I have two main nightmares, apart of course from that boring old one we all have, the one with the zither and the hat-shop and the angry nose. One is that someone will one day come round to my house and do something at me.

Friends tried to donate sizeable sums, during last month's Children In Need mawkfest, to get Will Young round to sing in my house, a threat that only really hurt the charity, as I wasted all my spare cash dashing out and being surprised at how much it costs for a decently weighted baseball bat.

The other nightmare is being late: I have dreamt of being tearfully late for the annual World Lateness Awards. And so it was with a lame and labouring heart that I approached my front door one recent morning, panting from a race to the shops, to find Keith Floyd standing there and looking repeatedly, flamboyantly, at his watch.

'Go away.'

'I'm sorry?' he asked, with flamboyance.

'Go away. I mean ...could you sort of go for a bit? And then come back? In a bit?'

To be fair to him, he took it in good grace, and wandered off to Upper Street for a coffee, and half an hour later arrived again with a jokey bit of hamming about meeting for the first time, and a fleshly handshake.

To be fair to me, he was half an hour early. I wanted to shave, or rather to repeatedly cut my skin with tired metal while contorting my features into new grotesqueries of panicked self-loathing, and I wanted to finish tidying. Also, I had, for the first and only time in my life, been actually ordered to be disorganised. Sort of. The idea was that we find the least kitchen-friendly man in the office, give him a six-month makeover, and watch him transformed into a domestic god, or at least someone who no longer manages to burn cornflakes.

So Keith, kind Keith, was starting it off, flying across from his home in Spain, to cook me lunch in me own gaff, as I might say if I was Jamie Oliver and badly wanted a punch in the frote.

Keith was surprisingly sprightly. He had recently had a mild stroke, of which there was no sign. He was surprisingly quick, given that the cuttings suggest he no longer drinks, to turn down tea and coffee and accede instead to my tentative suggestion that we open a bottle of wine. At noon.

He was also strangely sanguine about the way the cards were falling these days, chatting enthusiastically about the sailing he does near Malaga then dropping in the frank fact that he no longer owns a boat because he can't afford it any more. Almost all of the money he made disappeared when his lifetime's dream of a successful restaurant, The Maltsters Arms in Devon, went the way of my own lifetime's attempts at cooking. 'It was haemorrhaging money at the end,' he says sadly.

The publishers still like him, and recently cajoled yet another book, on his fast and simple favourites, but in general he now lives a far quieter, and infinitely less glamorous life in rural Spain with third wife Tess; he insists, with passion, that he is for once profoundly happy, but it's still an unpredictable late development for the man who did more than most to pioneer the idea of watchable cookery programmes, one that has led to today's heaving glut, although he won't thank you for mentioning this role.

He is also surprisingly forgiving of the fact that I don't actually possess a table. It's typical, I suppose, of men like myself who are categorised, in socio-economic textbook terms, as 'rubbish'. We have gone out, in a well-intentioned burst of trying to cook, to buy groovy reverse-pike turbo-thrust titanium-plated parmesan shavers, but haven't actually invested in things such as wooden spoons or tables.

When I eat, it's on a little wooden revolving bookstand, which leads to grand teatime gambles, especially when teatime's at midnight. Will the curry sauce overflow to the left, over my lovely boxed Folio Society edition of The Age Of Scandal, or right, over the latest startlingly unreadable Dick Francis?

Similarly, when we try to cook, we will pick the most fiendishly complex recipe in the book, start browning the onions, nip out to the local ethnic-minority shop for the last ingredient, affect surprise when it turns out they're fine for milk and fags but strangely out of emulsified raccoon spleen, give up and grab a Chinese and come home to a grim fog of burning onions.

Keith nods, as he stands, Winston Light in hand, and starts opening cupboards in my kitchen. 'Simplicity is of course a key, when starting out. Nothing worse than those poor new wives stuck for four hours in the kitchen, floods of tears and three bottles of wine down, because they've tried to do lark's tongue soufflé. But the other one is planning. Now... I need some bowls.'

And this was the first lesson I was taught, and it's a big one; the planning. Four nice clean bowls were found, and a big tupperware thing for the scrubbings and peelings, and as Keith sliced and crushed, garlic and peppers and chorizo and morcilla, for what turned out to be a winningly warming Spanish mountain breakfast, he explained further. 'Always do the fiddly stuff before. Never try to do it all as you go along. Chop, or peel, everything that you can stick in a little bowl in the fridge overnight; when you come to cook you're simply assembling it.'

And after a quick fag break, assemble it he does, and there was nothing too complex or fiddly about the cooking methods. It looked fairly easy, and tasted grand, and I've since made it myself, and it tasted about the same. Even Keith seemed to enjoy his own cooking, and stayed to finish the wine, and thanked me for having found the right ingredients; the morcilla and chorizo had been bought two days before, at a fine little place on Exmouth Market called Brindisa. I had had, for once, to plan.

What else had I learned? Never to wear a bow tie, but I sort of knew that one anyway. To buy a bigger knife, as Keith had wanted a heavier one with which to crush the garlic. This is now done; the result is the kind of thing that would have led to a shaming backwards topple if Mel had tried to lift it in Braveheart, and can slice bricks with a bored sigh. But mainly, as I say, to plan, to think ahead and work ahead before you cook. It might seem to you the most ridiculously simple advice, but to me, in these foothills of learning, it has already proved more useful than various hints on chopping and blanching, which can come later. By which time I plan to have a table.

· Flash Floyd: Timeless Favourites from Around the World is published by Cassell Illustrated, £14.99. To order for the special price of £12.99 plus p&p call Observer Book Service on 0870 066 7989