In the months following its publication late last year, I looked at and looked at and touched and looked at Giorgio Locatelli’s Made in Italy. Still, I didn’t know that I needed another cookbook. I eventually bought it and sent it to CC in Sydney so that I could buy it without owning it. But then, after Christmas, at fifty percent off on Amazon, I took the plunge myself. I tell you! It is the best fourteen pounds ever spent. Fourteen pounds! For a heft of six-hundred-and-something pages of recipes and stories and white-bordered photographs. I want to eat everything in it. Okay, maybe not so much the calf’s head salad. I say “maybe”: Giorgio could make me do it.

Giorgio Locatelli. How did the force of the media collect behind him and put him – literally, in the case of the Observer Food Monthly magazine, which had him swathed in a white robe and standing on a plinth – on a pedestal? If Giorgio Locatelli had been a celebrity chef – hello, Gordon! Hiya, Jamie! Kiss-kiss, Nigella! – before the book came out, I certainly didn’t know about it. And I read US Weekly! At least four times an issue! Until last weekend, when I finally, sadly, put it in the recycling, I still had the copy Jazon brought me from New York last summer. I digress. Thing is, I don’t think Giorgio Locatelli is a celebrity chef. Or maybe that’s what they want us to believe. Behold, the anti-celebrity celebrity chef: where Gordon Ramsay is known for swearing in the kitchen and Jamie Oliver is recognised for his casual bunging-it-all-together while ravishingly ruminating over it with a lisp, Giorgio Locatelli is known... for not being known.

Not any more, though, because the book is everywhere you look, and it is a very good-looking book to look at. It is charmingly written, too. Listen:

The first time someone tastes a truffle, they often find it quite disappointing, even off-putting, because usually they have heard so much about them and they expect so much. Sometimes people say to me, “Oh, they smell of feet. Horrible!” It hurts me to hear it, but I understand. If life could be described in a smell, then it is the smell of truffles. They smell of people and sweat.

This is not a man gesturing furiously with a fish knife! This is not a man with a lisp! This is a man who will take a truffle from a pile of truffles and generously shave it into your truffle risotto; this is the man who will then add a walnut of truffle butter just before giving the whole gorgeous mess a couple of final earthy-smelling swirls with a wooden spoon. This is a man who seems like he might be nice.

I made a caponata the other day from the book. Really, I can only say it was inspired by Giorgio Locatelli, because I missed more than half the ingredients, probably, on his list, including the one he said was the most important. Look – I was just trying to use up all the zucchini in the house without having to buy anything else. I didn’t want to head out for sultanas, not for an aubergine, not for celery stalks or fennel bulbs. And I’m certainly not buying any tomatoes till June. The point is, while including only a third of what was necessary (and maybe a couple of things that hadn’t even made it to the ingredients list) the zucchini bruschette were very well received. Imagine what could have been, had I had the appropriate market-fresh cornucopia on my hands. Marc says – I know we are starting to sound like The Giorgio Locatelli Fan Club here, sorry – and this Sunday we will be cross-stitching his likeness onto large cushion covers – Marc says that we need to make his risotto exactly the way he says, even up to the fifty grams of butter. Apparently it is one of those experiences that will change you. Olive scored four fat bundles of asparagus at the Berwick Street market yesterday, and I have just looked at the recipe for asparagus risotto. It calls for one hundred grams of butter. We will be very changed.

In the meantime, though – and this is where this all began, I was sitting on the sofa with a slice of currant toast and Giorgio Locatelli’s dessert pages – I’m looking for inspiration today for Sunday’s tea party. I want a Victoria sponge and some cupcakes, maybe, and there will probably be some sort of chocolate something. We have a couple of oranges in the fruit bowl, so maybe I’ll make an orange cake, too. But all of this seems too easy somehow, too familiar. I need to try something new. What can I make that won’t involve buying too many crazy ingredients? Something seasonal and fruity? What is grey and cold the season for, anyway? Rhubarb? I am not above a rhubarb crumble at a tea party.

