The secret diary a former of call girl
Revealed in VERY intimate detail: how Belle de Jour quit the high life... for kayaking, ceilidhs and life as a Highland housewife
SHE was the high-class London escort known as Belle de Jour who shot to fame with the bestselling book and TV series Secret Diary of a Call Girl, based on her anonymous online exploits. Now Dr Brooke Magnanti has made a new life in the Highlands where she skis, fishes and – yes – even makes the odd clootie dumpling.
MY love affair with the Highlands started when I was a cook for a summer at a hostel in Glenmore, near Aviemore. I needed some quiet to work as I was over from the US on a visa which expired that September, so my PhD absolutely had to be submitted by then.
Back in Sheffield, I just wasn’t getting any work done, so I took myself off to the Cairngorms because it was the most remote place I could think of. My only other previous trip to Scotland had been to Dundee.
Living in Glenmore made me realise what Scotland has to offer. I could be cooking breakfast at the hostel, writing at lunchtime and be out in the mountains for a few hours every evening.
Later, my husband and I got our fix of the mountains by coming up to Lochaber every holiday for several years, but somehow it was never enough. One day, sitting in our house in Bristol, I’d just finished a research contract and we’d always said we’d move to Scotland one day, so we decided to make one day this day.
We decided to move to the mountains permanently, found a house to rent on the internet and moved within days. My husband initially worked in a shop in Fort William high street, but now works in the fire service, while I write full-time.
We chose Lochaber because we’d done a lot of kayaking in the area, so we knew it well. My husband really likes ice climbing and walking, but I’m more of a fair weather person who’s into boats and kayaking. I rowed competitively at university – I’ve coxed and rowed at Henley – and I’ve always sailed, so Lochaber is like a fantastic playground. My husband drags me out skiing and makes me walk up mountains, while I get him into boats; it’s great that we’re both trying new things.
Lochaber is the best of both worlds – you get the mountains and you get the sea, so you could be doing both in the same day if you really wanted to. If you love the great outdoors, it’s hard to beat. We moved out here for the solitude – some days you just want to be alone with your thoughts. At Glenmore, I inadvertently bagged a lot of Munros, just because they were on my doorstep – but now I can pick the perfect day. Munro baggers from England or the Central Belt have their three days’ holiday and, if they coincide with the worst weather that Scotland has had in 50 years, they have no choice but to psych themselves into going out in it.
I can look out the window and think: ‘Yeah, I’ll do it another time.’ As I’m a writer, I work hard on the horrible days and make myself feel extremely virtuous, which means I’m free to enjoy the good ones without feeling guilty. When we do walk, it’s often to Spean Bridge, across to Creag Megaidh.
Over on the west side, my favourite walk would be to Sgurr Dhomhnuill on the peninsula – not quite a Munro, which means you get it to yourself. You get a spectacular view that shows where all the lochs and roads come together. You can see out to the Small Isles and, on a very clear day from the peak, you can see the Outer Isles. In the winter, we spend so much time skiing in the Nevis Range that we do a lot less walking – it’s funny the way you get very used to the gondola and chairlifts carrying you around the mountain.
Plenty of people ski well into their late years, and I like to think I’ll still be going strong on the slopes in my eighties. Skiing is one of those sports you can do into your later years, like shooting, stalking and fishing, which are really popular in Lochaber.
They are very different to the sort of shooting and fishing I grew up with in Florida, where my redneck family – like all rednecks – love hunting, shooting, fishing. Over here, a completely different type of person shoots and fishes, and people here seem impressed that I know how to bait a hook and gut a fish. Where I grew up, that was just a source of cheap food. The whole tweed thing came as a real surprise.
We recently did a three-day kayaking journey that I’d wanted to do for ages, and every minute was a magical experience. We parked the car at Glenfinnan and paddled down Loch Shiel, and then down the River Shiel to Eilean Shona before coming around to Glenuig, where the fantastic pub is owned by sea kayakers. We then picked up the train to get us back to the car, before collecting the kayaks and going home.
We could have pushed along faster, but for me it is all about the camping. There are lots of bothies that are accessible from the sea, but I prefer a tent. I love kayaking along that stunning shoreline, but what I really enjoy is arriving at a remote camping spot and knowing you’re not going to see anyone else.
I love the ritual of setting up the tent, building the fire, cooking dinner and eating it with one of those incredible West Coast sunsets as the backdrop before having a dram and then sleeping the sleep of the happy and exhausted.
So much of Lochaber has these hidden, perfect little beaches. My favourite is near Glenuig, and has amazing views out to the Small Isles – but unless you approach from the sea, you’d never know it was there. We’ve lived here for over five years now and still find new places all the time.
My husband got a map off a friend in the fire service which showed a secret cave that isn’t even marked on the OS map, so we kayaked around to it and, sure enough, there it was. There were some chalk marks, so some bouldering people had been in climbing around on the inside of the cave, but it was otherwise like our own little secret.
THERE’S an incredible array of wildlife in Lochaber, with deer everywhere, and golden eagles too. When we kayak, we’ll be accompanied by otters and seals, which follow you, sniffing the air and checking you out.
I haven’t seen any basking sharks yet, which is a huge pity, because I’m a massive fan of Tex Geddes’ book Hebridean Sharker. I just loved his energy, where he came back from the war and didn’t know what to do, so he set about using his commando training by setting up a basking shark processing plant on Soay.
We landed on Soay and walked to the memorial to Tex and his wife Jean. We passed a gentleman standing outside a shack, wearing worn-through tweeds and a jumper with the elbows long gone. He had big ginger hair, a big bald patch and a big ginger beard, and was obviously Tex Geddes’ son.
