Best-selling cookery author Kathy Slack was a high-flying advertising executive until a terrible, paralysing breakdown. In her new book, Rough Patch, she describes how her Cotswold vegetable garden helped bring her back to life
I’m on a Zoom call with Kathy Slack. Unusually, I’m in the kitchen — a shared space — because the study is so cold.
‘And so I need to apologise for the noise my husband is making crunching celery,’ I explain, as an unusual opening gambit. I mean, it’s a veg-based gambit which — considering Kathy’s renown as veg-grower extraordinaire — kind of works. (The decibels he’s creating during a snack-based activity are less easy to explain.)
‘Oh,’ Kathy offers, generously, in return. ‘I might have to apologise for our adolescent spaniel, Humphrey.’ (A reasonable equivalence.) ‘He’s a sweetheart in many ways, but he’s an absolute tinker. For some reason, as soon as either me or my husband get on a Zoom call or a phone call or a Facetime, he’s, ‘What am I missing? I’ve got to get involved!’
‘Agh! It’s a nightmare.’
It’s their second spaniel. The first, it turned out — ‘though I didn’t realise at the time’ — was the least spaniel-y spaniel ever. ‘So when Humphrey arrived, I was shocked. Our previous spaniel had been a bit like a… well, actually, I wrote about him in Rough Patch.’
Ah, yes. She’s referring to Hadleigh. Eccentric, nervous, sensitive Hadleigh; ‘aghast at being put on a lead, terrified of everything, panicky about being indoors’.
Kathy’s mum drove her from her Cotswold home to Bristol to get him from a breeder: one of two five-month-old puppies left from a working litter. ‘Darling,’ her mum said, as they made their way there, ‘given that you can’t read a map at the moment, is it sensible to expect yourself to look after a dog?’
She had a point.
Kathy Slack with Hadleigh. Photo: Stephanie McLeod Never mind reading a map. This was a Kathy who some days couldn’t get out of bed. We’re not talking apathy or tiredness. This was a brain that had forgotten how to instruct limbs to move. A brain that only felt safe under a duvet… What if she were to go out and — horror of horrors — bump into somebody she knew? Like… a neighbour. What if they were to spot her hands shaking, her pallor, her weight-loss? What if they were to ask her why she wasn’t at work, travelling the world as a high-flying (frequently literally) advertising executive?
So, yes, this book is about Hadleigh. (A little.) It’s also about a loving family; an understanding workplace; about time; about space. About — let’s not kid ourselves here — medication.
But it’s also — mainly — about leeks and parsnips, carrots and beetroot. Peas, spinach, lettuce. How the radish is quick and obliging to grow; purple sprouting broccoli temperamental (a prima donna of the veg world: when it finally performs, everybody rejoices). It’s about foraging for wild garlic; then whisking eggs and cream and pine nuts and cheese to produce a melting frittata.
It’s about vegetables nourishing the body.
And, in Kathy Slack’s case, about a vegetable patch helping to save her life.
(DO YOU THINK we’re the same people throughout our lives?
It’s a question I meant to ask Kathy Slack. And didn’t.
Yet, oddly, I think I might know what she’d say.)
What’s more (as if you need more): a very healthy bank balance, a lovely husband — Paul — AND (status symbol coming right up), a cottage in the Oxfordshire Cotswolds.
All she has to worry about is, eg, the trajectory of margarine sales. And the chocolate-buying habits of Saudi women.
Oh, and getting from the Cotswolds to London for an 8am. Or leaving home, Heathrow-bound (again), at 5am.
So a terrible, terrifying breakdown-depression?
…Let’s repeat an anecdote she relates. One that, perhaps, most perfectly encapsulates why this ‘lucky’ woman, with all she could want in life, gradually begins to find herself consumed with grief. (A profound sense of failure. Hiding from people. Fizzing with jitters as if preparing for every kind of disaster. Or a lethargy so complete, each limb has to be forced to move.)
She’s at a staff party, listening to a senior planner talking at her. He’s in charge of hiring and firing; and he’s giving Kathy useful tips on Getting Ahead. Suddenly, he chuckles gleefully. ‘You know,’ he tells her, ‘every planner I have called into my office to promote has afterwards confessed they thought I was about to fire them.’
‘ROUGH PATCH,’ I say to Kathy Slack. ‘What a wonderful book. A really important book.’ A staggeringly honest, unique book: veg-growing tips and recipes combined with the story of a terrible breakdown. But also of redemption in amongst the dark soil and fresh green shoots of a Cotswold vegetable patch.
‘I’ve only just given the book to my parents; and my husband is about to read it,’ she says. ‘Weirdly, I’m more nervous about them seeing it than people I don’t know.’
It’s also a courageous book, I posit. Not just in terms of one person stripping themselves of all pretence; but of that same person staring depression fully in the face.
She shakes her head.
‘I don’t think it took courage. I feel it’s been hugely liberating. When you’ve spent so much time worrying about how you come across to other people, being as open as I’ve been in the book is a huge release. Because you kind of feel: Well, if people know this much, I’ve laid it all bare. There’s nothing else left, is there?’
It’s not raw any more — that’s true. The bad things happened some 12 years ago.
And, in those intervening years, she’s learned. What pushes her buttons. What calms her down.
‘Like going on retreats; like making sure I step away from my phone at weekends. Dog walks. Like pacing myself and not looking too much in. This sort of stuff.’
Like planting radishes…
And that’s one of the things that fascinated me about Rough Patch. We’ve all heard — hear it all the time, in fact — about the healing power of nature. As though (and I’m not trying to be cynical here) looking at a tree is going to sort everything out.
It doesn’t. And it didn’t.
‘It was weird because being out in nature was overwhelming. I’d see this huge expanse of wonderful Cotswold countryside and I’d burst into tears because it was… so beautiful. And I somehow couldn’t recognise it.
‘Look! There’s all this obvious beauty in the world! And I feel nothing.’
That doesn’t mean to say that nature didn’t play a part. But, as with all good stories, this one starts with a seed.
Or, even more elementally, soil.
Almost without thinking — thoughts are a luxury — she digs her hands into the soil. Not an admiring-the-view connection with nature; a visceral one. An ant is scaling her thumb. A woodlouse is busy with whatever woodlice do to occupy their time.
Tiny plants are germinating.
Here’s a world she’s never noticed before.
Another universe within her third of an acre.
And while success, in her ad-executive world, is counted in pounds sterling. Here is success in a completely different currency.
Even now, she feels that same wonder she felt all those years ago.
‘It’s gobsmacking that basically sunlight and water and soil turn a totally lifeless seed into a Triffid. It’s incredible. And when you see it, I defy anyone not to feel wonder. And wonder, I find, is very therapeutic.’
Whether or not it’s subliminal, I don’t know. But Kathy’s language changes as the book — told through growing-months of the year — progresses. ‘Awe’ is a word that begins to appear. A lovely word.
‘Exactly. It’s such a small scale but it’s the fundamental part of life: That little moment of the radish germinating is what keeps us all here and the whole world existing.
‘But, also, something about sitting in front of a plate of food that not only didn’t exist a few months ago but that you have brought into being. And put on the plate for yourself.
When you can’t drive. When you can’t remember what day it is. When you feel like the world is falling down around your ears. That is weirdly empowering.’
Indeed. ‘Grounding’, I guess, is not a word we use accidentally.
Our confusion of pleasure and happiness is a conflation on which advertisers thrive.
‘And, in a way,’ I say to Kathy Slack, ‘what you’re defining in Rough Patch is the difference between pleasure and happiness.’
‘I love that,’ she agrees.
‘And I’m gobsmacked that I couldn’t have explained this to you at the time. I genuinely didn’t see it; it was like I’d been brainwashed… That’s too dramatic.’
Is it? That’s what advertising does!
‘I’d drunk the Kool-Aid. I was inadvertently making people feel a need for something they didn’t really need or want, and probably wasn’t very good for them.
‘I still wrestle with it now that it never occurred at the time that that was a bad thing. Which is staggering to me now and not edifying.’
It’s a multi-billion pound world that carrots can’t compete with.
Yet carrots won Kathy over.
‘Specifically growing vegetables (not just gardening and growing plants generally), I felt like I gained a sense of control and agency.’
It wasn’t instant. It took time. But it worked.
Mind you, she’s taken lessons from the advertising world with her.
She laughs. ‘Yep – that’s why when I do ‘Introduction to veg-growing’ classes, I almost always start with radishes. They’re so quick to grow; they’re so beautiful; they taste really exciting and really different from how they taste when you buy them in the shops.
‘But they’re a quick win.
‘So still deploying the same tactics, really!’
Kathy Slack, one-time Global-something-or-other, is now author of a best-selling cookbook (From the Veg Patch). She writes columns, develops recipes, does cookery demos, hosts supper clubs. She works as a food stylist and photographer.
Not a Jimmy Choo in sight.
To be fair to the world of commerce, her company gave her pay, space and time during her recovery; support she knows she’s beyond fortunate to have received. There was — as mentioned — medical support; a wonderful family; and a spaniel, too. All elements that helped save her when she was suicidal.
But vegetable-growing. That’s the key that opened the door to the world once again.
So, how would the person who once worked on the snacking habits of Hungarian teenagers have reacted to hearing her joyously exclaim, ‘Radishes!’
‘Radishes! I know!
‘I really wish I could chat to my 30s self and say, ‘Sweetheart, the reason you are so stressed and sleepless and anxious and depressed — though you don’t realise it yet — is because everything you are doing goes counter to your values. It’s just that you haven’t worked out yet what your values are.’’
That’s why I think I know how Kathy Slack would answer the question: Are we the same person throughout our lives? Even when we can seem so very different.
Take a radish seed: dull, uniform, hard. Plant it, give it the right conditions, and it becomes a sweet, rich jewel. Same plant; beautiful result.
Exactly as nature intended.
Rough Patch: How a Year in the Garden Brought Me back to Life, by Kathy Slack is out now in hardback, eBook and Audio (Robinson, £18.99); kathyslack.com
Most of the manuals will tell you to plant different potatoes at different times: beginning with first earlies (new potatoes) in mid-March, following with second earlies (also new potatoes) in mid-April, and then maincrop (old potatoes) in mid-to-late April. But there’s a problem with manuals, so I plant the whole lot anytime in mid-to-late April. That’s if I grow them at all. A potato, in my view, is a potato, whether shop bought or home-grown (controversial, I know) so I often don’t bother and save the space for something more interesting. If I do find space for potatoes, it will be for a row of something interesting, like Anyas, which are nutty and creamy. I will admit, digging up their caramel, pink-flecked tubers in August is like digging for diamonds. I do it more for the joy of harvesting than the eating.
Serves 2 generously (or 4 as a side)
300g Anya potatoes
150g broad beans, podded weight
2 egg yolks
1 tsp apple cider vinegar
Up to 100ml of your best extra virgin olive oil
6–8 radishes, trimmed and halved
Small handful of lambs lettuce, baby spinach
or salad leaves
4 spring onions, finely chopped
1 tbsp finely chopped parsley
1 tbsp finely chopped mint
2 tsp baby capers
3–4 cornichons, sliced
Place the whole potatoes in a pan of cold, salted water, bring to the boil and cook for 15 minutes or until a skewer pierces the middle without effort. When the potatoes have just a couple of minutes to go, add the broad beans for 2 minutes. Drain and tip into a serving bowl, halving any large potatoes as you do.
Meanwhile, make a mayonnaise. Put the egg yolks in a bowl and whisk in the apple cider vinegar and a pinch of salt. Ever so gradually, whisk in the extra virgin olive oil, pouring it in a thin stream so the mix doesn’t separate. Yes, you can do it in a food processor, but where’s the romance in that? Spoon the mayonnaise into the bowl of warm potatoes.
Add the radishes, leaves, spring onions, herbs, capers and cornichons and toss gently. Serve while still warm.
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