Jordan and I met the same day I landed the job with SC6. For years, I’d been working long hours, in hot kitchens, for pitiful pay. My best friend, Faith, spotted the advertisement: ‘Chef Wanted for Daily Television Cookery Programme. Media Skills Preferred.’ I protested I’d not so much as stepped foot in front of a television camera. Faith reminded me I’d been ‘The Face’ of the British Good Food and Wine Festival a decade previously. She went on about me being a natural-born entertainer. I reminded her that during such entertainment, the consumption of alcohol often plays a pivotal role. Faith encouraged me to go for it anyway. So I did. I almost couldn’t believe I landed the job – I’m sure it helped that the only qualified competition was a lard-obsessed LBC food critic and a Marco Pierre White apprentice with oily dreadlocks. Apparently, all other applicants that wanted to be on television had no culinary experience whatsoever. When the station signed me up, I was elated.

Faith and I celebrated madly. She arrived from her city job to the Notting Hill bistro where I worked around 9 p.m. We were closing last orders. Effortlessly glamorous – tall, thin, blonde and very pretty, with an electric personality – Faith whooshed in wearing a typically expensively tailored black trouser suit, her décolletage highlighted by the plunging neckline of her jacket. Greeting my colleagues with hugs and kisses, she insisted we celebrate my new success together with champagne, I’d only just handed in my notice. Such was Faith’s energy that everyone, including my boss, downed tools for a short toast to my future success on television before she and I continued on into town.

By the time we hit the West End clubs, I was sufficiently inebriated to hit the dance floor like I was Kylie Minogue in those signature gold hot pants – wearing, I must point out, my dark denim jeans. Grinding myself against the delightfully toned and debaucherously topless hunks in the club on Old Compton street, it mattered not that my gorgeous fans were all fabulously not-my-way-inclined. To my booty-swinging Shakira moves, they were my Ricky Martin partners in crime. From the side, where she was watching our drinks and resting her feet, Faith laughed and cheered.

I first met Jordan during a small break from such frivolities. Spotting a surly – but incredibly sexy-looking – lad by the exit, I boorishly asked if he was too straight to move his booty. I was pleasantly taken aback when he answered most tersely, ‘Actually, yes.’