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.

Does everyone turn into a truculent thirteen-year-old when they go home, or is it just me?

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.

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.

If you have any power at all from being popular, then you have a duty to help people out.

Despotism isn't nearly as bad as it's cracked up to be.

I'm the co-chair of the PTA at my kids' school, Ashmount Primary, in north Islington, London.