So we got away. Right away. Every­one in my house­hold was in some sort of state or other of anx­i­ety, pres­sure, frantic-ness of some kind. So on Fri­day morn­ing, when John appeared from his mys­te­ri­ous trav­els, we sim­ply… left. We packed the Mini within an inch of its life, to the gills, and yet we didn’t take any­thing: Wellies, hot water bot­tles, books, but not really ANY­THING. And we just drove.

For the first 20 miles or so, we pre­tended to lis­ten to a book on tape, but it was clearly putting John to sleep, so we turned it off and opened the win­dows. Avery asked what was up with the econ­omy, and that took some explain­ing. Strangely it did not seem an upset­ting task, to explain the dis­as­ters, so I let him go on. Finally we hit dead coun­try­side and made a quick stop for sup­plies (but for future ref­er­ence, any­one going to the Gothic Tem­ple should bypass Bices­ter alto­gether and head straight to Buck­ing­ham, where there is a per­fectly lovely butcher (more on that later), a Wait­rose, and for emer­gen­cies, a tiny Tesco. But I digress.

We drove along accord­ing to our direc­tions (I was in such a state of nerves that even my own unre­li­able sense of direc­tion was seem­ing to take on penitentiary-bound pro­por­tions), and then… we entered the gates of Stowe School, land­lords of the Gothic Tem­ple, and as we passed folly after folly, a truly roman­tic stone bridge over a lake bor­dered by cows (all nicely var­ie­gated as the paint­ing styles would dic­tate), we felt an unruly sort of calm descend: the sort of calm that says: this won’t be easy, you’ll have to strug­gle for it, but calm will prevail.

We passed a field of net­tles and low-lying ancient trees and there, in the dis­tance, was the place. Ridicu­lously majes­tic, windswept and seem­ingly aban­doned, it was like a fic­tional build­ing come to life, wait­ing for us. The very front door, as we pulled up, showed itself to be cov­ered sym­met­ri­cally with heads of gods: in bronze, pati­naed, sim­ply crazy.

We pushed our way in and car­ried our clob­ber up into the house and then couldn’t resist explor­ing: the lower floor, every­thing ROUND because the whole build­ing is round, so a lit­tle round bath­room, a lit­tle round kitchen (a very bad, bad kitchen as it turned out), and a round liv­ing room in which to read old log books, guide books, Jane Austen, play soli­taire or dou­ble soli­taire as the fancy took one. But upwards into the round (!) gallery, lined with win­dow seats set over var­i­ously per­form­ing radi­a­tors (John snagged, nat­u­rally, the one work­ing most vocif­er­ously right away), and on either end of the cir­cle, bed­rooms: just two, both… you guessed it… round!

The domed ceil­ing of the house is mosaic and tile, with lit­tle hid­den trea­sures, like the owl one can see only from one bed­room and the fig­ure of Nep­tune vis­i­ble only from another. Win­dows looked out onto fields and fol­lies and trees shaped like flo­rets of broc­coli, so ancient and enor­mous were their trunks, for such small trees. We all armed our­selves with things to read and to write, but truth to tell we suf­fered what we will always call “The Brooks House Syn­drome,” after a house we rented for sev­eral sum­mers in Maine, where the porch view was so lovely as to pre­vent anyone’s being able to read ANY­THING with­out look­ing up every two min­utes and say­ing some­thing tire­some about the view.

Mac­a­roni and cheese the first night! Of course. With fairly decent Wilt­shire bacon and sauteed red pep­pers, although… the hob could not have been worse. Pre­pare your­self, should you go. You can eas­ily rest the palm of your intre­pid hand on the sur­face of the hob when it is at its finest. The pep­pers took some cook­ing, I can assure you. But it was worth it for a deli­cious, dare I say it, din­ner that first night. It was all we could do to stay up until the sun had def­i­nitely set.

On Sat­ur­day we explored. A hugely long and muddy walk among the 23 (I think) fol­lies set in the grounds of the prop­erty known as Stowe School, a real live work­ing school which bought the exten­sive prop­er­ties left when a seri­ously mas­sively wealthy Eng­lish fam­ily sort of went under (sorry, an igno­rant American’s take on the sit­u­a­tion that took sev­eral cen­turies to develop). In the interim between being mas­sively wealthy and NOT (that must really suck), the fam­ily build a whole host of out­build­ings to show their alle­giance to British lib­er­tar­i­an­ism. I wish I were mak­ing this up, but I’m not. That’s why they did it. AND the show gar­dens designed by Capa­bil­ity (“please tell me his par­ents did not name him that?” Avery begged) Brown, of course chris­tened “Lancelot,” not all that much eas­ier to swal­low than “Capa­bil­ity,” but these are British peo­ple we’re talk­ing about.

And very capa­ble gar­dens they were. I could see a lot, if not all, of the strain John has been under melt away under the weight of the mar­bles, the down of the swans, a water­fall. Home for creamy mush­room soup, a nap for John, an after­noon of read­ing on the curv­ing win­dowseats on the first floor for Avery and me. She is, typ­i­cally, at a Land­mark Trust house, obsessed with read­ing all the entries in all the green leather log­books stacked in the book­shelves. To her delight last win­ter she found my entry from 1990 in the house we stayed in in Wales. I held a book and pre­tended to read while look­ing up con­stantly at the chang­ing land­scape. Bun­nies in the dis­tance hop­ping around an enor­mous war­ren, shift­ing clouds, set­ting sun, hordes of tourists walk­ing the ground, press­ing their faces against the win­dows of our Tem­ple and remind­ing us to pull the shades in the bath­room before tak­ing a bath! Roast chicken sur­rounded by car­rots and parsnips, cov­ered with good slabs of bacon… It was that sort of day.

On Sun­day we walked again in the spit­ting rain until time for a spot of shop­ping, so into Buck­ing­ham we went. The first thing I noticed on leav­ing the car was the over­whelm­ing sound of bells. Live, change-ringing bells. And if ever there was any­thing to make me love Eng­land, it is the sound of real live bells. Not for noth­ing did I name my cat Lord Peter Wim­sey: what about those “Nine Tai­lors”. I made my fam­ily fol­low me through the driz­zle toward the sound of them, kick­ing through fallen red and orange leaves, smelling woodsmoke from someone’s illicit fire… I was as happy as I could pos­si­bly be. We went into the church (of St Peter and St Paul) and looked for the bellcham­ber, but it was locked. But I got to hear actual Eng­lish­man call­ing out actual changes. I was HAPPY.

And then? Straight into the mis­ery of a street fair. Seri­ously, bouncy cas­tles, hor­rid high-flying acts, and mer­ci­fully a pair of minia­ture ponies to make Avery happy. We stopped in at Clays Fam­ily Butch­ers in the high street for a leg of indis­putably high-quality lamb, a jar of goose fat. From there to the Buck­ing­ham Del­i­catessen where I looked long­ingly at the mas­sive selec­tion of cheeses and cured meats, forewent all the glo­ri­ous ingre­di­ents because we had just the one din­ner left… and that was to be Orlando’s seven-hour lamb. I can­not rec­om­mend this recipe highly enough: get the very best lamb you can, the very best veg­eta­bles, home­made chicken stock and good wine. Then let the dish cook itself. Kudos to John for pulling this recipe out of the air on his iPhone (I had for­got­ten the cookbook).

Orlando’s Seven-Hour Leg of Lamb
(serves six)

1 large leg of lamb, about 3 kg
4 onions, sliced
4 car­rots, sliced
8 gar­lic cloves, peeled but left whole
300 ml white wine
300 ml stock
2 tbsp Arma­gnac, to finish

Sea­son the lamb and heat a brais­ing pan on the hob. Brown the lamb on all sides thor­oughly so it is nicely scorched — about ten min­utes. It will not brown dur­ing brais­ing, so this is your only chance. Lamb varies, so add a lit­tle oil if the pan seems dry, and pour away most of the fat if a lot has col­lected in the pan dur­ing the brownin.

Lift out the lamb and set aside. Add the onions and car­rots and brown those — about 5 min­utes — then add the gar­lic, lamb, wine and stock. Sea­son and bring to the boil. Cut out a piece of bak­ing paper [I had none and used alu­minium foil, which was fine] and lay over the lamb to keep it moist.

Trans­fer to an oven heated to 120C (100C fan) and cook for seven hours, turn­ing twice. After 5 hours the meat will be cooked; you can serve it now, or stick with tra­di­tion and give it a cou­ple of hours more.

There is no need to rest the meat when it is cooked this way, but you need to fin­ish the sauce. If you are plan­ning to serve the meat on a dish, put it on the dish now. Use wide spat­u­las and arrange your serv­ing dish in the most con­ve­nient spot before attempt­ing to lift the extremely ten­der lamb out of its cook­ing pot. If you are plan­ning to serve it in the cook­ing pot, drain all the cook­ing juices into a bowl.

Strain the juices — I dis­card the veg­eta­bles now but you can serve them — [we did and they were lus­cious, the car­rots sur­pris­ingly hold­ing their shape] and defat them (I use my gravy sep­a­ra­tor). Put the juices into a pot and boil quickly to a saucy con­sis­tency. Stir in the Arma­gnac, if you wish. Pour over the lamb or serve alongside.

*******************

Orlando tells us the lamb is often called “Lamb with a spoon” in France because it is so “melt­ingly ten­der,” and I can attest to this. I was scep­ti­cal about the sauce because it was very dull-looking and quite thin, for the sim­ple rea­son that I could not ade­quately heat up my hob to boil it down in time. How­ever, once poured over the lamb, it was a rev­e­la­tion: deeply fla­vored and almost instantly absorbed by the meat. A true delight.

We spent the after­noon on another mas­sive walk, leav­ing the path in the Deer Park and thereby giv­ing the sheep and cows a great deal to talk about. Avery was ter­ri­fied of being tram­pled, although it was clear they were a lot more afraid of us than we were of them.

Mon­day morn­ing dawned all too soon, and we were off home. Fully recov­ered from stress? Nearly so. It’s good to know that while you shouldn’t ever let your hus­band get that tied up in knots, if it hap­pens off your watch in an office thou­sands of miles away, you can fix it all by a long week­end, some long walks, and a leg of lamb.

Well, it’s not gor­geous. It’s not flaw­less. But it’s a pas­try shell, it smells gor­geous, and I never thought I’d see one of those com­ing out of my oven. It is from a recipe by my Totleigh tutor Tamasin Day-Lewis from her Tamasin’s Kitchen Clas­sics, and the proof of the tart will be in the eat­ing, as they say. I am no baker, but my food writ­ing week made me ashamed of how I indulge this weak­ness. Avery and I approached the var­i­ous unfa­mil­iar things like vanilla pods, icing sugar and tart pan with trep­i­da­tion, and I must say she went off to the sta­ble for her after­noon ride quite cov­ered with rasp­berry seeds, up and down her wrists. I only saw it in the bus, and then it was too late to scrape her off. We really made a mess. And blind bak­ing? What the hell is that? I put the pas­try in the oven only to have Avery say dif­fi­dently, “Uh, Mummy, why is she say­ing to remove the foil and beans? What foil and beans?” Oh dear.

