Ever since I met Omi (one half of the fashion design duo Vin + Omi) on a train, I have found myself, every six months, walking in their London Fashion week show. A preposterous idea, you’d think, an 86-year-old strutting down the catwalk. But I’m such a show-off, I can’t resist it. It is enormous fun. There’s a lot of hanging about while all 60 or 70 of us get our make-up and hair done and get fitted (and later dressed) in whatever we are to wear. I like the atmosphere with everyone in one big room and so at ease with each other. Exquisite young models of both sexes are stripping off with no embarrassment, sitting on the floor, everyone relaxed and friendly. One year I turned up to find my costume was a tube of black latex, the slits down the sides threaded with red cord: bondage gear, without a doubt. It was so tight it took two men to yank it over my head and down my body.
The last couple of shows have been in the Art’otel in Hackney, which, since it is circular, means we walk right round the edge of the building, with the public and press in rows along the side. Last time I lost my bearings and did two circuits by mistake. Vin had tipped off the musicians that it was my birthday and everyone sang ‘Happy Birthday’ while I clumped along in a voluminous pink trouser suit. This time I was in a gauzy full-length dress covered in embroidered flowers, topped off with an enormous red wig, only outdone by Alison Hammond’s huge black wig and magnificent sequinned dress. That will teach me to introduce my friends to Vin + Omi.
I left the best job in television, eating cake on Bake Off, because I wanted my summers back so we could have a holiday in Europe. So this year, for the first time in nine years, I could corral my children and grandchildren in a nice big house overlooking Saint-Jean-de-Luz on the Basque coast. Heaven. Then husband John and I spent a month touring the Baltic countries of Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. With the exception of Krakow, most of the main cities were pretty well flattened by bombing or burned to the ground by retreating Germans in the war. But the restoration of their old towns has been magnificent. Gdansk, Riga, Vilnius and Tallinn are rebuilt as they were before the war, so mostly brightly coloured medieval houses and soaring gothic cathedrals.
This week we’ve started filming for the fourth series of my ITV show Prue Leith’s Cotswold Kitchen. It’s good fun because it’s genuinely filmed in my kitchen with a good-natured all-Welsh crew. It’s stress-free because, unlike in my Bake Off days when I had to get up at 5 a.m. to get to location, I’m woken by Bambi, my make-up queen, banging on the bedroom door with a cup of tea, with just enough time to get dressed and primped. It’s also easy because I do almost no work: Katrina Michie, the cook I’ve worked with for years, does all the planning, prepping and thinking for the foodie slots, Jane Galpin sources my clothes (I loathe shopping) and husband John travels all over the Cotswolds interviewing artisan producers, farmers, thatchers, sheep dog trainers and the like. So all I do is cook in my own kitchen and chat to celebs such as Heston Blumenthal and Blake Lively who are good enough to trek to the Cotswolds. By 5 p.m. everyone has left and I have a fridge full of food for supper.
Even less like work is visiting festivals. The other weekend we went to the Big Brue, the first Somerset festival in Bruton, which turned out to be hugely enjoyable. Great food, really interesting talks on art, politics and books, and a wonderful rural setting. I survived a public discussion with my son, the Reform MP Danny Kruger, called Family Matters on disagreeing and managing to stay close. We disagree a lot about a lot, most notably and publicly on assisted dying (I’m pro, he’s anti).
A few months ago, John announced his intention of making a dovecote. I envisaged something 3ft x 3ft sitting on a pole in the middle of the herbaceous border. No, he said, it’s going to be 30ft high. Which, including the mound it sits on, it is. It looks great, sitting like a folly at the end of a recently planted avenue. But it wasn’t all joy. The first batch of white doves settled in happily, only to be picked off one by one by a sparrowhawk for breakfast. Mercifully, the hawk has now disappeared and we have 12 white doves swooping about the house and strutting round the courtyard. All is not totally well, though. Crows have been getting into the dovecote and eating the eggs or chicks. Fortunately, the doves breed like rabbits, but it’s a race between making more babies and extinction by crows.
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