As a professional Governess, I feel privileged to be responsible for the welfare, happiness, and education of a child. An impressionable young mind, an inexperienced soul, a developing body is the ultimate opportunity to support parents through the years of challenges and delights.

Selecting someone to become a new member of your family, a person you will trust imperatively, is no ordinary staffing issue.

You consider general criteria, like qualifications and experience, but more than anything, it is a personality fit. I realise this may seem strange, but much like dating, it is an intimate relationship on many levels.

Jo Macartney, one of the Recruitment Consultants at The Lady Recruits, at The Lady Magazine, tells me that many families find it difficult to articulate their ideal match. “I help guide them by asking about routines, their child’s likes/dislikes, and all manner of personal questions to create a clear picture of who they are”. The easy part is age, skills, etc, and I encourage parents to consider candidates who don’t always tick all of the boxes, however, for other reasons would complement their parenting and lifestyle”.

I know this to be true. I have been told by an employer I was chosen not because I had a childcare qualification (I studied Business at University), rather, my philosophy on child development and ability to convey to them I would always have the interest of their child as my highest priority.

I also believe the fundamental ingredients of love, lots of cuddles, intelligence, and a healthy dose of common sense is necessary. And humour. Lots of it.

I once ran out of nappies and thought I could wing it for the drive home. However, Master R’s toilet habits did not coincide with my calculations and I found myself in a busy car park stripping his clothes as it was more than a gentle wee that had exploded from his body.

I managed to fashion an improvised nappy from a small towel I kept in the car and sang songs about “pooey” boys, and “smelly” bottoms to distract him from the discomfort of being buckled in a child seat almost naked. We survived. And sometimes that is all a nanny, and a parent, can hope for.

The variables of working with children are almost infinite so if you think more openly you might just find a special nanny with imagination and creativity with whom your child may have a magical relationship for life.

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I wanted to tell you, very much, about the lambs skipping in the fields. Then I thought: oh, don’t be ridiculous; everyone knows about the lambs. The creatures do not need to be described.

I suddenly realised that this is not so. I thought: most people now live in towns or cities. I like to check my working, so I looked up the figures. It seems that just over six million people make up the rural population. That’s a great many individual souls, but in terms of the demographics of dear old Blighty, it’s a tiny minority.

Since we are on statistics, my absolute number one favourite statistical question is this. Can you guess how much of this green and pleasant land is actually built on?



I’ll give you a minute, to calculate in your head. When Mark Easton of the BBC first asked this question, and went searching for the answer, I remember thinking of all the parks and forests, of the rolling wildernesses which are only ten miles from my front door. For built areas, I guessed about twenty percent. The actual figure is 2.27%.

There’s something here that is curious. I feel the implications sliding against each other like sandpaper in my mind, but I can’t quite come to any conclusion. About ninety percent of the population lives on two percent of the land. Can that be right? Does it mean anything? It seems incongruous and in some ways portentous to me, but I can’t quite work out why.

The point is, that if I write about skipping lambs, and how they really do gambol and shoot vertically into the air and do amazing bronco tricks when they are only days old, that is news, to quite a lot of people. They really don’t see lambs every morning.



Yesterday, the old farmer brought a three-day-old trio down to the south meadow. (There is the old farmer and the young farmer, father and son, whose family has worked the land round here for generations.) I watched him and his little grandson put the new arrivals into the field with the rest of the flock. The young boy, who could not have been more than nine, was dealing with one of the lambs who did not want to get out of the trailer. He picked the wiggling creature up in a sure grasp, front legs in his two certain hands, and deposited it onto the grass.

‘He’s got the touch,’ I said. The old farmer’s weathered face creased into smiles of pride.

We talked for a while about the winter and the weather and how the ground was still four degrees below what it should be. We are at last getting some sunshine and warmth now, but all those of us who rely on the green grass – him for his livestock, me for my horses – are counting the days. We calculate that we are about three weeks behind.



The country is deep in my bones. I grew up in it. I spent my childhood running wild in a farmyard and a stable. There were only two rules: don’t go near the grain dryer, in case we fell in and drowned in corn, and don’t approach the double door stable of Charlie the Bull. (Charlie needed two doors, because he was a mighty beast.) As soon as I was old enough, I rode pretty much every day on the wide downland that characterises the Lambourn valley. I was brought up with earthy smells: of dung, of hay, of horse, of cattle.

