I'd had enough of Zoom – until I took a homemade sushi class

In 1994, or thereabouts, I was working the kind of hours that meant lunch was always eaten at my desk – and thanks to this, it was a period in my life that was very miserable. In the post-industrial wasteland around our office, there were no decent sandwich shops; the age of avocado on sourdough was still far in the future. But then, one day, the world turned on its axis. On this particular morning, the chief subeditor returned to her page proofs smugly bearing a bag from somewhere called Pret a Manger, out of which she produced a slim plastic box whose contents she proceeded to eat with small wooden chopsticks. The rest of us were agog. The dinky bottle of soy sauce! The little slices of pickled ginger! We were wasabi green with envy.

Fifteen years later, and everything has changed. Thanks to the pandemic, offices everywhere are eerily empty, and the once near-ubiquitous Pret a Manger is embarking on a drastic programme of retrenchment. Meanwhile, sushi is no longer even remotely exotic; there are certain children of my acquaintance who regard a (clammy, tasteless) supermarket California roll as only a slightly more unusual treat than they do a bag of Monster Munch. Most unlikely of all from my point of view, I’ve recently learned to make my own sushi – something of which I am, as I write, embarrassingly proud. (I know this because when I put pictures of my first efforts on WhatsApp, my dear but plain-speaking friend, A, responded with a prawn emoji and … a string of expletives.)

I didn’t teach myself. I learned online with Yuki Gomi, the author of Sushi at Home, an experience that was slightly barmy, but fun, too. We’re all exhausted by Zoom at this point, and in the first moments of the class, I was overcome with the desolation it always stirs in me. But then Yuki started talking – fast – and I realised that if I was going to keep up, there would be no time for melancholy (nor even for illicit sips of sake).

What’s strange about sushi-making – so many things to do with cooking are like this – is that it’s at once both extremely simple and weirdly difficult. Just as you can have made bechamel sauce a thousand times and still find that every once in a while the thing will still somehow fail to thicken, so it is with sushi. Everything can be just right and yet, within seconds, it can all go so very wrong. Looking at my hand rolls, filled with spicy tuna, I couldn’t help but feel they resembled something on a grass verge you would try hard to avoid stepping in.

But looks aren’t everything. In 90 minutes, I made four of them, and they tasted fantastic. I also wonkily fashioned 12 tuna hosomaki rolls; six California rolls with salmon, avocado and white sesame seeds; and a couple of fat futomaki, also with tuna. Before I did any of this, though, I had to learn how to make perfect sushi rice – sticky, but not too sticky – and I think it was this that made me happiest of all, because rice and me so often don’t get along. (This was also the first time that I’d ever stopped to ponder the distinctive flavour of sushi rice, which comes in part from the sushi-san you stir into it after cooking – a combination of rice vinegar, sugar and salt that not only gives it a certain sweetness, but also helps to deal with any bacteria that may be on it.)

Related: How to make sushi at home

At last, then, I can say that I’ve acquired a lockdown skill (before this, my achievements were limited to moping and reorganising my knicker drawer). And yes, if you happen to know me in real life, I think I might be available for regulation-approved, socially distanced drinks parties. To be honest, I can be yours for a bottle of something fizzy (not cider) and a pristine copy of the new Martin Amis, the only proviso being that clients must care more for flavour than visual perfection. At the moment, my presentation is, alas, still a bit Generation Game. Some unkind guests may be tempted, as they struggle to keep their roll intact en route to their mouths, to make not very funny jokes about the scores on the doors.