I had to google blind bak­ing. Pathetic. Serves me right for not read­ing the recipe all the way through before I began.

Last night may have been our best din­ner ever: two dishes I would be very grate­ful to have, and pay for, in a restau­rant. Two dishes from my dear tutor, Orlando Mur­rin, from his very touch­ing and also very use­ful cook­book, A Table in the Tarn: Liv­ing, Eat­ing and Cook­ing in South-West France. I am always slightly ner­vous cook­ing some­thing for the first time, and a bit taken aback to see how messy my kitchen gets when I’m not famil­iar with what I’m doing. Uten­sils every­where! With prac­tice, I will get these two recipes down with ease, because they’re not dif­fi­cult, they’re just unfa­mil­iar. I’d hap­pily eat each of them every night for a month, but I don’t think my cho­les­terol level could take it. Avery always orders her steak with no sauce what­ever, so I was a bit nervy on that account as well, but she was intrigued enough by eat­ing some­thing invented by the great teacher she’s heard so much about that she came bravely to the table.

As frus­trat­ing as it is for this Amer­i­can to try to cook with Euro­pean instruc­tions, I am going to repro­duce this recipe exactly as Orlando has writ­ten it, and let my read­ers deal with con­ver­sions. I myself was not tor­tured by pre­ci­sion because it was not bak­ing. Just be relaxed and know that the result will be worth the effort.

Orlando’s Steak St Juery
(serves 6)

50g unsalted but­ter, soft­ened, plus 10g extra
50g Roque­fort cheese (we sub­sti­tuted Welsh goats cheese, bril­liant)
1 shal­lot, chopped finely
3 tbsp Marsala or port (we used Marsala)
150ml beef or chicken stock (we used chicken)
2 tbsp creme fraiche
6 fil­let steaks
a lit­tle olive oil and but­ter
hand­ful of chopped toasted wal­nuts, flaked almonds and pinenuts (I had no wal­nuts)
chopped parsley

Mash the but­ter and cheese till smooth, or if you pre­fer, put in a small plas­tic bag and knead together through the plas­tic. Shape or press into 4 or 5 pieces, and refrigerate.

In the remain­ing but­ter in a small pan, fry the shal­lot for 3–4 min­utes till trans­par­ent but not brown. Add the Marsala and reduce to a syrup, then the stock and reduce again to a syrupy con­sis­tency — it should be about 3 tbsp, bub­bling with small tight bub­bles. Set aside, still in the pan, and cover.

Sea­son the steaks and fry for about 3 min­utes per side in the oil and butter

Set aside to rest while you fin­ished the sauce by bring­ing the reduced juices to the boil, then low­er­ing the heat so the sauce stays warm but does not boil. Whisk in the butter-cheese mix­ture piece by piece to make a thick­ish, glossy sauce. Whisk in the creme fraiche.

Slice each steak on the diag­o­nal into 3 thick slices and pour over the sauce. Sprin­kle with the nuts and pars­ley and serve at once.

*****************

And that’s it. I was dis­or­ga­nized and let one reduc­tion burn, and another sep­a­rate into part oil, part some­thing else. You must pay atten­tion! But the third time was the charm. I am not used to mak­ing sauces and it takes con­cen­tra­tion. But this dish was sim­ply SUPERB. Lux­u­ri­ous, unusual, and it left the house smelling like a real French restau­rant. I was incred­i­bly pleased, and Avery pro­nounced the steak “insanely good.” But that was not all.

Orlando’s Straw Potato Cakes
(serves six, he says, but we two ate them ALL)

2 medium pota­toes, shred­ded into tiny match­sticks, using a man­dolin or juli­enne slicer
1 shal­lot, chopped very finely
duck or goose fat, olive oil or clar­i­fied butter.

Because [Orlando says] there is only me in the kitchen cook­ing din­ner, dishes have to be prac­ti­cal and achiev­able. This potato dish is so quick that it can be made while the meat rests. A few hours in advance you can peel the pota­toes and juli­enne them; keep them under water.

When ready to cook, drain the pota­toes thor­oughly and squeeze as dry as you can on a towel — twist­ing and wring­ing as much as pos­si­ble. Mix with the shal­lots and plenty of seasoning.

Heat 2 tbsp fat in a large fry­ing pan and put in 3 hand­fuls of potato, shap­ing as rough cir­cles. Mod­er­ate the heat if nec­es­sary, but after 3–4 min­utes they should have started to stick together and the under­side to go brown. Flip them over using a palette knife or spat­ula and cook the other side the same way. They will not be very tidy or reg­u­lar but they will taste delicious.

Keep warm on a bak­ing sheet and repeat with the next 3, adding a lit­tle more fat to cook in if nec­es­sary (usu­ally it isn’t). Serve as soon as possible.

*******************

I chor­tled a lit­tle over his use of the dreaded, for­bid­den word “deli­cious,” (Tamasin uses it as well in her rasp­berry curd tart that Avery and I are work­ing on today, chuckle). It’s just a nice word.

These potato cakes are wickedly, sin­fully, melt-in-your-mouth salty indul­gence. And because I am obsessive-compulsive I didn’t even use a tool to make my match­sticks. So sat­is­fy­ing to slice the potato thinly, then take off the very edge away so you have a flat sur­face, and stack up the slices. Then you can slice them thinly again and slice the whole stack in two and voila: match­sticks. Now, I found that I wanted to fry these cakes a lit­tle longer than I expected, so be flexible.

Well, we were in heaven. Between mouth­fuls I said, “Aren’t I clever,” and Avery would chew for awhile and say, “You are so clever,” then we both had to take a deep breath and say, “Actu­ally, Orlando is very clever.”

I deserved a really rich din­ner because I had a ten­nis les­son in the after­noon: not just A ten­nis les­son, but a real pound­ing by my new instruc­tor, Rocco, a metic­u­lously groomed Brazil­ian man of intense ath­letic abil­ity. It must be said that he has, as well, an end­less sup­ply of off-colour sto­ries to shout at me as I’m try­ing to lift my toe, or have decent follow-through, or any­thing else to do with actual ten­nis. My God, he’s strange. But then he would turn from these rev­e­la­tions to ask Avery what the title of her book was, and where did she go to school. The man sim­ply appears to have no con­ver­sa­tional gov­er­nor! And since I could see I was improv­ing my game by leaps and bounds, so I sup­pose my moral sanc­tity can take a lit­tle drub­bing. But his cologne, good lord, the man must bathe in it, and it trans­ferred itself inex­orably via his help­ing hand on my rac­quet han­dle, and thence to my hand, where it remained indeli­bly through sev­eral hand wash­ings. I reported this to John who said from some 3000 miles away, “As your hus­band, I so did not want to hear that.”

It was a glo­ri­ous day of blue sky over­head, falling orange and yel­low leaves, a crisp breeze to keep me cool as I fended off my instruc­tor. Tonight is swim­ming and div­ing, in the mar­vel­lously old-fashioned school pool, glass-roofed and elegant.

And tomor­row, after nearly a week away, my beloved returns. And the three of us head off in the Mini, packed to the gills and with a dish of mac­a­roni and cheese at my feet, for a long week­end at the Gothic Tem­ple. As you know, we’re devoted to the Land­mark Trust and this is a place we’ve been eye­ing for many years, so it’s going to be an adven­ture. We all need some time as a three­some to regroup; it’s a funny dynamic being alone with a very com­pan­ion­able child for many days in a row. We get into our own con­ver­sa­tional groove that then has to adjust when Father Comes Home. He’s going to need all the peace he can get, after a dread­ful busi­ness week in blis­ter­ing sun and urban squalor. Poor man.

Before I close, I want to rec­om­mend to you a new blog, Roast Pork and Apple Snow, a new ven­ture writ­ten by my Totleigh Bar­ton com­pa­triot Edward. It’s a lovely com­bi­na­tion of sea­sonal appre­ci­a­tion, recipes and Edward’s mus­ings on food, cook­ing and the exam­ined life. You’ll love it. We are all absurdly moti­vated and ambi­tious for our writ­ing, after our week of inten­sive boot camp in Devon.

Well, the tart’s ready to be assem­bled, so fin­gers crossed. I’ll report results, if they’re fit to print. I have faith in Tamasin, just not so much in… me.

Good­ness, we’re wiped out. Just a short trip to Bath, a lit­tle lunch, a lit­tle shop­ping, quite a LOT of walk­ing, and a day full of con­ver­sa­tion with my friend Sam from Totleigh… we’re droop­ing this evening! But it’s all good.

We set off in the morn­ing and arrived at lunchtime, and what a lunch it was… Sam met us in the freez­ing cold wind (it was bet­ter in the sun) and we walked, talk­ing six­teen to the dozen all the time, to Jamie’s Ital­ian, open just two weeks, and abuzz with energy already. At the door (no book­ings) we were told it would be 45 min­utes and no leav­ing! No run­ning around sight-seeing and then com­ing back. Well, there was no ques­tion: we stayed. Had a lovely cran­berry juice spritzer (it really touched me to leave Avery and Sam while I went to the bar and look back to find them talk­ing non­stop, and laugh­ing: that’s the mark of a lovely, warm man, to be able to chat on his own with a lit­tle girl he’s known for five minutes).

But it was only 20 min­utes, so we were really silly glad we stayed. This new Jamie Oliver ven­ture, designed to bring really high qual­ity Ital­ian food to the masses, was a suc­cess from our point of view, any­way. Where else could Sam and I have a whole grilled sea bream for 15 quid? You could hardly buy it raw at the fish­mon­ger for that, and I so far am not quite brave enough to cook a whole fish (although after today, I’m tempted). It was served with what was described as a salsa verde, but while tasty, Sam and I had to dif­fer with the descrip­tion: it was a lovely scat­ter­ing of minced pars­ley, gar­lic and chill­ies, but NOT a salsa verde, and there wasn’t enough of it any­way. We were both dis­ap­pointed to find, upon eat­ing one side and flip­ping the fish over: no salsa on the other side. It needed a whole lit­tle ramekin of the stuff on the side.

But fla­vor: it packed a fresh, crunchy punch and the cook­ing of the fish could not be faulted. Creamy, ten­der, per­fect. A rather phoned-in salad of shaved fen­nel and ran­dom field greens (really “an aver­age pub salad,” Sam decreed, quite right). A side dish of I thought quite aver­age French-style French fries, but my com­pan­ions wolfed them down. Far bet­ter was the side dish of “flash-cooked sea­sonal greens,” which proved to be per­fect, olive oily, chilli-scattered ten­der­stem broc­coli which we ate with our fin­gers. Sam ate, Avery wants you to know, the fish eye­ball. Granted he took a very large gulp of his water after and spit­ted out some­thing rather… solid, but the point is, he tried it.

