Tom Parker Bowles

All you care about with your parents is that they are happy, and my mother is exceptionally happy at the moment, and I've always adored my stepfather, and he's always been a kind and good and lovely man.

The diet is a twisted, noxious thing, all tortured abstinence and short-term fraud. I speak from bitter experience. As a restaurant critic, I eat to live and live to eat. And having a toxic aversion to exercise, there is little to prevent the inevitable bulging of my gut. Hence the need for the occasional diet.

My father would go shopping, and he was supposed to buy loo roll or something, but he'd always come back with some fish or shellfish. And we've always had fresh vegetables from the garden. He is a massively keen gardener, so he grew all our tomatoes, artichokes, asparagus - whenever he wasn't working, he was in the garden.

In my travels, I also noticed that kids in Thailand like spicy food, and kids in India love curry. I'm hoping to introduce my son, Hudson, to lots of veggies and spices when he's young. I say that before he's started on solid foods, so it could be easier in theory than practice!