Two years ago today, I was lying under my desk, covered in glass, convinced I was about to die as a monstrous black cloud roared across my garden at 100mph, blasting branches and bricks into the air like a massive explosion. I’d barely had time to think Wizard of Oz before the tornado ripped through 150 homes in Kensal Rise, Northwest London, rendering 50 of them uninhabitable in just 2 seconds.

As I lay there, the windows exploded and glass showered down like rain as the roof lifted. Neighbours’ homes lost entire walls. But, miraculously, nobody was killed or even seriously injured. And, remarkably, what happened in those few terrifying moments has since turned out to have been an unexpected force for good.

Our street, where we’ve now lived for four yars since leaving smarter Holland Park in search of more space and a bigger garden, has always been a community.

At Halloween we hold a competition for the best-decorated house; the children play in one another’s homes, and some of us share school runs. But the ‘twister’ took things to a different level. I was struck by how people who might never have spoken before offered one another tea, clothing and beds. I also felt incredibly grateful to be alive – gaining particular strength from knowing that, had I stood for just two seconds more at my window, I would have been speared with flying glass and would probably now be blind or dead.

My intellectual grasp of the fragility of human existence was replaced with a deeper, visceral understanding of its transience. My attitude to life changed over the next few days: I realised that things were beyond my control and that there was no point worrying. If your time’s up, it’s up.

In such a context, losing some of our possessions seemed irrelevant; and anyway, our insurers were helpful. Our old Vi-Spring bed, used as a trampoline by the children, was replaced with a fabulous new one, and lacerated furniture was updated with new alternatives. Even our house is now improved – as we were in the throes of repair work, we decided to add a loft room. And I’d recommend a tornado to anyone who feels it’s time they rethought their colour scheme.

By September 2007 most of the residents had moved back in and we held a street party to celebrate. There were decorations hung across the road, trestle tables down the middle, and a dish from every home reflecting residents’ nationalities – from 1,000-year-old Chinese eggs to Jamaican chicken. Children played football alongside the street’s sax and keyboard players, who normally perform at Ronnie Scott’s jazz club in Soho. And the firemen who had come to our rescue on the day were invited back.

I met psychotherapists, writers and actors, a costume designer and a food stylist; nuclear families, single parents and two lesbians with their daughter. I’d always suspected that our street was interesting, a place of bohemian inclinations, books and pianos, yet I had still yearned for the stucco splendour of Holland Park. Ironically, it took being blasted out of my property to make me feel at home.

This year, our neighbour Sally Wilton (who in 2006 sold her event venues business for £21 million) opened the Pinkham Lighthouse – a community venue and 80-seater digital cinema – in an Edwardian theatre just around the corner. All profits go to an eco-village in South Africa. Opening the cinema was, Sally said, inspired by the tornado: it made her reassess her values. I went to a movie the other night, and half the street was there. We even help choose the films.

The camaraderie has continued. One of our neighbours is now teaching my husband Arabic; another is using me as a guinea pig for her training as a life coach, yet another offers babysitting. We’ve eaten in five different homes, there’s a street book club and a new sense of generosity. ‘If anyone wants a red geranium or pink rose plant, help yourself from my front garden,’ read a neighbour’s recent e-mail to residents. Of course it hasn’t all been good: even now I have recurring night terrors when, half asleep and heart racing, I think that if I get out of bed and put my foot on the floor, the house will explode. But despite this, my overwhelming sense is of the tornado having been a good thing.

Yes every cloud – even such a devastating one – has a silver lining.

SUZY Maas has bought, decorated and resold her homes, five times in six years, to make a handsome profit.

And much of her experience has gone into her house-doctoring company. She knows that certain simple changes do emphatically push up the price you can ask for your home, and that decluttering is more than just cleaning the windows and hanging up your clothes.

“It is worth spending a little money on getting rid of dusty curtains and replacing them with white, light-reflecting blinds, and putting fresh, white grouting into the bathroom tiles. Little things have a huge impact,” Maas says.

She has done it so many times that her contacts book is full of bargain warehouse addresses, wholesale shops and markets, where she picks up the accessories that save busy Londoners a lot of hassle, time and money.

Maas, 30, started the Final Touch, a housedoctor service for people wanting to prepare their home for rental or resale, in 1999. She offers moneysaving tips and is forever bargain hunting for clients. She charges £75 an hour or £475 plus VAT a day for her services.

She trained as an interior decorator and in 1998 went in search of her first home. Maas bought a dark, three-bedroom Battersea flat for £125,000. “It was like a train compartment, with all the rooms running off the corridor. I gutted and renovated it on a shoestring,” she says. She spent £12,000 on improving it and sold it a year later for £175,000.

Next came the three-bedroom house in Clapham that had been rented out for years. “It was damp and smelly. I put in a new bathroom, kitchen and redecorated,” she says. (Purchase price: £141,000. Spent: £22,000. Sold 18 months later for £240,000.) Her subsequent south London property required a loft conversion. “Cosmetic changes included repainting the kitchen units and retiling,” she says. (Profit made 18 months later was £69,000.) Then there was the four-bedroom house in Brixton in 2000. “I knocked through and extended to make one big kitchen, divided the huge bathroom into two – essential in a four bedroom house – and stripped acres of woodwork,” says Maas. (Purchase price: £275,000. Spent: £41,000. Sold 12 months later for £380,000.) She has learnt from her mistakes. “Before making decisions, it’s best to live in the property. I’ve also made the mistake of choosing colours from charts instead of painting samples on the wall. I’ve forgotten to keep fabric and colour references for touching up. I’ve dispensed with an architect after they have submitted drawings, instead of retaining them for spotting problems and dealing with builders’ disputes, which saves money ultimately,” says Maas.

But she has flair, targets her market precisely and has enjoyed a buoyant property market. “It’s getting harder. So many people are doing it that it’s difficult to find a wreck,” she admits.

Her current three-bedroom Victorian home is in Clapham. She lives there with her boyfriend.

“It hadn’t been touched for 20 years. I put in sash windows, rewired, renovated, redecorated, added a bathroom and extended the kitchen with a glass roof to the side return,” she says.

Thriftily, she changed the ancient nylon carpet for an oatmeal wool Berber for just £12.99 a square metre; made her chenille curtains (£5 a metre at Brixton market) in the bedroom, and bought a stylish oak refectory table with eight dining chairs – for £ 2,000 f rom The Collection in Parsons Green.

The cramped, dark kitchen had broken appliances, Seventies pine and severe damp. “It was like a dark tunnel,” she says. Now, measuring 15ft by 30ft, it is a light and contemporary Alternative Plans creation.

It has glossy tusk-coloured Hacker units, chunky brushed-steel handles, lime-white walls, a mushroom limestone floor, durable quartz/ granite work surfaces, a range cooker and modish Bisque floor-level radiators.

The bathrooms are equally stylish. Out went the migraine-inducing wallpaper, handheld plastic shower and rotten timber bath panels. In came fawns, ceramic limestone-effect tiles (£27 a square metre) and a double-ended Bette bath. She built another bathroom with Castle Grey walls, skylights, Bateige grey tiles on the walls (“£34 a square metre”) and a sheet of sturdy glass as a shower wall. Its elegant wall-hung Saneux loo, elongated Plan basin and star-shaped shower came from Bathrooms at Source.

