‘I’ve learned to LIVE LIFE in the NOW’

Joanna Lumley tells Prima about the secret of happiness, her ideal summer holiday and why she’s going back to the country where she was born

Joanna, 71, lives in London with her husband, Stephen Barlow, who is a conductor. She has a son, Jamie, and two granddaughters. She is back on our screens this month presenting a new ITV documentary series about India.

MY LIFE NOW

I was born in India, but we left the next year and so I have no memories of it from when I was small. All my memories came through my parents and grandparents and their photos and stories. My mother adored India and missed it until the day she died. But

I had reservations about making a film about the country because I know how many complexities it contains. So, rather than try to tell the whole story in three episodes, we took snapshots – from tigers in the wild to maharaja palaces in the middle of nowhere – starting in the south and ending up in Kashmir, where I was born. I loved every second of it.

My job is to appear on screen and camera, so I’d be an idiot not to care about the way I look. It’s important I don’t eat 50 cakes a day and get so fat I can’t fit into any clothes. I care about myself, but not obsessively: I wash my face with water and whatever soap is by the sink, and I take my make-up off with Astral cream. If it’s an important film that needs me to look especially glamorous for some reason, then

I try not to drink for a week beforehand – because that way your bones look better. I don’t eat four packets of crisps before dinner with a G&T which, believe me, I could easily do. Given the chance, I could live off G&T and crisps.

I never, ever exercise. I live in a tall house, I take the Tube, I walk and I garden. I don’t need to go to the gym. People never went to the gym in the 1960s – in fact, the gym didn’t exist. And we ate less back then, too, because we ate food that was in season – an imported orange was a bit of exotica.

I don’t mind cooking. We currently have houseguests for a month – a director from Chicago and a soprano from France – and preparing supper is the best fun in the world, chopping and eating while we talk and talk.

I don’t cook from books; I just make it up as I go along. I don’t eat meat or fish, but I cook them for my friends because you are not much of a hostess if you force all of your guests to be vegetarian. Last night, I made a fish pie that must have been good because they were practically sobbing with gratitude! I ate sweet potatoes with melted cheese, soya beans and green beans with radish tops. I’m always grateful for the food I eat. If you are grateful, then it tastes better. I was pretty skint when I was young and couldn’t afford all kinds of things. So, even now, when I am buying some beautiful cheese in France,

I am pleased and grateful for that

– as well as for all sorts of things.

Happiness is a discipline. If you say, ‘How lovely this is’, you will make it lovely. If the bus is late, say, ‘How marvellous – it’s giving me time to listen to the birds singing’. I think I was born lucky, with an optimistic nature, but happiness is a choice.

Plus, a lot of unhappiness is due to people imagining others have more than them. They think, ‘If only my legs were longer’ or, ‘If only I had a yacht’. But thinking like that is a red herring and not the answer to happiness.

I bought my first flat at 40. I couldn’t afford to buy one until then. When I was younger, all of us scrabbled on our knuckles doing any job we could, whether it was cleaning rooms or waiting tables. We walked to work because we couldn’t afford the Tube fare and we kept the milk on the ledge because we couldn’t afford a fridge. There were five of us to a flat – and we were as happy as clams. A yacht wouldn’t have made us any happier!

‘I loved every second we spent making the India programme. It’s the country of my birth, but I have no memories of it from when I was small’

I think we are all trapped by technology into doing far more than

we should be doing. We are always answering, responding and doing.

I do have a mobile phone, because I need it to pay for parking. But I will turn it on, let it warm up, use it to park, then switch it off. The thought of being called all day long and then coming home to 88 emails makes me shudder. We’ve all been turned into servants by technology. Stephen and I never send each other texts. You don’t need to communicate all the time.

MY FAVOURITE PLACES

I can lose myself when I’m gardening. Our garden needs lots of work, so I go at it like a threshing machine, but it’s still wild and beautiful. I can’t grow vegetables – I haven’t the earth or the garden – and there aren’t so many flowers, either; just some verbena and other sweet-scented things that are easy to maintain.

I do grow fruit, though. I have lemons, plums, figs, apples, pears, walnuts and mulberries. We get bagfuls of conference pears, which I leave on my neighbours’ doorsteps. I use the lemons for marmalade and, in September, we pick three or four figs a day and eat them – they are just paradise. But I’ve never managed to pick so much as one walnut because the squirrels get there first.

Stephen and I are working all the time

and so we don’t really have holidays. If I worked in a biscuit factory, then maybe I would feel the need for more holidays, but we both do things that we adore so why would we keep taking breaks? Stephen works his socks off and what’s the point of going on holiday without him? I loathe the idea of me-time or a spa, and the thought of going off on my own doesn’t appeal to me at all.

