While Katherine Whitehorn was not the inspiration for my career choice she was certainly a role model.
The column she wrote for the Observer for more than 40 years was an essential part of Sunday in my home.
Along with Mary Stott of the Guardian Ms Whitehorn helped change the face of writing for women, in both newspapers and magazines.
Instead of recipes and fashion, they moved on to discussing serious issues of education, health and relationships.
Ms Whitehorn, 80 this year, was talking about her autobiography, Selective Memory, with her familiar no-nonsense wit and wisdom.
Her attraction is such that her audience packed the Theatre Royal, the majority perhaps women of a certain age, but a fair scattering of men and young people too.
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She claimed to be a grumpy old woman and then went on to quote famous thinkers of earlier centuries who were all convinced the country was going to the dogs and yet it survives.
She posed the question: is it really worse, or just different?
She pointed out that since the 1950s when she started writing, life for women has become very much better
"We have control of our own lives, we can choose our own jobs and we have the same opportunities as men for further education."
2008 Bath Literature Festival
Sat Feb 23 - Sun Mar 2
She said that there were still very few women in the top business posts, but suggested: "The people at the top don't have the fun. Is that perhaps why women don't go for those jobs?"
In 1959 she wrote a cookery book, Cooking in a Bedsit which saved the life of many a young singleton fending for themselves for the first time, mine included. She is amazed that something she put together in three and half months became a bestseller, has been regularly updated and is about to be reprinted in its original form "as a retro laugh" in September.
She is now Saga Magazine's agony aunt which prompted questions from the audience encouraging her to lift the lid on the agony aunts' role over the generations.
For more coverage of the 2008 Bath Literature Festival, pick up a March 6 edition of The Gazette
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