A lifestyle, I now see, which has left me destitute having frittered away more than £1 million with nothing to show for it. To the outside world, including close friends and family, I appear to have always had it all. I’ve been a successful journalist and broadcaster for 30 years, holding down several high-profile jobs, including TV critic at the Daily Mail and soap critic on ITV’s This Morning.
I have enjoyed an enviable lifestyle: a large, beautiful home in the UK, and rental properties around the world, including Marbella, Paris, Los Angeles and, most recently, New York.
And I have freedom. No husband, partner, children or ties. On a whim, I could be at any airport within hours. But there was one anchor I always took for granted: my home.
Looking back, I can see that my six-bedroom Cardiff home has been the safe base from which I can stray with confidence. I always loved the moment when I put the key in the lock and opened the door to see my favourite painting by local artist Harry Holland in my dining room above the huge French oak table I brought back from Paris ten years ago. Now, they, like everything else, will have to be sold.
I blamed many factors for my demise.
The recession, the changing nature of the media industry, the banks who threw money at me, falling house prices, the people who promised me work and didn’t deliver: I’ve railed at them all. But, the horrible truth is, there is only one person responsible for this mess. And that’s me.
When I had the chance of some work in Marbella in 2005, I took up an apartment there as well (pictured). London, Cardiff, Paris and Spain - I was living in all four and when I was bored with one, I popped to another
For while I have worked hard all my life, and once had several properties and an income close to a quarter of a million pounds a year, I have frittered equally hard.
And it’s not as if I can blame my upbringing. I come from a normal, aspiring, working-class background. I worked hard at school, went on to obtain a masters degree at university, and was always brought up to ‘save for a rainy day’.
It was my work ethic that kept me going when I was starting out as a journalist back in 1984, spending many miserable years of unemployment in London, taking badly paid part-time jobs as I received rejection after rejection from newspapers and magazines.
Finally I got my first break at the Times Education Supplement, then clawed my way up the Fleet Street ladder and fought my way onto TV.
Suddenly I was earning money, and being offered more work. I flew to Hollywood business class for a pre-Oscars party; I sailed the Mediterranean on a private yacht for a travel piece; I appeared on The Last Resort with Jonathan Ross on Channel 4; I was a guest interviewer with Melvyn Bragg on Radio 4’s Start the Week.
I had never been able to afford to eat out, but now did so most nights of the week in Soho and at the private members’ club, the Groucho, where I had become a member. I hated seeing friends squabble over ‘Who had the prawns?’ when the dinner bill came, so I would usually pick up the tab for the entire table of 12.
There is no doubt too that drinking contributed to this mess along the way. My enjoyment of wine is well documented, and certainly if I had been sober more often I’d be richer right now. My drinking has always been fuelled by loneliness and my sometimes inebriated spending has often involved splashing out on others in the hope that they’ll like me.
But even after I addressed the drinking problem six years ago and drastically cut down, I still didn’t stop spending. What I am really addicted to is change: the drama of the new, the clean slate. Fresh hope.
And that was fine while I had the money. With each paper I joined, my income went up several notches, and my spending went up alongside it.
Looking back, I can see that my six-bedroom Cardiff home (pictured) has been the safe base from which I can stray with confidence
I bought my first home in 1987, a large, one-bedroom flat in Belsize Park, north London, for £87,000 when I was 29. I felt so glamorous. My parents were so proud.
But in 1990, my father died of heart failure at just 60. Losing Dad hit me hard and that’s when my spending started to escalate. I sought affection in relationships, and that only exacerbated the problem, as I adore spending money on other people, especially those I love. Especially men.
In 1987 I had become involved with a slightly older fellow journalist, who was still living with his girlfriend, and he wasn’t shy about accepting my kindness.
To please him I rented a large apartment in Belsize Park for £350 a week, in addition to the one I owned and on which I was paying mortgage payments of £800 per month, as he said that when he left his partner he would need a large office, room for his piano and a garden for his dog.
I bought a job lot of pine furniture to fill up the many rooms, because he said it was his favourite wood.
We broke up a month later, so I let the rented apartment go, but didn’t have the heart to sell the furniture, so rented a Soho studio in which to store it. It sat in there for a year, costing me £600 a month. Yes, a mad expense, but at the time I was simply thrilled I had a place in Soho too.
Pictured in 2003, in a South bank flat with views of the river, the Millennium wheel and the Hungerford Bridge
I discovered I loved
living in different places, so bought a £90,000 maisonette in Cardiff, my home city, in 1993. Then, realising I had always wanted to live in Paris, I went on the Eurostar in 2001 to find an apartment and rented it for the next four years.
That still didn’t seem enough, so when I had the chance of some work in Marbella in 2005, I took up an apartment there as well. London, Cardiff, Paris and Spain — I was living in all four and when I was bored with one place, I popped to another. I could afford it and I loved the variety. I ignored friends who questioned what I might be running away from.
While houses were the bigger part of the spending picture, other purchases induced the same high. In 1992, I went out to buy a £60 keyboard in Regent Street, after deciding I was going to be a jazz singer, and came home with a £3,000 Clavinova piano.
