FORMER Londoner Adrienne Campbell, 34, eats food foraged from hedgerows, teaches her children at home, has just created a new local currency for her Sussex village, boycotts supermarkets, won’t vaccinate her children, changed her name from Katy when she felt she’d outgrown it, was celibate for two years, has spiritual revelations and gave birth underwater at home in front of her children and the au pair.

Hers is an unusual life, and very unusual for someone educated at Francis Holland, a smart private London school. She was raised by her international businessman father and nicely bred stepmother among their friends like David Niven, Sean Connery and multi-millionaire entrepreneurs. She also gained a scholarship to America’s leading science university, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where, aged 19, she wrote a paper on cancer (with a professor from Harvard and another from MIT). Then she became a journalist on The Economist.

But first the currency. Adrienne, who lives near Wadhurst, has created a currency called Wads with 10 other community-minded souls. “One Wad equals a pound,” she says. “If I want to buy someone’s honey I’ll pay him a cheque in Wads, he banks that cheque at the wholefood shop and uses the credit to buy something locally. It’s a centralised bartering system whereby people exchange goods and services without having to do so directly with one another. If I have masses of herbs I can exchange them for baby-sitting or plumbing.”

The currency is useful for people short of cash and encourages villagers to develop skills and get to know one another. “Such systems are flourishing in England. More than 200 of them have started over the past five years.” She smiles and takes a sip of her peppermint tea.

SHE has also embarked upon another singular project. In January, Adrienne and two other families started a unique school in her sitting-room. It has eight children from the ages of five to eight whom she intends to educate until school-leaving age. The National Curriculum is followed loosely. But the emphasis is on freedom and nature (“The children can tell what animals have been through the hedges by the footprints and stool”) and fees are £600 a term. She hopes for a government grant and to offer an alternative to the state system. The idea came to her after her five-year-old daughter Sophie had spent a year at the village school.

“She didn’t like having to do maths when she wanted to read, or art when she felt like writing.” Adrienne was disillusioned by the state and private systems, the more so after studying the pioneering work of Satish Kumar, a visionary in Dorset. “Children educated privately are pushed academically too early on. Also I believe in respecting children’s choices.” Her school is a non profit-making, parent-run co-operative. “A parent who is a paid teacher teaches in the morning and the other parents teach for free in the afternoons.”

The latter don’t have formal qualifications. “The parent is the best qualified to teach the child. Studies show that home-educated children are two or three years ahead of school ones if they go back into the system.” She says her pupils are happy, uncompetitive, motivated and respectful. We’re sitting in the exquisite setting of her garden, next to wild flowers and her 25-year-old Citron. Here she lives with her three daughters (aged one to five) and composer husband, Dirk, in a 100-year-old oast house with round rooms. She has a beautiful equine face, speaks purposefully and slowly, and wears jeans and scraped-back hair. Her body is relaxed. Her first life-changing experience came on holiday in Turkey in 1982. “I had a spiritual revelation. I can’t explain it more.” On returning, she joined Subud, a cross-denominational religious movement. “Twice a week we do spiritual exercises. It’s like tapping into a divine life force.” She met Dirk through Subud. “We’d both been celibate because we kept making the wrong choices with the opposite sex.

“It was instant recognition. We got engaged after two weeks.” From there her lifestyle took more and more alternative turns. Take childbirth. “My mother had died in childbirth, having twins, so I thought through very carefully how I wanted to do it.”

Her first born, Sophie, was delivered underwater, without painkillers and with Dirk in the birthing pool. She didn’t have a choice with her next, Anna, who was born prematurely. She decided to have her third baby at home. TWO midwives and the children were present at the birth. “They sat cuddled up on the sofa next to Dirk and the au pair. I was screaming and grunting and Sophie was pretty disgusted with the blood.” Wasn’t that damaging and traumatic?

“Possibly. But I think it helped the girls bond with Rose and see that birth is a normal part of everyday life.” Wasn’t it voyeuristic? “Possibly. But I think the pros outweighed the cons.”

The family rarely visits a doctor. “I’ll only go for a diagnosis in order to find out whether the illness is infectious and what the long-term effect will be.’ She relies instead on herbal remedies, homeopathy, eating healthily and fasting once a year during Lent. “We eat a lot of salads made from weeds, wild flowers and hedgerow herbs.”

Adrienne decided not to vaccinate her children against anything. “I read extensively and felt the risks were greater than the benefits. The well-documented hazards of vaccine are brain damage, convulsions, a damaged immune system and death.” She looks at her feet.

Her attitude to personal hygiene is alternative as well. She didn’t wash her children’s hair for two years and now washes it only occasionally. “I have friends who spend six weeks letting the gunk out – you have to wear a hat because it’s so disgusting – and, after that, you have lovely shiny hair.”

I’M ON MY back on a bed with my legs over a woman’s shoulders. She pulls my supine body. Suddenly a man in an anorak appears on the roof outside the window of her first-floor Beauchamp Place room.

“Oh, don’t worry about him. They’re all fur coat and no drawers around here,” the woman responds curiously.

The woman is Chryssie Fitzgerald, Princess Diana’s personal health therapist. Yesterday she was exposed in the News Of The World as a former Madam and dominatrix.

Chryssie, 45, was convicted by Marylebone magistrates in 1983 for running a brothel. Now she runs an alternative health clinic in Knightsbridge and is married to Keith Rodrigues, who taught Diana kick-boxing.

I met Chryssie last month for my first and only treatment. As she pulled my legs over her shoulders, she said the position would help elongate my spine and alleviate my back problem.

It wasn’t a technique that had been used on me during four years of physiotherapy and osteopathy, but no matter. At least I was fully clothed. And I assume the man on the roof was inspecting the gutter. My appointment had been hard to get. I was six months pregnant, suffering from sinus and reckoned reflexology would be kinder on Junior than antibiotics. Outside the clinic is a sign displaying the Chinese word for health. You ring the bell to be let in at street level, then knock to have the door upstairs unlocked. Chryssie has a genial, caring presence but surprises with her looks. She has neither a trim figure nor radiant complexion to make a client envy her therapies. But she has a rousing manner that would enthuse the residents of an old people’s home. The room contains a little bit of alternative everything, apparently in the hope that something might work. I saw a huge amethyst trained, I think she said, on the pituitary; a framed poem (or was it a prayer?) to the colon; feng shui mirrors; statuettes of cats; certificates for her non-surgical facelifts and some unpronounceable Chinese treatments.

