The very first time she met her future husband, Melanie Ceysson did something remarkable. Astonishingly, Heston Blumenthal, the brilliant but 'eccentric' chef she would later marry, let her. Neither has forgotten the unusual intimacy of the moment.
'She took the glasses off my face and cleaned them,' Heston, 59, explains. 'They must have needed cleaning, but I hadn't noticed.'
Melanie, 38, has been helping him see the world more clearly ever since.
'Would I be here at all without her? I don't know,' says Heston, tears threatening to spill over at the thought of what would have happened had Melanie not been by his side, noticing things he did not. In sickness and in health, indeed. Last week, Heston's documentary about being diagnosed as bipolar at the age of 56 aired on the BBC. In the programme, he opened up about the manic behaviour and suicidal ideation that caused Melanie - then his wife of only eight months - to sound all the alarms in 2023, to flee the couple's outwardly idyllic house in Provence and have him sectioned. She watched the process from the sanctuary of her father's house, via security cameras.
And it was brutal. The chef, whose culinary brilliance had won him seven Michelin stars, was literally pinned to the floor by police and taken away by real-life men in white coats, one wielding a syringe, while his wife wept.
The signs that all was not well in his head - signs that had been there for some time; perhaps all his life - had been building to crisis point, culminating in incessant talk about his own funeral. It was the fact he was so excited about it that scared Melanie, she says.
Heston spent two weeks sedated in a psychiatric hospital and a further six weeks in a clinic before receiving the diagnosis that would allow him to start rebuilding his life with Melanie.
For a while neither knew how this love story would end. 'I thought he would hate me,' says Melanie today.
Heston Blumenthal, whose culinary brilliance had won him seven Michelin stars, was pinned to the floor by police and taken away by real-life men in white coats, one wielding a syringe
Heston shakes his head. 'Never. The sectioning was real love.'
And perhaps so was the aftermath, as Melanie helped Heston understand who he is, with his bipolar disorder now under a degree of control.
If the documentary - a raw, unfiltered account of a descent into horror - was a difficult watch, imagine how hard it must have been to film.
Heston - his speech slow and sometimes faltering as a result of the medication he is now on - admits he wept endlessly during the process. 'If they'd shown all the times I cried, I would have looked like a real victim,' he says. 'I kept asking the director: "Why am I crying?" '
He knows why, now. 'I cry when I think I've hurt the people I love and who love me. I never wanted to hurt my children in any shape or form. I never wanted to hurt Melanie.'
How different the Heston of today seems to the one who was such a danger to himself. The couple take turns to talk candidly about how Heston ('Gripped by something that wasn't you,' says Melanie) behaved, flying into a rage if she did something simple, like move a Post-it note.
They relive one night where Heston, who thought he was 'Superman or Jesus Christ - I thought I could save the world', talked incessantly and manically for at least four hours.
Melanie, used to these spates, tried to go to sleep. 'I kept talking,' remembers Heston. 'I was tapping Melanie on the shoulder, then I was up, pacing the room. Ideas were spilling out of me, ideas about how you could have a DJ station in the room, how you could use the mattress to turn the light on to go to the bathroom...'
'Brilliant ideas,' says Melanie. 'But too much. It was 3am.'
Then he got back on the bed with his wife. 'And I remember lifting her eyelid up, very delicately. I wanted to tell her one last idea. I can't even remember what it was now.'
Was Melanie scared? Not then, but she was later when the hallucinations started and Heston described the (non-existent) gun that was sitting in front of him on the table. 'You even drew a picture of it,' she says to him.
Some wives would have run from this situation at that point.
Towards the end of our interview, I ask if he feels lucky to still have her around. 'Hopefully, the word "still" will disappear and we will last a lifetime,' he says.
He knows this.
'It is one thing to say you love someone. It's another to say that you know they love you,' he says.
This wasn't a documentary about just romantic love, though. Heston has three children - Jack, Jessie and Joy - from his first marriage, and another daughter, Shea-Rose, from a subsequent relationship. They must have their own stories about what it is like to live with a father who has a mental health condition.
Jack, 32, was prepared to go public with his. In one of the most moving scenes in the documentary, Heston: My Life With Bipolar, he spoke about Heston the dad, rather than Heston the celebrated chef.
The awful truth is that Heston was a terrible father - remote, career-obsessed and self-obsessed. It was simply impossible for his children to have a normal conversation with him. 'We found it difficult as a family,' Jack explained, detailing how even going to see his father involved weeks of mental preparation. Conversation with him was pointless.
'It's nice to have... not a label but something we can refer back to - to say he wasn't just being a dk,' he concluded.
