Ice, ice baby

Should we do things that scare us? Feel the fear and do it anyway?

Join me in a barrel of ice at Broughton Sanctuary in Yorkshire, watch the allotment being transformed, plus vegan recipe of the week… and join us next week for a Menopaws walk around Easby Abbey! Watch and weep…

Me in a barrel of ice at Broughton Sanctuary

When I was appointed editor of Marie Claire, I turned it down. I called the publisher to let her know I couldn’t do it. ‘Is it the package? Do you want more money?’

         I said, ‘No, it’s not the package [the salary was £70,000 a year, plus a company BMW]. I don’t want more money. I just don’t think I can do it.’ I hadn’t been able to sleep, such was my fear of the news getting out. It was classic imposter syndrome… or was it?

         She took me for lunch at the OXO tower, overlooking the Thames. ‘There is a big wide world out there,’ she said. The choice of location was deliberate: all of London was glittering at my feet. But should I have trusted my gut? The job turned out to be a nightmare: endless meetings about budgets, ungrateful, difficult staff. The publicists of the big stars we needed for the cover were by turn rude and demanding, or simply impossible to get hold of. The star photographers grossly expensive; the late Patrick Demarchelier charged £20,000 to shoot Geri Halliwell, then promptly fell asleep on the shoot. The big fashion brands were snooty and demanding; I would get stern faxes (this was the turn of the century) asking why I’d put their clothes on a black woman, or an older woman, or someone who they had never heard of (‘Victoria Beckham? Oo is she?’). Even the writers were a nightmare: ‘I’m not going to LA in economy!’ This was a twentysomething writer. ‘I don’t want to interview that novelist! The book’s really looong!’

I was terrified most weeks by EPOS: electronic point of sales. This would tell me how many copies we were selling (this was before the internet would eventually make printed monthlies as obsolete as the horse drawn carriage). I hated being a boss, as your staff inevitably hate you. Even when I gave someone a pay rise, they would never think to say thank you. I would learn the Guardian was planning an exposé. I remember saying to my PA, Kerry, ‘Why? What have I done wrong?’

‘They say you just want the staff to like you.’