TV chef Nigella Lawson: How I learned to stop worrying

Celebrity chef Nigella Lawson has told how she is “happy at last” after she learned not to dwell on the past during lockdown.

The daughter of former Conservative Chancellor Nigel Lawson lost her first husband to cancer and divorced her second husband Charles Saatchi after their marriage broke down.

Businessman Saatchi was photographed in 2013 grabbing her by the throat and holding her nose outside the London restaurant Scott’s.

Her first husband, journalist John Diamond, died of throat cancer in 2001 at the age of 47, leaving her alone with two small children, Cosima and Bruno.

Her mother Vanessa Salmon died aged 48, and Nigella’s sister Thomasina died of breast cancer at 31.

Ms Lawson, 60, said she had been a “ruminator” her entire life. She said: “I don’t know if it was the calm of lockdown, or getting older, but I’ve stopped looking back on the past an awful lot.

“And after 60 years of being a ruminator, it’s an amazing thing. I guess. I’m very happy at last.”

She also told the Guardian she doesn’t worry about how she looks now, and often wears jumpsuits which are “very unflattering on me. But I’ve decided I don’t care.”

The multi-millionaire author of How To Be A Domestic Goddess said in June she was apprehensive about the end of lockdown which she admitted saw her home descend “into squalor”.

She said: “The idea of emerging from it is making me anxious.

“Yes, a part of that is a fear of the health risk involved, but I know really it’s because I have become utterly content with my desocialisation. I have gone feral.”