“I’ve always been quite a confident driver” Fay told me. “The day after I passed my test, I decided to drive straight to Edinburgh. Which was a little bit of a feat for a 17-year-old. Being a noncy drama student, I was off to tread the boards at the Festival. I seem to remember it was The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui – a Brecht piece, and very, very important. But I didn’t have a car at the time, so I borrowed my brother-in-law’s – a rickety old Hillman Imp.”

“On the way, I opened the door without looking. Which, as it happened, was onto a speeding vehicle. Door schmor. My fault, clearly. But I decided the show must go on, door or no door, and abandoned the Hillman Imp by the roadside. I rang up my brother-in-law, crying. I said ‘By the way, there’s no door on your car’ like I was blaming him for allowing me to drive it. I made him pay for the repairs too. What kind of sister-in-law was I?”

“I had another accident in my first year of driving, but this time it was more serious. It involved me writing off my Mini. I was going round a roundabout, putting my lippy on. I remember looking in the rear-view mirror, and singing quite loudly, when a gentleman drove straight into my driver’s side door. It was his first day in his new company car, and his foot was evidently a bit heavy on the accelerator. The Mini disintegrated completely.”

“It was quite terrifying. My seat lifted right up, and shunted over to the passenger side. It was like I was actually sitting in the passenger seat. The verdict of the insurance company was ‘knock for knock’, which I suppose was fair. But I don’t think I mentioned the fact that I was putting on lipstick at the time. The accident must have made an impression on me. I did own a Citroen 2CV later on, but I certainly didn’t buy another Mini.”

Maybe I should have a back-up judge on stand-by?

The finalists will be coming from all over Britain to take part in the event, which takes place at Jimmy Doherty’s farm from September 9-11. “We’ve been inundated with entries this year” says Richard Johnson, the founder of the Awards and the author of Street Food Revolution, which is published next month. “A pitch at the Olympics is such an amazing prize, and it shows how far street food has come. We’ve had the Summer of Love – but this is the Summer of Street Food. Yeah baby!”

The general public will be able to taste the food of the 13 finalists, who will be cooking up restaurant-quality food at takeaway prices. And they will be able to vote for the Best Looking Mobiler. The traders will be competing in all the categories detailed on the British Street Food Awards website at www.britishstreetfood.co.uk, including Best Pie, Best Dessert, Best Cold Drink, Best Hot Drink, Best Main Dish, Best Sandwich and Best Snack. But the one they all want to win is Best Of The Best.

There will be a few familiar faces from last year’s Awards. The Fish Hut (with its own seagulls and sandpit) will be back to defend the Best Main Dish title it won for the perfect fish and chips – served out of a pretty little Southwould beach hut. So will The Laughing Stock, with its family recipe for salt beef. And Lulabelle, the deliciously pink VW camper van from Yorkshire, with its tea and cakes. But the competition from the new boys and girls will be tough.

Ginger’s Comfort Emporium from Manchester, for instance, is quite a looker. The lovely old ice cream van will win fans with its olive oil and smoked sea salt ice cream, and the team hope to continue the tradition started by Kitty Travers and La Grotta Ices, who won Best of the Best in last year’s Finals. Chilli Gone Barmy is a bit of a looker too, trading out of a vintage Citroen H Van. Brian, the chilli man, would certainly win the Award for Best Name. If there was one.

Jun Tanaka will be escaping his London restaurant kitchen for the weekend to serve up some high-end street food in Street Kitchen’s beautiful Airstream trailer. There is something about the trailer’s aluminum, rust-proof skin. Its clean, sleek lines lend it a look of the past – and the future. Its monocoque body shell is still turning heads, 75 years after it was first launched. President Kennedy used one as a mobile office. The Airstream comes with a pedigree. That’s why Jun chose it.

The Black Box team are less flashy. In black uniforms, and a black truck, they’re a fearsome sight. But their skills on the griddle are balletic. And the smells they give off are exquisite. They will be competing for attention with the fresh fish being smoked next door by Rich from Halls Dorset Smokery. There’s something primeval about the whole outdoor smoking thing. The judges (who include Richard Corrigan and Antony Worrall Thompson) will do the right thing – and try both.

In many ways, crepes are the perfect street food. And ordering from mobilers (especially ones as charming as Paul from Lemon Jelli) is much less awkward than having a waiter make crepes at your table. They can’t be made in advance for a large group of people. They must be created, one by one, and eaten immediately to retain their essential crepeness. Which means that the eating must be done in the same location as the cooking. And what better location than the food field at Jimmy’s?

It’s the same story over at Churros Bros, who will be competing in the Best Snack category. George and Rachel’s crisp fingers of batter, served with a pot of rich dark chocolate, have to be enjoyed straight away. Leave them standing around for a few minutes and they will be chewier than old shoe leather. It’s hypothetical of course – no-one has ever left a pot of churros from Churros Bros around for a few minutes to find out.

