Jeni Barnett

My father mowed the lawn with a petrol mower. Dead straight lines, dark green, light green. It could have been Wimbledon. As it was it was a newly built council house with a patch of green big enough for a tennis net. We never played tennis. My father laid a concrete path around the lawn. … Read more

Loads of people write about ageing. It’s nothing new. Everybody has a perspective on growing old since we all go through it. The cosmic joke is that whatever we do is a passing trifle. Whatever we do we are leaving this plane for somewhere else, or not if you believe that death is the end … Read more

I was given a book by Rose Elliot, she of the vegetarian cuisine. It’s not a vegetarian cook book with beans and lentil recipes, it’s a book about change. ‘LIFE CYCLES’ takes the reader from their 20’s to the Knackers Yard. Each decade part of a life’s journey. If we’re luckily enough to live into … Read more

Ideas are elusive. There are those who say if you don’t grab an idea when it comes to you it’ll fly off to somebody else. Them creatives always say if an idea arrives in your brain box they’ll be five other bastards who have the same idea at the same time. An idea is tangible. … Read more

My house, growing up, was never silent. The Home Service ( Radio 4) blaring out. Radio 3’s classical music blaring out and jazz blaring out from my father’s quadrophonic speakers. Nobody talked in our house; parents screamed at each other. I took refuge in my room trying to dodge the cacophony. Homework was achieved, somehow. … Read more

Walking in the city is quite unlike walking in the countryside. When I worked on ‘Good Food Live’, my bosses didn’t want me running home after each show. We had prerecords and meetings, so they rented me a flat. Well I found the flat and they paid for it. A beautiful, riverside apartment with two … Read more

One of my first memories is lying in a cot looking up at big faces who were staring down at me and cooing. The cot was on the landing in the tenement block we lived in. Ha! The badge of honour that poverty gives you. My father fought for a flat from the council. He … Read more

My mother read with a torch under the bedclothes. Her sister, my Aunty Esther, knitted. The click clack of knitting needles accompanied the turning of pages. No Internet or smart phones people back then made their own entertainment, including knitting. And then my mother, laid down her books and swapped yarn for yarns. She fashioned … Read more

‘These are the good days’, according to a scientific discovery it is the five word sentence that can beat the blues. ‘Hedonic adaptation, also known as the hedonic treadmill, is the process by which people quickly return to a stable level of happiness after experiencing significant positive or negative events. This means that even after … Read more

It was a Sunday Sunday. I didn’t get dressed. I didn’t cook. I didn’t hoover. I didn’t garden. I didn’t wash the dishes. The dawter and her beau bought me the ‘Observer’ and I read an article on Bill Nighy who was asked to be Vogue’s agony uncle. That man of style makes me smile. … Read more