My cousin helped me find a job, so I had some money in my pocket. I was living in a bedsit and getting used to living in London. This new life in the big city was overwhelming. But I had come here to start again and ‘Smalltown Boy’ was rising up the pop charts.

With very little money I would go to a local gay bar. Being around other gay men I realised just how little experience I really had. One guy told me that I didn’t really even look properly gay. I took it to heart, had a haircut and bought some denims from Camden Market.

In Soho, I used to walk past a neon sign illuminating the words ‘Adult Store and Solarium’. In the window was a mannikin – a young man with a bare torso and perfect muscles staring out at me. It was a blank stare but behind him was a backdrop, a sandy beach. He was wearing only a pair of tight briefs that pulled his well formed crotch forward, willing me behind the glass to splash around with him in that imaginary blue surf.

One day I wanted to try the solarium. So I rang the shop’s bell and the door buzzed open. A rather supercilious queen looked up from the sales desk. After paying he pointed me towards to the basement, which meant that I had to make my way gingerly through rails of leatherwear, past shelves of magazines and videos, to the back wall of the shop, where the toys and accoutrements were hanging from hooks. I had never been in a sex shop. As I sauntered casually, trying not to seem prudish, my eyes widened.

At the bottom of the stairs, a man was head down sorting through piles of half-opened boxes. When I asked for directions, he looked up and pointed the large wobbling dildo he was holding in the direction of the solarium. Locking the door carefully, I stripped to my pants and lay down under the hot tubes, glimmering in the ultraviolet heat waves for ten sun soaked minutes. I imagined myself basking on the beach with the hot guy in the window. He was lying stretched out beside me, headphones on, toes twitching to the music on his Walkman. He sat up and rubbed suncream into my back as I flicked through a magazine, sipping an icy cocktail. Then the lamps went out. For a moment or two I kept my eyes tight shut.

Dressed, I walked back upstairs. On the top step I stubbed my toe and fell right into the shop. Picking myself up and pretending not to be flustered, I grasped at the first plastic box to hand. I dared not look at it.

The scalding heat of the sunlamps on my skin was now making me feel even more embarrassed. Especially under the sarcastic gaze of the sales guy who had been watching me the whole time. But it just didn’t seem right to walk out without browsing a bit longer. So I casually took in the selection of gimp masks and butt plugs, wondering how quickly I could leave. At the desk, I took out my wallet with an ordinary look, just like I was buying a daily paper. Looking me up and down, he raised one eyebrow. “Need poppers or lube for that love?” came the excruciating demand, waving a hand in the direction of the row of tubes and bottles behind him.

“No, plenty at home, cheers,” I lied. Everything in this shop seemed to be laughing at me.

At home, I examined my purchase. It looked a bit like a black rubber swimming cap with a tube attached. None the wiser, I had no idea what to do with it and left it on the table. Over the next few days, I picked it up and held it in different ways but still failed to see how this was to offer ‘hours of deeper pleasure’ as the slogan read on the packaging. Eventually, sick of looking at it and disappointed with my failure to find the allure of its hidden pleasures, I threw it in a drawer.

Sometime later an old friend came to stay. I got home one evening and he was looking pleased with himself, stirring a pot of pasta on the single working ring of the cooker. “I fixed up your bike today,” he announced. The bicycle in question had been languishing in the hallway for weeks with a broken chain and flat tyres. “I used that handy rubber patch in the drawer to fix the punctures,” he said smiling innocently, serving out the bolognaise into bowls, “but I just could not figure out what the little tube was for.”

Some months later I passed the shop and thought about spending another sunny afternoon with Mr Handsome in the window. But he had moved on. Christmas was coming and his successor was a boyish Santa wearing red sequinned mini shorts, a fake fur trim cape and a leather harness. I imagined the humiliation of trying one on and picked up my pace.

Reading what I have written about her, I think I make my adopted mother seem like a rather one dimensional character. I have tried hard to understand how she came to be the mean-spirited, ice queen because a less jagged edge was sometimes visible—deep down was a disreputable giggle, the glint of gentler moods. These were fleeting glimpses of a different woman, more relaxed, less caustic. I think when she became a devotee of Christian Science—that intellectually joyless interpretation of Christian doctrine—it played into her worst instincts and lent her haughty authoritarianism a dangerous religious fervour.

She certainly had it in for men. Having first witnessed her own father’s adultery, then been married to a philandering cavalry officer, she remarried a man who in later life she described as a moral bankrupt. At least she would shape her adopted sons into the men she wanted. Except that she had the maternal instinct of a harpy. And to her constant annoyance, I was not for shaping.

Judith had a favourite photograph album. One of the few fragments I salvaged after her death. As I sat there by the fire that night, the dry logs spitting out sparks, I leafed through the pictures, piecing together her life before.

I sneezed as the dust puffs up from opening the first page. Like an ancient manuscript, abandoned for years. The images are sepia and black and white with scrawled descriptions and dates below. The first photograph is professionally taken. A large ballroom with thrones at the end. Enormous chandeliers and swag curtains. She had been a debutante, after the privations of war ended, presented to King George at a ball. These glittering occasions were to mark coming of age, introducing young women to society—presenting them as fitting wives for the young beaus of the landed gentry.

On one side of the room there is a sea of girls, hardly more than teenagers in taffeta and silk, tiaras in their hair, looking as innocent as novice nuns. On the other the young men, hopeful in evening wear.

In the next photograph, the young debutantes are all gathered on a sweeping staircase, looking in the same direction, perched like synchronised flamingos on a lake. I can see her in the middle of this flamboyance, nineteen—observing cooly.

Judith grew up in India where her father was a government minister for the Raj. It was quite the life of privilege. Photographs of tiger hunts with Maharajas and grand military parades. She is peering out from a sunhat in exotic locations, turbaned servants attending a sumptuous picnic. There are very few with her parents and two brothers. Just one family portrait. She is held by her ayah who is cross-legged on the ground below a rattan chair in which my grandmother sits—my grandfather and two uncles standing behind her.

She always talked fondly of the Indian ayah who cared for her as a child. There was one story she told me many times. “In the heat of summer, we would all move from Fort Sandeman where we lived, up to the Hill Stations at Simla.” she recounted, assuming I would know where any of these places were. As the weather cooled again, they would head back to the plains below. One year, she was sent home early to prepare for returning to school before the monsoon started.

“That night before taking the train to Bombay, we stopped on the way in Quetta, where my father had an official residence. I was lying in bed when the most terrifying noise woke me and the whole house began to shake. Plaster was falling from the ceilings and my ayah picked me up and threw me under the bed. A great crystal lamp fell from the ceiling in the hallway and everything was smashed to pieces.” Time stood still as she talked. And then she said, quite matter of factly, “Of course many died. The whole city was completely destroyed. The sky filled with flames and all we could hear was the screams of the dying.”

I lift the delicate paper covering the next page. Here are some tiny snapshots of the building’s devastation. A young girl, in a flawless white dress standing in a garden, surrounded by ruins.

At some point pictures appear of the dashing Johnnie. He must have seemed like the perfect match. A young officer mounted on a black stallion in the outrageously embellished uniform of the Household Cavalry—gleaming breastplate, blue cloak, sword, white breeches, red plumed helmet, thigh length cavalry boots.

She embarked on the life of an officer’s wife. Photographs show skiing in Zermatt, fox-hunting and cocktail parties in white gloves. They honeymooned in Africa before being posted on tours of duty. In the early 1950s this was all peacekeeping - Germany, Palestine and Cyprus. Pictures of him in uniform show a handsome but inscrutable and slightly cross looking man. She looks immaculate. Even then her smile seems more like wincing. A little too forced.

They had been posted to Cyprus, at the time under British protection. There she discovered he was having an affair. Even back then, Judith was known for her icy turn. Carefree laughter could turn to a wintry chill without warning. He was unprepared for her revenge, which she enjoyed recounting. “I got my own back darling,” she crowed once. “We were on the troopship returning home, somewhere in the middle of the Mediterranean. So I had a song played on the ship’s radio as a dedication to Johnnie from his recent amour.” This seems to have set the tone for their marriage which unsurprisingly didn’t last.

But that’s another story.

November 1965. By the time I was collected, I had already experienced three mothers. Birth, foster and adopted. I came to the last, a ten weeks old parcel. 

It seems, for a while, I turned away from, not towards them. For whatever reasons, I was not yet the enthusiastically noisy communicator. So these new parents were tentative and noncommittal. I found letters from the time. They assumed I was deaf. They wrote back and forth to the private adoption agency asking them to provide medical evidence that I was not damaged goods. I can hear the surging fury in the clipped military tones of my father, like an officer on parade hissing commands. And my mother’s compassionless insistence that she had not expected to be so disappointed. It took almost a year.

I was kept on ice. 

They had already adopted a baby two years before I came along who had embraced them wholeheartedly. A few weeks after I came along, things were different. Judith confided in my aunt that she felt no bond. But she kept me. In that good old British upper class wartime spirit of never being seen to give up. I suppose she could not bear to have failed. 

My aunt recounted to me years later that she would frequently find me abandoned somewhere in the house. “Darling, you were always on the alert for passing attention.” When anyone approached my pram, “Your face lit up and you would shriek with laughter, beaming with a look of amazement,” she said. “As if this was the first human you had ever seen. You were always flirting with the world.” 

Poor Judith took no delight in that. It was a personal slight that I had not clung to her from the outset.

But I kept flirting.

