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halved in price - typically a steak that started life at £3.99 will now be priced at £1.99.
    One might be tempted to think that given the choice of un-matured bright red steak and matured dark red steak at half the price that people would jump at the mature steak. The truth is that the majority of people wouldn’t buy the dark red mature steak at any price, as they equate its colour with the steak having gone off. In fact the reverse is the case as the dark red colour of the steak is the signal that it is now ready to eat.
    Indeed the ‘Best before’ date is a misnomer and should if anything read ‘Worst before’. This is not my opinion but a fact. Many years ago I asked the owner of an excellent restaurant how it was that his sirloin steaks were always so tender whereas the steaks at many other restaurants, and the steaks I cooked at home for that matter, were nowhere near as succulent. I suspected he had access to some secret outlet of superior steak but this turned out not to be the case, the steak he bought being of good quality but no better than could readily be obtained by anyone. He took me into his kitchen and through to a cool, dark pantry. Hanging on hooks from the ceiling were thirty or so full sirloins and other cuts of steak. They ranged in colour from bright red to almost black. “These are fresh in,” he said, pointing to the bright red sirloins. Then he indicated the ones that were almost black. “In about two weeks they’ll be that colour. And when they get to that colour, and not a moment before, they’ll be fit for the table.”
    I’ve never forgotten that lesson and over the years it must have saved me hundreds of pounds. Not only that, it has meant that the steak we have at home is always wonderfully tender and juicy. So the next time you pass through the butchery department of a supermarket and see steaks with a ‘Reduced to clear’ sticker on them don’t turn your nose up at them, snap them up. Bon Appetite .
     
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    November 17 2006. AN EVENING WITH JOAN COLLINS
     
    In the Sunday Times Culture section yesterday I spotted an advert in the forthcoming concerts pages - ‘An Evening with Joan Collins. UK Tour 2006. With special guests 4 Poofs and a Piano’. Below the heading was a list of venues where Miss Collins and the 4 Poofs, along with their piano, would be appearing. I wondered briefly how the 4 Poofs have been able to resist a slight change of musical instrument in order that they might call themselves ‘4 Poofs and an Organ’.
    Miss Collins’s nearest port of call to me is Manchester Bridgewater Hall on 10th May. I shan’t be bothering. I’ve already spent an evening with Joan Collins, or part of one. Furthermore it wasn’t as a member of the audience but seated right next to her.
    The occasion was when we were both guests, along with others, on the radio programme ‘Saturday Night at Quaglino’s’, a live chat show that was broadcast in the early eighties from Quaglino’s night club in London’s West End, and hosted by Ned Sherrin. Whether Quaglino’s, or indeed Ned Sherrin, is still around, I’ve no idea, but probably not.
    I was on the show because at the time I was a scriptwriter on the News Huddlines and we’d recently published a book of scripts from the show. Along with another Huddlines writer Laurie Rowley I was there to plug it, which we did unmercifully and at every opportunity.
    I’m not sure why Joan Collins was there, but the late Leonard Rossiter was a guest also (before he was late of course), so it might have been something to do with the Cinzano television commercials. I forget.
    I was seated next to Joan, along with the other guests, at a large round table, set more-or- less in the middle of the night club where all the night clubbers could get a view of us. It crossed my mind that here might be an opportunity to progress from being a humble scriptwriter to a film star if I could impress Miss Collins in some way.
    This was around the time