Prue Leith Blog - Prue Leith

Colour,gloriuos colour

Thu, 7 Mar 2013 -1:00:00 GMT

Are you not thoroughly sick of grey, cream, beige and brown? Or minimalist black and white? I am. I go to a lot of hotels, most still stuck in the fifty shades of grey spectrum.

True, a bridal-type suite of billowing white muslin, deep goose-down duvet covered in finest white cotton, pale painted furniture and soft cream carpet exudes purity and luxury, but add a great wham of colour -- bucket of amaryllis or huge Howard Hodgkin picture of swirling green and orange -- and that virginal room will elicit a gasp of pleasure rather than a sentimental sigh.

I am delighted that, at last, at last, colour is back. In clothes, decor, kitchen stuff, everything. Going to a kitchen shop used to feel like going to a hospital supply store, all stainless steel and gleaming white. Only expensive le Creuset casseroles stood out in flaming orange. But now plates and bowls, utensils, napkins and pots are all a riot of colour.

Maybe we've caught the colour bug on our travels. The Far East, Asia, Africa, Mexico,

South America, India has always been great with colour. I love those Indian trucks lit up like a Christmas tree, and sarongs and longis dyed in jewel like stripes, tropical flowers of glorious vulgarity. I recently saw, in Sri Lanka, a household mop head, the bristles made of half a dozen violent clumps of different colour. Also a flashing light which jumps from red to blue to green to yellow. Useless, but irresistible. We bought four.

I have always had a penchant for vulgar colour. I have a garden terrace and flower beds stuffed with red, purple and orange flowers and dark leaved plants. I excuse it on the grounds of my South African childhood, where colours are strong: red flame trees, purple bougainvillea, blue plumbago against blue sky or yellow veld.

My drawing room has had the same bright turquoise leather sofas for twenty years. And every time I redecorate a room somehow it turns out orange and turquoise.

But I have been tastefully restrained with my new kitchens, of which I confess to having two in my re-jigged Cotswold house. One is pale dusty blue and one is pale dusty green but to be honest they are so subtle and classy, so “Farrow and Ball “that no one can tell the difference. But I do love them. If you spend as much time in the kitchen as I do, you need it to be calm and peaceful, not an exciting clash of glorious colour.

This brings me to colour for children and is one area where I think the love of colour has gone too far. Don't infants sometimes need a rest from strident primary colours absolutely everywhere? I know babies are supposed to need constant stimulation, but does every toy, dress, piece of nursery furniture have to be in fairground shades?

Maybe all that colour in childhood promotes the teenagers’ addiction to black?

An Evening with Prue Leith

Mon, 10 Dec 2012 -1:00:00 GMT

An Evening with Prue Leith

The temperatures were plummeting when we set off to Corby to spend an evening with Prue Leith. But despite the chill outside, Prue brought along a lot of warmth to the evening as she gave us a glimpse of her eventful life. She was a very natural speaker and romped through her South African childhood under apartheid, her passion for food, her relationships, and the adoption of her Cambodian daughter. She enthralled us all with many amusing anecdotes from different episodes in her career – from the cat ID tag in the trifle to the “bomb” package at the newspaper desk due to an error regarding quantities in a recipe!

My knowledge of Prue before the evening was that she is a restaurateur, caterer, TV cook, broadcaster, cookery writer and of course, judge on The Great British Menu. What I found out on the evening was that she is a very passionate woman with steel determination and ambition; an astute business woman.

Prue has also had an active career in charity and not-for-profit businesses, being a campaigner for good food and teaching schoolchildren to cook – in fact she had been teaching sixth formers at the Malcolm Arnold Academy in Northampton earlier that day. She is also the driving force behind the Fourth Plinth Project – the temporary display of artworks on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square. And she writes novels!

I am really looking forward to reading my signed copy of her memoir “Relish” (even if her editors cut out her many references to her “hobby horses”) to find out more about the life of this stylish, bossy but charismatic Septuagenarian.

To view more photos from the evening please go to our blog:

http://towcesterwi.blogspot.co.uk/

My gap year

Tue, 4 Dec 2012 -1:00:00 GMT

At the ripe old age of 72 I've decided to award myself a gap year. Woke up one day and realised that ever since I left cookery school at 20, I have never had more than a few weeks off. True, I've had plenty of wonderful hols and I took a few months leave when my children arrived, but I've never before opted out of real work for long.

I wanted a rest from novel writing, or indeed any book writing at all. So far I'm about half way through the year and to my surprise I have not suffered my usual writer's angst -- feeling vaguely restless and guilty if I don't write for a few hours a day. This could be because I've been doing it in a lot more style than hitching with a backpack. Instead I've swanned about the world, imbibing museums, music and sights in equal measure, and rewarding myself with frequent doses of five star luxury.

Happily, because I'm a director of Orient Express Hotels, I've been able to stay in the famous Mount Nelson in Cape Town, three safari camps in Botswana, the Governor's Residence in Yangon, dreamy hotels on Bali, and even get to sail up the Irrawady in a river cruiser and rattle up the Penang Peninsula on the Eastern Oriental Express. And I have just returned from a quick trip to Russia where we have the iconic Grand Hotel Europe in St Petersburg. What an extraordinarily lucky woman I am.

Needless to say I have put on half a stone in half a month. I had diligently lost that 7 lbs before the start of filming the new series of the Great British Menu. Then we had a short break and I went to Russia and stuffed myself full of herring and potatoes, caviar and blinis, chocolate cake and apple pie, all washed down with good Georgian wine and lots of vodka. We had two days of Orient Express meetings which meant two days of unavoidable dinners and lunches. Or at least unavoidable to me. I am incapable of resisting good food.

But at least I have developed a system for controlling, or half controlling, greed. I say to myself "Is it worth the calories?" If it is not truly delicious, it's not worth swallowing.

Trouble is caviar and vodka are always worth the calories.

My brother David

Tue, 4 Dec 2012 -1:00:00 GMT

My brother David died recently in the care of the NHS. His death was not their fault: no one can do anything about bone cancer except alleviate the pain. Which is what they spectacularly failed to do.

Bone cancer does not kill you. It just hurts like hell and your bones become so fragile that coughing breaks ribs. You have to wait for the disease to spread to an organ, the failing of which will kill you. Or you can hope for “the old man’s friend” pneumonia, to finish you off.

Either way, you should not, surely, have to endure months of pain and die in agony? Pain relief is possible, and many hospices and a few hospitals (notably the Royal Marsden) manage a patient’s dying days with compassion and palliative drugs (notably morphine) tailored to the patient’s pain. But most do not.

Hospices have a better reputation. Their aim is to aid a peaceful death. Hospitals, on the other hand are tasked with keeping the patient alive, however much he suffers.

David was eventually given morphine. The blessed relief would last three hours, but the nurses would be unable to give him his next dose for another hour. So out of every four hours, one would be spent in groaning, crying, sometimes begging, agony.

Consultants see their patients rarely and briefly. If they saw them in extremis, pity might move them to increase the dose - something the ward staff, who must deal with the pleading and crying, cannot do. It must be hell for the nurses; hell also for the other patients in the ward; distressing beyond measure for the family. And torture for the patient.

The truth is, I suspect, that doctors fear being accused of murder, or mercy-killing. They dare not prescribe enough morphine to make the patient comfortable. In our parents’ day, doctors would give their dying patients enough drugs to relieve the pain. Of course this also made them drowsy and they slept a lot. And if it helped them on their way, no one thought it wrong.

You would not treat a dog like that. And if you did, the RSPCA would rightly prosecute you for wilful cruelty and neglect.

In the last six weeks a pattern developed. David would get pneumonia, be admitted to the hospital, they would give him antibiotics, he would recover, be sent home. And a week or two later, be admitted again.

With only a fortnight or so to go, David’s wife discharged him, thinking it would be easier at home. They lived in a two-bedroom house and their four children came to spend their father’s last days with him. There were some good times. When the morphine was doing its job, David would be pain free, surrounded by his family, joking, or (unusual for him) telling them just how they had enriched his life and how much he loved them. That is how dying should be. And proper palliative care allows that – the space and time for the dying and the grieving to say those things they need to say, to give each other reassurance, comfort and love.

But mostly it was not like that. Those four children and beloved wife’s memories should be of those good times. But for David’s family I fear they are overlaid by the memories of the one-hour-in-four of agony for David and anguish and helplessness for them. Two of my nieces, separately and unknown to each other, pleaded with the agency nurses who came night and morning, to increase the morphine dose. But they could not, any more than the hospital nurses could. One said, “If you knew how many times we are asked that! We would willingly do it. All over the country, in and out of hospitals, people are suffering like your Dad. It’s so unnecessary, but no one admits its happening.”

David’s wife and children took turns to be with him, night and day. One said to me she’d sat for half an hour with a pillow in her hands, trying to screw her courage to the sticking point. But she could not suffocate her own Dad.

In the end David, determined to end the pain, refused any more antibiotics, so allowing the next dose of pneumonia to kill him. Dying of pneumonia is a horrible death. Basically you drown, slowly and painfully, as your lungs fill with mucus and you cannot breathe. David’s family had to endure the sound of laboured breathing, then for the last five days, a constant loud “death rattle”. They had to bear the sight of their father and husband, thick green discharge running from mouth and nose, veering from semi-coma to excruciating pain. Death is always distressing, but in 2012, with all our talk of respect and consideration for others, how can it be that a wife ends up praying for her husband to please, please, just die?

Surely all that is needed is something like a hospital protocol that if the patient and the next of kin want to end the misery, and two doctors agree the patient will be dead in a month anyway, they can increase the dose of drugs to the level sufficient to alleviate the pain, even at the risk of death.

If that is a step too far, cannot we at least accept Lord Joffe’s proposed bill which would allow, if not “mercy killing”, at least “assisted suicide”? This would make it lawful for doctors to prescribe, though not to administer, a drug that would cause death. The patient would have to request it, and take it while still capable of doing so.

The present state of affairs is surely monstrous. With 80% of the population is in favour of assisted dying, what are they waiting for?

Relish and Burma! A heady combination

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 -1:00:00 GMT

What a month! I have always egotistically enjoyed my book launches. Lots of interviews and radio or telly and an excuse for an excess of bubbly. But the publication of my memoir Relish has been less than delightful. I should have known that journalists, being journalists, would not be interested in my long career in food, the disasters of the catering trade, my restaurant and business concerns, interests in modern art, the charities I helped found, battles with government over food policy, the many companies on whose boards I have served, my obsessions with gardening and salmon fishing, even the adoption of my Cambodian daughter, and certainly not in my novels or writing. All they want to talk about is my love life and “rackety sixties existence”. To read the reviews or articles you’d think it had all been drugs, sex and rock and roll.

So I fear many a reader will be disappointed. But I’m glad to say the books are flying out into the shops – the hardback was reprinted before the official launch – but whether they fly out of again is another story. Am holding breath, thumbs and toes.

The other excitement has been the new T.V. Great British Menu competition. As I write, I’m on the train to London on my way to do an interview for Steve Wright in the Afternoon with Oliver and Matthew, my fellow judges. We finished filming the actual competition several weeks ago, but we still have the main banquet to come. It will be cooked by the winners (still a secret) in May.

This year (which is, I can hardly believe, our seventh) the winners will be cooking for Olympian athletes, who will take a break from training and their strict performance diet, to see if our chefs can match their dedication and determination in sport, by theirs in cooking. The concept this year has to be to find dishes and techniques which break new ground, which are absolute winners, which reach heights of gastronomy not before dreamt of! A tall order, but, you know what? Some of the winning food was just astonishing, truly Olympian. Let’s hope they cook as well on the night.

Once my autobiog had been delivered and there was no way I could change a comma, I went off to the Far East to take a look at a few of Orient Express properties. It was the holiday of a lifetime, probably only affordable because, as a director, I don’t have to pay full whack. We went steerage on Malaysian airlines and it was really good with roomy seats, good food and delightful staff. When we got to Bali it was like stepping into a movie. First to the Ubid Hanging Gardens hotel, in the centre of the island. Palm trees, clinging to the side of a gorge with a floodlit temple seeming to dance in the jungle across the river. Then on to the famous Jimburan Puri Bali: miles of white sand, blue sky, little boats in the bay, five star everything. We stayed in a private walled villa, with a pool in the garden. Heaven. Best of all was an evening at a beach restaurant with seafood caught that day, barbecued to order. No three- star Michelin chef can ever be beat that. Just amazing.

Then on to Burma, via Singapore and the Eastern Oriental Express train which trundled up the peninsula to Bangkok. Then a short hop to Yangon to stay in Orient Express’s Governor’s Residence hotel. Unabashedly colonial in feel, it provided a real insight into the Burmese character, which is generous and forgiving to a fault. Nothing too much trouble and no tips ever solicited. They are accepted with apparent embarrassment and reluctance. Further up country, it is sometimes impossible to give a Burmese anything. The Buddhist culture of generosity and good works is astonishing to our acquisitive Western eyes. Even the poor give 20% of their income to charity or good works. This used to mostly go on sticking squares of gold leaf on pagodas and images of Buddha, but increasingly goes on education and health projects.

The town of Bagan, half way up the Irrawaddy, has 3,000 temples, some of them covered in gold. We spent three days there, and it wasn’t enough to scratch the surface. But it was wonderful – days exploring temples and pagodas, and nights on The Road to Mandalay, the river cruiser that sails up and down the Irrawaddy like a five star hotel.

Burma, or Myanmar (even the Burmese seem to use both terms) is, for me the more interesting than even Thailand, Cambodia, Laos or Vietnam. It is much less Westernised and, as yet, more authentic. I felt strangely guilty at being part of the tourist invasion which will inevitably change all that. But, as Aung San Sui Kyi has at last agreed, they need the money. Her party is, has just won a clutch of seats in the by-elections, but that won’t mean instant democracy. But who knows? It’s a 6% start and from tiny acorns.

The one disappointment was the food. I suspect years of the British (who regarded the country as a province of India) has something to do with that. It has none of the fragrance of Thai cooking, not of the lightness of Vietnamese, none of the delicate spicing of Indian. It is pretty boring, frankly. But, (and I never thought I would say this) food isn’t everything. And they have very good beer.

Gok on my couch

Tue, 7 Feb 2012 -1:00:00 GMT

Gok on my couch.

The other day I staggered into the green room of the Great British Menu studio to find Gok asleep on my couch. I say my couch because it’s usually mine, Mathew Fort having gone off for a zizz in his dressing room and Oliver Peyton running his business from his i-phone in the corridor. Gok is a lovely fellow, just as he is on the box, and very very nice to old ladies like me. But you can’t help thinking that he’s probably thinking, God, I’m glad I don’t have to see her naked. (Just to explain to the truly out of touch -- like me until a few weeks ago -- Gok is the telly fashion guru who instructs s you to love the skin you’re in. And persuades all ages, shapes and sizes of ordinary mortal to strip off for the catwalk in front of hundreds of live folks and millions of T.V. viewers of ‘How to Look Good Naked’

He’s off his rocker of course. Love your body? Show me the woman over forty, or even under forty, who does. The only woman I know who truly believes she is gorgeous is seriously obese and was pretty damn miserable until she went through a programme that made her realise she IS gorgeous. Fat and gorgeous. We all need that program.