Avery had wild mush­room ravi­oli which I found a bit heavy, but there were nice whole sauteed sage leaves in the sauce and she ate nearly the whole dish. We all shared, I should say at the out­set, the meat antipasti, and were in heaven: bre­saola, parma ham, mor­tadella, salame, and then lit­tle slabs of the most piquant parme­san topped with a spoon­ful of the famous chilli jam. That jam lived up to its billing and if I could buy a jar of it to have with a cheese plate, I would do so. I can­not say there was any­thing earth-shattering about the pre­sen­ta­tion or any­thing unusual in the fla­vors, but the sim­plic­ity and high qual­ity of the ingre­di­ents was enough. With the antipasti came a melt­ingly (lit­er­ally) buf­falo moz­zarella sprin­kled with chill­ies and basil oil. Just gor­geous. We were happy.

We talked end­lessly about our Totleigh adven­tures, shar­ing sto­ries of slightly drunken episodes and con­ver­sa­tions, remem­ber­ing everyone’s writ­ing efforts, who read what, to what suc­cess. And dear read­ers, Sam shared with me his first child­hood culi­nary effort: a snack for his mum. He calls it quite sim­ply “Diges­tive Balls on Ice­berg Let­tuce,” and that pretty much sums it up. “All you do is line a nice glass bowl with some let­tuce [“Ice­berg?” I spec­ify, remem­ber­ing my own child­hood — “absolutely Ice­berg,” he affirms]. Then you scat­ter on some tomato slices, and THEN, you chew up as many diges­tive bis­cuits as you can, spit them out and roll them into balls with your hands [“unwashed,” I spec­ify], and arrange them on the let­tuce. It’s as sim­ple as that.”

Com­pared to the kitchen exploits of my child­hood, most of them involv­ing canned mush­room soup, this sounds pos­i­tively Lucullan.

We talked fast and furi­ous over lunch and then stag­gered out to begin our round of tourist sights. Bless Sam: he took us every­where: the gor­geous Cres­cent where “Per­sua­sion” and so many other mem­o­rable movies were filmed, Pul­teney Bridge, the Cir­cus and finally the rather odd and occa­sion­ally spooky Jane Austen Cen­tre, located on a hilly street in the cen­tre of town. I would say that the most appeal­ing bit of this museum is the book­shop, where had I had the cash, I could have bought an entire 19th-century edi­tion of all Austen’s books for 625 pounds. Heav­ens. I set­tled for a new copy of “Per­sua­sion” and we sat down for the sort of touch­ing guided-tour speech, and then strolled through the museum look­ing at var­i­ous cos­tumes worn by very creepy man­nequins with what seemed to be stock­ings pulled over their faces: every­one appeared to be in the throes of smoth­er­ing! Very odd.

A quick but deli­cious stop in Pax­ton and Whit­field, a small but well stocked cheese shop where I asked for and didn’t get a gratte paille, my absolute most trea­sured runny, smelly triple creme cheese. I wasn’t too dis­ap­pointed to come away with a cheese made by Neal’s Yard called “Finn,” heavy and creamy.

Finally we escaped to the Bath Sweet Shop in North Parade Pas­sage, for Avery to buy some of her trea­sured “mil­lions,” a truly hor­ri­ble sort of candy that she dis­cov­ered years ago on our school-finding trip. Sam joined her in a bag of some­thing called “toasted tea cakes,” tiny lit­tle… toasted tea cakes, and we walked along in the late after­noon sun toward the Abbey and the Roman Baths. Steamy, green and sug­ges­tive of so many sub­merged delights, we all won­dered how long we could wade in the pool before some CCTV-watching guide found us and chased us out.

Sam walked us to the train, but we stopped along Quiet Street to visit Kitchens, quite the most won­der­ful Aladdin’s Cave of kitchen shops I have ever seen. Sorry, my dar­ling Matthew Mac­fadyen, I will always be loyal to our shared des­ti­na­tion Diver­ti­menti in Maryle­bone, but this shop was sim­ply chock-a-block with trea­sures… it was all I could do not to buy the brushed-steel KitchenAid for Sam who drooled over it, and a com­plete set of new knives for myself. As it was, I restrained myself to a tiny saucepan for melt­ing but­ter for pop­corn (or poach­ing a sin­gle egg). What a fab­u­lous spot.

Home exhausted! Thank you, Sam, for a per­fect day.

Luck­ily there were left­overs to be had when we fell in the door around 8. Bolog­nese to be heated up, and the lovely remains of a new side dish I made from the divine Anna del Conte’s Amaretto, Apple Cake and Arti­chokes. Go very easy on the salt, though, as the salame I found at Carluccio’s was quite salty enough to carry the dish. I spent a very frus­trat­ing morn­ing try­ing to con­vert all the var­i­ous mea­sure­ments she uses into some­thing coher­ent for you, dear read­ers. It’s dif­fi­cult for an Amer­i­can to deci­pher some Euro­pean recipes, espe­cially when they’re writ­ten through an Eng­lish expe­ri­ence. I asked an Eng­lish friend, “How on earth do you con­vert ounces of but­ter into table­spoons?” and he replied in mys­ti­fi­ca­tion, “Why on earth would you ever mea­sure but­ter in table­spoons?” I had to laugh, in cha­grin, and tell him how Amer­i­can but­ter was labeled. Two peo­ples sep­a­rated by a com­mon lan­guage, and it would appear, but­ter labelling. Sigh. So here goes, as best I can man­age. At least it’s not bak­ing, so speci­ficity isn’t nec­es­sary. Just relax.

Baked Potato Puree with Salame and Moz­zarella
(serves 4 easily)

1 1/2 lb floury pota­toes
1/2 cup whole milk
2 tbsps but­ter
1 egg
4 tbsps fresh grated Parme­san
fresh ground pep­per to taste
7 ounces (a chunk about 3 inches thick) first-rate salame, cut into very small cubes
7 ounces (roughly a ball) moz­zarella, cut into very small cubes
hand­ful dry fresh breadcrumbs

Now, del Conte has you boil­ing the pota­toes and then peel­ing them. I found peel­ing boiled pota­toes to be sticky and dis­gust­ing, so next time I would peel then boil. Heat the milk as they boil, and then put the pota­toes through a ricer and mash with the but­ter and milk, beat­ing hard with a wooden spoon. As del Conte says, the longer you beat the puree, the lighter it becomes.

Mix together in a bowl the egg, Parme­san and pep­per. Add mix­ture to the potato puree, then stir in salame and moz­zarella and mix well.

But­ter a souf­fle dish or any oven­proof dish and tip mix­ture in. Top with bread­crumbs and bake at 375 for 20 min­utes, or until top is golden brown. Let rest for sev­eral min­utes and serve warm. Gorgeous.

I am con­cen­trat­ing on this lovely pho­to­graph as proof that by the din­ner hour, my house­hold is always quite peace­ful. I need this reas­sur­ance today because, frankly, things are quite mad here. I will try to describe.

As many of you know, to my intense cha­grin and seri­ous incon­ve­nience, I am aller­gic to horses. This would not be a prob­lem ordi­nar­ily since I can take horses or leave them, but as you also know, my child is quite addicted to the crea­tures and as a result, a fair amount of my time is spent get­ting her to the sta­ble and get­ting her back, not to men­tion watch­ing a les­son if it’s in the ring and not sim­ply wan­der­ing around Hyde Park. The hours, the hours I have spent watch­ing a lit­tle girl go around and around a ring, whether in the Bronx in the old days, the Cotswolds or Scot­land on hol­i­day, and then of course here in the park. Bore­dom vies with sneez­ing on these excursions.

Last night I went to col­lect her at the sta­ble and we took the rare lux­ury of a cab home, because pub­lic trans­port was severely messed up. It was the first mis­take: she was far too cold and wet for me to have the win­dow open, so we spent the half hour jour­ney com­pletely cooped up and with the dread­ful smell of barn suf­fo­cat­ing me. Home to throw her in a bath­tub and make my bolog­nese. I decided to ignore my sneez­ing because I can­not bear the super-intense thirst that comes with tak­ing an anti­his­t­a­mine: like hav­ing a mouth full of paper tow­els. Not nice.

How­ever, when at 11 o’clock or so I saw her filthy half-chaps and boots under my desk, I picked them up, dumped them in her ruck­sack and… rubbed my eyes. With horsey fin­gers. Instant mis­ery. I could not see, strug­gled to breathe. I could feel my chest clos­ing up and that is always scary. Rush to the cup­board, take TWO Benadryl, and… I func­tioned for awhile, and then it was like being hit by a truck. Sim­ply dead to the world. When at 8 a.m. I awoke to the DOOR­BELL, I could see that I had slept with­out mov­ing for the entire night: every pil­low per­fectly in place, as if I had been a medieval corpse with my hands folded over my chest. Who on earth could be ring­ing my door­bell at 8 a.m.?

“It’s Faux Frost, Mummy!” Avery was bounc­ing around look­ing sick­en­ingly ener­getic, to a per­son with a Benadryl hang­over. What an igno­min­ious hang­over that is, to be sure. No carous­ing, no hang­ing around a bar flirt­ing with some invest­ment banker over an Abso­lut Cit­ron… no, I have to get MY hang­overs from allergy med­ica­tion. So not cool.

I stag­gered up. You may recall the tragi-comic episode from last sum­mer, where our sofa and bench were held hostage for months by Mr Frost, at first merely a doesn’t-answer-his-phone uphol­sterer who became, in due time, a com­pletely dead uphol­sterer who went to his reward with­out, appar­ently, telling any­one where our belong­ings were. Well, over the course of the sum­mer the objects were located, ALLEGEDLY, although the fab­ric to do them up had dis­ap­peared (a wind­ing sheet, per­haps?). Mr Frost’s suc­ces­sor, Faux Frost, assured us that all would be well… we chose fab­ric again, he came for a con­sul­ta­tion, and when he left we held hands like chil­dren in a for­est, think­ing the story might have a happy end­ing after all.

Months passed, AGAIN. I became quite fond of the empty spots in our house where there should be places to sit… it was min­i­mal, and sort of elegant.

Then last week Faux Frost turned up out of the blue and said he would be around on Mon­day (oh dear, today) with our stuff. “What per­cent­age do you give that?” I asked my long-suffering hus­band, who said he thought about 20.

But here they were, first thing in the morn­ing, dis­gust­ingly cheer­ful and chatty. And we have our fur­ni­ture back. The sofa cush­ion is very, very odd, sort of envelop­ing the unwary sit­ting per­son in a crunchy and yet also feath­ery embrace. John will HATE it. Of this I am cer­tain. But I didn’t have the heart to send it away. Maybe it will grow on us. I’m just afraid that the day will come when we can’t find one of the cats and it will be folded into the cush­ion, trapped and hun­gry. Or even Avery. She’s not that big.

