In the early years of joining the community, I would help out in the kitchen sometimes. In 1999 I had been away in South Africa for three months and when I came back people were saying “Who can focalise the Wednesday afternoon shift?” and somebody said to Francine, who had just taken over focalising, “Well, Richard can do it, ask him.” I was away and she didn’t know who I was so was asking “Who is this Richard?” But I agreed and so really got volunteered into focalising the Wednesday afternoon cooking shift in the Park kitchen.

The idea was that it enabled the kitchen team to do their attunement on Wednesday afternoon and there would still be a meal in the evening. With me focalising, they didn’t need to find someone new every week, but knew they could rely on me. To begin with it was a struggle to get people to come and work with me because it was a new idea, but eventually they did and sometimes guests helped too, as well as local people I occasionally recruited. There were a few who taught me to have a loving and accepting welcome to everybody, people who were perhaps not quite the people I would have chosen to work with.

At the time there were communal dinners every day for guests and members living in the Park, so it could be 40 to 100 people to cook for.

I found working in the kitchen gave me a kind of appreciation that I didn’t necessarily get working alone in my woodwork studio and I really valued that. However, I remember some diners were very fussy and would rate my food on whether they had liked it or not. One particularly fussy diner once gave me a kiss because the food was so good and I chalked that up as a real success!

A favourite dish was cheese soufflé. This involved mixing the different ingredients, the cheese sauce and the cheese and the beaten eggs etc, especially the beaten egg whites, which had to be folded into this mixture very gently, so I would say that this has to be done as a sensual experience with the fingers, mixing it gently so as not to lose the air bubbles which give the lightness. Guests would come up to me two or three years later and say “I remember making cheese souffle with you”. Cheese and eggs seemed to be popular, as another favourite dish was eggs mornay – hard boiled eggs with some vegetables, covered with cheese sauce and browned in the oven.

What really landed the idea of the Wednesday afternoon kitchen was when Nick and Henrietta – who were ‘70s members – moved back from England with their son Tom who has Asperger’s and Henrietta was looking around for ways that she could get him to contribute to the community. He was about 20 and so she brought him along to Wednesday afternoon shifts. Henrietta so much enjoyed coming along and she would tell people about it who had just arrived in the Park and were looking for what to do with themselves, and so this group developed into the Wednesday afternoon shift and I believe that it’s still continuing.

Interviewed by Liz Wigglesworth