No king ever breakfasted on Cornflakes

I hate breakfast. Seriously, I do. I know it's not very foodiefied or on trend of me, but it really is my least favourite meal of the day.

Actually, that oversells my relationship with breakfast – it goes way beyond 'least favourite' status.

Now some of this possibly goes back to all my years of dieting, when skipping breakfast was an easy way to avoid calories, so the habit was broken.

But it’s also far, far more than that.

Is there any other meal that has become so restrictive in terms of what is readily available?

I mean, when I get up at about 6.30am, I am not ready to eat. Frankly, it’s unusual for me to even drink anything at that stage except the occasional glug of fruit juice. I usually start feeling ready to break my fast around 90 minutes later.

So I grab something on the way into work or slip to the canteen for something once I’ve arrived.

The former means a sandwich or roll from one of a couple of places or possibly a warm pastry with filling from Pret or something ‘healthy’ from the same place, like a pot of fruit. Or a pot of yogurt. Or a pot of fruit and yogurt if I’m feeling spectacularly flash.

The latter means a toasted bread product (Chorleywood sliced bread or crumpets) and butter, with occasional jam when pushing out the boat. Cereal is available. Or you can have a pot of fruit. Or a pot of yogurt. Or a pot of fruit and yogurt.

There is some semblance of a cooked breakfast available at the latter, but even if you get there as the canteen is opening for business, the bacon is already tougher than an old boot and the scrambled egg has been sunning itself for so long under a lamp that it needs manually scrambling again with a fork.

Perhaps if I started getting up at 5am, I’d be ready to eat by 6.30am and could prepare something that I actually fancied before leaving home . Although then I’d have to contend with The Other Half objecting to whatever I chose to rustle up.

I don’t mind pastries occasionally, but seriously, where do you get a proper croissant outside of France – the sort of confection that is utterly fresh and so rich in butter that it flakes at the merest reverberation of lips smacked in anticipation.

When I give in to temptation and buy one here, it’s always to be reminded of the triumph of optimism over experience.

Staying in Brighton last month for work, I genuinely enjoyed having poached eggs on toast in the morning. And indeed, at a weekend, when I manage to discipline myself enough to eat before doing something else (like doing the shopping on a Saturday), it’s likely to be a couple of soft-boiled eggs.

Eggs, it’s worth stressing, that are free range and organic and from a farmer I trust. Eggs that are a glory and make such simple eating utterly worthwhile.

When I was a child, my mother would equip us for school with a small glass of fruit juice, an eminently sensible bowl of cereal (Rice Krispies or Cornflakes), followed by a piece of toast with marmalade and a glass of milk.

And therein lies part of the problem.

Why do people eat cereals? Doesn’t it say something that Cornflakes were jointly invented by a man who was three stops short of Upminster and believed that a diet of two bland meals a day was essential to control nasty sexual urges?

The world’s two biggest markets of breakfast cereals are the US and UK – is it a total coincidence that both these mass consumers of such starchy carb-laden fodder have particularly high levels of obesity?

But set that aside: the taste, just think of the taste! It’s largely like eating cardboard – unless you drown it in milk and add sugar to give it some interest. And that’s the healthy ones, as opposed to those that arrive complete with tons of salt and sugar, plus a veritable cornucopia of additives and gimmicks, like chocolate or marshmallows, just to get the children to eat this ‘healthy’ breakfast.

Look at the aisles in a supermarket and see how many different cereals there are; take a look at the ingredient lists and see how many don’t have added sugar, salt and god alone knows what else.

The variety is as great as that of ‘potato’ snacks – in the same places that you’ll struggle to find more than one variety of English apple.

Which might also say something.

There is, of course, porridge, but that needs things added to it to make it less boring and bland.

But all this raises another question: if you read a story about a man who ate Christmas dinner every day, you’d think he was bonkers.

Yet vast numbers of people eat exactly the same every day for breakfast and apparently think that’s entirely sane.

And personally, the lack of variety is one of the things that most peeves me about breakfast.

