‘Hey Mrs Rosenblatt! Heard the prune pud caused a bit of a stir – in more ways than one!’

Mrs Rosenblatt peers over her broadsheet paper at me, a giggle in her eyes. ‘I feel a million dollars thanks to you.’

She is immaculately dressed, hair coiffed in her signature Elizabeth Taylor curls, her blue-kohled eyes smiling at me. Her room in the home is quite unlike any other; I imagine it’s what a magpie’s nest is like. Full of jewelled sparkliness in an array of shapes and colours, everything reflecting the light and catching your eye. Although Mrs Rosenblatt never leaves here, she still makes up her face each day with rouge and lipstick as if she’s just about to go for pre-theatre drinks.

She shuffles up in her bed, the neckline of her dusky pink nightdress beautifully embroidered with sequined peacocks. I love coming in here to see her. Every time I walk into her room, there’s something that reminds me of walking into Santa’s grotto, like there’s still kindness and magic and possibility in the world and all I’ve got to do is be good and try my best and all will work out just fine. I’ve noticed that just being here makes my heart stop beating a thousand anxious raps a second. The moment I step in and smell the mingling scents of floral perfume and talc, it soothes me. It makes me feel like time has stopped and there’s nothing to worry about, that everything will be all right if she tells me so in her ever-reassuring, dulcet voice.

I place the poached eggs and smoked salmon on a tray table by her bed.

‘Lots of omega-3 in that,’ I tell her. ‘Good for brains, hearts and immune systems. So eat it all up.’

Mrs Rosenblatt holds out her hand. ‘Come over here and give me a cuddle. You’ve made an old lady very happy indeed. It is small acts of kindness that make all the difference in a place like this. So enough of this Mrs Rosenblatt business. Martha. Call me Martha. Friends ought to refer to each other by their first names.’

I do as Martha asks and let her envelope me in a warm soft embrace. There is no comfort like it in the world. She smells like fresh linen and strawberry jam all at once.

Just before she tucks in to her breakfast, I open her window and tear off a little peppermint from the small herb garden she has growing in her window box.

‘Good for digestion, a little in hot water with a slice of lemon,’ I explain.

Martha takes it from me and inhales the fresh, sweet smell. ‘Oh that’s joyous. Reminds me of Morocco. Oskar and I loved to roam the souks and feast on all their spicy wonders. Heaven. Yes, peppermint tea, that would be a real treat. Thank you, Katie, you do spoil me.’ She points over to a heavy bound photo album which has morphed into more of a scrapbook, with invitations, concert tickets, postcards and personal letters stuffed between the pages. ‘Pass that over if you would so I can show you something.’

I fetch it from the small bookshelf by her wardrobe and hand it over to her.

My shift is finished now so I take a seat and she chats through her memories with me. All of her photographs are carefully glued to the thick card pages, each of them dated with captions in her elegant cursive handwriting. Such a life Martha had!

She flicks through to the middle and strokes her hand over a very small photo with a frilled border, its colours muted with age. It shows a much younger Martha, her hair pressed in perfect waves, and a man with a Poirot moustache grinning broadly into the camera whilst leading a camel in the desert.

‘Cairo, that was our honeymoon. Oskar said that we should start our married life with an adventure and so we did. I was against it at first, too lavish. I protested, but Oskar would have none of it. He told me to take the trip, buy the shoes, eat the cake! This was his motto, and by golly did he live by it! So we took the trip. I arrived in Egypt a new bride and I left there an expectant mother. Adventure indeed. Oskar Rosenblatt, you sure knew how to show a girl a good time.’

