I have been asked to write an autobiography. The trouble is that once you start writing about yourself, it is difficult to stop as the story rolls out in your head. So, I have started here, but not finished yet. For the person who asked for the biography, I will try to do a short one as well!
I was born about 10 days late in my mother's four-poster just outside the village of Benenden in Kent. This bed was a product of my father's obsession with building four-poster beds out of  carved standard lamp stands. She was a brilliant seamstress and had created ethereal hangings for it -  white muslin over pink cotton, caught back with olive green velvet ribbons. Like everything she ever did, it was beautiful and enormously stylish, but cost very little to make. She was well ahead of her time in many ways, and would not live to see how valuable skills like hers have now become, although she did make wedding dresses for people, she charged absurdly small sums.

In those days, it was much more normal to be born at home, and my mother had with her GLO (Miss GL Osborne - we never knew her Christian names) - a midwife who had trained durng  WWI. I was her fourth baby, and Dr Cameron the local GP I think arrived after I was born to pop his head round the door and check all was well. My brother Johnnie was two and a bit (the bit much emphasised in later years), and Dr Cameron's advice solely concerned him and his possible jealousy. My parents obediently pushed my Moses basket to the bottom of the bed for my brother's first meeting with me. Legend tells of his attempts to push it back up again.

My father had a chicken farm, and we lived in a red brick house in Kent, with cherry orchards and hop gardens all around - now mostly gone. I was sent first to Mrs MacLedownie's (no idea to this day how to spell it). Looking back, this was like an old-fashioned dame school - 19 of us, aged 4 - 8, in her front room. It was deadly dull. Only the taste of raffia and the smell of lunch linger in my memory. I longed and longed to go to the local primary school (where the comedian Jo Brand was educated around the same time) - as we would walk past at dusk and I could see the pupils' bright pictures pinned up on the walls. Mrs M smelt of smoke and had yellow fingers and front hair - no trace of us remained after we had gone home in her front room. I certainly didn't learn to read or anything like that, until I was seven and sent to boarding school.

Boarding school was Buckswood Grange. A Tudorbethan Victorian house near Uckfield in Sussex. Among my fellow pupils were the Maxwell-Scott sisters - funny white faced, blue eyed and dark haired skinny creatures, whose mother and father lived nearby (but still sent them to board). Their mother Susan was the last person to see Lord Lucan alive on his way down to the coast. Lucy used to drink ink out of her inkwell - she was permanently blue around the lips. I was seven years and three months old. My parents were moving from Kent to a windy hilltop in Surrey, and they had no time for me. My other  siblings, sister Virginia, brother Charlie and Johnnie, had long been dispatched. Only the little one, Chub (fat baby, now slim man) remained at home. Buckswood was run by a really quite horrible woman called Mrs Ford.  She didn't like children much, and clever children were a particular anathema. Luckily she employed some good teachers, and  I met two of my closest friends there.

I passed Common Entrance, and my parents sent me back to Benenden to the big school there. Among my fellow pupils was the terrifying Fiona Charkham (now Shackleton) - tough lawyer for both Prince Charles and Paul MacCartney. In those days these schools were pretty austere - no curtains on the dormitory windows. Outdoor swimming. No 'facilities' at all really. Weekends were dull beyond belief. I would walk down to the village and buy sweets (which I didn't even like much), then lie in a bath and read a book all afternoon. The teaching was good in some subjects, rotten in others. I did reasonably well in my O levels (all 11 of them, my favourite subjects were English, Biology and Food and Nutrition - now replaced by something utterly crass called 'Food Technology' - the origin in my opinion of a lot of the problems the FT generation has in feeding itself properly).

For A Levels, I wasn't allowed to do Biology with English and History - you passively accepted this kind of nonsense in those days - so I did Geography instead. I also did an 'S' or special level in English. Later that summer, I was flabbergasted to find I had three A grades - in those days very unusual - and a distinction in my S level. This made my ambition to get into Cambridge a little more realistic.

I went to Westminster Tutors in Victoria for Oxbridge - an extra term with another exam at the end of it. I had been feeling somewhat ill for some time - the GP at home kept giving me more antibiotics for a 'sore throat' - nothing of the sort, I had glandular fever caught off a young cousin I should never have been allowed to visit in bed.

I missed most of the term, and felt utter despair about getting in. Somehow I staggered through the exam - leaving the room in floods of tears during one paper. They interviewed me both at Newnham and Clare - where it turned out that the then head of Benenden had written me a very negative report, saying I had never contributed anything to the life of the school (code for refused to play lacrosse). Luckily the tutor at Clare laughed at it, and I was offered places at both. I chose Newnham because I had a cousin there.