Occasionally, if I’m at home on my own (and therefore won’t have to suffer outraged complaints about the smell), then once I’m ready to eat, I’ll rustle up some nice, traditional fried bread and fried egg – cooked in lard, of course – or, if really feeling the pangs of hunger, a bowl of basmati rice, served with seasoning and a dollop of good butter.

‘Rice for breakfast’, you say in shock. Well why not? Indeed, it’s a central component of kedgeree, that wonderful dish created by cooks for those returned from the Raj and missing India.

Y’see, while I have no desire to go all Gosford Park on you, those country house types had some good ideas about breakfast – a wonderful array of options and none of them involving sugared cardboard.

Kippers, for instance, or devilled kidneys.

I’m making my own mouth water, contemplating such delicacies. Now obviously such things demand time – and that’s something that few of us have on a regular basis when it comes to breakfast, but come on – even bread and dripping would be welcome.

Or if you had the ingredients, pan amb tomàquet, the Catalan bread that’s toasted and then rubbed with a cut clove of garlic and half a really ripe tomato.

Hotels usually make it worse rather than better: most cooked breakfasts are far from great – not least because they’re almost never actually fresh; the cheeses and cooked meats on offer for those wanting a more ‘continental’ approach are mass produced and bland.

And whoever invented those bloody awful rotary ‘toasters’ that take an hour to give a slice of bread little more than the merest blush should be force fed Special K until they burst.

Not that it’s much better at hotels across the Channel. Which is why we never eat breakfast in hotels but go and find a local café. It usually works out cheaper too and you can watch the world go by while consuming good coffee and pastries or bread that’s rather better than what I’ve described here.

Now I know that breakfast is important and these days, I not only understand the reasons, but can see the affect on my appetite if I skip breakfast.

But given that breakfast is when you’re supposed to dine like a king, then how come we have such a deadly dull range of easily available choices? And the mere absence of meaningful choice, seen against the number of available cereals, shows how much breakfast has become, rather than something fit for a king, the most mass-produced meal of the day, driven massively by claims that it’s healthy!

And now for some pork done Italian style

After a recent post about slow cooking, Bill King had mentioned a recipe for 12-hour pork. Although I'd been considering doing a flamande carbonade at the weekend to try to develop the lessons of the previous Sunday, Bill's was a comment that turned my mind.

Pork is notoriously difficult to cook - it's all too easy to end up with dry meat. And as such, it's not a meat that I cook very often. But I started looking and, in fairly short order, had returned to Elizabeth David's Italian Food.

And there was a recipe for pork loin, cooked in milk.

Now the are plenty of recipes online for pork cooked in milk, but most seem to involve for more meat than two people were going to require. But loin sounded sensible.

On Broadway Market, there were no rolled pieces of pork, so what I decided to do was to buy two smallish pieces of tenderloin instead and place them together, with Mrs D's suggested stuffing, before tying everything into something more closely resembling a roll.

The stuffing in question was a little flexible - I don't think Mrs D expected cooks to be utterly tied to a recipe anyway, but in this case she stipulated garlic, coriander seeds and marjoram or fennel.

Well, I didn't have any coriander seeds and I didn't have any marjoram, so I used fennel seeds and some dried oregano and dried thyme.

Then you dice an onion finely and brown it in plenty of butter - approximately 35g. When this is browning nicely, add about 35g of finely chopped prosciutto or Serrano and let that cook too.

By now, it's getting a bit crispy - and it smells divine. Take your roll of loin and brown this in the pan.

The weight of this was just under 0.7kg. According to the recipe, you need around 0.8 litres of whole milk for this amount of meat, but that rather relies on the pot you're using.

Anyway, bring the milk to the boil and, when it's reached that point and the pork has browned, pour it over to just cover the pork. See what I mean about the size of your cooking receptacle? Mine – a large sauté pan that just took the length of rolled tenderloin meant that I needed to rapidly boil more milk to cover the meat.

But once you've reached that point, the milk needs to simmer away until a skin forms over everything.

