Julian Roup – Burnt fingers, cooking in lockdown; & banging pots for the NHS Ep2
In Episode Two of his new book, author Julian Roup explains how he burnt his fingers at a braai to spit in the eye of Covid-19 and joined in with pot banging for the NHS.
In case you missed Episode 1, click here.
Life in a Time of Plague
Sussex, 11th April 2020
By Julian Roup
Last evening I made a barbecue for Jan and myself. It was a little gesture of normality, a small celebration of life and a link to our South African heritage, a braai.
I use kindling and wood that has dried out over two winters – oak, ash, chestnut and silver birch – delivered by Richard Rapson, our woodsman neighbour of 40 years, who cuts our hedges each autumn with his friend and workmate, Robert Taylor. Robert surprised us last autumn with a book of his nature poetry that he self-published. Both are my age, around 70. Through the winter, Robert has climbed the 60ft to our cottage roof three times to replace wind-blown tiles lifted by the storm gales. It is not a task I would relish, and yet he charges me just £20 each time. He and his wife live in a charming oast house nearby, on ten acres of pastureland that delivers the bluest haze of bluebells each spring. They are about due.
I burn my fingers on the barbecue grill, being out of practice, but the food tastes good, lamb chops and Cumberland pork sausages, rice and a carrot salad. We drink wine and it feels like a true communion with the living and our own beloved dead. Afterwards, in the gloaming, we take Gus for a walk down our lane and watch the bats winnow the air for midges and other flying insects. The sky is backlit in shell-pink, which makes the winter bare tree branches stand out in bold black tracery. On the way home, Gus rockets down the lane, his sharp eyes having spotted deer crossing from the grass fields into the woods. He comes when I call and we hear the deer moving fast through the woods.
Back home, we watch the TV chef Rick Stein crisscrossing his Secret France, hunting down those places that still offer the authentic French culinary experience, and I take mental notes to follow in his footsteps if our luck holds. We watch a film about an Orthodox Jewish woman escaping her claustrophobic life in New York for a new start in Berlin, of all places. And then an episode of our new discovery, Ray Donovan, a brutal story of a family of Boston Irish misfits transplanted to LA to wreak havoc in Hollywood. The film world portrayed is filled with more charlatans and crippled people than you can shake a stick at. The death and mayhem in La La Land makes us momentarily forget what is going on all around us here in Blighty. And so to bed, after swallowing the five different kinds of pills that keep me going.
Saturday starts quietly with coffee, and a quick scan of the news and any press coverage for my clients. Then a shower and a plan for supper, having got some ideas from Jay Rayner's BBC radio kitchen programme. I decide to make a simple Irish stew, but find no lamb in the freezer, so defrost some beef steaks and make beef stew based on the Italian triumvirate of caramelized onions, carrots, and celery. i add beef stock, red wine, a dash of passata, dark soy sauce, Chinese oyster sauce, salt and pepper, gluten-free flour to coat the beef and a dash of chilli powder.
I surprise myself by making flapjacks with more of the gluten free flower and some eggs and cream and a sachet of baking powder. They make a great breakfast served with butter and apricot jam and a second coffee. Jan and I tuck in with good appetite. We are either going to roll out of here pig fat, or each of us needing eight pall-bearers!
A neighbour, James, who lives in the big house, has kindly collected some asthma medication for Janice at the pharmacy in town and dropped it off. No big deal you'd think normally, but now it required a special trip and the small but real chance of catching the virus in the spaced – out queue at the pharmacy. Risking death for a neighbour is no small thing, and we will not forget this kindness.
And now, once more, I sit in the garden keeping a vigil for the swallows who must be close surely, maybe in France – Brittany or Normandy – with just the Channel to fly, exhausted no doubt from their 10,000 kilometre odyssey. Fly, friends fly!
In the wood behind the cottage, I can hear the soft warbling of a wood pigeon, so reminiscent of the Cape Turtle Doves that define Africa for me.
Two nights ago, there was a strange new sound in the valley, the banging of pots with spoons to show solidarity and thanks to the front line NHS nurses and doctors who are in the fight of their lives, for our lives and their own. It was eerie, hearing the dim echo through the trees from the town a mile away up the hill. Jan banged away with a will and smiled on hearing our next-door neighbour Sophie Golding join in.
I feel well. Though yesterday I had a slightly scratchy throat and took a slug of Jamesons whiskey which seemed to do the job.
I listen out for news from South Africa where my sister Jay and her husband Guy and their family live, and for news from the US where my brother Herman and his wife Teri live with their family. The news from South Africa is good thus far, but if the virus gets into the close-packed black townships, all hell will be let loose. President Cyril Ramaphosa got an early hand on things; there have been just 1,000 people infected and just one or two deaths so far. But in the US, the virus seems to be having a free run of it, and deaths there now top 20,000 even as their apology for a President mouths and gesticulates, signifying nothing. I worry for my siblings.
I find myself wondering how former work colleagues and long lost friends are, and I reach out to them. Some reply.
On the farm next door, Home Farm Equestrian Centre, the endless round of work involved in caring for horses continues as usual. The young team of grooms, Georgie, Harriet, Zoe and Leigh start at 7am and finish around 5pm. They each have around eight or ten horses to feed, muck out, exercise or walk out to grass and collect later in the day. And the DIY women, around ten of them, are busy too, but with just one or two horses or ponies to do. The tractor makes its endless journeys to the muck heap and back, or harrowing the grass in the paddocks to let sun and air speed the spring growth.
To our left, our neighbours, Terry and Michelle and their two little boys, Ethan and Freddie, are out in the garden feeding two lambs rejected by their mothers. The poor things, after the toughest start in life have finally stopped baaing. They are now working as lawnmowers, cropping the lawn and growing steadily. Terry manages the part of the farm that produces Sussex beef, lamb and wild boar, but his passion is motorbikes, and I meet him regularly in the woods on his Husqvarna scrambler.
These, then, are the sounds of this Easter, much as usual, with walkers and runners keeping their social distance, passing by in the lane from time to time.
And above us only sky. No sign or sound of aircraft, or swallows for that matter. I have faith though. They will come. I just hope I am here to see them.
Click here for Episode 3.