Hilary Mantel, Joyce Carol Oates... on the joys of everyday things There was a time when, if you gave someone a knife as a gift, they had to give you a penny: otherwise it would cut your friendship. Clearly we should have made each other a token payment. In time we were sliced apart, divorced. As we were on different continents, we did not have a custody dispute about kitchen implements. Time passed. We resolved our differences and remarried. We moved to another country. There was the knife, back in the drawer. I am not nostalgic nor sentimental. I like getting rid of things. Only its honest beauty saves the knife. When I last moved house, in spring 2011, I took it in my hand and showed how the blade rocked in the wooden handle. I said, 'I'm going to throw the knife away. I just tested this statement on the empty air. My husband didn't say anything. And after prolonged thought, far too long a period of thought for a utensil, I sheathed the blade in plastic and laid it in a packing case. I do reach for it, when a loaf proves stubborn. I keep an edge on it and I know how to adjust for its rocking. It's the dishwasher that shrunk the handle. It shouldn't ever have gone in there. But I didn't think it was a holy relic: until I did. I once visited a great house in Ireland so thoroughly sacked by the rebels of 1798 that the only thing left was a flour sifter. It now hangs over a doorway, where other mansions might have muskets or carved garlands. Fire and sword, love and hate: all passions outlasted by kitchenware. Clearly I have no power to get rid of the knife. It will be sharp when my wits are blunt, and in its drawer when I'm in a coffin. Nicola Barker: the Maris Piper Potato Nicola Barker's Maris Piper potatoes Photo: TOM KAVANAGH Nicola Barker's Maris Piper potatoes (TOM KAVANAGH) To say that my life is almost entirely centred around the humble potato wouldn't be an exaggeration. I'm severely gluten, corn, soya, nut and rice intolerant, a type-two diabetic and a lifelong vegetarian. I am pretty much the poster-girl for "I'd really love to, but I'm afraid I can't." In my mind there are two Nicolas; the slothful one who can do what she likes (lives on chocolate, marmalade and Twiglets, never plans ahead and eats Shreddies for two out of every three meals) and the actual, world-weary and regimented Nicola, whose every food-based manoeuvre has to be laboriously planned, pre-prepped and timed with an almost military level of precision. In the sad and restricted culinary world I dwell in, the potato - this cheerfully democratic, multi-functional and unassuming tuber - is my strength, my secret weapon and my great joy. Although it has a high starch and sugar content, it seems - I know not why - to have very little impact on my overall blood sugar levels. I can eat it almost with impugnity. And I like it. In fact, I love it. Of course I am - inevitably - very fussy indeed about potato varieties. I find the Maris Peer good for boiling but awful for my breakfast potato cakes (it burns too readily), I admire the yellow butteriness of the Charlotte and chuckle at the spotted flashiness of the Apache for my salad lunches, I loathe - loathe - the Jersey Royal (for some, bizarre reason it generates an extraordinary chemical reaction on the back of my tongue, resulting in a vile, choking, bitter taste in my throat). My favourite potato by a mile, though, is definitely the Maris Piper. It's British, so I don't have to feel guilty about its carbon footprint, and it is - as they generally like to proudly proclaim on every packet "Good for Everything." The Maris Piper can be boiled, it makes the best ever chips (is crispy but soaks up just enough of the fat), it's a dream when you roast it (golden, crunchy, fabulous) and makes truly wonderful baked potatoes. It is sweet and rich and succulent. The skin browns exquisitely. If a potato was a man, the Maris Piper would be Kanye West. But it wouldn't be dating Kim Kardashian. It would be adorably monogamous and dating me. I won't pretend that our relationship is without blemish, however. The torrential rains this year mean that it's been an especially trying year for potato farmers - and so, by default, potato lovers. Potatoes abhor too much damp. They rot and become vulnerable to pest infestations. The Maris Piper (and I can only speak for the ones from the South East, where I live) has been heavily pocked by a pernicious skin problem all season. But this hasn't shaken my confidence in the variety, I've simply been obliged to select them more carefully, prepare them with greater diligence and peel them more often. It's a small sacrifice to make for such a consistently marvellous, creative and obliging dinner companion. I make it happily. Joyce Carol Oates: the Quilt Joyce Carol Oates' quilt Photo: KRISTINE POTTER Joyce Carol Oates' quilt (KRISTINE POTTER) My favorite is always on my bed. Even in warm weather. It is not a large quilt but very beautiful, I think: comprised of numerous brightly colored knitted-wool squares of every imaginable color - red, yellow, green, blue, purple, magenta, brown, cream. Several generations of cats have slept on this quilt. Even as I write this, my little gray cat Cherie is probably sleeping on it, asprawl in a patch of sunshine. How many years have passed since my mother gave the quilt to me and my husband Ray Smith, I can only estimate: thirty years? Thirty-five? The quilt has followed me from one residence to another. The same bed, in different bedrooms in different houses in different phases of my