I was in a heritage apple orchard with Rick Stein the other afternoon, enjoying the north Cornish coast. For those 29 lovely minutes, life was smashing. The sun shone pleasantly over my sofa, and I pulled a blanket over my knees and ate shortbread. Rick picked apples, before making an apple charlotte, a pudding he learned from his mother.

Later, we toured the Land’s End peninsula together, Rick in his car, me inside my head, enjoying the great outdoors and the sublime joy of frittering away time with friendly strangers. Young people would call this kind of fun “wholesome”, meaning, roughly speaking, that no one dies or squats low to vibrate their bare butt cheeks.

By that definition, Stein is the king of wholesome television. And perhaps, like me, wholesome is all you can handle right now: some gentle, non-complex cookery, a little light travelogue. If this 15-part meander, taking in Mevagissey and Mousehole, isn’t for you, perhaps try Michael Portillo enjoying a packed lunch on the Settle to Carlisle line on BBC2 or Susan Calman taking her campervan to Broadhaven Beach to eat laverbread.

I’m saving It’s A Sin and The Serpent – both reportedly excellent – for a future life when they won’t feel like purposeful self-sabotage. In January 2021, the pandemic is “werkin’ me last nerve”, as my Liverpudlian Nana used to announce, pinching the skin between her eyes. It’s a phrase that has made me laugh for four decades, and it works perfectly when, nationally, sanity is at a premium. I have lost count of the number of friends who have had shouty arguments in supermarkets, parks or in the street over relatively minor events.

So, while the madness continues, please spare me Night Stalker on Netflix, featuring the real-life crimes of Richard Ramirez. Give me television with a purpose, albeit the slenderest, non-cerebrally-taxing sort; just a menu of achievable dreams for when lockdown lifts – a train journey, say, or a tearoom and a National Trust building with flapjacks. God damn it, I might even buy a cagoule. I survived 2020, and will get through 2021 (unless it kills me), so I’ll never let a little thing like rain stop me again.

And while I wait for the vaccine, I’ll self-medicate at Nigella’s table and make her chicken-and-pea traybake by carpeting the base of a large baking pan with approximately 2,000 petits pois, like an emerald sea of tranquillity. No, I am not taking my mother’s morphine, and yes, it is tempting. Thank you, Nigella, for giving me a purpose for the two and a half kilo bag of frozen peas I bought by mistake in an earlier lockdown. I’ve added them to just about everything since, but, if anything, the bag has only been getting fuller. “This must be how Jesus felt,” I mused last summer while scooping out another fistful before forcing the freezer door back shut.

Another moment of true happiness was watching delightful, cheerful kids on Channel 4’s Junior Bake Off committing to Pastry Day and making the likes of “a Spanish snack” and “a showstopping pie” with earnest aplomb. Whitney Houston once sang that “children are the future” and I always thought it one of her weakest hits, until I saw Reece, Naima and Safiyyah creating “bread creatures great and small” and a masterpiece biscuit canvas.

The one piece of foodie-escapism TV that I can’t consume, however, is The Cabins on ITV2, in which young, beautiful folk in designer loungewear are coupled up and despatched on a luxury Center Parcs holiday to see if they’ll bonk or, better still, bicker. If you’ve ever wondered why Love Island doesn’t show us the inmates eating, cooking or sterilising a worktop, The Cabins provides the answers: open flames and clip-on synthetic hair extensions are not natural bedfellows.

But, more so, cooking together is an intimate thing; it’s highly exposing. Joel made Jess a burnt beef burger, then packed his bags and left without saying goodbye. Will cooked Holly a full three courses without once straying from the microwave, and ended up firmly in the friend zone. Terelle and Amani quickly settled into cooking separate meals and eating them solemnly in separate rooms. Heartbreaking. Give me Rick Stein gently motoring through Tintagel over that any day. Right now, it’s all my fragile self can stomach.