Anyway – nothing like a little stream of consciousness to start the day – so I am looking to Giorgio Locatelli for a tea party treat, though I will secretly tell you, in a whisper behind the hen house, that I’m not entirely optimistic about the results. I like gelato, I really like gelato, but other Italian desserts have failed to wow. Matthew Fort writes, in Eating Up Italy, his engaging socio-historico-culinario-travelogue:

The Italians are limited in their pudding horizons.

(And here he uses “pudding” the way many Brits do, a way I’m still getting used to – to mean “dessert”.)

True,

he continues,

zabaglione, the velvety combination of beaten eggs, sugar and Marsala, is a great pudding; panna cotta, happily adopted by contemporary British restaurants, passes muster in its finest form; and ice creams reach a degree of perfection in Italy that we can only dream of. But for the rest? That ludicrous confection, tiramisu? The trifle of an impoverished imagination. Crostade? Tarts as heavy as manhole covers. Panettone? Better turned into bread-and-butter pudding.

It’s true, I like a slice of toasted panettone with a hearty black tea, and I do appreciate a light and rummy tiramisu, but so often... meh. Still, I have only just begun, and there is time yet for Giorgio to save us. We are only, so far, on the introduction to Dolci. “When the boys on the pastry get too carried away,” he writes, “I tell them that all the chocolate and vanilla must have gone to their brains and made them crazy.”

Out of nowhere the other day, Olive looked up from his computer and said, quiet-like, “Do you like mime?” It was so unexpected a question I said, in the grand tradition of do-first-think-later: “Yes?”

At the Mathurin Bolze show last week, the performers climbed up poles, crawled along walls, slipped and slid on moving parts of floor. They clambered and held tight and flopped about in a giant, slow-turning hamster wheel made of slats of handsome wood. So much of the show was dance and gymnastics and general gravity-defiance that I wondered how it had come to be described as “mime”. It is a curious thing, genre, because I would probably not have gone if the show had been listed in a programme of modern dance and I would definitely not have gone if it had been called performance art. Please – Olive wouldn’t even have asked. He may be a Frenchman smiling proudly over a flame-orange casserole of his beef compote, but he is not inviting me to a modern dance production any time soon. Emily and Marc were over to dinner a couple of nights ago and I made a spinach and mushroom quiche. Olive reached for the smallest of second helpings, a wobbly-edged sliver the size of a Sloane Ranger’s lunch ration.

“That’s all you’re taking?” I said. “Call yourself a man!”

“Hey,” he said, “I had eight hundred grams of your cauliflower gratin the other day.”

“Cauliflower?” Emily said. “I don’t think you’re helping your cause.”

He was unfazed. “There were,” he said, “potatoes in there.”

But Mathurin Bolze, which is a great name, the name of my nonexistent sausage dog, he has choreographed a thing that, in its own way, was all of these and more – dance et cetera, not cauliflower and potatoes – and I was open-mouthed and gripping on to the boy’s arm in wonder at much of the show Thursday night.

Part of the stage, at the Mathurin Bolze show, was a trampoline. You didn’t know it from where you sat, and the first time one of the performers jumped onto that space, you watched with wide eyes as the floor gave way and he bounced up again, weightless. The solid made supple, the concrete made compliant: the man fell upwards and downwards on the floor that wasn’t. Every preconceived idea rebounded with him.

In the vibratingly hot New York summer of 1998, CC and I went to see Nicholas Hytner’s production of “Twelfth Night” at Lincoln Center. Paul Rudd’s Orsino lounged by the edge of what was supposed to be a small pond before stripping off his velvet robe and plunging straight in. What looked like a simple watery onstage surface was, in fact, a real, live diving pool hidden in the depths of set designer Bob Crowley’s fantastical stage. In a single, clean movement, the Duke disappeared into the pond, feet first. I gasped, I think, if not out loud then certainly in my mind. In that moment when things are not what they seem, we experience a moment of blissful unreality. The ground moves beneath your feet. For one swooning, vertiginous instant, everything you know to be real is put into question.

