wildeabandon | Keeping busy...

So far self-isolation has been fairly managable, and although I worry slightly about the inconvenience it's causing to Ramesh & Robert, neither of them has complained, so I should probably worry less. It is notable that whereas normally on a day like this I'd doubtless be thinking "Well, maybe I should go for a run, but do I really want to in this ludicrous heat?" not being allowed to is making feel a lot more appealing. Somehow it hasn't translated into more enthusiasm for weightlifting, which I could do at home... although that's partly because I know that my lifting is going to suffer a bit of a setback during recovery, and that keeping it up to the last possible minute won't make all that much difference.

Anyway, between drastically cutting back on exercise, and not having any work at the moment, I'm enjoying a delightful surfeit of free time. I've been doing a lot more cooking of new recipes from the books I got for my birthday. I'm extremely impressed with East by Meera Sodha, to the extent that it might actually replace Anjum Anand's Indian Vegetarian Feast as my most recommended cookbook. Not only have several of the recipes from it come out absolutely heavenly, but it's also incredibly easy to cook from - the instructions are all in the right order (surprisingly rare in my experience), and she clearly distinguishes between instructions that you can be a bit haphazard and sloppy about, and ones where you actually do need to pay close attention and follow precisely. So far some of the best things I've cooked have been charred lettuce with mint raita, 'ben ben' noodles (a variant on dan dan noodles), butternut squash malai karai (an incredibly rich curry, which I could hardly believe was vegan), and my absolute favourite, a tomato curry with sticky coconut and caramelised onion base which tasted of pure summer and is a serious contender for best thing I have ever put in my mouth.

As well as all the cooking, I've had more time for reading the last few days, and have actually been making some progress through the giant pile of theology books that I've been guiltily failing to more than inch through for the last several months. I've just started the third of the four books Mthr Alice recommended on New Testament Studies, and plan to spend today finishing it off and then revisiting some bits of the NT in the light of what I've learned. And then for tomorrow, I've got myself a copy of Augustine's 'On The Trinity', which is in no way at all horrifically intimidating :)