My favourite Emma Bridgewater mug

My son gazed at the kitchen shelves, silently counting the rows and rows of colourful mugs. “Do you know?” he said finally. “We could invite 100 people to tea and not have to borrow any cups.”

Most of the cups he’s talking about are from Emma Bridgewater, the eponymous potter whose china adorns kitchens the length and breadth of  the country. Manufactured in Stoke-on-Trent and sold all over the world, Emma’s china is decorated with everything from those famous multi-coloured spots to flowers, birds and Union Jacks. My own favourite, produced in the nineties, is a mug printed with purple houses, keys, hearts and stars (below). It’s been used so much that it’s got a hairline crack down the side but I can’t bear to throw it away. I’m so addicted that I can’t walk past the Bridgewater shop in Marylebone High Street, currently decked out in patriotic red, white and blue designs to celebrate the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, without buying something.

I first interviewed Emma and her husband Matthew Rice back in the early days, when they lived in a house on the Fulham Road crammed with old china, architectural drawings and assorted animals – both live and stuffed. 

It’s a huge success story, which started in 1985 when Emma was looking for a cup and saucer as a birthday present for her mother but couldn’t find anything she liked. Even though she didn’t have any formal art training, she hit on the idea of producing her own designs.

“I knew before I started my business that it was going to take off,” Emma told me all those years ago. “If you’re going to do something successfully, you have to believe in it 100 per cent. It’s never an accident. You’ve got to wake up every morning with a powerful conviction of what’s going to happen today, what it is you’re trying to achieve.

“Mind you,” she added, “there were days when I got up with no conviction at all and went straight back to bed with a novel.”

Friday book review - Blue Monday by Nicci French

My admiration for husband and wife writing team Nicci Gerrard and Sean French knows no bounds. Just before my husband took up a new post in France we spent a month working in the same office at home. It did not work. He drove me mad pacing about and talking at top volume on the phone, while he couldn’t stand my cluttered workspace (he’s a fan of the clean desk policy) and leaning towers of books.

But Gerrard and French are an inspiration to working couples everywhere. They’ve been married for more than 20 years and in that time, as well as writing separately, they’ve turned out a cracking run of stand-alone thrillers under the pseudonym of Nicci French. Gerrard writes in the attic of their Suffolk home while French works in a shed in the garden. Most of the time they write alternate chapters and email them back and forth until they’re happy with them.

I’ve read quite a few of their books but I reckon their latest is the best. Blue Monday, now out in paperback, is a completely new departure - the first in a series of eight crime novels starring psychotherapist Frieda Klein.

In her late 30s, Frieda is an insomniac who walks the streets of London in the dead of night, drinks whisky and much to the irritation of her office, doesn’t own a mobile phone. The first book of the series focuses on a child abduction case and isn’t for the faint-hearted. But it’s a classy, nerve-jangling and addictive read, with the promise of more Frieda Klein stories to come. The second, Tuesday’s Gone, is out in July and I can’t wait.

Blue Monday by Nicci French (Penguin, £6.99)

The five most annoying phrases in the English language

“I truly am the reflection of perfection.” “In order to be the best you’ve got to beat the best.” “Enthusiasm is a huge asset of mine and I believe it’s caught not taught.”

Lines as dire as these can only mean one thing. Yes, you’ve guessed it. The Apprentice is back, with a new batch of entrepreneurial hopefuls (and hopeless cases) battling it out for the chance to go into business with the redoubtable Lord Sugar.

“This is not about a job anymore and I’m not looking for a friend,” the gruff tycoon told them last night (the bearded guy at the back looked like he was quaking in his boots). “If I wanted a friend I’d get a dog. I’m looking for a partner, the Marks to my Spencer, the Lennon to my McCartney. This is about me investing £250,000 into a business with one of you and I’m expecting you, as the so-called entrepreneurs, to make the money for me.”

I’m not sure if 2011 winner Tom Pellereau, who recently launched a curved S-shaped nail file called the Stylfile, is going to make shed-loads of cash for Lord Sugar or not. But the start of the eighth series of The Apprentice got me to thinking about some of the most infuriating phrases in the English language today. I’ve used the phrase “got me to thinking” on purpose. Sarah Jessica Parker (aka Carrie Bradshaw) uses it all the time in Sex and the City and it drives me and my daughter bonkers.

Anyway, here are my current top five annoying phrases:

1. “The fact of the matter is…” Politicians love this one but it doesn’t mean anything at all.