The house is an eclectic mix. “I like modern with old,” Maas says. In the sitting room, the look is traditional. The walls are crisp calico and there is a Sixties American oval glass and perspex table. But there is also an 18th century French commode and a period Venetian mirror.

Similarly, her Dix Blue bedroom has modern nickel pedestal side tables, a funky mirrored fireplace and fauxfur bed throw. But it also has a Chippendale tallboy, Louis XVI armchairs and an ornate bedhead (“a junk shop find”) of mirror, gilt and turquoise-painted wood.

Maas has perhaps inherited her mother’s passion.

When she was a child, her mother relocated annually over six years. “For years we just moved to parallel streets,” she remembers.

Many people find uprooting stressful and hate renovating properties. “Every time I move, I swear it is the last. Then I get bored.” She has lived in her current home since 2002. It must be time to sell? “Oh no,” she exclaims. “I adore this place.” A week later, she calls with a confession: “I’ve just put the house on the market.”

HOW to get the look
The Final Touch, 12 St John’s Hill Grove, SW11 (020 7228 4233; www.thefinaltouch.co.uk).
Dining table and chairs: The Collection, 76 New Kings Road, SW6 (020 7736 1166; www.thecollection.uk.com).
Floor-level radiators: Bisque Radiators, 244 Belsize Road, NW6 (020 7328 2225; www.bisque.co.uk).
Contemporary Boffi and Hacker kitchen: Alternative Plans, 4 Hester Road, SW11 (020 7228 6460; www.alternativeplans.co.uk) and 160 Notting Hill Gate, W11 (020 7243 9747).
Carpet: Carpet Base, 190 Cavendish Road, SW12 (020 8675 2232).
Bathrooms: Bathrooms at Source, 128 Garratt Lane, SW18, (020 8870 0066).
Paint: Farrow & Ball, 249 Fulham Road, SW3 (020 7351 0273).
Bateige tiles: Granite and Marble International, Westminster House, 35 Pensbury Place, SW8 (020 7498 2742).
Limestone-effect tiles: Moores Building Merchants, 35 Bedford Road, SW4 (020 7737 3539).
Where to get paints colour-matched: Handyman’s Corner, 138 Acre Lane, SW2, (020 7733 1149); Homebase; B&Q.
Architect: Martin Reynolds, 14 St John’s Hill Grove, SW11 (020 7223 1420).
Architectural salvage yards: Bacon Street Salvage, 12 Bacon Street, E1 (020 7613 4672); Old Time Architectural Salvage, 217 Blackshaw Road, SW17 (020 8672 7205).
Fabrics: from markets such as Brixton and Southall, and large retailers such as Fabrics Galore, 52-54 Lavender Hill, SW11 (020 7738 9589), Fabrics Direct (0800 975 7296).
Second-hand/antique items: household clearance shops, junk shops or country antiques fairs.
Many large retailers have clearance shops selling discontinued lines and damaged stock: Sofa Workshop, 8 High Street, Ealing Broadway Centre, W5 (020 8579 0693); Ocean Furniture, 2 Trevelyan Road, SW17 (020 8672 2020); some large retailers such as Heal’s often have one-off clearance sales, ask in-store for details.
Furniture warehouses: Comfortably Off, 70a Silverthorne Road, SW8 (020 7622 9393).
Auction rooms: Lots Road Auctions, 71 Lots Road, SW10 (020 7376 6800); Criterion Auctions, 41-47 Chatfield Rd, SW11 (020 7228 5563) and 53-55 Essex Road, Islington, N1 (020 7359 5707).

When her father was taken to hospital last month after a car crash, Caroline Phillips prepared herself for an NHS horror story. What happened was very different.

“The doctors and nurses in intensive care were superb – honest but supportive”

They say you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone. Equally, with the NHS, you don’t know what you’ve got until you need it.

On May 9 this year, my 79-year-old father, Ronald, careered off the M4 at over 70mph. He hurtled across three lanes on a busy Friday at 2.30pm, down a verge and hit a tree. Miraculously he missed all the other vehicles around him.

It was an hour before emergency services were able to cut him out of his car; then a helicopter landed by the motorway and airlifted him to Oxford’s John Radcliffe Hospital. I only heard about it at 4pm. “Dad’s been in a major car crash,” sobbed my younger brother, Simon. “He’s got serious head and leg injuries …”

In the emergency room, we found our father: a frozen lump with a face the size of two footballs. He was on a ventilator, sprouting wires, bags and drips and tethered to monitors. He’d sustained fractures to his pelvis and one foot, a deep ankle wound and fractures to 10 ribs and his sternum – giving him a life-threatening flail chest [where the rib cage compresses, rather than expands, on breathing]. We were told he might also have had a heart attack, plus brain and internal organ damage.

“There’s only so much we can do,” warned the anaesthetist. “We’ll try to get him to breathe on his own later – but he has to want to help us.”

I’ve had a complex relationship with my father, a sometimes tricky, adorably eccentric and essentially kind family man. Now he was dying, with so much left unsaid. “You can talk to him,” said a nurse, sympathetically. “We think hearing is the last thing to go.” I whispered thanks to him for looking after me since I was 13 when my mother bolted; for my great education; and for being an incredible grandfather. I told him that I loved him. I begged him to live.

But standing amid the artificially ventilated bodies with my anguished half-sister, Dara, I was terrified – my fears fuelled by all the scare stories I’d read about the NHS. Weren’t these doctors exhausted and incompetent? Wasn’t Dad destined for a hospital-acquired infection? At his age, wouldn’t our father be a low priority? Wouldn’t these medics just leave him to die? Frantically, I phoned consultant friends in London, trying to engineer the best possible care.

Yet, while I panicked over the state of the health service, the John Radcliffe’s staff worked with professionalism and dedication. We were kept constantly informed. A doctor phoned and briefed my consultant friend so that I could discuss the prognosis with someone I trusted; the anaesthetist urged our family to eat: “You’ve got a long night ahead of you.”

At midnight, Dad went into theatre. I prayed that my elder brother, David, flying from New York, would see him alive.

By 2.30am our father was in intensive care (ICU), off his ventilator – to the astonishment of doctors – conversing intelligently and joking. It was a miracle. And surreal. He had, according to doctors, defied all odds by surviving. The nurse showed me a Polaroid of his car, a Toyota. It looked like a foil wrapper crunched in the fist of a giant. He had only been saved by his airbag.

He stayed in ICU for a week. For four days, Dara slept in the relatives’ waiting room. My father’s condition remained critical, his breathing difficult, his heart irregular. There was the possibility he would contract pneumonia. Then he would have died. “It’s far harder being a relative than a patient in ICU,” remembered David, who had experienced intensive care after a spinal operation.

For 17 consecutive days, I drove the round trip from London. (In order to fit everything in, Simon would get to his desk in the antiques gallery founded by our father, at 5am.) It was physically and psychologically exhausting. Illness aside, Dad’s occasional morphine-induced confusion was frightening. “Did you put my V&A invitation in the orange juice?” he asked. Another time he smiled: “I’m on a boat.” (He’d been on a bedpan.) With the stress, my hair started to fall out in clumps; when I told Dara she said the same had happened to her.

We became part of a hidden community, patients’ relatives riding a terrifying roller-coaster. The young woman, careworn after three days of waiting to see if her sister was brain-damaged. The Lancashire couple, living in their mobile home in the car park, and despairing for their son whose pancreatic operation had left him on life support. “You don’t expect people to get infections in hospital,” said his father, tears welling in his eyes.

