COCONUT with everything.

That’s how my youngest daughter happily sums up our culinary tour of Kerala, south India.

Our first lesson takes place in the kitchen of a colonial bungalow overlooking the Arabian Sea. Wearing a blue sari and apron, our cookery teacher, Faiza Moosa, stands next to 16 dishes of pungent spices, from fiery chillies to local cloves.

A fan redistributes the breathless heat. Sandalwood incense burns and a lizard crawls up the wall. We’re a long way from the sanitised industrial kitchens and cookery courses of Europe. “These coconuts come from our garden,” adds Faiza, Kerala’s premier cookery teacher. “They’re in most of our dishes.”

We are at Ayesha Mazil, our first gastronomic stop, in the town of Tellicherry. A colonial-style guesthouse with four-poster beds, it is also home to Faiza, 50, and her husband.

I’m with my two young daughters, Anya, 13, and Ella, 11, learning basic Indian cookery in three different venues ‹ without paying a fortune, and enjoying sunshine, too.

Before we start our lesson, we go to the market near the Moosas’ home, to buy our ingredients and discover endless varieties of exotic local fruit and vegetables: from banana blossom (like maize) and long green drumsticks to karela, with its gnarled skin.

Then Faiza’s husband, who likes to be called “Moosa”, whisks us down a crowded alley to the fish market ‹ for kingfish, stingray, shark and pomfret. “Fishing boats come in three times a day,” explains Moosa.

Back at the guesthouse, Faiza stands amid ready-prepared ingredients (there are nine staff in her home). Keralan cuisine is subtle, different from anything else in India, and combines alchemical combinations of spices with influences of Portuguese, Syrian Christian, Jewish and Arab cuisine ‹ introduced by traders over the centuries. Faiza teaches the Moppilah (Muslim) cuisine of her Arab forefathers.

We make Chemmeen Varattiyathu (tamarind prawns) ‹ marinading the crustaceans in coconut oil, orange chilli powder and turmeric. We squeeze tamarinds and sizzle onions, green chillies and mustard seeds for sauce.

Meanwhile, Faiza speedily produces a chicken dish with aniseed, ginger and garlic. A cinch. Afterwards, we whisk jaggery (unrefined sugar), coconut milk and eggs, steaming them in a copper “vanduchembu” for Moppilah crème caramel. Our lesson (producing one meal) takes nearly three hours.

The next day, after breakfast, it’s time to leave. Driving to Sultan’s Battery, we see our ingredients growing ‹ from turmeric plants to cardamom shrubs. Kerala is a lush land with abundant rainfall and paddy fields, spice plantations, coconuts and fresh waters.

We reach Tranquil, a guesthouse on a coffee plantation surrounded by rubber, fruit and spices. We sleep in a treehouse but cook on terra firma. Our hosts are former planters Victor and Jini Dey, newcomers at cookery courses but old hands at cooking.

Our classroom is a backroom with a corrugated ceiling and freestanding gas stoves. Here they teach old family recipes ‹ a mouth-watering fusion of styles. Servants wander in and out, giving us lime sodas.

Our lesson is with chef Sashi, Jini and her daughter, Neesha ‹ with Neesha translating the chef’s Malayalam. We cook Naadan chicken curry ‹ a Masala fish dish and spinach with onion flowers.

Various kitchen hands and dogs join us at different times. At lunch afterwards at a communal table, we eat our produce as monkeys play nearby.

Then we go by train to near Kanam.

Our final destination, Serenity, is a 1920s bungalow-style boutique hotel in Vazhoor, famed as much for great food as its pet elephant, Lakshmi.

On a hilltop with views over the Western Ghats, Serenity has colonial furniture and artefacts and an ayurvedic spa. The cookery demo room is equally elegant ‹ a dining room with gas rings atop its antique table. Our teacher is Rineesh, a fresh-faced young man wearing a tall chef ‘s hat, chef ‘s whites and an apron. It’s all very Swiss, like one of the hotel’s owners.

Before he’s finished teaching us to make local specialities of cashew nut paste and curried fish, we have an electrical blackout (not that uncommon in India) ‹ but somehow he talks and cooks through the dark. Afterwards we devour lemon and lentil soup, curry and stuffed bananas.

But our food odyssey doesn’t end here. Even flying home we eat delicious vegetable curry with warm nan bread. And when we get back, we manage to make our own delicious Indian feast.

There might not be any coconuts in our London garden but at least the children have learned to cook.

DETAILS KERALA

THE TOUR

Scott Dunn has eight nights from £1,957pp full board staying at Ayesha Manzil, Tranquil Plantation and Serenity, including cookery courses, return flights with Kingfisher Airlines and private transfers.

As we arrive, a baboon is trying to break into our tent. The manageress shoos him away and calls a guard who arrives with his spear a few minutes later. She says our primate friend won’t return unless we offer him sweets, which seems good enough reason to ban sugar from Africa. The frisson we feel increases when we learn that guests are only allowed to their tents accompanied by guards. Welcome to the delightful excitements of Naibor Camp, one of the most exclusive tented safari camps in Kenya’s Masai Mara Game Reserve.

The camp is hidden in a grove of riverine woodland on the banks of the Talek River, enjoying possibly the best location in the Mara. Captivatingly, hippos bathe in the river at the bottom of its garden and can be seen hauling themselves out in the evening. The area has the region’s highest concentration of leopard. Rhino hang out on the south side of the river. Plus it’s strategically placed for the wildebeest migration, being close to all the major crossing sites on the Mara River. And because it’s in the heart of the Mara, there’s wildlife viewing throughout the year.

There’s a small air-strip 30 minutes away for landing private planes (or for charter ones, if you must). Or it takes mere seconds to get here if you come in a Lady Lori helicopter, as did the squillionaire who had our tent before us. The celebrity transport of choice, Lady Lori is renowned for accessing the inaccessible from finding a plant not seen by botanists since the Seventies to offering superlative safaris from the air.

