By the time you read this I will have celebrated my 49th birthday and, while I hope I don’t look a day over 48, I know it will be a moment for reflection. As I enter my 50th year, it will be a time for acknowledging all the things I have never done, especially in the kitchen. I like to think of myself as a competent cook, one who can roast and grill and simmer. I can make terrines and reduce sauces and knock up onion tarts from scratch. I know how to use spices from North Africa, India and Asia in ways that make sense, and anybody who has tried my braised lamb shoulder will talk of nothing else. As long as they’re sitting in front of me and I’m asking them repeatedly “HOW WAS IT?” and refusing to let them leave until I feel better about myself.

But I’ve never made a soufflé. It’s not that I’ve tried and failed. I’ve never even started. Don’t get me wrong. I adore a good soufflé. It’s just never struck me as something I should make for myself. By the same token I have never made a béarnaise sauce or, come to think of it, a hollandaise. Though I have made mayonnaise. It was a mildly satisfying process, but left me wondering why I’d bothered when I could have used the time making an onion tart, given how serviceable shop-bought mayonnaise is.

I’ve never whipped up a sabayon, hand cut steak tartare, blitzed salmon with cream and chives to make a mousse or rolled my own puff pastry. Short crust of course, but puff no. I’ve never made lobster thermidor, jugged a hare or prepared a woodcock in the classical style, its breast speared by the long beak of its bisected head. And I have never, ever made vichyssoise. There is a good reason for the latter. I really dislike vichyssoise.

At this point I believe I’m meant to do the whole carpe diem thing; to bellow that I have so much life ahead of me and that really I must knuckle down and fill all these gaps in my repertoire. But really, balls to all that. When I turned 40 I realised that one of the pleasures of seniority was all the things I no longer had to apologise for: if I want to drink rosé instead of beer I can. Likewise, if I never see another production of King Lear ever again that will be just fine by me. (If I want to hear about old people losing their marbles and bugging their grown-up kids, I can ask my middle-aged friends round for dinner and get them to talk about their elderly parents.)

If anything, my position has hardened through experience. I don’t need to make a soufflé at home, because there are an awful lot of people elsewhere who will continue to do so far better than me. Ditto a sabayon and a béarnaise. I should concentrate on the things I’m already good at and work out from there. Just as I don’t feel the need to, say, shoot a baboon dead to get some sense of what it might be like to kill a man, so I don’t need to stress myself with a technical culinary procedure I haven’t so far felt the desire to master. This isn’t lack of ambition. It’s not laziness. It’s prioritisation. Look, I’ve just turned 49 and time isn’t the resource it once was. Frankly, the poor old soufflé just doesn’t even get a look in.