MY HAVEN LADY COLIN CAMPBELL

The author and TV personality, 67, in the drawing room of Castle Goring, her West Sussex home

1 SHELLEY’S CASTLE

I bought Castle Goring two and a half years ago because I wanted to swap a chateau in France for a country house here. This is my favourite room: it’s beautiful, inviting, warm and gracious. The castle was built in the 1790s for the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley but he drowned aged 29 and it was inherited by his widow, Mary, author of Frankenstein. I intend to read more about the Shelleys, but I enjoyed this book by Richard Freeborn, Mr Frankenstein, which is in some ways an update of Mary’s Frankenstein.

2 DIFFICULT DAYS

This chaise longue was in my great-grandparents’ house in Kingston, Jamaica, and dates back to the 1850s. My father Michael Ziadie’s family were part-Lebanese and part-Russian, and after decades of religious persecution they moved to Jamaica. I had a very difficult upbringing – I was raised a boy due to a genital malformation and had corrective surgery at 21 – but it was a wonderful place to live. Most Jamaicans are warm and kind. The fact I haven’t lost my accent shows I’m proud to be Jamaican.

3 CATWALK QUEEN

I started modelling at 18, some photographic and some catwalk. It’s a lot harder work than people realise and very unglamorous, and because I’m not really an exhibitionist I didn’t enjoy being on display. But I’m glad I did it and people made a big deal about my looks. Patrick Lichfield was among the photographers I posed for and this picture of me modelling a Halston dress was taken by Marc Buffery in the 1970s. My father stopped me modelling though because he thought it was ‘ for tarts’!

4 HOT TOTTIE!

My father loved animals and when I was a child we had a Labrador called Satan and an Alsatian named Sporty. This is my 14-year-old Springer Spaniel named Tottie because she’s hot tottie! She goes with me to as many places as she’s welcome, and here I walk her in the eight acres of grounds. I also have two cats, and I’m planning to get a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel as a companion for Tottie. I want a dog I can put under my arm or in my handbag! I think dogs and cats give, and want to receive, pure love.

5 MY BOYS

When I wanted to adopt in the late 1980s I was told not to waste my time here but to look abroad, so I adopted Dima and Misha from Russia when they were five and three months old. They’re not related but I raised them as twins and they’re like brothers now. Dima’s just graduated from Toulouse Business School, and Misha has a hospitality job in London. For my birthday last year, Dima gave me this silver life-box which he had inscribed ‘From D&M’. Here it’s next to a photo of them when they were seven.

6 JUNGLE FEVER

Here I am on last year’s series of I’m A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here!. It was an incredible experience even though I left after a month, and I don’t regret doing it. I had no idea that, just by being myself, people would embrace me the way they did. Once the public could judge me for themselves, many of the misrepresentations to which I’d been subjected for over 40 years because of my gender fell away. I’m always prepared to like or love anybody – all they need to be is nice.

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