For heaven’s sake. As the Faux Frost Helpers were car­ry­ing the sofa upstairs, Avery and I looked out the open front door to see a tiny lit­tle lady face­down on the pave­ment just out­side our gate. Hmm. We decided to inves­ti­gate. As we approached, ask­ing, “Are you all right?” she slowly pulled her­self to a sit­ting posi­tion and said, “I’ve bro­ken off my toof.” And sure enough, six inches or so away from where she had been lying was a lit­tle white thing. How awful. She stood up and was not any taller than Avery, but clutch­ing in her hand an even smaller scooter. “I nicked my son’s scooter to run an errand or two, and now… this. Does it look awful?” She gri­maced at us, and then said dis­con­so­lately, “I can see from the look on your faces that I’m in a real pickle now.” She said she’d bet­ter go home and call the den­tist, where­upon Avery vol­un­teered, “I have to go to the den­tist today too… just a checkup, though, sorry.” Apol­o­gis­ing for not hav­ing bro­ken her own tooth off. For heaven’s sake.

Mad­ness.

The Frosts have retreated, the cats are fas­ci­nat­ing by the reap­pear­ance in their lives of a well-remembered nap­ping spot, and I’m drink­ing every­thing in sight try­ing des­per­ately to dis­pel this lame, tame, unin­ter­est­ing hang­over. The only thing cheer­ing me up is lunch. You could even eat it with­out a toof, I think.

Mixed Bean Salad
(serves lots, and improves with time)

1 soup-size can each: bor­lotti, can­nellini, black beans
1 cup edamame, steamed and pod­ded
1 red bell pep­per, thinly sliced
2 ears sweet­corn, cut off the cob
1 bunch scal­lions, sliced on the bias includ­ing green parts
1 red onion, diced
hand­ful sugar snap peas, sliced as you like
2 cloves gar­lic, very finely minced

dress­ing:
juice of 2 lemons
good slug chilli-infused olive oil (I am loyal to Apu­lia)
sea salt to taste (it can take a lot, I find, with the mild­ness of the beans)
fresh black pep­per to taste

Shake the dress­ing vig­or­ously in a jar till thor­oughly blended. Rinse beans well in a colan­der and then mix every­thing in a large bowl. Per­fect with a cou­ple of baguette bites and a fil­let of smoked mack­erel on the side.

Yes, John’s on an air­plane, Avery’s at the sta­ble, I’m at my desk: life has got back to nor­mal in an unnec­es­sar­ily deci­sive way. I’ve waded through the mound of paper star­ing me in the face and found all the respon­si­bil­i­ties therein com­pletely uncom­pelling: den­tal appoint­ment for Avery who has already found end­less ways to say, “Don’t make me go,” thank-you notes I’ve writ­ten but not both­ered to send, parent-teacher con­fer­ence appoint­ment sheets that have not been filled in, reminders to get a flu jab. You can see why I’m in avoid­ance mode. But it’s either deal with all that admin, or get down to the busi­ness of writ­ing my next cook­book chap­ter, and as a result, here I am, blog­ging. A friend of mine has just begun a new blog because, as he says, it’s a way to get one­self writ­ing every day. True, but it’s also a mas­sively con­ve­nient bolt-hole to save one­self from REAL writ­ing, as in craft­ing, edit­ing, choos­ing one’s words. But per­haps I’m being too hard on myself. And I DO have a load of laun­dry going, so the day has not been for naught.

We dropped Avery off this morn­ing on what looked like a rainy day until we were about halfway to the sta­ble, and sud­denly it was all blue sky so we put the top down on the Mini and felt cheer­ful. Sadly she arrived too late for the first ride but JUST in time for the first scrap­ing up of horse detri­tus in the Square. Poor child. At least she has really good chorizo in her lunch­box, which makes up for a lot.

What could be more nor­mal than a good dish of bolog­nese? That’s on the menu for tonight and I’ll tell you why I did not make it last night even though Avery begged. I was in the mood for seafood, some­thing light and really fast and easy. I can’t call it a recipe, exactly, but per­haps the descrip­tion will inspire you to save the red meat for another night.

Fox Point Seafood
(serves three with left­overs for lunch)

2 cloves gar­lic
juice of 1/2 lemon
pinch sea salt
cou­ple grinds black pep­per
1/2 cup good ready­made may­on­naise, or your own fresh
12 raw king prawns
12 raw scal­lops (roe off for me)
2 wild Alaskan salmon fil­lets
sev­eral shakes Pen­zeys Fox Point Sea­son­ing
juice of 1/2 lime
sprin­kle olive oil
1 tbsp veg­etable oil

Now, some­thing really inter­est­ing, chem­i­cally speak­ing, hap­pens when you mince gar­lic together with lemon juice and sea salt. I think it must break down some essen­tial build­ing blocks of solid mat­ter (oh dear, I think my art his­tory PhD is show­ing), well, what­ever it is I mean, the gar­lic is pul­ver­ized by the acid and salt in a very sat­is­fy­ing way. And the results are quite dif­fer­ent to sim­ply minc­ing the gar­lic and mix­ing it with the lemon and salt. Trust me on this point. I once made a mind-bendingly pun­gent vinai­grette for cole slaw that involved peel­ing and sec­tion­ing a lemon (nice obses­sive com­pul­sive job that was) and chop­ping the sec­tions with salt and gar­lic. I loved it, but I have a mem­ory of some of my guests cry­ing. So this mod­i­fied gar­lic rap­ture may be just the ticket for the faint of heart who nev­er­the­less want some kick to their aioli.

Mix the minced gar­lic, lemon and salt mix­ture into the mayo and set aside.

Place all the seafood on a plat­ter and sprin­kle it all with Fox Point Sea­son­ing. This mir­a­cle condi­ment is a clas­sic exam­ple of a whole being more than the sum of its parts. Why should dried shal­lots, chives and scal­lions be such a per­fect thing to accom­pany seafood, chicken, scram­bled eggs and dare I sug­gest it, but­tered pop­corn? But it is. Mag­i­cal. Driz­zle the lime juice and olive oil over all the seafood.

In a very large skil­let, heat the veg­etable oil till nearly smok­ing and place the salmon fil­lets in skin side down. Resist the temp­ta­tion to play with them: don’t poke at them, peek under­neath as they cook, just sit for about 4 min­utes. Now you may turn them. One hopes the skin will have cooked very nicely so that you can either enjoy it, or peel it off (I don’t do salmon skin). Cook on the flesh side for just another minute and remove the salmon to a warm plate. Turn back to the skil­let and see if you need more oil, if so add it, but judi­ciously, as you want this to be a nice light dish. Place the scal­lops as quickly as you can in the hot oil on one side of the skil­let and throw the prawns in at the other side. Toss the prawns with tongs and after about 2 min­utes, turn the scal­lops over. Now remove from skil­let and arrange nicely on the salmon plate. Serve with the aioli.

***************

Avery’s back from the sta­ble, weary, cold and filthy, but in her usual eupho­ria after sev­eral can­ters. “You just wouldn’t believe how gor­geous The Mile was, today, with all the fallen col­ored leaves under­foot, Mummy,” she sighed, “but Hobbs freaks out if a leaf falls on his nose. He has very sen­si­tive skin.” To think until that moment, I hadn’t known it. She is becom­ing quite the writer her­self these days, I think inspired by my tire­somely con­stant chat­ter about my week in Devon. Yes­ter­day, as she was adding to a story she’s been work­ing on all week, we had the fol­low­ing exchange, which for some rea­son filled me with joy.

“Mummy, you can’t really say that stone steps are ‘rick­ety,’ can you?“
“No, but you can say they are ‘well-worn.’”
“Oh, thank you so much.”

I’m off to pro­duce spaghetti bolog­nese with plenty of white wine and whole milk and just a hint of nut­meg, plus wilted pea sprouts and fresh apple­sauce. It’s autumn.

Some­times it’s good to have a day so unlike another day, except that they’re both called ran­domly “Fri­day,” that you really have to step back and ask your­self about con­ti­nu­ity. Not to sound too pre­cious (kick me if I do), but con­ti­nu­ity of self is an odd thing, espe­cially, to para­phrase the great short story writer Ray­mond Carver, if you have chil­dren. In fact, for­get “chil­dren”: I don’t even need the plural to make my life feel occa­sion­ally quite schiz­o­phrenic. One child, plus every­thing else I want to do in this life, is quite suf­fi­cient to make me feel that my arms are being stretched in oppo­site direc­tions. The per­son one is with a child and the per­son one is when said child is out of sight (and out of mind) are two very dif­fer­ent peo­ple. Most of the time it’s pos­si­ble not to notice this dis­con­nect because the fleet­ing no-child moments don’t last very long. One has to learn to func­tion on sev­eral lev­els at the same time (write all day, then it all ends at pre­cisely 3:45 every day to be replaced with lis­ten­ing to tales of school inequities, etc, pro­vide snack, find gym kit). One has to be ready to let go one’s own thoughts on com­mand. And this sev­er­ing can some­times seem to test the notion of iden­tity at all. As Carver also said, “One of the things I learned is that I had to bend or else break. And I also learned that is pos­si­ble to bend and break at the same time.”

A bit chill­ing and dire sound­ing, I know. So not me! But at Totleigh I dis­cov­ered what hap­pens if the stretches of time one has to one’s pre-parent self last for, say, Five Days, it’s some­thing a bit life-changing (my god, how British and dep­re­ca­tory that sounds! “a bit life-changing” like “slightly preg­nant”). But it is indeed a phe­nom­e­non to cher­ish and to try to bring back to real life. To try to rec­on­cile the two selves. A tough assign­ment, I’m find­ing. And I think all of us at Totleigh would agree that the time there, while chal­leng­ing intel­lec­tu­ally and not easy to respond to, was also a sort of bub­ble out of real time, and by Day Five the bub­ble was quite sturdy.

For exam­ple. Last Fri­day, just a week and a day ago, I was in super-selfish mode: didn’t do a thing I didn’t want to do, did lots of things I did want to do, rev­elled in the sen­sa­tion that we were liv­ing in a world apart, a world that wouldn’t last but another sev­eral hours, like a turning-point ripe fig. And it was all true. This Fri­day, yes­ter­day in fact, I did lots of things I didn’t want to do, some things I did want to do, and mostly felt over­whelmed with the end­less vari­ety there is to be had in this life. There’s wildest, remotest Devon where one’s clos­est com­pan­ions on a walk are sui­ci­dal pheas­ants. Then there’s Pic­cadilly, where I had to fight yes­ter­day to put my feet down on the pave­ment, where I stopped off to see the Robert Irwin show at White Cube. As an aside I must tell any­one who is in Lon­don tomor­row to go to the last day of the show: born in the same year as Don­ald Judd, Irwin’s work is just as min­i­mal, just as ele­gant, but more clever, fun­nier. Stun­ningly per­fect installation.

But I digress. More on the schiz­o­phrenic nature of my Fridays.

The com­pany? There are a bunch of bril­liant writ­ers to hang out with on a sunny day in said remote Devon, or a bril­liant, stressed-out hus­band and his bril­liant, end­lessly opti­mistic busi­ness part­ner in SW1. Both of those choices work for me. There’s the life of the higher mind, where you spend part of a Fri­day dis­cussing what words are accept­able to be included in food writ­ing, and where in all seri­ous­ness a per­son can ask the fol­low­ing ques­tion: “I know this is a con­tro­ver­sial sub­ject, but where do we all stand on the word ‘morsel’?” And then there’s the life of home­work super­vi­sion where “Bun­sen Burn­ers for Dum­mies” is a real sub­ject, and one’s music home­work can be done in lim­er­ick form. My mind is pretty much stretched on ANY of those subjects.

