In 1988 director Mike Leigh welcomed me into his Wood Green home with an "I'll put the kettle on". Tea abounds in his dramas: there were 29 references to it in 1980's Grown-Ups. It's also a tool when developing characters with actors ("How would she brew?"). That night, Leigh prepared our teas with a shrug and smile, remarking on a cheque for 5p his wife (Alison Steadman) had received from the BBC.

Leigh arranged a small plate of bourbon, digestive and Nice biscuits. "I might ask an actor, 'Has your character ever eaten a Mr Kipling cake?' An obvious example of food informing a character is Keith Pratt in Nuts In May. Keith chewed everything 72 times."

When I met him his High Hopes was shortly to be released. A film about class, tea, birthday cake and Alzheimer's, High Hopes began, Leigh noted, "with a man's arrival in London, following – unseen - an argument with his mother about buying pork instead of steak and kidney pies".

"More tea?" asked Leigh. "Or an Irish whiskey?"

The sweetest story he told me was of how, during solo travels following his father's death, in midlife crisis mode and with hernia, he'd "sat on a toilet, in a cheap hotel in Singapore, reading a local English-language newspaper".

In it he chanced, astonished, upon news of an unofficial production of his play Goose-Pimples (originally set in London's Dollis Hill). "They didn't expect the author to appear out of thin air," chuckled Leigh. "But they invited me into rehearsals. They retitled the play Be My Sushi Tonight and performed in Chinese-Singapore patois. Afterwards we went for practically a banquet."