Hope in a takeaway bag: Mackerel Sky reviewed

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.