My grandma was Glasgow Irish. Not a good start. She then lost her sense of smell to an illness at the age of 16. Which didn't improve her cooking one little bit. She kept on cooking until she died of a heart attack at 96.

Her favourite was corned beef, carrots and cabbage, all boiled until it was well and truly dead and all three had the same texture, like a steaming jellyfish washed up on a beach.

He crowning achievement: sheep's head broth. Put sheep's head in a large pan on the fire. Go up to the attic for something. Forget about the pan until the air up in that attic gets too black with smoke to see anything. Get husband to redecorate entire house.

One day her husband complained once too often about her cooking. She told him to get out of the house and go live in the shed in the garden. That was where I remember him, subsisting mainly on tea with huge globs of condensed milk and only coming into the main house to do plumbing and wiring (which he was very good at). My cousin who grew up in the same house said that she got the idea as a child that all grandfathers lived in sheds. He died of a heart attack at 88.

Needless to say that was where my mother learned to cook. My father died of a heart attack at 64, dead before he hit the ground with all his coronary arteries clogged up with cholesterol