Janet Street-Porter: ‘I'm sick of reading about ageing healthily – I love a fry up'

Telegraph

02-08-2025

How do famous names spend their precious downtime? In our weekly My Saturday column, celebrities reveal their weekend virtues and vices. This week: Janet-Street Porter.
8am
At the weekend we're usually in Norfolk. We live in a very isolated house in the middle of an island between the River Yare and the River Waveney, so I have no noise to wake me up. I love everything about our home. It's thatched, listed and old. I've sold my house in London and I'm moving to a flat in the Barbican. We also have a beach hut in Kent and our routine is the same there.
9am
I have exactly the same breakfast every day – a full English. I am sick of reading in newspaper supplements about ageing healthily. My partner Peter always cooks it. He'll do bacon and eggs from the local farm shop, tomatoes or mushrooms, occasionally a slice of black pudding. I will precede that with dark fruit, blueberries, black grapes, pomegranate seeds. That's my homage to the health people.
We always have wholemeal or seeded sourdough bread and our own homemade marmalade. We have an orchard, so we've got plums, greengages, redcurrants, Bramleys and Cox's Orange Pippin. We've got a vegetable garden too, with onions, a massive amount of chard, four lots of potatoes, lettuce, borlotti beans and runner beans.
10.30am
One bone of contention for me is that Radio 3 moved Andrew McGregor's Record Review to the afternoon. We love classical music and have it on all day. But we don't like the chat.
I'm looking forward to my tour Off The Leash. What I like doing is talking about my childhood and how bizarre it was. That really resonates with the audience. I was born directly after the war and there was this question over my parents' relationship and how they met, why they stayed together and how that shapes the person that you are. It's based on my book Baggage and the tour is going to be me ranting.
11am
I go for the newspapers. That involves getting in the car and driving for 20 minutes. I drive off the marsh on to the mainland and go to the community shop, run by the locals.
1pm
We go for a walk in the woods near Fritton with the dog Badger. He's an 11-year-old border terrier and very demanding – he sings and howls.
2.30pm
We come back, divide up the papers and chuck out the ads for stairlifts. As I've had a big breakfast, I'll have a piece of cheese and a tomato. I love the local cheese Baron Bigod – it's like Brie but better.
3pm
If the weather is nice, I'll be in the garden, not sitting indoors. My partner says I'm someone who is incapable of sitting still. I have little scraps of paper in a drawer by the bed and before I go to sleep I will write my to-do list and tick them off in the day.
5pm
There's my addiction to Scrabble on my phone to fit in. I'm playing at the highest level.
6pm
If I've lost at Scrabble, I'll be overtired and slightly grumpy, so I'll have a bath to calm down. I change for dinner. During the day I wear what I call marshwear – really old clothes, the kind that when you are spotted in Morrisons you can see people saying, 'Oh gosh, I thought she was on television once!' I might put on something like a big knitted dress that will allow me to eat a massive dinner.
7pm
We always have to think about what we are going to eat two or three days at a time because we don't live near a shop. I might have fish delivered that I've ordered during the week. We both really enjoy cooking and we might try a recipe from the paper that I have obsessively have cut out. I like Sally Clarke and, to a certain extent, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, people who use simple ingredients that they have grown or are local.
I read Rachel Roddy's book about pasta, so we might have a really good pasta dish with a salad from the garden, or brill or hake baked with olives and tomatoes. I have a non-alcoholic beer. During the week I go out to dinner with friends in London, so I would have one or two glasses of wine, but I cut back on the weekend.
9pm
We'll watch television. I like Nordic/Scandi noir or some subtitled foreign misery. I started Helsinki Murders but even by my standards it was so grim. I'm also watching Dept Q, set in Edinburgh.
11pm
I wash my skin with a gentle cleanser and put a Neal's Yard night cream on. I have glaucoma so I have to do eye drops twice a day. I might hear my partner through the floorboards watching a re-run of Bottom. I'll take some bits of the newspapers and go and read. At the moment I'm also reading Convenience Store Woman by the Japanese novelist Sayaka Murata. It's a real cult book. I'll read until midnight, fall asleep and then wake every two hours or so..