Never have I felt more personally trolled by a sales email. The subject line said, ‘Joanne’s ultimate cleaning journal!’

My god, it was even using my full name. I felt instantly hurtled back to the 80s when everyone still called me that. Especially my mum, who would wake me up lovingly at the crack on a Saturday by throwing a bucket and Marigolds at me and remind me that, ‘Joanne, it’s your job to clean the bathroom.’ What a joy that was in a household of six.

(Side note: ‘Joanne’ is a great one to name your kid if you wish to spend a lifetime nagging her. Especially in an Aussie accent, the ‘annnnnnne’ really drags satisfactorily for the parent you’re currently disappointing.)

So I must admit I was intrigued-slashed-unnerved. Was this an email addressed to me, by some marketing bot that just knows I need personal, targeted shaming into locating the broom? Had my name been sold by some dodgy database? Which, when you consider it’s really only the NHS and HMRC that still address me as ‘Joanne’, well.. then all kinds of sinister lines of enquiry were playing out in my feverish mind.

Of course, it was not directly shouting at me. There’s apparently a company called ‘Joanne’s Journals’ and they were simply keen to bring the attention of a real life Joanne to their Ultimate Cleaning Journal. For £29.99 the dream can be your reality.

And what an eye opener it was for a self-confessed sloven such as moi. Quite the trad wife-gasm if you’re into that sort of thing. Just look at the beautiful cover in its soothing, baby-ish pink. Immediately I felt that I had no right to own such a pretty product, because I don’t own a gingham apron and my farts don’t smell like little puffs of Glade Plug-In (tropical blossom scent).

Those glaring flaws aside, God knows I do try to keep my house in some order. I suppose I just had no idea how serious this is for some people. I knew about Mrs Hinch, of course, but I genuinely thought that was just her who cleaned 24/7.

Who is giving themselves a little tick box every time they wash a dish? How much time could you spend doing more cleaning if you weren’t writing in a diary about all the things you just cleaned? Isn’t the mental load of housework - anticipating who’s about to run out of pants unless you do a wash, remembering the sausages in the fridge are on the turn, forgetting yet again to buy more bloody dishwasher salt - made even more onerous by keeping up with filling in boxes in a judgey little journal?

You’ve probably clocked by now that I am not one of life’s list makers. But I can appreciate that many people get satisfaction and peace from slashing a red pen through one task after another. So yeah, fair enough, maybe a lot of people, non-Joannes included, would enjoy their Ultimate Cleaning Journal and the sense of achievement it instills. But to the big list fans amongst you: Do you actually need a list to remind you to ‘wipe counters’? I’m no Martha Stewart but even I can’t go more than about four hours without noticing when that needs doing.

Sorry, but I have more questions. For one: Surely this methodical and slavish Ultimate Brainwashing Bollocks approach to housekeeping is something of an oxymoronic luxury? Because if you are the kind of person who has all this time to devote to working through these hours-long lists of tasks, why would you actively choose to spend it doing this? How did we get to a place where housework - the thing that virtually imprisoned our mothers in the 60s and 70s - got repackaged and served up to us as a hobby? Calming and joyful and mindful, is it? Get in the sea, Joaaaaaaaannnnnne. If you need to do it, it ain’t no hobby. And… if you do really really love cleaning quite this much, then no shade here. But it seems to me the people who would be the prime target market for this - people who really do treat cleaning as a hobby - would never need a little book to nag them to make the bed?

To have this much time to dedicate to a daily checklist that runs the gamut from cleaning your front door to giving rooms an ‘afternoon touch-up’ (eh?!) you pretty much need to be someone with literally nothing else to do. Not out there earning money, not running around on school pick-ups and drop-offs, or walking the dog or nipping out to drive your mum to the GP. Even writing this nonsense here takes me hours, believe it not. (Some would argue that I should spend the time cleaning the front door instead, I know.)

Is it a symptom of the trad wife movement? It does make me laugh watching so many of them beam beatifically whilst hovering over a sink. Because from what I can gather, most of the big names in that space are super rich women running very lucrative businesses on the back of this wheeze. There is no way they are actually spending ten hours a day polishing skirting boards, or churning their own damn butter.

Here’s a fun experiment for you. Imagine, just for a minute or two, buying Joanne’s Ultimate Cleaning Journal and wrapping it lovingly and presenting it as a gift to a man in your life. Go on, really visualise watching as any one of them - husband, boyfriend, brother, dad, gay best mate, some guy in the office - unwraps this charming gift. You just know the expressions on their faces would be a mix of bewilderment, indignation, or maybe coughing up a lung laughing. And that alone speaks volumes about how far we’ve come, and how businesses still see that housework is a thing to market to women and women only.

I tried to find the equivalent cleaning diaries aimed at men. Have a guess how that went. They get things that look like what would happen if we asked AI to shove a jockstrap, some podcasting bros and a can of Lynx in a blender - no prissy pink cleaning journals for the ‘stronger’ sex, oh no.

This, ‘The Successful Man’ is no mere planner or diary, friends. It’s a ‘transformation system’! Look how masculine and well ‘ard it is! (Actually, if I was a guy I think I’d be pretty aghast to be given this too.)

The closest thing I found to a cleaning journal for men was this one on Etsy. You can tell it’s a cool one for the guys because it’s sweary and it too is all tough and black and there’s even a lion on it for… some reason. Did he come in and take a dump on your kitchen tiles? Hoover the hallway or he will eat you? Fuck me, indeed.

This whole issue is a strong enough point of gendered judgement - still - that I feel compelled, after railing against this Stepford Wife BS, to assure you that I do do housework.

I prioritise:

Cooking - because what to eat next is really my only concern.

Laundry - because I love clothes and I like looking after them. And folding is when I listen to podcasts.

Kitchen cleaning - I can’t say I love it, but who wants grossness where the food is?

Bathroom cleaning - I hate it, but who wants grossness where the pooing gets done?

Sheet changing - it can take hours to psyche up to it, but clean sheets day is thrilling.

Everything else gets done when I notice it. Like you, I have stuff to get done, places to be and sometimes I like to do stuff beyond boring necessary shit. Last week I took myself to the cinema to watch three hours of The Odyssey when yes, I know, I could have shampooed at least two rugs in that time.

If you love cleaning, I am happy for you. I can get the occasional buzz from sorting out a cupboard. But I’ll never be one of Joanne’s bestest little soldiers on this front. Then again, damn her - I have now noticed that the front door really could use a wipe.

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Once, on an anniversary card for Ross, I simply wrote, ‘I don’t know how you stand it.’
It’s true, friends: I am not a perfect wife. I know, as insanely unbelievable as that sounds, I’m a pretty irritating one. I’ve done a list of questions I ask him, on repeat, that might give you an insight into what he has been putting up with for now 26+ years of marriage and have you asking the very same thing I did in that card.

‘What do you think birds think cars are?’

I asked this once when I was driving and he was next to me and a couple of pigeons got out the car’s way sharpish. I can’t help it, I’m always looking at other species and wondering what the hell they think this world is. There used to be this crazy old 1960s TV show called Land of the Giants. (We got more American TV in Australia than you Brits did.) It was about a group of tiny humans who were, for some reason I’ve forgotten and can’t be bothered to research, were living as microscopic people in, yes, a land of giant people.

But… that’s actual reality on our planet for things like ants and spiders. They live in a LAND OF GIANTS. The fuck is that like? It’s fascinating. Do birds think cars are some kind of speedy, noisy, metal animal? Ross’s response was a deadpan and withering, ‘Great question, Jo.’

I can’t be the only one who wonders this….

‘Can we go home now?’

Here’s the thing. I really like drinking wine when we go out but it doesn’t take much of it at all to make me feel pretty tired, pretty quickly. My first sip of my third glass of wine is the tipping point that takes me from leading the proverbial conga line to being slumped sideways under the coat pile. I wanted to pass out and sleep about four minutes after this party pic, below, was taken. And it was a big fancy celebrity party and everything….

Ross can live on the Margaret Thatcher sleep regimen, even when downing litres of Sauvignon. When I’m struggling to keep my eyes open gone 10.30 - with or without alcohol to be honest - and whispering, ‘Shall we get an Uber soon?’, he looks at me, pained and says, ‘We’ve only just got here!’ In our elderly years, we have stopped bickering about it and each just leave the party when we want.

‘Why do you love me?’

I mean, look at this list. I really am in a pain in the arse. And I’m not that hot. So sometimes the needy side of me will fight its way past my pride and seek some validation. I’m only human. But on the odd occasion I ask, ‘Why on earth do you love me?’ I usually get, ‘Because you’re funny.’ But he doesn’t mean that he’s walking around with his personal version of Joan Rivers, making his sides ache with one liners every time she opens her mouth, oh no. He means I’m unintentionally funny - like the time an entire beach watched me capsize in a kayak in Cornwall on the shoreline, before I’d even paddled once. Or when we sat down to watch the Marvel Avengers film and half way through I asked him, in all sincerity, when Purdy and Steed would pop up. He tells everyone that.

‘How can I be a better wife?’

I can understand why this would raise a red flag for husbands the world over, because it feels like a therapy-fuelled trap: No man trusts an open invitation from his lady love to give unfiltered ‘feedback’. But I’d just come back from an excruciating management conference at Condé Nast and they’d overpaid some coaching ‘guru’ to talk to us all and this was his idea: Go home and let your spouses tell you how you can be a better partner. I was intrigued. It had probably been years (never) since I’d considered asking for anything like a performance review, so perhaps it was time.

While he was visibly irritated to be hit with a landmine of an inquiry at 8.17pm on a Wednesday night, I actually think this is a kind question and quite a brave one. Who knows what piece of unwelcome critique I was opening myself up to? I was braced for something like, ‘You could put out more’ which frankly, would be fair. What I got was, ‘You could stop leaving your used teabags in the sink.’ For the record, I leave them there because the next thing I do after taking out the tea bag is open the milk so I don’t want germy bin hands before I touch the milk, so it’s a whole thing and it’s more hygienic and this is my story and I’m sticking to it. In other news, here’s my sink currently so that’s how that’s going.

‘What should I give Bella for dinner?’

He’s better and more patient with feeding our ancient little dog the vet-prescribed food that she hates. When I ask this, it’s me asking permission to give her the treat of the food she actually likes rather than spend an hour trying to make her eat what she hates. But look at that face: Obviously I just want her to like me the most.

‘What shall we have for dinner?’

Honestly, I don’t get people who aren’t excited for what they’re going to put in their mouths next. I go to bed excited for breakfast. By 11am I’m planning lunch. In fact, one thing I miss about working in an office is that I usually worked with other like-minded souls. They might have been less than enthused about another day at work, sure. But then they remembered that today is the day they planned to have a cheesy jacket potato for lunch and suddenly there’s the rediscovery of a reason to live. I have written about how I don’t snack anymore so I really do love my three meals and love planning them. How can Ross not already be excited about what to have for dinner at 10 in the morning? How am I the weirdo in this one? Also, look what happens when Ross does get excited about cooking, so you can see my motivation.

‘Where are my keys?’

This is not my fault, they regularly transport themselves to portals of pure mystery.

‘Why did you have an affair in my dream?’

My god, this is a recurring dream of mine where not only is he cheating on me, but he is so callous about it. He’s all, ‘Of course I’m having an affair, you’re so boring’ and other such meanness. The last time was a few weeks ago and he’d left the house before I remembered and then I texted:

I mean… where did I come up with Meadow?? Why was she a sports writer for The Guardian? I never ever think about The Guardian when I’m awake. He’s right, I’m nuts.

‘Can you print this for me?’

I don’t work in an office anymore and I have a lot of freelance and Vinted-related admin.

‘Do you think the noise under the bed is a ghost mouse?’

I have some vacuum sealed bags under the bed and one night there was definite sounds of them being pressed down upon by… something. Little noisy steps. A few nights later, the cord on my bedside lamp started jiggling - violently - on its own. We have never ever found any evidence of what was under the bed. No droppings, no creature. Nothing. But I heard it and I saw that cord move. So ‘ghost mouse’ is clearly the only explanation and yet he still takes the piss.

‘The dishwasher is making a weird noise, what should I do?’

This is representative of our dynamic now that I work from home so much more. The downside of working from home: I do quite miss the days of being out of the house for sometimes 14 hour stretches - because that leaves much less time to notice weird noises and cracks. But the upside: It does give me lots of new shit to talk to Ross about on phone and email. Lots.

‘How does the heating work?’

Once, I (half) jokingly asked him to make sure that before he dies, he goes round the house putting post-it notes on things like the boiler, and the heating controls with written instructions on how they all work. I asked him to slap our Sky PIN number on the side of the telly. He refused. Honestly I just have zero patience for reading instruction manuals and understanding such things. That’s one of his real strengths and probably as good an insight as any into the balanced yin and yang of us. And on this issue alone I’m not sure how he has put up with me for so long.

‘Do you like my outfit?’

He knows this question comes stepped in agenda. These days, he normally responds with, ‘I’m not giving you a quip for your bloody hashtag.’ But I know he’s not keen on the shorts - capris? - above.

Got any mad questions of your own? Leave them below!

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Back in 2019, when the head of Daily Mail videos asked me to host a talk show all about the Royal Family, the first thing I said was, ‘But I give no fucks about the Royal Family.’

‘That’s exactly why you’d be good,’ he said.

At the time, I really didn’t understand the obsession. But now, as a journalist who accidentally veered into royal reporting - I hosted Palace Confidential for years before pivoting to The Royals Uncensored this year - I’m invested. You’ll never see me tearfully waving a Union Jack on the Mall. But I’m fascinated by the blend of celebrity, diplomacy, power and mystique

The King at The White House earlier this year showed us how effective the deployment of The Firm’s so-called ‘soft power’ can be. What other country can wheel out a family who can smooth over political ickiness, just by turning up? The Royal Family’s global fame, and the admiration they inspire really does influence so much about what the ‘British’ even is in British culture.

So yeah, I’ve come to really respect it. And I’ve gone from being non-plussed about the whole thing, to finding myself in conversations saying things like, ‘No no, that’s not true, what’s really happening with Harry’s security appeal is….’. And while words are coming out of my mouth I’m having a sort of out of body experience, watching myself and thinking ‘who even is this version of you?’

