Month: January 2021

Saturday 16 January: Iraq 🇮🇶: Fasoulia – Iraqi white bean stew

This is a very simple recipe taken a while ago from Meera Sodha’s series “The new vegan” in The Guardian.  Cook some chopped onions mixed with pepper, ground cinnamon, ground allspice, cumin and coriander stalks for 20 minutes until soft and dark.  Add chopped tomatoes, 2 tins of cannellini beans and 200ml of water, bring to a boil and then simmer for 10 minutes.  Serve with a dressing of rapeseed oil, coriander leaves, lemon zest and juice.

The effect?  Perfectly nice but a bit bland, especially the beans. The spices are pleasant but it lacks a kick with only the crunchy coriander and lemon dressing lifting it. The onions are still a bit undercooked even after over 20 minutes.

Monday 18 January: Iran 🇮🇷 : Khoresh-e-gheymeh – Persian Dried Lime, Lamb, and Split Pea Stew

Another Middle Eastern stew, but very different and a lot more complicated to cook. I take this from Persiana by Sabrina Ghayour, intrigued by the dried lime and lamb combination.

Again, fry some onions until soft (this time, I take my time…) Sear lamb chunks on a high heat. Coat in turmeric, then saffron, then cinnamon.  Add tomato puree and dried limes and then coat in water. Cook on a low heat for an hour and a half. Then add 200g of yellow split peas for a further hour.  

At this point, I leave overnight in the fridge. When I take it out the following evening, the limes still feel rigid, sitting in the stew like black ping pong balls, though there is an odd limey smell, and the split peas are still pretty dry too.  So I give it all half an hour more with some more water to soften, and serve it all with basmati rice and some fried potato slices.

And finally… the peas are still quite hard – though just about chewy – but the lamb is splendidly soft. The lime… is just odd… The rice soaks it all up nicely. And you can never go wrong with fried potatoes. I chuck some flat leaf parsley on top, which improves it all. The tomato sauce is delicious and works well with the lamb.

All in all, I am glad that I tried it and judging by the few times I have had Persian cooking in the past quite realistic, but not a recipe that I would rush back to.

Wednesday 20 January: Pakistan 🇵🇰: Lahori chicken

This one is the result of a good bit of Googling and comparing of recipes. Many of the classic Pakistani dishes suggested are prevalent throughout the Indian subcontinent but Lahori chicken stands out as defiantly rooted.  One can almost hear the muezzins of Lahore as I cook and eat it.

Give a large amount of skinned and sliced chicken and a small amount of quartered potatoes a quick marinade in turmeric, cayenne pepper and salt. Make a paste of onions, garlic and ginger. Fry some cinnamon, cardamom, cloves, black peppercorns, dried red chiles, coriander seeds and cumin seeds. Add the onion paste and a green chile.  Add some tomatoes and puree for a few minutes, cool, remove and then puree the whole lot.

Then brown the chicken and potatoes in the same pot, slowly add yogurt and then add the tomato masala. Once boiling, add water, and cook for around 30 minutes half-covered before uncovering and reducing the sauce. Finally add coriander and lemon juice.

The effect? After the subtle spices of the Middle East, the sheer heat of the spices makes my tongue tingle. It is gloriously hot, with a lovely lingering after-taste as the different spices play out: sneaky hints of cardamom and cloves, the perk of the cumin and the freshness of the coriander. The chicken is slightly overcooked and dry – I was on a Skype call – but still really chewy. The potatoes again balance it nicely.

The best spicy food continues to ask your mouth questions long after you have swallowed it, flavour after flavour, and especially the hints of cardamom, that most wonderful soft friend.

And the vibrant colours of a vibrant subcontinent: the turmeric-orange of the chicken and masala counterpointed by the lush green of the coriander.

This is a dish that says more. It is a dish that I want to cook again. It is a dish that makes me dream of sweltering nights and sweltering spices. It is fabulous.

