Carol Kirkwood: ‘We all need a bit of romance in our lives’

Does anyone in Britain really get through a day without mentioning the weather?

“I find all weather exciting, but you have to watch your language, because not everybody likes heat,” says BBC weather presenter Carol Kirkwood, who adores sunshine but understands why 30C can send us into a hot, bothered and tremendously sticky spin.

For the vulnerable and elderly, heatwaves can even prove fatal. “Don’t be like, ‘Oh, it’s going to be a fabulous day,’ just state the fact: ‘It’s going to be sunny and dry today. It’s also going to be hot, temperatures getting up to 32 or 33 degree celsius…” Her tone at this point, so familiar to those that have watched her almost every day for the best part of 28 years, makes speaking to a weather presenter about the weather feel rather meta.

Scottish meteorologist Kirkwood, 63, is not only on the frontline, reporting on increasingly volatile weather systems and climate change (“When I was growing up, there were four seasons, you had a definite winter, spring, summer and autumn. Now a lot of them tend to merge,”), she is also an ambassador for sheer escapism from such topics. “[Escapism is] always valuable because it takes you into another world, and you can leave your problems behind for as long as you’re reading the book,” she says. “There’s so many things going on in the world, it’s nice just to stick your nose in a book and forget about it for a time.”

Hence her fifth novel, Meet Me at Sunset, a dramatic romance about a fashion designer called Camille Fontaine, who is “running away from a shattered love affair” and whose secret-filled past is on the brink of overflowing into her present. More than your classic boy-meets-girl romp, Kirkwood says: “I really hope you think at the end of it, ‘I didn’t see that coming’.”

Her heroine is inspired by a woman Kirkwood spotted in a restaurant while on holiday in Majorca. “She was a very elegant lady, she was French, sat upright, her back wasn’t touching the seat. She had elegant outfits on. Her hair was in a chignon and she always had the same thing: a salad and a glass of white wine in one of these very delicate, fragile wine glasses. A puff of wind would knock it over and it would break,” she remembers reverently. “She always looked out to sea and ate alone. I thought, ‘Golly, why is somebody like this on her own? She’s beautiful.’”

The book is both an imagining of that woman’s life and a chance for Kirkwood to run literary riot with some of her favourite topics: glamour, fashion and, of course, romance. One of eight children, Kirkwood’s parents were hoteliers, and her adoration for glitz and glamour comes from watching Cary Grant, Grace Kelly and Audrey Hepburn films growing up. “These are the movies my mum would watch and enjoy, and they were always so glamorous – and then you’d see Marilyn Monroe,” she says with an awed sigh.

“My idea of what Hollywood glamour is, and probably the reality of it, are two different things. But some of my characters live in amazing houses with swimming pools, they’re in the sunshine and get into their open-top cars and off they go. Life isn’t quite like that,” she accepts. “I just think, to go into any store and be able to buy whatever you want, gosh, wouldn’t that be nice?”

Most would agree that Kirkwood oozes glamour herself – and certainly did on Strictly Come Dancing in 2015 – but she’s more self-deprecating. “You might not think it to look at me on a daily basis, but I do love fashion,” she says with a light laugh, noting she can be hampered outfit-wise depending on what studio she’s filming in. “If I’ve got the green screen on and I wear a green dress with short sleeves, you would see the end of my arms, my hands and my head.”
It can all end up a bit Andy Serkis/Gollum while you’re eating your cornflakes if she’s not careful.

But you get the sense that Kirkwood is careful and sensible, while still finding the joy and pleasure in life. So she does “try to look my best and stay healthy” but not because she’s on the telly, “but because I want to stay healthy. I got married not that long ago and I want to have a long life with my gorgeous husband, for as long as I can.”

Kirkwood married Steve Randall, a police officer, in 2021. “I am very happy and so lucky to have Steve. I wasn’t looking for romance. He came into my life. We were friends before we became romantically involved, and that was nice. I got to know him as a friend, and he’s so kind,” she says.

So she’s upped her protein intake and walks miles, often with Steve on the weekends, when they’ll discuss books. This year she also decided to stop snacking. “I don’t know what it is, you sit down with a cup of tea and you think, ‘I’ll have a Twix’. Or in the evening, with a glass of wine, you think, ‘I want some Pringles’. And now, I don’t do that. If I have a cup of tea, I just have a cup of tea. And if we’re having a glass of wine, I’ll toast some pitta or chop up some carrots or red pepper and put out hummus and it’s delish. What I have been missing all this time, stuffing my face with Pringles!”

Steve (people like to make a fuss about the fact he’s 14 years younger than her), she says, is “very romantic and very generous. He’s just a lovely man. I pinch myself. I’m punching, I’m really punching.” I tell her no way! And she says, clearly smiling on the end of the phone, “He says he’s punching!”

Kirkwood’s attitude towards romance is refreshingly cynicism-free, and yet, at the same time, thoroughly realistic. She is wonderfully invested in the whole concept, even though it comes with no guarantees. “I love hearing about how people meet. I feel sad when relationships break down. I was married before (to property developer Jimmy Kirkwood, they split in 2008), and we got divorced, and it’s always sad when that happens,” she muses. “But of course, there isn’t such a thing – I don’t think – as a perfect romance, where you’re never going to fall out or have cross words. Of course you are, that’s life.”

Despite all the heartache and the risk though, she is firm: “We all need a bit of romance in our lives. I know it may not be the genre that’s trendy at the moment, but it will always come back. I think there’ll always be room in the world for romance.”

Meet Me at Sunset by Carol Kirkwood is published in hardback by HarperCollins, priced £16.99 (ebook £8.99). Available now.