58 The Times Magazinethe pretensions of other diners to mock, bad
lighting and poor extraction to rail against, a
complicated and possibly scary journey home
to complain about... It’s no good filling the
first 900 words each week with what I did
while I waited for the moped to arrive and
then go, “At last, the doorbell rings!” and
finally tuck into the food.
And, anyway, I hate takeaway. I hate that
awkward exchange with the little man in
the helmet at the front door. I always look
through the spyhole and worry that it’s an
assassin. And if he doesn’t shoot me, but just
hands me a warm, wet bag of thoughtless
calories, should I tip him?
I hate choosing from a menu online in my
own kitchen. Menus are for perusing when
you are far from home and need food. If I’m
at home, why don’t I cook? Have I no arms?
Do I not know how?
And how often can I review curry, pizza
and burgers? Because that is all I can imagine
dialling up for. I know that lots (possibly
even most) of my favourite restaurants are
now doing home delivery, but the thought
of a sole meunière or a bouillabaisse avec
sa rouille et croûtons or a twice-baked
Emmental soufflé sweating away in a
plastic box, going bonk, bonk, bonk, over
100 north London speed bumps and arriving
all dank and separated and limp, makes me
want to boak. If I want a poor, flabby, bashed
up, brownish imitation of a poncy restaurant
meal, I can cook it myself. In fact, that is
all I can cook.
So if an exploited teenager on a zero-hours
contract is screeching towards my home
on his nasty little scooter like a drug dealer,
I want him at the very least to be bringing
me something fatty, salty, spicy, instantlyGiles
Well, we’re back. I’m so sorry. I mean, I’m not
sorry. We’ll have a lot of fun, just as we did
last time. It’s just that Esther and me sharing
this space again means that everything has
gone to crap, again. It’s like the sound of Vera
Lynn singing: all very nice and cosy, but it tells
you there’s a war on, your food is rationed, it’s
not safe to go out and we might all die.
When Boris Johnson announced the
closure of the restaurants, I texted my editor
with one word: “Bugger.” I had two reviews
all written and filed and ready to be published,
containing all sorts of provisos such as, “By
the time you read this, the whole country may
be in Tier 3, or even Tier 4,” which I thought
would cover all eventualities, but didn’t,
because it never does.
My editor texted back, “Takeaways?”
Seriously, takeaways. Seduced by the
idea that lots of restaurants have pivoted to
dumping their dinners in Tupperware and
sending them out on horseback, my boss
thought I might like perhaps to review those.
Literally, dial up a curry, eat it out of a bag
on my doorstep and then write about it, week
after week (he may have been joking).
I mean, sure, one could. If one wrote one
of those tiddly restaurant columns of a few
hundred words they have in other papers,
where the guy plods through the dishes one
by one, remarking upon how “toothsome”
or “flavourful” they are, and rounds it off
with his reservations about the price and
the conclusion that a good time was had by
all. But I’ve got 1,500 words to fill. I need a
revoltingly decorated dining room (other than
my own) to sneer at, waiting staff to berate,Who doesn’t love a lockdown
takeaway? Giles, for one...
STAYING IN WITH THE CORENS
GILES AND ESTHER ARE BACK!
gratifying and utterly disgusting that won’t
suffer too badly from being slapped in the
microwave to take off the morbid chill of its
journey through the rain.
But I still hate it. I hate the waiting, and the
plastic waste, and the cleaning up afterwards.
I hate the absurdity of laying the table all
nicely, and then putting a greasy paper bag
down in the middle of it.
In fact, I hate seeing restaurant food in
my kitchen. I don’t even like restaurant food.
Restaurant food is the price I pay for the
pleasure of leaving the house sometimes
and meeting friends and ogling strangers
and getting drunk on wine I didn’t have to
buy myself at the off-licence and cart home
in the car.
If I’m going to dine at home, I’d rather
eat a tin of tuna straight from the tin, standing
up by the sink, with a couple of squirts of
Hellmann’s, and drop the empty can on the
floor for the cats to clean.
I’ll leave the meals on wheels for when
I’m in a care home, thanks.Esther
In his 2008 book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell
said that to be truly great at something, you
need to practice it for 10,000 hours. Well, I’ve
been cooking at least once a day since I was
27, at an average of 2 hours per day. There
are 4,745 days in 13 years, so multiply that
by 2 and that is a minimum – absolute rock-
bottom minimum – of 9,490 hours that I have
cooked in my life so far. Very, very nearly
10,000 hours. It feels like 100,000.
After all that practice, I might be good
TOM JACKSON at cooking but, boy, am I sick of it. And the