Commander's Log: Sarsdate 09/04/0021 Sensory Depravation in Desolation Bog

From Bad Taste To Utter Tastelessness

Don’t worry, that’s a literal subtitle, not a content warning.

Here’s a sense check.

1. Sight

As a long standing member of the community for people of unvision, I am well adjusted to living with reduced sensory input. In fact, it’s quite helpful in a couple of regards:

• it’s a great excuse for lacking any apparent empathy for body language, facial expressions and all those other cues that old school commanders find so damn confusing

• in the olden days, when visiting hostelries was still legal, I rarely got slapped by Sherpa Shirl for perving the bar tender

2. Touch

After a 21-year succession of zoonotic pandemics, almost any physical contact is a thing of the past so I’m already two senses down.

3. Sound

A common Cisplatin side effect is permanent hearing impairment, which, added to increasing seniority and a misspent youth, has also put my third sense on the back burner.

4. Taste 

So now we come to taste. As mentioned in yesterday’s post, eating lots right now is important. But Cisplatin and particularly the radiation in Desolation Bog both have devastating effects on the taste buds. At Basecamp I enjoyed a marvellous piece of local venison with a subtle blueberry and juniper berry jus, accompanied by a fine claret, for which the tasting notes are too extensive to include here. But one week into Desolation Bog and I could taste little more than crude sweetness and lots of salt in anything I ate. Now complex food tastes mostly metallic and pretty unpleasant. But Sherpa Shirl has dug out the 1960s bestseller cookbook, ‘Bland English Food Without Any Of That Pretentious Foreign Muck’. With Shirl’s judicious recipe selection, I can now enjoy wholesome meals that are almost entirely tasteless. Compared to horribly salty or industrially metallic, this is definitely the best of a bad lot.

5. Smell

With four down, sensory deprivation in Desolation Bog is now almost complete. But with Bog Radio turned loud, we are marching confidently through Deadman’s Glen more than half way through the bog. Grimmy McGrim (known simply to his friends as Grim The Reaper) has dispatched many of his victims to this inhospitable glen. But he did have a good Scots upbringing, so he very much supports recycling and the circular economy. With that in mind, he built his Impossible Pie factory in the glen and installed Sweeney McTodd as Chief Baker.  Now I understand the local euphemism ‘going to meet your baker’. But as my one remaining sense detects the bubbling vats of Sweeney’s factory ahead, I yearn for a full house – where’s that loss of smell COVID infection when you need one? 

Our talented Chief Cartographer artfully sketched Deadman’s Glen and The Impossible Pie Factory into Mapa Carcinoma as we were marching through, hands over noses, so please take a peek and give it a ‘Like’.  

There’s no Commander’s Log tomorrow or Sunday as we will be resting ahead of next week’s push to The Dire Straits.

End note: If any classicist out there could elegantly tweak “de gustibus non est disputandum” to approximately mean “There’s no disputing the importance of taste” then I’ll have it engraved on my tombstone (settle down Grimmy, that’s not happening anytime soon).