St Delia
St Delia
Me and Mrs Smith
I’ve always liked writing, as perhaps you can tell; or at least, like lots of people, I like having written stuff. The process of writing - the actual slog of it - I could do without.
In 1996, the Independent on Sunday held a ‘new writers’ competition. The brief, if I remember correctly, was to review a play, film, theatre performance or television programme. It was a chance to play at being a newspaper critic.
The night before the deadline (is there any other time to write?), I duly knocked out a review of a Delia Smith cookery programme and sent it off.
It won its category and by way of a prize I received a fax machine which then sat unused on a desk in my home office.
I didn’t actually have anything or know anyone to fax anything to. But it was nice to have won something, however (literally) useless it proved.
I’m reminded of all of this because Alex Quigley, Head of English at the mighty Huntington School in York (which is precisely the job I was doing when I entered the competition), found the publicity photograph (above) stuck at the back of the English Department’s stock-cupboard.
He sent it to me the other day and it gave a nasty jolting reminder of the ravages of ageing. That, I can proudly confirm, was all my own hair.
The article itself strikes me now as rather snide and not as funny as I evidently thought it was.
And living in Suffolk - as much the stronghold of Delia Smith as Durham was the bastion of the Prince Bishops - I’ve always been mildly fearful of some kind of revenge.
Anyhow, all these years on, it’s time to dust off an embarrassing photograph and 240 words of self-indulgent whimsy.
As they say, enjoy ...
St Delia
By Geoff Barton
Whoever said that you can’t imagine Delia Smith breaking wind in her own kitchen missed the point. You can’t imagine her cooking either.
Of course, all the visual evidence works hard to convince us otherwise. We see freckled hands teasing a handful of cranberries into a bowl or chivvying a pan of reluctant butter. But mostly the images of actual cooking have the soft glow focus of Sainsbury’s commercials or pornography.
Ingredients plummet into glass bowls against a dramatic black backdrop. Delia’s voice describes what’s going on. But surely no one quite believes that she’s doing the cooking.
“This is how cooking ought to be,” seems to be the subtext. But, like Heaven, it seems coldly unreal. There’s never any swig of wine, no furtive nibbling at the focaccia. There isn’t a sense of people – of an audience for our labours. Instead we are in a kitchen of steel that is flawlessly stainless, of copper pans and “pretty plates” (“pretty” is one of Delia’s favourite words).
Students of semiology will already have deconstructed the pristine textual surface of her commentaries. But for genre novices, here’s an introductory lesson: “I get a lot of letters” (I’m important) “from people with cakes that have failed” (you, the viewers, fail) “and almost every time it’s the tin” (I’m the expert).
The slightly scolding tone of a fifth form Home Economics teacher seeps through.
Independent on Sunday, 19 May 1996
Geoff Barton
26 July 2013
10:50 am
Friday, 26 July 2013