You may wonder what link there could possibly be between a sports nutrition author and an international rock star…

Excitingly, Kasabian bassist Chris Edwards and his brother Jason have become Go Faster Food disciples, using Vermilion author Kate Percy’s blog as a nutrition guide in their mission to complete the gruelling Lands End to John O’Groats challenge. They visited Kate Percy en route, having dinner at her Bristol home on Monday 6th September. Despite the complicating factors of a knee injury, broken mobile phone and driving rain, the boys completed their 85-mile cycle to Kate’s home to feast on some of her delicious recipes and discuss nutrition for the rest of the trip.

Kate was interviewed on Heart FM on Friday 3rd September and Heart presenter Andy Bush joined the Kasabian team for their cycle into Bristol. Kate was interviewed for the Western Daily Press and on BBC Radio Bristol. Look out for an interview with Kate will run in The Telegraph Weekend magazine this Saturday!

Jenny - Press Officer

Dyslexia: How to survive and succeed at work by Sylvia Moody

The essential handbook for all those struggling with dyslexia or dyspraxia in the workplace.

Cindy - Assistant Editor

Is it me, or is it hot in here? By Jenni Murray

A brilliantly written book on the menopause by one of Britain’s most popular journalists and broadcasters.

Miranda - Senior Commissioning Editor

The Good Sleep Guide by Sammy Margo

Banish fatigue from your life forever with this practical, unique guide endorsed by the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy.

Julia - Commissioning Editor

Day 36

We gather in the canteen to celebrate the publication of the fabulous The Tent, the Bucket and Me – with not only author Emma, but also her utterly awesome mum and dad! It’s like a family picnic where we’ve all had to retreat inside (which is, after all, what happens at every family picnic I’ve ever been to). We have erected a tent (last seen in action at Latitude), and BQL has made Welsh Cakes. None of us has any idea what they’re supposed to be like – they seem to be a cross between a scone and a garibaldi.

Now, it would be a dereliction of my duty not to point you to Emma Kennedy’s very brilliant blog, which we’re all hooked on, as only she should be allowed to tell you the reaction of The Family Kennedy to the Welsh Cakes, which were made to Emma’s Aunt Peggy’s secret recipe. She told us afterwards that literally no-one in her family dares to make them, so Lou had done A Very Brave Thing Indeed.

Off to the Charlotte Street Hotel afterwards to see my friend Dominic’s new BBC drama Freefall. It’s got all sorts of starry types in it, including Aiden Gillen from Queer as Folk, Dominic Cooper from Mama Mia, Rosamund Pike from one of the Bond films and even Sarah Harding from Girls Aloud! Crikey.

It’s a drama about the recession (yeah, I know). It starts off in the heady days of late 2007, when I was buying overpriced flats in the hopes of turning a fat profit, Property Ladder-style, 2 years later. Aiden Gillen plays a horrible banker (boo!); Alfie Allen (brother of the more famous Lily) works with Dominic Cooper, who is a somewhat-under-scrupled man selling discount mortgages to people with ropey credit ratings (double boo!) He sells the dream of a better life, with a nice house and a flash car, to an old mate of his who’s currently living quite happily in a council flat with his wife and 2 kids. Can you guess where all this is going? Yes, yes you can. Very much so.

By the end of it, I wanted never to buy anything ever again, and to go back to renting, now that my flat is obviously a total albatross, even though my tracker mortgage has gradually reduced in price so much that the bank is practically paying me to live there. It’s all very Affluenza, and makes you wonder how the bankers got away with it for so long, making millions out of shuffling debt packages around different investors (although, is that what they were doing? I’m still none the wiser after all this time – there was a lot of talk about ‘warehouses’ in the film, and I couldn’t work out if they were literal or metaphorical, which didn’t help).

As Dom’s films are rarely in possession of a happy ending, it’s unsurprising when one of the characters tops themselves, but I’ll leave you to find out exactly which one it is. Ha! Good times.

Drinks saved: one and a half. Even more tempted to drown sorrows afterwards in wine as it was free, but resisted.

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Day 29

Not much going on today – I do manage to drag myself to the gym after work, though, followed up by the reward of a new series of The Apprentice. God, I love that show. The ‘business’ acumen demonstrated by the contestants (this evening’s classic of Mona enquiring ‘what’s that?’ when presented with a duster suggested that perhaps the team she was leading might not be the winners of the cleaning task). Margaret and Nick’s mad eye-rolling and brilliant asides. The dizzy heights of ludicrousness that the wannabes manage to scale when saying how brilliant they are at ‘business’ (one of the girls memorably describes herself as ‘a rough, tough, cream puff from New York’ – I think she might be better off on America’s Next Top Model). It’s also the best show for texting your mates as you’re all watching it, giving those of us who live on our own that community feel. Shouting at the telly doesn’t get any more fun than when you’re watching The Apprentice and wondering who on earth would want to work for Sir Alan anyway, and why, when he’s advertising how brilliant actual apprentices are on one channel, he seems hell-bent on finding the stupidest person in Britain to employ (‘for a six-figure salary’, no less) on another.

Drinks saved: none – you’ve gotta be sober to pick up all the total corkers on The Apprentice. (more…)

Day 22

Jasmine Birtles, the Money Magpie, comes in to give us a talk on ‘How to be Rich Without Really Trying’ at lunchtime. That’s my kind of thing – none of this Dragons’ Den, flogging half your company to people who’re already super-rich nonsense. Baking Queen Louise and I hatch a plot afterwards – watch this space!