Thursday the gas engineer arrived and fixed the boiler. I wanted to give him a round of applause. It’d been hairy there for a while. The Saturday of turning the gas off was fine with two layers of clothes, the Sunday was fine-ish with three layers of clothes and a blanket, the Monday I sat at my desk and, with fingers of ice, marked up a manuscript in red. I don’t think it was till Tuesday that we cracked, and Olive went to Argos for an electric heater.

My mum called and said, “I just wanted to make sure you were both still alive.”

“I’m getting up the courage,” I said, “to get into the shower.”

“Aiyah!” she said, “no need to shower lah!” This is the long-practising medical professional whose mantra, oft-heard in my childhood upon returning home from wherever, was Say kah say chiew!, or, Wash feet wash hands! As if we had gone chasing monkeys in the mud jungles of Singapore, and not, I dunno, fifteen minutes up the road to Mrs Khoo, the piano teacher. The path, once in the front door, was straight for the bathroom and the cleansing powers of water and Lux soap.

“No need to shower lah!” she said, and suggested instead: “Just wipe.”

There were other problems. No gas meant no cookery, save for in the oven or the microwave. I know some people can work magic in a microwave, but I am not one of those people. There is a microwave in the house because it came with the house. I might sometimes use it for desperation defrosting, but it is mostly off at the mains like the silent, dour teenager of the kitchen family. And the oven – I know what you are thinking, poppets, but contrary to popular belief, there can be too much cake.

I was on the phone with CC and I was under two blankets. This was the third day after the gas man cometh to turn the gas off at the meter. I was running out of ideas of oven-cooked food. “I think I’m going to make an eggplant tart,” I said. “Maybe with feta?”

“Maybe,” she said, “mozzarella, and maybe proscuitto.” “And maybe,” she said, “pesto. Just a little.” “Dollops,” she said, “on the top.”

“Okay!” I said.

We were eating the tart at dinner – it was everything it promised to be! The eggplant bitey! The mozzarella like clouds of cheese! The thinly-sliced proscuitto and dollops of crema di carciofini on the tart hot out of the oven! – and I was musing on how frozen puff pastry had changed my life. “No, really,” I said, “you can put anything on here and it’ll be good!” “You know what would be really good?” I said, and I was excited because I could almost taste it. “Mascarpone,” I said, “and figs, and honey drizzled on the top.”

“I really don’t respect at all mascarpone,” Olive said, and he may have shrugged. “Except in tiramisu,” he said. “It is,” he said, “a useless cheese.”

I smelt gas yesterday morning, then the gas man came. “I’m surprised you’re still alive,” he said. He was a cheery chap with a spanner.

The gas is off at the meter, now, so we yelp under cold showers and wear thick socks. I work with a blanket around my shoulders. “I’m cold,” I said this evening, and Olive said, “Put on a second sweater.” “I’m wearing two sweaters,” I said. He picked at my clothes with disdain. “This,” he said, pinching my fine-knit pink cardigan between his thumb and forefinger, “is a vest, and this,” he said, poking at the blue pullover, “is a T-shirt with long sleeves.” He slipped a sweater over my head. It came down to my knees. “It is made,” he said, and he was proud, “with hair from the ass of a llama.”

In other news, I have a headache and I wonder if I am being felled by carbon monoxide poisoning.

Forgive us, Father, for we are about to make a link to a MySpace site.

The first time we tried to go to a Hugh Coltman gig, some weeks ago, Olive came down with a cold. So when we heard Coltman was playing this past Monday at the intriguingly named Istanbul Basement Bar, we wrapped ourselves up warm and headed to the deserted after-hours darkness of Cleveland Street.

Someone had written online, about the Istanbul Basement Bar: “…and you can get a kebab upstairs after the gig!” “This is great,” I’d said, and in my mind I’d seen a tubby man in an apron and an impressive moustache standing in front of a tower of glistening lamb on a rotating spit.

Turned out the so-called Istanbul Basement Bar is the unnamed underground wine bar of the Istanbul Meze Bar, a very proper Turkish restaurant with neither neon nor pirouetting kebabs in the window. We bypassed the restaurant entrance and took the narrow steps down; the basement room was chocka with stylish young things in beers and cigarettes. “Weelll,” I said, “I’m hungry.” “Me too,” Olive said, so with at least half an hour to go – who starts an 8:30 gig at 8:30? – we went back upstairs. The waiter had just, of course, put a basket of warm pide bread on the table when we heard the whoops and cheers float up the stairs in the back. “Oh,” I said.

