What I cooked last night.

It was engineered like a chamber music performance; appropriately, given Roberta Flack’s classical music background.  The production wasn’t lush. It was extremely spare - significant given popular music’s headlong rush towards over-production at the time (even though the track was recorded three years earlier).  Flack believed the production to be too slow. The engineer had created a four-minute dream set to the rhythm of a sleeping heart rate in which a lover lies content, dreaming a soliloquy of happiness: or loss? A foreground double bass opens, and a classical guitar sheds teardrops of joy - or despair - in the mid-ground, before piano - and vocal - notes emerge so tentatively you can hear the studio air around them.  The song’s string arrangement by William Fischer is extraordinary, blending violas and cello into an emotional counterpoint that could be fateful, anticipatory, ominous,  portentous, celebratory, frightening or omniscient … depending on whether the...

The long high road sloping down to the distant coast sparkled with the blinding reflections of sun on an endless snake of cars. Chrome bumpers, body strips, window and door surrounds, bonnet ornaments and petrol caps shimmered and diffracted crazily in the haze of boiling engines and midday heat. A far-off strip of blue-grey - the sea! - underscored a cornflower sky. Later, the car I was in stopped opposite the beach where a line of shops stretched to the horizon. The driver got out, disappeared into one of the shops, probably for cigarettes, came back, and gave me an icy-pole in a wrapper with a picture of a helicopter on it. * Endless summer days. We are sprawled on beach towels, which were probably tasseled and multicoloured - but who would remember that detail? - on the sand in the shade of some kind of building, a yacht club or boat launching house or a covered pier. I lick the last sweet droplets, setting in the heat, from inside the torn waxed wrapper. Next to me, my father crus...

I made the following recipe years ago and then filed it away in the archive, where it remained a vague memory, like a lost game of chess. I found it again one hot day recently when I’d bought three large coming-into-season eggplants; and I made the dish and wondered why I'd eaten ten thousand boring meals in between. In the intervening years the recipe's origin seemed to have moved south from Naples to Sicily and its flavour is Mt. Etna-sized. Rather than the more common, and tedious, mince-and-rice filling, this dish relies on the ability of the eggplant itself to deliver extraordinary flavour thanks to the ingredients it carries. Stuffed eggplant with anchovies, capers and olives. Halve and cut the flesh out of two of the eggplants, leaving four shells with about half an inch of pulp remaining. Peel the third eggplant. Cut the pulp of all three into small cubes and place it into a colander, salting generously. Leave to drain for thirty minutes, then rinse and squeeze out exc...

There is an astrological concept known as the seven year cycle, probably the figment of someone’s imagination, like most irrational things are - if you’ll pardon the cynicism - in which some very odd unexplained things may happen amid a whirlwind of change and uncertainty. Last week some research was reported on (see below) in the newspapers (which for the benefit of younger readers are - or were - physical pieces of paper on which was printed ‘content’, produced by people known as ‘reporters’ or - in the case of the more self-absorbed - ‘journalists’). Newspapers still exist: online. If that statement strikes you as an impossibility you are, strictly speaking, correct: publishers continue to entitle their digital reportage a ‘newspaper’ as long it it is gathered beneath one ‘masthead’. Odd, really. Nevertheless an item appeared last week describing the research mentioned above. Some academics at a ‘university’ in some polluted regional city in the north of England (where possibly the ...