But we’re here to enjoy things from the ground, to explore from an open-sided Land Cruiser the rolling open grassland and Safari Wonderland outside our tarpaulin door. So, accompanied by our guide Daudi wearing Masai suka (blanket) and beaded headdress – we set forth into Animal Disney World. We don’t wish to spend time spotting different strains of the Greater and Lesser Safari Jeep or the hot-air balloons that litter the sky so Daudi takes us off the beaten plain.

We are soon rewarded with a herd of elephant, including mini Barbars gambolling and frolicking in the sun; a band of mongoose; and enough zebra to make a crossing. Then we see one of the world’s most spectacular sights: thousands of wildebeest and zebra crossing the great Mara River. A crocodile hovers nearby. But I have to admit that, in this instance, there are also other predators in sight: the animals are closely surrounded by bands of Homo sapiens and a fleet of four wheel drives.

Our next stop is lunch. It’s nothing like the steak and baked pineapple and custard enjoyed by some back at Naibor Camp. Instead we’re served a truly memorable Out of Africa picnic complete with chairs, table and chest of food eaten under a tree on the open plain under the wide sky. If it’s specifics you want, then imagine delicious chicken drumsticks with rosemary and honey and potato salad, eaten under the ‘sausage’ fruit tree beloved of rhinos and in which the leopard likes to lie with his kill.

Back at base camp and done for the day with the wonders of the natural world, it’s hard not to marvel at some man-made wonders. Take the Little Naibor tented suites with their enormous under-lit, low-floating beds on fig-wood bases, Savannah-sized cream sofas and African wool rugs: contemporary style allied with muted bush colours. And as for the Mess Tent with its rustic fig-wood dining table and chunky bush dining ‘thrones’…well, it’s pure Conran en Afrique. And if such style doesn’t sound like the bush, you should try reflexology in the spa tent…

Naibor Camp is also so eco it makes you weep and recycle your tears of joy. Everything is solar- run. It has safari showers and charcoal-heated irons. It attracts khaki-heeled guests who want to leave the world a better place, families, people who want luxury in the bush and rich businessmen. It’s also popular with honeymooners, sipping sundowners and eating romantic meals privately under the stars. After all, it’s particularly charming at night; candlelit and gas lanterns light the paths as the sounds of hippos, frogs and crickets fill the air. And as you sit chatting about the day’s adventures around that communal table, a camp fire burns cheerily…

From £1868 per person based on two sharing for 3nights on a fully inclusive basis including flights, air taxes, park fees and transfers. Book through Scott Dunn: 020 8682 5000; www.scottdunn.com; www.naibor.com. Lady Lori helicopters can also be arranged through Scott Dunn.

NOT heard of Lili TarkowReinisch yet?

Well, you soon will. She’s one of London’s hottest new songwriters.

Her lyrics are being promoted across the Atlantic to Grammy-award winning singers like Carrie Underwood, and to American Idol.

Not bad going, considering Lili is also a full-time psychotherapist, wife, mother of two, Aikido black belt and marathon runner.

And the sole decorator of her Ralph Lauren-meets-Louis-Vuitton-andAndrew-Martin-style apartment.

The entrance hall to her west London home sets the dramatic tone.

A Senegalese burial outfit hangs on the wall and the corridor is flanked with wooden African fertility symbols in museum display cabinets.

There’s an Art Deco ebony console table and, on the floor, zebra skin.

Even the nearby loo has walls of black oak planks that were used underwater as sea defences to stop enemy submarines during the War.

Lili greets me in Chanel, jeans and bling. Her hair is waist-length and her eyelashes almost as long. “Never underestimate the superficial,” she laughs.

Originally from St Louis, she came to England 15 years ago. “I came here to do a Masters in Economics at LSE.

My knowledge of the Maastricht Treaty made me the darling of every party!”

Afterwards, she returned to her private psychotherapy practice.

The apartment in which she now lives with her hedge-fund husband, Mark, and their children is stylish.

“Home” wasn’t always thus.

“When I was 12, my father left us in such penury that my mother had to apply for a special permit for me to work,” she recalls.

“Our neighbourhood was disparagingly dubbed ‘Indian Ghettos’.

“We got food stamps – which the Government give you when you’re really poor.

Our motto at home was, ‘If it ain’t broke, it will be soon’.”

Her “escape” came with a scholarship to Washington University, and she hasn’t stopped working since.

It was with a desire to put all this behind her that she tackled her décor.

The couple bought the flat five years ago: Mark liked it because it didn’t need any refurbishment.

Lili, however, had other ideas – for changing every room!

It took three years to get planning permission to knock down walls.

“For a year we lived with builders to save money.”

The experience was worse for Mark.

“I dusted him every morning before work.

He was initially resistant to the changes, so every time he travelled, I’d take a wall down!

Once, he went to his beloved steam room but it was already in the skip.”

The new look is bold, masculine, aesthetically harmonious and somewhat disturbing.

There are white walls and bleached lime oak floorboards.

“But everything has a dark side.

The flat’s full of creatures that have been captured.

Analyse that,” she says, surveying the sitting room with its reindeer rugs over sofas, old zebra skins and antler candelabra.

“That’s not just a picture of a rodeo,” she says, pointing to a wall-sized photograph.

“It’s a prison rodeo.

A sculpture, Missing Boy 3, by the Korean artist Ki June Park is purposely unsettling.

And Tim Shaw’s ‘Man on Fire’ bronze should make you cry.”

It’s also an oasis of brown, silver and monochrome.

“When the man came to design the fish tank in the TV room, he thought I was joking when I said, ‘Only black and white fish – anything with colour becomes a fish finger’.”

Underlying this order is a sense of hedonism. “There’s a bar you can dance on, and every room’s set up for a party.

A sound system follows you around the flat – anything by Shwayze, Wrapt-Up productions or Lo-Star.”

And there’s a wine fridge in most rooms.

“Yeah, pure class,” she laughs.