Chryssie starts massaging my feet to release blocked energy, hoping to fight disease in related parts of the body.

She treats the person as a whole, attending every acupuncture point. “Bless you little toe, ah, bless you,” she whispers, pummelling my toe. She looks me straight in the eyes and is a friendly, no-nonsense type. She asks me what I do. I say I am a journalist, and ask for an interview. She agrees, sets a date and suggests I have colonic irrigation – an idea at which I balk. I can do without the introduction of warm filtered water into my intestines.

I look out for Princess Diana in the waiting room as I leave, but she is not there, neither is another client, Rula Lenska. Instead there are a couple of rastafarians.

I pay £40 for my appointment. Chryssie gives me a hug and tells me to sit down and drink a cup of fruit tea. It takes away the nasty taste of the Bach flower remedy, a potion made from plants to deal with my emotional symptoms.

Later Chryssie’s receptionist cancels our proposed interview an hour before we are due to meet. “Chryssie had a miscarriage four, I mean two, months ago and needs time to get over it,” she explains. I call five times subsequently, but she does not reply. The next I hear of her is in the Sunday papers.

IT IS undisputed that hospital admission for asthma has increased steadily in Britain over the past 20 years; for children, the admissions graph goes uphill at 45 degrees. One in 10 suffer from asthma, a huge increase over the past few years. Nitrogen dioxide from exhaust fumes has been similarly increasing in the air: twice as high as 20 years ago.

Children on bicycles, engulfed in a cloud of exhaust smoke from a passing bus, accompany worried articles about our smelly and damaged world. It is surprising, then, to hear from two world experts that the incidence of asthma is no higher in cities than it is in the country. A recent survey in Scotland found that it was just as bad in Skye as in the centre of Aberdeen. Another survey compared post-Cold War industrial East Germany to clean West Germany and, again, found levels just the same.

And as for the hated ozone layer, Peter Barnes, Professor of thoracic medicine at the Royal Brompton Hospital, says: “You’d expect the ozone level to be higher in cities, but it’s not. Ozone is formed by nitrogen dioxide and oxygen coming together, catalysed by sunlight. In the city, the ozone reacts again with the nitrogen dioxide to form oxygen. So the levels of ozone are actually higher in the country.”

Really knowledgeable people, like Professor Barnes and Dr Andy Bush, Senior Lecturer in Paediatrics at Royal Brompton, are willing to admit ignorance. The underlying cause of asthma remains a mystery, and the two experts do not pretend otherwise. “There are two issues,” said Dr Bush. “What is causing asthma in the first place; and if you’ve got asthma, what makes it worse?

“There’s quite a lot of evidence that pollutants can make asthma worse if you’ve got it, but I suspect they’re not actually causing asthma.” But the disorder attracts theories from the under-informed as irresistibly as cot death, anorexia, ME or any other mysterious medical horror of modern life.

Anti-pollutionists blame the increase on exhaust fumes; anti-smoking campaigners point to women smoking during pregnancy; anti-stress obsessives say it is overwork and anti-central-heating fanatics blame house-dust mites, a warm, modern house being a breeding paradise.

In trying to find answers, volunteers – asthmatic and non-asthmatic – undergo grim tests. They endure up to six hours in various kinds of polluted air in an exposure chamber, sometimes working on an exercise bicycle. “The tests are controversial,” said Professor Barnes, “because to get any effect you have to use high levels of pollution. If you do tests with nitrogen dioxide, you can’t detect the effects; but what seems to happen in real air is that if you have nitrogen dioxide mixed with sulphur dioxide, then you do have an effect.

“That’s the concern: pollutants are amplifying each other, and the combinations are what cause trouble.”

WHAT is clear is that asthmatics are all different and no one theory will account for all cases. Sylvia Dowding is south-east regional organiser for the National Asthma Campaign. Its aims are to fund research, build awareness and offer support. Her son, 25, had severe childhood asthma which is now controlled. Mrs Dowding feels that pollution can be a trigger. “If asthma is there already, pollution can bring it on. But when my son was young he had to spend a night in London for some tests. We thought the city air might be dreadful for him, but actually we had one of the best nights ever. It just shows how individual the problem is.”

The pollution theory is positively harmful, she says. “People might think, well, there’s nothing to be done, and give up taking medication, or give up trying to find the true reasons for it.”

Her son has been a smoker since he was 15, with no ill-effects on his asthma. “You need a tube to soothe the tube” as the wry asthmatic Joe Follows says to the hero of Ferdinand Mount’s novel Of Love and Asthma – a charming love story written by a man who knows just what it is like to be “a member of the great community of the bronchially strangulated”. The smoking asthmatic, like the chocolate-eating fatty or the one-lunged long-distance cyclist, is simply putting two fingers up to health theorists. Surely a good thing, even if it is medically slightly mad?

Dr Bush, though, has a thing about smoking and is convinced – though it is still only a theory – that passive smoking is an underlying cause of asthma. He cites a study in the Isle of Wight which showed that women who smoke in pregnancy are more likely to have babies with childhood asthma. In the second half of pregnancy, the baby’s tubes increase in size, but they don’t if the mother smokes. “The Government has breathtaking hypocrisy when campaigning for the health of the nation while allowing cigarette advertising,” he says. “Smoking in front of a child is a form of child abuse. My 15-year-old son tells me that about three-quarters of his friends are smoking.”

What the great doctor says may well be true, but there is a whiff of the hobby horse in his words.

Asthma is also being diagnosed more than it used to be and doctors admit that this is part of the reason why numbers are going up. ‘A lot of grown-ups say, ‘I always had a bad chest’,” said one south London GP. ‘Now almost any child who gets slightly wheezy at night is said to have asthma.” PROFESSOR Barnes said: ‘But an attack is an attack. You can’t hide it. And the increase in hospital admissions shows that asthma is getting worse.” In the waiting room at Dr Bush’s paediatric clinic, there were different things said about the pollution question.

