About Rachel Johnson: Rachel Sabiha Johnson is a British editor, journalist, television presenter and author based in London.
With so many forty- and fifty something mums and dads in Converse stalking the streets, I can see why there's a slew of books about the menopause and middle age, the most recent addition being David Bainbridge's plucky, glass-half-full meditation or,...
When I'm called unkind... that really cuts to the quick. You can say anything else that you like about me.
I don't mind being called snobbish, a pain and a social climber, but being called unkind really hurts.
I want 'The Lady' magazine to be restored to its traditional place in the pantheon of weekly magazines.
I went freelance in 1996 and my children are now teenagers and it seemed right.
I do not think that having children - I have three teenagers - keeps you young. The reverse. It thrusts you into a full-frontal confrontation with your own all-too-obvious maturity.
Of course I'm naughty. I've always had to compete for attention, you see.
Being boring is just wrong, isn't it? You wouldn't have got anywhere being boring.
Without my Johnson trademark mop of yellow hair, I think I would be nothing.
Being blonde, for me, means never having to say: 'I'll have the honey-striped half-head of highlights for £200,' to a bored colourist in a Mayfair salon, which is much more satisfying, not to mention cheap.
Being blonde means people decide on sight that you are much prettier and nicer than you really are, just as Americans automatically add 10 points to someone's IQ when they hear an English accent. Fact.
The reason we all need a mutton alert, which needs constant testing, like smoke alarms, is because there is really no such thing as age-appropriate dressing any longer, as I know because my wardrobe is interchangeable with my daughter's.
People always say there's no such thing as bad publicity, and you always think they're right, because it seems self-evident: nobody's going to buy a magazine that nobody ever talks about, so people should want to buy a magazine that everybody's talki...
Of one thing there is no doubt: if Paris makes demands of the heart, then Munich makes demands of the stomach.
In Germany, salads are assemblies of ham and mayonnaise, not trendy tossed leaves.
I am a total coffee snob and bore. If anyone makes the mistake of offering me 'a coffee' they tend to regret it - I'm worse than Mariah Carey, and the hot milk rider is completely non-negotiable.
It's very hard to self-motivate without someone standing over you snarling, ready to hurl the chalk at your head at the slightest slackening.
If there's anything worse than being 16, it's having parents visibly reliving their own teenage years in your anguished presence.
Our parents provided us with the essentials, then got on with their own lives. Which makes me realise that my parents were brilliant, not for what they did, but more for what they didn't do.
'The Lady' is a piddling little magazine that no one cares about or buys.
