Bernadette Strachan

STOCKHOLM Very jolly, the Swedes. Never thought I’d write that sentence. I thought my trip to Stockholm would be a two day long Bergman film, but it was a delight. Stayed in a hotel owned by Benny from Abba. Yes, really. It was 5 star funky opulence and comfort, yet cost less than I’ve paid for chain-hotel misery in this country. The Swedes are very well dressed, very cool, but friendly and natural. I felt right at home. Not because I’m well dressed, you understand, despite the new trousers I was sporting, but because everybody spoke to Matthew and I as if they’d known us for years. I saw no WAG-style nightmare young women at all, although there were herds of 80’s kids. The night before, at home in Kingston, we’d passed countless girls dressed for an orgy somewhere much warmer than Kingston, and it was nice to be surrounded by women with actual clothes on, as opposed to strips of lycra. I’m a convert to the Nordic way of life, but this always happens. I come back from Rome on an imaginary vespa, and when I get back from Ireland I cry sentimental tears over anybody whose surname begins with O’.

PRINCE Niamh, my 5 year old, is a Prince devotee. Especially 'Get Off' and 'Kiss'. Although she confuses him with Michael Jackson. Her love of the latter led to me trying to explain plastic surgery in terms she would understand. He asks the doctors to change his face around I stammered.

TELLY Hoovering up the Easter leftovers before the post-Easter diet meant that I was enjoying a cream tea for dinner as I settled down to watch the first instalment of Hell’s Kitchen. I learned so much. I learned that Linda Evans’ lips are not nice (they seem to have been turned inside out by a bored plastic surgeon). I learned that Grant Bovey (husband of Anthea Turner, God help us) refers to himself in the third person. And I learned that Marco Pierre White is the most ponderous, self obsessed sod I’ve ever come across. The simplest question gets a Yoda-esque, carefully enunciated response. ‘Where,’ you might ask, ‘do you keep the cheese, Marco?’ He would reply, ‘Ah my friend. If it is cheese you seek, why do you ask? If I were to tell you, what would that make you?’ (He often includes one of these mantrap little questions, to which there is no correct answer, only kitchen-y death. Quite fun watching Adrian Edmondson struggle with how to answer ‘Did you season it?’ about a beef sandwich.) I hope fire never breaks out in Hell’s Kitchen because Marco is incapable of shouting ‘FIRE!’ he would have to drawl ‘When heat meets chip oil, my friend, something is bound to happen.’

BOOKS Just finished The Genius and The Goddess by Godfrey Meyers, a book that examines the professional and emotional partnership between Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe. There are snippets in here that Mr Miller left out of his mighty memoir Timebends, and much new, scurrilous stuff on Marilyn. (The bald assertion that she was a prostitute seems unsupported by any source.) Such a beauty, such a pain in the ass. Sorry, arse. I always catch vocabulary from reading.

EASTER I baked a cake, a gooey chocolate one which is my default cake. There were chicks on it, not real ones, that would be silly. Dressing the table for a big lunch I started off stylish and chic, then mouthed oh sod it and strewed the whole thing with rabbits, chocolate eggs, fluffy chicks emerging from plastic eggs, the lot. We had not one but two easter egg hunts. We know how to live, don’t we?

WRITING  After a week off (Stockholm, then Easter visitors) I’ve forgotten how to do it? Any tips, anyone?