Cooking With Fernet Branca by James Hamilton-Paterson Page A

calls himself. It feels neither like advance nor retreat, more of a sideways shift away from the world of the starting pistol and the stopwatch. Oh well, why not? Same old despair but at least a different scene. My bruises ache. Great putty-flavoured farts follow me from room to room.

14
    Days have gone by. I am back on form. Marta has been strangely and agreeably quiet over in her warren, except for a mysterious episode a few nights ago when it briefly sounded as though she were motor racing. It woke me up but faded almost immediately so I gave up thinking about it. None of my business. Maybe one day I shall discover that in addition to everything else she is an expert mechanic and has a secret workshop hidden away at the back. She may even turn out to be a Per Snoilsson fan. Nothing about that woman would surprise me.
    I am bustling about my own house, generally straightening it up and getting things into some sort of order for a famous visitor. I have even been creakily down the terraces to inspect the crash site and put a match to the remains of the privy. A faint smell of dry rot and creosote hung over them and they burned briskly, sending up gratifying clouds of fatal tars and dioxins into the Tuscan sky. In a day or two I am supposed to drive down to Pisa airport and collect the great Brill, who will be flying out Ryanair in horn rims and a wig, as I myself have often thought of doing. It seems he is so keen to get this project of his under way he is prepared to take time off in order to see whether we like each other enough to work together. His agent insisted he would do better tucked away in the anonymity of my mountain retreat for a day or two than heavily disguised in a hotel suite in Pisa. Naturally I’m uneasy. I have no idea what it takes to get on with the lead singer of a boy band. Cocaine, possibly, and I seem to be temporarily out of that.
    What I can supply, however, is culinary creative genius. I am planning menus in my guest’s honour while ignoring the advice of a streetwise interior know-all who urges me not to bother but just to lay in oven-ready chips and deep frozen pizza. Well, Brill can get that sort of stuff anywhere. I shallmake it clear that if he wants to do a deal with eternity he’ll have to do a deal with Gerald Samper first, and that includes expanding his dietary horizons. I debate making my celebrated otter dish but one can never be sure what will be in the market. Tuna stuffed with prunes in Marmite batter? A good old standby but maybe unsuited to a Tuscan summer lunch table on a terrace beneath vines. Deep-fried mice? I sometimes wonder if one is not more seduced by the mellifluous sound of a dish than by how it would actually taste. You might think the same went for pears in lavender, but I have discovered that poaching pears in water with a double handful of fresh lavender heads, honey and a cup of Strega makes a striking change from the usual wine-and-cinnamon routine of suburban dinner parties. Don’t be tempted to use Fernet Branca in place of Strega, however. It will taste revolting.
    Meanwhile, I have gone right off my beautiful idea of pears in Gorgonzola with cinnamon cream. It’s all Marta’s fault. Had she not drenched that putty ball of hers in the cinnamon cream I was experimenting with the other day it might still be a possibility. But the whole idea now reeks of linseed oil and bullying and has been ruined for me. Imagine Bach busy writing a soulful aria for the St Matthew Passion when in the street outside a butcher’s boy goes past whistling a popular ditty about three jolly swineherds. Suddenly poor old JSB realizes it’s the very tune he’s now writing, only much faster and in a major key. ‘God damn ,’ he mutters softly to himself as he slowly tears up his manuscript, having unwittingly had a preview of what in a hundred and fifty years will be known as the unconscious. That’s pretty much how I feel about the irreparable damage Marta has done my