And then you leave it for a good hour while it continues to simmer away.

After that, scrape all the skin and the crackly bits down the sides of the pan and back into the general sauce.

Mrs David says that this is where the liquid can evaporate remarkably quickly, so you have to watch it. But she didn't have quite as much liquid as me, so I was in little danger of it boiling away completely.

The meat, which had held together well even with my very inexperienced string work, was very tender and tasty.

The sauce? Well, it's counterintuitively lumpy but tasty.

I served it was rice and some sautéed courgette on the side. (Should that be zucchini?)

The biggest problem with cooking like this is that I've never eaten such a dish – so you don't really know what you're aiming for and whether it works as it should. It was certainly interesting, though.

But before that, early in the afternoon, as the sun finally broke through the grey and gave us a touch of divine warmth, I finally tried something else that has been stewing around in our heads for almost two decades – something that I had once tried.

Many years ago - almost 20 - when The Other Half lived at Finsbury Park, he took me for a birthday treat one year to an Italian restaurant on Blackstock Road.

A greasy spoon by day, it would be transformed after dark. I think we went there twice: certainly I remember a power cut on one occasion, leaving us eating by candle light.

But we have also both remembered the zuppe verde that we had at least once.

It was a light broth, with assorted leaves in it.

Yet for all that I've hunted, I've never found a recipe. And, since I have been wedded to recipes, it has thus remained a memory.

But enough was enough. With the spring-like weather, it would make a perfect light lunch.

The morning had started with stock making, using the remains of Saturday's chicken. One of the jars of this thus went into a pan with about the same amount of water, two bay leaves and six peeled, roughly chopped cloves of garlic.

I let it simmer away for a very short while, before adding a few cored leaves of cavallo nero, some spinach and the few leaves that had been on top of the celery 8'd bought at the market.

After about four minutes, I tossed in some very loosely torn basil and gave it all another minute.

Checking the seasoning, it needed a good two pinches of salt, plus black pepper.

It was served garnished with a drizzle of virgin oil and a little sprinkle of fleur de sel.

Now memory is as notoriously unreliable as pork is difficult to cook. But while it might have borne little more than a passing resemblance to what we had eaten all those years ago, it was certainly tasty.

This, for someone so wedded to recipes books, was a really enjoyable success. And it'll certainly be on the menu again. Clearly two, there is an extent to which you can play around with what leaves you use, depending partly on what you have in. And indeed, I found myself wondering how it would work if you replaced the basil with mint, which is apparently a particularly popular herb in Rome.

There's food for thought.

An Italian job

The weekend began in conventional style: wakened early by a combination of my internal alarm clock, the light outside and the cats, I made coffee and hauled out various recipe books.

Elizabeth David's Italian Food had me reading of ricci (sea urchins) that taste of "the sea, iodine and salt" and should be eaten by scooping out the coral flesh with bread, but "within sight and sound of the sea, preferably after a long swim, and washed down with plenty of cold, local white wine".

You can almost smell and taste them and, if you shut your eyes, the picture that forms in your mind's eye is so tangible that it's almost possible to feel the salty air in the soft down on your flesh.

But this is Hackney; it is early March and the early morning was grey - grey with a vengeance.

At least concentrating on the matter of food helps lift the spirits.

The Other Half had defrosted the freezer, so it was clearly time to start making things to fill it up again.

Since he was off to the other side of London for a rugby league match in the early afternoon, and I needed bag carrying help, we headed up to Broadway Market together nice and early.

With Mrs D's evocative writings in mind, I was about to go all Italian.

Saturday evening was easy: roast chicken, done à la River Cafe Easy Two and which I've mentioned more than once. Three and a half hours and the best roast chicken I've ever produced – every time.

Yesterday, it was served with baby new potatoes that were boiled and then finished off in the oven, for the final half hour of cooking the bird, in olive oil and with fleur de sel and a spring of rosemary.

And then there was some cavallo nero, the Italian kale, which I'd not cooked before.