I’m also taken aback to be someone whose friends now phone me when they want to know what’s going on with the royals.

But what really shocks me on the regular is, what I will politely call the more ‘passionate’ devotees of the royal family. By which I mean… unhinged. Oh the vitriol that gets flung about online! Just the other day, someone turned up on my Instagram page to accuse me of

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I know. I know. I have been a little SubSLACK and I really am sorry. I can’t lie, I’ve been having a blast with hefty amounts of work and play.

Firstly I need everyone to know about a couple of glorious full circle moments that happened. Most people who know me are aware of my mid-life morph into a KPop fan. No one is more taken aback by this than me, but we are where we are. First up, I was lucky enough to score tickets to the BST Hyde Park gig a couple of weeks ago. I wanted to go because the incredible Taemin was performing.

While it’s well known that I am a rabid BTS fan, fewer people know that my head was first swivelled to KPop - with whiplashed violence - by this guy. I still think this song is the best thing that KPop has ever produced.

He is a better dancer than Michael Jackson ever was. Yeah that’s what I said. And obviously not even slightly as problematic.

Well…after his brilliant set I GOT TO MEET HIM.

My friend David runs Kpop artist liaison for a big PR firm and, knowing how much I adore Taemin, he invited me back stage for a little meet and greet. I could not believe it. It was fast, we only exchanged a few words. I think he understood me when I said, ‘You are the reason I got into KPop,’ because he smiled and nodded a lot . But when I said, ‘You are a better dancer than Michael Jackson ever was,’ he seemed to be losing for his interpreter, a bit panic-stricken. But then he was whisked from my stalker clutches to go and meet Flo and film something cute for Tik Tok.

But who cares because now I have the evidence that I MET THE ACTUAL TAEMIN, a proper god of Kpop. If you are so moved by my fangirling, the essential Taemin playlist includes Criminal, Move, Want, Guilty, Sexy in the Air and Idea. And he is also a member of the powerhouse group, SHINee.

And the KPop joy kept coming because…. finally: We got the BTS comeback when the group landed for their London shows. As I’ve written recently in You magazine, becoming part of the BTS fandom - ARMY - has brought some very close friends into my life and we all got to go together last week.

We sang, we danced, we screamed. A lot. I was not the oldest person there, as many of my friends who take the piss had predicted. There were many guys there, too, but like this adorable soul, they knew their place.

I went both nights and I’d have done more if they’d done more. They are so talented, so good looking and they model a delightful brand of masculinity that I wish we could extract from their veins and make into some kind of injectable serum for all men.

Here’s that list I promised of good shit I’ve bought and one piece of unbelieveable shit. Some affiliate links incoming, I hope that’s OK.

My BTS Arirang T-shirt

Is £65 too much for a T shirt? Certainly. Do I wish I’d bought this and maybe two more? Abso-bloody-lutely. I love the… ‘unobviousness’ of the image. I know it’s RM, my bias, as will all BTS fans, but it’s also just a cool pic. I think it was photographed by Alexi Lubomirski. Yeah I think I might need all seven.

This Alemais dress

I do try to be very strict with myself when it comes to Vinted and only use it to sell, not buy. (You can find my page at bellaluna38). But my god, this dress practically threw itself at me. It’s Alemais. A favourite brand. An Aussie brand. And it was £200 (once I’d haggled a bit) when it would easily be at least double that retail. I am exceptionally pleased with it and it got lots of compliments on its debut outing, when I hosted Jo Malone CBE at Soho House to talk to her about her new(ish) Jo Vodka brand, below.

Diptyque fragrance

On a 35 degree day in London, when I’d arrived at Soho House to interview Jo Malone via the vileness of a packed, un-airconditioned tube carriage, I was cringing as Jo, the fragrance genius of our age, pulled my sweaty carcass in for a hug.

‘Ooh you smell nice!’ she said. We must thank Diptyque for this utter miracle. It’s not the first time my scent of choice, Eau Capitale, has elicited compliments but I’ve never been more grateful for a product to do its one job. In all my years of being a magazine editor, I was a very spoiled cow on the fragrance front - many bottles would arrive for me, most weeks. Now that I’m paying, I’m very faithful to Diptyque.

Train ticket to Tunbridge Wells

After a false start when the heatwave buckled the tracks and all the trains got cancelled, I finally got to go and visit a friend who’s having a traumatic time. She is still having a crap time and there are many tough days to come. Texting’s all very well, but the chance to sit with my friend and listen - even to the silences - are worth it. I hate that I can’t do much at all, but being there really did strengthen the bond for both of us. I think, anyway. Probably the best £21 I have spent in some time. If someone’s been in your thoughts and on your mind, for whatever reason, try and go and see them. You’ll be both be so glad you did.

Melissa Odabash lounge set

Before we did an episode of Friday Night Fashion in her beautiful Chelsea store, I’m embarrassed to admit I had no idea how much more than swimwear Melissa Odabash does. And I was powerless to resist this sparkly PJ set. First chance I get I’m wearing it to a fancy dinner. It’s loose and lightweight but still dressy. It comes in a pretty pale blue too.

The Suri toothbrush

This toothbrush is brilliant. The charge lasts for weeks. As do the plant-based, fully recyclable brush heads. They last about three months and you can send them back and they use them to make lightweight soap dishes. Plus, most importantly, a brilliant thorough clean with a built-in timer. Would highly recommend.

This Uniqlo dress

It is a great, easy summer dress and then, as it is the colour of BTS’s comeback - thanks to the red and white of their Arirang album cover, it was the perfect thing to wear to night two at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium. Paired with my red and white Adidas sneakerinas, I was ready for the sweltering conditions in the stands and the long walks to and from the tube station.

But this is shit

Yes. I am one of the human victims behind this headline:

It was an ad on YouTube - and I love YouTube. I appear on it every week, so it must be wall to wall reputable, right? And this technology that ‘cools any room in 90 seconds’ was developed at Nasa!

Did the thing (pictured at the top of this piece) look pathetically small and like it had maybe just snapped off the bottom of a fridge? Was £60 a suspiciously small sum to pay for such groundbreaking comfort? Yes and yes again. But… guys… Nasa. They invented space for crissakes. Clickety click click click, and here’s my debit card number, you science geniuses. In the three weeks it took to arrive I assumed I had been scammed out of £60 for no reason, but then, last Tuesday, I discovered that I had been scammed out of £60 for a piece of landfill crap that serves no purpose. I’ve been cooler from letting the dog pant on me. Ross has not stopped laughing and sending me the above article on repeat.

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I did something last week that I vowed I would never do. For once, I decided to override my lifelong FOF: that’s Fear of Festivals

Mine is the usual list of cliched aversions: the ever-present threat of being trapped in a grotty bog, a la Glasto 1997; asphyxiating in an overflowing chemical toilet cubicle; no showers for days; people. So many people. I can’t. Never been thrilled by the idea of any of it. My friend, Emma B, asked me to swing by her Virgin Radio daytime show to discuss ‘festival fashion’ and she couldn’t stop laughing about the fact that a few days later I would actually be going to The Isle of Wight Festival. ‘You?!’ she kept saying. Very ‘off brand’ for me, we agreed.

But I’d drunkenly accepted a kind invitation some months earlier. I was at a drinks party thrown by my friend and PR legend, Alan Edwards. He’d just visited the island and was all spiritually energised by the place. He’d fallen in love with it and wanted a motley crew of journalists to do the same.

So he invited us to be his guests at the Isle of Wight Festival where The Cure would be headlining. The actual bloody Cure! All that kohl-drenched emo despair brought me so much joy as an 80s teen. And the chance to correct a great injustice of my youth - in never getting to see them live - inspired me to attempt to conquer the FOF. Well, once I had written confirmation that I’d be staying in a nice hotel.

But then the itinerary arrived, and I had a bit of a wobble. Let’s just say, it was not designed around the Elvin stamina and its woeful limitations. Exhibit A:

We had to leave home at around 7.30 on Saturday morning, and we’d be powering through to 1am, after a set by The Sex Pistols. Then straight back to the Festival in the morning to enjoy a lot of acts I’m really not bothered about - David Gray, The Kooks, Rita Ora - until The Cure go on at 8.30pm. Straight after, leg it to catch a midnight ferry to the mainland, followed by a car to Waterloo station, from whence to find your own way home at around 3am on Monday morning.

Even some of my most enthusiastic festival going friends were going green when I showed them this schedule. I started to think I should figure out a plausible excuse and cancel.

But… The Cure. I decided to tell myself to shut up and buckle up. Sleep when you’re dead etc etc

And guess what? I did it! With stamina and good cheer. All of my friends have seen me start tugging at my husband’s sleeve to go home about 10pm. Everyone should be shocked and impressed with how well I did.

A few things definitely helped: One, not drinking wine. The one paper cup full I was handed tasted like it might actually be rat’s piss. So I opted for margaritas and pace myself - one an hour, at most. And this is how I learned that other drinks don’t make you anywhere near as tired, as quickly, as wine.

Two, I doubt I’d have been as good humoured without a real bed to lie in after a real shower and the comforting proximity of my own clean toilet. It’s best for all concerned if I’m never invited camping.

Three, we did not stay up to watch The Sex Pistols on the first night. We went to bed at midnight. Good move.

And four, it has to be said that, key to having the best time was that our fellow festival goers were a delight.

Some I knew very well - like Ross, he’s my husband. I’ve also known Alan, our weekend leader, for more than 20 years and he and his partner Chandrima are always fun. I have known The Times writer Will Hodgkinson, for more than 20 years, through mutual friends, but until last weekend, I’d probably spoken to him 10 minutes tops in all that time. He is a well known name and face to music fans of a certain demographic and Ross and I enjoyed watching him being stopped, at least 10 times, by greying rock fans keen to nerd out with him about some unheard of hippy band or another.

I love these kinds of excursions where, unlike a party or a dinner, you don’t feel the same kind of urgency around making conversation sparkling. You know you have hours and hours to fill with the same people so the rhythm is different. It’s a casual mix of random, in the moment observations, brand new-in jokes, bursts of animated anecdotes that blend easily with comfortable silences. You get to know people in a totally different way. And then just when you least expect it, one of them blurts out incredible gossip about their friends who live next door to Harry and Meghan in California. (You’ll have to watch my royal show for more on that).

Just for a little while, I stopped watching the clock. I stopped fretting about how I would feel the next day on so little sleep. I even found myself enjoying one or two songs from The Kooks which I couldn’t have imagined just 24 hours earlier. Just not my cuppa tea, but you know… I was there, doing my best to live in the moment.

When we were finally in our Uber, at 4am at Waterloo station, I said to Ross, ‘Can you believe we did this?’ ‘No!’ he laughed, before quickly adding, ‘Well… I can’t believe you did it.’ Fair point, well made.

Here’s some photos.

After a very foggy early ferry ride, our first stop was lunch at Dimbola Museum. The former home of a pioneering Victorian photographer, Julia Margaret Cameron (not least because she was - gasp! - a lady), it’s now something of a temple to the island’s rich culture and a lot of that is Festival-related. They’ve just opened an exhibition called Experience Hendrix, dedicated to Jimi Hendrix’s 1970 performance at Isle of Wight. He would be dead just a few days later.

Dimbola is room after room of festival history, along with the preserved sleeping quarters of Julia Margaret Cameron - romantic-slash-creepy as is the Victorian way.

In fact, Jo Macaulay, curator of the Jimi Hendrix exhibition, is adamant Julia’s ghost is about and it’s not hard to believe.

They make blue sparkling wine on The Isle of Wight and if you’re intrigued you can buy it. How does it taste? Like white sparkling wine.

The Molotovs, a young brother-sister duo, were a godsend of a mood boost just as I was having a real fatigue crash on Sunday afternoon. A cheering mix of rock, youth and arrogant swagger.

The Cure - absolutely everything we all hoped. Robert Smith’s still got the pipes and his own artful way with misapplying lippie.

And it’s really hard to keep track of just how many brilliant songs they pumped out in their day and they played all of my favourites. Which, to my utter delight, included obscure fan favourite, From The Edge of the Deep Green Sea.

My friend Melissa Odabash had generously gifted me this hat which I love and which was necessary in the heatwave.

Kept thinking about getting on this swing ride, never did. And now I must live forevermore with the regret.

We stayed at Albert Cottage, which was once owned by Prince Albert. It was pretty. And gave good breakfast.

Alan stopped in at a local bookshop to see if his book was there and it was and he signed it. And the book shop owner, pictured, was another one of Will H’s mega fans.

I wore a kaftan on the first day. From Zara.

But you were seriously underdressed if you weren’t accessorising with an inflatable alien.

I felt like death for two days after getting home. I wanna go next year.

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It’s been a few days of surprises. First that Amanda Wakeley’s and my little piece in The Times mag, about our YouTube show Friday Night Fashion, got a front page mention. It made me lol to be sharing real estate with Keanu. Life goal unlocked. Secondly, a friend of mine showed me this, on the Instagram account @cheerupluv

First thing to say: I wrote this piece for the magazine about Amanda and me, but not the headline. It is almost unheard of for the writer to be the one who actually writes the headlines. That falls to sub editors and then the editors. It always surprises me how many people don’t know this. And so, some people were angry with me. They’ve been sliding into my DMs all week to lecture me about my internalised misogyny. And when I’ve responded that I don’t write the headlines, I’ve still got it in the neck. Some people think that it reflects badly on my character to willingly write for publications that would tarnish my work so. To which I say, my mortgage provider does not accept holier-than-thou-integrity as a currency.

Of course I understand why people find the headline reductive - as if women are still being assessed by whether or not men want to shag them. But I also understand, inside and out, the editing game.

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It’s all very well saying ‘Don’t read the comments’ but it’s just not always possible. For example, for the YouTube show I do with Amanda Wakeley, Friday Night Fashion, we are very grateful for the support and loyalty from our viewers. And so we like to reply to our mostly lovely commenters, especially if we can be helpful. Inevitably, there’s always a couple of people who want to roll by just to snark. And well, if you don’t want that to ruin whole days or even weeks, you do have to just learn to take it on the chin. ‘What?! Someone on YouTube’s being… an arse? But this has never happened before!’ my husband will cry, mock-clutching imaginary pearls to really ram the joke home.

