House With No Name Weekly Digest: From the John Lewis Christmas ad to Anya Hindmarch and the art of the apostrophe

Every Saturday the House With No Name blog features a round-up of the week’s highlights.

The picture above shows the gorgeous Christmas lights that hover like mysterious planets over St Christopher’s Place in the heart of London’s West End.

While I was in the vicinity I couldn’t resist popping into H&M to see the much talked-about new Versace collection. There wasn’t a lot left in the Regent Street branch but what a disappointment. There were shocking pink patent bags, silver belts and a scary pair of palm print leggings that even Elle Macpherson would be hard-pressed to look good in.

House With No Name on grammar: Anya Hindmarch and the art of the apostrophe
House With No Name on the week’s most uplifting story: The journalist and the Afghan teenager
House With No Name on the John Lewis ad: I cry at anything, but this leaves me cold
House With No Name Book Review: India Knight’s Comfort and Joy
House With No Name Children’s Books: My obsession with Enid Blyton's Malory Towers stories

PS: Nineteen days into the National Blog Posting Month challenge and I’m nearly two-thirds of the way through!

Friday book review - Comfort and Joy by India Knight

I’m a huge fan of India Knight. She’s wise, fun and talks more sense in her Sunday Times column than most other journalists put together. In short, she sounds like the sort of best friend we’d all like to have.

If that wasn’t enough, I opened the December issue of Red magazine to find that her house boasts joyous pink walls (she says they’re “really cheering on a January morning”), huge amounts of clutter and an amazing personalised mural drawn by artist Charlotte Mann with black marker pen. She likes “books, colour and over-decoration” and, asked what she’d save in a fire, reckons she wouldn’t save anything, apart from people and her laptop. “I don’t think it would really make much difference if you had your favourite teapot or cushion,” she says. “You’d just have to start again.”

It’s for all those reasons that I knew I’d love her Christmas novel, Comfort and Joy. Out in paperback this month, it perfectly captures the chaos of a family Christmas. Knight admits that the book is “fairly autobiographical,” with lots of “mashed-up memories and experiences,” but I reckon it’s all the better for that.

Comfort and Joy is the story of a modern family Christmas hosted by mother-of-three Clara Dunphy over three consecutive festive seasons. Like most women I know, Clara is determined to make Christmas special. As she says, “I want it to be so lovely, so redemptive, so right. There’s no point in doing it craply, is there?”

But even so, it’s a tricky feat to pull off when she’s got 16 guests turning up and is doing everything single-handed. Sitting round her London table each year are her ex-husband, her about to be ex-husband, three children, eccentric mother, two half-sisters, her non-PC mother-in-law and a host of well-behaved and not so well-behaved friends.

Knight is brilliant at blending laugh-out-loud humour with real insight into the stresses and strains of a family Christmas. You’ll love her third novel if you’re hosting Christmas at your place this year (though it might make you want to book a one-way ticket to the other side of the planet) – and even if you’re not.

Comfort and Joy by India Knight (Penguin, £7.99)

The uplifting story of the journalist and the Afghan teenager

Few people, if any, have a good word to say about journalists these days. As the Leveson inquiry reveals shocking new details about deception, trickery and intrusion in our newspapers, it’s hardly surprising that us hacks are regarded as the lowest of the low.

Yet most journalists I've come across are honest, hard-working and dedicated to their profession. I don’t know anyone who’s hacked a phone or tricked someone into telling their story against their will. And in amongst the gloom, there are still examples of journalists who’ve gone that extra mile to make a real difference to people’s lives.

Jerome Starkey, the Afghanistan correspondent of The Times, is a case in point. I’ve seen his by-line loads of times but until I read his Times 2 feature yesterday I had no idea about the amazing role he has played in helping to transform the life of a young Afghan boy called Najib.

Starkey’s and Najib’s paths crossed in Helmand on August 20, 2009. Najib was cycling along an empty street with his younger brother Hamid on the back, when a rocket hit the road beside them. Starkey witnessed the attack but managed to scramble for cover. But Hamid died instantly and Najib was left badly injured.

As Starkey wrote in yesterday’s piece: “Neither of us knew it, but that rocket was to entwine our lives. It would propel Najib – the son of an illiterate cobbler – towards unimaginable opportunities that would change his life forever.”

Thanks to an American charity, Solace, Najib was eventually flown to the US, but doctors were unable to save the sight of one eye. When he returned to Afghanistan, he threw himself into his schoolwork, aided by an international charity that helps to get talented Afghan students to schools and universities in the US. He and Starkey stayed in touch and earlier this year Najib asked the journalist to help him study in the UK.

Thirty-year-old Starkey had no idea where to start but he agreed to email Anthony Wallersteiner, the headmaster of Stowe, his old school (above).

The long and the short of it is that after interviewing Najib on the phone, Dr Wallersteiner agreed to award him a sixth-form scholarship, covering the Buckinghamshire school’s £28,000 a year fees. Najib, now 17, moved to Stowe in September and by all accounts has settled in well.

Starkey is acting as his guardian and as he wrote at the end of his uplifting piece: “I could almost cry when I stop to think about how far he has come.”

Children's books, Jack Wills and a spelling mistake

I’m busy reviewing a batch of children’s books and can’t get over the fantastic array of titles. So far I’ve whizzed through a novel for teenagers about a missing girl, a gorgeous story by Anna Kemp and Sara Ogilvie called Rhinos Don’t Eat Pancakes and I’m now on to Jacqueline Wilson’s Sapphire Battersea.

When I was little I loved books like Richmal Crompton’s Just William and Noel Streatfeild’s Ballet Shoes. But Enid Blyton was my absolute favourite. I used to get two shillings and sixpence pocket money a week and every Saturday morning I’d wander down to the local book shop and buy a new Malory Towers or Famous Five story. Then I’d go home, curl up on my bed and read it from cover to cover.

Enid Blyton doesn’t get a good press these days. Some critics reckon her vocabulary is hopelessly limited while others accuse her of being elitist, racist and sexist.

Characters like the Famous Five’s prissy Anne and her liking for party frocks and dolls are a bit hard to take but there’s no doubt that Blyton could spin a great yarn. Her stories captured my imagination so much that I longed to be part of the Famous Five gang, to spend days swimming at a Dorset cove, taking a brown mongrel called Timmy for long walks and solving mysteries.

When I had a quick look at a Famous Five book recently what struck me most was the freedom children had in Blyton’s day. Julian, Dick, Anne and their tomboy cousin George are all aged between 11 and 13 but they dash out of the house after breakfast, land themselves in loads of scrapes and don’t come back till tea-time. They’re allowed to row out to Kirrin Island by themselves and camp there alone for two days. Two days! It sends me into a cold sweat just thinking about it.

PS. Thank you so much to everyone who commented on yesterday’s blog about the art of the apostrophe and students’ dodgy grasp of grammar. I didn’t even mention spelling, so I was shocked to get the new Jack Wills Christmas handbook in the post this morning and find two pages of greeting cards, diaries, notebooks and pens marked “stationary.” Ahem, Jack Wills, do you mean “stationery?”

PPS. Still on the subject of the Jack Wills catalogue, I did another double take when I spotted a gorgeous long black dress that would look divine on my daughter. She says Jack Wills, which markets itself as creating "fabulously British goods for the university crowd," is too preppy for her. But even if she liked it, there's no way she'd be tempted. Why? Because the Belford sequin dress costs a staggering £798. That's the cost of two or three months' rent for most students I know.

