I grow more than 100 things to eat, including eight or nine types of tomato, five varieties of kale, three kinds of raspberry, various sorrels, 10 kinds of lettuce and a few flowers, all edible

I'm watching a lot of early Dallas and The West Wing DVDs at the moment, because there is hardly anything on television, though I am becoming addicted to The Apprentice. It's just like early Big Brother, which I loved.

Eastern European soul food, for me, begins in Bangkok. Where else would one expect to find an expert on chicken paprikash? My family’s last surviving one lives there, with a street cat called Mango and her half-Thai, quarter-Indian, quarter-Hungarian-Jewish, entirely American grandson.

I don’t understand the point of garden visits. Why do ordinary people, the owners of mere balconies and tiny yards, torment themselves by touring other people’s grand estates? Nut trees, stables, ancestral compost heaps: I need no reminder of what I am missing.

Baths are the perfect place for murder: self-contained, soundproof, easily sluiced. And crime fiction is the greatest analgesic. When life is particularly grisly, we don’t have time for idiots falling in love, or Britain’s glorious hedgerows.

Resolutions are for teenagers. Once we’re adults, we no longer need to start the year with self-loathing, failure and shame. Give blood, walk more, donate to charity, wear your favourite clothes, find a therapist, stroke pets.

As Jewish Book Week comes to an end, novelists Charlotte Mendelson and Nathan Englander reflect on what makes a Jewish book, and whether the experience of being a Jewish writer differs between the US and UK.

As a child, Charlotte Mendelson thought her grandparents' native Hungarian sounded ridiculous. But now her tiny vocabulary keeps their memory alive

Please don’t say that I’m alone. Or perhaps I am, and that’s why I do it. Yes, I know some of you, the captains of industry, the retired teachers, were forced to learn bushels of poetry, in the good old days. You can declaim “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day” and “I wandered lonely as a cloud” if called upon . . . but you never are. Memorising couplets may train your intellect, and keep the great voices of the canon alive but, otherwise, does it sustain you?

For most of us, apartment dwellers and city types, houseplants are an admission of defeat. We look wistfully at plants in the supermarket—tendrils and fronds, furry flaps, spines and holes and soft neon shoots—persuading ourselves that they might bring us comfort.