But, despite all my preconceptions, the nurses and doctors in ICU offered superlative medical care. They were also psychologically astute, honest but supportive. They always went the extra mile. One day, attaching an oxygen supply and face mask, they put our father in a wheelchair to enjoy the sun on the terrace. A nurse also put up with our touching belief in alternative therapies – decrying it as anecdotal, while authorising our use of Bach Rescue Remedy.

It was a tough decision whether to take our children, aged 12 and 10, to visit their grandfather at a unit where one woman wailed as if in permanent labour and many patients were wearing contraptions (metal halos) on their heads that looked better suited to a carpenter’s bench than a hospital. But the girls, distressed at not seeing him, wanted to go. Sensitively, nurses shielded them from the brutal sights by pulling the curtains around patients’ beds.

The demands on us as a family have been high. We’ve divided our father’s affairs among ourselves – as if dealing with a death but without the funeral arrangements. Paying bills, sorting insurance, cancelling appointments, arranging visitors, researching future medical care, taking him food and tending his dog, Pingu, who’d been in the accident with him and had a ruptured spleen. (A witness whisked him to the vet’s where, unbelievably, they performed an emergency splenectomy. Pingu is 14 – 98 years old in human terms – but his old age did not preclude treatment either.)

And as we faced the possibility of parental abandonment, rivalry, stresses and strains came to the fore. “It’s a myth that dysfunctional families suddenly pull together in a time of crisis,” said one friend, a family therapist. Instead, events have highlighted our family’s maladjustments. Perhaps a positive way to look at it is that we’ve had a dress rehearsal for a parent dying and can make changes before the final curtain.

Our father remained for two weeks in the trauma ward, one of the best in the country, where overstretched staff are as attentive as possible, efficient and reassuring. His private health insurance policy with Saga Health Plan proved to be a saga: he’d paid thousands, but at a lower premium because of agreeing to accept NHS care if the state could treat him within four weeks – thereby effectively nullifying his access to private healthcare for this condition. So he had to wait to be “repatriated” (as medics dub moving a patient to their local hospital) to Chelsea and Westminster on the NHS, as there wasn’t a bed for two weeks.

Meanwhile I’m counting my blessings. Sixty years since it began, we’ve experienced the NHS at its best. And this episode has enriched my relationship with my father. There’s the chance to love him for longer. His dog visited him yesterday: one patient hobbling on four legs, the other unable yet to stand unaided on two. Above all, staff at the John Radcliffe deserve nothing but praise. So, too, our father who, thanks to the NHS, has foiled the Grim Reaper this time.

Ann Maxwell had heeded one particular teacher’s comment in a school report, it’s doubtful that she would have headed the VIP guest list at No 11 Downing Street for the presentation of the 2008 Clarins Most Dynamisante Woman of the Year award last week. ‘If Ann doesn’t lower her sights, it may inhibit her achievements in life,’ her report read. Happily, for many thousands of children – including her own son Muir – Ann, 45, is not one to lower those sights.

Why rally your friends round for a modest fundraising cake sale when you can organise a dazzling charity ball that brings in £1.1m – as last year’s Muir Maxwell Trust Masked Opera Ball did? Why settle for boxes of chocolates and foot spas for your raffle when you can rustle up a £25,000 diamond solitaire and a bespoke Alfa Romeo Brera for your prize draw? And, most importantly, why be content with providing 700 epilepsy alarms, offering peace of mind to sleep-deprived parents, when you can devote much of your waking life to working towards a cure for childhood epilepsy, which afflicts 70,000 children in the UK alone?

What really shaped Ann’s destiny wasn’t a teacher’s barb, but the birth of Muir, now 11 (Ann has two other sons, 14-year-old Connor and nine-year-old Rory). When Muir was four months old, he suffered a seizure one night while sleeping in his parents’ bed at their home in Edinburgh. ‘With a tiny baby, seizures are quite subtle. But I knew something was wrong,’ says Ann. Whisking her son to the A& E department, she was reassured to be told it was probably the side-effects of a fever (Muir had been given some vaccinations earlier in the day).

‘But a month later, Muir was miserable and unwell. My maternal instinct told me something really was wrong.’ En route to hospital, he had another seizure – though this, too, had passed by the time she arrived, hysterical, on the hospital’s doorstep.

It was several months before doctors put Muir on anti-epilepsy medication, during which time he’d suffered one seizure so severe that his parents almost lost him. ‘It’s called status epilepticus,’ says Ann – basically, a fit that doesn’t stop (in this terrifying case, for more than two hours).

Cumulatively, these seizures affected Muir’s brain and, eventually, he was diagnosed with a rare genetic form of epilepsy called Dravet Syndrome.

Muir will never be able to hold a pen properly or to read. His speech is affected and, as his motor skills are also affected, he can’t learn to sign either. By the time he’s a teenager, Muir may be in a wheelchair. But he is clearly adored by everyone who knows him (who have no problems working out what he is trying to communicate). ‘Muir is one of the happiest children I know. Hugely affectionate. Totally beautiful, with a wonderful demeanour. The inspiration to all of us,’ says Ann.

Desperate for information about childhood epilepsy, Ann found a local charity which ran a special playgroup that she was told Muir could join. The day before his first visit, Ann was told the group had been disbanded as there wasn’t enough in the kitty to pay for the group leader.

So when Ann got a call from a fellow mother of an epileptic child, inviting her to a fundraising fashion show, she went along.

Not long after, Ann bought three tables for friends at a ball for this local epilepsy charity, which raised £50,000. But Ann had her own vision – and her sights, as that teacher identified, were set high. When the ball’s organiser declared she wasn’t up for a repeat performance, Ann stepped in. ‘I pledged to give the charity £50,000 out of what we raised, with the rest going to establish the Muir Maxwell Trust.’ Whereupon, Ann brazenly announced her intention to stage ‘the most glamorous event that Edinburgh had ever seen’. Ticket prices were an unprecedented £150 a head. Prize-draw tickets were a staggering £100, but it paid off, raising £40,000 from the raffle alone.

The first ball netted over £200,000, and since then the annual Muir Maxwell Trust extravaganza has become one of the most successful events in the charity calendar, raising more than £3.5m since it was launched five years ago. High-profile supporters include Christopher Biggins – who chose the MMT to benefit from £25,000 he scooped on a celebrity episode of Who Wants to be a Millionaire – Natasha Kaplinsky, Joan Collins and Lorraine Chase.

Ann’s secret is that, cleverly, she has tapped into the generosity of affluent friends and contacts in the financial world (she’s a former financial planner and husband Jonny works in private equity). ‘They saw what we went through with Muir, and have been incredibly supportive,’ she says. ‘Often, they were on the receiving end of e-mails from me, sent at 1am, telling them that I just couldn’t cope any more – so they understand how devastating this condition can be for families.’ What eventually offered Ann and Jonny peace of mind while caring for Muir was a simple epilepsy alarm; placed beneath the sheets on which a child sleeps, it is sensitive to movement and alerts parents to a seizure.