But the rest of us know we are too tall, too short, too fat, too thin, too wrinkly, too something or other. I thought by the time I hit fifty I would not care about such things. Wrong. Ditto at sixty. Ditto at seventy. I bet it will be the same at eighty, Ninety? O God.

So, alright, it’s a life sentence. But the thing that really bugs me is that I used to be gorgeous but didn’t know it and I got not an ounce of joy from it. OK, maybe I wasn’t gorgeous, but good enough to make a few bucks by modelling hairstyles, underwear and bikinis. Admittedly the swimwear was “for the fuller figure” but I was only a size twelve then, and the reason my underwear career was short-lived was my mother found out.

All this keening for lost youth is brought on by trawling through my life for my memoir. (Quick plug – it’s called Relish and will be out February 28th (but you can download it on Amazon). The trawling included boxes of old photos and that’s what got me thinking about how stupid young women are not to glory in their youth and good looks while they can. I found a picture of me looking glamorous, age 29, (and yes, I know, ridiculous too) and Quercus, my publishers decided to use it for the front cover. But when my current friends and colleagues saw it they were horrified. “It’s hopeless. You are unrecognisable. The readers who will buy your memoir are people who recognise you from the telly or from newspaper pics of today. They’d walk right past this glamour-puss with dangly earrings, false eyelashes and come-hither look.

So Quercus changed their minds. And had a posh photographer, hair dresser, wardrobe mistress and make-up artist all do their very best with today’s edition.

So here is the serious note: If you are young you are probably beautiful -- youth just IS beautiful, at any size and shape. So enjoy it. And if you aren’t young, be comforted: you are about to get older and less beautiful, so make hay…

Gok, I think I am beginning to get the point.

Opening of Leiths 1969 Prue 2012

Public Appearances

Mon, 7 Nov 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

Me at Steyning Book Festival
June 2010

Photographed by Take Two Photography

www.taketwophotography.co.uk

"Me doing my literary-festival bit, this time at Alton, Hampshire, with the Mayor David Willoughby

What is my favourite dish??

Thu, 3 Nov 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

It’s that time again. I’m just about to start filming for the Great British Menu – the seventh series is coming up. I think Ladbrokes should start taking bets on how long the BBC will keep me as their pet Oldie, the one they can point to when accused of not employing older women. But I am looking forward to it. You’d have thought, with all the glorious food I have eaten in a long life, I’d be sick to death of Michelin star gastronomy. But every year new top chefs bring their imagination, creativity and taste buds to the challenge and do simply amazing things.

People often ask me what my favourite dish is, or what style of cooking I like, and the truth is, it depends on what I have just eaten. If I am going out for a very smart celebration dinner in an expensive restaurant then I won’t want any of it if I have been foolish enough to have a big lunch. But if I’ve skipped lunch and had a fruit-only breakfast I will be ready for anything the chef puts before me – even a tasting menu of 30 tastes from Heston Blumenthal.

The other thing that influences me, beside the fullness of my tum, is the company I’m in. I would never have gone to Heston’s Fat Duck or the famous, now no more, El Bulli in Spain with someone not interested in food. My beloved husband could not stand all the foodie talk and the constant interruptions by the waiters as they poured liquid nitrogen into a bowl to freeze tequila sorbet at the table, or explained that the pearl size blob green blob on the salt spoon was concentrated tarragon and had to be left to melt on the tongue immediately after a mouthful of pomelo granitè, or some such gastronomic instruction. But to go to these places with other people, like my daughter (as obsessed with food as me) or a restaurant chef or manager is a fantastic experience.

I have been thinking a lot about food styles of late, because I am a director of the hotel company, Orient-Express Hotels, just declared the best in the world by the Leading Quality Assurance organisation which goes about testing everything from the quality of the bath bubbles to the smile on the waiter’s face. And food is central to customer perception of course, so we are always keen to know what our customers want.

Since we are unashamedly expensive, our customers are pretty well of, ranging from an elderly couple celebrating their golden wedding with a once-in-a-life-time-treat at the Cipriani in Venice or Mount Nelson in Cape Town, to seriously rich young business people who eat too much good food in too many luxury hotels. It is not a circle very easy to square: older couples tend to want peace and quiet, no children, very sophisticated food, room service and plenty of spa treatments. Young couples want a great spa too, but also a terrific modern gym, a kid’s club, things for children to do, and other things for themselves to do, and very simple, fashionable, delicious meals that don’t take too long. They also want the best chefs in the world, but they want light, healthy, modern food, not French gastronomy.

I’m 71, but I find myself agreeing with both sides of this discussion. I do love classic haute cuisine with its reliance on reduced wine sauces, cream, butter, confit of this and confit of that, rich slow cooking, plenty of protein. But since I am a lot less active than I was when I worked ten hour days in the kitchen, I would be positively mountainous if I ate like that now. As it is I am two stone heavier than I was when I opened my first restaurant and at least a stone heavier than I should be. I am still working hard and very very busy (though not on my feet all day) so light, quick, healthy food is what I mostly prefer. And years worrying about the way children eat (I was Chair of the School Food Trust) has made me very aware that the perfect diet consists of almost no fat, very little protein, rather more (healthy) carbohydrate, and plenty of veg and fruit.

But I am such a sybarite I refuse to give up completely on the lamb shanks and ox cheeks, the butter-fried kidneys in a mustard cream sauce, the terrines and pates of my beloved France. So my solution (which I don’t always stick to) is to eat these things, in very small portions with a lot of brilliant veg.

The chef who knows absolutely how to marry the needs of both types of customer, is Raymond Blanc, the gastronomic genius behind our famous Manoir aux Quat’ Saisons in Oxfordshire. His restaurant is packed, lunch and dinner, day after day. And the customers are of every age and nationality and the food is astonishing. The portions are small - hungry rugby players can have it all again if they like – and sensational. The veg and salads taste (and often are) picked that day, the colours are electric-bright, the combinations original or classic but never over-contrived. Only one problem. Resisting puds is impossible.

Photo taken by Jean Cazals

Autumn 2011

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

When I fixed up the ancient barn as my “old age home” I thought I would live in it for years. But my children objected to my proposed sale of their childhood home so we’ve now decided to let the barn, and I will move back into the house and hope to see my grandchildren run about the place as their Dad did. The truth is the barn is beautiful for one, but hopeless for babies and children.

Barn Interior

So it back to upheaval. The builders, who are re-wiring, re-plumbing and re-roofing the house at the moment, will I hope, be out for Christmas and we will have a massive party with both barn and house to shelter extended family and friends.

Bats permitting, that is. I discover that my house belongs to ten bats. I am not allowed to carefully re-house them in the outbuildings with the hundreds of their cousins already there. I have to wait until they are good and ready to go off for six weeks in early October to find mates or whatever they do. Until then we cannot even look into the attic. And then, when they come back, everything in the attic must be as they left it, presumably with a welcome mat saying, Milk in the fridge, Heating turned on.

I finally delivered the first draft of Relish, my Memoir last month, and it came winging back from my editor with instructions to chop out thirty thousand words (it is too long, I agree) and lose a lot of the business stuff and the charity stuff. I am not so sure. Do readers only want food and love? Tell me, please!

Oh to be in England

Tue, 2 Aug 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

Oh to be in England.

I know it is a cliché as old as Chaucer, but there is NOTHING like a perfect English summer’s day. Temperature of 24 degrees, sun, blue sky, light breeze and everything happening in the veg garden. This year, because my big garden is getting an overhaul, I’m reduced to an ancient cattle trough filled with herbs and two tiny raised beds outside my front door.

Mags on my herb trough

It is heaven. I’m free of the tyranny of the hopeless struggle to keep up with nature’s excessive bounty, of beetroots swelling to the size of coconuts when your back is turned, of broccoli bolting, of too many lettuces one week and none the next, of the fridge stuffed with berries I am never going to turn into jam before they turn into a smelly mess. And I don’t have to feel constantly guilty about the waste. I now stand smugly admiring my purple and green cabbages, three different lettuces, runner bean plants climbing a wigwam, spilling courgette plant and reddening tomatoes. I hardly like to pick them they look so good, but of course I do. The difference in flavour of a lettuce leaf out of the soil five minutes ago and one that has spent a week in a bag of nitrogenous air in a supermarket distribution chain is just astonishing.

Maybe I’ll forget about the veg garden altogether. More space for flowers.

And that is the other obvious, cliché-laden thing. English flowers in an English summer. I MUST be getting very old: I think I would rather wander round my garden, secateurs in hand, than almost anything. Unless it’s perhaps arranging them. In my restaurant days my veg garden was also a cutting garden and every week I’d be up at six picking armfuls of flowers for my London restaurants. It took hours, was often wet and cold, and yet I enjoyed it. But not like I do on an early summer morning, sun still at a slant and the scent of roses better than Chanel.

Summer flowers...heavenly!

Summer 2011

Fri, 29 Jul 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

Have just returned from a perfect summer afternoon – at Guiting Power Jazz festival. I’m not a jazz nut, and I don’t go to a lot of music festivals and when I do I expect it to be raining and cold and to get the car stuck in a field. But today was heaven. Took a friend, a picnic and a bottle, and fell asleep listening to Fats Waller and Satchmo in the sun.

I’m in that blissful period when I’ve just delivered a book – my Memoir, at last -- to my publishers and they have not yet come back with instructions for the inevitable re-writes. I feel free as a bird and totally untroubled by the itch to write. I do think writing is a kind of disease: incurable and recurrent, like malaria. But right now I feel I will never need to write another line. But in a month or two I know the beast will be back, gnawing away.

The Memoir – it is called Relish – is far too long I know. My books usually come out at 90,000 words. This one is 150,000 at the moment. The fact is I didn’t know what to leave out. How do I know what bits of my life are remotely interesting to anyone else? There is a good bit about business, because business has been such a big part of my life. But maybe that is deeply boring? Still, deciding what stays and what is binned is what a good editor is for. Up to her to wield her blue pencil and just chop stuff out.

I’ve been hugely relieved and gratified by the reaction of my nearest and dearest. I sent both my brothers the chapters in which they appear. I rather expected them to tell me that I’d got it all wrong, but they were both nice about it and David, my elder brother sent me a bunch of anecdotes about our childhood that I had forgotten, so now the book is even longer. O dear.

I’ve had some great short breaks this summer. I finished Relish at the end of May, went straight off to stay with Ernest for a few days in Lanzarote and just slept and ate and drove round the island, which I now love. Then I had a great few days in Rock, Cornwall, where my son and his wife had rented a house. It was very beautiful with great views but about as suitable for a toddler as the lion cage in the zoo. The terrace did not have a gate to prevent access to the precipitous garden which in turn had three gateless exits down a steep bank to a busy road, and hence to the sea. The garden contained a slate coffee table at baby eye-height with a broken jagged corner, the terrace was full of missing stones and we had to barricade the stairs in the house. When not fussing over young Malachi (his parents are happily much more relaxed than me) I was cooking. I really enjoyed it. I felt like a B and B landlady. What with about ten family and friends I seemed was frying eggs or making spag bol and chicken stew all the time. But once I made an effort and we had oxtail with cider, prunes and beans from Jocelyn Dimbleby’s new book Orchard in the Oasis. This is a great book of “Recipes, Travels and Memories”. She writes as she cooks – like a dream.

And then two weeks ago I had a few days with my friends the Greenes in their amazing castle in Tuscany, on top of a hill with views for miles. It was hot -- forty degrees – and I got up each morning and did a couple of hours of pruning in the vineyard before it got too hot to bear. The real workers prune for five hours, starting at six am, and then do another couple of hours in the cool of the evening. But I pleaded old age and laziness. But it was fascinating. Somehow you have to balance the following:

1. Leave only one bunch of grapes on each branch

2. This should be the lowest bunch

3. It should not be touching any other bunch

4. Take off enough leaves to ensure the air can get through so the grapes won’t get mildew

5. But not so many that too much sun shrivels the grapes.

6. And you want each vine to carry a couple of kilos of grapes, which sometimes means ignoring 1 above

I loved it. It requires just enough concentration to not make a boo-boo, but is still relaxing and stress-free.

Rather like salmon fishing really, which engages your attention just enough to stop you worrying about the family, work, money, etc but leaves you free to notice the birds and water voles, dragon flies or cloud formations. I was in Iceland for a week, on the River Hofsa, right up in the Arctic Circle, which was as chilly (7 degrees) as Italy had been hot.

I really do not know why I love fishing so much. Standing shivering in a river in the rain, catching nothing, doesn’t sound like a whole lot of fun, but it is. I caught eight fish the smallest weighing seven pounds and the biggest twelve. Very satisfying. But I am not sure we were not cheating; on the last two days, in glorious sunshine, I caught five of them with a guide standing next to me in the water (close enough to hoike me out if I fell in) and he had a friend lying on the top of a very high steep bank over the river from where he could see the salmon. The fish-spotter shouted instructions in Icelandic and my guide translated “ Take a step”; “No, back nine inches”; “Cast a foot more line”; “reel in a bit” “cast more downstream” etc, until the fly would land so close to the salmon they just had to snap at it. Cheating or not, I am now insufferably pleased with myself and will bore anyone who will listen. I’ll let you off an account of every fish landed (and released you will be pleased to hear) but I have to tell you about one. I had twice got tired or fed up at no action and handed the rod to my guide for him to have a go. Both times he had immediately hooked a salmon. The third time I had just cast a long line when I decided it was time for a sit-down and I handed him my rod. Immediately he was into a fish. I tried to punch him on the arm, shouting, I don’t believe it! But he turned because he wanted to hand me back my rod and my punch missed, I lost my balance and fell into the river.

So there he was trying to pull me out with one arm and holding onto the rod (and the fish) with the other. Finally I stopped laughing, took the rod and started to play the fish while he ran along the bank to get the net. I brought the salmon in, he got her into the net and was just about to remove the hook so we could release her when she leapt out of the net and headed for freedom. But I was still hanging on to the rod. So we had another five minute battle and I brought her in again and this time we got the hook out and let her go. Poor fish. I had fifteen minutes of huge excitement and pleasure while she had 15 minutes of fright. Fisherman sometimes justify what is a cruel business by saying fish don’t feel pain. I am sure they do, and anyway, it’s pretty obvious they don’t enjoy the experience. Even when, as on the Hofsa, you let them go.

