This is a piece I’ve written for Woman & Home about the virtues of a lazy marriage. Frankly, I’m a bit lazy about most aspects of my life – I’m the sort of person who won’t bother changing channels if I can’t find the TV remote, but marriage is something that we’re constantly told we need to ‘work on’. Ben Affleck, for example, said in his Oscar acceptance speech: “I … Read the full entry

I used to work for Hello! Magazine almost twenty years ago when I lived in Madrid. To which everyone would say, don’t you mean you worked at ¡Hola! (quite a challenge typing one of those upside-down exclamation marks, I can tell you), but no, I worked for the English version but in Spain. They had a very strange system whereby the magazine was mostly written in London but edited and … Read the full entry

I wrote a piece for the Sunday Telegraph’s Stella magazine about the realities of being a weekend wife. Not that I am one, but I am lucky to have cooperative friends who are living the weekend wife life. Especial thanks goes to Natalia and Greg Willmott who not only gave me the idea for the book, but also posed for some photos for the article in and around their idyllic … Read the full entry

March is a wonderful time of rebirth and renewal, daffodils and delight. The 10th is also the date of publication of the trade paperback of The Weekend Wives. I’ve got various bits and pieces of press to do with it and the whole concept of the part-time marriage. According a recent report by estate agents Hamptons, families seeking to leave London are casting their nets further and further away from the capital, … Read the full entry

Whenever I write something a little bit outlandish and possibly technically impossible, life goes and proves me right all along. Bit of a spoiler here, but in The A-List Family, there is a house collapse caused by the hubristic creating of layers of underground excavating. When I wrote the book, there had been various cases of street sink holes and huge subsidence caused by such work in London. But nothing … Read the full entry

About few weeks ago I finished the draft of my new book and emailed it off to my agent and my editor. The process of sending your work for someone else to read has been likened to sending out your used underwear; it feels that exposing and intimate. Fortunately they both like it, which allays the mortification a bit. They both also promptly went off on holiday, which gives me a glorious hiatus when … Read the full entry

Today’s Daily Mail has a piece by me taken from a book called Things I Wish I’d Known: Women Tell the Truth about Motherhood, which is edited by Victoria Young and published by Icon Books. (Aside, it’s a really great compilation of essays and would make a great present for the thinking pregnant woman). The piece has a slightly more alarmist headline than I’d have chosen myself as I think the actual words … Read the full entry

Today’s Daily Mail has a piece that they commissioned me to write about clutter. I think I am one of their go-to people when it comes to marital disharmony and mess, which, although professionally rewarding, is domestically unnerving! Part of what The Pile of Stuff at the Bottom of the Stairs was about was the gap between how we want to live our lives based on some impossible image that we … Read the full entry

A few random thoughts and bits and pieces of news. Today I did my first ‘Google hangout’ for Telegraph Wonder Women. It was on the subject of paternity leave, something I haven’t had to think about for nigh on six years. My take was, broadly, that we should be thinking about what it’s for before we worry about how long it should be for. Then I guess we have to … Read the full entry

The property expert turned everything expert, Kirstie Allsop, has recently opined that it’s not worth girls going to university as they should just get really well paid jobs aged 18 and buy themselves some property in order to be in a good position to bag a boyfriend and birth a baby aged 27. By coincidence, the Sunday Times published a piece I wrote about whether, in these days of fees … Read the full entry