(Night-time seizures can be extremely dangerous and there is a risk of Sudden Unexpected Death in Epilepsy – Sudep – which can be avoided if the child is placed in the correct position to breathe.) ‘Sleep deprivation is a recognised form of torture,’ Ann says, ‘but it’s something parents of epileptic children can endure for years. Parents sleep with the child in their bed, or in their child’s room, or simply take turns to get up in the night every half an hour to check on them.’ The monitor Ann and Jonny bought was a type used in hospitals, ..

adapted for home use. One of the key activities of the Muir Maxwell Trust is to provide these monitors to families. More than 700 families have benefited so far, with a further 250 monitors a year now being distributed. The letters from parents say it all: ‘The monitor has allowed us to put some normality back in our lives, giving us the confidence to allow our daughter to sleep in her own room – and giving us a rest.’ Or, ‘The monitor has been brilliant. As a parent, I feel much better and I am able to sleep.’

But no way was Ann going to stop there. So another part of the Trust’s work has been funding an £80,000 DNA sequencer machine, which is leased to the NHS, to help with early identification of genetic epilepsy. It has also funded two ‘video telemetry’ units to assist with diagnosis, helping doctors to identify the drugs or other treatments which may prove most effective in a specific child’s case, eliminating a lot of trial and error. ‘There are many different forms of childhood epilepsy,’ Ann says.

‘They each respond differently to different drugs or diets.’ So the Muir Maxwell Trust also sponsors two ketogenic diet clinics: a little like the Atkins diet, with a focus on protein, a ketogenic diet can help to control symptoms in some children. But that’s not all. Oh, no. Eventually, as Ann proclaims, her goal is nothing less than ‘to find a cure for paediatric epilepsy’. And her son’s epilepsy isn’t the only challenge that has faced Ann Maxwell on her path to becoming the Clarins Most Dynamisante Woman of the Year. Because she herself is suffering from an incurable – albeit currently slow-growing – cancerous brain tumour, diagnosed in 2005.

‘One side of my face went numb,’ she recalls. ‘I mentioned it to my dentist, who didn’t dismiss it but said I might have something pressing on a facial nerve.’ With her annual ball looming, Ann scheduled an appointment with her doctor for the Monday after the party was over. Subsequently booked in for an MRI scan, Ann felt like a fraud: ‘I couldn’t believe they were fast-tracking me when there were obviously far needier people.’ Otherwise well, she was so convinced the numbness was down to a virus that she squeezed the appointment to hear her diagnosis between two other important commitments – but instead, found herself being ushered to another hospital department to see a consultant neurologist.

‘Nobody mentioned the word “tumour” to me. So I texted my husband – who was in California – to say they’d found a growth, and promptly turned my phone off.’ Frantic, Jonny Maxwell jumped on a plane to be with his wife, who later underwent two operations to ‘untangle’ the tumour, which had macraméd itself around the cranial nerve. ‘Eighty per cent of the tumour was removed in two operations, during one of which they removed my inner ear – so I am now deaf in that ear,’ says Ann, in the most extraordinarily matter-of-fact way. ‘I faced death twice, because the operations were so complicated.

I put my affairs in order, talked to my children – because I had to face the possibility that I might not see them grow up. But because of that, now every day is precious, a bonus. I don’t have a fear of death – and I certainly have an appreciation of life that I never had before.’ Nevertheless, as the lynchpin of the trust founded in her son’s name, and with a question mark over her health, Ann is fully aware of the need to secure the charity’s future.

And so the generous £30,000 Clarins award money will underwrite two years’ salary for a full-time fundraiser, ‘with the aim of turning that into at least £160,000 for the purchase of epilepsy alarms,’ says Ann. Friends insist that Ann Maxwell is a one-off, irreplaceable – yet Ann is convinced that ‘there’s somebody with as much dynamism who can inject his or her own energy into this project, and drive it forward’. As much dynamism as this year’s Clarins Most Dynamisante Woman of the Year? It’s a tough call. But as her teachers, friends, family and colleagues know: when Ann Maxwell sets her sights on a goal, who’d dare to doubt her? To make a donation or to find out more, log on to muirmaxwelltrust.com or call 0131 273 5255

OUR OTHER DYNAMIC CLARINS FINALISTS

LOUISE MASSAMBA’S Merseyside Refugee & Asylum Seekers Pre and Post Natal Support Group (MRANG) cares for women, children and pregnant minors, championing their cause with social services, the medical community and immigration authorities — and providing a day centre in a local church hall.

SUE HAYWARD, who founded Working for the Children of Watamu after a holiday to Kenya in 2003, has built three schools for 700 children, with a library of 15,000 books (shipped from the UK), and a computer room. Next on Sue’s agenda: Happy House, for children orphaned by malaria, Aids and other diseases.

KAREN HILLYER joined the Erb’s Palsy Group in 1991 after her son was born with the condition. The condition is caused at birth and results in a lack of movement, growth and feeling in one arm. Through the education of midwives, the group, which Karen now chairs, has helped to reduce the incidence of Erb’s Palsy dramatically.

AMY HATHAWAY decided to devote her life to working with children in Africa after watching the Ethiopian famine unfold on the TV news as a child. Today, 28-year-old Amy runs Forever Angels Baby Home in Tanzania, an orphanage for 40 infants (many of whose families have died of Aids).

HEATHER LAST, an occupational therapist, founded the Pace Centre in Aylesbury in 1990 to offer life-changing conductive education to children aged from three months to 11 years with physical disabilities, such as cerebral palsy.

JO BAKER-WATSON set up Megan Baker House which offers free conductive education to children, as well as counselling and support to parents and carers. It was set up in memory of her daughter after Jo and her husband David saw how the technique helped Megan during her short but precious life.

As Europe’s largest arts festival draws to a close, Caroline Phillips braves the mud and rain to rub shoulders with the clever, the famous and the passionate

‘Bill Clinton said Hay is like Woodstock of the mind’

The venue for drinks with the “man who used to be the next president” is Top Secret – for security reasons. Guests are to be taken (blindfolded?) by bus to an unknown destination. Given directions just minutes before it starts, I go by car. It’s easy to find. Outside the “secret” location flies a state-sized American flag and security men stand ready to prevent, er, blood and gore.

Al Gore, the former US vice-president and self-dubbed “recovering politician”, is on the lawn outside the Penrhos Court Hotel, an organic establishment where they serve nettle soup. He’s hotfooted it here from Cannes where his documentary about climate change, An Inconvenient Truth, was showing. Now he’s come to persuade audiences at the Hay Festival – Europe’s largest arts festival – of the dire consequences of global warming.

He could also be a presidential contender for 2008, despite assurances that he’s a “recovering politician”. “Are you planning a relapse?” I inquire. He grips his champagne glass tightly and then breaks into a smile. “Very unlikely,” he replies.

Gore is a large man – six foot three-ish with a girth to match – and sports a black suit and cowboy boots. “Cowboy boots!” I point rudely but as he and I are both Hay virgins, I feel we’re kindred spirits.

“I came prepared,” he responds. “Bill [Clinton] said the Hay Festival is like the Woodstock of the mind. There was a lot of mud at Woodstock.”

The festival, brainchild of the energetic and clever Peter Florence, artistic director, started in 1987 with 15 speakers meeting for a weekend in the tiny Brecon Beacons village. Now it attracts megawatt guests – aside from Clinton, Paul McCartney, Susan Sontag, John Updike and Donna Tartt have all been lured here. (When the late Arthur Miller was invited to talk, the response came: “Is Hay-on-Wye a sandwich?”) It is now a scorchingly hot social event – a sort of Serpentine Gallery summer party in Wales.