The mother of Toni Watson, 16, from Shoreham-by-Sea, said: ‘We moved to the coast: we thought it would be the end of Toni’s asthma. But it’s been far worse. Perhaps it’s the main roads nearby, or the factories. We don’t know. We took Toni to Disney World in Florida in 1993 and for that whole fortnight she was fine. My other daughter has no problems with allergies in London, but when she stays with us she’s always coughing and sneezing.” The mother of Esther Grew, 13, said: ‘I do believe pollution makes it worse. We live at Wallington in Surrey. It used to be a village, now it’s so busy with cars going through to Croydon, it’s disgusting.”

Mike Lacey, father of nine-year-old Rasmus, said: ‘We live at Heston, three-quarters of a mile from the runway at Heathrow. We moved from Denmark last year. Rasmus hadn’t had any trouble there but it’s been really bad here.”

Farah, 11, who goes to Graveney School in Tooting, added: ‘I always take my inhaler before games: swimming and PE bring my attacks on. My asthma’s about the same in the town and in the country. But I’m allergic to cats.’ Mrs Turner, mother-of-three from Chingford, said: ‘My son has hay fever, my daughter Robin has asthma and the baby has the first signs of eczema. I’ve asked the doctor, ‘Where should we live? I want to get rid of this’. But there’s no simple answer. And you can’t get a doctor to tell you that traffic pollution’s bad for asthma. Perhaps it’s a conspiracy, to stop everyone moving out of towns into the country.”

The diary of a sufferer JOE Pitura-Riley (now three) would shout, scream and cough at night, and awaken at least six times, writes Caroline Phillips. His mother Annette was exhausted and could never sleep more than two hours for being at her son’s side.

If ever Annette or husband David, a corporate video presenter, allowed Joe into the chilly garden, he’d be wheezy and chesty. If Joe even ran to the bottom of the garden, he would gasp and rasp. And whenever he caught a cold, it would go straight to his chest and he’d have to be hospitalised. Joe was admitted to Guy’s hospital six times between the ages of 18 months and eight years.

The first time Annette took him to hospital, he was eight months old. She was traumatised. ‘I asked the doctor whether Joe was going to die,” says Annette, 33, a literature student.‘He had started to turn blue and looked so scared. I felt so helpless for this little baby who couldn’t get air into his lungs.”

I SLAMMED on the brakes of the car in heavy Christmas traffic. Adrian, my fiancee, got out and walked off. So I abandoned the vehicle, door open, in the middle of Kensington High Street.

Motorists behind hooted. I yelled to Adrian that if he didn’t want his car left there, he’d better collect it. Then I hurled the keys to him – or at least to a place estate agents would have considered within his walking distance.

Passers-by, captivated by the domestic soap but looking discomfited, pretended they weren’t watching. I huffed off, collected later by the kindly Adrian in his retrieved car. He’d complained about my driving. Leaving the car to drive itself had seemed a perfectly rational way to react. I’m pregnant. We’ve had 13 weeks of this madness. I’m normally slightly Mediterranean, but never like this.

In the week of the abandoned-car incident we went to a Sunday service in St Mary Abbot’s, seeking a venue in which to marry so that the bun-in-the-oven doesn’t come from a single-parent family when his father is away on business trips. We’ve been together nearly five years and I’ve been wearing the Phillips rock for one, so it’s not so much shotgun, but more of an about-bloody-time wedding.

The service started, and my betrothed said something suspect. So what does a girl do? Say shhh? Course not. Stomp out, that’s what. Flying past the congregation in Ferrari-red coat, bereft of keys and money. Then spend the rest of the day, happy as Santa, visiting friends and forgetting to go home for our lunch party.

I knew I was enceinte when the pregnancy test – well, four actually – showed positive. It seemed to me that the first three came from tampered stock, thus necessitating a fourth test. I was several loaves short of a picnic even then. Luckily, the beloved, watching Silence Of The Lambs, was in cheery mood when I broke the good news.

Immediately I suffered the most common complaint of pregnancy. Worry. First worry was who to have it with, so to speak. I chose John Malvern who combines professional brilliance with a sense of humour and a senior post at Queen Charlotte’s. A rare combination in a man.

Since then, like a third to half of all pregnant women, I’ve suffered from the misnomer of morning sickness. More like morning, noon, afternoon and middle-of-the-night sickness. And show me a cigarette and I rush to the bathroom.

Then came the gas, heartburn, burgeoning 38 double-D cups, indigestion, emotional instability, crying five times in a day, reduced libido, wanting a Thai curry in the middle of the night and dizziness.

My sense of smell has become bloodhound strong. People smell. Not just pongy, body-odorous types, but everyone. A friend once told me she always knew when she was pregnant when she could smell women menstruating. I thought she was bonkers.

STUART Carroll, 42, was head of litigation and a senior partner at Nabarro Nathanson, a leading London law firm. He ran major cases of commercial litigation – acting for disputing governments and sports and entertainments personalities. He earned a salary in the hundreds of thousands. ‘More,’ says Stuart, ‘than a chief executive of a publicly quoted company earns.’ And there he was in the glossy corporate brochure – looking serious, professional, highly motivated and dangling his glasses authoritatively. But now he’s ‘taking off’ the rest of his life. He has stopped working – forever. ‘I hated the English winters, going to work in the dark and coming home in the gloom. So I’m living on an island where the climate makes me feel alive.’

What does he say when people ask him what he does? ‘That I enjoy myself,’ he answers, sitting by his villa poolside on St Bart’s. ‘Then they ask me what I do, and I say that I live on a Caribbean island, snorkel, swim, read and lie in the sun for 12 months of the year.’ Will he never work again? ‘I think there’s a very good chance.’

Before leaving his job in March, he had been working 12-16 hour days, six days a week, jockeying between London and New York.

‘I was wishing my life away by working and being frustrated that I couldn’t do other things because I didn’t have time, or because I used work as an excuse for not doing them. I spent my time saying ‘I can’t do this, I’m too tired and I’ve got busy meetings next week’.’

