The answer is always and emphatically no, for a variety of reasons including lack of confidence (I prefer to call it healthy scepticism ) and no real understanding about how to stage an efficient kitchen. If you all want to come over and eat the same thing sometime between eight-thirty and ten o'clock at night, well, then we're in business.

And while it is a pleasure to cook for friends and family, one of the biggest reasons for not making a professional endeavour of it is that : strangers + food = a bunch of psychopaths, worry-warts and complete nut-bags.

I learned this very quickly during the few brief moments I worked in the food service industry and I don't, honestly, think there are any exceptions. I also learned that I have no sympathy for the kind of anxieties and peculiarities you're asked to suffer when you serve people a meal.

Take the poor wanker at the bakery, yesterday, lugging loaves of bread from the cooling trays to the front of the store and forced to wear a hairnet on his beard. His beard!

I know this may come as a shocker to some but if there were really a serious health and safety issue involving facial hair and food we'd have found out about it long before we invented the hairnet!

I don't like hairy food any more than the next person but, seriously, stop the madness.