I never did cocaine with Nigella. We never once hoovered up 'Colombian marching powder' together before dinner, or, for that matter, smoked cannabis while out of our minds on coke after dinner.
The times I met her over the last 10 years she must have been particularly adept at disguising what her former assistants Francesca and Elisabetta Grillo effectively said in court last week was a murky drug addiction of well over a decade.
(The drug claim was called 'totally scurrilous' by the prosecuting counsel, Jane Carpenter QC.) In an email read in court last week, her ex-husband Charles Saatchi described her - among other perhaps ungallant things - as 'Higella'.
I never saw the Domestic Goddess get high. I saw her take off her shoes in a London restaurant and put on some knee-high designer boots she had just bought on Bond Street and model them coquettishly for me. I saw her order several different desserts and foreign beers and wines - and insist, almost matronishly, that we try all of them. I couldn't do my job for over 20 years without being around, at some point, people - showbiz folks with narcissistic personality disorder - who are on cocaine, or doing cocaine, or have been on cocaine or have come off cocaine.
So I think I know the signs of someone on cocaine and in my humble view Nigella Lawson didn't exhibit the signs of being out of it on cocaine. Just good crack. Please note: as opposed to good crack cocaine.
That night in London, she drank from my wine glass and I from hers. She fed me dessert. 'I am a feeder. I'm not proud of it, but I can't deny it,' she explained later. It was November 2004; we got quietly pissed in the Rib Room in the Carlton Towers Hotel in smart Cadogan Place near her home in Belgravia, on a somewhat sybaritic evening. Nigella laughed when I told her that The New York Times had suggested her Botticelli-esque sexiness of full lips, bottom and breasts made cooking dinner appear 'like a prelude to an orgy'.
She was relentlessly good crack - please note: as opposed to relentlessly on crack - telling me that while cooking a roasted lamb for her mate Salman Rushdie, in the early days of his fatwa, her hair caught fire as she opened the oven to take it out. She was also profoundly and adorably excitable. Indeed she recounted herself to me a conversation with her assistant Hettie. . .
Hettie: 'This is what I hate about you. I hate it when you're manic.'
Nigella: 'Let me tell you, when you're really slow and bovine I don't like that either!'
I met Nigella for the first time the year before in Dublin's Merrion Hotel - we bonded over eggs Benedict and love; she gave me long lectures on my love life as I filled her in on the gory details. Twelve months later in London I expected her to have forgotten everything.
'You were wondering whether I'd remember or not,' she said in the Rib Room, 'and you had somehow made that a test of whether I was a real person or not.'
Very much a real person, Nigella, who was only married a year to Saatchi in November 2004, said she and her new husband were 'at that nice stage where the children are just about old enough where they don't wake us up at weekends.' On the other hand, Nigella remembered reading something particularly fabulous recently: 'You never regret a baby or a swim.
'That is a great expression,' Nigella smiled. 'Of course, the truth is: you would if you drowned. And you can drown in domesticity and the difficulty of doing everything.' She has two children, Bruno and Cosima, by her first husband, the late John Diamond. Nigella, who was born January 6, 1960, said if she were younger she would have children with Charles. It's a natural inclination if you love someone to want a child with them, she said.
'I cannot imagine not wanting to be with Charles,' she continued. 'I don't do things lightly. I'm not a fickle person. I find it very difficult to make decisions. The funny thing, having been married twice, is that I always get very anxious about getting married and I'm not sure at all - but I like it once I am.'
When I ask where he was, she said he was at home in Belgravia watching football on the telly or listening to gangsta rap. 'Charles doesn't go to parties. He hates parties. He watches music. He doesn't dance to it. He is completely obsessed with pop music. It's the great irony: marry someone older and have to listen to pop music all the time!'
Nigella said the last in reference to Charles, who is 17 years her senior. 'I think you're always the same age,' she continued. 'Your biological age changes but you're always the same age.'
We have stayed in touch on and off pretty much ever since that night in London. I get the odd text from her still. When I texted her last month that I hoped she was okay over the break-up of her marriage to Charles, she texted back: 'Thank you.'
She is a dedicated texter. I put her in my phone as Nigel in case my phone ever got lost or stolen. She actually calls herself Nige to her friends. When she came over to do The Late Late Show one Christmas: 'I'm in Dublin airport. Nige.'
She has a sense of humour all her own. For a wheeze - and as a bit of a running joke - I used to text her what she would ask a certain international star whom I was about to interview. Posh Spice. Jane Fonda, etc. She was always amusing and certainly original. When I said I was about to meet Pamela Anderson, Nige texted one word: 'Ophelia.' Bemused, I texted The Goddess back: 'What about her?'
The Goddess replied: 'Ask her about Ophelia. Does she want to play her one day?'
'What was behind my asking if she wanted to act the role of Ophelia,' she went on, 'stems from my wondering whether she had that cutie insecurity thing; was she like those old Hollywood starlets who petulantly sighed about not being taken seriously.
'To be fair, Barry,' she adds, 'I was minding my own business walking down a street to go into a meeting, when I got a text from you saying, 'I am going to interview Pamela Anderson. What shall I ask her?' I wish I could have given you a question of rare brilliance and perspicacious wit, but the pressure rather stumped me. Irritating, but there it is.'
In time, hopefully Nigella Lawson will come to see the drug allegations about her last week as just that: irritating but there it is.
Sunday Independent
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