IT WAS MY TURN TO cook. By which I mean it was the one night a month when my overwhelming sense of guilt at never cooking overrode both my and Oliver’s awareness that I was horrendously bad at it. Since Oliver had, after a long email exchange with Bronwyn, come to the conclusion that it was ethically unsupportable to be vegetarian but not vegan if you claimed to care about animal welfare and had therefore cut out animal products entirely, I’d decided to make a sweet potato, chard, and celeriac rainbow-layered pie. Which had seemed like a great idea when I’d Googled good vegan recipes a couple of days ago. Then seemed like quite a poor idea when I’d been wandering around Tesco’s wondering where the fuck they kept their celeriac. Then turned out to be an unbelievably poor idea once I’d started trying to make it.

For a start, store-bought pastry wasn’t vegan so I’d had to make it from scratch, and I quickly learned that whipping up your own pastry from coconut milk, flour, and almond oil was really, really hard. Especially when, according to the recipe, you were supposed to do it in the twenty minutes your beetroot was roasting in the oven so everything would be nice and ready when the time came to combine it all.

An hour and ten minutes into the one-hour prep time that the recipe had promised, I was covered in flour to my elbows, juggling three different roasting tins that had to go into the oven at different times, trying to work out whether my pastry needed more coconut milk (I’d bought extra in case) or more flour (I’d bought extra in case) or less of one or the other (in which case how was I meant to take it out), and fast returning to my monthly realisation that I should never, ever be allowed in a kitchen.

Eventually I got the pastry to a sort of play-dough consistency where I could just about squoodge it into a cake tin and start filling it with layers of chard leaves and semolina, which would apparently absorb the juices but which I was beginning to strongly suspect would not in fact absorb anything. I wrestled the whole mess into the oven, set the timer, and made a brief despairing effort to clean up before realising that I had no idea where to start.

Oliver arrived home just as the smoke alarm went off.

“Smells delicious,” he yelled from the hall before heading into the front room, grabbing a sheaf of documents he’d been working on, and waving them frantically under the smoke alarm.

“Thanks. It’s supposed to be a pie.”

“And what’s it actually going to be?”

“Honestly?” I came through from the kitchen, yoinked the papers gently out of his hand, and took over waving duty. “Probably a takeaway?”