My heart stopped a few beats as I opened the letter from social services. After reading a couple of lines it restarted. Relief. Uncertainty. Excitement. The court had granted me access to my adoption papers. This comprised my original birth certificate and a set of notes taken during an interview with my birth mother a few weeks after she had given me away.

Immediately, two discoveries mattered most. First, she was a Baroness. Married to a man with an exotic Prussian sounding name. Registered as father of the child.

Within seconds, my misguided youthful arrogance conspired at the possibilities. Does this mean that I am a Baron? Naturally I would have to change my lifestyle – smoke Sobrani cocktails and possibly walk with silver mounted cane.

The second discovery was my mother’s family. Years growing up in Scotland being told I was English. It turns out that I was properly Scottish.

Dundas of Dundas. Of that Ilk.

Now I could claim my true origins, I would have to prepare accordingly – smarten up my act, make appointments with tailors and kiltmakers.

Dundas Castle is a sprawling stately home outside Edinburgh overlooking the Firth of Forth. I pictured myself driving out there and announcing myself as a lost scion of the family.

Determined to keep my new found grandeur a secret, later that night in the pub after a few pints, I told anyone who would listen.

Slightly hungover, the following day I made my way to the library and requested a copy of the Almanach de Gotha, a prestigious genealogy of European nobility – rather like Burke’s Peerage. Sitting down at the long polished tables with inlaid leather, I airily leafed through the pages. Then there it was, plain as day – the Baron, his wife and their issue of three children. All born before me.

The question swimming around in my muddled head: Why didn’t they keep me?

Of course it turned out that in fact, I was not, nor ever would be a Prussian Baron or indeed any other form of aristocracy. The Dundases were what was known among Lowland families as Belted Earls – and my grandfather had been chief. But he had not covered himself in glory. As an unrepentant fascist – one of Sir Oswald Mosley’s henchmen – he had to slip out of the country before the war began or risk imprisonment. He never returned and later remarried. The clan chief title passed out of Britain to a son through his second marriage.

Before returning the book to the librarian, I committed a shameful act of vandalism. Writing in fountain pen on the page underneath my siblings, I inscribed my name. Philip. And the year of my birth. 1965.

As a child, on a fleeting summer day, skinny-dipping was unsurpassed pleasure. The smell of crushed grass on the riverbank, the hum of darting insects and the splosh and drip of water. Dream days, when the cold silk of the river and the warmth of the sun renders us back to innocence.

What this scenario of childhood hours omits is the rather less halcyon reality. As the years passed I forgot how I had inevitably trodden my plimsolled feet through the crust of slick green cowpats walking through the field, how the brambles lacerated my legs and the nettles stung me as I struggled through the undergrowth to the muddy fringes of the river. And rather than emerging from the water like a naked glistening elf, I squelched out, mud-smeared and scratched, underpants saggy and wet, looking like a drowned rat.

Which was not the rat I wanted to be.

Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in the Willows has sat on my bookshelves as far back as I can remember. I still read it regularly as I did then. The bliss of sylvan childhood is nowhere more effortlessly evoked.

I was consoled by its portrayal of Mole’s adoring friendship with Ratty. It set alight in my imagination a longing for the happy domesticity of their lives. Two chaps drifting on the languid river, setting up home together, sharing everything. If ever Mole was distressed or unhappy, Ratty’s spirits would be there to brighten the mood. And in the background there was the deep avuncular affection the rather more serious Badger had for his young friends.

The book was given to me by Granny Jean. I never knew her. She was the mother of Johnnie – my first adopted father. A swashbuckling widow and great socialite – she had run off with a US army colonel from Vermont with a passion for fox-hunting. There is a photograph of me with her in a London park. I am two or three years old, standing at her feet gazing up at this wonderfully glamorous woman.

Granny Jean had taken Mummy under her wing, introducing her to a racy set around Knightsbridge. Gays aplenty, I later discovered. Apparently the two women were quite the life and soul of the party.

Years later, I had returned to the farmhouse to box up books to take to a new flat. A letter fell out of my copy of Wind in the Willows. It was from a beautiful boy with blond curls. Mummy found it on the floor. Like the story of the riverbank, it was sweet and harmless – full of ardent love.

She on the other hand was blistering with damnation. Brandishing the letter, “You must give up this life of squalid sodomy,” she screamed. “We will pray together, for you to overcome this.” I was certainly not in the mood to submit to her religious fervour. And moreover, I was rather abashed at how well informed she was – clearly far more so than I at that early stage in my life as a homosexual. I was dreaming of Brideshead Revisited and Maurice. Sodomy was still a far off diversion.

Once the boxes were packed into my car, it was all quickly brushed under the kitchen table – on top of which tea and buttered crumpets were politely served. Like all unpalatable incidents in my family, it was never mentioned again. But whenever I reach for the green cloth bound edition of my favourite book, I think of my bejewelled grandmother and the handsome boy I had loved.

I used to read to my husband in bed when we first met. I would do all the voices. I have always identified with Mole. He thinks I am more like Toad. Poop Poop!

Of all the books we were made to read as children, I could never understand why we were supposed to think so highly of Lord of the Flies. Watching the new BBC production reminded me how bullying was fetishised at school.

At the village school there was a boy whose father had died in a motorcycle crash. The boy was a bully. He had come from a special school. We all knew that they were for bad boys. I saw an easy opportunity to get my own back. On the school bus, I said he should go back there now his dad was dead.

There was silence. I looked out of the window.

The brakes squealed and the engine roared as the bus raced round the corners of the country lanes. What I said was horrible, I knew that. I wanted to jump off the bus and run away over the fields in shame.

I was reported to the headmaster. He was a decent man. But he said, “I have to set an example, though I am reluctant.” I could hear the cane swish before it hit me. I knotted the tears and the

unfairness up inside me. It was the first time.

Jack punches Piggy for shame of letting the beacon fire go out. Aged twelve, reading this book, the injustice of it stung me. I could never get much further than that.

At my new school, bullying was an everyday thing. Almost like it was part of the timetable. There was one boy in my class who kept telling me I was a poof. I did not know what it meant, only that it wasn’t a good thing. All the other boys laughed and chanted with him – poof poof poof at me. Once a master came in and saw. I thought he might defend me. He looked for a moment, and turned to walk towards his desk, calling us to order.

The bully had two friends. They got me in the corner of the school yard outside the bogs and held me down, gobbing all over my face and blazer. Even in my mouth when I cried for them to stop.

One day just before class, he approached my desk. Something red filled me up. My fists clenched so hard. I don’t really know what happened, but I ran at him. He wasn’t expecting it. I saw the surprise on his face and felt the bulk of him at the same time. My body crashed into him. Skinny but with enough force. As we both fell, he hit his head on the metal leg of the desk.

There was blood.

I thought they would cheer. But everyone went quiet and looked at me.

I meant to hurt him, I think. But it scared me. For a while he didn’t come near.

A few weeks later, we were on a cross country run, around the playing fields. They must have planned it. I was straggling. The games master who normally kept shouting at us at the back wasn’t there. Out of nowhere, they pounced on me, pushed me face down and silently gave me a kicking. Back in the changing rooms, I washed the blood and mud from my mouth.

That would teach me to fight back.

Back home in the holidays, the gamekeeper took me into one of the old sheds on the farm to teach me how to throw punches. I couldn’t hit him like he showed me. It was the same as when he wanted me to break a rabbit’s neck. The rabbit wasn’t properly dead. He handed it to me. “Finish it off, son.”

But I couldn’t. The feeling of its legs kicking for life. The terror in its eyes. It made me sick. I am not strong. But I could not break something weaker than me.

He gave up when he saw I wasn’t tough like that. But he said something I have never forgotten. At first, I thought it was just a joke.

“You’ve got to try to be the lead husky, son,” he told me. “Or the view is the same all the way.”

It has taken me a lifetime to work out what he meant.

I am slightly eccentric when it comes to tea. Black tea. Nothing green or fruity. No abominable blends or floral travesties. Just black tea. I drink a lot of it – more than is probably reasonable. But not in a British I’d better stick the kettle on sort of way. I’m not especially interested in providing tea for other people, and it doesn’t heal my moods or see me through catastrophe. Red wine does that job.

Tea, for me, is routine. A kind of liquid meditation – though not in any cultural or spiritual sense. I’m not offering anything to the gods or contemplating enlightenment. Drinking tea is simply a necessary indulgence, performed at only two possible times of day.

Despite reading many books about tea, I can claim little expertise. No need for a history lesson here. Except to say that, like most good things British, tea production was robbed from elsewhere. It was once a closely guarded secret in China; the production kept out of sight from foreigners. But eventually a fellow Scot whipped a few plants and documented the process disguised as a mandarin. The Empire did the rest.

The grading of tea is complex. My favourites, Darjeeling and Assam, have classifications from Orange Pekoe – which has nothing to do with oranges – to Super Fine Tippy Golden Flowery Orange Pekoe. This nomenclature is supposed to describe the size of leaves and what happens to them after they are picked. But as with many things in life, I am still none the wiser.

I know what I like. Most mornings begin with Darjeeling. A hint of green still on the long, curled black leaf, which gives it a fresh, quenchable flavour. Just a pinch between the thumb and forefinger, no more. Enough to turn the boiling water to the palest hint of honey. Gnat’s pee, we used to call it. Always loose leaves. Teabags have no place except in emergency or when Builder’s Tea is required. But this does not fit the bill here. My mornings require a deluge of tea. Which means a teapot, capacious and extravagantly decorated.