My first discovery about Hay is that it takes 700 hours to get there in half-term holiday traffic. Some put the time to good use: Bloomsbury editor Bill Swainson bought the UK rights to Gore’s latest book by Blackberry while sitting in a layby.

I was unprepared for the sheer scale of Hay, a Glastonbury for colour supplement readers. Two years ago, the festival moved from the village to a vast tented metropolis in a field. This year, there were more than 80,000 visitors and nearly 400 events with guests including Seamus Heaney, Simon Callow, Zadie Smith and Sebastian Faulks. Virtually everything sold out.

One rule of Hay is that it always rains. There’s a tractor to help vehicles out of the paddy fields. On site, even the Guardian came with a pac-a-mac, which pre-empted jokes about wet liberals. If there are any inaccuracies in this article, it’s because most of my scribblings were washed away. “Being in the mud and rain brings out the best in Brits,” Margaret Atwood told me. At least, I think that’s what my notes say.

Mostly, the weather dictates the dress code. Anoraks and boots. Boots and anoraks. Literary agent Caroline Michel went a little further in waisted lime-green coat dress and, minutes later, a pale silver outfit with heels as high as the Brecon Hills.

Meanwhile, Tanny Gordon, wife of John (he’s the grand fromage of achingly fashionable Intelligence Squared, which runs university-style debates for London’s chattering classes) stepped into the mud in satin Marni pumps. The couple were accosted every step of their regal way with offers to speak in John’s debates.

Hay is a melting pot for political, socio, economic, arty and literary ideas, and its audiences are super-informed. Scary. David Hare gave a stimulating talk on theatre and politics while a few muddy steps away abstract painter Howard Hodgkin “talked” to Simon Schama. Hodgkin answered in monosyllables. Antony Gormley stayed for two minutes then joined the throngs walking out.

In another tent, professional contrarian Christopher Hitchens was in mid-brilliant discourse on Thomas Paine and the rights of man when someone’s mobile rang. “Who the f— is that?” he asked the thousand-plus audience. “We know where you live. We know where your children go to school.” Then he lit another cigarette, drank yet more whisky and donned sunglasses. The line worked less well in his afternoon gig. Ring, ring. “We know where you go to school,” said Hitch, staring unsteadily at the offender.

This ideas fest was punctuated with a visit to Giffords Circus, a psychedelic, bohemian annual spectacular. Even the audience was surreal. Paul Rusesabagina, the hotel manager whose experience of genocide was powerfully told in Hotel Rwanda, sat beside Joanna Trollope and Sheila Hancock. Germaine Greer arrived late, with steam coming out of her ears.

Channel 4 held its elegant party in the grounds of Hay Castle. Security was tight because Gore was on the guest list. But the circus troupe crashed it disguised as “distinguished authors” – all elected to come either as Rosie Boycott or Atwood. Inside, there was a buzz about Nick Broomfield’s Ghosts, a film inspired by the Morecambe Bay cockle-pickers’ drownings.

I’m very glad I lost my virginity. Just like Gore, I can envisage a comeback.

When Christian Constantine was born, the doctors at London’s Portland hospital had never seen such severe cranio-facial deformities. They didn’t, and still don’t, have a name for his condition, but he is believed to be one of four people in the world with a combination of so many rare and serious defects. At 23, he has endured more than 35 operations, including highly risky major reconstructive ones. He has also faced the possibility of blindness, had his kidneys operated on, gone deaf in one ear and suffered life-threatening illnesses such as meningitis and hydrocephalus (fluid on the brain that causes compression).

Yet Christian’s is a story of hope, determination and extreme bravery, which he has chronicled in a memoir for which literary agents Curtis Brown are seeking a publisher. We meet in the central London apartment belonging to Christian’s mother, Mina, and father, Adam, a company director; who are both Greek but were raised in London. With his scarred forehead, slightly drooping right eyelid and somewhat distended cheek, Christian is now taken by most people for an accident victim rather than someone born with a rare combination of disabilities. He talks from the back of his throat, with a nasal tone: speech that, owing to therapy, is vastly improved since he was at nursery, when only his family understood him. (“At the time, I thought that was normal,” he says later.)

Mina, 52, offers me biscuits, chocolate, fruit and tea. “I didn’t know anything was wrong until Christian was born and I saw my doctor’s eyes,” she says. “Then they put me to sleep again immediately. I didn’t see him for three days. Not until the nurses said, ‘First we’re going to show a Polaroid picture of baby to mummy.’ That’s when I insisted on actually seeing him. He was very wrong-looking indeed. But I felt love at first sight.”

The doctors were mystified. The bones of Christian’s face had stopped forming prematurely, he had hypertiliorism, which meant that his eyes were too far apart and his eyebrows abnormally high, and a severe cleft lip and palate, leaving the roof of his mouth open and the top gum exposed. (“That thing protruding from my lip is the roof of my mouth, I think,” says Christian later, showing me photographs, including one of his mother holding him adoringly, and another of him aged three and wearing a bow tie with his father.) “They didn’t even know whether he was going to live,” says Mina, who had him baptised in intensive care when he was three days old.

At the time, the doctors were particularly concerned that the frontal lobe of his brain had been damaged by the cleft, which went up to his forehead. “They mentioned putting him in a home and also said, ‘If he gets ill, we won’t try hard to save him, all right?'” says Mina. “I said, ‘I agree.’ That’s the only time I ever felt that, when I thought he might be brain-damaged and not have a quality of life. Happily, he was fine. He had his first operation at six weeks, to repair his cleft lip. But nobody had any idea that we’d still be operating nearly 24 years later.”

In the intervening years – from Chicago to Houston, London, Paris and Los Angeles – Christian has undergone a series of radical procedures (including moving his eyes and building a nose) as well as operations to create eyelids, to put bone grafts in his mouth to support teeth implants and to prevent urinary reflux (when urine flows back to the kidneys). In 1985, he had surgery at Great Ormond Street to correct his compressed head bones – his brain was growing faster than his skull would allow. Surgeons opened his head from ear-to-ear to release the bones. Shortly afterwards Christian got meningitis and hydrocephalus.

In 1993, Paul Tessier, the “grandfather” of cranio-facial surgery, performed a massive procedure on him in Paris to bring his eyes closer together and lower his eyebrows. Before the operation, Adam overheard Tessier saying to his anaesthetist in French, “We’re entering a patch of fog without a compass.”

“They had to remove the entire bone from my face and reshape it and my brain was ‘shrunk’ to allow more room for the surgeons to work,” says Christian, straightforwardly. “Blindness was a risk, as was exposing my brain after meningitis.” Afterwards, he threw up a lot of blood. “Obviously, I couldn’t see anything because my eyes were stitched together.”

Was this his lowest point? “I’ve often woken up and thought, ‘This is physically unbearable,'” he says. “When I was 19, they had to correct a forehead defect by applying pressure to it. The only way to do this was to staple a bandage onto my head. To remove it, they had to yank it out. Excruciating.” Once he had tissue expanders (which are similar to balloons) placed inside his head and then inflated with water to stretch the tight, scarred skin. “They put water through a needle into a tube inside my head and then the expander got bigger and bigger under the skin. It was agony.” Another time, when the upper lip was being improved, his lips were sewn together for two weeks.

