16/10/2026
Starry treat in little old Launceston last night as Nigella Lawson came to town as the big ticket guest in the Tamar Valley Writers Festival .
Iâve always admired Nigella not just for her delightful giggliness in the TV shows (watch the bloopers at the end) but because after she lost her first husband and quickly married one of the Saatchi brothers, she said that sheâd known a lot of grief in her life and believes that if you have the chance of happiness, you should take it. That shut the tabloids up. She touched on it last night saying weâre lucky to be alive, and she celebrates that.
She had many similarly pithy and sensible things to say and I scribbled some of them down.
She said women of our generation were brought up being told to think of our bodies as things to be looked at, and that should not affect the choices we make. If she eats a âhealthyâ salad itâs because thatâs what she felt like eating and if she wants to have cake afterwards, sheâll have cake afterwards. She tries not to describe foods as healthy or naughty and prefers to listen to her body. One day she might just want carbs.
She has long been a food writer since before being on TV and she has a wonderful writerly way of putting things sometimes. Verbatim was this: âAustralians are Poets of the demotic, phrase makers like no other.â I just love that there are still people in our culture who express themselves like that - articulate and colourful. I had to look up what demotic means.
When you see a person reading a particular book on a bus or in public somewhere, itâs âlike a book recommending a personâ, she said. That struck a chord with me. I was once on a bus on the Holloway Road in London and looked round to see the young man next to me was reading Nick Hornbyâs book High Fidelity. I nudged him with my elbow and showed him my copy, which Iâd just dragged from my bag to get stuck into. The extra layer of serendipity was that we were travelling along the Holloway Road, and High Fidelity is about a man who runs a record shop, on the Holloway Road.
There was a hilarious moment when she talked about recommending books on her Instagram and how she was accused by one commenter of getting paid by publishers to do so. âMy dear,â she said leaning towards us and shouting, âThe people writing the books arenât even getting paid by the publishers!â How we laughed. She recommends books genuinely because she thinks people will enjoy them, and that might be a friend or people who look at her socials, equally.
I loved the way she described time spent in the kitchen. If sheâs having people over and preparing in advance with 45 minutes here and there in the days before, she loves how itâs âthreading food through her life.â Describing how our thoughts can percolate in the kitchen, she said you might just be cooking onions, but they start to look different as they go translucent, the sounds changes as they sizzle, and thereâs the smell. So cooking stops our intelligence from being all in our head, which is in danger of happening more and more now weâre on devices all the time.
Asked about what keeps her love of food and interest in it fresh, she said sheâs greedy for food, but also for words, and âthe light people give off.â Isnât that lovely?
Launceston had a ball listening to this woman. Notable was the fact that the audience was full of people wearing their best colourful glasses and spectacles, and Nigella and Alice Zaslavski, who interviewed her, were both splendid also, keen and lively, sending their wonderful words and thoughts up into the air which was just as Nigella described it - when youâre zesting lemons, the air is full of beautiful spritz.
Shout out too to Alice Zaslavsky who interviewed Nigella, and because you just gotta love diminutive women in glasses who live life big.
Nigella Lawson Alice Zaslavsky