Friday 8 January: Bosnia 🇧🇦 : Bosanski Lonac / Bosnian Stew

The first dish from a country that I have not yet visited though will get to as soon as this crisis is over. I Google recipes and specialities of Bosnia and this one comes up regularly. The recipe that I use is from allyskitchen.com

It is a Friday evening and I start cooking late after getting back from the supermarket. So late in fact that I only serve up at around 11…

The recipe is simple though. Start by frying some beef. Add some spicy sausage. (The recipe for American audiences says pepperoni, but I am forced to go for chorizo.) Add some garlic and shallots. Deglaze with a bit of vodka and then vegetable stock. Season with salt, chilli flakes, whole peppercorns, and bay leaves. Then add layers of tomato, carrots and potatoes. Leave in an oven for 45 minutes. Add some chopped celery. Cook for a further 15 minutes. Throw in some basil briefly. Leave for 15 minutes. Eat.

It is utterly simple. It is utterly delicious.

It is a balance between the tender chewiness of the stewed beef, the soft fruitiness of the carrot, the solidity of the potato, the crunch of the celery, and the kick from the peppers, chilli and chorizo, with a lingering hint of the basil, all held together with the tomatoes.

It is a country stew with knives drawn and guns at the ready.

And it is even better for lunch the next day, and dinner a few nights later. The peppercorns rise up like jewels from the ocean, sublime from their marinade.

I can’t wait to ride in Bosnia.

Saturday 9 January: Montenegro 🇲🇪 : Brav u Mlijeku / Lamb in Milk

Another Balkan stew but a different type of preparation, again the result of extensive Googling. The recipe I use is from internationalcuisine.com. Some of my friends blench when I tell them that I will be cooking a milk stew yet it is very common in the Balkans and Italy.

A garlic and parsley sauce blitzed with fennel seeds and chopped rosemary. Chopped bits of lamb shoulder fried in the green sauce until loosely brown. And then the milk, first to deglaze and then to stew. Peeled and chopped potatoes and carrots and a few rosemary sprigs are thrown in and then the whole thing is left to stew for 75 minutes.

Finally, the meat, carrots and potatoes are removed and the milk sauce is reduced then pureed. To balance the heaviness of the stew, I make a Shopska salad. Admittedly this is not so much Montenegrin as Balkan or more specifically Bulgarian, but as it is widely made across the whole region, I see it as fair.

The end result? Utterly fabulous. The lamb is soft and chewy, retaining all its gorgeous flavour. The sauce is lightly cheesy, halfway between a bechamel sauce and a cheese sauce. As with the Bosnian stew, the carrots are soft and fruity and the potatoes give the sauce some heft. There is the odd delightful taste of the fennel.

And all of this is balanced by the freshness of the salad: cucumbers, tomatoes, black olives, peppers and goats cheese, all blended with oil and red wine vinegar: the very taste of so many Balkan meals from my journeys.

I go to bed with a heavy but happy stomach and a hope that it will not be too long before I ride through Montenegro.

Sunday 10 January: Albania 🇦🇱 : Butrint Mussels

The first time that I went to Albania was in 1994 as part of a ‘study visit’ with fellow students from the College of Europe. The country was crazy but wonderful: few cars but thousands of satellite dishes all pointed towards Italy. After our first dinner in the country, my Albanian friend A pulled me and a few other friends away to a converted underground bunker where we were joined by his family and fed what I recall as sheep’s intestines in a milk sauce. I was delighted to be part of the special group, but after a hefty main dinner, had to squeeze the food down to please my hosts. I still remember the stomach ache…

On that trip, we also had a roasted suckling pig, lamb, and other meats grilled over a fire or hot coals. And returning to Albania two years ago, it is fair to say that stewed lamb or barbecued meat would have been the most representative way to eat Albanian. But having just made two stews and being in the thick of winter, I settle for a more modest recipe from Rick Stein’s roadtrip from Venice to Istanbul based on some mussels he had on the coastal town of Butrint. I figure that it will be my last fish for some time, the recipe sounded intriguing, and it gave me a chance to try again with mussels.

The recipe is super easy: sweat some garlic, diced green pepper and sliced onion in some olive oil for a few minutes. Add some ouzo (or in my case pastis) and 600g of cleaned mussels until the mussels are well steamed, and then briefly heat some passata and feta with a bit of chilli flakes and seasoning before scattering some chopped dill at the end.

