Fern Britton has opened up about being ‘in a very bad place’ during the pandemic, where she picked up smoking and it left her ‘not breathing well’. The Celebrity Big Brother star, 67, split from her TV chef husband Phil Vickery after 20 years of marriage , months before the first lockdown in 2020. At the time, she’d also been grieving her parents, after her mum died in 2018 , and her dad in 2019.
‘My mum died and a year later my father died and the next year my marriage died ,’ Fern recalled. The former This Morning presenter said she ‘fell into this era of indolence’ where she ‘just started lying in bed later and later and later’. ‘What was the purpose of getting up and getting dressed or getting showered or cleaning my teeth because I will soon be back in bed.
‘Why don’t I start smoking? Yes. Drinking. Yes, eating yes, the whole thing.
And then it took me about a year to realise that I put a lot of weight on, that I was not breathing well.’ Speaking at the Cheltenham Literary Festival, in quotes obtained by The Mirror , Fern added that she ‘had a very bad time’, recalling how she took to smoking ‘like a duck to water’. She said: ‘It punctuated the day, lets have a fag and then what time is it 4 O’clock? Let’s have a glass of wine.
’ ‘Looking back I was in a very bad place and gradually I started to pull myself out of it,’ Fern added. One moment in particular catalysed the change, when she was driving home in Cornwall, but had.
