Giles Coren
Personally I ride a bicycle, travel by train and bus and campaign tirelessly for a car taxation system that will hammer ignorant, selfish, petty, fat, spoilt, stupid car abusers into giving up their addiction and walking.Collection: Travel
I have quite good general knowledge and I had a very drilled education from an early age. I do know more than most people. I know more than most journalists. I know more than most columnists on big, important newspapers.
I have Gordon Ramsay to thank for my TV career because Channel 4 spent a long time trying to find him a sidekick for 'The F Word', then he suggested me, knowing I'd stand up to him.
When I write I inhabit a personality that is and is not me.
My dad never really wrote what he thought. None of his inner rage and darkness and problems, which we all have, made it on to the page. For him, writing was a process of making everything appear funny.
The way I write possibly shouldn't be turned on serious things.
The notion of getting pleasure from food has gone too far; we can also get pleasure from anticipating a meal, and from not being quite sated.
Instant gratification is bringing this planet to its knees.
It was fine for my Polish Ashkenazi forebears to live on dumplings and potatoes, because they laboured in the fields. But that diet is unsuitable for an urban lifestyle.
I was 41 when I became a dad. I try to be as much fun as my father was, but I'm at home more - and less of a disciplinarian.
Gradually, I developed opinions about food, and my French friends taught me that you have to complain in a restaurant.
When I tell people I spent almost a year in Paris, I know they imagine something out of a Woody Allen movie, which it wasn't, of course. I was just working in a clothes shop, but I was aware that it was exciting.
My time in Paris was an education in both the grimness of a relentless, grinding day job and the joys of nights in glittering restaurants. The good fortune of my life, which has been to turn those glittering nights into my job, all came from there.
I'm not a mad, crazy foodie. But I have strong opinions and I know a lot about food.
Gentile smoked salmon is all... muscular and smells of smoke. It's not very fatty. They don't understand - smoked salmon should be almost spreadable! So you give them the real stuff and they can't believe how delicious it is.
I always feel quite Jewish but I used to deny it until I was in my twenties.
At home, we have fish and greens, fish and greens - maybe salmon steak with curried lentils. No poncy cooking goes on, we don't have dinner parties, we don't entertain.
So what on Earth there isn't to like about New York? I don't know. But what you do also have is a load of very ordinary restaurants which you make a terrible fuss about which are really only very average. Which is fine. One doesn't go to New York for the food.
Of course you can get a decent mouthful of food in New York. You can get a decent mouthful of food in Nairobi. You can get a decent mouthful of food in Warsaw or Chad if you look hard enough. It's just I wouldn't actually go there looking for the food.
I'm just a bit frustrated that in London we make such an effort to ape the New York restaurant scene. I have good friends who ape the New York restaurant scene and do it brilliantly. None of them would claim that the primary reason for going to their restaurant was the food.
World cross-fertilization is fantastic. Immigration across the world has led to all kinds of fantastic new and exciting kinds of food being available. And there's all kinds of different kinds of restaurants.
I have a tailor now, I have a doctor, a wine merchant, a jeweller, a gardener, a cleaner, and a nanny. It was clearly ridiculous that I did not have a hairdresser. So I got one.
I come from a country where there's a reputation for bad press.
We've got rid of subeditors because we don't need them. Because they were never necessary. They were just fetchers and gophers. They had a job, which has been superannuated by technology.
I think unionization of labour is a great thing.
I sleep nine hours every night, I have a little nap after lunch, and, if I'm going out for dinner, I sneak in an extra one before I head out.
I used to be a very angry person, I used to throw things and break them. Then I had five years of constant psycho-analysis, and I don't get angry any more.
How clever am I? I'm really quite clever. I mean, look, I've got a first-class degree from Oxford.
The world's most competitive man, my dad. Wouldn't let us win at Monopoly... he wouldn't cut any slack for his children. My sister's also very, very competitive but she is more concerned than I am with being liked. So she hides it away. I try to make my competitiveness part of my charm.
People think you get paid millions by the BBC if you're famous, but me? Me, I'm in the Premier Inn in Gillingham.
All I care about is that people who like me think I'm funny. I get on with writing pretty straight-down the line, old-fashioned stuff.
My dad was very successful as a journalist, so I didn't want to be one. I wanted to be a novelist.
I always say what I think to be amusing.
I used to be so angry. I think back to my early days as a critic in the late 1990s, and I blush. I would go swaggering into restaurants in some ridiculous tramp disguise, challenging them to mistreat me, order the things I was least likely to enjoy, then hurl my plate aside in a fury and demand to see the manager.
I had become mean and stupid and deliberately hurtful because that is what is expected of restaurant critics. Of critics in general.
I let the other reviewers eat the bad meals, so that I didn't have to, and my wife and I went out only for the good stuff. And I wrote mostly positive reviews. Not only. But mostly. And, ooooh, it felt an awful lot better.
Mineral water is a preposterous vanity, either bottled in glass which is stupidly heavy to freight, or in plastic that ends up in one of the plastic patches the size of Texas occupying our oceans.
In the beginning, we huddled in cities for our own protection. We built walls around them with slits through which to fire arrows at scary, cross-eyed rural people, and brought our food and family inside because they were the safest places to be.
Not since Ancient Greece have cities been thought of as the ideal living environment for humans. And that was so long ago it predates the invention of trousers.
I tried to leave the city once, for one of those other places. And, my God, the silence. I could hear myself think, and found that I wasn't. I am not designed to be lonely as a cloud.
My dad is the best and funniest newspaper columnist. There is nobody anywhere near as good.
The first thing I remember is that my dad had a big iron Olivetti typewriter and he worked all night. He was a staffer at Punch but in the evening he wrote columns for the Evening Standard and The Times.
Where my dad taught me everything about writing, Graham Paterson, who gave me my first job at The Times, taught me everything about journalism, which is that it's no big deal, and it's more important to have a glass of wine.
A man of strong opinions is one thing. But a man whose strong opinions depend entirely on how he is feeling in that instant is a disastrous thing in a city of 10 million people just trying to muddle through.
People like me make modern life intolerable.
But still I can never shake the feeling that buses are somehow beneath me. Which is why I have a rule regarding their use: I never, ever run for one. And nor should you.
There is nothing wrong with getting a bus. Nothing in any way demeaning about boarding a huge smelly communal vehicle that will rumble noisily and very slowly in the vague direction of the place you need to get to and then dump you half a mile away in the freezing wind and rain.
Being a success in the world, having total control of one's life, is about being able to take or leave things.
It doesn't matter how much of a hurry you think you are in. Be one of the people for whom ten minutes does not make a difference.
Hipsters being hipsters, coolness and inaccessibility have overtaken all other concerns. Food no longer matters. Even burgers are too foody. All a restaurant needs to be now is a place with bricks and exposed plumbing where you can take an edgy selfie that will make your friends feel like they are missing out.