Anya Hindmarch and the art of the apostrophe

During my short-lived teaching career I was taken aback by my students' poor grasp of basic grammar. Many of them avoided capital letters like the plague, used commas instead of full-stops and as for semi-colons, well, forget it.

So maybe St Paul's School for Girls, one of the most successful schools in the country, is on to something with its decision to run traditional grammar lessons for pupils aged 11 to 14.

"You would think that we might be attracting pupils who already have a pretty strong command of English grammar given that we're very strong academically and that we expect a very high standard from the pupils that we test for admission," headmistress Clarissa Farr told the Daily Telegraph.

"However, the reality is that a lot of our students don't even have a basic command, as we would see it, of the rules of conventional grammar when they arrive."

I don't know what she'd think of the bag above. I'm a huge fan of Anya Hindmarch, who's a brilliant businesswoman and fantastic designer. But I nearly fell off my chair yesterday when I spotted this £165 Anya Hindmarch bag on the Net-a-Porter site.

I reckon that whoever came up with that slogan should sign up for a grammar lesson immediately. Urgent apostrophe classes needed.

The Chipping Norton Literary Festival, James Corden and bike helmets

A dynamic writer friend called Emily Carlisle is one of the organisers of a brand new literary event due to launch next year. The Chipping Norton Literary Festival takes place in April 2012 and promises to be a treat, packed with writing workshops, author talks, book swaps, readings, signings and debates.

Over the weekend I’ve been helping (in a minuscule way) with the website and as I worked I got to thinking about some of the very best literary talks I've been to over the years. Two instantly came to mind. One was the late Sir John Mortimer, the beloved creator of Rumpole, who spoke at the Kings Sutton Literary Festival in 2008. I’ll never forget my teenage son’s engrossed face as Sir John regaled the audience with memories of Laurence Olivier playing his dad in A Voyage Round My Father, tales of Harold Wilson’s jollity and the fact that QCs keep their silk stockings up by wearing suspender belts designed for outsized hospital matrons.

My other favourite was hearing Martin Amis at the Oxford Literary Festival last year. He was interviewed by the poet and critic Craig Raine (who as a postgraduate student taught Amis at Oxford). I loved the way Raine dumped his bag on the floor, unravelled his scarf and then admitted cheerily to the audience that the pair had rehearsed “very little, if at all.”

But the friends’ hour-long conversation was enthralling. They covered everything from Amis’s view that for women, “having it all suddenly became doing it all” to his realisation that age is “very comic and tremendously humiliating.”

The most fascinating part of the discussion came when Amis spoke about his early novels. He said his writing style had “changed unrecognisably” and that he’d been “aghast” when he’d recently re-read three or four pages of his first novel, The Rachel Papers. “A first novel is about energy and originality,” he said, “but to me now it looks so crude. I don’t mean bad language – it’s so clumsily put together. The sense of decorum, the slowing a sentence down, the scrupulousness I feel I have acquired, aren’t there. As you get older, your craft, the knack of knowing what goes where, what goes when, is much more acute.”

I’m sure the Chipping Norton events will be just as illuminating. If you’re keen to hear the likes of Joanna Trollope, Sir Andrew Motion, Susan Hill, Jill Mansell, Katie Fforde and many more, you can sign up to the mailing list here.

PS: James Corden is one of the funniest men on the planet but my admiration for him soared today when I read an interview with him in the latest ES magazine. Asked what he would do if he was Mayor of London for the day, he replied: “Make sure that Boris bikes came with helmets. It’s terrifying that they don’t.” I’ve been thinking the same since the cycle hire scheme began. We urge everyone to wear helmets when they’re riding their own bikes, so why not when they ride Boris’s?

That John Lewis Christmas ad - and interviewing Morrissey

It seems another world now but my first job in journalism was as a reporter for a small weekly newspaper in the West Country. Golden weddings, flower shows, parish councils, you name it, the news team had to turn the comings and goings of country life into scintillating copy. Well, do our best, anyway.

After two years I escaped to London and became a feature writer on a women’s magazine. Friends assumed this would involve writing cosy stories about shopping, cooking and babies, but they couldn’t have been more wrong. The magazine was keen to attract a younger, hipper audience and I was instructed to interview as many up-and-coming rock stars as I could. While other writers rushed round the world meeting the likes of Mel Gibson and Tom Cruise, I set off in pursuit - metaphorically speaking - of stars like George Michael, Paul Weller and Morrissey.

The reason I’ve been thinking of those heady days was that Morrissey is back in the news again this week. Why? Because he has allowed John Lewis to use a cover version of Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want for their Christmas advertising campaign. One outraged fan complained: “Please, Please is our hymn about longing and unrequited love. No way on earth should it be used to sell household goods or clothes.” Incidentally, the ad, which features an angelic young boy counting the days in the run-up to Christmas, has reduced thousands of viewers to tears. For some reason, even though I cry at virtually anything, I don’t find it heart-rending in the least.

But to get back to Morrissey, my abiding memory of him is his wonderful turn of phrase. I interviewed him over lunch at J Sheekey in Covent Garden and despite his dour, tricky image, he was charm itself. He told me how his mum always believed in him (even when he decided he wasn’t cut out for work) and that as a child growing up on a Manchester council estate he far preferred staying in listening to Billy Fury records than going out to play with the other kids. And even then, he refused point-blank to settle for mediocrity.

“It sounds quite dramatic but I would never be content to straggle midstream,” he told me. “I always felt that if I couldn’t have what I wanted, I would rather have absolutely nothing at all. Perhaps that’s why I always thought that I would be impossibly successful or incredibly inconsequential.”

PS: As The X Factor gets more annoying by the week, 15 year old singer Jasmine van den Bogaerde, alias Birdy, shows the rest of them how it should be done. The great niece of actor Dirk Bogarde has just released her debut album (above) and it’s stunning. Her version of Fleet Foxes’ White Winter Hymnal sends shivers down my spine.

House With No Name Weekly Digest: From tooth fairy inflation to a new murder mystery by PD James

Every Saturday the House With No Name blog features some of the highlights of the week. The picture above, by the way, is the cover of Lauren Kate's eagerly-awaited novel, Fallen in Love, which will be published in January 2012. If the gorgeous jacket is anything to go by, her legions of fans are in for a treat.

House With No Name on tooth fairy inflation: How much does the tooth fairy pay at your house?
House With No Name on Liz Jones: Columnist is unfair to slate hard-working young women
House With No Name Education: What 21st century teaching is all about
House With No Name Book Review: PD James’s Death Comes to Pemberley
House With No Name Film Review: Page One: Inside the New York Times

PS: Twelve days into the National Blog Posting Month challenge and I’m battling on. A friend asked me why I was doing it, and for the life of me, I can’t remember!

Friday book review - Death Comes to Pemberley by PD James

Formidable – that’s the best word I can think of to describe PD James. She’s written 19 novels, created the much-loved Inspector Dalgliesh and two years ago hit the headlines when she gave BBC director general Mark Thompson a grilling about the large salaries paid to executives.

She's now 91, yet she still has the capacity to surprise her fans. Instead of producing another Dalgliesh story, her latest novel is a murder mystery set in the world of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.