Yeah, it’s never been a hobby of mine, so I find it hard to understand. But being an arsehole online really does do it for millions of people out there, so I guess we just need to accept that at this stage, that’s unlikely to change.

But then there’s comments like this that I don’t think really come with nasty intent but they nevertheless manage to land with a bit of a sting. I still wonder why this needs to be said:

Always enjoy your vids but don’t understand why you both hide your lovely eyes with massive Deidre Barlow glasses. Am I missing something - I am 74..

What this commenter is missing, at least in my case, is that I need my massive Deidre Barlow glasses so that I can see. Actually for the record, my glasses are in fact by the genius Tom Davies. It’s not the first time I’ve had a comment about ‘hiding’ in my glasses, including once from a complete stranger on the street in New York City!

‘Or maybe I should ask, what?,’ asked the woman, maybe five years older than me. ‘What are you hiding?’

I suppose that, unlike internet trolls, here was a person prepared to say something to my actual four-eyed face. In real life. I was speechless. My daughter still cracks up if it’s ever mentioned.

People who want to know why I’m ‘hiding’ in my glasses usually couch it with some kind of caveat that’s meant to be a compliment - it’s ‘a shame’ because I ‘have pretty eyes’.

But something about women wearing glasses on camera really does give a lot of people the ick. I get my fair share of comments like the one above and then I came across this from award-winning BBC news anchor, Monika Plaha.

@monikaplahaReply to @usersixone Ive also never worn contacts #FAQ #journalist #presenter #fyp #learnontiktok #bts

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‘Frequently asked questions’! I’m sorry how many questions can one have about this? I guess the questions were frequent enough to exasperate Monika into making this explainer video. And considering that she has nothing to answer to/apologise for, I think she’s done it with saintly grace and patience.

Because answer me this: WHY is, ‘Why do you wear glasses on air?’ a question that needs to be answered? What difference is it making? It’s a question that should be met with the same puzzled frown that would come if you were asked, ‘Why are you wearing your hair on air?’ When around 60% of the population are wearing glasses, I’d love to see the stats on how many people need to put theirs on before they chime in to ask why a person on the telly has the gall to wear hers.

And then, a maverick arrived. I found it thrilling a few weeks ago to see that Emma Willis, both gorgeous looking and a gorgeous human, was hosting This Morning wearing her thick frames.

Because it was quite startling to see a main anchor - a female anchor - unapologetically doing so. Think about it: It’s just not something you see that often. A woman on the telly in glasses. Newsnight host Victoria Derbyshire will sometimes have a pair handy to read a crib note live on air. Yes, yes, Prue Leith, but I think we all know that she gets a pass on account of being ‘of a certain age’. And by making a feature of changing up her glasses to match her outfits, Prue has leaned in to making it a style trademark, which for the most part takes the fun out of it for any trolls. But when you’re younger, like Monika Plaha, and you’re just wearing your everyday glasses so you can see and do your job? Armchair warriors throughout the land shall be vexed.

It’s true that I wore mine on the telly. But I’m not sure my blink-and-you-miss-me six minutes a week on Lorraine Kelly’s show was ever going to be a game changer for the culture.

And truthfully, I always did feel self-conscious about wearing my glasses on that show because I usually was the only woman doing it. I just did my best to make my peace with it and decided to listen to the producers at ITV who said they liked me in my glasses. Part of my ‘strong look’.

I suspect they might not have been quite so thrilled if Holly Willoughby wanted to sit on the sofa every morning looking like Brains from The Thunderbirds, but we shall never know. Here is a helpful image of him for those of you who are not Gen X.

And I do wonder too, if my glasses had anything - even a tiny little bit - to do with me not being asked back amidst all the cost-cuts and changes on ITV breakfast. I’m possibly just being paranoid there.

But the truth is, I also quite like my face with glasses on it. Which is just as well, because I need them. Along with a lot of my friends, even I think my face looks a bit odd without them these days. They’ve kind of become as much a part of my face as my eyes and ears and nose. I also think they’re pretty great at hiding a few more lines and wrinkles and eye bags. And if I’m deluding myself on that one, kindly leave me in wallow in my own blissful ignorance. Contact lenses and I have tried, but we’re just not that into each other. In fact, when I begged an optician to please help me try and get them in again, even she admitted that my right eye is a little bit of a bitch when it comes to opening wide enough to get them in.

The only time I feel a bit dismayed is when I’m all dressed up for something fancy and I have to finish off my hair, make-up and whatever dress I’ve decided on, with the big glasses.

And no matter how often I console myself that style icon Jenna Lyons (former JCrew creative director and now a Real Housewife of New York), rocks hers, I do feel that for most of us, glasses really put the dampeners on our glamorous eveningwear.

Somehow I doubt that when Emma Willis starts hosting Strictly, she’ll be teaming her sparkly Saturday night outfits with big frames. And I get it.

Every so often an A-list celebrity will wear her specs at a fancy awards show or film premiere and it launches a million online news articles with writers marvelling at the bravery. And it is a brand of bravery, isn’t it? It’s a willing gamble to look less than what is considered conventionally sexy, which is a marketing risk when casting decisions are still made with those conventional standards very much front of mind.

Yep, all the old myths and cliches really cling hard, don’t they? The ol’ ‘men don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses’. That eyewear is for nana-age women who can’t see and who nobody wants to have sex with anymore. The nerd trope in films and of course, the classic: the ugly duckling who is an instant swan once the frames come off.Remember in Neighbours when ‘Plain Jane the Super Brain’ was ‘ugly’ until she took off hers? I can still get furious when I think about how Mike suddenly deciding she was pretty enough to talk to and her not telling him to get well and truly bent.

So to answer our Friday Night Fashion inquisitor, I am not hiding in my glasses. Although I am rubbish at doing my own eye-liner so I’m trying to hide that. No, I am simply wearing them so I can see.

I’d beg everyone to just let a four-eyed bitch live, but I know that’s a big ask.

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It’s not the end of the world by any stretch, but every so often I do feel a bit dismayed that I will never, in my life, know the sound of silence.

I must have known it at some stage, waaaaaaay back in my youth. My early teens. But right now, as I type this in my quiet house, my ears are screaming their constant little song.

Tinnitus: for me it’s a mix of that ringing you get in your ears for a few hours after you’ve been to a loud concert, together with another high pitched piercing sound that sits in there with it. At night, when I’m lying on my side in bed, I hear a dull, almost musical sound of two notes. Think the ‘wee-aw’ sound of an ambulance siren but much lower register, like a fog horn. That’s new. For a few weeks I thought it was a new generator or exhaust fan in the big bakery that’s right behind our house. It was only when I was away from home for a night, and I could still hear the two-note wee-aw, that I realised that my ears had dropped a whole new track.

Through my teens and early 20s, I think I’d honestly thought everyone had constant ringing in their ears. I only read the word ‘tinnitus’ in some newspaper piece in my mid-20s. In those days I was a raging hypochondriac, my anxious brain always on the lookout for the next big illness to be freaking out about. (‘Gotta be gettin’ somethin’’, Ross used to sing at me, to the tune of Michael Jackson’s ‘Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’’.)

Reading in black and white that I had ‘a thing’ made me a bajillion times more conscious of it and, just like that, it was driving me crazy. Like, genuinely insane. The noise in my head took over my life. When I wasn’t lying in bed quietly tearing up about it as it now kept me awake, I was reading everything about it I could get my hands on. The obsession drove the anxiety as I kept reading that really, you just have to learn to live with it. Nothing to be done. There was about a month where I lost all rational thought and wondered how anyone could possibly learn to just put up with it.

A doctor told me I would need to ‘train’ myself to, and that sent me spiralling even more. He could send me to therapy sessions or suggest audio tapes to mask the sounds, but it was going to be an exercise in mind over matter. I was outraged that there was no magic pill to fix this.

After a few weeks, I became exhausted enough from the despair to finally calm down and realise: The doctor’s right, I am living with this now. Best figure out how.

It did feel impossible in the early panicked days. But as infuriating as it is to be told to just get on with it, it can be done. Daily life is not so bad. When I’m running around living my life, having meetings, doing my work, meeting people, jumping on and off the tube, I ‘forget’ to hear it. The ringing and screaming and buzzing from within can’t really compete with the same from London.

It’s silence that is much tougher, and of course that's what you generally want when you’re lying in bed trying to sleep. Drowning out the screaming buzz at that point is more challenging. Meditation has helped - Headspace is the classic everyone recommends for a reason. But really any apps with a calming voice are great, because I can focus on that, which dominates over the noise coming from my own ears. And I think I’ve mentioned before I search for either ‘theta waves’ or ‘binaural beats’ on Apple music, which gives my ears something pleasant to prioritise as I try to drift off to sleep. It generally works.

I don’t know why I have it. I think it’s the cumulative effect of the abuse I inflicted on my ears in my youth. Screaming at George Michael or Prince or INXS along with 15,000 others at Sydney gigs. Or regularly cranking up my Sony Walkman headphones to two points above the sound barrier. The only damaging incident I can remember was years into all this. I was 45 and on a Glamour shoot. I was standing next to a big speaker when the photographer put his music on and I got a full point-blank blast of decibels. I actually felt it like a massive stab in my right ear and it fully ached for hours after. So that possibly hasn’t helped.

But I’ll tell you what I wasn’t expecting, which is stupid of me: That it would get worse. It had just been what it was for many years, but in the last 12 months, the ringing has gotten louder, and as I mentioned, it has a new element to it. I put it down to the joys of ageing, which is still probably the most likely reason. But as a friend pointed out, seeing as I’ve had tinnitus for decades, maybe there have been some medical developments since the last time I checked.

So I booked an appointment with an ENT specialist.

I have to say, the ringing was incredibly bad by the time I got to this point. I was worried it was a sign of going deaf, because it was starting to interfere with my day to day hearing. Embarrassingly - hilariously - it turns out I actually had an astonishing amount of ear wax impacted in there. Please believe me, I’m not some crusty dirt burger: even the doctor said my ear canal is stupid tiny so the wax doesn’t really have anywhere to go. ‘But there is evidence that you’ve been sticking cotton buds in there,’ he said sternly. ‘I’m saying nothing,’ I said. We all know we’re not supposed to do that, but sometimes it’s just an itch that needs scratching, am I right?

He explained that tinnitus is not a disease in and of itself, but rather a symptom of some underlying issue. He felt certain that giving my ears the mother of all cleans would help a bit.

Miraculously, when he flushed a lot of the gunk out, the ringing did go down a few notches. It’s not fully gone, it never will be. And - I’m dying inside as I tell you this - they couldn’t get all the gunk out in one go. It’s so packed in there!

So I’ll be going back and investigating further. I’ve been putting up with this for a long time assuming there’s nothing I can do, but I’m in the mood to revisit the issue. I’ll let you know how I get on, but also I would love to know of your experiences. It can be such an easy thing to allow to make your life miserable, so I’m sure any tips you have for how you cope with tinnitus will help us all.

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One of the startling things about getting older is that you have to re-learn some things about your very own body as you travel in it through the years. I remember discussing with a doctor once that my menstrual cycle had become erratic and saying, ‘I don’t get it, this never happens to me.’ And he said, ‘Well you’ve never been 40 before.’ It was one of those ‘punch in the face’ reality checks: Ohhhh… I’m going to get old, just like everybody else.

And so, it occurred to me a couple of years ago that I was a little bit behind with re-learning how to live in this body, now that she’s in her 50s.

For years - decades to be honest - my body was something that brought me embarrassment and shame. And I’m ashamed to say that. I feel really sorry and stupid about all the years I wasted hiding myself away in baggy clothes, denying myself the freedom of swimming in the sea or wearing shorts in summer, all because I believed that my skinny frame was ugly. As I’ve written about before, a lot of people used to tell me that. But to be a woman is to be bombarded, relentlessly, with comments about your weight, your shape. Everything about your face and body. In my case, for many years my body shape was supposedly the embodiment of the cultural ideal: ie, thin. But I was exceptionally skinny and that attracted as much ridicule and judgement as anyone else’s less than perfect frame.

My mum used to tell me I had a fast metabolism - calories seemed to burn on impact. All through my childhood and teens and then into my 20s and 30s, I could eat garbage, all day long, 24/7 and never put on weight. Sounds like a dream to many, but it didn’t mean I had any body confidence. And funnily enough I was always getting sick.

I was in my late 30s when I started to be OK with being as slim as I was. Having a daughter really helped me to understand I needed to set an example of appreciating my body. So I started braving the swimsuit in public, or letting my ‘preying mantis legs’ be seen from under a skirt.

And then, just as I was finally allowing myself to appreciate some genetic fortune, my body started to change.

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A friend, Sybille, messaged me on Instagram yesterday and said something that slightly stopped me in my tracks: ‘I love that you are not afraid of change.’

It was a very nice compliment, I could tell it came from a place of generosity and admiration.

But I don’t think it’s true.

She was referring to the news I announced on Instagram a few days ago that I’m leaving the role I’ve had at the Mail for the last six years, my freelance gig of hosting their royal YouTube news show, Palace Confidential. I started doing it when I was the editor of You magazine, in late 2019. I didn’t know back then if spending half a day a week filming this show would be a worthwhile use of my time, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to try my hand at it and see if I actually could host a chat show.

I like a challenge. Even - especially? - the ones that scare me a little bit. And this one very much did.

I’d been at You for about a year when the video team at the Mail asked me if I would be up for hosting a new royal show they were planning on launching. ‘But I don’t really know much about the royals,’ I said. No matter, they said. They just wanted someone who could talk on camera. At the time, I’d say I was OK at that. Fair to middling. I’d been doing bits and bobs on Lorraine Kelly and other shows, but I had not stared down the barrel of a camera and tried to hold an audience for a whole show. The Grahams and the Claudias get the big bucks because they are brilliant at making a really fucking hard thing - the feeling of being intimately connected through a screen - look easy. What I did have going for me though, was something quite rare in the company at the time: the willingness to try.

