Want To Make Your Best Friend’s Christmas? Send Her Some Nice Food

I used to just have fantasies about sexual scenarios. Now, I have them about friendship scenarios. This is what this year has made me: a friendship fantasist. But actually, it’s pretty fun. And necessary. Fantasies are the exotic. The unattainable. Simple meet-ups with friends have become the thing lusted after. Relaxed, tactile meals with friends, where you sit elbow to elbow, the air between you thick with whispers. Crowded pubs where you hunt for a face that you know, and rejoice when you find it. Spontaneity. Holidays. Sharing a cigarette. All of these things casualties of the super-sanitised 2020. All of them lost gold. But when the world says ‘stop’, the imagination says ‘go wild’. That’s what makes us lucky to be human, with luscious brains, ready to create. And so, during Lockdown 2.0, as real life once again was reduced and boxed-in, I let my fantasies run free. I’ve whiled away hours picturing leisurely brunches on Californian hillsides with my best women, all of us wafting around in kaftans, high on legal weed in some kind of female utopia.

I’ve imagined hotel spa weekends, where the champagne and intimate conversation flow. I’ve sat in a corner upstairs at Quo Vadis in Soho with a few of my ride-or-die girls, the table littered with martini glasses, an afternoon and evening lost – a boozy lunch gone gloriously astray. My thrills are the chat, the kinship, the switching off and kicking back. These fantasies have buoyed me up.

Meanwhile, over in the real world, my friends and I have been connecting over something conversely ultra-physical and real: food. If we can’t actually eat with one another, then we can at least send over something delicious. In early November my friend Alison sent me 12 (12!) bottles of wine for my birthday. I don’t think I’ve ever had such an exciting delivery. A whole BOX of wine. I thanked her profusely, it felt like so much. ‘Oh god, we used to blow that on a night out,’ she said, sagely. ‘Anyway, consumables are the best kind of gifts right now.’ Which is true. What else says love, says home, says closeness, like food? It’s the ultimate deep connection to everything that makes us feel safe. I sent her a posh pasta meal and charcuterie board back, for her birthday, a few weeks later.

The Best Christmas Gifts Of Food And Alcohol The Internet Has To Offer

She loved it – scoffed the lot for her birthday tea. There’s something delightful about buying things for the moment, too. Gifts that don’t last; that demand to be used for instant gratification. Maybe it’s because we’re all a bit more carpe diem. Anyway, it’s a bit flirty, it’s a lot fun, and I am here all day long – literally – for these care packages.

My friend Ciara sent a box of luxury frozen ready meals, to ‘make life easier’ as I was about to give birth. These were so appreciated. Such a good idea – quicker and healthier than ordering something online for those first frazzled weeks of new parenthood. I love the fact she chose things she knew we’d like, too. There’s thoughtfulness in every bite.

Want to make someone’s day? Send nice food. You don’t even have to spend much money to say it with consumables. My friend Jen left pots of homemade beef and coconut curry on my doorstep, ‘left over from a dinner party during the days of freedom’ and it was – and I don’t use this word lightly – orgasmic. You know when you eat something and your eyes roll back in your head? That good. In fact, I think it was just about the best curry I’ve ever had. Even in my wildest, filthiest, modern-day fantasies.