Last Fri­day I ate a meal that I cooked with three heart­warm­ing friends, and last night I was fed very posh food by fire­light, cooked by a lovely fam­ily who looked after my child while I was away self­ishly cook­ing for myself. And the three-quarter moon we left behind in Devon was full last night, here in London.

So there you go. I realise com­pletely that in all these compare-contrast high school home­work sort of essay in the above, one thing stands out: I have absolutely no room ever to com­plain about any­thing. I err on the other side, actu­ally: hold­ing it all so close that I threaten to smother every­one and every­thing in my path! Learn­ing to hang back and take it all for granted a bit more is prob­a­bly a good idea for me. This after­noon I added a line to the piece I wrote at Totleigh about our beloved island in Maine, where I describe the children’s fairy forests, and they are words to live by: “The chil­dren do not mind that these fairy houses will be stepped on, will fall apart, will dis­solve in the next rain­storm. It is enough for them to have made them. I know I should feel that way about the things I make.”

So, Day Five came. I knew from the out­set I was in for a treat, for the sim­ple rea­son that there’s no day I like bet­ter than one spent in the kitchen prepar­ing a meal for guests. But nor­mally that means a very soli­tary, if delight­ful day, lis­ten­ing to a book on tape, work­ing at my own pace, queen of my domain. Not last Fri­day. I was put in the very amus­ing posi­tion of being sig­nif­i­cantly older than, and hav­ing cooked sev­eral mil­lion more ordi­nary meals than had the chef pre­sid­ing in the kitchen (Edward) and yet being praised for my red onion dice. “Oh, I AM sorry,” he said, “I’m being con­de­scend­ing.” You think? But it has to be said: he ran a mon­u­men­tally effi­cient kitchen that after­noon. The four of us: Edward, Char­lie, Roger and I, gath­ered after lunch to dis­cuss our roles, and we all quickly realised it was the bet­ter part of valor to let the only one of us pro­fes­sion­ally trained to take charge. Where­upon Roger dis­ap­peared on some mys­te­ri­ous spy errand, and Char­lie was given an enor­mous bowl of egg whites and the slow­est egg beater on earth, and I? I picked apples in the glo­ri­ous mid-afternoon sun­shine and felt grate­ful to be there. A beau­ti­ful, blink­ing golden blue after­noon… with noth­ing to do but cook.

Roger reap­peared in time to pick the apples requir­ing a tall per­son, and we all began chop­ping, mix­ing, stir­ring, lis­ten­ing to Roger’s Swedish (or was it Nor­we­gian?) girl singer music, all to the relent­less whirring of Charlie’s egg beater! Tamasin came in sev­eral times and gaped in aston­ish­ment and sym­pa­thy at the con­tin­u­ing whir. I have never known a man so devoted to egg whites as Char­lie was, that after­noon. “We’re look­ing for stiff peaks,” Edward advised, and of course the two of them were very mature, snick­er­ing in a way that is uni­ver­sal among men: Amer­i­can or British, cooks or not. That line is always a winner.

Edward went off for his Orlando tuto­r­ial and emerged whole, if not wholly unscathed (we would expect noth­ing less intense from our esteemed tutor), and the after­noon sort of dwin­dled away, full of tasks and pots to scrub, desul­tory con­ver­sa­tion and lots of silence. Alto­gether, I can­not explain why, one of the gen­tlest and most pleas­ant after­noons of my life. I know, you are all think­ing: that is sim­ply pathetic! What about shop­ping in Paris, doing research in Moscow, set­ting up a gallery open­ing in New York, you name it? Surely after­noons get nicer than mine last Fri­day? No. They don’t.

We cooked, we served, we ate. Slow-roasted pork belly with thyme and olive oil, roast potato wedges with fresh rose­mary and sea salt, braised red cab­bage with Bram­ley apples and cloves, and Edward’s spe­cial pud­ding which he is keen to remind me I never EVEN TRIED, apple snow. I do not like Eng­lish pud­dings, for which I am very sorry and undoubt­edly mis­guided, but there you go. Then we cleaned up and headed over to the barn for the last evening’s readings.

But I’ve for­got­ten to tell you about the amaz­ing trans­for­ma­tion on Day Four of Rosie: into Foxie the Par­ody Writ­ing Instruc­tor! None of us can remem­ber hav­ing laughed so much for so long… and yet I can’t pick out a sin­gle word of wis­dom to show why it was so funny. All she did (all!) was to read aloud from a truly sick-making Amer­i­can (nat­u­rally) self-help man­ual for peo­ple who have writer’s block. And then she inserted her own inim­itable, purely British, tongue-in-cheek bits to… help us under­stand the text. There is some­thing so Amer­i­can (well, prob­a­bly Cal­i­for­nia, my New Yorker’s iden­tity wants to believe) in the “come on, chil­dren, you can do it, put a lit­tle power to it!” cheer­leader non­sense that the book rev­elled in. And Foxie’s deliv­ery? I can­not describe it, but she had a hard time get­ting some of the words out, laugh­ing till she was quite ill, too.

And I’ve for­got­ten the Inter­minable Dawn Death March that was my early-morning walk with Jenny and Louise! I had just come back from a walk all on my own, sen­si­bly on DRY GROUND, when they scooped me up at the kitchen door and said, “Come on, we’ll take the long way around.” I stu­pidly for­got to ask, “Around what?” and went off ami­ably enough, in my absolute most favorite Varda boots from New York… and at first all was well. We went down the lane, up the lane, made a left where I nor­mally carry on straight, were given direc­tions by a wiz­ened old man lean­ing out his pic­turesque cot­tage win­dow, and were… promptly set down in a pos­i­tive sea of mud. Jenny and Louise had on Welling­tons. I did not. For a mile or two it seemed like a fine chal­lenge for an autumn morn­ing: after all, mud dries, doesn’t it? Finally, how­ever… “You two, how much longer can this go on?” And Jenny said, “It’s not so much how long as how DEEP.” And she was right. At one point I was up to my knees. I wanted to lie down and sob, but there was cow s*&^t as far as the eye could see. I know, typ­i­cal Amer­i­can, unpre­pared for the elements.

It’s hard for me to be objec­tive about that last evening’s read­ings because I read one of my favorite pieces, about vichys­soise and Avery’s birth­day par­ties where we always served it. I don’t know if it’s a suc­cess­ful piece for any­one else, but as usual I found myself vastly too emo­tional about it to read aloud very well. How do news­read­ers get through the sto­ries that make lis­ten­ers cry? I think I needed some dis­tance. But that was a com­mod­ity thin on the ground on Day Five. Edward read from “The Lit­tle Prince,” a piece both naively sim­ple and inclu­sive of vast and mys­te­ri­ous emo­tion. Every­one sat as if spell­bound as he read; it’s one of those sto­ries that lets each lis­tener escape into a sort of secret room of indi­vid­ual emo­tion. Tamasin said to me later that he wove a Zen-like spell around us, and that is the fairest descrip­tion I can muster. “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essen­tial is invis­i­ble to the eye…”

Thank good­ness, Pauline fol­lowed with a foodie poem of her own design, which she’s given me per­mis­sion to pub­lish here. Its charms may fall under the cat­e­gory of “you had to be there,” but I don’t really think so. And then Orlando played the piano, we danced, we took one more long walk… And that, dear read­ers, was my week at Totleigh Bar­ton. I need a para­chute to come down. If I decide to.

Writ­ing on Food

For Melissa the course proved less than entic­ing
The moment she found that it wasn’t on icing
She thought she’d be writ­ing on pink birth­day cake
Not lap­top or paper, she felt such a fake

Tubes of colours and sprin­kles crammed into a car­ton
Weighed down her suit­case at Totleigh Bar­ton
She kept it locked shut, per­cep­tively sens­ing
That e-numbers caused a vis­i­ble tens­ing
In tutors who wor­ried about unre­fined sugar.
This was quickly becom­ing a right, royal bugger

But fast on the uptake she tried to fit in
And chat­ted ‘bout sausages with Tamasin
At lunch she leant over said “ketchup with that?”
Tamasin fainted flat out on the mat

Through lemons and food reviews things just got worse
Melissa’s writ­ing got more and more terse
When asked to rate din­ner the pre­vi­ous night
She wrote “If you’re ask­ing, the salmon was shite”

Orlando’s gougeres didn’t impress her a lot, its
Reported she mut­tered she’d rather have Wot­sits.
Then later that night after two crates of Becks
She and a fel­low had credit-crunch sex

By eight in the morn­ing she’d left with­out trace
Except for a mes­sage of dubi­ous grace
Piped onto a choco­late cake left in the kitchen
(She told tutors both what to do with their pitchin’)

And every­one thought now that that was the end
Of Melissa and words that she’d caus­ti­cally penned
There were some who imag­ined she’d end up in jail,
But no, she’s a colum­nist now on The Mail

She writes about food using words like ‘deli­cious’
And restau­rant crits. that are always quite vicious
When asked where she learnt to tell pitta from naan
She always says Devon, with friends, in a barn.

I’ve sud­denly real­ized: I have not described to you any­thing about Totleigh Bar­ton itself! That must be rec­ti­fied, because the atmos­phere was really inex­tri­ca­ble from the expe­ri­ence. No one can ever tell me that one can learn any­thing any­where: well, maybe so, but one learns bet­ter in beau­ti­ful, his­toric places. That’s just the truth.

Totleigh Bar­ton is, as all the lit­er­a­ture told me solemnly, a “pre-Domesday thatched manor house.” I ingested this infor­ma­tion with­out any real idea what that meant. Thatch, I under­stood, but pre-Domesday sig­ni­fied noth­ing, igno­rant Amer­i­can that I am. So I’ll tell you: it’s to do with a book, as most good things are, I find. The Domes­day book was com­mis­sioned by William the Con­querer in 1086 as the most com­pre­hen­sive land sur­vey in the world. A con­tem­po­rary observer of the com­pi­la­tion remarked “there was no sin­gle hide nor a yard of land, nor indeed one ox nor one cow nor one pig which was left out.” Pretty impres­sive, that.

But for our pur­poses, I have to aver that the house we stayed in, while very very old, is cer­tainly not a medieval manor house. The impor­tant thing is that there has been a house, on that spot, since before the Domes­day book was com­piled. Pre­sum­ably who­ever lived there in 1086 is included in the book! I don’t know any more than that. But Totleigh Bar­ton itself must be sev­eral hun­dred years old. The floors were made of GRAN­ITE. Can you imag­ine? A glass dropped on the kitchen floor sent shat­tered shards into the adja­cent coun­ties, I am quite cer­tain. The ceil­ing beams in the kitchen were so low that I am con­vinced Edward in par­tic­u­lar lost a fair num­ber of IQ points bump­ing relent­lessly into them, poor man. We were an unusu­ally tall bunch of food writ­ers, it would seem, so care was taken.

