Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall on his addiction to secondhand cookware and other home truths

I drop my backpack on an old leather armchair just inside the front door where there’s also a sofa and a fireplace. I’m looking to make contact with either a human – my daughter Louisa or wife Marie – or one of our three dogs.

I like to buy, occasionally, secondhand cookware that I think will look good in photographs because I put cookbooks together and I want them to look great. If I go into a secondhand shop, I’ll look for stuff that has got a patina about it, that’s got the feel of having been part of someone’s life. When I buy a brand new frying pan every few years, I probably get the Le Creuset nonstick.

Making my daughter’s breakfast. I don’t really see it as a chore but it’s something I do almost every day. It could be something very simple like toast and peanut butter, but I quite often make her scrambled eggs on toast and I always cut up one or two pieces of fruit. It takes a minute or two to put together a nice breakfast, then we sit down together for a chat before she goes to school.

The hoovering. I do it occasionally, but I’m not the main hoover-er. I hope that I make up for it in other ways but I suspect it probably is a deficit in my bank balance of domestic chores.

I could be tidier. I take off shoes in odd places around the house and, every now and again I find a small mountain of shoes at the bottom of the stairs, which is a subtle message [from my wife], saying. ‘Please put them in more sensible places’.

My family. I am a homesick traveller, which is not to say I don’t enjoy the adventure of travel, but I’m always thinking of home. I call home, I send messages, I send pictures, I want pictures back of what’s going on at home. I don’t just stride out and disconnect. Coming home is always a great treat. There’s that lovely sense of relief and calm.