Ella Risbridger, «Midnight Chicken»:

It was like this: one summer, I woke and discovered that the world had become different. Or rather, I had become different. Between the world and me, something had changed. I had fallen out of love with the world. This was not the first time, but it was the worst, and I recognised it with the dull, sinking feeling of a person on a picnic looking at a cloudy horizon. A storm was coming.

I tried my best to head it off at the pass, before it could break (or before I could break). I took up yoga and Zen meditation. I gave up caffeine and bright screens. I went to work every day. But still it kept on, and I knew it was coming: the big It, the Something, the Storm.

Everything about the world was becoming overwhelming, and it was terrifying. Sounds were too loud, colours too bright, every decision a choose-your-own-adventure of potential catastrophe. People’s faces moved too quickly, and their minds the same. I was dizzy and sick on crowded trains. I couldn’t follow a conversation. I couldn’t breathe. It was as if the whole world had been turned up, and I had been turned down: I was thinner through, like tracing paper, or wet newsprint. I was a ghost. I clung to things, hoping for some shape, for some pattern in me to emerge triumphant. But there was nothing, and so every day I came home from work and cried.

Summer became September. I quit my job, and cried more instead. Mostly I stayed in bed. And then, one wet day just after my twenty-first birthday, a Monday, I tried to step into the path of a number 25 bus, destination Oxford Circus.

A lot of people, cleverer and more learned than me, have written books about why people try to kill themselves. I prefer to think of the reasons I didn’t.

An ambulance came and took me to the hospital, and I sat in the waiting room of the duty psychiatrist, and suddenly, for the first time in a long time, I thought of baking: of a pie. I don’t remember very much about the hospital itself (the brain is clever about forgetting things it would hurt you to remember), but I remember the pie, and I remember the way I worked through each ingredient, step by step, and how, when the duty psychiatrist asked me why, I could only think of shortcrust and soften the leeks in Irish butter until translucent and rub the butter into the flour and bind with milk. In the end I said, I don’t know, which is so often the only way to try and explain suicide.

And she gave me a large dose of Valium, told the Tall Man that she probably ought to keep me in for observation but that she thought I’d be better at home, and that she trusted him to keep me safe until they could make me an appointment with the emergency psychiatrist. They were talking, but I wasn’t listening: instead I was thinking of pie.

And how I’d learned to make pastry with my grandmother, and how I wanted to cook again. It was like a little map: I will get through this, and I will cook something, and I will eat it, and I will be alive. I will be alive, and I will make something with my own two hands, and I will get through this. This too will pass – it has to – because there is a pie at the end.

I didn’t cook much as a little girl: I was a books girl, not a cook girl, and I spent most of my time lying flat along the rafters of the barn with my nose in The Secret Garden or Five Children and It or The Railway Children. I wasn’t especially interested in cooking, and nor was my mother.

I did not learn to cook at my mother’s knee. And nor did you, probably. People don’t so much, now.

So I taught myself.

I really, honestly believe in cooking. I believe in bad cooking and experimental cooking and giving-it-a-go cooking. And I believe that cooking like this is good for you, and I believe that if I can cook, you can cook. If I can cook, anyone can cook.

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