How to get the body to Di for
The Sunday Express | 9 Jun 1996
It is disconcerting to wear an old mashed potato-coloured tracksuit over post-natal body and scruffy trainers and then bump into the Princess of Wales.
View cutting image View PDF
“Caroline Phillips is a tenacious and skilful writer with a flair for high quality interviewing and a knack for making things work.”
It is disconcerting to wear an old mashed potato-coloured tracksuit over post-natal body and scruffy trainers and then bump into the Princess of Wales.
Setting up an interview with fashion designers Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana is a nightmare. Until the last minute, the appointment time is changed and the venue is undecided. Then they offer half an interview – Stefano will talk, Domenico won’t. Then they relent. Next they refuse to have their photographs taken. I arrive in Milan to discover the couple don’t speak English. But, of course, I did forget to ask.
AT AYTON Castle, Lady Christine de la Rue, in red jumper and jodhpurs and wearing dusters on her feet, is skating around what appears to be 27 miles of wooden hall floor. A polishing trick she picked up at the Pucci Palace in Florence. The fire is blazing, sandwiches are laid out on the grooms’ table in the hall – where they play ping pong and do Scottish reels – and Highland terriers scamper about.
The mistress of Ayton Castle, Berwickshire, is a colourful character with a past as dramatic as her castle.
Random drugs tests are to be carried out on about 12,000 prisoners a year to combat the growing narcotics problem in jails. It’s estimated that nearly half the inmates of British prisons take self-prescribed medication (heroin, LSD, cannabis and the like) while detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure. That’s a prison population of 49,000 in England and Wales alone. So the forthcoming tests should provide enough material and statistics for Prison Service paper shufflers to write off an entire rainforest.
But aren’t they locking the cell after the criminal has bolted? Isn’t this approach comparable to giving HIV tests and forgetting about condoms and safe-sex education?
Jay Alexander is black, about 10 feet tall and three inches wide, wears tighter than skin jodhpurs or a chiffon skirt and high glittery shoes, hair scraped into a weeny bun and has lips that confuse UFO spotters. He’s the Terry Venables of the modelling world: the man who teaches the top models how to walk, sniff but not eat pain au chocolat, move their hips and carry double-faced sticky tape to attach to their stockinged feet to save slipping on high-heeled mules.
The Hercules in which we are arriving in Sarajevo makes a tactical landing, suddenly nose-diving in case there is small arms fire. The Serbs take more pot shots in the afternoon when they’re drunk, but this is early morning. Still, the crew say they can’t underestimate the threat from the ground.
I feel frightened because, in contravention of the rules, I don’t have a flak jacket. This is Saturday, the day before this same plane is used for Operation Irma.
The homes around the airport have been razed by war and a black cloud of smoke hangs over Mount Igman. Serbs burning villages or villagers making tea, says one of the crew, wryly.
Picture that over-sized meat abattoir, Wembley Arena. People are eating toffee popcorn instead of doing drugs.
White jean beclad thirtysomethings are sipping beer out of plastic bottles. And nobody is smoking in the no-smoking auditorium.
The only sniff of something really ‘way out’ here are the neon exit signs.
This is the first night of sex queen Cher’s two-night stand in Wembley.
Comedian Harry Enfield has a nightmare. It is rooted in a childhood experience. “The only violent dream I ever had is of beating a monk, Father Gaisford, around the head with a cricket bat. I completely bashed him.” Father Gaisford was at Worth Abbey, a Catholic public school, which Enfield found horrifying. He was there for two years between the ages of 13 and 15, before his parents took him away early. “My abiding image is of 14 boys lined up just before Christmas in 1974 outside the headmaster’s study, each one going in to be beaten. It was like something out of Tom Brown’s Schooldays.”
The writer Margaret Drabble lives in a Hampstead house and Michael Holroyd, the husband to whom she is devoted, lives in Ladbroke Grove. It is an arrangement that London’s top-drawer literary couple have maintained since their secret wedding in 1982. But now she wants to move in with him.
When they entertain, they sleep at her house; when they go to the airport, they spend the night at his. “We speak every day,” says Drabble of Holroyd, the enigmatic man of letters who received a record advance of £625,000 for his biography of George Bernard Shaw.
The other day I chased burglars across west London. This is the second time I have done so. In 1990 there were 174,780 reported burlaries in London (compared with 127,310 in 1980), most of which seemed to happen in my street. It’s the maxim of metropolitan life: “We live in London, so we’re burgled.”
These figures don’t include robberies from persons, muggings, theft and handling of stolen goods including joy riding, beatings on the Tube, or my stolen bicycle. And I am one of many who has decided enough is enough.
Cameras flash and the fashion world applauds while eating cheese straws and drinking Lanson champagne. These are the British Fashion Awards – the Oscars of the designer rag trade.
It is all taking place in the tented world of the Duke of York’s barracks. The audience wears black and glitter and off-the-shoulder creations and looks as if it could swap places with the catwalk folk.
Next to the door bell is a sticker bearing the legend: “Make his day. Break in.” On it is a picture of a pit bull terrier, stocky and muscular with a steel-trap jaw.
So why would anyone want an American pit bull terrier – or APBT, as the new Sporting Dog periodical would have it?
There are an estimated 10,000 APBTs in England, of whom 1000 reside in Dave and Maria Britons’ borough of Waltham Forest, an area where youths walk in the park: one with an APBT, another with a rottweiler. With its killer instinct, the APBT is a loaded weapon.
I am onstage in front of 65 strangers who think I’m a stand-up comedian. I’ve never done anything like this before. Why have I agreed…
Barring a lottery win, a trip to The Ranch is out of my reach. So I’m having a bargain-basement bash at it by trying to…
Captivating wildlife, waterfalls, castles galore – you’ll be mighty impressed by deepest Perthshire