James’s new book opens in 1803, six years after Elizabeth Bennet walked down the aisle with Mr Darcy. The couple and their two young sons are happily ensconced at Pemberley, Darcy’s grand country house, and Elizabeth’s sister Jane and her husband Bingley live nearby.

But their blissful idyll is shattered the night before the Pemberley autumn ball, when a horse-drawn coach races down the drive and out tumbles Elizabeth’s drama queen younger sister Lydia. To the Darcys’ horror, she shrieks that her husband has been shot in the woods.

A plot that plunges Elizabeth and Darcy into the midst of a murder investigation might sound preposterous, but James, with her fine writing skills and expert knowledge of Jane Austen’s work, takes the challenge in her stride. The end result is a pacy detective story that displays an eagle eye for period detail (especially when it comes to 19th century forensics).

It’s fascinating to learn, for instance, that 200 years ago detectives couldn’t distinguish one person’s blood from another’s and that night-time autopsies had to be conducted by candlelight.

In her author’s note, James observes that Jane Austen avoided dwelling on “guilt and misery” in her writing and apologises for involving "her beloved Elizabeth” in a crime story.

She adds that if Jane Austen had written this book she would have done it better. I’m not so sure. Death Comes to Pemberley is an elegant and quietly compelling read.

Death Comes to Pemberley by PD James (Faber and Faber, £18.99)

Liz Jones moans about young women

Over the last few months I’ve stuck up for Liz Jones left, right and centre. I even defended her in this blog back in June, saying “...she writes so well and with such disarming frankness that her diary is a must-read.”

But this week she’s gone a step too far. Even for me. She’s hit out at a whole generation of young women, castigating them for everything from taking maternity leave to not answering their BlackBerrys when they are off sick. She compares maternity leave to a “holiday” and clearly thinks no one should ever be ill. She rounds off her Daily Mail piece by raging: “Personally, I think you should crawl to work if you have to. No wonder the number of women who are unemployed is rocketing. If ever I employ a woman again, I’ll make jolly sure she’ll have already gone through the menopause.”

Liz Jones makes her living by being outrageous, but today’s rant is ridiculous. For a start, she reckons looking after a baby is a doddle, that you stick your infant in the pram, put your feet up and watch daytime TV. As all mothers know, the first few months are wall-to-wall hard graft. I went back to work at a magazine when my daughter was nine months old – and it was easy in comparison. I did endless phone interviews, wrote a couple of articles a day and even had time for a sandwich at my desk – all impossible (maybe I was just a hopeless mother) with a young baby.

But her criticism of “the lack of work ethic in young women today” is even more bizarre. At 19, my daughter and her friends are far more industrious than my generation ever were. They juggle university studies with jobs, start their own businesses and are 100 times more capable than their parents. With the recession starting to bite and employment hard to come by, they know they’ve got it tough and have to be equipped with the skills to succeed. The last thing they need is one of the best-known columnists in the country slating them so unfairly - and with so little cause.

PS: I’ve just discovered my new favourite clothes shop – Mint Velvet. Launched by three ex-Principles employees two years ago, it now has four stand-alone stores (Marlow, Tunbridge Wells, Chichester and Windsor – they should open one up north soon) and concessions in House of Fraser stores across the country. The designs range from soft leather biker jackets, flattering trousers and chic dresses to a gorgeous grey suede cross-body bag I fell in love with. I popped into the Marlow store (above) yesterday and it’s stunning. Best of all, the assistants were helpful, charming and knowledgeable. I’ll definitely be back.

The tooth fairy - and GlossyBox

It’s a much-loved custom, passed down through the generations. When children’s baby teeth fall out they tuck them under their pillow at night, then wake in the morning to discover the tooth fairy has left some money.

How exciting, only it turns out that the tooth fairy is an awful lot more generous in some parts of the UK than in others. In London a child receives an average of £5.10 per tooth, an amazing sum that would add up to £100 for a full set of milk teeth. In Portsmouth, however, children get 10p a tooth while in Hull it’s only 5p.

In these bleak economic times it’s clear the credit crunch is hitting everything – even the tooth fairy. As Mark Pearson, chairman of MyVoucherCodes, the company behind the survey, says: “Even the tooth fairy is feeling the pinch.”

Looking back, I got off lightly in the tooth fairy stakes. I paid a Scrooge-like 50p for my daughter’s baby teeth and when it came to my son I didn’t pay a penny. Why? Because in his down-to-earth and logical way he announced at the age of five that he didn’t believe in the tooth fairy at all. “It doesn’t make any sense,” he said. “How can a fairy arrive in the middle of the night and leave money under your pillow? How do they know I’ve lost a tooth?”

He was so unconvinced by the fairytale that I didn’t even bother to argue. Except a year or so later he suddenly realised he was missing a trick and that thanks to the tooth fairy his schoolfriends were coining it in while he was getting nothing.

“You know the tooth fairy,” he said. “I’ve changed my mind. I think there's something in it after all.”

PS: I know lots of people ask for specific Christmas presents, but I prefer surprises. Which is probably why I love the idea behind the GlossyBox. The idea is that you sign up, pay £10 per month (plus £2.95 p&p) and in return get sent a chic pink and brown box (above) containing what the company describes as “five high-end luxury samples from exclusive brands.” I’ve just been sent one to try and it’s absolutely gorgeous. As it was the sixth box, it contained six items - a Dermalogica pouch with three product samples (one is a “multivitamin thermafoliant” - I don’t even understand what that is!), a pack of Robert Piguet perfume samples, Stila smudge stick waterproof eye liner (brilliant) and some Leighton Denny nail varnish (I’d describe it as pink but it’s called Babydoll and it's lovely). So if you know someone who's keen on trying new beauty products and loves surprises, it could make a great (surprise) present.

Sleep deprived parents and Christmas shopping

My teenage daughter arrives home for her university reading week laden with history books, files, an enormous bundle of washing and these sky-high Topshop shoes.

“Try them - they’re really comfy,” she says. So I do, and amazingly they are. Well, until you wobble and fall off, when you’re liable to be carted off to hospital with a broken ankle. And as for hobbling round London on the tube or walking into Oxford, forget it.

But the main reason she’s back home for a few days (well, apart from seeing us lot) is to catch up on her sleep. A full-time student, she spends her spare time working three nights a week in a chic Shoreditch bar, running the university art society and partying with her friends. Wow - I’m not surprised she’s tired.

It’s ironic that she’ll happily doze till lunchtime these days, considering she was a very wide-awake baby who slept for five hours at night if I was lucky – and never in the daytime at all. Her sleeping was so dire that my South London GP referred us to a sleep clinic but that didn’t do any good either. It was years and years before she changed her mind and decided she liked sleeping after all.

But despite the solitude and profound lack of sleep I wouldn’t swap those days for anything. She laughs when I tell her about the endless nights of playing soporific Enya tracks to her and about the way I used to climb into her cot and lie beside her in a desperate attempt to get her to nod off. At least I don’t have to do that now.

PS: A new Good Food magazine survey says that in these dire economic times one in three of us are planning to “make or bake” our Christmas presents. Not for the first time in my life, I feel completely inadequate. I can’t think of anything I can "make or bake" that anyone would actually want. Suggestions gratefully received...

What 21st century teaching is all about

“I wouldn’t last very long here,” admitted Sandy Nairne, director of London’s National Portrait Gallery after spending the morning at a primary school in Hackney, east London.

