The week I was featured in the Oxford Mail

It was amazing to be featured in the Oxford Mail this week, the newspaper where I started my career as a journalist aged 21 [read the article here and also on Yahoo Life!].

I was doing work experience there when I got an exclusive that almost made the front page (it was on page 3 in the end) and that's when the editor at the time the lovely late Jim McClure offered me a job.

After working for the Oxford Mail and The Oxford Times for five years I moved to London to work for the London features agency at Splash News as a 'real life' writer, where I secured a UK exclusive about twins who had been separated at birth for a social experiment.

That helped me get my first magazine job at celebrity title NOW magazine, where I did more feature writing as well as the odd bit of celeb news. One of my roles there was ghost writer for Spice Girl Emma Bunton's weekly column. So once a week I'd get to call her for a chat and then I'd write up our conversation for her page in the magazine. 

After NOW magazine I moved to the brilliant Closer magazine, where I was Lifestyle Editor. There I had the fascinating and often colourful job of interviewing celebrities about their health and fitness routines, filling nine pages of content every week with a team of one (me).

After five years there I went freelance, which allowed me to write and edit for some of the UK's bestselling health and fitness magazines and websites while having my two beautiful daughters. 

Like many people who are self-employed, Covid and lockdown saw a lot my work disappear overnight and that's when I decided to retrain as a personal trainer - combining my passion for fitness with a new career.

Being a freelance journalist is great, but anyone who knows me will confirm I'm a bit of a chatterbox so it's lovely to be able to have meaningful connections with my PT clients, while helping them get fit at the same time.

So that's a little bit about me. If you got to the end and are still reading this, then bravo.