Loving Glow

Cork-born chef Clodagh McKenna is flying high at the moment with a weekly cooking slot on the ITV’s This Morning. She’s recently gotten engaged to Harry Herbert, brother of the Earl of Carnarvon and lives on a house on the Highclere Estate, best known as the setting for Downton Abbey. She talks to Carissa Casey about staying grounded while keeping her head in the clouds.

It’s easy to assume that Clodagh McKenna’s life is idyllic. She’s happily engaged to an English aristocrat, lives in a house on the fabulous Highclere Estate (Downton Abbey to the rest of us), has a regular, high profile TV slot, a successful lifestyle business and a sprawling garden where she grows vegetables, cut flowers and keeps chickens. She’s bubbly, fun and looks a good ten years younger than her 45 years.

But she also works hard, is a big fan of living a disciplined life and has found a new sense of peace since lockdown restrictions put an end to her constant travelling.

The lockdown – the first big lockdown, as she describes it – didn’t start so well. “Like a lot of other people who have their own businesses, everything just got cancelled in the first week,” she remembers. “It was like a domino effect every day and I was left thinking, what am I going to do? How am I going to keep my business going? I knew I wasn’t going to be generating income but how can I keep something going? How can I keep myself going? How can I have something to get up for every day? Something to keep my mental health in check?”

Her solution – doing Instagram TV (IGTV) daily recipe videos – turned out to be one of the best business moves she has taken. It led to her best-selling book “by a country mile”, Clodagh’s Weeknight Kitchen and, eventually. a slot on ITV’s This Morning, which has an average viewership of around one million.

“When I got the ITV call, I definitely feel it came from the 136 IGTVs I did. I guess the discipline of doing something like that every day - it’s important when you’re being chosen for a big live show. You have to be dedicated and disciplined. It feels all like glamorous, doing live TV on one of the biggest shows in the UK. But you have to have that discipline of looking after yourself because you can’t call in sick. You’ve got to turn up full of energy and looking well. Then there’s all the work behind the scenes to make it happen, to have the right recipe for the viewers and all that.”

But none of that was obvious during those first couple of weeks of lockdown. “All I kept thinking was, oh my god, how am I going to survive the year? Will I ever get these contracts back? Will I ever get the work back that I had?

“But as the news started coming in and you started listening to other people’s stories - the nurses and the doctors and what they were going through - all of sudden, my worries seemed so small. I thought we can really scale down on our life and get through this. And be thankful that we don’t have to go into a hospital every day and work and we’re not sick.”

The IGTV daily recipe videos were born as much out of a need to play some role in helping people through the lockdown as they were about giving herself something to do, something to focus on. “Always the best things that come from your work, are the ones that are unplanned. When you’re really trying to push yourself to do something which might help people. When I asked myself what can I do from my part to get myself through this and benefit other people?”

Given that so many people were floundering, seeking connection, advice and inspiration, it’s not too surprising that Clodagh’s bubbly personality proved a hit. “The feedback we were getting was amazing. We were getting two or three hundred direct messages a day from people asking about the IGTV. I spent every evening sitting down for two hours and responding to everybody. I just built up this very loyal community of followers,” she says.

“It went from there and I just kept myself out there. I started doing TV in America via Zoom. Then I started doing ITV, doing live cooks from my kitchen into the studio. It just kept growing. It wasn’t in anyway planned. It was a matter of just thinking on the spot every day, just to keep myself occupied and busy and hopefully get some work from it.”

With such a strong following on Instagram (it now numbers nearly 140,000) she had a ready-made readership for new book. The recipes were based on those that she was doing in the Instagram videos – “easy, fun – by that I mean not stressful – quick recipes, the whole family would like. Also people on their own. I was so mindful so many of my friends were on their own isolating.”

The night before she did a recipe, she’d put three options up on Instagram and ask her followers to choose their favourite. “It was like having direct contact with my future cookbook buyers of what they really would love.”

With the book flying off the shelves, she got a phone call and a WhatsApp offering her the regular This Morning gig.

It’s an extraordinary story for a woman who has previously used agents and flown regularly to the US and Canada for work. Simply staying put and doing what she enjoyed most, led to her most successful career break to date.

“I was talking to friends about how the lockdown changed us and one of them said to me, ‘your feet are buried in the earth but your head is still in the clouds which is where it should be’. I thought that’s such a great analogy of being in a really good place. It’s so nice to stop for a while and focus on one thing. Before I was travelling so much to America and so much to Canada and here and there and everywhere. It feels so much nicer to be just working near where I live. That’s normal to everyone else but it wasn’t normal for me.”

What hasn’t changed, though, is Clodagh’s commitment to discipline. “I love discipline, it’s great for everybody - in work, outside of work, for your health. Sometimes discipline is a word that feels negative or army like, but if you read any of the great thinkers or spiritual people, discipline is so much part of living a healthy life.”

“When working for yourself you have to have a discipline. It’s so easy to think, oh I’ll start at 12. So I just get up and do a 9 to 5. I work hard, because I love it for those hours. But weekends are off, that’s it for me.”

Her downtime these days is spent out in her garden, a relatively new passion, discovered when she moved to the house on the Highclere Estate. “I was new to the gardening world. Before I used to kill everything that I grew. What I have learned is that nobody is born with green fingers, you learn it. It’s all about having time. I never put time into it before. During that first lockdown, like I think a lot of people, I was out growing vegetable. I found a lot of my Instagram followers were doing it too, often for the first time. I loved it so much, it’s become a huge part of my life. And now we have the chickens and everything. I almost love it as much as I love cooking, seeing everything grow. It feels so good mentally. When you’re out there, nothing else seems to matter, you just get lost in it it’s really nice.”

“I feel like I’d never go back to the very busy life I had before, doing all that travelling. I definitely wonn’t go to as many events and dinners because I really love that calm I’ve found.”

But Clodagh is definitely looking forward to one trip, once restrictions ease, and that’s back to Cork to visit her mother who she misses greatly. “I’m very respectful of Ireland and what it’s going through right now. I’d never put my own personal emotions ahead of being responsible. So many times, I’ve just thought, oh will I just try to get over there? But it’s unfair for me to do that when there’s still, a pandemic going on.”

“The great thing about digital is that I can Facebook my mother every day. We probably see each other more. But it’s nothing like being in person. I just want to make sure I’m safe when I go.”

In the meantime work is keeping her busy. Aside from the book (and she’s already at work on another) and the TV appearances, she also opened an online store during the lockdown. “Doing the IGTV, people were asking me, where do you get your zester? So I got a few in for a store and then I had 300 orders for them. For tableware, I like to have somewhere to go where I can get the whole look. So I’m creating this easy, accessible place where people can shop the whole look for a table.”

The website also includes blogs on her day to day life, handy hints, tips on gardening, health and other lifestyle issues. This Morning already features short videos of her home and garden, with plans afoot to do more of those. “It feels like a really great moment in my career,” she’s says.

Her ambitions have also changed during the lockdown. “I cannot wait for the day that I can go to a pub in West Cork and have a pint of Guinness and a sing song. That would be my ultimate.”