Personalised Signed Copies of 'The Game Cook' by Norman Tebbit + Debby Mason Postcards

It all started in my local butcher's shop, the New Street Butchers in Horsham, West Sussex. I often took in to him pheasants, partridges and ducks from my days out shooting.

I was looking at the pheasants priced between £4 and £5 and said: 'Why do people pay more for a rubber-boned supermarket chicken than they would for a pheasant?'

'Well,' he replied, 'I think mostly it's because they don't know how to cook them - and they think it would be very difficult.' That, I thought, is probably correct, but something should be done to put it right. So I wrote down a couple of my favourite pheasant recipes, printed a few dozen copies and put them on his counter (probably a breach of Hygiene and Food Handling Directive Two Million and One from Brussels).

To my delight, the recipe sheets disappeared - and so did the pheasants.

From then, I was on the hook and bit by bit I gathered together recipes we used at home, put them all together and created The Game Cook. A lot of my friends were somewhat surprised that I should have written a cookery book rather than one about how they are all cooking the books at Westminster, but I was interested in food even before politics.

In fact, I cannot remember a time when I was not interested in food.