Special Guest Blogger: Jilly Cooper

Darlings, I have popped off! Honestly. It’s enough to make a girl reach for a second G&T. And I did.
A quick, ridiculous, and faintly unglamorous end, a fall and hitting my head. Gravity, that vindictive cow. How utterly… tedious. I’d rather be run over by a runaway horse-drawn carriage driven by a naked viscount. I was a Dame and famous for my bonkbuster books for heaven’s sake. One has standards but i almost went twice before, once from a minor stroke and the second time when i was a  passenger in one of the derailed carriages in the Ladbroke Grove rail crash. 31 people died but i managed to crawl our through a window to escape.
Sure I left behind a mountain of books filled with gloriously naughty aristocrats, formidable women with bosoms like howitzers, and more bonking than you can shake a riding crop at so there's that I suppose.
I began as a journalist after the editor of The Sunday Times Magazine saw some short stories i had submitted for teenage magazines and asked me to write some columns and then after 11 years, i began writing books with an explicitly upper-middle-class British perspective, with many many sex scenes or as the tabloids nicknamed me 'The queen of the bonkbuster'.
People forget the sheer graft involved, you know. They see Rivals on the telly, with all those glorious, beautiful people shagging in my name, and they think it was all a jolly romp. And it was! But it was a chaotic jolly romp. My ‘research’ for the romantic scenes mostly involved lying on the sofa, eating a packet of cheese and onion crisps, and asking my poor, long-suffering husband, Leo, is he thought ir was physically possible to do that on a chaise lounge while wearing jodhpurs and holding a glass of Bollinger?
My legacy isn't the books. It's not the gongs from the Queen, bless her. It’s not even the fact I kept the gin and tonic industry in business single-handedly for the past fifty years.
No, my true legacy, I’ve decided, is the number of women i’ve enabled to imagine there’s a magnificent brute on a horse who’s desperate to sweep them off their feet (and then probably do terribly rude things to them).
If my books have given readers a few hours of joy and a bit of a flush to the cheeks… well, then pop that cork. I’d consider that a job bloody well done.
Cheerio, darlings.