There Are No Holds...

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Just watched a lovely encomium to Keith Floyd on YouTube this evening, which made us reflect on the very influence this bloke had on us - food wise - during the 1980s and 90s, a legacy that obtains to this day. I can't begin to count how many thousands of great meals that we and our friends cooked and shared with each other over those decades, but suffice it to say that Floyd's enthusiasms and flamboyance had a very big influence on us all and our cooking. One of the things that stand out about the man was that he was prepared to wing it and improvise, and often to - publicly - fail: jazz, mes enfants! - something that has always been dear to my heart. Very often you've just got to go with the moment and rely on native instinct come hell or high water. I once told my photographer cousin that I could operate a Sony broadcast quality Betacam camera for a video shoot for Toyota, only to get him to stop en route to the shoot so that I could rehearse what I'd only just read of the thing the previous evening from the operator's manual. The shoot was a success, but my cousin's heart-rate took a little longer to subside, methinks. All in a day's improvisation for yours truly, though.

I think that the earliest seeds to my personal love of the impromptu lie not with food or music or photography particularly, but with my first climbing trip to the Roaches in Staffordshire with my two maternal uncles, Godfrey and Edgar, back in 1966, at the age of twelve. They tested me on an unremarkable and easy slab at first to see how I would fare on an actual route. After about three or four feet up this piece of rock, I asked Godfrey - who was leading the climb - '... "where are the holds?"...'. His reply was blunt and straightforward: '..."There aren't any holds"...', at which point the penny dropped. Wing it. Which is what I've been doing with my life ever since: winging it. Stay sharp and adapt, and you will learn to do stuff and survive to see another day and cook yet another good plate of food.  I can't remember or begin to enumerate how many pivotal moments of my life have turned on such impromptu moments, but they are many in number. One thing I can say for certain is that my life has been richer for these many moments of serendipitous decision-making than it would have been otherwise...

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