Cooking I find easy and satisfying. Preparing microwave dinners, on the other hand…

When some years ago I stopped having to go to an office, mainly because nobody wanted me to go to one, I started to do quite a lot of cooking. I am no natural cook, but I had ambitions. I bought more and more cookery books — Jane Grigson, Elizabeth David, Nigella Lawson, Jamie Oliver, that kind of thing — far more than I was ever going to consult. And as it turned out, I found myself relying mainly on just two books — Marcella Hazan’s Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking for Italian dishes, which are generally satisfying and quite simple to make, and, for similar reasons, on Delia Smith’s Complete Cookery Course for traditional English roasts and puddings (though for bread-and-butter pudding I liked to refer to the late Duchess of Devonshire’s Chatsworth Cookery Book, where it is puzzlingly found in the index not under ‘B’ but under ‘D’, for ‘Duke’s Bread and Butter Pudding’). Even for the simple dishes that I cooked repeatedly I never dared make one without looking up the recipe again, so feeble of memory and lacking in confidence was I. But I quite enjoyed cooking all the same. It was intellectually undemanding and less exhausting than gardening, and yet it required sufficient concentration to make me forget my worries for a while.

But now things have changed. I have, to my surprise, a job (at the Oldie magazine), and so have to spend a lot of time in London, commuting up and down from my home in Northamptonshire; and at my age (74) I don’t feel like spending hours at the stove any more. So unless I have guests at the weekend, I rely to a shameful extent on microwave meals, purchased, as often as not, at the Marks & Spencer food store at Milton Keynes station.