Go out for a Thai meal with a friend after work, which finishes quite early, so back home in time to watch a bit of telly.

Drinks saved: 1 glass of wine (more…)

Day 15

Emma Kennedy, author of the pant-wettingly hysterical The Tent, The Bucket and Me, which we have all been obsessed with for months, comes in for a Sales/Marketing/PR update. Our entire department has a bit of a girl-crush on Emma; we’re stalking her through her utterly brilliant blog, she’s now on Twitter and hopefully is expecting a visit from Aslan because of her pre-orders on Amazon. We beg her to bring both her parents (the joint heroes of the book) and her beagle, Poppy, in on publication day, when we’re going to have a celebratory tea in our canteen, complete with her Aunt Peggy’s legendary Welsh Cakes, which Baking Queen Louise is going to make. We’re all a bit doolally with excitement afterwards.

Going to the other extreme, in the evening I go to see Watchmen at the Ritzy in Brixton. It turns out to be one of the most cataclysmically boring films I’ve ever seen (it manages the unlikely feat of being literally twice as boring as The Curious Case of Benjamin Button – a film during which, by the end, I felt like I really had lived the titular hero’s entire life along with him).

Having no knowledge of the source material (why would I, I’m a girl) and having deliberately not read any reviews (sometimes I just like to judge things on my own, and not be dictated to - radical), the whole thing was utterly incomprehensible and was the longest two and a half hours of my life. There’s a bit near the end where one of the characters says, ‘Nothing ever ends’ and I had a crazed moment of thinking that I really was going to be stuck watching this thing till the arrival of the Apocalypse. When it finally did end, me and the girl sitting next to me basically both shrieked, ‘OH THANK GOD FOR THAT’ and then bonded over how utterly awful it’d been.

Drinks saved: a glass of wine over dinner beforehand. Sorely tempted to leave the film halfway through, get an enormous bottle of wine from the bar and drink myself into oblivion through the rest of it, mind you. (more…)

Day 8

An awful day – we find out that Random House is having to make redundancies (this comes after we’ve heard from several friends at HarperCollins that they’re either being made redundant or in a pool for their jobs). To be fair, with everything that’s going on in the world at the moment, it’s not entirely unexpected, but I for one had been playing ostrich and sticking my head firmly in the sand, whilst also putting my fingers in my ears and shouting, ‘La, la, la, I can’t hear you’ every time Robert Peston appears on the news at ten.

I knew one of my colleagues had a meeting with our MD scheduled this morning, and we’d been texting each other last night, worrying about it, but we hadn’t heard yesterday that anyone else had been called in. I come out of our weekly jackets meeting and my colleague takes us and the rest of the team into our boss’s office and tells us about the redundancies – including his. We’re all shell-shocked, all the more so because he tells us with such calm dignity and is being so positive on behalf of the rest of the team.

We spend the rest of the day in various meetings talking about what’s happening and finding out about other members of staff who’re affected, whilst feeling kind of numb and helpless. A few of us go to the pub after work to try to work out how we feel and offload a bit. Tempting as it is to down the better part of a bottle of wine in order to take the edge off, I stick to the lime and sodas; God knows, I’m feeling weepy enough without adding booze – a depressant – into the equation.

Drinks saved: at least 2 large glasses of red

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Day 1 of Lenten Abstinence

What’s the best thing to do on the first day you’ve decided to forego alcohol for 6 weeks? Yes, that’s right, go to Camden, spirits(ual) home of Amy Winehouse (oh, those booze puns are everywhere to taunt me) and the rest. I even start off at the refurbished Hawley Arms – on a Wednesday night at around 7 pm, it’s largely home to slightly confused-looking tourists and 18 year-olds in headbands with stripy T-shirts and artfully mussed-up hair. Unless they’re all YouTube/MySpace stars whom I’m entirely unaware of, there didn’t seem to be anyone of note there.

We then go to Jongleurs, for a comedy gig. Last time I went to Camden Jongleurs was for a hen do, at which I was also sober, on account of having been mugged and dragged along the ground in the process, resulting in a set of grazes on my knees and feet which needed thrice-weekly visits to the local nurse to be re-dressed and despite their best ministrations went septic, resulting in a course of antibiotics. The evening saw me downing copious amounts of water, with my infected foot throbbing and a succession of comedians who all picked on the same guy at the front, resulting in an almost unbearably aggressive atmosphere.

So, would I have a rip-roaring laugh-a-thon this time round? In a word: no. To start with, we were told, ‘Food’s off’, it being but moments away from the show starting. Great: I’m not only not drinking anything, I’m now not eating anything either. This Lent thing is really kicking in. I contemplate gnawing my own arm off and hope the comedy will take my mind off my growling stomach and plummeting sugar levels. The compere, a tall, lanky bald man called Roger something, comes on and gives a massive preambular introduction – including the fact that the show will, apparently, go on for days. As Roger also spends a long time taking the piss out of a man with a hat, some men with beards and some older men (who may or may not have beards), and is basically incredibly dull, this doesn’t fill me with joy.

By half time, I am almost crazed with boredom and sobriety, and have had very few laughs. It’s 9.30pm and it’s probably going to take me an hour and a half to get home, so I make my excuses and leave, resolving never to go to Camden bloody Jongleurs again.

Drinks saved: A painful 3

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