HE HAS never married and has no dependents. ‘I’ve always been guilty of putting work first – to the detriment of relationships. But I’ve had relationships that have lasted a few years.’ So he decided to up and off. ‘I thought ‘I’ve got to do it when I’m young enough to keep my options open’. This isn’t a mid-life crisis and it’ll be harder to make changes as I get older. I’ve still got time to make mistakes and fall flat on my face.’ He called together the four most senior partners in the firm – with whom he had worked for 12 years – and told them he’d decided to resign. ‘I said ‘I want to live in the place I want to live in and do all the things I want to do while I’m young’.’ The partners were dumbstruck. ‘There was a great deal of shock. They didn’t want me to go and asked me to think about it.’ Stuart didn’t need to think. He sold his three-bedroom Victorian house in Richmond and decided to live off the capital and its interest. He didn’t have a car. And he didn’t mind leaving his friends. In fact, he thought he’d probably see more of them in the Caribbean. So as soon as he had completed his notice period, he jumped on a plane.

He is 6ft and work-out lean. He has the face of a hard-nosed litigator, and one that is also enquiring, intellectual and kind. He wears expensive clothes – Paul Smith, Armani and St Laurent – which now dangle disconsolately in his villa cupboards alongside his new daily clothes – swimming trunks. He’s even-tempered, reserved and solitary.

He was brought up in London’s East End. His mother was a teacher, his father an accountant. Stuart went to a comprehensive. ‘It was awful. I didn’t start learning until I was 19 when I went to Tottenham Technical College for a year to do A-levels.’ Then he did a University of London law degree. He has a first-class mind. ‘I did the Law Society professional exams on my own. I couldn’t see any point in wasting time travelling to and from Lancaster Gate when I was living in Hackney. So I borrowed the course notes off a friend who had attended – and I passed and he failed.’ AGED just 23, he went into the law and became a partner at the unusually young age of 28.

These days he lives in a huge rented villa with a maid and swimming pool overlooking the ocean. Every day he visits the patisserie, then swims, snorkels and lies on a beach with white sand, turquoise water and reefs. Then he’ll sit in a cafe, sip cafe au lait and read Emma, Wuthering Heights, Ivanhoe or Pride and Prejudice. ‘I want to read all the classics I never read at school.’

His arduous morning is followed by a lunch of fresh local fish and an afternoon of sitting under a palm tree dangling his feet in glistening water or snoozing in the gazebo. He also draws, paints, learns French, does a strenuous form of yoga (‘hanging off walls and so on’) sees friends, travels and learns the lambada. When he tires of the island, he’ll move elsewhere. ‘I feel much better about myself,’ he says, ‘I’m living a more worthwhile and rounded life. I don’t have any regrets and I feel I’m going forward.’ But he is unemployed. Does he feel a loss of identity or self worth? ‘Not at all; I’ve never been worried about status.’

LIONA is 12 and has never smiled. She is physically handicapped, doesn’t speak and doesn’t play. Then she was taken to Thorpe Park on an outing. Suddenly her classmates gathered round her excitedly. Liona was smiling. This was Kids Out, an event involving thousands of boys and girls, including 2,300 from London. As Liona gave her first smile, other disabled and deprived children elsewhere were at 100 similar events.

This was an annual day out for children with special needs, started in 1990, organised by Rotary clubs and Littlewoods and funded with money from race nights, raffles and bands to sponsorship.

Putney Rotary Club President Alan Davies talked 150 businessmen into taking the day off work to drive 300 local children, with police escorts and orange balloons, to Thorpe Park. And the Metropolitan Police provided the lunch boxes they have when they go on uptown demonstrations: egg or corned beef sandwich, juice, Twix and apple.

I meet Alan at 9am at Paddock School, Roehampton. A girl sits in a wheelchair, head dropped backwards. ‘You are a pretty girl,’ says headmistress Nora Evans, affectionately. Another child stops and hugs Nora and strokes her hair. ‘Smooth hair,’ she intones. ‘Yes, very smooth,’ replies Nora. The child is autistic and suffers obsessions, the latest for smooth hair.

‘Where’s your hearing aid? We’re going on a picnic today,’ a teacher tells a youngster, in sign language. The child jumps, exuberantly. Nearby another is strapped into a wheelchair, his tongue lolling and his wrists bound loosely together. His face lights up with pleasure at the news. Four classes, ages 7 to 16, with severe learning difficulties and profound and multiple disabilities are coming on Kids Out.

In the car park by the windmill on Wimbledon Common we meet the others. Hundreds of youngsters, blind children from Linden Lodge, and disadvantaged ones chattering animatedly. A Rotarian clown squawks amid the parked cars and the mayor of Wandsworth looks on with her chain of office over her raincoat.

Eleven-year-olds Paul and Cally are in our black Audi coupe when I return. ‘This yours?’ demands Paul, cheerfully. ‘Well I gotta tell yer, you’re sitting in the back.’ Then he plays happily with the electric windows. ‘Put your head in the window. I promise I won’t chop it off.’ Paul looks at my fiance, Adrian. ‘So who’s this Adrian? You love him? You been to bed with him?’

These boys are from Chartfield School, Putney, a school for maladjusted children. (A ‘delicate’ school, says one teacher.) Cally is sensitive, gentle featured and reticent about his illness. But Paul is bullish about being dyslexic and asthmatic.

Three schoolmates in another car chip in. One has cystic fibrosis, another severe learning difficulties. ‘I was bullied at school,’ says the third, dolefully.

PAUL sings ‘Hit the road, Jack,’ as we set off. I say he is a groovy guy. ‘I ain’t gay,’ he responds, heatedly. Do they want crisps and chocolate? ‘I don’t have colourings, I’m allergic,’ he says. For miles up the A3 we can see nothing but cars with purple streamers and Kids Out balloons. Cally says that he wants to be a doctor, to save people’s lives. ‘Don’t,’ implores Paul. ‘You’re too short and won’t be able to reach the bed.’ They discover Adrian works in a bank. ‘Why don’t you rob it? I won’t tell anyone,’ says Paul, waggishly. ‘That’s bad,’ says Cally.

