Food

Reader, I’m marrying him. Since moving to Dorset we have home-grown a free range ring-bearer each plus one bridesmaid. In the first year of our thirteen together without a drama, crisis or major distraction, we are sailing away with them, our mums and two old friends to the land where the Bong-tree grows for a wedding-moon.

June is the start of it. That endless blue sky, long-light, lazy-lunch feel that carries us through the summer and the holidays and puts us in mind of al fresco picnics, garden lunches, rugs and showers and easy food where the temperature of the food is less important and critical than the temperature outside. That peculiarly British thing of braving the breeze and the cloud on the horizon and taking food outside no matter what.

"I’ve spent over half my life in America. When I was a student, I had no money whatsoever and would always go to this shop in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and buy stuff that was way out of date. I spent an enormous amount of time eating things out of packets. Cottage cheese with pineapple was an obsession. Peanuts are a hugely positive form of food. Travelling around the Deep South it was so much easier to stop at a petrol station and buy a bag of peanuts than to go into some awful fast food place. American fast food is disgusting – the very notion of fast food is an anathema. The point of food is to enjoy company and so if you need fast food, you just buy some peanuts. But if you’re sharing food you take a good long time over it, that’s the point.