I love the film Airplane!, and my favourite of its many running jokes involves Lloyd Bridges’ hapless tower supervisor Steve McCroskey. “Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit smoking”, he announces relatively early in the movie as the scale of the challenge before him becomes apparent, before popping a cigarette in his mouth and lighting it.

As the film degenerates, McCroskey also announces that he picked the wrong week to quit drinking and amphetamines, hip flask and pill jar in hand, before culminating in his decision to fall off the glue sniffing wagon. He inhales greedily through one nostril, then the other, before falling backwards, cross-eyed and catatonic. It’s a perfect cinematic moment.

The reason I’ve been thinking about Steve McCroskey is that in the run-up to lockdown I was making a conscious decision to lose weight and lower my alcohol intake and, to paraphrase the great man, it looks like I picked the wrong time to quit comfort eating and boozing. Nearly everyone I know is relying on alcohol to get them through weeks stuck at home, and lockdown presents an almost infinite number of opportunities for what I can only describe as chonkification.

It’s especially difficult for me, as someone who has always used food and drink to fill a no doubt gaping spiritual void. “He’s only truly happy when he’s eating or drinking” my mum told Zoë, shortly after we got together and, sad to say, there is probably some truth in that.

I made the decision to lose weight last winter. I was doing a clearout of my wardrobe, picking things to send to the charity shop, and it involved one of the most depressing processes known to man, where you try clothes on to work out whether they still fit. It made me realise just what a high percentage of my clothes simply sit in drawers, folded and undisturbed, because I don’t want to face the reality that I probably can’t wear them any more.

Zoë’s approach to this, pragmatic and not unkind, wasn’t like any I’d experienced with previous partners. Clothes were divided into categories: “okay, you’d need to lose a stone to fit into that”; “two stone for that one” and “forget it – by the time you fitted into that you’d want to buy something new to celebrate”. I made my decisions, black bags were filled and I decided, this time, to actually do something about it.

My first weigh-in took place, bleary-eyed, on the scales in the bathroom one Friday morning in October. “It’s best to weigh in on a Friday, so you can tear the arse out of it over the weekend and then make up ground the rest of the week” said Zoë, clearly speaking from experience.

Needing spectacles is often a nuisance – when you have your hair cut, for example, and you have no idea how it’s looking until right at the end – but when having weekly weigh-ins I was decidedly glad that I couldn’t see the number on the scales. Zoë made a note of it, and we made a deal that every week she would tell me how much I had gained or lost but not my actual weight. I reckoned that would be too demotivating.

I didn’t have any grand plan for how to lose weight. I just knew that you either exercised more, or ate less, or did a combination of the two. Looking at the amount that I ate in a week, I could see a calorie intake with plenty of opportunities to make cuts. Was having chocolate most nights really a sensible decision? Did I honestly need that second sugar in tea and coffee? Was I drinking that additional latte in Workhouse because I loved it, or because I was bored and I didn’t want to head home?

I’m very much a food lover, but in all honesty the last square of chocolate, inevitably, tastes exactly the same as the first. And when you hoover food down without even really noticing, the way I can sometimes, you could argue that there really isn’t much enjoyment in it, or much point. So I decided to be mindful, and make a note of everything I ate every day, and try to trim some of the excess. I didn’t stop eating out – those restaurant reviews weren’t going to magic themselves into existence – and I didn’t stop going to the pub, but I thought I would see how far that got me.

Between October and lockdown, my weight loss was very much two steps forward, one step back. Some weeks the weigh-in was a cause for celebration, some weeks the celebrations of the previous seven days made for grim readouts. There was the holiday in Paris – that was a setback – and of course Christmas, when nobody loses weight. That was okay, I decided, because weight loss should be a controlled descent, rather than a crash landing. People who lose a lot of weight quickly often look like the air’s been let out of them in a hurry: this would be more like having a slow puncture, I decided.

Even when I was making depressingly little progress, something was changing in my mind. Just as a hangover is the bill biology hands to you at the end of a brilliant evening, weight gain is the consequence of all the fun you had. And when you look at the receipt, if you decide that the payback didn’t feel proportionate, you have to do something differently. Gradually I began to think about calories a little more: did I really want this particular treat? Was it genuinely worth it? A single chocolate HobNob, for instance, has nearly a hundred calories in it. Was it really worth demolishing a third one, or was two enough?