This time, I leave the cleaned mussels in cold water for 20 minutes to get rid of the salt, an approach that works nicely.

The effect? Perfectly edible and nice to eat, but I had the feeling of two separate dishes, not quite complimenting each other, with the tomato and feta sauce rather overpowering the delicate taste of the mussels.

And was it really Albanian? Googling it too late, I found no other reference to it so suspect that it was a local chef trying something out. Greek feta and ouzo, Italian passata.

And yet in some way very Albanian. Few countries have such an energetic diaspora. The country was almost destroyed under the Hoxha dictatorship with local traditions dying out and thousands heading abroad (and many others leaving to escape the dire economic situation of the post-communist years). Many of those émigrés have returned, bringing with them the experience and tastes of their time away, including a generation of Albanian chefs ready to experiment using foreign-inspired ingredients melded to local ingredients. So very, very New Albanian.

Monday 11 January: Greece 🇬🇷 : κουνέλι στιφάδο / Kouneli Stifado / Rabbit Stew

I use the time saved making the mussels to get a stew for the next evening mostly done, based on a recipe from Sue Smillie in a recent series in The Guardian in which writers evoke dishes associated with their travels.

Again, super simple: sear a whole skinned and jointed rabbit – in my case with the smoke nearly burning the kitchen down – and then remove. Throw in some whole peeled small onions and garlic cloves. Pour in some red wine and vinegar to deglaze. Add water and returm the rabbit pieces. Stick in the oven for one and a half hours until the skin falls off easily.

Having done that, I remove it all and reheat the next day, serving with a Greek salad very similar to the Shopska salad served with the Montenegrin lamb.

The effect? The rabbit is pleasantly chewy. The rich brown onion sauce provides a gentle back up for the bunny, subtle and very unlike the rather overpowering French onion soup. Again, the crisp freshness of the salad provides a nice counterpoint.

It is simple. And yet, in the emptiness of my lockdown home and no one to be disgusted, I find myself plucking the rabbit bones and unceremoniously sucking every bit of meat from them.

It also evokes a very pleasant memory of a delicious braised rabbit in a converted Turkish baths in the back streets of Chania, Crete, as well as pleasant summer memories of open air barbecues and the smell of the charcoal and roasting meat. Quietly wonderful.

Wednesday 13 January: Turkey 🇹🇷 : Circassian Chicken

My final dish for the week, and the end of Europe and the start of Asia.

When I think of eating in Turkey, I think of a night on the suburbs of Istanbul near the end of my ride from Sofia to Istanbul in 2018, sitting outside on the banks of the Bosphorus with a plate of fried whitefish, a decent salad, and a glass of raki mixed with water.

But I also think of a night in the nondescript town of Saray in Thrace, chosen only because it had a hotel and was a convenient stop on the way to Istanbul, in which with very limited Turkish, I ended up in a cheap and cheerful restaurant where I pointed at the cooked chicken stew that I wanted and had it doled out to me. Simple but nice.

So I opt for my third Rick Stein recipe, and again very simple: poach two skinned chicken breasts in chicken stock until tender enough to peel into thin slices with your hands, whiz some walnuts with breadcrumbs, crushed garlic and the leftover chicken stock to the point of a creamy walnut paste, mix with the chicken, throw in some chopped coriander, and drizzle the whole lot with some red pepper sauce made from grilled and peeled red peppers, tomato puree, and cayenne pepper all whizzed together with a bit of olive oil.

The result? It is like a warm chicken salad on steroids. The soft moist goodness of the chicken pieces, the delightfully creamy walnut paste and the gentle kick given by the red pepper sauce. Delicious and indulgent.

On to the Middle East…

January can be such a dull month, a let-down after all the hype of December, the days still dark, winter at its coldest, and miserable weather.

And this January in particular is a difficult one, with lives still very restricted because of the evil bug, and threatening to get a lot worse before the springtime of mass vaccination. It may be a long time before we can travel easily again.

So I had the idea to cook my way around the world, as though I were visiting by land and sea, cooking or eating a dish from each of the countries that I would have passed through.  