Some days demand a maltier brew. Inspiration requires Ceylon tea. Stronger and more oomph. My current favourite is from the Kenilworth Estate, high in the Sri Lankan highlands. There are echoes in the name — the Earl of Leicester, Sir Walter Scott — that lend it a romantic quality. And once it’s in the cup, it is a baptism of heavenly tannins which leaves a slightly bitter mouthfeel.

Late afternoons provide another window during which tea is the right beverage. The fermented complexity of Lapsang Souchong or Keemun intoxicate my senses with their smoky aromas. In a perfect world this would always be accompanied by a slab of fruitcake. But the march of time against the inevitable impact of gravity does not allow me such luxuries, so I must make do with the liquid elixir itself. This is the settling of the day. A mark of time passed. Which does not always signify achievement. It just means tea now.

As a child, the first sound I heard every morning was the dry squeal of the stove lid being lifted, followed by the heavy cast-iron kettle crashing down onto its hot plate. Mummy was up. She drank strong tea with milk. Her own mixture of China and Indian leaf. An enormous cup was taken in the kitchen, gathering her thoughts. The second was brought upstairs while she made ready for the day. The first betrayal of age was a trembling hand, which set the bone china rattling against its own delicate strength.

Graham’s day always started later than his spouse’s — another habit I have inherited. He ate breakfast alone, and his tea was altogether different. Tightly rolled balls of Assam, brewed to boiling point in a metal teapot on the stove, then left to stew. Dark, black, and dry, to accompany vintage marmalade on oatcakes. No butter or milk to taint his ascetic palate. Just the thing to set him off on a day of serious rumination.

Exploring an old cottage on the farm, I came across a wind-up gramophone and a stash of records from the 1940s. Graham had always been faddish in a Toad-ish sort of way. Among the mothballed remnants of his life there had been alpinism, chemistry, Highland dancing, photography, accordion playing, hunting to hounds, painting — always in abundance. Always the best of everything. The record collection was extensive.

I hauled the gramophone back to the house. Unusually, Mummy was excited by my find. There was no reprimand for being where I shouldn’t have. Soon I had the old thing turning, and the music seemed to have a curious effect, like a draught of forgetfulness, spinning her back to her younger self.

When the sounds of his past reached him, Daddy left what he was doing and joined us. The kitchen table was pushed back. They began to dance — a big band number. I twirled on the sidelines, carried by these new sounds. Later Mummy taught me to waltz with my feet on hers. Step two three four, side two three four.

My favourite of all the records was Jack Buchanan, a

svelte and handsome Scotsman – a matinee idol who eased his way on to the silver screen speaking with as much mid-Atlantic Englishness as Noel Coward himself. The song was called Everything Stops for Tea. I soon knew it by heart.

To this day, as the afternoon wanes and I stand up from my desk, the tune pops into my head. And I still sing aloud.

Now I know just why Franz Schubert didn’t finish his Unfinished Symphony.

He might have written more but the clock struck four.

Everything stops for tea

.

My novel ‘Daniel at Sea’ is a fiction that draws on ideas sheltered for many years. At its heart is a loss I experienced in my own life. Until now, I have avoided writing a memoir. Forging a narrative from the truth is harder. It is an uncertain, tentative process. Like a photographer capturing a few fleeting seconds–not the complete picture, just some indelible inkspots.

I can see eyebrows arching. What have I achieved to merit such an endeavour? I have not circumnavigated the world single-handed, fought wars or scaled icebergs. But I have survived. And along the way, I have been a beachcomber. It is a story of flotsam and jetsam, gathered up. Unruly memories, misplaced and rebellious. Writing today, in mid-life, my nascent memoir holds some of them up to the daylight.

I have always been reluctant to turn back before now. My next move would be to write another novel. Hone the craft. Develop the muscles. But then at the back of my mind is this old house, boarded up and shuttered. The orphanage of unwanted ideas. Half-written, uncared for fragments grasping for attention. During the last decade, I have confronted buried trauma. Years seeking justice for childhood abuse. As a writer, my instinct was to escape into fiction. Use it all as material. But that would not have been honest. Not what I really wanted. Circumstance had drawn me back into the details of those things: the accidents of fate, the silences and lost memories. So rather than walking on as usual, I lingered.

I have boxes of half-full notebooks. Every time I move home, I grant myself leave to spend a bit of time with them, seeking inspiration. Perhaps in my youth I had been brilliant after all. Something that will launch me now into a career-defining project.

In truth, they contain mostly inconsequential ramblings. I can see it now. Notes written on the deck of an Aegean ferry. Hoping for genius to descend. A direct arrow from the muse. But my mercurial attention span was always easily distracted. Instead, a jug of retsina and an incomplete poem later, I would probably have been chatting up a handsome boy.

These records do reveal something important. Which is probably why I have never properly confronted what is in them. I never kept a journal. In many cases I am guessing when they were written and what was going on in my life. They suggest a mind at odds with itself, constantly seeking order. In that sense, they can feel like an admonishment.

Reading back like this, I always seem to have been on the brink of renewal or transformation. Writing was what I returned to. And yet despite that, its disciplines eluded me. No doubt I was able to describe the scent of orange blossom in Seville or the sweeping turns of the Irrawaddy, but I did not yet know how to connect those experiences. I went round the long way through academia, journalism and broadcasting. There were unfinished manuscripts, plays and poems. Each a narrative of a particular time. Nothing entire or wholly reliable. I notice that the echoes do not always resonate neatly. Can memoir ever be more than glimpses of the truth?

As I am rifling through a box, the slightest fold of paper falls out of a pocket book. I can tell immediately it has been torn from a Filofax. Written on it are four words: come back to me. In a moment I am with him again. We are in the back of a car, speeding to an airport somewhere. Next I find my diaries from South America. A life-changing adventure, almost a quarter of a century ago. Not all these are a search for meaning. Many cannot be made sense of. They are all flares of time–unconnected fragments of my history.

I take the scrapbook of my life and set it in the window of an empty shop on a busy street. Most passing by are too busy to notice. But there is an old man taking each ponderous step as the people rush onwards. When he reaches the window, he stops and gazes in.

I am not sure how they knew him. They often took in strays—loners from church usually or one of my father’s students. Invite them for a meal. Someone they felt sorry for. Or lord it over more like. He was older than me. Early twenties. Did not seem the churchy type. He had freckles and sandy blonde hair. On his forearms too, I noticed, when he took off his jacket. It was the usual boring Sunday meal. My parents droning on. He had a stammer. So though he smiled, he was quite taciturn. I learned that word recently. From Jane Eyre. Mr Rochester was moody and taciturn. There was a picture of him on the cover of the book. He was on a horse wearing a top hat. I imagined him lifting me up onto his saddle. Jane Eyre said he was like a fettered beast.

I, however, was not taciturn. Whenever there was a new person, I wanted to talk to them. In case they might like me. It was easier with people who were older. Though it was always a risk if my mother was there. “Who asked you to pipe up?” That’s what she would say. “No-one is interested in what you have to say. The grown-ups are talking. Don’t interrupt. And stop drawing attention to yourself. Blah blah blah.” Diminishing me was one of her favourite things. Especially in front of someone else, someone new. Do her best to make me look stupid. I would go bright red of course. Absolutely cringing inside. Hot tears ready to pour out. But I never let that happen. I tried never to give anyone the satisfaction of seeing me actually cry. Like school, with the other boys. Anyway, I was used to it. Ridicule.

He looked kind. And handsome. I felt bad for his stammer. I knew that she would find the conversational messiness of this deeply inconvenient. She judged disability a person’s own responsibility. I took my chance and asked him if he enjoyed reading. He smiled, chewing slowly, waiting to finish his mouthful. But before he could answer, she laughed. “Oh Philip, for goodness sake, do stop interrupting and clear the plates for pudding.” She gave me that sort of haughty look, shaking her head and rolling her eyes. She turned to him for approval, hoping to coerce him. That was what she did. Forced other people to be complicit in making me small. I was fair game. It was to keep me in my place. But he did not assent and glanced away.

Meanwhile my father was on his usual loop, ignoring everyone else, talking about anything from his time in the second world war to some random philosophical treatise he was reading, which none of us understood. Except I suppose this guy, his student. He could probably understand. Which means he was impossibly trying to field three people talking at him at the same time. And with a speech impediment. Anyway, eventually he made up his mind. By which time my mother was pulling an apple crumble out of the oven and not paying attention. As I was clearing his plate he turned away from my father. I felt his chest lean in against my arm. He looked right into my eyes and said quickly without hesitation.

“D.H. Lawrence.” Like he’d been saving it up for ages.

“Oh!” I said, surprised. Delighted that he had persevered with me. But I know he has chosen the wrong person. This means he won’t be invited back. Though I doubt he would come anyway. Most people didn’t. Come back, that is. “There is a whole row of his books upstairs. Which one are you reading?” I could picture the musty orange paperbacks with broken spines. I had flicked through them but they seemed dense for a fourteen year old. As he was busy trying to get the next words out, my mother interrupted him. He was too slow for her.

“Oh, those are mine. I read all of his work when I was young. The novels can be over-written and tedious I find and his poetry rather overrated.” That was it. She couldn’t bear the idea of me winning a conversational victory, however small. So she just killed it. No chance of just waiting for him to finish, while she spooned out steaming pudding on to the plates. For the rest of the meal, she just filled in for him. Which was comical because she really had no idea what he was going to say. He stole the odd glance at me. Almost a smile. So I liked him. I could tell there was something the same about us. I felt a bit safer with him there.

