When popularity is your only goal, doing well in class is going to feature very low, if at all, on your priority list.

Sticking to a diet required me to have a permanently low self-esteem. But happily, I developed other skills beyond a fluctuating weight, eventually building up a different source of self-worth.

Sending your child off to school for the first time in their life is terrifying.

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

The real me now may not be thin but she's got the cake and, if she likes, can eat it too.

My parents both had Oxford degrees, they read important books, spoke foreign languages, drank real coffee and went to museums for pleasure. People like that don't have fat kids: they were cut out to be winners and winners don't have children who are overweight.

Both Plockton and the Isle of Muck in north-west Scotland are incredibly beautiful. Sadly, Plockton has been discovered by tourists because it's where they shot Hamish Macbeth.