The other great thing about not having a book to write, at least for a few weeks, is that I can read a few. I’m finally tackling that pile of “modern classics” at my bedside. I’ve never read any John Irving so I am deep into The World according to Garp

Which is a very strange, but oddly compelling book, full of curious characters, not all of them believable, but all interesting. There are scenes of appalling violence, lots of bad language and a good bit of explicit sex. And yet it is a delicate and moving book. And then I will have a go at Susan Hill and then another try at AS Byatt. I loved Possession and Angels and Insects. But she’s written eight more novels since then none of which I have read. The latest is The Children’s Book, which has 615 pages of very small print – about twice as long as my already-too-long Memoir. But then, she is AS Byatt, and you would not want an editor with a blue pencil anywhere near her.

My property development project continues and it scares me stiff. Every time I see the chap in charge of rebuilding my house and giving it new wiring, new plumbing, new roof etc, he tells me that I have to make more savings if I am to meet the budget. So far I have forgone fixing the pergola under which we, very occasionally, have summer lunches (which mean the rotting wooden sleepers that hold up the grapevine might just fall down one day); I’ve given up dreams of an Aga, I’ve realized that replacing the parquet flooring is a blown dream, and that paint is going to have to do instead of tiling. But what I really regret is the cancellation of the hideously expensive piece of kit that would have meant I could close all the curtains at once with the flick of a switch. I don’t know why I hate it so much, but opening all the curtains in the morning and closing them all at night seems a massive waste of time. And yet I cannot not do it.

Spring 2011

Tue, 15 Mar 2011 -1:00:00 GMT

How does anyone manage to talk to their friends on Twitter or Facebook? I struggle to deal with my emails, never mind write this blog. This explains, but does not excuse my lateness in replying to mail sent to this website. I’m sorry. Must try harder.

What a hideous winter. At least I managed to escape for a good bit of it to Cape Town, which I fell in love with, all over again. I was born in Cape Town and went to University there. But I was brought up in Johannesburg which has always regarded Cape Town as half asleep, dull and slow. Not anymore. Give me Cape Town any day. It’s one of the loveliest towns in the world, sandwiched between the mountain and the sea. And the place is buzzing.

But before my escape, at the moment that Cotswold temperatures broke all records with minus 17 degrees, we were moving house. Three weeks before we were due to move, the heating oil ran out, we could not get more, so the heating went off, everything froze, and even the hardy removal men who are used to lugging stuff from freezing storage depots, could only do a couple of hours before needing a warm up in their van. Poor Francisca, my P.A. sat at her desk in overcoat, gloves, hat and boots. The rest of us, including cats and dog, had decamped into my newly converted barn. But Francisca could not come because BT, having absolutely insisted that we book a date months before to move our broadband and all the kit from house to barn, could not, would not change the date. And then, guess what? Right. On the due date they did not turn up anyway.

We sold our London house with a pang or two. We only bought it five years ago and our apartments (son and his wife and baby on the ground floor, me on the floor above and daughter Li-Da on the floor above me) still felt brand new. But the new owner is ripping the whole lot out to turn it back into a single family house.

The good thing is they let us remove the baths, basins, dishwashers, cookers, the lot, which will help with the refurb of our country house which has hardly had a penny spent on it since we did it up 35 years ago. Now it is to get a new roof, new plumbing, new electrics, the works. Then we’ll move back and I’ll let the barn.

Li-Da bought a flat in a mansion block near Paddington Station and Daniel is renting a cottage in Hammersmith, having temporarily given up the house hunt. And I won’t buy anything in London at all. I reckon, at 71, its time I retired to the country.

But it’s not working entirely to plan. I seem to be working as hard as ever and am in London for a lot of the week. Orient Express Hotels, of which I am a director, are busy with expansion, upgrading and general recovery from the recession and I am filming the Great British Menu every week, on Fridays. Really, is eating on telly a proper job for a grown woman? One thing is for sure, it makes this grown woman grow visibly thicker round the middle by the week.

And then Slow Food UK has really taken off, with four food- education programs up and running. Cat Gazoli, our American-Italian CEO is as determined as she is energetic and no amount of set-backs faze her. See www.slowfood.org.uk

So, one way and another, writing my Memoir, which is supposed to be my main activity, is going rather slowly. Also, I am worried stiff about it. When I got to the catering and restaurant chapters all I could remember were the disasters: the time I failed to give the Queen a cup of tea, the time I stabbed the second chef, the time we poisoned a high court judge. I must have done something right or we’d never have been so successful, but the Memoir reads like a chapter of accidents. No, a book of accidents.

I was once described as the James Herriott of the Restaurant world, but the truth is every caterer and restaurateur has similar tales to tell. It’s an accident-prone trade. Anyway, if you want a taster (it won’t be out until 2012, and that pre-supposes that I will manage to finish it) click here for a tale of incompetence.

Diet!

Tue, 9 Nov 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

Having chickened out, at the last minute, of an operation to fix my dodgy knees (decided 20% failure rate and 1% chance of hospital bug was too much risk) I thought I’d do better if I lost a stone and took some exercise. So I persuaded my daughter Li-Da to come with me to Ernest’s house in Lanzarote and we did a do-it-yourself- detox week.

Li-Da was brilliant. She insisted on a weigh in, and recorded all our measurements, and got us to agree to a 600 calorie a day, no caffeine, no ciggies, no alcohol, no carbs and no protein diet. Which basically means you live on fruit and veg: juiced for breakfast (we’d lugged her juicer with us), stir fry for lunch, soup for supper.

We took it in turns trying to be creative with the chilli, ginger, herbs from the garden, lemon grass, etc. Did you know you could make a delicious juice out of parsnips, cabbage, pears, kiwi and mint..

And we thrashed up and down Ernest’s pool, and went for long walks along the cliff paths (well Ernest and I doddered along, Li-Da ran herself into a muck sweat).

One day we went to a German friend, Georg, for lunch and he responded to our announcement that we were on the diet of all diets by producing the most amazing beef consommé with Thai spices and great delicious lumps of real meat. We fell on it as only the starving would.

George, by the way, has the most amazing house and garden. AND is one hell of a cook.

When, at the end of the week we solemnly weighed out, Li-Da and Ernest had both PUT ON a pound and Li-Da had gained 11 inches round the waist. When the shrieking subsided we realised that I’d originally read the tape measure wrong and given her a 21 inch waist, and that the scales, depending on how you stood on them, or how they stood on the uneven flag stones, could give you just about any reading you liked.

Home now, and still trying. But I bet I’ll be as fat as butter again in a flash.

Autumn 2010

Thu, 14 Oct 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

God, the year is almost over and I am not doing well with the Memoir. I’ve written a good few words, maybe 40,000, but they are in no sort of order. I cannot decide whether the story should be chronological in the classic manner from cradle to grave or whether I can tackle themes in a random fashion, on say, food, family, business, telly. Or pin the story on personalities, or what.

But that is only an excuse. The truth is I have been mightily distracted by lots of things, not least my grandson who is just delicious and now onto solid food.

His parents, I am proud to say, are following the “Baby-led weaning” method of feeding him, which is brilliant, if messy. Basically you put a selection of cooked and raw food (cooked veg, raw fruit, bits of cheese or chicken etc) on his high chair tray and let him get on with it. Nothing with sugar in it, which every child will quickly become addicted to, but pretty well everything else. He plays with the little lumps of food,flings them onto the floor and smears them all over his head and body, but a good bit does get swallowed
		Malachi eating supper

He is very keen on courgettes, which he chose for his very first solid food. Next he had a short-lived passion for broccoli, and then a more sustained (three weeks so far) enthusiasm for beetroot. He is not a pretty sight as you can see. Daniel and Emma tend to strip him down to a nappy for feeding purposes and then wipe him (or hose him in the sink) afterwards.

The theory is simple. Since children of weaning age will put absolutely anything into their mouths (bits of lego, paperclips, dead flies, strangers’ fingers) if you give them healthy food, they will put it in, and if hungry, chew and swallow it.

The method is time consuming, messy and wasteful. But since no one is trying to force a spoon into his mouth, and he is allowed to bang the tray to make the bits of food jump, and squidge it in his fingers, he has a lovely time and mealtimes are funny and stress free. The trick, Emma says, is not to fill him up at the breast or bottle before meals. If he is not hungry he just plays the 8 month old version of mud pies.

One day we went to L’Ortolan, the Michelin Star restaurant in Shinfield, near Reading, belonging to Alan Murchison. Malachi sat on a high chair between his Mum and me eating quacomole and butternut squash. He spat out the raw tuna though.

The reason for taking an eight-month old to such a grand restaurant was because we were celebrating my CBE, which I had just been presented with by Princess Anne in Windsor Castle. I was allowed three guests, so of course that meant Daniel and Emma and my daughter Li-Da.
		Me with Li-Da and Daniel in the Castle grounds

Emma's Mum, Ginny, came with us and walked Malachi round the castle while we sat in a rather long and somewhat tedious ceremony. (I don’t know how the Royals stand it. Four or five times a year one of them, usually the Queen, but sometimes Prince Charles or the Princess Royal, have to conduct 40-second conversations with perhaps 100 people.)

Of course the bit when you get your 40 seconds is not at all tedious. It is surprisingly nervous-making. It should be easy. You ought to be able to walk six paces to an equerry, stand next to him until your name is called, walk forward four paces, turn to face the Monarch, curtsey or bow your head, walk forward, stand there while she slips your gong onto a hook already on your coat, answer a question or two, take a few paces backwards, turn, exit.

What’s to fear? Well, this was the first time I had worn high heels for probably three years and I teetered along in a very wavy line, like a drunk. But Princess Anne was amazing. We managed to have, at her instigation, a conversation about the importance of the School Food Trust and whether the new Government would abolish it (I said, I doubted it. It is anyway already a charity and independent of Government); how vital it is that children learn to cook, and how good the Great British Waste Menu programme had been. All this in 40 seconds with no feeling of hurry.

So, OK, she is always well briefed, but to do that with seventy or a hundred people and finish on time, is pretty impressive.

		After the ceremony Edward Griffiths, who runs the Royal Household and whom I have known for donkeys’ years – he used to head up Roux Catering when I owned Leith’s Events and Parties and we were deadly rivals – invited us to have a glass of fizz. It was brilliant. We had a drink overlooking Windsor Great Park, and then had a private tour of the castle, including a corridor full of amazing sets of china, some of it hundreds of years old and still used on grand occasions and of the kitchens. And we were shown the rooms that had been restored after the fire and the spot where the Queen had authorised the firemen to break through the ceiling and let the fire rip, rather than allow it to spread from the state to the private apartments.
Me with no shoes!

Daniel with Malachi

Ernest and I had a week in Sicily staying at the Grand Hotel Timeo up in the ancient town of Toarmina and in the Villa St Andrea down on the beach. I was there for an Orient Express Board meeting, and Ernest came along for the ride. We did some sightseeing and ate a lot of seafood pasta and figs and ham. Yum. The company has just bought and refurbished the hotels and they are lovely: The Timeo is right below the completely breath-taking Greco-Roman amphitheatre. It is built into the hillside on a little spur of land and from all sides you look down through pine trees and palms to bays with clear blue water, little boats and huddled houses.

I also had a great week in Iceland, fishing with my brother. I’m mad about fishing, but understand that you might not be! So click here if you want to see an article I wrote on the subject of 'The one that got away - Of course' (Published by kind permission of Gamefisher, Salmon and Trout Association)

I’m in a bit of a state over my garden. I really need to simplify it. I’ve lived here in the Cotswolds for 34 years and in that time I have lavished attention and a fair bit of lolly on the garden with the result that it is now, I think, seriously overplanted. And definitely time-consuming and expensive to keep in perfect nick. So I am trying to decide what has to go: herbaceous border? Lake planting? Vegetable parterres? Shrubs and roses in the lawns?

Some of the younger trees (an avenue of pink rowans for example) can be replanted in the hedges on my new barn, which is now finished, and I will root-prune two big weeping ashtrees this winter (I should never have planted them where I did – they have got far too big) and try to move them next winter.

My barn is now ready, the garden is planted and I will move in December. Then we must pack up the main house (and the office, which is moving with me) so it can be re-roofed, re-wired, re-plumbed, the lot. The thought of such a big project, coming hard on the heels of the Barn re-building, is rather daunting, but the fact is I love building projects, and I am greatly encouraged by Derek Skeats, my designer and project manager who managed to bring home the barn on time and on budget, which is a first for me in a long life of building things. He is brilliant.

Not to have the use of the garden for a year will mean no Open Day for the National Garden Scheme, which we have supported for over 30 years, and no more garden fests, which I will miss. This year we had the leaders of all the regional groups of Slow Food UK, and a lot of ordinary members here for a grand Slow Food Picnic and the AGM. It was a lovely day and everyone brought food to share, and sat all over the garden.

But the biggest distraction, and excuse for not getting on with the Memoirs, is attending Literary festivals to plug my books. I have never done so many as this summer. I am such an egotist I like nothing better than talking about myself, my writing and books. But travelling all over the country does cut into writing time. I was comparing notes with novelist Angela Huth the other day and she said if you weren’t careful, you could spend all your time flogging books and no time producing them.

It’s a dilemma, because, unless you are already a real million-seller author, your publishers cannot spend great wodges of money promoting you. So no posters in train stations or ads in the press. If you sell well but not spectacularly, you have to get about and flog the things yourself. This year I went all over the place from the massive Edinburgh festival to the enchanting Appledore Festival in a tiny pretty town in Devon.

One great breakthrough in my life is that we have finally got my dog, Meg, to behave. She has been an untrainable nightmare for years, jumping up on people, barking at other dogs, chasing cars. And worst of all, she has taken to growling at my brother and sister in law and trying to savage their German Shepherd, Raksha. The problem started when we first got Meg from a rescue home, and Raksha, herself a not-yet-trained puppy, bit Meg, making a nasty, but soon healed, hole in her haunch. From then on Meg was terrified of Raksha and at first would run away if Raksha visited, hiding under a hedge or shivering in a corner. But over the years, Meg has got bolder and started growling at Raksha, then growling if she smelt Raksha on my brother or his wife Penny, and eventually growling at other German Shepherds and then at other dogs, especially at the vets.

Apart from the fear that she might bite someone, or their dog, which was worrying me increasingly, it was so maddening that I could not walk with my sister in law and our dogs, or leave Meg with her if I went on holiday, or offer to dog sit Raksha. We had tried everything, including spending fortunes on dog trainers for both dogs.

And then Penny suggested Marianne Davis, the daughter of a dog breeder who trains dogs for shows, films, and everything else. I expected the usual stuff about having to understand the dog, reward her with treats, never shout at her, be patient, it takes months, etc.

Marianne said she thought a couple of hours would do it. Just to bring both dogs to her. Meg was on a lead when Raksha approached. Meg went ballistic of course, desperate to savage her enemy. Marianne took Megs lead, pulled her head close to her thigh and set about walloping her with an empty plastic bottle with a stone inside it, shouting at her, No you don’t. No, No. The stone made a fearsome racket but the bottle could not hurt her. But she did not like it. Penny, who is more soft-hearted than me, could not watch, and indeed Marianne said, “Don’t do this on a main road, someone will report you to the RSPC for cruelty to animals.”

