C2Reading and Use of EnglishPart 6
Gapped text
You are going to read an extract. Seven paragraphs have been removed from the extract. Choose from the paragraphs A-H the one which fits each gap (1-7). There is one extra paragraph which you do not need to use.
Cooking at the Bottom of the World
The advertisement asked for a cook ‘with experience of catering for large groups, a calm temperament and no strong objection to darkness’. I had the first two, or believed I did, and had never been anywhere dark enough to have an opinion on the third. Eight months later I was standing in a kitchen on the Antarctic coast, responsible for feeding twenty-three people through a winter in which the sun would not rise for almost four months, and in which the nearest supermarket was, broadly speaking, on another continent.
The question I most wished I had asked was how to plan eight months of menus without repeating myself to the point of mutiny. My predecessor had left a folder of notes, most of them practical and some of them alarming. ‘Do not,’ one of them read, underlined twice, ‘run out of chocolate before midwinter.’ Another said simply: ‘Fridays matter.’ I did not understand that one until much later.
I learned this the hard way in April, when I made the mistake of serving the same curry twice in one week. Nobody complained to my face, but the following evening the station doctor, a softly spoken Glaswegian called Fergus, took me aside and observed, with great tact, that there were people on the base who were counting. I assumed he was joking. He was not.
Midwinter, the shortest day of the year, is the great festival of every Antarctic station, observed with a solemnity the rest of the world reserves for weddings. There is a formal dinner, there are gifts made by hand, and there is a tradition of exchanging greetings by radio with other bases across the continent. Preparations begin, I was told, more or less the day the ship leaves, and in my case that was barely an exaggeration.
What nobody had warned me about was the period afterwards. With the celebration behind us and the sun still weeks from returning, the station sank into a long, grey slump. People slept badly, tempers frayed over trivia, and conversation at dinner, once lively, dwindled to remarks about the weather. I found myself cooking for a room that scarcely looked up from its plates.
It was not, I think, the pizza as such, which was perfectly ordinary. It was the business of standing elbow to elbow in a warm room, arguing about toppings and getting flour on one another’s sleeves. The scientists, who spent most of their days alone with their instruments, seemed especially grateful for it. One of them, a glaciologist who rarely spoke at dinner, turned out to hold strong and thoroughly researched views on anchovies.
The first ship of the new season arrived in November, bringing crates of fresh food that seemed, after eight months, almost indecent in their colour. I remember holding a lettuce in both hands with something close to reverence. Several people ate apples standing on the quayside, like children let out of school. I made a salad that evening and was given a round of applause.
I have cooked in a number of restaurants since, some of them rather grand, and I have never again felt that the work mattered so much. In a restaurant, a meal is one pleasure among many; at the bottom of the world it is frequently the only one. People sometimes ask whether I would go back. I tell them I would, though not, perhaps, for the reasons they expect. I would go back for the Fridays.
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