Mariella Frostrup on menopause: A man I met was repulsed

Times

5 hours ago

It's a cloudy afternoon in Somerset, where — just a few miles from Bruton, dubbed by this paper no less 'the UK's Montecito' — I'm sitting at a long wooden table in an extremely tasteful kitchen surrounded by lush garden, tucking in to a turmeric cauliflower, chickpea and spinach lunch pot prepared by my hostess, the broadcaster, author, campaigner and journalist Mariella Frostrup.
Beside me is Belles Berry, until now best known as daughter of the former Bake Off queen, Dame Mary Berry. 'Is it good?' Frostrup asks in her unmistakable drawl, once voted the sexiest on telly. 'Yeah,' says Berry. 'Good! I always get nervous when Belles is eating my version. Normally I can get the taste right, but my presentation lacks finesse.'
The recipe is from the cookbook the women have co-authored, a first for both — Menolicious: Eat Your Way to a Better Menopause. For Frostrup, 62, it's another part in her decade-long campaign to destigmatise the menopause. For cordon bleu-trained Berry, 53, it's the first step in a post-menopausal attempt to establish herself as a cookery writer in her own right, after a lifetime being known as Mary's daughter.
'I was always waiting till Mum retired to write my first book. That didn't happen,' she says. 'Two years ago, I asked her, 'So when are you going to retire?' She basically said, 'Never, while the BBC still wants me.' I thought, 'I'd better get on with it.' She's 90. I've wasted a lot of time.'
More on Berry, who is a taller version of her mother, later. First it's time to talk menopause, about which Frostrup has been the nation's chief flag-waver for a decade, chairing the Menopause Matters campaign and being made, as of last year, the government ambassador for menopause employment.
It's the latest, somewhat unlikely metamorphosis in a 40 year-plus career that began when she arrived in London from Dublin aged 16, reeling from the death of her father, an alcoholic Norwegian journalist, and unable to stay with her Scottish mother and her abusive partner, to live in a squat in Shepherds Bush.
• Menolicious: six easy recipes that boost your health in the menopause
She worked as a music manager, and was a PR for Live Aid. Since then, she's variously hosted — among others — The Film Programme and the Sky Arts books show, and judged the Booker and Orange prizes. All the while, gossip columns buzzed about her friendships with Mick Jagger and George Clooney. In 2003, she married the human rights lawyer Jason McCue, who's 56. Molly, now 19, and Dan, 18, were born in quick succession and the family left their Notting Hill home for the countryside.
Her campaigning zeal was sparked aged 48 after she suddenly began experiencing terrible, unexplained insomnia and anxiety. Her GP was unhelpful. Eventually — 'When I'd really fallen apart' — she saw a private gynaecologist, who immediately pronounced her perimenopausal and prescribed HRT. Frostrup was horrified.
'I was full of the injustice of it. Actually, it was more than that — it was incredulity. I couldn't believe millions of women — 13 million women in the UK — were going through menopause and how ignorant we were about it. How we've suffered in private and been gaslit into just putting up with it. It's crazy: this is something that's going to happen to every single one of us, yet the medical profession isn't geared up for it. It felt like the world's biggest conspiracy — the silencing of half the population when they hit a certain point and most need support.'
• The app for GPs promising to revolutionise menopause care
Frostrup was on a mission, yet many didn't want to know. 'I was at a dinner party and started talking to the man next to me about it. You could see in his eyes he was repulsed. He turned his back on me. It certainly wasn't the Mariella Frostrup he'd been expecting — he wanted someone drinking neat whisky, maybe smoking a cigar and talking about hanging out with Mick Jagger. More importantly, his wife, who was my age, was like, 'Eurgh!' '
Over to Berry, about whom we know so much less. She grew up in Buckinghamshire with her two older brothers. Their father, Paul Hunnings, worked for Harvey's of Bristol, the sherry brand, and dealt antique books. Far from the phenomenon she would become, Mary was the food editor of Housewife and Ideal Home magazines.
Mary Berry once admitted she used occasionally to slap her children with a wooden spoon. 'She would chase us with butter pats. We all were naughty. Once we were all rusticated [sent home] from school at the same time. Mum was filming in a big BBC tent and didn't know what to do with us. We had an absolute ball.'
Berry was sent to an all-girls boarding school where she was miserable and acted up. 'I wanted to be with my brothers at Gordonstoun and I wasn't allowed because I was a lady.' But Gordonstoun is co-ed. 'I know,' she shrugs. 'But that was my parents. Anyway, I ended up being asked to leave a few schools.' The last time she was asked, she was 15 and hadn't yet taken GCSEs. 'Which I think is illegal,' she says, laughing. 'But Mum only has one O-level in home economics.'
After a stint in 'a survival school for rebels' in Montana, she took her cordon bleu course, then went to secretarial college. She was a student there, aged 17, when she and her brother William, then 19 and at Bristol Polytechnic, climbed into their parents' car one morning to go to buy the Sunday papers, with William at the wheel.
'The car flipped and we skidded down a hill in an open-top MG on our heads. I blacked out. When I came round, the car was the right side up and the ambulance and fire brigade people got me out.' William died. She received no counselling. 'I was left in a room in the hospital, with a cup of tea, which I poured all over myself. You just had to battle it out by yourself, which is a dangerous place for a teenager — you're very alone. I went back to college the next day in shock. It was a brutal time.' Mary subsequently became a patron of Child Bereavement UK.
Did Berry feel survivor's guilt? 'No, because I wasn't driving. But your life's never the same after that. What it did give me, however, was an incredible lust for life. Once you've had a near-death experience, you realise how precious life is. So I really have been going for it ever since.'