Many seasoned newspaper journalists saw this new pivot to podcasts and TV shows and social media sharing as an irritating distraction from their proper jobs. I always thought that attitude was madness. Trust me - every newspaper journalist needs to grab opportunities to upskill with both hands. Others were just mortified by the idea of putting themselves ‘out there’ on camera, for scrutiny. And I get that. Standing up and being counted as an employee for the Mail is not for the faint of heart. The abuse started for me the day I announced I was going to be the editor of You. I understand why some people just weren’t up for offering up their looks, their opinions and their outfits up to the digital coliseum for a free kicking.

It wasn’t that I was unafraid of the challenge. I was scared. I did think the odds were high that I would suck. But I jumped in anyway. Even though I felt like I looked dreadful on camera. And even though it really did mean I lost hours every week for doing my ‘proper’ job that I just had to catch up with in my own time. But I got on with it. I asked for some training and did my best to listen to all directions and just try to get better at this. Quickly.

Looking back at those first few episodes, I get away with it, just about enough. But I can see how stilted and unchill I am.

The decision to lean in to the thing that scared me has had many shockingly great results.

1. The show has become a huge success, each week attracting hundreds of thousands of viewers. Only my parents were more stunned than me when an Aussie viewer approached me in their sleepy little suburb, because he recognised me from Palace Confidential! (I had mentioned a few times to them over the years that I hosted a YouTube show, but it was only after this event that they were interested in checking it out for themselves. Boomer parents, eh? So supportive. Lol.) Once, when we were discussing Canada on the show, I mentioned my friend Chad, who is a realtor there, in a town in British Columbia. He texted me the next day to say a woman had popped her head into his office to ask he was ‘the’ Chad who knew me. She tracked him down to say hi and send word she loved the show. Wild. We’re all very proud of the adoring following it’s grown, all over the world.

2. The role meant I met so many people in the building, that I probably otherwise never would have. They include Mail journalists Rebecca English, Richard Eden and Luke Blackall who I call my great friends now. Seeing them once a week has been something I’ve always looked forward to. They’re clever, kind, hilarious, and they’ve helped me more than they know through some tough phases in the last few years.

3. I’ve been shocked to discover that I really do love presenting on camera. I find it fun to challenge myself to be entertaining, but also hopefully bring out the best in the people I’m interviewing.

4. The even bigger shock? To find I love discussing The Royal Family!

   This previously indifferent Aussie did not see that coming. I wouldn’t say I’m a fawning monarchist, I have my notes for them as an institution. But I’ve also come to understand and respect their role in public life and on the world stage. When we started Palace, I wasn’t the only one who would say, ‘Is there really going to be enough to say about these guys every week?’ Sometimes we have upped it to four or more shows in a week.

5. I will confidently call myself a broadcaster/presenter these days. I’ve got a lot of hours under my belt now and have done everything from intense interviews to holding together live broadcasts for Palace Confidential. Like here, when we all nearly choked to death on pollen outside Buckingham Palace for last year’s VE Day commemoration.

It’s a challenge I love to test myself with every time. It’s something I work hard on and has opened up other work opportunities for me, so I’m very grateful to Luke and the team for having such curiously high levels of faith in a much greener me. (But they probably were just desperate).

And now, this thing I did even though it terrified me, has opened a door on a new and exciting chapter. I’m going to be co-hosting a brand new show with royal journalist and author, Katie Nicholl. Called The Royals Uncensored, it will launch on YouTube on Thursday 30th April. You can check it out and subscribe here.

It’s a new venture from the growing Piers Morgan Uncensored media brand, and I’m very grateful to Piers for his belief and support. We’ll be covering news and opinions - from everyone from staunch monarchists to fierce republicans. And we’ll also deliver a ton of colourful fun and trivia, from fashion choices to the inside track on what the royals are really like behind those palace walls. We will also have a semi-regular co-host in Grant Harrold, who was once a butler to Charles and Camilla. He’s now an etiquette expert and has a brilliant Instagram account. He’ll be on hand to provide intimate insights of the lives of the royals and school us all in the intricacies of protocol and etiquette.

So, going back to my original point about my friend Sybille’s comment. I am not unafraid of change. I will feel the pressure that comes with making this new show a success. I do not take for granted that several people had to agree that I could be trusted to take this on and I respect that. But it’s the tugs of nerves in the pit of my gut that are my motivating energy. Honestly I feel the same way I did when I was asked to launch Glamour - jangly and looking forward to this big challenge.

Other changes I have pursued even though they scared me, include:

• Moving from Sydney to London

  I’m grateful to my young, as yet fully formed adult brain for not over-thinking this. I could have been stunted into inaction worrying about all the things that might go wrong, the ways in which I might fail to find work here. Though I do remember shaking like a leaf as I said bye to my parents and ordering a really big scotch on the plane.

• Travelling on my own in Europe.

  By the time my two backpacking friends and I went our separate ways, between us we’d already endured stolen passports, attempted assaults, sexual harassment, being served questionable hooch that knocked us out for more than a day, being ripped off, being lost, being incapacitated by food poisoning, a terrifyingly drunk bus driver, being thrown off a bus in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere. Maybe it’s because we’d endured all of these things that I still felt hardy enough to part company with the girls and spend some time going exactly where I wanted to, no compromising - and no pilfering of my precious tampon supply.

• Launching Glamour

  I was stressed out of my tiny mind doing that - so many moving parts, so many opinions to filter in and out, so much money being spent on this thing that I had been trusted to make work. I drowned out the negative ‘what ifs’ about things that might go wrong and reminded myself - daily, hourly, nightly - of how great this could be if we just worked really hard on it.

• Becoming a mum

  I know on one hand that becoming a parent is so pedestrian - almost everyone’s at it. And at the same time, when it’s you, you somehow do feel like you’re the only one who’s ever done it: at sea in your own soup of apprehension and excitement. It’s the biggest life change anyone can put themselves through, and possibly the only life choice you will make where you can’t go, ‘Actually, do you know what? I’ve given this a go, but upon reflection, it isn’t for me.’ And I think that every one of us who does it is afraid of it and ploughs on anyway. Instinct, I guess. But from the moment you find out you’re pregnant, there are anxieties to swallow down on. At first, I foolishly thought that parental anxiety was something that I would conquer with experience. I’ll stop being scared when I’ve pushed the baby out and I’m not worrying about the birth. I’ll stop being scared if the baby is born healthy. I’ll stop being scared when she can talk and I don’t have to guess why she’s crying. I’ll stop being scared when she knows how to cross a road by herself. I’ll stop being scared when she’s gotten through the emotional boot camp of high school.

She’s 21 this year and I’m still scared. All the time. Is there anyone alive who fully, wholeheartedly believes they are absolutely bossing being a mum?

• Quitting my job at You magazine

  That was four years ago. I was scared. I was afraid of the change. My husband was quite stressed about it too. But I pressed on, for what I still think are rational reasons. I just knew I needed to figure out life after print media. The longer I waited, the older I got, the harder - scarier - that would be. And it hasn’t all been TV jobs and influencer holidays, believe me. There have been some low moments in my new life after magazine editing. There have been times where I’ve missed the money. Times when I’ve felt lonely sitting in my home office all day and realising I haven’t spoken to anyone in eight hours. But I look back over the last few years and realise that my career choices have also opened doors that I’d have never even known about had I let fear keep me from moving forward.

It’s not that you must be a fearless person to be able to take risks. You just have to figure out your way of sitting with that fear alongside the excitement of the challenge. Mistakes will be made. Failures will occur and humiliations will be suffered. But those nicks and scars and lessons are all information that fortifies you for the next round.

Maybe I’m just lucky that nerves don’t put me off - that it’s that daunted feeling that often feels like the very reason I should give something a go. My fears are often the actual rocket fuel that lights my backside into gear.

How about you?

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When I was writing this piece a few weeks ago I found myself way down and deep in a 1980s and 90s rabbit hole. And then I stumbled upon this treasure on Ebay and I just had to have it: The June 1989 issue of the Aussie magazine, Dolly.

It was the cover line, ‘Girls who work in the outback’, that had me double-tapping Apple Pay in a heartbeat. Because that, as it happens, is the very first magazine story I ever worked on. I had been granted a week’s work experience at the mag. I was 19 and studying communications at university when I’d kept calling and calling - and calling - multiple magazines until someone at Dolly was finally worn down and ushered me past the velvet rope.

The editor, Caroline Lees, was keen on getting together a feature about young women working in what were considered ‘boys’ jobs’ on sheep farms and cattle ranches. Caroline was British, which may have explained why the whole concept seemed exotic and fascinating to her. She’d been wanting to get the story running for ages but I got the sense that the staff writers were bored to the back teeth by the idea and kept kicking it down the road. They just kept telling they were trying but hadn’t found anyone yet.

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So Caroline gave me, the green little teen with literally no media experience, the challenge of finding these women. She probably figured I would not be successful, but that the task would keep me out of everyone’s hair for the entire week.

As it was the editor - the editor! - who had personally assigned me this task, I took it very fucking seriously. I located the one set of Yellow Pages phone books in the company building - there was a separate one for every state. They belonged to the deeply territorial switchboard ladies on the 13th floor. I was only allowed to use them if they remained within sight of the territorial switchboard ladies. They’d heard all your bullshit promises about bringing back the Yellow Pages before, and they weren’t falling for it again, OK? These phone books were the Google of their day. Precious yellow-tinted cargo indeed.

And so I spent two whole days sitting cross-legged at the feet of the territorial switchboard ladies, looking up phone numbers for cattle ranches and sheep stations and pig farms. I copied down names and numbers from all over the place in New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland. And then I spent another two days phoning every single one of those numbers and explaining that Dolly magazine was after girls who might work there to be interviewed. On my last day of work experience, I was able to give the editor a list of about five young women as suitable options.

I’ll be honest, she wasn’t the only one amazed that I’d got this far with it. I too was shocked It was pretty intimidating as a teenager to cold call all these places and ask them weird questions about their supply of girls and their ages. Not as creepy as it sounds, but still…. Most places did not have any young women I could speak to. Some did but understandably thought the whole thing sounded well dodge and just hung up on me.

And I can’t lie, it was also a damn boring way to spend hours and hours and hours in that five days. It was all thumbing through pages and pages of printed phone numbers and then dialling every one of them. Have I mentioned there was no Google? Well it’s worth stressing again.

But I pressed on, because even as someone who’d never been in a magazine office until this week, I found I was instantly reverential about delivering unto the editor what the editor wants. I wanted to impress her. It was one of my first signs that this career was my calling.

My tenacity resulted in the feature that their experienced journalists would then pick up and run with.

It’s but one example of how much time and energy goes into one magazine feature. You can make up your own mind about whether or not it was worth the effort. Do you think it was worthy of six whole pages?! That’s a ton of space in magazines! And yet there was apparently not a sliver of room to give me a tiny research credit. Rude. But it was typical of what I loved about Dolly: showing readers so many different ways in which young women were living their lives on their terms.

Boring or riveting, I don’t care - this feature was my big break. It resulted in me being asked to go in for two days a week and help research other things. It was unpaid, for about eight months and I was absolutely thrilled to be there. And as I bedded in, I was given tiny bits and pieces to write and slowly but surely entrusted with more stuff, until I got my first piece in print - the story of being ripped off by a dodgy modelling agency.

Let’s have a quick flick through this delightful time capsule. I mean, June 1989 was a damn eon ago. Guys, Taylor Swift was still six months away from even being born. This is proper ye olden times. Come join me for some of my favourite observations from this forgotten fragment of time.

I suspect this cover did not sell very well

It’s beautiful Anna Louise Gould who was a favourite Dolly model back in the day. But it’s very dark and moody and worlds away from the covers that the future editor Marina Go would make a success of. Look at the difference between Anna Louise, at the top of this piece, compared to the bright commerciality that Marina would usher in:

This magazine was a proper talent incubator

There was editor-in-chief Lisa Wilkinson, who was Dolly’s editor when I was an avid, younger reader. At this point, she was the editor of Cleo, another giant on the Australian landscape.

The beauty editor, Marina Go who would become editor after Caroline and give me my first proper magazine job.

A quick word on Caroline, who looks as though she’s only kept thriving in her stellar career. When she was the editor, she would make time to sit with me, often for an hour at a time, to help me understand what had and hadn’t worked about my first attempts at feature writing. I’ll never forget how seriously she took my ambition and how much she helped me learn, and quickly.

There was Maureen Vivian who now also lives in the UK and is a brilliant stylist to a raft of A-list clients. She and I would go on to be on the launch team of Sugar magazine in the early 90s. That’s her at the back of this merry mob at the Fashion Awards a while back.

This fashion was shot by Regan Cameron, a New Zealand-born lad who would move to the UK in the early 90s and become a very enormous deal in fashion photography.

Look how current this shoot looks - although I’d hazard a guess that editor-in-chief Lisa was pissed off to see grainy black and white pictures for the main fashion spread. Lol. But the model’s jeans are not a million miles away from the current barrel styles everyone’s loving.

The make-up on this shoot, below, was done by one Val Garland, another industry icon who will be known to many avid readers of Vogue.

Look at these peak 80s ads

Her teased crop! His frosted tips! But also the analogue way of getting your hairdressing career going. Send off for a brochure!

Be a model. Or at least look like one. June Dally Watkins was a household name in Australia and, incredibly, these deportment courses are still going strong. Believe it or not, this is on their website right now:

Why is there a random older dude in the pad ad? Complete with state-of-the-art covered digital watch, almost certainly from the brand, Casio.

This one is wild. I know that the Madonna of Medjugorge is a famous miracle, yes, but somehow I suspect it would not be allowed today.

Same shit, different decade

I think whoever answered this reader’s problem is overlooking a bare naked elephant in the room.

This random band profile

In this interview, The Danglin’ Brothers are described as ‘the best country band to ever emerge from Bondi’. The word ‘best’ could safely be interchanged with ‘only’. It is well documented that I wasn’t the hippest kid in Sydney, but I think I’m right in saying that The Danglin’ Brothers didn’t make an indelible mark on the culture. Hilariously, I just for a little look-see for them on the internets and stumbled across the fun fact that the writer of this piece was also their manager.

