Call me an over anxious, middle-class mum, but my eight-and-a-half-year old son looks very much, to me, like he's headed for a life of crime.

As I was growing up, it was made clear that the fat me wasn't welcome, that a thin person was expected and awaited, and impatiently so.

If, however, you have richer pursuits in mind and know that no woman should be judged by how she looks - that everything she brings to the party is more important than the size of her arse - then refuse to be sucked into the never ending whirligig of self-doubting, self-hating madness that is stop-start dieting and crazy new exercise regimes.

I spent my entire childhood living abroad because of my father's occupation, so we were on long-haul flights all the time.

There is so much that is positive, wonderful even, about state schools. At a state school your kids will learn to live alongside and appreciate other kids from many diverse and different cultures.

I have never done a package tour in my life. It appeals in a way, but then I remind myself that you can't control the other people with you, which could turn out to be ghastly.

With a diplomat father, for whom foreign postings were a fact of life, my siblings and I were expected to attend boarding schools in Britain.