Andrew Watts

I have always thought of weather like that of the last week as Dating Weather.  It’s not that one can only date when it’s hot, or that one is more amorous in heat than cold (if anything, the reverse is true); but when I was young and single I was very poor. As George Orwell observed in Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), in a line so good Nancy Mitford stole it: ‘It is not easy to make love in a cold climate when you have no money.' Dates in the winter necessitate a restaurant or a cinema or, at the very least, somewhere with heating – and that costs money. Dating in the summer is a walk in the park.  And now I am old and single, I am cash-poor – at least until the matrimonial acquest is sold.

John Wilkes, the eighteenth-century radical, rake and uglybug, claimed that it only took him half an hour with any woman to talk away his face. Tinder gives you five hundred characters. It’s not enough. I am not saying that I am, like the old libertine, a shocking dog to look at, who ought not to be exposed to pregnant women’s view - Tinder hasn’t, yet, destroyed my self-esteem quite that much - but I think I probably need slightly longer to talk away my photos than the length of this paragraph.  I had hoped that I had dodged dating on the apps - I was married the year before Tinder was launched in Britain - but that optimism lasted no longer than the marriage.

As the results are being announced for this year’s local elections, I am reminded of where I was almost exactly a year ago: standing in Carn Brea Leisure Centre in Redruth, Cornwall waiting to hear my neighbours’ verdict on me and the Conservative party.  The Count stalks my memory like I’m Mina Harker.   To be fair, it wasn’t the worst six hours I have spent in a provincial sports hall - it ranks somewhere between a team-building five-a-side football tournament and my GCSEs - and I’m glad I didn’t take the Liz Truss option of waiting in the McDonalds across the street.  I had never been to a count, and so didn’t know how much of what we watch on election night is pure theatre.

I assumed that the headline in the Mail about ‘pasty wars’ would involve some grievous insult to Cornish pride, including something other than beef, onions, potato and turnip; perhaps pointing out that the turnip was actually a swede. Instead, it was about how a deli in Mousehole, where I live, was charging a tenner for a pasty – albeit served on a plate (presentation is half the battle) with a side salad. The Mail journalist wrote that it was ‘shocking’ that a pasty in a restaurant overlooking what Dylan Thomas called ‘quite the loveliest village in England’ [sic] would cost more than a pasty from an industrial estate off the A30. It’s not rocket salad, as the saying goes.

One of my favourite dad jokes – and, since I became a father, I have many – is to respond to the question ‘How did you sleep?’ with ‘I lay horizontally in a darkened room with my eyes closed’. But it has never been that simple for me. All my life I have suffered from insomnia. Something that should be easy – newborn babies can just about manage it, after all – has become the hardest thing in my life. I’ve lost jobs because of it, and relationships: you feel like you are cut off from society. That’s one of the most annoying parts – most people’s response to the word ‘insomnia’ is to feel an obligation to say: ‘Really? I always fall asleep the moment my head hits the pillow!

Foraging has become a sign of status rather than a lack of it and seaweed is perhaps the most abundant wild food of all. The alternative is mushrooms, but I’ve always thought fungus-hunting a bit too wild; the possibility of a first-class risotto being offset by the risk of death or, worse, expanded consciousness. Rotting seaweed is disgusting. My local newspaper in Cornwall regularly publishes complaints from tourists Caroline Davey, who trained as a botanist before becoming a forager, assures me that only three species of seaweed are poisonous and they are found only in deep water. They might conceivably wash up on the shore, but the basic rule of seaweed foraging is to avoid the stuff at the high-water mark – that’s all dead and decomposing.

You might remember that short period during the pandemic when eggs were unavailable. I was very annoyed that the one period when I had time to cook breakfast in the mornings there was no breakfast to cook. However, I was finally able to persuade my wife that we needed to keep chickens. Purely for logistical purposes, you understand: we had to guarantee our supply chain. During the pandemic, otherwise sensible people bought into that kind of logic. My wife had never been keen on the idea previously. Like most Jewish women, she thinks of the natural world as that greenish blur between the taxi and the front door; and, while I’d managed to persuade her to move to a cottage in the country with roses round the door, keeping livestock was a Step Too Far.