January 17, 1968

Rowan Pelling (January 17, 1968) , a British journalist, edited the Erotic Review starting in 1997 and it gained a reputation for quality, which did not however, prevent it failing for a lack of funds in a few years. She still, sometimes, in columns for the Daily Telegraph, answers questions about sex and relationships. I skip those columns and still find plenty of her writing which amuses and educates me.

Pelling graduated from an Oxford College with a literature degree. Now she lives in Cambridge with a family which includes two sons, and a cat. And, like most people, she is writing a novel.

Here is an excerpt from a column dated April 23, 2014.

To say I am pathologically untidy does not begin to do justice to the thick soup of chaos in which I swim. When I found I could no longer access my study for towers of bills, books and shoe-boxes, I simply closed the door and moved my centre of operations to the loft.

.....[When my older son turned 10 this week] and ... pleaded for a bedroom large enough for bunks and sleepovers. .... [it] was time to break into the room, armed with bin-bags, J-cloths and a bamboo pole for gently dislodging spiders.

My resolve was strengthened when I took delivery of 10 large flat-pack cardboard boxes. There’s something akin to the pleasure of origami in picking up a two-dimensional rectangle of card and folding it into the kind of clean-lined, clutter-munching receptacle that would make an archivist purr. My husband, who was orderly to the point of obsession in his bachelor days, was instantly on my assembly line, soon to be joined by both sons, demanding containers for superheroes and Lego. Who knew, outside the world of cats, you could create so much rapture in a simple cardboard box?