Arabella Weir

If I'm hunting down gifts, I like to buy locally.

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

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.

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

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.

I don't understand boys - just ask my husband.

Why has everything got to be about feelings these days? In the old days, no one knew what anyone was feeling and, what's more, they weren't expected to.

I cry at everything, even the length of the queue at Sainsbury's.

If one's honest about it, spending time in a car with children is pretty ghastly.

When not eating, I like shopping; although I'm afraid I've become a bit of a cliche.

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.

As an actress and comedienne, I'm a huge fan of he theatre and the Tricycle in Kilburn is my favourite in London. I dragged my kids to a performance of 'Twelfth Night' there, where they handed out pizza. Who knew that all it takes to get children interested in Shakespeare is a snack?

My mother, father, stepmother and surrogate mother have all died of cancer; my best friend has got terminal cancer and at least five of my other friends have had cancer but survived it.

If you have any power at all from being popular, then you have a duty to help people out.

I don't think I've got the expertise with which to nit-pick, and I freely admit that my motivation to support charities has been emotional, rather than as a result of being particularly well informed as to how the money is used.

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 theory is that one needs to be loved completely, unconditionally, and unfettered by parental disapproval, if one is to get happily through life which, after all, presents its own hurdles.

The real me now may not be thin but she's got the cake and, if she likes, can eat it too.

My parents both had Oxford degrees, they read important books, spoke foreign languages, drank real coffee and went to museums for pleasure. People like that don't have fat kids: they were cut out to be winners and winners don't have children who are overweight.

I don't subscribe to the 'Doctor Who' magazine and we've only got the normal amount of 'Doctor Who' fridge magnets.

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.

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

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

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