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.