I've got a little list
Actually, I seem to have quite a few.
I suppose it started at the start of the lockdown, when a single weekly visit to the supermarket became our new routine and popping out to get something we’d forgotten wasn’t really an option. After forty years of relatively relaxed daily meal prep, I suddenly found I had to plan meals for the week and create a list of ingredients for my shopping list.
The outcome of that is that my shopping basket is littered with those shopping lists as well as the masks, hand sanitiser bottles and extra shopping bags we are all carrying around right now.
A couple of weeks into this new routine, I realised that I needed an aide memoire for those times when I looked at the pack of prawns in the fridge and wondered what I’d bought those for. I wanted to make sure the vital ingredient for one dish didn’t get used for an impromptu lunch or worse, get left behind on the shelf at the end of the week with an expired use by date.
I decided to hang onto these lists for when inspiration was lacking - what shall we have for Sunday lunch this week? A quick glance through the lists of previous weeks soon offered an answer and I began to see why meal planning had always been regarded as a “sensible” household skill. The trouble is, although I might be sensible and even quite organised, I really don’t like deciding right now what I am going to want to eat next Thursday lunchtime!
We adopted another new habit as a result of being at home more: we began to read the What’s On TV sections more carefully, making a note of anything we thought might be worth watching and feeling quite pleased to have something to refer to when we settled down and asked ourselves “what shall we watch now?”
The heap of scribbled notes, recipes and reminders on the kitchen worktop was becoming quite “a thing”.
Cheltenham Literature Festival published their programme last week - so I made a list of my bookmarked choices. Am I really becoming a list maker?
And then yesterday, we had the first family Sunday Lunch in a while (yes, there was pavlova!) I found myself making a list, just to make sure I had room in the oven at the correct temperature for everything - I made Jamie Oliver’s overnight roast pork and that seemed to disrupt my usual Sunday roast routine.
The longest list of all, though, is this one. It’s a list of the operas we’ve watched (one or two ballets in there too) Unsurprisingly, we’re finding the Met Opera stream is showing one or two repeats these days, so we have to look a little further for our cultural couple of hours, not to mention finding a new sheet of paper.
As I gathered up the lists this morning in an attempt to tidy up a bit, I realised there was no way I was going to throw them all in the bin - I just have to find a large enough pocket to put them in my Project Life album!
Life recorded in a few lists, eh? (I think it’s been done already)
