Love and microwaved eggs – my dinners at Dad’s

When Clare Finney’s parents divorced, she discovered her kind, clever father was fallible in one place – the kitchen

I have absolutely no memory of dinners before my parents’ divorce, which is odd because I was six at the time and as divorces go theirs was quite painless. Our meals were not marred by screaming matches; there was no seething tension across the table. Mum and Dad might not have been best suited as for-better-or-for-worse partners, but they were never deliberately unkind.

No doubt a psychoanalyst would suggest there is more to my amnesia than meets the eye. I prefer to focus on the dinners I can remember, those after the divorce, when life was divided into time at Mum’s house and with Dad. The split was 50:50, almost to the second, a constraint that made mealtimes more significant.

I learned that eating, just as much as cooking, is an act of devotion

There was an air of collusion to those meals with Dad, a devoted, gleeful camaraderie