Despite all this, he recalls junior school as a “happy” time. “He was so cute and outgoing when he was little,” remembers Christian’s 21-year-old sister, Isabella. Aged 12, Christian played the lead part in the school play, and loved it. “I was dressed as a woman in a bright red wig and skirt,” he says. And what of unwanted attention? When he was nine, he tells me, the children at a party ran up laughing, “Look at his face, he’s an alien.” Another time a boy taunted, “That must be a mask you’re wearing.” “Once,” says Christian, “somebody was staring so much that he tripped and fell over in the street.”

“His being stared at was the worst thing for me, more upsetting even than sitting in hospital waiting rooms,” says Mina. “It doesn’t matter how educated people are, they can be awful.” In the street, his parents and sister would stand in front of Christian to block him from view. “I’d talk loudly to him,” says Mina, “so people would know that just because he didn’t look right didn’t mean that he couldn’t understand what they were saying about him.” At first, Christian wasn’t aware of the attention. “When I was young, it didn’t affect me that much because being stared at was all I knew,” he says. “But once I got into my teens and went to secondary school, it was terrible.”

Schoolwork was hard because he was off sick so much, sometimes for more than a term at a time. (He scraped through his GCSEs, but failed his A-levels.) And once his adolescent peers started partying and chasing girls, Christian withdrew into himself. His problems were exacerbated by his stunted growth. Aged 13, he wasn’t even 5ft (he’s now 5ft 7in). “By 15,” he says quietly, “I’d lost my confidence. I hated my looks, felt deserted by my friends and avoided social activities.”

He developed feelings for a fellow student. Did he tell her? “Of course not,” he smiles.

“I used to tell myself, ‘Who’d go out with someone as bad-looking as me?’ Then one day some boys started jeering, ‘Who do you think you are? The way you look, you don’t have a hope of

getting a girlfriend, ever.'” He looks down momentarily. “If I saw them today, I’d break their legs.” Did his parents consider therapy for him? “I didn’t tell them what was going on.” Mina nods. “I only heard about a lot of this recently. But anyway there weren’t

support groups that I knew of,” she says, “and he didn’t ever want to be grouped with people just because of having deformities.”

When he was 16, his closest friend since childhood, George, died. “That hit him really badly,” says Mina. “Not least because it shook his faith in medicine. Until then he’d always thought doctors could fix anything.” He started skipping school to drink beer at 11am. “At night, I’d wait until my parents were asleep, then drink a bottle of wine,” Christian says. Depression took hold and he’d sit listlessly in the waiting room on the floor where George’s bedroom had been in the Royal Free Hospital. “I’d go there after midnight and sit there for hours just looking straight ahead.”

“I knew he was devastated about George, all his friends were, but I didn’t realise anything else was going on,” says Mina sadly. “He hid it so well from us.” At his GP’s suggestion, Christian had counselling in 2001. “It wasn’t much help but I never wanted psychiatric care,” he says. “I’m not very open. I don’t talk about my problems.”

His difficulties came to a head when he was studying shipping at Southampton University in 2004. “I’d thought everything would be different there,” says Christian, who took a year out in 2005 to have an operation to lower his eyebrows and hairline. “But after a few weeks, I’d hardly talked to anyone. I’d just go to lectures, then back to my room. I was drinking to escape my problems. I didn’t even dare go to the common room. But I told mum and everyone that I was loving it.”

One evening in October 2004, he walked back from a bar resolved to take his life. Back in his room, he grabbed 20 Panadol Extra. “I didn’t even know if it would be enough to kill me,” he says. “But it wasn’t really a suicide attempt. I didn’t even try.” It was seeing a photograph of his family that stopped him. “That brought me to my senses. Whatever I’d been through, they’d suffered too.” He was hysterical when he rang his Uncle Basil, who calmed him down. “It’s the first I’ve heard of a suicide,” says Mina, with surprising calm. “I think he’s shielded me from lots of things.”

Unsurprisingly, the impact of his disabilities on the family has been great. “I adore him now,” says Isabella. “But for obvious reasons he got most of the attention when we were children. I was very jealous.” Often when the family went to operations, Isabella had to stay with relations.

Adam and Mina’s stable 26-year marriage has inevitably suffered. After giving birth to Isabella in 1987, Mina terminated two further pregnancies for foetal abnormalities similar to Christian’s. In 1988, after her first termination, at 22 weeks, Adam walked out. “Only for a few weeks,” says Mina. “We both wanted another child and were coping with Christian, but another abnormal baby was too much to bear.” She pauses. “I also had a sort of breakdown after my second termination. Things got progressively worse and culminated, finally, in a nasty bout of pneumonia, for which I was hospitalised. I’m sure it was psychosomatic. I always felt that I didn’t have anywhere to go and cry.”

The high financial cost of Christian’s treatment is also clear. Their health insurers, PPP, underwrote most of the early procedures that were carried out in the UK, but the Constantines have had to pay for other operations, plus their worldwide travel and hotel expenses. “We had to. They just wouldn’t have been able to do things like the nasal reconstruction and lowering his eyebrows here,” explains Mina. “They made sacrifices,” adds Christian simply. “But they were always clear that they’d do whatever was best for me, whatever it took. And, frankly, plastic surgeons are light years ahead in the US.”

Christian’s immediate family has been ceaselessly supportive and protective of him. “I think I helped him psychologically with my positivity,” says Mina, who has dedicated her life to making things better for him. “I also taught him to be a bit arrogant, as a defence and protection.” Isabella says she still “babies” her brother and always keeps her eyes and ears open for him, “although he’s more than capable of doing anything himself”. Meanwhile Adam has worked tirelessly, researching the best doctors, paying for and attending operations. (“Adam is intensely private,” adds Mina, “but he’s had his dark moments. Once they stuck a massive skin graft on Christian’s face and it looked like a croissant under his nose. I think that’s when Adam wanted to pitch himself out of the 46th floor of our hotel.”)

Christian also has a close extended family (he has 20 first cousins). “He was treated as normal by them,” says Mina. Many would fly to lend support at operations. (The Constantines travelled 14 times to Chicago in two years, and spent two months in LA at a stretch, for operations.) “Adam’s siblings, their partners, my in-laws, my mum and granny, about 20 of us, went to Paris for Christian’s operation in 1993,” says Mina. “I’ve only ever attended minor operations alone.”

The doctors still have no idea why Christian’s problems occurred. Last year the Constantines saw geneticist Prof Raoul Hennekam at Great Ormond Street. “He’s still researching,” explains Christian. “He says there are only four similar cases in the world.” If the defects appeared in Christian’s children, what would he do? “I’d want to terminate,” he says. “I don’t want to sound arrogant, but I can’t imagine anyone else surviving what I’ve been through. I couldn’t let my child go through what I’ve suffered.”

There’s a sense, however, that Christian is coming to accept his lot. Step by step, he’s confronting his problems. He feels he has his drinking more under control. “Sometimes I don’t drink for a week,” he says. “If I drink, I can’t stop. So I have to be careful. I’ve thought of trying AA. I think I’m doing it now because I’m addicted to alcohol rather than to escape problems.”

“He seems to have come to terms with things more,” confirms Mina. His appearance and self-esteem have improved radically. Now, in the rare event that someone stares, he stares right back. He has also made good friends at university. “Not just relations and Greeks!” he laughs. He’s finishing university this year. “For a change, it looks as if I’ll pass my exams.” After graduation, he’s thinking of living in New York. And he hopes one day to marry and have children.