Zoë said that she sometimes used the acronym HALT in situations like this: was she really hungry, or just anxious, lonely or tired? Anxious made a lot of sense – I am usually battling at least one low-level anxiety or another – but, more damning than that, I think I often just do it because I’m bored. Comfort eating is, after all, one of the safer ways to go looking for trouble.

And so to (very moderate) exercise. I also started using the health app on my phone to track how many steps I was taking every day, which essentially measured how often I left the house. I’ve not developed David Sedaris levels of obsession, but on the days when I go for a walk I feel like a failure if I come in under ten thousand steps. Most of the time that involves a stroll up towards the university, round the Harris Garden, back down to Reading Old Cemetery and home, which normally gets me to the magic number: I tell myself that pacing the length of the kitchen doing the drying up does the rest.

People are still everywhere, in greater numbers than I’m comfortable with. This week Zoë and I went for a walk down the Thames from Caversham Bridge, heading in the direction of Mapledurham. It was a warm, close evening, still light at nine o’clock, and the path was thick with people. Just off the path, congregated around a bench, I saw a group of almost a dozen people clustered together, smoking and drinking and chatting. “You’re going to have to stop muttering as you go past these people,” Zoë told me. “There’s no point.”

By the time we went into lockdown, I had lost about half a stone, but I still had to reckon with the other main reason behind my calorie intake: the booze. Zoë had decided to cut down on her drinking last year, and she recommended that I download the app she was using. So I did that back in November, reasoning that I didn’t drink that much anyway and that moderation would be a doddle. How little I knew.

With the app, called DrinkAware, you log every single drink you have and the number of units in each. Often, that involves finding a way to navigate the app, as (appropriately) it contains a limited number of drinks. It definitely doesn’t cover all the weird and wonderful beers and ciders which have taken up residence in my basement.

The app helpfully tots up your units, tells you how many drink-free days you’ve had and whether you’re high risk for that week or month. There is even a functionality where you can get the app to flag hot spots where you tend to do a lot of your drinking. I didn’t enable that, because if I had the app would have ended up contradicting the official health advice from the government by telling me to get the hell out of my house, and fast.

You probably know this already, but I didn’t: the recommended maximum intake is 14 units of alcohol a week. I certainly didn’t know that the average pint of cider – my usual pub drink – uses up 2.6 of them. But that’s okay, I reasoned, because I don’t go to the pub that often and I don’t drink that much when I do. Unfortunately, the data from the app suggested otherwise. I excused November because I’d been on holiday in Paris, and I decided I’d earned a pass for December because it was Christmas. And for January – well, everyone needs cheering up in January, don’t they? But even in February and March, although I was drinking less than I used to, I was still consuming more than you’re meant to.

Getting that under control in lockdown has been one of the most surprising aspects of how the world has changed. For three months now I’ve been drinking comfortably within limits, and it hasn’t felt like privation or donning some kind of Covid hair shirt. If you add the number of units I had in April and May, it’s still fewer than I consumed in the whole of November.

I have a drink when I feel like it – on a hot day after a walk, or because some interesting beers have arrived – but I often stop at the one. I still have a virtual pub session once every few weeks, and that blows most of my allowance for the week, but when I do it’s a special event rather than me chugging through pints, as I would in a real pub, just because they are there.

It makes me realise just how much social interaction revolves around drinking, and how much drinking is driven by being sociable. If someone is going up to the bar to get a round in, you ask for another even if you don’t necessarily need it. If it’s coming up to last orders, you get a gin and tonic in as a finisher even though you’ve already had quite enough. I have a friend who will turn up to the pub, say she’s not stopping, buy her own drinks, have a couple of halves and then shoot off home: I used to find this strange, but now I admire her iron will. She is, unsurprisingly, thin.

I crossed the Rubicon in late April: I had finally lost a stone. At that point, to celebrate, I asked Zoë to tell me exactly how much I weighed (and, by implication, how much I had weighed when I began all this). If I’d known how depressing the number would be, I might not have asked, but it was still good to know how far I had come, even if it showed that I had some way to go. Things being as they are, it was a Rubicon I re-crossed – in both directions – in the weeks ahead, but for the last few weeks my gradual descent has continued.

It’s hard to visualise a whole stone. I find the easiest way is to picture those bags of sugar that I take far longer to work my way through these days. I’ve lost six big bags of sugar – a lot of weight, and yet looking at my body I can’t quite figure out where it has gone. Six bags of sugar has been spirited away, but to my eyes I still look the same. When you weigh more than you want to, you get used to trying to be photographed in certain ways that conceal it: from above, from a distance, not side on. Maybe what’s really happened is that I’m starting to look just a little more like the flattering photographs.

