MY WORK

Guardian column

From July 2012 until May 2013, I wrote a column in the Family section of The Guardian called 'Doing it for Dad’ about being power of attorney for my father, who had vascular dementia. It was incredibly comforting to put words to what was happening and connect with readers going through the same thing. My Dad died in October 2013, three months after the birth of my second child. I miss him every day. He was a Cornishman, who loved nothing more than going out on his boat and would always be there ‘dreckly’.

The Sun / Femail

As a senior writer at The Sun, I interviewed then-PM Gordon Brown at Downing Street, flew to New York to buy SJP’s wardrobe, attended a ‘school for seduction’ in a Moscow suburb and flew to Kiribati, an archipelago of islands in the South Pacific where I lived for two years as a child, to report on climate change (the irony of which is not lost on me). I left to become a commissioning editor at Femail, where I managed to get into hot water with Lembit Opik and spent a lot of time trying to say insightful things about headlines at ten o’clock at night, before leaving to go freelance shortly afterwards.

The Times

Shortlisted for The Times graduate scheme, I ended up as an editorial assistant on The Times Magazine. I compiled the Taste Test column before progressing to writing features and interviewing all sorts of well-known people - from Coleen Rooney to Michael Winner. To this day, I follow the latter’s method for the perfect scrambled eggs. (‘Take the pan off the heat and keep stirring, darling!’)