It must be wonderful to be fearless about what you say.

Broadcaster and writer Janet Street-Porter doesn't seem to mind what she says about anything or anyone to anybody.

She had an audience of more than 300 people sitting down to tea and laughing, gasping and stunned into silence.

The first volume of her autobiography, Baggage, has recently appeared in paperback and takes us up to the time she left home at 18.

As she told us, she was mightily relieved to go. I can't tell you in a family newspaper how she described her mother but it was bluntly honest - and vulgar.

The book was an attempt to understand why her mother was so bitter.

Janet was worried she was turning out just like her.

Janet told us about her lack of good looks when young (6ft aged ten, NHS specs, goofy teeth, beige hair and Auntie Vi's hand-knitted sweaters).

It was all too much for the now editor-at-large of the Independent On Sunday in post-Second World War London.

Her love life also came under scrutiny while we ate delicious sandwiches and cakes. She has been married four times and had three other long-term relationships (she calls herself a serial monogamist). All the men have been different types and she has come to the conclusion that the only link is that they were all "pathetically grateful"!

Now single, she is happy and claims she will not make the mistake of marrying again.

Although there was no love lost between Janet and her parents, she loved her Welsh grandmother. She spent many childhood holidays in Wales, has tried to learn the language of her forefathers (it wasn't a great success) and said although there was a lot about Wales she liked, the Welsh were "very thin-skinned".

Move over Anne Robinson. Then we were treated to a gentler Janet. As a keen walker and vicepresident of the Ramblers' Association the issue which annoys her most at the moment is off-road cars and motorbikes in the countryside. She loves coastal waking, has completed the South Downs Way and particularly liked the section from Eastbourne to Birling Gap.

Janet has most recently been on TV tackling children in a classroom and also in the jungle with TV programme I'm A Celebrity ...

It was like "a mental assault course" to her. She did not sell out, she claims, because she is a journalist first and foremost and so was able to interview the other contestants. Paul Burrell failed to make a good impression.

Again her descrption is too stong to be printed here.

Her saving grace in the jungle was that, in her words, she didn't come out "like a gormless t***". I never thought she was - and the weekend's encounter confirmed that.