The addictive joy of cookbooks

New Year’s resolutions are famously frail, so pick one that’s achievable. Half of the year’s cookbooks are sold in December: this January, let one shine in use, not simply rust unburnished. As an inveterate buyer of well-chosen recipe books, and a victim of gifting that I’m ungrateful enough to call less discriminate, I have never lost my faith. Each cookbook, I believe, is the one that will change my life – despite being at the stage when I need to smuggle them in so as not to dampen my wife’s belief in the existence of our ‘one in, one out’ rule.

The passing years offer their own excuses for buying more. A man loves the meat in his youth that he cannot endure in his age. The fashionable joy of eating seasonally is a modern cliche, but not enough attention is paid to the seasons of our lives.