She gently closes her album and I put it back in its special place. While she then leafs through her newspaper, we chat about films and books and holidays, about work and house prices and airline strikes and everything else in between. I prune the window box for her, water the herbs, and take a few leaves for myself. I’m not in a hurry. There isn’t anything I need to do, nowhere I need to be. This is one huge difference I’ve found since I had to shut my own little restaurant, the relentless amount of time I’ve got. For the first time in my life, I have huge swathes of time. And I know that most people would think that this is enviable. But, actually, I hate it. I realise now that I was married to my role as restaurateur – so it feels like I’ve been dumped and deserted by an unrequited love. Because god knows I loved that restaurant; I gave it everything. I gave up everything else to focus on it completely, to give it my all. For me it really was till death do us part – although it was more like till debt do us part in the end…

All this endless, aimless time has been one of the worst, and most unforeseen, results of going near bankrupt and losing my job and business. I no longer use my time productively, which makes me frustrated with myself even more. I use it to spend too long reading labels in little delis that I can’t afford to shop in and flicking through food channels and browsing cakes on Pinterest and Instagram and dragging my feet along the long walk home, which brings me past my locked-up restaurant. The curtains drawn, a ‘For Lease’ sign in the window. Being time-rich and cash-poor is zero fun. I need to be busy, to have a structure, a purpose, a goal. Before, I ate drank, ate, slept, bathed and burped my restaurant-baby. It consumed every waking moment. There were not enough minutes in the hour, not enough hours in the day. No time for myself, or my family, or my boyfriend, Ben. Well, that’s what he told me just before he left to chase his big break abroad. And now that everything is all over, with Ben and with my restaurant, I’m at a complete loss as what I’m supposed to be doing with myself.

So at first, to put a silver lining on things, I thought, well, I’ll have oodles of time now to do all the stuff I couldn’t because I was working so damn long and hard. I can get fit, go on some dates, take up a new, life-enhancing hobby.

But the truth is I’m no good with all this time on my hands. I don’t want to lift dumb-bells or sit in a pub with a stranger or learn how to paint in watercolour.

All I want to do is chef. I doubt that’s ever going to change. And now that I can’t, well, killing time is killing me. What I had before was a very brief chance at heaven. I had a boyfriend I loved and a career that made me tingle with excitement. Every. Single. Day. Losing them has been hell. So I guess I’m stuck washing spuds in this purgatory until something else comes along for me.

I stick on the kettle and make us both another peppermint tea.

‘Katie, I’m puzzled,’ says Martha, holding up her newspaper. ‘I need to ask you, what on earth is a “snowflake”?’

‘Snowflake?’ I repeat and shrug. Martha was a top city banker and she certainly hasn’t lost her marbles so I know it must something beyond the obvious. ‘What’s the context?’ I ask her.

She holds out the newspaper to me. ‘Go to the back page, you’ll recognise that vile man. Jean-Michel Marchand. Complete narcissist if I ever saw one… He’s taken a full-page ad out. Shameless exhibitionist. I met him, once: tiny man, gigantic ego.’

I turn to the back page. And sure enough, there he is. Jean-Michel, the most famous chef in the country, has taken out a full-page ad featuring his life-size face, so close up it’s as if he is really staring right back at me. In big bold letters across the top of the page reads, ‘Do YOU have what it takes to be Jean-Michel’s next Grand Chef?’

I take a seat on the soft corner of Martha’s bed.

Martha sits up and points to the small print under his chin. ‘See there at the bottom, it says “No home chefs or snowflakes need apply.” What on earth does he mean by that?’

Wow. Jean-Michel is looking for a chef. Not any old chef. A Grand chef.

‘Do you know what he means, Katie?’

I turn to answer her, peeling my eyes away from a face I’ve studied in recipe books and on television since the moment I knew that food was my future. ‘I can’t be sure, Martha, but I think it’s kind of a derogatory label for my generation. Some say that we can’t handle real life and we take offence to everything. So they call us “snowflakes” because they say that we think we’re special and unique and have an inflated sense of entitlement but don’t know what hard work is, so we melt easily under pressure.’

Martha taps her finger on the paper and shakes her head. ‘I wouldn’t expect anything less than sensational nonsense from such a brute.’

