By Lindsay Slogrove
Thank heavens for dogs and chocolate.
They’re a powerful antidote to Gloomy Gloria, who made a determined bid for Sunshine Sally’s turf this week.
Too much news is a hazard of the job, and there’s a lot of horrible, disturbing, sad and bleak news out there at the moment.
So to tempt Sally out from the clouds, Gloria took to the couch with five dogs and a load of chocolate, and thought about that instead.
This was the Very Important Question she pondered: if you don’t eat anything else at all, is chocolate still bad and fattening?
Surely that smidgeon of cocoa bean counts as a vegetable? Some have nuts, which all the health and nutrition experts urge you to eat more of. And the one with the coconut filling can’t be bad for you – that too is a vegetable, no?
Still haven’t found an excuse for the caramel and Turkish delight and toffee.
And if you don’t eat anything else, they come out of the food budget, so you can be broke and happy.
Two (of the many) things I miss the most from the before times are sleep and a healthy appetite. Apart from chocolate, there’s nothing that appeals.
You know how you keep going to look in the fridge, hoping a delicious meal has miraculously appeared, but all you see are eggs, a few tomatoes, assorted condiments and toast spreads.
The cupboards deliver up the same: things you have to cook, which is okay if the final product tempts the tastebuds.
But zero luck there. So you reach for the toaster yet again, specially if it’s sort of close to bedtime and you can’t eat chocolate because it will mess up your sleep even more.
The sleep thing is a big issue: middle of the night or early hours wanderings have become a thing. No lights, no TV, a cup of chamomile tea in the hope your eyes droop a bit before it’s time to get up again. Of course, if they don’t, you get to spend the day taking five-minute breaks from the computer to walk around a bit, fending off a bruise on your forehead when your head crashes on the keyboard.
Okay, that’s a bit hyperbolic, but it gets the message across.
We’re all tense, stressed out and jumpy. This week there was major mayhem on social media when someone said the ban on alcohol was going to be reinstated, that night. No warning or period of grace.
It could have been someone looking for more sales because (according to later posts) queues of people were lined up outside bottle stores.
Soon after, Minister in the Presidency Jackson Mthembu tweeted that it was fake news.
It was, however, a sign that citizens had learned the lesson on sudden U-turns, like when the initial ban on tobacco products was kept in place from level 5 to level 4, also without warning or a grace period.
I even briefly considered rushing out to get my friend some e-cig refills in case they were going to be suddenly banned again too. Instead, I collected on some canine cuddles and chocolate, and booted Gloomy Gloria into touch.
* Slogrove is the news editor.
The Independent on Saturday