All the children are let into Thorpe Park for free. Their £10 ticket charge is waived and adult helpers pay less than half price. Thorpe Park is buzzing with children in wheelchairs, walking unsteadily, running chaotically and beaming genially. We go rowing, sit in a spinning tea cup, hazard a dinghy on the Depth Charge daredevil water slide, eat from the Sweet Palace and watch virtual reality. They scream with the thrill and the fear. Then they stand mesmerised by two ducklings. The Rotarians began in Britain in 1911, solid citizens and prominent businessmen dedicated to worthy causes. Normally straight laced, they have a fuddy-duddy image. The battle over female membership lasted seven years in the States. But they raised £67 million to immunise children worldwide against polio. And now Paul and Cally are standing joshing in front of me. Paul says he wants to drive home in a BMW or Mercedes. A jolly Rotarian offers his, ‘clapped out Peugeot with bank burgling equipment in it.’ The children look gleeful.

IF YOU want a rabbi to live with you for a week or so, at a charge of £1,000 plus expenses for seven days, Rabbi Martin Felt is your man. In America, the personal nutritionist has replaced the fitness trainer as the ultimate status symbol, and Madonna, Cher and Michael Jackson take theirs on tour. Now Martin, a 40-year-old American kabbalistic rabbi turned nutritionist, has brought the practice to London.

Frequently he lives with clients, whether individuals or families, for two intensive weeks. Sometimes he goes on holiday or business trips with them, as far afield as Los Angeles. Other times he flies to Bahrain or Kuwait to offer advice or rejuvenation programmes.

Martin is, for example, live-in personal nutritionist to businessman Avi Nissanni and his family in Hampstead. ‘I’ve lived with them for a week or two four times in the last six months. I’ve changed his body chemistry, massaged them, cooked for them, taught his family how to prepare food, looked after his wife, exercised with them, and taught them how to stretch, breathe and meditate.’ Martin, who is soon to accompany the family on a trip to America, has two dozen such ‘very wealthy’ private clients. Many of his clients (‘mostly women from SW1 and SW3′) simply lack a feeling of general well-being. Others suffer from chronic tiredness, anxiety or depression. But he specialises in degenerative diseases, and has worked extensively with cancer, arthritis and Aids. He believes food is the best medicine.

He has just published a book, Eat Yourself Fit with the Felt Formula, to help you ‘discover the food plan to change your life’, and promising immediate and extraordinary results. A questionnaire helps you interpret your symptoms and find your individual Felt formula for eating, to bring your body back into balance. But he prefers to meet clients, preferably for four hour-and-a-half consultations, at a cost of £70 each. ‘I’ve seen hundreds of thousands of people over the years,’ he claims.

He came to Britain eight years ago to escape American health radicalism. He doesn’t believe in extreme diets or megadoses of vitamins, smokes ‘10 cigars a year and the occasional cigarette’, and eats his share of junk food. ‘I’m not a phoney food faddist.’

He sees outpatients in his one-bedroom, student digs-style flat, with posters of Indian deities on the wall, amid the alternative books and dirty crockery in the kitchen. He diagnoses with a conventional blood test (£59) and extensive questions. ‘Have you had any infection over the last few weeks? Any specific pain? Any gas, belching or flatulence? Are you short-fused, irritable or volatile?’ He is efficient and his diagnosis very precise.

He tells me not to mix proteins and carbohydrates (to aid digestion), cut down on acid-forming foods (the body stores toxins, which acid exacerbates), not to eat bread (yeast ferments in the stomach), and to take Solgar and BioCare supplements (food capsules represent a third of his treatment). MARTIN is dressed in dark colours, and has an intense face and curly hair. He’s extremely knowledgeable but weird and controlling. He talks, sometimes with his hands in the air, with his loud voice rising, saying things like: ‘You have the institutionalisation of the mythological basis of a culture anthropologically manifested in a country with a psychic nature phenomena.’ The phone rings incessantly and he talks at leisure: ‘Not a disturbance, nice to hear from you…’

His method is a sensible integration of Western and Eastern medicine. Later I followed some of his advice and found it made a positive difference. Atmospheric pollution and stress, he says, affect the chemical balances of our bodies, changing the genetic basis of health: everything is bio-chemical; most physical and mental ailments can be attributed to the food we eat; and eating yourself fit, alert and energetic, and to the correct body weight, is simply a matter of knowing what to eat and when. ‘The foods fuelling the body must be accurately and metabolically precise for whatever disease or stress imbalance is going on.’

Martin was brought up in Philadelphia where his father sold insurance and his mother was a university administrator; a ‘just above working-class’ family. He gained a degree in law, political science and history. Thereafter, none of his dietary research was carried out in an institution or university.

His system, which has taken 10 years to develop, stems from his training with his ‘mentor’ Dr Kaushik, an Indian medical doctor, ‘a Hindu and Buddhist’, who taught him Ayurvedic and Chinese medicine, meditation, homeopathy and yoga. ‘I lived and studied with this man for six years in the Seventies.’

In addition, he’s studied herbalism, re-birthing, clinical nutrition, naturopathy, and body work from osteopathy to Rolfing. ‘I experienced all these things myself.’ There is, he says, nothing wrong with being a jack of all trades.

His work culminated in 1987 in a doctorate of divinity at Shiloh seminary in America, where he studied mysticism and the link between science and spirituality. He calls himself an ordained kabbalistic ‘rabbi’, ‘an esoteric and non-pulpit position’. This isn’t a rabbinical ordination recognised by Orthodox Jews, who compare it to a divinity graduate calling himself a ‘mystical vicar’.

Martin has three young children, all living abroad, by three different women. He’s not married to any of them, has already been married twice and supports the children. ‘My work has always been a priority.’ What’s he like? ‘I’m tempestuous, volatile, cataclysmic and mercurial.’ Can’t he transform himself with his food? ‘I am. Things don’t change overnight.’ Aren’t things meant to change radically and swiftly? ‘On different levels. I’m not holding myself up as a guru.’

IT IS a truth universally acknowledged that a single woman in possession of a fortune must be in want of an alternative therapist. At least that’s the world according to Princess Diana, who has just been seen stepping out of the latest fashionable foot doctor’s surgery, probably en route to Manolo Blahnik via a touch of colonic irrigation. But this is a truth on which the Princess and I agree. Because I am also a therapy junkie.