For two years I was fine, the balance of academic to social was probably a bit off. But I kept on top of most of it. Boarding for ten years is probably the worst preparation for the independence of university - I was so green it was ridiculous, and when things got difficult I wasn't able to cope. In my last long vac I found out that a school friend had shot herself. It was then that I found that there was no back up anywhere for the appalling grief and shock that I felt, which manifested itself as a terror of failure combined toxically with an inability to get on with what I was meant to be doing. These days, I assume the tutors would have noticed and made sure something was done about it - probably counselling. In the late 1970s, the response I got from my tutor was, 'You are far too depressed to do a dissertation on Jean Rhy'. So I did my last dissertation on Dickens and the Imagery of Death - of course a much more cheerful subject.

I had done perfectly well in my Part I - the exam at the end of the first two years. Part II which counts as your finals, was awful. The English department had fallen into the hands of the structuralists - revisionist and Marxist literary theory that was completely not the way I responded to texts at all. I was lost and flailing both emotionally and intellectually. I passed but with a 2:2. I still dream desperate dreams about it, and have considered trying to go back and do my Part II again.

During that difficult time, I did the Vogue Talent Content - and somehow got through to the finals. My performance at the lunch where they choose the winner was lamentable. But after leaving Cambridge, I was offered my first proper job in the Books Department - being a general assistant. The early 1980s was huge fun, lots of clubbing and parties. I shared a house with close friends to  begin with, and it was what you expect - sharing clothes. I was hopelessly immature, and plagued by the sense of failure that had dogged me since my poor friend.

All that changed in October 1983. I had a new job at Vogue, in the subs room, and was tired and distracted one Friday evening. Asking my flatmate where the car was, I stepped off the curb. It is the last thing I remember until I woke up in St Stephens hospital in the Fulham Road. A bus had been slowing down to stop at the Bus Stop on Fulham Broadway, and I had stepped in front of it, been flung in the air and landed on my head on the road in a pool of blood. Much worse of course for my poor friends gathered on the pavement. When I came to in the morning, I attempted to get out of bed and fainted on the floor. The realisation of what I had done and that I was alive, came to me in a kind of bolt of revelation. The next thing I remember is waking up in the dim light of Intensive Care, with the surgeon sitting gloomily beside me, and talking to me like a medical student. Having explained that I had probably lost the sight of my left eye, 'Any more questions?' he barked. 'Will I look odd?' I asked. Of course!

'Well,' he said with infinite kindness and tact. 'It might start rolling around a bit, in which case we can always take it out and give you a glass one.' 'If you dare say anything like that to my mother...' I said back to him through gritted teeth. He seemed visibly to shrink away from me.
I got over it. Everything healed. My great aunt came to see if I had damaged my marriage prospects (I hadn't). I went back to working alone in the subs room, and brought out two telephone-book sized copies of Vogue all by myself without a single typo or mistake. Then I left Vogue to go travelling and take a kind of belated gap year. I had met Thoby by then, while I was still recovering, and the accident had made sure I took this relationship seriously for the first time.

I was also able to let my poor friend go as the barrier between me and uncomplicated happiness. My room at the hospital had been filled with flowers and people all day long for ten days. I felt like Agatha Runcible, and so much loved, supported, appreciated and befriended that I couldn't really continue to undersell myself any more. Everyone was completely wonderful for which I thank them to this day.

Off I went to India, with a little money only to spend, and two girl friends. We went everywhere, and travelled rough and ready, and learned so much. And I lost so much weight that when Thoby came to join me, he hardly recognised me. As didn't my father when I arrived at Heathrow after five months.

Then I freelanced for a bit, and had a lot of fun, before getting married in on April 25 1987 on a bright sunny day. We went to church at 2pm, and then had a party in an open sided tent in my parents' garden. My father made one of his best jokes about that. When my mother went to tell him the marquee had arrived, he rose to his feet and said, 'I must go and greet his lordship.'

I went to be deputy editor of a glossy giveaway called The Magazine. Then I had Maud in March 1989. The day she was born, British Rail announced they were going to put the Channel Tunnel rail link through the house we had bought and done up in Peckham to have our family in. We were pretty traumatise by that, and made the poor but understandable decision to buy a very old and interesting house outside London in Essex, in which we never lived full time. The property market had crashed, and we were a bit stuck, so went to stay for a while with Thoby's parents.

I went back to work at Marie Claire when Maud was nine months old, and then in rapid succession to the Times (diary hack); Tatler etc. You can find most of the places I have worked on my CV. While I was pregnant with Archie in 1992, my beloved aunt Judy died at the very young age of 68. My mother, who adored her, and had recently travelled to India with her, found her. Mummy died about 18 months later of cancer.