Ellee Seymour

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.