Ellee Seymour

Regular readers will know about my fear of public speaking and how I am trying to overcome it with the help of Cambridge Speakers Club, a Toastmasters International organisation.

I used to freeze and dry up and feel so panic stricken, but I am gradually becoming more confident. In fact, so confident that I have accepted an invitation to chair a discussion entitled “Addressing Business Issues and Values” and the speakers will be the Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, as well as Alan Barrell a Cambridge entrepreneur, and Mark Traherne CEO Senexis.

It’s very high profile stuff, am I brave or mad? It’s being held on the Cambridge Science Park, dubbed Silicon Fen, and 300 people from business and commerce have been invited.

It’s certainly my biggest public speaking challenge ever and I naturally want to do well and feel a great sense of achievement at having accomplished it. I’m testing these skills at my speakers club next week where I will be the Toastmaster, the most demanding role of the evening.

I was recommended to chair the panel by a local BBC journalist and the discussion is being organised by Chaplaincy to People at Work.

Any advice would be most welcome.

If, like me, you watched Newsnight last night with journalist Mi chael Pollan being quizzed about his latest book, In Defence of Food, did you also wonder why food has become so complicated?

For example, who eats butter any more? Is it made from the right kind of fat, does it contain Omega 3 oils? These are the questions I ask myself too as I avidly scan food labels. Have we become a little hysterical about food?

Pollan believes that our idea of what food is and what we should be eating has been completely distorted by the food industry and nutritionists. He believes that people are now so confused about their diet that they have no idea what real food actually is any more.

As far as I am concerned, food should be fresh and locally produced if possible. And this is a subject close to my heart as I love food and I love eating, and I like to enjoy what I eat.

So it is a great pleasure for me to work on my latest project with NIAB, the National Institute of Agricultural Botany, which is actively supporting the Year of Food and Farming and will be working with Cambridgeshire schoolchildren this spring and  summer to inform them about food and where it comes from.

I am meeting with their staff this afternoon to discuss our communications campaign, which will include students learning about modern plant varieties and the importance of plant breeding for consumers.

Sadly, according to Food and Farming research:

One in five children never visit the countryside – indicating that more than a million children across the country have absolutely no contact with the land.

• 21st century youngsters are more likely to have holidayed abroad than to have explored England’s fields and farms.
• A further 17% have only been to the countryside "once or twice", meaning a third of children have little, if any, experience of the rural world.
• A fifth of children say they have never picked and then eaten fruit – one of the staples of classic outdoors life*

It is tragic that at a time when so much information is available about healthy eating, it seems to confuse people and we have ended up with record levels of obesity, though inactive lifestyles is also a major contributory factor towards this.

As someone who has helped Nigella Lawson amass her millions by tuning in to watch the Domestic Goddess demonstrate her culinary skills, as well as buying her latest Nigella Express cookbook - the pear and chocolate pudding is to die for - I was fascinated to learn that she does not plan to leave her fortune to her children when she dies.

I wonder whether being the daughter of a former Tory Chancellor of the Exchequer has influenced her very determined views that not having money to earn “ruins people“.

She shares an estimated wealth of more than £110 million with her art collector husband Charles Saatchi and says:

“I am determined that my children should have no financial security. It ruins people not having to earn money.

“I argue with my husband Charles, because he believes that you should be able to leave money to your children. I think we’ll have to agree to disagree.”

I believe Nigella has highlighted a problem she has seen among other wealthy families where young people may have squandered their inherited fortune away, she has seen the negative impact it has had on them, how it has ruined their lives. She wants her prevent her two children, 13-year-old daughter Cosima and son Bruno, 11, from her marriage to the late journalist John Diamond, from falling down the same slippery slope.

While countless charities would obviously be very grateful for Nigella’s generous bequests, money alone does not “ruin people”. The problem is it attracts undesirable hangers-on and fortune hunters, but if young people are brought up grounded and having to pay their own way through life, such as university tuition fees, getting a weekend and holiday job to fund themselves, paying for their driving lessons and their own first car, surely that is when they start learning about the value of money. That is what Nigella should be teaching her kids right now.

I have already made my will and specified that I want my two sons to benefit from the best education if I should die sooner rather than later. I think I owe them that. But if I’m alive, they will have to pay their own way and wait a little longer before they have all my worldly goods.

Do be sure to watch ITN’s News at 10 this evening and see their dangerous undercover investigative work on sex trafficking in Eastern Europe, it’s a highly lucrative trade. I’ve just seen a trailer and it is going to be really gripping and eye-opening.

