It's Ramsay's red face day

You drop into people's lives like a stone when you interview them. This can be a problem when you don't know what's going on behind the scenes. For instance, I didn't know that Gordon Ramsay was under so much pressure when I went to see him on Friday. He'd told an anecdote about feeding chicken stock to a vegetarian the previous week and all hell had broken loose.

Protesters demonstrated in front of his restaurant at Claridge's and animal rights activists had even written to Michelin to demand he lose one of his stars. Plus, the week before he had pulled out of cooking a dinner in Miami because the kitchen was "horrific" and the hotelier was threatening to sue; he was in the middle of opening a café in Knightsbridge; was still not over an emotional trip to cook for street kids in Tanzania for Comic Relief; and had had a call from a friend warning him that I would stitch him up.

I sat happily waiting in the bar at Claridge's with no idea of all this. I obviously knew he was volatile - he regularly went nuts during a flyonthe-wall documentary, Boiling Point, and famously ejected the food critic A A Gill from his restaurant - but I was excited to meet him.

Ramsay is the only chef in Britain to have three Michelin stars, and as well as Claridge's he oversees the Connaught, Petrus in St James's, and his three-star eponymously named restaurant in Royal Hospital Road, Chelsea. My theory was that anyone who works 18-hour days, six days a week is going to lose it from time to time, but that he was very misunderstood: not nasty at all, but big-hearted and loyal.

Actually, I still think that, though next time I would be more wary before I went to see him.

Ramsay came out and shook my hand. He had very white skin and a prematurely seamed face. He seemed nice. He led the way across the restaurant, joking that he wouldn't mention the word "vegetarian".

He said the truth of the story was that 10 years ago he made artichoke risotto for a friend's wife and put chicken stock in it. "This was at home," he groaned. "I would never dream of doing that to a vegetarian in one of my restaurants. Now I've got these animal activists writing to Michelin. Last night they were demonstrating about foie gras. Bloody hell."

I asked about Miami and his face clouded. He leaned back. "It was difficult. I sent out a chef, Darren, the week before. When I arrived things had gone pear-shaped, in that he was subject to all kinds of difficult conditions. Chefs had been smoking in the kitchen, chefs were drinking on service. I said, 'You're clearly not happy and I'm not happy' and we left.

"It wasn't the right thing to do, to walk away with no notice, but everyone was paying $350 a head and if you can't maintain a standard, you can't do it."

I suppose I should have asked him about Comic Relief then. Instead I mentioned some of the things I was curious over - his angry, negative father, his unhappy childhood in Stratford-upon-Avon, and whether his father was violent or alcoholic (Ramsay doesn't drink).

He said his father had hit him with a belt as a punishment but it wasn't a big deal. He seemed fine about it. Then he said he was "going for a quick wee" and left the room.

He didn't come back. An awful feeling sank through me. I sat with my little glass of water and he didn't come back and he didn't come back. I did a very black, dense doodle. The PR girl sitting in on the interview went to look through the sliding doors. Then she disappeared too. Finally, Ramsay reappeared. He sat down. He said he was ending the interview. I was shocked.

He said: "There's been two or three things recently I haven't been entirely happy with that have been misinterpreted. I'd much rather you were a little bit more honest about what you're doing."

I didn't know what he was talking about. I admired him, I bleated.
"If you let me just finish," he said, and his eyes were ice picks. "I've worked my bollocks off for Comic Relief and given up a lot of my free time. I'm not here to pull my pants down, for you to have a fun day and raise your profile. So. I'd rather for legal reasons call it a day if you don't mind. I'm sick to death of it all. I've got more important things to do."

Anyway, off I went. I called my editor, and sat bleakly at the bus stop. I had been clumsy in my questions. But, oh God. And damn, I could never go to his restaurant now.

My phone rang. Ramsay had changed his mind. He had "panicked". He was ready to continue the interview. I could go back to Claridge's. Well, I thought. That was big of him. Now, after all, I was even more likely to stitch him up. I trooped back down Brook Street. I waited. The staff glanced at me curiously. After 15 minutes Ramsay came out. "That was nice of you," I said.

