Delia dishes up her meals with grace

When you spend five days in bed, coughing, sniffling and aching in every limb, as I did last week, you see the world outside through jaundiced eyes. In between sleeping and medication I watched some television (the indoor bowls very therapeutic, the silly antics of the Dingles and Battersbys were far from it).

I read Excalibur, the last in Bernard Cornwall's excellent Arthurian trilogy and newspapers.

Funniest yarn was the ongoing row over Delia Smith's new television series, which assorted celebrity chefs have ridiculed as too basic. Gary Rhodes, he of the spiky hairdo and madly gesticulating hands, was particularly scathing.

I enjoy the telly chefs as much as anyone; they are grand entertainment, although the pudding is being somewhat over-egged at the moment, and they are not real life are they? Fascinating though it is to watch them go through their complex gyrations with exotic ingredients (incidentally, what has become of lemon grass? Has it gone the way of sun-dried tomatoes - out of fashion?) they have little relevance in most of our kitchens.

Delia, on the other hand, has her feet on the ground, deals in what always seem achievable objectives, explains things without fuss or Ainsley Harriott-style histrionics. Significantly, she is not a chef, she is a cook, a writer and broadcaster about food. She does not have a restaurant, so she has no need to pose, bully subordinates or act the prima donna.

A high profile London chef recently ejected a food writer and his guests (including actress Joan Collins) from his restaurant because he did not wish to serve them. More astonishingly, another writer and his wife were asked to leave an hotel on a tiny island off the Scottish coast because he presumed to criticise the food at dinner. They returned to the mainland by tiny boat, at night, in a gale!

Less dramatically, I recall going to dinner at a fairly pricey North Yorkshire restaurant. When two of our party ordered steaks, the head waiter sniffed: "I hope you won't insult the chef by asking for them well done." As it happened, they wanted them medium rare, but if I wanted my steak well done that's the way I would have it. Is the chef doing us a favour, or vice versa?

Of course, not all chefs are like that, not even the telly chefs - my favourite is no-nonsense Yorkshireman Brian Turner. But those with over-grand ideas should not attack Delia Smith because she meets a demand.

Could their wrath be due to just that? Her books outsell all other cookery manuals by a mile. Her latest, based on the TV series, already tops the hardback list after just two weeks, with sales of nearly 30,000. Chew on that, Mr Rhodes!

IT DIDN'T do my sniffles any good to learn that Edinburgh had beaten York in the battle of the Army HQs. But, of course, it was no surprise. Despite the best efforts of York's campaigners, it was always a losing battle against the tartan mafia.

The Defence Secretary, George Robertson, is a Scot, as is the Armed Forces Minister, Doug Henderson. Not that it influenced anything, of course. But one third of the Cabinet is Scottish, although 87 per cent of the people they govern are English. The great offices of State are held by Scots - the Prime Minister, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Foreign Secretary and Lord Chancellor and a disproportionate number of junior Ministers and Labour MPs came from north of the border. Home rule indeed!

They need to keep the natives happy in advance of the Scottish Assembly elections.

Scotland got the Royal Yacht Britannia, now the Army HQ.

I suppose it's too late for the Millennium Dome to be re-sited in Kirkintilloch or Kirriemuir?

Pity!

3/11/98

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.