It was remarkably easy. As per the same book, you cut the cores out of each leaf, and then cook them for five minutes in boiling, salted water. Then refresh and drain. When you're nearing readiness, smash up some fennel seeds and dried chili, and slice some garlic, popping all that into a pan with olive oil and allowing it to cook before adding the leaves for a minute at the end.

Voila! Or whatever they say in Italy. The job was a good un.

In the afternoon, I'd concentrated on making nice things from a vast (and heavy) bag of lemons, plus a 300g bag of frozen, organic raspberries.

The latter went into a very easy sorbet.

The lemons - organic, unwaxed and from Sicily, which place seems to be cropping up more and more in my imagination at present - were unbelievably fragrant.

Zesting and juicing as though my life depended on it, I turned 15 into a sorbet, as per Felicity Cloake's Guardian piece here, while several others were added to a luxurious custard made with organic, unpasturised milk from a Jersey herd, plus unctuous double cream from another Jersey herd, and then popped into the freezer to form a gelato, a form of ice cream.

I haven't the space for an ice cream maker, but you really can manage without, as the four boxes now in the freezer will attest.

And the taste of the gelato in particular attests to something else - the merits of using the very best ingredients you can get your hands on.

The evening concluded with a double dose of Sicily: art historian Andrew Graham-Dixon and chef Giorgio Locatelli continuing their cultural and culinary tour of the island. And then Montalbano, another episode of the Sicilian police procedural based on Andrea Camilleri's novels.

A fitting end to a very Italian start to the weekend.

And all after our little part of Hackney even managed to throw up a crime this week that would hardly have been out of place in Montelbano's Mafia-ridden world.

Looking out of the kitchen window as I prepped those Sicilian lemons, I could see across the road, past a block of flats and then to the Regent's Canal. On the far bank crime scene tape was visible, along with police officers.

There, earlier in the week, the torso of former soap actor Gemma McCluskie had been found floating. Her brother is currently in custody.

It was a striking concatenation of events and ideas, flavours and smells, light and darkness.

What's your beef?

Regular readers of this blog will know that, among my pet gripes is the absence of modern recipes for slow-cooked food that actually involve, err, slow cooking.

In other words, not 90 minutes or two hours, but hours!

I can only assume that writers and publishers have convinced themselves that the modern domestic cook will not countenance cooking something for any longer longer.

But the problem with this thinking is that it doesn’t work.

I’ve eaten traditional beef dishes in France that have been melt-in-the-mouth gorgeous, coated in voluptuously sweet, thick sauce that, however humble the dish, leave you in sated awe.

In particular, I’m think of you, boeuf à la gardiane, in Nîmes in the summer of 2010.

And then I’ve tried to reproduce such dishes back at home. And I’ve also tried to cook dishes that use beer instead of wine.

And for all that I follow the instructions – from a variety of supposedly reliable sources – they invariably fail or at least fall short.

Take this recipe for a carbonnade flamande, a classic Flemish, northern French dish.

Cook for two hours.

And this is without mentioning all the different books I’ve cooked such dishes from – often books that have a history of providing me with excellent dishes. Except when it comes to anything that requires slow cooking.

The reason that they fall short is that they always seem a tad bitter when I cook them.

Well, the penny has finally dropped. That’s one of the differences that serious slow cooking makes – it sweetens everything.

This was finally grasped when I spotted the recipe for a stacotto in Elizabeth David’s Italian Food.

This hearty beef stew is almost ridiculously simple. But the divine Mrs D’s instructions made it clear that we were talking in terms of five hours cooking in a “very slow oven”.

My only problem was knowing exactly what that means in terms of the dial on my own cooker. Remember my other perennial gripe about lost skills and knowledge? Well it's always applied to me too – I'm having to learn from scratch.

I opted for about 80˚C, on the basis that that is what works for the River Café-style three-and-a-half-hour chicken that I love.

As it happens, it didn’t quite work that way and, on three hours, I turned the heat up a little; and then some more as it became clear, on five hours, that it was not ready.