Award winning journalist Chris Rogers liaised with CHASTE - Churches Alert to Sex Trafficking in Europe when working on this.

Please watch it, and do let me know what you think.

Update: This dangerous undercover investigation is being highlighted on News at 10 each night up until Thursday, please read the comments for further info, it makes compelling viewing.

The owners of this East Anglian brothel have just been jailed and it is thought the prostitutes were probably trafficked.

I don’t imagine it will be too long before Tony Juniper lands a top new job which will enable him to continue promoting green issues.

The Friends of the the Earth will find him a hard act to follow after he steps down as director from the green group later this year.

I am very surprised that he chose to announce he was quitting in the Mail on Sunday rather than via his regular Guardian comment is free blog.

However, he uses it as a cathartic moment to recap his 18 years at FoE, the challenges he has had to overcome, constantly slogging away with the same message, often falling on deaf ears. He slams the Labour government for being “cowardly and lacking in vision”, despite their eco-rhetoric.

“The Government is terrified of saying anything that will upset business or the electorate. We can do a lot as individuals, but it is laws that will make a real difference - and this Government is bigger on talk than it is on action.

“Persuading families to use less energy, cut pollution and generate less waste need not be a problem if done in the right way. Saving money, having warmer homes, safer streets and better health can all be part of a greener society. We need politicians with the leadership skills to tackle the environment crisis - inspiring figures with the vision to persuade people that protecting the planet needn’t threaten our comfort.”

These changes are never going to happen overnight, publics still need convincing about climate change. Instead of relying too much on celebrity endorsement which Tony recommends, I would like to see more ordinary people demonstrate how they are making these environmental adjustments. Let’s have some webcams and video blogs from Tony’s own home, as well as Prince Charles’, who he praises for his consistent support; these can be used to educate, inform and persuade.

I have heard of a German MEP who is a farmer and converts his sugar beet into biofuels which he uses for his own vehicles. Let’s hear more examples like this, living proof of what can be done, and how.

My exotic mother Loula is visiting me this weekend. Her motto in life is to “live and love your life away”. Yet every time I speak to her on the phone, her last words are: “I must go and wash the kitchen floor”. She seems obsessed with washing her kitchen floor!

But this weekend she can leave her mop behind and have some fun with me. It starts tonight with a 25th wedding anniversary party given by a couple of arty friends. It was Chris’s second wedding and her two sisters apparently turned up at the register office carrying banners pleading with Chris not to tie the knot again.

They warned her that while she might sink into his arms to start with, she would later be up to her arms in the sink. Thankfully, she ignored them and they have two lovely kids. Perhaps I should have bought her a pair of rubber gloves as a present.

Tomorrow we head off to Wembley Arena for the Strictly Come Dancing tour, a Christmas present from me to my mum. My mother really loves this show and I have a couple of recorded episodes on tape. I play them whenever she feels low because she misses dad who died five years ago and she always says exactly the same thing at the same time, eg: “He is fantastic, he is God’s gift, she is a bitch, I love her dress, you can’t beat Russian dancers, he has no sex appeal.” I think you get the drift.

If she gets the urge to wash my kitchen floor, I shall just play her favourite Strictly tape and she will soon be in another world….

I must confess I have never read a Mills & Boon book, yet 35 million bodice-ripping copies are sold every year - one every three second.

This year marks the centenary of the publisher, and I was surprised to learn that its romance writers did not include the legendary Dame Barbara Cartland, who produced 724 books, sold over a billion copies and entered the Guinness Book of Records as the best selling author in the world.

I had tea with her once at her Hertfordshire home when I interviewed her for a health page article about health supplements, another area where she had clearly made her mark. From memory, I believe she took about 60 supplements a day, it was an extraordinary amount.

She had also urged servicemen and women to eat Marmite for its vitamins during the second world war when she served as a Chief Lady Welfare Officer, and in 1964, she founded the National Association for Health in the UK, of which she was president, as a front for all the Health Stores and for any product made as alternative medicine.

I naturally felt distinctly under-dressed during our meeting, while the Dame looked exactly as you see her in the pictures, a vision of pink from head to toe, frothy hair and pearls, with her little dogs faithfully sat by her ankles. We had sandwiches and home made cakes and biscuits and she regularly threw biscuits under the table for her pet pooches.

