Credit Crunch? We’re all ready for it, over here. To quote the wisdom of former Spice Girl Geri Halliwell just before she took on the Top Gear test track in the ‘Star in a Reasonably Priced Car’ feature: ‘fail to prepare - prepare to fail.’ Well put, Ginger Spice.

            Geri’s preparation prior to attempting her lap of the track involved getting in a few sneaky rally-driving lessons from a friend. Mine involved going shopping.

            See, while some peoples’ ideas of forward planning to avert financial meltdown might involve withdrawing all their money from the bank and stuffing it under a mattress or putting it on a horse, mine turned, as usual, to food. What will we all eat in these times of economic gloom?

            The answer lay, or so I thought, within the pages of ‘101 One-Pot Dishes,’ a handy-sized cookbook of, well, 101 one-pot dishes. I picked it up in Borders for the credit-crunch-friendly price of £4.99. Economical, comforting and delicious. What could possibly go wrong?

In my head I was all set to spend the dark evenings of autumn and winter smugly ladling out nutritious casseroles and cunning cassoulets for my amazed and grateful family. The washing-up would be completed in moments, drudgery halved, job done - mug of tea, anyone?

            It hasn’t turned out to be as simple as that, sadly. Things rarely are. But I have to admit that part of the problem lies with my long-held belief that reading recipes all the way through before starting cooking is strictly for cissies. If you’ve got the ingredients, you can cook it, so get on with it… 

The first one-pot recipe I tried was a yummy-sounding stew of pork, apples, potatoes and sausages. Excellent. Everything apart from the sausages was bunged into the pot and left to simmer for an hour or so, with just the sausages to add near the end of cooking time. So, at the allotted moment, I checked the foot of the page. ‘Brown the sausages and add to the pot…’ Eh? What in, exactly? Call me pedantic but doesn’t that make it two-pot cooking? Similarly with the curries. ‘Serve with rice’ at the end of a recipe to my mind involves cooking the rice in a pot first, doesn’t it?

Admittedly, one recipe suggested buying ready-cooked pasta to serve on the side of the dish. Very crafty. However I couldn’t find ready-cooked pasta in Tesco, nor could I bring myself to ask, in case I got that most dreaded of things from the assistant: a Funny Look. But even if I had managed to track it down, what would I have heated it up in? The cheering warmth of the evening sun?

Flicking through the pages, I thought it a bit of a cheat when I read the recipe that suggested putting a tray of oven chips in a hot oven, and then, five minutes before supper time, cracking some eggs into the gaps. That was when I realised how fine the line can be between crafty, one-pot cookery, and just being a bit of a slob. I mean, did you know that you can pour Heinz Baked Beans straight into the pan that’s still busy cooking your breakfast fry-up? Me neither. But apparently you can.

Serendipitously, just last week found me with no power in my kitchen, and only a single ring through in the back of the house to cook on. And in addition to the family, I also had two builders needing dinner before driving back down south. Thank goodness, I thought, for the astute episode of forward-planning that had led me to buy ‘101 One-Pot Dishes!’

Except I couldn’t find the book anywhere. It has disappeared. I think it has realised that it has been rumbled, and skulked off under a stone. £4.99’s worth, missing in action.

There was nothing else for it but to fall back on that other credit-crunch essential: parents. Mine, spotting the SOS sign picked out in pebbles on the lawn, turned up with stoic, ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ Blitz-spirit smiles, and mercy-dropped a large pot of steaming Bolognese into our cheering midst.  We were saved! For now…

By the way, it’s worth noting that Geri Halliwell, even after all the preparation she put in, still clocked up a rubbish time on the Top Gear track.  There’s a moral in there somewhere, surely?

What do you keep on your bedside table? If it’s not too personal a question? The permanent fixtures on mine are as follows: my Great Aunt Kate’s onyx lamp with its old silk shade, my specs case, some pens, a notebook, a lavender pouch that lost its fragrance many moons ago and a prehistoric digital alarm clock radio with livid green numbers that must make the house look haunted from the outside - perhaps even from outer space - by night.

            Also, well on its way to becoming a permanent fixture, is Andrew Marr’s breezeblock-sized “A History of Modern Britain” which, in a self-improving frame of mind, I imported from the bookcase to the bedside table aeons ago.   One day I shall get beyond the introduction. Oh, who am I kidding.

            There is almost always a recipe book, and some sort of paperback - currently Stephen Fry’s “Moab is my Washpot“, the rambling autobiography of his early life.

            But now there’s a new bedside man in my life. His name is Banksy, he’s a graffiti artist and his book, “Wall and Piece”, is one of very few where, after getting to the end, I immediately turn back to the start and read it all over again.

            It’s mainly drawings and photographs, you see. Powerful images and statements illegally painted or installed, sometimes in high-profile places but mainly just on random walls in random streets; messages and comments about society that make you stop, smile (mostly), think about the state of stuff, and then move on. Genuine Pop Art, I guess.

            The cover quote is from a Metropolitan Police spokesman and it reads: “There’s no way you’re going to get a quote from us to use on your book cover.” Round one to Banksy.

