When I was growing up in Yorkshire, all those years ago, there were many things one read about in cookbooks but did not find in the local greengrocer’s shop. I was 25, living in France and pregnant when I met my first globe artichoke. I had seen the tinned ones, artificially preserved and nothing like these fresh ones. My husband brought them home from market, and I recall wondering at the time how on earth one cooked them and, looking at the huge and scaly thistle buds, why anyone would choose to do so.

My husband, an excellent cook himself, took pity on my ignorance, explaining that young buds could be eaten whole, but the bigger, older ones took a bit more work. He prepared them in his favourite fashion… boiled till tender and served with a whipped vinaigrette. He demonstrated how to eat them, pulling off the individual leaves and drawing them through the teeth to get the flesh. Eventually I found the hairy ‘choke’ and wondered what to do next, it looked so unpalatable. But one only has to remove that too in order to get to the heart. The treasures of the artichoke are well hidden.

It was a fiddly, messy business really, just for a vegetable, leaving in its wake a pile of half-emptied leaves, a mass of spiny fibres and fingers and napkins covered in oil. But oh it was worth it!

I am feeling a bit like an artichoke. A lot like one, really, as the stripping process that began a few  years or so ago keeps on pulling away my leaves, getting ever closer to exposing the inner heart of me.

It began with the ‘things’.. the material things I clung to but, actually, did not really need. Then the relationships that, in spite of determined efforts, went so far downhill they fell off the bottom.  It continues, stripping back the veneer of illusion, the cherished masks I have hidden behind, largely from myself. And that is the thing, isn’t it? We wear the masks we want others to see.. but if we were truly happy with who we are there would be no need to project an ‘image’ .. we could simply be ourselves.

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