When we ate it, it still wasn’t cooked quite enough for what is supposed to mean ‘over cooked’. But it was tasty and far, far closer to the real slow-cooked deal than I’ve managed before (apart from the recent cassoulet).

Mrs D started with around a kilo of lean meat (in imperial terms). I bought a piece of 1.5kg and made some adjustments on that basis. The meat was from Wild Dartmoor Beef and, as farmer Richard Vines always stresses, it's grass-finished – which really adds to the quality.

Peel and slice an onion, a couple of carrots and a couple of sticks of celery.

Melt some lard in a heavy pot. Gently brown the vegetables.

Add the meat – in one big piece – and brown on all sides. Add a couple of Italian sausages (or Toulouse ones, as I did), a glass of white wine, a generous dessertspoon of good tomato purée and some seasoning. I also added the blood that had been in the packet with the meat – why waste it? – and which I'd kept when I took the meat out and dried it off.

Cover with a disc of parchment paper and then your lid – and cook.

Now, since my little struggle, I have found this recipe for a daube by Paula Wolfert, who knows a thing or two about the cooking of south west France in particular and the Mediterranean in general.

She starts by heating the oven to 175˚C, cooking at that for an hour, then turning the heat down to 120˚C and cooking for a further three to four hours, “until the meat falls apart easily”.

I suspect that this is the way forward on the stracotto front too.

In the meantime, my not-quite-a-stracotto has meant very little cooking for the days since – and I’d hardly slaved in the kitchen on Sunday anyway.

On Monday, it was reheated, with a tin of tomatoes added as per some online recipes. These show clearly that, like any of these great, gutsy traditional dishes, there are as many ways to make it as there are people who have made it. And then a drained, rinsed tin of cannellini beans finished it off.

On Tuesday, it was served with par-boiled new potatoes that were finished in the pot.

And yesterday, the remains of the meat were cooked with chopped onion and crushed, boiled spuds in lard – a sort of cross between a hash and a bubble ‘n’ squeak.

It’s been a beefy week, alright! And real slow cooking is absolutely to be utilised even when, like me, you haven't got a slow cooker or the room for one.

Love your books?

After yesterday’s post on World Book Day, it seemed apt to continue the theme – but on a rather more serious note.

It’s bad enough that, in the UK, independent book shops have taken a thrashing in the last couple of decades, as the neo-liberal idea of the ‘markets’ has seen them wilt under the pressure of massive, powerful book chains – and then the massive, powerful supermarkets.

There has been no protection for them – as there is in, say, Paris – but corporate clout has been allowed run riot, regardless of the consequences for quality.

Small is no longer beautiful and many who spout a supposedly pro-business mantra are only pro about vast corporations: they care little for small businesses.

Just one example of this impact can be seen on Euston Road in London, almost exactly opposite the British Library. There used to be a small, independent bookseller there called Unsworth’s. It sold antiquarian, second hand and remaindered books and you could turn up more than a few absolutely unexpected gems.

It presumably made enough to survive – until the landlord hiked the rent substantially and drove it (and a small, general shop a few doors down) out.

Unsworth’s was rescued by being given a small amount of space in Foyles on Charing Cross Road – not the first time an independent has found refuge there; it happened to Silver Moon in 2001.

Grant & Cutler, the superb foreign language bookshop that had its home on Great Marlborough Street, has gone the same way in the last year.

Coffee, Cake and Kink lost its home in Covent Garden – although this could be on the way back from just a cyber existence, where the coffee and the cake really aren’t much cop.

There’s something inherently wrong about this. And it is not being ‘anti-business’ to say so.

Economic systems are, of themselves, no more moral than they are immoral – any morality is simply a matter of the actions and decisions of those people who administer companies and governments.

But you only need to look at our high streets and town centres – dying on the one hand, and homogenised into identikit blandness on the other – to realise the damage that has been done by an attitude that says that might is right.