OK, Substack’s telling me to stop this now. I hope you will forgive this indulgent walk down memory lane. But I just never ever thought I would see this part of my magazine origin story again - let alone get to touch it and smell those musty old 80s pages. And if you’re one of my Aussie readers, tell me your Dolly memories!

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This is long, sorry, but it’s a speech I gave a couple of weeks ago at a lunch hosted by the charity, Action For Children. It seemed to go down quite well - although I think some people thought I was a bit too sweary, no shocks there - so I thought I would share it here. I suppose it’s the real origin story of how I fell in love with magazines, and how it’s no exaggeration to say they did, in many senses, save me. It’s easy to forget that behind every outward-facing, professional identity, there’s usually an unexpected back story.

If I showed you my 1987 Aussie school photo, and asked you to pick out the future fashion magazine editor, well…I can’t see you pointing to my face. Actually you might have wondered if I was a future rock metal god, given that my hair - long frizzed dry by a perm - was not unlike Jon Bon Jovi’s preferred style at the time. Also, at 17 years old, I was still on occasion being mistaken for a boy.

Yes, the reviews on my appearance were in and they were not kind. Frankly, I agreed with the classmates who told me I was too skinny, too pale, too freckly to be pretty. The acid yellow of my school uniform did no favours for any of it either. Rarely a day went by when I didn’t hear a shout across the playground of ‘starvation on stilts’ or ‘flyshit face’ (on account of the freckles). Cruel but quite impressively creative, really. I was so naturally, painfully skinny - a genetic quirk passed down on my mum’s side of the family - that my ‘friends’ advised me to cover my pale, gangly legs as much as possible. The consensus was that skinny was desirable, but ‘obviously not as skinny as you, Joanne.’

I’d love to show you what I looked like back then but all the photographs of me have disappeared because of… a mysterious mystery. I wish I hadn’t destroyed most of them because whilst I used to dread seeing myself at all - in photographs, in the mirror, through the eyes of my peers - I realise now that that awkward young girl was a necessary part of becoming the woman I do quite like today. Even the way she looks.

I’m not trying to craft a sob story here. I didn’t have a bad life as a teen. My mum and dad were working class grafters who’d levelled up. They’d met at the telephone exchange in the 60s where she was a secretary and he was a phone technician. She was a teen bride, married at 18, and giving birth to me a few weeks after she’d just turned 20. They worked hard to provide for me, my two brothers and sister and by the time I was 10, they were running a petrol station.

But they’d achieved their dream of a new four bedroom house with two cars in the driveway and an in-ground swimming pool out the back. We weren’t rich, we weren’t poor. We lived a pleasantly average life in a very average suburb on the outskirts of Sydney. I was still years away from learning that my address was apparently an embarrassment. Coming from the drab, flat western suburbs of Sydney marked you as a ‘westie’. Urban legend declared that westie girls were all brainless sluts with no style or class whose only goal in life was to claim single mum benefits for their multiple babies. So, you know, the same classist crap you hear the world over.

But my little bubble was about to burst. I was 13 when I’d just got home from school and my parents came crashing through the front door. They were home early which was weird, and they were screaming at each other, which was not. Quite standard to be honest, they fought a lot. But my mother was crying and repeatedly yelling, ‘HOW MUCH?!’. Then I realised my dad was crying. Shit, no one’s dad cried in the 80s. So then I started screaming and crying and demanding to know what the hell was up.

They sat me down and explained, though my teenage memory of the exact details is beyond patchy, that there were debts. Big debts. And the reckoning was now. I had actually been recently enrolled in a posh new private school that I’d be attending in the new school year. Not anymore.

‘We won’t even be able to afford school shoes anymore!’ my mother spat.

The next few years were tough. The fights between my parents were so regular and ferocious, I started wishing they would get divorced (they didn’t and they’re fine).

My mother got really ill from the anxiety that there were hospital stints for her. My brothers, 10 and 7, and my 14-month old sister were farmed out to relatives for weeks at a time. I was doing the Aussie version of GCSEs, so I stayed at home. I barely saw my dad, who was now juggling two jobs.

I realise when I look back on those days, that I was grappling with my own depression. It wasn’t diagnosed and it never would have been. There was no such thing as ‘mental health’ in the 1980s, especially for teenagers. But how else to explain that, lying in bed at 6.30 every morning, I’d already be aching for the second I could get right back to here, the shelter of my room. For years I felt like I was playing a role. The mask went on and I went through the motions of whatever it was I was supposed to be doing - school, homework, maybe it was my night to cook - before I could get back to my room and shut out the world. All I wanted was my favourite music and as much time as possible to fantasise about the life I would have the second I could escape high school.

To my teachers, I was a good student. And I studied damn hard because I was fixated on making sure life would get better. ‘These are the best years of your life!’ one of them would say on repeat, to which I’d be silently screaming, ‘ Bloody hell, that cannot be true. This cannot be as good as it gets. Things have to get better. They must.’

I barely listened to anything my parents had to say in those days, but somehow their overriding message sunk in: hard work leads to good things. And somewhere I managed to still believe that, even in the face of their hard work leading to bloody struggling anyway. But I would never have been able to get up in the mornings if I hadn’t. Because my school life was like a daily assault course.

There were all the usual Mean Girl moves, like being frozen out for days on end for reasons unknown. Who’s in, who’s out, who’s dead to everyone because they accidentally did a weird laugh at break time.

And my ‘ugliness’ continued to be something of a school-wide hobby. A ‘friend’ might pull me aside one day because she just thought I should know everyone in her roll call class was saying how shit my hair looked today. I’d walk past a boy I didn’t even know and he’d make a vomiting sound. Even a male teacher once commented, in front of the whole class, about how badly I needed a tan. This, day in and day out, made me hate everyone in the place. Like depression, ‘bullying’ wasn’t really a thing in the 1980s.

Looking back, you can see a very strong awkward phase playing out here:

I hated it so much that, in ironic contrast to my good grades and exam scores, I was also an A-grade truant. With my parents being barely around, I would, at least once a week, succumb to my low mood and just stay home. I forged so many sick notes that on the odd occasion that my mum did sign anything, they thought that was the fake. Teenage me thought I was a genius at working the system, until the day my parents presented me with a letter they’d received. Apparently my attendance was so poor that I might not be allowed to sit for my final exams.

This jolted the reality back into me. Fast. No school certificate meant no chance of university, no chance of taking the first steps to my dreams of working on magazines and no chance of getting as far away as possible from this hole of a suburb.

When I look back and remember how miserable I felt, I do marvel at how I retained any sense of ambition and dreams for the future. But you know what gets the credit for that? Magazines.

We don’t need a psychologist to see why I was so drawn. These glossy pages, fronted by pretty model after pretty model, plastered with promises of the key to a better life, nestled within the pages. It was a portal to a world I wanted. I didn’t want to ‘Drop a dress size by Saturday’, as most magazines seemed to shout from the cover every few weeks. But I was lured in by the words that assured me there were ways to be prettier, more likeable, more stylish. Of course I also entered the competition to try and ‘Win! The chance to meet Duran Duran.’

But soon enough I found something so much deeper. Magazines gave me a real sense of camaraderie. One magazine in particular, the teenage title Dolly, at times seemed to be written just for me.

Thirteen year old me felt seen by the articles about feeling like the odd one out at school. In amongst the models and beautiful celebrities, they featured normal looking girls and women who were managing to have happiness, even though they didn’t look like models. These magazines were sanctuary. They spoke to me with kindness, assurance and encouragement.

Years later, when I would often be accused, as a magazine editor, of making women feel inferior about their looks, I couldn’t help but think back to how it was magazines that were the first place to help me truly value myself beyond my appearance.

Magazines, so relentlessly derided for making women feel bad about themselves, were my very first roadmaps to confidence. I became less depressed about how I looked, less apologetic about my ‘ugly’ face. Therapists everywhere would no doubt shake their heads, but it was thanks to the life lessons in magazines that I began building the muscle of a deflective sense of humour. When yet another person came at me with a comment about my bony frame, I was learning to come back with sass. ‘Actually,’ I’d say. ‘I was going to ask if you know of any crash diets, I could really do with losing a few more pounds.’ Being the first person to deliver the joke about me took the fun out of bullying.

Then I discovered British magazines and I experienced something of my own Big Bang Theory. Suddenly a universe I never knew about was expanding before my eyes and I wanted in.

Once a week, I’d walk 40 minutes to the nearest newsagent, usually in 35-degree Aussie heat, to buy Smash Hits, Number One and if I was lucky, The Face. They were always months out of date but I didn’t care. I loved the interviews and the pictures - especially of my all-time first and forever crush, David Bowie.

But most of all I loved how they were written: sarcastic and laugh out loud funny. I so wanted to be part of this gang.

And so, by 17 years old, I became convinced that I was actually British person who’d been accidentally born in the western suburbs of Sydney, Australia.

Consider the evidence: Aussies are supposed to be walnut tanned and brilliant at sport. I was see-through white and so bad at throwing a ball that my classmates fought over not having me on their team. ‘Oh sir, that’s not fair, we had her last week!’

I didn’t want to listen to Jason Donovan, I wanted maudlin Morrissey and The Smiths. Clearly there had been a terrible, administrative error.

And then I realised: There were people actually being paid to go to China with Wham! And write about it. Once I realised magazine writing was a job, it was all I wanted.

Of course, as a teenager, this all still felt ludicrously out of reach. But I realise now that I was already visualising, already taking subconscious steps towards making the life I wanted happen. I became all-consumed with this projection of my future life. My waking dreams were filled with the future glamour of my life - no pun intended.

If I could go back and tell 14-year-old me that this phase is actually a very good and useful thing, I’m sure she’d have rolled her eyes, told me to fuck off and slammed her bedroom door in my face. But I’ve come to realise that those teenage experiences are exactly what helped me, in so many ways, to achieve my dream career.

I think that being an unpopular teen - a‘dag’ to coin the famous Aussie term - gave me the empathy I needed to be a good magazine editor. I’ve always been obsessed with how I want anything I create - an article, a front cover, a speech - to make an audience feel. When it comes to magazines I’ve produced, I’ve always wanted readers to feel cheered by at least one thing they’ve found in it. I will bet that most of you, when you’ve opened the pages of Vogue, have come away feeling maybe a bit… poor. Which is part of the point of luxury fashion magazines! They’re supposed to show you a rarefied world that you can’t afford but will want to look at anyway.

It’s probably why I would never be destined to be editor of Vogue, because I’ve always wanted the magazines I make to be the antidote to that. Whether it was the teenage magazine Sugar, or the women’s magazines I edited from New Woman to Glamour to You, I was always thinking of those girls and women who felt a bit crap.

I wanted to open a window on a world where anyone can work towards being the best version of themselves they can be. And I wanted to do it with kindness. I’ve never forgotten the reassuring tone from the magazines of my youth, that I think genuinely saved my mental health.

In hindsight, it is exactly that girl in the school photo, the sickly pale, runty one with the tragic Jon Bon Jovi hair, who won’t smile because she’s been told she looks even uglier when she does, who would know exactly what other girls and women like her would want in their future magazines.

I wanted to tell this story today, about this slice of my background that I never really give much air time, to be honest with you. But it seems appropriate to talk about when we’re thinking about the children that Action For Children aims to reach.

Because I was raised in a nice family. I was raised in a nice house in a nice neighbourhood: green lawns, swimming pools, air conditioning. But behind our front door there were some big struggles. My parents were frightened and exhausted. I was a young girl dealing with my own private, daily anxieties while watching them deal with theirs.

And despite all of that, I never doubted that I was loved. However bare the cupboards were at times, however lonely I often was in that house, it was still a fundamentally safe place for me. That safety net, and I guess my inherent stubborn streak that kept me dreaming of a different life, very possibly saved me. It makes me realise how very different things could have been for me, had I not had some reserves - somehow - of good old fashioned hopes and dreams, I could have easily spiralled downwards and under in those years.

Knowing how much I struggled, even as a so-called ‘lucky’ kid, makes me feel sick with panic when I think about the children who don’t have that. Children who don’t feel safe. Who don’t feel worthy. Who can’t see or feel that anyone is on their side.

Every child deserves to have big dreams. To imagine a future that excites them. Right now, there are young people with extraordinary potential to contribute to the world, and it’s quietly withering in homes filled with fear, neglect and abuse. And I know how easy it is, as a young person, to lose sight of your own worth, even if, on paper, you’ve got nothing to complain about.

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I’ve had a hectic few, my friends, but while it means I’ve been a bit slow to post, it does mean my world has become filled with recommendations that I want to pass onto you. Here’s just some of the genuinely life-enhancing discoveries of my recent times. There are some affiliate links just FYI. x

A really great cook book

A few weeks ago I was invited to a really lovely day hosted by Trinny Woodall and her Trinny London brand. They were launching their ‘I Didn’t Know I Could Do This’ ad campaign. For some reason, there was axe throwing! We threw axes and somehow I did not suck at it as much as I thought I would. Behold the evidence, above, for I even got a bullseye! Although in axe throwing we call this a ‘clutch’ don’t you know.

But seriously, Trinny had gathered some smart women to share their wisdom with us all. Thank you Deborah Frances-White who gave us all a brilliant pep talk on how to confidently own any room when you’re speaking. Life coach Dior Bediako was brilliant on how to be strong enough to set boundaries for yourself. Tech journalist Natalie Salmon made me slightly less afraid and cynical about AI and was full of knowledge on how it can enhance our time-poor lives. And nutritionist Dominique Ludwig educated us all on better nutrition and gut health. Best of all, Dominique gave us all her incredible book which I have to tell you, is now seriously my new religion.

I have made so many delicious, gut-friendly meals from the recipes contained within. Joyously for me, tons of them are gluten free, or easily adapted to be. Dominique is sensible, straightforward and 100% fad and gimmick-free on the subject of nutrition. I must admit I was not aware of her until the Trinny day, but my daughter took one look at the book I was clutching and said, ‘Oh my god, she is my queen.’ Last night I went all out and took the time to make these red lentil balls and chickpea pancakes.

