You need, for God’s sake, a decent chef’s knife. No con foisted on the general public is so atrocious, so wrongheaded, or so widely believed as the one that tells you you need a full set of specialized cutlery in various sizes. I wish sometimes I could go through the kitchens of amateur cooks everywhere just throwing knives out from their drawers – all those medium-size ‘utility’ knives, those useless serrated things you see advertised on TV, all that hard-to-sharpen stainless-steel garbage, those ineptly designed slicers – not one of the damn things could cut a tomato. Please believe me, here’s all you will ever need in the knife department: ONE good chef’s knife, as large as is comfortable for your hand.

Brand name? Okay, most talented amateurs get a boner buying one of the old-school professional high-carbon stainless knives from Germany or Austria, like a Henkel or Wusthof, and those are fine knives, if heavy. High carbon makes them slightly easier to sharpen, and stainless keeps them from getting stained and corroded. They look awfully good in the knife case at the store, too, and you send the message to your guests when flashing a hundred-dollar hunk of Solingen steel that you take your cooking seriously.

But do you really need something so heavy? So expensive? So difficult to maintain (which you probably won’t)? Unless you are really and truly going to spend fifteen minutes every couple of days working that blade on an oiled carborundum stone, followed by careful honing on a diamond steel, I’d forgo the Germans.

Most of the professionals I know have for years been retiring their Wusthofs and replacing them with the lightweight, easy-to-sharpen and relatively inexpensive vanadium steel Global knives, a very good Japanese product which has – in addition to its many other fine qualities – the added attraction of looking really cool.

Global makes a lot of knives in different sizes, so what do you need? One chef’s knife. This should cut just about anything you might work with, from a shallot to a watermelon, an onion to a sirloin strip.

Don’t Sit Up Straight

Sitting with your torso flexed 135 degrees from your legs — halfway between bolt upright and flat on your back — is best for your spine, even though you’ll have a tendency to slide off your chair, say a team led by Waseem Bashir of the University of Alberta Hospital in Canada.

On the basis of MRIs, the researchers say the 135-degree position is better than sitting upright or leaning forward. 32% of people in the UK spend more than 10 hours seated, and half don’t leave their desks even to have lunch.