            From the Warhol-esque image of the clown being dragged away by riot police, under the tiny caption: “You told that joke twice”, to the characters from The Jungle Book, bound and blindfolded by axe-wielding loggers in the middle of a torched wasteland, Banksy always makes me think: ‘I wish I’d thought of that’…

            He sneaks into animal enclosure in zoos and scrawls groups of lines on rocks, with diagonal strokes through them, as though the animals are counting off their days in captivity. He attaches wheel clamps to statues of chariots in Central London, he recreates famous landscape masterpieces, and then adds sinister CCTV towers or police ‘do not cross’ scene-of-crime tape. He outlines primitive shopping trolleys on cave paintings, daubs ‘Late Again’ on the sides of trains and depicts ferocious, masked hoodies, hurling bunches of flowers.

            Problem. It’s easy, after a few read-throughs of “Wall and Piece“, to start fancying that you can see an art installation in everything. I can no longer look at a row of traffic cones without wanting to do a Banksy and return in the dark, wearing a balaclava, to cut their bottoms off at diminishing heights and angles, making it look as though the ground they’re standing on has turned to quicksand.

            Similarly, there was a flashing sign near me for weeks saying ‘Work starts here on 25^th August, delays expected.’ And when the 25^th came and went with no progress I thought I was onto something - aha! The very delay is the delay! It must be art!

            Banksy takes an aggressive stance on what constitutes art. Who decides what art is? He says, “when you go into an Art Gallery you are simply looking at the trophy cabinet of a few millionaires.” Which is a fair point. I am no expert, as will be obvious by now, but I do recall someone who sounded like they knew what they were on about explaining on Radio 4 why The Mona Lisa wasn’t, technically, a very good picture. It’s all very confusing.

But I admire people like Banksy, who nudge at the boundaries of things that we accept as inevitable parts of modern life, in clever, entertaining ways - see Bob Geldof for more details. That’s not to say I’d be happy for someone to come and paint on my wall - they’d get raced faster than you could scream “Oi! Not In My Back Yard!”

Unless, of course, it was Banksy himself. He’d get coffee and maybe a nice scone.  

Most of us have heard of Tennis Elbow, though strangely, never once at Wimbledon. Tim and Boris and Steffi always went down with viruses and groin strains and the like, but never Tennis Elbow. I wonder why?

            Same goes for Athlete’s Foot. I didn’t hear anyone in Beijing blame their failure to ‘medal’ on a nasty bout of that.

            Housemaid’s Knee?  Can’t say I’ve ever been afflicted with that one although to be honest, it’s doubtful I’ve ever gone at the housework hard enough to put myself at risk.

            Probing a nearby GP in the name of research, I learned of more occupation-specific conditions. Did you know that there’s an ailment known as Policeman’s Heel? That Gamekeeper’s Thumb isn’t limited to just Gamekeepers? That you don’t need a diamond-patterned jersey to suffer from Golfer’s Elbow? That Golfer’s Elbow is different from Tennis Elbow?

Brewer’s Droop - there’s another one. It sounds a bit rude, but it’s nothing compared to the tender condition that’s attributed to Chimney Sweeps. Poor chaps.

            Who names these things? Worthy physicians in Victorian wood-panelled consulting rooms, or groups of people in pubs having a laugh? Anyhow, I’ve discovered a new one.

            If nobody minds, I’m going to call it “Museum-goer’s Leg”. And it is the curse of the holiday mum.

            My legs seem to know the instant I go over the door of a museum. They’re like animals who can sense when they’re on the way to the vet. It’s very mysterious.

            There’s no time delay; no hour or so of pain-free looking and learning, before the symptoms come crashing in.

Instant sore feet. Swiftly followed by an aching numbness that travels upwards to my knees, as though all of the blood has stopped circulating and is solidifying, throbbing, screaming to get out.

            The condition is usually eased by diverting to the café for coffee and a bun, then formulating a plan of where to go for an early lunch. Management thereafter involves fixing a time-limit for the rest of the visit. Half an hour is about right.

            Sometimes, though, even that is too long. The legs feel like they’re going to explode in a pulpy mess and the feet scream for mercy. When that happens -let’s call it the acute phase - proceeding directly to the gift shop can help, until the rest of the family’s ready to leave.

            This summer holiday, with the weather being how it was, we visited several museums. And I learned that it didn’t really matter what sort of trickery they threw at us in the name of education and entertainment, the attacks of Museum-goer’s Leg were still triggered within the first five minutes, every time. London’s Science Museum, for instance, offered an all-singing, all-dancing interactive spectacular exhibition designed to prove to our children that no matter how much they cared about the environment they were still all doomed, it was all their fault and there was nothing they could do about it. At least, from my chair over in the corner, that’s what it seemed like to me.  Afterwards I trudged in their wake up to the earthquake room and lurched onto the earthquake simulator, just to get something to hold on to.

            If Museum-goer’s Leg strikes even in hyper, buzzy environments like those, it ought to be ten times worse in the Natural History Museum with its endless glass cases filled with assorted stuffed critters, no?

No. It’s actually a bit better there, which is odd. Maybe it’s because of the wonderful high ceilings of the beautiful old building, that lift the spirits and ease the feet. Or maybe it’s because the stuffed critters don’t try to send any right-on messages apart from: ‘Excuse me? Can you get me out of here?’ Which, come to think of it, is pretty much what my legs were telling me, so perhaps that explains it.

            I don’t dislike museums. I just wish they didn’t hurt so much. I like what they do; those occasional Kodak moments when the children are fully engaged with something alien to me like fossils and I can sit back - in the café, usually, and feel like Parent of the Year. Curiosity - aside from what it did to the cat - is good. Museum-goer’s Leg is bad. Though it’s infinitely preferable to what the chimney sweep gets.