Table for one please

What you eat does not always represent how you are feeling. My good friend Tom, the Donne fan, couldn’t care less about food. For him, food is fuel. So he eats packets of cooked chicken and porridge and protein bars. My best friend Lindy eats healthily most of the time but has a weakness for large bags of crisps which she eats mechanically after a 12-hour shift in A+E. My dad could survive on carbs alone. This is perhaps why I have an almost literally sick disregard for bread and potatoes. Sometimes, there is nothing I want more than the previously mentioned potato waffles and there is nothing nicer than a white roll with salty soft Irish butter and thick-cut marmalade for breakfast, along with two cups of tea, one after the other, as also enjoyed by my all round hero, Nigella Lawson. But the Famale household is overrun with bags of Scottish rolls, different types of sliced bread, croissants in hard plastic packaging, scones of two varieties, pancakes and pastries. This is no exaggeration. It’s the carb equivalent of Mrs Pratchett’s sweet shop in Roald Dahl’s Boy. My dad is round and happy and likes nothing more than a sneaky meander round the bakery section of Morrisons, with the obligatory gallon of milk and two tabloid papers in the basket for good measure. But to me, bread is the enemy of the mid-west waistline. The sight of white bread that has been bleached and deprived of any natural flavour fills me with dread. The same goes for biscuits. An old boyfriend who was neither a leading man, nor hero, once asked me if I was going to eat another biscuit. Only, it was a rhetorical question. Like courtroom lawyers, we only ask personal questions we know the answers to. And sometimes we don’t like what we hear. But now when I see a packet of biscuits I’ll take one or two, but I can never again munch my way through more than a few without some kind of remorse. Which is maybe ridiculous or maybe a realistic and helpful warning bell. When I am sad or worried or about to sit an exam, I can hardly eat anything. The days before my art school degree results were due, I survived on cans of Coke. And even when I’m baking, I try things but I don’t go back and have one all to myself. But give me fresh vegetables or Dairy Milk or nann bread with curry sauce by the bucketload, because they have not been tainted by anyone else. When I am not cooking for other people, I eat very plain, simple 2:2 food. So it’s potato waffles, eggs, porridge, Coco Pops, green beans and avocados. Stuff that doesn’t involve any effort whatsoever. I don’t want to be defined by food or controlled by it. But personally, I’ll be glad when it’s salad season again and I can refuse the bread, the thick Scottish soups and the fish and chips, not because I am sad or fussy but because they make me feel heavy, both physically and mentally. That’s why I like eating alone best. That may sound strange for a food blogger, but there is nothing better than eating exactly what you want to eat, when you want to eat it,  with all your routine quirks and deliberateness. You can keep your dinner parties and student union lunches. I want soft avocado squashed into toasted oatmeal bread with a crush of salt and a stream of olive oil and I want to eat it alone, thanks very much. My literary man hero, Charles Bukowski would have agreed with me, albeit he would have preferred a bottle of whisky to a slush of avocado: “don’t come round but if you do, yeah sure, I’ll be in unless I’m out, don’t knock if the lights are out, or you hear voices or then, I might be reading Proust, if someone slips Proust under my door, or one of his bones for my stew.”