The Istanbul Special Kebab was very tasty. The hot sauce was very hot.

By the time we made it down to the basement again, the small stage area was clear but for the fairy lights and the mike stand. We squeezed, standing, into the only available space next to the bar. “That’s him,” Olive said in a low voice, looking straight ahead. “Mm?” I said. “To your left,” he said, still in espionage mode. “Ah,” I said, and Hugh Coltman was hunched over a table and a highball glass in front of me. He had a black-and-white checked scarf around his neck and his guitar was in its case.

“We came to see you,” I said, to Hugh Coltman, because I am not always the best spy, “but we got distracted by the kebabs upstairs.” “Were the kebabs good though?” he said. “Yup,” I said, and he said: “Well.” He shrugged his shoulders. It was a sentence. “I’m playing again on the nineteenth,” he said, “somewhere,” and I said, “Okay!” I wanted to redeem myself.

We stayed long enough to hear a funny Japanese boy and his guitar before we left in the blustery night. He hopped onto the stool, Moss did, in a grin and a knitted mushroom hat, and said “Hey!” The room was in love with him already. By the time he got to his “Pepe Julio”, in which he sang-yelled “Pe-pe-pe-pe-pe-pe-pe-pe-pe-pe-pe-pe-pe-pe-pe-pe… Julio!!” over some violent, jangly strumming, the crowd was hooting and clapping along.



Olive knows things about music, so last night we counted on third-time’s-the-charm for the Coltman gig at the shiny, new Fopp store on Tottenham Court Road. Fridays at Fopp – who knew? With free live music, and a bag of Marmite crisps and a J2O for less than two pounds, it’s the best thing to happen to Friday nights recently. Susy Thomas sounded like coffee late on a sunny Sunday morning. Lisa Theunissen had a big voice. Harold Someone sang off-key, and with his eyes closed. He did a rendition of “Blackbird” that ended like this:

Ah said,
You were only waiting for this moment to arise.

Ah said,
You were only waiting for this moment to arise.

Ah said,
You were only waiting for this moment to arise.

“I hate him more than James Blunt,” Olive said, and I said, “But we love James Bond!” I remembered coming out of the cinema on New Year’s Day and walking down Boulevard Saint-Germain, singing “Nung-nuh-nuh-nung-nung nung-nung-nung nung-nuh-nuh-nung-nung.” I was ready to sing it again. “James Blunt, I said,” he said, and I said, “Oh.” “I like James Blunt,” I said, and he said: “Eeeyur!”

Hugh Coltman came on stage, he slipped his guitar off his head, he said, “Wait.” “I’m going to start with something else,” he said, and he eased a harmonica out of his jeans pocket. He blew into it, a wailing intro to a great blues song. He sang, and in a smoky corner in your mind you saw a blind black man in a dignified hat, tapping his shoe in the dust. You opened your eyes to a skinny Lego-playing white boy in a faded Millfields Shine Academy T-shirt. There was a single mike on stage, the guy was playing his harmonica, and the lights on the back wall changed green and blue and yellow and orange.

“I think of a New Orleans funeral,” he said, later, in the middle of a song, and his fingers tapped and strummed, still, on his guitar. “Imagine the, y’know, the cortège coming by, and the brass band. The trombones,” he said, and he scat sang over his invisible accompaniment. The invisible trumpet behind him glinted an invisible gold.

We were all leaning forward, I tell you, we wanted more, he was a road trip chasing the sun and a quiet day in the French Quarter, he was a deep velvet booth in the back; and when Hugh Coltman shouted into the wings, “How are we doing for time?” the girl behind the bar shouted back, “Great.” One day he will be £25 (£20 advance) at the Scala, but right now he is no money down and playing again in a couple of weeks.