But the fact is that it is not cruel. A dog that chases sheep, or cars, or bites people could quite easily end up dead. Marianne just wanted Meg to understand that she cannot go for other dogs and that she must do as she is told. And I swear, within half an hour she had Meg and Raksha walking past each other, lying down next to each other, and after an hour Meg was happily, tail wagging, lying on top of Raksha.

		I could not believe it. And I was convinced Meg would revert to her old ways the minute she had gone. So she came to my house and repeated it all on Megs own territory. And for the first time for years, we can now walk the dogs together, take them to each other’s houses. And Meg walks to heel, and sits when told to and will even lie down next to me when a white van is driving past. It’s true I can feel every fibre of her being longing to chase that van, but if I’m firm with her, she stays put. It’s a miracle.
Meg sitting beautifully when told!

Summer 2010

Wed, 14 Jul 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

Have been struggling to get into writing my next book, which will be a memoir. Not an autobiography, please note. I would have to tell the truth, get the dates right, do research, with a biog. But a memoir is a memory as you remember it, is it not? And if what I remember has been embroidered upon, or dreamt up, well, that’s what I remember. I am very nervous about it. There’s a danger of just rambling on as I do in these blogs. There does not seem to be the discipline of a novel, and discipline is what I need. Actually discipline is what I need in everything: my nature is to talk to much, eat too much, write too much, work too much, just do too much altogether. One suggestion for the title of the book reflects the idea of too much appetite for everything: “Relish”. Any comments? I am not sure about it.

Have you read Wolf Hall? I’ve struggled a bit with Hilary Mantel in the past but this is un-put-downable. It’s huge, which it has to be since it is based on the life of Thomas Cromwell who had fingers in so many pies he makes my life look like that of a gnat. The book is panoramic in scope and bubbling, if not festering, with larger than life characters. Anne Boleyn is both exotic and terrifying, Henry VIII endearing, enraging, admirable and laughable. Other rattling good reads are The Three of Us, by Julia Blackburn which is a touching and harrowing tale of growing up with her sex-mad bohemian mother and drunken father. Then A Feast of Freud is a collection of some of Clement Freud’s funniest writing. And Lionel Shriver’s So Much for That is a tale of love and loss with a background of the American health service that makes the NHS look like very heaven. I wish I wrote as well as any of the above.

But since I am never likely to write like Mantel or sell like her either, and I am no longer much of a wage earner, we’ve decided to sell our London house, in which we all have flats. I find to my astonishment that I don’t really mind. Son Daniel and his wife Emma want more room for their fast growing (but still delicious) baby son Malachi, now nearly six months old, and, for (I hope but dare not ask) future siblings for him.

Daughter Li-Da doesn’t mind where she lives as long as it’s on the central line and within reach of an airport. Abroad is what she likes. And as I hope to spend more time in the Cotswolds, I don’t really need a London flat and so am trying to wheedle my way into the Chelsea Arts Club. I like the idea of propping up the bar with interesting bohemians and staying the odd night in London without crippling hotel costs.

Of course they might not have me. They used to take non-visual artists like singers and pianists and writers, but are pickier now. Does a cookery-writer-turned novelist qualify as an artist? I expect not. I would argue – I will argue – that cooking is an art anyway, but that may not wash. To be certain of membership you need to be a painter or sculptor, and a damned good one. Every year they produce a diary that the members contribute gratis to, and, although I don’t use a paper diary anymore, I still want one – every page a treat.

So currently there are agents tramping through our Notting Hill Gate house, bringing women who look askance at the bathrooms and kitchens, imagining, I am sure, paint being replaced with marble, chrome with gold plate, showers with “wet rooms”, cookers with chef’s ranges. Very rich people seem to want kitchens that a professional chef would kill for, and then never cook in them. I asked the agent if we should repaint the house to sell it better, but he said don’t be silly: anyone buying this house will rip it apart anyway.

With luck the value will have risen a bit in the five years we’ve owned it because we could do with some lolly to spend on what the government calls my “principle private residence” aka my Cotswold house which, after 34 years, could do with new insulation, plumbing, electrics, the lot. I have a grand plan: as soon I’ve finished refurbing my barn as my old-age home, I’ll move into it, and start on the main house.

		I like building projects, though I’m not brilliant at them. I’ve never yet come out on time and on budget, and am hoping that the barn will be a first. I have converted or built restaurants, catering premises, cookery schools, houses and flats, every one coming in late and costing more than planned. But I have hopes. Derek Skeats, the so-far-brilliant surveyor who is overseeing the barn conversion, is reassuringly chirpy.

Have just got back from Brazil where I went for a board meeting of Orient Express hotels in our newish acquisition, the Hotel das Cataratas at the Iquassu falls. It is just amazing, the only hotel in the National Park and overlooking the falls, which are astonishing

http://www.hoteldascataratas.com/web/ogua/photo_tour.jsp

The park is open to the general public from 9 am to 5 pm but before and after that the hotel guests have the place to themselves. I walked the length of the trail along the river’s edge and both times (once at sunset and once at sunrise) I had the place to myself. Completely awe inspiring. The falls are deafeningly loud and terrifying in their power. You can go out on a wooden platform built between the upper and lower sections of waterfall, and look up at million of tons of water crashing towards you and below to a giddying drop with more tons of water crashing to rocks below. The falls stretch in a half mile horseshoe across the river.

We went up in a helicopter too which scared the hell out of me. Spent the time alternatively gasping at the view, or praying for the trip to be over.

I’ve also had a great few days fishing on the Spey. I was invited by James and Jocelyn Carr and it was bliss in spite of failing to catch anything other than a small floating log. But my host got a couple of sea trout and dutifully put them back in the river, to the dismay of his wife and me. We’d hoped for a fresh fish supper.

Have to stop this blog now and re-engage with the post office telephone run around in which all buttons lead to more recorded messages telling you to go to the website, or press another button, which tells you to go to the website, or ….I don’t think any recorded message is going to tell me what to do to recover my inadvertently posted spectacles. I need a human being to grovel to, and admit that while answering the phone and simultaneously putting on my make up in the back of a taxi, I removed my specs (to apply the eye shadow you understand) and put them on the pile of letters to post. When the driver stopped at post box I gathered up the letters and, blind as a bat without my glasses, shoved the lot into the post-box.

The driver said it was typical of the old. Oh dear!

A Letter from Her Majesty

Wed, 7 Jul 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

Six weeks ago I had a letter telling me that Her Majesty was “minded” to honour me with a C.B.E, which was pretty thrilling. It means, I discover that I am now, or will be once she pins the gong on my bosom, a Commander of the British Empire. How about that for a title? Maybe the first person to get a C.B.E did, in some way or other, command the British Empire.

For uncivilized South Africans like me, it is very confusing. I already had an OBE, which means Order of the British Empire, and below that is an M (Member) B.E. and above, the CBE. But they are all Orders of the British Empire. Never mind, I am very grateful. When I was given the OBE the voice over at Buckingham Palace announced as I arrived in front of the Queen “for services to … Broadcasting” I had never been a broadcaster. This time my C.B.E. is for services to Catering. I have not been a caterer for 20 years. But then, why carp. I’d love to be honoured for my brilliant novels, but hey! Why whinge? I’m just delighted to get it.

Spring 2010

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 -1:00:00 GMT

This is written at the end of February, and optimistically called Spring 2010. Just hope the artic weather has been replaced by Spring sunshine by the time its on the website.

Weather or not, I’ve had a cracking few weeks, and been wonderfully, almost deliriously happy.

First and most important, my first grandchild arrived. For the previous four months my son and very pregnant Emma had been living with me in my flat and only left a couple of weeks after Malachi arrived. For someone as organised and basically tidy as me, I cannot believe how much I enjoyed having them. This in spite of the fact that I slept on the sofa, they were in my bed and their worldly goods were everywhere and growing rapidly as baby baths and clothes and toys accumulated. But to have them home for a bowl of soup before dashing off to a pre-natal class or work – they both work for Only Connect, their charity that helps prisoners and ex offenders – was wonderful. http://www.onlyconnectuk.org

But I was in Lanzarote with Ernest when the bub was born, a few days early. I had a horrible night because for some reason Vodafone failed to forward the vital text “All fine. Happy healthy boy” at 10 pm when Daniel sent it, and since I had last heard, about an hour before, that he’d be born any minute, I got more and more anxious as the hours went by. No response from my son’s mobile, nor from Emma’s Mum, nor from the hospital. So I lay there imagining the worst, until the text finally dropped in at 5 am. Of course, once Malachi had appeared and Daniel had sent us the news, he’d turned off his phone to concentrate on his wife and son, little knowing that the text would take seven hours to get to me. A lesson in relying on technology!

Of course, like every gran, I am completely besotted. And in the last month a great deal of baby worship has been going on with all of us, my daughter, cousins, friends and of course Malachi’s parents, drooling, cooing and aah-ing. He is just the most beautiful baby and gets passed about like a parcel.

__________

My other great excitement has been my 70^th birthday and Ernest’s 80^th. On my actual birthday my children had told me they would cook dinner in my flat – Malachi being as yet a bit young for a restaurant – so when I came out of the hairdressers I was puzzled by my daughter appearing and insisting I follow her down the street. The surprise was hilarious. Horrific, HUGE, pink limo, as long as a railway carriage, containing sixteen family and friends.

We set off on a magical mystery tour of places of significance in my life (house we lived in when I was 7, my first mews house from where I ran my embryo business, the flat we moved to when we married, Leith's Restaurant, etc complet with vintage music to go with each year.

Nothing worked as planned: the great pink hummer’s music system was kaput; my son had divided us into teams for a quiz around the music, relevant dates, my 70 year history etc but of course we are all so competitive we shouted the answers out at once, and refused to play properly. And then we could not see the destinations out of the limo’s windows which were all steamed up. And once we got a window open we froze to death because it could not be closed again. And my sister in law, the rather well-known and elegant Penny Junor, sitting by the jammed window, definitely did not want to be recognised in the most vulgar vehicle in Christendom. The fizz was, probably fortunately, undrinkably sweet – presumably designed for teenage hen parties. And the length of the limo prevented it getting to any of the destinations except one, and that one was inaccessible because the road was closed.

So each time I had to jump out and run in the rain to get my pic taken with someone of significance (eg LiDa at the block of flats because that’s where she arrived, my friend Angela at the house in Little Venice where I shared a bedroom with her as a kid etc) BUT GUESS WHAT It was the greatest fun.

Got back (having abandoned a couple of destinations) to our current house in which Li-Da, Daniel and I all have flats, and where Li-Da’s flat-mate was supposed to have laid out the buffet and heated up the lasagne in my flat but Li-Da had forgotten to give her the keys, so more chaos. But a lovely, happy, hilarious, family evening.

Our main party at my Cotswold house on the other hand, PERFECTLY organised by the bossiest woman you know. I had a great time doing it. And you know, I realised that although I have organised hundreds and hundreds of posh parties for other people I have never had a real proper party of my own. I’ve had business ones, like book launches, and when I got an OBE, and dinners for family on birthdays and anniversaries, but I’ve never had a wedding, or engagement party, or 21^st or anything.

I was determined not to have it look “catered” so we just filled the ex-playroom (now office) with twelve tables from the garden and house, covered them with all the fabrics I’ve never been able to chuck – old sheets, bedcovers, tablecloths, duvet covers, curtains, even fitted under sheets, as long as they were orange, pink, purple or yellow. Turns out these colours must have always been my favourites. There was nothing blue, or green in the pile. They were a great mix of hot exotic hues, patterned, striped, and plain

Then we used twelve of my pashminas or scarves in similar colours as runners or laid diagonally across them. And I wrapped oval litre ice cream cartons in some left-over wallpaper I once painted with apples for my bathroom ceiling. I filled them with sand and stood three or four yellowish candles in each of them, and stuffed them full of flowers of every hue – tulips and roses and anything else, filched from bunches of flowers friends had sent me for my birthday. Then we scattered shiny little foil stars in reds and golds and purples all over the tables. We had an electrician put the chandeliers on dimmers and the room did look just beautiful. And doing it all gave me inordinate pleasure, recycling stuff and wasting time doing Blue-Peter cut and paste activities.

The sitting room got turned into a concert hall, seating the 80 of us on hired gold chairs. The concert was certainly original and at first I feared it could be sentimental and embarrassing. I had written six poems celebrating falling in love in late life. Readers of Choral Society will know that it’s a recurrent theme with me. I wrote the poems two years ago, when Ernest and I drove around France on a summer holiday.

Click here for Poems

And Ernest has, off and on since then, been setting them to music. (He once won the Royal College of Music Composer’s prize and bought his first Steinway with it, but although he has never ceased to play the piano, he has composed only a couple of sonatas and his daughter’s wedding march since then. But I kept his nose to the grindstone and though he was still altering them daily in the week before the party, he did finish them)

We invited Catherine Hopper, a professional Mezzo Soprano we met at the Verbier Music Festival last summer (google her or listen to her on U tube, she’s wonderful) to sing the songs.

www.catherinehopper.com

It was an absolute triumph. Ernest made the most loving but not mawkish little speech about my bullying him into finishing the composition (I’d have preferred him to call me his muse, but hey, whose complaining?) and then got on and played the songs. I felt pretty emotional, but I hope not too visibly. Everyone loved the words and the music, or at least they said so. Actually, many of our friends are our age and I think the idea of late romance cheers them up.

Then we trooped into dinner and had delicious Italianised cassoulet adapted from an old Good Housekeeping recipe and cooked by local caterer and v. g. cook Susie Harris (susiejayharris@yahoo.co.uk) with salad and Chateau Leoville Barton 87, which had been in my cellar for 20 years. Son Daniel made a brilliant, funny and touching speech about me and Viv, Ernest’s youngest daughter, spoke, also excellently, about him. Then I forced everyone out onto the below-freezing terrace (comforted by big deep shawls/pashmina things that I had cut from bolts of tightly woven wool bought on the cheap from a Pakistani shop that deals in Afghan wool they use in the mountains) and fortified by glasses of port or hot ginger toddy which they were handed as they stepped outside.

Click here for Italian Cassoulet

Click here for Hot Ginger Toddy

Then four minutes of crackingly good fireworks, with my floodlit lake (it has a Chinese style bridge and pagoda on a little island) in the background and the sky clear and dark and the fireworks magical. Then back into the warm. I’ve never enjoyed a party so much.

And finally-- because this seemed such an important occasion I got dressed to the nines. I’d even braved the January sales, on a Saturday at the Bicester Designer Discount Village to get a posh top (Armani no less, and still more money, even with 75% off than I’d usually pay) top to show off a new necklace and my Lanzarote tan. I also borrowed one of those corset things that stop the wobbly bits bulging and had someone come and do my make-up, and it was all worth it. I felt a million dollars which is nearly as good as looking it.