Today, Heston lifts his phone and reads a text he received from Jack after the BBC documentary aired. He takes those glasses off to wipe his eyes again. 'I'm assuming you are overwhelmed with responses from the doc,' Jack writes. 'You were f*g brilliant. I felt every emotion. Very proud. Give me a call when you are ready.'
Heston's relationships with his children seem far more complex than his relationship with Melanie, but he is determined to be honest about this, perhaps for the first time in his life.
'It took the documentary for me to have a proper conversation with Jack about it. When they were growing up, I was in the kitchen. And the way I was [more recently] didn’t give way to conversation.
'Jack couldn’t talk to me. I didn’t listen. I didn’t ask enough questions. I was too busy saving the world – asking: “Why are we here?” ’
It sounds as if there was no room in your life (or your head) for your family, to put it bluntly?
'No,' there wasn't,' which was selfish and sacrificing,' he replies.
How would he sum up his regrets? 'We all have regrets, but regrets can be changed into something positive. The good thing now is that my relationship with my son and my two daughters is better than it has been before. It has taken quite a while to get here.'
The awful thing about Heston's descent is that it may well have happened right in front of us all.
For much of his adult life, he was the mad professor of the culinary world; the acclaimed chef-turned-TV star whose wild ideas (who else would have thought to make snail porridge or try to send a potato into space?) made for gripping TV. The fact that no one could work out what was going on inside that brilliant brain only enhanced his standing.
How far back did the signs that all was not well go, though?
I interviewed him in 2009 when we chatted at length about how he was a complex unpredictable character.
He was well aware back then that there were issues. He told me that years previously there had been an incident where he had threatened some debt collectors with a gun and chased them down the street with a meat cleaver.
Not 'normal' behaviour by any stretch. Although no one was harmed ('Actually I made them a cup of tea after,' Heston said), it was an alarming episode.
He told me that his first wife Zanna (to whom he was married for 28 years) had spoken of his eyes 'changing' in that moment of rage where his family had been threatened. He had subsequently seen a cranial osteopath who had treated him for anger management issues. 'Perhaps it should have been a psychiatrist,' he said in that interview.
Sixteen years on having since been diagnosed with both ADHD and bipolar disorder does he feel that perhaps they were early indications of a more serious mental health issue? He simply doesn't know. 'I didn't think about it but quite possibly.'
Now the problem is it's almost impossible to unravel which parts of his life - and his creative genius - were actually down to his mental health conditions.
What he does know is that he feels fear now and the bipolar disorder shielded him from that.
'I think I felt fear as a child,' he says trying to work it out. 'And now I do. I have an anxiety when I'm travelling and when I am somewhere unfamiliar. I didn't feel fear at all before. I felt invincible.'
He always was a truly remarkable man. He has recently been assessed as having an IQ of 130 which puts him in the top 2.3 per cent of the population. Science was always an obsession too; back in that 2009 interview he tried to explain how he felt his desire to control the temperature of his food was linked to his attempts to keep his own temper under control.
Whatever it might have been down to; his experiments made him one of the top chefs in the industry. His restaurant The Fat Duck was voted the best in the world in 2005.
As he built his empire - further restaurants cooking shows and books followed - no one questioned his manic work ethic. He says former wife Zanna accepted that she would be the one to raise their children 'because I was always in the kitchen'.
That marriage broke down in 2011 but the couple did not divorce until 2017.
The following year Heston moved to France where he had another relationship with estate agent Stephanie Gouveia with whom he had his third daughter Shea-Rose. It was reported that the two had married in 2018 but whatever ceremony they had it was not legally binding. ‘I have only been married twice,’ he points out today.
By 2019 he was single again and clearly struggling with his mental health. He talks of vivid suicidal thoughts of planning his funeral working out how he would do it (he had no access to a gun couldn’t contemplate using rope and ‘wasn’t near any railway stations’ to throw himself under train). Melanie just nods.
Later when he was with her his excitement about the idea of suicide terrified her. ‘It was the thrill when he spoke of it,’ she recalls.
They met around Christmas 2021 on a skiing trip. Melanie didn’t know who he was but she was instantly attracted to this huge personality. And talent.
‘He has a brilliant mind so yes he was fizzing with all these ideas. I thought he was eccentric yes but so interesting.’ It seems highly significant that Melanie has more awareness than most about mental health issues; her father works in the sector. Yet still she admits she felt isolated and scared when in 2023 things became intolerable. ‘You feel powerless to help.’
It was the reason why they did the documentary. ‘There is still a stigma,’ says Melanie ‘and people are scared as soon as you mention mental illness. But it is no different than cancer. If Heston had been diagnosed with cancer I would not have tried to treat it myself. So I did the same.’
She did exactly the right thing.