Sadhbh Warren

This piece ran in MX, a daily Australian transport newspaper. Wishing you all a pleasant holiday season and see you in 2015! Despite the tinsel and sparkly lights and fat bearded men in bright red suits, I find Christmas a sneaky season. One again, December has rolled round and I haven’t even bought my Mum a pressie yet. Every year, all the magazines advise shopping early and taking advantage of the January sales. I read them, think “what a good idea, I’ll do that” and then forget. So, instead of basking smugly with a glass of wine, I’m gearing up to battle maddened parents and frazzled assistants who have been tasked with finding an intimate present for their bosses partner - or partners. At the  start it's easy to be  optimistic  and  energized  - ready to shop and roll, baby. You  start  thinking big. Wouldn’t it be great if you got everything in one shop? You’d be finished! The Queen of ...

“If you wrote something for which someone sent you a check, if you cashed the check and it didn't bounce, and if you then paid the light bill with the money, I consider you talented.”  Stephen King, On Writing Stephen King wrote that. On my good days, I remember that Stephen King - Stephen mofo-ing King, a man with both an amazing body of work and an absurdly cute dog  - apparently considers me talented. I’m not going to be using my income from writing to buy a solid gold pony, or even a solid gold hamster, but I have made it into five figures. That was over three years, mind; not exactly a lucrative career but enough to keep me in beer and boots. On my bad days, I remind myself that those three years were over six years ago and that my cumulative work since having children are four dull and forgettable pieces for business publications and a few blog posts where the amount of swearing considerably outweighs any interesting content. I have written many other things. Bir...

Ripped jeans, micro-minis, offensive t-shirt slogans and far too much cleavage on display (from either gender) - researching my recent piece for Executive PA magazine brought me plenty of information on how office casual dress-codes can work, and how they can go horribly, horribly wrong...   Mark Zuckerberg wears a hoody, Tim Cook continues Steve Jobs's casually dressed CEO tradition, and Sir Richard Branson is rarely out of denim. While the office maxim is "copy the boss", what if they start dressing down?  Are CEOs really ditching the suit and, if so, should you? What with company leaders in jeans, increasing informality in many industries and the omnipresent casual Friday, it looks like business wear is going out of fashion. But how casual is too casual? One office found itself writing endless guides to clarify what business casual code means. "We had juniors in mini-skirts and new hires in ripped jeans and thongs," says their MD's PA. "We end...

I am the youngest child in my family. By the time I was old enough to cook my Mum was past the “let us bake together, angel children, never mind the mess” stage and into “get out, get out, are you trying to get burnt”. So I haven't really been taught to cook food basics. This can be an issue when I am faced with standard foods that I don’t care about enough to learn how to cook. I do a mean butter chicken, for example, because butter chicken is delicious but fail every time at making vegetable soup because, ugh, vegetable soup tastes like used socks. These days I have family of my own to feed - four people and a dog! - so obviously there's only one solution; exploring the wonderful worlds of malnutrition and massive credit card debt simultaneously by ordering takeaway all the time! Hah, but seriously no (as my partner says to me ALL THE DAMN TIME). Most nights I try to put together a home-cooked meal to give the impression that we are a functional family unit and not a near-r...