I flew home for a few days to see my mother who was recovering from a shoulder operation at our summer house in Germany. Our house sits on the edge of the beautiful Lake Starnberg. It is one of my favourite places in the world. On the horizon the Alps protectively surround it like friendly giants. I’m still mesmerised by the light green texture of the water, its exhilaratingly cooling quality that makes it a little challenge each time you jump in. As much as I love the ocean there is something mysteriously alluring about a lake. Its deep and calm water, opaque at times, and transparent at others, permitting you to see all the way to its muddy floor that is overgrown with dangling plants. As children we used to be quite scared of the water-plants imagining that they could wrap themselves around our little legs and drag us to the bottom of the lake. The perfect serenity of the water fascinates me. How can anything be so still? Often the water is so still it looks like a painting. Not a sound can be heard.

We only spend a few weeks a year at most in this house. Nowadays I spend even less time there but somehow I feel more at home there than in the main house I grew up in. Each morning I would wake up in a huge pink bed with puffy sheets and a lacy pink and white curtain falling down the middle. It could easily be a prop from the set of Marie Antoinette. I have slept in the same bed next to my sister for as long as I can remember. Every morning our whole room is filled with a soft pink light, glowing through the matching pink curtains. I love my morning ritual of opening the big windows and letting in the misty sky with its cool morning air. There is something incredibly romantic about looking out over the lake covered in mist lying there as still and sparkling as a mirror.

At the end of the garden lies a dock, we call it the boat house. There we spend all day in the sun and swimming in the cool water. Most of all I enjoy water skiing on the lake and I have memories of doing so since the age of five. My mother spends her days sitting in the boat toeing us and our friend’s on water skis. This sounds very generous on her part and it is however telling people what to do is also an uncontrollable obsession of hers hence she is a natural born teacher. She loves teaching people how to ski. This activity can go two ways. If you are talented and a quick learner, you are in luck, my mother will love you. She will shower you with flattery and encourage you. If however sport is not really your thing it becomes pretty difficult to get in her good books thereafter. She might forgive you if you pray the rosary with her every night but that’s another story. In the past she has screamed threats and insults at people (mostly her children or nephews but it has also happened to certain friends) after repeated failure to get out of the water. Lucky for us, growing up in an ongoing boot camp means that we are quite good at most sports and pretty resilient when it comes to performing under sever pressure (terror).

This weekend the weather was warm and sunny in that crisp and refreshing way it only gets in autumn. It felt so revitalising to get out of the city and into the green hills and bright yellow fields of Bavaria. As much as I complain about Germany being provincial and small minded, the Bavarian countryside always reminds me that it must have been created by someone who knew a thing or two about sumptuous beauty.

Back in London I head to a fashion meets art (or rather art meets fashion half way) Pringle party hosted by Tilda Swinton and Ryan McGinley. It’s Pringle of Scotland spring/summer presentation – it is still fashion week after all. The photographer McGinley presented his latest installation, a film staring Tilda of course. Hhmmm! Lots of walking around in the Scottish hills I would say. I sat opposite Tilda over dinner in one of the Saatchi Gallery’s bright and huge rooms. She did strike me as a very relaxed and down to earth screen siren although I didn’t really get a chance to chat to her much. I did however speak quite animatedly with the perfectly charming Hans Ulrich Obrist (curator of the Serpentine). It is always refreshing to come across a brainy curator with a healthy dose of humour and energy. We had a little Blackberry versus Iphone debate where he told me quite a funny story regarding David Hockney’s fable for making daily Iphone drawings and sending them out to all his Iphone friends. When Hockney discovered that HO was a Blackberry user he was startled. According to the painter Blackberries are only used by Presidents and accountants. Hans Ulrich countered, albeit after some reflection, that really Iphones are for visual artists only. Indeed I say! Let’s face it – typing even a text message on an Iphone requires a Bachelor in Fine Arts. On the Blackberry however you can comfortably type away, you could write an entire novel if you wanted to. His conclusion: Blackberries are made for literary artists, writers.

