The pasta, the leek, the novel and the font.

The dressing for the gnocchi was merely a leek, cut very finely from the middle, where it is not white nor dark green, but a colour most accurately described as chartreuse. 

This brilliant yellow-green tone is rendered almost fluorescent when cooked very gently. I sautéed the little flecks of leek, curved like minute sections of E-type Jaguar front wing, or small arcs of the lime-green patent leather knee boot of a 1960s Carnaby Street model, in a generous quantity of olive oil, keeping a careful eye on it so that it wouldn’t brown but merely absorb the oil via a kind of reverse oleaginous osmosis.  

It had been a busy day. The weather hadn't turned. One or two warm days; the rest had been wet, windy, cold. Second month of spring. I had found a book in that shop where people throw out their unwanted clothes, old pictures off their walls, kitchen pots and pans and utensils beaten and greyed, and broken crockery sets (broken as in incomplete if not actually chipped) left over from 1980s dinner parties soundtracked by Morricone or lonely one-person vigil dinners in front of only an admonitorily ticking clock. 

The book was a 1962 Penguin: The Victorian Chaise-Longue by British journalist, novelist and contributor to the Oxford English Dictionary Marghanita Laski, in excellent condition, a pathetic op-shop sticker on its back cover (peel carefully or it will lift words from the puff-piece by The Guardian's literary critic and spoil the cover forever) reading $2. $2 for some of the finest writing in the English language in a slim, original imprint with a cover illustration, black and white out of Penguin orange, by Charles Raymond, and its text set in probably the most readable font ever, Monotype Scotch Roman. $2 should not buy any one of the vast number of sentences in the 120-page novel, such is their spare tight lyrical eerie quality, yet it buys the whole book. Lucky book. Old books are mostly consigned to the incinerator, or worse, the recycling factory. Imagine fish and chips wrapped in what used to be Martin Boyd, Philip Roth or Myrtle Rose White. 'No trees were felled to bring you your dinner!' Just a few classic novels.

So I used supermarket gnocchi. Some of them are fine. The cooking instructions (as if you need them) on the La Tosca brand (from the refrigerated section, not the shelf) recommend cooking directly in the sauce rather than boiling. Not having a wet sauce, I ignored that and placed the gnocchi into almost-boiling salted water before removing them after a minute and dropping them into the sautéed leek. 

The leek shards clung to the pillows of potato, along with their chartreuse-toned droplets of olive oil. I added herbed salt (Herbamare, Jane's Krazy Mixed-Up Salt etc etc), a shower of grated Parmesan and plenty of finely chopped parsley. White wine, chilled.