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There’s that moment after lunch on Christmas day when you’re flopped in a chair, barely able to lift your arms to clutch at your overstuffed belly when you’re genuinely convinced you will never want to eat or drink again. Then, when you’re in the car on the way home after being away for three days, you realise that you will need to enter a grocery store of some description in order to buy some milk so you can make yourself a nice cup of tea to soothe away the excesses of the recent festivities. At the shops you see that someone is ordering pizza for dinner at the local Domino’s and you can’t conceive that anyone could possibly not have a fridge full of left-overs or, at the very least, not have been sent home with various foil-wrapped plates and recycled take-away containers whose forced lids barely hold their fare. The next day, after you make your morning coffee, you discover you have nothing for breakfast except left-over Christmas desserts. You justify eating cake drizzled with alcohol before 9am by telling yourself that the French, and many other nationalities besides, have champagne and croissants for breakfast. For lunch you eat ricotta pesto, again. You taste tested it first when you made it the night before you left home. You’ve subsequently served it with grilled chicken stirred through pasta to your hosts on Boxing Day. In the evening, you marvel over how a small amount of ricotta pesto can stretch so far; and why hasn’t it gone off yet? The next day after a breakfast of Brazil nuts and Diet Coke that was pressed upon you as you departed after Boxing Day, you make a salad out of the only vegetables in your house: tinned artichokes and frozen peas. You try to recapture that post-Christmas lunch feeling of certainty; you weren’t going to eat again, remember? It is only the fear of scurvy and a strange craving for fresh tomatoes that convinces you to resume a normal routine and go shopping for some food.

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