Mariella Frostrup puts her fingers to both temples and hoicks up her face. Is there a woman over 35 who doesn’t do this in the mirror for the grim pleasure of seeing five years, maybe ten, momentarily vanish? “The awful thing is, I look so much better like this,” she says, still holding her skin taut. “I used to have principles against surgery. All I’ve ever done is to have one session of Botox about six years ago but I couldn’t be bothered with renewing it every few weeks. But as I get older I have so many friends my age who do a bit of this, a bit of that, some Botox or fillers injected in that line from nose to mouth. And they don’t look like Hollywood wives; they look fantastic.”
It is probably Frostrup’s greatest good fortune — one that she is quick to acknowledge — that at 42, when beautiful women often start to panic and despair, she suddenly has little time for self-indulgence. With a nine-month-old daughter, Molly, and another baby due in October, she’s on the steepest end of the parental learning curve.
Her conversation is full of maternal quandaries. How can she get flexible childcare to deal with her irregular working week: she hosts Radio 4’s Open Book on Thursdays; Radio 2’s The Green Room on Fridays; and an assortment of corporate jobs and voiceovers. Could she bear to have a live-in nanny? “I’d feel guilty if she was always alone in her room, but resentful if she was sitting at my kitchen table.” Can she give birth to her second baby naturally when, despite being induced, her first labour stopped and she ended up having a Caesarean section? And although she lives among the yummy mummy bankers’ wives in Notting Hill, West London, she’s ambivalent about this privileged world of cashmere Babygros and £500 prams. She owns a “must-have” Bugaboo but loathes it – “have you ever tried to fold one?” – and claims that she will transport baby two in the cheapest, tackiest, lightest buggy she can find.
She slightly disgusted her girlfriends by requesting their unwanted maternity-wear – “they ask, ‘You really want my old clothes?’ ” – because her thrifty Irish upbringing means that she lacks the modern aversion to second-hand.
None of these workaday issues features in her book, Dear Mariella, a collection of her agony aunt columns tackling issues of the boudoir not the nursery. She doesn’t get many letters requesting practical advice – “which is just as well as I’m hopeless ” – or about babies. Indeed, she was first asked to become the Dear Deirdre of the chattering classes on the grounds that “you’ve lived a bit”. Which is, of course, misogynist shorthand for “you’re a slightly rackety good-time girl who has seen too many bedroom ceilings to ever find true love”.
So you cannot but share her delight in raising two fingers to the moralists who’d have preferred her 20-odd years of irresponsible hedonism to be paid for with infertility and regret. Instead, in a plot-twist too corny even for Bridget Jones 2, her boyfriend proposed as midnight struck on her 40th birthday. And a solid, worthwhile Mr Darcy, her now husband Jason McCue is “the most moral person I know”, Frostrup says – a human rights lawyer who has represented victims of the Omagh bombing and is seven years her junior.
There is one distinct benefit in being an older mother who has “lived a bit”. Frostrup has stayed in enough fancy hotels in her early twenties as a rock industry PR, attended enough first-night parties, befriended enough celebs and been a permanent enough fixture on the Groucho Club scene not to miss these things now that her life is more shackled to home. “I was already over wanting to go out a couple of years before Molly,” she says.
Pre-motherhood, Frostrup had imagined that she and Jason would leave their baby behind for glamorous solo breaks diving in the Maldives. “I had no notion of the tearing I’d feel, how much I’d miss her. Even if I’m upstairs working and I can hear her playing I think she should be laughing with me.”
Her friend the artist Damien Hirst rang her recently asking if she fancied going to see U2 in New York. She accepted but as soon as she replaced the receiver reality took hold — a week of jet-lag, being unable to drink because she was pregnant and long nights missing Molly. For what? A concert? “Now these things seem very alluring on the outside, but as you approach them they quickly lose their pull,” she says.