Scotland is a very different sort of country, but the smells and the sense of clean air and wide skies is the same. It runs in my blood in the same way. The city is the lovely, dancing, antic time of my twenties and thirties. Now, I come back to where I started: looking for the first blossom, listening for the call of the woodpecker in the woods, discussing the very temperature of the soil. This is my first language. When the mare whickers for her morning feed, it is the sound of home.

It's my weekly duty night in house tonight. I'm attached to one of the boys houses in school and am attempting to get them to do "prep" from the hours of 6-8pm. Then I'm attempting to get them to not wrestle each other or play football/cricket/insert other dangerous sport indoors from 8pm-10.30pm. It is the latter part of the evening that is always the trickiest, particularly as Rob and Ben have decided that the new pool cues can, and should, be used as light sabres.



My housemaster is a tall, terrifying tower of a man. He moves silently around the corridors and appears in a whisper when there is trouble. Last week he sat me down and walked me through some of the "trickier characters in the house".

"You'll have to watch out for Hugo. He's a bit of a drip and the boys have found out he sleeps with a teddy bear and have done some unspeakable things to it in the last 48 hours."

"Oh gosh," I say mouth falling open, the world's most disturbing images flashing up in my mind.

"They've also taken to de-bedding him on regular occasions so do be alert for that one."

"De-bedding?" I repeat. "Er what exactly does that involve?" I ask.

He looked at me over his whiskey. I shift a little under his gaze. It's enough to make you want to pee your pants with nerves.

"Well a group of the boys go into his room in the middle of the night and tip his mattress straight up."

"Oh that's terrible," I state.

"Quite, quite, but there is little we can do about it. De-bagging is much easier to catch."

I don't bother to repeat this time, brain churns as I apply the same logic.

"Tipping up his bag?" I hazard.

"Exactly," his smile is wide, the smile of successful teaching.

"And there have been some suspicions this term that the prefects have brought back fagging, I've questioned my head of house but he is adamant I am mistaken."

"Smoking?" I ask, "In house?"

"Sorry?"

"Having fags?" I check.

"No, no fagging, you know the usual tricks: getting the younger boys to warm the loo seat before the older boys use it, getting them to fetch things, making them type up their prep - one has a fag if one is nearing the end of one's school career (pronounced 'carrahh')," he finished his whiskey.

"Does one," I whisper.

"So best to be vigilant and report anything to me using this," he says, tapping an A5 burgundy book, "It's my 'Book of Suspicion'," he states, stroking the cover fondly.

He hands it over and I flick through the pages, lighting on one message from the week before that simply says,

'Jack - don't put in bedroom of tower - first form spotted dangling from window.'

I gulp.

Sometimes the simplest recipes are the best - and this one will certainly brighten up brunch!

Ingredients

• Rapeseed oil and butter for frying
• 1 medium onion, sliced or 2 spring onions
• 3 eggs, beaten
• salt and pepper
• 40g Gruyere cheese (grated)

Method

Heat a frying pan with oil and butter and add to the pan the onions and fry them until they are softened.

Whisk the eggs and add the seasoning. Pour into the pan and cook slowly until the top is just starting to cook. Place the onions back on top and add the grated cheese.

Place the pan under a grill to finish off - 2 minutes.

Carefully fold over the omelette and serve.

Doing voluntary work is really interesting. There is a fascinating disconnection between what it sounds like, and what it really is. It’s not something I’ve ever done before, and, now I am deep in it, I raise my head and sniff the wind and discover all the unexpected elements that I would never have foreseen.
Volunteering does not sound thrilling or sexy. It is a low-profile occupation, with no red carpets or front-page headlines or glitzy razzmatazz. For some reason, I remember the words of Thoreau: beware of all enterprises that require new clothes. Voluntary work in my case certainly does not require new clothes, only some sturdy, muddy boots and fingers to type.

I think I may have associated it with kind old ladies who ran Oxfam shops or held jumble sales for a fine cause. It can also have a faintly pious, holier-than-thou aspect to it: look at me, with my Good Works, whilst you lesser mortals indulge your voluptuous pursuits. It may carry an older whiff of the churchy, the preachy, the stiff dictates of the chapel.

In fact, I discover, it is none of those things. For a start, I get far more out of it than I put in. I get the priceless feeling of looking in the glass each morning and knowing that I have done one small useful thing in the world. As I roar into middle age, I find that daily knowledge is beyond rubies.

It is also really good fun. I laugh a lot; I meet fascinating people; I have unexpected conversations. The charity for which I work, HorseBack UK, helps those who have been wounded in the service of their country. I knew hardly anything of military life before this. Now a curtain has been raised for me on a whole world of which I was almost entirely ignorant. (For a writer, this too is beyond price.)

