Why you'll always find me in the kitchen during lockdown

Since coronavirus took all my other pleasures away, food has never tasted more delicious

I’ve always been more than usually alert to the human appetite, and not only because I’ve long since learned to be highly suspicious of the kind of person who’s apt to “forget” to eat lunch. Like the writer MFK Fisher, a new edition of whose wartime classic, How To Cook a Wolf, is published this month, the older I get the more I grow convinced that our basic needs – for food, for security and, above all, for love – are “so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others”. Consider hunger, and you’re also pondering love. Think about love, and you’d probably do well, at some point, to mention dinner.

In such times, pleasure really is vital – and where else might we find it, save for in our supper?