Still, for a while she was 'lost'. She tried various jobs including interning at Vogue, until she mislaid some photographs of the royal family after biking them to the wrong address. 'I couldn't remember the name of the courier and there were no negatives. They told me I'd lost them £3 million.' She then found work through an employment agency but ended up being fired from five jobs in five days.
Her 'beacon of light' came at 21 when she won a grant from the Prince's Trust (now the King's Trust) to start a company making candles. She went on to establish Mary Berry & Daughter selling her mother's dressings and sauces and building the brand.
Mary hit the big time aged 75, when she got the Bake Off gig. 'That was pretty weird and wonderful.' The company was subsequently sold in 2014 for £2.5 million. 'Mum and I are two peas in a pod; we respect each other. I don't know who's more excited about my book — her or me. She loves my recipes.'
Mother and daughter live six miles from each other in Oxfordshire, where the senior Berrys downsized just before Covid. Berry has three children, aged 20, 19 and 14, with her builder husband Dan Bosher, whose business collapsed eight years ago. So she's the breadwinner? 'Yes, and I've worked very, very hard for it. Now this is a new chapter. I always knew I had to do something on my own and now I'm going for it. I've got nothing to lose.'
When Berry had her first hot flush at nearly 51, she became very socially anxious — 'and I absolutely love going to parties'. She remembered how her mother had been affected at the same age. 'I don't think Mum noticed at first, but her accountant said, 'I'm not coming back to work until you get HRT.' So Mum got the patches and loved them — and the accountant came back. I remember seeing the patches — I just thought she had lots of stickers on her. Anyway, I went straight to the doctor and got HRT.'
Berry searched for a cookbook featuring ingredients to help her with the physical and psychological changes she was undergoing, but couldn't find anything. Then two years ago, she was introduced to Frostrup and asked her if she'd like to collaborate. 'I'd always wanted to do a menopause cookbook,' Frostrup says. 'In fact, I'd been begging Yotam [Ottolenghi] to do one and he was like, 'Yeah, we'll do it together,' and it never… It was infuriating. There were a couple out there but they were very lavender, all misty and gentle adzuki beans. We had a vision of what we wanted this to be, which was easy and fun and reflected women's lives at this point.'
They've succeeded — the book's packed with straightforward, delicious-sounding recipes, including the cauliflower we've just eaten, along with Frostrup's very tasty 'guilt-free' porridge bread made with yoghurt and no flour, not to mention their women's energy balls. ('In the photograph they look like testicles,' Frostrup says, not wrongly.)
I'm not sure the book needs its menopause tag, since the recipes appeal to everyone. Frostrup grins. 'Jason cooked the coconut black bean chicken stew from the book and said, 'I'm not going to catch the menopause from this, am I?' So I'd say levels of understanding need a bit of work in this house.'
It's hard to imagine now, but before Frostrup (along with the likes of Davina McCall) began banging the drum, menopause was a taboo subject. I'd never have dreamt of bringing up the subject in an interview, yet now virtually every 40-plus woman I meet falls over herself with tales of diminishing oestrogen. At least, most do. When I recently interviewed the Britain's Got Talent judge Amanda Holden, 54, who was promoting a supplement that's marketed (among others) at menopausal women, she shut down my questions. 'Move on. I'm not one of those women. I just don't talk about it. Seriously. It's just not… no!'
Frostrup frowns. 'Not to talk about [Holden] at all, but to me that just screams of fear of ageing and the assumptions that come with it. But the whole menopause awareness thing is a kind of emperor's new clothes. Menopause has become a word that's bandied around everywhere among the chattering classes, but more widely there's still incredible stigma attached to it. The health service is still not up to speed.'
All the same, Frostrup's made some tangible differences. Largely thanks to her campaigning, for example, HRT is now available with a prepayment certificate that costs £19.80 for a year's supply (roughly the price of two prescriptions, when many women actually need significantly more). 'It's nice to feel you've effected change. But it certainly comes at a price. I'm a good example of why some women are afraid to own menopause. I do it because I've always been gobby — if something seems wrong, I have to speak up. But it makes people think all you're about is menopause and you couldn't possibly do anything else. I know that from the calls I get from my agent. When I suggest I could do something else apart from menopause now, there's a rebuff: 'Oh, but you must be so busy campaigning.' '
Frostrup's equally ambivalent about being seen as a cheerleader for the middle-aged women (such as Holden, not to mention Claudia Winkleman, Gabby Logan, Cat Deeley and so on) who increasingly dominate our prime time.
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'I'm very conscious the glam ones float to the top… I'm sure that's been the case for me as well,' she shrugs. In fact, she's wary about bigging up midlife. 'I found turning 60 particularly hard, because you couldn't even pretend you were middle-aged any more. It's going into twilight. I'm not old yet, but I feel older. Things ache. Glastonbury takes a week of recovery, rather than a day. Even in my fifties, there were waypoints when you thought, 'Oh, OK.' I used to get discounts from fabulous places because I was on television; by 54 I don't think any of them were in place any more. I used to get my hair done at John Frieda — suddenly, boof, gone. Prada was the last to go. You think, 'OK, once you thought of me as an ambassador. Now you think of me as an embarrassment.'
'There's so much more you've got to push against. I'm not as energetic as I was, and it feels like a lot to keep on and not just go quiet and work on my dahlias. But I can't envisage that. At 90, I aspire to be Mary Berry. Still working.' Just keep munching on those cauliflower pots.
Eat Your Way to a Better Menopause by Mariella Frostrup and Belles Berry is published on August 28 (DK Red, £22). Buy from timesbookshop.co.uk or call 020 3176 2935. Free UK P&P on online orders over £25. Discount available for Times+ members