When these two top cooks go to war it's like stags in heat round my house – Susan Morrison

There are two very accomplished cooks in this house. Neither of them are me.

I have been known to cook, in the same way that Donald Trump has been known to be a president. It happened, but let’s move on.

My son peruses cookery books. He knows how to read them. He’s like an Egyptologist reading hieroglyphics. I see two terrible dangers on those glossy pages. One, I can’t understand a word, and two, those photos are lying. I’ve fallen into that terrible trap before. A side-by-side shot of my cooking looks like Cordon Bleu next to Chernobyl.

He will select a dish, then I am presented with a shopping list of ingredients with weights in brackets, which I do not understand. I never went full-on metric, you see. It’s why I weigh myself in kilos. I don’t actually know what it means, so I don’t know how fat I am.

My husband is more of a ‘well, that’s what the recipe says, but what happens if you bung in half a bottle of chilli sauce’ kind of a cook. Perhaps not a good approach for a Victoria sponge, but it gives the old British casserole a fair old kick.

Now, you’d think this is a recipe for a great life for a non-cook, but things sometimes come to a head when they both want the kitchen. You have what is basically a turf war over the hob. No, I don’t know what that is.

It can get, well, heated. I was reminded of this whilst watching Attenborough the other night. Excellent programme, as ever. He was introducing us to the age-old story of battles for supremacy. A mighty old stag and a younger one were having a right set-to in a Highland river, knocking lumps out of each other. The old stag won and did a bit of victorious bellowing.

He does that, when he wins, my husband, only he clears his throat in a very Yorkshire way and rattles the frying pan. But for how much longer can he protect his kitchen territory from the young buck, eh?