacco (tobacco, sad to say, smells beautiful right up to the point where you foolishly take a match to it). I have a fragrance which is a recreation of vintage suntan lotion – Coppertone, to be precise – and when I wear it, even though I am miles from a beach, I feel as if I’ve just got back from one. Another smells of tomato leaf, putting you in a sultry, summery virtual greenhouse. I had one fragrance which smelled of – and this is no word of an exaggeration – Smartie shells. It had that unmistakeable blend of sugar and cocoa, and I admired the trickery more than I liked the scent. I gave it to an ex: I wonder if she still wears it.

Another fragrance I own smells of honey, spice and amber, a proper, smouldering, wouldn’t-wear-it-to-the-office smell. Back when I was married, my ex-wife forbade me from buying it – she really couldn’t stand it – and last December, on a holiday to Paris, I finally bought myself a bottle. It’s part fragrance, part emblem of emancipation. And I also have a fragrance which smells of rose, because people who believe that men can’t smell of roses are every bit as wrong as people who think that men shouldn’t wear pink.

Most fragrances aren’t really such things as men’s fragrances and women’s fragrances: in summer I’ll wear my fragrance that smells of mimosa, a pure, fresh uncomplicated thing, how laundry might smell in heaven, and I won’t give a monkey’s if anybody thinks it’s effeminate.

Scent is the most incredible form of time travel, too: sometimes I go back and buy a fragrance I’ve owned in the past, and whenever I put it on a cascade of memories comes tumbling back. Eau Sauvage, for example, will always remind me of waking up in Granada on Christmas Day, over ten years ago, having bought the bottle in Duty Free on my flight out. They played Feliz Navidad through the speakers on the connecting flight to Federico Garcia Lorca Airport. I remember, I remember: smelling Eau Sauvage is somehow more effective than looking at any photograph.

I have one fragrance, although I wouldn’t call it a signature scent, that I have worn consistently for the best part of twenty years. It’s a single dogged olfactory thread that runs through every house and flat I’ve lived in, every friend I have made and lost, every person I’ve shared my life with, however momentarily. It’s dirt cheap and probably, objectively, nothing special: nevertheless, I live in constant fear that it will be discontinued.

Really, my new fragrance isn’t seasonal at all, although it’s better this week, now that the weather has turned to shit and there’s rain in the air (petrichor, the smell of the ground after rain – also known as geosmin – is one of the most gorgeous smells there is: I have a fragrance that smells of that too). In the months ahead my sweeter, sunnier fragrances will get more of a look-in, whether that’s bright, green scents, fresher everyday colognes or the one with notes of blood orange. And then, when the sun sets earlier and the air is chillier, it will be time for different smells: of incense, leather, smoke and oud. I have one fragrance that has the sharpness of bitter orange muffled with a smudge of clove: much as I love it, it feels rightest to wear it in December.

All this might feel like a far cry from everything I usually write about, but I’m not sure it should come as a surprise. Smell and taste are so closely linked, after all, and the smell of food is one of the most beautiful things about it, given how it always acts as a trailer for what is to come. Imagine the smell that only comes from onions and garlic sizzling away on the hob, or the aroma of a slow-cooked ragu taking its time to become delicious. When I open my cupboard in the morning, ready to make that first Aeropress of the day, I smell the richness of the coffee long before I finish all the jiggery-pokery involved in making a cup of the stuff. And that, too, brings me joy.

The scent of food or drink is a promise, hanging in the air, waiting to be kept. Good food sometimes takes its time to fulfil that promise, but one of the wonderful things about other scents – like fragrance – is that they offer a more instant gratification. Or they do, at least, provided you don’t spend two weeks getting round to getting them out of the box.