IT WAS a five-minute sunlit stroll from my rectory opposite the Old Bailey to my favourite butchers on Smithfield market.

Glorious, with the early morning light sparkling rainbow colours on the huge wrought iron gates which open under the arch between Charterhouse Street and St John's. They knew how to combine beauty with usefulness did those great Victorian engineers and builders; so Smithfield market is designed on the model of a renaissance palace.

My butcher Trev, the cheeky chappy, is a relentless tease: "You're paying for this joint out of the collection, eh?" Or else some joke so indescribably off colour through which he hopes to make me blush. Some hopes. I've heard 'em all at my wizened old age.

He's getting nervous is Trev, as he sees Manchester United threatening to close in on his team, Chelsea. Anyhow, I bought some liver and kidney and a leg of lamb.

I cooked a meat-and-two-veg dinner for my wife and me. It took me five minutes. I'm telling you this so you don't imagine that because I live among the City types that I follow their practice and buy my food wrapped all packaged from the supermarket and stick it pathetically in the microwave just long enough to warm up its monosodium glutamate content. The reason they buy this expensive junk food in its multicoloured packets is because they can't cook. I'm not exaggerating: they wouldn't, most of 'em, know one end of a spud-peeler from the other. And they're so squeamish, the sight of a piece of fresh dead meat would bring on an attack of the vapours.

I'm not boasting about my culinary skills. It's dead easy. I peeled one large spud, cut it into slices and laid it in an oven tray in olive oil. I put some salt and pepper on the shoulder of lamb, sprinkled it with dried basil and put that in the oven too. Then I forgot all about it and sat down to watch my horse pull up in the Grand National.

Three-quarters of an hour later I opened the oven door and put some courgettes in, turned the heat down and returned to the crossword. Seven o'clock and it was done perfectly. A delicious gravy formed all by itself under the slow-roasting meat. Ten seconds to open a bottle of wine. Five minutes' labour in all.

So what's gone wrong with folks?

Why have we become a nation of practical incompetents? All those brainy City types earning ten times my priest's stipend and they wouldn't have a clue what to do with a carrot - except perhaps something that my butcher Trev could tell a rude joke about. But here's an odd thing: cookery programmes wall to wall and watched by millions - yet nobody cooks. We've become a nation of spectators, culinary voyeurs. And never so much advice about healthy diets - yet obesity is epidemic.

It's not to be wondered at. I mean they come in from a hard day sitting in front of the computer screen - stopping off at the supermarket to buy a packet of food so horrible it would put you off eating forever - and sit eating it on their knee in front of the telly.

And what do they watch on telly? Sex and the City - their own lives unrolling before them on screen. Or they watch other people living out their oikish, grungy lives on the likes of Big Brother.

This passive modern "lifestyle" is all a puzzle to me. What did Eliot say, "Where is the life we have lost in living?"