After lunch, she was done with their guest. He had not shown enough deference. And so after he and my father had discussed an academic project, it was suggested that I take him for a walk. Later they would drive him to catch a bus back to the city. Fine by me. I was used to passing the afternoons on my own. I would enjoy a companion. And I could find my way up the hill with my eyes closed. There was no danger of getting lost. I might even show him my secret place. He had a faint limp and so trudged quite slowly while I dawdled alongside him chattering incessantly, pointing to things in the hedgerows or cupping my ear to familiar birdsong. There was something a little wounded about him. I was sad that I couldn’t talk about D.H Lawrence. I told him all about Jane Eyre and how she had been betrayed by Mr Rochester but that even when she was miles away something called her back to him. And that by then he was blind and had lost everything. He seemed to listen intently and then said. “Y-y-y-ou l-l-l-love b-b-b-ooks then?”

‘Yes I do. They are like my friends.” I replied quickly. “I will read some D.H. Lawrence too.” Giving the D and the H serious emphasis. “I promise.” I liked the sound of a writer with two initials.

By the time we got up the hill, I could see he was tired. “I have a special place just up here. Somewhere that I go. It’s a secret.” I said, hoping he would not dismiss my enthusiasm as too childish. His face lit up cheerfully. “We have to climb a bit. Up there.” I pointed to where a Rowan tree clung to a cleft in the rocks. “We climb past the tree trunk and onto a ledge where the stream runs down over the rocks and makes a small pool. Sometimes I jump in when the weather is warm. I can go first. It’s easy. You follow me.” It didn’t take us long. I put my hand out to him at the last bit. He took it, though it must have seemed a bit stupid. Me offering to lift him. There was a branch. I was used to it taking my weight. He reached for it. I heard it snap. He fell. Not very far but there was a thud. And some scraping. I peered over the ledge. He was fine. I scrambled back down. A tear in his corduroy trousers. His hand was cut a bit. It was my fault. I could feel my eyes filling. “I’m so sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean for you to get hurt.”

“I-I-I-I’m f-f-f-fine,” he said, brushing the mud from his trousers. That smile. He could see I was upset. “D-d-d-don’t worry. We-we-we w-w-w-on’t tell your mother. Alright.” Something about that. He knew. I could not hold back and the tears came. He put his hand out and drew me to him. We sat there together under the Rowan tree, saying nothing. He smelled of coal tar soap. Me in his arms. Until it was time to go.

He never did come back.

And I didn’t remember his name.

Photo by Kirk Thornton on Unsplash

I am drifting in and out of sleep. Whippoorwills fill the September night air with their eerie call in the forest below. The tree crickets seem to be getting louder. I don’t know why there are frogs so far from water but they too add their raucous call to the silent darkness. My sleeping pad has definitely deflated but I can’t summon the energy to get up and fix it. Also, I am a little bit afraid. Not frightened exactly. Just uncertain of my surroundings. I have been like this most of the night, falling in and out of a waking sleep.

There is a crash in the undergrowth. Branches crack and leaves crunch. There is something big out there beyond the shelter. I turn on my head torch, alert and fully awake now. For minutes I sit upright waiting, hardly breathing. But nothing comes charging out of the laurels. Maybe it is a widowmaker, the name hikers give to broken, rotten or lightning struck branches that hang precariously and suddenly fall from damaged trees. It is always worth checking before you pitch a tent.

This is Western Mountain Shelter where I have settled down for the night, perched over the valley from Bear Mountain. This is my first overnight outdoors in America. I am spending a few days exploring the wilderness. The experience is different in so many ways from hiking long distances in Europe, not least because in the Pyrenees and the Alps there are always huts with food and warmth at night.

Another big difference. Here there are bears. They are shy creatures, but can’t resist the temptations of human food. Arriving after a long day’s walk, I checked the app used by Appalachian Trail thru-hikers. Bears have been recorded close by. And recently. Someone also notes that they resisted a rattlesnake trying to snuggle into their sleeping bag. Unusually for me, I find myself getting into a slight panic. It stirs a sense of my aloneness out here. What would I actually do? I wonder if I have been reckless.

So I talk myself down. It is only natural to be nervous the first time round. Bear sightings are rare. I will use a cable far away from the shelter to hang my supplies out of reach. When it comes to deadly snakes, I am not sure I am ready for that nocturnal encounter. Would I be better in my tent? But the view from the open shelter is spectacular.

I continue in this state of half sleep. It is a long stretch. You might think that the first rays of dawn would have had me springing into action. But just the knowledge that the night stalking predators are no longer a threat, sends me finally into a deep sleep. When I wake, the sun is up and a woodpecker is busy in the tree above me. A bowl of hot oats and steaming black tea served under the trees revives my enthusiasm as I plot the day’s route before packing up my belongings and set off.

The terrain is very different from what I am used to. The state park is part of a green tunnel, where dense trees create a continuous overhead canopy, so that I walk for most of the day without getting a sense of the distance I am covering. It is liberating and this is how I have always liked to go, with a sense of direction, knowing where I want to end up, but not always how I will get there. It is also disorienting. In unfamiliar terrain, I wonder, is this the right way?

Then just as quickly this mood breaks when the endlessly undulating pathway breaks out on to the hot summit and there is a rush of free air in my lungs. Here are incredible vistas of rolling deciduous forest landscape in all directions. Then when the trail plunges down deep into mossy, prehistoric glades, I am grateful for the cool, damp air again. Here the light is dappled–I feel imbued with a sense of the sublime. These are places where the ancestors sleep. The path goes on for hours. I decide to change route, walking longer into the afternoon to reach a shelter next to a lake.

When I arrive, there is ample fuel to collect from the surrounding woodland as the sun drops and the chill of night comes in. It is a good feeling to drop my heavy pack and allow real physical tiredness to flow over me. I sit before the fire, contemplating the bliss of walking alone and free in the wilderness. Nan Shepherd–a famous solitary walker–comes to mind. She talks about walking all day and seeing no-one: “Man might be a thousand miles away.” Solitude as she describes it in her book The Living Mountain–a book which should be on every serious walker’s shelf–is a process of transcendence. In Scotland when I walk, I feel the land so intimately, my body almost becomes part of my surroundings. But this is an unfamiliar environment, where the birdsong rings differently in the air, where forests and creeks–though they look the same–unfold with newness. It is not an unpleasant feeling. Just one that demands a higher state of focus. I am not yet attuned to its call. As I clamber into my sleeping bag, sleep comes with a strong force.

Just being immersed in the woods without the distractions of conversation and free to choose my own direction is replenishing. My efforts are not focused towards an end point but observing the way there. It has always been my instinct, learning to listen to the mountain, as Shepherd writes. For me the point has never been about ascending the greatest heights. But about the experience itself. Even if the destination changes, the walk is never lost. And how lucky to discover a new pleasure–walking quietly with vigour by day and sleeping under the stars by night.

This week, the cardboard boxes that have been holding my books for the last year, emerged from storage. As I stripped back the tape, my heart raced and eyes widened to remember so many old friends. I have had to cull a huge number but the stalwarts—and some new acquaintances—have come for the ride. Along with the literary heroes and favourite childhood stories came my cookery books. The aroma of many kitchens past lingering across their pages. Smudges and oily stains marking the favourites as my fingers eagerly search through the memories held within.

Cooking began with my mother, from whom I acquired an instinct for ingredients, the way others learn music. Watching her in the kitchen fascinated me. And it was a place where we seemed to hold truce. She devoured the work of Elizabeth David, the food writer who coaxed post-war Britain out of pies-and-pudding into the fresh Mediterranean flavours of France and Italy. Move over hot-pot and spotted dick and welcome poulet estragon and mousse au chocolat. Olive oil and salty anchovies appeared like contraband treasures. Pasta and risotto–once exotic and mildly alarming to tweedy county folk raised on nursery food–appeared on menus.

Through David and other writers who had ventured across the English Channel, British cooking slowly transformed. My mother somehow coerced my father’s devotion to gamey roasts and heavy puddings to include some more continental tastes. Salad was no longer hunks of cheese and ham served with slices of cucumber and tomato but bowls of herbs and tender green leaves dressed with the silkiest dressings and served with ripe cheeses, rinds wafting with sour wine. Soups reached beyond heavy broths to clarified bouillons. We had caramelised tartes and crisp quiches with flouncy pastries that flaked with foreign elegance, richly fragrant daubes cooked for hours would emerge steaming from the old stove. And ragu bolognese served with slippery spaghetti slurped up noisily—accompanied by much giggling—through the gap in my front teeth. Thanks to this culinary pioneering, suppers were no longer always served in rigid courses, but placed at the centre of the table to be reached for, shared, maybe dipped with a baguette bought from the French bakery on a visit to the city.

When she was in the mood to cook, I would be despatched by my mother to the kitchen garden with instructions to gather what she needed for that day. Surrounded by orchards of apples, pears and plums, it was a square half acre of bounty, staked and barricaded against rabbits, hare and deer. Beneath the nets, neat lines of vegetables were supported with wires, canes and clay pots; as the weather warmed there were peas and beans clambering their way along hazel twigs, neat rows of spinach, potatoes and onions, and blousy lettuces on long raised beds under glass cloches. When these had all but died out, winter brought cabbages, broccoli and Brussels sprouts. A far less joyful time. I would reluctantly venture to the wasteland, my boots encrusted with clods of heavy mud, fingertips and earlobes freezing in the hoar frost. After I sought sanctuary in the heated greenhouses, where the rubbery sweetness of the fig trees still lingered but here there was nothing to scavenge for a small, greedy boy. The apple store held the last scent of autumn, where the fruit sat in rows on wooden palates, gazing out like the rosy faces of children. Beneath beetroots and carrots slumbered in sandboxes. But these pleasures dwindled by midwinter as the stink of rot began to spread among the apples.

