“Caroline Phillips is a tenacious and skilful writer with a flair for high quality interviewing and a knack for making things work.”
I’d like to go on a fitness holiday, but I’m not really into gyms and I find boot camps terrifying. I’d also like some pampering spa treatments. Do you have any ideas?
The fashion for top-notch food continues apace, so Caroline Phillips learns her goosegrass from her ganache with the help of some culinary superstars on the UK’s best cookery courses
Mornings were worst. I would wake with lead in my veins, a jackboot pressing on my chest and my body rigid, as if set in formaldehyde. I’d be beset by a terrible inner loneliness and desolation, paralysed with foreboding. I became destructive, self-sabotaging and impulsive, forgetting that I’m a successful, loved woman with a good life and an exciting future.
This is depression. A crippling depression that has been with me all my life. So who would have thought that the best help would come in the form of a spa therapist?
You get a good idea about freelance stylist Mary Fellowes just by looking at her walls. There’s a frmed obituary of her uncle – Hugh van Cutsem, erstwhile confidant of the Prince of Wales – and, nearby, there is another about her grandmother, Lady Margaret Fortescue, who inherited one of Britain’s largest land-holdings. There is also a Polaroid selfie of Fellowes with Paris Hilton – signed by the hotels heiress.
Welcome to Brent — once called the drive-by-shooting capital of the UK. Before that it was the People’s Republic of Brent, ravaged by poverty and famed from the late Eighties for outspoken local MP “Red” Ken Livingstone, London’s first elected mayor.
When I moved to Kensal Rise in Brent, the place was derided. But “The Rise” has now risen, earning a reputation as a celebrity haunt-meets-Nappy Valley. Last year Brent experienced Britain’s fastest-rising house prices, outpacing even the oligarch hotspots of Kensington and Knightsbridge.
Katie Winterbourne works with your energy, reading your unique energy ‘signature’ and using her intuition to give you a better understanding of your life – to deliver healing in whichever form her higher consciousness reckons is best. You can have a reading with her by Skype or over the phone, at a clinic on Wimple Street and or at Harrods Urban Retreat in London, or alternative locations by arrangement.
Especially since the arrival there at the end of 2013 of an excellent eponymous restaurant by André Garrett (please click here for full review). Plus the hotel has become super-appealing with its just opened, newly refurbished East Wing – the first stage of restoration of the principal bedrooms. Even the staff seem different – gone is their stiffness, replaced by making the visitor feel like a treasured house guest.
Under the Livingstone brothers, the new owners, the dining space has been moved from its humiliating basement home to the ground floor overlooking the Parterre – traditional gardens with formal beds, box hedging and yew topiary. Beyond that, as far as the eye can see is an unadulterated 19th century country view, not a house in sight, and the distant mist rising from the Thames.
After years of being so-so, Cliveden – the stateliest of stately home hotels – now deserves a trillion regal curtsies. Prepare ye for a (rare) eulogy – because the hotel’s new leaseholders, the Livingstone brothers, have been making changes with oodles of fairy dust, cash and sophisticated taste, and they have pulled not so much a rabbit out of a hat as a voluptuous grande dame dressed in fashionable finery.
Only the most intrepid backpackers used to make it to this hidden valley, a three-hour drive by (windy, potholed) road from Punakha, passing wild marijuana and cascading forests. Then they grew up, stopped trying to smoke their roadside pickings and wanted a proper place to bed down.
It started with home shopping and home office. Now it’s home everything. You don’t have to schlepp anywhere nor waste time travelling. There’s no need to sit in waiting rooms, deal with receptionists or make small talk with salon assistants. Nor go food shopping, dirty so much as a saucepan or wash up after your dinner guests.
A skinny fellow with a ‘man bob’ and his attractive female companion are sipping prosecco and gazing at an extinct volcano in a valley that has scarcely changed in a century. Nearby, a woman from Cincinnati surveys a medieval building that is being turned into a tiny spa, while an impecunious musician eats a meal made by a chef who worked at one of Giorgio Locatelli’s restaurants.
Ronald Phillips never planned on dying, claiming he would live for ever. Even an Evening Standard cartoonist’s illustration of Ron (his preferred name) fishing an…
Sunday 14 December. It’s a perfect afternoon: sun, sand, surfers. I’m in Sydney visiting my two Londoner daughters who are here living the Australian dream. My 28-year-old, Ella, is at the beach with friends; her elder sister Anya, 30, is out with her boyfriend. So I go for a swim alone at…
My life is currently as challenging as a long-haul budget flight full of stag-party revellers, hope mislaid like lost luggage. The reason? My marriage is…