Finally!

In the words of Mick Jagger "Please allow me to introduce myself"

So truth be told, as my few pioneering subscribers can attest to, I’ve been dodging Substack for quite a while. As we’re increasingly made aware, the world is full of people with opinions and I’m already sharing mine for better or for worse on Twitter/X, Instagram and LinkedIn. Is there really any need to impose myself and my all too often reactive thoughts on another platform? As a career journalist, broadcaster and, more latterly, campaigner, it’s never been easier to highlight personal opinions and throw out comments for debate, though as a refusnik to paying for elevated X status on what’s becoming less a forum for discussion as a disturbingly rabid platform for insult, such “communication” is rapidly losing it’s allure. What once seemed an advantage, the ability to hone a thought into a few brief characters seems more and more the path to lazy, and frequently unsubstantiated opinining and I’m as guilty as anyone of taking advantage of that!

So Substack with its genuinely engaged subscribers and space for rumination and discussion seems a perfect place to hang my hat at this point in our history. What I have to offer and how I use it will I hope evolve and develop as I understand better who’s reading and listening and what value I can lend to the community. But you can expect politics, particularly of the gender variety, societal issues, arts and culture including books, films and anything else that gets my creative juices flowing, travel, and of course campaigning around injustice and inequity, long a commitment and increasingly a full time occupation, particularly at the moment around menopause. My new book, Menopause is Hot, has just been published in the US by Simon and Shuster.

My neighbour Don McCullin and I enjoying a Somerset view

In conversation recently with my near nonogenarian friend the photographer Sir Don McCullin we pondered the positives of being able to write ones obituary. A (de) pressing topic with 155 years between us already accrued on the planet! The benefits of being able to record the highs and lows of our careers as we saw them, rather than reflected by the wider world seemed plentiful. So in a few short sentences I’ll try to give a brief digest of mine. I’m a mongrel, Norwegian, Irish, British by birth, residence and adoption respectively. My father Peter, a Norwegian journalist and literary critic, later Foreign Editor of the Irish Times, inspired in me a life long interest in digging deeper, the gift of democracy, holding those with power over our lives to account and bringing light to areas of injustice. My mother, a painter, whose dreams of pursuing a creative path were dashed thanks to my parents separation, subsequent financial struggles and the challenges of raising five children alone made me the woman I’ve become. The campaigning I’ve been committed to over my lifetime around gender equality and most recently around the penalisation of women at work for the ‘flaw’ of their different biology was ignited watching my mothers dreams founder on the reality of what the world felt her value to be.

Learning to swim in Connemara age 8

Back to me, and after six formative years in Norway and ten years schooling in Ireland, the premature death of my father at 46 prompted me to take charge of my own life. Age 16 I arrived Dick Whittington style on a sunny summers day to London, brimful of ambitions and with no sense, at that tender age, what an uphill struggle as an immigrant and an autodidact, they would be to achieve. A spell doing what we called McJobs after the recently opened McDonalds chain, then a real (dream) job at 18 working for a record company. It was the 80’s, the music business was booming and along with promoting bands like Dire Straits, Soft Cell, UB40 and many more I got my first taste of people power and how each of us has it in our gift to shift the status quo, working with the inspiring indefatigable Bob Geldof on both Band Aid and Live Aid. Witnessing his (occasionally) curmudgeonly determination, and his ability to shrug off setbacks in pursuit of a singular goal, was the finishing school I needed. Later I worked as a publicist for the launch of Comic Relief and I’ve travelled extensively as an ambassador for Save the Children and my own GREAT Initiative.

‘Finishing School’ with Bob Geldof

Those few years in the music business segued into my first job in television, one of a trio of presenters on Channel Four’s pioneering carnival of ‘World Music’ as it was then called Big World Cafe. Every week from Brixton Academy broadcasting the best music from around the globe, including many of my fathers African favourites, the likes of Salif Keita and Youssou N’Dour to Sufi bards like Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. Another hobby turned professional when I presented a series of film programmes from The Little Picture Show to SKY TV’s At the Pictures. Cumulatively it kickstarted a long if not always stellar TV career and a public profile that was far more preoccupied with my looks rather than my abilities, as was often the case in the unreconstructed last decades of the 20th Century. It’s ironic that in maturity it’s a focus that’s turned full circle!

That was then, let me now fast forward, as I’m sure you’ve got work to do. TV, Radio, an agony column in the Observer for 20 years, a book programme on BBC Radio 4 for the same two decades, a plethora of columns and opinion pieces, two anthologies, the first celebrating women’s more cerebrally sexual impulses as a pushback to ubiquitous pornography, Desire (100 of literatures sexiest stories) , then Wild Women a collection of first hand accounts from female explorers, who like so many other female high achievers seemed to have been wiped clean from the history books! And then Menopause, the supposedly ‘end of life’ condition that dared not speak it’s name and despite years of feminist campaigning I was totally in the dark about when I hit that wall. My own ignorance propelled me to dig deep into the toxic mythology and support available, inspiring a documentary on the BBC called The Truth About the Menopause and a co-authored book with my friend Alice Smellie optimistically titled Cracking the Menopause; now revised and published in the US as Menopause is Hot!

Cracking the Menopause with my friend Alice Smellie

And that was just the beginning of this new phase of life. I’ve co-founded an annual summit in the UK and the US where we advocate against and investigate the solutions to women’s secondary positioning in the working world WiWSummit.com. A recent McKinsey report finds that we could add trillions to the global economy simply by making work work for the other half of the population that it wasn’t created to accommodate. And I Chair Menopause Mandate, a campaigning organisation created to propel menopause from the shadowy corner it’s been relegated to for millennia and into normal conversation, and argue for better support and health care so we don’t lose 1 in 10 women in the workforce at the height of their professional careers.

Women in Work Summit 2024

As you can probably tell I could go on and on but that’s all just to say that my ambition here is to introduce you to some of my cultural passions, keep the conversation running on how we stay hopeful, committed and resilient despite the darker forces currently amassed against women’s rights , human rights and the past lessons of history, let art and culture open our eyes and travel broaden our minds and hopefully have some much needed play along the way!

Welcome to my Substack! I would be honoured if you subscribed and I’m intrigued to hear your comments.