Nigel Slater

For years, Nigel Slater has kept notebooks of curiosities and wonderings, penned while at his kitchen table, soaked in a fisherman’s hut in Reykjavik, sitting calmly in a moss garden in Japan or sheltering from a blizzard in a Vienna Konditorei.

These are the small moments, events and happenings that gave pleasure before they disappeared. Miso soup for breakfast, packing a suitcase for a trip and watching a butterfly settle on a carpet, hiding in plain sight. He gives short stories of feasts such as a mango eaten in monsoon rain or a dish of restorative macaroni cheese and homes in on the scent of freshly picked sweet peas and the sound of water breathing at night in Japan.

This funny and sharply observed collection of the good bits of life, often things that pass many of us by, is utter joy from beginning to end.

A Thousand Feasts

Cassandra Tang

A menu is a collection of temptations. A card from which to choose something that someone else will cook. 

If you take it slowly, concentrating on your every movement, cooking can be a deeply meditative experience. Rush it, and it becomes purely about the end result, about sustenance. 

A suitcase is never empty. Each one is so full of plans, hopes and dreams that there is barely room for clothes. No wonder we have to sit on it to get it to shut. 

When you hand someone a plate or a cup with both hands you feel as if you are handing them a gift, an offering, which of course you are. It is also how things end up not being broken. 

Sometimes the book carries a tale even before you turn the first page. A gift, a love story, complete with signatures and dates: ‘Happy Birthday’ or ‘Saw this and thought of you’; ‘To my dearest Helena’.

Finding a new perfume is probably like finding a new friend: you need to take your time to see what is left behind once the top and middle notes have vanished. Lite polite conversation, you have to know what lies beneath the initial shallowness of a first meeting. 

Repairs are more than examples of frugality, they are a way of letting your clothes know how much you respect them. A repair is beautiful, like a scar. Its presence enhances rather than diminishes. 

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