Step one: don’t try out a new recipe…
I haven’t yet caught any of Jamie Oliver’s new Channel 4 series Together, in which he cooks the kind of stuff you can rustle up for groups of family and friends without experiencing a total nervous collapse. But I love its title, and not only because it makes me think of Lukas Moodysson’s 2000 film of the same name (the best movie about a Stockholm commune ever made). Few words are to me more lovely than together, and all the more so following months of painful, enforced separations. In the ear, its syllables seem to ring like an old-fashioned doorbell.
In the grind of lockdown, there were moments when the sight of my kitchen made me feel physically ill. My relationship with my fridge, in particular, began to be vaguely abusive: I was always slamming its door in a huff. No wonder, then, that the great opening up induced in me a state of ecstasy that could only end in near bankruptcy.
