Welcome to spring
My husband Adrian and I are at opposite ends of the tidy scale. I would love to live in a clutter-free home with beautifully curated shelves and wellorganised pots for pens and pencils. Adrian, on the other hand, has an emotional attachment to stuff. He’s not a hoarder or anything extreme like that but he says things like, “I can’t get rid of that table [dark brown wood, been in the garage for decades] because my granny used to eat her dinner at it.” I feel I can cherish the memory of my grandparents without keeping every item they ever interacted with, but Adrian would feel he was betraying Granny Christine if he put that table on eBay. It just goes to show that clutter is complicated, which is why we’ve devoted a few stories to it this spring-cleaning season. Our brilliant columnist Allison Pearson explains why she could never become a minimalist and “bin the fragments of her past” (page 17), but if you do want to get a bit more organised and find stylish ways to store your stuff, then turn to page 184 for 16 brilliant solutions.
While we’re on the subject of grandparents, can I draw your attention to my favourite feature in this issue
– Family royalty on page 48? With the queen’s eighth great-grandchild expected pretty soon with Harry and Meghan’s firstborn, we decided to interview some other great-grannies about their lives. Apparently, we are enjoying a great-grandparent boom right now because baby boomers had their children quite early and are living longer. When you read the interviews with Hermine, 81, who has 24 greatgrandchildren, and Diane, 84, who has two, I’m sure you’ll agree that their families are most definitely enriched by the older generation’s influence.
I recently went to a beautiful lunch hosted by the Estée Lauder family (I know, tough job, right?). Now the Lauders know how to do good taste, and the flowers and table setting were so breathtaking, I decided to investigate who created them, and discovered the amazing event designer Fiona Leahy. While Fiona travels all over the world designing lavish parties for the rich and famous, her ideas are easy to emulate at home on a smaller scale. Turn to page 74 to read about three A-list tastemakers and check out their Instagram accounts for more entertaining inspiration. I will definitely be including old-fashioned roses and velvet ribbon when I next have a table to set.
I’m immensely proud to have Julie
Walters on our cover this month. From one of her earliest movies, Educating Rita, to Billy Elliot and now her new film Wild Rose, no actress does warm, funny and moving like she does. In our exclusive interview on page 12, she talks about preferring gardening to being on the red carpet these days, and I think we can all relate to that love of the simpler things in life. She says the one film she’d like to make this year is a third Mamma Mia! because “it’s like a holiday”. Let’s hope her wish comes true.