Ardent hobbyists are often viewed as eccentric. I think they might be the only normal people left. As a rule, they are active and engaged. They are more interested in making than consuming. They dream and they do. A passive appreciation for steam engines or military history or orchids isn’t enough. Hobbyists want to take part. “I grew up fascinated by history, and wargaming helps you make that interest interactive,” says Daniel Faulconbridge, editor of Wargames Illustrated. “It’s not good enough for me that I just read about the Battle of Hastings, I want to collect the figures that represent the troops that fought in the battle, and then paint them and play a game with them. So it’s taking your hobby to the Nth degree.”
I have been writing this column for 15 years. That means there have been 180 of them, filled with wisdom, insight, whimsy, prejudice, contradiction and sometimes just outrageous stupidity, all of it interrogating the way we cook and eat now. As this is my last of these columns I thought, as a service, I should summarise the key points. Are you ready? Good. Let’s go.
As a piece of writing it is absolutely in a class of its own, with an inventive and often witty prose style telling a complex story in a spell-binding way that has a rare physicality about it.
There is, quite literally, never a dull moment.
To run your finger along the body of work snapshotted here is to appreciate offering somebody the opportunity to drill deep into a subject that produced pieces that stand the test of time. A ludicrous thought in our clickbait world.
It matters too that Talese had an uncanny knack for mining gold where others wouldn’t even be bothered to break ground.