WE’VE walked past tiny hamlets and ancient stone farms, stopping only to drink water from a mountain stream. We strode in dappled sunlight through pine forests, then wandered up a hill, alongside verdant fields and cattle wearing cow-bells.

Now one of the oldest monasteries in the Western world – the imposing Monasterio de Samos – stands resplendent below us in the spectacula Ouribo River valley.

No wonder walking this, the medieval pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela in Galicia, northern Spain, is considered something to experience before you die.

It had never crossed my mind to do it. But then Nancy Durrell McKenna, film-maker and founder of the charity SafeHands for Mothers, asked me to join their six-day, 84-mile sponsored walk – the last leg of the 500-mile ‘French Road’.

Having never walked further than seven miles, it seemed an irresistible challenge. We were a motly group of 19 international ‘pilgrims’, all with our own reasons for walking, but united by charitable worthiness.

Lesley Nelson was a 40-something Aboriginal and maternity health worker taking her first-ever trip outside Australia; Sir Robert Naylor is chief executive of University College London Hospital, usually in charge of seven London hospitals and a budget of £750 million but was now our driver and gofer.

Events organser Michelle Laven had a poignant reason for participating: ‘I want to do something really difficult to alleviate my depression,’ she said. ‘My brother died in December.’ ‘It’s a privilege to follow in the footsteps of St James the Apostle,’ added Irish midwife Sally Griffiths, tears welling in her eyes. ‘I hope to strengthen my faith.’ For me, it had taken seven weeks of traumatic preparation for me to get to this point. I had all the nerdy essentials – from spring-loaded retractable walking poles and water backpack to fashion disaster Gore-Tex tousers (thereby facing the awful prospect that it often pours in northern Spain).

For relief I’d escaped to Sweaty Betty for voguish walking gear – but the shop assistant had suddenly produced a list of anorak pilgrimage must-haves: ‘Duct tape (to cover blisters), Vaseline for preventing chafing…’ With mouting horror, I read about the refugios (hostels) in which pilgrims sleep communally in rooms full of snoring people, if they can even get a bunk, and endure cold showers. Then came Ryanair’s demand for £250 on my excess luggage – so I emptied my suitcase, put on all my clothes at the check-in desk and waddled, Michelin Man-like on to the plane.

The first night we stayed in Casa de Labranza Arza, near Samos, in a 1720s, thick stone-waled farmhouse surrounded by spectacular scenery.

Next morning we started our pilgrimag at Igles de Camino in nearby Triacastela. We stamped our pilgrims’ passports in the church. Two Lithuanian monks wearing habits asked us to join them in prayer. We held hands in a circle, dew on the grass, mist rising. ‘Bless these pilgrims, our walk,’ intoned the monk. ‘Hallelujah.’ Yee ha!

We set off, following the yellow pilgrimage arrows. For more than 1,000 years pilgrims – including Louis VII and St Francis of Assisi – have undertaken the Way to earn forgiveness for their sins. Was I going to have a pilgrimage like the actress Shirley MacLaine famously had, with visions and meetings with angels? Or perhaps the opposite – as satirised in Luis Bunuel’s film The Milky Way – of encountering religious hypocrisy and human cruelty? Over the ensuing days we climbed gently rolling hills, followed tracks between stone fences and passed ancient pilgrims’ hospitals and centuries-old churches. We walked by smallholdings with private chapels, and sprouts and cabbages growing neatly for the family’s thick evening soup (caldo).

One day, in a medieval scene, a pilgrim walked past playing bagpipes, with people following him. My James Bond-style Silva radio pedometer recorded things like: ’27km, 2,016 (calories burned), five hours 48 mins (walking), 36,273 (steps).’ Part of the interest of the journey was meeting other pilgrims. There was Lavinia Scrymgeour, 22, a Scot who’d been walking for five weeks. And Andre Barreiro, 32, a Knight of Malta and son of a retired admiral. He worked in a Knights’ hospital and had walked 1,864 miles from Rome, living on alms.

The Camino (‘Way’) is said to be a journey of the soul. Outwardly, the pilgrim faces the weather and terrain.

The inward journey is about encountering challenges and having the space to discover what’s important in life.

The first ‘test’ of my pilgrimage was living communally. One of my room-mates snored like an erupting volcano.

Still sleepless at 3am, my torch clenched between my teeth like some wannabe Girl Guide, I dragged my mattress into the corridor – only to be woken every 15 minutes by a chiming clock.

As the journey progressed, people became reflective, self-disclosing and authentic.

We were on literally and metaphorically on the walk of life – helping each other face obstacles along the way.

NORMALLY I’m competitive and have to be first – but on the Camino I challenged myself to arrive last every day. I learnt to dally and eat chorizo. When I walked alone, it was harder – just spotting the arrows pointing the Way.

