Cover of Skimpy Grotts
Black and white newspaper front page with the headline 'Scarborough ahoy!' showing a ship on water; includes other headlines and advertisements.
A vibrant cottage garden with various colorful flowers, potted plants, and wooden garden furniture, surrounded by lush green trees and shrubs.
Scarborough beach at sunset with footprints in the sand, calm water, cliffs with buildings, and a clear sky.
A white ceramic pitcher with pink floral patterns on a white windowsill, filled with purple, pink, and lavender flowers facing a window with an outdoor view of green bushes and trees.
A robin bird standing on a white sprinkler head in a grassy yard.
A smiling child with dark hair in a striped shirt laying on grass with a happy dog, seen in black and white.
A black and white photo of a boy and a dog walking along a dirt path through a field of tall grass, with a background of trees, clouds, and a power line tower.

My love of storytelling started when I was eight, writing poems about my toys.

By 14, I'd talked my way into work experience at my local newspaper and earned my first byline. What hooked me wasn't just the writing. It was finding out what was happening, why it mattered and how it affected people.

After sixth form, the offer of a traineeship rather than the university route proved too tempting. The paper funded my NCTJ training and indentures, so at 19 I went straight into a busy daily newsroom producing two editions a day, learning the craft while doing the job.

I left as Deputy News Editor and moved into the rather more glamorous world of television PR. But the subject matter stayed close to my journalistic roots: news, crime and documentaries.

From there, my career took me into a wide range of organisations, from NBC Universal to the Home Office, and across corporate, executive, internal and change communications. That variety has always suited me.

I like work where there's a lot to understand and where different audiences often see the same issue very differently. Over the years, that has meant helping leaders find the right words for difficult moments, shaping corporate stories, protecting reputation, building communications functions and supporting people through significant change. I've also spent a lot of time taking complex information and turning it into something leaders can stand behind and people can actually understand.

The journalist in me hasn't gone anywhere. I'm curious, practical and happiest when I can get close enough to an organisation to understand both the business and the people in it. Once I understand both, the communications usually become much clearer.

There was life before all of that too. I've been a magician's assistant, a children's face painter and a lifeguard, although thankfully never all at once. My earliest publishing experience also included a sixth-form magazine called Skimpy Grotts, which probably deserves no further explanation.

These days, home is in the Buckinghamshire countryside with my husband, our teenage son and Clover, our Labrador and unofficial head of wellbeing. I love cooking, planning holidays, pottering in a garden I optimistically describe as a cottage garden and getting outside with the dog.

I grew up in Scarborough, though, and I'm still very much a Yorkshire girl. Put me by the sea, preferably with the North Sea being suitably dramatic and the dog doing zoomies, and I'm happy.