There is something radically wrong with Tuscan bread. Frankly, it’s a disgrace: the one thing to disfigure an otherwise classic cuisine. Even Italians from other regions make ribald remarks about it – like for instance that it’s the only bread in the world to emerge from the oven already stale. This is merely a slight exaggeration. Tuscan bread is non-fattening once it is over three hours old because cutting a slice requires energy equal to the slice’s calorific value. (This is henceforth known as Samper’s Law.) It is a feature the Italian slimming industry should do more to promote. It now occurs to me that when Robert Graves coined his appallingly sentimental image of ‘women good as bread’ he may have had Tuscan bread in mind, in which case he meant the far more likely women hard as nails.

The reason I mention this is because in the days following that first dinner with Marta I had a great craving for bland nursery food and found a good use for Tuscan bread in bread-and-milk: little bowls of pap I ate slowly with a spoon that trembled. My complacent simile that had likened Garlic and Fernet Ice Cream to a .44 Magnum had been wrong. One never saw Clint Eastwood incapacitated by his own gun’s recoil.

For several days I poke listlessly through the typescript of The Chequered Fag, correcting typos and still trying to think up an acceptable title. Like all racing drivers Per Snoilsson is constantly besieged by girls he laconically refers to as ‘pit bunnies’ or ‘screwdrivers’: part of the perks of hi-glam living. The readership wants plenty of detail about that, of course, and I have dutifully packed the text with titillating vignettes of post-race celebrations. These include the obligatory showers wearing nothing but the victor’s wreath, also the champagne-soaked knickers draped over silver ice buckets. There is even a description of the Pit Stop Game as played by three Ferrari drivers in a Monaco hotel suite. This had involved each driver pretending to be a car coming into the pits and being besieged by a team of girls whose duty was to attend to various parts of his body and have him away (aliter dictum ‘back in the race’) in record time. Pointless to apologize for such unedifying episodes, they’re what readers want. But they don’t help with the title. I rack my Fernet-damaged frontal lobes. Why couldn’t this stupid Swede have had the enterprise to be something unusual, like that American driver who is an evangelical preacher between races and for whom the title Rev would have been a natural? Then I remember Per’s having once allowed some medical researchers to cover his body with electrodes which transmitted intimate physiological details during a race in Brazil. He informed me proudly that his buttocks had reached a temperature of 41 °C Bingo! Hot Seat!

Oh yes, I like that. It suggests the weight of responsibility, danger, even lethality, as well as gruelling conditions. At a more private level it brings to my mind indentations made in quick-setting foam at a Surrey works. The phrase is so familiar I wonder if it’s already in use as a title but then think the editor can worry about that. Hot Seat! is good enough for me. Exclamation marks sell books! so I make some copies of the disk and take one down to Camaiore, where I consign it to the post office. Another job jobbed. In the market I find some plump and yearning langoustines and on another stall a refrigerated tray containing pieces of lontra. Farmed, of course: you can’t get wild lontra these days for love or money and I have tried both. Still, irresistible. I buy one and a half kilos for a sum that will appreciably dent my next advance, but what the hell. On the way back I pick up my mail from the bar and by the time I’m home my spirits have soared. Not only have I finished the book and got it out of the house but up here among the trees and crags the summer’s day that was sweltering at sea level is cooled by altitude to a pleasant warmth. I also realize my headache has gone, the last traces of shonka having been purged from my body.

This calls for some celebratory cooking. The chance proximity in the market of the two major items I have bought prompt my culinary ingenuity to come up with an ideal marriage between river and sea, as it were. I see … yes … a cold dish, a race-day picnic-out-of-the-Bentley’s-boot sort of dish, a perfect complement to mood and weather. I come up with an inspired variant of a little something I once pioneered in the water meadows near Oxford:

