I wouldn’t say I’m an especially brilliant cook, but I do like to dabble. I’m less of a culinary wizard and more of a competent recipe-follower. And I like my recipes to be simple, tasty and unpretentious too. Think Jamie and Delia, rather than Nigella and Gordon.

I do most of the cooking in my house and over the years I’ve honed a few signature dishes. My lasagne is pretty sweet and my kedgeree always goes down well. I can do a mean chilli and I never have any complaints when I make a roast. I’ve learnt how to cook almost all of these dishes by reading books and following instructions.

But what I’d really like to be able to do is cook on instinct. You know how they do on Masterchef or Ready, Steady Cook, when the contestants get given a bag of random veggies, some meat or fish and a maybe a tin of this and that – then gets told to make something from it? That’s what I want to be able to do.

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If you want to improve your business writing, be more like Satan.

That’s the advice John Simmons offers at the end of his Writer’s Materials Trilogy. Don’t worry. We’re not talking Satan in the epitome-of-all-things-evil kind of way here. Rather the Satan who appears in John Milton’s Paradise Lost.

Now for those of you not up to speed with your 17th century blank verse epic poetry, Paradise Lost begins with Satan and his dark angel buddies being banished to Hell by God, after a failed attempt at taking over Heaven.

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