In Memory of the Excellent Bill Granger.

I first met Bill at the South Bank Centre where Edie -his eldest child- and Felix -our youngest- were performing in a choral competition. It was an odd event, or I was feeling odd, or both. The children were doing a piece called The Eagle, I think, and were conducted by a teacher who was a dead ringer for that lovely Gareth Malone off the telly; they must have done well because a few weeks later they did the same piece at the Royal Albert Hall.

Anyway, our mutual friend Victoria introduced us, and I remember it vividly. Bill was super charming, smiley, modest, good looking and gentle. I hadn’t heard of Bill Granger before this though I had heard word of a feted Australian chef who had landed in London to open a restaurant in a notorious graveyard site on Westbourne Grove. Opening there seemed nuts to me, but I didn’t think about it much. I chatted with Bill and Victoria and despite Bill’s dodgy low-slung V neck T shirt I was left with an impression of a man who I liked a lot and who had just landed in London with bags of gentle warmth and quiet confidence.

That relationship grew into a friendship, particularly once Caroline started working with Bill and Nat on their extraordinary global enterprise, not least of all because that meant that the Grangers became a big part of our life for many years; always in our conversations and our diaries. And Bill was always -always - gentle, kind, modest, stylish, brilliant.

And here’s a key thing about Bill, he really was brilliant, but he was just so damn modest. As that graveyard restaurant was transformed by him -and by Nat- into a humming, throbbing cauldron of happy customers and other openings followed in London and across the world and his books tumbled onto kitchen counters in their tens of thousands and his beautiful face lit up our TVs, he never seemed to seek the limelight. I think that he just knew what worked and how to make it work and he didn’t need to shout or show off. That’s incredibly, profoundly rare.

A few memories. Just a handful.

Having dinner cooked by Bill in the downstairs kitchen of the Grangers’ rented house a stone’s throw from that first London restaurant. Bill cooking beef with such relaxed poise and style that this mere act inspired the way I have tried to cook ever since.

A few days at Glen Dye, our home in the Highlands, where Bill and Nat came to collect Skippy, a Labrador pup we’d bred and which they were taking from us. In the end, Skippy didn’t suit the Grangers’ London life, so he came back to us where he lived with an energy that I have never encountered before. By way of illustration, he once ran 14 miles in 45 minutes; and he would avoid any form of bridge, instead hurling himself into the river in order to cross it, however perilous or improbable that was. I loved Skippy and he died young, because, I think, he had used enough brilliance and energy to last for several lifetimes and just ran out of steam. I don’t know, maybe there’s some truth in that.

Going to Jessica’s house for a party and discovering that Bill and I were both wearing the same Dries van Noten jacket with a very distinct white collar. That was a defining moment in our friendship; we were men of a particular generation who liked clothes where this was simply not done.

Bill’s wonderful 50^th birthday high in the Alps, looking out at the North Face of the Eiger; ten of us for a long weekend. Bill and I discussed opening a menswear shop together that weekend. This might have been a reality; our passions were similar, and our skillsets would probably have converged quite well. I wish we had.

There’s a picture of the ten of us standing on the tiny train track outside our hotel just before we left that idyllic weekend. I took it on self-timer, and it worked out well at the first attempt. There we all are, looking well and happy and feeling optimistic, with all the time in the world ahead of us. Fifty? That’s halfway through life, isn’t it? No hurry. We can do all of this stuff another day. For now, we’re all here and celebrating life.

How wrong we were.