We’re the A Team – people with analysts, acupuncturists, accountants, architects, allergy therapists and Alexander Technique teachers. Been there, done that, got the green pesticide-free T-shirt. There! It’s out. (But only after major advisory consultations with my shiatsu masseuse, reflexologist and homeopath.) We’re the sensitive types who sit in offices (if we have to work) with an ioniser nearby to purify the air, a lumber roll, stocks of horse-sized vitamin pills and a water purifier from which to drink. Aromatherapy essential oils burn in a dish nearby to overcome our obsessive hatred of Gitanes.

We believe we’re all addicted (whether to chocolate, heroin, shopping or caffeine) and use words like rageaholic. We’re addicted to finding things wrong. We are also, of course, hopelessly self-conscious and obviously self-absorbed.

At home we hide books like Women Who Love Too Much and What Women Want. Almost any book on recovery (a key A Team word) while we wait for a book on self-help recovery. If we thought the neighbours couldn’t hear, we’d play music from Puerto Rican rainforests or New Age dolphin gurgles to help extend relaxation and awareness. We yearn for weekends in Tyringham Naturopathic Clinic eating grapes and soya bean casserole while sitting in a seaweed bath.

I have tried most of these things. I have acupuncture regularly, allowing a practitioner to play voodoo dolls with me and right an imbalanced liver which has a channel flowing up my big toe. I learned Alexander Technique until I almost died of boredom. (For weeks the tutor teaches you how to get out of a chair and sit down again. It was worse than the severe riding accident which got me there.) When I wanted to lose weight, I visited a Chinese kinesiologist (tests muscles to diagnose food allergies). I can’t remember what he said, but I bet I had some.

I’m hooked on Ayurvedic massage (two people massage you) and Indian rope massage (where a man swings from a rope to massage you with his feet). I’ve even been to Balham to have my feet done by a Metamorphic technique practitioner who says the foot from toe to heel corresponds to the pre-natal period from conception to birth.

Alongside Princess Diana, I’ve had reflexology, in which areas of the soles correspond to organs of the body and the feet are probably the key to the entire workings of your mind.

I’ve had colour therapy and gem therapy; pill-popped homeopathic remedies, taking substances so diluted they’re like a drop of liquid in the Baltic Sea; tried Bach Flower Remedies for negative emotional states; and been in a flotation tank with saline solution to stimulate the body’s production of happy hormones.

In Hong Kong, I tried herbalism and daily drank tea probably made of bull’s horn and fish ear, which proved handy for menstrual tension; resident in Sydney, I had iridology, which can diagnose the entire nervous system from the surface of the iris.

It’s easy to laugh. But whether you have spots, tennis elbow or major depression, it’s obvious to me that you need rolfing, past-life reconstruction or hands-on healing. If all else fails, you can have your aura photographed for a tenner or nip off for a self-realisation weekend workshop (another key word that, workshop, in the A Team) in the South of France. We don’t even mind too much if the therapist is unregulated and a former management consultant.

The big question is why? Is it too much money, time, lack of self-worth or guilt that has led the ladies who lunch (or work) to have reflexology instead of pasta in Beauchamp Place?

I’ve had my share of illnesses, operations and emotional traumas. But I suffer no more from physical ailments and psychic malaise than your average citizen. Probably less. I’m not a hypochondriac. But I believe in holistic treatment, in which the patient’s mind, body, diet, lifestyle and emotional state are considered alongside Western medicine.

We live in a society in which orthodox religion has been forgotten (priests no longer have the answers for our troubles). We often have a sense of powerlessness and lack of worth. So we search for answers and ways to fix ourselves, seeking remedies to help us feel in control of our lives. Religion gave us rules. Now there aren’t any rules so people have to find something else to give meaning to their lives. Eastern religion and gurus from America do nicely.

We no longer believe in original sin or spend our lives trying to atone for Adam and Eve’s hash-up. Now the onus is on the individual. Psychotherapy, which is all about realising the self and balancing the opposing forces of good and bad, has replaced religion. But psychotherapy is painful and hard work. Sitting under a purple pyramid is quicker. Instead of original sin, we now have to deal with childhood. Which is something we’ve set up as a false icon, thinking it should have been an idyllic period of innocence. (But ‘They f*** you up your Mum and Dad . . .’) So we’ve all had damaged childhoods and been abused (another key A Team concept). We’re all insecure and have an inner child who’s in a bad way. We need anything to help us get over the drama of having been a child. The problem is that we’ve forgotten that our difficulties are just part of the human condition. Even Princess Diana’s.

DIANA’S GUIDE TO ALTERNATIVE THERAPY CHIROPRACTIC
She regularly receives treatment and in 1991 was made patron of the Anglo-European College of Chiropractic.

ACUPUNCTURE
Oonagh Toffolo has visited the Princess since 1989 to stimulate the body’s ‘meridians’ – invisible energy paths on the skin – with needles.

AROMATHERAPY
Receives treatment from Sue Beechey, of Aromatherapy Associates in Fulham, using different oils for different effects – eg citrus oils to stimulate; basil and camomile to relax.

REFLEXOLOGY
Yesterday it was revealed that the Princess has been having her feet massaged, stimulating the blood supply and nerves and relieving tension.

COLONIC IRRIGATION
In September 1992 rumours were rife after she attended the Hale Clinic on a day when colonic irrigation practitioners were offering treatment.

HOLISTIC MASSAGE
Stephen Twigg started providing deep tissue massage in the late Eighties as part of his holistic approach (the belief that the health of mind, body and spirit are co-dependent). Sacked in 1992 after talking to the Press.

ASTROLOGY
Visits Frederick Lyle, who has a reputation for making observations in psychological, rather than astrological, language.

HARLEY Street psychoanalyst and phobia expert Michael Whitenburgh, 41, a neat and smallish man with watery eyes and a rubicund face, arrived an hour late. He’d called after we should have started and said in a measured voice: ‘I’m going to be half an hour late, my sister has just died.’ He didn’t want to reschedule.

‘Some people choose the most inconvenient time to die,’ he said, surprisingly flippantly in his Liverpudlian accent, as he arrived. He sat cosily beside me rather than at the desk in his monumental consulting room. It was only 11.30am and he smelled of alcohol. (He said he’d been drinking the night before, but I had my doubts. Later on the phone he said: ‘Well, I had a brandy that morning.’) And as the interview progressed, something in his manner and what he said rang alarm bells. I actually had this creepy feeling that maybe his sister hadn’t died at all. Whitenburgh is promoting this as national Phobia Awareness Week. Today he will be at London’s St Giles Hotel as part of his countrywide campaign to educate the public on phobias and let them know that permanent help is available.

