Possibly the least surprising revelation from the Times’s recent Nigella Lawson interview: she loves eating in bed. It’s so on-brand, it reminded me that some Top Chef exec once thought it would be a brilliant idea to put Lawson and Padma Lakshmi in side-by-side hotel room beds wearing fluffy robes, to be awkwardly fed by sweaty chefs. Now Lawson has said she’ll eat “absolutely anything in bed except something that needs a knife and fork. It has to be either fingers or a spoon.”
I worship Nigella. The time my friend Kate and I saw her in a west London pottery cafe (a one-off: we sat next to an intense Dutch woman angrily stencilling leeks on a plate and nearly got thrown out for giggling) remains my best-ever celebrity spot. But this crosses a hard line for me.
I will not, do not eat in bed, not since my children stopped wobbling in once a year with a tray of cold toast and Cheerios on Mother’s Day. Apart from the obvious crumb exfoliation situation, my objections are twofold.
First, positioning. Unless your pillow situation is five-star-hotel lavish, I do not see how you can create the necessary lumbar support for duvet dining. We do have a tray with legs, but eating off it means lolling uncomfortably against the bedhead or using my nonexistent “core”: neither is pleasant.
Second, I’m a disgustingly messy eater: eating in bed risks spillage on sheets, and that means I might have to change them. Changing the bed is my most-loathed chore. I’m not going into premature battle with a king-sized duvet cover just for a few minutes’ Nigella cosplay.
The recipe accompanying Lawson’s interview – gochujang orzo – meets her spoon criteria but reads like a reclined catastrophe-in-waiting for me. I can imagine myself dropping spoonfuls of sticky pasta down my pyjamas, leaving pungent red smears and chive snippings all over the duvet (yes, the scene I am conjuring is almost unbearably erotic, deal with it).
Eating in bed sounds deliciously decadent, but it’s best avoided when you’re more goblin mode than domestic goddess.
