Clarissa Dixon Wright: ‘I was healed by a holy relic’

I’m tempted, just for a second, to feel sorry for Clarissa Dickson Wright. There she is, with her back to me, 15 feet away, at a table in Valvona & Crolla — a refined little deli/café full of focaccia and Parmigiano Reggiano tucked in beside the lager shops on Edinburgh’s Leith Walk. There she sits, waiting for me: the last of the Two Fat Ladies, all alone: no fat husband to cook cakes for, no fat children to lick the icing from the bowl.

I’ve read her memoirs, so I know that she’s been through the mill: alcoholism, homelessness, the death by drink of the love of her life.

But I also know, as I begin my approach, that to pity Clarissa would be idiotic. For one thing, she’s had a much more exciting life than most, and for another, she’d hate it. And if I’ve learnt one thing from Clarissa’s book it’s that it’s a mistake to annoy her. Her TV co-star, the late Jennifer Paterson, used to cook for The Spectator and once, furious, threw a drawer of cutlery from an upstairs window. Clarissa’s temper is if anything more formidable. At the Sacred Heart school in Hove, she ‘lifted up the school bully and threw her against a radiator’. Later (under complicated and extenuating circumstances), she ‘picked up a rent boy and pushed him through a window’. She’s even socked a copper in the face.

‘Yes, it’s true,’ she says, after we’ve said hello and I’ve broached the subject of her impressive rage, ‘I do have a temper. In fact my nickname when we were shooting Two Fat Ladies was Krakatoa, because I’d suddenly explode!’ She laughs, and I laugh too, nervously. ‘I inherited my anger from my father, I’m afraid,’ she says. ‘He was a brilliant surgeon but quite a frightful man.