MORNING SOAK & SMOKE
9am
Wake up and feel instantly guilty at the late hour. So idle! Office workers will already be at their desks eating sad pots of porridge. Remind myself to be more Princess Margaret and less worried about the little people. Margaret was always woken at nine by a servant carrying in papers and breakfast on a tray. But scrambled eggs weren’t on the menu (too common!); instead she only ate ‘buttered eggs’. Am momentarily annoyed that I don’t have a servant, so I text my flatmate demanding that he goes to Tesco for bread and eggs. And newspapers. And cigarettes, since Margaret chain-smoked in bed all morning, like a posh Dot Cotton.
9.06am
Flatmate texts back. ‘You joking? No. But you can borrow my vape if you like.’
9.22am
Go to Tesco myself, come back with supplies. Google ‘buttered eggs’. Turns out it means scramble them with ‘two to three tablespoons of butter’. Go back to bed with plate of eggs, newspapers, mug of tea and packet of Chesterfield Blue (Margaret smoked up to 60 Chesterfields a day, despite royal physicians’ pleas for her to give them up). Flick on radio.
10.15am
Have read all the papers, even the boring bits about takeover bids at the back, and scattered them around my bedroom floor as Margaret did because someone else would pick them up for her. My tea has gone cold and there are crumbs in my sheets. Try my first Chesterfield, smoked through my grandmother’s old Cartier cigarette holder. Exhale first drag through narrow gap in bedroom window. Feel sick, throw rest of fag outside into garden. Get back under my duvet because I have to stay here until 11am when Princess Margaret actually got up. Two hours in bed every morning might sound dreamy but I feel
borrowed various natty couture numbers and The Dorchester has allowed me into its Oliver Messel suite, decorated by the flamboyant, 20th-century stage designer. Designed in 1953, the suite looks like a set itself – think rich yellow wallpaper, maroon furniture, gilt mirrors, doors painted with flowery murals and (my personal favourite) a gold, scalloped loo seat. It is perfect to prance about in as Margaret (especially as it comes with a secret glass bar, hidden behind a bookshelf), and very apt, since Messel was Snowdon’s uncle and later designed Margaret’s beloved house in Mustique.
In London, Margaret’s hairdresser René would sometimes visit her at Clarence House in the morning. Later, after she was married, her driver of 26 years, David Griffin, would often take her to a hair salon in South Audley Street, in London’s Mayfair, before lunch. I back-brush my hair into a wobbly beehive. Never mind if it’s a bit Amy Winehouse.
12.30pm
First drink! Pour myself a vodka and orange since Margaret often had her first ‘pick-me-up’ around now. Important to maintain vitamin C levels, after all. If not vodka, it might be gin and tonic or whisky. When she lived with the Queen Mother at Clarence House, Margaret would come downstairs for this drink, before an ‘informal’ four-course lunch served on silver dishes, plus a cheeseboard and half a bottle of wine. She was often foul to her mother. According to biographer Anne de Courcy, she berated the Queen Mother’s wardrobe (‘Why do you dress in those ridiculous clothes?’), and if she found her downstairs in front of the television, ‘Princess Margaret would simply switch it to another channel without a word if she did not like what the Queen Mother was watching’. After Margaret had married in 1960 and moved to Kensington Palace, she often lunched for up to three hours at the Ritz or a ‘nice restaurant’ such as Maggie Jones’s, named after her, tucked behind the palace.
I text my mother telling her I’ve already had two drinks and am going out for lunch with friends. ‘Darling,’ she replies instantly, ‘are you OK?’
1pm
Meet friends at a pub near Holland Park. Order a bottle of wine before I even sit down.
‘What should we call you?’ asks my friend Dave, when I explain that I am being Margaret for the day.
‘Ma’am,’ I tell him firmly, as Margaret insisted most of her friends did. Another friend, Amy, has brought her baby to the pub, so I spy an opportunity for a Princess Margaret-style slap-down and ask if he’s said his first word yet. For someone who seemed curiously unmaternal, Margaret once scoffed at a friend who claimed their child’s first word was ‘Mama’ by declaring that her son’s was ‘chandelier’. Amy looks peeved and says, no, he hasn’t said anything yet.
