women's magazines Archives - Circles in the SandCircles in the Sand

It’s not all that long ago that I worked on women’s magazines in London. Okay, it was a decade ago – and two countries ago – but sometimes it feels like yesterday.

As well as writing for several health and beauty titles, I was a magazine junkie. I literally gobbled them up. My London flat was crammed to the rafters with glossy magazines (Marie Claire, Red, Vogue), which I’d leaf through for ideas, their beautiful pages becoming progressively more dog-eared and tattered as the years went by.

Any space remaining in my single-girl flat was taken up with the freebies I received from PR companies. Eye creams, moisturisers, vitamins, hair products, makeup, body-firming lotions – you name it, you could probably find it in my bathroom.

Oh yes, there were benefits to working on magazines (dah-lings!), especially the pharmaceutical title I edited for a few years. I was plied with ‘gifts’ from big-budget drug companies, and swanned off on press trips abroad at the drop of a hat.

Smart cheats, easy fixes – what’s not to love?

But, today, things are different, aren’t they? I realised this while standing in line at the supermarket this morning.

The new issue of Good Housekeeping Middle East was out and I actually felt a ripple of anticipation. I picked it up. I put it back on the shelf. I picked it up again. The feeling of excitement was undeniable. So I tossed it in the trolley, on top of the broccoli.

Fifteen bags of groceries later, I was able to snatch 20 illicit minutes on the sofa with the January issue, while sipping tea and being used as a climbing frame by LB (there may have been some Maltesers in there too).

I pored over the page with the headline ‘Declutter Your Fridge’; read all the quick tips on freeing up shelf space (square, stackable containers are better than round ones – who knew!); I learnt that eggs stay fresher if you keep them in their carton, not the fridge’s built-in egg holder (a revelation!); I even drooled over some rather nice bathroom sets.

I sped-read an article on having too little time, and found myself engrossed in an interview with New York City lawyer-turned-writer Gretchen Rubin on getting into the right mindset for decluttering (bring it on!). Can you guess what exciting things I’ve been doing this week? Yes, clearing out our accumulated junk.

LB might have started gnawing on my leg by now he was so peckish, but I was inspired – 2013 will be the year I become a better housewife, I vowed. I will never be THAT person who moves unopened mail half-way across the world again.

Boy, how times (and taste in magazines) change!

Many moons may have passed, but in an entirely different life two countries ago, it was my job in women’s magazines that people were interested in.

It helped that at the time I was seeing someone who ‘worked in computers’. Not many people knew exactly what he did – and nor did I – so people would turn their attention to me and ask questions about working in media.

They loved hearing about the problem page I did for a health & beauty magazine. Were the problems made up? (yes, some of them!). What kind of letters were in the postbag? (some corkers!) Did readers reveal explicit details about their sex lives? (yes, eye-opening).

Then, when they found out I also worked for the Mirror newspaper, they’d be really curious about the stories I wrote. Again, were they true? How did you find those basket-weaving, identical twins who gave birth at Butlins?

I’d tell them about my baptism by fire into the world of tabloid journalism and explain how I had to find a whole class of teenaged school girls, with a willing head teacher, and persuade them to keep diet diaries for an attention-grabbing feature on osteoporosis.

Love, sex, food, fashion and family - in women's magazines, these are familiar territories

The original brief was to have the girls X-rayed – but as this wasn’t ethical (not to mention entering nervous breakdown territory for me), the diet diaries were the easier option. “Just don’t mention smoking,” said the head. And I didn’t – until the article got rewritten so the intro described the schoolgirls as ‘living on crisps and cigarettes’ and the headline blared ‘Junk-food generation: Crippled by the age of 35’. Not quite the publicity the principal had in mind for her fee-paying school.

People also wanted to know about the press trips I was lucky enough to go on. Monaco, Germany, France, Prague, Portugal – the French one involving travelling by private plane to the launch of a nasal douche (a squirter the manufacturer was convinced would become as popular as toothpaste – it didn’t, not in the UK at least!) and the Monte Carlo trip accompanied by a ‘sexpert’ to report on the launch of a condom with an applicator (try keeping a straight face during *that* demonstration!).

But, as I said, this was all a long time ago. Turned out Computer Boyfriend wasn’t just working in the tech industry – he was also working on another girlfriend. We broke up. I was reunited with my teenage sweetheart, who became my DH. We moved to Florida five days after marrying and the rest is history.

Nowadays, given that my work is more of a side show, and the rest of my time is spent attempting to control and entertain two small boys, wiping bums, soothing tantrums and refereeing fights (on far less sleep than when I was working under the tightest deadline as a freelance journalist), it’s DH’s job that everyone’s interested in.

Where do you go? people ask. Do you ever have celebrities on board? (Hilary Swank, Natalie Imbruglia, Gerard Depardieu are a few he’s mentioned). Have you ever had a near crash? Seen a UFO? Isn’t it on auto-pilot the whole time? And from guys: ‘Do you get to hang out with the flight attendants at the swimming pool?’

On his most recent trip to Germany, there were even spectators when the plane came down to land – and people videoing the aircraft’s arrival and departure (the A380 has only recently started flying into Munich and is still turning heads). I’ve watched the video footage on YouTube.

Where we live there are more pilots than you can shake a control stick at, so when we’re at home, it’s all very routine, very normal. It’s when we’re mixing with people outside the aviation world that the interest is sparked. But the thing I find funny is how DH views office life. He’s only ever spent three days in an office – three days – and that was just ‘work experience’ when he was a teenager.

He watches programmes like The Office with the same fascination that I watch shows like Airline or Pan Am. Consequently, he thinks that in officedom we spend our whole time hitting on each other, photocopying body parts and hiding the stapler. When I told him that at work, someone had actually stapled my co-worker’s post-it notes together, he thought this was hilarious.

I’m quite truthful with him, pointing out the realities of office life – because don’t you think that his fantasy version of the 9-5, complete with a hot secretary in a short skirt, office cubicles and a resident prankster, is the equivalent of a cockpit kitted out with a remote control, take-away pizza, pin-up poster girl and fluffy dice?