any years before his death, I remember the writer John Bayley saying that while grieving the loss of his wife, Iris Murdoch, he spent a lot of time, in his head, in his childhood. It was clearly a pain reflex, a way of escaping the present into his most vivid memories and a sense of making time elastic. Trapped inside, going nuts, there aren’t too many ways to get away at present, but revisiting long-distant comforts is one. The quickest way to do this is through food. Incidental data in the United States suggests that for the past two months, among the overall boom in grocery sales has been a spike in the consumption of comfort food. Sales of chocolate, ice-cream and popcorn are up, as well as expensive processed foods that, before the lockdown, might have been considered an unhealthy extravagance. That’s certainly the case in our house. For years I’ve eyed up the frozen TGI Friday’s jalapeño poppers in my local supermarket, while being too thrifty and puritanical to buy them. They work out, incredibly, at about 50 cents a mouthful – but in recent weeks, and in the absence of any other source of drive-by comfort, they’ve become a staple in the weekly shop. My kids and I make endless bowls of strawberry jelly. We buy ice-cream cones and assemble teetering sundaes. It doesn’t always work out. I got halfway through a plate of highly anticipated frozen buffalo wings, then had a mental flash of the chicken processing plant and couldn’t finish them. On the other hand, I have never eaten more baked beans in my life – on potatoes, with eggs, even thrown into bolognese sauce, and always chased with a massive block of cheddar, a regression to the ultimate Beano version of kids’ comfort. After dinner, at the end of another hard day of playing garbage games on their iPads, my kids are made to engage with one other major source of nostalgic comfort. If they come out of this period with one new skill, it won’t be yoga (bitter laugh), chess or the rudiments of coding, but the words and music to the American musical songbook. On Monday night, we did My Fair Lady (the soundtrack to the original Broadway production, not the movie, obviously). “Six feet distance!” they screamed, before skipping around the living room to I Could Have Danced All Night and falling about laughing. The next night we did The King and I – so many winners, I’d almost forgotten! And although, as I disappeared down a memory wormhole and my five-year-old snapped disapprovingly, “You look like somebody died”, by the end we were all dancing. You find solace where you can. In the park, at the weekend, everyone was in masks except the evil joggers and those New Yorkers exercising their God-given right to walk the streets of Manhattan while drinking iced coffee. For goodness sake, I thought, then checked myself. These days, it’s hard to begrudge anyone their tiny shortcuts to happiness.