__________

The next big event is that my new book, A Serving of Scandal, is out and selling into the shops well. Now we just have to make sure they sell well there, or they will all come winging back to the publishers on Sale or Return. But so far so good. I feel pretty hopeful because Choral Society is still selling well in paperback. Waitrose have sold over 7,000 of them. And at last, at last, I begin to meet readers who tell me they’ve read my novels and liked them. Until recently almost everyone expressed astonishment that I wrote novels and irritation that I’d given up cookbooks.

Click here to read first chapter

So now it’s on to the next book. Which is going to be a memoir. I was speaking at a Calcot Manor Literary Lunch in Wiltshire and I asked the 150 odd people there if they’d rather I embarked on a trilogy of novels about a restaurant family or a personal memoir and only one person voted for the novels and all the rest for the Memoir. I hope this means they like the sound of my life rather than that they could not face any more novels.

Winter 09

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

I’m writing this on the train on the way to interview Ruthie Rogers at a Literary Festival about her new River Café Cookbook. I love Ruthie and think she’s a brilliant cook, writer and restaurateur. She has one of those families you fall in love with in toto: talented attractive children and a charismatic husband, the architect, Richard (now Lord) Rogers. But if I’d been concentrating I would have refused to interview her, in accordance with my determination to only appear anywhere as a novelist, not a cook or cookery writer or interviewer of cookery writers. I had assumed, arrogantly, that the organisers wanted me to talk about my latest novel, Choral Society, which is just out in paperback and selling satisfyingly well, but No, I am to talk food with Ruth.

I should not have worried. Ruthie is nothing if not generous and she gave my novels a few whopping great plugs and shared her spotlight with me. Her book, written with Rose Gray (her partner in the River Café and the books) is The Classic Italian River Café Cookbook and is completely seductive with recipes at once unbelievably simple and unbelievably delicious.

www.rivercafe.co.uk

This business of insisting on being a novelist, and avoiding the foodie image, is more difficult than I thought it would be. The trouble is I’m so vain. For example, I rather enjoy being on telly – the next series of the Great British Menu starts again in March and we start filming in January. Now if I want to be thought a novelist, what am I doing eating endlessly in front of millions of viewers? My agent says it helps with novel sales, and that’s my excuse, but the truth is probably that I enjoy being stopped in the supermarket for my autograph.

What I don’t enjoy about telly is seeing myself on it. Again, it must be vanity, but all I can think of is how crooked my teeth are, how grumpy my expression, how double my chin. Which is why I have only ever watched a couple of episodes of The Great British Menu. It does not help that kind people always tell me, astonishment in their voices, how photogenic I am and how good I look on the box.

Of course I should be grateful to be offered the job. TV producers like youth and glamour, and I will be seventy in February. Which is a great excuse for resigning from everything. Well, almost everything. I plan to stay on the Orient Express Hotels board as long as they will have me. Ernest and I have just had a great weekend at La Residencia in Mallorca, where I had to attend a board meeting. (I hasten to say, before someone shouts "Disgraceful!", that Ernest paid his own air fare and we traveled Easyjet.

One of the benefits, I hope, of semi retirement will be fewer annual reports, magazines and newsletters jamming my letter box. I can decently give up the societies, associations, trade bodies, clubs – groan, groan -and etc connected with the restaurant trade, catering, cooking, home economics, food technology, chef training, management, -- more groans - etc of which I am a member. I shall, as befits a septegenarian, retain my membership of the National Trust, the Ramblers, the Royal Horticultural Society, the Royal Society of Arts and the Arts Fund, and finally be able to enjoy my membership, and go on jolly outings to lovely places. Can’t wait.

I will also, with sadness, give up chairmanship of the School Food Trust, which I still think is the most important job I’ve ever done. But more of that in a month or two.

I’m not planning to stop writing, however. A Serving for Scandal is finally delivered, and will come out in March. I am thoroughly nervous about it. When I was proof-reading it, I felt alternately delighted and anxious about it. I do believe bits are very funny, and I love my central character, Kate, the cook who gets mixed up with a politician, and I think my readers will. But since one of the main themes is how difficult it is for a politician to remain true to his ideals, and I wrote most of the book before the MPs expenses scandals, I now worry that the sins of Oliver, my politico, are rather tame.

I’ve had a great summer NOT writing, I must confess. I’ve had to do a few rewrites and corrections for A Serving of Scandal, but thought I would give myself a break before starting the next one. Publishers like you to deliver your next book just as they publish the current one. But I certainly won’t manage that time-scale this time.

One of the problems is that I am dithering between writing an autobiography (my agent’s choice: I guess non-fiction sells better) and tackling my ambitious idea of a trilogy about a restaurateuring family through three generations. The problem with the biog is that I’ve lived my life and I’m not very interested in doing it all over again. And it would have to be more of a memoir than an autobiography anyway as the chance of much of it being true is remote. My memory is appalling for a start, and I’ve embroidered and re-invented stories for so long I haven’t a clue what’s true and what’s not. When my brother and I compare mutual childhood experiences, the versions bear no relation to each other.

The problem with the trilogy idea is, will I manage to hold that much information in my head? I have trouble enough with one short novel, remembering how old everyone is, the colour of their eyes, their back story, whether they like tomatoes, without having to do it over three novels and fifty odd years. And will I be dead, or senile, before I type The END? Probably. Thoughts in an email please… Trilogy or Memoir?

So, while dithering, I’ve been having fun. In August my life-long friend Jane, who lives in Canada, and I went to stay with the great Dame Liz Forgan in the Orkney island of North Rolandsay. Liz has run just about everything (Editor of the Guardian women’s Page, BBC Radio, Heritage Lottery, and currently chair of the Arts Council), but I think is happiest in her croft on the edge of a cliff with wheeling gulls and spinrift from the crashing waves and huge changing skies.

We spend happy hours picking crabs and lobsters and cooking gigantic chowders, and further happy hours eating them, and gossiping. The islanders are good at gossip and drop in unheralded at all hours. We walk round the island, admiring the lighthouses, the great slabby rocks out of which they make roof tiles the size of billiard tables, and the tiny, wild, multi-coloured North Ronaldsay sheep. They live on seaweed, a trick they learnt a hundred years or more ago when the laird had the islanders build a dyke to keep them off his pasture.

I also went to South Africa to flog Choral Society and check up on the Prue Leith Chefs Academy www.prueleith.co.za and was having a great time when I had to come whizzing back, because Ernest, who had whacked his head falling backwards down the stairs a few weeks before, suddenly had to have a midnight emergency op to hoover out the blood leaking into his brain. I arrived at Heathrow not knowing if he’d be dead or alive and rang to speak to the nurse in intensive care and she said, "Sure, do you want to speak to him? He’s eating a hearty breakfast and flirting with the nurses." This from a man who could barely stand or speak the day before and had had no idea what was happening. (please check back for photo)

And he’s still full of beans. He may be heading for 80, but he’s embarking on a new career, and taking me with him. The ancient camel house he’s been turning into a concert hall in Lanzarote is now done, the piano arrives this month and the cottages are almost ready. One will house visiting artists and one will be the bar, loos, garden and etc for the audience.

You never know. Maybe we will change the reputation of beautiful Lanzarote from one of beer-soaked brits behaving badly (by the way I’ve never seen them do so) to one of high culture.

www.camelhouseconcerts.com.

(please check back for photos)

My other great news is that I am, at long last, to be a granny. My son and daughter in law Emma are to have a baby boy to be called Charles Rayne Malachy Kruger (all my husband’s names except the Malachy, which will be what the bub will be actually known as if the parents have their way. Bet he will end up Mal or Malki.

Emma looks as she should -- glowing and enchanting. She is as slim as ever but carrying a great round ball before her. Both she and my son Daniel work every hour that God gives running their charity Only Connect (www.onlyconnectuk.org) which helps ex-offenders and prisoners change their lives for the better. Heaven knows how they will manage a baby as well as the 30-odd seriously challenging guys they look after.

Meanwhile, they await the birth living with me in my none-too-big two-bedroom flat, having managed to find themselves homeless between flats for four months. I love it of course – gives me an excuse to play Mummy again and make soup and iron my son’s shirts.

But, poor things, they must hate it. They are living out of carrier bags, boxes and bin liners, all their possessions piled in my study and bedroom. And the piles will grow as baby-gear accumulates. I expect there will be prams, child seats and plastic baths any minute.

We all groan about the arrival of Christmas, but I think we secretly love it. For me, this will be a busy one. It is the first time since my husband died seven years ago when I have hosted the family for Christmas. My brother James and I used to take turn and turn about to feed our dozen or so immediate family, usually swollen to 20 with friends and relations. But Rayne died a few days before Christmas, a year when it was my turn and the turkey was bought and decorations up, so we went ahead --- festivities alternating with grief. And then, somehow, James and his wife Penny have done Christmas ever since.

Anyway, this time, it is to be me again, and I am looking forward to it. We will be about 20 for dinner, 10 staying in the house and 60 coming for drinks on the 23rd. I shall be in a heap by the end. But then so will any friends foolsh enough to stay with us. My children warn their mates: Never offer to help, she'll have you in the sink, scrubbing the spuds or lugging the rubbish to the compost heap. Or all the above.

(please check back for photo)

P.S.

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

Can’t reisist a bit of blatant self promotion and ego-ism here. Last month I had two letters from readers which were so complimentary you’d think they were written by my Mum! Can’t resist including them:

“Your novels are amazing – completely absorbing, marvellous characters and compelling storylines. We started (oddly) with Choral Society and worked out way backwards somehow – The Gardener has gone the rounds and is a treasured gift for gardening friends – Leaving Patrick was thrilling ……….”

“… An anonymous lettercard to thank you for writing such a superlative book – “Choral Society” which I have just read and found very hard to put down (a very rare occasion!). You research and character development are amazing and I am not in the least surprised that it took from years to complete. You are made of sterling stuff to work so consistently on such a project.

Quercus have printed a superb book – just the feel of it starts the enjoyment, the title, the cover and whole set out are splendid.

I look forward to reading your previous novels and just want to thank you for this absolutely delightful and absorbing book. I belong to a small choir and it was the title which beguiled me! …”

P.P.S. Please check back to my last blog for photos of Verbier and for the updated version of Chapter One of my next novel (or just click here!).

August 09

Mon, 3 Aug 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

Full blown summer. Or it would be if the Met office had been right. My garden is sodden, sandals and tee shirts unworn, no chance of a picnic, never mind a barbecue.

But in fact I’ve just had a couple of great weeks, one in Verbier for the Music Festival and then another with Ernest in Lanzarote in scorching heat, palms trees blowing in the hot, sand-laden wind from Morocco. But the more I go to Lanzarote the more I like it. I’d shared the snobby prejudices of my friends about “Lanzagrotty”, convinced the island was full of loud, overweight, deeply unattractive English swilling lager. Well, there are some of course, but once you get off the plane where their children have been kicking your seat and screaming for three hours while Mum takes no notice, you need not see them again until the flight home, by which time they will have taken off most of their clothes to display the painful effects of sleeping on the beach. I now regard the parade of horror at Arrecife airport as a kind of entertainment. Today there was one fat fellow, probably 40, who was carrying his flip flops in one hand and a beer in the other and wearing nothing but a pair of short shorts, mostly hidden by his paunch. Do they let them on the plane like that I wonder? Would it be discrimination if they did? After all, it’s not illegal.

Lanzarote is, I think, wonderful. Reliably sunny, even in winter. Clean as a whistle, no high-rise buildings (well there is one, a hotel which went up without planning permission and became a landmark and was eventually, after years of standing empty, allowed to stay), the houses are all bright white with dark green wooden windows. The mountains are all conical, defunct volcanoes, sculptural against the bluest of skies. The fields are frequently covered with picon, the black gravel made from the volcanic rock, which keeps the soil protected from the fierce sun and preserves precious water. Briefly green in early Spring, the landscape is mostly grey or a gentle brown. There are no European trees, only giant cactus and palms. The light is extraordinary, the coast either rugged and dramatic, or long white beaches.

Ernest, my pianist-turned entrepreneur-turned-pianist-again partner, is at the age of 79, building a concert hall out of a 300 year old camel barn on the island. He has persuaded his long-time friend, the pianist Paul Crossley, to be its musical director and the first mini-festival is to be at the end of March. There will be 12 weeks of concerts and Paul has already engaged most of the performers, all, like Paul himself, international performers of massive reputation. Of course I know nothing of music or musicians but the three of us watched them, one after another, on You Tube, and they had both Ernest and Paul wiping their eyes.

Maybe one day I will be able to tell Bach from Beethoven, but I doubt it. The depth of my ignorance astonishes Ernest’s friends but they are more charmed at my eagerness to learn at my advanced age than disapproving. Verbier was a revelation. A beautiful alpine town, very high up, and for three weeks each year taken over by the festival. We were there, oddly, not for Ernest, but because I had been invited to talk about Choral Society. The festival organisers like to have fringe events, which anyone can go to for free, as well as the big attractions. Christian Thompson, who had heard that my latest novel was about singing, thought it might be fun to have me discuss food, singing, whatever…so he gave the book to his mother to read. Her verdict was “Well, its not that much about singing, and not at all about music, but it’s a good read.” I could not imagine why anyone would turn up. But turn up they did, forty or so of them, and Classic FM recorded it, and we had a good natter about how music-lovers can make the whole business so scary that ignoramuses like me hardly dare go to a concert in case we wear the wrong clothes or clap in the wrong place or mis-pronounce Sybelius or Beyreuth.

Anyway, they were not like that at Verbier. Hardly saw a jacket or a tie, except for the concert version of Don Giovanni or big-name concerts in the evening, and even then they were rare.

Would not have believed I could take so much music. We went to rehearsals and workshops, masterclasses and talks, and concerts, concerts, concerts. Can’t swear I’m any more knowledgeable but I did have a good time. Only really bored once, by a mighty famous pianist who seemed to me to bang away with all the feeling and emotion of a photocopier. Gratifying to discover Ernest agreed and we skipped out at the interval and went down the mountain in the cable car. (Meant to go up, but nervously scrambled onto the wrong one – no matter: the views were still glorious.


Views from Cable Car	Prue in Cable Car!

So now its back to work. Novel Five (still untitled, but likely to be called A Serving of Scandal) is in final re-write stage and I was appalled to get eleven pages of closely typed notes from my ed. But happily most of the 100-plus notes are brisk comments like “Your favourite word is “O”. First, it should be spelt “Oh”. And at least 50% of them should go.” A little humiliating, but a lot better than being asked to cut a character or re-write a whole chapter.

Now, as regular readers will know, the whole point of this website is to try to get people thinking of me as a writer rather than a cook, and rushing to buy my latest novel, so you will have to forgive me if I include here my editor’s and agent’s comments on the book. (Yes, yes, I know, they are biased. Their job partly consists of being nice to their authors. But praise is praise and I love it. Also, they are both tough women, quite capable, as I am afraid I know first hand, of telling me if something just won’t do. And you can judge for yourself by reading the first chapter.