Pizza is another classic street food. Although street pizza is very different from the pizzeria pizza. Unlike the 12” rounds you find in a restaurant, “pizza a taglio” is generally made on large square trays, and sold by the rectangle. It’s easy to hold, and leaves you one hand free to steer your Vespa. Jalopy cook their pizzas in an authentic Ephrem wood fired oven, and taste as good as anything you’ll eat in the South of France.

Angus Dunoon will be trundling up to Jimmy’s with his theatrical Kolkata Street Food Experience. His jhal muri – the snack that you find on every street corner of Kolkata – is the stuff of legend. It’s the snack you can eat between meals, with drinks, or with family. “Or slowly slowly, with your love,” says Angus, “because everybody love love the jhal muri. I don’t mind about winning the Street Food Awards – I just want people to love my jhal muri.”

But he’s been dead 20 years. And you can wish your life away with all that mourning, can’t you? So, eating Richard Corrigan’s pigeon in puff pastry, with savoy cabbage and madeira gravy was my way of saying goodbye. And what a way to do it. The tender pigeon evidently had not been fed on my Gramp’s formula. I love Corrigan’s food. Always have – always will. So to get to taste his food every day on Cookery School (currently screening Monday to Friday, 2.05pm on Channel 4) was a joy. And now he’s going to be one of the judges for the 2011 British Street Food Awards……

Today we were filming something on street food for the Good Food Channel’s Market Kitchen Big Adventure. Richard wanted to know all about the Awards, so I took him to Exmouth Market – with wonderful offerings from Spinach And Agushi and Moro. He loved it. Ironic really. He’s a Michelin starred chef, but a believer in real simplicity. He knows that, if you have a superior product, you do as little as possible to it. He went away talking about doing street food outside Bentley’s, his amazing oyster bar and grill on London’s Swallow Street. Watch this space.

White was in Manhattan promoting The Devil In The Kitchen – the American edition of his autobiography. His publicists at Bloomsbury were selling him as the original rock-star chef. The one who made Gordon Ramsay cry – who would string up his kitchen juniors by their aprons before dumping them in the dustbin. He was off to do a live cooking demo on The Martha Stewart Show. If he could keep his breakfast down long enough.

Last night it went wrong. It went wrong when White suggested ‘the house cocktail’. The heat of the shot glass threw one member of the drinking party into a blind panic, and she smashed her hand down onto the table. There was flaming sambuca everywhere. White got burnt, and had to ram his hand into a bucket of ice water, and bandage it up in a table napkin, before somebody – nobody quite remembers who – rolled him into a cab.

But somehow he still managed to look handsome – despite a grey demeanour and a tangle of greasy hair. He hadn’t spent any time at the mirror, but it wouldn’t have hurt – The Martha Stewart Show is, after all, the American standard for gracious domestic living. White’s turbot with citrus and cilantro was due to sit alongside a leaf-covered candleholder how-to, and a tip on using old navigational charts as gift wrap. It was the start of one hell of an adventure……

Marco (alongside the equally brilliant and magnificent Mark Hix, Antony Worrall Thompson and Thomasina Miers) will be judging the British Street Food Awards. And by the look of this Marco Pierre White LIDO feature in the Sunday Times magazine, he’s quite excited about it……

“You’re on holiday, you’re feeling peckish, what do you do? You don’t really want the expense of a full blown meal, so you think to yourself ‘Do I trust the street vendors?’  The answer in many cases must be no.

My general rule of thumb is, if you’re in a western country (USA, UK, Germany, Australia), don’t touch them with a bargepole — unless, of course, you are into greasy nondescript burgers with boiled onions or boiled frankfurters with tasteless cotton wool bread.   Let’s face it — we don’t do street food well. Except, of course, the great bacon buttie. As long as good quality bacon is used.

Take the sub-continent, the Far East or other Asian Countries and even North Africa and we’re talking a very different story, I love this sort of street food.   In the hawkers’ markets of Singapore I’ve experienced some of the most delicious stuffed flatbreads and piping hot bowls of steaming noodles with chicken and prawns, cooked to order in large woks.

Then in Indonesia you can’t afford to miss the different sate with a variety of sauces including the traditional peanut.   There are times when you yearn a steaming spicy vegetable stir-fry enriched with sambal oelek, soy sauce and honey or some fab seafood encased in a fritter with a spicy chilli sauce.

And in China you can’t go wrong with their vegetable or chicken spring rolls. So cheap to make, but so delicious to eat.  I’ve even eaten saffron ice cream from an Indian street vendor, how brave was that? But it was delicious, and I’m still here to tell the tale. Street food done well has to be one of the nicest forms of instant fodder, but be selective — go where the crowds go; it’s definitely the best endorsement.

Antony dealing with the excitement at the launch — and Whitecross Street Market in London is busy at the best of times…….I love Antony. He set off early to get to the Street Food launch, but got caught in heavy traffic down Shaftesbury Avenue. Anyone else would have turned round and gone home. Not Antony. A thoroughly nice man, with high principles. And a decent Sat Nav.