The sitting room is where everything happens, from seeing patients to recording music and writing songs (“with Jerry Meehan who tours with Robbie Williams, Ellie Golding who’s always in the papers, And Leo Whiteley, who signs stars for Notting Hill Music.”)

There are tribal artefacts, a yee-hah! Remington cowboy sculpture and vintage Louis Vuitton.

But also a grand piano, lead-lined acoustic floorboards and ceiling. Ceiling-height black oak cupboards conceal the kind of technical gear that warms her “trailer-park heart”. Like much of the furniture, she designed these cupboards.

“If I can’t afford something, I get it copied or hit Lots Road.”

This stylish thrift extends to the children’s rooms, despite their Ralph Lauren sleigh beds.

“There’s not a single thing they couldn’t take to their first flats.”

(The kids are aged eight and 11.)

And what of the master bedroom, an Asian enclave with Tang horses?

“Our heavenly Vi- Spring mattress is the star turn alongside my closet of car-to-bar vertiginous heels and Ruhlmanninspired tallboy.

The photographs of vintage cars are all Portobello Road finds.”

She pauses.

“Much of what’s here only costs a fiver.

But the cheap stuff’s beautifully lit, so looks expensive.”

It’s also a home bursting with love, laughter and style.

Now all she needs is a Grammy in the loo.

HOW TO GET THE LOOK

Lighting: All Square (020 7727 0606, www.allsquaregrp.co.uk) .

Handmade beds: Vi-Spring (01752 366311, www.vispring.co.uk).

Audio: BOSE sound system (0800 1074999, www.bose.co.uk); integrated lighting and music from Lutron Homeworks (020 7702 0657, or visit www.lutron.com); and Redhorn Audio Visual (020 7486 8604/8605, www.redhornav.com).

Kitchen: Gaggenau appliances (0870 840 2003); units by Clive Christian (020 7349 9200, london@clive.com).

Antiques and artifacts: Ralph Lauren (020 7535 4600) for sleigh beds. Henry Gregory Antiques (Portobello Road, 020 7792 9221) for vintage Louis Vuitton. Sebastiano Barbagallo (020 7792 3320) for African art.

Display items: from Striking Displays, Brighton (01273 423623) for Perspex display cases.

Aquarium: designed and supplied by Aquatic Design Centre (020 7636 6388).

When her father was taken to hospital last month after a car crash, Caroline Phillips prepared herself for an NHS horror story. What happened was very different.

“The doctors and nurses in intensive care were superb – honest but supportive”

They say you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone. Equally, with the NHS, you don’t know what you’ve got until you need it.

On May 9 this year, my 79-year-old father, Ronald, careered off the M4 at over 70mph. He hurtled across three lanes on a busy Friday at 2.30pm, down a verge and hit a tree. Miraculously he missed all the other vehicles around him.

It was an hour before emergency services were able to cut him out of his car; then a helicopter landed by the motorway and airlifted him to Oxford’s John Radcliffe Hospital. I only heard about it at 4pm. “Dad’s been in a major car crash,” sobbed my younger brother, Simon. “He’s got serious head and leg injuries …”

In the emergency room, we found our father: a frozen lump with a face the size of two footballs. He was on a ventilator, sprouting wires, bags and drips and tethered to monitors. He’d sustained fractures to his pelvis and one foot, a deep ankle wound and fractures to 10 ribs and his sternum – giving him a life-threatening flail chest [where the rib cage compresses, rather than expands, on breathing]. We were told he might also have had a heart attack, plus brain and internal organ damage.

“There’s only so much we can do,” warned the anaesthetist. “We’ll try to get him to breathe on his own later – but he has to want to help us.”

I’ve had a complex relationship with my father, a sometimes tricky, adorably eccentric and essentially kind family man. Now he was dying, with so much left unsaid. “You can talk to him,” said a nurse, sympathetically. “We think hearing is the last thing to go.” I whispered thanks to him for looking after me since I was 13 when my mother bolted; for my great education; and for being an incredible grandfather. I told him that I loved him. I begged him to live.

But standing amid the artificially ventilated bodies with my anguished half-sister, Dara, I was terrified – my fears fuelled by all the scare stories I’d read about the NHS. Weren’t these doctors exhausted and incompetent? Wasn’t Dad destined for a hospital-acquired infection? At his age, wouldn’t our father be a low priority? Wouldn’t these medics just leave him to die? Frantically, I phoned consultant friends in London, trying to engineer the best possible care.

Yet, while I panicked over the state of the health service, the John Radcliffe’s staff worked with professionalism and dedication. We were kept constantly informed. A doctor phoned and briefed my consultant friend so that I could discuss the prognosis with someone I trusted; the anaesthetist urged our family to eat: “You’ve got a long night ahead of you.”

At midnight, Dad went into theatre. I prayed that my elder brother, David, flying from New York, would see him alive.

By 2.30am our father was in intensive care (ICU), off his ventilator – to the astonishment of doctors – conversing intelligently and joking. It was a miracle. And surreal. He had, according to doctors, defied all odds by surviving. The nurse showed me a Polaroid of his car, a Toyota. It looked like a foil wrapper crunched in the fist of a giant. He had only been saved by his airbag.

He stayed in ICU for a week. For four days, Dara slept in the relatives’ waiting room. My father’s condition remained critical, his breathing difficult, his heart irregular. There was the possibility he would contract pneumonia. Then he would have died. “It’s far harder being a relative than a patient in ICU,” remembered David, who had experienced intensive care after a spinal operation.

For 17 consecutive days, I drove the round trip from London. (In order to fit everything in, Simon would get to his desk in the antiques gallery founded by our father, at 5am.) It was physically and psychologically exhausting. Illness aside, Dad’s occasional morphine-induced confusion was frightening. “Did you put my V&A invitation in the orange juice?” he asked. Another time he smiled: “I’m on a boat.” (He’d been on a bedpan.) With the stress, my hair started to fall out in clumps; when I told Dara she said the same had happened to her.