Importantly, his major surgery is now over. “I may do a few more cosmetic things and have an operation to improve my speech.” He pauses. “Some people think I’m obsessed with looking perfect. But if anyone told me I couldn’t ever have another operation, I wouldn’t be terribly upset.” Really? “Honestly. It’s taken me a long time. But now I really do feel that it’s what’s on the inside that counts.” Which is someone funny, energetic and resourceful. And, of course, incredibly brave.*

*Some names have been changed.

I’m sitting at a kitchen table in West London’s Notting Hill talking to the two parenting gurus of the moment. Their children – a total of eight between them – are at school, but there are bikes and scooters in the hallway, two fish tanks on a worktop, and the fridge is covered in magnetic letters, like a hundred thousand other family kitchens around the UK. It’s the home of Karen Doherty, and this table is where she and Georgia Coleridge have spent the past five years writing their book Seven Secrets of Successful Parenting.

Karen, 44, and Georgia, 42, became friends through their offspring. ‘We met in the communal garden that our houses both backed on to,’ explains Karen, who has Californian surfer-girl good looks, matching accent and Juicy Couture tracksuit. ‘Our children would run in and out of each other’s houses,’ adds Georgia, more bohemian in her spotty dress and with the face (in the words of her husband) of a prettier Cherie Blair.

Karen is the partner of Peter Doherty, a financier, and mother of three girls and a boy, aged eight, nine, 11 and 13. Georgia is married to Nicholas Coleridge, writer and managing director of Condé Nast, publisher of glossy magazines such as Vogue and Glamour. They have three boys and a girl, aged nine, 12, 15 and 16.

Despite being the kind of groomed, confident women who make mothering look easy, both admit to having felt paralysed with fear when they first became parents, and being tested to the limit by their own children’s antics. ‘My youngest son was the naughtiest in his nursery class,’ says Georgia. ‘He got up to endless mischief with Karen’s son, who was his best friend. And two of I’m our daughters were also partners in crime – at the age of five they escaped on to the street through the garden fence.’ Karen, who is forthright and witty, has an MPhil in management from Oxford and was a producer and journalist for American television before she became a full-time mother. Georgia, an Oxford graduate in politics, philosophy and economics, is children’s book editor of the Daily Mail, a reviewer and a spiritual healer. Tiptop academic, journalistic and caring credentials on both sides – but the idea for their book stemmed from their complete lack of confidence at the thought of bringing up children.

‘When I had my first baby,’ says Karen, ‘I was terrified I wouldn’t be able to cope. I’d never changed a nappy, and I was worried that I’d make mistakes and ruin my relationship with her. But then I saw how well a friend of mine dealt with her son when he was rude to his great-grandmother. If I’d behaved that badly as a kid, I’d have been slapped across the face and reminded for months of my insolence,’ she says. ‘So my friend’s sympathetic approach was a revelation. I realised how much I needed to learn, so I started reading lots of parenting books and signed up for classes.’ Georgia remembers feeling a similar sense of panic and bewilderment. ‘I had intended to be Julie Andrews up a mountain with a guitar and permanently happy children,’ she recalls. ‘So it was a terrible shock when mine argued with me, fought with each other and didn’t do what they were told. Whenever there was any sign of trouble, either I panicked and froze or lost my temper.’ They both attribute their lack of instinctive parenting skills to difficult aspects of their own childhoods.

Karen was raised in California by her father James Weinberg, then a Hollywood lawyer, and mother Patricia, then a nurse turned housewife. Her parents divorced 25 years ago. ‘My mother hated having her authority challenged,’ she explains. ‘Her dogmatic approach worked with my younger brother and sister, but I stood up to her, and she didn’t like it. To her [she’d been brought up by a Christian fundamentalist father] I was the devil child, the root of all evil in the house. She screamed and shouted and meted out physical punishments that would be considered child abuse these days – like hitting me so hard with a wooden spoon that it broke. She just didn’t know how to deal with me.’ Georgia, the elder of two daughters born to George Metcalfe, then a businessman, now a life coach, and his wife Elizabeth, who did charity work, was raised in Fulham, West London, amid gerbils, dachshunds and her mother’s home-made tapestry cushions. ‘My mother would be nice…then even nicer…then when being nice didn’t get through, she’d lose her temper volcanically,’ Georgia recalls.

‘My parents divorced when I was eight and I became like…’ She pauses. ‘Do you remember the boy in The Snow Queen? When the queen’s mirror .. ‘When I had my first baby, I was terrified that I’d make mistakes and wouldn’t be able to cope’ breaks, a shard goes into the little boy’s heart and he can no longer feel proper emotion. I’d been a sunny child until then but I coped badly with the underlying tensions and sadness, and my mother pretending it was all OK. I was fine at school [she won a scholarship to St Paul’s, the top London girls’ school] but at home I froze up and wouldn’t connect with my mother at all. ‘She had had a very difficult childhood too,’ Georgia adds. ‘Her own mother ran off when she was two, and her parents fought a vicious custody battle over her for 16 years. So she’d had poor parenting herself, yet she did her best as a single mother to look after us and hold everything together. But she was suffering, I was suffering and it was all just too painful. When things were at their worst, there was no money because my father’s business had folded and my mother was struggling to keep us all afloat. She couldn’t physically even kiss us goodnight – she just couldn’t touch us because life was too much for her.’ Interestingly, both Georgia and Karen had better relationships with their fathers than their mothers. ‘I told my father everything,’ says Karen.

‘He was the one who helped me sort out boyfriend troubles and took me to buy my first bra. To him I was an angel and he always saw the best in me. He never shouted at me or hit me, and I responded much better to his style of parenting – very gentle, very thoughtful. When I did misbehave, he’d sort it out sympathetically.’ And Georgia? ‘My father was just so cuddly and affectionate, I’ve always got on with him,’ she says. ‘I am so grateful that my mother didn’t repeat the pattern from her own childhood, and fight him for custody. It was a lifeline seeing him at weekends.’ So for both Karen and Georgia, most of their ‘mothering’ came from their fathers. ‘But let’s put this in perspective,’ says Karen. ‘Neither of us had idyllic childhoods, but nor were they terrible. There are plenty of people far worse off.’ And despite their troubled experiences, both of them have gone on to have large families of their own. ‘My relationship with my mother didn’t put me off having children,’ says Karen.

‘And luckily my temperament is very like my father’s. When each baby was born I loved them so passionately I just kept on getting broody. But I knew I’d reached my limit after having four children in five years.’ For Georgia, raised as one of five children from the age of 12 (both her parents remarried so she acquired two half-sisters and a half-brother), large families ? seem normal. ‘I love the different characters and relationships you get in big families,’ she says. Yet both women felt they couldn’t cope with the reality of a sprawling family without additional help. ‘I hired a nanny for a time, because I couldn’t manage a baby, two toddlers and a five-year-old on my own,’ explains Karen, who has no extended family nearby, having moved to the UK 20 years ago when she met her husband and won a place at Oxford. Georgia adds, ‘I had a wonderful lady to help me out. And I was lucky because when Alexander [her oldest child] was born, I went back to the office part time.

