Once upon a rooftop

This week I take a walk around Covent Garden that takes thirty-five years, and make a cheerful chicken provençal that’s full of sunshine.

37 Shelton Street, where I got my first job.

Last week I was in London, staying with one of our oldest friends in our old neighbourhood, going out to lunch and dinner with other old friends in other old, familiar neighbourhoods. On Sunday we celebrated my beautiful godson Luca’s twenty-first birthday over roast pork and birthday cake. This is clearly impossible, as he is obviously still a baby and his mother and I are still wheeling him in his stroller from park to farmer’s market to café, talking all the time, just as we have in all the thirty-three years we’ve known each other. And yet somehow, here we are in their cheerful kitchen, surrounded by his enormously tall friends with deep voices, huge trainers and shy, sweet manners. One boy, in a beret, offered us a sip of the honey vodka he’d brought back from his trip to Poland and it felt like a benediction.

Time is a strange and slippery thing. On the Monday, just before before we left France, we found out the mother of two of our oldest friends had died. On Tuesday, we heard another friend had died at his house in Spain, a huge and brilliant man so funny, so clever, it feels impossible that he isn’t still out there laughing at his own jokes and making the rest of us feel cleverer just for being around him. Then on Wednesday, my friend’s dog died and could it all just stop for a minute? I said an extra hail Mary and got on the plane.

On Thursday, I was very early to meet my agent for lunch at a restaurant in Endell Street, so I took a walk down a road where, thirty-five years ago, I wouldn’t have believed I might become a person who could write, “I was very early to meet my agent for lunch”. I was twenty-one, the same age as Luca, and I had just graduated. I had an art history degree and no idea. A friend phoned me on an actual landline to see what I was doing that summer. Would I like to come and interview for a job as an editorial assistant at the publishing house where she was working?

This is how I ended up working at Conran Octopus in an old warehouse on Shelton Street for £9,000 a year. We had enormous computers we used like type writers, Filofaxes and no internet. I worked on cookbooks, gardening books, books about antiques and decorating, craft and design. Honestly, I wasn’t a very good editorial assistant – I always wanted to tell my own stories – but I loved it. Sometimes news would drift up to the top floor where I worked, far away from the grown ups, that Terence Conran had entered the building, usually complaining that the flowers on the front desk were too arranged and wafting cigar smoke.

Only half of our floor was covered in grey carpet, where our editorial desks were. The other half, where the designers sat, had a lino floor because designing books in those days was heavily dependent on Spray Mount, cutting boards and scalpels. We bought our clothes from Hobbs’ sale and lunch from Food For Thought on Neal Street. They didn’t peel their vegetables, to preserve the nutrients, and everything contained pulses. Somehow it felt less worthy than Cranks, the other vegetarian restaurant in Marshall Street, probably because FFT usually had something in satay sauce on the menu. On sunny days, we sometimes abandoned the mountains of page proofs on our desks and clambered out onto the roof of 37 Shelton Street to smoke and sunbathe.

Neal Street

Neal’s Yard, where we used to go to buy cheese from Neal’s Yard Dairy, and essential oils from Neal’s Yard Remedies.

The Crown & Anchor is now the Onitsuka Tiger Tavern.

The Cross Keys, where we went when we didn’t want to be seen.

37 Shelton Street is now a Costa. Food For Thought closed in 2015, after trading for forty years, because of rising rents. The Crown & Anchor, the pub on the corner we used to go to after work, is now the Onitsuka Tiger Tavern. The Cross Keys, around the corner in Endell Street, the pub we used to go to when we didn’t want to be seen, remains pleasingly small and dark and concealed behind a fountain of ivy. Most comfortingly of all, Earl’s sandwich shop was still there. I can still remember my order, a cappuccino and a ciabatta roll with egg and spinach salad. When I walked past on Thursday, the tiny outdoor tables were filled with builders eating bacon sandwiches and baked potatoes and office workers queued up along the pavement. I wondered if one of them was a young girl picking up sandwiches for a directors’ lunch meeting just as I used to do, and I if she was hoping there might be some left over she could steal for her own lunch, just like I used to do. Even then £9,000 didn’t go very far.

I went to have lunch with my agent, slightly weary from the ten-minute walk around the block that had taken thirty-five years. I often battle with my natural inclination towards sentimentality, but it felt overwhelmingly poignant. Sometimes, time feels like nothing. Life is simultaneously filled with adventures, people, parties, new jobs, accidents, illness, joy, books, travel, love, popping out for a pint of milk, heartbreak, loud dinners, planting flowers, vacuuming and putting a wash on, and vanishingly brief.

Poulet Provençal

And in other news… a sunny dinner for a poignant moment. This is such a simple and cheerful dish for summer. If you want to punch up the Mediterranean flavours even more, you can add a couple of anchovies to the pan when you’re cooking the onions – it won’t taste fishy, it will just add an extra savoury element – and scatter in some capers right at the end. Poulet Provençal is great if you’re entertaining a lot of people because you can double or triple the quantities and prepare almost all of it ahead.