Mine look nothing like the beautiful picture so I won’t be showing you but it all tasted amazing. I recommend this book with my entire soul.

This poo supplement

Similar levels of love for this. Not only did I get the incredible book but two other women on the Trinny day out told me about this supplement and it too is a game-changer. If you want to give your gut a kick up the backside, then definitely try this. I am skipping with renewed vigour and my clothes are not tighter at 4pm. It’s a green powder you add to water. It looks like it will taste of arse. It does not. Quite nice, actually.

These dog poo bags

On our dog walking episode of Friday Night Fashion, Amanda Wakeley made a very good point: Why do we take something organic - dog poo - and place it in something so very not - a plastic bag? So she got me onto these paper poo bags. They’re bio-degradable. I will admit they took me a second to master. They’re not the easiest for those poop moments that happen when you must also keep one hand on the lead. But I am willing to endure that struggle in the quest to be a little kinder to Planet Earth.

This gorgeous fashion brand

Right let’s raise the tone from poo, shall we? Here comes some fashion. Gorgeous, sustainable fashion. Last week, the wonderful Amy Powney, founder of the former brand Mother of Pearl, held a pop-up to showcase the spring and summer pieces coming soon from her new(ish) brand, Akyn. And I promptly fell in love with this claret red dress.

In fact I will be popping it on this very evening to wear to the Jane Goodall Institute Hope Gala. I’m going to wear with some black and white zebra mules from Aquazurra. But then I will also wear with sparkly flats to run around during the day. It’s such an easy one and done that you can dress up or down. Do check out Akyn for some truly gorgeous, timeless pieces. And if you loved Mother of Pearl, Amy still does plenty of the beloved signature touches from that brand, like the embellished epaulettes on coat sleeves, and quirky statement buttons on jeans.

Although if you do get this red dress, don’t make the mistake I did and smash yourself in the face with those little beads the first time you take it off.

Brooches

I’m getting heavily into them. I was first inspired by my friend Geraldine who has the sharpest, chicest collection of brooches on the planet. Very Lacroix-heavy, darlings. She’s been amassing them since the 80s and I always look forward to having them showcased for me at various lunch and dinner dates. But I’ve found some affordable ones, namely from Caramel Vintage London at Wolf & Badger. Like this sweet one.

And I chanced upon this cute dragon fly when I was shopping in Brora with Amanda Wakeley for another episode of Friday Night Fashion. It got a lot of compliments when I wore it for the first time last week.

Why don’t we wear more brooches? They are delightful.

My new overalls

I’m a big fan of these from a small luxury British brand called, funnily enough, My Overalls.

Super soft cotton makes them incredibly comfortable. The ones I’m wearing here come with a cute little built-in bum bag so I’m running around in them today with my phone and debit card and keys stored snugly and safely.

Andrea McLean’s book

I’ve been privileged to have a sneak preview of my friend’s new book and, trust me - I really don’t think you’ve read a celebrity memoir like this. Andrea McLean’s shiny TV world has taken some hard knocks in the last couple of years and I really don’t think you’re ready for her powerful honesty about that. So brace. But do read it because I think it’s a liberating conversation we need to have about how personal feelings of shame can keep us isolated and alone and afraid. If we all shared that one thing we really don’t want anyone else to know about us, we’d all be so much more mentally well. I’m being deliberately vague because I don’t want to spoil the book for you. Just believe me, it’s going to be making waves. It’s out in May but available to pre-order now.

This protein powder

I’ve written before about loving Ancient and Brave’s True Collagen powder and now we can add this to my list of firm favourites. When I mix their Brave Ancestral Protein into my porridge, I can actually feel the porridge filling me up so much more than it otherwise would. So I’m not starving again two hours later. It’s a great way to up your protein intake because it’s easy and tastes really good. It’s also packed with other nutrients like collagen and kiwi fruit, which is very good for the gut. When I got my first delivery, it came with this great pancake recipe. (And even though the recipe calls for bananas, they work fine without bananas for those of us who agree bananas are the devil’s cock.)

Fearne Cotton’s book

I’m not surprised this book has raced into the Sunday Times Best seller list. It’s a call to arms for everyone - but inevitably, especially women - to question how much we put up with, how much we shrink ourselves and relegate ourselves to the bottom of the list, all in the quest to be liked. I found myself nodding furiously along at many, many points in Fearne’s book. I must have actually looked slightly unhinged doing that when reading it on the train. I so enjoyed getting to delve deeper into the topic when I hosted a chat with Fearne at Soho House last week.

This soothing Instagram account

And lastly, a little bit more nutrition for the mind. To paraphrase an old adage, in this terrifying bonfire of a world, look for the people who are helping. And this account, @globalmindapparel is helping me. I don’t know much about the guy behind it, except that his name is Louis and he’s a musician. And I gratefully drink everything he feeds me because it is all cheering and uplifting stories of times when human beings have been exceptional and kind to one another. It won’t stave off World War III but it might give you a moment of reassurance to know that there really are a lot of wonderful people out there doing their utmost to make the world good.

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Here’s me, above, with Nicholas Coleridge, who gave me my job at Glamour. I couldn’t find a photo of us from back in the fledgling days of Glamour, so here’s one from about three years ago.

When I was appointed editor of Glamour, there was a lot of what could be politely described as ‘surprise’. One senior beauty executive actually said to me, ‘I just don’t know how it’s possible for you to change the way you edit to make Glamour as different as it needs to be from New Woman.’

That’s hard to imagine now, I know, because I’m accustomed to the fact that, if anyone knows who I am, it’s because they know I was the editor of Glamour mag for many years - 17 in total. I still regularly get introduced thus: ‘This is Jo. She was editor of Glamour’. Even though it has now been seven years since that was the case. And so because the magazine was so fused with my identity for so long, this next piece of info might surprise you: I was never the first choice to be the editor. In fact, I don’t think I was anywhere near second. Here’s how it ended up being me anyway….

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I must apologise profusely to you, the public. For I have apparently caused great offence in recent days. I realise now that I have let you down. But most of all, I have let myself down. Allow me to explain.

It was some time in the middle of last week that I chanced upon a survey from the anti-ageism charity, Centre for Ageing Better. They polled 4000 people for their ‘Age Without Limits’ campaign. Two thirds of those asked said that 56 is the age at which one should stop wearing fashionable clothes, as that is when one ‘no longer looks good wearing the latest fashion.’

Unfortunately, I only discovered this edict about four days after my 56th birthday, for which again, I apologise. In fact, it was on the occasion of my 56th birthday, on Saturday 21st February, when I met friends for dinner and I wore a bright red dress.

Debate may be heated about whether or not the dress constitutes ‘the latest fashion’, but considering it is indeed new, and from the new spring collection from fashionable brand Me+Em, I must accept that it fits the dictionary definition. It goes without saying, I also now realise, that I should have redoubled my efforts to be virtually invisible in a far more muted tone. Perhaps a shade of dishwater grey.

To compound matters, it is with a very deep shame and embarrassment that I also admit: as recently as the 24th February - at the even greater age of 56 years and three more days FFS - information has come to light that I was seen wearing barrel leg jeans.

I’m not sure which clothes were deemed by those surveyed as ‘the latest fashions’, but I am aware that most fashion scholars would agree that the barrel is still very much the jeans cut du jour. I would love to be in a position to deny this allegation but the photographic evidence, above, is authentic and irrefutable.

To make matters worse, I knowingly teamed these striped jeans with not one, but two more clashing striped prints in a shamefully conscious attempt to add a modern - yes, I’ll say it… ‘fashionable’ - twist to my outfit. At more than 12 months old, my Adidas trainers were not strictly ‘the latest fashion’, but I can see that many might still be affronted by the image of a woman of such a grand age as mine wearing trainers at all.

Indeed, had I known at the time that I was in such a dire breach of societal conduct, I’d have dutifully reached for some floral stirrup stretch pants and tan Hush Puppies. Again, I offer my deepest apologies. I plan to take some time over the coming weeks and months to reflect on my actions. I will work on myself - it’s going to take some time to replace my now-verboten jumpsuits and sneakerinas and rebuild a wardrobe of more appropriate loose-fitting gaberdine. In the meantime, I humbly ask for your grace, patience and forgiveness as I endeavour to do better.

Seriously, who comes up with these bullshit surveys? Now of course I like the idea of campaigning groups and charities raising awareness of ageism for the express aim of eradicating it. But as a jaded - sorry seasoned - magazine editor of many years, I also know this game. It’s all about gaining attention from ‘shocking’ conversation points. This means, more often than not, the ‘shocking facts’ get thought of first - long before anyone offers up any related opinion. It’s rare in the media that survey results are organically left to chance. It’s less about finding genuine answers to questions, more about finding the result that can be packaged into the big headline you want to see about your survey in the press. Surveys cost money, and an ageism charity can’t really get much traction with ‘the public says wear whatever the fuck you like, granny, we’re not even looking at you’. The Daily Mail won’t print that.

So questions get asked that are framed in such a way as to force a respondent’s answer down a particular cul de sac. A question like, ‘At what age should a person stop wearing fashionable clothes?’ has already couched the desired bias. I don’t know for sure, but I doubt there would have been much of an option to say, ‘I don’t agree with the premise of this question’. There would likely be a multiple choice option of ages. Most people answering such a stupid question would never have had any opinion on this, until the very second it was asked.

I don’t know if this is exactly how this particular survey was conducted. I could well be wrong. But generally speaking, I am right about how these… let’s call them ‘creatively arrived at facts’ become headlines. As a result, I respect very few survey ‘results’.

On this one though, what does depress me is that it’s a bit of a sad irony that yes, an organisation that wants to stamp out ageism would have got their shouty headlines, but alongside it they’ll have likely upset quite a number of women aged 56 and above. Why do women need it pointing out that some people don’t like our outfits? And let’s be real: no one is ever picturing men in their heads when asked questions about ‘people’ and ‘the latest fashions’.

I realise my position is slightly different to most in that I’ve been shaped by a career in fashion magazines. I have come to be confident in my own style. It was a long, slow process, but I did get here. Some women tell me that their age makes them feel self-conscious about shopping in supposedly ‘young’ fashion stores like Zara or H&M. I really don’t. It’s true that I’m never drawn to the very short skirts or dresses with cut-away midriffs. I don’t like me in those things but that was also true when I was a teenager. My friend Kathy Lette, 60-something, has better legs now than I had at 18 and looks cracking in hot pants. Tell her otherwise if you dare, but she will simply laugh in your face and scurry off to find another glass of fizz.

I don’t look back wistfully at my younger years wardrobe. I think I am a way better dresser now than 30 years ago. I’ve grown in confidence, I’m fairly sure of what suits me and I know what styles of clothing I like. Every year, there are trends that are just not my cup of tea, but there’s always stuff I get excited about. And if I’m getting any judgey side-eye about it, I won’t even notice. Oh wait actually, I did notice once. It was last year, I was wearing my Gucci shearling-lined loafers and a woman on the bus looked me up and down with such disdain, I wondered for a second if I’d soiled myself. Some people might crumble in those moments. But if I’m happy enough knowing that I like my clothes, I really do not care if you don’t. I can’t see me ever changing what I wear based on some weird made up ‘rules’ about fashion and age.

But I do understand why less confident women can be really flattened by ageism in fashion. As someone with a reasonably high profile, I’ve found that in the last year or so, any trolling that comes my way has had a more ageist tinge. I host the weekly YouTube show, Palace Confidential, which clocks hundreds of thousands of views, from all around the world.

A lot of the viewers like to comment on what I’m wearing - most are kind, which is of course very lovely. But if someone wants to insult me, I’ve noticed that lately the barbs are along the lines of ‘Jo, your clothes are far too young for you.’ The most intriguing I’ve had is, ‘Having your chicken chest on show is shameful!’ Not really sure what ‘chicken chest’ means but I’m guessing it’s some sort of allusion to wrinkles? And for the record, I was wearing a shirt with a couple of buttons undone. It wasn’t exactly an afternoon at Hooters. Here is that chicken chest on shameful display with a side of zebra, who do I think I am?

I’ve noticed too, that these kinds of comments always - always - come from women, which genuinely fills me with sympathy. Those chains of internalised misogyny are very hard to break.

I see it too with the show I co-host with Amanda Wakeley, Friday Night Fashion. I know lots of you love it precisely because we are older women who unapologetically love fashion and getting dressed. Although this week, we decided to talk about what to wear to walk the dog and it’s a decidedly dressed-down vibe:

A lot of our viewers comment and tell us they ‘can’t’ wear this or that because of their age. It is our mission to assure you: That. Is. Bollocks.

Because really: if we’re saying age bans a person from looking fashionable, we’re also saying age bans you from self-esteem and confidence. It’s cutting off the right to carving your own identity and from a great source of creative joy and self expression.

At what age are you going to willingly accept opting out from all of the above? Me? I can promise you this, my friends: I will have complete control over what they dress me in to put me in the coffin. Instructions will be left and I strongly suspect the vibe I want to leave this earth in can be summed up as: circus clown.

Yes, even on that day, I will remain committed to being what I’ve described before as ‘belligerently visible.’ And the more of us who refuse to self-regulate our dress sense, based on things like surveys and outdated attitudes, the more pointless the whole ‘is she too old to wear that?’ narrative will be.

I’ve only grown more convinced that what I wear, how I present myself to the world each day, gets more important with age.

And I’ll be brave enough to say it: I do think I look pretty good in my fashionable clothing. You may disagree, either about my clothes being fashionable, or me looking good in them, or both. That’s your prerogative.

But it won’t stop me dressing for me and enjoying it. Putting on clothes is something we all do - have to do - every day. Why waste time fearing it when it can be a rather easy route to joy?

I’m curious to know: Do any of you get dressed from a place of fear? Are you looking in the mirror to figure out if the outfit is one you love? Or just one that you think will elicit the least amount of judgement, real or imaginary? It’s a conversation worth having, if not with me, then definitely yourself.

