When I was still quite young I had a complete presentiment of life. It was like the nauseating smell of cooking escaping from a ventilator: you don't have to have eaten it to know that it would make you throw up.

We're leaving," I told her one July afternoon."We? You and I? Where are we going, young Master Paul? Do you have your belongings tied up in a red-spotted handkerchief on a stick?

My parents' marriage, to my unforgiving nineteen-year-old eye, was a car crash of cliché. Though I would have to admit, as the one making the judgement, that a 'car crash of of cliché' is itself a cliché.

Sit yourself down," Joan instructed as we reached the the fag-fogged, gin-scented den that was nominally her sitting room.

The relationship between professional and domestic cook has similarities to a sexual encounter. One party is normally more experienced than the other; and either party should have the right, at any moment, to say, "No, I'm not going to do that.