Prue Leith on saying yes in later life

She traced it back to childhood: two brothers, and a determination to become chairman of the tree-climbing club, which meant climbing higher than either of them first. That instinct, she said, never left her. "It never occurs to me that I will fail, so why not try everything." Her default answer to any invitation, she added, is yes.

It's an instinct that has taken her to unexpected places. At 85, while taking her grandchildren skiing, she discovered the sit-ski after her own children vetoed the idea of her standing up on two. She still travels widely, to the extent that she gave up filming Bake Off over the summer in favour of European summer holidays.

But reinvention isn't only about new pursuits. It's also about editing. "Life's too short to stuff a mushroom," she told Fairweather, a line that doubles as a philosophy. Cooking, like everything else, gets simpler with age, not more elaborate; the result was Bliss on Toast, her most recent bestselling cookbook, built on precisely that principle.

Leith was equally candid about love. Widowed after the death of her first husband, she spoke about coming to enjoy a period of life alone, no crumbs in the bed, meals on her own schedule, before meeting her second husband later in life. "Falling in love is the same at any age," she said, dismissing any suggestion that romance belongs to the young.