At Home With Farmer Giles

Katie Jarvis meets Giles Coren, Times columnist and restaurant critic, and discovers a) his Cotswold home is quite hard to find b) his lawn tractor is quite hard to start and c) he isn’t especially angry at all (but actually quite pleasing).

- Katie Jarvis

False start number 1, in which I learn how to get a celebrity interview: I first meet Giles Coren at the Wilson Art Gallery, where he’s opening an exhibition about fakes (no metaphor/ wider comment intended). He’s ushered over to me – slim, neat, impossibly polite and good-looking - and, even though I should be asking him about fakes, the conversation finds it hard to steer away from sheep.

While he’s pondering a particularly sticky ovine topic, I quickly slip in, “May I do an interview with you?”

“Yes,” he says.

“No,” I clarify, suspiciously. “I mean a proper one. Where I come to your house and stuff.”

“Yes,” he says.

A few weeks later, when I’m sitting in his garden, staring at sheep, I quiz him on this surprising turn. “Why did you say yes to the interview?”

“Well, I was at that thing doing Peter Harkness [chair of Cheltenham Trust a favour.”

“So you were basically stuck?”

“It would seem rude to say no. Erm. And Phil The Newsagent would be excited that I’m in Cotswold Life.”

Thinks: To secure a top-class interview, find celebrities doing Peter Harkness a favour. And check Phil The Newsagent’s excitement levels.

False start number 2, in which I find Giles Coren’s home against the odds: To get to Giles Coren’s home, I drive along lanes white with breeze-blown cow parsley; under birds dazzling in huge flocks above hills so many shades of green that you’d have thought a paint-shop was marketing them. There are even blood-red splodges of poppy spattered along the roadside. It’s like Edward Thomas invented it.