And maybe not. Zoë showed me a picture she had taken of me almost a year ago, on holiday in Bologna, and I can see it: my face is bigger, more rounded, the edges less distinct. Just to twist the knife, Facebook recently threw up a memory with a photograph of me from when I was 19, looking away from the camera, with a jawline I would kill for now (“all prick and ribs, as my mum puts it” said Zoë). But there is progress, even if it’s slower than I might like.

By the time this piece goes live I will have had my dreaded weigh in. On the weeks I’ve lost weight I celebrate, on the weeks I’ve gained I am glum. The weeks when it stays static can go either way: I’m either frustrated or I look at what I’ve eaten and drank and deep down, I know that I’ve dodged a bullet. It seems to be an inexact science, and the result is often one I haven’t predicted.

Either way, tomorrow I will have a takeaway and I have a virtual pub to hop on in the evening. Zoë is already going through the beer in the basement, if not physically then in her mind, working out what we’ll sample next. My DrinkAware app will flash red to tell me that you shouldn’t have ten units in a single sitting, something I already know. But however it turns out, I will properly appreciate every single sip of those drinks. And when I have my hangover the following morning, when biology hands me the bill, I will know that it was really worth it.

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.

It’s been a tough week. I know I shouldn’t watch the news, but I do, and I get angry. I know I should put down my phone and read a book, or watch one of the dozens of films in my list on Netflix or Prime – something I’ve not seen before, to stretch me, or something I know well, to comfort me. But I don’t; instead I go online, to get my inevitable dose of outrage and despair.

You know all this already, but here it is: we currently have one of the worst death rates in the world, and a government which is both so inept and so callous that you could easily spend a long time wondering if the euthanasia is accidental or deliberate. They didn’t lock down quickly enough, they didn’t lock down strictly enough, they stopped testing and tracing cases, they filled stadia and racecourses when the rest of Europe was closing its doors and they told us that it was safe.

They also said that they were following the science and then, even though the science didn’t change, they mysteriously changed course. And the lies! So many lies. They lied about how many people they had tested, they lied about how many people had died. They lied about how much protective equipment people in the NHS were given. They released people who might well have had the virus into care homes, like some postmodern take on Deathrace 2000. Tens of thousands of vulnerable people died alone, with nobody by their bedsides, almost nobody at their funerals. A schoolfriend of mine died, albeit not of the virus, and I watched some of the webcast of his funeral. One of the only things more tragic than a funeral is a funeral with only ten people at it.

And, of course, there’s the news from the bank holiday weekend. The creepy man pulling the strings, who is always described as if he’s Rasputin but in reality is essentially Gollum in a gilet, broke all the rules he put in place, the rules we’ve all been keeping for an eternity. He had to leave work and go home, because his wife had the coronavirus. But then he went back to his workplace, because she magically didn’t.

Then – and by this stage I wasn’t sure who did or didn’t have the virus – the two of them got in a car with their four year old child, who they were seemingly trying to protect and infect at the same time, and drove for four hours on a single tank of petrol without anybody needing the toilet. All to recuperate at the cottage on a family member’s estate: well, we’ve all been there.

That’s before we get on to the sixty-mile round trip to a noted beauty spot either to get exercise or to test his eyesight, depending which of those two lies you find more convincing. It happened to be his wife’s birthday.

When accused of doing all this, he lied about it. When caught, he lied some more. Long, detailed, fiddly lies. The plan, of course, is to make it so boring and so involved that you get tired, you just say “oh, whatever”, and that’s the plan because the plan works. It worked on Brexit: it worked on people I know. “Oh, whatever” they said. “We just need to get on with it and move on.” We’re always moving on, it seems. Backwards.

I know people in Australia, New Zealand and Spain enjoying their freedom slowly beginning to return. I talk to a schoolfriend in New Zealand every few weeks – he feels sorry for us, stuck here, governed by these charlatans. I see photos and Facebook statuses and Tweets of people I know living some kind of normal life elsewhere, while all of us have been sitting at home for twenty-three hours a day watching all hell break loose outside. When it happened in Italy, it was apocalyptic. Here, where things are even worse, it’s just the way it is.