In contrast, summer really was a world of temptation: thick hedges of raspberry canes, ruby strawberries nestling on a bed of straw, gooseberry and currant bushes heavy with fruit. It was all perfectly ordered. Box hedging marked the pathways and sweet peas and cornflowers snaked the boundaries between the beds. My juice stained hands ran through the fragrant herbs that thrust themselves swaying on to the pathways; parsley, tarragon, marjoram, chives, chervil and everywhere mint in all of its many guises.

That early love of ingredients never left me. It still shapes the way I cook, ruled by instinct and imagination. I’ve always believed that confident cooks share two things— they know their kitchens, and they know their ingredients. When you understand what you’re holding in your hands and know what to do with it, you don’t have to follow instructions. You respond to what you have. You trust your instincts. I suppose, it is more or less how I have lived my life too.

My mother cooked whatever was seasonal, or whatever irresistible produce the local grocer could provide. Her pantry was full of ingredients she loved. I still shop and cook the same way. What’s fresh, what’s interesting, what sparks something in my imagination—that’s what goes in the basket. I am a compulsive collector of spices, ferments, and exotic condiments. Filling every corner with surprises that reveal themselves. My fridge is a treasure trove. Life wouldn’t be complete without a fine vintage marmalade or some pickled walnuts winking down from the kitchen shelf. You’ll have your own favourite titbits. If you can imagine yourself unscrewing a lid and poking a finger in to fish out a mouthful of something mouth-watering, then make sure it’s hiding somewhere. These are what tell the story of your cooking and build your love of the kitchen. For a cook, as Elizabeth David wrote, “everyday holds the possibility of a miracle.”

Today I’m making something inspired by spices bought from a spice shop in the East Village—a mesmerising emporium with a bewildering array of jars and dried treasures. These shops are irresistible to me. Like a magician’s cave or an alchemist’s laboratory, they seem to be where the very fumes of life are born. My dish is a Moroccan-leaning stew of beef cheeks with orange zest, ras el hanout, coriander, black limes, juniper berries, and pink peppercorns. Left in the oven for many hours at a low heat, it will be ready tomorrow to accompany a jewelled couscous–made at the last minute–of pomegranate seeds, rose petals, coriander leaves, and pine nuts.

After that, all you need is a table, a few friends, laughter and good conversation.

The best cooking remains the simplest.

The most important ingredient is love.

I am sitting at my kitchen table in London, a map of the Brecon Beacons spread before me. Its paper smells of fresh print. On the stove, a pan of fennel and prawn risotto bubbles gently, the scent of aniseed curling into the air. Around me, wooden wine boxes are stacked high with the remnants of another life—cutlery, dishes, plates, glasses, pestles and mortars from my restaurant.

Today I signed the lease away to a younger chef, full of ideas and nerve and the kind of energy I once thought would last forever. I wish him well. I knew it was time to let go. Moving to Covent Garden had been a mistake, but my pride fought to keep that dream alive. Beneath the pride though, was disappointment and fatigue. The sensual, instinctive joy I once felt cooking in our wonderful garage restaurant—the pleasure of shopping each morning in the markets for our no-choice, daily-changing menu—had given way to spreadsheets, tax returns, and invoices. I was no longer creating; I was managing. The restaurant had had lost its meaning for me.

Months before it ended, old ghosts had begun to stir—memories I had kept buried for decades, the familiar whisper speaking of failure. With the exhaustion came despair and an increasing sense of alienation. I was fifty, and it felt as though that old story was closing in on me again. I had a good enough life. Perhaps it was time.

After the doctor prescribed antidepressants, I was able to navigate these feelings better. The medication steadied me, but it also blurred the edges, separating me from myself. Don’t get me wrong—it helped. Sometimes there were moments of elation. Like taking a running slide down a long corridor of polished wood. My mind cleared. Soon enough, the negative thoughts dispersed. I was breathing clear air again. But it was like an oxygen mask, not a mountaintop. I knew that to properly heal, I needed something more elemental. A way to listen from within.

So I threw some gear into a pack and took the train to Wales. I went to walk in the mountains there. Walking is my meditation. The mountains ask nothing from me. Among them I can listen and see more clearly.

I camped in a stand of birch trees beside a hidden river deep in the valley below the summit of Pen-y-Fan. The air smelled of wet bark and moss. I built a small circle of stones, lit a fire, and watched the smoke climb into the trees. When morning came, I jumped naked into the water. It was cold, catching my breath—but soothing too. I sank deep into the pool. The water closed over my head, and for just a moment, the world went perfectly still. Surfacing, my skin felt raw and clean. I lay on a flat rock to dry off in the September sun. The river gurgled around me like laughter, falling into the pool below. I lay there, feeling part of a world bigger than myself. Something that does not require willpower or judgement.

That night, as the embers of my little fire dwindled and the stars came out, I heard it—a whisper, soft as breath: You belong to us. You are part of the world. You are loved. It wasn’t a voice exactly, but something older, woven through the sound of water and wind. A breeze in the birch branches. Tears came before I could stop them. Years of shame and endless striving washed away, carried downstream. The river laughs—or maybe it was me. Ridiculous but alive.

Now, back home at the table, my husband looks up and asks quietly,
“So, what did you learn from your weekend in the woods?”

“That I need to listen to the right voices,” I say.

He reaches across the table and takes my hand.
“The man I love.” And smiles.

I have been quiet here lately. Mostly, I’ve been writing, keeping up with the daily word count for the memoir that’s been taking shape in my mind for years. I turned 60 a couple of weeks ago. There have been celebrations, laughter and wonderful dinners. Then there was the quiet weight of the milestone itself. Sixty. Somehow it lands you squarely in the centre of life. It’s a reckoning. I feel the spirit of a teenager in my bones, but it’s wrapped in the quiet wisdom of a man who’s lived. Nothing lofty, just simple experience. I have faltered and I have grown. There is a strange thrill in knowing that some of the lessons of the years behind you can actually guide the path ahead. I want to focus on what matters most now; the friendships, the adventures, the quiet victories.

Friendship has been on my mind. Since moving to New York just a few months ago, we have met some extraordinary people; warm, spontaneous, and genuinely present. Manhattan seems to encourage it: a chance encounter at a bookstore and suddenly you are having coffee with someone who, a few hours ago, was a stranger. But friendship isn’t just about hanging out; it’s also about trust. It’s knowing someone will hold your hand in the dark, be your steady companion, or hold the rope when you’re dangling in fear.

I didn’t have many friends when I was younger. School was hard. The way some boys made it clear I wasn’t welcome in their world. Bullies have a way of carving out your solitude for you. So I spent a lot of time alone, wandering the school grounds, finding corners where I did not have to watch my back. One afternoon, past a cluster of prefab sheds used for the outdoor clubs, I saw a teacher coiling a rope. Boys were carrying rucksacks, chattering quietly. “Mountaineering club,” he said when I asked, “You might want to come next week.”

I had always climbed. Walls, trees, rocks - anything vertical called to me. I remember a hill near the farm where I grew up in Scotland, a strange volcanic plug rising from soft lowlands. It was ancient, sacred even, once the stronghold of a forgotten tribe. I used to scramble over its sheer face in wellington boots, not a care in the world. Then one day, I saw two men I had only ever glimpsed in magazines standing by their car parked by the field - Chris Bonnington and Hamish MacInnes. I nearly fell backward. They were here, at my hill.

The climbing club felt like home immediately. We were a ragged bunch, not suitable for cadets, none of the prowess of athletes, just boys happy to test ourselves on the rock. The first outing was to a disused quarry. I remember the weight of the rope in my hands, the jingle of nuts and carabiners, like a workman with his tools. You start slowly: feeling the fibres of the rope, checking knots and sliding into the harness. Every piece of gear matters. It could save you. Climbing is meditation in motion. Like life, you need to go steady and slow. It is easy to get stuck at a point where you cannot find anywhere to protect yourself. There is a rule which is that you must always have three points of secure contact with the rock. Without two of your hands or feet holding well-judged positions, you are putting yourself and your partner at risk. One wrong handhold and gravity quickly reminds you of the mistake. The rock will not bend to your will.

That’s where I met Steve. He was bigger, steadier, someone who had my back before I even knew how to ask. We climbed together from day one. He taught me to focus and to trust. I remember leading a climb on some sea cliffs once, the tide curling around our feet. I was reckless, way too confident. Halfway up, a handhold slipped just out of reach, and panic squeezed my chest. “Just come down,” Steve shouted from below. His voice was calm and unwavering. Step by step, slowly I made it down. Then he led, and I followed after him. That day I learned that friendship isn’t spoken, something that comes from trust.

Not long ago, I climbed again for the first time in decades with Steve. Nervously tying on, checking my harness, and the tension in the rope. I looked at my old friend and grinned. “Climb when ready.” he said. Trust isn’t spoken, it’s earned, built in the spaces between breaths, in the fingers that grip the rock, in the eyes that meet yours when the world feels big.

My heart was beating pretty fast but my legs - still spidery - were sure. Climbing helped me to become a man. It shaped my body and stretched my limbs. More importantly, it shaped my understanding of loyalty, courage, and friendship. Steve was the first friend who truly had my back, and nearly fifty years later, he still does.

Now, at sixty, I carry that lesson forward. The quiet reliance on those who matter, the courage to face the unknown, and the understanding that friendship, trust, and loyalty are the true measures of a life well-lived.

I have changed the name of this substack publication to A Boy in the Kitchen - a room that has always been at the heart of my life, from the farmhouse where I grew up to the kitchens where I’ve cooked and learned and watched life happen since. Now in New York’s West Village, sitting at my kitchen table, this is where my stories, my reflections on life, and the beginnings of my memoir come together. And maybe even a dish or two.

A recent review in the New York Review of Books of a novel by John Tottenham called Service describes service workers as “distinguished…by the emotional and relational quality” of their job; the chief product of the service economy being “not a consumer good but a satisfied customer”. This at all costs is what restaurant owners in America require. Not necessarily, as we might expect, because they actually want us to be happy with their product when we leave but more that they are relying on us to pay the wages of those workers. Restaurants in New York, good, bad and indifferent are expensive. Way more expensive than you could be prepared for. And because the hospitality industry works so differently from anywhere else in the world, it is hard to get accustomed to paying these prices. The system takes a principle of hierarchy originally developed in old school restaurant settings and applies it to every species of service from fast food to slow dining. All restaurants here are run with layers of service experience, from the affable Maitre’D to the silent servers (usually immigrant workers) who refill your water and clear your plates. I am constantly asked by visiting friends whether they are required to tip so exorbitantly as the industry demands here (in the UK a standard twelve and a half per cent applies and elsewhere in Europe you might tip ten per cent in exceptional circumstances but normally a euro or two would be sufficient nod to excellent service). The answer is of course yes, you must. Here is why.

Most restaurateurs - there are exceptions - generally try to pay their staff as low an hourly rate as they can get away with and then use what is called the ‘tip credit’ from the (mandatory) gratuities paid by customers to make that up to a basic wage. And while higher level staff may make any additional tips above that, except in the most expensive places with wealthy customers, it is always the bare minimum and only the most highly experienced waiting staff in the best restaurants earn anything approaching a good salary. It also means that the heavy lifting in most restaurants, from food prep to clearing tables, be it a local diner or a five star hotel, is done by poorly paid, unskilled, undocumented workers who barely make enough to meet the income tax threshold anyway.

I am not telling you this from a partisan standpoint - in fact both political parties have been effectively lobbied by the industry to keep minimum wages out of hospitality - but because it tells you something about what you can persuade people about fairness. Americans are persuaded to rely on their immigrant workforce and the willingness of those with nothing, to earn the most meagre remuneration for the most menial work in the service industry. And the food industry has persuaded them to pay for this. But when you first come to America from elsewhere, it is hard not to feel aggrieved at the twenty per cent or more you are expected to add to every bill, until you know this. Nobody here complains about paying almost a quarter again on top of their bill. In this, the restaurant owning business has pulled off an astonishing heist by making everyone else cover their staffing costs. And according to the article ‘Check Your Bill’ in the New Yorker 28 July 2025, they will stop at nothing to prevent the introduction of a minimum wage where everyone would be paid fairly. All of which leaves a bad aftertaste.

“Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are” is the famous quote attributed to the original gastronome, 18th Century French lawyer and politician Brillat-Savarin. I might adapt that maxim to “tell me how you eat.” Nowhere have I found this more apt than New York City. Food is everywhere. There are endless offerings of fast and easy food, from burgers to tacos, bagels to pizzas, empanadas to shawarmas, not to mention the cookies and cakes, candies and ice cream. Within the supermarkets are the frozen foods and deli counters, selling pre-cooked meals. A cornucopia of independent speciality grocery stores fills in the rest. The choice of restaurants is bewildering too, from fine dining to hole-in-the-wall, brasseries to steak houses, omakase to salad bars, trattorias to taverns, grand hotels to greasy diners. This is before you even start counting the coffee outlets and sports bars, cocktail joints, pubs and speakeasies, roof gardens and street terraces. Here it’s all about having what you want, when you want it.

But the persuasiveness of convenience has caused a rift between people and what they eat. And the ‘how you eat’ has become a triumph of demand over authenticity. I recently queued up outside an Italian trattoria, supposedly renowned for its authentic home-cooking, selfied by influencers and apparently loved by celebrities. There was not a single Italian waiter among the crew and none I could see in the kitchen. The place has been designed to look like Nonna’s kitchen but it’s a simulacrum, an artificial environment created by her grandsons. When the people serving and cooking know nothing about the culture of the place where the food you are eating is from, there is a disconnect, there is no sensual link between ingredients and palate. The most basic relationship between emotion and flavour is entirely missing.

New Yorkers seem to cry out the mantra “can’t cook, won’t cook” with pride. Apartment kitchens are generally tiny in comparison to other places I have lived. Space is at a premium and so most people don’t want to waste that on using up unnecessary square footage for cooking. When there is so much out there why would you? Few entertain at home. This is not a city where you will encounter the kind of north London Nigel Slater impromptu week night suppers for a friend, thrown together from a few leftovers and a Kilner jar of something lipsmacking nestling at the back of the fridge just waiting for an evening like this. Dinner invitations at home are rarely issued, friends generally meet in restaurants and cooking is certainly not a matter of course. Even if it is not a burden, why would you cook when everything you could want to cook seems to be right there in front of you?

Food and the places you can access it, often reveals some of the most interesting aspects of a city and where you will find some of the most innovative, creative, entrepreneurial people. In London, from Eric’s informal lunches at Books for Cooks to the artisan producers huddling around Maltby St, breakfast of sage fried eggs at Leila’s Shop in Shoreditch, curries in Drummond Street and old school Soho lunches at Andrew Edmunds, there is always somewhere to satisfy a particular longing, where you will find a energy and enthusiasm for ingredients and excellence in cooking. In a new place, that is harder. Navigating restaurants to find the best food and service, where there is an eager passion for what is served isn’t obvious. When a distinctly average dinner costs almost $150 for two, I can’t stomach too many mistakes. It’s easy to see why the foulmouthed Ramsay has done so well here. The conditions people are prepared to accept concerning their most basic human right, that of bodily nourishment, can be woeful. The cooking is an easy target for reality TV outrage.

The thought of which sends me running for my stove. It has taken me some time to work out how to shop efficiently and effectively across my neighbourhoods. I am getting to know where to buy what I need and where there is affordable quality. I have been well advised by friends and locals. But it is still hard to see how most people can afford to have a healthy relationship with food. Which circles back to Brillat-Savarin who, while no champion of the poor, believed in the connection between well-being and culinary know-how. For most people the correlation between how and what you eat has been severed from its origins. Eating has become merely subsistence, necessary fuel, an uncomplicated arrangement of the appetite, hunger delegated to others and cooking relegated to a diminished position in the domestic agenda. So much so that in my apartment block, food is delivered day and night from outlets only minutes walk away. Fast fare is left at apartment doors, so the residents don’t even have to see the person who delivers them their convenience. And thus all that is good about food and eating - conviviality, shared pleasure, conversation, flavour - is reduced to function and practicality.

There is great food out there. You can find it. And I am barely more than a stranger here so there remain many avenues and alleyways for me to explore in the culinary heartlands of the city. There are great vendors at farmers’ markets, delicatessans, bakeries and speciality shops, where you experience the love those people have for what they sell. There are wonderful restaurants too, places where you can taste a chef’s alchemy bringing alive the simplest ingredients. Served with flair, the simplest menus - a few dishes, freshly created - always satisfy. Far more than the fussy, overcomplicated ambitions of the high end restaurants with their brigades of chefs, platoons of serving staff and $400 tasting menus.

It is time for me to write about the kitchen again, to remind people of the innate importance of self-nourishment, cooking for yourself, and the way it stimulates creativity and balance. How cooking can be restful and vivifying in a busy life where time is sparse. Searching out the best ingredients, listening to what your appetite tells you, learning how to shop, satisfying that desire for flavour, cooking dishes that meet your longing, looking after your body and mind by taking action in the kitchen, controlling what and how you eat, acquiring the habits of a cook. All these tell you who you are.

Today I am in Greenwich Village, sitting under the trees at the NYC AIDS Memorial Park. There is a small garden here looking over at the St Vincent’s Triangle, a vast latticed steel canopy of white inverted triangles. The heat today is oppressive and even the sparrows are sluggish in their search for crumbs leftover from the lunchtime crowd. I stop here on my way to the West Village to buy groceries. It is where St Vincent’s Hospital once stood, the medical centre at the heart of the story of AIDS in New York City during the early 1980s and the place where gay men first came, suffering from a mysterious new disease. They opened the first HIV ward here and the the park was constructed in recognition of those who lost their lives and the people who cared for them, the doctors who strived to find ways to cure them and the allies and campaigners who advocated for them. It is a peaceful place to reflect.

There are still many LGBTQ+ people living in this part of Manhattan and I often wonder when I see older men and women passing me in the street, what they have experienced here. Actions that have unknowingly changed lives for so many across the world. I catch a cheap happy hour martini at the deliciously unspoiled Julius a few blocks away, where a legendary ‘sip-in’ was staged to protest the owners’ continually throwing out their gay clientele. And of course, round the corner, where the anger simmering in the hearts of the queer community exploded in a riot outside the Stonewall Inn. All of these are landmarks in the collective narrative of our history. Moments of which we should be proud. But what they are not, is the rungs of a ladder. We are not rising upwards. Nor perhaps should we want to. Being different is to be celebrated and we should always fight to it keep that way.