Originally I wanted to complete it by the end of the month, but as two of my New Year’s Resolutions are to take life more calmly and to limit my food wastage as much as possible, I decided to take my time and stick to my usual rhythm of cooking a few dishes a week.  This also means that I can get out for long bike rides and walks without feeling that I have to rush home to cook a new dish.

For those of you who haven’t endured my cooking, I should note that I am really not a very good cook: put me in front of a collection of ingredients and ask me to improvise a dish and I would be hopeless. My chopping skills are hopeless. My timing is even worse.

But I am a relatively adventurous cook, ready to try out new challenges and cuisines and I can – more or less – follow a recipe. And I am learning the real stuff, bit by bit, burnt steak and squishy potato by burnt steak and squishy potato.

Week One

Thursday 31 December: Belgium 🇧🇪: Moules frites / Mussels & chips

Why start the day before? Because every adventure must have a departure and surely then a departure meal. I live in Belgium so that must be my departure meal.

I mull over the options and am initially tempted by carbonnades de boeuf, a deliciously meaty stew that feels just right for winter. But looking at my itinerary, I realise that I will have plenty of stews as I ‘travel’ in the Balkans and Middle East. Other options are chicken waterzooi, a chicken stew, so again no, and paling in t’ groen, eels in green sauce but I’ve always found the green sauce – mostly parsley – rather insipid.  Eels need something to spice them up. 

So the obvious dish has to be moules frites, or Mussels and Chips, the Belgian dish above all other: a dish redolent of Belgium’s supremely ugly seaside but also of wood-panelled taverns and a dish that you can eat nearly all the year, though really it is best enjoyed during winter and autumn when the mussels are fresh off the Belgian and Dutch coasts.

I settle for a simple moules marinière recipe from Ruth van Waerebeek’s “Everybody Eats Well in Belgium Cookbook”: chopped and sautéed shallots and celery stalks, a bit of thyme and parsley, all washed over with dry white wine before steaming the mussels.

But first I have to clean and check the mussels and frankly, every time I do this, it makes me feel awful. Because you go through, examining each one to see whether the shell is closed and if it is open, you give it a quick tap on the counter and give it a minute to see whether it closes or not.  If it closes, it is alive and can be… sentenced to death by steaming… If it does not close, it is already dead and can be thrown in the rubbish with the other mollusc corpses… I feel like a mass murderer.

The consolation is the smell of the brine that the mussels came in: instantly taking me back to the salty air of my childhood on the edge of an estuary. I am transported to rockpools and shrimping and deep green seaweed.

Then I chuck the mussels into the wine stock and only slowly realise that I have made a big mistake by not adjusting the amount of stock to the smaller amount of mussels that I am using, so instead of steaming them, I am boiling them and when they come out, the alcohol has not burnt off and the mussels are still salty from the brine. The mussels are still delicious but the mariniere is clearly still drunk: white wine fumes overpower the celery and shallots.

But the frites are fantastic. A simple recipe: cut up potatoes into chip sized bits, deep fry them once at 170C for 5-10 minutes, let them cool and then fry them again at 190C for 2-3 minutes. I make use of the deep fat fryer that I have bought myself for Christmas.  To avoid the smell permeating the entire house, I cook outside on my freezing patio, but still the waft goes everywhere. The result is fabulous, especially dipped in a bit of Belgian mayo and mustard.

Friday 1 January: France 🇫🇷: Soupe à l’oignon / French onion soup

Again, many recipes to choose from but only one serious contender as most of the rest are regional ones: choucroute alsacienne, bœuf bourguignon, bouillabaisse… French onion soup must surely be the embodiment of French cookery. My friend Magali tells me that it is reputed to come from Louis XV getting hungry during a stay at a hunting lodge and finding only onions, butter and champagne to cook with.

My recipe comes from a British writer – Felicity Cloake – but a British writer with a deep commitment to French cooking. She is also a keen cyclist and fan of the Tour de France and combined all three in her book “One more croissant for the road”, the story of a summer spent cycling round France, eating regional delicacies and in search of the perfect croissant. It is not a classic but it is good fun and Felicity really knows her stuff, writing a regular feature for The Guardian on “How to cook the perfect …”.