Nairne was visiting Jubilee Primary School as part of a “job swap” organised by the Cultural Learning Alliance, an initiative where senior staff working in education and the arts spend a day shadowing each other to see what different jobs entail and to discuss new ways of introducing children to culture.

The minute-by-minute demands of headteacher Jacqueline Bruton-Simmonds’ working day clearly made a huge impact on Nairne. As Lucy Kellaway wrote in her Financial Times piece about the swap (above), the head’s day began with an 8am staff meeting, then continued through a whirlwind of teaching, observing classes, discussing everything from teacher training to school heating and talking to parents. “Headteachers have two jobs,” she explained. “We are managers and we teach children. We have to squeeze it (all) in.”

I’ve long thought that if politicians, business leaders and celebrities tried their hand at teaching they’d soon discover that it’s an awful lot harder than it looks. I’ve taught in schools and colleges in the past and it’s the trickiest thing I’ve ever done. For a start, today’s children, the internet generation, are very demanding pupils. As a teacher, you can’t simply stand at the front and deliver a “chalk and talk” lesson – or you’ll bore your class to tears and they’ll switch off. You have to devise interesting lessons, keep the students’ attention and ensure they actually learn something along the way.

When I interviewed teacher Oenone Crossley-Holland about her book on the stresses and strains of working at an inner-city school, she told me: “When you’re working in a school in a challenging area there are no quick fix solutions. You have to have a whole toolbox of different methods you use every single day, every single lesson and every single minute.”

And as the brilliant Channel 4 series Educating Essex showed, teachers juggle so many different roles. As well as helping teenagers to achieve at least five A*-C GCSEs, teachers like the wonderful Mr Drew, deputy head at Passmores School in Harlow, Essex, also have to support them through problems like bullying, family breakdown, friendship issues, teenage pregnancy and many more.

Headteacher Vic Goddard stressed that his teachers refuse to give up on their pupils. “If we just permanently exclude students when the going gets tough, who is going to redirect these young people to avoid them becoming the underbelly of our society in the future?” he said. “Being a headteacher is about moral purpose and ensuring I can look myself in the eye in the morning when I do up my tie, knowing that we have done all we can to ensure that every student has a future that can contribute to society positively.”

It's an approach that clearly works.

Page One: Inside the New York Times - A movie every journalist should see

“Journalism is alive and well and feisty, especially at the New York Times.” Those were the upbeat words of journalist John Lloyd after a special screening of Page One: Inside the New York Times at Oxford’s Phoenix Picturehouse last week.

With the hacking scandal still unfolding and journalists universally unpopular, many critics would take issue with his view. But there’s no doubt that Page One shows journalism at its very best. Some have compared it to The September Issue, the brilliant film-documentary about Vogue – and I loved it just as much.

Film-maker Andrew Rossi followed journalists on the NYT’s media desk for a year and the hacks emerge as a sparky and determined crew, dedicated to getting their stories right. Two writers who stick in my mind are Brian Stelter, a go-getting young reporter who juggles phone, two computers and Twitter-feed at lightning speed, while the maverick David Carr, a gravelly-voiced ex-drug addict who’s been writing about the media for 25 years, comes across as a larger-than-life character devoted to his craft.

Several things were puzzling though. As Lloyd, a contributing editor at the Financial Times as well as director of journalism at Oxford University’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, pointed out at the lively debate after the Phoenix screening, hacks in the UK would be astonished at the amount of time Carr gets to produce his reports. At one point he tells his boss that he’s got two more weeks of interviewing and research on a story he’s covering, followed by a week of writing it all up. That’s a luxury that doesn’t happen on this side of the Atlantic any more.

I was surprised, too, that none of the reporters seemed to use shorthand and that when they conducted phone interviews they typed their material straight on to their computers. Not a notebook in sight.

Set against a backdrop of the Wikileaks revelations, charging for news online and the demise of many fine newspapers, this is a movie that every journalist should see. But even if you aren’t a hack and you don’t even buy newspapers any more (shame) it’s definitely worth a look. You never know, it might even make you see journalists in a different light.

PS: Today is Day Six of NaBloPoMo - a fifth of the way there!

House With No Name Weekly Digest: From Laura Marling in concert to Nicolas Sarkozy’s kind gesture to David Cameron

Every Saturday the House With No Name blog features some of the highlights of the week. I took this picture, by the way, as I walked along London's Marylebone High Street and spotted Emma Bridgewater's gorgeous shop window.

House With No Name Book Review: David Walliams’s Gangsta Granny
House With No Name Music Review: Laura Marling plays Birmingham Cathedral
House With No Name Culture: Where you can buy a work of art for £45
House With No Name on No 10: Nicolas Sarkozy’s kindness to David Cameron
House With No Name Lifestyle: Who does the school run in your house?

PS: Five days into the NaBloPoMo challenge and I'm still going. But a friend from my days as a trainee journalist made me stop and think yesterday. She writes a lovely blog called The World from My Window, about life in rural Dorset, but she's dubious about blogging so often. "I find it self-indulgent inflicting my blog on people twice a week, let alone every day," she wrote. Hmmm. She's definitely got a point, especially as in our early hack days we were instructed not to use the word "I" in news stories. What do you think ? Is blogging every day self-indulgent? I'd (sorry) love to know.

PPS: The most uplifting story in the UK this week was Adam King's proposal to his girlfriend Lucy Rogers on the 19.57 commuter train home from London Euston. If you haven't seen the YouTube video yet, you can watch it here.

Friday book review - Gangsta Granny by David Walliams

I used to find David Walliams (and Little Britain too) plain annoying. But now I’m going to have to eat my words. Firstly because he did that amazing swim for charity along the murky River Thames and secondly because he’s fast becoming a writer to be reckoned with.

I adored Billionaire Boy, his third children’s book, which I picked as one of my Christmas reads last year. Sweetly dedicated to his supermodel wife Lara Stone, it’s the story of Joe Spud, the richest 12-year-old in the world. He’s got 500 pairs of Nike trainers, a grand-prix race track in his garden and a house that’s visible from outer space. In short, Joe has everything a boy could want – except, sniff, a friend.

Now Walliams’s new book, Gangsta Granny, is out – and even though I didn’t love it quite as much as Billionaire Boy it’s hugely entertaining. This one’s the story of 11-year-old Ben, who thinks his granny is the most boring person on earth. All she wants to do when he stays the night is play Scrabble and, even worse, she serves up disgusting cabbage soup, cabbage pie and cabbage mousse for his tea. When he tips one gigantic portion of soup into a pot plant and hurriedly tells her it was “yummy,” she's so pleased she immediately serves up a second bowlful.

In this funny, touching and at times sad story, Walliams cleverly reminds children that just because their grandparents might be old doesn’t mean they haven’t led exciting lives.

As he says: “Ben couldn’t imagine what Granny would have been like young. He had only known her as an old lady. He even imagined she had been born an old lady. That years ago when her mother had given birth and asked the midwife if it was a boy or a girl, the midwife might have replied, ‘It’s an old lady!’”

But even though Ben’s granny has white hair, false teeth and used tissues tucked up her sleeve, it turns out that she has a deep, dark secret he would never have guessed in a million years – one that plunges him into an amazing adventure. You’ll have to read the book to find out what it is.