Chapter One - A Serving of Scandal

Jane Wood (Editor) said:

Well, I loved it! Really really truly. I think this a hugely compelling novel with two tremendously appealing main characters and readers will long for a happy outcome for them, just as I did. The novel’s setting is so well realized. It’s very contemporary and of our times, and makes its serious points without hammering us over the head with them. There are many powerful and memorable scenes – Kate getting ready for the Suskind wedding and it all going wrong; Oliver’s horribly realistic scenes with Terry (beastly man – I wonder who you had in mind when you wrote him?!) I could go on. Your writing is very warm and immediate and engaging. I think you’ve written a winner – certainly a winner for me. Congratulations!

And Jane Turnbull (agent) said “I started this morning and am just gobbling it up - it's terrific - you get better and better and I'm looking forward to talking to Jane W about publishing plans as I think it can do incredibly well - it's so contemporary and everyone will be guessing who it's based on! You have developed SO fast as a novelist - these characters are so real I can't believe they come from your head - a great talent Prue , it's very exciting.”

My other bit of good news is that WHSmith will be promoting the paperback of Choral Society which comes out in November. If I crow about this to my friends they look baffled. What’s so great about that? But believe me, WHS can shift books if they like them. You get to be on a table for a start, with a big sticker on the book saying 2 for 3 or some such, and on the shelves, you get your front cover rather than the spine facing the reader. And it lasts a whole month. You might even get into a window. All a heap better than one miserable copy on a shelf, in a corner, round the back of the shop.

Of course Tesco would probably be even better. It’s a bit sad really. Poor Hatchards and Blackwells and Foyles. What with Amazon and the supermarkets moving in on them, life must be tough.

Right, enough about books. My other excitement for this month is that I wrote a rather rude piece in the Spectator about a re-hab island that Ernest and I went to for three weeks in the hopes that it would help him cope with his depression. Needless to say the Management are pretty sore and making threatening noises. But since every word is true and I can prove it, I hope they stop protesting and improve their act. Click here. Since then I have been contacted by people with similar experiences in that and other quasi medical/re-hab/clinic-type places, of which there seem to be an astonishing number. Sad to think of hundreds of people suffering from addiction or depression and finding the “cure” not only expensive and horrible, but also useless.

Maybe one day someone will crack bi-polar (manic depression). Millions suffer from it, and have for centuries. And the medics know it is caused by too much or too little serotonin being “taken up by receptors in the brain”. You’d think swallowing serotonin would do the trick but No. It seems the only thing that is at all helpful is a combination of medication and some kind of talk therapy. And that takes years of trial and error if it works at all.

Still I suppose that’s better than a lobotomy or electric shock treatment or a straight jacket. But not much.

Summer 2009

Thu, 14 May 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

Best thing this month for me was the London Book Fair where, to my astonishment, I was “Author of the Day” on the Wednesday. I had thought there must be dozens of us, one for every publisher showing off their new books to booksellers from all over the world. But there were only three, one for each of the days of the fair. And the other two were James Patterson who sells more books than anyone else in the world and the wonderful Vikram Seth, garnerer of countless literary prizes.

How I came to be in such a line up I have absolutely no idea and I don’t want to ask. Maybe no other publisher put forward a woman?

Anyway, I had a ball. I was shepherded around the fair to sign books, was interviewed live in front of an audience by the lovely Matthew Fort who is a great friend and asked me all the questions I wanted him to, had my picky taken clutching copies of Choral Society and standing between giant posters of Prue Leith and Vickram Seth, and was the guest of honour at a cracking good lunch (catered for by my old company who have the contract at Earls Court) for foreign publishers looking for English translation rights, and ended up on the stage at a sort of literary closing ceremony given by the London Book Fair people. It was an ego-trip I will never forget and will certainly not be given again. Thank you Quercus

I’d never been to a trade book fair before and it was completely fascinating. The main Earls Court arena was as you would expect – full of huge publishers stands stuffed full of books. I had no idea that there were specialist publishers dealing in nothing but fishing books, or bird books, or maps, or archaeology, or inventions or photography. Name a subject, however esoteric, and there’s a publisher for it.

And then I saw the Espresso book machine in action. This looks like (and indeed is) a giant printer into which you put the CD of a book typescript and after a bit of whirring and humming, out comes a bound book, still warm like a new laid egg. Apparently Blackwells and Foyles have already bought an Espresso, and so readers or scholars wanting an out-of-print or obscure book can order one then and there. And I guess it will be a gift for writers who are unable to find a publisher.

But most astonishing of all was what goes on upstairs. The entire first floor, as big as the exhibition space downstairs and as far as the eye could see was full of tiny booths, each with a desk and chairs, and all of them occupied by agents doing deals with publishers, and publishers doing deals with distributors.

Who says the printed book is dying?

On the book front, it seems odd to be dashing around publicising just-out Choral Society when I have nearly finished writing the next one. If you can stand anymore about my life and writing and this book, clike here for press articles and reviews. I think I’ve only got two chapters to go, and it is due in to Quercus next month. And then they will take as long to publish it as I have to write it – 9 months so it should come out in Feb next year. Providing they like it. Right now I’ve no idea if it is any good at all. Maybe you could tell me? Click here to read first chapter – still in draft I warn you.

On the school food front, I went to visit the brilliant Cowes Primary school on the Isle of Wight. It was amazing. They do everything right. The food is delicious, the children help in the kitchen and they eat what they are given and love it. They all learn to cook, they grow vegetables and herbs, they keep chickens and sell the eggs. They’ve made friends with the old-age home next door and the children visit the residents. The school has appropriated a big chunk of the home’s garden for growing and composting and for their big commercial polytunnel which they use for salads. (pictures to follow - please look again)

The children give names to their laying hens, but they also rear chickens and lambs for the table and they don’t give them names. I think it is wonderful that they are taught to rear animals kindly but the fact that they will be killed for food is not hidden from them.

On the day that I was there the school playground had been taken over for the local farmers market and some of the children were helping on the stalls, selling bread and jams. A group of eight year olds were being questioned by the vegetable grower about the produce on his stall. They could identify absolutely everything including growing herbs like coriander and basil, vegetables like turnip, kohl-rabi and purple sprouting broccoli. It was a joy to watch.

This was a very different visit from the last time I was on the Isle of Wight. That must have been in the early seventies and I was a guest of Max Aitken, then the boss of the Beaverbrook empire. He was nuts about sailing and had a famous racing yacht called Drumbeat. I was so excited at being invited for the weekend by such a grandee that I failed to mention that I am terrified of the sea, hate sailing and get seasick. Most of the time I left them to it and stayed on dry land.

On the Saturday evening there was a dinner party and I found myself sitting next to Ted Heath, then Prime Minister and of course, champion sailor. He was not much good at dinner party chat and I was awed into silence by his position, so things were a bit sticky. Then Max announced, in an effort to give the PM something to talk to me about “Prue is a great cook you know Ted, talk to her nicely and she might make your breakfast.” To which Ted replied, without a glimmer of humour, “Well, thank you, I will have half a grapefruit, a three-and-a-half-minute boiled egg and one slice of wholemeal toast please.”

So midnight found me and Max’s then girlfriend, neither of us exactly sober, scouring the town for a grapefruit and wholemeal bread, “for the Prime Minister’s breakfast.” We succeeded in the end.

So, very pleased with myself, I arrived at the PM’s door at 7 am, grapefruit perfectly segmented, toast in a napkin, egg exactly 3.5 mins, coffee, transistor radio for him to check the sailing weather. But I was stopped by the policeman outside the door who insisted on taking the radio to bits in case I was a bomber. I expect the egg was overcooked if not cold by the time I delivered it. But all apologies went out of my head as the Head of State heaved his fleshy white torso out of the sheets. Not a pretty sight. But at least I can now say I know Ted Heath did not wear pyjamas. Well, not pyjama tops anyway.

Spring 09

Thu, 12 Mar 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

Have been having a great time doing a round of Lit Fests, and even selling a lot of Choral Society, which slightly astonished me. I am used to selling novels fairly well, but all my previous ones have been in paperbacks, this being my first hardback novel in the UK.

£17.99 seems a lot. Maybe they get marked up because they know they will be discounted on Amazon? Anyway, who am I to complain? Quercus obviously know what they are doing, and have been sending me off all over the place, talking at Literary lunches or dinners or book signings. I am such an egotist that I adore all that.

Mind you, I had a minor humiliation the other day. There must have been 400 people packed into the theatre at the Words on the Water festival in Cumbria to hear Michael Beurk being a grumpy old man, railing against the BBC, political correctness and etc. He was very good and very funny. I looked down from the box reserved for festival "talent" (I love being called the talent) and thought, Great, the place is packed.

Only there was a little gap between him and me and when we returned I'd lost half the audience. Nintey percent of the men had scarpered to the pub leaving me with a practically all-female audience. I had always thought my readership was female and over 45. Now I know. The compensation is they were a great audience and dutifully queued for ages to buy books and then queued again to get them signed.

I'd forgotten just how wonderful the Lake District is. Even in the rain, the sky, mountains and water are breathtakingly beautiful, all soft greys and purples, browns and yellows, Spring green underfoot. You understand why the British are such great water-colourists. You also, sadly, understand why we head for reliable sun in the summer.

Hyping ones books, can lead one into huge embarrassment, I was interviewed recently by the Daily Telegraph. It was to have been a whacking great profile, a lot of it about the book. And of course I talked (since I am nothing if not indiscreet) about "love in the afternoon of life" since all my characters are in their fifties and of course they all have love affairs, some good, some bad. Which got me on to Ernest and how I met him. When the interviewer got back to base her editor saw her piece and said, "Great love story. We'll use it for Valentines Day" And promptly cut everything except the love-in-old-age bit, with only a brief mention of Choral Society.

And then the Daily Mail read it and asked me to write about my experience of geriatric love. I said stoutly, "Look, I've already been stitched up by the Telegraph, I will only do it if I can write about my book too". "Sure” they said, and then when I sent my piece in, they promptly chopped everything about the book out of it. Still, even truncated it's a heartfelt piece, (Click here) but I'd never have written it just to tell the world what a great guy my chap is. Hey ho, that's newspaper editors for you. They are a law unto themselves.

Loving Oliver (if it ends up called that) continues. For once I have a novel that is going well. Probably means it is rubbish. I've had a few trips to the US on Orient Express Hotels business and a holiday with Ernest in Lanzarote and a long haul flight with my daughter to the Far East, so the chapters have steadily built up. Most writers need the peace of their study to get on with it. I seem to need a long haul flight or a hotel bedroom! Or, as now, a hospital. I'm writing this in Cheltenham General where I am in for "Obs" because I woke up with pain in my chest and I've seen too many of those ads on the side of buses with a man's chest being constricted by a wide belt and a warning that what feels like indigestion could be a heart attack in the making. So tomorrow I am to have an angiogram (where they stick some dye in your arteries and see if it gets stuck somewhere) which I hope will prove that I am a hypocondriac. I'd rather have that diagnosis than be on statins and betablockers and aspriins and, worst of all, a no-fat diet, for the rest of my life.

Prue and Ernest in Mexico 2008

P.S. It seems I am a complete fraud, if not a hypochodriac. Nothing the matter with my heart .... or anything else. Just as well as I want to go walking in Cappodica in May.

February 2009

Fri, 23 Jan 2009 -1:00:00 GMT

Choral Society is finally published!

What with all the cookbooks and now four novels, I should be blasé about that first sight of a new book with Prue Leith in big letters on the cover. But the thrill is terrific. Hope you like the look of it, and even more, hope you buy it, and even more than that, hope you like it!

Here’s what it says on the back of the book:

Rebecca

According to the Sing Your Heart Out website, she was going to ‘experience the endorphin rush of deep breathing combined with the emotional satisfaction of singing with others in harmony. Well, good, she thought, but what I want is to meet new people, preferably male.

Lucy

This singing thing isn’t going to work, she told herself. I don’t want to pay fifty pounds every week to come up to London on this inevitably late train. And all so I can sing in a group that my daughter thinks will do me good. I don’t want anything that will do me good.

Joanna

It wasn’t like her to be so nervous. But she knew, without a shadow of doubt that she was about to make a fool of herself. For pity’s sake, she’d managed hundreds of people, bought and sold businesses, made large amounts of money. So, she couldn’t sing. Big deal. Lots of people couldn’t sing. But the difference was, she was dealing with it.

------------------------------------

On the writing front I am now a little deeper into my next novel, the political one, provisionally called Loving Oliver. And at last I feel the story is beginning to take off. I am trying to make both my protagonists sympathetic: the cool, distinguished, slightly arrogant Government Minister, and the chubby, emotional, single Mum whose life he ruins.

The world of Whitehall is both awesome and awful. Like a huge machine that no one can beat. The most idealistic politician cannot get done what he knows to be right, the most innocent citizen cannot get past the bureaucracy. It makes Yes Minister ever more authentic.

------------------------------------

I went walking with my daughter, Li-Da, in Northern Laos near the Chinese border for a few days after Christmas. It was an experience that I would not have missed for the world. And I wouldn’t repeat it for the world either.

The terrain is magnificent: jungle covered mountain range upon mountain range, paddy fields in the flat valleys, and between them terraces of rubber trees, dry rice, sugar cane and vegetables so evenly dug round the contours of the slopes the hills look like crinoline petticoats, layered with lace.

The trek was astonishing. Very arduous and chaotic as to organisation. But so breathtakingly beautiful in all directions it hardly mattered that we are being offered nothing on the original itinerary. The local guide had never heard of the waterfall we were to have visited, or the “bird-caller who can summon the birds with his whistling”, or the “homely teahouse overhanging the river”.

On Day One we hiked for five hours slowly up to a hill village so remote there is no water, no electricity and no sanitation. The wooden houses, roughly thatched with palm leaves are on tall stilts and look as they must have for hundreds of years.

We stayed the night in a shack (the Chief's) under a sort of eiderdown on the floor with half a dozen women plus a lot of babies (the men and older children were banished at bedtime). To have a midnight pee, I had to risk life and limb to climb down a rickety ladder. Put my foot on a water-buffalo as I stepped off. He was even more alarmed than I was and heaved himself up and blundered away. I set off in the moonlight followed by barking village dogs and expectant pigs (you don't want to know, but explains the fact that there is no mess on the ground and no smells).

The pigs seem to live on a diet of plastic bags and other species poo. O well. The pork tasted great. The hill tribes on the other hand live on a diet of sticky rice and whatever they can trap, squirrels, rats, birds (our hostess -- who, being a woman, did not address a word to us-- was plucking what looked like kingfishers and canaries). They draw the line at cats, which are sacred to the Buddha.