Can I describe to you the com­plete unsuit­abil­ity of the kitchen as a room for prepar­ing food? I have to remem­ber that food writ­ing is but one topic cov­ered at Totleigh Bar­ton and pre­sum­ably the rocket sci­en­tists who fol­lowed or pre­ceded us did not care one whit that the only truly prac­ti­cal thing the kitchen was capa­ble of emit­ting was fried mush­rooms. There were two ovens, but only one worked. Well, the other might have worked, but the wail­ing, whin­ing, thump­ing sound the inter­nal fan made caused us to turn it off in heart-thumping dis­may. The oven that did work, did so only under duress. Its door tried to remain open at all times, its tem­per­a­ture was quixot­i­cally inde­pen­dent of any mea­sur­ing, order­ing or pre­dict­ing. The stove top was so inef­fi­cient that Tamasin’s car­rot soup had to be put into three sep­a­rate pots in order to achieve even the most mod­est sim­mer at a time even approach­ing past lunchtime.

And the light­ing? Or lack thereof? My dears, it was like cook­ing in a cave, lit by a sin­gle torch hang­ing by a string in the cen­ter of the enclo­sure. There was one enor­mous dan­gling LAMP that sus­pended itself pugna­ciously over the kitchen table (whose evi­dence of absolutely no proper hygienic scrub­bing made me fran­tic all week: I kept promis­ing myself I’d creep down at 2 a.m. some­day and have at it with a bleachy sponge, but alas, it never hap­pened). There was, unac­count­ably, a truly superb chop­ping knife, and my expla­na­tion for that is quite sim­ple: no on in the his­tory of Totleigh Bar­ton before us had ever attempted to use it. Enough said.

The inad­e­quate flat sur­faces that we were meant to cook on were taken up almost entirely by teaket­tles as far as I could see. The British! Hon­estly, it’s the largest group of the crea­tures I’ve ever been exposed to in cap­tiv­ity, and the num­bers of cups of tea that they require to func­tion is stag­ger­ing. How do Amer­i­cans man­age to get through a pro­duc­tive day with­out begin­ning to talk about a cup of tea at 11, fran­ti­cally long­ing for it by noon? And again at 4, or 5? They would all all troop relent­lessly into the kitchen and crowd around those *&^% ket­tles, mak­ing up odd pro­nounce­ments about which sorts of tea could receive milk and which for whom the addi­tion of a dairy prod­uct is tan­ta­mount to treason.

And every day a new cake mys­te­ri­ously arrived into the kitchen, to be fallen on by these dear peo­ple as if on a moose car­cass by starv­ing hunters. It was fas­ci­nat­ing! Every time I think that some lit­tle fact about life in Britain is exag­ger­ated (the rain, the bad food, the obses­sion with minor celebri­ties, the devo­tion to one’s foot­ball club, their TEA), I’m faced with the unde­ni­able real­ity: a whole lot of them with their lit­tle mugs, every sin­gle day and you realise it’s all true. And, I might add, they will have their tea no mat­ter WHAT ELSE is meant to be hap­pen­ing in the over­crowded kitchen to begin with! There I was, wash­ing inter­minable pots at the tiny sink (I DID scrub that one), and one of my fel­low writ­ers would hang dis­con­so­lately over my shoul­der, ask­ing plain­tively, “Could I get just a lit­tle cold water, Kris­ten? Thanks SO much.” Sigh.

But I am dis­tract­ing myself.

Day Four.

One of the wicked things about being with a lot of other sto­ry­tellers, yarn­spin­ners, is that a fair amount of embell­ish­ment, drama­ti­sa­tion, not to say out­right inven­tion goes on. Which is what hap­pened with… Day Four. For some rea­son, in the kitchen at break­fast (read, cup of gin­ger tea for me just to fit in, while every­one else was doing mas­sive fryups and Tamasin and I were hard at work on a stock), I said, “You know, it’s Day Four.” “Yes, what dif­fer­ence does that make?” some inno­cent per­son asked, but Tamasin jumped right on it. “I’ve been on Day Fours on pho­to­shoots that you would NOT BELIEVE.” “Exactly,” I said. “Day Four.”

By that after­noon, every­one was ask­ing every­one else how “Day Four” was going: was it liv­ing up to expec­ta­tions, had any “Day Four” things hap­pened, etc. Sheer sug­ges­tive non­sense, but good fun. Edward and I walked into Sheep­dip, I mean Sheep­curd or Sheep­wash or what­ever the nearby vil­lage was called, just to clear our heads. We ducked into the pub and were greeted with, “I’m just clos­ing up now, mind,” where­upon Edward ordered a pint and I ordered… a pint of cold water WITH ICE. “I never saw any­thing like that barman’s face. Ice *&^% water? After he stayed open for us…” We sat out in the sun and dis­cussed life, feel­ing we’d escaped school for a bit. Mas­sively long walk back, some­how so much longer than the walk there, and UP and DOWN. Both of us felt it in our calf mus­cles the next day! But glo­ri­ous weather, in a place where the say­ing is, “Wel­come to sunny Devon, where it rains six days from seven.” Not for us, not for the food writ­ers of Totleigh Bar­ton. We were blessed.

Day Four. There was a pal­pa­ble sad­ness, at least for me, that I couldn’t pre­tend it was only halfway fin­ished. The fact was, it was the Next To The Last Day. I have writ­ten in my jour­nal from the day, sim­ply, “Fab­u­lous.” And it was: chat­ting about our writ­ing plans, our dreams of what we can accom­plish, run­ning the bril­liant tutors’ ideas past each other for moral sup­port, and as an under­scor­ing of how HARD they are work­ing to give us some­thing… and to great results. At one point Orlando, with his seduc­tive com­bi­na­tion of hard crit­i­cism and self-deprecating iden­ti­fi­ca­tion with us, said, “I think it may be pos­si­ble that what some of you have learned this week is that you do NOT want to be food writ­ers…” The only point at which I felt this was dur­ing what I termed “recipe hell.” Have you any idea how bloody spe­cific you have to be in writ­ing a recipe? They set us a fas­ci­nat­ing test: watch them go around the kitchen cre­at­ing some­thing unnamed (never mind that we prac­ti­cally all had to have indi­vid­ual torches, the light­ing was so abysmal, and every­one hit heads on the beams, AGAIN), and were allowed to ask about what ingre­di­ents and quan­ti­ties they were using, method and prac­tice, and it turned out to be lit­tle choux pas­tries. Then it was off to the barn to turn our impres­sions into… a REAL recipe. Con­sis­tent with the meth­ods, mea­sur­ing stan­dards, word­ing stan­dards, of what­ever pub­li­ca­tion we planned to sub­mit to. My God, it was exhaust­ing. In the way that some­thing can be exhaust­ing that doesn’t involve any phys­i­cal effort whatsoever.

Tbsp, or tbsps if plural? Herbs mea­sured before or after chop­ping? Water men­tioned in recipe ingre­di­ents or no? Just the term “sea­son­ing” or salt and pep­per in the list of ingre­di­ents? And how to describe the fin­ished dish? A list of words we are NEVER allowed to us: first and fore­most among them “deli­cious.” Just not on, not allowed. As also, “crispy.” “Crisp” should be good enough for any red-blooded food writer, it was dic­tated. “Unc­tu­ous” is overused and a prob­lem child. Imme­di­ately none of us could pro­duce any piece of prose that did not involve these words. You try it! Take a word off the table and it’s the only word that will do. AT ALL.

Through it all, all morn­ing long as we per­se­vered and mem­o­rized and took notes and lis­tened intently to all the wis­dom being offered, COWS marched past the low win­dows of the barn and COWS stared in at us. I defy you to sit qui­etly and take notes about how to pitch a piece to the Guardian when an enor­mous COW has stopped, looked in the dusty win­dow at you, mooed, and moved on. Sim­ply priceless.

What came out of so much of our instruc­tion was painfully sim­ple, and yet sur­pris­ingly dif­fi­cult to make hap­pen: BE TRUTH­FUL. Tell the truth. Tell a proper story with ACCU­RACY. In a restau­rant review, pick out the ingre­di­ents and dis­cuss them. If you can’t tell, ask a waiter. Get into the kitchen and see what’s hap­pen­ing. All through this, both Tamasin and Orlando talked fast and furi­ous, giv­ing me the def­i­nite sense that we could lis­ten to them all day, every day, almost infi­nitely, and there would be still more they could impart. How they accom­plished such a com­plex, var­ied, high-flying set of points for us to digest with­out hav­ing done this before together, I can­not fathom. It was light­ning fast, not a wasted word, and we sim­ply THOUGHT and worked.

One of my favorite bits: Orlando’s Magic Three Qual­i­ties in Writ­ing: and each of us is good at only two, and has to slave at the third.

RESEARCH
WRIT­ING STYLE
STORYTELLING

Go on, think about it. What is Jamie Oliver good at? Well, prob­a­bly research and writ­ing style? What is Simon Hop­kin­son good at? Writ­ing style and sto­ry­telling. What is Martha Stew­art good at? Research and sto­ry­telling. But we can’t do all three, nat­u­rally, well. Two come nat­u­rally and third is hard-won by sheer hard work. Fair enough. I know for cer­tain that I can tell a story and my writ­ing style, if not bril­liant, is MINE. But research? Never stirred a heart­beat. Lovely.

Day Four. Intense.

You know what? The food got bet­ter. Lunches were a mys­tery to me, strange con­coc­tions that were bet­ter left to one side for more mun­dane sal­ads. The cook­ing at night got bet­ter as the friend­ships one depended on to pro­duce the food got stronger. Each din­ner prep had its own Zen. I will wait until tomor­row, Day Five, to describe to you the joys of cook­ing with Edward, Char­lie and Roger. Me and the boys. It was a hoot.

Actu­ally, while there was obvi­ously a Day Three, we didn’t rec­og­nize it as such. I think that dur­ing the first two days, we were all so over­whelmed by the amount of respon­si­bil­ity we had for being there that there wasn’t much chance to count up the days. Does that make any kind of sense? It was fairly gru­elling to get through the first two days, being will­ing to strip off the armor of pride, sen­si­tiv­ity, you name it: all the aspects of one’s writ­ing per­son­al­ity that have to be the first things to go, if you’re going to learn anything.

So on the third day, we were faced with a tremen­dous chal­lenge. The night before had been the first din­ner we were respon­si­ble for: not I, but four of my mates. And our tutor Tamasin had scotched the planned mack­erel (thank you, God, I don’t like mack­erel) for salmon. Fair enough. Only the only avail­able salmon was farmed, and let me tell you, Tamasin can­not say enough, strongly enough, about the evils of farmed salmon. I think it’s like veal that’s been raised in lit­tle light­less boxes and fed God knows what, so that the unhap­pi­ness of the lit­tle beasts is a cen­tral part of the fla­vor of the meat. So the salmon was fight­ing a los­ing bat­tle to begin with, poor thing.

