I was features writer for a very long time. And then as I got older and quite well known I was mainly writing columns. That’s still probably 70 percent of my output today. Then one day I was on Twitter and completely innocently said, “The beauty page in the Guardian is a scandal.”
[Laughs].
And I was a writer on the Guardian! A girlfriend of mine who’s a columnist on The Times replied, “Oh my God, yes it’s so, so bad.” And then quite a few female celebrities replied, “That page is so terrible.” Anyway there was a bit of a storm about it on Twitter and I got an email from the editor of the supplement the next day saying, “Do you think you could do better?” And I said, “Yes I do.” So I went in and she said, “What’s wrong with it?” And I said, “If you know nothing about beauty it teaches you nothing. And if you do know about beauty it’s kind of laughing at you.” And she said, “How do you think it should be?” And I said, “I think you should credit your readers with intelligence, and it’s perfectly fine for women to be clever and love lipstick. Nobody else writes beauty like this. It’s about time someone did.”
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