MY LIFE lessons
Presenter Penny Smith (65) chats to us about friendships, food and the importance of following your heart
Don’t try to be someone you’re not
Be honest with yourself, even if you’re not with everybody else. Sometimes we say things because we want to fit in and we don’t want to stand out from the crowd, particularly when we’re younger. At school, I would say, “I love David Bowie” or whatever was the latest cool thing to be into and then I would go home and put on Joan Sutherland’s The Art of the Prima Donna because actually, that’s what I preferred to listen to. If you like something different to everybody else, you don’t have to tell them and put yourself up to be judged. So keep the faith and be honest with yourself.
Follow your heart
I’ve always wanted to travel. When I was 17, after finishing my A-levels, I went to France with a friend doing itinerant work like peach-picking because we didn’t know what we wanted to do. Then I decided I didn’t want to go to university, I wanted to carry on travelling.
Extraordinary things happened. I was held up at submachine gun point in northern Thailand, I was in an earthquake in Colombia. I fell off a minibus in Ecuador – there were about 185 people on a 20-seater minibus and we fell over as we were going around a corner. I was in a hurricane in the Philippines, hitchhiked into Venezuela and nearly fell off a mountain in Nepal when we took the wrong route on the map. An exciting, enthralling, extraordinary, never to be regretted experience.
True friendships are everything
Friendship is very important and sometimes your friends are wrong for you, so be honest and know when it’s time to move on.
I’m very much friends with John Stapleton, who was my telly husb
