Arabella Weir Quotes
The crushing, pitiful, and frequently just plain risible pathos of an unsuccessful actor/performer's life is well charted.
My theory is that one needs to be loved completely, unconditionally, and unfettered by parental disapproval, if one is to get happily through life which, after all, presents its own hurdles.
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.
My mother, father, stepmother and surrogate mother have all died of cancer; my best friend has got terminal cancer and at least five of my other friends have had cancer but survived it.
Does everyone turn into a truculent thirteen-year-old when they go home, or is it just me?
If there's one thing I know, it's this - everybody thinks somebody else is having a better life.
If you have any power at all from being popular, then you have a duty to help people out.
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.
Statistically, if you have ever dieted you are extremely likely not only to regain any weight you lose, but to go on to gain even more. Dieting makes you fat.
I would like it to be a legal requirement for all businesses to be linked to a charity.
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.
Society prizes a girl for being thin more than anything else she might bring to the table.
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.
Why has everything got to be about feelings these days? In the old days, no one knew what anyone was feeling and, what's more, they weren't expected to.
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.
Success, in whatever form it takes, is a tricky thing - once you've achieved your goal, then what? Where do you aim?
I was accorded the opportunity to learn by failing - albeit at the cost of a few honourable teachers' sanity - and now I realise what a rare and incredible luxury that is.
I'm the co-chair of the PTA at my kids' school, Ashmount Primary, in north Islington, London.
My dad was a diplomat and after living in America, where I was born, he was posted to Cairo.
I spent my entire childhood living abroad because of my father's occupation, so we were on long-haul flights all the time.
I don't subscribe to the 'Doctor Who' magazine and we've only got the normal amount of 'Doctor Who' fridge magnets.
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.
When popularity is your only goal, doing well in class is going to feature very low, if at all, on your priority list.
The real me now may not be thin but she's got the cake and, if she likes, can eat it too.
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.
If no one saw - it didn't count. It's only when you eat in front of strangers or people that make you feel guilty that food is really fattening.