Brilliantly illustrated by Tony Ross, Gangsta Granny would make a great Christmas present for boys or girls aged nine to 12.

Gangsta Granny by David Walliams (HarperCollins, £12.99)

David Cameron on doing the school run once a week

Soon after the coalition government was formed David Cameron and Nick Clegg announced their intention to delay morning cabinet meetings so they could help with the school run.

But in this week’s Grazia interview the PM said he doesn’t take his two school-aged children to school as much as he used to, though he does try and do it once a week. “...every morning there are priority meetings and phone calls,” he told interviewer Jane Moore, “so you’re endlessly being squeezed...”

Well, welcome to real life. David Cameron is far luckier than most of the working population because he lives “above the shop” and can dash upstairs to the flat above No 10 for a cuddle with baby daughter Florence in between meetings. If you’re running a small business or working as a teacher (don’t forget, it’s the last episode of Channel 4’s fantastic Educating Essex tonight) there’s no way you can break off during the day and pop home.

For most of us, working means a lot of hard graft and endless compromises. Six years ago my husband was working on his computer in our freezing cold attic. He was in between jobs at the time and suddenly came rushing downstairs at top speed. He’d had an amazing new idea for an ingenious hi-tech system that helps to reduce water leakage. Not the glamour end of the market, but pretty damn smart all the same.

All this time later, his eureka moment has resulted in a fully-fledged company 70 miles from home that’s helping to save vast quantities of water around the world. There’s still a long way to go, but to get this far at all he’s had to work flat out seven days a week, 52 weeks a year. He’s missed parents’ evenings galore, cancelled holidays at short notice and hardly ever took our children to school. But then again, if he had helped with the school run, his company wouldn’t exist at all – let alone be employing anyone or making a major contribution to saving water.

I’m sure he’s not the only parent who’s made sacrifices. In fact he’s probably very typical of so many working parents.

Nick Clegg said last year that children often miss out on time with their dads and highlighted research showing that “where fathers are involved in their children’s lives they develop better friendships, they learn to empathise, they have higher self-esteem, and they achieve better at school.” Well yes, but this isn’t something you can fix through legislation or by insisting fathers (sorry, but it is usually the dads) get home in time to put the children to bed. Working parents simply have to make time for their children when they are at home.

PS: After reading my blog about the forthcoming RCA Secret exhibition yesterday, a reader asked what I’d bought in previous years. I’m embarrassed to say I can’t remember who the artists are but the two prints we bought are pictured above, in their full glory. Sad to say, they are not by Damien Hirst or Tracey Emin.

RCA Secret - how to buy a work of art for £45

The Royal College of Art invitation sits tantalisingly on the shelf. This year’s RCA Secret sale takes place on November 26 and looks set to be as good as ever, with original postcard-sized works by superstar artists alongside up and coming art graduates. Last year's show featured art by Tracey Emin, David Bailey, Peter Blake, Maggi Hambling and many more.

RCA Secret was launched back in 1994 and is now an annual event. Each year hundreds of artists, from penniless students to household names, create a one-off work of art on a postcard. The public can then buy one of the 2,800 cards on display for £45 (all proceeds go to support student artists training at the RCA). But the catch is that you don’t know who designed your card till you’ve handed over your money.

The first year I went I queued for three and a half hours and failed to buy anything. So the following year we set the alarm for the crack of dawn and arrived at 6.30am. Big mistake. By the time we got to Kensington Gore the queue snaked right round the college and back again. Some intrepid art fans had pitched sub-arctic style tents on the pavement outside and rumours were flying around in the darkness that they’d been there for three days.

We thought we were well-equipped for the wait with coffee, iPods and thermals but our efforts paled into insignificance next to our fellow queuers. Most had sleeping bags, blankets, chairs and ski gear.

When the queue hadn’t moved an inch after 90 minutes my son whispered in my ear. “Shall we go home?” he said. Freezing cold and fed-up, I agreed. But my daughter wasn’t having any of it. “Don’t be so feeble,” she instructed firmly.

It was an agonising five hours till we reached the front of the queue. By the time we got inside the RCA building we were so numb with cold we could barely speak. And just like the year before, when we made it to the basement saleroom virtually all the cards we liked had gone. Electronic score boards flashed green for cards that were still available, red for ones that had sold. My daughter gave a running commentary as we inched closer and closer to the sales desk. “There’s one of your choices left, and one of mine,” she told us cheerily.

“Numbers 113 and 1898,” she told the saleswoman, when we finally made it to the front. And guess what? They were still there!

“You were right to make us wait,” I said as we trudged out, clutching our precious postcards. “But I’m not coming again.”

Except now it’s nearly time for the 2011 event… and I’m wavering.

You can view the postcards at the RCA from November 18.

From Victoria Beckham to David Cameron - the new Grazia

Tuesday is my favourite day of the week. Why? Because a loud thump on the doormat signals the arrival of the latest issue of Grazia. I subscribed to the magazine a few years back, ostensibly for my student daughter. But in truth I love its heady mix of news, reviews and fashion just as much as she does.

I’m supposed to be writing a book review right now but couldn’t resist a sneaky look at today’s edition. It’s a cracker, featuring news that Victoria Beckham’s “in torment” over David’s possible move to play for Paris St-Germain (what are you thinking, Posh, Paris is the most fashionable city in the world), claims that the scar on Kate Middleton's head was caused by a sporting accident at school and an exclusive at-home interview with David Cameron.

The chat with the PM, conducted at No 10 by Sun columnist Jane Moore, is clearly designed to head off criticism that he’s sexist following his “calm down, dear” remark to shadow treasury chief secretary Angela Eagle during a House of Commons exchange. Not only that, a recent YouGov poll found that one in three female voters regard him as the “greatest male chauvinist” of the three party leaders.

Today’s interview runs to five pages but I’m not convinced it will make much difference. Revelations include the fact that romantic dinners with wife Sam are tricky when the protection team is sitting close by, that Sam often tells him to “calm down, dear,” that the couple’s elder two children like taking Fox’s Glacier Mints from the cabinet table and while his daughter Nancy loves The X Factor he tends to wait till near the end of the series because he “can’t be dealing with the man in the silver suit.” Does he mean Johnny Robinson? I’m not sure...

The most touching disclosure is that whatever differences the PM has with Nicolas Sarkozy, he’ll always be grateful to the French president for his kindness before his father’s death on holiday in France last year.

“We didn’t really know how bad it was,” says Cameron. “I was going to do PMQs, then get a flight a bit later, but in the meantime someone told President Sarkozy I was coming to France, and he’d got his own doctor to call the hospital and had found out things were really bad. So he rang me in the car to say ‘you must get on a plane now.’ So I did, and when I landed, he got me to the hospital... Whatever row I ever have with President Sarkozy, I will always remember that he got me to my dad before he died.”

PS: It’s probably mad, but I’ve signed up to NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month), which challenges bloggers to post every day for, yes, a whole month. Can I do it? Watch this space!

Laura Marling plays Birmingham Cathedral

Under a grey October sky we joined a queue stretching the length of Birmingham Cathedral and across the churchyard green.

Everyone in the line had snapped up tickets for the last day of Laura Marling’s For Whom the Bell Tolls tour (you had to be quick because they sold out in a trice) and the sense of excitement was palpable.