life. In this most recent phase, in which the quilt is laid on a pale blue comforter on my bed in a house in Princeton, New Jersey into which I moved in 2009, with my second husband Charlie Gross, my mother has been absent from my life for nine years. Nine years! That seems so long, yet my memory of Mom is so vivid, I can glance up and "see" her in the doorway of my study - I can "see" the expression on her face, and (almost) hear what she is saying. My mother never visited this house. She would love it, I think - especially the large curving flower beds. When she'd visited Ray and me in my former Princeton home, less than five minutes from this house, Mom had always helped out in the garden, as in the house; we would garden together, and we would prepare meals together, while my father, a gifted amateur pianist/organist, played my piano in the living room. Whenever my parents came to visit us in Princeton my mother would bring gifts for us: mostly items she had knitted, crocheted, or sewn. She'd knitted me several sweater-coats, one of them in a vivid crimson wool; she'd sewed the most exquisite blouses - a white long-sleeved blouse in raw silk; a pumpkin-colored silk blouse; a dove-gray silk blouse with a fine-stitched collar. For years I wore these blouses, and dresses and jackets my mother had sewn. Those I no longer wear are enshrined in my closets - I look at them often, marveling at the fine stitching and hemming, the exquisite small touches, mother-of-pearl buttons, pleated bodices. There is nothing so *comforting* as wearing clothes your mother has sewn or knitted for you. In February 2008 when Ray Smith was hospitalized, and after he died unexpectedly a week later, often I lay in bed too exhausted to move, beneath the rainbow-colored quilt. The bed became my haven, my refuge, my sanctuary, my "nest" - with my mother's quilt predominant, a sign of how love endures in the most elemental and comforting of ways. Warmth, beauty, something to *touch.* *In extremis* we care very little for the public life - the life of the "career": it is comfort for which we yearn, but comfort can come to us from only a few, intimate sources. I know that I have been very fortunate, and I never cease giving thanks for, my wonderful parents who bequeathed me their love and their hope for me; for this quilt on my bed, as singular and beautiful in 2012 as it was in the late 1970s. Marina Lewycka: the Bentwood Chair Marina Lewycka's chair Photo: TOM KAVANAGH Marina Lewycka's chair (TOM KAVANAGH) Sometimes, when I have more than six guests for dinner, I have to bring down the spare chair from the bedroom. I'm always surreptitiously careful to make sure that the person to be seated in it is the slenderest and least wriggly of the party, because the chair is very old and precious. It's an antique bentwood chair, with a cane seat and three slender interlocking loops within the wider curve of its back, so graceful and pretty it immediately caught my eye when I spotted it lying legs-up in a skip outside a derelict building near King's Cross in the summer of 1969. I took it home, stuck it in the hall, and wondered how I could get the seat repaired. At the time I was living in Islington with my then-boyfriend, in a house that was almost derelict too; but we were working on it. Helping us out was a young Italian postgrad called Lorenzo, who happened to be passing through London that summer, and ended up staying in the attic, scraping and painting in lieu of rent. He was breathtakingly handsome, and I was twenty-four, and one day we looked into each others" eyes and fell in love. But even in those free and easy times making love in the house was out of the question. However, Lorenzo had some friends in Notting Hill who lent him the key to their flat. In the afternoons, we used to take the tube across London to Latimer Road and make languorous love on his friend's double bed. Then, starry-eyed, we sat side by side on the tube, holding hands all the way back, past the graffiti on the Hammersmith line that read 'Man is born free but everywhere he is in trains," which some anarchist had painted on the wall alongside the track. We smiled, thinking that didn't apply to us because we were free from convention, careless of the future, cocooned in the bliss of love. I discovered that among his many skills, Lorenzo knew how to do caning, and not of the Fifty Shades variety. Which was odd, because he was a physicist by training. "I will mend your beautiful chair for you," he said. It disappeared into the attic, and I forgot about it. What with love, and guilt at two-timing my boyfriend, and uncertainty about how things would be resolved, and the permanent chaos in the house, I had plenty on my mind. By the autumn, the house was almost habitable, and Lorenzo had to return to Italy because he'd been called up to join the army. One day, we made our tube journey together for the last time, and sat with tear-stained faces wondering how we would ever live without each other. When we got home, he presented me with the chair, newly re-caned. It was his parting gift. We wrote letters for a few years, then one of us moved and we lost touch. I split up with my boyfriend and soon after I fell in love with the man I would eventually marry. He was no featherweight, and one day he stood on the bedroom chair to change a light bulb and went right through the seat. I had it mended, of course, but it was no longer the same. (c) Hilary Mantel, 2012; (c) Nicola Barker, 2012; (c) Joyce Carol Oates, 2012; (c) Marina Lewycka, 2012