Then there was Jack. To give him credit, he was the only pro­fes­sional chef among us, and he had STAN­DARDS. And then there’s the com­plex­ity of ego in a kitchen: who is in charge, whose wishes are ulti­mately respected, who gives orders and who fol­lows them. Soli­tary as I am in my kitchen 99 days out of 100, these are all issues that hold lit­tle weight with me. I have the dubi­ous dis­tinc­tion of being com­pletely in charge, but the only crea­tures around to give orders to would be the cats. So I have the honor of order­ing the menu, doing the shop­ping, cre­at­ing all over the place, serv­ing, and clear­ing up. Not much ego fight­ing avail­able in that sce­nario. I had no idea.

Chefs get sarky about their kitchens! And dare I say it, men are really silly about the drama and the hier­ar­chy of cook­ing. The times I had a man in that kitchen come to the sink where I was invari­ably scrub­bing out a pot, and casu­ally throw a skil­let or bowl in the sink (“my” sink? not really!), say­ing absolutely noth­ing but clearly expect­ing I’d wash up! I can’t count the num­ber of times. Last night after din­ner, John handed me a par­tic­u­larly vile skil­let and said, “That needs to soak,” and I had to laugh. “That is the CLAS­SIC line to come from any man in any kitchen! ‘Soak­ing’ is a pure euphemism for ‘if I let it lie there long enough, some woman will scrub it for me’!” The look on his face was price­less: it was as if I had uncov­ered one of the great secrets of the bat­tles between the sexes. I’m reminded of Grace Kelly’s say­ing to Celeste Holm in “High Soci­ety”, “Aren’t men won­der­ful?” And Celeste replies drily, “The lit­tle dears.”

But I digress. My point is that the salmon din­ner was felt by Jack to be an unmit­i­gated dis­as­ter. The salmon was over­cooked, the pota­toes not timed prop­erly, the only good thing about the entire din­ner was a dish of warm sauteed cucum­bers with pars­ley and but­ter, and THAT had been Tamasin’s cre­ation. So there was a lot of unhappy skulk­ing about going on, a lot of mut­ter­ings. I myself was sim­ply so happy to eat some­thing some­one else cooked for me that I could not bring myself to argue. Clearly I do not pos­sess the killer chef gene.

So Day Three saw us in the barn, ready to write. And the assign­ment? Write a restau­rant review of the pre­vi­ous night’s din­ner. Oh dear. So we all got down to it. I became so involved in the elab­o­rate fan­tasy I wove around the restau­rant hav­ing been closed down for months only to reopen in a flurry of pub­lic­ity and excite­ment that I frankly ran out of time before I could describe the food prop­erly! Always one to weave a story rather than get down to the busi­ness of crit­i­ciz­ing some­one… Any­way, it came time for us to read out our pieces (mine was received in pre­cisely the unin­ter­ested silence it deserved), and we went round the room hear­ing everyone’s reac­tions to the salmon, the pota­toes, the cucum­bers. Every­one was kind. Fair enough. We came to Jack him­self, the chef in ques­tion, and for some rea­son he looked com­pletely furi­ous. He looked around and said, “Just for the record, I hope you lis­ten to your taste­buds and don’t tell your­selves lies when you eat,” and then read out HIS review, which was unac­count­ably of a Thai place in Isling­ton. Hmmm…

Of course it turned out later that he was out of the room when the brief was given, and didn’t know we had been assigned to write about HIS MEAL. Imag­ine his reac­tion when absolutely EVERY­ONE chose to write about HIS MEAL. He must have been apoplec­tic, poor man. Once the mis­un­der­stand­ing was cleared up, he regained his sang froid. But can you imagine?

That after­noon I tried really hard to rewrite my two pieces that had been so thor­oughly, let’s see, GONE OVER by our hard-working tutors. From my per­spec­tive as a for­mer pro­fes­sor, I can assure that it is no pic­nic to have to read the var­i­ous highly-charged out­pour­ings of stu­dents’ pens. We each of us obvi­ously feels deserv­ing of the most thought­ful scrutiny! It can be tempt­ing to say gen­eral things, to say sup­port­ive but ulti­mately mean­ing­less things, just to get it over. Not these two. To a per­son, each of us felt we’d been well and truly read, ana­lyzed, cor­rected, con­tex­tu­al­ized. To be sure, it’s not easy to be on the receiv­ing end of so much high-powered atten­tion. And it must be kept in mind while one is (well, all right, I am) try­ing to absorb the com­men­tary: these peo­ple are hotly admired pro­fes­sional writ­ers with extremely high stan­dards. So a lit­tle quiet weep­ing into one’s jumper sleeve is only to be expected, isn’t it? After all, they know good writ­ing, and they know rub­bish, and they were only too ready to divide up one’s writ­ing into those two cat­e­gories. If one was lucky enough to have any­thing in the for­mer, that is. Sigh.

One of my hap­pi­est mem­o­ries of Day Three? Loung­ing around on the rather dodgy sofas in the barn, just before cock­tail time, rewrit­ing my pieces in a desul­tory sort of way, Edward read­ing, or per­haps not even read­ing, “In Defence of Food,” Roger prop­ping up my cam­era on a roll of paper towel, tak­ing end­less (and end­lessly bor­ing) pho­tographs of me to try to get the light metre right, Char­lie across the room work­ing on his bul­let points for his tuto­ri­als with Tamasin and Orlando… pure peace. Day Three, late after­noon, when you know you’ve accom­plished about all you will get done on that day, you’ve recov­ered from Days One and Two, you know you’re over halfway there, and the sense that you should hug it all close is begin­ning to steal over you. When I real­ized that I had wasted a huge amount of emo­tional energy dread­ing going! Only to have it all be quite won­der­ful. Then, as so often hap­pens, the calm was made that much more so when Orlando came sweep­ing in and sat him­self down at the mas­sive grand piano in the cor­ner of the room and began play­ing sort of 1970s Top 40 clap­trap, all the beloved songs of my piano-playing child­hood from music books with titles like “Music to Love By,” Bee-Gees, the Cap­tain and Toni Tenille, but also Ivor Nov­ello and NOel Coward…

The atmos­phere was pos­i­tively cat­like in its rest­ful lux­ury. Never to be repeated. And all the more inter­est­ing and pre­cious for that.

Then in swept the the mag­nif­i­cent Simon Parkes from the Food Pro­gramme on Radio 4 swept in in all his 6 foot 4 splen­dor, to speak to us after din­ner about his career in broad­cast­ing. That voice! Like melted choco­late. He has the demeanor of a Stephen Fry, in a way: larger than life, but more dap­per, and with an expan­sive ges­ture now and then to match his voice. He read aloud from his new book about India, The Cal­cutta Kitchen, mes­meris­ing us all, under the ridicu­lous heaters sus­pended from the roof of the barn (we’ll all prob­a­bly die pre­cisely 1 hour and fif­teen min­utes ear­lier than we would have done with­out the hideous fug com­ing out of those things).

Isn’t it funny how I have had vir­tu­ally noth­ing to say about food? That’s partly down to the rather pathetic nature of what we were offered to eat, but partly as well a result of the stu­dents’ iden­ti­ties being pri­mar­ily writ­ers, and sec­on­dar­ily as food writ­ers. Which is as Tamasin assured us it should be: it’s about the qual­ity of the writing.

Well, I’m off on this nasty rainy day to col­lect Avery. She’s had a major life tri­umph: last evening, at the school pool where we were splash­ing around before din­ner, she learned to dive. After prob­a­bly 8 long years of try­ing, being fright­ened, being annoyed with me because div­ing is one of my few true skills, sud­denly last night it all came together. The lit­tle sprite is so proud of her­self she could bust, and so we will be back at the pool on Thurs­day evening to make sure it wasn’t all a dream. Dear girl. And tomor­row… Day Four. Which had its own drama, to be sure.

But first, I’ve got to stop laugh­ing and report that it’s hap­pen­ing again: the bizarre and won­der­ful world of cus­tomer ser­vice in my adopted land. I just now rang up the Olympia Horse Show ticket office to book for the Christ­mas Show, hav­ing tried to buy tick­ets online and being told they were sold out for the Fri­day. Not feel­ing defeatist I thought, “Hang on, I bet a real per­son can help me here,” and it was the work of a moment to get an agent on the line. And then the fun began:

“May I help you?” (rather lack­adaisi­cal male voice)

“Yes, I’d like to buy three tick­ets for the Fri­day evening, and I’m being told online that it’s sold out, so I thought I’d check with a real per­son. Can you help?”

“Yeah, sure. I’ll check for you… What’s the name on your order?”

“But I don’t have an order, that’s why I’m ring­ing you.”

“Right. I’ll check to see if there are any avail­able. Did you know what event you wanted?”

“YES! The Olympia Horse Show! Three tick­ets on the Fri­day night.”

“Yeah, there’s the first tier at 51 pounds, the sec­ond at 44…” (and so on)

“I’ll take the 51, please.”

“What day did you want that for?” (didn’t I say already?)

“The Fri­day, please.”

“And did you know how many tick­ets you wanted?” (hmmm…)

“Yes, please, three tickets.”

“That’s sold out, actu­ally, if you wanted the Friday.”

“Yes, I did. Are there tick­ets at any other price?”

“Did you know how many you wanted?”

Grrr! At this point I felt I had been thrust all unknow­ing onto the stage of an ama­teur pro­duc­tion of an Ionesco play.

The long and short of it is, Friday’s sold out full stop. I finally got tick­ets for Thurs­day, but I’m not at all sure they will turn out to be for the horse show. If I end up booked for the “Christ­mas Con­fer­ence for the Lac­tose Intol­er­ant and Vegan in the Lon­don Expat Com­mu­nity,” I will be not at all surprised.

Right, rant over. The point of my post today is sim­ply to wax lyri­cal over last week’s expe­ri­ence at the Arvon Foun­da­tion at Totleigh Bar­ton. To think that eight days ago I could not really have lisped the ten­der syl­la­bles of the place because I was com­pletely under­whelmed at the thought of going… and com­pletely over­whelmed at the thought of leav­ing home. The whole thing just goes to show that get­ting right away, and hav­ing the courage to leave all the whole of your life details in the hands of other care­fully cho­sen peo­ple, is a fan­tas­tic idea. Go, do.

Once I actu­ally left home, it turned out, I was fine. Just the phys­i­cal act of shut­ting the door behind me was ther­a­peu­tic, really. I felt the weight of the world drop from my shoul­ders! Isn’t that pathetic. I really must get out more. A lovely trip through the misty coun­try­side to arrive at Exeter St David’s train sta­tion and much covert scrutiny of my fel­low arrivees to try to deter­mine who might be a food writer. And won­der­ing where the promised taxi might pos­si­bly be, and gen­er­ally feel­ing extremely foot­loose and ran­dom, not at all my usual sense of being firmly planted in a sit­u­a­tion where all the pieces are in place for nor­mal life.