My ideal holiday would only happen if Stephen broke his arm and

couldn’t conduct. Or I broke my nose and couldn’t work. And then I would love to drive around Europe and stop wherever we like, then move on when the fancy takes us.

Even if we have to work like wizards, I always try not to scowl about what is on my plate. Every time I feel burdened, I think of someone who is caring for someone

24 hours a day, seven days a week. Even an hour a week off would make their lives bearable and it really reminds me of how lucky I am.

We have a cottage in the Southern Uplands of Scotland and we go whenever we can. It’s up a steep track, high on a hill, with a wild

garden and trees, and all you can see is valleys and hills. The cottage is six miles from the nearest village and it’s adorable. All that’s there is the solace of emptiness and beauty. We have barn owls in our roof and kestrels fly overhead. We walk in the hills and never see another soul. We are completely alone, apart from when we go to our beloved village where we know everyone. Sometimes, in winter, we get snowed in and just have to wait for days – it’s heaven.

The clothes I wear in summer are the clothes I wear in winter – minus the

extra jumper! Much of the time, I am wearing my gardening clothes, which are so unglamorous – they are distressing beyond belief. I don’t wear wellies in London, but in Scotland I live in them.

I’ll have my coffee outside in wellies and a dressing gown and it’s just fabulous.

WHAT GIVES ME PLEASURE

I enjoy making money, so that I can give it to the places where it’s needed. At the moment, there is an ex-gurkha major assisting women in Nepal and a woman called Anita Philpot in England helping girls in Africa. They are both concerned with the same thing: helping girls who can’t afford sanitary towels, which isn’t very glamorous, but there you go. It’s important. In Nepal, women are locked out of their houses when they are menstruating and in Africa they are reviled for having women’s bodies that bleed. If I can help by putting my effort and some money behind them, then I will.

I support various causes, but I don’t really see it as charity work. I just do what I do to help people – if I can. It can be as little as sending a photo, or giving a talk, or hosting an evening to raise money for something. I like little charities, because big ones spend so much on advertising. Just a

scriblet of money would alter the lives of thousands of women in a country like Nepal.

Money is a disease. The richer people get, the less money they give. And the more money people have, the more anxious they are about having enough. And the poorer people are, the more likely they are to empty their pockets out, spend their money and say, ‘I’ll have some more next week’.

I am a reader. I read everything, all of the time. I like history, autobiographies, biographies and novels. And I read real books rather than a Kindle. When I go away, I’ll always stick in a few classics: Dickens, Kipling, Jane Austen. I’ve always got five books on the go and I read at night because I think it’s a luxury to read during the day.

Home is very important to me. It’s where my loved ones are, so it needs to be safe and lovely and, above all, welcoming. I don’t want a house that is so frighteningly smart people are afraid to sit down. All my life I’ve got stuff from skips, so I’ve got quite good at making old alien stuff work together, whether by painting a table or re-covering a chair.

But paintings are my extreme

weakness. I’m guilty of buying far too many: they are frame-to-frame in every room in the house. My latest purchase is some artwork from an advert in the 1940s with a girl standing on a hill with the wind blowing in her hair, waving a handkerchief. It’s a ravishing little piece. I loved painting and drawing at school and would do more if I had the time.

MY DOUGHNUT OF LOVE

My granddaughters are Emily, 12, and Alice, 14, and I see them whenever I can. BAFTA recently gave me a fellowship and my son and his family all came from Inverness, where they live. The girls sat in front of me, while Jamie, Stephen and my daughter-in-law, Tess, sat behind me – they surrounded me like a doughnut of love and gorgeousness. And when they are here for a few days, we get proper time together. We went to Tate Modern and the girls – who are great long-leggedy ladies – and I walked ahead just talking our heads off.

I don’t believe in gravestones. We put Mummy’s ashes on the northernmost tip of Scotland and Daddy’s under his favourite chestnut tree, and I don’t want a gravestone. If people remember you, then they do and if they don’t, they don’t. But I don’t want to keep on taking up space after I’ve died. The great joy of this time of my life is not caring or worrying so much about things. No matter what you believe and whatever faith you are, this is the only time you’ll get here. We can’t do anything about tomorrow; yesterday has already happened. So it’s important to learn to live in the now, and make that as good as it can possibly be. And that is pretty much what drives me.

‘It’s important to live in the now and to make that as good as it can be’

Joanna Lumley’s India is on ITV in July