He told us about how they used to fish illegally and how, if anybody was coming out to catch them, the local crofters or fishermen would hang a sheepskin to alert them. It was so brilliantly Whisky Galore.
The further you get away from Fort William, the more pressing the lack of jobs becomes. It’s a real issue in the area because, as soon as they are out of school, most of the kids are off to work in the Central Belt or England.
When we moved to our village in Ardnamurchan, we immediately had a queue of retirees asking if my husband could help move some rocks around their garden or mow their lawn. I think we brought the average age of the village down by at least a decade.
WE are very involved with our village community. It helps that I love to dance, love ceilidhs, and play the banjo embarrassingly badly. As long as you’re willing to throw yourself into local life, people will give you the benefit of the doubt.
I even joined our area’s agricultural society a couple of years ago, as the secretary, although I knew nothing about sheep. I learned how to make all of the things you can enter in the local show, especially empire biscuits and clootie dumplings.
I suggested a home brew category, because we do a lot of home brewing and produce everything from wine and mead to beer. Mead is great – dead easy, and quite a lot of local people have hives in their back gardens.
We’re about a mile from the village pub and like to go there after events in the village, but going to the same pub, night after night, isn’t for me. I love gin and especially whisky – I’m an ambassador for the Wee Nip whisky festival in Inverness – so I’m happy just sitting in my pyjamas in front of a roaring fire, enjoying my home brew or a dram.
We have beautiful views from our house, but more often it’s the people and the animals that provide the real entertainment. At present we have two rams in our front field, and they are great to watch – I never knew they were so clever and such inventive escapers.
I visit Edinburgh and Glasgow when I need a fix of galleries or museums, but the restaurants here are pretty good. Kilcamb Lodge in Strontian is great – we went there for my motherin-law’s birthday and were lucky to get in, because the night before Kate Winslet had arrived by helicopter and taken over the whole place.
The venison at the Boathouse in Kingairloch, the fish at The Whitehouse in Lochaline are great and, if you like fish and chips, the Loch Shiel Hotel in Acharacle is hard to beat. There’s a surprising number of restaurants in the area – the Old Pines in Spean Bridge, the Lochleven Seafood Café near Kinlochleven and the Crannog Seafood
Restaurant in Fort William are all excellent – which is the upside of having a seasonal influx of tourists.
I love the food in this part of Scotland. I was a vegetarian until I moved here, but that’s not going to really work in Scotland – the heather doesn’t taste good and takes a long time to chew. I love proper home-made oatcakes, and the forester that uses our field gives the venison from half a deer as payment. My husband drove a dive boat for a while and he used to get tipped in scallops – happy days.
Having grown up in Florida, I’m a hot weather person. The weather here is a shocker, and the fact that I will put up with it shows how amazing it is to live in this part of Scotland. There are loads of days where you just can’t go out. The worst was that dreadful winter of 2010, our first here, when were snowed in for days and all the pipes froze.
We’re prepared for it now: our house is south-facing, gets the light, has a good fire, good heating, and we need good back-up because the power goes out a lot. There’s a sense of satisfaction when it’s the middle of winter and the power goes out but your fire is already going merrily, and you just pull out the Scrabble and the whisky and that’s your evening’s entertainment sorted.
Back in the States, even from a young age, I was a big fan of bourbon, so appreciating whisky came easily to me. One of the first things we did when we moved up was a tour of Islay’s distilleries – the tour of Ardbeg was the best, but Lagavulin has long been my favourite whisky. Adelphi have built a distillery near us in Ardnamurchan, and it’s been a fantastic boost to the area.
I absolutely love Scottish music. I grew up with American country music and there are quite a lot of similarities, mainly because a lot of folk music in the States has its origins in Scottish music. Now it’s starting to go the other way – it’s interesting to rock up somewhere and hear an American song that I know from my youth with different lyrics and a different name. I like the trad performers, such as Fred Morrison with his pipes, and obviously we’ve seen Blazin’ Fiddles.
We’re not very far from Mary Anne Kennedy’s place and she does a lot of secret shows, where it’s not really a gig, it’s more ‘here are some musicians that are passing through so come along with a box of wine and enjoy yourselves’.
It’s really good that the musical tradition is so strong – you see everyone there, from lots of young people to the guys who are working the ski lifts, who turn up in their vans at the village hall, planning to stay there all night and sleep on the roadside, just to enjoy traditional music.
ITHINK appreciation of traditional Scottish music is something you don’t always get in other areas of Scotland, or in the States. Not that the music here is set in aspic, it’s music of the people.
There are also several Gaelic choirs in the area, and they’re really popular because for lots of people here the language is their mother tongue. I’ve yet to learn more than the odd word – the name of a mountain usually – but the local colleges put on courses for complete beginners. I like it that people are keeping it alive, and especially that young people are taking an interest.
The arts in general are very vibrant in this part of the world. There are lots of writers in these parts, which is why we have the Three Lochs literary festival every second year.
Ali Smith doesn’t live too far away, and many writers come here for inspiration. I am very much into fairytales and local mythology.
It’s not like the 1700s when Glencoe was universally perceived as a savage wilderness, but living in this remote corner of Lochaber still has its challenges. You can’t just pop out to the shops, and you soon find out who will and will not deliver here.
After a while, Fort William feels like a metropolis in which Morrisons is our equivalent of the Selfridges food hall. People go to Oban for a dash of civilisation, and to Inverness for their Christmas shopping. Your horizons can contract, living somewhere as remote as this, and you definitely become better at planning life. But it’s worth it, for the upsides so outweigh the small inconveniences.