Before you rush off to try this dish for yourself, a caveat. Otter is a far subtler meat than rabbit (for instance), as no less an authority than Gavin Maxwell attested – and he was referring to sea otter at that. It should be cooked with the greatest care to preserve its uniquely delicate riverine flavour: like that of kingfishers fed on watercress. It is easily ruined by brutal treatment. Banish Clint Eastwood metaphors to another universe. Imagine a dish prepared by the Water Rat in The Wind in the Willows in a mood of wistful hyperaesthesia and you will have some idea of the sensitivity you will need to bring off this masterpiece:

Wash the otter well in cold running water and pat dry with paper towels. Ironically, given the animal’s natural habitat, otter is a dry meat and to keep it succulent it needs to be cooked in just enough liquid as will cover it. The chunks are put into an iron pot together with the oil, nasturtium leaves (2 medium sprigs of watercress are nearly as good), the sliced shallot, saffron, sugar and white wine. Add as much water as required to cover the meat. Now remove the meat and bring the remainder of the ingredients to a boil with the lid on. Add the otter chunks and, when it has all come back to the boil, put the lid back on leaving a crack the thickness of a credit card. Reduce heat to a slow simmer for twenty-six minutes. Remove pot from stove, close lid tight and allow the otter to cool in its own juices until it can be put in the fridge.

Meanwhile prepare and boil the langoustines in the usual way. When cool enough to handle, shell them. Put the shells, claws and legs into a blender together with the anchovy, capers, Fernet and olive oil and reduce to a fine paste. Reserve. Then make about half a pint (300 ml) of mayonnaise. Incidentally, this is the only recipe I know that is associated with a curse. Two acquaintances who tried to make the dish died within the month, one in Buckinghamshire and the other in Somerset. By the quirkiest of mishaps both fell into rivers in spate and vanished into mill-races. The cleric’s body was found three weeks later, much disfigured. The drama teacher was never seen again. On enquiring I discovered that each had used commercial mayonnaise purchased in a supermarket for this recipe, so there is some justice in this world after all, even if a bit on the lenient side. Certainly the Bishop should have known better. No decent cook gets to heaven by way of Hellman’s. For present purposes you should use half olive oil and half grape seed oil (mix them beforehand) because we don’t wish to drown the flavour of the otter. Use the yolks of two eggs – ducks’ for preference because they add richness without pungency. Now fold the langoustines’ meat together with the paste from the blender carefully but thoroughly into the mayonnaise. You may need to add a smidgin of salt, depending on how salty the capers and anchovy were.

When everything is cold doff the otter’s hat and you will find him sitting happily in a little savoury jelly. Bone his meat gently and lay it on your finest serving dish together with the jelly. Around it spread the mayonnaise mixture and garnish in a suitably restrained fashion. Slices of hardboiled thrush eggs, though fiddly to peel and cut, look exquisite arranged in shell patterns. Dedicated foodies with patience, eyesight and steadiness of hand may do the same using kingfisher eggs, as I did in the prototype of this dish. (I here salute my friends in Thames Conservancy, without whose help I should never have established – let alone obtained – the right ingredients). Then pop the dish in the fridge for at least six hours. Serve with reverence, a panoramic view and a crisp white wine.

So cheerful do I become while preparing this wondrous dish that I break into song – Ennio’s exhilarating aria ‘Non disperdere nell’ambiente, cara’ from Lo stronzolo segreto. It’s when Nedda is threatening to throw away the little flask of tears she has wept for him and he begs her not to. By all means the tears (he sings), for roses will spring up wherever they fall to earth; but not the antique Venetian bottle I bought for you … This may, in fact, be the earliest example of environmentalism in opera. As I whip the mayonnaise and sing away in my newly painted kitchen I become aware from time to time of some jarring noises off. Finally, I pause to listen. There is no mistaking that discordant plonking: Marta is taking her piano for a trial gallop. My hand freezes aloft, mayonnaise falling from the fork in disregarded clumps. ‘Aha,’ I think. ‘So that’s it, huh?’ Grimly I resume beating. The plonking continues too, distant though quite intrusive, as no doubt intended.

That damned house agent, the weaselly Mr Benedetti. My ‘quiet foreign neighbour’ was to be here just one month a year, eh? It is a situation that calls for immediate investigation.