To be a truly bad cook - you must despise the people you are cooking for AND the meal you are cooking.

The Spanish are great at their own cuisine, but they have nothing but naked resentment for anyone who comes to Spain and wants to eat non Spanish.

My mother in law was a case in point. She was totally mistrustful of anything in the slightest bit foreign. And despite many dire experiences she kept ordering omelettes and egg and bacon.

One egg and bacon day in Benidorm,   I looked at her across the table end enquired the reason for her evident distress.

'They've put garlic in the fried egg,' she said mournfully. I did what any son in law would do in the circumstances - and laughed my ass off and ordered another large brandy.

One time in Grand Canaria I was seduced by the promise of a chicken curry for 325 pesetas in a bar. My wife said, 'Don't be stupid - you're wasting money. You know they they don't know what chicken curry is.'

Well what can one say? I should have realised Denise was right by the incredulous look on the face of the barman - incredulous that anyone would be so stupid as to wish to eat a meal with its origins in the dark regions of the earth.

The meal arrived. A teaspoon full of Colemans curry sauce on a chicken leg. I turned the chicken leg over - there was still ice on the other side.

I looked up the barman, and three of his mates stood there ready to beat me up if I asked for my money back. I ordered a large brandy. The three men looked the other way and started talking, and you could feel the atmosphere in the bar calm down. If I had suggested he didn't know how to cook a chicken curry - it would have been a real blow to his macho thing, and I would have been floating in the Atlantic alongside Robert Maxwell.