The colourful life of the TV chef Keith Floyd was celebrated by friends and family today at a humanist funeral.
The 65-year-old, who was diagnosed with bowel cancer in June, died at his partner's home in Dorset on 14 September after suffering a heart attack. He was said to have enjoyed a last meal of oysters and partridge, with champagne, before his death.
Guests gathered at Ashton Court Mansion, in Bristol, the city where he started his career in the restaurant business and was discovered by the BBC. The public memorial at the 15th-century grade I-listed mansion, set in 850 acres of woods and grassland, will be followed by a private family service at Canford Crematorium.
The order of service for the humanist ceremony included a reading of Rudyard Kipling's poem If and a song called Keith Floyd Blues performed by songwriter Bill Padley.
Floyd is to be cremated in a banana leaf coffin, which his partner Celia Martin said had been chosen partly because it was environmentally friendly but also as a humorous tribute to his love of cooking with leaves.
David Pritchard, the BBC TV producer who discovered Floyd 27 years ago in Bristol at the chef's first restaurant, Floyd's Bistro in Chandos Road, Bristol, was among those who arrived to pay their respects.
"I was having a lovely meal and there he was strutting around the place like an adjutant asking if people were enjoying their meal," he recalled.
"He sat down with me and started to drink some of my wine and asked me what I did for a living. I told him I was a TV producer and I thought he was brilliant and ought to be in TV himself.
"We had a true love-hate relationship. We didn't actually speak for some 16 years but we reconciled and I am so pleased we did.
"Before he came along, most cooking programmes were sensible but ... the thing people loved was his clear enjoyment of the cooking process. This is a sad day for me."
Floyd married four times, and leaves a son from his first marriage and a daughter from his second.