The problem with working next to Oxford Street is that there is no consumable that I can’t get hold of by leaving the office and walking for five minutes. Need new gloves? Accessorize is right there. Knickers? M&S is just over the road. A beautifully-designed but faintly useless toothbrush? Muji is your friend.

Even worse, I can eat anything I like for lunch, and even worse than that, there’s a place at the back of the always-empty and visibly low-rent Plaza shopping centre called “Pizza Hut Express”, where you can get a 6″ pizza, chips and a drink for £4.69 and eat it at your own four-seater table in the food court. For the first week after I disovered it, I ate there almost every day, because why wouldn’t you?

I offset this, in my mind, with the fact that I walk in to work from Charing Cross in the mornings and back again in the evening: an upside of this location (and there are lots) is that more or less all of central London is within walking distance of here. The station is a mile away and it me takes less than twenty minutes to stride through Soho to reach it; Camden is two miles along the edge of Regent’s Park and barely takes longer to reach than it would by tube; Shoreditch is a bit further but still under an hour away on foot, and rather that than pile onto the Central Line at Oxford Circus in rush hour.

(I don’t go to Camden or Shoreditch for fun, incidentally. I am 36. But I have to go for work sometimes.)

The other way to offset it is to eat well in the evenings, which is much easier to do (or, rather, harder to not do) now we have a veg box. In our Abel and Cole 2013 calendar, February’s recipe is this celeriac and stilton soda bread, which is super-easy to make and tastes amazing (although I had to cook it for about 20 minutes longer than the recipe said), and since they sent me beetroots instead of carrots this week I made it last night with borscht, which is one of the best cheap but exciting things to make. Do wear an apron, because even fresh raw beetroot makes everything red, though not as permanently as the pickled stuff does. This recipe is an amalgam of several, and you should play around with adding and removing things, though I think you MUST add carrots to get that carroty silkiness, and you MUST strain it through a sieve, because it’s the contrast of the rich, earthy beetroot flavour with the delicateness of a strained soup that makes it so nice to eat. If you don’t have caraway seeds you can add fennel, or you can have both, or neither.

Ingredients (serves 2)

3-4 fresh beetroots

3-4 carrots, more if they are tiny

A stick of celery

A handful of shallots

A clove of garlic

1.5L of your stock of choice (mine is chicken but beef and vegetable are OK too)

A teaspoonful of caraway seeds

A bay leaf

Method: Peel and roughly chop all the vegetables and put them in a pan with the caraway seeds, the bay leaf and some black pepper, and salt if your stock is not a salty one. Cover with the stock, bring to the boil, then turn down to a simmer and cook for about an hour. Remove the bay leaf, whizz in the blender until smooth-ish, then strain through a sieve. Reheat on the hob and serve by itself or with a splosh of sour cream (Polish sour cream, which you can get in Polish stores, of which there is definitely one near you even if you haven’t ever noticed it, is tastier). Eat wearing a bib, or something you don’t mind getting red on.