The Nineties also saw me buy a saxophone while waiting for a train in Cardiff because I fancied myself as Lisa Simpson (sax-playing daughter in the Simpsons cartoon). Then I went to buy a £20 badminton racquet and returned with £200 worth of squash paraphernalia when I thought I had what it to took to make it in the sport.
Despite all these purchases for myself, however, it is splurging on other people that really tore through my money.
In 2005, I rented a box at Cardiff Arms Park rugby stadium and, in addition to the £13,000 it cost a year, I paid for my guests’ food and drink for five years. I would invite friends, friends of friends, and players, and every week met a bill of around £400. I didn’t flinch at the time, but now I shudder at my stupidity.
I showered boyfriends with gifts, holidays and cash — a £200 electronic chess set to a dentist I dated in 1993, a holiday in the South of France and Paris weekends to another man whose bank account I also kept afloat.
On I went giving and giving, with no thought as to whether anyone would give to me in my hour of need. Even when I lost a lucrative job six years ago, I didn’t draw in my horns. Aside from mortgage payments, I was blowing £2,000 a week.
In 2008, a Los Angeles-based screenwriter’s passing, gushing comment ‘You belong in Hollywood!’ saw me in the Virgin Atlantic Upper Class lounge before you could say ‘Beam me up, Spielberg!
On board a private jet during a visit to the Isle of Man with X Factor judge Simon Cowell in 2005
But LA is no place to live without an income. And for all my wide-eyed ideas about becoming a film writer, the reality was that I was living in dreamland. I had no savings and just continued to spend every penny as it came in.
Suddenly my debts started to escalate. I was ‘living’ in Cardiff, Spain, LA and New York — my most recent apartment in the Big Apple cost £3,000 a month. At the height of my spending, I paid £10,000 a month in mortgages and rents.
I just imagined everything would work out fine. That money would find me again. Yet the stress niggled and niggled. In LA, I lost a lot of weight and became increasingly down as I tried to find a foothold. It felt like it was 1984 — the year I started my career — all over again.
At the end of 2011, I returned to the UK to sort out my finances, but was burgled while in my own house in Cardiff. The £3,000 cash they stole (in the house only because the banks were closed) added to my debt and left me fearful of being alone. So it was back to LA for me.
In July, I gave up my £2,000-a-month LA apartment in favour of New York. But then, three months ago, I got a letter from the Woolwich, which holds my Cardiff mortgage. And another. The letters and calls kept coming, the most recent being threats about taking my home. So then, two weeks ago, came the call to tell me it was all over. My house is being marketed at a little under £800,000 and although my outstanding mortgage is £650,000, I am seven months (just over £20,000) behind on payments.
Since the letters began, I’ve begged and begged for a break in payments. For help.
When the new pension rules come into play in April — allowing people to use their pension pot like a bank account, taking out lump sums instead of being restricted to a set amount each month — I will be able to pay off the debt on my house.
Ironically, I contributed to a pension as a self-employed person the second I started work . . . the one piece of Dad’s advice I did adhere to.
But for the bank that’s not soon enough. If I could keep up basic repayments until then, they might offer a stay of execution, but I probably can’t. So, they will take me to court or I can hand back the keys under ‘voluntary repossession’.
Now that the brutal truth is too clear for me to ignore, I’ve been desperately trying to turn my finances around. There’s not been a waking hour when I haven’t been working, trying to sell articles and seeking commissions from drama producers, with few results.
I have written two books and I am hoping that my autobiography, Broke: A Life of Small Change, about my relationship with money and debt, will make me my fortune. I am always hoping.
I feel humiliated. I feel hurt. And I feel a complete failure.
I may still have my writing ability but everything I have achieved is being taken away. I feel like screaming ‘It’s not fair!’ But then I come back to the fact that it was my own foolishness that got me here.
I now find myself in my 50s, with a hefty mortgage, a credit card debt of £120,000, loans of £30,000, plus a backlog of other debts, including overdrafts of £30,000. And that’s without taking losing my house into account.
Being without security and money seems particularly devastating at this age. Society is already cruel enough to women of advancing years who’ve never fitted into the conventional norm — I have no long-term partner and no children.
But loneliness, that’s different. That is something I have never chosen, yet have never been able to escape from. I have been lonely all my life, and my spending and lifestyle has become a means of treating that loneliness. There is a sadness in my heart, I think, which spending seems to alleviate.
But now I cannot spend, and I cannot alleviate it. Some weeks, I have not had money for food, and last week I suffered a toilet paper famine that was a devastating new low.
On occasions I’ve found myself walking ten miles to a meeting because I cannot afford the bus fare.
Although there has been one, unlikely, silver lining. For I have been humbled by the outpouring of love and offers of help, not only from friends but also from complete strangers over social media.
Their kindness and support have made losing the house slightly less painful. The pain of the past few years has shown I get far more comfort and reassurance from my beloved friends and family.
As I hand over my keys, I will be buoyed by the fact that while I’d spent thousands of pounds each week buying people drinks, dinners and gifts, I now have no money but am surrounded by love.
Source: the Mail
