Dinner was going well. The sourdough bread hadn't prompted anyone to complain of the smell of catsick; the focaccia had absorbed all the olive oil I couldn't fit in the cupboard; the salad and the mussels were accepted as 'delicious'; and the wine bottles were mostly empty. Time for the flourish: the richness of a Christmas syllabub with walnut shortbreads.

I had taken a few liberties with the recipe: the walnut shortbread called for two packs of butter and so I halved the quantity - and still ended up with a tray full of thick biscuits. And then, when I was adding the cream to the fruit and spices infused with alcohol, I realised that my huge carton of double cream was half the size required by the recipe. So I was only making half the quantity ... still, a little, light burst of sugary sweetness to end the meal - yes, that would be acceptable. If people were still hungry, I could get out the cheese and biscuits.

Maybe I shouldn't have had so much wine before I started to serve the syllabub. Maybe then I would have noticed.

I started spooning the meagre quantity of syllabub into individual bowls and I didn't seem to be making much impression in the amount I made. The I dunked two shortbread biscuits into each bowl and the tray still seemed full.

People could always come back for more, I thought.

After a few minutes at the table, I got the distinct impression that people were struggling. Conversation had died. There was an embarrassed silence around the room. Nobody had eaten more than a quarter of their syllabub; and everyone had eaten enough.

'Ha!' I improvised. 'I wondered when you would all have had enough!' Slight attempts at laughter around the table. I finished it off: 'Do, please, stop when you want. This is far too much. Far, far, too much.'

The next day I checked the recipe. If I'd made double the quantity, it was supposed to feed 4-6 people. Maybe that was 46 people.

The recipe came from the Hairy Bikers.

I won't use another recipe from fat people.

David Hare's Page Eight

They showed David Hare's 'Page Eight' on television. I was mesmerised. You would expect the acting to be superb and the story to be clever, but this was exceptional. So much of the story was understated that my head was buzzing with the effort of keeping up. At the end, I felt privileged to have seen it.

Reading the reviews and the comments was a depressing experience.

'Page Eight' is about trust and the difficulty of having trust between people and in systems. The actual events are incidental to that theme - it was a play, not a documentary. How do we trust? How do we trust the information that we receive that informs us who we should trust? Every scene had that edge: do you believe what that character says?

I feared the ending was going to be a cliche: the main male character leaves a painting with the female character and disappears. Would we have that shot of the painting dissolving into the real location and the two characters appearing in each other's arms? No. Instead, the female character looks at the painting and suddenly gasps at its significance. Hare assumes that the audience is already there - sadly, the reviews I read missed this completely.

There is so little intelligent drama on television, it seems a shame that Page Eight has not yet had the acclaim it deserves.

Art accrues

Some people write to express themselves. Some people write to communicate with specific audiences. The hardest writing is the stuff that appeals to a lot of different, unknown people. I find notes to myself that I can no longer understand; there are letters and emails that are full of code and shared ambiguities that would be confusing in the wrong hands - or even dangerous; but fiction ...

There are already more novels in print than a person could read in a lifetime. Does the world need any more? Does a new novel have to be better than what has gone before? Is topicality something people want from their fiction?

The question is important now because the traditional methods of distribution for all the creative arts is changing. And the creators are the ones who are suffering most. Bookshops are now big and muscular, or online and dictatorial, and are squeezing the publishing companies; photographers contribute to massive online libraries where the revenue gets lower and lower as more and more pictures are available; music is sold by the track or listened to for next to nothing on streaming audio. People can access everything, from any time, so new work is in obvious and direct competition with classical and proven material from all over the world. Who wants to pay a premium to listen to stuff, just because it's new or local?

I don't know what happens next. I can see less and less originality making it into the public arena and I know more and more creative people who are struggling to earn money from their imagination. Meanwhile, publishing companies are refusing to read manuscripts and even agents are preferring work by celebrities.

This is one story that does not appear to have a happy ending.

Travel broadens the mind, maybe

"In future times, even these things shall seem pleasant." I forget the source of that quotation. A Greek, I think. I carry the phrase around like a warn coin that has worn off the milled edges and the raised type of details, spending it regularly on journeys where I am tired through lack of sleep and excess of motion, thin from rucksacks and missed meals or thick from the extravagence of lunchtime menus and credit card dinners - as time goes by, what I recall are the occasions where my jaw dropped at the wonder of the world, created by nature or man. I forget the bites and the wet clothes and remember the unique and unusual, things stared at intently to fix and cement into memory.

And then I return, usually to nothing special, but more aware of the world.

