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Kirstie Allsopp sparks debate after admitting she irons her tea towels

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kirstie allsopp at chelsea flower show 2019

- Had to do an interview with him once was it for Good Housekeeping? I think it might have been. If you've not seen it, you've got to, it's amazing. Is it Grace and Frankie or Frankie and Grace? - Grace and Frankie - Grace and Frankie it's on Netflix, it's epic. Jaffa cake is obviously a biscuit, I don't see that anyone could think anything else. So here I am, having a cup of tea with GH. Calming camomile tea, let's see if it works. So I'm trying to have less sugar these days, the problem is ordinary tea, builder's tea with milk I like with sugar, I hate it without sugar so that means I've been having a lot more of the herbal teas and I'm gonna go for it's been a long day so I think I'm gonna go for the camomile. Calming is what I need at the moment. I would have a Jaffa cake with it. Jaffa cake is obviously a biscuit, I don't see that anyone could think anything else. Um, but I don't think you can dunk a Jaffa cake in camomile tea so I'm going to be very good and leave that Jaffa cake where it is. This is a royal wedding mug I have a large collection of royal wedding mugs this is a Diana and Charles royal wedding mug. Um, but I've got them going back quite a long way. I don't know that they did royal wedding mugs when Queen Victoria got married. But I think I've got every wedding since then. Funny enough, what there isn't on this beautifully arranged plate, is any of those thins you know those like digestive thins, the ones which are thinner? Got really into those a couple of years ago, they're very dangerous, and this sugar jar, which I would be using for sugar if I was letting myself have a cup of tea with sugar, was made by my son in a pottery class. I love it. Don't know which son, I'm sure it says somewhere which one, B.A. yes, Bay. So, here I am, having a cup of tea with GH. Calming camomile tea... let's see if it works. - Emma Freud, because Mary Berry adores her, and Mary Berry's been to her house, and she is my neighbour and she's very good at making cakes. Oh..... Prince Charles! He has got incredibly good interior taste. I had to do an interview with him once, was it for Good Housekeeping? I think it might have been. And um, I thought it was absolutely beautiful and he's got incredibly good. So, if someone who wasn't an interior designer had to redesign my house, It'd be Prince Charles. My sister, Sofie Allsopp, who is a brilliant florist and I think flowers really really matter, so that's who it would be. I think the aforementioned Graham Norton. Graham Norton is really good with dogs, I'd call on Graham Norton. She's not a friend, but I think the answer is Jane Fonda. Anyone who has been a fan of Grace and Frankie- or Frankie and Grace- I can never remember which way it is, will notice that Jane Fonda always looks really elegant in that character. So I think if I was gonna have a stylist, I'd ask Jane Fonda. Or Jane Fonda's stylist. Holly Willoughby, of course, who always looks immaculate I'm sure that Holly Willoughby could make up someone's face to look as fresh and young as she always does. I'm very political, and I watch news all the time, and I love talking about politics, so the answer is Emily Maitlis. I would ask Emily Maitlis to come around. I think that'd be really fun and interesting. Phil Spencer, to be honest. He is a nice person to go out with for an evening. And we don't do it often enough, so probably Phil, Ben, Phil's wife Fi, that's a really nice night out and we haven't done it for ages. - The thing about dream dinner party guests is that you never know whether they'd get on with each other. But I'm going to try to have a dinner party with the Queen, who I would very much like to meet and haven't. Greta Thunberg, who I did see in Lausanne at a climate strike, and who I was really struck by in a very profound way. This sounds like a very strange thing to say but I think she's been sent from another time to warn us. Tom Hanks would join us for dinner, who I've just been such a fan of. I don't think I've ever seen a Tom Hanks film I didn't like. Also Reese Witherspoon, who I'm sure would be a lot of fun and she'd get on with Greta, and the Queen and Tom Hanks, and she'd make everything go really well. So how many girls? We've got three girls so far and one boy, we need to balance it out, Ben, my other half would always be at my dream dinner party, I'd love to have my boys and my stepsons but their manners aren't so good, I'm not sure if I could bear to watch them eat in front of the queen. Ooh, I like the doctor off Call the Midwife I think he's called Stephen McGann he's always rather nice, and he'd probably get along with everyone as well. Nothing keeps me awake at night, rather scarily. It's very rare that I don't sleep. As a result, I don't sleep enough because I have the luxury of falling asleep the second my head