So I go online, but Twitter is simultaneously a group hug for everybody who is watching what’s going on in this country with a mounting sense of horror and unease, and an echo chamber amplifying a primal scream until it drowns out everything else. Or at least it is as long as you follow the “right” people: there are plenty of bots, bigots and useful idiots out there complaining about our biased media, or telling us to stop being so negative.

But even if the people in my echo chamber are in the right, does that make it the right stuff to read? Is it good for the soul? Because heaven knows, it’s boring, being angry all the time. Boring and exhausting. Sometimes I look back at my own Twitter feed, all that indignation and those Retweets of other people, incandescent with rage but far more articulate than me, and I think I’m not sure I would follow me on here. But what happens if you stop being angry? You get resigned, and then everything is lost. This stuff is so important that I don’t know whether I’ll ever be ready to move on to bargaining or acceptance. It’s a puzzler.

If all this doesn’t make you angry, you’ll have to let me know how you manage that. Or maybe I need to take whatever it is you’re taking. Drop some round: I’ll give you some of my stockpile of blue Toblerone in return. I had some Tramadol, but I gave it away to a friend with toothache. It felt like the right thing to do, and we’re all about following our instincts now.

* * * * *

How are your dreams, lately? I keep having the oddest dreams. Or rather I seem to be remembering my dreams more at the moment, because I recall reading somewhere that we always dream but we don’t always remember them.

At the start of the week, I had the most wonderful dream. I was spending the afternoon wandering round Oxford – a dream Oxford that bore no resemblance to the real place, but which I still knew was Oxford – when I realised that I hadn’t made a restaurant reservation. So I hastily made a list of places that would be worth a speculative phone call, to see if they could fit me in at 6 o’clock, the early bird special before taking the train home. It was a slim chance, but worth a try: if you don’t ask, after all, you don’t get.

It’s odd, the elaborate worlds your brain cooks up for your entertainment when you are asleep. There I was wandering round an imaginary city, one I apparently knew well, running through a mental list of imaginary restaurants (which I apparently also knew well). None of it really existed. Of all the things to dream about.

There’s always that point, usually in scary or uncomfortable dreams, the why-have-I-gone-to-work-with-no-trousers-on dreams, when you realise: Ah! It’s a dream. And that’s normally when you can wake up. I reached that point as I was weighing up the relative merits of all these restaurants I had never visited, and that should have been the point where the dream ended.

But for some reason it didn’t, and although I have no memory of picking a restaurant, or phoning it, or walking to it there was a jump cut and there I was, sitting at a big, square, pale wood table, a window seat looking back into a lovely, neutral room. I had a large glass of deep red wine in front of me and I was looking at a handwritten menu, the sort some places do when they have a different menu every day. Pretty soon the room would be buzzing, and speaking as someone who hasn’t been in a buzzing room for eleven weeks I couldn’t wait.

The starters included fritto misto, and I remembered one of the many reasons why restaurants are so special, that they cook things you simply could or would never prepare at home. And I could picture it in front of me already in my mind’s eye – the prawns, the squid, the mussels, all in that golden, light, almost translucent batter. I could imagine squeezing the lemon over it, the aroma, the crunch of that first bite. It would have been perfect with a beer or a crisp white wine. Why did I have a glass of red wine in front of me? It didn’t make sense, I thought, I wouldn’t have ordered that. And then I remembered: of course it doesn’t make sense. It’s a dream, silly! And that’s when I woke up.

The following night I woke up partway through a dream about being on holiday – in Granada, although again it didn’t look like the Granada I visit most years. But even so I absolutely knew that was where I was, and I was already starting to mentally bullet point all the places I had to go – cafés for my first al fresco coffee in a long time, bars for wine, or cold cañas of Alhambra, or for huge places of cheese and charcuterie. And again, of course, just as that itinerary was coming together, the cord snapped and I was yanked back into the present. It was May 2020, it had been May 2020 for about five years, I was in my house and that’s the way it was going to stay for quite some time.

I wonder what purpose these dreams serve. Is my psyche trying to tell me something I already knew – that I really miss eating out and going on holiday – or is it trying to comfort me with visions of the things I miss? Is it just my subconscious, wrestling with withdrawal symptoms on a warm spring night? Or are they just mental doodlings that don’t signify anything at all?

I reached a point where I was quite excited to see what was playing in the cinema of my mind every night, to see where I was transported to next, but the following night my dream was one of those horrendous ones that involves a bereavement. Now I would quite happily have unmemorable dreams, for a couple of weeks at least. I should have known, really. We live in scary times: what on earth made me think my dreams would be non-stop fun and frolic? If I want harmless escapism, maybe I should copy my friend Laura and re-watch Dawson’s Creek.

