conversations with the dead

and a nigel slater recipe

Photo by Febe Vanermen on Unsplash

I have a handful of people with whom I keep in almost daily touch, engaging in long, involved, at times comfortingly repetitive conversations, irrespective of the fact that they are dead, total strangers, or both.

One of them is my old friend the late broadcaster Stuart Maclean who died of cancer a few years ago at the a…