Prue Leith

For this year’s Christmas issue, several friends of The Spectator were asked which picture they’d choose to own. Here is Prue Leith’s answer: Since it’s Christmas, my favourite picture of all time is Botticelli’s Avignon ‘Madonna and Child’ because the Virgin is so exquisite and touching. She can’t be more than 15, and there she

Christmas in our family seems to guarantee tears and tantrums as well as jingle bells and jollity. Indeed, in my childhood, ‘feeling Christmassy’ meant feeling thoroughly overwrought or bad tempered, the antithesis of the ‘Christmas Spirit’. I think my father invented it when my mother, who was a terrible cook, spent all day making marmalade

Christmas in our family seems to guarantee tears and tantrums as well as jingle bells and jollity. Indeed, in my childhood, ‘feeling Christmassy’ meant feeling thoroughly overwrought or bad tempered, the antithesis of the ‘Christmas Spirit’. I think my father invented it when my mother, who was a terrible cook, spent all day making marmalade

I’m heartedly sick of hearing how feckless and selfish the young are. Maybe I move in enchanted circles, but I keep on meeting young people making a go of it, and frankly if they are the future, we should have no fear of Brexit. At Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s River Cottage Festival, there were (among the Glastonbury

Is it just my age, or has summer always galloped past with indecent haste? No sooner do the reluctant leaves force themselves into the cold, like early morning runners, head down, braving the rain, than they are over, looking dusty and tired, turning yellow, spent. I know how they feel. My chief complaint is cramp.

When my husband, John, was born in 1946, doctors were the chief agents of adoption. His mother was young, single, pregnant and desperate. Her doctor had another patient, a happily married but childless woman in search of a baby. The doctor, knowing the two women, solved both their problems by handing John to his new

When Facebook and co stop selling on our details to third parties, will it be the end of spam? For half an hour every evening my otherwise chatty husband is lost to me as he deletes hundreds and hundreds of emails. My PA does the same, and so do I. The waste of time is

Who would have thought eating cake could bring one so much attention? Since my ghastly gaffe in revealing The Great British Bake Off winner, every quiz and comedy show invites me to join them to make a further ass of myself; McVitie’s, on hearing me say I didn’t care for Jaffa Cakes, sends me a

My first husband, the writer Rayne Kruger, was friendly with Lord Armstrong, who owned Bamburgh Castle. In the 1950s, when Rayne was young and struggling, Lord Armstrong would lend him the castle keep as a bolthole in which to get on with his writing. He and his then wife had a cat called Gato. Every

To Skibo Castle for a four-day wedding, a dream of super-luxury and great good fun. I was struck by how the American rich are saving the Highlands. Skibo is supported by a band of mega-wealthy Americans, some of whom have invested heavily in the nearest town of Dornoch, which is thriving as a result. They

Why do we do it? We really need to stop supporting the snake-oil industry. We know there is no such thing as a miracle diet, a magical health cure, a mystical practice or a strange (and always expensive) product that is going to make us youthful, happy and, above all, thin. When Planet Organic first

I’m an unashamed Archers fan. But for the first time in 50 years I’m exasperated by the storyline. A fortnight ago Usha, who has no ball sense, is justifiably rejected as a potential player by Ambridge’s cricket captain. Even she admits she’s useless. Nevertheless, bleating ‘sexist’ and ‘age-ist’, she leads a Lysistrata-style boycott, not of

A fortnight ago I got a taste of what being far too famous might feel like. A leak that I’m a contender for the Mary Berry slot on The Great British Bake Off morphed into the fake news that I’d got the job. For 24 hours it was a lead story — then it was

To Edinburgh to get married, but first my toyboy groom John Playfair (he’s a mere 69) shows me the city of his birth, which is peppered with his kinsman William Playfair’s neoclassical buildings. Outside the Chambers Museum there is a new, magnificent statue of him by Stoddard. We climb Calton Hill to admire the monument

Why do we assume all doctors are good? We don’t think there are no bad cooks or bad plumbers. But everyone thinks their surgeon is the best in the world. Recommended to one such, I booked an appointment. He rattled off his spiel about the pros and cons of surgery, physio or jabs for a

I’m a real sucker for Christmas. I still have home-made decorations, angels and hanging ornaments made by the children 35 years ago. Our old wheelbarrow, rusted and full of holes, nonetheless gets a coat of red paint each year to turn it into Father Christmas’s cart. (The reindeer that pulls it is a rocking horse