In culinary terms, squid can be a slippery creature. Lose your grasp of cooking time and you may find it rubbery. Cooked properly, however, it is simply magnificent. One of the best ways of cooking fresh squid is to sling them on a hot grill for a few moments, just long enough for their translucent flesh, streaked with the lines of the grill, to become opaque, and then to anoint them with a little olive oil and lemon juice and eat immediately. The other is to score them with a sharp knife and stir-fry them, fast and hot, with a few aromatic seasonings, as in the following recipe, where the pale elegance of the squid is speckled with colourful morsels of chilli, ginger, garlic and spring onion. On more than one occasion when I’ve made this for friends, they’ve pronounced it the best squid they’ve ever eaten.