The tour has seen the singer play a series of gigs at cathedrals up and down the country. Whoever came up with the idea should be applauded because if the Birmingham concert was anything to go by, England’s cavernous cathedrals offer the perfect acoustics for Marling’s amazing voice and storytelling lyrics.

She played two Birmingham events, one at lunchtime and a second in the evening. We had seats near the back but it didn’t matter because Marling, a slight blonde figure playing acoustic guitar, commanded the entire place from start to finish. From the moment she arrived at the front and quietly said “I’m Laura,” we sat spellbound. There were no gimmicks, no accompanying musicians and barely any chat. Apart from a couple of anecdotes about her former days touring in a five-piece band stuffed (drum-kit and all) into a Ford KA, she kept everything simple – and just sang her heart out.

With three albums and the 2011 Brit award for best female solo artist to her name, it’s hard to believe that Marling is only 21. Just hearing her play some of my favourites, Night Terror, Goodbye England (Covered in Snow) and Sophia, made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. Every number she played was her own apart from a haunting cover of Jackson C Frank’s Blues Run the Game, which, she recalled, she used to listen to on a mix-tape driving home from concerts in the early days because she couldn’t afford to stay in a hotel.

I didn’t realise at the time but Marling never plays encores. It could be that the hundreds in the audience didn’t know either, or maybe they just couldn’t bear to accept it. As the final chords of Marling’s guitar faded away, the claps, cheers and foot-stamping sounded loud enough to raise the cathedral roof from its rafters. But with a quick shy smile and the lights catching the top of her blonde head, she was gone.

PS: Today’s Mail on Sunday reports that Pippa Middleton is close to signing a book deal on how to be the perfect party hostess. The Duchess of Cambridge’s sister already writes a blog on children’s parties for her parents’ mail-order business, Party Pieces, and apparently the book will have a tone similar to the blog. In a recent blog entry, says the MoS, Pippa advised: “The key to creating a wonderful party lies not in spending vast amounts but in planning – from choice of venue, entertainer and party theme to the selection of food, decorations and the birthday cake.” Talk about stating the blooming obvious. I’m sorry, Pippa, but you’re going to have to do a lot better than that...

House With No Name Weekly Digest: From the dreaded dog debate to the glittering Cosmo Blog Awards

A Saturday round-up of the week at House With No Name

House With No Name Book Review: William Fiennes’s The Music Room
House With No Name Film Review: The Help
House With No Name Glamour: The party to celebrate the 2011 Cosmo Blog Awards
House With No Name Goes to the Dogs: The dreaded dog debate rears its fluffy head
House With No Name Lifestyle: Country or City? The best place to live

FRIDAY BOOK REVIEW - The Music Room by William Fiennes

I’m one of the judges for the first novel category of the Costa Book Awards this year - so I'm up to my eyes in books at the moment. For that reason, I’ve decided to steer clear of novels for this week’s Friday book recommendation and choose a non-fiction title instead.

The Music Room was published in paperback last year but I only read it a few weeks ago. I was completely bowled over by it, so bowled over in fact, that I chose it for my book club to read. The eight of us have got very different tastes and it’s not often that we all love the same book – but this was one of those rare occasions. It got the thumbs-up all round.

Two things inspired me to buy The Music Room. The first was hearing a moving interview with author William Fiennes and the second was the fact that it’s set at Broughton Castle, the Oxfordshire family home where Fiennes and his siblings grew up. I used to live a few miles from Broughton and know it well. I’ve walked from Broughton Castle across the fields to North Newington scores of times and whether it’s the height of summer or the depths of winter, the beauty of the landscape never palls.

In one sense The Music Room is the story of Fiennes’s own journey to adulthood and in another it’s the story of an ancestral home dating back 700 years. There’s a moat, gatehouse tower, woods and parkland, (the castle has featured in loads of films, from The Madness of King George to Shakespeare in Love) and it’s clear that running the place is a major undertaking. While Fiennes’s childhood friends lived in “warm, compact and efficient” houses, his home was full of historical exhibits, rattling windows and a ghostly long gallery he was scared to loiter in alone.

But the heart of the book is Fiennes’s older brother Richard, a charismatic figure with a passion for Leeds United, puns and herons. Eleven years older than William and severely epileptic, Richard was a towering presence in everyone’s life and as his mother kept repeating to them all after his death at the age of 41, “we are rich in what we have lost. We are rich.”

Beautifully written, tender and heartfelt, The Music Room is a stunning read.

The Music Room by William Fiennes (Picador, £8.99)

The party to celebrate the Cosmo Blog Awards 2011

A pink cupcake, a gothic-looking ring, fake eyelashes, jelly beans and some blusher from the new beauty line by Nicola Roberts (aka the redhead in Girls Aloud).

It's been quite a while since my children used to bring home party bags, but I've forgotten how much fun they are - unless, of course, you're the hapless parent who has to organise them. I remember assembling healthy goody bags at my daughter's party one year, with miniature boxes of raisins, books and little jigsaws, and the guests were not impressed. But the treats listed above are just a few of the presents inside the glamorous goody bags we were given at the Cosmo Blog Awards celebration party.

I was thrilled to be shortlisted - and thank you so much to everyone who voted for House With No Name - but on the night the lifestyle award went to the talented Miss Thrifty.

The best thing about the evening though (apart from the bright pink Cosmopolitan cocktails), was the chance to meet some fantastic fellow bloggers. Kate Monro had two blogs shortlisted - BigGuySmallDog and The Virginity Project - while journalist Katie Byrne is the brains behind The Young Creatives, a blog that showcases the work of artists, writers, musicians and designers under 25. It was fantastic, too, to meet the lovely Marion Katrina from Rust and Gold Dust and the brilliant Olivia from The London Ladybird, whose blogs I subscribed to the moment I got home.

The bash, held at a club called 24 Kingly in London's West End, was glamorous, loud and lit in stylish pink. The only drawback was that I was easily the oldest blogger in town (even though I'm really not that old.) On the train home to Oxford, I texted my sister. "The party was great but I felt 103," I typed.

"I would have felt 153," she texted back.

PS: A list of all the winners can be seen here.

The dreaded dog debate

Oh dear. The dreaded pet debate has raised its fluffy head again. My children’s young cousin is about to become the proud owner of a puppy and my usually laid-back teenagers are green with envy.

They claim they are deprived children because they’ve never owned a pet. Well, apart from a sickly goldfish in a polythene bag that my daughter won at a fair. It swam listlessly round its tank a few times, survived less than 24 hours and she never clamoured for another.

But dogs are different. Over the years they’ve come up with a host of arguments about having a puppy in the house. They’d call it Coco and promise faithfully they’d be in charge of feeding, washing and taking it for walks. My daughter’s stance isn’t at all convincing bearing in mind that we live in Oxford and she’s just moved into a student flat in Shoreditch, but still.

Deep down I know (and I reckon they do too) that there’s one person who’d end up on 24/7 dog duty - and that would be me. Several friends whose children faithfully promised to take sole charge of the family dog report the novelty wore off within weeks and then they were lumbered for life. Katie, a Lancashire pal who’s admittedly grown fond of her children’s Labrador, reckons the dog’s far more trouble than a baby. So far the puppy has chewed gaping holes in the sofa and Katie’s Nicole Farhi jacket, howls if she’s ever left on her own and as for training – hmmm, let’s just say there’s quite some way to go.