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There are two sports in life that, if they allowed them into the Olympics, I would 100% be a gold medallist. They are: 1. Shopping and 2. Holding grudges. I say this with no pride. Or shame, to be honest, it’s just who I am. You all know about the shopping, but not many of you will know about how angry I can still get when I think of the time, in 1995, when a group of four bus inspectors got on my no19 London bus, found a fare evader and kicked everyone else off on to deal with it. I still begrudge the grown woman who, in 2009, spent ten minutes playing with an interactive kiddie display at The Eden Project in Cornwall, while my four year old - within the age group it was actually intended for - stood patiently waiting for her turn. Before you ask, no, therapy hasn’t helped this particular flaw in my psyche.

And then this past week, my grudge-holding prowess intersected with the actual Winter Olympics in a way that I’d never have imagined, as I watched the unedifying episode involving the US men’s ice hockey team and The President of the United States. We know who The President is. He shows us, every day. But yet again we must be dismayed by the fact that, when every other man in that locker room lol’d along with Trump’s ‘hilarious’ joke at the women’s expense - a women’s team who are among the most decorated teams in their sport in Olympic history - it’s infuriating and disappointing but, of course, unsurprising.

The guys’ reaction to the subsequent fallout has been oh so predictable as well. Grumbling about people ‘trying to make everything political’. Pointing out that their coach is a woman - mum to two of the team mates, like that’s supposed to make it better, when actually it makes it worse. Pointing out that some of the men’s team apologised privately to the members of the women’s team. Privately. There’s the rub, as per. Time and time again, men who are performative chest thumpers for what great feminist allies they are, can’t quite seem to grow the spine to demonstrate it any time it actually matters. Or to show it, I should say, when to do so might risk them losing a bit of face with the misogynists who are happily perpetuating the double standards. Yes, it would have been a bit awks to call out the President. But anyone with half a brain could have done it with a bit of grace and even some humour. Nope, when push comes to shove, most men don’t want to leave the safety of the testosterone-soaked locker room. Even if they genuinely don’t agree with or approve of the tone of the banter, they don’t want to be the unpopular buzzkill who says so. Who makes a stand at the point in time when it will make a difference.

These hockey guys are far from the first and they won’t be the last, who could have stepped up in the moment, to be true allies to women, and instead actively chose not to. For reasons we can only assume keep them shielded in their powerful bubble of the bro code. Don’t rock the boat. Don’t upset the alpha males, who want to keep the playing field forever tilted. Or risk having them ridicule you as less of a man for sticking up for women. So they have now been placed in my personal little hall of grudges alongside these other guys…

Justin Timberlake

This happened in 2004 and yes, I am still furious with Justin about it. Remember the wardrobe malfunction? Everyone does. Especially Janet Jackson. Long before Bad Bunny would enrage MAGA cultists everywhere by singing songs in Spanish at the Super Bowl, Justin and Janet delivered a half time performance that would incite a national nervous breakdown. As part of the performance, Justin clutched at Janet’s top and it ripped exposing her boob. It was live, people got upset. But only with Janet. Her career thereafter was heavily punished - blacklisted from MTV and radio, disinvited from the Grammys. Justin? He was fine. He apologised, in such a way that didn’t so much throw Janet under the bus as have it reverse back and forth over her a few more times. And then he performed at The Grammys.

This was a moment where his power and popularity as a male entertainer - and the guy who was at least half responsible for the incident that made everyone so angry - could have really done her a solid. If he’d spoken up to defend her, just a little bit, who knows? It might have quelled some of the rage.

Of course, it might have also spewed more rage in his direction, so… best let her take all the flak, eh? It was FIVE YEARS LATER that he finally said, perhaps he shouldn’t have done that. ‘I wish I had supported Janet more.’ Me too, mate. Me too. Long after the damage is done is not really the moment to speak up about what an ally you are. That moment was straight after that exposed breast, when a man could have recognised the sexist double standard of the fury and helped do something noble about it. Being a demonstrative, rather than performative, supporter of women could have really helped her out back then. I’ve never gotten over it.

Karl Stefanovic

A lot of you won’t know who this is, but if you’re one of my Aussie subscribers (owyagoin’?) you possibly know what’s coming. Full disclosure: This story also involves a very good friend of mine, Lisa Wilkinson. For years, Lisa and Karl were the popular, award-winning presenting duo of the no1 morning breakfast TV show, Today. I was on it once! Karl must have been on holiday, because that below is Lisa and Richard Wilkins.

In 2017 Lisa and Karl had been the dream team for ten years and it was time for another round of contract renewals. Lisa asked the management of Channel Nine to match her salary to Karl’s. Somewhere along the line she’d discovered that he was earning almost double what she was. They did the same job, five days a week. The ratings were strong. Frankly, she polled as the more popular host in focus groups. But the channel dug its heels in.

Karl was amazing - he gave a statement saying that pay parity was the very least that women should expect in the 21st century and he would be holding out on signing his contract until this issue was resolved. From that day forward, no television network dared risk such sexism being discussed in the public domain and it blazed a trail for pay equality throughout Australia.

HA HA HA HA, JUST KIDDING.

Of course Karl said nothing. Total silence. To me, again, this is another situation where the guy actually standing up publicly and saying men and women deserve the same pay for doing the same job could well have settled the whole matter overnight. It reminds me of a story I told on this Substack just recently about Anna Wintour, when she reportedly would not take her seat at a fashion show until she was sure every one of her team also had a seat. Karl could have stood til they found Lisa a seat. But nope. Too risky for his standing with the management. Too risky, let’s be honest, for his pay packet. In her memoir, It Wasn’t Meant To Be Like This, Lisa says that she and Karl agreed to a ‘Friends-style’ pact where they would negotiate together as an unbreakable duo on equal pay. Then, she alleges, he went quiet and ultimately did his own multi-million dollar deal without her.

Obviously I don’t have a handle on all the goings-on here, but I don’t think it’s a stretch to glean that the pact hit the skids when the guy realised it might mean he’d risk getting the crappier ‘lady deal’ on the money.

I am still angry, but satisfyingly, ratings plummeted on Today after Lisa left. And her new book, all about the forgotten lone Australian survivor of sinking of The Titanic, looks brilliant and I know how hard she’s worked on it so check it out.

We’ve all had our own versions of all of this. We’ve all worked with the men who tell you what proud champions of women they are and then you find out they’re the ones who break out the rape jokes the minute it’s all just the guys in the room. We’ve all been in the meeting where the boss says something demeaning or sexist to you, the one woman in the room, and only when he’s out of earshot, does one of your ‘nice guy’ male colleagues pull you aside to say how disgusted he was with how you were treated. It’s finding out that the ‘guru of enlightenment’, Deepak Chopra who has empathised with us that ‘the feminine has been suppressed, violated or ignored’, was also happy to keep a useful, congenial relationship going with a convicted sex offender.

Talk is cheap if men can’t stand up and use their greater power when it counts. I’m glad the men’s ice hockey team has been dragged over this. I love how sad and empty their White House celebration looks, chowing down on cheap McDonald’s, while the women’s team got a Michelin-starred meal hosted by Stanley Tucci.

I don’t care about the people saying ‘it was just a joke’. I haven’t lost my sense of humour, I’ve just lost my patience with the constant diminishing and dismissal of women. Because the joke only works if you’re willing to laugh about the women’s achievements being ‘less than’ because they are ‘the girls’. It’s not just a joke when the man sitting in The White House should be acting like a leader proud of all of his citizens and their achievements for the country.

Is it so hard, or in any way demeaning, to be the Andy Murray in the room? And as someone pointed out to me the other day, this example gets trotted out all the time because it’s practically the only one.

Yet again, it will be mostly only women who already agree with me who read this. I know there are many millions of great men who walk amongst us, but too often they are still hiding behind the ‘not all men’ cloak of solidarity. They don’t see themselves as a problem, so don’t think they bear any responsibility to solve the problem of misogyny, or inequality, or violence against women and girls. Even though it so clearly will not change without their active help. It can change if the guys in the locker room don’t laugh at the cheap shot at women’s expense.

The comedian Daniel Sloss, in the viral speech from his 2018 stand-up special, was so on the money when he said, ‘When one in ten men are shit and the other nine do nothing, they might as well not fucking be there.’

Daniel is someone who gets it. Someone who understands that the so-called ‘micro harms’ like sexualised banter are big damn red flags that need to be torn apart, right there and then. Unfortunately it took the rape of a friend for it sink in, but in a cesspool of relentless misogyny, I’ll take the win. His message gave me a small glimmer of hope that things might be changing.

And then every single young guy in the locker room laughed so hard at their fellow female athletes, and so I will now hold this new grudge to go with the other ones against men who were too scared to be allies to women when it mattered.

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Not only is it Friday today, but tomorrow is both Saturday AND my birthday. When it comes to birthdays, I am not one of those people who doesn’t like a fuss. I like to enjoy my birthday. I have booked a restaurant to celebrate with some of my favourite humans. And, I am trying - really trying - to give my brain a day or two off from All Of The Shit. Just yesterday I found myself in the surreal position of anchoring a show about the Royal Family as that waste of skin, Andrew, was being arrested. It was quite exhilarating to a) see some actual consequences for a change and b) to be part of a team having to adapt in real time to breaking news.

But it’s time to try and have a break from all of that so for now, I want to share with you all my favourite new make-up discoveries. Last Friday I was invited to a pop-up event where a whole host of independent brands were showcasing their wares and, seriously, I’ve found a few things I have now fallen in love with.

The best foundation ever

Firstly, I had not been aware of Dcypher. I am now a convert. And not least of all because my foundation of choice for the last couple of years has been an Estee Lauder one. I’m boycotting Estée Lauder. The owner of Lauder, Ronald Lauder, is the person credited with egging on Donald Trump with the idea of controlling Greenland. In what is, I’m sure, merely a staggering coincidence, Ron Lauder has many financial stakes in Greenland and would get richer from this arrangement. The man runs a female-founded company and is rich because of his almost exclusively female customer base and he’s cheerleading for the MAGA man hell bent on taking women’s rights back to the Dark Ages. Like Trump, Lauder has more years behind him than ahead of him, already more money than he can spend in that time, and yet he’s happy to be part of something that threatens to dismantle NATO and every scrap of hard-won world order. So absolutely fuck him and fuck Estee Lauder.

God, sorry, I was supposed to be trying to not think about All Of The Shit. But politics engulfs everything, so we are where we are. And it’s relevant because this means I won’t be buying their foundation or anything from their whole list of brands. (Particularly annoyed about Dr Jart.) Fortuitously, my new foundation from Dcypher is much better anyway. In fact, it’s the best I have ever come across. They use AI to colour match you exactly and make your foundation to order. No mass production of 50-100 shades that might suit a majority - but not all - skin tones. Just an individual colour formula for you. And they can do it in minutes. I was there with the lovely beauty editor and podcaster, Nicola Bonn and we were both watching each other’s colour being applied and going, ‘No way! That’s amazing!’ They also guarantee they will shade match for you. I love everything about it. I am loving my new Dcypher foundation and not just so I can say - again - fuck you, Ron Lauder. I would be delighted if you were moved to join me in hitting him where it hurts.

A lipstick I can cope with. And an immovable eye liner!

And then there’s this gorgeous Irish brand, Hildun Beauty. Since that event last week I’ve been wearing these things on repeat:

I am always saying I hate me in lipstick. I look like The Joker or Pennywise with any kind of bold colour. But I was coaxed into trying this beautiful lip pencil, above, which is a subtle pinky brown colour - just enough to give an extra hit of polish. Especially when you use it with one of their beautiful Melting Moisture Lip Balms. I’m hooked.

And the eyeliners! They’re called their ‘silk to set’ range and the texture on these really is velvety soft.

I have a lot of trouble with eyeliner running. I think it might be an age thing but my eyes stream a lot, annoyingly, especially in this cold weather. Well my stupid streaming eyes have met their match with this brand. It seriously stays put. Rejoice.

Hildun also have a few products they’ve done in collaboration with the make-up artist Hannah Martin. As I am a huge fan of hers, her endorsement speaks volumes for me. So I am now a new and confirmed Hildun fan.

The brilliant Reeson Beauty

I’ve written about this brand before. Gorgeous Ree, beauty blogger turned entrepreneur was the one who invited me to this event so I was already familiar with her goods. Many of them are on heavy rotation in my make-up bag, particularly her Bronzing Balm…

… and her beautiful Glossing Balm.

The hating lipstick thing means I’m obsessed with lip balms and need at least two in my handbag at all times. Which is why I love this new thing Ree’s done, the balm charm!

A little holster for your gloss. Pretty damn cute.

Rum

Oh my, I don’t know how I wasn’t aware of this brand, but thankfully that dark chapter of ignorance is now in my past. Two of my faves, Sali Hughes and Sam Chapman, are behind Rum, which brings you smart beauty products and other chic bits like T shirts and stationery. Their hero product is undoubtedly their Wrap Party tubing mascara

And well… it’s brilliant. I had not tried tubing mascara before because I was of the misguided opinion that it would be too hard to remove. The whole point of tubing mascaras is they don’t use the oils and waxes of traditional mascaras, but wrap the lashes in polymer tubes. (Am I taking this straight from Rum’s website and pretending this is information I already knew? Possibly.) So yes, they’re apparently great for actually staying on and not smudging, and I assumed this would make them a faff to remove. I was wrong. It’s really easy. Especially with this Gatineau cleanser that I have wanged on about before.

So now, for the first time in my life I have eye make-up that is really working on my leaky, streamy, 56-years-old-tomorrow (!) eyes.

What an enlightening and productive time I had at that pop-up! Thank you so much to Ree for inviting me. I hope you find some stuff here that’s useful and that you might want to try.

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I’m not sure if my favourite story I ever heard about Anna Wintour is true, but I’ve always liked to think it is. Supposedly, at a fashion show, there was a kerfuffle because one of the editors who formed the sprawling US Vogue entourage had arrived to find they had not been assigned a seat.

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In the interests of trying to cleanse my mind of the current news cycle and perhaps give myself an afternoon off from collapsing with rage, I have been putting effort into seeking out joyful things. And I have found some! Here’s a list of random delights I have chanced upon in the last few days.

Some affiliate links ahead, just FYI.

