THE MEANING OF LIFE, BY DELIA...
and it sounds much simpler than baking the perfect leek and goat’s cheese tart at gas mark five!
Delia Smith has always been a reassuring figure. We have one of her previous works, Delia’s How To Cook, on our kitchen shelf. It is the least scary of cookbooks. One section, First Steps In Pastry, begins: ‘If you can’t make pastry, or don’t even know how to start, the very first thing you need to do is forgive yourself and not feel guilty – please understand it isn’t because you’re born inadequate or not born to such things, it’s probably because no one’s ever actually taught you how.’
In You Matter: The Human Solution, Delia brings the same sense of reassurance to grander matters. Where once she got to grips with pastry, now she gets to grips with the meaning of life. In fact, in her no-nonsense way, she makes the meaning of life seem rather simpler than baking the perfect leek and goat’s-cheese tart at gas mark 5.
‘If you know me, or know of me, you might be thinking, “What’s going on here?”’ her introduction begins. She goes on to reveal that this book ‘represents my burning desire to communicate something I’m now even more certain needs to be said, given the times we are living in’.
So what exactly is it that she wants to communicate? In a nutshell, it is, she says, ‘probably the most important thing we should know: what an amazing thing it is to be a person and to be part of the collective human venture’. Furthermore, ‘My only goal in writing this is for you to know that you matter and are a unique part of this amazing human venture.’
As you may have twigged by now, this slim volume – fewer than 200 pages – is not lacking in ambition. Some of the greatest minds in history may have grappled with these huge issues before her, but Delia potters on, undaunted.
‘What is this amazing thing called human life in which we are all involved?’ she asks, in a section clunkily titled Rethinking Thinking. Her favourite word is ‘amazing’ and her second-favourite is ‘thing’. In reply to her own question, she says there are only two options: you either reject new ideas and remain a sceptic, or you ask questions and are ‘willing to consider whether or not these questions may have answers’. There is, she insists, ‘no middle ground’.
By now you may be wondering if You Matter: The Human Solution is the first of a series of new philosophical works from the leading TV chefs: Gordon Ramsay On ‘Plating Up Postmodernism’, Ainsley Harriott On ‘One-Pot Logical Positivism’, Mary Berry On ‘Language, Truth And Sticky Toffee Pudding’, and so forth.
On the other hand, Delia Smith is now 80 years old – an amazing thing in itself – and has, she says, given a ‘lifetime of thought’ to these important issues. No one would argue with Richard Dawkins’s right to poach the perfect egg, so why should anyone object to Delia tackling the meaning of life?
As to the meaning of life, it so happens that Delia and Dawkins are at odds. Delia declares that her main source of inspiration is Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the 20th Century Jesuit biologist who sought to create a synthesis between evolution and religious mysticism. Teilhard de Chardin remains a guru for those who believe that life is more than, as Delia puts it, ‘some kind of insignificant cosmic accident’: for him and for her it has a preordained purpose and meaning.
Though she never names him, Dawkins – just three months Delia’s senior – has criticised Teilhard de Chardin as ‘the quintessence of bad poetic science’. But Delia is having none of it. ‘Of course, for some scientists, human life is about nothing at all,’ she says. ‘In the grand scheme of things, we’re totally insignificant and irrelevant, they patronisingly inform us, their arms tightly folded. Our planet is a fluke, a cosmic accident, a chance happening about as likely as winning the lottery.’
Teilhard de Chardin was a Roman Catholic, and so is Delia, but not once in You Matter does she mention Christianity. Why ever not? Has it now become the religion that dare not speak its name? Throughout her book, Delia presupposes a power greater than ourselves, and a determining force in the universe, but for some reason she shies away from ever mentioning God. Is this a failure of nerve?
The trouble is that, without the ballast of Christianity, her philosophy becomes hazy and wishy-washy. For instance, at one point she argues that ‘everyone is unique and has something to offer the rest’.
Fair enough, but in the next paragraph she cites as a source for this truism ‘the late Sir David Frost, who spent his life interviewing celebrities’ and who ‘said that, without exception, every person he met was special and had something others didn’t’.
She goes on to quote from a mixed batch of celebrity thinkers including ‘one of my favourite musicians’ Pharrell Williams, Madonna, Sarah Brightman and ‘another great thinker, Steve Jobs’.
I admire her for reminding us of essential questions which, in the hurly-burly of everyday life, we are inclined to ignore. ‘The big question is always going to be: “Why?” Why were you born into the world and the universe – and what is the meaning of the inescapable reality you now call your life?’ She expresses these questions simply and clearly. But her answers, when they come, are all a bit greetings-cardy. One chapter is called There’s Only One You. ‘Imagine every living person reaching their very best by consciously joining forces with all the rest,’ she enthuses. You half expect The New Seekers to chime in with a chorus. Later on, she argues that the quotation ‘None Of Us Is As Smart As All Of Us’, which she placed over the wall of the reception area at Norwich Football Club, of which she is a director, ‘should be the rallying cry for a world facing crisis.’
As a cook, her reputation has always been for straightforward recipes that work every time. But as far as philosophy goes, Delia thinks it best to bung everything – hackneyed old leftovers from Yeats, Donne and David Frost, generalised amazement, a cheery belief in community – into the pot, let it all simmer and then serve up any-oldhow. So what do we end up with? ‘I think what I’ve been banging on about all through this book is what we call “common sense”,’ she summarises.
Unusually for such a pragmatic cook, dayto-day advice is thin on the ground, though she does advise spending half an hour alone with your thoughts each day and suggests we all go to classes in ‘how to behave’. This would, she argues, mean that ‘Picnic rubbish wouldn’t be left in the countryside or on the beach. There would be no skipping queues or parking in disabled bays, and everyone would care for others’. In short, it’s Neighbourhood Watch for the spiritually inclined.
‘If I were asked to sum up this whole book in a few words,’ she writes, ‘the lyrics from Within You Without You by The Beatles would be a strong contender.’ Those who don’t have the lyrics on the tips of their tongues will be disappointed. ‘At this point, I want to share my thoughts on the indelible words of the song, which I often go back to. However, copyright regulations prevent me from reproducing the lyrics…’
Admittedly, lyrics – particularly Beatles lyrics – cost a lot to reproduce, but, having sold upwards of 20million books, and with an estimated net worth of £27.5million, couldn’t Delia have splashed out to let us know the secret of life?
All in all, it’s a brave, sincere book, clearly written for love rather than for money. But might its soupy sense of wonder have the reverse effect?
‘Can there be anyone who hasn’t had a cosmic moment of wonder as they gaze out at the sky on a starry night and wonder how it is that we are connected to it all?’ asks Delia. At this point I found myself thinking of my old friend Peter Cook, who once said: ‘As I looked out into the night sky, across all those infinite stars, it made me realise how insignificant they are.’