Breakfast at Christopher's

Despite the fact that I have twenty or so cookery books with such diverse titles as "Italian Cooking", "Cooking the French Way", "Grandma's Little Recipe Book", "The Woman's Institute Book of Recipes", Delia Smith's How to Cook , Part Two", "The Malawian CookBook", "1000 Recipes", "Miracle Foods" and even "Winnie the Pooh's Cook Book", I hate cooking. To spend hours skinning and peeling , chopping and mincing, flavouring, savouring, basting, tasting, dicing and slicing and spicing ; all for an end product that will be swallowed in less than ten minutes, seems a pretty pointless occupation.

I try to follow the recipe books faithfully; but I always discover that one - apparantly indispensable - ingredient is not in my pantry; and I have absolutely no aptitude for discovering a satisfactory substitute. My pastry refuses to form a ball and I add water until it becomes a grey approximation to the ooze that, as a paddling child, I used to find near the sewage pipe on Bridlington sands. No longer how long I beat, my egg whites remain nebulously clear and my arms sore with the exercise. My frying oil is either too much or too little-and always too hot, with grey acrid fumes rising from the pan. Worse still, my sausages are black on one side and lucidly uncooked on the other.

I hate frozen food because it always seems to need frying (see the problem of frying in the previous paragraph) or boil in a bag which seems rather akin to making a cup of tea rather than a hearty meal. In any case, it seems to me that all frozen food, when heated becomes instantly tasteless. I do not use a microwave: I can neither understand the instructions nor eradicate my instinct that if food can really be prepared so quickly, someone might have discovered that fact centuries ago and putting the kibosh on the careers of Mrs Beeton and Delia and the countless other young, fashionable chefs that appear endlessly on TV.

I am not absolutely useless. I can make a hearty soup and don't mind doing so: I bung all the necessary ingredients into a big saucepan and leave the kitchen for an hour or so. On my return, I tip the slush into a food blender and, voila! a thick country soup. And I have discovered how to make an Apple Sponge.

So, all I need is the course in between.

Well, on Sunday, I roasted beef. It sort of worked, but the real test came yesterday, when I had to clean the oven which was dark brown -nay, black- with burnt crusted fat.

There never was a clearer reason for becoming a vegetarian.