"Well," he said. "It's for a greater cause. For Comic Relief." A little grimly, he raised his arm. "After you, ladies." The PR woman and I filed to the table, silently this time.

He put his muscled forearms on the table. "We started with nothing, so it's all a little bit too hard to stomach sometimes when all people do is pick on you," he said awkwardly, and his eyes weren't so hard. "Everything I've ever done I've grafted for. And I give a lot back. I just feel people are pouncing on the slightest joke. I work like a donkey. It really has been a tough couple of weeks."

He hasn't really got over his trip to Tanzania in December. "That was the hardest week I've ever gone through. You're stuck in the bleakest, most remote country, with seriously underprivileged children who don't get to eat one proper meal a day. I felt so guilty.

"It took me three to four weeks before I started eating again. I must have lost over a stone. I honestly lost the excitement of eating good food because I couldn't come to terms with it."

Subdued, I asked about the Red Nose Day Fun Run he is doing for Comic Relief. At five kilometres it's a warm-up for a man who does marathons, training at 11pm after he finishes at his restaurants - he runs through the pain of his hammer toes, acquired when he played for Rangers in too-small boots as a boy. He bit his lip.

"Everyone thinks I'm spreading myself too thin. But I'm not. Angela Hartnett runs the Connaught, she has shares in it. Marcus Wareing is very much a partner at Petrus. I run Claridge's and I run Royal Hospital Road and I'm going to be running the café. I'm now 36 and have no interest in retiring before I'm 50.

"I don't know what I'd do, if I'm totally honest. I'd be an absolute total nightmare. I'm a self-confessed control freak. I think my life would probably end up disintegrating."

I asked, nervously, how his wife, Tana, coped with never seeing him - he often goes to bed at 3am and leaves at 7am for work; they have four young children.

"It is an issue," he admitted. "I see her and the kids one-and-a-half days a week, which is not a great amount of time. But it's quality time. Tana knows full well I want to provide for our children the way her dad did for her and her sisters - she never saw her father until she was 15 or 16. So the relationship we have is slightly, er, tough, but we're not sat there arguing over who pays the gas bill."

This was presumably what went on between his father and mother. He was very poor as a child, and resolved never to be like that again. "It was survival," he said. "We were a large family, six of us, mum and dad, two sisters, me and my little brother. Mum and dad had a very tempestuous relationship - she married dad when she was 16 and had four children by the age of 21.

"They separated after 25 years. I was old enough then that I didn't have any problems with it personally, but my little sister and my brother were badly affected.

"We didn't have our own house so we didn't have any security; we constantly moved from council house to council house. We had tea, went upstairs, had a bath - we all shared the water - and then went straight off to bed.

"Someone asked me two weeks ago, is my drive from the fear of waking up and not having it. No! It's for fear of going through that harshness and strictness of having nothing again."

When their parents' marriage broke up, Ramsay's brother, Ronald, got hooked on smack. He had been his dad's blue-eyed boy, and had gone into the SAS. I asked if he was still addicted. Ramsay nodded. "Sadly he's still using. It has to be tough love. I still know inside that I've given him the maximum [help], I've funded it, I've gone through rehab with him five times, and it's not working. So I have to concentrate on my own life and my own children knowing full well I've tried every angle.

"The saving grace about going to Tanzania was that it helped me realise that he has a choice and those street kids don't. So it's helped me come to terms with his addiction and stopped me feeling so guilty."

A large party had arrived to sit at the table where we were talking. We went out into the restaurant. There was an air of quiet luxury. Waiters moved quietly. Ramsay shook my hand without enthusiasm and kissed the PR girl warmly. "Bye," I said. He nodded. I left. Chastened.

To join the Red Nose Fun Run in London on Friday, register online at www.rednoseday.com or call 01245 426 969. It costs £10 to enter, £8 of which goes to Comic Relief.