This is taken from that series and combines the best elements of recipes.  She does though warn that it takes a lot of time. And it does. Doing one thing: slowly browning four chopped onions in 80g of butter without the onions sticking or burning.  I spend over two hours, having to stir the onions every few minutes, patiently waiting for them to turn ‘golden brown’, taunted by the deep brown pictures in her article.

For most of the cooking, it is not so much onion soup as butter with onions, the sheer smell of the butter cooking the onions. It reminds me of the famous advice for making perfect mashed potato: “Du beurre, du beurre, et encore du beurre” (Butter, butter and yet more butter”.

Finally I get to mix in some flour, some thyme, some balsamic vinegar, some dry cider and some beef stock before simmering for a further hour.

For the final result, I slice a baguette, rub garlic over the slices – of course – then grill them before adding melted cheese, and grating a bit onto the soup as well.

After all the work: delicious, sublime: sweet, sweet onions in their own heavenly gravy with the croutons absorbing the butteroniony sauce and just a hint of the cider. Utterly French. Utterly delicious.

Sunday 3 January: Italy 🇮🇹: Spaghetti alla Puttanesca

I take a day off to recover from a fever that thankfully turns out not to be COVID but to be a mild flu. Luckily my next dish is the easiest of the lot and an old favourite.

Why spaghetti alla puttanesca?  Hard to find a dish that sums up the wonders of Italian cookery, but I think that this has a good claim. For a start, how many Italian dishes have so many of the key ingredients of Italian cooking all rolled into one? Pasta, fresh tomatoes, salted anchovies, capers, tuna, flat leaf parsley, red chilli, olives, lemon, all cooked with extra virgin olive oil.

I also love the fact that like much Italian cookery, it is so damned simple: boil a pan of hot water, put in some pasta, cook up a loose sauce based with whatever you have in the store cupboard or on the window sill.  When travelling in Italy, I have often admired the sheer simplicity and unpretentiousness.

And then there is the combination of the salty umami of the anchovies and capers with the subtle kick of the red chilli, cinnamon and lemon juice.

Utterly simple, utterly delicious.

Monday 4 January: Slovenia 🇸🇮: Idrijski žlikrofi – Idrian dumplings

After the familiar and easy, the totally unfamiliar and challenging. Slovenia is a beautiful country and I have eaten very well there, most memorably a ten-course meal on a cold December night in a hamlet out in the middle of nowhere, yet only 30 minutes from Ljubljana with my friend Marjan.

So I go for dumplings with a warm chicory salad.  I have not done much baking and have never made dumplings, but why not try?

As soon as work is over, I start making the dough, pounding and kneading away, almost pleading with it to soften up and become smooth.  After well over half an hour of this, I conclude that good enough is good enough and leave it to set for half an hour. While doing this, I have put some potatoes on to boil… and in the heat of the kneading completely forgotten about them. By the time I remember them, they are totally soggy.  Still, I figure that this will make mashing them easier: no big deal. Then I mix them with some freshly fried bacon and some chopped chives and marjoram – the recipe is unclear on the quantities. I also chop and boil some more potatoes and a chicory for the salad.

I move back to the dough and start rolling it. The recipe calls for a thickness of 1-2 mm, which I try to do, again figuring that enough is enough after a solid 10-20 minutes of rolling. The dough is just about 2mm but hey, what can possibly go wrong?

I then try to squeeze the potato mixture into compact hazelnut-sized balls, but the mixture is still hopelessly soggy.  But I have already spent about two hours on this and am getting seriously hungry, so I persist and make lines of soggy balls and then roll the dough over them and cut, trying to make little dumplings and then squeeze the dough together to make little hats.  My dumplings are rather bigger and much less elegant than those in the recipe, but again, what can go wrong?