Then I was more aware of minor aches – and just focused on taking one step at a time. (I discovered a team of Aussie midwives were winning by using haemorrhoid cream on their feet…) When we arrived in the splendour of Santiago, I felt both elated and deflated. We were staying in the beutiful San Francisco Hotel Monumento, a lovely old convent with thick stone walls and courtyards. Musicians played schmaltzy Ave Maria in the streets. Pilgrims wer lying on rucksack pillows, sunbathing.

The architecture rivalled Venice. But for the first time in my life it had been the journey, not the destination that mattered.

We reached the great Baroque cathedral, and joined the queue for the tomb of St James. Every pew was full for the daily pilgrims’ mass, wi th people standing and baggage and sticks piled high. I sat on the floor while an enormous silent incense burner was swung spectacularly and dangerously overhead on a massive rope.

As we wandered cheerfully to the pilgrims’ office to get our completion certificates, I surprised myself. I decided which stretch of the Camino I’d walk next…

TO donate to Safe Hands For Mothers, visit njustgiving.com/safehandswalkforlife

WEB WISDOM For more uplifting walking ideas worldwide,go to travelmail.co.uk

NOT heard of Lili TarkowReinisch yet?

Well, you soon will. She’s one of London’s hottest new songwriters.

Her lyrics are being promoted across the Atlantic to Grammy-award winning singers like Carrie Underwood, and to American Idol.

Not bad going, considering Lili is also a full-time psychotherapist, wife, mother of two, Aikido black belt and marathon runner.

And the sole decorator of her Ralph Lauren-meets-Louis-Vuitton-andAndrew-Martin-style apartment.

The entrance hall to her west London home sets the dramatic tone.

A Senegalese burial outfit hangs on the wall and the corridor is flanked with wooden African fertility symbols in museum display cabinets.

There’s an Art Deco ebony console table and, on the floor, zebra skin.

Even the nearby loo has walls of black oak planks that were used underwater as sea defences to stop enemy submarines during the War.

Lili greets me in Chanel, jeans and bling. Her hair is waist-length and her eyelashes almost as long. “Never underestimate the superficial,” she laughs.

Originally from St Louis, she came to England 15 years ago. “I came here to do a Masters in Economics at LSE.

My knowledge of the Maastricht Treaty made me the darling of every party!”

Afterwards, she returned to her private psychotherapy practice.

The apartment in which she now lives with her hedge-fund husband, Mark, and their children is stylish.

“Home” wasn’t always thus.

“When I was 12, my father left us in such penury that my mother had to apply for a special permit for me to work,” she recalls.

“Our neighbourhood was disparagingly dubbed ‘Indian Ghettos’.

“We got food stamps – which the Government give you when you’re really poor.

Our motto at home was, ‘If it ain’t broke, it will be soon’.”

Her “escape” came with a scholarship to Washington University, and she hasn’t stopped working since.

It was with a desire to put all this behind her that she tackled her décor.

The couple bought the flat five years ago: Mark liked it because it didn’t need any refurbishment.

Lili, however, had other ideas – for changing every room!

It took three years to get planning permission to knock down walls.

“For a year we lived with builders to save money.”

The experience was worse for Mark.

“I dusted him every morning before work.

He was initially resistant to the changes, so every time he travelled, I’d take a wall down!

Once, he went to his beloved steam room but it was already in the skip.”

The new look is bold, masculine, aesthetically harmonious and somewhat disturbing.

There are white walls and bleached lime oak floorboards.

“But everything has a dark side.

The flat’s full of creatures that have been captured.

Analyse that,” she says, surveying the sitting room with its reindeer rugs over sofas, old zebra skins and antler candelabra.

“That’s not just a picture of a rodeo,” she says, pointing to a wall-sized photograph.

“It’s a prison rodeo.

A sculpture, Missing Boy 3, by the Korean artist Ki June Park is purposely unsettling.

And Tim Shaw’s ‘Man on Fire’ bronze should make you cry.”

It’s also an oasis of brown, silver and monochrome.

“When the man came to design the fish tank in the TV room, he thought I was joking when I said, ‘Only black and white fish – anything with colour becomes a fish finger’.”

Underlying this order is a sense of hedonism. “There’s a bar you can dance on, and every room’s set up for a party.

A sound system follows you around the flat – anything by Shwayze, Wrapt-Up productions or Lo-Star.”

And there’s a wine fridge in most rooms.

“Yeah, pure class,” she laughs.

The sitting room is where everything happens, from seeing patients to recording music and writing songs (“with Jerry Meehan who tours with Robbie Williams, Ellie Golding who’s always in the papers, And Leo Whiteley, who signs stars for Notting Hill Music.”)

There are tribal artefacts, a yee-hah! Remington cowboy sculpture and vintage Louis Vuitton.

But also a grand piano, lead-lined acoustic floorboards and ceiling. Ceiling-height black oak cupboards conceal the kind of technical gear that warms her “trailer-park heart”. Like much of the furniture, she designed these cupboards.

