Flight Mischief

Spear’s | 22 Jul 2010

If you’re going to pay a flying visit to the hotspots of East Africa, then by golly do it in a helicopter.

• Travel: Europe/ Africa

Samantha Davies: ‘Sometimes I sail naked’

YOU Magazine | 22 Jun 2008

When you see Samantha Davies pottering about in a teeny pink bikini on her pink sailing boat, Roxy, and spritzing her cabin with perfume, it’s difficult to imagine her facing waves the size of houses, 80-mile-an-hour winds and nights without a second’s sleep. It’s hard to think of her sailing solo among icebergs, killer whales and vicious storms. Or being stuck, as she once was, with no wind, in thick fog and in the path of an oncoming ship – seconds from death, had she not turned on her engine.

But that’s how life is for Sam, a 33-year-old Cambridge University engineering graduate who once wanted to be a ballerina, still loves to dress in girlie clothes onshore and wears three tiny diamond ear studs and a belly ring.

• Interviews

The urban ruralist

Country House Magazine | 21 Apr 2007

I’m not the type who finds it pleasurable to relieve myself behind trees or have calamitous journeys just to get lost in country lanes littered with reeking mounds of bovine excrement. (Personally, I’d poop-scoop cow pats.) Others may enjoy the experience of losing their mobile signal and collecting blackberries with not a BlackBerry in sight. Not me.

• Columns & Regulars

Boot camp babes

School House | 21 Mar 2007

The Suzuki style of teaching children music is exhausting and intense, and that’s just for the parents. But the results, as Caroline Phillips found when she attended the London Suzuki International Summer School at Bryanston, are a delight.

• Caroline’s Life

Jennie Withers: Let’s make a baby!

The Observer Magazine | 2 Jul 2006

It’s strange that I’ve come to this. I always used to say, ‘I’d rather die than be one of those women pushing a pram around Sainsbury’s.’ The mundane and domestic terrified me. It’s only in the past two years that I’ve started to acknowledge that I’d like a family. I’ve been looking for a partner – more a soul mate, really – for ages. But the right person hasn’t come my way. Then, about six months ago – profoundly, peacefully but really clearly – a thought came to me: ‘I want a child.’

It made me cry. It felt as if it had come from such a true place. The idea that I could want a child and not have a partner was extraordinary.

• Interviews

On a Moroccan roll

Rich City | 16 Feb 2005

When Vanessa Branson purchased her riad in Marrakesh, she was the only woman who didn’t sign the deal with a thumb print. There were other details that also made the transaction novel. “Myself and my business partner, Howell James, had to wait a further four days before completion because the vendors didn’t trust our notaire to hand over the keys and money.” Vanessa and Howell followed the 26 Moroccan family members involved in the sale back to the riad, and the problem was resolved over mint tea.

• Homes, Interiors & Property,
• Travel: Europe/ Africa

Lunch isn’t for wimps

The Sunday Times Magazine | 5 Jun 2004

When Faith MacArthur was a child, she’d pluck chickens and pick potatoes during the harvest. She lived in “Cow Town” – Calgary, Alberta – in the Prairies. Her mother, a minister’s wife, would hang home-made noodles around the house to dry. Sitting on her mother’s knee, four-year-old Faith would pummel bread dough and make carrot curls for garnish. Now Faith, 42, is standing in her fashionable Notting Hill kitchen, knee-high in ingredients for soups: cumin, cinnamon, turmeric, ginger, chickpeas, chillis. Rows of saucepans are steaming on an industrial oven and scribbled, half-complete recipes litter every surface.

Faith is half of the husband-and-wife team behind the EAT chain of cafes.

• Food

Patricia O’Neill: Animal House

The Sunday Times Magazine | 19 Sep 1999

They call it, with some affection, Broadmoor. At least, that’s what they say in the family. To others, however, it is Broadlands, the stud farm belonging to the horse breeder and animal conservationist the Hon Patricia O’Neill.

She has 42 stray dogs who move in packs through her house, and a kitchen carpeted with yapping Pekingese. She also has a donkey, jackal, lynx, chimp, 200 parrots, 40 stud ponies, a cage shared by a tortoise, cockerel, monkey and rabbit, plus 19 rescued baboons – some living in a room with filing cabinets and books.

• Interviews

Ingrams on death

The Week | 4 Oct 1997

Richard Ingrams, the former editor of Private Eye and now editor of The Oldie, has been dwelling on mortality.

• Interviews

Sir Jocelyn’s temper

The Week | 19 Apr 1997

Although a sign on his office door reads “the floggings will continue until morale improves”, Sir Jocelyn Stevens, Chairman of English Heritage, denies he’s the “fascist cannibal beast” he’s made out to be.

• Interviews

Kaleidoscopic impressions of India

E.S. | 5 Jan 1993

A cow is aborting at the side of the road. Nearby sits a man with a sawn-off arm and no hands. He is covered in flies, and his body is bent from the waist so his face rests on the tarmac. The next day both man and animal are in the same positions. They are in a street in which a woman buckets out the contents of an open sewer and piles it by the side of the road, then a dog starts to eat it.

We’re staying in a rose sandstone Umaid Bhawan Palace amid the splendour in which the maharajah still lives, with Art Deco suites and tigers’ heads on the walls.

• Travel: Asia/ Oceania

The £200,000 reason why they hate this woman

E.S. | 4 Oct 1987

This year 34-year-old Gerry Bridgewater may earn £235,000. That’s a basic salary of £35,000 plus between £20,000 and £200,000 n commissions. For Gerry was the first female dealer permitted to trade in the Ring of the London Metal Exchange; a coup that involved a lengthy fight. Subsequently she broke a 109-year-old tradition and became the first female individual subscriber permitted to trade on her own account. ‘I never take no for an answer. I’m a strong self-believer,’ she explains. She is the LME’s own Iron Lady.

• Current Affairs