Not an ordinary day in Africa, but, instead, an invitation to work in a professional kitchen. Yes, I was nervous. I knowing without knowing a thing about it, that I am likely to trip over or be tripped over. Life will move fast and everyone there will already know the swerves required. I don’t want to be the one holding a hot pan of something bubbly without knowing the swerves required. I clean my spectacles, about 10 times, wiggle my toes just to check they are in sync and ask my neaural pathways to create me anything but spaghetti junction. There won’t be clear roads ahead, not once the Head Chef, Vernon, begins his breakfast traverse. However, having left home in the pitch mosquito dark in order to be here by 6am, there is an empty calm. I scan the room. Enough seating for well over 200, although they never all come at the same time. Nonetheless it feels daunting.

The film studios I will be working to feed number 6, including Deal or No Deal and Masterchef. Other studios are set up for shoots on all the most popular sitcoms and series in South Africa. The complete staff number over 2000 and I am lucky enough to get a dawn tour when most are empty, excluding Make-up, Costumery, Continuity, Editing Suites and other important and NO SPEAKING booths and units are already at work. I walk through Props for everything, see costumes hanging lifelike as if those who will put them on are already therein. We drink coffee and I hear the menu for breakfast. Cheese omelettes are already being mixed in the biggest bowls I have ever seen, seasoning added, Mercy tasting. I am to make a milk thing which looks like porage, but isn’t. 4 big packs of butter to melt. I can’t see over the lid of this pot and the burner is as wide as Mull. I add a bucket of flour and stir it all into a roux with a wooden spoon the length of a household broom. I add milk, keep stirring, the temperature rising in me and the kitchen, as Chef Vernon begins his prep for lunch. A thousand (not) chicken portions to wash and dry, season and herbify. He is a giant, quiet, gentle, solid as Ben Mhor. We all move around him. I am getting this.

We check the coffee machine, fill the hot salvers with hot things and pour lakes of juice into the juice things. And they begin to arrive. Some actors in robes, pre costume and make-up, some tech guys, some prop artists, directors, some producers and I am introduced as the guest chef from Scotland. The buzz is wonderful, the welcome genuine. I grab a portion of cheese omelette, delicious, and am ready now for chopping and slicing and dynamic swerving. In a kitchen where everyone knows their place, I am a swivel, a quick turnaround, a shimmy through skinny places, but although all the workers know that, they are smiling with me, laughing, sharing stations.

I am gifted the red MasterChef apron and wear it with pride. Although the next series won’t shoot till next week, this kitchen feeds all crew and staff, including those who work on that series. And I have been there, seen the studios, met the camera crew, the producers and directors, the costumier, the make-up team, the tech guys, the runners and sorters. All those who make it all happen, who arrive pre dawn, who leave last, who make sure that the standard is high and faultless. It was a huge privilege to see all of that, to be inside the mix of it all. I have never sliced 50 tomatoes, nor a whole net of onions before. Oh, chuckled Alpha, my onion chopping mate, You never? No, I said. I cooked for 20, perhaps once. I thought she would fall over backwards with all the laughing in her beautiful black face and I laughed along with her.