I was a jobbing journalist, writing on women’s issues in women’s magazines, determined to prove that anything boys could do, we could do better. And then I came to time of life when you feel you’d like to do something the boys can’t do. I wanted to continue the career and I wanted to go play with my baby. The then-editor of Family Circle, for whom I wrote articles and a page as an “Agony Aunt” offered me the perfect compromise – a monthly column called “Mum’s the Word”, which ran in the once best-selling magazine that shared space at the checkout tills of supermarkets with razor blades and mints.