It’s an attitude that says, for instance, that it’s fine if, because you have more money/borrowing power to buy more of a product at a lower price and thus sell it on at a lower price, you put that smaller business out of business. Because if that smaller business can’t keep up, it has no right to be in business.

And the ‘choice’ argument too is, frankly, errant nonsense.

Book buyers and readers are not served better by losing the likes of Unsworth’s and Grant & Cutler – the ranges that they sold are not available in every Waterstone’s – let alone in Tesco.

Just as having 20 million varieties of potato-based snack to select from doesn’t mean that supermarkets, per se, offer greater choice in anything much else at all. In fact, they offer reduced choice, since you have fewer places to choose from in which to buy whatever you want.

The neo-liberal idea of increased choice created by aggressive laissez-faire capitalism is a nonsense – at least as seen in the UK of today. Just as the idea that being able to ‘choose’ which company you pay your water bill to is meaningless, since you cannot actually chose what water you buy.

But the threat is not just to independent bookshops: libraries are under threat too – many of them, right across the UK are closing or facing closure or cuts.

I remember, attending a traditional girls’ grammar school, that being a librarian was a job that required a decent degree and was considered a good job.

Like so many other jobs (teachers, for instance) such roles have been gradually down played so that now, in terms of libraries, the idea is that volunteers can run your local library if cutting real jobs (or the pay of those in those real jobs) doesn’t cut costs enough.

Campaigning against this is far from being a case of the ‘usual suspects’: indeed, the campaign has brought together such apparently diverse groups as trade union UNISON and the Women’s Institute.

Libraries are far more than simply a place to borrow books – although the importance of that, culturally and in terms of literacy – can hardly be overstated.

Take the library in Winsford, Cheshire.

There, staff have had to deal with some appalling behaviour – assaults and vandalism in an increasingly boarded-up town centre.

But they can also tell heartening stories – such as that about a local boy, aged 10, who visited the library regularly on his own and would take a stack of books out with him.

None of his family read – he came from what staff called an ‘Argos family’ – in other words, a household where the Argos catalogue was the only reading matter to be found.

He came from the most deprived part of the town; no family ever came with him and, if he had a fine to pay, he had to finds the money himself.

Once a week, the library hosts a reading group for people with or recovering from mental illness. They have to have been referred to the library to become part of the group.


They take turns to read from a book (nobody's forced if they don't want to) and then a librarian asks questions to start a discussion.

In Winsford, there are seven people attending these sessions – they regularly all turn up, which is regarded as an incredible record, and a stable and stabilising situation for them all.

There are also, of course, the groups for parents to bring young children to.

And at least one elderly person spends most of one or two days a week in the library. He lives on his own. But the library is where he finds a haven from his loneliness.

Libraries are not simply a rather tweely comfortable concern among the middle class that remember them – but don’t use them.

You an find out more in a variety of places, but as starting points, there is Alan Gibbons’s blog, which hosts a lot of information about Campaign for the Book. The Facebook site for that campaign is here.

You can also find out more here, here and here.

By the book

On World Book Day, moving behond the simple - and obviously obvious - point that books are quite simply fabulous, it seems entirely apt to ask a number of literary questions.

The current 'big question' that seems to be exercising many in the literary world is less 'what are you reading?' and more 'what are you reading it on?' Or put another way: books v ebooks. Which is a sort of new religious war.

Now frankly, there are some downright daft – and pretentious – arguments doing the rounds in favour of both sides of this debate, but it seems to me that ultimately, the only one that is important is what you like yourself. In other words, it's entirely subjective.

Personally, I can do many things on a mobile device - writing this blog, for instance, or reading news on a wide variety of sites - but when I want to read a book, whether fiction or not, then I will read a book.

There is a pleasure in the physical aspect of a book. You hold it differently. It feels utterly different in your hands. That's not to say mobile devices are bad - they have their place.

The point is, there are arguments for both. And they're neither right nor wrong in simplistic terms.

But on this day, let's move away fom such diversions.