A colour dictionary

How had I never heard of this? My friend Sarah sent me a Tik Tok video of an influencer, Parker York Smith. He’s all about styling menswear but he has a lovely presenting style and he likes colour as much as I do, so I’ve been hooked. Anyway, Sarah sent me his video because he’s started using this Japanese book - A Dictionary of Color Combinations - to inspire his outfits. I had to know more about the book and I bought it. First published in the 1930s, it’s pages and pages of rather adventurous colour combinations. Here’s Parker exploring one wild combo, with great success if you ask me.

At the moment I am loving simply flicking through my new book for the mind candy that is these extraordinary colour combinations, and the imaginative names for them. Er, I think you’ll find that it’s not pink, oh ye of simple brain, but actually Eosine Pink, OK?

So enchanted am I by Parker’s idea to get dressed using the book, that I’m going to shamelessly rip off his idea. In fact, it’s the book and Parker who have given me joy. And for that we must thank Sarah, the original purveyor of the joy. Spread joy, everyone - it just grows and grows!

And expect an outfit from me using these four colours - Raw Sienna, Deep Lyon Blue, Benzol Green and Apricot Yellow. Any day now. Joyful.

A calligraphy lesson

It’s not every day one receives an invitation to attend a calligraphy lesson. It would have been insanity to say no to something so novel and intriguing. I was a guest of the brand Yard-O-Led. I will freely admit, I had no clue, but if you’re a pen nerd, you’re most certainly freaking out right now, for they are a Beyonce in the pen space. They have been hand-crafting solid silver, luxury writing instruments for more than 200 years. Birmingham-based, they recently opened a gorgeous London store in Mayfair’s Piccadilly Arcade. To celebrate Valentine’s Day and the launch of their new necklace.

So over bubbles and cakes, we were invited to try our hand at some actual proper penmanship. We were guided by mindful calligraphy teacher, Laura Edralin, who had discovered that the practice helped her recover from her career burnout a few years ago. And I have to say, even after just 45 minutes of slowly, mindfully trying to perfect these characters, I really felt like my nervous system had been given a hug.

It’s just one of those activities where, when you’re giving yourself over to the concentration of doing it right, you simply cannot think about anything else. I was completely taken aback by how satisfying I found it. And then I realised: I couldn’t remember the last time I wrote with a pen, on paper. Which is probably half the reason I found it so enjoyable. It occurred to me that I just don’t do much handwriting anymore. None of us do, really. And here is my homework ready for you to mark. I mean… I don’t think it’s half bad for a first attempt?!

I remember reading that a 2021 Japanese study found a link between regular handwriting and better brain health. Apparently writing, on paper, increases activity in the parts of the brain associated with memory and language. There’s something incredibly satisfying about it, and when you haven’t done it for so long, that is easy to forget. I can absolutely see myself doing this the next time I need a moment of calm.

Katie Loxton bags

Remember ‘it’ handbags? I don’t know if it’s just me, but I don’t know anyone anymore who sees the point of spending squillions on a designer handbag. I think Lockdown had a lot to do with rewiring our priorities on that one. But I’ve recently discovered this brand, Katie Loxton, that does very nice bags and they are extraordinarily good prices. I’ve been using this on-trend chocolate number for weeks now. The handles make it easy to sling on your shoulder and the size is great.

I also fell for this cabin bag, which I had embossed with my initials.

Spring shoes and longer days

Longer days are here - my heart positively sings when I notice it’s still light at 5pm. I know I’ll still be freezing my arse off til well after Easter, but it doesn’t deter me from my favourite spectator sport at this time of year: spring shoe shopping. Because I like to torture myself, my favourite first port of. call is always Gianvito Rossi. I will say, any shoes I have bought from there are brilliant quality and last for years. So I have my eye on these and I am fearing that my right hand will whip out the Amex while my left pretends nothing whatsoever is happening. But how perfect are they? They would definitely be ‘an investment’.

Bad Bunny

My daughter laughed way too hard when I said I quite liked Bad Bunny’s music. It’s not something I’ve actively sought out, I realise he is a young person’s pop star, but they play him a lot in my Peloton classes and - sorry if it’s embarrassing to my daughter - I do enjoy his vibe.

But the reason I adore the man is because he said this: ‘‘As a human being, violence against women affects me. So I am going to do what is within my reach to work against that.’

When I think of how rare it is that men understand this, let alone say anything about it. When I think that it’s virtually only women who shout about this all day long. When it’s more normal to hear men huffing and puffing on social media that it’s ‘not all men’. When it’s - god help us - somehow more normal that the leader of the free world’s name appears hundreds of times in The Epstein Files. Well… it’s good to have a lovely and very famous man on our team, right? So yeah, I was really pleased with him as the choice for the Super Bowl performer and I silently wished him well with that from my side of the world. And he was absolutely, shittingly magnificent. I say ‘shittingly’ because his magnificence really upset every shitty human you care to name. And he gave every normal, right-minded, hopeful person in the world a reason to smile for a good 20 minutes there. Twenty whole minutes of escapism! Buen trabajo, Benito.

Alpha waves music

I have outrageous tinnitus which does seem to be getting worse, sadly. When it first happened, in my 20s, I spent a few weeks going out of my mind with despair and depression about it. You really do just have to train yourself to live with it. The worst is at night when it’s quiet and the masking sounds of everyday life just aren’t there. When it’s been really bad lately I just find these Alpha Waves music tracks on Apple and they really do help. They mask the ringing in my ears, which is always there, and calm me into a meditative, restful state. It is seriously akin to a drugged, sedated state, try it.

This Gatineau cleanser

They’ve done it again. I am a forever fan of a melting balm cleanser and now Gatineau have just launched the God tier of the category, their Collagene Expert Melting Cleansing Balm. I am not being paid to say this. I just love it. It takes everything off but it’s so velvety on your skin. It cleans without leaving you feeling stripped. And it smells gorgeous. And it works for all skin types.

My collagen supplement seems to be working

I’ve been having a couple of teaspoons of Ancient and Brave True Collagen powder, either mixed in with porridge oats or just in a glass of water, since October. And for the first time in about three years, my nails are growing. They have been flaky and splitty and downright shitty for the longest time. I don’t know if was because I had a period of being a Shellac obsessive, or the menopause or a combination of both, but they had been so weak for so long and barely grew at all. It was only a couple of weeks ago that I was shocked to notice that perhaps my nails might actually need cutting. Until then, the scissors were deployed to cut off the sad little brittle shards. It is an absolutely glorious rebirth and I might allow myself a little Biab treat very soon. Apparently Biab is kinder to nails, we shall see.

The most perfect trousers in the world

I am so obsessed with these, from Uniqlo, that I now own them in cream, beige, khaki and grey and eagerly await any forthcoming spring colours to add to the collection. They are so comfortable and versatile and they are £34.90. There’s something about the barrel shape that works for virtually everyone. And with the trousers being this cheap, maybe it justifies the eye-watering cost of the Gianvito sandals? If anyone fancies enabling me on that one?

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Hope you found some of this useful, or at least pleasantly distracting for a few minutes. As you were….

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Right, sorry this is a bit of a stream of consciousness. I have a lot of thoughts and angsts this week, in the wake of the new dump of Epstein files. I’ve been simultaneously consuming as much information as I can about the whole nightmare - a lot of it I need to be across for the inevitable discussions on Palace Confidential. I also think we have a responsibility to hear these stories. To know what was done to these women and children, in elite circles of wealth and power. And as a result, I’m feeling pretty flattened under my own outrage and anger, and an exhausted sense of futility. I know I’m far from alone there. But I was grappling with so many thoughts about it all, when I received a few Instagram DMs like this one:

‘Jo, what support/voice are you giving to women and girls murdered, assaulted and raped?’

There’s a lot to unpack here. I don’t know where to begin. Firstly, violence against women and girls is something I do talk about. Really quite a lot. On here and via social media. I’ve campaigned for charities like Refuge and Women’s Aid and amplified many of their messages. I’ve tried to advocate for them as much as possible in my little cubby hole of the internet. I don’t have the biggest profile, but if organisations like those think I can be of service, I absolutely will.

But seriously, what would these messengers like me to do? I will be frank with you: this week has made me seriously question the point of railing against the relentless tide of abuses of women. As we watch establishment figures, yet again, float (gloat) into the the murky mist of unaccountability, what other conclusion can we draw?

It feels clearer than ever to me this week that there will never be any meaningful action on protecting the safety and rights of women and girls. Nothing that really changes anything significantly. We will keep campaigning and shouting about violence against women. We will shake with rage thanks to the ‘learnings’ from enquiries into grooming gangs that find women were routinely ignored or blamed for their abuses. We will angrily demand the release of thousands of documents about rich and powerful men gleefully gathering to cavort on an island where they were apparently all oblivious to the presence of half naked minors and the abuses they endured. We will wring our hands whilst watching prestige Netflix dramas about young boys being indoctrinated by the internet’s darkest corners of misogyny. We will continue to scream for justice for the women murdered in their own homes and those who are raped by men who know that, when it comes to punishment, the odds will be forever in their favour. We rage, we cry, we don’t sleep at night until we know our daughters got unscathed out of that taxi home. Men shrug, or mutter a defensive ‘not all men’. And then, in our age of so much progressive enlightenment, their favourite tech bro uses his intellect and obscene wealth to gift them an AI tool that lets them undress pictures of children.

So my question to the women who slide into my DMs to dress me down for not saying enough is this. What would you like me to do? What can I do that will change one damn thing? Women have been protesting about this shit for considerably longer than I’ve been alive. What, if anything, is really going to make this world safer for women and girls?

The release of The Epstein Files was supposed to be a turning point, a great reckoning. I’m not sure it will be. Yes, a former Prince has been stripped of his titles and that has made for a vanishingly rare, once in a lifetime sort of headline. But he has always protested his innocence of any sexual misconduct. And his fall from grace came about, not because of anything the late Virginia Guiffre claimed, but because it became apparent that he lied, on Newsnight, about cutting ties with Epstein, after he had served prison time for sex offences.

To most decent human beings, turning a blind eye to Espstein’s offences is as disgusting as committing them anyway. And Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor is far from the only one who knew that Epstein was a sex offender and carried on holidaying with him, connecting him to more power, leeching off his wealth, regardless. This is why nothing will change. Rich, powerful architects of our establishments - many of whom have run charitable foundations and call themselves philanthropists and gurus and consider themselves to be model statesmen and women - knew who this monster was and did not shun him. Quite the opposite.

When you have people of such power willing to ignore such plain disgustingly wrong criminality, where is there room left to hope for change? And what is the point of me being angry and heartbroken about any of it, much less posting a message on Instagram saying that men should not rape women and we should believe victims?

Even the supposed consequences are quite laughable when they happen. There was some palpable delight when Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was stripped of his royal titles and evicted from the residence he’s fought tooth and nail to keep. But honestly, what true penance is the man actually bearing? He’s not technically a prince anymore, but he’ll still live like one. He will continue to live in what most of us would consider luxury, and he will likely continue to decline invitations to tell the American authorities what he knows about who did what aboard ‘the Lolita Express’.

And actually I’m resigned to the fact now, that even if he did testify, it wouldn’t matter. If Andrew and Bill Gates and Deepak Chopra - to name just a few whose fawning emails were sent to Epstein long after his 2008 conviction for sex offences - tell us everything they know, so what?

This, from the infamous 50th birthday book put together by Epstein’s friends in 2003, makes my stomach turn. They didn’t know what kind of guy he was?

What LOLZ. What japes. Oh, that Jeff, he’s a one, lol. Not even mildly bothered about trying to hide in plain sight.

The US Department of Justice has already said there will be no further criminal proceedings in relation to the Epstein files. Their position is that, heinous as much of the material in the files is, there is no apparent grounds for any criminal charges based on what has been released.

So I have questions. If it has been proven that Ghislaine Maxwell was a child sex trafficker, and is now serving a prison sentence for such, does it not stand to reason that there’s a lot more to see here in terms of who received those trafficked girls? When the victims have stood up to be counted and given their testimonies? When the victims’ lawyers are exasperated by the ‘nothing to see here’ response from the DoJ?

Why did anyone bother to launch this investigation, gather these thousands of emails and hundreds of victim testimonies, if actually all enquiries halt at this point? Why are so many alleged perpetrators’ names redacted? And why is there not more outcry about Maxwell’s recent claim, that 29 individuals were shielded - by the US government - from being charged for any offences via ‘secret settlements’. Money talks. Women can shut the f up.

What do you think it will take to change this for the better? Because I can’t be the only one who’s just really fucking tired and feels like we’re going backwards.

Ghislaine Maxwell is justifiably in prison. But it doesn’t mean it’s lost on me that the only person serving time in the wake of all this horror is a woman.

We get angry at the point of discovering these evil acts. When the damage is done, the abuse committed and, invariably, the evidence diminished to the point of useless. But what is happening to dismantle the systems that enable these crimes in the first place? Some men - not all - will be shrouded in shame in the wake of the Epstein files. There may be some uncomfortable questions for a time. Fancy invitations might get lost in the post for a few months. But we know the script: Bide your time, and get your legal team to deliver a non-apology and you will probably be able to slide back into polite society. Through it all, these men will hold onto their wealth and status. Ultimately, the news cycle will move on, and we will wring our hands and shout and scream into the abyss the next time a sex scandal reliably rolls into view.

And the Epstein victims will carry on bearing the fall-out of survival, and coming to terms with the fact that courageously coming forward, and having the most intimate vulnerable information and images of them from the files plastered all over the internet, will change very little at all.

I will probably keep my chin up. I will rally. I will keep doing what I can, which doesn’t feel like much. And I will absolutely keep sharing the loud voices of much more knowledgeable and articulate voices than mine. Some people who are excellent at keeping the volume up and the heat on include Dr Jen Gunter, Deborah Frances White aka The Guilty Feminist, and Barrett Pall, who was a male model caught up trafficking.

But instead of sliding into the DMs of your fellow women, to ask ‘What are you saying about this?’ perhaps we can start applying real pressure to the people who can do something about it? Like, all the men who could just stop fucking abusing women? Lol, I know that’s ridiculous, ignore me.

If you have ideas on how we might actually stop the rampant sexual abuse of women, the world over, I would love to know and help make it happen. Because for now, in this week, I’m just so tired….

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