These guys make belts, wallets and other lovely things using recycled New York Fire Department water hose.

It ticks so many boxes for me and they make it all in what is probably my favourite colour - red.

I have a pair of boots that are so hand made they’d cost you over £1000 but I managed to do a deal and get them free in return for making a film about how they were made.

It was mesmerising watching a master cobbler literally hand-twist the thread that sewed the leather upper onto the sole.

When Waitrose moved into Edenbridge, everything changed.

Suddenly we had a larder 500m from our house with some of the finest produce the world could offer. For years I used the free coffee to kick-start my day and sat watching the posher people from the surrounding countryside wander round stocking up.

I was lucky to meet a guy called Simon Niblett.

We worked together on a film for Lonely Planet in Vietnam. This guy had everything, or so it seemed - the looks, the passion, the courage and the kit. Every imaginable gadget a man desires - Ducatti, leatherman knife, waterproof walkman and a Billingham camera bag.

Over the next few years I began to buy pretty well all the things he had and my Billingham bag went with me on every filming project over the next 25 years - every imaginable bit of gear I needed was squirrelled away in some pocket or another.

I’ll never forget seeing an 18 year old black girl at a festival doing keepy-uppy for about 5 minutes.

I had to ask her where she got her trainers - ‘Gola Sambas’ she said - so I bought a pair and they lasted forever.

They were so indestructable I eventually used them to clamber around one of my timber construction projects. Not cheap but an enduring classic for sure.

We drove a classic old Jeep for years - a perfect rough and tough family car but it had a thirsty 4-litre engine.

At 17mpg and huge repair bills, the time came when it just had to go.

Enter the Skoda Kodiak - it was like floating on air and did 40 to the gallon! It was like being catapulted into the modern age in a single day.

Classic old cars are a great conversation piece but I’ll trade in a bit of romance for a car as utterly practical and fit for purpose as the Skoda.

I guess Apple has done what every brand on earth longs to do - become completely embedded into a family’s way of life both in work and pleasure.

All our edit machines, laptops and phones are Apple.

They look great, they work well and we are always tempted when the next version comes out.

So I guess we owe a huge debt of gratitude to Steve Jobs for his pioneering work of combining technology and beauty.

There is no doubt he has blessed our lives in immeasurable ways as all great companies should do. And when all is said and done, the items we bought mostly proved to be of great value for money.

I recently went into Paul Smith with Esther.

It was a nostalgic trip really, because I loved remembering all the times when I’d gone in there as a single man needing something spot-on to impress a girl or help me feel confident in an interview for a freelance job.

Most of the things I have bought from there have lasted amazingly well. I have a pair of brogues which are still going strong - I stopped counting after 30 years.

My greatest tragedy was losing a sheepskin hat which I owned for about a week during a cold winter. I left it on the floor in a pub and never saw it again. I would love to hear the story of that hat from the moment it became someone else’s.

I seem to like a lot of brands that other people malign.

Imagine starting a secondhand bookshop, mail-order, and ending up becoming one of the richest men in the world, creating an online market stall the size of which the world had never seen.

I cannot tell you how many things in our house I have been able to fix myself by ordering just a few small components from Amazon.

I am sure in time, they will get their workforce practices right. It cannot be easy dealing with the millions of products that they do every day.

Thanks Jeff

While everybody else used to slag off King Charles, for all his supposed weaknesses, I have always had a soft spot for the man.

One of the things I’ve always admired is the way he built the Duchy brand from scratch when organic vegetables were seen as a bit of a quirky thing to do. Duchy now lead the way in organic produce at the highest level and although we can’t really afford it, I do walk past and think well done you old bugger and now you are king – God’s reward for your patience and faithfulness to a cause.

Lidl isn’t a glamorous brand like many of the other ones on this list, but they really helped us as a family.

When it first arrived in Edenbridge, all the Waitrose shoppers turned their nose up at it but with the economic downturn, they are there in their droves.

We have eaten gallons of their Greek yoghurt and have Parmesan cheese on virtually everything and as for the nuts, oh blimey, I had almost given up eating them except for in pubs - now they’re part of my daily diet.

To me, Titleist has always been the Porsche of the golf world.

When I was younger, I dreamt of being a professional but I could not afford the golf balls - so I used to steal them. It was embarrassing, getting in touch with my childhood Golf Club as a middle-aged man and parent and admitting in a letter to the secretary to what I had done as a youngster. I enclosed a substantial cheque to cover what I felt was the value of the balls I’d stolen plus a bit for inflation.