Skip to content
The Long TableFamily life across two homes

The magazine

Contact The Long Table

One address, read by the editorial desk. No forms, no telephone queue.

A wooden hall table holding an open envelope, a pen and a small stack of unopened post.
Post on the hall table. Email is faster, but the idea is the same.

On this page

  1. Write to the editorial desk
  2. What we can help with
  3. What belongs elsewhere
  4. Writing for the magazine

Updated 29 August 2026.

Write to the desk

01 Write to the editorial desk

The address is [email protected], and it reaches the people who put the magazine together. It is the only address we use, and it is the right one for every kind of message: a correction, a suggestion for a piece, a question about how something was written, or a proposal about working with us.

We read everything. We answer what we can, and we answer faster when the subject line says what the message is about.

02 What we can help with

Corrections are the most welcome sort of post. If a place has closed, a description no longer matches what is there, or a sentence reads as advice when it was meant as observation, tell us and we will change it. Our approach to corrections is set out in the editorial policy.

Suggestions for coverage are also useful, particularly for days out in Devon, where local knowledge ages quickly and readers usually know before we do. We are equally glad to hear which pieces in the two homes section were worth the reading time and which were not.

03 What belongs elsewhere

We cannot advise on individual circumstances. Questions about arrangements, contact, finances or the courts need a qualified adviser who can look at the whole picture, and a magazine cannot do that responsibly. Health questions belong with a GP. Our piece on support for separated parents describes the kinds of help that exist in Britain and where people usually start looking.

We also do not publish readers' personal accounts or family details. That is a settled editorial position rather than a shortage of space, and it is explained in full on the privacy page.

04 Writing for the magazine

We commission occasionally, and the pieces that work here are practical, specific and grounded in something the writer genuinely knows how to do. A proposal of a few lines saying what the piece would cover and what a reader would be able to do afterwards is more useful than a finished draft.

What does not work is a personal account, an argument about family policy, or a piece built around statistics we would then have to verify. The standards are set out in the editorial policy and they apply to commissioned work exactly as they apply to everything else.

Local knowledge is the area where we are most often glad to hear from people we have not met, particularly for Devon and Exeter. If a description in one of those pieces no longer matches what is there, that is worth an email on its own.