We woke up early and Alex was reading his book when Leila woke up, Leila made a beautiful coffee using the new Press beans and they sat in the sun and at coffee with their sunglasses. They looked kind of matching so took a selfie. Alex worked on his Econometrics and a little bit of the policy memo, while Leila read her book and then called Anish. After about 30 minutes, she passed the phone to Alex and they chatted to him a while together before she started making pizza dough. Anish sent recipes for Pakora and Alex did all the work for the pizza (this is wholly inaccurate but Leila will let it slide).
The pizzas were really good if a little bready, Alex had completely overloaded his with toppings (including potato) and therefore we’ve photoed Leila’s instead. It was really nice cooking together though (despite Alex doing all the hard work) and they ate them in the sun. After lunch, Leila did some Spanish and Alex continued working. Leila looked particularly funky in Alex’s headphones so he took lots of pictures. They also made a list of things they both wanted to achieve during the lockdown period, individually and together, and then picked the most important things to them from that list.
After work work work – Leila helped her mum build her website, Alex talked through the Ethiopia project with the team. We went for a walk into Regents Park with Alex being super strict on not coming anywhere near any other humans, while Leila tried not to laugh at him. They discussed Extinction Rebellion and their thoughts on breaking the rules.
They then went to M&S which surprisingly didn’t have a queue, probably because it was 8pm on a Saturday night. They procured more vegetables, lots of vegan cheese, Salmon, some nice beers, and some beetroot and lentil burgers which Leila cooked on their return. Leila noticed how they could have the same “core” meal (burgers) but they now know each other well enough to adapt the meals slightly to meet each others’ preference – Leila had hers in a salad with a piece of bread whereas she made Alex’s plate with added cheese, more bread and some rice (with leftover tuna and tomato pizza base mixed in). She also noticed how they jazz up their simple meals with things they both love – cornichons, lemon, tahini, kimchi, chilli, Tabasco, hummus. Over dinner they chatted about their mini “superpowers” including Alex’s ability to zone out of the world and focus energy entirely on one thing (Leila finds this really difficult) and Leila’s semi photographic memory. Then Alex started working on his econometrics homework again on the sofa whilst Leila watched Chicas del Cable. Alex decided he didn’t want to watch because he didn’t like any of the characters in it because none of them were truly relatable or nice. They headed to bed after his brain was saturated from metrics.
Coffee, Wine and Isolation 