Down in Bedfordshire, Dylan Winter's in the kitchen, scraping, scrubbing and scowling ...
There is a friend of mine who occasionally comes to stay for the weekend and invariably offers to cook the Saturday night meal. "Don’t you two worry about tonight’s meal," he says, "It’ll be my treat - the pleasure will be all mine, really…"
The preparation for these meals follow a now familiar pattern. At about six in the evening he insists we relax with a bottle of wine, while he retreats to the kitchen. Nothing could be nicer. Could it?
Well..... to steal a phrase from my kids - not.
During the next three hours the kitchen will be subject to a blitzkreig from which it will take at least two weekends of hard labour before it has fully recovered.
In the early stages of this annexation, all you can hear is the innocuous muted harmony of his whistling and the muffled rhythms of knife on chopping board.
Then come the questions.
"Where do you keep the butter", he yells.
Soon after comes the shout for the salt.
I sneak into the pantry, catch the salt unawares and return to the Merlot and Mantovani.
The respite is only temporary. Pretty soon he is howling for the bread-board.
Dam. I have deliberately hidden it - a vain attempt to keep it safe from his orgy of vegetable infanticide.
"Never mind - I’ve found it" comes the cry from the kitchen.
"I rush to intervene - but too late. The garlic cloves have already met the bread knife and the juice is being lapped up by the moisture hungry oak grain.
I decide then that I may as well stay in the kitchen and start clearing up behind him. If I don’t make a start now I am in for a very, very long night. Occasionally I stray from my post at the sink and dab ineffectually at the red, yellow and green coloured hail storm of oil spats which are pockmarking any surface within spitting distance of the hob.
"Just turn up the heat and reduce that down to thicken the sauce nicely," he says, cranking up the National Grid.
Then it’s all ready and a flotilla of wonderful bowls of exotica comes pouring out of the kitchen. The food arrives at the table at just the right temperature and right on cue. His timing is immaculate. It all tastes delicious. Hot and cold, spicy and subtle in perfect balance. The courses give way seemlessly from one to another. But, all this pleasure comes with a monstrous price tag.
Once the sweet has been brought to the table Said Friend relinquishes all control of the kitchen and it reverts to my responsibility. I hunt down the cheese and the coffee and sullenly survey the dripping gastronomic junk yard that was once my domain.
At 11.30 my wife, Jill, leaves said friend and I for manful and increasingly meaningless conversation for another hour or so before he cheerfully announces that all that cooking has tired him out. It’s time for him too, to lay down his head. He bids me to sleep well and heads for the spare room.
I am left alone in the quiet small hours of my own house.
My mood is that of a man who faces a long uphill cycle ride to work,
in the rain,
on a dark February morning,
in Slough,
no, on second thought make that Staines.
While it is possible to count such a man as a friend it would take the fortitude of an angel to share a life and a house with one so gifted in the art of trashing kitchens.
