Archives for December 2011

Like most women my age, like many mums up and down the land, and like hundreds of people who leave everything too late, I'm finding it all too much.

Christmas just won't happen if I don't grab a bit of time off. It's so hectic in my house. And what's more today is my number two son's birthday.

Happy Birthday, Jamie!

Mental note: Always, always, always take the week before Christmas off from work.

So my lovely team here at BBC Radio Berkshire have listened to my plea with sympathy and have cajoled the wonderful Bill Buckley into coming into the studios and standing in for me for the rest of the week.

Thanks so much guys. And especially thanks to Bill.

That makes today's programme my last one of 2011. It's been a great year, actually. Together, we've been awarded a Sony and a Gillard award, and we've done some really exciting programming.

Lots of love, thanks, and praise to my collegaues, the totally supportive Duncan, the wonderful and inspirational John Baish, the fantastic and oh-so-calm John Hudson, the multi-talented Soose, the mellifluous Marie, the gorgeous Claire and everyone else who has made the Anne Diamond show (or The Big Show, as we call it) such fun in 2011.

But I'd really liike to say farewell by telling you about my guest today, Chris Morrell, who was awarded an MBE for his services to school sports.

More amazingly, and shockingly out of the blue, Chris had a stroke several months ago. He is now fully functioning again, but only because, he says, of FAST. It's the mnemonic designed to help people recognise a stroke. F for Face. If your face falls on one side, it's a sign. A for Arms - can you hold them up? S for Speech - is your speech affected? And finally T is for time. It's crucial to get help fast. For more information go to the Stroke Association website.

And pass the message on. Let's hope you never need to use it.

Have a wonderful Christmas, and a Happy New Year. See you in Olympic year!

As ever, any broadcaster finds themselves doing lots of interviews about 'how to get through Christmas' or 'how to survive the extra stress levels'. Coupled with that is the inevitable interview about the sudden upsurge of suicide at this time of year, and even how the festive season ends, and the New Year begins, with rising numbers of people calling Relate to try and keep their marriage together, or ease its falling apart.

So why, oh why, do we make such a big deal of Christmas, when it is almost bound to give us grief, heartburn, red faces, bags under the eyes and turn our hair white?

Now we know why Father Christmas looks the way he does!

Sarah Winckless, a regular on my radio show, is at the top of her sport. She's an Olympic medallist and winner of countless gongs for her rowing, and now chairs the British Olympic Associstion Athlete Commission. But today she got news that seemed to eclipse all of that - at least for a while.

She's been picked to run with the Olympic torch - somewhere in our patch - on July 10, which is a Tuesday. It's a date we should all put in our diaries and all turn out to cheer her along.

Never have I seen her quite so emotional.

Congratulations Sarah. We are ALL so proud of you.

Met Louise Woodbridge today, from the Child Bereavement Charity.

Her story almost too painful to bear but if you'd like to hear her do revisit today's show on the BBC iplayer. Her most important messages: that the human spirit is indomitable and that survival, even after the most painful trauma, is possible.

The Child Bereavement Charity can be contacted online or on 01494568900.

I'm taking a day off tomorrow and James Cannon will be looking after the show for me. Speak to you on Friday.

This time yesterday I was absolutely determined to go get an illuminated reindeer to put on my front lawn. "Why not?" said all my guests on the show yesterday. "Don't get hung up on the idea that it may be naff - who cares?"

I have always thought that one can indeed overdo the outdoor christmas lights. There are plenty of examples of this on my daily drive into work. One enterprising neighbour has an inflatable Santa and a whole herd of multi-coloured stags with nodding antlers.

But, face to face with an £80 illuminated reindeer in my local garden centre, I bottled it.

I am sorry, but even at that price, it was...well...naff.

By the time I got home, my whole family had heard that I may well be coming home with luminescent wildlife and they were, to a man, really worried that I'd finally gone "eccentric" (something I have always threatened to do).

I'll perhaps do that next year - with a solar powered twinkly tree. Saw one of those at the garden centre and was tempted.

...and it was so nice to have a decent debate about the Leveson Inquiry and what it is going to achieve.

The thorny question came up - why do people buy the papers that peddle hatred and vicious attitudes, and the magazines that specialise in horrid photographs and paparazzi pix?

In other words, are we getting the press we really want?

I reckon such attitudes have been encouraged by the press itself. Twenty or thirty years of the drip, drip effect of nasty attitudes permeating our culture. Can we reverse the effect? It would be nice to try....

And no, I'm not talking about me.

She's Vera Day - and she acted in The Prince And The Showgirl, the movie starring Marilyn Monroe and Laurence Olivier, shot at Pinewood in 1957. Of course the making of that movie is now a movie itself - "My Week With Marilyn".

Vera, a Twitter virgin, has had a fantastic career herself. As a showgirl in her first ever musical, she was talent-spotted by movie director Val Guest, and suddenly found herself in the world of movies. She's been strangled by Boris Karloff in "Grip Of The Strangler", joked alongside Tommy Cooper and William Hartnell (the first Dr Who) in "And The Same To You" and was a tight sweatered secretary in "I Was Monty's Double". Later she did lots of acting in what was probably the golden age of television - with Roger Moore in "The Saint" and making a couple of Armchair Theatres which were done live.

She has a hundred stories to tell and a fantastic photo album. Definitely someone who

should write her autobiography!