But we had the merriest time. We'd provided beer and rice whisky so of course the chief’s family rather swelled, the women sitting quietly round the edge with the men arguing ever more fiercely round the fire. Li-Da and I and our two guides were given the strongest Lao massage (like Thai) you can imagine while everyone yelled with laughter at our squeaks and protests. They cooked all the food we'd brought to produce a huge feast of soup, curry, egg-and-pork- morning glory, rice etc on a tiny fire in the middle of the room, (no chimney just a few holes in the roof, so very smoky) and just dropping the scraps through the floor boards for the animals.

At 10 pm we tried unsuccessfully to go to sleep while the men debated some great matter at the top of their voices, very animated. No fisticuffs but plenty of shouting. Not even the guides understand the local language and at midnight the Chief stomped out and the women, who had sat in silence without getting, in spite of my efforts, any beer or food, unhooked their babies from their backs and curled up under their blankets, fully dressed. We were in the same state, it being far too cold to take any layers off! And at 3 am the cockerels had a two hour crowing competition and the ‘chief among roosters’ was under our house. By five the noise of children, dogs, cows, pigs and men all clambering for the women to feed them, was quite something.

The married women go bare breasted but wear long skirts, seldom trousers. The non-nursing women (adolescents and grannies), hike miles into the mountains to cut sugar cane or tall grasses for making into brooms or drying for stuffing their thin mattresses. The children, as in slums the world over, wear filthy t-shirts over bare bums, but seem well fed and happy, and infinitely photographable. The men, especially in the lower villages nearer roads have mobile phones, Chinese motor bikes, shiny jackets with logos on them and watch footie on satellite TV. It was ever thus.

September 2008

Fri, 12 Sep 2008 -1:00:00 GMT

Having finally got Choral Society off to the publishers, there is now that long unsatisfactory gap waiting for the wretched thing to be in print. I've no idea why it takes as long to publish books as to write them! I should get page proofs any day now, and hope to God I don't want to change much, and then there is the dust-jacket to agree. The first design was of a glamorous woman with swirling skirt and hat obscuring her face. I objected on the grounds that she looked about thirty, and all three of my women are in their fifties. I thought my readers would reject it as "chick-lit" and readers of chick-lit would feel conned when the characters were not t-somethings getting drunk and getting laid on every page.

And then at the airport I saw a book by Valerie Martin, whom, I'm ashamed to say, I had not heard of. The cover was almost exactly like the one I'd just rejected. A swirling skirt of a young woman, back half-bare and black-laced, face obscured, I would have rejected it as junk, but, on account of the debate with my publishers, I picked it up. Turns out Valerie Martin is a very serious novelist indeed, winner of the Orange prize for her novel Property. I bought the book, called Trespass. It is wonderful, one of the best novels I've read for a long time. It's about a woman's possessive angst as she loses her only son to a young woman who she regards as an opportunist and a adventuress. It is terrific. Get it by clicking http://www.orionbooks.co.uk/11297-1/Author-Valerie-Martin.htm So maybe I made a mistake about the jacket. We shall see!

I'm in terrible trouble with my old school. I wrote a piece in a collection of writing by South African writers on the subject of boarding school, called Bath time for Sister Superior

Bath time for Sister Superior

The Head of the Old Girls association thinks I have betrayed my alma mater, brought the school into disrepute and etc. I will not be asked again, she suggests, to Speech Day.

And yet I thought I had written a sympathetic piece. And we are talking of events that happened 50 years ago, for goodness sake. The Chapter occurs in Cheesecutters and Gymslips published by Umuzi-Randomhouse www.umuzi-randomhouse.co.za/cheese.html and includes a brilliant piece by Doris Lessing about the Catholic Nunnery she attended where, as a very little girl she had to sleep in a dormitory with huge terrifying pictures of the Crucifiction, St Sebastian stuck full of arrows and the bleeding Sacred Heart, and where they were not allowed to wash or change their clothes: cleanliness, far from being next to Godliness, was a sign of vanity. This and other accounts of the cruelty and pressure-cooker sexuality inevitable if you lock young men or women up in single-sex institutions, make my little adventures very tame indeed.

One morning when we were abroad, we had a phone call from Ernest's mother's carer. The old lady, at 106, had stopped eating and drinking and, having hardly had an aspirin in her life, never had a night in hospital and still with her wits about her, appeared to have decided enough is enough. So we scuttled back from Italy and the whole family converged on her in Lytham St Annes, from all corners of Europe, to say their farewells. Whereupon she sat up, ate a hearty breakfast and continued as before.

I am full of admiration. Getting there after the death or when the person is too ill to enjoy the attention is no good to the subject and leaves the family with distressing memories. I think a little false alarm a very good thing. Everyone re-united for her funeral two months later, was so happy to have seen her in May, when she had changed her mind about dying.

In August we had a long weekend in Tuscany, staying with friends in an ancient castle that they have been slowly restoring over the years. It was one of those dreamlike experiences that belong in novels or Merchant Ivory films. A houseparty full of musicians, music lovers, writers, artists, designers. Somehow I end up judging, with a couple of artists rather more qualified than me, a painting competition for the local primary school.

The daughter of the house runs the vineyards and the olive groves. A wonderful (Leith's trained I am glad to say) cook somehow manages to cater for 20 to 30 people every day. We eat in the cool shade of a long loggia with views down to the river and across to the hills. And informal concerts erupt at any time of the day: Gregorian chant in the chapel, singing and piano in the dining room.

Ernest, who at 77, is playing the piano better than ever in his life and about to record all the Chopin studies, is in his element, with two pianos to choose from. One night he plays all the GoldbergVariations, one night all the Chopin Studies. And he practices all the time. Absolutely no stopping him. One night after a concert, I go to bed. At midnight, still no Ernest so I ring him on his mobile -- I'm not about to go down three floors and hunt for him in a huge dark castle. Cheerful as a cricket he announces he's talking to a couple of musicians and he'll be up soon. At 2 am I ring him again. Oh, he's just gone to another village to see one of the musician's studios. It's fascinating; I should have come; the musician is a genius; he's invited him and his girlfriend to stay in his house in Lanzarote; he's going to arrange a concert for them. Well, fine, but I'm going to sleep. And then I think, How is he going to get in? If no one knows he's gone off with one of the audience, and there are a set of iron gates, then a set of solid wooden gates and then a big front door? There isn't a drawbridge, but there might as well be. But by then I'm pretty cheesed off and think, well, if he has to spend the night in the olive grove, serve him right. And I go to sleep, only to be woken, with the rest of the house, by all the dogs barking as Ernest arrives home. Someone lets him in, he crawls into bed, -- it is now 3 am. And then he is up again at 4.30 am, playing the piano.

On the food front, I've been having fun. The most exciting project is the brainchild of the South African Tourist Board. The Hoxton Apprentice, the Charity restaurant I helped set up to give really disadvantaged young people in Hackney (www.hoxtonapprentice.com) a chance to become chefs and waiters and the Prue Leith Chefs Academy (www.prueleith.co.za) in South Africa have gone into partnership to run a South African food and wine week at the Hoxton Apprentice. The SA Tourist board flew 10 of our apprentices out to South Africa, gave them five days of sight seeing and then the Prue Leith Chefs Academy gave them five days of intensive training to learn the menu they had developed, showcasing the best of South African food and wine. Then back they flew to London, accompanied by six students and staff from the Academy who will help them with the South African week. And then we hope to have South African gastronomic dinners in all sorts of posh restaurants to spread the word, culminating in a stand at the London Food Festival next May.

For more info on the Prue Leith Chefs Academy click here www.prueleith.co.za and for more into on the Hoxton Apprentice click here www.hoxtonapprentice.com

In my last blog I said I'd tell you if the doswer's cure for my sick rose worked. If you remember he used a little blob on a chain to interrogate some thing or some body about the nature of the radiation and concluded that it was coming in a straight line from the South West and that a metal pole put on that side of the rose would interrupt the evil waves. Well he stuck the pole in and the rose died anyway. I'm not sure why I find this result satisfactory?

Summer 2008

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 -1:00:00 GMT

At long last! Here is a taster of Choral Society, finally delivered to Jane Wood, my editor, after two major rewrites and endless fiddling about. I wish I could say the novel is as good as I can make it, but I suspect that if I went on re-reading it for the rest of my life, I'd keep on tinkering with it. But please God, Jane will not send it winging back with more jigging required. Click on link for Chapter One ....

Choral Society - Chapter One

I hope you like it. If you don't at least you will not have spent good money buying it, and if you do, sadly you'll have to wait ‘til Spring to get the rest of it. It will be published in hardback by Quercus in the UK and by St Martin's Press in the States.

The last rewrite was hell because I radically changed the chapter order, which meant that I kept finding that some character would mention a past event that hadn't happened yet, or that a character would be wearing a sundress and sling backs in the middle of December. We had two weeks to the deadline and so I took to getting up at 5 am in order to put three hours work in before the day started, but then would find I was so done in by 9pm I'd go to bed. Francisca, my trusty P.A. took to coming into the office at 7 am and working weekends. It is a miracle she still works for me really. She liked the book when she first read it but she now says she never wants to hear the names Lucy, Rebecca or Joanna again.

By way of antidote to revising the novel, I've been reading “Nothing To Be Frightened Of” by Julian Barnes. It's about his fear of death, and I feared it might be gloomy as hell. But it's interesting, moving, funny and above all thought provoking. It's a long time since I stuck so many yellow post-its into a book, mostly at paragraphs I wanted to argue with him about.

I guess getting older -- I'm 68 now -- should make you think more of death. But I hardly ever do, except in fleeting moments of irritation or regret that I won't get in all the things I want to do before it's all over. I am not remotely afraid of the process of dying, since I cheerfully feel someone will zonk me out with morphine or something so I won't know if its Belgium or Tuesday. And I'm not afraid of what happens after death since I'm fairly sure nothing does.

The old age thoughts that concern me are not about death, they are the ones I have given my three main characters in Choral Society: Rebecca hates the wrinkles and fears the thickening waist; Lucy is convinced she's going senile like her Mum, and Joanna's knees mean no more tennis and kneeling to weed the garden is no longer a pleasure. But fear not, Choral Society is more about women's resourcefulness and courage. And of course it’s about second-time-around love, and about the friendship of women -- something I never really appreciated until I became a widow.

The last few months have also, of course, been full of food! And so have I. I had lost half a stone, which is not enough since I am still a good stone overweight, but recently I've not lost a pound, in spite of returning, reluctantly, to Pilates, something I have always found excruciatingly boring. I like competitive exercise like tennis, or at least exercise with a view, like walking. But this time I went to classes given by Vesta a super-active friend of my daughter who is passionate and relentless. She's very good though, even makes it interesting, and is OBSESSED with breathing.

So much so that when I went salmon fishing with my brother on the Dee, I'd find myself muttering "breath in" on my back cast and "exhale" on the forward cast. And trying to suck my belly button into my backbone while at it. Good thing you are mostly totally alone when fly fishing! I love it: you need to concentrate a bit -- enough to keep your mind from thinking about work, or writing, or money or children -- but not enough to spoil the relaxed nature of standing in a river, water rippling round your feet, kingfishers dipping over the water, salmon and trout bouncing out of it.

One other huge pleasure has been the garden. I'm inordinately proud of my garden, and no one who comes to the house is let off without having to walk round it. And I get very beady if they gossip to each other and fail to OOh and AAh enough. It is the most wonderful year for roses and a couple of years ago I scooped up all the bush roses dotted all over the place and stuck them in beds round the front of the house. They are not tastefully colour-coded or subtly blended, they are just a wonderful mass of old shrub roses, floribundas, hybrid teas, all sorts, just a riot of summer colour.

Rosa Mundi Hedge

By contrast my new formal box-edged border has four beds all filled with Little White Pet a smallish rose that has, I think, twice as many blooms as leaves on it. It starts off with the tiniest pink buds which open to a bright white on a blue-green leaf. Amazing. One day I was showing a garden club around and one of the guests, a professional dowser, got out his little gadget on a chain, swung it over the one rose (out of 76) which appears to be dying, and asked aloud if it was evil radiation that was attacking it. The bead on the end of the chain whirled about, saying, he said, Yes. Then he asked it which way the line of radiation ran and the bead swung in a straight line NW - SE. Next question: Which direction is it coming from? More whirling about, which meant from the South West. So he stuck a metal stack into its path to interrupt the flow and said, Right lets see if that's stopped it then. The bead hung still upon the chain, no whirling about. Good, said the dowser, we've done it.

Well, I'll go for anything that works. If the rose recovers, I shall tell him. Also if it doesn't. And if I remember, I'll post the result in my next blog too!

I quite often have groups of keen gardeners round the garden. People who organised garden tours love it because a) my garden is such a contrast to really posh gardens. We only grow what likes growing. I cannot be bothered with the rare and delicate, because its too heartbreaking when some big bully of a plant romps all over them and gobbles them up. I like plants that fight for their space unaided. One organiser said, "Your garden is such a nice contrast. This morning we went to this immaculate garden and everyone got exhausted by all the latin names and the rarity of everything. In your garden they recognise every plant, and probably have them in their gardens, and best of all they recognise the weeds in the lawn and the nettles in the borders!

Actually, I say immodestly, they like our garden too because we sometimes give them lunch. This year one group got lasagne made with beef off my neighbours hill, salad out of our garden, last year's damsons out of my freezer and elderflower cordial from the Cotswold hedgerows. One interesting sign of the times: in a party of forty we had three veggies, one no wheat, one no dairy, one no fish, one no red meat, one vegan.

One evening I was at my desk when a car drove up. O hell, I thought Jehova's witnesses. I lack the patience of my beloved Ernest's mother who used to invite them in and hear them out, saying "Well, they have their job to do, and who are we to stop them doing it. We should at least give them the chance to convert us." I am not so tolerant and sometimes leave the door unanswered. But anyway, this car was swiftly followed by another. O God, they are now hunting in packs, I think unkindly.

Red Bed

But then a third car, then a fourth. And the penny drops. It's a garden tour and I have forgotten. Frantic search of Francisca's desk to find any details. Then I notice a big notice on my desk: DON'T FORGET GARDEN TOUR 6 PM. 25 PEOPLE. DRINKS. Thank God its not supper! I streak to the larder, fling a case of white into the freezer, dash out to the lawn and pooper scoop my unteachable Meg's offering (why cannot I teach her the difference between the lawn and the field?) and arrive at the front door flushed but smiling. "How lovely...."

One advantage (or sometimes disadvantage) of my telly-judging of chefs on the Great British Menu, is I'm asked to do a lot of eating. I went to a Boys school, The Forest School, in Horsham, West Sussex to judge their entries in the Junior Masterchef schools competition run by the Rotary Club. It was terrific. 6 boys, all a lot better cooks than most of the women of England, making excellent food. It was won by Dean Tilley for his mouth-watering menu of Fillet of Chicken stuffed with Leek and Goats Cheese, on a bed of Roasted Ratatouille with a balsamic, herb and olive oil dressing, followed by Apple and Wild Berry Crumble with Clotted Cream.

