Nigella Lawson offers life advice ahead of Bake Off stint

The TV cook and food writer was named as the replacement for outgoing judge and Cotswolds resident Dame Prue Leith in January.

Ms Lawson read Modern Languages at Oxford University’s Lady Margaret Hall, edited the student magazine Isis, later saving it from financial trouble, and graduated in 1979.

A portrait of the food writer was then hung in the very same Oxford college, installed in 2018, to inspire students.

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Then it was announced in February that Ms Lawson would join the Financial Times as a columnist, leading food and drink coverage.

In her monthly column, she uses cooking as a lens onto all facets of life and joins a line-up of FT Weekend food and drink columnists that includes Jay Rayner and Marina O’Loughlin.

Now, in the latest edition released today (Thursday, June 4), Ms Lawson has given some life advice to her readers.

Speaking on the dangers of pessimism and how her outlook has changed on this, when speaking about the arrival of summer, the 66-year-old spoke of her mood shift on the matter.

Ms Lawson admits that she is allergic to the sun and hates the heat, but still allows herself to be caught up in the “collective rush” of summer each year.

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“It’s like an incantation of optimism, and I want to be an optimist,” she wrote.

“I’ve trained myself to be one. When I was young, I felt that pessimism and dread were safeguards against disillusionment and disappointment, but as I got older, I began to see my ‘every silver lining has a cloud’ approach for what it was: an anxious mask of puny bravado to conceal, even from myself, an underlying cowardice.

“Also, it doesn’t work. Disappointment is an occupational hazard of being alive, as I often — like Mary Poppins’s sour alter ego — reminded my children when they were growing up.

“You can’t avoid disappointment any more than you can avoid making mistakes: it’s how you deal with them that equips you for life.”