No fat ladies

[Gob]

According to Who’s Who, Clarissa Dickson Wright’s recreations were ‘hunting, shooting, fishing, food, rugby, men’.



This most extravagant of characters was being uncharacteristically economical, for she could easily have added ‘exploding shibboleths’ to that list.

Though she will be remembered by millions as a TV chef, Miss Dickson Wright, whose death was announced yesterday, was more influential and complex than that plastic term suggests. She was a former lawyer, an alcoholic and a daughter of wealth who plunged into penury through her own profligate faults

Incidentally, she disliked the noun ‘chef’. ‘I am,’ she would say, nostrils flaring, ‘a cook. Chefs are forever stacking and arranging the food. They forget what the food was about in the first place.’

It was a typically no-nonsense, ego-pricking statement. As soon as a dish was out of the oven she slopped it up on a plate and got stuck in. Years of posing by poncy TV chefs went down the drain!

Clarissa was, in her eventful life, a pheasant plucker, master butcher, author, restaurateur, businesswoman and Lord Rector of Aberdeen University.

She was also a campaigner, particularly for field sports and farmers’ markets. She was the most prominent supporter of the Countryside Alliance, throwing her considerable weight behind rural people’s desire to see off the nanny state and be left to their own devices.

Clarissa was one of those countrywomen who, if told not to do something, are more likely to do it.

Was this not the essence of the woman? She was disobedient. Magnificently so.

In the public’s mind, she will forever be the larger half of the Two Fat Ladies cookery show, the one in the motorbike sidecar with a daft helmet that looked more like a Lancaster bomber pilot’s headgear.

She was the one whose accent was as clipped as a stately home’s yew hedge. With it went a politically incorrect approach to hygiene, both in the kitchen and in her language. Boy, she could be withering when she wished.

More than any of these, however, Clarissa was a state of mind, an attitude, a two-fingered rebuke to convention. She bridled at officialdom. She saw that the man (or woman) in the ministry was often a fool.

And like many people who ride in motorbike sidecars, she had a fatalistic side. She accepted that life had its potholes and sharp corners. The very fact that she had lived so much made her doubly, trebly human.

Clarissa Theresa Philomena Aileen Mary Josephine Agnes Elsie Trilby Louise Esmerelda Dickson Wright was born in 1947, the youngest of four children of a celebrated London surgeon and his soft-hearted Australian heiress wife. Clarissa loved her mother Molly. She hated her father Arthur.

Her memoirs Spilling The Beans (2007) accused him of being a violent drunk. ‘The first time I saw my father hit my mother I was six,’ she wrote.

Arthur was a surgeon to the Royal Family and his circle included Harry Secombe, Yehudi Menuhin and Alexander Fleming. The family lived in a nine-bedroom house in London’s smart St John’s Wood and the appearance was one of prosperous distinction.

Clarissa claimed otherwise. She told of her father beating his wife and using physical violence against his children.



Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... z2wHI2yw3M

[rubato]

Too bad. She was a lot of fun.


Most of her cooking seemed to involve wrapping things in bacon & similar.


yrs,
rubato

[Daisy]

She believed that lentils made vegetarians randy. And you can only be truly happy if you eat meat, specifically fatty meat as it stimulates seratonin.

She blew an almost three million pound inheritance in just a few years.

A proper British eccentric, it surprised me that she was only 66 I thought she was in her sixties when she made TFL.

[Gob]

"Clarissa Theresa Philomena Aileen Mary Josephine Agnes Elsie Trilby Louise Esmerelda Dickson Wright", that's a bloody name and a half!

[rubato]

She believed that lentils made vegetarians randy. ... "

What do they do to omnivores?


yrs,
rubato

[Beer Sponge]

Gas.