First thing I do on Saturday mornings is switch on Radio 4 for the brilliant Saturday Live show with Sian Williams and Richard Coles. It might be a bit sad, and it probably says something about my age, but I find them great company. I absorb so many curious facts from the human stories they feature. I'm not a great shopper and there are only so many café lattes one can drink, so the radio is great company on a Saturday when I'm doing chores.
I love where I live at the moment on the banks of the Thames in west London. When I was little my family lived on an utterly magical Dutch barge moored nearby in Chiswick. It was a lovely place to grow up, with portholes where you could watch the tide moving and you never knew whether you'd see swans swimming by or dead bodies in the mud. It was so unpredictable. Not many of my friends stayed over because their parents were scared of them falling in the river, and the boat made such a lot of noise that it was quite freaky for young children. But I loved the sound of the water slapping against the sides and I even loved the smell, which actually was probably mildew. I found it all incredibly romantic. Of course there were downsides – there certainly wasn't much privacy. When my brother and I were practising our piano and French horn before school it was basically torture for everyone. I remember the loo was absolutely horrible, too, because the sewage would shoot back up the pipes, and the bath was always full of silverfish, but I was a bit tomboyish and I loved it. My riverside home now has all the magic of the barge.
One of my favourite things to do on a Saturday afternoon, if I'm not in a show, is to go to an antique market like Ardingly or Kempton Park Racecourse. Usually I don't even buy stuff but I love wandering through all the quirky stalls, spotting old things I remember my grandmother used to have. It's so nostalgic.
I'm not very domestic at weekends but at the moment I'm trying to learn to cook from a book my mum left me – she died of cancer when I was 25. I'm OK now at groundnut stew and sausage casserole, as well as biscuits and cakes and other naughty things, but my progress is up and down on my normal cooker as I always had an Aga in the past, which was so easy with its three settings.
Quite often it's just me in the house at weekends since my son Jesse, who's 16, lives between my house and his father's, and my daughter Ellie
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