DAVID HOCKNEY

T by Kazuo Ishiguro

T is for T-Bone Steak, a dish renowned for its directness and simplicity. Much loved by veteran blues singers who go weeks without seeing daylight. Heartbroken cowboys, especially during divorce, may consume four or five a day without noticing. In its bloodier versions, this dish is capable of awakening atavistic dining instincts in the most urbane of us. It is said to attract closet cannibals. It would appeal to ageing vampire aristocrats but for the dread of exposing one’s own canines, in the very ecstasy of devourment, the crucifix of bone buried in the flesh.

I have rarely partaken of this dish myself. But once in my student days, on a bleak morning in the Pennines of northern England, I stopped to rest in an abandoned wooden bus-shelter and found one such steak, well-cooked but soiled, discarded on the ground beneath my seat. Another time, hitch-hiking in the windswept emptiness of Alberta, on a lonely highway at sunset, someone cruelly threw one at me from a solitary passing car whose approach had raised such hopes. I was, I remember, too exhausted to react until the steak was lying there at my feet in the mud and the vehicle was just a diminishing dot in the distance.