"Basil, je nai pas de chef pour les petits-dejeuners!"

I took this to mean we were in the s**t becuase I don't like being woken so early by the 'emergency' phone that sits next to my bed.

Not long after taking the reins of the manor house and after a busy festive season, I took Sybil away with Sybling and Ted for a break. For me is was just to get the sound of "sleigh bells ringing" from playing in my head as it had throughout the season to be jolly. Our kinder collective of 5 daughters would miss the start of the school term about as much as we would miss the manor house.

On our return the new squire was lying in bed, contemplating, as so many do, that, after a jolly good holiday, what one needs is a jolly good holiday to get over it.....when the phone rang next to me, it was one of our French chef de rang.

A French chef, our number two in the kitchen, was AWOL and hadn’t turned up for the breakfast shift, ominously he was nicknamed ‘Oily’ as he was always well lubricated. We had thirty guests who would soon be down clamouring for food - and no chef.

At times like these one has to admire the continental Europeans. Give them a demi-tasse of coffee and croissant filled with chocolate and they might go quietly. But Brits are made of sterner stuff and demand their ration of pig and hen fruit in order to get the day off to a good start.

In a trice I was at my post in the kitchen, demonstrating my qualities of leadership, and had the nosh on the go in no time. The pork and leek sausages were just coming into their prime when in walks Oily.

Only he didn’t walk in, he reeled in, fending himself off one of the refrigerators en route. He seemed surprised to find me at the helm of what he regarded as his ship and more than little bit miffed about it. He appeared to have been celebrating something a little too well and certainly very unwisely as his eyes were as red as the grilling tomatoes, and I was fearful that his breath might get near a naked flame.

We wrestled over a spatula as he tried to take over the sausage cooking and, as diplomatically as I could, I suggested that he should go home to lie down to sleep it off. This seemed to have struck some Gallic nerve. Did I think he was incapable? Yes, he was late but he was here now, wasn’t he? De Gaulle must have felt the same way when they forgot to tell him about D-Day.

As he staggered and swayed, he mistook the stress that showed on my face as the orders started to flow in to mean he was at fault in some way, or indeed in trouble. Now the kitchen is not the place for any confrontation, the only things that should be in there are clean, hot and surgically sharp, unlike the wit of my drunken chef, who, in this state had none of these attributes. I later learned that he cooked best when like this; I just hadn’t seen it before now or he would have worked his last shift for us long ago. I asked him to leave the kitchen, but when he refused I ‘led’ him from the kitchen with his arms behind his back. He threatened to kill me with a plastic spatula, not now maybe, given where his arms were, but some time in the future when I was not looking. Welcome back, boss.

So for the next few mornings I was on duty until we could find a replacement. My kitchen shifts started to become easier and service was as well oiled as the departed chef.....

That was seven years ago. But I was reminded of Oily when I advertised in a French restaurant magazine for a chef last week...I got an email with a CV from the same, one Oily chef....had he forgotten, was he drunk or did he now have balls of steel as he now wanted to be head chef!