Being Old…and Learning to Love It!

Description

So much more than a memoir, this a spirited canter through Prue’s musings on the triumphs, trials and tribulations of ageing well. Including health, beauty, fashion, business, work, widowhood and finding love again, decorating, downsizing, and assisted dying.

From Bake Off presenter, Prue Leith, comes a truthful, inspiring and funny short book – part memoir and part reflection, on time running out and accepting the inevitable end while still having fun and being visible.

Sometimes serious, sometimes funny, and always entertaining, with themes reflective of her one woman show – geriatric love, the catwalk appearances, being Pegasus on the Masked Singer, her new ITV show My Cotswold Kitchen, and a focus on the trials and taboos of age: why are we embarrassed by oldies kissing; what is acceptable behavior when you’re old?, to work or to retire, staying healthy and active, her passionate belief in Assisted Dying, and dealing with grief.
Binding Type: Hardcover
Author: Prue Leith
Published: 05/12/2026
Publisher: Short Books
ISBN: 9781804193747
Pages: 320
Weight: 0.97lbs
Size: 0.93″ H x 9.46″ L x 6.28″ W

About the Author
Now 85 years old, Dame Prue Leith is first and foremost a businesswoman, who made her name with Michelin starred restaurant, and Prue Leith’s school of Food and Wine which she sold in in 1995. She has written more than a dozen cookery books, seven novels, and Relish, her original memoire in 2013, and has worked as a columnist for Daily Mail, The Guardian and the Daily Mirror.

Her first television appearance was in the 1970s as a presenter, and she returned to television to be a judge on The Great British Menu for 11 years until 2016 and a judge for My Kitchen Rules, which she left to replace Mary Berry in The Great British Bake Off.

She has also been active in general education, and many diverse organisations including Ashridge Management College, Kings College, and as Chancellor of Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh. While at the RSA, she led the successful campaign to use the empty plinth, now known as the Fourth Plinth, in Trafalgar Square to house changing sculptures or installations by the best contemporary artists.

She has been a non-executive director of British Rail; British Transport Hotels; Safeway; Argyll plc, the Leeds Permanent Building Society; Whitbread plc; Woolworths plc; the Halifax; Triven VCT; Omega International plc; and Belmond Hotels Ltd (formerly Orient Express Hotels) and is a director and investor in several start-up companies.

More recently in In February 2024, Leith’s ten-part cookery series Prue Leith’s Cotswold Kitchen began airing on ITV1. In September 2024, a second series was commissioned. In 2025, Leith participated in the The Masked Singer as “Pegasus”, eliminated in the second episode.