My Cooking Day by me

Well, I have to say the Cookery School was amazing with a billion gleaming pots and pans and sauciers and thingumiwhatsits and every bit of le Creuset ever made but where were the spoons, the tea-towels, the oven gloves, the chopping boards, the scales and aprons? It was a treasure hunt. I found a kitchen porter to help us but it was his first day so, like me, he was about to burst into tears too. I asked for a hand held whizzer but was given something that looked like a cement mixer. I didn't use it. Also the ovens required a comprehensive knowledge of state of the art oven operation - I learnt and then taught it on to my fellow five cooks. Something about a boarding school education was helpful here - sharing Latin homework and games kit.

Just when things started to get tricky and I was beginning to panic about my cranberry sauce with stolen port from another cook, along came team after team of people who fired horrid difficult to answer questions at me. They grilled me on all sorts of foody things and about how and when and where and why I cook, shop and feed people. I was trying to concentrate on my cooking; I was nice to the first two groups but by the third or fourth I was becoming tetchy and beginning to tell terrible lies.

By some miracle and good organisation on my part, it all came together; then the gannets descended. In these groups there is always one young chap who is a bit crap at his job, takes no notes, asks no questions, probably has a bit of a hangover and tags along hoping nobody will notice him and he is terribly greedy. There were several of him and they all came back for seconds. All my pheasant en croute with cranberry and port sauce disappeared in a trice. The pudding, a meringue roulade, hit the spot and, as I had it done quite early, managed to be filmed and photographed ostentatiously.

Then came the eating. Armed with forks we charged round the kitchen trying each others' delicious dishes which were just amazing. I felt I only had a teeny bit of this and a little bit of that but it probably accumulated into a vast buffet in my stomach and I was so full I wanted to lie down rather than have yet another Q&A session.

When I got home, completely shattered, I emptied all my leftovers onto a layer of pastry, rolled it up and served it to the next team of critics, Mr Smith and the Apprentice. "A bit dry, isn't there a sauce? What's for pudding?" By that time I was fast asleep.