I caught the eye of a girl who struck me as hav­ing a suit­case full of recipes, so I approached and said, “Food writ­ing?” and she laughed and said, “Yes, I’m Louise.” The first friend, very promis­ing. A com­pletely jolly man with a per­fectly Eng­lish shock of blond hair approached and said, like a line in a play, “Food writ­ing?” We laughed. He was Char­lie, and quite firmly the sec­ond friend. More and more peo­ple gath­ered round, a very young chap called Adam and a reserved, qui­etly obser­vant man called Edward, an unas­sum­ingly friendly lady called Pauline… and there was the first taxi, so there was a rather gen­tle­manly skir­mish to allot the first pas­sen­gers since clearly we would need more than one conveyance.

Char­lie, Edward and I were left peace­fully behind to await the next taxi, and there was per­haps 25 sec­onds of hes­i­tance before we began the relent­less ban­ter that became what Avery has described as (hav­ing heard thou­sands of sto­ries by now) “The Kris­ten, Edward and Char­lie Show.” We could not talk fast enough. Edward’s chuck-it-all, I’m-bloody-addicted-to-cooking three-month stint at Bal­ly­maloe, a cook­ery school in County Cork, Ire­land, Charlie’s devo­tion as a PR man to the fate of a Scot­tish reg­i­ment. I don’t remem­ber if I con­tributed any­thing more intrigu­ing to the gen­eral may­hem than con­fess­ing a hatred of tofu, but in any case we made fast friends in an instant, and then real­ized that no taxi was in sight to take us to our des­ti­na­tion. Char­lie rang up the com­pany. “It’s bro­ken down you say, and you’re send­ing another? In 45 min­utes? And you think we should have a cup of tea and wait? Right…” He strode over to the taxi rank nearby and ges­tured thumbs-up to us, and we were off.

There fol­lowed an hour-ish of the most enter­tain­ing con­ver­sa­tion I can ever remem­ber. What did we talk about? Any­thing and every­thing, our words spilling over each other in reck­less silli­ness. I think a lot of our instant bond came from sheer relief: the unspo­ken fear we had all har­bored about our upcom­ing week, a jump into the unknown, an inescapable throw­ing together of strangers for an expe­ri­ence grounded in total iso­la­tion. What if there was no one of inter­est, I think we had all feared, what if every­one is a dire bore and one can’t get away? What if I’ve landed myself into a week of stilted con­ver­sa­tions about noth­ing, punc­tu­ated by mis­er­able, enforced togeth­er­ness at meal­times? This had, I think, been in all our minds, and our joy at find­ing fas­ci­nat­ing (well, I can speak only for my per­cep­tion of Edward and Char­lie), well-spoken peo­ple with intrigu­ing sto­ries to tell made us rather instantly the best of friends. “How bad can it be,” Char­lie mused, “if we at least have each other to talk to?” Lit­tle did we know, the only prob­lem over the com­ing week was going to be get­ting enough of the peo­ple around us. There was never a lack of con­ver­sa­tion, all week.

Our taxi dri­ver, sit­ting beside me, emerged from his silence to say, “We are about fif­teen min­utes away,” and I said, “What’s your name, any­way?” “I am Sedgkin, I am Turk­ish,” he said, “and I must ask you: are you all come­di­ans? Because this is the best taxi ride I have ever had.”

At one point, twist­ing around in my seat as I had to, to chat, I heard Char­lie say what I thought was, “Then I spent two years as Santa,” which struck me as amaz­ing. “Do you know David Sedaris?” I asked, instantly think­ing of his mind-bendingly hilar­i­ous sto­ries of his days as a Macy’s Christ­mas elf in New York. “You’ve got to lis­ten to it, with your expe­ri­ences!” I went on, although tak­ing in a bit the utter blank­ness on their faces. Typ­i­cal British peo­ple, I thought, think­ing Amer­i­cans rave on about the stu­pid­est things, I thought, feel­ing a sur­pris­ing hurt that my two new best friends didn’t under­stand my enthu­si­asm. Then it dawned on me. “WHAT did you say you spent two years doing?” And of course that was it. He spent two years at SAND­HURST, say that with a British accent. For God’s sake. If I could have crawled under the seat I would have. “You know, the place Prince William went,” Char­lie added help­fully, “pass­ing out and so on.” Pass­ing out: if I could have done that, I would have.

We arrived in gravel-spitting splen­dor and got out of the car, to be con­fronted with the most dra­matic of land­scapes and archi­tec­ture, as you see. Twi­light was com­ing on, there were sev­eral smok­ers in the group casu­ally light­ing up out­side what would turn out to be the kitchen win­dow, a chap roared up on a motor­cy­cle dressed in leather and I thought, “This could be very inter­est­ing.” A com­pletely unfa­mil­iar wave of glee came over me as it dawned on me that I was absolutely on my own, about to make what friends I would of these unknown peo­ple. I felt a part of me that had been sleep­ing wake up sud­denly: that per­son that a per­son is when stripped of all the cozy bits that make up one’s iden­tity: fam­ily, home, respon­si­bil­i­ties, rou­tine. Per­haps I’m alone in feel­ing so depen­dent on those cocoon­ing strands of iden­tity, I don’t know. I do think most peo­ple find it eas­ier to let go of them than I do. But I did.

I can tell you right now that the food, from Day One to Day Five (as we all uni­formly referred to the pas­sage of time!) was nearly uni­formly dia­bol­i­cally bad. Isn’t that ironic? Here we were, six­teen aspir­ing food writ­ers gripped with vary­ing degrees of obses­sion with what we eat, and… it was dire. We were faced with pre­cisely the same menu and store of ingre­di­ents as, say, a group of poets or sci­ence fic­tion writ­ers would be. Oven-baked Span­ish Risotto? I don’t even know where to start in my list of objec­tions to THAT notion. Where else do you bake some­thing? Risotto is Ital­ian, not Span­ish, and is NEVER baked, even in an oven. For heaven’s sake. Fried Tomato and Haloumi Stacks? That’s just WRONG.

I can also tell you that you may expect an instant ratcheting-up of your ten­dency to swear, should you embark on an Arvon week. I never swear, hon­estly. Who can, with an 11-year-old as one’s con­stant com­pan­ion? Well, I do now, or I did and now I’m hav­ing to rein in my appalling lan­guage in sit­u­a­tions like a missed shot on the ten­nis court or an impos­si­ble con­ver­sa­tion with a ticket agent on the tele­phone. For &^%$‘s sake.

We learned from Simon, our Arvon host, that part of the week’s activ­i­ties would be cook­ing together, in groups of four, each night for din­ner. At this, Edward, Char­lie and I fell over each other rac­ing to the sign-up sheet. “Spicy Roast Chicken With Spinach” seemed the least dire choice, although a bit laconic in its word­ing. Spinach how? Ah well, how bad could it be. And we’d have fun. We gath­ered up the only other Amer­i­can, a mys­te­ri­ous travel writer called Roger, for our four­some, the last night of the adven­ture. Lit­tle did we know what dra­mas would ensue in the kitchen, to the menu, to all our friend­ships, as the week progressed.

Another thing I can tell you is that spend­ing five days hav­ing one’s every WORD scru­ti­nized, ana­lyzed, described alter­nately as “rub­bish,” “riv­et­ing,” “just wrong,” “truth­ful but awk­ward,” etc., is one of the most life-changing expe­ri­ences a writer can have. Can you imag­ine? Sev­eral of us dis­cussed the phe­nom­e­non as the week went on. “Don’t you find your­self mea­sur­ing your words to a degree you never have before?” the youngest mem­ber of our group, Sam, asked ingen­u­ously one after­noon, as we sat keep­ing the smok­ers com­pany in the sun out­side the kitchen. “And not just in writ­ing,” I agreed, “even speak­ing has become some­thing I can’t do just nat­u­rally anymore!”

I’ll describe to you the sequence of our hours, and you can imag­ine how stun­ningly self-conscious, and inti­mately con­nected to one another it makes writ­ers, as the days go by. First thing in the morn­ing: a trek to the ancient barn adja­cent to the house, with soar­ing ceil­ings fit­ted with the most hideously inef­fi­cient heaters ever devised. We all arranged our­selves on the sev­eral sort of stage-set-like draped sofas around the perime­ter of the room (I kept imag­in­ing some­one from an Alan Ben­nett play to leap out from behind one). Our tutors, Tamasin Day-Lewis and Orlando Mur­rin, would bark at us to get in and get started. They set us an exer­cise to write about that instant, twenty min­utes’ time limit. Hold­ing up a lemon, Orlando said on our first real day of work, “Describe this object to an alien. Twenty min­utes.” Oh, no. But oh, yes. And twenty min­utes later, we each read out our pieces to the whole group, at that point rel­a­tive strangers, to the tutors’ (and even­tu­ally all our) rig­or­ously truth­ful response. Painful! Scary!

Then lunch together, mak­ing ten­ta­tive for­ays on that first day into friend­ship (although “The Kris­ten, Edward and Char­lie Show” was full-on even on Day Two of our adven­ture, so at least there was always some ban­ter, even ini­tially. Per­son­al­i­ties began to emerge: moth­erly and yet feisty Rosie, Roger the Spy (was he or wasn’t he? He could tell us but then he’d have to kill us), peace­ful Katie, ambi­tious and very young Adam, laconic but intense Jack the motorcycle-riding pro­fes­sional chef… how would I be described? An inter­est­ing question!

After lunch we had our indi­vid­ual tuto­ri­als with Tamasin and Orlando, and dear read­ers, I don’t know if I was really prac­ti­cal, really brave, or really stu­pid to sched­ule mine both on the first day. Prob­a­bly a bit of all three, really. My idea had been that I would get their responses and their crit­i­cism to the pieces I had sub­mit­ted right at the start, and then have the whole week to work on them. Well, per­haps. But what I didn’t bar­gain on was the gut-wrenching shock of pro­fes­sional, no-holds-barred feed­back (how I hate that word now) before I had prop­erly learned what my strengths and weak­nesses were. True, I had all week to work on what they said, but I also to my peril had all week to REMEM­BER what they said, in all its black-and-white drama. Fairly shat­ter­ing, I have to confess…

Then din­ner (enough said), then more reading-aloud in the big barn at night. Thank­fully, the atmos­phere at night was quite defin­i­tively admir­ing, enjoy­ing, sup­port­ing, as an anti­dote to the fiercely hon­est mood of the day­time read­ings. I don’t think any of us would have sur­vived oth­er­wise, quite sim­ply. You emerge from a week of this treat­ment com­pletely with­out fear of any­thing any­one will ever say again about your writ­ing, I assure you. But it’s a week of trial by most elo­quent fire.

Well, I must get back to actual liv­ing, as opposed to describ­ing liv­ing. What a bore that is, some­times, the reg­u­lar liv­ing. Because yes, I’m back in the real­ity of super­vis­ing Latin home­work, emp­ty­ing the dish­washer, remem­ber­ing people’s birth­days, fill­ing out school forms. But I’ll be back, because I really need to put some of this extra­or­di­nary expe­ri­ence into words, if only for me…