You might chuckle about retrophobia (the fear of returning to work after a holiday), erythrophobia (fear of blushing) or alektorophobia (fear of chickens), but phobias are serious things. He believes that 90 per cent of the population has a phobia, and he claims to have ‘cured 12,000 people’ in 15 years. But there’s nothing on earth that scares him. ‘I can honestly say I am frightened of nothing.’

Whitenburgh, who also runs the private School of Stress Counselling clinic in Liverpool, has recently had spectacular media coverage which has, so far, generated 1,700 phone calls. He is booked solid for the next month with eight new patients a day (at £65 for a 45-minute session). His team of five in Liverpool has monitored all calls and identified 200 different phobias. ‘Astonishingly, the most common fear is monophobia (fear of loneliness), closely followed by claustrophobia. The most ridiculous phobias are a fear of buttons (button phobics have to replace their buttons with Velcro fastenings), bagpipes, toilet ball cocks and dwarfs,’ he recites, alarmingly.

Phobias are a result of an outward expression of inner emotional turmoil, he says. The person can’t justify these feelings, so he externalises the internal stress as a phobia. ‘If someone has a powerful emotional experience and sees a spider at the same time, then the spider will be blamed for the experience.’

The effects of phobias are dire. ‘They bring on palpitations, dizziness, cold sweats, panic and depression. They isolate the person, making him lonely. They affect the auto-immune system and lead to heart disease as the emotions pull on the heart strings. It can be devastating. The lady who is frightened of ball cocks can only go to her own toilet. Her life is totally restricted.’

Whitenburgh says he cures phobias in anything from one to six sessions. He gets his subjects to relax by visualising country scenes. Then he makes the patient regress to the time of the original cause of the phobia, bringing out the emotion. This is known as abreacting.

‘Eventually all hell breaks out,’ is the way he puts it. ‘There are emotions and tears. I have never failed, and there is a technical word for this, to bring the person to catharsis in 12 sessions maximum.’ He claims a 100 per cent success rate. ‘I ask anybody who is not satisfied to come back for free treatment. Nobody ever has.’ Symptoms, he says, will never reappear in another form.

He glosses over his ‘hotchpotch’ training, which took place from Liverpool Polytechnic to Switzerland (‘under Professor Doctor Max Lucher’ of Basle University. ‘I’d prefer you didn’t mention that,’ he says, without elaborating) and the Vienna School of Psychoanalysis.

I called him later to query his qualifications. He admitted that he’d only spent a month in Basle and six weeks in Vienna. His real training was for 18 months with the Psychoanalytical Institute of Bournemouth. Subsequent enquiries found no trace of such an establishment. When I called again, he remembered that he’d actually trained with the International Association of Hypnoanalysts – a correspondence course supplemented with four one-day seminars.

Whitenburgh did undergo psychoanalysis himself. The son of a building manager, he has (‘had, I mean,’) six sisters, a ‘very happy’ childhood, is married to a trainee counsellor and has two children, one of whom has cerebral palsy.

‘When you go through analysis, you become very content within yourself.’ He is controlled as he speaks, giving nothing away with his body. ‘I was in analysis for 10 to 12 weeks, once a week’ – a short time for someone training professionally. The British Psycho-analytical Institute says that its analysts undergo analysis five times a week for at least four years. ‘It doesn’t have to be complicated,’ said Whitenburgh, dismissively. He considers lengthy analysis for trainee therapists outmoded. In fact, in his work as a general psychoanalyst, he tends ‘to keep people for treatment for a maximum of three months’.

Amazingly, anybody can call himself a psychoanalyst: there is nothing illegal in doing so. But Dr Richard Lucas, consultant psychiatrist and external relations officer for the British Psychoanalytical Institute, says: ‘You can’t be a bona fide psychoanalyst (trained in Britain) unless you have received the British Psychoanalytical Society’s intensive training.’

FRINGE therapists might disagree with this and Whitenburgh certainly does. ‘I have permission from the Minister of Health to call my centre a clinic, and I’ve done plenty of training.’

Is he for real? ‘I’ve had 15 years of experience and work to a code of ethics, which includes no sex with the patient and treating him in the shortest possible time. We have professional indemnity, but no one has ever claimed.’

But Dr Lucas says: ‘I wouldn’t recommend this treatment. It might be dangerous. Patients can become very disturbed with unpredictable results, like harming themselves or even contemplating suicide, if they are not treated in a responsible way by someone who has been trained rigorously.’ Whitenburgh demurs. ‘There’s nothing whatsoever dangerous in what I do. My patients are not vulnerable. They’ve tried everything, the pills, the potions. They want my help. I am the catalyst. Once a person abreacts, his life will improve.’

So what then of Whitenburgh’s dead sister? When I called him five days after the interview, he was cagey. He even had trouble remembering her name, only reluctantly disclosing where she’d died and saying he didn’t want her mentioned in the article. Subsequent calls to the registrars and coroners of Liverpool uncovered no record of her death.

Whitenburgh rang later the same day. ‘I’m shaking with aggression. I wasn’t thinking straight on the phone earlier,’ he said. ‘But my sister is not dead. It’s been a practical joke and I only found out this morning. I was on tour when a man who said he was a friend of a friend called to tell me that she’d died. I’ve been away ever since and didn’t want to phone her home. Somebody is really sick. They’ve also sent round the black vans to my home twice to collect my body. We’ve told the police, but they say, ‘What can we do?”

I don’t know what to believe. But one thing I know for sure is that Whitenburgh does have a phobia. ‘Maybe I’m phobic about journalists,’ he said, when we last spoke. ‘I don’t like them.’

CHERRY ROOMES is 43. To date she has lost 13 babies. Anne, Jane, Megan, Edwina, Emily and Eleanor survived long enough to be named. Megan lived for three days and Eleanor for seven and a half months.

THE nursery stands ready and the crib has been redecorated in new broderie anglaise. It is the crib Cherry Roomes slept in as a child. Now it awaits the arrival of a miracle.

