Down in Balham SW12, where cool young professionals are now outnumbering the original old locals, Sam Harrison co owns and runs Harrison’s, a smart restaurant and bar that shows his gift for giving the people exactly what they want and for doing it well.

Real ale is really different. Following on from our visit to the Fullers Brewery last week, we settle down for a glass and a chat with their head brewer John Keeling

Richard Bigg, 46, has been described as ‘the grand druid of hip hangouts’. He founded Shoreditch’s ‘Cantaloupe’ bar in 1995 followed by ‘Cargo’, ‘Market Place’, ‘The Big Chill’ and ‘Camino’. He lives in Sussex with his wife and two young children. Douglas Blyde meets him at Camino in Kings Cross, London, in his Observer Food Monthly’s Bar of the Year 2008, over silken octopus, gooey croquettas and succulent veal belly…

The giant sunglasses of the cool clientele are rotated like satellite dishes to the TV screen showing ten-foot tall tennis players. It’s not Wimbledon but maybe somewher better, the forecourt of the Bluebird café. Nick Harman asks Chef Mathew Burgess about his service at this Chelsea icon.

Glance left as you drive down the A4 out of London and you can’t help but notice the landmark Fuller’s brewing complex. Proving that he can indeed organise something in a brewery, Nick Harman went inside for a better drink, err..look

Our man with a taste for wine Douglas Blyde looks beyond the bubbles in the land of Prosecco. A cheap alternative to champagne? Maybe we’ve been drinking the wrong stuff

Up in The Bread Factory main office, where it’s warm cosy and smelling deliciously of, what else but, freshly baked bread, the staff are gently taking the mickey out of one of the accountants. ‘Every morning, first thing, he’s goes off to the baking floor for his fresh cakes and croissants!’’ they laugh. He smiles, acknowledging their banter, and then his eyes go all misty and unfocussed. ‘Look,’ his colleague says,’ he’s dreaming about those cakes again!’

‘Nick! Trousers!” Yes indeed my keks are once more collapsed around my ankles as Ian Pengelley, Head Chef of Gilgamesh, has spotted. Fortunately they are chef’s checked trousers worn over my normal ones so this Grandpa Simpson moment is not too embarrassing for the ladies from Good Housekeeping and the BBC who are also on this cookery course.

Ahh France, since the first time Dad and I watched his Ford Anglia slowly winched onto the cross-channel boat (roll on, roll off, roll over, ferries hadn’t been invented at the time) I’ve loved the place. So much so in fact that I spent a large proportion of my time at university doing a degree in the language, but the sad truth is that the affair has reached a stumbling point and that point is the prices.

‘They’re too big!” Chef Franco Taruschio, the chef who will always have ‘Walnut Tree’ in any sentence that follows his name, is giving me the full benefit of his sixty-nine years of culinary experience. ‘You want a size seven,” he says gazing at my feet, ‘ but they’re still a nice pair of shoes.” As we walk out the shoe shop and join the Italians promenading up the main street of Porto Recanati in La Marche, Italy, his squat figure makes his wife Ann giggle. ‘Here we are in Italy and he still looks and dresses like a Welsh farmer,” she says fondly.