Hungry: The highly anticipated memoir, from Celebrity Masterchef’s new judge Grace Dent

by Grace Dent

My childhood – in fact, almost all British childhoods in the 1970s and 80s – contains a lot of mince.

Fact!

My mother’s capacity for denial and revisionism would make Chairman Mao blush.

When Heston Blumenthal shows up making a risotto with a Dyson Airblade and a conical flask of formaldehyde, I still think: Use a pan, mate. Stop dicking about.

Home-schooled children are a liability in the workplace and in social groups; they are naive, malleable and overly trusting, because they didn’t ever learn at school how awful people can be.

After a woeful day dealing with dickheads at work, very few people experience a guttural yearning for a bowl of mixed leaves with oil-free dressing.

The word grooming was just something posh girls did with their ponies.

In the ‘good old days’ people would, could and did just disappear. It’s less painful for us if we cling to the idea that our elders did these things for reasons that went with the era: out of shame or because of religion or poverty or some other very difficult set of circumstances. We don’t want to think it was down to pure selfishness. Or that sometimes, in the ‘good old days’, people were just absolute arseholes.

Clearly silly things won’t win you as many prizes as being serious; however, you only have to write once at a silly frequency that makes a stranger really snort with laughter and then you’re in their hearts, just a little bit, forever.

We could gob off, push people’s buttons, flip-flop between beliefs and act atrociously without anyone screengrabbing the evidence and storing it in a folder as a weapon.

we remember not knowing things: how the definitive answer to the question we had in the shower that morning was probably on the top floor of a library in New York and we’d never know within our whole lifetime.

Maybe the greatest difference between being rich and poor is the number of instances per day that strangers inform you that you’ve been seen or your needs noted.

an air of pseudo-effortless confidence and sometimes, when faced with someone who was trying to impress you, giving almost no reaction at all.

Posh is having so much money subliminally available, floating about in the ether via forthcoming inheritances, that you couldn’t understand being working class if you tried.

She did it because mothers and wives everywhere had no choice.

What do people imagine I will do if they don’t approve of me? Take the hint and stop?

It feels like a terrible humanitarian disaster has happened, but it hasn’t; this is just an average Saturday in a regional NHS hospital.