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The Long TableFamily life across two homes

The magazine

Who writes The Long Table

The byline on every article is the magazine itself. That is a deliberate choice, and this page explains it.

A writing desk by a window with a notebook, a laptop closed on a stack of paper and a cold cup of tea.
The desk at the end of an afternoon. Most of what appears here is written, left overnight and cut the next morning.

On this page

  1. One byline for everything
  2. How a piece gets made
  3. What the byline does not claim
  4. Reaching the desk

Updated 29 August 2026.

Write to the desk

01 One byline for everything

Every article in The Long Table is published under the name of the magazine rather than under an individual name. The writing and the editing are done collectively, pieces are revised by more than one pair of hands before they appear, and a single name at the top would misrepresent how they were made.

It also suits the subject. This is a magazine about family life across two homes, and a great deal of it deals with matters that people are entitled to read about without anyone performing personal authority over them. The value of a piece here comes from whether the advice survives a wet Tuesday, not from who signed it.

02 How a piece gets made

Every article starts from a practical question that a household in two homes actually has to answer: what goes in the plan, where the PE kit lives, what to do with a wet Saturday. The question comes first and the writing follows it.

Drafts are cut hard. The house style is short paragraphs, plain sentences and no vocabulary of crisis. Anything that reads as a claim we cannot stand behind is removed rather than softened, which is the rule set out in the editorial policy.

Pieces are then read again against the practical test: could a tired reader do this on a Wednesday evening? A great deal of otherwise sensible material fails that test and does not get published.

03 What the byline does not claim

The magazine does not present itself as a source of legal or clinical authority, and no article here should be read as advice on an individual situation. Where a reader needs that, the piece says so and points at the kinds of service that exist, as in support for separated parents.

Nor do we publish personal accounts. Nothing on this site is a report about a real household, and readers who write to us can rely on that, as explained on the privacy page.

04 Reaching the desk

Corrections, suggestions and local knowledge all go to the same address, and the contact page has it in plain text. Correspondence about corrections is kept so that there is a record of why a piece changed.

If you want the short account of what the magazine covers before writing, the about page has it, and the six sections are listed there in order.