2. “Don’t get me wrong but…” Columnists use this phrase way too much.  

3. “At the end of the day…” Surely there must be a more original summing-up phrase than this?

4. “With all due respect…” It  means the opposite.

5. “Absolutely.” Why can’t interviewees just say “yes” to a question these days?

I'd love to hear about your most loathed words and phrases. I have a feeling that Lord Sugar’s Apprentice happy band of wannabes might inspire a few.

1976 - the best year to be a child

1976. The year of Raleigh Chopper bikes, Abba and the longest, hottest summer in living memory.

I remember it like yesterday. But even so, it was a surprise to discover that 1976 has been voted the best year to be a child. Apparently children spent an average of 810 hours outside, went on ten weekend family trips and unlike today, 90 per cent of us felt safe. In contrast, 2011 was the worst year to be a child, with a staggering one in seven youngsters spending just 26 hours playing outside during the entire year.

So what was life like in 1976? I was a teenager and even though I was supposed to be revising for exams I spent most of that glorious summer lying on a Dorset riverbank with my school pals. A friend called Larry bought hundreds of old copies of Jackie magazine for a pound at the village fete and we spent virtually every afternoon reading soppy love stories and pouring over Cathy and Claire’s problem page. Not surprisingly, my exam results were utterly dire.

The girls all wore floaty Laura Ashley dresses and lace-up espadrilles while the boys had long hair and side burns. Me and my best friend Angie listened to Eric Clapton and Jim Capaldi on an old-fashioned record player and lived on toast and homemade biscuits. One afternoon I burned the toast and set the school fire alarm off. The whole place had to be evacuated midway through exams. Not surprisingly, I was the heroine of the hour…

My dream office - and jackets on the backs of chairs

Tyler Brûlé is a publishing phenomenon. A war reporter turned fashion editor, he launched the ultra-hip style magazine Wallpaper* in 1996 and the following year Times Inc bought it for a cool $1.7 million. He writes the Fast Lane column in the Financial Times and has also founded an upmarket monthly magazine called Monocle. His latest venture is based at chic headquarters in Marylebone, where everything is so stylish that if you ask for a coffee it comes in “a minimalist white cup on its own limed-oak board, with a single brown sugar cube and modernist zinc teaspoon.” Wow. I want an office like that.

Brûlé featured in a Guardian interview at the weekend and the thing that really stuck in my mind was his insistence on an immaculate office. “People need to attend to details,” he said. “I believe in a tidy ship. No jackets on the backs of chairs.”

Jackets on the backs of chairs. The offices I’ve worked have been full of them. If you walked through a news room in the 80s and 90s you’d see rows and rows of chairs with jackets slung over the back. Mainly because their owners wanted it to look like they’d just popped to the canteen to grab a quick coffee and would be back toiling away at their desks within a couple of minutes. The truth was that they’d actually slunk down the back stairs for a pint or two at the pub.

Newspapers are very different places now. The rambling Fleet Street rabbit warrens have given way to sleek modern towers, with airy, plant-filled atriums and state-of-the-art technology. I’m pretty sure, though, that there are still quite a few jackets tossed over the backs of chairs… 

The days when everyone had their own train

Travelling is an expensive, stressful business these days. Fuel costs are sky high, train fares prohibitively expensive and I was stunned when I drove to Manchester recently to find that using the M6 toll costs £5.50 each way. That seems an awful lot for just 27 miles of road…

The news didn’t get any better this morning when I opened The Times to discover that David Cameron wants to kickstart the economy by allowing private companies to build, operate and maintain motorways and trunk roads. Hard-pressed motorists apparently won’t have to pay to use existing roads but firms could charge for new routes or new pay-as-you go lanes.

As I read all this doom and gloom I wondered what Princess Alice, the Queen’s late aunt, would have made of it all. Over the weekend I was sorting out my embarrassingly cluttered office and discovered the transcript of a speech my mum once made.  She’d interviewed Princess Alice at her Kensington Palace home and they talked a lot about her childhood.

“As the daughter of the Duke of Buccleuch Princess Alice spent a childhood travelling from one ancestral home to another,” wrote my mum. “Whenever a journey was imminent, the children, servants, horses and luggage would be loaded on to the family train. ‘How extraordinary, Ma’am,’ I said, ‘to have your own train.’ ‘Oh, in those days,’ she said, ‘everybody did.’”

PS. I spotted this leopard-print Beetle in east London recently and still can’t decide whether it’s super-hideous or super-chic!