Fairly Legal and Caught In The Middle With B
Kate Reed has a very successful career. Having given up practising law to become one of San Fransisco’s top mediators she is at the top of her game – it is just a pity that her personal life if a mess.
With a ‘wicked stepmother’ boss and a complicated relationship with her estranged husband to contend with, both in and out of the office, Kate’s life is…well, let’s just say, ever so slightly complicated.
With Fairly Legal starting this Sunday, Universal Channel UK enlisted the blogging talents of London’s very own Kate Reed, our very own Miss B, to reveal the hectic life of a thirtysomething professional in the big city.
Here is the first column:
If you stand on Piccadilly Circus at rush hour you will see us. We’re a unique tribe – 30-something, single women, speed walking the streets of London talking on our iPhones while emailing a client on our Blackberry. We work as PRs, lawyers and consultants, in finance, advertising, marketing and the media. You will catch us dashing across the road in our Burberry macs, with our classic Mulberry handbags, stopping only to swap our MBTs or ballet pumps for our Louboutin stilettos. While we are competent at our jobs, doing multi-million pound deals, we’re worried that all we have is our job. Our mothers fought for equality so that we could have it all – but what we’re quickly finding out is that we can’t DO it all. While our careers are on track, our personal lives are off the rails – just like Fairly Legal’s Kate Reed!
As a freelance writer, I never know when commissions are going to stop so I accept every job that I can possibly take on. So I’m a little overcommitted. I run an online lifestyle website Belle About Town, and also edit the celebrity news pages of a well known weekly women’s magazine. It’s not easy fitting everything in as it is – catching up with friends, seeing the family, squeezing in work-outs and weekly manis/pedis, let alone meeting a tall dark handsome stranger. From the moment my alarm goes off at seven am, I am on the go, before even getting out of bed I have my iPhone in hand checking the news and my emails. Not that I am a morning person. In fact my housemate, a very beautiful management consultant, and I barely manage to grunt at each other in the morning as we grab coffee and race out the door.
This week has been particularly manic. Days have been spent writing and editing copy, talking to PRs over lunch and interviewing new reality TV contestants who are hoping they will be the next big thing. The low point was when I was booed by the entire male group of reality hopefuls for managing to insult their star quality. Most evenings this week were taken up doing restaurant reviews or going to launches of the next big thing. By the weekend I was exhausted. I hadn’t seen my friends and had been avoiding calls from my family.
On Saturday night my Glamorous Housemate said she was off out with friends and invited me to join them at a local pub for a bite to eat, a glass of wine and hopefully some meaningful glances and conversation with the local boys. To my shame all I wanted to do is curl up on the sofa with a take-away and a good movie. GH was quick to point out that I was not going to meet a man by myself in my own living room on at a Saturday night. At that moment, the only man I wanted was Patrick Swayze. However, I pulled on my little black dress that shows off just the right amount of cleavage, some black tights and my new TopShop platforms and without much enthusiasm I decided to give it a go. Would I meet someone worthy of Dirty Dancing?
Somehow I doubted it.
Follow the adventures of Kate Reed in Fairly Legal, starts this Sunday at 8pm on Universal Channel. Read future Caught In The Middle With B columns every Thursday at Universal Channel.
