The health minister-turned-author invites us into the Surrey home she shares
with her partner John, and explains how she got a fruit bowl into EastEnders.
The kitchen is definitely the centre of our home, because John is a brilliant
cook - I like nothing better than to sit and watch him. But I do find it
trying when I'm invited to someone's
house and they spend their entire time in the kitchen. I prefer to take people
out to a restaurant and let someone else do the cooking and the washing up.
There are always loads of newspapers strewn over the table - we get The Times,
The Telegraph and the Mirror. I do a show -
Late Night Currie - on Radio Five Live, which everybody thinks is recorded,
but it's actually three hours of live news and comment, with a phone-in on a
subject chosen that day.
So I really have to keep up with the news and
we spend at least an hour a day sitting around the table arguing about the
issues.
The table is where the correspondence lands in the morning, too. My 'filing
system' goes: kitchen table, living room table, lost. So, important things
have to go into the office straight away. I have to be quite firm with myself
and tear myself away from the kitchen to go and work, but once I'm in the
office, I settle quite quickly. I've rented the old
village shop next door as a food-free, smoke-free, phone-free working
environment, with my computers, my reference books, and everything I need. I
call it The Other Place, partly as a parliamentary joke because that's what
Members of the House of Commons call the House of Lords - which they think of
as a kind of retirement home for MPs.
We always have a bowl of fruit on the table - this stops me eating chocolate.
I put on weight easily, so I try to eat a sensible diet. I'm the reason why
you'll see a bowl of fruit on EastEnders. When it started, the characters
spent all their time in the pub, boozing and eating crisps. As health minister
at the time, I suggested very sweetly
that the scriptwriters might like to encourage better habits, and how about a
bowl of fruit? The allotment was also a response to my comment, but it hasn't
helped, they're still a miserable bunch.
I'm not into organics at all. Some things do taste better if they're
organic, and I certainly don't think organic producers are trying to rip
anybody off, but modern science is not an enemy. For example, I think that GM
should be continued with careful and well-supervised research because it has the
potential to do great good. Of course there's potential for harm, too, but
there is in everything. And you have to remember there's nothing natural being
grown any more. British gardens are crammed with things you don't find in
nature - and I find it exciting. I think I must go round supermarkets with the
same eyes Khrushchev did in the Fifties. Imagine having 16 types of olive oil to
choose from. I think it's wonderful, as does my mother, who can still remember
when you had to get your milk from a man who came round with a cow, and if you
were lucky the cow didn't have TB.
Edwina Currie's latest novel, 'This Honourable
House', will be published in July by Little, Brown and Company.