Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Hope in a takeaway bag: Mackerel Sky reviewed

(iStock)

You don’t dine in the age of pandemic: you scuttle about in the wreckage. If you can afford food, and you aren’t afraid of your neighbours, who don’t understand the government strategy and believe that if they stay indoors for eight years they will survive, and so should you, you can eat out; or rather you can collect takeaway in the comforting dusk. It is not because I want the food. My husband, with whom I re-enact Sunset Boulevard in lockdown, each taking it in turns to be crazy Norma or Max the butler, is a superb cook. It is that I want local restaurants to survive. It is my version of painting a rainbow in a window and calling it political activism, which it isn’t. It is praying with crayons. I don’t want to emote in primary colours, and I won’t do a rain dance for anything, particularly medicine. I would prefer, and always have, to emote with food.

Unless I want to eat Domino’s Pizza, which I don’t, I have two possibilities now: the Hole Foods Deli in Mousehole, which is superb, and Mackerel Sky across the bridge. Mousehole is charming — it is all charm, it is a glut of charm, it is cursed by charm. Even so, someone called the police on me for paddling in the harbour; someone else, on hearing it, called me Typhoid Mary, which is not a comfortable thing for a Jew to hear. It’s a release, of course, under cover of pandemic; an emotional opportunity. It is payback for the romanticisation of this village by others, which is really moral blindness and greed. It is payback for the ice creams dropped for seagulls; the incompetent paddle-boarders; the traffic. They just want their country back, and I can understand that. Don’t we all?

‘Are you sure there’s no way I can work from work?’

Here, in my cowardice and my hope, is Mackerel Sky across the bridge: a small and pretty seafood cabin, bright and lovely, with a terrace on the river, which sometimes contains two swans.

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