The other thing is that there is no time to feel good or holy, because the overwhelming sense is of frenzied activity. I have to learn to fit my paid and unpaid jobs into the hours of one day. I have to develop new muscle memory: that of efficient use of time. This is entirely new and stretches me to the limit. There is no moment to pause in any kind of horrid self-congratulation.

Perhaps the most vivid example of the law of unintended consequences is that it serves as a most potent antidote to vanity. All writers are a little vain, and there is nothing particularly wrong in that. It is one of the fuels which keeps the engine of ambition firing. On the other hand, too much ego, excusable and even faintly charming in the very young, is rather revolting in the lady of a certain age. This work drowns ego in one cold bucket of water.

It’s partly because all the writing I do for HorseBack is not under my own name. If I do manage to turn a finely honed sentence, I will get no public credit for it. The reward is not critical praise, but the private knowledge that something useful has been achieved. In the case of grant applications, my words may translate into actual, countable cash.

There is also the acute consciousness that none of this is about me; I am subsumed into an organisation which is much, much bigger and more important than I. I find this a chastening and refreshing corrective.

It also helps marvellously with first-world guilt, an idiot condition from which I have suffered from a young age. I used to assuage it with direct debits and purchases of the Big Issue. Now I can put this slightly neurotic tendency to some pointful use.

The funny thing is that all this came about through the merest shimmer of chance. It was not part of my life plan. Through whim, circumstance and the mere fact of geography, this thing arrived, almost gift-wrapped, at my feet, and I feel profoundly lucky. Fortune spun her wheel, and came up smiling.

New research from an online bathroom retailer has revealed that two thirds of Britons use technological gadgets whilst in the bath, despite the risks of water damage.

And 1 in 10 admitted to having damaged electronic goods by dropping them in the bath water accidently.



The study, conducted by www.UKBathrooms.com, polled 1,241 adults from around the UK as part of ongoing research into bathroom habits. The study asked, ‘Do you ever use technological equipment whilst in the bath tub?’ to which 67% said ‘yes’.

The survey then looked at the gadgets most commonly used in the bath.

The top 5, as revealed by the poll, was:

1. Smartphone- 71%
2. eReader - 54%
3. Tablet - 47%
4. iPod - 42%
5. Handheld games consoles - 31%
(respondents could select more than one answer if they used more than one gadget in the bath)

The most common bathtub activities involving gadgets, were:

1. Keeping up to date with social media - 57%
2. Speaking on the phone - 52%
3. Texting - 49%
4. Reading novels - 46%
5. Listening to music - 41%
6. Playing games - 38%
7. Watching videos - 33%
8. Keeping up to date with current affairs - 32%
9. Emailing - 29%
10. Skype/Facetime - 12%

Some 38% of people claimed they ‘became bored’ if they didn’t use gadgets in the bath, while 44% said that they spent longer in the bath due to using gadgets whilst having a soak, with 20 minutes being the average additional time spent in the tub for those using gadgets, compared to those that didn’t.

Words by Katy Pearson

More than a third of British women would rather lose weight than have a pay rise, says a new survey.

With summer holidays fast approaching it seems shedding pounds is more important than saving them for 35% of working women in the UK.

The poll by travel website HolidayPlace.co.uk asked British women if they would rather lose a stone in preparation for the beach or gain £1,000 on their annual salary. Despite the recession only 65% opted for the pay rise with the remainder saying they’d happily forgo the salary hike for the chance to possess the perfect bikini body like Kelly Brook’s.

And almost one in ten, eight per cent, said they would happily give up £1,000 of salary if it meant they were assured of losing a stone effortlessly.

Words by Katy Pearson

I adore so many of my classes but I loathe the last period on a Friday afternoon. It is not natural to teach kids things when it's dark outside. It should be made law or something. And fine it is not exactly dark, dark but I swear yesterday I saw the moon in the sky so that means it is basically night. Henry VII - as boring as he sounds?

Anyway it's Year 7 who are called "Removes" for no discernible reason that I can make out. They are pretty tiny, the youngest in the school, and they can be way too energetic at the best of times. The teacher I replaced (by the by no one is giving me any reasons for his speedy departure: there are rumours I am yet to piece together) left me no scheme of work to follow and the kids tell me that they spent the Lent Term learning about "Canada and Premiership Football" which doesn't match my Head of Department's insistence that they should have learnt about the Tudors.

