A thousand feasts

Nigel Slater has kept notebooks of curiosities and wonderings, penned while at his kitchen table, soaked in a fisherman's hut in Reykjavik, sitting calmly in a moss garden in Japan or sheltering from a blizzard in a Vienna Konditorei. Nigel records the small things, events and happenings that gave pleasure before they disappeared. In A Thousand Feasts he details a soup for breakfast, packing a suitcase for a trip and watching a butterfly settle on a carpet, hiding in plain sight. He gives short stories of feasts such as a mango eaten in monsoon rain or a dish of restorative macaroni cheese. This funny and sharply observed collection of the good bits of life, often things that pass many of us by, is utter joy from beginning to end. Nigel hones in on the scent of a bunch of home-grown sweet peas, the sound of water breathing at night in Japan, the occasional 'pfuff' as a tiny avalanche of snow falls from leaves.