Isabel Ayuso, President of the Comunidad de Madrid, commissioned the book “Soy de Madrid”. The book contains contributions of Nobel Prize, Mario Vargas-Llosa, Arturo Pérez-Reverte, Andrés Trapiello… along with lesser mortals such as my colleague Pablo Sun and myself.
I like eating, drinking, smoking; I really do. Needless to say, I also like conversation, discussion, laughter and a long etcetera of other things, but what really matters for me, what I really like doing, is sharing all these activities. To be honest, I don’t even like going to the bathroom alone, although one must, like a few other things, because after all, people talk.
Leonor gives me no credit for studying all those languages, Chinese, Japanese, because I enjoy it, as simple as that. I tell her she’s wrong and that what I really like is smoking, drinking and suchlike and that the studying is basically self-improvement, and that doing so does require an effort, and a hell of an effort at that. But that’s pretty much where she and I are at. I should point out that Leonor is my mother-in-law.
Anyway, to the point, and getting back to the pleasures of eating and the good life in general, I’ve just read Ignacio Peyró’s latest book, Comimos y bebimos, subtitulado Notas de cocina y vida, (We ate and we drank: notes on cooking and life) published by Libros del Asteroide.
I think the best thing I can say about it is that it’s a book to be shared, because after finishing each page, I want to talk about it with somebody, uncorking a bottle and sharing a bite to eat. Anyway, I’ll say no more and instead leave you with a small fragment that I believe counters our age of running and vigorexia…