Our interview was interrupted a couple of times by other journalists calling for interviews, including from the States. She clearly loved all the attention and was very polite and charming to us all.

Her home at Camfield Place was painted turquoise, one of her favourite colours, and she showed me the famous oak tree in its garden planted by Queen Elizabeth I. I believe the young princess was sitting by it when she was told King Henry VII had died and she was to be Queen. The Dame gave me a souvenir leaf to keep from this historic tree which had been framed, as well as a couple of her books, but I cannot for the life of me remember where they are.

The Dame was a great character and kept writing in her dotage, producing up to 20 books a year, between the ages of 77 and 97.

If you have a favourite Mills & Boon to recommend, then do tell.

Home Office Minister Vernon Coaker made two references at yesterday’s sex trafficking conference expressing surprise at the zero media coverage following the launch of a new organisation called the Men’s Coalition.

It aims to advise government and other policy makers on designing policies and services that take account of the specific needs and experiences of men in a wide range of areas, including violence, crime, parenting, relationships, health, work and education.

It also seeks to identify “how masculinities and men’s experiences” should inform and enable government and other agencies to develop a collaborative approach to gender equality.

Having read this far, you are probably wondering, like me, what exactly this means, and whether men really feel discriminated against?

Members of the Coalition include the Men’s Health Forum, Respect, Fatherhood Institute, Men’s Advice Line, Relate, the Research Unit on Men and Masculinities at Bradford University, NCH and the White Ribbon Campaign. It is also supported by the Home Office and the Government Equalities Office.

The Coalition’s core principles outline how “the specific needs and experiences of men and boys are not well understood or taken into account in the development of public policy or professional practice across a wide range of areas”.

It believes that “men and boys should not be discriminated against, stereotyped or overlooked in the development of policy and practice, that men and boys, and women and girls, should be explicitly included in the development of policy and practice.”

Excuse me, but I thought opportunity was already available in our democratic system, this is what I do not understand. And are men being discriminated against in policy making decisions?

And what do these two statements mean about their intentions:

“To promote the understanding of how the social construction of masculinities functions within a range of diverse social and cultural contexts.

“To promote effective mechanisms for government and other agencies to engage with men and boys and develop gender-sensitive policies.

I have no idea how much money, if any, the government has spent on supporting this Coalition. The reason for the lack of media interest could be because the Coalition serves no real purpose, that facilities and processes already exist to achieve its aims.

Government should be inspiring and helping our men at an earlier stage in their lives so they leave school with skills that carry them through life, they should focus on helping them to achieve better results at school and raise awareness about specific male health concerns that could be cutting their life short.

Come on guys, there isn’t a Women’s Coalition along the same lines as far as I know, and women are certainly discriminated against in many more ways than men.

But maybe men think differently, so tell me guys, do we need a Men’s Coalition, do you feel discriminated against?

It may sound like a sexually transmitted disease, but primogeniture is in fact the common law right of the first born son to inherit the entire estate, to the exclusion of younger siblings. Note the word “son” in this sentence, in this enlightened day of sexual equality.

So why in the 21st century do males still take precedence over females when succeeding the throne? Why are females ranked lower than males in their royal household? And isn’t it a seriously worrying thought that Princess Beatrice should rank 5th in line to the throne while our hard working Princess Anne limps behind at 10th? Who would you have more confidence in as your monarch if we ever reached such extreme measures?

I was heartened to learn from the erudite Graham Dines, a top ranking political editor with the East Anglian Daily Times, that this dated legislation is unlikely to have a leg to stand on in the European courts, should any female royals chose to challenge it.

In his blog, he states:

“It’s time to do away with the Act of Succession, which wouldn’t stand up to the scrutiny of the European Court because of its discrimination against Catholics and women.”

I didn’t realise that a cross-party group of MPs, including Colchester’s Bob Russell, wants an end to primogeniture. I have no idea how much support it has, but what about you think, do you feel our female royals are unfairly discriminated against today?

I shall be working in London today at the CHASTE conference - Churches Alert to Sex Trafficking in Europe - where many authoritive speakers will give their valuable insights into this very topical and worrying issue.

I’m delighted that the Press Association is interviewing and filming CHASTE’S founder Dr Carrie Pemberton there at 8am, which means this story will feed through to all the national media, plus many more, it should help generate great coverage. I worked hard on getting them to bite on this, and am thrilled I was successful.

Here are some highlights from the conference, I think you will agree that it is pretty powerful stuff: