Why do I still carry a torch for Keith Floyd when he's such a seedy old thing? 'He used to be really gorgeous,' I told my daughters when they caught me secretly watching his last series, Capital Floyd, but they laughed and said 'don't be silly, mum - he's bald.' Well, yes, bald I concede - he was already thinning when he started on television and now he's down to one hair in front. And his eyes seem to have disappeared for good - they always used to disappear when he smiled, but now they don't come back.

But that's not really the problem - it's his programmes. Does anyone now remember how cutting-edge Floyd seemed when he started? Up till then television cookery consisted of some queen in a studio kitchen saying 'Here's one I made earlier'. Floyd was cooking on camping stoves, on pitching boats at sea. His title music was the Stranglers. But now his programmes look like tourist-board ads - on Capital Floyd in Vienna he actually cooked a Sacher Torte. Apparently he's still HUGE abroad. Whenever you are stuck in some far corner of a foreign hotel-hole you can almost certainly catch Floyd on cable. But here in Britain he's been eclipsed by the Nigellas and Jamie Olivers (whom Floyd has never seen because he doesn't watch television), dropped from the BBC and banished to the wastelands of Channel 5.

And yet the call comes - do I want to interview Keith Floyd? - and off I go, flogging down the M40 to Wallingford on Thames. Why Wallingford, I wonder, given that he now lives in Spain with his fourth wife, Tess? I know he hates London but his roots are in the west country - Somerset where he grew up, or Bristol where he had his bistros in the Sixties and Seventies, or Devon where he had his ill-starred pub in the Nineties. Wallingford seems a bit genteel, a bit prissy, for him. But what do I know? I haven't seen him for years and perhaps I never knew him anyway, though I thought I did.

I first met him in 1988 when he was at the height of his fame. The Sunday Express, my employer, had just signed him as its star cookery writer, so I was dispatched to the Orkneys where he was filming Floyd on Britain, to write a cover story. I thought a week in the Orkneys with Floyd would be fun - I can't tell you what a hideous psychodrama I walked into. Floyd and his producer, David Pritchard, were locked in mortal combat, and each of them would grab me at every opportunity to tell me what a complete and utter wanker the other one was - 'And I want that on the record!' They both swore that once this series was over they'd never work together again - in fact they made several more series before the final break in 1994.

Floyd would go into the same rant every evening, reciting every single wrong Pritch had done him, starting with day one of the pilot programme and carrying on through however many hundred days they had been filming since then, interlarded with general attacks on the BBC, and how everyone conspired to do him down. Floyd's girlfriend, Zoe Meeson, would pluck at his arm to distract him but nothing would deflect him from this nightly catalogue. It might once have been funny, told with bravura, but the record had stuck, you could see the crew rolling their eyes and edging away. 'And that was in our honeymoon period!' Pritch laughs when I remind him: 'It got MILES worse after that!'

Until that week with Floyd in the Orkneys, I never believed there was such a thing as a Jekyll and Hyde personality, I thought people just had varying degrees of skill at covering their true nature. But Floyd really WAS two people. For most of the day he'd be the genial, bonhomous, fruity old wine-slurper you see on television and then at night he'd turn into a raging paranoid misanthrope who could clear a room with his ferocity. Pritch always reckoned the switch came at 9.20p.m. though Floyd could sometimes wrong-foot you by doing it earlier - at all events, once he switched, no amount of flattery or cajoling or sympathy could win him round. There are hints in some of Floyd's interviews that he fears madness, and one can see why - it must be like being a werewolf, waking up in the morning with some dim memory of blood on the walls.

Anyway, this is the fascination that draws me to Wallingford. The George Hotel seems a nice enough place, though the bar is empty apart from a quiet elderly gent partaking of a glass of claret with a vivacious red-haired girl. I watch them for a moment, wondering whether they are boss and secretary on some illicit outing, before realising with a shock that the quiet elderly gent is Floyd. He seems to have shrunk; he looks far older than 57. 'Keith?' I mutter doubtfully. 'Lynn Barber,' he says without enthusiasm. 'I don't believe you've met my wife, Tess.' Tess seems friendly - much more so than Floyd - but she says she must go and unpack, they have only just arrived from Spain.

'Do you remember the Orkneys?' I ask him. 'Do you remember that pub where they kept a raven in a fridge?' 'No,' he says coldly, 'I'm afraid it doesn't mean anything to me.' Can he really have forgotten? Of course not - and later, when we are having our row, he will tell me sinisterly, 'I remember EVERYTHING'. But perhaps it was a mistake reminding him of the pub with the raven - was it on Stronsay? - because that was where he came into the bar and screamed at the locals, 'You bunch of tossers!'

This Wallingford Floyd is a new one on me - wary, uptight, pompous, cold as ice. Why on earth did he agree to see me? Oh yes, to plug his new Channel 5 series, Floyd on India. He has been filming it since March and only finished a couple of months ago; since then he's been writing the book. He says he's learnt so much from the trip: 'Quite frankly eight programmes is not enough, because it's SO interesting. I mean I've managed to learn competently about 75 completely different Indian dishes - but they run into HUNDREDS, and I would have stayed on and on if I could.' Does he really believe he can cook Indian food as well as people who've been doing it all their lives? 'Certainly, yes. All cooking - it's like being a bricklayer, as long as you know how to mix the cement and line the bricks up properly, you can make any shape of building you like. And I do have a knowledge of the underlying basics of cooking - I've been involved in it for an awfully long time.'

He has indeed. He opened his first restaurant in Bristol when he was only 22 - his Mum and Dad used to help with the washing up. By his thirties, he had built quite a gastro-empire in Bristol but he never discovered the real secret of restaurant-owning which is how to make a profit. In fact he was on his way to bankruptcy when David Pritchard made Floyd on Fish and gave him this great burden of fame which he has been grumbling about ever since. He used to talk about fame as if it was some leprosy he contracted in 1985; now he's changed his tune and says he always felt famous even when he wasn't.

'I mean in the context of my little area of Bristol, Clifton, in the late Sixties and early Seventies, I became very famous. I have always attracted attention, without having to seek it. It's very strange.' Why does he think that is? 'I don't know. I was the one that was always in trouble it seemed to me. But I suppose it was because I was always doing things.' Always doing things and then - more importantly - always talking about them, sharing his dramas and disasters with whoever happened to be around. His habit of uninhibited confessional makes his life like a soap opera - you always want to know what happens next.

But once he became famous, he also became terribly lonely. He had left two wives behind in Bristol and fallen heavily for the property developer Zoe Meeson, but she left him after a couple of years, tired of his drinking, his depression, his constant grumbling. In the early Nineties, he seemed to go through a bimbo period - sometimes he would actually ring girls who wrote him fan letters, and ask them to come and stay. Then he met a very young Irish girl called Shaunagh Mullett and proposed within four hours. The marriage ended two years later when he accused her of forgetting his forty-ninth birthday and threw her and 50 diners out of his pub.

He had bought the pub, the Maltsters' Arms at Tuckenhay in Devon, and made a good start in 1989 when he hired Jean-Christophe Novelli (who has since launched - and lost control of - Maison Novelli in London) as his chef. Novelli recalls that he didn't really want to go to Devon, but Floyd won him round by interviewing him in his own Provençal argot, and showing his obvious passion for food. Novelli rates Floyd's cooking very highly: 'His humour used to change, you know, but his food was very consistent. He is such a compulsive, obsessive man. But because he is such a perfectionist, he would flip into anger - I saw him flipping and I was the only one who could control him. He may seem a bit of a spoiled child when he is pissed, but he is so funny, so generous, so loyal. He is a darling.' Nick Trant, his sous-chef, also remembers Floyd as 'a blooming lovely bloke' - when Trant married the pastry chef, Floyd gave them a lavish reception at the pub, and lent them his Bentley with a chauffeur to go on honeymoon. And he would let the kitchen brigade borrow his boats on the River Dart, and sometimes take them all up to London to eat at Bibendum. Novelli recalls that Floyd was different in London - 'In Devon he was king of the castle, but in London very reserved, very quiet. He is really shy you know.'

But when Novelli moved on to greater things, Floyd could never find another chef of his calibre - and he sacked so many staff he was known as the Butcher of Tuckenhay. Moreover, he grew to hate his customers - 'thick and snobbish and as stupid as you can get'. And he still hadn't discovered the secret of making a profit. Eventually the pub went into receivership and was sold in 1996. Floyd said afterwards: 'Thank God it's over - I was permanently frustrated and angry.' But luckily his love life improved at that point - he met Tess Smith, a food stylist, and married her in 1996 and moved to the Costa del Sol. The plan, he said then, was for him to work very hard for two years, 'and then, hopefully, we'll have enough money to pull the drawbridge up, have children, and lead the kind of quiet life that only lots of money can buy'. The children haven't happened yet, but Tess seems to have solved the problem of what he calls his 'spiritual loneliness' - they have only ever spent one night apart, when her parents were ill.

