Not so long ago in another city an ocean away (oh all right then, New York, I was going for a slightly more prosaic approach, but you’ve spoilt it now..) two English girls (can you still be a girl if you’re 40?) were launching books with varying degrees of success.  Mine, Face Value, was fiction, Kate Reardon’s, Top Tips for Girls is quite possibly the most useful book you’ll ever possess.  Tina Gaudoin, a prolific editor on both sides of the pond, put us together.  ”You two need to know each other,”  she said. 

I think we were meant to bond and share.. well, tips.  About books, publishing, launches and the like.   But the truth of the matter is that apart from bumping into each other once and a phone call here and there we didn’t have time.  Yesterday we met for tea at the Berkley hotel, and Tina was right.  We needed to know each other.   Apart from the fact that Kate’s Top Tips is now an international industry, with glamorous offices off Oxford Street (she’ll be laughing at that because up until today when she moves in to said offices, she confesses to preferring to work in pyjamas at home), 150,000 website users a month, regular slots on GMTV with Lorraine Kelly, a 2 book deal and plans to turn Top Tips into a movie, Kate is  - like the mini cakes they were serving for tea yesterday - exceedingly good, at pretty much everything it turns out, which is why I’m sharing her with you. 

Here she is: 

For anyone yet to be acquainted with Top Tips.. where have you been?  It’s brilliant.  Send them a problem, and readers, ie REAL women, will respond. Because the advice is moderated, rather than edited (ie, you won’t get illiterate messages in TXT English, but you will get genuine advice from real people who’ve been through the same problem or experienced the same things, or are a dab hand at getting a stain out of a carpet) it can be both incredibly moving and prosaic at the same time.  

“When I started the site, ” says Kate, “I thought I’d have to re-write everything.  I know that’s patronising, but I was used to working in magazines where all the advice came from experts.  But instead I found that people are wise, women’s wisdom in particular is pared down and practical.” 

She loves the community that has grown through the site, and encourages interaction.  For the book version of the site, all the tips were taken from those that were emailed in to the website, but unusually, the contributors were credited fully, with their names listed at the back of the book too. 

“I spent 20 years doing journalism, writing about handbags that cost £3000.  This is so much more relevant.  Every woman I know has been dumped and wants to know how to deal with a heartbreak.”

Her career as a fashion journalist started at US Vogue.  ”It made the Devil Wears Prada look like a home movie,” she laughs.  Via a friend’s mother, she managed to get a letter to the head of Conde Nast, shortly after leaving school.  He passed it on to the Personnel department.  ”I don’t know what happened but somewhere along the lines the letter got lost, and I don’t know, they must have thought I was his god-daughter or something, because suddenly I was being offered a job in whichever magazine I wanted.  But English people were very fashionable then.  All you had to do was pick up the phone and say “Vogue” in an English accent and everyone loved it. Although they did all take bets on how long I’d last - in front of me.” 

She admits that in spite of still writing articles about fashion for Vanity Fair, she wasn’t cut out for a career at Vogue, at least not in fashion.  ”Really I was a moron,” she says.  ”Once we had a shoot with six supermodels, there were Winnebagos, helicopters hovering over skyscrapers, lots of striding and leaping, that kind of thing.  And when everyone was ready to go, hair, make-up, etc, the fashion director turned to me and said: “Kate, can I have the shoes?” and I thought, “THE SHOES!!!!” I’d forgotten all about them.  The whole story was shot with the models feet chopped off because they had to do it barefoot. 

Does she have any life-changing tips that she’s gleaned from the website?  ”Gosh, I have so many tips, if I could remember all of them I’d be a genius.  But here’s one, although I’m not sure that it’s life changing.  It’s about cleaning silver.  You take a big bowl, line it with tin foil, fill it with really hot water, add a tablespoon of bicarbonate of soda to it, then dunk in your silver.  It comes out clean, immediately.  Rinse the silver very well, and buff”

For more Top Tips, check out the website: http://www.toptipsforgirls.com/