“Caroline Phillips is a tenacious and skilful writer with a flair for high quality interviewing and a knack for making things work.”
French interior designer Jacques Grange is an industry legend whose latest project saw him completely revamp New York’s Mark Hotel. Caroline Phillips hops stateside to pay a visit and recommends how to get the look back home.
It used to be a man’s world. But since the credit crunch men have increasingly been turning to everything from make-up and cosmetic surgery to hormone replacement therapy. Now chaps are having to play a woman’s game. Men in high-powered jobs are expected to be eternally youthful, to display endless stamina and vigour. And, on top of this, increasingly, they’re judged on their looks.
If you’re going to pay a flying visit to the hotspots of East Africa, then by golly do it in a helicopter.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Richard Ingrams, the former editor of Private Eye and now editor of The Oldie, has been dwelling on mortality.
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.
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…
Hurrah. Some new intimate wellness solutions for the sisterhood. Gentil focuses on pH balance, gut and skin microbiome, alongside urinary tract health.