Arabella Weir

Despotism isn't nearly as bad as it's cracked up to be.

I have never done a package tour in my life. It appeals in a way, but then I remind myself that you can't control the other people with you, which could turn out to be ghastly.

Sending your child off to school for the first time in their life is terrifying.

Sticking to a diet required me to have a permanently low self-esteem. But happily, I developed other skills beyond a fluctuating weight, eventually building up a different source of self-worth.

My dad was a diplomat and after living in America, where I was born, he was posted to Cairo.

The crushing, pitiful, and frequently just plain risible pathos of an unsuccessful actor/performer's life is well charted.

Success, in whatever form it takes, is a tricky thing - once you've achieved your goal, then what? Where do you aim?

There is so much that is positive, wonderful even, about state schools. At a state school your kids will learn to live alongside and appreciate other kids from many diverse and different cultures.

I know a lot of people fear the rougher types who might be at a state school, but surely it is better to know who they are and how to deal with them than for that kind of child to appear as a completely different species to yours.

When popularity is your only goal, doing well in class is going to feature very low, if at all, on your priority list.

I spent my entire childhood living abroad because of my father's occupation, so we were on long-haul flights all the time.

I wish my parents hadn't made me feel that how I looked was linked to how much they loved me. But I do also see how hard it must be to see your child pile on the pounds and trust they'll find their own way back to a healthy weight.

With a diplomat father, for whom foreign postings were a fact of life, my siblings and I were expected to attend boarding schools in Britain.

There is an inherent tolerance and kindness in the state school teenagers I know.

I can't write about my greatest mistakes because I've slept with most of them.

I'm the co-chair of the PTA at my kids' school, Ashmount Primary, in north Islington, London.

Call me an over anxious, middle-class mum, but my eight-and-a-half-year old son looks very much, to me, like he's headed for a life of crime.

My parents' generation's benchmark was simple: Fat Equals Bad.

If, however, you have richer pursuits in mind and know that no woman should be judged by how she looks - that everything she brings to the party is more important than the size of her arse - then refuse to be sucked into the never ending whirligig of self-doubting, self-hating madness that is stop-start dieting and crazy new exercise regimes.

Statistically, if you have ever dieted you are extremely likely not only to regain any weight you lose, but to go on to gain even more. Dieting makes you fat.

Look, I want what's good for everybody. I want to promote good state education for all. I want to raise standards for all kids, irrespective of race and class but why can't they all just do what I say when I know I'm right?

As I was growing up, it was made clear that the fat me wasn't welcome, that a thin person was expected and awaited, and impatiently so.

In the 20 long, hungry years between my late teens and late 30s I bought in to virtually every new diet and/or exercise regime that hoved into view, particularly at this most vulnerable time for those of us prone to poor body image - a new year.

I was accorded the opportunity to learn by failing - albeit at the cost of a few honourable teachers' sanity - and now I realise what a rare and incredible luxury that is.

Both Plockton and the Isle of Muck in north-west Scotland are incredibly beautiful. Sadly, Plockton has been discovered by tourists because it's where they shot Hamish Macbeth.

Society prizes a girl for being thin more than anything else she might bring to the table.