Books are a wonderful part of my life - as is literature (the two are not synonyms). As recently as 12 years ago, I considered Tolkien to be the greatest author ever and writer of the greatest ever novel(s), but fortunately, the last decade or so has seen me grow up. And realise - amongst other things - that Lord of the Rings is far from original. Far, far, far from it!

So here's a brief list to celebrate some of my favourite books - and hopefully inspire you to think about your favouring books too.

Favourite classic novel

I have to go for Pride and Prejudice, which I read approximately every two years - and always find something new in it.

I hate the chiclitification of it - this is a very clever satire, not a simplistic rom-com. Fab stuff - and too subtle of most people, it seems. Jane Austen still utterly rocks.

Favourite modern novel

The Tin Drum

There are quite a few contenders for this - more than one by Gabriel Garcia Marquez - but Günter Grass's debut novel was one of the first pieces of serious literature that I read, and it remains an astonishing work that lives high in my personal panteon - not least as an example of northern European magic realsm,, which people seem to be surprised exists.

Favourite short story/novella

Death in Venice

I have now lost track of how many times I have read Thomas Mann's apotheosis of western short fiction since I first discovered it, some 10 years ago.

It took me a month to read, that first time - I was so utterly stunned to discover that a book could have as many layers as an onion. I couldn't write anything myself for months thereafter. And then, like a damn bursting, thoughts and words burst forth: my working vocabulary seemed to grow expotentially.

There are reasons I rate Mann so very highly. And that's without even beginning to explore the ideas in a book that so many completely misread and/or misunderstand.

Favourite graphic novel

V for Vendetta

Alan Moore's graphic masterpiece was the first graphic novel I ever read. It was a shattering read and I've not seen it bettered.

Otherwise, Asterix. In English, German or even the original French.

Favourite piece of non-food non-fiction

Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Fall of Prussia

Christopher Clark's history of Prussia is a fabulous example of modern history writing. Quite simply superb.

Favourite piece of foodie non-fiction

An Omelette and a Glass of Wine

Anything by Elizabeth David is worth reading. But this collection is, in particular, an utter joy.

Favourite single volume of poetry

The Man With Night Sweats

Thom Gunn's collection left me stunned by its power when I read it in a single sitting. Extraordinary stuff.

Favourite childrens's book

Well Really, Mr Twiddle is possibly appalling, but it was the first non-picture book that I ever read, all on my own. And I sat in a little red and white whicker bucket chair and chuckled madly through the entire Enid Blyton affair.

Favourite piece of genre fiction

The Big Sleep

Raymond Chandler's masterpiece is, err, a masterpiece. Cynical poetry. Superb.

Favourite comic novel

Witches Abroad

Just on of Terry Pratchett's fantastic series of comedy fantasy satires. I could have picked any one of many others, but this gets the nod. It ranges from outright farce to heart-rending pathos.

I love PG Wodehouse and Tom Sharpe, but Pratchett has taken the English comic novel to new heights.

So, what about your own lists?

The stuff of a Biblical soap opera

And so it began. Or rather - so it began again. If Manchester City fans believed that they had seen the last of Carlos Tevez in a sky blue shirt, then they imagined wrongly.

Because, like the prodigal son of Biblical fame, Carlos has come back, begging for forgiveness. And in equally Biblical fashion, he has felt the arms of the club embrace him again. It might be said that he is – to continue the religious analogies – ‘born again’.

Late yesterday afternoon, Tevez stepped onto a football pitch for the first time since his refusal to warm up – and therefore play – for the Blues in Munich.

That withdrawal of labour had come in the glamorous-as-it-gets Champions’ League, but this return was in a reserve (or elite development squad, to be accurate) match against Preston North End – one of the founder members of the football league to be sure (and the first English league champions), but not romantic opposition these days.

He lasted 45 minutes. Which, after a five-month, self-inflicted holiday, is not bad.

Football is a funny old mix of the pragmatic and the romantic.

For every religious analogy, there are others types. This has gone from low farce to operatic drama to soap opera and back.

Actually, the soap opera is what I keep thinking of - even though I haven't watched one in close to 30 years.

