Sunday with Julian Clary: ‘Our family tradition is a midday gin’
Lie-in or early start? Definitely not a lie-in, because of my neurotic rescue dog Gigi. She was a feral creature living in a Serbian graveyard and demands to be taken out at about 7am, so there’s some negotiation between me and my husband as to who gets the job.
What’s for breakfast? I’ll eat blackberries and yoghurt and a £1 croissant from the local Co-op. But you have to get there early as the local cafés buy them up and then you see them in their windows for a fiver.
Lunch in our out? We have a main meal later in the day, unless the lesbians and their dog, Henry, are coming around. They call themselves the licky lesbians. Neither my husband nor I are great cooks, but he might rustle up a salmon joint and some salad. The dogs will ignore each other.
Childhood Sundays… They were more formal: proper Sunday lunch, everyone sitting down. I was a teenage cockswain at Kingston Rowing Club, so I would cycle home from the freezing fog on the Thames to a lovely Sunday lunch with my parents and sisters.
Sunday snifter? Our family tradition is a midday gin. My grandfather used to pace up and down looking at his watch as 12 approached. My grandmother told my grandfather he couldn’t drink until midday, so as noon struck, he’d pounce. I do, too, in memory of him.
Any other habits? I iron everything apart from underwear. It’s very important to me and I’m horrified by people who don’t iron their bedsheets. My husband enjoys ironing too, usually with Radio 4 on in the background, so we often argue about who is going to do it.
What about family? I phone my mother every day and on Sundays while we’re getting ready for Antiques Roadshow, which always amuses me. It tickles me to watch these people queueing up with their bit of tat hoping it’s worth a gazillion pounds.
Bedtime routine? At some point between seven and nine we’ll take Gigi around the block; we do that together because we don’t want to get mugged. Then we’ll watch the headlines of the abridged BBC news bulletin to see if anything exciting has happened.
Julian Clary’s Curtain Call to Murder is published by Orion at £20. Buy it for £18 at guardianbookshop.com
