AS COVI-19 case rates drop in some parts of Australia while others parts are showing upward blips – including Sydney where I am staying – increasing attention is being placed on mental health.
Truly it can get you down, remembering to mask up and sanitise and stay away from other people.
For a start, it takes all the joy out of shopping, the lingering over the new season fruits and exotic cheeses and the possibility of chatting to friends (as there always is up in Darkest Flagstaff supermarkets).
It is true that here there is some easing of “iso” restrictions, but its not exactly party time yet.
Things got a bit cheerier a couple of weeks ago when we acquired the mental health big screen television, which household members assured each other would make all the difference and certainly justified the expense.
I remain somewhat unconvinced that seeing familiar TV stars with heads twice as big as mine and showing every flaw and misplaced eyebrow hair is good for me, but I go with the flow.
However things have come to such a pass that younger daughter, known as Cuddles the Thug, announced at breakfast that she had existentialist dread.
I didn’t really know what that meant, but in no time we all felt that we too had existentialist dread.
I’ve also got Giant Cell Arteritis which is taking a long time to be fully cured and makes me get my symptoms mixed up.
We laid out our various complaints in a comprehensive list to compare them.
One of our number complained of cramps in his hands.
This was finally attributed to his use of a jackhammer to chip some tiles off a wall, something he would not normally be doing.
I reported I was getting terrible hand cramping, although all I was doing was peeling carrots.
We decided to leave that symptom out of the existentialist dread list for the time being after consulting ‘cramp’ on internet.
The symptoms list was getting out of hand when someone decided that contemplating the garden would be good for us, as recommended by the excellent Gardening Australia television show.
Unfortunately our garden features some extremely annoying dead trees.
They didn’t actually die on my watch, they had well and truly given up the ghost by the time I arrived in the household.
But they were lurking in the back like a mute reproach, probably for not having been given enough water over the dire heat of last Australian summer.
I had dropped several hints to the jackhammer operator that he could probably wield a cane knife or pruning shears with equally good result without getting hand cramps.
He rose above it and ignored my hints, nudges and outright pleas.
Meanwhile it was thought best that we should get on with a favourite activity of choice and report back later in the day on the effect of it on our existentialist dread.
I decided to bake a cake from a recipe in the latest supermarket catalogue.
These brightly coloured magazines are distributed by every supermarket chain and are my delight and solace.
I love looking at all the products I never knew even existed and must surely be good for mental health.
It happened I had enough of the correct ingredients to get on with something called a Lemon Drizzle Cake. Or thought I did.
It seemed someone had eaten all the yoghurt, but I managed to fake it with some oldish cream I found in the back of the refrigerator.
There were certainly enough lemons to flavour an entire party of gin and tonic drinkers although grating the skin for the zest threatened to bring on the hand cramps there and then.
I have to say the cake was something of a success and nobody noticed that the ‘drizzle’ part smeared over the top was the recycled sauce from the sticky date pudding; not after I disguised it with more lemon skin grating.
Sad to say I overreached myself and had a go at the cabbage pie as well.
This was a recipe I found on the computer and appears to have originated in some northern Baltic country where there are long, vegetable-less winters filled only with cabbage and stodge.
I did my best but truly, it was dire.
Even the dog wouldn’t eat it, although I tried to disguise it with some tinned canine kangaroo treats.
I disposed of the cabbage well wrapped in newspaper and got on with impressing people with lemon drizzle cake for afternoon tea on the verandah….where I could not stop my existentialist dreading eyes from wandering over to the dead trees.
Finally I cracked and took to some mournful nagging, pointing out how much better I would feel if this poor deceased flora was removed so that we could see the burgeoning bottle brush behind it.
The jackhammer operator didn’t actually agree, but did find a couple of gardening implements and disappear in the undergrowth.
Sounds of sawing ensued.
The result is that the compound is now strewn with dead branches waiting for someone (apparently me) to hack them up and stuff them, little by little, in the green bin for council rubbish pick-up.
Meanwhile the jackhammer operator has gone off to see some medical person about the tree splinter in his eye.
He isn’t saying anything about existential