Winner - Dean Tilley

Less serious, but huge fun, was judging celebrity chefs and top food critics, trying to ice cakes in five minutes in aid of Action Against Hunger at TASTE festival in Regents Park. Tom Parker Bowles made Stonehenge out of chocolate bars on his, Michel Roux from the Gavroche might have won if he could spell Toujours (he forgot the s, and he's a Frenchman!) and Aldo Zilli proved what we all know, male chefs are useless at cakes and icing, but the exception that proved the rule was the French chef, Pascal Aussignac from Le Gascon, who, since it was Ladies Day at Ascot, turned his cake into an Ascot hat and won.

The winning cake!

See www.aahuk.org and www.restaurantsagainsthunger.org

I've been celebrating the delivery of that wretched novel with some serious pleasure. In the immediate euphoria of completion I've been to Glyndebourne to see Evgeny Onegin which was so romantic it made me cry; to Wimbledon where I saw three terrific early wins for Murray and Nadel, and swanned about in the posh bit as a guest of a member; I visited Wisley where the director showed me round the garden himself, a rare privilege, and to the National Trust Hidcote garden too. Both these visits paraded as work, because I am trying to set up links between the School Food Trust's cooking clubs in schools (see www.letsgetcooking.org.uk) with the National Trust and the Royal Horticultural Society's gardening clubs or initiatives for children. Both have excellent education schemes for schools, see www.nationaltrust.org.uk and www.rhs.org.uk

I do lead a lovely life. No question. Had 10 days in Italy with Ernest staying in the incomparable Hotel Splendido in Portofino and in the Villa San Michele outside Florence. I had been a bit reluctant to see Portofino because my parents had been there as young lovers before the war and always said they would retire there it was so perfect. I feared it would all be high rise horror and spoilt. But it must look exactly the same: there's no room for any development, and the Italians are too conscious of their heritage to let it happen. The only difference I guess is the shops. What would have been lace-makers, fishing supplies, grocers, are now all Gucci, Pucci, Comme des Garcons and the rest!

Villa San Michele is similarly unspoilt. I knew we (I say we because I am lucky enough to be on their Board of Directors) had added a lot of rooms and I remembered it from 32 years ago as a beautiful grand house, but simple. But the rooms are buried in the hillside terraces, and all but invisible and the swimming pool is completely invisible on the highest terrace right above the hotel. It was heaven.

The Villa san Michele has fond memories for me. When I was pregnant with Daniel, and it was not much more than a pensione, we were there over the Easter holiday weekend and since there is a fiesta on Easter Sunday outside the Duomo in Florence that day, we could not get a taxi. So we hitched a lift with a waiter, who said his name was Daniele. "Danieli" we both exclaimed. "Daniel" that's what we'll call the baby. So Daniel, now 33, is named after an Italian waiter, and very happy I am with that!

April Blog

Thu, 15 May 2008 -1:00:00 GMT

Well, I did manage to deliver the complete book, 97,000 words, by Easter, and am glad to say both Janes (editor and agent) like it. Which does not of course mean that ed. Jane will not come back, once she has been through it with eagle eye and fine toothcomb, with demands for another re-write. We shall see.

Mean time, it is the author’s favourite time: the blissful gap between one book delivered and the next not started; for once free to do what you like, like read other peoples’ books, and go on holiday without the laptop, and refuse to feel guilty about not knuckling down to another few thousand words.

I am, however, churning ideas round a bit. There are so many books I would like to do: such as a basic cookbook based on the healthy standards that are now the law for school dinners, but designed for parents and children on a tight budget. I had sworn I’d never write another cookbook (in order to concentrate on fiction) but I think changing the diet of children is just so important I can feel myself getting sucked back into food writing; and then I want to do a trilogy – three novels about three generations of the same family, whose lives resolve round a family restaurant, or maybe a hotel; and then I’d like to do a fictionalized autobiog. It would have to be fictionalized because my memory is useless, and I am too lazy to go digging around in ancient diaries to get the facts straight.

And as I am extremely unlikely to live to do them I’d better choose. Advise please! Would you buy any of them?

Ernest, my partner/mate/”sous-chef” has just published his autobiography, or rather the first half of it, from growing up in a working class family with both parents working in a weaving mill, to becoming a concert pianist, and, in his forties a millionaire mill owner and businessman. He’s called it, How to be A Failure and Succeed. Of course I am biased, but I think it’s a great and inspiring read, sometimes funny, sometimes heart-rending, and maddening because it stops just before his real success, which was to set up the “practical utopia” that was to regenerate the centre of Halifax. Still, he’s now writing the second book. I only hope he does it faster than the first, which took him 15 years! I can’t wait that long, and neither can he, since he is seventy-seven! Mind you, his mother is 107 and still going strong and has never had an aspirin in her life, so you never know…

The big event in the school food saga has been the launch of SchoolFEAST (Food Excellence and Skills Training) centres, which are basically cookery schools for dinner ladies, school cooks and catering managers. They are mostly in existing colleges, but they had to tender to us at the School Food Trust for a bit of money to set up special courses aimed specifically for school cooks – which means they need to be inspiring, motivational courses and at the same time cover the nutritional standards, cooking on a budget, cooking in quantity, pleasing teenage and younger customers and marketing skills, since the catering team are in the best position to persuade children to give something a try.

Anyway we have sixteen of them up and running now and we had a sort of celebration at Thames Valley Uni, with the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, and Raymond Blanc as guests. The idea was that I would act as a sort of telly presenter interviewing the celeb guests as they acted as commis chefs to three of the dinner ladies who had just graduated NVQ Level 2 qualifications from the SchoolFEAST course. We were up in a teaching kitchen, and the audience of Press, school heads, caterers, other SchoolFeast centre chiefs etc watched on a big screen.

I found it a nightmare to control, but it went down hugely well mainly because Ed Balls, the Secretary of State, turned out to be a dab hand with a chopping knife, wok and ladle and of course the Press loved that. He tells me he cooks with his children at weekends, which I wish more Dads did. He also announced some more money for another lot of SchoolFEAST centres, plus another three years funding for us at the Trust. I wish I could promise that in three more years we will have every child in the country happily eating stir fries and veg, fruit and good soups. But it has taken 20 years to degrade the nation’s diet, and we cannot work miracles. But we will have a damn good go.

See the school food trust website www.schoolfoodtrust.org.uk

Had a proud Mummy moment last month when my son and daughter in law, who run a charity called Only Connect which tries to help prisoners and ex-offenders through Drama, had their first production in their new, tiny, theatre, near Kings Cross. The cast were all newly released ex-prisoners from Wormwood scrubs and Holloway who had been in some of the productions that they had done in prison. Son Daniel, who does the fundraising, admin and a lot of the hands-on counseling etc, and his wife Emma who directs the plays and befriends the prisoners and ex-prisoners,, were both looking completely exhausted having been responsible, not just for a new production, but for the good behaviour of some of the cast who they were supporting in a rented house, at the same time as getting the new theatre ready.

The Grapes of Wrath ran for a week to packed houses, got some excellent notices, made some money for the charity and, more importantly gave real confidence and self-belief to a band of very damaged young people, most of whom should never have been in prison in the first place.

If you are mentally unstable, on drugs, alcoholic, or just homeless and suicidal, is prison really the place to fix it? No wonder two-thirds of prisoners re-offend.

www.onlyconnectuk.org

I can’t believe it is Great British Menu time again! When the show is off the air no one ever recognizes me, but when it is running, people stop me all the time, usually, I am glad to say, to tell me they like the show. But occasionally to tell me in no uncertain terms that they don’t. I got a lecture from a woman in the street in Cheltenham about how ugly people look when eating. I tend to agree with her. Chomping and swallowing is not a pretty sight, and since we have to look down at our plates, a wobbling double chin is my reward for nobly eating endless Michelin star great cooking! “You have the best job on television” is what most people say. Well, Yes, but it comes at a price.

www.bbc.co.uk/food/tv_and_radio/menu_index.shtml

P.S. For anyone interested in how school meals went from good to dire, click the link to this article by Prof. Alan Malcolm (he’s the boss of the Insitute of Biology).

I gave a lecture to the Institute of Biology last month, and banged on as usual about the importance of teaching children about food. I met Alan Malcolm (CEO of the Institute) and he sent me the following excellent description of how we managed to degrade our school food progessively over the last 25 years or more.

School Meals

February Update

Tue, 12 Feb 2008 -1:00:00 GMT

The last weeks have been dominated by two things: trying to get Novel Four - now called Choral Society - finally (well, I hope finally) finished. And the announcement by the Government that cooking will now be compulsory in schools. Hurrah.

My book has 27 chapters and I am now on Chapter 20 or the third re-write. Sometimes I believe it will be my best novel yet, and sometimes I want to dump the whole thing. My new editor, Jane Wood, who is famous in literary circles for being as nice as she is good at her job thinks I should bump the book up from 70 thousand words to 90 thousand and that we need more about my main characters' motivation, more about the men in their lives and slightly slower development of their relations with each other. I just LOVE being told what to do. I've been struggling with this wretched book for four years, and suddenly it is going well and I am determined to deliver it by Easter. Won't see the light of day for another year however. Publishers these days have to negotiate months in advance with booksellers how much space the book will get, what shelf it will be on... Nightmare.

But generally I'm pretty upbeat. I have a new agent, Jane Turnbull, who keeps telling me what every author wants to hear, true or false: that I'm a brilliant writer, should write a trilogy, should write my autobiography, and etc. And I have a new publisher in Quercus, a new enterprising company, determined to break the mould of enormous publishers just treating books as commodities and driven by the idea that all the public wants is chick-lit and celebrity biogs.

The more important thing, at least for society, the nation and civilization generally, is that Ed Balls, Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families has just announced that every child in England and Wales will get eight cooking lessons -- proper cooking, not designing a pizza on computer -- while in secondary school. This will mean, roughly, that they will have one cooking lesson a week for a term (although I trust teachers will give them four two-hour lessons instead so they don't spend more time getting ready and clearing up than they do cooking).

Some of us old campaigners have been badgering successive governments to make hands-on cooking compulsory for years. One of the best campaigners has been the redoubtable Sara Jayne Stanes, who runs the Academy of Culinary Arts (www.academyofculinaryarts.org.uk) an association of top chefs. They have been sending chefs into schools to teach them about food for years, and recently have been banging on the Government’s door.

The sad thing is that we have the obesity crisis to thank for the announcement. With increasing evidence that children who cook are more likely to eat healthily and eat a wider range of foods than non-cooks, the Government have realised that teaching cooking is a key element in their strategy for tackling obesity. Also, the Food Standards Agency have at last come out with confirmation of what many parents and teachers already knew -- that some additives make children hyperactive and impossible to control or teach. Last week I went to a school in Finchley where the Head teacher told me that children who eat school dinners do, on average, 8% better than those who bring packed lunches, which often, sad into say, consist of crisps, sweets and cake.

At the same time as announcing the compulsory cooking, Ed Balls also announced his intention that schools should try to control what goes into lunch boxes. I was amazed, and of course delighted, that the press concentrated on the compulsory cooking, which was widely welcomed and ignored the lunch box issue, which I had expected a lot of flak about. I thought we'd have cries of Nanny State from the Tories and "Our kids will eat what they like" from the left wing press. My own, view, for what its worth, is that schools have an obligation to educate the whole child and teaching him or her to like and to eat a healthy diet is as much a part of the preparation for life as learning how to read, add and write. And you cannot persuade children to try a vegetable curry or a fruit salad, or even a shepherd's pie, if they are full of chocolate.

Another great food campaigner is Henrietta Green, who has a new Food Lover's website, (www.FoodLoversBritain.com) which is worth a trawl. Henrietta and I share a desperate desire to be slim and elegant with an equally strong (in my case too strong) desire to eat what's put in front of us. Both our jobs (she is the champion of farmer's markets and small producers) and I spend a lot of time eating top quality nosh on television.

Last week she came to dinner at my London flat and proved she can stick to one small glass of wine, even at a party. I could not. The occasion was a dinner cooked by my favourite caterers, Vincent and Estelle (www.estelleandvincent.com)

They are a young married couple, he French Canadian, she unadulterated French, and I had them cook, not just for Henrietta, but for Matthew Fort, Guardian Food Editor and Judge with me on the BBC Great British Menu telly series; Fay Maschler, Evening Standard Restaurant Critic; Tom Sitwell, Editor of Waitrose Food Illustrated, and Tom Parker Bowles who hosts the TV series Market Kitchen with Matthew.

Vincent is the cook and Estelle the waitress and they do really top-food in your own home, and for rather less than it would cost in a restaurant serving that kind of food. Here's the menu!

Canapés:

-Pickled cepes on a crouton

-Hiramasa sashimi (family of the Kampachi which is a white tuna from Japan), Jerusalem artichoke crisp & pineapple ketchup

- Braised sea-bass, verjus beurre blanc

- Kumamoto oyster, tarragon water & pomegranate foam

Starter

Roasted turbot, sweet onion tart, "Neal's Yard" crême fraîche, minus

8 vinegar, walnut and ice lettuce

Main

Côte de veau from Aubrac, roast salsify, hedgehog mushroom, Swiss chard and raw kohlrabi, roasting juices with beurre noisette.

Aligot (Laguiole cheese tomme fraîche with mash potato)

Dessert

Apple and frangipane tart, vanilla ice-cream

Maple syrup caramel

Poor Vincent! He had to cook with a photographer from the Evening Standard (click here to see the pics and Fay's article) clicking away and making them pause and pose at every turn, and having to step over his cables, duck under his lighting umbrellas and etc. But all in a good cause, as the whole point of the dinner was to promote the pair of them. They have the sort of dedication who see from only the most obsessed cooks, and they are amazing. And most impressive to me, a caterer, cook and employer of kitchen staff for decades, they clear up beautifully. Vincent works like a dream, washing up as he goes, letting nothing pile up in the sink. I abandoned them to it at midnight and went to bed. Next morning the place was cleaner than they'd found it!

I'm writing this on the way to Lanzerote, where Ernest (who I've decided to call my "sous chef" rather than something embarrassing and unsuitable for a pair of OAPs like boyfriend, partner, mate, new best friend, significant other) has a lovely Moroccan style house far from any lager louts or hen parties. It is just lovely as a winter writing retreat. No so hot that you are tempted to go to the beach or lie at the pool, and yet warm enough for a walk along the rocks or to eat breakfast outside.

We eat breakfast in a little covered courtyard off the kitchen, and lunch at a sunny table in a Moroccan courtyard with fishpond, palm trees and fountain. There's another Egyptian style courtyard with more fish in a pond with a rill, and faded frescoes on the sun-soaked walls, and two lead sphinxes guarding the steps to the exterior garden and swimming pool.