Of course, it might not be a result of the times we live in. I’m taking medication for tension headaches, and my mother – who takes the same tablets – told me once that they give her dreams, usually unhappy or unsettling ones. Ironically, she takes the pills to help her sleep, although she says the dreams are a price worth paying. The only other effect the tablets had on me, when I first started taking them, were that for the first few hours of every morning I felt like I was behind glass, or deep under water. You’re somehow sealed off from things, like a stereotypical Fifties housewife on Valium.

It’s not an unpleasant sensation, actually, and nicely anaesthetic: maybe I should stop taking them so I can re-start and experience it all over again. On the other hand, when I was prescribed some medication for anxiety during a particularly dark period a few years back, the doctor told me I would have strange dreams, and I did. The worst one involved being stuck in the seat next to my ex-wife in a crowded rail replacement bus for five hours (in the interests of balance, I’m sure she would describe that as a nightmare). Still, that’s another thing to add to the list of lockdown silver linings: however bad the dreams may get, at least none of us has to take a rail replacement right now.

* * * * *

I have been reviewing restaurants for the best part of seven years and I thought I’d heard pretty much everything by now, but this week a story in the local news introduced me to a brand new term.

It came up in a piece in the Reading Chronicle by (the always excellent) Tevye Markson about a disagreement between Mexican chain Tortilla and Reading Smiles, the fancy dentist a couple of doors down from Sainsburys on Broad Street. The dentist had complained about the prospect of Tortilla being granted a licence when they opened their restaurant, saying it would damage their reputation and increase the security issues at the site.

That’s as maybe – perhaps some people like to celebrate being given a clean bill of health or a scale and polish by grabbing a frozen margarita, who knows – but the best bit of the story was the dental practice’s claim that the smell of food from Tortilla would “penetrate the building” and put patients off visiting the practice.

That made more sense to me. The last thing you want, I imagine, as you’re having your molars checked is to get a whiff of refried beans. I can identify with that: it’s uncomfortably reminiscent of the time I was having a pampering massage in the basement of John Lewis, eyes closed, tuning in to the whale music when the masseuse leaned forward and belched into my face (I’m pretty sure she’d had a Scotch egg for lunch, too).

Anyway, the planning consultant representing Tortilla had a killer response to this argument. There was no risk of food smells getting in to the dental practice, he said, because no “primary cooking” took place onsite. What a wonderfully euphemistic way of putting it. He meant that all the work is done in a central kitchen and everything turns up at Tortilla ready and waiting to be heated up, I assume, which essentially means that you’d be sitting there eating a slightly more fancy ready meal.

That said, many chain restaurants do this. The reason Côte has been able to start offering “Côte at home” in lockdown is because they also prepare food in a central kitchen, so effectively you’re paying to heat up their food at home instead of someone heating it up in the restaurant.

But what marks this out from, say, the new offering from Clay’s is the transparency: when you ate in at Clay’s you knew everything was made from scratch, and that means that if they cook it, vacuum pack it and drop it to your house you feel lucky to get to warm it up at home, rather than deceived or taken for a ride.

When Tortilla finally opens, assuming it still will, will you particularly fancy going there, knowing that they’re not doing any “primary cooking”? I suspect not, especially knowing that you could go to Mission Burrito instead. The impression is that Tortilla’s “secondary cooking” is second class, or just plain old number two.

I do think, though, that this terminology could catch on. On weekends when I just can’t face dusting and hoovering I’ll just claim that no primary housework has taken place, as I invert the reeds in my (many) room diffusers, or put the recycling in the bin outside. Some days this week it’s not that I haven’t caught up with any of my friends, it’s just that I didn’t take part in any primary conversations. And I think you can be virtually certain this week that, as any week, there’s absolutely no primary journalism happening at Berkshire Live.

Anyway, in happier news the Lyndhurst announced this week that it was reopening Thursday to Sunday for takeaways. The menu they published was full of old favourites and new options – including their legendary chilli nachos, curried chickpea nachos (a dish premiered at my readers’ lunch back in March), pulled pork tacos and jackfruit tacos. Who needs Tortilla when you can get beautiful food from the Lyndhurst? They even make their own tortilla chips, for crying out loud: it’s proper, delicious, primary food.