I’m set to interview Nigella on the 100th and final day of a brutal food
replacement diet that has seen me shed three stone in as many months. It
feels good to be ringing her substantial doorbell today, because I know that
anyone crossing her threshold can be sure of one thing — they will be fed.
“If she bakes you a cake, bring us a slice back!” says just about everyone I
know.
“Oh dear,” she says when I tell her, “I haven’t baked you a cake.”
She looks genuinely worried as she leads me from the gorgeous book-drenched
study of the Belgravia palace she shares with her husband Charles Saatchi
through to the utensil-heavy kitchen. There must be about a hundred slatted
spoons alone. “I’m very messy,” she explains, settling down at the kitchen
table with a mug of tea.
I’ve known Nigella for several years, since before John Diamond, her first
husband, died of throat cancer in 2001. In fact she supplied me with the
toughest gig of my career to date when she asked me to sing a cappella at
his funeral.
She’s always been great company: candid, witty, sensitive. She tells me that
she’s dreading the photo shoot for this interview, not because she’s not
vain but because she likes to avoid mirrors. “More and more I think that how
you feel about your body really doesn’t depend on your body so much as what
sort of mood you’re in,” she says. “In some moods I don’t want to go out and
in other moods I’m very glad that I don’t have that skinny straight
up-and-down shape, that I’m this Edwardian throwback with a very small waist
and ankles and wrists and the rest . . . billowing.”
Has she always felt this ambiguous about her figure? “My mother was tortured
by her weight. Everything was always very controlled. When she was dying she
said, ‘It’s the first time in my life I haven’t worried about what I’m
eating.’ You’ve got to think how warped it is to feel released from dieting
because you have a terminal illness. When I had a daughter I vowed I would
never say ‘I hate myself — I’m fat’ in front of her because I didn’t want to
pass it on.
We talk about the difference the love of a good man can make. Charles, whom
she married in 2003, is resolute in his support of Nigella’s gorgeousness,
famously saying she was sexier than Marilyn Monroe. “I’ve never ever been
with a man who thinks that skinniness is desirable, which helps. I think
it’s very important to be with someone who makes you feel madly desirable.”
Nevertheless, she must sometimes blanch at the odd unflattering photo? “It
would probably matter a lot more to me were I not lazy. As you see me now is
how I am — I’ve been outside, I haven’t brushed my hair, I look like
someone’s mad relation and I don’t mind a great deal. Occasionally I do get
punished for that — there’ll be a picture that’s hideous — but I’d rather it
were that way round.
“Given the choice between making an effort or looking a mess, I’d rather look
a mess and suffer the consequences. I haven’t quite moved into everything
elasticated — although nearly! — but I’d so much rather be comfortable than
look nice.”
However, she does admit to calorie counting, and once lost three stone by
limiting her intake.
“I never went very low calorie,” she says, worrying about me and my recent
extreme measures. “You can’t live on 1,000 calories a day and be happy. Now
diets are all saying ‘This isn’t a diet, this is a way of life, forever’ —
well that just makes me want to throw myself out of the window. I once did
the Atkins, and I almost did it again last year but diets are like
boyfriends — it never really works to go back to them. Now I don’t know what
I weigh — I don’t think I want to find out! I don’t want to be totally
consumed by that world. Even when I was dieting I’d take recipe books to the
gym and balance Ten Best Cream Cakes on the treadmill.”
She sets about cooking me lunch. She cooks a proper lunch every day. “Lucky
Charles,” I say.
“Oh Charles doesn’t really like proper food — he prefers a bowl of cereal.
Last week I made a prawn dhansak and he ate it all and then said, ‘That was
really really horrible!’ ‘Why did you eat it all? You needn’t have,’ I said.
‘I was being polite,’ he said, ‘but then I panicked that you’d cook it
again’.”
