I have been involved with the magazine for five or six years. I used to live in France and I came back when Smurfit won the contract to publish Cara. We publish it for Aer Lingus, but it's the airline's magazine, basically.

I was deputy editor for a lot of the time, and a feature writer. In May of this year, I took over from Vincent De Veau, who was the editor. We redesigned the magazine and relaunched it and it's now published 10 times a year - it used to be published bi-monthly - so it is effectively a monthly magazine now.

My job has changed in the sense that I'm now getting involved with the financial side of things. This takes up more of my time than I would ideally want. Obviously there is now less time for writing than there was. Although we did always plan the magazine together, as editor, I spend more time planning ahead and thinking longer term.

I wouldn't say necessarily there is a typical day, but a lot of my time is spent either commissioning writers or sub-editing articles. I also proof read and plan the magazines.

I work with the magazine's designer and together we try to make the visual elements match the editorial. Unfortunately, there are also a lot of unnecessary meetings.

I have travelled a fair bit for the magazine, so it wouldn't be that untypical for me to go to New York or a European city to write stories and profiles. That's also part of the job.

Cara is a good publication to work on because it's a glossy, nice-looking magazine and it is something you can be fairly proud of at the end of the day. I do obviously like the travelling side because I've always done a lot of travelling. It's not quite as idyllic as people think it is, though. People think that you just swan around all over the place, but you do usually work when you travel.

We are now working on the December issue. Our copy dates are the first day of the month prior to publication - for December our copy date is November 1st - because we generally print in the middle of the month. Obviously we are a little bit different from your average monthly, off-the-shelf magazine.

We print early so Aer Lingus get the magazines in time and can stock the planes. We have to plan a few issues ahead. The very busy time of the month is production week, which is that week before we print. Then we will have our copy in and all our photographs should have been done. We then put the magazine together, the design work will be done and the whole thing comes together. That is the busiest week by far.

Also, we publish bigger issues in the summer because it is Aer Lingus's busy time. That is the busiest time of the year for us. That's when we work hardest, really.

My next travel destination is probably Paris. I used to live there and so I often go back. We may well include a feature on the French capital in our next issue.

I would certainly hope to be going back to New York soon. I was actually there very shortly before September 11th. We did a big story on Central Park. It would be very nice to go back again soon - out of solidarity.

In conversation with Elaine Larkin