I still feel mean for not agreeing to my teenagers’ dearest wish though. And I wobbled a few years back when I discovered my son sadly herding a gang of snails (all named, of course) into a little enclosure outside the back door.

“I’m never going to have a pet so I’ve decided that these will have to do instead,” he said morosely.

The film of The Help is an out and out winner

My favourite books are the ones that make me laugh, make me cry and make me think.

I reckon the same rule can be applied to films – which is why The Help, the new film based on Kathryn Stockett’s tale of life in the American Deep South during the 1960s, is an out and out winner.

Stockett’s book, which chronicles the story of a group of black maids who look after the children of white southern families in Mississippi, spent 103 weeks on the bestseller list in the US and in three years has sold more than 12 million copies worldwide.

Film director Tate Taylor, Stockett’s best friend at school, spotted its potential and bought the film rights before the book was even published.

The Help is told from the viewpoints of three women. Two of them are maids, Aibileen, a wise and stoical black woman in her 50s who’s brought up 17 children of white women, and her feisty friend Minny, who extracts hilarious revenge on her racist employer. The third is Skeeter, a wealthy young white girl who desperately wants to be a writer. The trio form an unlikely friendship when Aibileen and Minnie agree to help Skeeter write a controversial book about the maids and their lives – a book that shakes the insular community they live in to the core.

It’s a controversial subject, and while some critics have slated the film for “sugar-coating” the civil rights struggle, it’s got heart and it mostly works. Viola Davis, as Aibileen, and newcomer Octavia Spencer, as Minny, have both been mentioned as likely Oscar contenders, as has Emma Stone as the sparky Skeeter. I managed not to cry till the scene where Aibileen is forced to say goodbye to a little girl she has looked after since she was a baby, exhorting her as always to remember she is “smart,” she is “kind” and she is “intelligent.” Then I couldn't stop.

Despite its flaws, The Help manages to be deeply moving, poignant and funny at the same time. Yes, it simplifies a violent era of modern history, but it’s a powerful, beautifully shot movie - and definitely worth seeing.

The Help, certificate 12A, opens on October 26.

PS: The preview I attended was organised by ShowFilmFirst - so thanks to them.

Why I moved from the city to the country - and back to the city

My daughter was a year old when I got obsessed with the idea of moving to the country. We lived in Camberwell, south London, at the time and even though I loved the house, with its pocket-handkerchief garden and scruffy Georgian facade, I hated the traffic and noise.

In the space of a few weeks, one neighbour was mugged in the next alley-way and another had her bag snatched while her two small children looked on. One night I glanced out of the back window to see flames soaring 20 feet into the night sky. Joyriders had stolen a car down the road and set it on fire next to our fence.

Then out of the blue my husband was offered a new job in Blackpool. Within weeks we’d let our house and rented a farmhouse in the wilds of rural Lancashire. Our friends thought we’d gone completely mad. The way most of them reacted you’d have thought we were emigrating to Siberia, not 200 miles up the M6.

But it turned out to be the very best thing. Downham is one of the loveliest villages in the country. It looks like something out of a picture book – complete with pub, church, post office, stream with ducks, even a nursery school. What more could you ask for? We were entranced by the clear air, stunning views and hearty walks up majestic Pendle Hill.

My son was born in Lancashire (and still supports Blackburn Rovers in fact) and I’m sure the lifestyle there, playing on his bike and swinging on a rubber tyre hanging from a huge oak tree near the house, gave him a lifelong passion for outdoor pursuits. When a friend came up from Manchester with her young son she marvelled at the way he hared off down the field. “I’ve never seen him run that far before,” she said. “At home I always have his hand clamped in mine. I’m terrified to let him out of my sight.”

But sadly, after a few years of living up north, we had to move south for work. With the children growing up fast, the idea of living round the corner from schools and shops seemed oddly appealing. So we decided to have a change and moved to Oxford – where even now, the novelty of being able to walk out of the house at all hours to buy bread, coffee and a bottle of Pinot Grigio still hasn’t quite worn off.

PS: My husband's finally succombed to the inevitable and bought reading glasses. I helped him choose a chic tortoiseshell pair in David Clulow and texted a picture to our daughter. "Are you trying to make him look like Bill Nighy?" she texted back. Hmm, she's got a point. Since Bill Nighy's my number one pin-up, I think I probably am.

Picture of Downham: Lancashire County Council

House With No Name Weekly Digest: From The Hummingbird Bakery to We Need to Talk About Kevin

A new Saturday round-up of the week at House With No Name.

House With No Name Book Review: Cecelia Ahern’s The Time of My Life
House With No Name Film Review: We Need to Talk About Kevin
House With No Name Writing Tips: How to Write a Great Plot
House With No Name Cake Appreciation: The Hummingbird Bakery’s Halloween Specials
House With No Name at the Cheltenham Literature Festival: Carol Drinkwater and Michael Wright

FRIDAY BOOK REVIEW - The Time of My Life by Cecelia Ahern

The thing I like best about Cecelia Ahern’s books is that they’re different to most chick-lit. Rather than turning out classic romances she weaves magical stories that take a sideways look at life. So far, her novels have featured letters from beyond the grave, a girl with an invisible friend and a book that can predict the future.

Her new novel, The Time of My Life, is the story of Lucy Silchester, a scatty translator who lives in a grotty flat. She’s broken up with her boyfriend, hates her job and has a tricky relationship with her family.

But one day she arrives home to find an envelope on the doormat. It's embossed with a mysterious gold symbol and contains an invitation to a meeting with someone called Life. And it’s not any old life either. It’s her life.

When she comes face to face with Life in a down-at-heel office block, he turns out to be an unprepossessing man with a clammy hand-shake, bloodshot eyes and bad breath. He reveals he’s in such a state because of the careless way she’s been treating him.

The storyline sounds ridiculous but actually, Ahern pulls it off with panache. Lucy and her neglected life make an engaging, if grumpy, duo as he helps her to realise that she’s lost sight of everything important. Fed up with being overlooked, he accompanies her to the office, meets her astonished friends and even does a little matchmaking along the way.

I'm sure Ahern, the daughter of former Irish prime minister Bertie Ahern, would never claim her novels (this is the eighth) are Man Booker contenders, but The Time of My Life is one of her best. It's funny and touching and has a meaningful message at its heart.

The Time of My Life by Cecelia Ahern (HarperCollins, £16.99)

How to write a feature that works

From Emily Carlisle to Sarah Duncan, fellow bloggers have given me loads of fantastic advice over the last few months. I’ve gleaned tips on where to go in New York from Liberty London Girl (the High Line and the Strand Book Store were just two), picked up delicious recipes from Eat Like A Girl and kept up to date with life in France from my old friend Colin Randall at Salut!

Desperate to think of something to offer in return (well apart from the best pubs in Oxford and must-read books), I’ve realised that just about the only thing I know about is journalism. So, if you’ve got an article to write, here is my five-point crash course on the basics of feature writing for newspapers, magazines and websites.

1. Structure. All publications are aimed at different readers and have their own unique style – so your piece must take account of that style. If you’re unsure about your writing, use concise sentences and short paragraphs. Be consistent when it comes to tenses and avoid clichés, waffle and long, convoluted sentences that are tricky to understand.

2. Introduction. The first paragraph of your feature is probably the most important of all. It should grip readers’ attention immediately and compel them to read on.

