““The kitchen was the bivouac of an insurgent army. Every surface had been colonised by objects that had nothing to do with cooking: a rotating globe, illustrations ripped from anatomy textbooks, toy Ambassador taxis from India, an obsolete desktop computer, a shelf of floppy disks, miscellaneous handwritten missives stuffed into folders. Making a cup of coffee was a philosophical manoeuvre. You had to take a position. You had to ask yourself, what is coffee? Why is it consumed? How far would I go for a cup?””
