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Asparagus salad

4 good-quality eggs (I use Clarence Court Burford Browns) Snap the woody stalks off the asparagus spears and use a vegetable peeler to remove any outer fibrous parts. Lay in a shallow pan, add cold water just to cover and season with salt. Bring to a rapid boil, then simmer until tender, about three minutes (this way, I find you use less of the flavour than you do cooking asparagus in a massive quantity of water). Lift the asparagus from the water and set aside to cool – again, this way you retain more flavour than you do plunging the ...

How fast fashion is a slow death

Every morning when I wake up I am confronted by my fashion history. Mistakes, corrections, good buys, bad buys, comfort buys, drunk buys: they refuse to go away. This is because my wardrobe is opposite my bed, and the door, like a broken zipper, will no longer pull across to hide the tale of excess. In the cold light of day many of the micro trends I’ve “invested in” – T-shirts with chains, a one-shouldered jumpsuit, and other designer lookalike items – merge to form a type of sartorial wasteland.

Go al fresco

I have fond memories of Dad taking my brother and me to Brittany when we were children. We’d spend hours putting up our tent with the usual shenanigans of lost tent pegs and inside-out canvases, but the reward was always a trip to the local Monoprix supermarket, where we had purchase cold meats, sweet cherry tomatoes, peppercorn pâtés and crisp French baguettes. Everything would be eaten out in the fresh air, back at the campsite. Those meals could not have been any tastier. These days, I love having picnics at home in London.

What we learned from the royal wedding

FASHION DILEMMA What did we learn from the royal wedding? For months Fashion Statement has resisted the lure of that wedding. Even during a sustained blitz of press releases promoting hideous wedding-themed tat (our personal favourite? The “scent of a royal wedding” candle. Presumably the mingled nausea-inducing odours of hysterical tabloid columnists, with base notes of paparazzi sweat), we kept a dignified silence. OK, a silence. But just when we thought it was all over, we have succumbed.

Ready, steady …

“Oh my God,” stated my sister when I told her. “You’re actually spawning? With him?” I had, reluctantly, to confirm the news that, after two years of marriage, Toryboy and I had decided to try for and then successfully conceived a baby. “I’m sorry,” I said. “But you had to know there was a chance this might happen.” And here I am, eight and a half months into pregnancy, an experience at once so profound and so mundane that you daily risk a dozen stress fractures across your psyche.

How sexy are your underarms?

On any given day, before I leave my flat, I do three things: first, I check my teeth for stray poppy seeds. Then I have a quick look at my hair, making sure my afro is even on all sides. And last, but by no means least, I check my underarms. If this were true, I’d be one of the 77% of women who, according to Nivea, “feel sexier when their underarms look good”. Because if there is one part of the body that the idea of my sexiness hinges on, it’s my armpits. Obviously. Every so often, it seems, a part ...

The royal wedding menu

In food circles they speak of nothing else. It is a better kept secret than was once the identity of Deep Throat in the Watergate scandal, the name of the person at ITV responsible for putting Simon Cowell on telly, and what McDonald’s does to their chips to make them go floppy within 30 seconds of being served. Yes, what everybody is dying to know, what they NEED to know is: what exactly will the guests at the royal wedding be eating tomorrow? A moment’s silence please while we brood on this question.

Consider the aubergine

I’ve come to love aubergines, but I’m not entirely sure why. Their flavour is exceptionally mild, like mulch and damp J-cloth. Raw, an aubergine has a texture akin to a woolly apple; its cooked flesh disintegrates into slimy mush or takes on a leathery sogginess. Its skin has no special perfume, neither does it have an appealing crispness or offer much else of gastronomic note. But a slick of roasted aubergine has the most tantalising savouriness. There’s something curiously un-vegetable about that pulpy fleshiness.

Ask Hadley

What shall I wear to watch the royal wedding? Well, Martha, nothing educates more than example so I shall tell you what I will be wearing: pyjamas, bed socks and a pair of toothpicks, holding up each of my eyelids. As you might have discerned, this is an outfit with a toothpick-prodded eye more on practicalities than aesthetics, and the practicality here is that certain editors are making certain writers watch the wedding even though these writers live in a different time zone and therefore will need to be awake and pretending to care about things like “succession” and “balding ...

The problem with princesses

When is the prince marrying the princess?” my five-year-old daughter asked me recently. The question took me by surprise. I thought, at first, she was referring to a bedtime story. I have two daughters, the younger of whom is three, and a dispiriting number of our bedtime stories revolve around lowly girls with tumbled locks awaiting rescue by handsome noblemen on steeds. But, no, she meant the real one; the one about to take place between the son of our eternal non-king and his comely peasant girl.