You know when you tell a self-deprecating story at a dinner party, everyone's laughing along with you? But then when someone else repeats that same story at another dinner party you feel they're all laughing at you?

I don't envy young Brits crossing the Atlantic to make their fortunes today.

I miss being fawned over by restaurateurs and chefs.

Top Chef is a very smooth-running machine. All the people working there are incredibly professional and absolutely at the top of their game.

I've never been to a shrink. But my parents were very psychologically literate - my father had undergone Freudian analysis - and we often talked about other people in psychological terms, so I picked up a lot of that.

America thinks of itself as a meritocracy, so people have more respect for success and more contempt for failure.

There's no reason why you can't deliver a grammar-school curriculum to an all-ability intake.