Ges on the Box; Duo doesn’t have a recipe for success

DOROTHY PARKER, as you well know, was a self-styled great wit of the 1930s. She coined the phrase: “Never believe a women who tells you her age, if she’ll tell you that, she’ll tell you anything”.

I’m 55. Well, I will be 55 on the 15th of next month — you can send my card here to the paper. I tell you this only to prove that I have no secrets.

Which is why it’s surprising that you don’t know I used to own a restaurant. It’s no secret. It was very nice if I say so myself. The only thing wrong was the person who ran it.

Not because I couldn’t do it. I could do ‘it’ all right: lay tables, peel carrots, polish silver, clean beer pipes, differentiate between burgundy and beaujolais...

What I couldn’t do was make a profit. Or at least, not enough of one.

I obviously wasn’t born to be rich. I wasn’t born to be decorative either. Pretty bum rap I got, all things considered.

I inherited my mother’s rotundness and my father’s moustache. Had it been vice-versa, the shaving could stop. But, there you are, neither use nor ornament as my father often muttered.

How could a man with a size 30in waist and a handlebar ‘tache to be proud of, have spawned a child with a 56in belly and a toothbrush on her upper lip?

But I digress.

As I was saying before I was rudely interrupted, I ran my own restaurant into the ground. Which is why I watch with bated breath as Alasdair and James stagger into the semi-finals of “The Restaurant” tonight.

Here’s a pair who couldn’t run a proverbial in a brewery. They make my culinary efforts look positively star quality. Michelin, naturally.

At least my diners always had the cutlery with which to eat their meal. Alastair seems to find this a novel idea.

But James, I recognise. He is a chef. Only with a capital C. He’s a bully and his front of house man, bumbling Alistair, is terrified of him.

I was terrified of my chef. We did things her way (oh yes, my chef was a she). With plenty of wastage. And my inability to tackle her was probably the major reason I went bust.

But enough of my woes.

For, as the very famous (and very thin) Ms Parker said all those years ago: “Misfortune, and recited misfortune especially, may be prolonged to that point where it ceases to excite pity and arouses only irritation”.