The lockdown became altogether more serious last night - but it is strange how even in a crisis you can have seemingly trivial thoughts or reactions…

Today dans with glorious spring weather again and the birds have been out in full song. Which had me thinking the most irrelevant and passing of thoughts - and that was how wildlife has absolutely no idea that we humans are undergoing such a worrying drama at the moment.

The buzzard wheeling high above my home-office at this moment isn’t going to think: “Weird… There aren’t so many of those loud flying machines passing overhead as there used to be.”
The crabs in West Country harbours aren’t thinking: “Where are all the kids who normally come here to put us in buckets when the sun shines?”

There can be few people in rural areas who have not been woken by the loud and wonderful dawn chorus in recent days. Since the weather improved, our feathered friends have been singing their hearts out as part of their ambition to reproduce - and there’s no reason why domestic fowl can’t emulate what the wild birds do.

Local people who keep chickens will tell you they are in full laying overdrive at the moment, which is good news for all those of us who like to eat eggs.

Hens that are left to run more-or-less wild probably get to eat a much greater range of bits and bobs than any bird that is farmed commercially, no matter how free-range they’re allowed to be - and all those different grubs and insects do make a difference to the flavour of an egg.

Several people keep hens in our valley and to be honest I would like to do the same - although getting hold of live chickens during this lockdown is obviously not going to happen. So I will have to rely on the intermittent honesty box just up the lane.

But how do you cook such things to perfection? Indeed, are there fool-proof ways of preparing any egg? When I say perfection, I refer to an egg white that has set firm, while the yolk inside remains cooked but runny.

You could employ a sous-vide machine, or wand as the Americans call it. There are plenty of models on the market nowadays costing anything between £70 and £140. Basically you attach the device to the inside of a large straight-sided pan filled with water, plug it in and set the temperature.

The point of these machines is that they will take the water to exactly the temperature you set and hold it, precisely, for hours on end. Once you’ve used one to cook steak, you will never prepare that (or just about any other cut of meat) in any other way ever again.

Eggs are in a class of their own when you use the device. By setting the device to 63.5 degrees centigrade and carefully placing your eggs in the pan, all you have to do is walk away and do something else for an hour. You will then have perfectly boiled eggs complete with nicely cooked runny yolks and whites that are firm enough so that you can remove the shells without coming to grief. This is fantastic for homemade scotch-eggs or things like Caesar salads, but also enjoyable just mashed on to a bit of sourdough toast.

Of course, there are times when nothing but a fried egg will do - and here I admit to having just learned something it’s taken me 60 years to understand. Fried eggs always taste and eat better when they have a crisp underside - and you cannot achieve this in a non-stick pan.

You can cook an egg that looks good and doesn’t break apart, but it will not have the the pizzazz of an egg which has been fried at very high temperature so that the white has bubbled up and turned brown and satisfyingly crispy on the underside.

The best (if not the only) way to achieve this is to take a good non-coated stainless steel or cast iron pan and season it. Heat vegetable or some flavourless oil to a high temperature, swirling it about in the pan until it smokes, then carefully rubbing it around the interior with a cloth before discarding that hot tablespoon-full and repeating the process two or tree times.

Treated like this, a stainless steel pan is as nonstick as the most expensive of coated examples - but you can heat its cooking surface to far, far hotter temperatures, allowing you to “shock-fry” an egg in seconds.

The difference between that and a “nonstick-egg” is like comparing a steak which has been thrown onto a live flame with one that’s been lightly stewed. The former has flavour and attitude, the latter will be a lifeless also-ran.

If only I had known about this lockdown I would have bought some chickens weeks ago, and I wonder how many other people lucky enough to have gardens will think the same? Our very own food providing machines - and they’d help fertilise the veg many of us will start growing in the coming weeks.