I went to my first London Gay Pride in 1985, on a bus from Scotland, dressed in denim and doc martens with a peroxide flattop haircut, clean white socks, condoms and Edmund White’s Boy’s Own Story stashed in my Army & Navy store knapsack. I wasn’t particularly political, but I do remember there were Welsh miners with their banners at the front of the march. It was a fight for visibility, equal rights and justice and the freedom to live our lives without prejudice. The rain, I recall, eventually sent me running for the nearest gay pub and into the arms of an art student from Brighton.

I am proud of the battles we won. But I can also hear myself on a reverential time loop. It’s so easy to sentimentalise the past. To lament that we were part of some golden age of resistance, placards waving. In fact, we are all driven by circumstance, necessity being the mother of invention. HIV forced us to hold a mirror up to ourselves and we just had to fight to find a way to survive. We did our bit and struggled on.

And now today in the heart of New York at a time when the rights of the LGBTQ+ community, particularly trans people, are being so severely threatened, I question if I did enough back then? Honestly, I was only too glad to come out of the 1980s unscathed, surfing on a sense of relief from the endless misery of HIV and Thatcherism. I quickly got lost in the wide-eyed, ecstasy-driven, celebratory years of the 1990s and like so many others, I reached out for the glitter-ball lifestyle with enthusiasm, defiant and carefree, emerging from the mythical Trade nightclub at Sunday lunchtimes, shirtless and trolleyed.

We took what was on offer, but that should never have been enough. There was a blind faith in the gift of ‘tolerance’ we had been granted by society. In hindsight, the promise was always too thin, too indistinct. I never questioned closely enough how the others within our communities would be left, and as I came down from the highs and retreated to the safety of middle-class liberal values, I met a boy, got married and considered parenting.

Now here in my sixth decade in New York, I am feeling proud again. Proud to be gay but proud to be queer too. I know lots of my peers don’t like the queer word. It’s too transgressive for some, too raw for others. And I well remember it as a slur spat across a street or from passing vehicles. But I relish the semantic heist of reappropriation. Queer has become both an act of defiance and a cultural definition. It represents what it means to be ‘other’, to grow and flourish whatever your identity, and to be proud of that.

On every sidewalk, in every restaurant, gallery, bar, café and business in this city there is someone profoundly, singularly, projecting and defining what it means to be queer. Straight people too because in some strange and wonderful alchemy, queer values have now become a refuge for anyone, who recognises the joy in difference, the vital creativity that brings this place alive, and wants to celebrate that. Perhaps away from Britain with its layers of social branding, I feel freer and no longer a duty to make anyone feel comfortable.

Queerness has always been central to cities. Throughout history, from Sparta and Athens to Vienna and Berlin, it is what has made the most interesting places thrive. This tangled mess of a city, where people of every determination and origin are thrown together, seems undaunted in showing its support of queerness. Everywhere I look there is the pride flag with its infinite possibilities of identity and desire, signifying openness and hope. It is a brand that proclaims you are welcome, whoever you are and wherever you are from.

Happy Pride!

I realise that as a newcomer to New York my observations are not original. Nowhere has been more written about and commented on. But like all clichés, there is truth in the well-worn. Moving here has been a whirlwind. This really is the city that never sleeps. In the early hours of the morning the sirens blare down Twenty-Third Street and I lie awake pondering the life which has brought me here in my sixtieth year.

In these wet but warmer weeks of Spring, the bitter cold has retreated and the night shift of drunks stalk across the city blocks, bawling their grievances to the empty streets; their cries attempting but never quite reaching the rooftops. Later, as commuters begin their daily routines, they step over the rough sleepers, the insane and the addicts who sprawl in doorways in a mess of belongings, barely more than trash, washed up on the sidewalks.

Witnessing the sharp and ruthless contrast between the fortunes of the people who live here has been perhaps one of the hardest experiences to overcome. More than anywhere I have lived before, there is little mercy here, no time to give way to others; ambition is the touchstone, everyone needs to reach their goal. This is a city where you mark out your particular groove on a turntable of urban survival. If a person falters, as so many do, they will be left behind. The sheer number of homeless and destitute is overwhelming, so I focus on where there is something I can do. I talk most days to Ted (Ted Believes in Miracles) and sometimes buy food for a veteran who holds open the door at the grocery store. I pay for chocolate I don’t want from the young children of an undocumented Venezuelan in the subway. These are all people with stories and lives that should be better. They too aspire to better things.

Living here is a Faustian contract. Life in the great cities of the world has always been so. But as much as there is poverty and hardship, there is also a powerful energy full of optimism. And I am quickly learning to navigate with my own sense of purpose, working hard to mine the riches this city has to offer. My search is to understand how it all works, to find inspiration, and to nourish a sense of belonging. Which is not so difficult since I am living in Chelsea, historically the home of so much creativity and innovation. Easy access to the astonishing range of world class exhibitions has been a practical way to get to know both my neighbourhood and Manhattan more widely; from the reserved echelons of the Upper East Side to the shimmering chic of Soho.

Last month I went uptown to see an exhibition of the German photographer Andreas Gursky. A small number of large scale framed photographs were on display, each in dialogue with parts or the whole of a familiar old master painting which was papered onto the walls next to them; works by Bruegel, Turner and Caspar David Freidrich. The centerpiece called Eisläufer is a contemporary photograph of crowds on the frozen Rhine in Dusseldorf. On the opposite wall is a huge reproduction of Bruegel’s Winter Landscape with Skaters and a Bird Trap. Quite quickly, switching my gaze between the paired images they seemed to merge, working together to create a kind of uber painting. Each of the pairings carry a different focus of intention but as we view them, the new overlay and connect with the old. In this striking visual echo chamber, Gursky seems to be challenging the viewer by showing how the works we know of great painters, though buried in the subconscious remain etched on the mind’s eye like palimpsests. In one case, he takes an iconic natural scene and asks how memory and art coincide under the shifting landscape of climate change. The gallery experiment worked masterfully.

Looking out from where I write in my own privileged apartment block while making these observations about life in Manhattan, a different Bruegel painting has occupied my thoughts. As a child I was captivated by the Old Testament story of the Tower of Babel. A king commands a great construction to be built, reaching up to the heavens, where all peoples will live, speaking the same language and where human endeavour will be eternally celebrated. God is displeased by this, recognising that such an achievement will give his creation too much power. So he confuses their language and scatters the people across all corners of the earth, leaving the Tower of Babel to remain as a derelict symbol of man’s hubris.

While this may seem like too far of a stretch to describe life in New York City today, there are certainly some obvious parallels. My windows open up to the rooftops and buildings of Nomad, the area just above Madison Square Park. Over to the east, 262 Fifth Avenue, an 860-foot pencil-thin skyscraper, is being constructed. It will be an apartment building for the extravagantly rich with their super yachts and limitless wealth. Its presence has caused a considerable furore amongst local residents, not least because from a certain perspective looking north from Broadway at Union Square, this still incomplete building partially obscures that great symbol of New York’s god-like grandiosity, the brooding mass of the Empire State Building, built almost a century ago.

And thus the life of the city goes: political compromise, conflicts of interest, the power of money, ambition for betterment, the inexorable desire to literally reach for the sky. There are countless layers of existence here, from the lowlife tenements of the Lower East Side to the lofty mansion blocks overlooking Central Park. None of this is new, but like the vaunting ambition of Babel, one cannot help wondering where it might all end.

I have always flirted with the world. It is how I tick. My life has been lit up by being around people. I rely on the unnoticed routines and behaviours that anchor us to each other, the daily touch points we experience as we move forward on our separate paths encountering friends, passing acquaintances and strangers too.

I am immersed here in wonderful new experiences and people, but some days I miss those instinctive interactions that come from knowing people well; the intuitive gesture or knowing look between friends, where no explanation or small talk is required. The virtual exchanges of social media can, to some extent, channel these gregarious reflexes and do bring the occasional dash of delight. But it will take time to collect the personal camaraderie and ease of familiarity and friendship.

Some of the best moments of my days are the peaceful early morning walks in Central Park. Something I thought I would miss is recognising the sounds of birds. Since I was a boy growing up in the Scottish countryside, birdsong has followed me. Though I have lived in cities for forty years, though barely perceptible to most people, birds have always been some kind of grounding, a connection to the world around me, even to myself. I can still hear the soundtrack to my youth, the haunting skirl of the Curlews, the rising descant of the Skylark and the rippling notes of the Yellowhammers as I tramped through the countryside.

I was a keen birdwatcher back then, enthusiastically identifying new species from my dog-eared Observer Book of Birds, learning the markings and flight patterns by heart; the flash of the Flycatcher as he weaves through the clouds of insects in summer always returning to the same spot, the aerial histrionics of a young Peregrine learning to stoop free-fall through the sky to stun her prey, a mob of Fieldfares and Redwings raiding the hedgerows in late autumn. I have never lost that awareness of birds as I go about my life.

Coming here, I worried that I would lose that connection, the reassurance of knowing the company in among the trees. So armed with the Merlin app on my phone, I have been recording their songs and getting to know my newly acquainted feathery chums. It has been a wonderful revelation so far. I am entranced by the astonishing varieties and their wonderful names, some almost familiar like the American Robin, Goldfinch, Red-Winged Blackbird, Water Thrush, Tufted Titmouse and Waxwings, then others I have never heard before: Grackles and Cardinals and the exotic sounding Scarlett Tanager (pictured), Eastern Towhee and Baltimore Oriole. But they are not all high-falutin here, there are any number of different species of sparrow. My favourite is the White-throated Sparrow with his smart yellow eyebrows, who gives a nonchalant whistle like a street urchin up to no good.