‘He may be a brute. But he’s also a culinary god.’

She considers me a moment then slides her glasses up her nose. ‘You should go for this, Katie. Throughout my entire life, I have been wined and dined and eaten the most wonderful meals by the most esteemed chefs and I can tell that you have that in you too. That passion, that work ethic.’

Yep. I know this spiel. It’s sweet, but it can really lead you in the wrong direction if you take it seriously. Make you believe anything is possible, yada yada.

‘Thanks, Martha, but it takes more than that. I already had my shot. All that “go for it, you can do it, if you can dream it, you can achieve it”. I bought into that, hook, line and sinker. And both me and my debt manager can tell you, it’s not true. It’s a very expensive and painful delusion that passion and hard work is enough to succeed.’

Martha purses her lips and narrows her eyes at me. ‘Are you a home chef?’

I shake my head. ‘Um, no! I passed my four-year program at Le Cordon Bleu in London. I’m a fully qualified French cuisine chef.’

‘Are you a snowflake?’

I laugh. ‘Do you seriously think that any person with an inflated sense of entitlement would work here? With Bernie?’

Martha taps her finger on the paper and meets my gaze. ‘Well then. You’ve got what it takes. Applications cut off at midnight tonight, so I suggest you pull your finger out, chef.’

I blink my gratitude for the well-intended compliment, however misguided. It is really nice that she wants to big me up, give me a dream to chase. But Jean-Michel is a shark. He’d chew me up and spit me out. It was already impossible to get a decent cheffing gig after my grand failure, so a bad word from Jean-Michel would finish me off in the fine dining world altogether.

‘I appreciate the confidence, Martha, but as you rightly say, the man is a brute. He expects, he demands, perfection at every point. I’m good, but I’m not good enough for him. This is a whole different level. Every serious chef in the country would want to be in a kitchen with Jean-Michel; the competition would be outrageous. And cut-throat. So even if I got through, he’d throw me out in the first stages of selection. The smart thing to do would be to save myself the time and trouble.’

Martha takes both my hands in hers. ‘You know, being old isn’t as bad as you may think. It brings with it great wisdom, it means you see things differently. And, Katie, I see you here, every day, struggling. So I’m going to tell you this plain and simple. You think you are saving time and trouble staying put? Wrong. Because, sweetheart, whether we are twenty-nine or eighty-nine years old, none of us can take our futures for granted. None of us have time or chances to waste. Your time is now, honey; take it or somebody else will.’

And in that instant something sparks, deep inside me. It feels hot and urgent like anger and ambition and outrage and passion and it’s burning up in my chest.

The crippling overheads and soaring rent took my restaurant from me, the promise of promotion and adventure took my boyfriend from me, cruel and ruthless illness took my mother from me. Bernie’s even taken my herbs from me for crying out loud.

I can’t let anything else be taken.

Nothing else is up for grabs.

I look back at the photograph of Jean-Michel. This phenomenal chance to work with one of the greatest living chefs is up for grabs. I take in the anger and ambition and outrage creased in his brow, the manic intensity in his eyes, the tightness in his jaw, and the defiant rise of his chin. He wouldn’t stay put. He wouldn’t settle for anything less than perfect.

What would Jean-Michel do if he were here, right now, in my current position? Fresh from another robust bollocking with the biggest opportunity in the culinary world staring him in the face? He’d take it. He’d grab it. One way or another, he’d fight his way out, claw his way back and rise above everything else that got in his way.

I study his lips, his fingers, the deep lines burrowed across his forehead like old battle scars. Who are you, really, Jean-Michel? How did you build your empire? How did you get to where you are today? What makes you tick? What’s your secret?

I shake my head in confusion and fascination. One thing’s for sure: if there’s a teacher out there worth learning from, it’s him.

Martha reaches out and gives my elbow a gentle squeeze. ‘Katie, with the greatest respect, what have you got to lose?’

We both know the answer to that.