I should point out (as well as asking you to excuse my dodgy Italian) that this isn’t actually Antonio Carluccio’s recipe for calf’s liver, but it’s something I cook from time to time which, for me, recaptures my favourite dish from long hung-over lunches with my friend Max in the Islington branch of Carluccio’s restaurant.

What’s that? Calf’s liver? Yes. Fegato is calf’s liver.

Living in California, the pervasive attitude of horror that Americans have towards offal is a source of endless amusement to me. Even more amusing is the peculiarly American euphemism “variety meats”, which leaves me with a mental image of a beefsteak in a top-hat singing vaudeville tunes.

Liver, done just right, has a fantastic melt-in-the-mouth texture and a distinctive, rich flavour which is hard to beat. It’s also full of nutrients.

Anyway, this is how I capture the London/Italian way of serving it.

This is going to seem a bit off-topic for now but bear with me and I’m sure everything will mesh into a coherent whole eventually. In a few posts’ time. If I remember to write them.

I want to talk briefly about sustainability because it’s one of the motivations behind my “leave the car behind and live in the city” plans. Excuse the apparently irrelevant opening example.

I love San Pellegrino sparkling water. I know, every time I open a bottle of the stuff, that I’m essentially being suckered by slick marketing – chubby, friendly bottles with their sophisticated light blue labels. Neverthless, I have a fondness for the stuff for a couple of reasons.

The Milk-God pedalled a broken old Raleigh bike around the streets of Samode. It was painted in brilliant white and had a rusty cart attached to the seat-post. The bicycle was a cast-off from England, donated by a charity of some kind. The cart had come from who knew where. Most people reasoned that the Milk-God must have built it himself.

He distributed his product — the one we named him for — to the village, and occasionally to bewildered tourists from the Palace-turned-hotel which overlooked the streets from the top of the hill.

“I’m a mermaid” she said through the bedraggled tangles of her salt-bleached hair, but the track-marks on her arms suggested otherwise.

The legs where a tail should have been were a dead give-away too.

She was just lying there on Malibu Beach, covered in wet sand and gasping in the late-afternoon sun, her fair shoulders turning slowly pink as they burned.

I sat down next to her, curious.

“And what are you doing here?”

She offered one word, “banished”, and then fell silent.