Digestif

Heavenly jockeys, splitting trousers and plenty of Pinot Grigio – Imogen Lycett Green enjoys a breathless lunch in the Cotswolds with Jilly Cooper

Two hours earlier she had rushed, panting, into the Crown Inn in Frampton Mansell. ‘I am SO SORRY I am late!’ she said, falling into the fire-smoky bar wearing leggings, knee-length brown boots, a white shirt and a belt that looks like a piece of horse tack. Sexy is the only word for it. Her instantly recognisable helmet/halo of thick grey hair frames her round, rosy-cheeked face. She is wearing a silver brooch of a galloping racehorse.

‘How are you?’ she says to the young barman. ‘I’m good,’ he replies. Jilly is thrilled. ‘I love the way the younger generation say I’m good. It’s such a misnomer. I’m sure you’ll be behaving badly the minute you get home.’ He blushes and lopes off to fetch the Pinot Grigio. Jilly is flustered from managing a conference call that morning with the American producers of a mini-series of one of her books. Her rescue greyhound Feather had run back from the woods and appeared squeaking and scraping with his paws at the window in the middle of the call. ‘They’d say, now what about the dialogue, and he’d go, scrape, scrape.’ Jilly has a tendency to explain her life as a series of embarrassing moments (like splitting the au pair’s trousers that she had borrowed without asking). She is habitually apologetic.

‘I can’t cook,’ she says. ‘No, no I’m hopeless. My father, who was so glamorous, he worked in the war office and he would finish his lunch and get up, and the subalterns in the mess would look at their watches and say, ‘One minute, 33 seconds today.’