Saturday 1 March 2014

Solitary Confinement

When my "other half" recently went away for ten days I became conscious of just how apt that particular epithet is: the fabric of life which is daily woven by two people living together soon peters out to a tatty fringe as one's warp runs out of weft. I have taken advantage of the opportunity temporarily to pursue my interests with unabated selfishness but am aware, even so, that the danger of unbridled self-indulgence is a tendency towards excess. As the man who built a replica of the Starship Enterprise's command deck in the dining room said, "I think it might have had an adverse effect on my second marriage."

On the very first day of my solo sojourn I had a reminder of the extent to which our domestic arrangements are a result of compromise agreements rigorously enforced in the interests of harmonious co-habitation. I had reason to visit a person living alone and was intrigued to see that dishes from the last evening meal were unwashed, that the place was littered with clothes, books and gadgets and that everything was laid out to suit the preferences of a single occupant - who was not even in a position to offer me a seat. I went home determined not to fall into such antisocial ways.

Time continued to pass quickly enough, the majority of one day being spent on the phone to the TomTom helpline. I tried in vain to convince three operatives in turn that my device had stopped functioning and that I wasn't a technophobe moron who just didn't know how to connect it to a USB port: and yes, I had tried turning it off and back on again - several times. My problem was eventually "elevated" to a specialist who sounded quite alarmed when I described one of the symptoms and, after consulting seven colleagues, all of whom were flummoxed, admitted that the fault must be with the device, not me.

It had been a very trying day so when I retired to bed I took the lazy, selfish option of listening to Book at Bedtime. It's such a good idea but, just as it puts children to sleep, so it does me, which means there is no dodging the necessity of reading the book in the end. Mind you, there are plenty of sleep-inducing programmes on TV as I discovered on assuming total control of the channels. The one that promised most interest but delivered most zzzzs was BBC 4's architectural programme Bunkers, Brutalism and Bloodymindedness. And the unfettered freedom to watch any film I wanted led inevitably to my choosing a dud: Sid and Nancy, the story of the relationship between the famous Sex Pistol and his girlfriend. It was so dreary that I was left emotionally unmoved even by their predictably early deaths.

But it's not all solitary media-consumption and techno-chores: one evening I had friends around for dinner. This is normally a double act and so, aware that I had to take responsibility for front-of-house as well as kitchen, I planned a menu which could be prepared in advance and finished with a flourish before any alcohol-induced laxity set in. I settled on a main course of confit duck leg, green beans and Gratin de Pommes de Terre à la Dauphinoise, of which the latter was the trickiest since I had no prior knowledge of it. Frantic searches through stacks of neglected cookery books (I must replace them with an app) finally turned up a recipe by the authentically French-sounding Auguste Escoffier and the resulting dish was declared "a triumph" by at least one of my esteemed guests.

The question is this: if my other half failed to return, would I slide deeper into lazy, self-absorbed, squalid ways or would I learn more new recipes?

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