Actually, this is almost a genuine question

[NB: the question referred to above comes later on]

Yesterday, my old friend & colleague Colin Wilbourn (from the St Peter's Riverside Sculpture Project days - that's a link to an index page, but if you're curious do read "The Year of Living Differently": it's not too long, and it says much) and his partner Lynn stopped by in mid-road trip, for general catching-up and meeting-Karen and drinking wine and dining. I made a shrimp salad and chicken couscous, with a quatre-quart cake and roasted rhubarb to follow (and yes, we may have talked about Paris, somewhat).

Today of course is yogi night. Karen's actually gone off to yoga alone, but we're expecting a slew of diners - and I am tired and disinclined to spend another long day in the kitchen. Fortunately, there is leftover cake & rhubarb; and plenty of leftover stewed chicken. I have disassembled the stew, picked out the chicken and turned the remainder veg & chickpeas into soup for tomorrow, probably. With the chicken, I am thinking I can add mushrooms & onion to make a sauce for pasta; I have some nice spinach linguine. Green beans with my own bacon as a side shouldn't stress me overly, and knocking up some pesto is the work of moments. I don't even need to flinch at the cost of it, as I wisely sold a house last year and bought some pine nuts.

But! [Here comes the question. Do you remember there was to be a question?] I had made the pesto, and I was thinking about making up the sauce, and "garlic, of course" crossed my mind - at which point I was brought all to a standstill by a sudden dawning.

Am I in fact the only person on the planet who doesn't put garlic in his pesto?

Everybody else seems to, and every recipe I look at wants me to, and I won't. I think this dates back to my first encounter with the notion that actually one could grow basil and make pesto, even with no more than a windowsill to work with; and I suspect the recipe was Elizabeth David's, and it's even possible that she said something along the lines of "do not add garlic, that is heresy!" She was notoriously prescriptive. But anyway, all my cooking life, pesto has been another quatre-quart concoction: basil and oil and pine nuts and cheese*, and you're done. I seem to be an outlier; what I don't know is if I'm holding to a stubborn tradition, or if I've build a stubborn tradition on deeply shaky ground, or if there really is a school of thought that waves flags wildly at the mention of my name asserts my own philosophy. All I know is that my pesto tastes grand just as it is, and garlic is very welcome to sneak in to the meal otherwise, but it won't be coming via the green stuff.

*Sardo Pecorino for preference, which again came from that long-remembered recipe; Parmesan at a pinch. Mostly, over here, I am pinched.