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(21/5/1999)

Why is it that the best meals are near disasters? I don't mean that I favour eating on the hard shoulder while watching the paramedics tending to the wounded in a motorway pile-up - rather that there is a fine line between failure and success - that there has to be a certain edge for something creative to happen.

You can plan a meal meticulously - a dish you have made many times before - and it will be just mediocre. Or worse - with plenty of time to prepare it, the dish can end up being over-cooked, or over-complicated. If you mix enough colours together for long enough, you will always eventually get brown. Every child knows this.

Cooking is usually improved by speed - maybe even by haste! The same can be said for any creative excercise. There are exceptions, but most acts of creation would never happen without a deadline (or else they would turn out 'brown'). Who was it said that the deadline is the rock, against which creative juices are squeezed out? Even God had to get his universe finished in six days. If He'd had longer, there might have been fewer quirks and imperfections, but it might not have been quite so beautiful.