We became part of a hidden community, patients’ relatives riding a terrifying roller-coaster. The young woman, careworn after three days of waiting to see if her sister was brain-damaged. The Lancashire couple, living in their mobile home in the car park, and despairing for their son whose pancreatic operation had left him on life support. “You don’t expect people to get infections in hospital,” said his father, tears welling in his eyes.

But, despite all my preconceptions, the nurses and doctors in ICU offered superlative medical care. They were also psychologically astute, honest but supportive. They always went the extra mile. One day, attaching an oxygen supply and face mask, they put our father in a wheelchair to enjoy the sun on the terrace. A nurse also put up with our touching belief in alternative therapies – decrying it as anecdotal, while authorising our use of Bach Rescue Remedy.

It was a tough decision whether to take our children, aged 12 and 10, to visit their grandfather at a unit where one woman wailed as if in permanent labour and many patients were wearing contraptions (metal halos) on their heads that looked better suited to a carpenter’s bench than a hospital. But the girls, distressed at not seeing him, wanted to go. Sensitively, nurses shielded them from the brutal sights by pulling the curtains around patients’ beds.

The demands on us as a family have been high. We’ve divided our father’s affairs among ourselves – as if dealing with a death but without the funeral arrangements. Paying bills, sorting insurance, cancelling appointments, arranging visitors, researching future medical care, taking him food and tending his dog, Pingu, who’d been in the accident with him and had a ruptured spleen. (A witness whisked him to the vet’s where, unbelievably, they performed an emergency splenectomy. Pingu is 14 – 98 years old in human terms – but his old age did not preclude treatment either.)

And as we faced the possibility of parental abandonment, rivalry, stresses and strains came to the fore. “It’s a myth that dysfunctional families suddenly pull together in a time of crisis,” said one friend, a family therapist. Instead, events have highlighted our family’s maladjustments. Perhaps a positive way to look at it is that we’ve had a dress rehearsal for a parent dying and can make changes before the final curtain.

Our father remained for two weeks in the trauma ward, one of the best in the country, where overstretched staff are as attentive as possible, efficient and reassuring. His private health insurance policy with Saga Health Plan proved to be a saga: he’d paid thousands, but at a lower premium because of agreeing to accept NHS care if the state could treat him within four weeks – thereby effectively nullifying his access to private healthcare for this condition. So he had to wait to be “repatriated” (as medics dub moving a patient to their local hospital) to Chelsea and Westminster on the NHS, as there wasn’t a bed for two weeks.

Meanwhile I’m counting my blessings. Sixty years since it began, we’ve experienced the NHS at its best. And this episode has enriched my relationship with my father. There’s the chance to love him for longer. His dog visited him yesterday: one patient hobbling on four legs, the other unable yet to stand unaided on two. Above all, staff at the John Radcliffe deserve nothing but praise. So, too, our father who, thanks to the NHS, has foiled the Grim Reaper this time.

When Christian Constantine was born, the doctors at London’s Portland hospital had never seen such severe cranio-facial deformities. They didn’t, and still don’t, have a name for his condition, but he is believed to be one of four people in the world with a combination of so many rare and serious defects. At 23, he has endured more than 35 operations, including highly risky major reconstructive ones. He has also faced the possibility of blindness, had his kidneys operated on, gone deaf in one ear and suffered life-threatening illnesses such as meningitis and hydrocephalus (fluid on the brain that causes compression).

Yet Christian’s is a story of hope, determination and extreme bravery, which he has chronicled in a memoir for which literary agents Curtis Brown are seeking a publisher. We meet in the central London apartment belonging to Christian’s mother, Mina, and father, Adam, a company director; who are both Greek but were raised in London. With his scarred forehead, slightly drooping right eyelid and somewhat distended cheek, Christian is now taken by most people for an accident victim rather than someone born with a rare combination of disabilities. He talks from the back of his throat, with a nasal tone: speech that, owing to therapy, is vastly improved since he was at nursery, when only his family understood him. (“At the time, I thought that was normal,” he says later.)

Mina, 52, offers me biscuits, chocolate, fruit and tea. “I didn’t know anything was wrong until Christian was born and I saw my doctor’s eyes,” she says. “Then they put me to sleep again immediately. I didn’t see him for three days. Not until the nurses said, ‘First we’re going to show a Polaroid picture of baby to mummy.’ That’s when I insisted on actually seeing him. He was very wrong-looking indeed. But I felt love at first sight.”

The doctors were mystified. The bones of Christian’s face had stopped forming prematurely, he had hypertiliorism, which meant that his eyes were too far apart and his eyebrows abnormally high, and a severe cleft lip and palate, leaving the roof of his mouth open and the top gum exposed. (“That thing protruding from my lip is the roof of my mouth, I think,” says Christian later, showing me photographs, including one of his mother holding him adoringly, and another of him aged three and wearing a bow tie with his father.) “They didn’t even know whether he was going to live,” says Mina, who had him baptised in intensive care when he was three days old.

At the time, the doctors were particularly concerned that the frontal lobe of his brain had been damaged by the cleft, which went up to his forehead. “They mentioned putting him in a home and also said, ‘If he gets ill, we won’t try hard to save him, all right?'” says Mina. “I said, ‘I agree.’ That’s the only time I ever felt that, when I thought he might be brain-damaged and not have a quality of life. Happily, he was fine. He had his first operation at six weeks, to repair his cleft lip. But nobody had any idea that we’d still be operating nearly 24 years later.”

In the intervening years – from Chicago to Houston, London, Paris and Los Angeles – Christian has undergone a series of radical procedures (including moving his eyes and building a nose) as well as operations to create eyelids, to put bone grafts in his mouth to support teeth implants and to prevent urinary reflux (when urine flows back to the kidneys). In 1985, he had surgery at Great Ormond Street to correct his compressed head bones – his brain was growing faster than his skull would allow. Surgeons opened his head from ear-to-ear to release the bones. Shortly afterwards Christian got meningitis and hydrocephalus.