To date Cherry has lost 13 babies. Anne, Jane, Megan, Edwina, Emily and Eleanor survived long enough to be named. Megan lived for three days and Eleanor for seven and a half months.

Two children from a previous marriage have survived, but all the other babies died in the womb and with four of them Cherry had to go through labour knowing the child was already dead. Yet next week she hopes to give birth to baby number 16 by Caesarean section. He already has a name, Benjamin.

By safely delivering him, the medical team at King’s College Hospital will be making medical history, and put an end to one woman’s extraordinary saga of love, despair and monumental determination.

Benjamin is already a miracle of human science. For the baby has already undergone the world’s first bone marrow transplant in the womb and he has been kept alive by regular blood transfusions – some of them directly into his heart.

His mother has rare rhesus negative blood. Her husband Geoff, a primary school headteacher, is rhesus positive. Every time Cherry Roomes becomes pregnant, the unborn baby is also rhesus positive, and her body simply attacks and kills it as a foreign invader.

The nursery stands ready and the crib Cherry herself slept in as a baby has been redecorated in new broderie anglaise.

‘I recovered the crib inside and out in 1981, but I’ve never had a baby to put in it,’ she says.

Although she has never heard Benjamin’s cries, she feels she already knows him. She has journeyed from their Kempston home near Bedford to King’s College for one day every week of her pregnancy. At the hospital, she watches the baby on a scanner as he undergoes a complex series of tests. Two albums full of blurry scanner pictures chart Benjamin’s development from seven weeks after conception. Cherry can locate every limb and facial movement from them.

‘To me, it’s like looking at normal photographs. He’s a very strong, fit, healthy baby.’

Cherry Roomes, who says she is talking to us because she wants to help other childless couples, is clearly remarkable, but so then is Dr Kypros Nicolaides, a consultant in foetal medicine and head of the Harris Birthright foetal research centre at King’s. It is he who has refused to be beaten by Cherry Roomes’s problems and, as a result, his relationship with the couple has become intensely close.

She finds it difficult explaining the almost primal instincts that urge her to keep trying and for putting the crushing pain of bereavement behind her, the instinct that has driven her on in the constant, dogged struggle to bear a child that comes from herself and Geoff.

In 1986, convinced they would never conceive, she and Geoff adopted baby Charlotte, then aged 15 months, and a cerebral palsy sufferer. ‘I had two sons already and we had adopted Charlotte, but I felt it would complete the family to have one child that we shared, one of Geoff’s. ‘To be honest, you blank out the pain. You just put it at the back of your mind. If you dwelled on it, you couldn’t cope. If you thought about it, you wouldn’t ever try for another one.

‘I haven’t carried all the babies to the end. A lot of my miscarriages came early. It is a lot more upsetting to carry a child 20 to 35 weeks and then lose it. Your immediate reaction is ‘I’ll never do it again’. But eventually you get over it, because time heals. But it doesn’t get any easier each time one dies.’

She found the death of Eleanor (who was severely handicapped) her worst experience. ‘She may not have been the sort of child that most people want, but we loved her. Her death was desperately painful for us. Nothing could be worse than that. I don’t think I’ll ever get over that completely. I’ll never forget her. We talk about her daily. Her photos are still around.’ With the exception of the death of her first baby, she has seen all of her offspring. ‘I’ve always asked to see them, to hold them, to look at them. They’re not people if you don’t look at them. They have to have identities. If they don’t have identities, there wouldn’t be any point. ‘I have photos of the little ones who have died. You’d be surprised how early a foetus has features, you’re not looking at some horrendous red blob. The photos help you to grieve for the baby.

‘At no time when we have lost a baby have we screamed and yelled and cried in front of Charlotte. You keep your grieving behind closed doors. My husband goes to church every week. I don’t go at the moment, because I’m not the right shape. But we do have very strong religious beliefs. We believe in life after death. Hopefully somewhere our children are all together.’ Dr Nicolaides say: ‘People may think she is mad and I am mad, but I am only trying to do what my patients want. And if that is to help them have children, then that’s what I do.’

There have been five haemorrhages during the pregnancy. During one of them, the Roomes phoned Dr Nicolaides at home in the middle of the night. ‘I just told them to get down to the hospital as fast as they could and I met them there,’ he says. ‘She was all right. She is a very brave woman.’ It was Dr Nicolaides who developed the bone marrow transplant technique which had to be carried out before the baby developed its own immune system, just 12 weeks into the pregnancy when it was less than three inches long. Marrow from Mrs Roomes’s hip was removed under local anaesthetic. It was purified and injected directly into the wriggling baby’s thimble-sized stomach using a hollow needle. The idea was to make him start producing his own rhesus negative blood.

Cherry explained: ‘Benjamin hasn’t got the same blood group as me, which was the idea of the bone marrow transplant.’

It didn’t work. It reduced the rejection process, but Cherry’s blood is still attacking the baby’s red cells. Now, the blood transfusions from Cherry not only top up his blood supply but also confuse his mother’s immune system so that it does not try to attack the growing baby.

‘Now it seems my body doesn’t recognise the baby as totally foreign, so it’s not having an all-out, vicious attempt at killing it, which has happened with my other babies. It’s only a half-hearted one,’ she says calmly, showing little of the emotional stress that must mark each minute of her day.

The transfusions carry their own deadly risks.

‘You never know with each transfusion if it’s going to kill him,’ she said.

‘The last one two weeks ago obviously created a strain on his heart. He was very quiet for several days afterwards, but I could feel him wriggling so I knew he was alive.

‘There is still one more transfusion to go before the birth. I just have not to think about anything going wrong. I have total trust in the team at King’s and I have to think they’re going to get it right.’

Her two sons Grant, 22, and William, 17, from her first marriage survived because the rhesus incompatibility was less severe.

Last year, Dr Nicolaides, who has been their mentor since 1985, offered them new hope with the experimental marrow transplant.

‘I have to believe him,’ she says. ‘It doesn’t take anything away from Charlotte and the boys that we want to have one last try.

‘At the moment, I’m the only one who’s agreed to have this treatment done. But if they don’t have people who are prepared to try, then they are never going to progress.

‘If we can get help and help others at the same time, I think that’s good.’