Mary Berry. What can you say? When you see her on TV, she’s exactly like your grandma. And her autobiography was less like a book and more like sitting in your granny’s kitchen with a cup of tea and a cream scone and listening to her reminiscing about the old times.

I have to be honest, I’d never heard of Mary Berry until the Great British Bake Off started, but I can see now that she’d actually done a lot before then, even retiring from her career before getting the phone call out of the blue about judging a ‘village fete’ style baking contest.

She led a rather privileged life when she was younger, but worked extremely hard to make it to where she wanted to be, leaving school with no qualifications and working her way up to a regular slot on an afternoon talk show, and even filming segments in her own house, which looks pretty grand by the way. She’s had her fair share of hardships too, from a life-threatening stay in hospital with polio when she was younger, to losing her son in a tragic car accident.

As much as the book was like a nice cosy chat with your gran, there were times when it felt a little preachy, when Mary was talking about the way that she would rather do things, and how everyone else is either stupid or doing it wrong. But I suppose that’s quite like your average gran too.

I found it a rather enjoyable read (and I now keep using the word ‘rather’ far too often, just like Mary). I saw that her life story was actually on TV yesterday, with the second part tonight, so I would kind of like to watch that too, just to see the places she talks about brought to life, especially her beautiful sounding house.