I got home Thursday night and looked in the fridge. There was not a lot in there. The shelves were almost bare, like the ones you see in supermarkets on beach resorts in North Carolina on changeover day.

There was one Red Bream, a very bony fish, which I left to defrost the night before, some cabbage - what remained from my last "cabbage and squid" recipe and some "reduced" string beans one day past their "sale by" date.

There was no question of the fish or the any of the other ingredients staying in the fridge another day, they had to be cooked that night.

They all went in the pan with some chopped garlic and ginger, and about a pint of water. The cabbage and string beans were chopped coarsely and the fish, about a pound in weight, was chopped in three, having been very well cleaned by my Brixton supplier.

I was so tired I could not possibly stay awake another ten minutes so I put the dirty laundry to wash and went to bed for a couple of hours, waking up at midnight to hang the washing and turn off the soup, which was cooking over a very low flame, as usual.

I woke up at midnight, hung the laundry but failed to turn off the soup and went back to bed.
I kept on waking up every hour thinking the smell of fish soup was not abating, as it should do, once it starts going cold.

About four in the morning I decided to double check that I had really turned the flame off and was not surprised I left it on because at that point my flat was smelling like a fish market.
The soup looked disgusting. The cabage went all brown, although I remember my dad cooking cabbage rolls - they took eight hours to cook - and the cabbage becoming a similar colour so not all was lost.

At any rate I was not prepared to try it so I left it there to cool down.
Luckily or unluckily, I don't know yet, it did not burn, but the soup became very murky, almost like Guinness.

Back I went to bed.

The next morning I looked at my soup and it still looked disgusting. Still, I put it in the fridge ready for when I got back home from work, which I did, having entered the initial stages of starvation.

I got the soup out of the fridge at it was still a horrific sight. I ate some of the cabbage and then the string beans and was surprised that it was quite tasty! Immediately I got a spoon - I had been eating with my fingers - and started attacking the cold soup straight out of the pan. By the time I had dug out and examined a piece of fish, I concluded that it looked or tasted no worse than tinned tuna, even the texture was kind of similar so by accident I discovered how to make tinned fish, just boil it to death! Also, the bones were edible.

I really went for it and finished nearly all contents of the pan, about two pounds in weight, that is a lot of food, too much to digest at that time, even though it was only about eight in the evening.

So, with a belly full of suspicious soup I ended up going to bed and it was not easy to digest. I did not enjoy my usual deep sleep.

To make things worse, my upstairs neighbour, just before the crack of dawn, got involved in an argument with her lover. That lasted for a good hour, until he left, and there I was half-awake listening to the muffled unfriendly exchanges.

A few hours later, while pondering on the nutritional value of my new recipe, I saw a young woman lighting a skunk spliff while waiting for a train at Balham station. The train soon came and she put out the spliff, by rolling off the ember, next to the open door button, then entered the train.
I looked at her and wondered if I would ever make the horrible fish soup again.