This is mid-week cooking at its best—long, laborious and deeply discomforting. Traipse through the door at six, unfeeling, you’re too tired to do anything but this only takes two hours. Dinner comes together in three pans and your rusty Le Creuset, which makes washing up a dream. It couldn’t be easier—once you’ve chopped the herbs, prepped the vegetables, par-boiled the potatoes, turned the parsnips, sautéed the onions, whipped the ricotta, steamed the broccoli and de-boned the chicken breasts, you’re ready to start cooking. Tell your insufferable Clapham-based PR friends to fuck off. Try and fail to fix your disintegrating affair with your Welsh cousin. Throw it together as you watch your aged father stubbing out his cigarette on his open thigh, your mother sitting in silence—it’s the perfect side dish for family deterioration and other celebrations. And guess what, you can get all the ingredients down at Aldi, it’s part of their new extreme budget range, designed for people who were fired from their Clapham-based PR job, and have endless time to cook and chop and prep and par-boil. This soup is nourishing, your mother’s plat par excellence, cigarette ash drooped on the surface, curdled and bleeding onto your spoon and into your mouth. This meal is so inconvenient, it’s there whenever you don’t want it, it’s never there when you want it, it’s in Bexley. It’s low protein, which is ideal for my low-fucking diet, Rhiannon will never marry me anyway. I stumble in, she’s right behind me, I tell her to mind the fucking meal planner which I keep on the whiteboard, regimented, neat, planner is planned. I’ve planned a feast, I am wretchedly hungry, I hope you are too, I don’t care about the salt-to-fat ratio as long as it sates my hunger. I’ve heard tahini is great lube, but then I never get the consistency right. Flung, smashed, seeping between the mock-gothic wooden floorboards, great for hosting but maybe not so much now. Rhiannon says to get a fucking move on, Bexley’s in her diary at six, I gasp and rush into the bedroom, my feet are covered in tahini, I don’t care, I kiss her like Bexley would, although I don’t know I’ve never done it with him. It’s exactly what you want, need, up, down, running along nature’s line. I don’t know why you slept, wept, but the oven’s on, just leave it for hours, it does the work for you I’ve heard, we don’t need an air fryer. It’s traditional, it’s a staple of southern Welsh cuisine so be fucking grateful, the table is laid sparingly, eat with your hands on the burgundy linen cloth. Barely discernible outside the fogged windows, Rhiannon please, sing the songbird’s song with ineffable religiosity—no, sexuality—while the potatoes par-boil. Bexley doesn’t have potatoes, you don’t have to fly at 6, wine is imminent, just you wait because my red’s got pigmented tannins, it’s Bordeaux Supérieur and I won’t have it wasted. You’re the man, I’m the man, you’re the man, I’m the man, loudness belies its synchronicity, repeating you’re the man, I’m the man, you’re the man, I’m the man, now get out. Crestfallen, ashen, burned lips, but not the potatoes, never the potatoes now I’ve taken that course, it’s gastronomic, but still get out, I can’t look past your debilitating inconvenience towards my schedule, it’s fucking selfish, take the 312 to Bexley. Save it for a special occasion, snarled, scampered, crawled, ran. Goodbye Rhiannon, besmirched you are, not me.∎

Words by Sebastian Hall. Art by Phoebe Birch.