Except the world I return to does not care for wonder elsewhere, does not value experience beyond its own horizon, so my home world seems even more tawdry and childish, more limited and plain than when I left.

So then I find myself stretched, with my feet on familiar roads, entering familiar shops to buy the routine and the essential; but my head still sees the snow on the mountains and the golden temples, still smells the fragrance of the forest and the salt of the sea, still hears the bird calls and the choir to which I now belong, singing in the wilderness.

The twin myths of consistency and justice

There are two things in which we all believe, although we may not realise that we do: that things happen for a reason; and that there is a power of justice at work that rewards the good and punishes the bad ... in the long run.

The first belief is important for our sense of consistency, which ties together our fragmentary worlds and our delicate sense of self; this consistency edits our own histories to ensure that we have always believed what we currently believe, have always, deep down, been supposed to be doing what we are doing now; this consistency says we make our own luck and "unlucky" people are simply failing to see the opportunities around them, while good fortune is a natural end product of endeavour; and that the world is not random and, deep down, there is some force that keeps us safe ...

The second belief, in justice, is important so that we do not scream in blind, impotent rage when we see people do bad things and misfortune strike people who are doing good. These are temporary diversions and, in the long run, people get the right punishment and reward. Just you wait. Any minute now. Soon. Well, maybe in the next life, then.

There are various ways of dealing with these myths. They can be accommodated in some religious systems; they can simply be accepted as something that affects Other People But Not Me; or they can be a prompt for a more considerate approach to people doing well and others doing badly. There, but for the grace of God ... and, if you do not believe in God, and even if you do, there is a need to accept that someone down on their luck may not deserve their misfortune, that successful people may be bad and greedy, that the team that wins the match did not 'deserve their victory' simply because they scored more goals, that Little Dorrits do not escape every time. Consistency and judgment are desirable myths, reassuring and universal constructions, without which most people have difficulty in being optimistic.

We do our best not to think for ourselves, but, instead, to follow those heuristic rules of thumb that save us effort; to use processes when we should be exercising judgment. Recognising that consistency and justice are desirable is good, but we need to recognise that they are not hidden hands watching over us. We do not make our own luck, but we do identify our own opportunities, using our own judgment (and sometimes there are no opportunities, so we sit and wait). Our successes are not simply due to effort, or desire; and our failures are sometimes beyond the vision of a seer. Our own misfortunes are usually seen as temporary setbacks, even as tests of our fortitude, and we all hope that people will evaluate us for our potential rather than our success when we feel unfulfilled; contrarily, people will ask to be evaluated on their trappings of success when they have simply stumbled upon good fortune.

Let us be stoical and recognise our own selves are not simply a reflection of the randomness of the world around us. A person's character is independent of their fortune. Let us judge ourselves accurately and then be prepared to value others in the same way.

Tummy ache

I met someone recently who was working too hard and no longer trusted their own judgment. In particular, the stresses of the job, the range of responsibilities, were making everything a source of tension: so much so that they were getting a tummy ache simply thinking about the tasks in hand.

Tummy aches are a wonderful indicator of what we should be doing. Our intellects can find the value in a number of tasks; but our bodies can tell us quite clearly that this is not something we should be doing, either because it is not in keeping with our real interests or because it is morally wrong. We want to expand our horizons, take on new tasks, grow into new roles and responsibilities, and it is right that we should be nervous about such unknowns. But there is a difference between apprehension and dismay, between wondering whether we are up to a new task, whether we can learn enough and fast enough, and that Kafka-esque state where we can rationalise the most uncomfortable situation which is not in our best interests.

Too much work and responsibility overwhelms the indicator, makes everything too much, so that a tummy ache ceases to point to any direction and, instead, suggests we should lie down for a while and relax.

Gatekeeping should never be a process

I keep finding situations where creative solutions are denied because the gatekeepers are managing a process and not evaluating the situation as unique. From publishing to management to job recruitment, it seems the process constantly gets in the way, ensuring that the solution boils down to more of the same, more of what we already know and what we already have. That is what process delivers. Is that what is required?

Harry Potter was rejected by many publishers because it was about boy wizards and there was no market for books about boy wizards because the publishers didn't publish any. I saw an Internal Communications Management job advertised by a Recruitment Agency where their best fit would be someone with the same understanding of internal communications as them - limited, restricted and ineffectual. I see organisational innovation programmes that are so process driven that they run counter to their objective. And I see customer service where the individual nature of the customer is denied by the proscribed process.

Organisations do not trust their staff to make judgements. So they should train their staff and take risks. Processes are never going to provide the best answer.