A goddess falls to Earth

For about 20 of the more exciting minutes of my life once, I shared a sofa with Nigella Lawson. It was in the Westbury Hotel in Dublin, back around the turn of the century. And I know that when I say we shared furniture, it implies a personal rather than professional encounter. But in a way, that’s what it was.

Yes, she was in town to publicise a book: her early, bakery-themed opus, How to Be a Domestic Goddess. But it was a Friday afternoon. So her series of interviews was aimed at the Sunday supplements, mainly. It was too late for our Saturday magazine, and it didn't fit anywhere else. Which is why, I think, a features editor passed the invitation to me. "You might get a column out of it," she said.

This gave the liaison a furtive quality. My lack of a deadline, and the likelihood I wouldn’t be writing anything afterwards, made the whole thing seem a little wrong, somehow. Still, even while gazing into Nigella’s deep, dark eyes, I did my best to seem professional: asking questions, taking notes, and pretending to be interested in food.

Not that she talked about food much. Her main point, I recall, was the irony of her book’s title. Some feminists had chosen to miss the joke, she lamented. And gamely, she ridiculed any suggestion that she was goddess material herself. The glamour was all a trick of television, she implied.

No doubt the gallant thing would have been to reassure her that, in real life, she wasn’t nearly as attractive as viewers thought. But I couldn’t bring myself to lie, even to comfort her. She looked at least as edible as anything in her book. All I could do was try not to stare much.

Of course this was before she struck up with that Saatchi man. In fact, she was still married to her first husband, John Diamond – who was very publicly dying – at the time. So that lent a sombre note to the conversation.

She also talked about her two children and how, being descended from big families, she had always believed a couple should be “outnumbered” by their offspring. It was too late for that now, she said ruefully, before her handler moved in and told me my 20 minutes was up.

I’m not sure if the short time I spent in her company back then entitles me to be worried about Nigella now. But I am, a bit. To tell the truth, I’ve never been entirely comfortable with her role in the so-called “food porn” industry, well-paid though it may be.

No matter how much the performers involved claim to enjoy all that steamy kitchen action – and they do often seem genuinely excited – it must take an emotional toll, eventually. Besides which, I also worry about the effect food porn has on its consumers: mostly women.

This is not prudishness. Purely visual representations of cooking don’t work for me, personally. But if other people get their kicks from softly-lit pictures of sticky-toffee puddings, good for them. It’s just that I wonder if long-term overexposure to that sort of thing makes it impossible to appreciate the everyday meals that are most people’s reality.

The pursuit of pleasure can be a very destructive thing. And that’s why, if Nigella asked my advice now (not that it’s likely – I forgot to give her my number), I would suggest her next book have an epicurean theme, in the true sense of that term.

As she will know – she’s a former literary editor – the original Epicurus was devoted to pleasure-seeking, through food and other means. But it was only simple pleasures, and a state of physical and mental equilibrium, he was after.

According to Russell's History of Western Philosophy, he ate bread and water, mostly, "with a little cheese on feast days". He avoided rich food, for fear of indigestion; alcohol, for fear of hangovers; and sex, for fear of fatherhood.

He wasn’t opposed to luxuries on principle: only because of the “inconveniences” that followed. And this risk-free approach seems to have worked for him. In the final hours of his life, despite pain, he could write placidly of his feelings on this “truly happy day”.

Interestingly, Epicurus did not expect an afterlife. But – and again this might interest Nigella – he did believe in gods and goddesses (non-domestic). He just presumed that, being sensible, they didn’t involve themselves in human affairs. As Russell put it, Epicurus’s gods were “rational hedonists, who followed his precepts and abstained from public life”.

fmcnally@irishtimes.com