I always forget how loud it gets in the Elk in the Woods, what with the nonstop chatter and the music bouncing off the horned skulls on the wall. Nonetheless, it is a nice place to fall into as the sun sets on a Sunday afternoon, and it was nicer still to have a teatime tête-à-tête with Nora in the red lotus room in the back. We had a seat by the window, where I saw that Mr Christian’s across the way is, confoundingly, closed, with an A4 sheet in the window that reads: Closed until further notice. Apologies. Said A4 sheet is suspiciously Times New Roman on white, as if Mr Christian packed up real quick, hugging a jar of pennies as he ran. What happened, Mr Christian? No return ticket from New Year’s in the Bahamas? Or was it the result of a visit from the food hygiene cops? Bugs in the baking flour? Rats behind the pots of gourmet jams? I wanted a loaf of bread today, Mr Christian, and I would not have said no to a cupcake.

Everyone around us was getting chips, but we had signed up for cake. “Toffee crème brûlée,” the waitress said, and she was Mia Farrow in the seventies. “A chocolate pot,” she said, but she must have seen, in our eyes, that we were going for gold. “Banoffee pie,” she said, and we said: “Oh!” There was banoffee pie for two, then, and fresh mint tea on a wavy-rimmed saucer.

“I have a ghost,” I started to say, later, but then I thought I should back up a little, because who wants to be the woman hunched over in the corner, wringing her knobbly hands and darting her eyes about wildly? “I mean,” I said, “I was on the sofa the other day and it started shaking – I mean, sometimes at night, well, really, anytime during the day, but at least once a day there is a sound in my apartment,” I said, and I couldn’t stop, though I knew I was starting to sound crazy. “No, honestly, once a day, just a quick knock, like someone knocking, but just once, loudly, and the other day I was on the sofa and it started shaking.” My eyes were darting about, I’m sure, though my hands were steady, and Nora said: “Are you mad?”

“That is what Olive said!” I said. “I said, ‘Olive, the sofa is shaking,’ and he said, ‘Are you mad?’ But then the lampshade began vibrating, so I pointed at it; he saw it too, and he said, ‘Someone is doing construction somewhere.’” I think I allowed myself a breath.

“It is pipes,” Nora said, and I narrowed my eyes at her. “I believe in pipes,” she said, “and you believe in ghosts.”

“I don’t know that I believe in ghosts,” I said, “but you know there’s that show on TV?” “I’ve never seen it,” I said, “but I’ve seen the trailer, and I think what it is is, you think you have a ghost in your house, and you call these people, and they use those cameras that film in low light, and they come over and suddenly everyone’s screaming.”

“Do not call those people to your house,” Nora said, and she reached over with her fork to sample my leftover toffee.

Back from holidays is best for seeing everyone, just like at school, and I wonder if it is like this for old people, too. Friday we had a full house for a steak dinner, and Saturday Emily called to invite us over to touch the pasta machine. The boy was feverish on the couch, but a pasta machine is a pasta machine, so at half past seven I flagged down the number 38 bus to Angel.

In a deep peach kitchen, Emily made a flour well on the kitchen counter and broke two eggs into it. She rolled the dough into balls and said, “You want to try the machine?” She plugged the machine into the power outlet, and Lucy and I said, “Ohh. I thought it would be hand-powered.” In our minds we saw Italian grandmothers with flour in their hair, and goats in the yard. Still, a pasta machine is – all together now – a pasta machine, so I said: “Yeah, okay,” as if I do this every day. I tell you! Making pasta is great! The folding of the dough, the flattening, the even-flatter flattening, the flatter-still flattening, the very-flat flattening. The cutting into tagliatelle. It must have been well past nine by the time we put the water on to boil. “This is great,” I said, “but I tell you, sometimes I am quite happy to buy my pasta at Tesco.”

Carl came by at some point, Carl who is half-Japanese and half-Swedish so his eyes are the colour of sand, and Carl and Lucy live in Los Angeles, so of course I said, “Do you go to the Giant Robot shop all the time?” I tell you! They do! “And do you know Eric Nakamura?” I said, and Carl said, “Yes.” “Tell me more,” I said, and I put down my fork. “I know Eric,” he said, “but I think Martin is cuter.” “Ya!” I said, “Me, too!”

