It’s becoming politically correct these days to have a pop at the way supermarkets fly in foods to make them available all year round, but he’s absolutely right: “Our culinary seasons have been blurred by commerce… I have honestly never met anyone who wants to eat a slice of watermelon on a cold March evening, or a plate of asparagus in January.”And that’s his second point: to fit what you eat to the mood of the season, to how it makes you feel. For the most part, I eat one decent meal a day and then some other stuff. Under which you can file beans on toast, bacon sandwiches, fish fingers, cheese on toast, more cheese on toast and shop-bought sushi.” On 19 August, he writes ecstatically about takeaway pizza.This is intended to be something more than a standard cookbook, and its format – selected entries from Slater’s diary chronicling what he cooked and ate during the course of a single year, with recipes provided – allows for a much more fleshed-out description of how cooking fits into everyday life and the passing of the seasons than usual. On the contrary: most cookery writers make it sound so effortless that it’s daunting And you get the feeling that they mean it to be.

So Nigel Slater’s willingness to include the occasional cock-up in The Kitchen Diaries comes across as refreshingly frank. Take the entry for 30 January: “The warm smell of baking pastry wafts into the rest of the house Heaven. Half-way through baking, I check the tart’s progress, only to find the pastry case empty and the citrus filling forming a lemon-coloured pool on the baking sheet. I pile the whole damn failure into a basin (and later eat it in secret after everyone has gone home) and start again.” Or 2 August: “Ruined a perfectly good salad today… On 11 February, “dinner is a couple of tins of Heinz baked beans, tarted up with finely chopped chillies, several shades of Tabasco and mushroom ketchup, and a tablespoon of black treacle It will do… For some reason I decided to add a bit of blue cheese I had in the fridge.

Don’t know what I was thinking of.”
He’s also unusual in admitting quite openly that he doesn’t whip up a gourmet masterpiece for every single meal. If there’s one thing you don’t find in the pages of the average cookery book, it’s admissions of failure. How often do you catch the Jamies, Nigellas or Gordons of this world saying something along the lines of: “Well, of course, the first time I made this I set the curtains on fire and it was a complete bloody mess”? You won’t find Elizabeth David ruminating on how she always tended to overcook the paupiettes of sole, or Jane Grigson letting slip that she found Mrs Raffold’s Bacon and Egg Pie dreadfully tricky at first. It’s called bitter lemon.’” Walter Bennett seemed to believe implicitly in quack cures. On his death, Alan finds in his father’s wallet a newspaper cutting announcing “Cure Bronchitis in a Week! Deep Breathing the Only Answer.”Bennett’s life with his parents is so simply, clearly described that readers will inhale the very odours of home: wintergreen, duster coats, raw meat from Dad’s butcher’s shop, their old-fashioned kitchen range which Mam preferred to “the tiled fireplaces everybody round about thought were the height of sophistication”.The book treats lightly the way in which his own shyness – and to some extent his spectacles – impeded Bennett’s sexual experience, and I laughed aloud when he recalls saying, at a charity concert, “that to enquire (as Ian McKellen had done) if I was a homosexual was like asking someone who had just crawled across the Sahara Desert whether they preferred Malvern or Perrier water”.There is so much engaging material here, from the experience of being savagely mugged when travelling in Italy with his partner Rupert Thomas; the cancer operation and its aftermath (Alec Guinness evinced annoyance when Bennett’s hair failed to fall out following chemotherapy); his insights into renowned entertainers such as the late Dudley Moore; to the behaviour of bin men in Camden where he lives.Bennett writes: “I have never found it easy to belong.” After Untold Stories, I have no hesitation in saying he belongs to all of us And we’re all grateful..

‘Your Dad and me have found an alcoholic drink that we really like. The nearest [they] came to alcohol was at Holy Communion and they utterly overestimated its effects. She was otherwise an admirable wife and mother, but her “fastidious deprecations”, as Bennett puts it, carried her into a dark night of the soul.Indeed, her descents call to mind the depressions of John Yepes (aka St John of the Cross), mainly brought about by the “terrible pain of scrupulosity” which I suspect was her burden too. However bad the weather, Dad never drove to church because Mam thought the sacrament might make him incapable on the return journey.” Then one day: “Mam rang up in some excitement. “Mam” dies in a kind of hospice in 1995, 21 years after her husband Walter’s fatal heart attack, possibly induced, Bennett surmises, by daily 50-mile round trips to visit her, not willing to miss a split-second of precious visiting time.One is struck by the parents’ amazing innocence as much as by their intense shyness. “Drink would have helped but both my parents were teetotallers, though more from taste than conviction…