1.15pm
Margaret generally liked plain food – ‘lamb or chicken in watery gravy’ – so I order the chicken. Ask waiter if it comes with any ‘disgusting’ sauces, since Margaret was often rude about food and once described a
chicken dish as ‘looking like sick.’ Waiter sighs and tells me the sauce can come ‘on the side’.
2pm
Eat half my chicken and ignore the potatoes. This is almost impossible since I am exceptionally greedy. At friends’ houses, if Margaret refused certain dishes – such as potatoes – the hosts might withdraw the offending food altogether so nobody else could eat it. Fellow guests were also supposed to stop eating when she’d finished, meaning that those who ate slowly had to leave half their plate. She often chain-smoked throughout meals and would leave her cigarette holder, ash burning at the end, leaning on a side plate. But on no account should you have offered to light a cigarette for her. ‘You don’t light my cigarette, dear. Oh no, you’re not that close,’ she told Derek Jacobi, the actor, when he once sat next to her and held up a lighter during a dinner in Covent Garden.
3pm
The bottle of wine is finished, so I demand that we order a bottle of sauternes pudding wine and a cheeseboard. Feel very perky after so much wine and try another Chesterfield. It still makes me feel
would drink with her whisky. ‘No, sorry, only tap,’ says my sister.
‘I’ll just have wine then,’ I say, trying to sound cross.
10.04pm
Princess Margaret had a short concentration span and adopted a zero tolerance policy towards conversation she deemed boring, so I decide to interrupt a discussion about Brexit at the dinner table. ‘This is very dull,’
I shout. Turn to one of my sister’s friends, a man called Harry, on my right. ‘Can you balance a pint glass on your penis?’ He mishears me.
‘Can I balance a night bus on it?’ he asks.
I cackle with laughter and explain that the pint glass trick was a favourite of John Bindon, a London gangster known as ‘Big John’ who could supposedly hang five half-pint glasses off his, ahem, manhood. He was rumoured to be one of Princess Margaret’s lovers in later life and was photographed next to her on the beach in Mustique.
11.20pm
Realise that being Princess Margaret is not only aimless, it is simultaneously exhausting. I’m desperate to go home to bed but I can’t, since Margaret often stayed up until 4am, smoking, dancing, drinking and playing games. In an effort to stay awake, I suggest a game of Bananagrams. Margaret once became so infuriated during a game of Trivial Pursuit that she tossed the board in the air, sending everyone’s pieces flying. As a deeply competitive person myself, I sympathise. Am annoyed when my brother says I can’t have ‘India’ since it’s a proper noun.
12.15am
As everyone starts leaving, my sister says I have to go home, too. Am secretly delighted that I don’t have to stay up any later. Margaret’s chauffeur would shuttle her back to Kensington Palace so I order an Uber. I have drunk my weekly booze allowance, am tired, hungry and feel a pang of guilt at having spent my day so frivolously. My mouth feels like a furry dustbin.
Get into the Toyota Prius, forgetting that I’m still wearing my plastic tiara.
‘I like the hat,’ says my driver. I don’t think he gets it at all.
Picture an autumnal Friday evening when, after a typically boisterous bathtime followed by the donning of superhero pyjamas, my four- and two-year-old sons, Ruadhán and Donnacha, are – hallelujah – tucked up asleep in their respective bedrooms. Collapsing on the sofa with a well-earned G&T, I glance at the baby monitor to see a now familiar, but still somewhat unnerving, sight in Donnacha’s bedroom: three small green specks of light flickering on the screen as they dance like fireflies above my snoring toddler’s cotbed.
I can guarantee if I crept up the stairs and opened the door there would be no sign of them. They are only visible on the monitor’s screen, and only ever appear when the camera is in Donnacha’s bedroom – nowhere else in our home or at the hotels and friends’ and relatives’ houses where we’ve used it.
I first noticed them over a year ago, when we moved my youngest son from a cot in our bedroom to his own room in our three-bed, 19th-century home. They don’t appear every night but we still see them several times a month.
Initially, I heeded my husband Malcolm’s pragmatic insistence that some sort of electrical interference or a fault with the monitor was to blame. But that didn’t explain why we only saw the orbs at home.
Malcolm is as ‘non-woo-woo’ as they come and refuses to ponder any sort of otherworldly explanation. And, conscious that revealing UFOs appear in my child’s bedroom at night in my mum-circles might mark me out as odd, I kept shtoom. That is until I saw something on Instagram that sent shivers down my spine.
A friend of a friend had posted about an