Well in the last heatwave it was me. Nothing culinary, but I was ‘as boiled as a cup of tea ’, as my grandson said. He was right, and I needed several cups of the amber nectar to cool me down. What is it with heatwaves that people suddenly think that a cup of tea won’t refresh your thirst? After all, it comes from India, where they are used to this sort of weather. And as for cooking, it didn’t happen much. No wonder the Spanish don’t open restaurants till after the sun has gone down.

It surprises me that many contemporaries expect that I’m cooked for by management, and even in these days of equality ( sadly still not real ), it seems expected that man cannot feed himself. I’ve always enjoyed cooking for a very simple reason: I like eating. My tastes are not what I call ‘big plate/small food, neither are they ‘whopping piles‘, less said about them the better. Nowadays we don’t eat a lot of meat either; I rarely eat a sausage, but am partial to a good scotch egg. As for porkinson pies, they are rarely over the threshold, consigned to car park consumption. In fact, pastry only seems to creep into the house when management is absent without leave.

Shopping? Yes, I do that too, but always alone. The thought of shopping with someone reading the ingredients of a tin of tuna and checking if the hens that lay the eggs have had the freedom to read books in the open air. Or suchlike is just too much to bear. I’ll follow a list, but will go off-piste on every visit. I’m not going to talk about supermarkets much, but the one where the checkout staff are posher than the customers only gets the occasional visit, and then the ulterior motive is the King’s Marmalade, not that expensive and very good, even for someone of republican persuasion. Though I’m also content to buy marmalade ‘proudly made in Manchester’, because we all know that it will have been freshly made from the nearby orange groves of Charlton cum Hardy and Ashton under Lyne. On my shopping trips, there will be ALWAYS one item that I have either missed or could not find. There should be a word for that, might I suggest ‘ Nether Wallop’? I think it’s a village in Somerset that people avoid. So a Nether will now be an item either missed or out of stock, and a Nether Wallop is the same thing, but it was also missing from the original shopping list.

There should also be a word for when you’ve done the shopping and realised that you have been working on the wrong list that was left at the bottom of the bag for life. Any suggestions?

I grow my own tomatoes, and cucumbers, and any red lettuce ( the slugs seem to dislike red leaved veg ) and I am attempting this year to grow kale, which will be a battle with the pigeons. Watch this space.

I’ve never ever had a McDonald’s, and am not about to change that. I’ve looked at one and thought it appeared considerably different to the ads, and I have had a Kentucky Fried Chicken once or twice, and then some years ago, but anyone who puts food in buckets is not a gentleman and certainly wouldn’t reach the rank of Colonel.

There are a few industrial foods that I’m partial to: factory-made fruit cake, the slabs, not those individual mini bricks you get on a train. That posh supermarket does one that hardly has any gaps for cake between the fruit; it resembles an engineering brick. I like that. It makes an excellent winter pud if microwaved and dropped into a small lake of industrial tinned custard, another of my favourite industrial foods. There’s a factory in Manchester that produces just one thing: Lancashire Eccles Cakes; these have no cake in them, but are buttery pastry wrapped round dried currants. They are artery-blocking beautiful, somehow perfect for normal British weather as opposed to this continental hot stuff we’ve been getting. Save tasting them for a frosty day and heat them ( I say them, but you need only one ) in an oven briefly ( not in a microwave )

For the most part these forays into industrial food are kept to a minimum. Every day would be excessive , every week a little too much, perhaps a foray every three months might keep the apppetite for them sharp.

Meanwhile, we look like we might be in for another hot spell, bringing with it the odour of fire accelerant for barbeques and then the smell of dodgy sausages wafting through the hot air, or is the cook that’s cooking?