The diet is a twisted, noxious thing, all tortured abstinence and short-term fraud. I speak from bitter experience. As a restaurant critic, I eat to live and live to eat. And having a toxic aversion to exercise, there is little to prevent the inevitable bulging of my gut. Hence the need for the occasional diet.
My father would go shopping, and he was supposed to buy loo roll or something, but he'd always come back with some fish or shellfish. And we've always had fresh vegetables from the garden. He is a massively keen gardener, so he grew all our tomatoes, artichokes, asparagus - whenever he wasn't working, he was in the garden.
Like the Devil, the Norway lobster is known by a variety of different names: cigala in Spain, langoustine in France, Dublin Bay Prawn in Ireland. And in Italy, as well as the U.K., scampi.
My mother was a mother. She didn't really work, apart from bringing us up, which a job in itself, but at an age where lots of people are thinking of retiring, so is having up to 20 or 30 engagements a day, and she's brilliant at it - she has always been brilliant with people.
You get lots of people, especially where I live, who go in to a butcher and insist on organic beef - even when the butcher has better-tasting stuff from a farm that's been producing wonderful meat for 100 years but hasn't jumped through the hoops to get organic certification.
People moan about Twitter, people being rude and trolling. Just turn it off. Life goes on.
I have stayed in lots of great hotels around the world, and the Plaza Athenee is definitely one of my favourites.
