She arrived quite early and finished at about a quarter past one I was so busy I forgot about

She arrived quite early, and finished at about a quarter past one I was so busy I forgot about her. At two, a waiter came back in and said she was still waiting - and was looking very impatient now. So I went down there thinking: "What am I going to do? Look embarrassed and apologise, or try and get round this one way or another?" So I went round the corner, and she was sitting there, very colourful with her hair up, and I went up and said: "How nice to see you, my dear", and gave her a kiss and a cuddle which was obviously the right thing to do. She was very nice and responded the same way, so we got off to quite a good start, I felt - because waiting such a long time is not always fun, though I couldn't really do anything about it.She was very worried about feeding 500 middle-aged conservative ladies, who wouldn't necessarily be tuned into Caribbean food, all the spices and so on. At the time I wasn't exactly an expert in Caribbean food myself, though I'd been to Jamaica and I'd had some of it But pigs tails and salt codfish didn't excite me too much.

Although we loved our holiday over there, there's only so much you can do with pigs tails. Floella and I had a very good discussion about it, and she told me about her childhood and how she's so Caribbean, but what I'd seen in the Caribbean wasn't exactly visual food. It was very tasty and very different, but it wasn't very visual. I said it wouldn't be that great if it looked too Caribbean - some of those ladies might not eat much lunch and might complain afterwards. So we had the idea that we would make Caribbean food look snazzy, dolled- up: give it a bit of make-up. It was all very nice in the end - we toned down the spices a little.A little later we had the idea that we could do something together for television about Caribbean food.

Well, all Floella's peers, all these other 499 ladies, were saying: "Floella, how nice, what a marvellous job you've done with your idea about Caribbean food", and she was basking in the glory of that, and she came back to me and said: "Could you do the same for the rest of Caribbean food?" - the whole lot - and I thought "Crikey!"After that our friendship carried on without much planning, really. I said to her: "Why don't you come along to lunch?", and she was easy to get on with, a good laugh. My life is very serious - in working terms, anyway - so it's nice to have somebody around to have a laugh with, that you don't have to take too seriously. We meet up quite often: we often lunch together with her husband, who pretends to be very English, this English gentleman sort of idea, which of course is completely alien to me, so I take the mickey out of him quite a lot - but she seems to enjoy it, which is very nice.Floella is a very unpretentious person, very down to earth.