Which is the most dangerous room in your house? Assuming you are not a Christian Grey type with a cellar full of torture gear, the answer is probably your kitchen. That’s where the sharp and hot things live. That’s where you can do yourself real mischief if you’re not careful.
But even if you are careful, the kitchen might still be out to get you. Researchers in the US who tested domestic air quality found cooking a roast dinner or even just stir-frying vegetables can produce levels of air pollution exceeding those of a London street at rush hour.
Hot fats and oils, along with the soot and grime from non-pristine ovens and pans, produce tiny particles in the air. These enter your lungs and can ultimately damage your respiratory system, liver and brain.
The effect is lessened if you cook with the window open or an extractor fan on. But still — the idea that your Sunday lunch is slyly poisoning you is quite vexing.
As head chef in our house I’ve long regarded cooking as a form of productive mindfulness: relaxing, creative and broadly speaking (so long as one goes easy on the salt and ghee) healthy.
Now it seems that all those weeknight suppers and weekend braises may have been a long, lung-busting exercise in self-harm comparable to skateboarding a yard behind the No 19 bus all the way from Finsbury Park to Battersea Bridge (south side).
I know scare stories about innocuous things that may kill us are all part and parcel of living in the 21st-century peacetime West, where unprecedented levels of general prosperity and long life expectancies have, paradoxically, combined to make us fearful of the slightest little things. But still, when even your rack of lamb and roasties have it in for you, one thinks: is there anything left that isn’t lethal?
There’s a bad moon rising over the M25
At 3am on Saturday — the cold, silent witching hour — I was out of bed and on the road, driving our eldest daughter and her schoolfriends to Gatwick for the first easyJet flight of the day to the Alps. The lost sleep left a mental fog over the weekend — a sort of stay-at-home jetlag. But it was worth it for the drive back.
Rumbling home, alone, behind the wheel of a minibus on the near-deserted M25, I watched a huge, sickly yellow three-quarter moon set over London. It was Gothic, ghostly — mesmerising. You understand sometimes why the wolves howl.
Alan Partridge, the Alpha Papa of British comedy
Read More
It’s amazing to think that it’s a quarter of a century since Steve Coogan’s hideous yet brilliant drivetime marionette Alan Partridge first appeared on British television, hosting the sports reports on The Day Today.
And it’s even more incredible that after all that time Partridge is as strong a character as ever, one which Coogan and his co-writers have developed deftly over the years, adding depth and moving along the world he inhabits without losing the essence of what makes him so funny — and at times so tragic.
Partridge arrives at last on BBC One next Monday in This Time with Alan Partridge, which could be described as a satire on The One Show — although that would be to undersell the thing. Partridge has worked for so long, in so many different formats, because it is both a character study of a man living out time with his foot permanently in his mouth, and a sharp-fanged send-up of British broadcasting.
As he has ranged across news shows, talk shows, local radio, digital broadcasting, audiobooks and now evening magazine TV, each foray has told us something new about the man, while skewering the medium that enables him.
He is, quite simply, one of the great British comedy creations — long may his slow fall upwards continue.
*To Cardiff for the biggest rugby match of the year so far: Wales v England in the Six Nations on Saturday. It should be even more raucous than usual as the victors will be well placed to win the whole thing. I’m not sure I’ll enjoy it. The tension gives me nausea. But that in itself is addictive. I wouldn’t miss it for the world.