Finally, I boil them, waiting for them to rise to the top of the water – with them ballooning as they do so, before fishing them out, whipping up a bit of salad dressing for the potatoes and chicory, scattering some lamb’s lettuce on top and serving it all up at around 10.30 at night. I manage to take a plausible photo, but when I finally bite into the dumplings, the dough is disgusting, like undercooked pasta but much softer, still ballooning in my stomach, and the filling is totally insipid. Even the salad is boring.  

I chuck the sad dumplings into the organic waste bin… and dream of one day sitting down in a small Slovenian town to a plate of delicious dumplings in a beautifully meaty sauce… and thinking “Wow! I couldn’t do that…”

A disaster but at least I had the guts to try.

Wednesday 6 January: Croatia 🇭🇷– Grilled sea bream with blitva greens

After my disaster with Slovenia, I opt for a much simpler recipe, one from Rick Stein’s book “From Venice to Istanbul”: grilled sea fish with a potato and green beans side.

And it really is simple: boil the potatoes and French beans and then toss them in some lightly fried garlic. Baste the fish with a bit of olive oil and grill until done.

Even before I start cooking, I have the wonderful smell of the fish as they come out of their wrapping, reminding me of the smells of my childhood in a fishing village.

Grilled lightly until the flesh is soft and white, the sea bream is quite delicious, taking me back to happy sunlit evenings on the Croatian coast. A reminder of how easy fish is to do if only you have the nerve.

And the blitva greens? The tender but firm potato, the soft and juicy beans both absorbing the garlic make a wonderful solid counterpoint to the fish. Surf and turf.

The whole washed down with a glass of Slovenian white.

I can almost hear the waves…

The nothing days between Christmas and New Year are a wonderful time for rest and reflection. The end of the calendar year calls us to close up the mental accounts and settle the psychological profit and loss for the previous 360-odd days: to look at what has been achieved but also what has remained undone.

But in 2020 of all years, there was obviously much that we COULDN’T do, no matter how hard we would have tried.

But even when we legally could, I found myself too tired to do so. I went through the year in an almost permanent state of fatigue, reaching the end of each day mentally and physically exhausted.

Some of that was the unexpected mental effort from doing everything digitally, getting ‘Zoomed out’. 

But some was the mental strain of having to deal with the continued uncertainty and fear, and having to handle the difficult emotions of others.

So a more realistic assessment of the year involves asking yourself not what you did, but what you learned. What is it that you will take forward? 

This awful year could actually help us in the long run, like a kind of Resilience Boot Camp.

So below I have listed just some of the things I learnt. I would love to hear from you about what you learned too.

I learned to love my house and what I have. I always appreciated it but I never had enough time: rushing off to work and then only back when late and dark for a quick supper then bed, or at weekends rushing out shopping or riding or to see friends. Whereas now, I had the chance to see the changes of light during the day, to observe the changes of season, to see the different ways that weather played. To observe the squirrels, the magpies and yes, the bloody pigeons. To see the trees across the road from my home office come into glorious life, bake in the summer heat, discolour and then return.

I learned to love my neighbourhood. About fifteen minutes away, there is a forest surrounding an old monastic abbey: the Red Cloister or Rouge Cloître. In earlier years, I would get there maybe once, twice a year. Since the crisis started, I walked there at least once a week and usually more. In the thick of the first lockdown, I was there every night, out for two hours. I explored it with friends and on my own. One evening as I was walking near the lakes around dusk, I heard a rustling and looked up to see two boar coming down to the stream to feed. It was a magical moment. The forest is continually changing, with familiar paths looking different from one week to the next.

Now it is turning winter and I am still exploring it, these days by night twice a week with separate friends, rediscovering the paths that I have walked by months now lit up in the moonlight or light pollution.  In addition to the boar, I have seen chipmunks and squirrels. My evening walks are serenaded by owls.

On Winter Solstice, a friend and I stopped and lit candles on the path, the drizzle ensuring that they would not burn the forest. We danced to a few songs. A young woman came by, walking her two black dogs. My friend said “Do you want to join us?” and she said “Actually, yes…” a total stranger taking a bit of release in a difficult time. In the dark, neither of us could see her face so we have no idea what she looked like. But the three of us danced there and let our cares wash away.