It is no surprise to me that moving to New York has been challenging in this way. Taking on a new country and culture is an adventure, moving beyond the comfort of the known. Like all of the most interesting journeys you begin with a compass not a map. You find your direction first, and see where it leads. It is forcing me to marshal my inner resources and to examine what is important in life, what to keep and what to shed. This city is different from what I know, despite looking so familiar. But it is fascinating and bold and beautiful. And it is opening up the new in me.I suppose rather like the birds, it will take some time to get to know.

This week I went to the Skyscraper Museum. Part of the permanent exhibition is given over to images of the construction of the Twin Towers. An original architectural model sits before a monochrome photograph showing their ethereal ascension over Battery Park in the 1970s. Despite the cityscape changing so rapidly and new buildings seeming to grow like supercharged saplings, in my mind New York is both what it is now and what it was before. The One World Trade Center dominates the skyline where those iconic symbols of modern life once stood. But somehow one still sees the spectre of the towers haunting the horizon. It’s true that wherever we go, we bring what we already know, the expectation and experience of a place, along for the right. In his literal giant of a novella The Colossus of New York, Colson Whitehead writes:

“You start building your private New York the first time you lay eyes on it.”

Unsurprisingly, the city has a different rhythm altogether from what is familiar to me. I know it would be easy to park behind my writing desk looking out at the unruly chaos of the rooftops, as if that will inspire me or imbue me with some feeling of belonging here. But I must push myself out onto the streets to find what I will learn to love, to map the outline of my new city beyond its superficial impressions. To see it as it really is.

As I go, I ask myself the questions about where I feel at home and what that even means, which experiences will sustain me, how I will connect with the city? It is all so new and vast to grasp in its detail. And often during this precarious spring weather the dour drizzle can almost fully shroud the buildings, leaving mere generalities of scale. On other days, the light is so sharp, my focus is drawn to the bricks holding these blocks and buildings together.

I am relishing each new discovery in New York and enjoying the thrill of its exploration. It has taken me a few weeks and many tests of memory to work out which side of the street the subway heads Downtown towards Brooklyn or Uptown to the Bronx. I start to map out the names of the districts close by; Chelsea, NoMad, West Village, Gramercy, Meatpacking and Flatiron. They each draw out their boundaries as the map of Manhattan unfurls before me. And familiarity comes with just walking, and walking more, block after block. By navigating the grid, the avenues and their connecting counterparts, the city gradually begins to make sense. Looking up, I try to note the landmark buildings above me. At street level, it’s so easy to miss them.

Home is perhaps the ease of the known, the simplicity of being led by the nose. Here I am still taking my first steps. I need to be decisive though, have my feet firmly planted in the direction I intend to follow and calibrate those bearings from the outset. When I leave my apartment building, it is to spill immediately out into the thrust of the city, where there is no time for hesitancy or doubt. Manhattan is like a giant ice rink and teetering unsteadily around the edges will not do. I must dive into the whirl of skaters, energised by their movement. Daring to do this can feel uncomfortable at times, but it brings good results and I build confidence from sheer determination.

It would be a deadened heart too that does not bear the imprint of each lost mind and broken life barely surviving on the streets and in the subways: people with perhaps more right than me to own some refuge here. Urban survival has taught us to step over the misfortune of others. We tell ourselves that we do what we can, we reward a street musician but recoil from the filth of the destitute and insane for whom only the open streets offer succour. The doors and stairways remain closed to them. Once the city spits you out, there you remain. How easy it is to become an outsider even on your own home turf.

I have been rereading the writer Alastair Reid. A Scot, like me he was raised in the rural lowlands and escaping as soon as he could, he spent most of his life getting away from his homeland. Reid lived for many years in the West Village and was a frequent contributor to The New Yorker. His poetry and essays often focused on ideas about place and belonging; both the uniquely objective perspective and entirely subjective sense of ‘otherness’ one has as an outsider. In ‘Notes on Being a Foreigner’ he explains:

“The foreigner’s involvement is with where he is. He has no other home. There is no secret landscape claiming him, no roots tugging at him. He is, if you like, properly lost, and so in a position to rediscover the world, from the outside in.”

That is how it is for the traveller, for me here now. I find myself regaining a childish sense of wonder at so many absorbing new signs and signifiers. You lose that when you have lived in a place for a long time. To understand the nature of this city, I have not only to explore its regions, but to seek a rediscovery of myself in this setting, to see myself in a new context. Though I bring with me some residue of the places I have been and the experiences that have shaped me, nowhere else claims me. This is both liberating and daunting, which is surely how life should feel at its best.

‘The strangeness of a place propels one into life’, writes Reid. As the days pass and the vistas across the city expand, my own inner landscape is coming into being, its contours measured out by a growing sense that home is not a place but the kernel of an idea that I carry with me.

It was with mixed feelings of excitement and anticipation, two weeks ago, after seven days crossing the Atlantic that I stood, in the early morning, on the deck of the ocean liner. As we gently sailed under the Verrazzano Narrows Bridge into the Upper Bay, flanked by New Jersey on one side and Brooklyn on the other, I could not help but imagine the feelings of the countless refugees from wars and persecution who have taken this journey and arrived here to begin a new life. As we approached the pier, the lights of Manhattan were obscured by fog and only an impression of the Statue of Liberty emerged against the dark. This seemed to echo the disturbances and uncertainties of arriving here at this time and the slight sense of apprehension of what lies ahead.

Since I was a child, so many books, songs, poems and films left their depictions of New York in my imagination. From the tv cop shows of the 1970s and the countless movies filmed here, to the big-voiced jazz singers and the poets and writers who told us its stories, my imagination had roosted itself in the city. For a small town boy, it held an enduring fascination, a restless idea. New York existed as a place beyond possibility.

As I grew into adolescence, all I wanted that was dangerous and sexy was born in Manhattan. Among my friends, we borrowed from our heroes and adored them from afar. In those days, fashion was the hallmark of New York; the big brands, the famous models, the sidewalk styles we wanted to emulate, but were a little too shy to carry off. As we grew up, we couldn’t get enough of that New York state of mind. The bands we loved came here to be influenced by its musicians and producers. Paddy McAloon’s words in ‘Oh Manhattan’ summed it all up. Announcing his arrival here “A billion souls all dying to know me, Well here I am! Loaded with promise and knee deep in grace…” Creativity itself seemed supercharged in New York.

The grand metropolis reaching into the sky, the dream of Gotham, has always seemed so familiar and yet so unreachable. It was a world apart from my parochial beginnings. We knew it was far from perfect, full of trash and crime, guns and dope. But so alluring, here wealth and shabbiness, grime and glamour existed side by side; people flowed through the streets in crazy parallel lives. That very collision of cultures is what made it so appealing.

And then there was New York gay. At some point in my sexual awakening, every book I read seemed to explore the lives and loves of gay men here. That openness and freedom was an inspiration, bold and celebratory; it gave us hope in the cold, closeted world of Thatcher’s Britain. The clones, the bathhouses, the porn and the dancefloors were enticing beyond our horizons. A place where gay men were strong, wholly themselves. Until, everything changed and the city was decimated by AIDS. For a while, we wondered if we were the lucky ones.

Alongside the rumours and whispers, the snippets and headlines that travelled across the ocean to us in Britain, America was still strong and indomitable. Whatever might have been lost, there was high energy, always more. And there was hope. Despite that disaster, the many deaths, New York City remained intact. The shimmering, jagged skyline continued to flower and the skyscrapers towering over the long avenues became the iconic symbols of millennial success.

Then the next disaster. The collapse and destruction of the twin towers, like the end of empire; the sobering moment that changed all of our lives in some way. Visiting New York then became more like a pilgrimage, a chance to pay our respects for all the losses. It exposed us to our own vulnerabilities like never before. But build back bravely it did. The city made a powerful statement of resistance against fear. The bounce and bravado returned.

I visited over the years but it remained a city I knew only superficially. I felt that I had always missed the moment just passed. I wanted to have been to the places I had read about, Studio 54 and the Continental Baths, parties that were like Woody Allen movies or Paul Auster novels, Bowie and Roxy Music at CBGB. But that was all long gone and like every other tourist, I simply went through the motions.

Here I am in my sixth decade and finally I have arrived to live in New York City. I am always eager for change and a new adventure but at a stage of life where many people are contemplating winding down, I am taking on the city which, more than any other I know, demands full attention at all times, requires constant alertness to your surroundings and a nose for your destination. I have been listening to Prefab Sprout again. After a lifetime of doing other things, being elsewhere, now those words “knee deep in fate”, come with a different meaning for me. As Paddy was then when he came to record, I too am immersed in the myths, as I observe the city. Not a visitor but a resident alien in a country where the unpredictable has become the norm.

In these observations, I hope to bring to life some aspects of the city and my life here; the ideas that spring from its foundations to surround and inspire me, like the steam that rises from the heating pipes under the streets. While I am waiting to cross 23rd St, sometimes I stand next to those vents from which the drainy vapours ascend and it feels like being baptised in the very lifeblood of New York. “But stay in lane man, and get over to the other side”. There are so many who do not make it.