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Hello and welcome to Table Talk, the Spectator's Food and Drink podcast. I'm Lara Prendergast.

And I'm Olivia Potts. And we're delighted today to be joined by

Geoffrey Archer, Baron Archer of Western Supermare, the celebrated English novelist,

former politician and peer of the realm. His new book, Hidden in Plain Sight, is out now.

Geoffrey, welcome to Table Talk. Thank you very much indeed. Lovely to be here.

We're going to begin where we always do at the beginning. Could you tell us about your earliest

memories of food? Well, I come from Western Supermare in Somerset and we had a fish and chip shop called Coffins where you could get a

bobbot which was one shilling five p for a fish and chips and coffins was next

to another shop and the Coffins queue was always round the block

whereas the other shop you could always pop in when he wanted to which taught me that quality

does matter and doing a good job does matter the The queue wasn't there by mistake.

And when you weren't eating at coffins,

what were family meals like for you?

Well, it was just after the war.

The war had just finished.

I was born in 1940.

I'm now 80.

So there was food rationing.

We had ration books.

Bet you've never seen one of those.

And when you went to a shop to get meat,

...