The Fortnum & Mason magazine, Spring 2008

Website: www.fortnumandmason.com
Cost: £3.50
100 pages, including cover
Strapline: Let us cultivate our garden

Recipes: Ooh, lots. Let's just say they tend towards the aspirational - mushroom soup with dry white port, rose champagne and strawberry jellies - but there's some surprisingly cookable stuff, including a beautifully photographed apricot galette.

Favourite article: The chocolate maker. Choccy to die for. And I've learned that the optimum temperature for storing your chocolate is 16C.

I'm still not completely sure how and why I've ended up on the mailing list for Fortnum and Mason's quarterly magazine. Not that I'm complaining - I quite look forward to it dropping through the letterbox.

As it's based on the products that Fortnum's sells, it can be a bit of an odd mix - lots of food and wine, coupled with luxury gifts and accessories. But somehow, it manages to carry it off in style.

I just love the way the magazine's written (although I do hope that some of the language used is slightly tongue in cheek). I'll give you a flavour:

"The arrival of spring brings with it hundreds of things to be thankful for, from Easter eggs and spring lamb to the happy sound of the first gilt-edged wedding invitation landing on one's doormat. Here at Fortnum's, we can help you with those delightful seasonal chores, from the excitement of the Easter egg and spoon race to the choosing of the perfect summer hat...."

Marvellous. It's a whole other world in Piccadilly.

The photography is gorgeous - you could practically smell the chocolate on one of the pages (oh, and by the way, if anyone's listening, I'd rather like a box of the bespoke Fortnum's chocolates in Moroccan mint tea and Oriental Jasmine Green Tea flavours. Although at £85 a kilo it might just be one of each...). There's nice page layout too - lots of white space to let the words breathe.

And the features are pretty good - interesting stuff on balsamic vinegar and tea - yes, Fortnum's products are plugged pretty heavily, but not quite as blatantly as does, say, Sainsbury's in its mag. I'll have to get Waitrose Food Illustrated to compare properly, but for me, it's definitely the classiest of the supermarket or shop-based mags so far.

The only fly in the ointment was an article about the art of pampering - I'm afraid being told to "make your dressing table a place worthy of a boudoir" and "adorn the table with brushes and mirrors that are more than merely functional, such as Swarovski crystal-embellished cosmetic brushes" just made me want to hurl things (hairbrushes?) across the room.

All in all, a lovely read, especially if you would like to see how the other half deal with the traumas of gilt-edged wedding invites, picnic hampers and choosing gentlemen's accessories.

The Crack, March 2008

Website: www.thecrackmagazine.com
Cost: free
60 pages plus cover
Strapline: AN ABUNDANCE OF NORTHEAST music: fashion: clubs: cinema: theatre: comedy: queer: art: dance

Recipes: none. There's two restaurant reviews though.

Favourite article: none. I couldn't find one I liked.

I shouldn't be too hard on The Crack, really. It's a glorified listings magazine rather than a paid-for glossy, focusing on what's on in the north east. There's lots of short articles relating to forthcoming events, a bit of a style section, and two two-page spreads (on the Gateshead International Jazz Festival and the forthcoming production of Equus at the Theatre Royal). That's all topped off by the important stuff - lots and lots of listings, grouped together by theme.

In the main, it does what it says on the tin. It really does contain an abundance of information about music, fashion et al, all laid out in logical fashion, so it's easy to read and find what's on in the theatre or cinema, say, on any given day.

I don't know if it's me, though, but I don't open it with sense of excitement that I used to. I've no idea how long The Crack's been going, but I've been in Newcastle 10 years, and from what I can remember of the late 1990s (given that I probably can't tell you what I had for tea last week you'll have to judge for yourselves how reliable my memory is) it was always around.

The comment articles seem very world-weary these days, out to knock anything and everything off its pedestal. Bizarrely, however, the restaurant reviews get more and more sycophantic - I nearly fell off my chair with excitement when the Flatbread Cafe got a truly awful review a couple of months ago. It's starting to look tired (both in terms of content and design, especially in comparison to the zingy website), and in places irrelevant, I think.

