Kathy Lette: ‘I’m glad I found a bloke who doesn’t think mutual orgasm is an insurance company’
How do famous names spend their precious downtime? In our weekly My Saturday column, celebrities reveal their weekend virtues and vices. This week: Kathy Lette
9am
What does a woman really want in bed? Breakfast and a really good book. I’m lucky because my boyfriend Brian [O’Doherty, 58] always brings me scrambled eggs and smoked salmon in bed and gallons of coffee. There’s nothing sexier than a man in a cooking apron. He’s also a classical guitarist so he can serenade me too if he wants. I don’t worry about my gut microbiome, I go with my gut instinct and it says Saturday mornings are for lying in bed having too much coffee and being spoiled rotten by your boyfriend.
9.30am
I read all the papers. In the week I’m up at sparrow’s fart and chained to my desk writing articles and books, but Saturday is for refuelling the brain.
10.30am
I’d like to say I casually crank out a morning run and 30 lengths in the lido before lunch, but the only thing I run up at the weekend is a phone bill. I keep in touch with my children Jules [33], who is autistic and an actor, and daughter Georgie [31], a political animal and brainiac [Kathy’s children from her second marriage to barrister Geoffery Robertson], and my sisters and girlfriends, who make me laugh like a kookaburra. I’ll also do a crossword with my 92-year-old mum over FaceTime, she’s a dedicated cruciverbalist.
1pm
I have a bowl of Brian’s homemade soup.
2pm
Back home in Australia, we conquer the great outdoors, but in Britain you conquer the great indoors. London has some of the best culture and history in the world. Brian and I will walk and talk our way into town from our home in West Hampstead and visit The National Gallery, the Courtauld Institute of Art or Somerset House. I call it plucking my highbrows. I’ve just booked tickets to the Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind exhibition at the Tate. It really annoys me that a lot of my British friends are so complacent about having all this treasure.
5pm
I change into something nice to meet my girlfriends Penny Smith and Anneka Rice for a cocktail in town at the Savoy, where I have a cocktail named after me – the Kathy Cassis. Your women friends are your human Wonderbra – they’re supportive and make you look bigger and better. When we get together we strip off to our emotional undies in about 3.6 seconds. It’s a psychological striptease. It’s not just great therapy, it’s also fantastic material. Every story in my new book The Revenge Club [Bloomsbury, £16.99, out 9 May] about a group of middle-aged women who take revenge on the men who set on them for the crime of being menopausal, is taken from real life.
6.30pm
Many an evening I come home to find my poor beleaguered boyfriend foraging in the garden with dinner guests knocking at the door. I always forget who’s coming round. Our house is like the unofficial Aussie Embassy for visiting Australian actors, pop stars and politicians. They invariably end up at my kitchen table where Brian has cooked up a feast – he does a great paella. I like to rub shoulder pads with my favourite British friends too.
9pm
We always end the night dancing and laughing. Brian will play his guitar – but only if he’s asked.
11.30pm
The English guests seem to pike about 11.30pm whereas the Aussies just keep on dancing.
1am
I congratulate myself on finding a bloke who doesn’t think mutual orgasm is an insurance company. Oh, what a feeling. The post-menopausal years are the best years of your life. Every woman deserves to have a sensational second act.
