When I was growing up in Scotland I did not appreciate my mother’s Caribbean cooking, I just took it for granted. Of course I did appreciate it after I left home, but at the time I used to say why do I have to have this food? Why can’t I have something like Spaghetti Bolognese? My mother had many many skills but one of the things God bless her she was not the greatest of teachers so I never really became a great cook because my mum was a bit critical.

Because of things that I’ve been going on I haven’t really had a chance to focus on the things that I like and I’m interested in. There are so many things that I am interested in. One of the things that I’m wanting to do is relearn the quadrille. You see I come from Scotland, and I am very proud of Scotland, I love the fact that they honour their traditions.

One of the things that they make sure that you do in primary school and high school is know how to dance. Traditional dances -so every person in Scotland grows up knowing how to do the gay Gordon, strip the willow and the dashing right sergeant ,and the lovely thing about those dances as they are communal dances so you could be an eight year old dancing with a 75-year-old and it’s a wonderful way of bringing communities together, they’re wonderful dancers because they’re lively and they get those endorphins going.

The thing is in the Caribbean we have dances that are similar to that because we are so linked. The dances contain some of our history, they are also a way of us finding our historical roots. So when you look up the Quadrille the Jamaican Quadrille because you have to realise the Quadrille exists in various formations.

So you have the standard quadrille where you meet and greet and do a figure of eight but the way that you interpret it depends on which region so it varies. So in the Jamaican one there are parts of the choreography that are straight from Irish sat dancing and that’s how you can see how powerful and strong the Irish culture is.

To talk about Jamaican culture, so for the people who don’t know Jamaica when they think about Jamaica they probably think it’s an island populated by people descended from African slaves and it is true that the majority of people that populated Jamaica were descended from slaves from west Africa ,but there were other influences as well.

The Irish population there is very strong and there are parallels when you actually listen to the vernacular of Jamaicans and Irish, it’s so close to the point where when I have spoken on the telephone people I thought I was Irish because there are things that Irish people will say that Jamaican people will say. For example "tree" instead of "three". I think they say that 25% of Jamaican people can claim Irish heritage. Then you had the Germans, you had the Chinese, you had the Indians. many of the Indians left they didn’t stay in Jamaica like they did in Trinidad and Guyana, but there was still enough that remained.

Then you had the Libyans for example lady Colin Campbell is from the Syrian Lebanese heritage. Then you have Jewish people. Jewish people in Jamaica are identified by their names which are often Spanish or Portuguese names so obviously you have Spanish and Portuguese influence too and it’s very interesting because this all manifests itself in Jamaican cuisine, so when you look at the food it’s fascinating because you have a whole Geography of influences. That’s what can be so sad because people don’t realise there is so much to celebrate. you have a wonderful blend and it’s not just in the food is in the music and it’s in the dancing.

The quadrille is a dance that to me it reminds me of the Scottish dancing, and the funny thing is I knew about the Quadrille but I didn’t realise it was a thing that was also owned by Jamaicans.

My grandmother spoke about the quadrille but I only discovered what it was and what it meant when I went to Columbia. Quadrille is a dance that can be danced as group. So in Jamaica and all the Caribbean islands they would celebrate it just like the Scottish celebrate through the ceilidh, so they celebrate it at a wedding or a party.

You'd ask your partner to dance or you'd to form a group of four and just have a quadrille, and what is interesting about the quadrille and why I’m passionate about it it’s not just a dance, they reinvented it. And it was revolutionary. What happened was that during the days of slavery anything that came from France was fashionable and desirable and sophisticated. So what the slave masters would do they would want to be up-to-date with what was going on, so they would invite slaves to make up the numbers and that’s how the slaves learn the dances.

so when the slaves learnt the dances they would take what they learnt go back to the barracks they would mock the masters .And they would put in their own version, so they would swing their hips instead of being so strict, so they were flouting it and that’s what makes it so unique. And so significant and so interesting.

I have a friend in London and she tried to create a festival of quadrille but it was very difficult to get Caribbean people to recognise it for what it was so they would go to salsa classes or a salsa festival or something that was their own they weren’t really ready to honour it or celebrate it or appreciate it or recognising the significance of it and that is one of the things that I have found amongst some black British people, many tried to become assimilated

A bit too much, to the extent that we are losing our traditions, it’s not just amongst British Caribbean I know that in French Caribbean community is the same thing is happening. The danger of that is that we are actually losing a lot of our traditions and heritage. So one of my passions is I really want to preserve what we have.

So we need to be more imaginative for example if we do at a Caribbean cookery class let’s speak about where things come from, what they signify, for eg some foods have a religious significance for example when we take the bread it is symbolic of Jesus Christ

are so many ways are so many ways you can present stories and knowledge. Think if there was a cookery lessons on Caribbean cuisine that would be fantastic and you could make it so interesting, you could bring in the history of slavery how they used to store rice in the hair how the Chinese but Bammy to Jamaica, and how the French patty and the Cornish patty came together. It would be so much more interesting than just doing an ordinary bread-and-butter pudding