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I cannot say I am one of nature's born housewives. For a large part of my 20s and early 30s, I tackled housework the Joan Rivers way. \"I hate housework,\" she once said. \"You make the beds, you wash the dishes and six months later you have to start all over again.\" two-day blitz. Then it was back to squalor. It was only when I was sent to write an article on the National Trust that I began to see the benefits, even pleasures, of housework applied consistently and professionally. I discovered that housework can bring its own satisfaction and I set about learning as much as I could - not for its own sake, but because I was working full-time and didn't have the time The Housewife's Handbook is the book of the column, but when it came to writing it, I realised that housework - surprisingly - had changed since the column ended in 2005. Housework seemed to be in the air to such an extent that it spawned a prime-time television show, How Clean Is Your House? In addition, housework, like everything else, had gone green. It no longer means sloshing gallons of bleach about. People want to clean in a way that is going to do least damage to themselves, their children and the environment.

So I find the fashion for \"heritage paints'' incomprehensible. You know what I mean: the ones based on the paint colours our ancestors would have used. They have names like Mouse Droppings or Bat's Tongue. They are the sludgy greens, dingy pinks, sulphurous yellows and dirty blues you see in stately homes. And while they may look fabulous in a Palladian house or a Lutyens villa - that is, in large rooms, with 18ft ceilings - in the meaner proportions in which most of us live today, the effect is deadening.

What follows is a convoluted plot involving police corruption, Corsican terrorists, the death of [Aimee LeDuc]'s father and a breathless hunt through the streets of Paris, or, as Black might put it, les rues de Paris - for she likes nothing better than random Frenchisms, presumably to show American readers that she has actually been to Paris, France.

Like most women, I have \"ishoos'' with my weight - the main issue being that I think there is too much of it. So I leapt with unholy glee on the news that scientists are working on an anti-obesity vaccine. Imagine! Eat normally and still lose weight! It's the answer to Freud's question: it's what women want. The point is, why do women think that? Why do I agonise that I am a stone heavier than I was a decade ago? I'm still able to buy normal clothes in normal shops. I may think I am fat, but I am not - I am the right weight for my height. But always there is this urge to be thin, thin, thin. \"I've lost 5lb,'' a friend will say, and the correct female response is to congratulate her. The acme of celebrity achievement is to be able to squeeze into a size 0 - the American equivalent of a British size 4. There is even - so rumour has it - a size 00, a British size 2, or as we used to call it, age 10-12. For that is what all these Victoria Beckhams, Nicole Richies, Paris Hiltons and Lyndsay Lohans - these role models - look like. With their teeny- tiny torsos and twig-like limbs, they resemble nothing more than prepubescent girls.

According to [Sarah Beeny], the best builders work to a 60-70 per cent capacity to allow for this. \"Good builders plan everything. If you get someone round to price a job and he makes a few notes on the back of a cigarette packet, don't use him. And pessimism is a good trait in a builder, too. Then there's less chance of unrealistic expectations.'' Builders also hate us asking them to do a job on the cheap. \"When you consider the overheads, the tools, the time it takes to do a job, ask yourself what you would say if someone suggested paying you pounds 20 for three or four hours of your time,'' says Beeny. \"You work to pay builders for the time and expertise you don't have or can't be bothered to learn.'' Sarah Beeny is good at many things. As well as Property Ladder and the property development company she runs with her brother and her husband, Graham, she has recently set up a dating website, mysinglefriend.com. But lest this sound too idyllic, I can report that she is currently living in temporary accommodation - for, like half the population, Sarah Beeny has got the builders in.