The lunch is already imperfect

Someone in Amman is cooking for twelve on Friday, and has been planning it since Tuesday.

The lamb has to be right. The rice cannot stick. The aunt who notices everything is coming. There is a version of the meal in the cook's head that is flawless in every detail, and every hour of the morning is spent measuring the real meal against it.

The real meal will lose. It always does. Something will be oversalted, someone will arrive late, the yoghurt sauce will split or come close to it. No lunch for twelve has ever matched the one imagined on Tuesday.

The other half deserves saying out loud too. The lunch has already worked, a little. Twelve people are coming. The pot is on. Whatever happens at the table, that much is settled before anyone sits down.

So the useful question is not whether it will succeed. It will, partly. It will fall short, partly. Most of where that line lands is decided by things nobody in the kitchen controls: the traffic, the moods people arrive in, the lamb itself.

What is left to decide is how to spend the four hours that remain.

They can go on fighting what cannot be fought, checking the clock, rehearsing apologies for a sauce that has not split yet. Or they can go on the onions in the pan, on tasting, on laughing with the cousin who came early to help.

The morning is the only part on offer. The afternoon will settle itself.