A light in the darkness: Home Kitchen reviewed

Home Kitchen is in Primrose Hill, another piece of fantasy London, home to the late Martin Amis and Paddington Bear. It is a measure of the times that Elizabeth II had no literary chronicler – no Amis, no Proust for her – but was, almost against her will, given Paddington Bear instead. When I saw the small bear at her memorials, I thought: is that her genre? Infants’ fiction? Couldn’t she do better? The question that follows is, of course: would they have eaten together at Home Kitchen?

To do so – and forgive this fiction, but Primrose Hill lends itself to fiction – they would first have to navigate the duality of Primrose Hill: that is, the things that make it awful, and the things that allow it to believe it is not as awful as it really is.