Spot on Hans Ulrich, I could not have said it any better. Yes I too am a proud member of the Blackberry brigade. Eat you heart out gadget obsessed Iphone people.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 24th, 2009 at 12:53 pm and is filed under Princess Diaries. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

As September swiftly takes its strides and people begin trickling back from their summer holidays a somewhat fickle energy surrounds London. The weather swings between hot and muggy, T-shirt and gladiator temperatures to frosty jacket and scarf winds the next day. It is utterly unpredictable and I seem to always be getting my attire wrong. I wear thick tights and long sleeves on a steaming day and a flimsy little dress when it’s freezing. My fabulous friend the young designer Wes Gordon (a name to look out for on the fashion circuit – watch his beach bag collection for Bergdorf Goodman) said that seasonal dressing is “so over.” It’s all about layers.

The weather is not the only cause of confusion. London is difficult to navigate on various fronts. For one it’s always crowded. Getting anywhere involves either copious amounts of patience or a lot of elbowing, both equally exhausting although I must to say I rarely find myself exuding the first. What is it with people moving extra slow in cramped spaces?

Further, ones diary entries can be somewhat confusing. Barely three weeks back and I feel up to my neck with parties, weddings, dinners, openings, meetings, boxing classes. I even started taking acting classes – as if I needed another activity!

Over the weekend I was invited to a very old friend’s wedding, thankfully here in London. Weddings can be either lots of fun or very boring so I really try and be as selective as I can about which ones I attend. This wedding was a must because the groom and I go way back. When we were children both he and his sister would come to our summer house every year. Our summer house was always perfect mayhem with all these different kids piled together under the same roof. My mother’s solution to the whims and moods of puberty was organising a sport bootcamp. Tennis, riding, waterskiing – anything remotely active and in the realms of the possible was on the menu. Of course we loved it! Even the most resilient and rebellious twelve-year olds sat quietly at the dinner table after such an exhausting day. One year my siblings and I came back from a survival camp in Scotland where we had fallen in love with abseiling. Henceforth we began abseiling from the castle tower everyday. It was thrilling. The first ledge was perfectly terrifying as you floated in the air for several seconds before you finally reached the tower wall a few feet beneath. Whoever mastered the top ledge became one of the cool kids. I don’t know any other parents who would have not only permitted such activities but actually encouraged them. Most kids therefore loved coming to our annual summer camps.

So Freddie’s wedding was a must, him being one of the suspects in those early memories. His wedding happened to be held at Hampton Court, which as I learnt from the wedding booklet houses the most important Tudor ceiling in the whole country. It is truly a stunning sight. I snuck back into the church after the ceremony and stood marvelling at the ceiling in blissful tranquillity while upstairs hundreds of people were mingling in the beautiful wooden tiled rooms. The ceilings opulence and vivid colour, different from the Baroque and Gothic architecture I’m more familiar with, is very much worth a visit. Even more exciting I found the fact that no one had been wedded in the chapel since Henry VIII wedding to his last bride Catherine Parr. In fact the vows Freddie and Sophie exchanged were the same vows Henry VIII and young Catherine spoke so many years ago.

The wedding was followed by a party in Annabel Goldsmith’s garden. Usually wedding dinners can be lengthy and a little exhausting. However Freddie and Sophie’s host had a much brighter idea. The tent in her garden was decked out with comfy little sofas and tables where people just plopped down to chat while hordes of waitresses walked around with plates of food and delicious drinks. Mini burgers, ham and cheese toasties, salmon and porcini ravioli were paraded around the room in abundance. It was quite refreshing to be served such uncomplicated and easy food that everyone clearly enjoyed. Shortly later Brian Adams sang one of his old time romances, as I reminisced my early teenage years when we blasted his tunes whilst melancholically sitting on our beds. The bride and groom rocked romantically on the dance floor. After that the music luckily livened up a little with a great live band, the lead singer being Freddie’s best man. There was not much waiting around at this wedding. The tunes were punchy and by 10.30 everyone was perfectly sweaty and dishevelled. At most weddings my main effort would be trying not to fall of my chair from sheer boredom at that hour. The key to any good party is keeping the dinner short and cheerful.

The ultimate key to a good wedding however is being fond of the couple. You can then endure almost anything, from bad speeches to bizarre foods possibly even cheesy music and delightfully enjoy a celebration that has none of the above like Freddie and Sophie’s one.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 16th, 2009 at 4:53 pm and is filed under Princess Diaries. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

It’s not easy getting back into the swing of things after being on holiday. It’s made harder returning from a couple of weeks in Africa, Kenya to be precise. Although this was by far my shortest summer ever it felt much more like a holiday than most of my previous ones have. You see, when two weeks is all you get you really make the most of it.