Part of the problem could, of course, be that I'm long past my time as a student - and I suspect that they make up a large part of the target market for this publication, assuming they haven't all wandered off to web 2.0, and are twittering themselves to death in a heap somewhere on Facebook. I'd like to think that thirty-somethings are relevant in this day and age, and I'm certain there must be some out there with a better grasp of the meaning of the words 'social life' than me, but I'm not sure The Crack is catering to them.

Olive, March 2008

Website: www.olivemagazine.co.uk
Cost: £3.20
130 pages plus cover
Strapline: eat in, eat out, eat away

Recipes: where do I start? I counted 56 in the index...most of them mouthwatering, although I have to admit to not knowing what some of them were (Ravigote sauce, anyone?) There's even a handy booklet containing Olive's 30 best ever recipes, should you not find enough in the mag itself.

Favourite article: Easy does it (simple, laid-back brunch recipes). Though that might be because I've got a think about pancakes at the moment. The photo of the American pancakes with bacon is sheer food porn.

Billed as the "Cheapskate's guide to luxury eating", the March issue is focused on budget food. For you and me, that might mean Lidl or the Reduced to Clear section at Tesco, but for Olive it means cheap eats in Paris, New York and London, and menus for £5 a head. I'm not sure I'm Olive's target market, but hey, I can do aspirational with the best of them.

On the plus side, the recipes look gaspingly beautiful. In fact, the photography throughout is pretty fantastic, with some lovely montages in the travel section (the Paris one made me want to jump on a Eurostar immediately and never come back).

Have I actually made any of the recipes yet? Well, no. I will try some (the purple sprouting broccoli, chilli and feta tarts sound quite fun), although I will be giving the delightful Mr Ramsay's soused mackerel with cucumber salad a miss (I'm not great at remembering to prepare something 24 hours before I want to eat it, and the recipe was rather fiddly too). I did like the way that wines were recommended for each dish, although to be honest I'll probably ignore most of them as £5 is generally my limit for a bottle of wine.

Sadly, I think that's indicative of the fact that I'm not sure I'm rich enough to be a regular Olive reader. That's no reflection on the cover price, more on the fact that 13 pages on eating out (albeit budget eats) and 12 pages of 'foodie destinations' make it an aspirational read rather than a practical one. Yes, I'd love to zip off to New York for the weekend or pop out for supper on a regular basis, but I'm not sure it's going to happen any time soon.

Full marks to them for trying, but if this is a budget issue, I'd hate to see what a luxury one would look like.

IKEA Family Live, Spring 2008

Website: www.ikea.co.uk
Cost: £2 (or free to IKEA Family members)
98 pages plus cover
Strapline: Wake up with Spring energy!

Recipes: none, unless you count using salt, olive oil, lemon and white wine vinegar (no, not all at once) for cleaning.

Favourite article: Time Out in Tokyo - it made me want to repaint my living room in green.

Not an obvious choice to start the whole project off - but it was just the first thing that I picked up and read in March. And I actually read it cover to cover - it's surprisingly good, if you're after some cheap and easy design/furniture ideas for your home.

There's lots of bright, colourful photography, some nicely written text, and it's not overwhelmed with advertising (mainly because the whole thing is one big advert for IKEA, I suppose).

But at least with this kind of magazine you know what you're getting. Yes, it'll advertise IKEA products - but actually I like the fact that it's upfront about that. I'm sure there's no pressure whatsoever on most glossies to feature products from their advertisers. Not.

So much for the good stuff. On the downside, for a magazine that claims to feature "52 pages of real homes", far too many of them just happen to have owners who are involved in design in some way. Let's see what their job titles are, shall we?

full-time mother and part-time editorial assistant/full-time banker and part-time mountain guide
freelance interiors coordinator/corporate development
retired lighting shop owners
interior designer for IKEA
copywriter/designer for a Swedish fashion company/research consultant

I suppose I shouldn't complain too much - it's better than the usual double-barrelled twits who are renovating their second homes in Dorset with handmade tiles and heritage colour paints. At least this lot give you some affordable ideas without pretension. And they're pleasingly European, so I can't complain about the usual bias towards people who live within a 50-mile radius of the M25.