Tim’s choice of venue for lunch is The Farmer’s Kitchen at Washingpool Farm and when I arrive he’s already there, chatting easily with owner and farmer Simon Holland in the busy farm shop. What strikes me immediately is the genuine friendship and palpable respect between these two veterans of the local food scene.

The game is over. Country-dwellers will not mourn the loss from their plates, they are attuned to the gentle music of the seasons’ rhythms, the onward march of nature and March’s early, hesitant notes of spring. If city dwellers realized that cutting country corners involves, at the season’s end, untrained surgery, nipping and tugging out game birds breasts, discarding legs and wings to avoid the misery of flying feathers and torn skin, and wrenching out clusters of guts high with hanging, they’d doubtless be shocked. But that is the way with farmers whose braces of birds have already graced the table to the point at which a delicacy has lost its cache and the deep-freeze is still stocked with a flock. The skinless breast which I have abjured for ever as the root of much lazy cooking evil is upon us.

Viewed from the front, the terraced house of Goyas and Safna Miah in Dorchester looks ordinary enough: car in the drive, neatly-trimmed grass and pots of flowers for decoration. But looks can be deceiving, and a check around the back tells an extraordinary story about their efforts to create a garden flourishing with the vegetables of their native Bangladesh.

As a youngster Simon Ford launched a campaign called ‘Operation Save the Eel’ to stop his Grandad from eating eels. Today he delights in the ‘wonders of jellied eels’, but are they sustainable?

“I was born in Chippenham, Wiltshire. My father was a policeman but shortly after I was born he joined Woolworths and trained with them, so I moved around a lot as a child, living in rented rooms, then a caravan on a farm near Stroud. Our first house was in Banbury where we lived for five years, and most of my secondary schooling was at Keynsham Grammar School between Bath and Bristol where I managed to fail all of my A levels, heaven knows how or why.

South Somerset is not a multicultural hotspot, but that didn’t prevent Pheeraya Hill from moving there. Leaving Thailand in 1992, she first went to Haselbury Plucknett before settling in Merriott, where she and her husband, Jerry, now live.

Chinese Crispy Duck has been voted Britain’s third favourite food, pipping Chicken Tikka. Ducks, once a peasant winter staple, are now bred on a massive scale. Simon Ford goes in search of those that don’t look like UFOs.

Dark days dishes. The time has come round again. The West-country word ‘dimpse’ is so onomatopoeically apt at this time of year, when the light leaks away so early, so abruptly, and all we can do to counter light-lustrelessness is cook hearty, gutsy, bright, light citrussy dishes and pretend. Pretend that we are in the scented orange grove that fills the kitchen when we make Seville orange marmalade or a steamed pudding dripping with an ointment of lemon, orange or lime-curd. And pretend good intention after the excesses and overkill of Christmas despite the fact that we tend to fail resolutions well before we admit we are defeated, that we have cheated.

I won’t eat puddings in January, I’ll give up drink, I won’t eat cream.

Josceline Dimbleby has an extraordinary life story. She has travelled all over the world and, drawing on her exceptional memory for people, food and places, has written a new memoir/cookery book entitled Orchards in the Oasis. As a diplomat’s stepdaughter, she was able to experience parts of the world that were little known at the time. She spent her early life in Damascus, travelling from London with a governess she hardly knew and spending five days at sea in order to get there. This is the sort of travel accompanied by leather suitcases and initialled brass bound trunks, where dinner was served on linen tablecloths and eaten with silver cutlery.

Modern mid-life man has dreams. He has fantasies. For some it is still the perfect car but for an increasing number it’s the perfect porker – they lust over Readers’ Piglets rather than Meno-Porsche Monthly. My other half, Foodie, is a confirmed porco-phile and shows absolutely no enthusiasm for cars until we move from central London to deep Dorset at which point he develops a sudden, late-entry need to motor.

You can almost see my courgettes grow. Maybe not quite as impressively as the 9 inches a day I was once told an asparagus spear can push aside soil and stone to launch itself on to your plate, but enough to make me head for the garden through the summer and way into autumn, right up to the first opportunistic killer of a frost, with a sense of pride, anticipation and always, despite its continuously generous-natured bounty and reliability, surprise.

Known for his campaigning approach to making films that tell it like it really is, with programmes as diverse as Jamie Oliver’s American Road Trip to The Secret Policeman, double BAFTA award-winning television producer, Simon Ford, takes just as keen an interest in where his food comes from. This month he looks at the fate of veal calves.

Richard Bertinet may prove to be a great advertisement for the boy scouts. One of the first nuggets of wisdom he passes on to me about his cooking style is the need to be prepared. “It makes it easier to just sit down and enjoy your food” he says. “Cooking is only a small bit of it. It is the preparation of all your ingredients – the cooking part, if you look at it, is very simple stuff. The preparation is what takes time. I believe it is a bit like winning the 100 metres, your race will last 10 seconds if you are very good, but your preparation will last two or three years.”

Ever since man first learned to communicate, passion has been a source of huge inspiration – powerful emotions have compelled human beings to reach for the impossible, and often achieve the unimaginable. Whether building spacecraft, writing sonnets or expanding the horizons of medical science – like trees or plants that reach for the sky – it is often the passion of one individual that drives others to great heights of achievement.

When someone shows a particular affinity for, or skill in a chosen hobby or trade, they are often said to have it ‘in their blood’, especially if the same interest can be traced back through their recent ancestry. We have all known of artists, musicians, writers, sportsmen and even politicians who are adept at their chosen art as a result of genes passed down through the generations. Family elders might watch a youngster play the piano or kick a football and sagely comment ‘it’s in his blood you know’. And though it’s common comment for many professions and activities, there are times when the saying just sounds odd. For example to say that George Streatfeild, of Denhay Farms in West Dorset, has cheese in his blood might be a bit of a conversation stopper, but in one sense it is true.

According to Clarissa Dickson Wright the trouble with cooking and cookery books in this country is the chefs. “People either do things which are totally banal or over complicate things” she says. “Chef’s are rather like lawyers, I mean they complicate things for the sake of complicating – to make themselves appear rather more important than they really are.” As someone who passed her bar exams aged 21, becoming the country’s youngest female barrister, she should know. She is currently ensconced in London’s Goring Hotel talking about her new book Potty: Clarissa’s One Pot Cookbook. I suggest that the title is very her, to which she readily agrees but points out that it is also dedicated to her two and a half year old goddaughter and therefore doubly relevant.

Moving from the city to the country to live the smallholding dream is not always all it’s cracked up to be – especially for the less obsessed partner of the Foodie in the family. Telling it like it is, Good Life Wife watches Foodie get broody.

Though written for the cost-conscious kitchen, Tasmasin Day-Lewis’s new book is definitely not about cheap food. She talked to Fergus Byrne

The first TV chef to get out of the kitchen and bring us closer to that which we were about to receive, Keith Floyd inspired millions, and travelled the world bringing his own special splash and dash to culinary adventure. Far from sitting back on his laurels he has recently published two new books, is about to open a new restaurant and soon launches his own cookery theatre. He talked to Fergus Byrne about a life well travelled.