I was walking on my own through the wilds of a field thick with mud and trees and tall grass this morning and my only care was staying up right, when all of a sudden, the grass was short enough to have been shaved. I was standing in the middle of a golf course. You would have thought I would have felt all right on a golf course; you can see for miles all around and you know there are rules that everybody is following, but rules can be tricky if you aren’t sure what they are or if you want to follow them. The golfers were all very definite about where they were going and they were wearing solid shoes. In Luton, they aren’t a very talkative bunch to outsiders who show up in the middle without equipment. I wasn’t sure if I were fair game for target practice and if I should just start running or pretend that I was scoping the place out for my next shot. As soon as I decided to walk and scope and not worry if I was the right thing or the wrong thing in the eyes of the rest of the players, I was fine, and started to enjoy the landscape. It was a challenge to try and guess which way a group might be swinging, especially if there were a quite a few in the same area, but you get good at something like that really quickly when your survival depends on it.

I recommend cooking with abandon and against the rules occasionally. My brother in law says he goes crazy sometimes with plain old tomato soup. You could just make tomato soup (garlic and a bit of onion cooked for fifteen minutes with fresh thyme, then a can of whole tomatoes smashed through your hands and set to simmer for a while, and finally half as much cream.) Or you could try putting a few cloves of garlic and an onion and fresh ginger in a separate pan until it is completely cooked through with whole spices that get crushed in a mortar and pestle and added. (Try cinnamon, nutmeg, a little clove, black pepper, some torn bay leaves, coriander and cumin or whatever moves you) When the spices are toasted, he adds cut up chicken breast, cooks the chicken gently and then adds the soup. Go with your gut and do what you like.