In 1993, Paul Tessier, the “grandfather” of cranio-facial surgery, performed a massive procedure on him in Paris to bring his eyes closer together and lower his eyebrows. Before the operation, Adam overheard Tessier saying to his anaesthetist in French, “We’re entering a patch of fog without a compass.”

“They had to remove the entire bone from my face and reshape it and my brain was ‘shrunk’ to allow more room for the surgeons to work,” says Christian, straightforwardly. “Blindness was a risk, as was exposing my brain after meningitis.” Afterwards, he threw up a lot of blood. “Obviously, I couldn’t see anything because my eyes were stitched together.”

Was this his lowest point? “I’ve often woken up and thought, ‘This is physically unbearable,'” he says. “When I was 19, they had to correct a forehead defect by applying pressure to it. The only way to do this was to staple a bandage onto my head. To remove it, they had to yank it out. Excruciating.” Once he had tissue expanders (which are similar to balloons) placed inside his head and then inflated with water to stretch the tight, scarred skin. “They put water through a needle into a tube inside my head and then the expander got bigger and bigger under the skin. It was agony.” Another time, when the upper lip was being improved, his lips were sewn together for two weeks.

Despite all this, he recalls junior school as a “happy” time. “He was so cute and outgoing when he was little,” remembers Christian’s 21-year-old sister, Isabella. Aged 12, Christian played the lead part in the school play, and loved it. “I was dressed as a woman in a bright red wig and skirt,” he says. And what of unwanted attention? When he was nine, he tells me, the children at a party ran up laughing, “Look at his face, he’s an alien.” Another time a boy taunted, “That must be a mask you’re wearing.” “Once,” says Christian, “somebody was staring so much that he tripped and fell over in the street.”

“His being stared at was the worst thing for me, more upsetting even than sitting in hospital waiting rooms,” says Mina. “It doesn’t matter how educated people are, they can be awful.” In the street, his parents and sister would stand in front of Christian to block him from view. “I’d talk loudly to him,” says Mina, “so people would know that just because he didn’t look right didn’t mean that he couldn’t understand what they were saying about him.” At first, Christian wasn’t aware of the attention. “When I was young, it didn’t affect me that much because being stared at was all I knew,” he says. “But once I got into my teens and went to secondary school, it was terrible.”

Schoolwork was hard because he was off sick so much, sometimes for more than a term at a time. (He scraped through his GCSEs, but failed his A-levels.) And once his adolescent peers started partying and chasing girls, Christian withdrew into himself. His problems were exacerbated by his stunted growth. Aged 13, he wasn’t even 5ft (he’s now 5ft 7in). “By 15,” he says quietly, “I’d lost my confidence. I hated my looks, felt deserted by my friends and avoided social activities.”

He developed feelings for a fellow student. Did he tell her? “Of course not,” he smiles.

“I used to tell myself, ‘Who’d go out with someone as bad-looking as me?’ Then one day some boys started jeering, ‘Who do you think you are? The way you look, you don’t have a hope of

getting a girlfriend, ever.'” He looks down momentarily. “If I saw them today, I’d break their legs.” Did his parents consider therapy for him? “I didn’t tell them what was going on.” Mina nods. “I only heard about a lot of this recently. But anyway there weren’t

support groups that I knew of,” she says, “and he didn’t ever want to be grouped with people just because of having deformities.”

When he was 16, his closest friend since childhood, George, died. “That hit him really badly,” says Mina. “Not least because it shook his faith in medicine. Until then he’d always thought doctors could fix anything.” He started skipping school to drink beer at 11am. “At night, I’d wait until my parents were asleep, then drink a bottle of wine,” Christian says. Depression took hold and he’d sit listlessly in the waiting room on the floor where George’s bedroom had been in the Royal Free Hospital. “I’d go there after midnight and sit there for hours just looking straight ahead.”

“I knew he was devastated about George, all his friends were, but I didn’t realise anything else was going on,” says Mina sadly. “He hid it so well from us.” At his GP’s suggestion, Christian had counselling in 2001. “It wasn’t much help but I never wanted psychiatric care,” he says. “I’m not very open. I don’t talk about my problems.”

His difficulties came to a head when he was studying shipping at Southampton University in 2004. “I’d thought everything would be different there,” says Christian, who took a year out in 2005 to have an operation to lower his eyebrows and hairline. “But after a few weeks, I’d hardly talked to anyone. I’d just go to lectures, then back to my room. I was drinking to escape my problems. I didn’t even dare go to the common room. But I told mum and everyone that I was loving it.”

One evening in October 2004, he walked back from a bar resolved to take his life. Back in his room, he grabbed 20 Panadol Extra. “I didn’t even know if it would be enough to kill me,” he says. “But it wasn’t really a suicide attempt. I didn’t even try.” It was seeing a photograph of his family that stopped him. “That brought me to my senses. Whatever I’d been through, they’d suffered too.” He was hysterical when he rang his Uncle Basil, who calmed him down. “It’s the first I’ve heard of a suicide,” says Mina, with surprising calm. “I think he’s shielded me from lots of things.”

Unsurprisingly, the impact of his disabilities on the family has been great. “I adore him now,” says Isabella. “But for obvious reasons he got most of the attention when we were children. I was very jealous.” Often when the family went to operations, Isabella had to stay with relations.

Adam and Mina’s stable 26-year marriage has inevitably suffered. After giving birth to Isabella in 1987, Mina terminated two further pregnancies for foetal abnormalities similar to Christian’s. In 1988, after her first termination, at 22 weeks, Adam walked out. “Only for a few weeks,” says Mina. “We both wanted another child and were coping with Christian, but another abnormal baby was too much to bear.” She pauses. “I also had a sort of breakdown after my second termination. Things got progressively worse and culminated, finally, in a nasty bout of pneumonia, for which I was hospitalised. I’m sure it was psychosomatic. I always felt that I didn’t have anywhere to go and cry.”

The high financial cost of Christian’s treatment is also clear. Their health insurers, PPP, underwrote most of the early procedures that were carried out in the UK, but the Constantines have had to pay for other operations, plus their worldwide travel and hotel expenses. “We had to. They just wouldn’t have been able to do things like the nasal reconstruction and lowering his eyebrows here,” explains Mina. “They made sacrifices,” adds Christian simply. “But they were always clear that they’d do whatever was best for me, whatever it took. And, frankly, plastic surgeons are light years ahead in the US.”

Christian’s immediate family has been ceaselessly supportive and protective of him. “I think I helped him psychologically with my positivity,” says Mina, who has dedicated her life to making things better for him. “I also taught him to be a bit arrogant, as a defence and protection.” Isabella says she still “babies” her brother and always keeps her eyes and ears open for him, “although he’s more than capable of doing anything himself”. Meanwhile Adam has worked tirelessly, researching the best doctors, paying for and attending operations. (“Adam is intensely private,” adds Mina, “but he’s had his dark moments. Once they stuck a massive skin graft on Christian’s face and it looked like a croissant under his nose. I think that’s when Adam wanted to pitch himself out of the 46th floor of our hotel.”)

Christian also has a close extended family (he has 20 first cousins). “He was treated as normal by them,” says Mina. Many would fly to lend support at operations. (The Constantines travelled 14 times to Chicago in two years, and spent two months in LA at a stretch, for operations.) “Adam’s siblings, their partners, my in-laws, my mum and granny, about 20 of us, went to Paris for Christian’s operation in 1993,” says Mina. “I’ve only ever attended minor operations alone.”

The doctors still have no idea why Christian’s problems occurred. Last year the Constantines saw geneticist Prof Raoul Hennekam at Great Ormond Street. “He’s still researching,” explains Christian. “He says there are only four similar cases in the world.” If the defects appeared in Christian’s children, what would he do? “I’d want to terminate,” he says. “I don’t want to sound arrogant, but I can’t imagine anyone else surviving what I’ve been through. I couldn’t let my child go through what I’ve suffered.”

There’s a sense, however, that Christian is coming to accept his lot. Step by step, he’s confronting his problems. He feels he has his drinking more under control. “Sometimes I don’t drink for a week,” he says. “If I drink, I can’t stop. So I have to be careful. I’ve thought of trying AA. I think I’m doing it now because I’m addicted to alcohol rather than to escape problems.”

“He seems to have come to terms with things more,” confirms Mina. His appearance and self-esteem have improved radically. Now, in the rare event that someone stares, he stares right back. He has also made good friends at university. “Not just relations and Greeks!” he laughs. He’s finishing university this year. “For a change, it looks as if I’ll pass my exams.” After graduation, he’s thinking of living in New York. And he hopes one day to marry and have children.

Importantly, his major surgery is now over. “I may do a few more cosmetic things and have an operation to improve my speech.” He pauses. “Some people think I’m obsessed with looking perfect. But if anyone told me I couldn’t ever have another operation, I wouldn’t be terribly upset.” Really? “Honestly. It’s taken me a long time. But now I really do feel that it’s what’s on the inside that counts.” Which is someone funny, energetic and resourceful. And, of course, incredibly brave.*

*Some names have been changed.

THE MOST important beauty issue for women approaching 40 is how to reverse the ageing process. Increasing numbers of Londoners are opting for surgery to banish wrinkles and sagging skin but there are less drastic options if you want to look 10 years younger.

The natural path involves using creams and trying holistic health treatments to improve the appearance of skin. Or there is the scientific approach ‹ cuttingedge anti-ageing technology such as oxygen treatments and chemical peels.

So is natural or hi-tech more effective? We asked Liz Hoggard and Caroline Phillips to try the latest rejuvenation treatments and report on the results.

NATURAL ANTI-AGEING PROGRAMME, NEAL’S YARD

The problem: It was being photographed in direct sunlight at 8am that did it.

Last summer I did a shoot outdoors for this newspaper and the results were terrifying. For years I had battled oily, teenage skin but now suddenly I had the ravaged complexion of Rider Haggard’s She. I knew I’d been overdoing the fun but I hadn’t realised quite how washed out I looked.

What is it? Neal’s Yard tailor-made me a six-week anti-ageing programme, based around its holistic treatments and remedies. Aimed at the more “mature” woman (euphemism for anyone who feels their skin may be losing its bloom and needs to shed a few pounds), the programme sets out to boost your energy and vitality over six weeks using herbal remedies, essential oils and other therapies, thereby rejuvenating skin and perking up sagging muscle systems. In short: no Botox, no bullying.

Who does it? Initially I went for a consultation with homeopath Susan Curtis, director of medicines at Neal’s Yard. She quickly identified that I have quite a bonkers lifestyle, which was probably contributing to signs of ageing, so it was a question of making subtle changes that I could manage.

This meant dropping the quick fixes ‹ caffeine, alcohol, tobacco ‹ which rob your body of key stress-busting nutrients ‹ stress is a key factor in the ageing process.

She also gave me practical advice on everything from diet (cut out soya to avoid bloating) and joints (take up yoga) to eyesight (eating blueberries offers major benefits in preventing and treating eye disorders).

The treatment: I had a detox aromatherapy massage, where essential oils are applied to your skin to alleviate stress and eliminate toxins. Emma the therapist spent time finding out my mood and background, before making up a blend of neroli (to soothe), cardamom (to comfort) and mandarin (to refresh).

On my second visit, she did a facial diagnosis to check for any signs of inner health problems, then applied Palmarosa Purifying Mask to my oily T-Zone and White Tea Enriching Facial Mask on cheeks and forehead (to counteract the crumbly effect spotted in the photos). For daytime she recommended using Orange Flower Facial Oil, which reduces fine lines and balances moisture levels.

Both treatments leave you feeling fantastic. But learning to relax was trickier. Emma teased that just as she was still saying, “So if you’d like to get up slowly,” I was already upright in my shoes, raring to get out the door.

Does it work? Being listened to and pampered is incredibly good for you. And Neal’s Yard has just the right combination of tact and insight. When women spend a terrifying £539 million a year going under the knife, it seems a far more humane alternative. No, of course I haven’t done the yoga. But I am trying to relax and burning organic essential oils at night.

But the real find is the Organic Beauty Oil (£8.95 for 200ml), which you take internally as a supplement.

A cold-pressed oil made from flax, hemp, pumpkin, avocado and evening primrose oil, it is the most disgusting thing I have ever tasted, but my skin seems clearer and less sensitive after a month. Hardcore fans suggest you sprinkle it as a salad dressing if you really can’t bear the taste.

Neal’s Yard Remedies, Covent Garden, Blackheath, Richmond and Foubert’s Place (www.neals yardremedies.com; 0845 262 3145).

£65 for an hour’s holistic massage including consultation; £50 for an aromatherapy massage; £160 for a tailored anti-ageing package.

LH

CARBOXY THERAPY (CO) AND THE ULTIMATE FACE LIFT LASER TREATMENT

The problem: I wanted a face that looks 10 years younger than its 48 years. I’d always believed laughter to be the best medicine but that’s left me with unamusing crevices beside my lips. My brow looks like the “before” ad for Botox. And too many summer holidays have left me with sun spots.

What is it? Two treatments that require a degree in rocket science to understand. Carboxy Therapy (CO2) and the Ultimate Face Lift laser treatment (UFL).

Claiming to be the biggest breakthrough in beauty therapy since Botox, CO2 is said to eliminate cellulite, stretch marks, fat, psoriasis and scars and fight age, by rejuvenating wrinkly, loose skin. In the US, predictably, they’re even testing it to remedy impotence.

And the UFL? It helps reduce thread veins, sun spots, laughter lines, open pores, sagging jowls, wrinkles, zits and eye bags – stimulating elastin and collagen and plumping up the skin.

Both treatments act on the collagen and the tissue beneath the skin’s surface ‹ in effect giving a face lift but rejuvenating the skin at the same time.

In CO2, natural gas is administered ‹ great for those scared of Botox.

Who does it: Parisian Dr Daniel Sister, a man with a French accent and Dolce & Gabbana suit. The first doctor to practise Carboxy Therapy (CO2) in the UK and a grand fromage in “the happiness business”.

The treatment: “Ha! You’re having the needle today,” laughs Dr Sister, after gleefully showing me photos of clients’ faces and chicken-wing upper arms that he has turned into spring-chicken ones with his magical needles. I’m a wimp so I’ve opted for carbon dioxide (invisible and odorless gas that’s in the air) being injected subcutaneously into my face with a weeny needle ‹ the latest weapon of Hollywood A-listers.

The gas apparently improves blood flow, bringing a rush of oxygen, helping the body’s drainage system, promoting the renewal of elastin fibres and collagen and mechanically breaking down fat cells.

The doctor sticks 10 needles into my face in as many minutes. These injections sting, like mosquito bites.

Then gas bubbles through my skin which the good doctor massages to distribute the gas. I have five sessions of CO2 (twice weekly) for 15 minutes.

Sometimes I end up with tiny bruises on my jaw, as if my children have pinched me.

This gentle torture is combined with four 90-minute monthly sessions of UFL. This involves three different types of laser therapy for different layers of the skin. With the Aurora part of the treatment, which reduces surface blemishes, a headpiece is pressed against my face for 20 minutes. It throws out a flash of red light and heat, and feels like a slight electric shock or being pricked with hot needles.

In Act II, the ReFirme part of the treatment, RF (Radio Frequency) and IR (infrared) heat the dermal tissue to 55 degrees to stimulate collagen production and tighten the skin. Next anaesthetic cream is smeared on my skin and I walk up the corridor for Polaris treatment with Dr Sister. This uses a RF laser light which works even deeper into the dermis to stimulate more collagen and “rub out” my remaining wrinkles.

Does it work? Brilliantly. Although it takes seven hours 15 minutes (less than the average working day) in total, results are seen almost immediately.

My skin looks brighter, fresher, smoother, firmer and younger.

Forty-two years old, perhaps. My nineyear-old scrutinises my face and, unprompted, tells me my “wrigglies” (wrinkles) are disappearing. But my husband still hasn’t noticed.

Notting Hill’s BeautyWorksWest (www.beautyworkswest.com; 020 7221 2248). Five x CO2 at £100 per session, four x UFL at £450 per session, grand total: £2,300. Top-up is recommended after six months.

THERE’S nothing outside the elegant stucco Chelsea townhouse to indicate the extraordinary things that go on inside.

Nothing to show why the rich, famous and just plain troubled now store this discreet address in their BlackBerries. A peer of the realm and a young woman stand on the pavement chatting. “It’s great that you’re also dealing with your sex compulsion,” she says. He smiles.

“Is that an acupuncture stud in your ear?” he answers.

“No,” she responds. “A magnet. I press it to release endorphins and serotonin.” These are patients at The Recovery Centre, a private clinic that offers just five clients at any time for £1,200 a day a bespoke treatment for addictions within the walls of a smart residential London house. There is a choice of more than 80 freelance counsellors plus some off-beat “therapies” ‹ from playing polo, gokarting and watching butterflies to shopping in Bond Street with a personal shopper, about which more later.

Despite its bizarre approach and high fees, such is the demand that within little more than six months of opening in November last year, the owners have rejected a bid to be bought out and are now planning further centres in Notting Hill, Primrose Hill and the City.

The centre is the brainchild of Charisse Cooke, 29, a south African psychologist, and Robert Batt, 40, a former drug addict and aristocrat who, aged six, inherited his family’s Norfolk estate and 24 cottages. He swapped snorting “shed-loads” of cocaine, spending £50,000 on shopping in one day and driving one of his Ferraris drunkenly through a field for eight years of personal recovery, a psychology masters degree and personally financing The Recovery Centre.

Cooke and Batt’s brand of therapy attracts aristocrats, rock stars and millionaires.

It has become the treatment centre of choice for one supermodel.

“An estimated one in 10 of the population suffers from addiction,” says Dr Robert Lefever, a world authority on the subject and the man for whom Batt and Cooke worked for five years at the Promis clinic.

I’m visiting the centre to experience two days of treatment ‹ to top up the regular therapy I’ve been doing for the past 19 years after successfully recovering from an eating disorder, amphetamine addiction and alcoholism in my early twenties.

I came from a classic dysfunctional family ‹ my mother walked out when I was 12 and before that I’d had to deal with her mental illness. When I was 21 and at Bristol University, I saw a consultant psychiatrist in Harley Street. I was so intimidated at having to expose myself psychologically that I would take amphetamines before visits. The psychiatrist helped me but also colluded in my addictive behaviour. “You’re not an addict,” said the good doctor.

“You don’t take pills every day.” When I went to work in Fleet Street, I started drinking and bingeing. I appeared to have it all: a good job, nice flat, fast car, friends. But inside I was desolate, lonely and often suicidal. It was after I spent a weekend hidden in my flat alone, crying inconsolably that a friend with whom I’d lived told me about Promis.

She talked openly about her eating disorder ‹ which had been such a shameful and secretive disease for me..

She was full of hope and happiness. So I checked into Promis for addiction counselling. After that, I spent five years in psychoanalysis and graduated to a psychoanalytical psychotherapy group.

Treatment at Promis saved my life ‹ but it was tough love. So I’m curious to see how different the luxury atmosphere of The Recovery Centre will be.

Cooke greets me wreathed in smiles.

“We were just talking about Treatment Chic,” she laughs, sporting a Hermès belt. I nip into the bathroom: it’s marble with fluffy white towels, Jo Malone soap and luxurious Diptique candles burning. But this is no urban retreatstyle spa. If addicts are recovering here, there will also be tears and hurt aplenty.

It’s 9am and time for my appointment with Cooke, who has designed my personal programme. Questions cover everything from whether I’ve ever prostituted myself to whether I suffer from sexual anorexia, exercise obsession or have a criminal history. Having said no to the first two and admitted to shoplifting, aged 19, and a nascent exercise obsession, we move on. I leave the session feeling exposed and vulnerable.

In between sessions, staff waft in and out like First Class air stewards saying, “Can I get you anything?” and returning with nuts and herbal teas. At lunch with four patients and Cooke, the chef dishes up risotto with black truffle shavings followed by sea bass on rocket salad. The food may be fancy but conversation is authentic and poignant. A 24-year-old patient talks about the day her four-year-old son watched “problem drinkers” on Jeremy Kylie’s show then asked: “Mummy, are you an alcoholic?” Cooke hugs her.

By mid-afternoon I’ve already had three sessions: an interview with a psychologist, some experiential dynamic psychotherapy (AEDP) and 50 minutes with a performance enhancement specialist and have a cracking headache from such intensity. But it’s time for group therapy with Batt. Wearing a Savile Row suit and speaking like a Coldstream Guard, the regiment founded by his family, Batt prods and pokes psychologically.

Batt says he’s watching my eyes darting around, “filtering” what I’m going to say. He remarks upon my breathing becoming more shallow. “I feel tearful,” he adds, wanting me to talk, “as if my gut is being wrenched and contorted.” I squirm. I’m not used to therapists sharing their emotions.

Immediately after group therapy, Cooke bounces in giggling. “Hello lovely ladies. Let’s change the atmosphere in here. Let’s play a game.” We each pull a piece of paper out of a glass and follow its directions. “Your secret wish …” is one. “Reveal your most embarrassing moment Š” is another.

My answer? Running down a Kensington street as a dare, stoned and wearing only a moped helmet. It’s the kind of party game I’d play when I was drunk.

Puerile perhaps. But it offers welcome light relief. This style of treatment is Batt and Cooke’s idiosyncratic vision: the way that Batt himself got “clean”.

Aged 14, he drank a litre of whisky at Harrow, spent two days unconscious while friends shouted out his name in roll call, then graduated to a cocaine and shopping habit. Batt got clean with the help of friends, (“other recovering addicts”) and an ongoing mixture of “yoga, therapy, helping other people, contemplating nature, having fun and med- itation”. With this in mind, he recently directed one patient to take creative writing lessons with novelist Raffaella Barker; escorted another to the Syon Park butterfly house (“It helped him get in touch with his inner child”); refused to treat one unless she took tap-dancing lessons; and sent several out shopping with Sally Bardsley, erstwhile personal stylist to Princess Diana and Madonna.

Some critics will find these bizarre therapies silly. Others, like myself, may consider the hugging, hand-holding and the overlap between therapists with patients to be lacking in boundaries.

I am slightly apprehensive on my second day. What is in store for me? A former theatre director turned drama therapist (“I believe in anonymity,” he says,) works with four of us. “When you were young, who was the dominant character in your household and what were their Ten Commandments (or rules)?” We write our lists, my mother’s “Commandments” suddenly spilling out of me. Then we enact a dinner scene, each member of the group becoming one of my family members, to debate the “rules”.

NEXT in art therapy with Maddi Strong we use plastic toys to enact stories that become very self-revealing.

The Recovery Centre believes in creative “play”. “Psychoanalysis and long-term therapies have their place in treating addictions,” says Charisse. “However, addicts initially respond more readily to more humanistic and supportive therapies.” After two days, I feel wrung-out but also empowered. In each of the sessions I have learned something useful about myself, something to fine-tune my recovery, and I have also had some fun. My own experience of early recovery was that it was very painful facing my demons without the “anaesthetic”.

It’s too early to tell whether Batt’s patients will achieve long-term recovery.

But they seem to be getting well.

You could argue the centre’s approach is elitist, recovery only for the wealthy.

Fortunately, most people get well ‹ for no more than minimal voluntary donations ‹ through fellowships like Alcoholics Anonymous in draughty church halls.

But to focus on the centre’s “swish” factor is to miss the point. “If you’re at rock bottom, lobster and cream carpets won’t heal you,” comments NHS and private psychotherapist Lili Reinisch.