Arabella Weir

As I was growing up, it was made clear that the fat me wasn't welcome, that a thin person was expected and awaited, and impatiently so.

When popularity is your only goal, doing well in class is going to feature very low, if at all, on your priority list.

Success, in whatever form it takes, is a tricky thing - once you've achieved your goal, then what? Where do you aim?

I'm the co-chair of the PTA at my kids' school, Ashmount Primary, in north Islington, London.

I know a lot of people fear the rougher types who might be at a state school, but surely it is better to know who they are and how to deal with them than for that kind of child to appear as a completely different species to yours.

If you have any power at all from being popular, then you have a duty to help people out.

There is an inherent tolerance and kindness in the state school teenagers I know.

Society prizes a girl for being thin more than anything else she might bring to the table.

Sticking to a diet required me to have a permanently low self-esteem. But happily, I developed other skills beyond a fluctuating weight, eventually building up a different source of self-worth.

The crushing, pitiful, and frequently just plain risible pathos of an unsuccessful actor/performer's life is well charted.

My theory is that one needs to be loved completely, unconditionally, and unfettered by parental disapproval, if one is to get happily through life which, after all, presents its own hurdles.

Call me an over anxious, middle-class mum, but my eight-and-a-half-year old son looks very much, to me, like he's headed for a life of crime.