I’m cooking almost full-time for my poor old Mum and learning on the job: shepherd’s pie, roast pork, cauliflower cheese. I’m slaving over the stove and recipe book for hours and she hardly touches any of it. ‘Come on. Eat up. Do you good,’ I say, not unconscious of the role reversal. The other day I tried a slow-cooked beef casserole. The BBC website advised browning the meat first. Sheer political correctness. I simply lobbed the ingredients in a pot, poured on the boiling water, shoved the pot in the oven, got in my car and drove to the pub.
About once a week, I drive over to my petrolhead friend Charlie’s posh little village pub for six o’clock. His village is colonised by wealthy and well-fed Londoners who are all in love with the pub. When it was built a couple of hundred years ago, there was plenty of clearance between the locals’ heads and the oak-beamed ceiling. Nowadays the bigger heads on the larger bodies of the well-fed, money-no-object, second-home owners must bow to avoid contact with the beams. And the bar is about the size of a snooker table. With, say, 15 people in there, it’s like an intensely convivial, dead posh Black Hole of Calcutta. At six o’clock I walked in on a shouting, laughing, barging, jostling crowd wreathed in woodsmoke. ‘What’s that on your face?’ said Charlie. I wiped and looked at my fingers. ‘Flour, mate,’ I said.
I insinuated myself between animated Barbours on the far side of the room to say hello to my favourite local, Ron — accidentally trampling two dogs on the way.
Ron is retired and lives alone in a cottage. If the number of layers and the thickness of the padding he wears in the pub is anything to go by, his cottage must be freezing.
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