I'm doing a storyboard lesson - Henry VII's life as if it was a film - and have laid out paper and pens on tables around the room. They troop in, shirts untucked and ties askew and I send them out again reminding them "we queue up, remember". They don't, and insist Mr Phillips never made them, which makes me grind my teeth further.

I get them in, and it's going pretty well and after about twenty minutes of group work I get them to ask questions. Things they want to know about Henry VII's life that they haven't read on their research sheet. Hands go up and the questions come,

"Was he as boring as he sounds?"

"Well Charlie that's an excellent question, I suppose lots of people thought he was dull because he was quite a greedy man and didn't like flashy things or wars."

"Did he love his wife?"

"Well Alice supposedly he had a good marriage to Elizabeth of York and had plenty of children."

"He looks like Torres with brown hair."

"Well Harley, that's not really a question is it. Do you want to ask anything else?"

"Yeah Miss, what do you think dinner is?"

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This traditional English dessert makes a wonderful afternoon tea treat...



Ingredients

• 100g shortcrust pastry
• strawberry or raspberry jam
• 60g butter
• 60g caster sugar
• 1 large egg few drops of almond extract (optional)
• 1/2 tsp lemon zest
• 200g ground almonds
• 1/4 tsp baking powder
• 1 tablespoon of flaked almonds Icing sugar for dusting

Method

1. Pre-heat the oven to 190 C

2. Grease or line a 20cm (8 in) fluted tart tin.

3. Roll the pastry into a round shape a little larger than the tin.

4. Spread jam evenly over the bottom of pastry base.

5. Beat butter and sugar until white and creamy. Beat the egg and lemon zest and add gradually to the creamed butter and sugar mixture. Add the optional almond extract.

6. Add the ground almonds and baking powder into the wet mixture

7. Spread this mixture over the jam layer. Sprinkle flaked almonds on top.

8. Bake in the oven for about 30 minutes until browned and thoroughly cooked. Sprinkle with icing sugar and serve.

The talk of the village is the continuing non-arrival of spring. Even the vet is fed up. The vet is a very dazzling sort of professional indeed. He is a horse specialist, and has more spiffy kit and 21st century technology than you can shake a stick at. He can talk you through a scope like nobody else. When he is not being a vet, he rides and breeds polo ponies. He has a beautiful thoroughbred stallion, whom I am going up to photograph the moment the sun comes out. (This occasions about twenty-seven emails, saying things like: forecast suggests there might be watery sun around 4pm.) This gent is not a moaning Minnie or a negative Nelly. He is usually smiling, under his stockman’s hat. But even he suddenly exclaims: ‘I am fed up with this weather’.

The moment the weather is mentioned, the floodgates opened. We mourn the plight of the farmers, who roar around in their old Landrovers with bleak faces. Tales are told of entire crops having to be ploughed up because not a single sown seed sprouted. The ground is still so cold that even the potatoes have not put out a shoot.



I met a grass specialist last weekend. In my old life, when I was running round the Groucho and those nice transvestite clubs in Soho which I preferred (best lipstick tips in London) I would have fallen on the floor laughing if you told me I would be riveted by a grass specialist. As it is, when I see him and he mentions, rather diffidently, his interest in grass, my eyes light up like those of a maniac. ‘Oh please,’ I say, trying not to sound too keen and crazed, ‘tell me about grass. It’s all I think about, aside from American politics and who will win the 5.30 at Punchestown.’

So then we talked about grass for an hour. It was one of the best conversations I’ve ever had. I’m not inspired to broadcast a wild meadow mix for the horses. But that is still a dream, since the coldness of the ground means that the little green shoots are still stuttering and debating and wondering whether it is all right to come into the world. I tiptoe round the field, bent double, my nose on the ground, searching for the verdant signs of life. There was a bit of jubilee yesterday, when I went down for evening stables to find the horses actually grazing. They were ignoring their fabulously expensive pile of hay, and had found some pasture. I whooped into the still evening air.

This is what such long periods of weather do to you. You become a grass detective. You tell endless stories of farmers in Wales pulling lambs out of snowdrifts. You study the two-hourly forecast until your eyes give out. I wonder sometimes if meteorology is character. No wonder the people of North-East Scotland are so tough. They deal in brevity; there is no floweriness or spurious charm here. By contrast, the easy-going Mediterraneans may be as they are because they knew pretty much every day would be a sunny day, and they never had to go and rescue the sheep from twenty feet of snow.

I refuse, unlike some people I know, to throw in the towel and fly away to find some warmth. Besides, I have to look after the horses. But I do dream of blossom, and leaves on the bare trees, and green, green grass.