Then, as I had more babies, I found I could do large chunks of my job in the middle of the night when the children were asleep. But,’ she adds, ‘I kept thinking, if it’s tough for me, how incredibly hard it must be for other people. Like most parents, I’ve been tired for years and years. That’s why I wanted to find solutions that work for everyone.’ Georgia’s four children are all now at boarding school. Isn’t this surprising in a parenting guru? ‘Yes, I’m frightened people will say, “How can she write about parenting when her own children board?” But the two youngest have only just started, so for 16 years I’ve had children at home full time,’ explains Georgia. ‘I mourned each of my children for a year before they went to school. My husband says boarding days were the happiest of his life, so they wanted to go too. It was a hard decision, but a good one. They love boarding and my relationships with them are still very strong. The only thing we’ve lost,’ she continues, ‘is the fight over homework. I spend tons of time with them in the holidays, see them most weekends, and speak to them up to three times a day. I’m still very physical with them. Even Alexander, my 16-year-old, will sit on my knee and hug me, although he’s taller than me now.’ What, though, makes the duo think they can tell the rest of us how to parent? ‘We can’t,’ responds Georgia. ‘And we don’t want to. I’ve thrown lots of bossy, patronising books, the sort that tell you there’s only one way to do it, in the dustbin.’

Instead, they collected anecdotes and solutions from all sorts of parents – at the school gates, in grocery queues, at parenting classes, even in sandpits. ‘Most of our stories came from mothers,’ says Karen, ‘but as we both had such great fathers we tried to get lots of input from men too.’ Both of them think their own husbands do a fantastic job. ‘Nicholas is a great father,’ enthuses Georgia. ‘He’s very affectionate, cooks them breakfast and stands on the side of a hockey pitch in horizontal rain. He took Alexander and Freddie to Egypt, on his own, when they were five and six. I’m not sure what was more exciting for them – seeing the pyramids, or being allowed Coca-Cola!’ ‘I couldn’t have had so many children if Pete wasn’t such a good father,’ agrees Karen. ‘When they were babies he did endless night shifts, and as they got older he’d take them swimming and cycling. Now he’s always around in the evenings to help with homework, and at the weekends he’s on pancake duty.’ Karen and Georgia’s book distils their findings into seven parenting types and a collection of simple, accessible, easily remembered emotional tools for dealing with everything from getting your child to clean his teeth or turn off the television to picky eaters and bullying.

The idea is that you don’t have to be one sort of parent all the time – you can adapt different approaches to deal with different situations. It’s about finding a style that feels comfortable for you, and works with your children. If your child is persistently naughty, picky about his food or being bullied, for example, you will need to try more than one approach. ‘The more options you’ve got, the easier it is,’ says Karen, ‘but we’re not here to tell you which type of parent to be.’ And which type are they? ‘I’m good on the friendly stuff,’ says Georgia. ‘Like my father I’m a naturally Tuned-In and Cheerleader Parent [see box, above]. But I’ve had to learn ? how to be more authoritative, more of a Commando type, and it has helped a lot.’ ‘I’m naturally a Pause Parent,’ says Karen. ‘When my children started fighting, my mind went blank and often I didn’t know the best thing to do or say. But I found that saying nothing is a lot better than shouting, and once everyone has calmed down, it’s easier to sort things out. I also take after my father as a Tuned-In and Cheerleader Parent.

But I could become more Sorted. It’s a miracle when my children all end up at school with the correct kit on the right day.’ Writing the book has also helped them to resolve childhood issues and their relationships with their own mothers. Georgia had lunch earlier this month with both her parents, in a restaurant in Westminster. ‘By some fluke, Mrs Thatcher was upstairs,’ says Georgia, ‘so everyone was up there gawping and we had the ground floor to ourselves. We spoke about things that we’d avoided for 35 years and had to keep wiping away the tears. My relationship with my mother had been like a raw egg – neither of us had dared tap too hard on the shell in case we found all sorts of raw, runny, scary emotion inside. Now for the first time we were able to tap the egg and talk directly.’ Karen and her mother have also had a reconciliation. ‘I refused to talk to her for years in my teens,’ she says. ‘There was such a wall between us. But we’ve been able to get beyond that now.

She says she regrets all the years we lost. Touchingly, she also says I’m the best parent she’s ever seen and she’s now using our techniques with her grandchildren.’ Their relationship improved when Karen’s children were born. ‘My mother came and helped me, as her mother had helped her. It was the first thing she’d done for me in decades, and I saw a calm, more compassionate side of her.’ There will be no stopping the born-again parents now. They’ve been doing public speaking engagements, have just launched a parenting website, (KarenAndGeorgia.com) intend to run parenting classes and are bringing out a book on siblings next year. ‘The connection with our mothers wasn’t what we’d have wanted and we’ve both tried hard to give our children what we missed,’ concludes Karen. ‘It’s taken a hell of a long time to figure it out and make it simple so it works. Now we just want to help others too.’ And they will. Seven Secrets of Successful Parenting by Karen Doherty and Georgia Coleridge will be published tomorrow by Bantam, price £12.99. To order a copy with free p&p, call the YOU Bookshop on 0845 606 4204 or go to you-bookshop.co.uk

Seven ways to successful parenting

Karen and Georgia have identified seven parenting types, each with their own unique approach to family life. If you have children, you will almost certainly identify with one or more of them, but what can you learn from the other parenting styles?

PAUSE PARENTS give themselves time to think. They stay calm and quiet and don’t overreact in a crisis. If their child is arguing, whingeing or shouting, they realise it doesn’t help to get wound up and sucked into the drama. They know that once everyone has simmered down, everything will become clear. Then they can pick up the pieces, solve the problem, and maybe even stop the same scene playing itself out again in the future.

CHEERLEADER PARENTS focus on their child’s good points and are great at motivating with praise. It’s not that they don’t care if their child misbehaves; they stay positive because they know it gets results and that bad behaviour tends to shrivel up from lack of attention. Often saying something kind is all it takes.

TUNED-IN PARENTS understand the feelings behind their child’s behaviour and try to work out why he is behaving as he is. When their child is behaving badly or being defiant, they assume there’s a good reason for it, even if they don’t know exactly what it is. So before telling him off, they listen. They are brilliant at breaking deadlocks by helping their child deal with difficult feelings.

PHYSICAL PARENTS realise that there don’t always have to be deep psychological reasons for bad behaviour; sometimes children get ratty because they are exhausted, cooped up for too long in front of the television or juddering with sugar. They know that if their child feels well she will usually behave well — that she will be far less grumpy if she isn’t full of junk food, has a run round the park and gets a good night’s sleep. They also know a hug can work miracles.

SORTED PARENTS stay one step ahead of their child. Getting themselves and their children organised removes a whole layer of stress. If children know in advance when the television is going to be switched off or who is going to get the window seat in the car, they are far less likely to argue about it. Being a sorted parent is about seizing the upper hand and refusing to be a victim of fluctuating circumstances.

COMMANDO PARENTS have no-nonsense authority and are good at being in charge. They get things done without shouting, nagging or being bossy and everyone knows where they stand with them. ‘The juice is spilt, we need a cloth’ works much better than ‘You’re so naughty — clean up that mess now!’ LAID-BACK PARENTS manage to chill out and encourage their child to do things himself, rather than controlling every aspect of his life. They trust their children’s judgment and encourage them to develop their independence. Asking a child for solutions gets his brain working and helps him to feel more confident.