Lady Therese

River view in Paris.
Lady Thérèse waiting for Chocolate Chaud in Paris.

Karma Chameleon

Lifestyle•Travel
I know. It’s been a while. I’ve missed you too. “So what happened?” I hear you ask. “Where have you been these last few years? What have you been up to?” Well, it’s been quite the journey. I daresay there may have been warning signs in my earlier posts because it was during the writing of Letter From Paris that I developed a rare syndrome. A therapist may have considered it a personality disorder. I prefer to think of...
View of pristine white beach in France.
Lady Thérèse lying on a lounger at the beach.

No Strings Attached

Fashion•Lifestyle
“You know why I feel older? I went to buy sexy underwear and they automatically gift wrapped it” – Joan Rivers. While it was an American man who invented the tea bag, it was a French man, Louis Réard who invented the bikini. In 1946 while on vacation in St. Tropez, the designer noticed women rolling their two-piece swimsuits to get a better tan and came up with the idea of the exposed midriff. In France you can sunbathe...

Liquid Gold

Lifestyle
“A woman is like a tea bag – you can’t tell how strong she is until you put her in hot water” – Eleanor Roosevelt. Did you know that an American invented the tea bag? Unearthing that nugget was the sum total of my achievements yesterday. After many hours at my desk attempting to draft an introduction to the upcoming Tea With Lady T series, this sentence was all that survived – ‘In 1910, Thomas Sullivan, a New York...

The Photo Shoot Tales

Career•Fashion•Lifestyle
Uber is like a drug. I can’t stop using it. A couple of trips in the back of their chauffeur driven limousines and my own car was dead, tumbleweed rolling under the tires. People talk about inventions that changed history – Sancerre, Botox, Elvis on iTunes and five-inch stilettos, but to paraphrase John Lennon ‘before Uber there was nothing.’ For the first in our series of photographs we Ubered to The Peninsula Hotel for Afternoon Tea. History has it...
Lady Thérèse has her hair done at the salon.
Lady Thérèse has her hair done at the salon.

Maintenance

Fashion•Lifestyle
“It takes a lot of money to look this cheap” – Dolly Parton. Apologies for being a tad late with promised tales from the LA photo shoot. A trip to New York to promote my husband’s new book, the announcement of our daughter’s engagement and becoming a Huff Post blogger have all been pleasantly and hugely distracting. Now that what passes for normal life in our household has been restored, I am back to regale you. For those new...
Blossom Trees in LA
Yellow flowers bloom along the coastline of California.

Spring Has Sprung

Lifestyle
Last week everyone I met in New York was deliriously happy to be welcoming spring after endless months of grueling winter. My friends and family in England are equally excited that sunny days have arrived there too. The season has finally changed. As I am sure you’re aware, LA is not like the rest of the world. Here we have three seasons not four. First of the year comes Awards Season – The Oscars, Grammy’s, Golden Globes, Bafta and...

Exclusive Celebrity Interview

Career
I lived in Stratford-Upon-Avon, birthplace of William Shakespeare, for thirteen years. It’s a tiny town where the local industry is all things Shakespearean. I got to know him well during that time and was thrilled when he agreed to this exclusive interview to celebrate his 450th birthday. He is currently in LA pitching a remake of Coriolanus so we agreed to meet at The Beverly Wilshire Hotel. I joined him at a corner table where he sat resplendent in...

Lights. Camera. Action.

Career•Lifestyle
“Use a picture. It’s worth a thousand words” – Arthur Brisbane. My UK publicists needed photographs of my life in LA – shots by the ocean in Malibu, having afternoon tea, writing at my desk, relaxing in the sunshine. They asked for images that would capture the contrast between London and California, pictures that would reflect the themes in my novels as well as ones that can be used for my ongoing series Lady Terry’s Tips where I give...

Playtime

Lifestyle
Globe-trotting has its rewards and one of them is exhaustion. Since coming home I’ve had the urge to do some mental spring cleaning and been re-reading Julia Cameron’s book The Artist’s Way. Her program spurred me on when my first book – How to Stay Upwardly Mobile When You’re Spinning Out of Control was languishing in a drawer, rejected by a publisher because it was too similar to a book they’d recently published called Mommies Who Drink. I wrote...

Happy St Patrick’s Day

Lifestyle
“May the road rise up to greet you. May the wind be at your back” – Irish Blessing. My grandmother sailed steerage from Ireland to Ellis Island looking for work and a new life. Fifty-one million people chased the American dream that way. Can you imagine two whole weeks on the Atlantic Ocean in the bowels of a ship rife with dysentery? After a few years mopping floors in New York, Grandma went back home to visit family. She...