By the time we woke up on Sundays, my dad would have left home to get mutton. It was a kind of stew with thick gravy that my mother used to make in a pressure cooker. Even after the mutton was over, the cooker would still have some masala left. I used to polish it off with some rice.

There's something brave and touching about game girls of all ages keeping themselves smart in hard times - one thinks of those wonderful women during World War II drawing stocking seams in eyebrow pencil up the back of legs stained with gravy browning because nylons were so hard to get hold of.

I think the idea that you know who your inner self is on a daily basis, because... you know. What's good for you 25 years ago may not be good for you now. So, to keep in touch with that, I think that's the first ingredient for success. Because if you're a successful human being, everything else is gravy, I think.

I love food: biscuits and gravy, cheese grits, spaghetti and meatballs, chicken-fried steak with white gravy... but my favorite dish is my wife's beanie weenie cornbread casserole. It's so good. It sounds stupid, but if you eat it, it's heaven. Of course, it's only something you can eat if you've got a lot of money.

I always knew I'd keep at it with the plodding doggedness that I used to master lump-less gravy and wriggle out of fitness classes; I always knew I'd get a zillion rejection slips. I figured I'd write part time while working various full-time office jobs, and maybe, maybe in my 50s, I'd be able to quit and try writing full time.

Just as I am working hard to adjust to a new level, someone comes along and asks me to move up again. I'm not complaining about it; I just get on with trying to make sure I don't let anyone down. Training with England is just a different gravy again. Movement-wise, finishing-wise, you can learn such a lot from watching the very best in action.

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