VICTORIA COREN MITCHELL

I have a complicated relationship with the zoo; maybe everyone does. It's so wonderful and so sad.

I am a big fan of Bournemouth, having enjoyed many happy hours on its sandy beach and crazy golf course.

I'm really bored by the constant vilifying of people (especially women) for things they didn't say.

I play quite an old-fashioned game of poker. It's a lot about getting a sense of people at the table rather than the maths of the thing.

I don't quite comprehend what Kim Kardashian is, where she came from, or why we talk about her.

I don't know if I'm a writer who plays poker or a poker player who writes.

I like the fact that the weather forecast is always wrong. In a world of BlackBerry insta-connection, Google research, and Hadron Colliders, it is a daily reminder of the ultimate ignorance of man. It is a signpost towards all the enormous things we cannot understand.

You will enjoy the TV and radio forecast much more if you stop taking it as advice and simply treat it as a short poem about the weather.

I've always hated the idea of carrying grudges and resentments around like a load of mouldy suitcases.

Never take your makeup off before bed. Sleep in it. That way, you're all ready to go if a hot postman rings the doorbell early.

I've never understood why the knowledge training and rigorous testing of London cabbies isn't rolled out all over the U.K.

People have become desperate to reduce everything, including each other, to mindless categories of good and bad, as if the world can be divided into Facebook likes and dislikes.

I have cared so much and so little about the cars I've owned.

After a bath, we all love to dry off with a towel. But do we need it to survive? No. It's a luxury.

I know that I'm probably far more pedestrian and less talented than many who dreamed of becoming writers but couldn't see the road so easily.

If you are actually ordinary, the only way to give royal status meaning is to live an extraordinary life. It can't be jeans and burgers and granny doing the babysitting.

My speeding offences (whether caught or not) are always in situations where the speed limit is 30, but I think it's 40. And I'm never doing 40, always a careful 37.

Socks and sandals together are absolutely fine, as long as your flares are wide enough to cover your feet.

I'm too short-sighted, too squeamish for contact lenses and too vain for glasses.

Reverse-parking in a small space is one of those high-pressure situations where a critical, watching eye becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The older you get, the more 'mindfulness' becomes about trying to remember why you came upstairs.

Society is notoriously stupid in its failure to harness the wisdom of older women in everything from television to politics, family life to boardrooms, and here is one reminiscing with honesty and realism about women's particular challenge: to create our professional and financial structures in the same period as our peak fertility.

When I was 15, I still liked climbing trees and hiding in cupboards.

The phrase 'working mum' makes me nervous.

They say multitasking is a female trait, but it's not about gender; it's about personality type.