3. Body of the text. Although your intro is crucial, the rest of the article must fulfil the promise of your stunning first paragraph. Develop your theme, message or argument step by step and make sure, too, that each paragraph flows logically to the next.

4. Quotes. Admittedly some people are more quotable than others, but strong, accurate quotes help to bring a feature alive.

5. Ending. A good ending should tie up any loose ends. But remember that a feature isn’t an essay, so avoid simply recapping all the points you’ve mentioned before. Don’t finish the piece too abruptly or let it tail away either. If in doubt, a good quote often works well and rounds the piece off in style.

Michael Wright and Carol Drinkwater on living in France

Soon after I signed on the dotted line and the House With No Name officially became mine (help!), I wrote my first and only fan letter. Well, actually it was an email, but it was to a journalist called Michael Wright.

I’ve been reading Michael’s Saturday column in the Daily Telegraph for eight years now and I’m still as gripped as ever by his tales of leaving his safe South London life for a dilapidated French farm with only a cat, a piano and a vintage aeroplane for company. In the intervening years he’s married the lovely Alice, a childhood friend and former intensive care nurse, and they now have two little girls.

Actually, my fan letter turned into a rambling missive about how Michael’s hilarious accounts of moving to the Limousin had steadied my nerve about buying my tumbledown wreck with a dodgy roof and years of building work ahead of me.

But within hours an encouraging email from Michael pinged into my inbox, cheering me up no end with its positive talk. “The secret with your farmhouse is, I think, to make friends with some of the local French and to ask around about a good builder who is sérieux,” he wrote. “Make friends with this man, and make him feel that he wants to help you. Ask him to recommend people too, to do the things that he won't touch. One day it will be, I feel sure, a wonderful house again.”

Wise words, so when I spotted that Michael was speaking at this year’s Cheltenham Literature Festival I booked a ticket straight away. He was teamed with actress Carol Drinkwater, who played Helen Herriot in the BBC’s All Creatures Great and Small and has written a clutch of bestsellers about her olive farm in Provence. The pair hadn’t met before the event but they made a great duo. Carol told how she and her now-husband, TV producer Michel, found the olive farm (and fell in love with it and each other at the same time), while Michael recalled how moving to France on his own helped him “to become the kind of man I always hoped to be when I was a child.”

Along the way the two writers reminisced about their early years in France. Even though Carol is married to a Frenchman, she perfected her French by doing a course at Nice University. Michael, however, took a slightly different approach. As well as chatting to neighbours and poring over Balzac and Baudelaire, he found that reading photo love stories magazines helped him learn colloquial French. He also joined the local tennis club, where the art of losing with aplomb, he said, was his “contribution to international relations.”

The massive marquee was packed to the gunnels for the event and we were so entranced by the pair’s tales that afterwards scores of us queued up to buy signed copies of their new books – Michael’s Je t’aime à la Folie and Carol’s Return to the Olive Farm. I snapped up both but didn’t look at what Michael had written inside my book till I got home. “To Emma,” he’d scrawled. “Cheering you on in your dream!”

Annie Lennox at the V&A, The Hummingbird Bakery and ghosts that say "boo"

Goodness knows why, but I was once invited to be a guest on a local radio show. In amongst the chat about books, they played four of my favourite music tracks – like an inferior sort of Desert Island Discs, I suppose. Anyway, the first song I chose was the Annie Lennox number, No More I Love Yous, which I still adore.

The memory of sitting in that dungeon-like Leeds radio studio struck me forcibly this week when I went to the Annie Lennox exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum. The former Eurythmics star has helped to curate a collection of her work at the V&A – and it’s well worth a visit.

Over the years, Lennox has kept cuttings, ideas for lyrics, photographs and outfits galore, and loads of them are now on view at the exhibition. She’s always been feted for her bold, theatrical look and chameleon-like image so it’s fantastic to see some of her show-stopping costumes for real. Remember that amazing Union Jack suit she wore to the Brit Awards in 1999? It’s there, along with a stunning gold lamé corset and matching fingerless gloves she sported in the late 70s when she was lead singer of The Tourists, and many more.

Standing in the museum, with black and white videos of some of Lennox’s most famous performances playing on the screen above my head, I was impressed by how prolific she is. As well as her platinum discs, awards and humanitarian work, she’s even won an Oscar for best original song – for a track she wrote for Lord of the Rings: Return of the King with Fran Walsh and Howard Shore.

The best bit of the exhibition is a desk (below) showing snatches of Lennox’s work in progress. In amongst the pens, highlighters and scraps of paper, it’s inspiring to see notes of her most famous lyrics, all scrawled in capital letters. There are also a few of Lennox’s own books dotted around, an eclectic collection with The Art of Seduction alongside I Don’t Know She Does It, Allison Pearson’s novel about working mother Kate Reddy.

PS: For years, no trip to London has been complete without a trip to The Hummingbird Bakery. Everything about this bakery is gorgeous, from the exquisitely-decorated cakes to the chic pink and brown boxes they’re packaged in. With Halloween just around the corner, the South Kensington branch has excelled itself. The windows (above) are filled with cut-out paper pumpkins and the cakes come decorated with scary witches, broomsticks and ghosts that say "boo." I brought a spider's web cupcake home for my son and as you can imagine, it was gobbled up in double-quick time. The Hummingbird Bakery now has four shops - in Notting Hill, South Kensington, Soho and Spitalfields - and look out for their two gorgeous books too, The Hummingbird Bakery Cake Book and The Hummingbird Bakery Cake Days.

The House of Annie Lennox is on at the V&A till February 26 next year (2012).

Film of We Need to Talk About Kevin is shocking but thought-provoking

“Well, that was cheerful, wasn’t it?” muttered a middle-aged man as the credits rolled at the small basement cinema in Covent Garden where we’d just seen a preview of We Need to Talk About Kevin.

The rest of us didn’t utter a word. I, for one, felt like I’d just been run over by a ten-ton steam-roller. I’d gone to the movie with my teenage daughter but was so emotionally wrung-out by what I’d just seen that I could barely speak till we were halfway back to the tube station.

There’s no way you can feel indifferent about We Need to Talk About Kevin, the much-anticipated film of Lionel Shriver’s 2005 Orange Prize winning novel. It’s the story of Eva, a mother who puts her ambitions and career aside when she has her first child, Kevin. But far from building a warm, loving bond, the icy-cool Eva finds herself unable to love her son and can’t relate to him at all. Whether she’s throwing a ball to him, playing mini-golf or taking him for a meal at a restaurant when he’s a teenager, their relationship is brittle, artificial and chilling.

Even though the subject matter is grim, the film is beautifully shot. It moves back and forth in time, from the days when Eva was a go-getting travel writer to the aftermath of the horrific high-school massacre perpetrated by the teenage Kevin. The colour red features throughout the film, from opening images of Eva taking part in a tomato throwing festival in Spain to her house and car being daubed with red paint following Kevin’s shocking act - red paint which Eva constantly attempts to scrub off her hands.

There’s no doubt that Tilda Swinton (above), as Eva, gives the performance of her career, and Ezra Miller as the teenage Kevin, is utterly mesmerising. But for me, watching Eva grapple with her feelings of grief and responsibility for her son and his actions was just too much to bear.

Directed by Lynne Ramsay and with a 15 certificate, We Need to Talk About Kevin is released on October 21. It’s controversial, shocking and thought-provoking – but not easy to watch.