Today we’re having prawn and sweet potato curry. Nigella picks out a jar of
dried chillies. “Ah — best before December 2004,” she says, hooting with
laughter at my shock. “The fact that it’s not best before 1984 is quite
something,” she says. She is not at all bothered by the endless interest in
her domestic life.
“All women are interested in other women’s domestic lives. People’s real lives
are the truest thing about them — what you’re doing on telly is not that
interesting to most people. You get so bound up with your real life that you
don’t have time to sit and think about being a celebrity.”
How does she cope with that modern mother’s dilemma — juggling children and a
busy career? “My mum was always around physically but she wasn’t in an
emotional sense. I think it’s more important to be available when you are
there. My daughter recently asked me, ‘What do you think your life would be
like if you hadn’t had children?’ and I’m always honest with them so I said,
‘Well, I don’t know, but I’d probably have been more successful.’ She was
very cross so I said, ‘Listen, I would rather have you, and you did ask
me’.”
Does she plan to expand her family and have a child with Charles? “If I were
10 years younger, but I feel I’m too old (she’s 46). I haven’t got it in me.
But I do love babies. Life is as it is — there’s no point saying ‘Oh if this
had happened at that time’ and so on. Occasionally I do get idealistic and
think, ‘Wouldn’t it be lovely to have a little baby?’ ” Her two children by
John — Cosima, 12, and Bruno, 9 — are growing fast. Her life seems pretty
idyllic. She snorts. “It never feels that way, though, does it?” “In what
way?” “I’m a worrier. My father always tells me not to worry, that it’s
pointless, but I tell him it’s pointless to tell a worrier not to worry. I’m
still fearful about things to do with work, but I suppose I now feel it’s
the one area of your life where you can afford for things to go a bit
wrong.”
If anyone should know about things “going a bit wrong” on the personal front
it’s Nigella. Her mother, her sister and then John all died of cancer. Has
being exposed to so much death changed her? “It’s made me feel guilty when I
feel depressed. If I feel down I think it’s wrong in a way. And when people
complain about getting older, inside I think, ‘I’ve seen the alternative.’
Other than that you only have the life you have — it’s not like I have
another parallel life where no one died and everyone’s happy, so mostly it’s
just how things are.
“Plus, there are three people whose lives have gone, and the idea that it is
all about me makes me hideously embarrassed — because it isn’t. I mean
obviously in moments of self-pity it seems that it is. I do like a lot of
people around me and I do like to make people happy. That’s what drives me.
I’m good in a crisis, but I do get rather beaten down by things. I can be
very strong but sometimes I need to be covered up in a duvet.”
I wonder how someone as soulful and intelligent as Nigella copes with the
somewhat more cartoon version of herself peddled on TV? “I don’t watch my
own programmes — why would you want to watch yourself on television?” Has
she seen Ronni Ancona’s finger-licking, wooden-spoon-fellating impression of
her? She laughs heartily. “Yes, and I’m sure it’s very good but I don’t
recognise myself in it. But then I think that’s the nature of all
impressions. I watch her doing everyone else and I think, ‘That’s spot on,’
then she does me and I think, ‘That’s not me at all’.”
Nigella tells me that if she watches television it’s normally Match of the
Day. “I’m a keen Chelsea fan, with a big soft spot for Spurs because of
John. One of John’s biggest fears when he was dying was that I would turn
the children into Chelsea fans. When I watch Match of the Day I long to be
there in the studio with them — the camaraderie, the ribbing, the chitchat.
Charles and me love to relax in front of the football.”
It’s time to eat. It is absolutely delicious and I stuff myself stupid. What
better way to break a diet than at Nigella’s table? “Here, take this home,”
she says, thrusting a package of cherry and coconut cake at me. “Very few
people leave here without something wrapped in foil . . . I’ve got some
stale panettone in the larder and I was thinking about making a bread and
butter pudding . . .”
Ah. All is well with the world. That’s the Nigella effect.
The full feature appears in the April issue of Red magazine, out now
