I have no idea how I have ended up doing what I do: none of it has been planned.
I became a restaurateur because I loved good food, and I loved good food because my impoverished, working class mother was preternaturally interested in eating and cooking. When my husband, David, suggested we bought Hintlesham Hall from Robert Carrier I thought he was mad. He told me that if we didn't buy the Hall I was never to mention the idea of having a restaurant again. So we bought it. We then turned it from a restaurant to a hotel with 33 bedrooms – and an 18-hole golf course.
I became a food writer because I met Delia and her husband, Michael, at Hintlesham and they liked the newsletters I wrote. They asked me to be a contributing food editor on their (then) newly launched magazine for Sainsbury's and I continued to write two or three columns a month for about six years. I was then food editor of the Daily Mail Weekend Magazine for two years. I have won two Glenfiddich awards for food writing and have written three cookery books, The Really Helpful Cookbook; Fat Girl Slim; and Something for the Weekend.
I became a televison presenter because Jill Laurie (who had had the original idea for what turned out to be The Hotel Inspector), contacted my then agent to ask if she knew of anyone well versed in hotels. Despite turning down many offers on many occasions, I have – to date – presented three series of Hotel Inspector for Five, one series of Country House Rescue for C4 (with a second series due to air in Feburary 2010), as well as Ruth Watson's Hotel Rescue on C4.
I became fat because I obvously eat too much. It's something else my skinny childhood, slender teens and svelte twenties did not prepare me for.
The only thing I have ever actively planned was to learn to drive, something which still gives me enormous pleasure and too many speeding endorsements.
You can follow me on Twitter to keep up to date with what I'm doing.
|
|
