It’s an itsy bitsy week for me, rushing around to get things organized for a week away with the Blondes. We are four friends (with varying degrees of blondness), with friendships that go back more years than I like to add up,  to our days working together at Time Out. Three of us are still…

This is my birthday week but it begins with Sunday’s unprecedented closure of Turnham Green Terrace, a Together on the Terrace initiative to help revive business on the Terrace. We have a newly restored fountain with new benches by the edge of the Green and today is the unveiling of what turns out to be…

The lovely Indian summer weather is holding out, hot like summer during the day but chilly in the evening, so comfort food and lighting the fire, is starting to change the way we think about what we want to eat. I’m thinking sausages, writing notes to myself and popping into Macken’s (www.mackenbrothers.co.uk) to get more…

It’s worse than back to school in my house, it’s Diet Week; no booze, no potatoes, no pasta, no rice, no bread, no cheese and Small Portions. I decide to give up breakfast, having read Anna Murphy, the Times fashion supremo, claiming she lost a stubborn half stone by doing just that. My breakfast is…

I haven’t been to Rye since I was a small girl. During the long summer holidays my parents would often get my brothers, sister and me up early for a day out to the coast, usually the Kent or Sussex coast and we’d pack into the car with a humungous pic-nic, usually with a couple…

 So begins two weeks in Provence. We’ve come to the same house for the second year running, a splendid mas, as they call the traditional farmhouses round here, on the outskirts of Eygalieres, a delightful village close to St Remy de Provence. Lavender grows in profusion next to lawns in front of the house, fruit…

Sunday All the work for the family bbq done, all I have to do is lay the table in the garden and thread the chicken onto kebab sticks. Now this should be a quick, painless episode but although I’d thought ahead and soaked wooden sticks, decided to use my ancient metal skewers, now tarnished with…