Life on Mars

A place where garlic bread is the local dish is not a bad place to be. Every night we stayed in Madeira, we were greeted with a plate of bolo do caco with garlic butter. It was a nice little unexpected treat, like the extra scoop of fries you get with your order at Five Guys.

There's some economic term for this: giving the customer something that feels like a freebie but costs you little. What you lose in product you make up tenfold in loyalty and satisfaction. And each night was something different: sometimes it was an amuse-bouche of red snapper, courtesy of the chef, sometimes a glass of local sparkling wine. One night we were given a huge prawn with caviar. T slid it across the table to me. Even though as a vegetarian he doesn't mind a bit of 'holiday fish', anything with whiskers is too much. 

Sometimes it was a palate cleanser in the form of a mango sorbet, or sometimes it was just the glorious sight of a very large free pour of wine. Culinary generosity is nothing to be sniffed at, and it made me love the first foreign country I'd been to since the start of Covid, even though I had to take a Xanax just to get there.

It would be easy to tell you about the Portuguese pastel de nata, but why aren't more people talking about the garlic bread? Over linguine with scallops, I recounted an incident in a fashionable London restaurant where four of my friends and I asked for the £5 basket of bread. It arrived with a humble three slices. When we pointed out there were four of us, the waiter looked distinctly unbothered. That was just the amount of bread you got, whether you liked it or not. Going out to dinner is not just about the food, it's about the welcome. And what says welcome more than freshly baked bread slathered with a pungent delight - for free?

It was nice to be away from London's 90-minute covers and have time to luxuriate over tuna tartare and chocolate orange fondant. It felt good to have generous food that makes room for conversation and thought that doesn't always appear at your dinner table at home. Over a caramelised banana tart I warned T that I wouldn't come to Mars with him to start a new life when the climate disaster continues and the whole world is on fire. I would be too scared of the flight. 'Just pop your Xanny and you'll be fine,' he said. He told me if I wouldn't come he'd have to leave me behind, unless they had invented cryogenic freezing by then, in which case I wouldn't even remember the journey. No, even then I'd have to stay on our fireball planet. He was incredulous. 'So you'd rather stay on Earth and die than come to Mars just in case you might die?'

I suppose it doesn't make sense, but sometimes I think I'd rather stay at home for the rest of my life than get on a plane to go abroad. Is it irrational to think you might die on a plane? After popping my little pill with my Pret sandwich I felt a lot better, and reasoned that it wasn't so much a fear of flying as a fear of death. Of not wanting this to be the way to go. And I suppose there's no pill you can take to eliminate that.

Still, it was worth taking the deathmobile to drink a poncha over a sparkling sea and be asked if we'd like some garlic bread to start. There are no kinder words spoken in the English language, surely. The answer is always yes. There is nothing that can't be solved by garlic bread, even the question of whether you and your spouse will have to live on separate planets when the time comes.

You couldn't pay me enough money to travel into space, but I have heard that once astronauts see the Earth from orbit, they often return with a new-found appreciation for the fragility of where we live and focus on environmental causes. As I nibble on a last Starbucks custard tart on our descent into London, I understand the sentiment. The man next to me is telling me how he travelled to Prague during lockdown by faking his girlfriend's pregnancy to get across the border to see her. They met six months before but it's ridiculous they had to be apart, he said. We're high above the snaking river of London as he recounts this strangely forthcoming anecdote. I tell him I'm scared of flying and he says I hide it well. His dad used to be a pilot, but his mum is terrified of flying and prefers to stay put in the Cotswolds. 'She texts me every time I take a flight telling me how much she loves me.' I agree it's an overreaction, but it's hard not to have such grandiose thoughts when someone you love is floating in the sky and eating crisps as though everything is normal. 

I was just, a moment ago, sitting and eating grilled tuna in a warm courtyard, in a restaurant where the garlic bread was cut into small triangles. Now, I am sitting at home in London slicing celery, grateful to be alive and to have an opinion on Portuguese cuisine. A few months ago this would have seemed absurd. Maybe one day soon, when T has doped me up and taken me to Mars, it will seem similarly absurd. But for now, the best thing to do is not overthink it. Take the garlic bread when it's offered to you, even if in abundance. Laugh at your fears but make promises and be good to each other. Text your mother when you land.

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This week I'm eating: Vodka pasta, overnight oats, padron peppers.