Derek Jarman had a small flat above a theatre on Charing Cross Road, where I interviewed him in 1987 over a takeaway from Chinatown. Part of the time he chose to eat duck while posing with his head hanging backwards over one end of his couch.

While upside down he watched home movie footage shot by his father and grandfather - which he was cutting together with his own experimental Super 8 footage: "There's grandmother Mimosa carving up a Sunday chicken back in 1929. I remember her huge turkey sliding off a collapsible table, in slow motion, in 1951. 'Catch!' said my mother, but I couldn't."

"When others argued, my mother turned and talked to the teapot," Jarman noted. "When a priest came to her bed before she died she said, 'I don't want a service, thank you, but do stay for tea and cherries.'"

Her atheism didn't get in the way of the creation of Jarman's greatest kitchen memory.

"I once went downstairs to find my mother making a vegetarian meal for a 7ft tall dreadlocked black guy who'd knocked on the door dressed in rags. This was early 60s suburban Surrey. He wanted to baptise her, there and then, into a rarefied one true church of Christ on Earth. So to be pleasant, but because he wanted to pour cooking oil over her and she'd been to the hairdressers, mother decided, 'Derek will be baptised!'

"So I was forced to my knees and covered in oil. And in the middle of this ceremony, my father arrived home, with bowler hat and umbrella. And he just looked at us, through his monocle, said nothing and retired to his den."