hits the pillow. This means I don't go to bed, so what actually keeps me awake at night is tidying up. Going around the house fiddling, putting things away preparing for the next day, clearing up my handbag, sorting it out, just I'm a terrible one for fiddling around the house I don't really like going to bed until everything's tidy. So, what keeps me awake at night is tidying. My biggest extravagance is travel. Both financially and environmentally. Increasingly, we're aware of reducing our carbon footprint and flying less. In terms of extravagance, that is definitely mine. I try when I'm traveling around the country for Location, Location, Location, to always do it on the train. Uh, I very rarely fly within the UK, even to Scotland, where my sister lives, I take the sleeper train, but occasionally I might fly back in order to get home to the kids, but yes, my greatest extravagance is travel, and It's one that I and everyone else is gonna have to reduce. Oh, I've made a lot of interior design mistakes. And they are usually to do with sales. I make mistakes when something has a 50% off sticker. I just never seem to learn my lesson, I always think oh, I'm not gonna get the sofa I was gonna get, and I'm not gonna use the fabric I was gonna use. I'm gonna be careful and use the stuff that was in the sale. I think sometimes that is my mistake, but probably the worst mistake I ever made was choosing some fabric for the very large windows in our kitchen I chose it when I was pregnant, and it was little ducks and ducklings, and I lived with it for about ten years and really I should have lived with it for about five minutes. My TV guilty pleasure is The West Wing, which I watch over, and over, and over again and I find it immensely relaxing. Particularly in these rather strange political times. Thinking that President Bartlet is in the White House is enormously reassuring. My biggest culinary fail was when I lied and said I'd made some pesto, which I hadn't. And it turned out it had peanuts in it. It made my flatmate quite ill, and that sounds very frivolous, I don't obviously take a frivolous attitude to allergies this was a long time ago I was rushing home, someone was coming round for dinner, it was a second date, I wanted to impress him. I didn't have time to make the pesto, I bought it and I lied about it. But, I've had many, many, many other culinary disasters. I love to cook, I do experiment, and things go wrong. And one just has to accept that. But so far, I've only once poisoned someone. My mother was very unkeen on what she called dust gatherers and increasingly I realise that she was right. She was probably a precursor to Marie Kondo in that she really was very unsentimental about things but actually looking back, she was probably quite right to be anti-clutter. There's no household job that I don't do. If I had to choose between washing up and ironing, I would choose ironing. If I had to choose between dusting and hoovering, I would choose dusting. There are definitely things I prefer, but I like cleaning. Probably if I did it all the time I wouldn't like it as much as I do. But because I'm often away at work and there's someone else who is doing the cleaning, when I do get a chance to do it myself I really enjoy it. I'm good at it. It gives me enormous satisfaction. I find it enormously therapeutic. There's nothing like coming into a filthy bathroom and cleaning the whole thing and leaving it all glittery, and I never have that feeling of oh, I'm going to have to do this again next week, I don't have that sort of- I know some people are anti-housework because they feel it's remorseless but for me, I feel it's enormously therapeutic. Should shoes come off? Or stay on at the front door? I think it's entirely up to the person whose home it is. End of. So if someone asks me to take my shoes off, I will take my shoes off. But I won't take them off automatically, and I don't assume that people want me to take them off. I do worry that we are becoming overly focused on germs. And I'm not talking about, obviously contemporary, COVID-19 germs, 'cause obviously we have to take that very seriously, but we all know that some dirt is good And I think we have to be careful I think we particularly have to be careful of what we're cleaning with. That's very important, I'm a great fan of Nancy Birtwhistle, and she does a lot of work on social media coming up with ways of producing cleaning products which are less harsh on the environment. So once I was on a chat show with Graham Norton, it was a one he did specially for comic relief, I have not been on the Graham Norton show, although I would like to go on it. He asked me how often I change my sheets, and I said at least once a week, and the audience gasped in horror. And I was like god, do you think that's not often enough? And Graham and the other guests were like no! That's way too often. But the truth of the matter is I change them at least twice a week. You know, I am one of those people who is a great changer of sheets.