Eureka!

I have found the antidote to my seasonal moroseness.

 

I’m moving in with Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. He says that since growing his own food he has attuned with the changing seasons, and found with them a sense of purpose. ‘The very opposite of postmodernist disillusionment and consumerist fatigue’, I think, my eyes squinting to read the typeface on my laptop screen, my fingernails chewed to the quick from my dash through the London rush hour.

 

 

I have a very warm, soft spot for Hugh. All those years ago when he did the first River Cottage series he was a guilty pleasure that I relished in secret, lest my reputation as a rock’n’rolling teen were compromised. But there was something about the way he picked fresh roadkill from the hard shoulder for a hearty stew, or got his local carpenter or whatever to build an eel trap from a design found on an 18th Century manuscript, that made me fall in love with the man. Most of all his enthusiasm for the simple life, for being a glutton for the glut of Mother Nature and that.

 

Tonight’s show was no exception. Sadly, it was the last in his River Cottage Autumn series, but he got the Church of England to donate some land for would-be horticulturalists, made pig’s trotters look like a long-lost delicacy, inspired families on their journey to becoming self-sufficient smallholders, and, as if that weren’t enough to keep you going, made HOMEMADE PINK MARSHMALLOW FROM SCRATCH WITH NO ARTIFICIAL ADDITIVES!!!!!

 

According to one ruddy, round-faced boy on the show (pronounce with thick Bristol accent): ‘Your marshmallows are gooder than that they get in they packets’.

 

Is there no end to what this man can do? Hugh, if you’re reading this, will you please be my friend?