Come for the weekend, said my friend who lives further down Cornwall. There was a slight pause and she added, 'and bring all your gardening gear'. The added incentive was that there was some lovely fish on the market at the moment (she lives near the coast) and did I want anything special, such as sea bass? As this was from a person who has never been all that interested in cooking, and of whom it was once suggested that she could easily write a book entitled '101 ways with mince and a jacket potato', I was slightly suspicious. As it turned out it was her husband who was going to be donning the chef's apron. He had been for a day course at the Rick Stein Cookery School in Padstow and was anxious to try out his Sole Veronique on me. I envied him hugely, although apparently there was not a sight nor sign of Rick. One of his chefs conducted the course which left all those who attended crazy about fish and impatient to get their hands on a few gills. Not crazy enough, as it turned out, because plastering the bathroom took precedence and the next day I found myself trying out my recipe for shoulder of lamb with rosemary and lemon accompanied by garlic mash on them. There was not a sniff of a fish in the vicinity. I didn't mind. I love cooking, especially for an appreciative audience. I am, after all, my friend says 'the expert', which is what she also says about my gardening skills. And who can't help being a sucker for compliments. When she was looking at the cottage she now lives in the owner was most anxious that it went to someone who would be able to keep up the garden. I wasn't there but I know how the conversation went. 'Oh, I've got a friend who's a garden expert and she's dying to get her hands on it.' Hence the weekend travel with trowel. It's lovely to have a friend who thinks I'm an expert, but a bit embarrassing. Because I'm not. I'm just getting older and have learned over the years by my mistakes. The trouble is, if you work for a newspaper, you can easily become an expert. Mention that you once knitted a jumper and you become women's page editor in an instant. Never mind if the jumper had one sleeve upside down and you never lifted a pair of needles again. Mind you, I've been women's page editor on numerous newspapers, purely because I was the right sex, never mind the knitting. Over the years you learn to become very wary if anyone asks you if you've read a book lately, or seen a play. Because in next to no time you'll be appointed literary editor or theatrical correspondent with a title but no extra money and the prospect of wading through tons of tedious tomes and sitting in the stalls of a Saturday night watching a local am-dram company trying to recreate Beckett's Waiting for Godot on a village hall stage in front of an audience who would rather see a Brian Rix farce. To become cookery editor you only have to let slip that you make your own mayonnaise and you've had it. Thereafter, anything to do with food is yours. Strangely enough it doesn't work with wine, especially any invitation to taste it. I've never really understood that. I once wrote a feature on a local dig and thereafter because archaeological correspondent which quickly transferred itself to anything considered old, so antiques were quickly added on. People quickly got the message and anyone who wandered into the front office carrying something ancient they had found in the attic, or on one occasion someone who brought in what he thought might be a live shell (that was an exciting day, we didn't often get the bomb squad round) was directed to me. One of my colleagues became the fishing correspondent simply because he owned a Mirror dinghy. We all avoided being the farming correspondent by simply denying we'd ever been anywhere near the countryside, and didn't know one end of a cow from another. I didn't mind being the film editor because this meant a free pass and four mornings a week watching new films and occasional trips to London premiers. I got the job because I told the editor I knew Laurence Olivier, which was true if sitting in the same railway carriage and saying good evening on two occasions counted. Larry, as we who knew him called him, lived in Brighton, as did Peter Sellers, who was another string to my bow should Larry's name ever lose its allure. My husband and I had once helped him into a taxi at the station after he had dismounted somewhat unsteadily from the Brighton Belle train from London. The position none of us really wanted to fill was the after-dinner speech correspondent. This was frequently fought over, not to get, but not to go, because it involved sitting through a hotel dinner. These were always the same. Well done meat, usually roasted sometime in the distant past and sliced by surgeons scalpel when cold. Three roast potatoes, two piles of Duchesse potatoes singed on the edges, a spoonful of peas, five carrots and if you were really unlucky, cabbage. Only Christmas varied, the roast was replaced by turkey, the cabbage by sprouts and there was a solitary bright pink chipolata with minimal pork content and a spoonful of Paxo added to the plate. Every meal had the same gravy, extravagantly described as a sauce in French but always suspiciously tasting of Bisto and hot water. Pudding was invariably profiteroles, very solid outsides and a filling which looked and tasted like hot sludge with little hint of cocoa butter. After dinner, to which you always had to go to alone because they only gave you one ticket, there were long speeches you were supposed to faithfully record because otherwise they wouldn't have given you the ticket. Shorthand and indigestion don't mix. The only bonus was that women got a hairdressing allowance for a dinner, the men got an allowance to have their dinner jacket cleaned. It wasn't enough. I probably got to be a gardening expert long ago by allowing myself to be seen caring for the office pot plant in one office where I worked, a job considered only fit for a woman. I probably said I didn't mind because I liked gardening, and that was it. I do like gardening, I've learned a huge amount since I started writing the Gardener newspaper, but I'm not an expert. For a start these fast-ageing little grey cells have a hell of a job retaining Latin plant names. A lot of this is the fault of public relations companies whose employees simply have no idea how local newspapers work. They were, and still are, constantly ringing up asking to speak to the music editor, the environmental editor, the arts editor and so on, as though there was a vast staff of people who dealt with any one particular subject only. In reality we all sat in a small crowded office in Brighton just big enough for five of us and every time someone called Lavinia called to speak to the opera editor we fought over whose turn it was to pretend to know something about La Traviata. If there was any expertise about, it was an expertise in avoiding being an expert. As for a cookery expert, I just like cooking and, most important for a cook, like eating. I was brought up in a family where the cookery was mainly done by a grandmother who had absolutely no patience with recipes and who cooked entirely from memory. What kind of memory a person who once put green peas in her rock cakes because she ran out of currants had I don't know. I had a slight suspicion all through childhood that somewhere there could be found food which had some taste to it and began reading cookery books avidly. There followed a life-long fascination with trying out new foods, and a life-long fascination with cookery books and other people's expertise. I was, however, taught at school by a far-thinking English teacher who told us that we didn't need to remember miles of information parrot fashion to be clever, we just had to know where to look for it and how to find it. He'd have loved the internet.