This isn’t EastEnders or Corrie: what’s in my mind is Dynasty, with Tevez all over-sized shoulder pads and a veritable wardrobe full of diva flounces.

Boss Roberto Mancini might have initially lost the plot in the immediate aftermath of the events against Bayern Munich – and I'm being über-critical here – but he has totally out-played Tevez and his band of advisors ever since.

Paternal, calm and offering the possibilities of forgiveness and redemption, it's been a classic performance.

One of the prime parts of the problem, though, is Kia Joorabchian, Tevez’s agent and a man that, frankly and personally, I wouldn’t trust further than I could throw him. In fact, probably less than that. So a bit of a sort of backward pass, as in rugby. But let's stop that analogy right there, before it gets really tortured.

Tevez is, I suspect, hardly the brightest penny in the jar – which is no crime. But actually, in saying that, what I really mean is that, as a son of one the poorest areas of Buenos Airies, he won't have had much formal education.

So let's be clear that he’s done superbly to lift himself from those humble beginnings – and apparently doesn't pretend they didn't occur.

That, of course, brings me to the thought that he's a little like one Diego Maradona. Okay – not quite as gifted, but hardly untalented – but in other ways, there are similarlties.

But one senses the finger of the university-educated Joorabchian – and a bunch of Russian ‘businessmen’ who, through Media Sports Investment, have ‘owned’ the player – in much of the problems that have plagued his entire career.

Of course, there’s the wider problem of agents in football per se: they have a vested interest in unsettling their clients, because that’s how they make money.

Tevez has been being unsettled at City for well over a year – two transfer requests in the last 15 months or so were hardly helpful, plus there was the sulk that saw him have to be threatened with disciplinary action by the club when he was intending to miss the post-FA Cup victory celebrations in the city.

He's certainly not getting good advice.

Last summer, he was almost on his way back to South America after the club had cut its asking price and said that Corinthians could pay in instalments. But that fell through at the last minute.

Hardly surprising, then, that Mancini opted to take the captaincy away from Tevez and give it to the magnificent Vincent Kompany.

All of which provoked another strop from the falling star as he complained about not getting his ‘loyalty bonus’. Well no, Carlos – the clue is in the word ‘loyalty’.

Yet the fans forgave him.

Tevez might be ‘high maintenance’ off the pitch (and Mancini had fallen over backwards to accommodate him more than once, particularly when he was complaining of being home sick), but at least when he was on it, he’d give the proverbial 110%.

So it was hardly surprising that refusal to go on to the pitch – or do the warming up that would have subsequently led to that – would be met with such anger, not just from Mancini, but from the fans.

So what now, with this climate of apology and forgiveness?

Pragmatism, methinks.

Personally, I never wanted to see him near the club again. But the club – although richer that Croesus – needs to comply with the forthcoming new financial rules and could do without letting him go for nothing.

Which rather left sacking out of the equation – and also means he needs to play to avoid a rule whereby, as a senior player, he could walk out without a transfer fee at the end of the season if he didn't make enough appearances.

To get anything like the sort of mood that he would like – and the January transfer window revealed interest but no buyers – Tevez needs to change the theme and remind people that he's actually a damned good player. A game changer, indeed.

So here he is, back at City, with that in mind. Doing his best for the club, on the pitch, is now his way of escape.

And what of the fans?

Well, those of us of a certain vintage might recall comparisons with marital infidelity. Howard Kendall notoriously left the manager's post at Maine Road to return to Everton, declaring the former to have been an extra-marital dalliance and the latter his one true love.

So I would be worried about great claims of love in this instance. But there have been none – and pragmatism might work in our favour.

City have been long enough without a title that, as the possibility of a championship grows slowly closer, I am personally prepared to say that, if Carlos Tevez can bring something positive to the final months of the campaign, then I for one will welcome him – if not exactly with open arms and a ticker tape parade – but with a sage nod and with pragmatism in my heart, and with the continued belief that there is something even greater that (hopefully!) awaits us in the none-too-distant future.