I learned to be a better cook, trying things out for myself – who else? – and learning to taste, to improvise with missing ingredients, to improve. I tried Chinese, Indian, Italian, Belgian, Iranian, and whatever Nigel Slater and Yotam Ottolenghi came up with in The Guardian.  I learned to enjoy my failures. The other day, I cooked a Persian meat stew. It came out looking like a bad case of dog diarrhoea. It tasted delicious. I will never be a brilliant cook, but I matured and started to improvise.

I learned to slow down including on the bike, to take in the nature, especially in that eery quiet of April, when hardly a soul stirred. As I rode through France and Italy, I was regularly passed and I did not care. I am still learning to slow and calm down: to overcome my impatience, but it’s a start.

I learned to appreciate that nature around me and the sounds that are usually masked by traffic. I started to learn how to recognise trees. So far, I am limited to oaks, pines and beech trees but it’s a start.

But I also learned that without humans, something essential is lacking.  I will never forget cycling through the empty centres of Brussels and Leuven with bars and restaurants shuttered.

To my surprise, I learned that I like working in an office, surrounded by noisy humans. I always used to resent the trudge into work and the disruption of colleagues, but now I pine for it. But that office is only right when it is filled with human noise. In the slight relaxation of the rules in summer when we were able to go back into the office again in limited numbers, the only times I enjoyed being back were when I was surrounded by the team. 

I learned to humour my team, and the way that quiet moments of listening and encouragement to a despondent team member one week would often yield results week later when one of them would lift me out of a slough by their positive attitude and enthusiasm for life. When we started to get back to work in late May and they allowed us back 10% at a time, I was so thrilled to be back that I was hardly working for two hours. The member of my team who I had nominated to come in, swept past me, switched on his computer, and calmly told me that yes, he would be happy to talk but maybe at lunchtime or in the afternoon: he had work to do. Dead right and I learned and got down to work.

I learned that I can be strong in the storm but I also learnt to accept my negative emotions and be kind to them. Those early weeks of lockdown felt like going down a dark tunnel with no knowledge of when we would see light again. I woke up with a sense of dread but I learnt to see the positive and get through each day. I learnt to surf the waves of my emotions however irregularly and fiercely they hit.

I learned to accept my limitations. Including my slowness in learning to identify trees. And my poorness at slowing down.

I learned to be less judgmental of others as they surf their own waves and react differently to the fog of uncertainty and misinformation over the virus and vaccines. I learnt that some friends were mighty oaks that toppled in a storm whilst others were delicate flowers bending with each breeze but surviving due to deep roots. I learnt to accept both and do my best for them but also to step back from internal personal struggles that are not my own.

I learned to appreciate my real friends both in person and online. But l also learned that I yearn for the moment when I can see them again face to face with no ‘social distance’.

I learned the importance of touch. When I met up with a friend for my first restaurant meal after the relaxation of lockdown in that all too brief summer, and she hugged me as we left, I nearly fainted. It was my first serious human contact since I had hugged my parents goodbye four months earlier. I hunger for touch.

I learned how extraordinarily lucky I am to have a secure job out of harm’s way while health workers and many, many others put themselves put themselves out there, day after day, week after week, month after month, and business owners and workers see decades of hard work and financial investment washed away.

I learned that there are many quiet heroes. But that there are also many vocal dicks.

I learned to read people by their eyes. I learned that I love noses and mouths.

I learned how few hours we have in a day, how few days we have in a life.

I learned the fierce urgency of now, the importance of seizing the moment like a wild fish in life’s rushing stream.

I started to learn how to write a blog and a piece for LinkedIn. I can still fit all the followers of this site into a large cardboard box. I learned not to care.

I learned that I should have followed the advice to choose a title for my blog that was sufficiently wide and general to allow for wherever I found myself wanting to take the site later. Because otherwise you end up with a post on resilience and life learnings in a site dedicated to comfortable bike touring…

I learned that you have to punctuate your words with pictures because otherwise people get very bored.

I learned that you are still learning every day. Even in early January when you think that you can sum it all up.  Every day.

And I learned that you shouldn’t overthink or over-elaborate a post. Sometimes you should just stop right there and click ‘Publish’.