How yoga helped me when I found Paula’s body, by her best friend
PAULA YATES’S best friend reveals today how yoga helped her cope when she discovered the lifeless body of the TV presenter, who died from a heroin overdose.
Recal l i n g the heartbreaking moment in 2000, Jo Fairley tells BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs: ‘It’s in your darkest moments that you find your greatest strengths.
‘I was incredibly calm and I don’t know where it came from, probably all my yoga I had done over the years. I just dealt with it. It was dramatic and painful and traumatic. I had lost my best friend and she had left behind four beautiful girls.
‘I have stepped in and tried in my way to keep her alive for them.’
Ms Fairley, 61, who co-founded the organic chocolate firm Green & Black’s, tells presenter Lauren Laverne today that she found Ms Yates’s body in the star’s home in Notting Hill, West London. Friends believe the former wife of Boomtown Rats singer Sir Bob Geldof never recovered from the death in 1997 of her l over, I NXS f rontman Michael Hutchence, who hanged himself in a hotel room.
Ms Fairley chooses Careless Whisper by George Michael as her favourite record, recalling how she and Ms Yates would dance to the song and how the Wham! star was DJ at the TV presenter’s wedding to Sir Bob in 1986.
Ms Fairley, who is a contributing editor for The Mail on Sunday’s You magazine, says her business success was inspired by a religious education teacher who told her she would fail to make it even as a secretary.
Describing the ‘defining moment in my life’ at Bromley High School for girls in Kent when she was about 15, she says: ‘ We were having a scripture class and instead of discussing the Bible, we got into a talk about what everybody was going to do when they left school.
‘She [the teacher] got to me and I said, “I want to be a secretary.” She narrowed her eyes, looked at me and said, “If you make so much as a Girl Friday, Jo Fairley, I will eat my hat.” It was like I heard a Saturn 5 rocket ignite under my chair. That was the moment I became absolutely determined to make something of myself and prove her wrong.’
Ms Fairley launched Green & Black’s with her husband in 1991 and reportedly sold it to Cadbury’s for £20 million in 2005.
Desert Island Discs is on Radio 4 today at 11.15am and repeated on Friday at 9am.