I remember that before Maud and Yaya and I left New York to drive to LA, people said, “Oh, LA. You’re going to have to drive everywhere, and you’re going to get stuck in traffic. There’ll be all this smog. You’re going to hate it.” We got to LA and it was the candy-coloured stuff of our dreams. I remember the palm trees, I remember the swoosh of the Getty Center, I remember that day we were at the beach. That first balmy night we went out with Jude and Chad; we drove with the windows down, we fell into a bar somewhere. Later that night, rolled in and tucked up in the boys’ living room, Maud and I laughed till we cried.

I have a soft spot for LA. It’s the Neutra houses, I think, and the Eameses, and in the background it sounds of the sea and Spanish-speakers. I remember thinking, when I lived in America and this was a relevant thing to think, that it would probably be curious and interesting to spend time in a city that seems to have such a strong Asian American population. I don’t tend to get hyped up about yellow power, but I can’t help being Chinese. I think I thought LA would be like living in the pages of Giant Robot.

The wind fought its way in today, through windows sealed shut. I made a banana cake and put it on a cake stand. Then Dan came by for tea. He was telling us about Cornwall. There are pirates!, or there were, anyway; and pasties; and plays at the theatre in the hill. We’re going to take a train out there, next autumn, maybe, and it seems like a while away, but look, it’s mid-January already, and we weren’t even trying. Pirates, and pasties, and champagne on a picnic blanket. And the train goes by the sea. It’s worth waiting for.



There are places to go, and I tell you something else: there is a merry-go-round in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris that presents a curious menagerie. None of those painted horses with their wild, glittering manes; here an antelope, a dodo, a triceratops, a corps of giraffes and a smiling, sad-eyed panda go round and round and round. The lights were on, Christmas Day, and a tinny fairground music floated out from behind bare trees.

The new year crept in while we were on salads and cheeses still, and then there was the flurry for champagne, and toasting, and I had red wine in my glass, and Marc’s was empty, in fact, but it didn’t matter, what with the chin-chins and the clinking while looking one another in the eye because no one wants seven years’ bad sex. We went up to the terrace, where the wind was blowing up a bluster, and the Eiffel Tower in front of us fizzed like a gold-and-diamond sparkler at a dusky dinner outdoors.



Paris is always good, and it seems to get better every time. I was at the Café de l’Industrie with Maud, early in the new year, we were tucked into a corner with a small yellow lamp, and she was fiddling with her hair, all practiced insouciance, and she said, “…So, are you moving to Paris or what?” “Could you show me that by-the-way look again?” I said, and one of us – both of us? – snorted. The thing is, Paris is always good, I know, because it is untouched by the concerns of work and laundry. There is that, but there is also the quiet understanding, somewhere in me, that Paris is good because, hang it all, Paris is Paris.



Laurence had taken off to Hawaii – blonde hair, check; surfboard, check – so we holed up at her place in the Tenth for a week. Down one end of the street, there was the little wine shop and the homeless people camped out by the canal. Down the other end, there were jeans on sale, and a windowful of mismatched lamps. We were up two spirals on the narrow, curving staircase. Mornings, the slight winter light came in through large windows. The living room was very cold – all the better for hibernating, with two covers and an old Vanity Fair, in bed.



We drank outdoors, indoors, we snacked in the street, we dined in backstreet bistros and fancy restaurants with cheese trays the size of the table. One muted afternoon we poured sugary mint teas from silver teapots while the waitstaff lunched. We were sitting by the radiator. There was one other man in the restaurant. He had a hat, I seem to remember, and a newspaper.



There was a large pitcher of sangria between four, one night at Bar 10, while Olive fed the jukebox; and another night we were squished in a corner when Hughes came by. Hughes has wild hair and a big laugh, and we squished some more to make room. Emily said Marc said Bar 10 is where you go to pick up American au pairs, but it was hard to spot them, if they were there, through the cigarette smoke. Bar 10 is where I go to pick up a mini chorizo tartine on the end of a toothpick.