Born in Oslo, Frostrup moved with her Norwegian journalist father and Scottish artist mother to Ireland when she was 6. Her big break came in the late 1980s when she presented the film programme The Little Picture Show. Thus began a career founded on being prettier than the cleverest women and cleverer than the prettiest. With age she has gained gravitas and has judged the Orange, Booker and Whitbread awards. Yet because they are truly her friends but also because it adds to her allure, she can’t restrain her gossipy name-dropping. She talks of her recent Christmas stopover chez George Clooney and her intimate dinners with Mick Jagger at a little Chinese place round the corner. She tells of watching a sassy, bright actress friend become a vain, insecure nightmare as she entered the Hollywood A-list.
In person, she is slight, effortfully-charming and flattering, with the kittenish vulnerability patented by Felicity Kendal. She wears a frilled designer dress but renders it kookie with a pair of old sneakers. And of course there is that voice: low, posh and after-hours, with its smokey crack when she’s excited. Yet she also exudes a sisterly warmth unusual in women who are famously beguiling to men.
Briefly married to the Skids lead singer Richard Jobson at the age of 18, Frostrup has since been linked with Chris Evans (denied) and George Clooney (denied, but a good friend). But mostly her love life was a series of three-year relationships, all lacking something until Jason.
Her agony aunt postbag is stuffed with letters from women whose lives have followed a similar trajectory. “In their early thirties they complain that they are lonely, that their job is all-absorbing, that they’ll never meet anyone. Then in their late thirties they seem to stop being lonely and become much more concentrated on what they’re going to do: should they risk marrying this man they’ve just met so they can have a baby?” When she was 39, Frostrup diagnosed her own mid-life crisis. Weary of the London media scene, she escaped by travelling to the Brazilian rainforest to stay in an activity boot-camp resort for a week. She so impressed the instructors that on arriving back in London she received an e-mail inviting her to return and spend four months leading kayaking and hiking trips. She didn’t hesitate and three weeks later was on a flight for Rio de Janeiro. A few months after returning, she met her future husband: “I have the gut feeling that it happened because I allowed myself to step out of my normal behaviour patterns.”
Now she is astonished to find how much she relishes domesticity, seizing chicken bones from her husband’s plate to make stock, poring over mail-order catalogues and planning for her new baby. During her first pregnancy she did yoga twice a week. “It was quite lightweight in terms of exercise value, but it was two hours when I could forget trying to carry on as usual and just allow myself to be pregnant.”
She’s spent years bunking off the gym, lying to personal trainers that, yes, honestly she did 30 minutes on the treadmill. “My friend and I shared a personal trainer and because we’d rather talk to each other than the gym instructor, we told him to come after we’d done our half hour on the treadmill. But after a while we started turning up just five minutes before he arrived and ran very fast to work up a convincing sweat.” But she loves hiking. “
If there is a Scandinavian in me it is in a passion for walking and being outdoors.”
She was a most virtuous mother-to-be, insisting on organic food, drinking fresh juices, quitting the pack-a-day fag habit that moulded her voice. And she had no weight to lose after Molly; indeed, Posh Spice-style, she went all skinny despite eating masses. But, she says in despair, looking down at what appear to be very slender legs, “it’s the thighs – they’ve just gone. I keep thinking there must a shortcut, a machine where I can just lie there.”
Since having Molly, she has felt desperately unfit. “I used to think that going to the gym twice a week did me no good whatsoever. But when I stopped because I was trying to have a baby, things fell apart a bit. Only in the past four months I’ve started to go on walks again and I’m nothing like I used to be. I feel knackered and old.” After this baby is born, she’s going to hit the gym big-time. “I may even go back to Brazil,” she says. I bet she doesn’t.
Dear Mariella . . . An Indispensable Guide to Twenty-First-Century Living, by Mariella Frostrup (Bloomsbury, £6.99, on July 4), is available from Times Books First at £5.94 plus p&p. Call 0870 1608080, www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirstbuy
