DEBORAH ROSS
Sweet Jesus, I am so utterly bored of everything that goes into family meals — the shopping, the preparing, the eating of the meal itself, which can never be entirely enjoyed because 1) I'm a crap cook, even if I say so myself, 2) I know that another one, which has to be shopped for, then prepared and cooked (blab., blah, blah, yawn, yawn, yawn) will be coming along in a minute and 3) all my dishes come from a repertoire that would be extensive if it weren't so entirely limited. Thank God for sausages! Thank God for pasta with pesto!
You know, every time I go to Waitrose I go with every intention of buying exciting new ingredients for exciting new meals that will provide exciting new flavour combinations, but once I actually get there something happens, a kind of failure of will and enthusiasm, so that I come away with exactly what I bought the last time and the time before that and the time before that, and so on; perhaps even to the very beginning of time itself, or at feast back to when I didn't have a family and could have cornflakes for supper, or peanut butter eaten from the jar, and be done with it.
However, I didn't realise quite how fed up I was with this whole business until the other day when I went to our local greengrocers, the Clocktower Store in Crouch End, to do the 109th top-up' shop of that week, and couldn't be bothered to buy anything. Just the thought of having to pick up a basket and get my wallet out was too, too mind-killingly boring. So instead I went to Starbucks and read Hello!. Julian Clary gives a rare interview at home in Brighton with his sister? Personally, I do not like my interviews to be rare. I like them well done, and will send them straight back if they come as anything less. I know, I know, people who like their interviews well done are seen as absolute philistines these days, but I'm sorry, it's just the way lam.
So, this week, no restaurant, just how families manage this seemingly endless meals business. (Seemingly? Is there anything 'seemingly' about it?) I ask my mother how she coped with us four kids. 'Well,' she says, `the difference between my generation and your generation is that my generation said "Supper is ready", whereas your generation says "What do you want for supper?" 'This was then followed by a long lecture involving much use of the words 'rods' and `backs'. I ask a friend of mine who has four kids herself. 'Well,' she says, 'thank God for sausages and pesto. It is just so boring, isn't it?' I ask another friend with three kids, and whose husband is a fascist on the ready-meal front. 'Still, I buy them from M&S, dispose of the packaging at the very bottom of the bin, and just pass them off as homemade.' Once, she continued, her husband surprised her with an early return. 'So I shoved the packaging down my socks, and wore them throughout supper like cardboard shin pads.'
So, anyway, I get back from my abortive trip to the Clocktower Store and say to my partner, 'That's me done, You're doing all the shopping and cooking and preparing for the next week. I am too bored.' He says, *But I do my share.' I laugh. Our son laughs. Our cats don't laugh as such, but I can sec a twinkle of amusement in their eyes. Our Breville sandwich-toaster would laugh, but, having been stuck at the back of the same cupboard for the last 23 years, it has rather lost its sense of humour. I love my partner dearly (or at least for ten minutes every other Tuesday, if I can be arsed), but he truly does live in a parallel universe, one in which he not only cooks but also unstacks the dishwasher. (Actually, I think he thinks that little elves come and do it in the middle of the night, after they've restocked the cupboards.) True, today's men are possibly marginally better than yesterday's men. My son recently stayed with my parents, and my dad cooked him a boiled egg for breakfast. I don't know where my mum was. An emergency bridge game, I expect. 'Is it ready yet, grandpa?' asked my son. Grandpa went to check. Then Grandpa said, `Nope, all the water hasn't boiled away yet.' My son later said his egg was so hard that his soldiers ricocheted back into his face and fair knocked him out.
Whatever. My partner eventually agrees, largely because I keep on at him about it. Men, I have always thought, are rather like dogs: a firm, no-nonsense voice and you can pretty much train them to do anything. So, he cooks for the week, and you know what? I thought it would be magic. I thought, no mad dashes to Tesco Metro at lunchtime, so no more thinking about what we are going to have for dinner; acres of time to devote to Hello! plus OK' and Heat and Closer, with its medium-rare interview with Ulrika Jonsson. But it wasn't magic. It was, well, utterly humiliating, frankly, The thing is, he cooked for the week, and while the quality was admittedly variable — his chickpea curry was tip-top, his tinned tuna dish was interesting', and I wasn't at all sure about the fish (cod? haddock? coley?) rescued from the freezer after it had been banished there several years ago — he did not go to the shops once! How did that work, then? 'Well,' he said. 'You shop too much. Under your system the cupboard gets so clogged with food, we don't use the half of it. We don't need to stock up. We live in Crouch End, not the North Pole. In the freezer there are several packets of pitta bread, all opened. In the cupboard there are at least 30 bags of rice, all opened; 27 bags of pasta, all opened; 15 jars of peanut butter, all opened; 745 cans of tuna. . . look — you can see the back of the cupboard now.'
And you can, and what is there? I'm guessing it's what everyone has in the back of their cupboard but never sees, like the tin of golden syrup with the lid that would never go back on properly and the roll of clingfilm that clung to itself in 1973 and refuses to be unclung. I put it to him that he should be in sole charge from now on, `Right-oh,' he said. 'Only joking!' I added quickly. I hate to say it, but during the week, whenever I had driven past Waitrose on the Holloway Road, I had felt the most intense longing.
The lesson learned, if any? Well, now it's the supermarket just once a fortnight and the occasional fruit and veg top-up as necessary. There will always be something in the cupboard, because that's just the way it is. It is Crouch End, after all, and not the North Pole. As for Ulrika, her interviews, now I think about it, are less medium-rare, more abominably overdone. Toodle-pip!
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