The fact that people immersed in the online world sometimes need help with handling real life is not something she judges or condemns, but it is something she occasionally worries about. ‘There can be something beautiful about the immediacy of connection that the digital world allows, but on the other hand dating apps where we swipe left or right can leave people feeling disposable, commodified even, and that commodification is hurtful and degrading.’
Esther first received international acclaim for her insights into relationships when she published her book Mating in Captivity, an exploration of ‘erotic intelligence’ and how to keep sex alive in long-term relationships. Esther brought into the open the underlying contradictions in coupling-up: the fact that we crave both freedom and security, the predictability love needs yet the novelty desire longs for. It gave some straight-talking solutions and has been credited with saving countless relationships ever since.
Beyond the actual content of her work, the most fascinating thing is why Esther was drawn to studying people and relationships in the first place. ‘My interest in people, in humanity, in the way people live, whether they create a life of meaning or not, it goes back to my two parents, who are Holocaust survivors. They both spent four years plus in concentration camps and came out with nothing. All they had was themselves, their sense of decency and their relationship. That is what endured. And my dad said that was all that mattered.’
And her father’s wisdom echoes in the advice Esther gives, which is among the best and most profound I’ve heard:
‘The quality of your life ultimately depends on the quality of your relationships. Not on your achievements, not on how smart you are, not on how rich you are, but on the quality of your relationships, which are basically a reflection of your sense of decency, your ability to think of others, your generosity. Ultimately at the end of your life, if people commend you, they will say what a wonderful human being you were, and when they talk about the human being that you were, it won’t be the fact that you had a big bank account, it really won’t. It will be about how you treated the people around you and how you made them feel.’
‘THE QUALITY OF YOUR LIFE ULTIMATELY DEPENDS ON THE QUALITY OF YOUR RELATIONSHIPS. NOT ON YOUR ACHIEVEMENTS, NOT ON HOW SMART YOU ARE, NOT ON HOW RICH YOU ARE, BUT ON THE QUALITY OF YOUR RELATIONSHIPS, WHICH ARE BASICALLY A REFLECTION OF YOUR SENSE OF DECENCY, YOUR ABILITY TO THINK OF OTHERS, YOUR GENEROSITY.’
– Esther Perel
INSIDE HESTON BLUMENTHAL
IT’S NOT GOING WELL. THE score is 10–1, match-point to Heston Blumenthal. The Michelin three-starred chef and owner of the best restaurant in the world (as voted for by the best chefs in the world) turns out to also be a fiend at table tennis. In my defence, before the match started he plied me with strange-coloured cocktails and confessed to having table-tennis lessons up to three times a week. At least the humiliation is swift: his final serve goes the way we both know it’s going to, and I retire to the bench and to the solace of my next cocktail.
The experience of going to see Heston at home is the British middle-class equivalent of visiting Hunter S. Thompson: liquor is drunk, cigars are smoked, deep chats are had, and while no guns get fired, he does have his table-tennis serving machine, a device that shoots out one hundred balls a minute. We turn it on and it causes a hailstorm of the little blighters pinging off every wall and surface in his table tennis-dedicated basement.
I’ve known Heston for a while now. His brain is like that ping-pong machine, capable of throwing out a hundred ideas a minute. His curiosity, creativity and appetite for learning are greater than in anyone I know. The first time we met was at a company meeting, where I watched him get 300 people to each eat an apple holding their noses, to demonstrate how flavour is what we smell, not what we taste. He is a man who lives and, literally, breathes sensory experiences. And to illustrate the point, we’re now back in his kitchen and he’s teaching me how to smoke a cigar so you can appreciate all the different flavours. It involves repeatedly pulling a lit cigar from his lips with a pronounced ‘schmack’ sound; the trick apparently is to ‘keep the smoke out of your mouth, don’t let it get past your teeth’.
Food doesn’t just play a central role in Heston’s life, he sees it as a way of explaining all of human existence; food has shaped not just what we do and who we are, but also what we are.
‘We evolved because of eating and the things around eating … when we discovered fire we moved away from eating only raw starches, our lower digestion started to shrink, our neck and therefore our larynx lengthened, which allowed us over time to start to vocalise. And that ability to communicate meant we could start to spread ideas, build up our imaginations and from that everything became possible.’
Connecting food to human imagination is his signature dish. He’s brought more original ideas into the kitchen than anyone else. He first got major attention in the culinary world when his restaurant, The Fat Duck, put crab ice cream on the menu – a dish that now seems almost ordinary in the food fantasy world he’s since created of edible pubs, food you can listen to and chocolates that float in mid-air.
He says his interest in the world of food went from zero to one hundred in a lunchtime: as a teenager, his dad got a bonus from work and to celebrate he took the family to a Michelin three-starred restaurant in France. The combination of not just the food and the tastes but the sensory overload of the smell of lavender from the restaurant garden, the feel of linen on the table, the crunch of gravel underfoot, the sounds of crickets and clinking glasses: ‘It felt like I’d gone down this rabbit hole into wonderland and I found something that fascinated me and I knew right then I wanted to be a chef.’
His imagination and curiosity were kick-started by studying ice cream. He found a recipe from 1870 for Parmesan ice cream. ‘I thought, “That’s bizarre!” and then I started questioning why was it bizarre, who says ice cream has to be sweet? And once I started questioning that, I began questioning everything. I found that thread and just kept on pulling.’
It means that while your average chef is checking out other restaurants and menus for inspiration, Heston will be investigating the worlds of biology, chemistry, history and geography. He has teamed up with professors in macrobiotics, psychologists and molecular scientists. As an example of how deep he can go in these lines of enquiry, this year the Royal Society of Chemists is publishing a list of 175 of the most influential scientists and chemists on the planet, alive or dead. Einstein’s on it, so is Heston.
He leads me over to a coat of arms he created, now framed on the kitchen wall. He says it took him seven years to design, as he wanted to capture everything he stood for. There is a twig of lavender to reflect smell and the trip to that first restaurant, a pair of hands to reflect the craft of his work, a Tudor Rose for the historical element of his cooking, a magnifying glass for the importance of investigation and enquiry, and an apple to reflect Newton’s discovery and non-linear thinking. Most telling of all is his motto, just two words, inscribed in italic font, which explain his approach and his creativity and what he puts forward as his best piece of advice for life:
‘Question everything.’
And to me he expands:
‘The opposite of question everything is question nothing. And if you don’t question things, there’s no knowledge, no learning, no creativity, no freedom of choice, no imagination. So I always ask why. And why not. I ask question, question, question, question. And then I listen. And that’s how I discover something new.’
He then concludes by asking me a question. It’s the one I am most dreading: