Julian Barnes

In those days, we imagined ourselves as being kept in some kind of holding pen, waiting to be released into our lives. And when that moment came, our lives – and time itself – would speed up. How were we to know that our lives had in any case begun, that some advantage had already been gained, some damage already inflicted? Also, that our release would only be into a larger holding pen, whose boundaries would be at first undiscernible.

In those days, we imagined ourselves as being kept in some kind of holding pen, waiting to be released into our lives. And when that moment came, our lives – and time itself – would speed up. How were we to know that our lives had in any case begun, that some advantage had already been gained, some damage already inflicted? Also, that our release would only be into a larger holding pen, whose boundaries would be at first undiscernible.

This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn’t turn out to be like Literature. Look at our parents – were they the stuff of Literature? At best, they might aspire to the condition of onlookers and bystanders,

How many cookbooks do you have?
(a) Not enough
(b) Just the right number
(c) Too many?
If you answered (b) you are disqualified for lying or complacency or not being interested in food or (scariest of all) having worked out everything perfectly. You score points for (a) and also for (c), but to score maximum points you need to have answered (a) and (c) in equal measure. (a) because there is always something new to be learned, someone coming along to make it all clearer, easier, more foolproof, more authentic; (c) because of the regular mistakes made when applying (a).

I also threw in a mild rant along the following lines: theoretically I know that all recipes are approximations, that the creative cook will each time make adjustments according to the quality and availability of ingredients, that nothing is set in stone (except wine vinegar mixed with hot molten sugar), and so on and so on. I just don’t want to be confronted with the reality of this in mid-cook.

So it didn’t matter in the end? No, not really. Then why all this fuss? Because, well, that’s what cooking’s about, isn’t it? It’s practically a dictionary definition. Cooking is the transformation of uncertainty (the recipe) into certainty (the dish) via fuss.

Cooking is about making do with what you’ve got – equipment, ingredients, level of competence.

In 1923, Joseph Conrad’s wife, Jessie, published A Handbook of Cookery for a Small House. Her husband’s preface begins like this:
Of all the books produced since the remote ages by human talents and industry those only that treat of cooking are, from a moral point of view, above suspicion. The intention of every other piece of prose may be discussed and even mistrusted, but the purpose of a cookery book is one and unmistakable. Its object can conceivably be no other than to increase the happiness of mankind.

And no doubt if they examine the frame they will discover woodworm living there

HOW DO YOU turn catastrophe into art?
Nowadays the process is automatic. A nuclear plant explodes? We’ll have a play on the London stage within a year. A President is assassinated? You can have the book or the film or the filmed book or the booked film. War? Send in the novelists. A series of gruesome murders? Listen for the tramp of the poets. We have to understand it, of course, this catastrophe; to understand it, we have to imagine it, so we need the imaginative arts. But we also need to justify it and forgive it, this catastrophe, however minimally. Why did it happen, this mad act of Nature, this crazed human moment? Well, at least it produced art. Perhaps, in the end, that’s what catastrophe is for.