When was he happiest? Was it when he had his restaurants in Bristol, or before that when he lived on a yacht in Spain? 'Oh happy periods come and go, they're like occasional showers.' What was the worst period - was it Devon? 'No I had a lot of fun creating what I created in Devon. But I move on, I don't dwell on any kind of past.' Then suddenly Floyd turns stern. 'What I worry about here, Lynn, is that this interview was meant to be only about India and food and not about my personality. Didn't you get Stan's e-mails?'

Crikey, I did, or at least my editor did, but we thought it politer to ignore them. They were from his manager, Stan Green, and said things like: 'Keith has asked me to stress that the interview is stricktly [sic] about Floyd's Indian journey and Indian food, and not about anything personnel [sic] or his life style past or present, etc. Their [sic] is plenty to talk about regarding Keith's Indian journey. The problem is that every time a journalist gets near Keith we read the same old crap.'

'Has Stan Green been your manager long?' I ask Floyd. 'None of your business. And it's also agreed that every word you write is submitted to us for our approval before publication.' 'Oh no! No way! We never do that.' 'Excuse me. You had better at this point ring your editor because this has just been out of order.' I do, but he is out. Floyd tells me to try again in half an hour. 'I'm not going to say a word till you've spoken to your editor.'

And so we sit in silence, both chain-smoking, drinking red wine - anyone watching us would think we were such old friends we didn't need to talk. But his silence annoys me - if he won't let me ask him questions, he could at least ask me some, just to fill the time. But of course he's far too much of an egotist ever to show the slightest interest in anyone else. 'Can I ask one question: why are we in Wallingford?' 'No,' says Floyd, 'that's personal! That is exactly the sort of question you are not supposed to be asking!' Okay, I say, tell me some more about Indian food. 'No,' he sulks, 'they should have sent a food writer.'

The minutes tick away. 'I like your shoes,' I tell him. 'Are they posh?' 'No. And that's another thing you did to me once...' and suddenly I notice his voice rising, his face darkening, all the symptoms of the werewolf taking over . 'I remember EVERYTHING, everything. You came down to my restaurant with Mary Wesley and you said I gloated! I NEVER GLOAT.' What? Apparently once when I went to Tuckenhay he told me he was paid £4,000 for making a three-minute speech and I accused him of gloating. 'But of course you wouldn't remember,' he sniffs, 'you were very drunk that day.' Oo! This is war!

Then he starts blaming me for some rude remark A.A. Gill made about his wife and I realise we have entered the realm of 'you journalists are all the same'. I know exactly how the monologue will proceed from now on: he will recite every single wrong that has ever been done to him by a journalist, probably starting with his school magazine, and he will wind himself into a blacker and blacker fury whereby I represent all the wicked journalists in the world and probably all the wicked women too. And at this point I decide I can't face it, and say, 'that's enough. I'm going. Goodbye'.

When I turn to leave, I find his wife sitting quietly a few tables away. 'I'm sorry,' I tell her, 'the interview was a bit of a fiasco.' She doesn't seem at all surprised - and says very sweetly, 'I'm sorry you had to come to Wallingford. We've got family here, it was my idea'. Not at all, I tell her, wondering if she has overheard every word of our conversation or only the last bit. Anyway she seems thoroughly nice - perhaps there is hope for Floyd yet. But I think I am finally cured of my Floyd fascination.

Floyd Facts

Opened his first Floyd's Bistro in Bristol at the age of 22.

First appeared on TV in 1985 with Floyd on Fish. Did 20 bestselling books and 19 TV series.

Married his first wife, Jesmond, at the age of 24, in Bristol. Three years later they split. They have a son, Patrick aged 33.

Married his second wife, Julie Hatcher, mother of daughter Poppy, now 19, in 1983. Julie was 10 years his junior.

Married third wife, Shaunagh, in 1991, seven months after they met in a pub in Dartmouth. They divorced in 1994. No children.

Now lives in Spain on the Costa del Sol, where he moved with his current wife, food stylist Tess Smith a few years ago.

Ran the Maltsters Arms in Devon for a brief, but colourful, period. In this time, he threw out 50 customers from the bar at closing time (including his wife of the time) because she has not bought him a birthday present. The pub was repossessed in 1996.

He went bankrupt after personally guaranteeing a £36,000 drinks order while running Floyd's Inn Pub, in Devon.

At one of his book signings, his cousin was the only person to turn up.