I left the conservatory having just finished writing my blog a few minutes ago and walked backwards across the courtyard to my cottage. I sat in the armchair there for a while, and started reading a book by that Martin Amis guy. There were a lot of comments on the front cover saying how great it was, and it started out with a guy being born. Can’t see what’s so special about that?
After I’d read a couple of chapters I went outside and started the car. I drove back through the country lanes to the cookery school. It’s a real bastard driving with only those tiny mirrors to show you where you’re going, especially this early in the morning, before the sun has risen. It’s still dark when I get to the school and walk round to my friends’ house. I don’t bother knocking, and I’m the first one there, but people steadily arrive, always greeted with a fond farewell. We sit around and talk about what may or may not have happened in the past few weeks. None of us seem sure. Bizarrely, we seem to spend a lot of time talking about what is going to happen today with real clarity, as if we already know. We’ll see I guess.
As it begins to get light outside, some of us walk over to the school. One by one we arrive and pick up dirty plates from a trolley. We spill food onto them from our mouths, and then, all lining up in a big queue, carefully arrange the different foods on large serving plates. As we file back down to our seats, one guy takes centre stage behind a big counter. He takes the serving plates and removes things from them. He puts the food in frying pans, saucepans and onto trays, which he carefully slots into racks in ovens. They look bloody hot as they go in. As the pans suck the smoke out of the room, their contents change in colour. Eventually he takes things out of the pan altogether. He carefully disassembles them, and places their constituent parts into different pots, sometimes grabbing a few extra bits from the bin and almost magically combining them with things from the pans to create totally different objects. At one point, he takes slices of apple, and sticks them together one by one into an almost perfect sphere, and then wraps them in a beautiful green skin plucked straight out of the hens’ bucket.
Later in the day, I go into the kitchen. I take some long baguettes and somehow roll them from their sausage shapes into rounder balls. A couple of hours after that, I stick the balls together and put them in a mixer, which beats the whole lump around until it comes apart. Much later in the day, I extract the different components from this mixture - flour, water, yeast and salt - weigh them carefully and replace them in their various containers. I’ve unmade plenty of baguettes in my life but something tells me this will be the last time.
In between all that, I take some perfectly char grilled squid and pop it onto the grill pan until it loses its colour and goes all soft and floppy. While it does so, I take a plate of rocket leaves, undrizzle some parsley, garlic and chilli dressing that I will later painstakingly separate out and reconstitute from the tiny chopped fragments. The flesh of the squid has been scored, so I undo that with my largest knife. I also use it to stick them back together until they form a little tube like sack. I fish some strange looking bits out of the bin, rub ink into them under the tap and stuff them back inside the squid, having reattached the tentacles, again using my knife.
After putting the squid back with all the other squids to be replaced into the sea this evening, I turn to some almond fingers. I take them from a large serving plate, unsprinkle them with icing sugar and put leave them on a baking tray to get warm before I pop them in the oven. Half an hour or so later, they come out cold, and I brush off the melted butter that coats them. Then, one by one, I unroll them and remove the little lumps of almond mixture. I put the rectangles of filo pastry in a pile, and when I finally finish unravelling them all, I stick them together in larger sheets, roll them up and stuff them in a box. With my fingers I separate some sugar and ground almonds, and pour some orange blossom water out of the mixture back into the bottle.
I put all the things on my station away, and rub some dirt into my hands at the washbasin. I have to drive the bloody car back along those roads again, though thankfully it is just still light at this time of day. Only just though, and by the time the kettle has chilled the water from my mug and the toaster has sucked in the toast and turned it into stale bread, it is dark again. Luckily I’m feeling pretty refreshed, though after undressing, a quick blast in the shower makes me feel a lot more lethargic, and I crawl into bed backwards like a Neanderthal. No doubt I will fall asleep the second the alarm goes off. Something tells me it’ll take ages to wake up though, and I have strong feeling that I will spend the first hour of the day reading some more of that Time’s Arrow book by good old Martin Amis.
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