Strangely enough Africa is one of those places in the world I feel drawn towards most. I feel an urge to go back over and over again and to explore more and more. It is not that I necessarily feel I belong there but rather that being in Africa makes me feel I have finally arrived. I travelled quite extensively throughout Asia in my delayed gap year and was very much taken by several of its countries namely Burma, Cambodia and India. The difference is that I do not feel an urge to go back to these countries, at least not as strongly as I feel an urge to travel to Africa each year. So when a friend who just moved out to Nairobi sent me an email describing her first few days there I knew that I needed to drop all my other plans and spend a few weeks on the black continent instead. I spontaneously decided to pull the rip cord on Europe. I had various lovely invitations to Ibiza, Panarea and our house by the lake in Germany (where the rest of my family had congregated) but somehow I felt a strong desire to go, well, back to the land I suppose.

What is it about Kenya that attracts me so, I wonder? For one its people, with their smiley faces and abundance of humour make it special. Rarely have I come across a nation I find it easier to laugh with. I love Kenya’s dry dusty air and its red sandy earth, which sticks to your skin so resiliently. I love watching the slow rhythmic walk of the locals wandering along the narrow roads weighed down with heavy bunches of firewood or simply crouching along the path as if sunken in deepest meditation. I love the fact that time means nothing there, as annoying as it can be when you are waiting for your driver to take you to the airport. However there is something ever so refreshing about Kenya’s timeless serenity. After all, does it really matter whether you arrive somewhere at 2 or at 4?

Maybe it’s an irresistible cornucopia of all those images that exhilarates my senses?

Africa is a place of extreme contrasts and endless possibilities. My original plan was to fly out to Nairobi to see my friend and use Kenya’s capital as a base for further adventures. I loosely had planned to shoot off to Rwanda on a trek into the bush in search of the infamous silverback gorillas. Unfortunately, due to my unwillingness to make any concrete commitments, there were no permits immediately available. Getting such a permit, which allows you to trek after the gorillas, is harder than getting a table at the Waverly in New York. To me that makes perfect sense – after all the gorillas in Rwanda are much rarer than the gorillas at the Waverly.

So, I was back to last minute planning, which from significant first hand experience I recognise involves a certain amount of flexibility to resort to a plan B (sometimes even C or D). Luckily all of my options sounded equally fun so my disappointment was moderate. I found a ranch called Sosian (or maybe it found me?) close to Mount Kenya on an open and vast sandy land. Perhaps it was the fact that it was a ranch but the landscape reminded me somewhat of Argentina. The main differences were lions, stripy hyenas, wild dogs, elephants – pretty much all you hope to see on safari and many more unusual creatures wandering the grounds. It was simply fabulous. I went on game rides rather than game drives – much more entertaining as you can gallop along the plains when bored of looking around. We even saw a lion whilst riding which Charlotte the lovely English trainer said she had never seen before on horseback. I went on a couple of walking safaris accompanied by Steve the Zimbabwean hunk, who runs the camp together with his lovely Scottish wife. He knew pretty much everything there is to know from tracking animals to animal babble, a right old Dr Doolittle in fact. So there I was living it up in Kenya’s Northern splendour diving off waterfalls and gone was all the regret for not having made it into the arms of the gorillas.

I have been to Kenya countless times as my mother has a house by the ocean where we often spend Christmas. I spent my second week there perfecting my sun tan (getting burnt really) doing little more than kite surfing, reading and sleeping. Walking around barefoot all day, the salty seawater on my skin, my hair tussled by the water and the air. Oh yes, and eating copious amounts of fruit. I basically had breakfast three times a day. It was heaven. I felt a little bit like Pippi Longstocking in this big house, no grown-ups in sight to tell to me to go to bed or to brush my hair. It was very different to the perfectly organised household I encounter when my mother is around. Proper cooked meals were replaced by picnics. The food was not served on porcelain plates but taken straight from the fridge and put on the table still in its tupperware. I left our home a little heavy hearted but filled with certainty that I would be back in a few months time, albeit the household then under the firm directions of my mother. This will mean a little less chaos and washed feet but having a good slice of grilled tuna every now and again makes up somehow.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 4th, 2009 at 2:34 pm and is filed under Princess Diaries. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.