“If I can’t afford something, I get it copied or hit Lots Road.”

This stylish thrift extends to the children’s rooms, despite their Ralph Lauren sleigh beds.

“There’s not a single thing they couldn’t take to their first flats.”

(The kids are aged eight and 11.)

And what of the master bedroom, an Asian enclave with Tang horses?

“Our heavenly Vi- Spring mattress is the star turn alongside my closet of car-to-bar vertiginous heels and Ruhlmanninspired tallboy.

The photographs of vintage cars are all Portobello Road finds.”

She pauses.

“Much of what’s here only costs a fiver.

But the cheap stuff’s beautifully lit, so looks expensive.”

It’s also a home bursting with love, laughter and style.

Now all she needs is a Grammy in the loo.

HOW TO GET THE LOOK

Lighting: All Square (020 7727 0606, www.allsquaregrp.co.uk) .

Handmade beds: Vi-Spring (01752 366311, www.vispring.co.uk).

Audio: BOSE sound system (0800 1074999, www.bose.co.uk); integrated lighting and music from Lutron Homeworks (020 7702 0657, or visit www.lutron.com); and Redhorn Audio Visual (020 7486 8604/8605, www.redhornav.com).

Kitchen: Gaggenau appliances (0870 840 2003); units by Clive Christian (020 7349 9200, london@clive.com).

Antiques and artifacts: Ralph Lauren (020 7535 4600) for sleigh beds. Henry Gregory Antiques (Portobello Road, 020 7792 9221) for vintage Louis Vuitton. Sebastiano Barbagallo (020 7792 3320) for African art.

Display items: from Striking Displays, Brighton (01273 423623) for Perspex display cases.

Aquarium: designed and supplied by Aquatic Design Centre (020 7636 6388).

ONE woman has thrown away the wheelchair to which she was confined for two years. She suffered from ME (chronic fatigue) for 15 years and now, confounding medical orthodoxy, is symptom-free. Another patient says he endured asthma intermittently for 30 years – and is now cured. Improbably, both say their transformation is down to yoga. They are not alone, because many major health benefits are now being claimed for the discipline.

The number of people practising in Britain has tripled in the past decade and now the first NHS yoga facility in a primary healthcare centre has opened in London’s Kentish Town. “It specialises in yoga for diabetes, back pain and breathing difficulties,” says its founder, biochemist Dr Robin Monro, also founder of the Yoga Biomedical Trust, which runs clinical trials into yoga and offers lessons.

A recent study showed that yoga can significantly lower levels of triglycerides – the fats in your blood which if elevated can lead to heart disease. Another concluded that yoga can increase brain gammaaminobutyric levels, which when lowered are associated with depression, anxiety, epilepsy and even Alzheimer’s. It’s also known to lower blood pressure, cholesterol levels and improve memory, sleep, energy, gastrointestinal function and tolerance to pain. In some instances, chronic pain can be eliminated.

Jo Manuel is a practitioner who helps sufferers of illnesses from muscular dystrophy to Parkinson’s. In 2004, she founded the Special Yoga Centre and launched Yoga for the Special Child, a unique service in Britain for disabled children. For a small, charitable facility in Kensal Rise, it punches way above its weight – Jo’s techniques have been adopted by all New York’s special-needs schools.

It was to the SYC that Samantha Cameron took her and David’s late son, Ivan, who suffered from cerebral palsy and epilepsy. “Sam said yoga helped her son relax and find more peace in his body,” says Jo.

Last month SYC held a charity art auction and raised a whopping £100,000 – with artists from Marc Quinn to Sam Taylor-Wood personally donating works – to fund its work. Television presenter Gaby Roslin said: “I’ve watched Jo working with autistic children. I’m astounded by what she achieves with kids who can’t normally even make eye contact or sit still.”

The centre teaches several forms of yoga, from ashtanga to kundalini, in general classes and has 40 instructors. There are special classes for adults with everything from ME to MS and sessions for pre-natal teenagers. Jo’s speciality, a hathabased practice, is the one she uses to treat 350 special-needs children a week.

Jo believes yoga has a positive effect on even the most serious illnesses. Fiona Agombar, a former high-flying executive and author of Beat Fatigue Through Yoga, is one of the centre’s teachers.

“I had ME for 15 years, I was in hospital for months with appalling fatigue and muscular pain, and in a wheelchair for two years. The medical view is that after five years with ME, you don’t get better,” she says. “With yoga, I’ve become symptom-free. Last year I went trekking in Nepal.”

So can yoga cure any illness? “MS, for example, isn’t going to be stopped by it,” says Jo. “But it can slow the degeneration and help sufferers manage the pain. I also see Down’s children meeting their developmental milestones earlier than those who don’t do yoga.”

Dr Monro believes more investigation is necessary if yoga is to be accepted as a part of everyday healthcare. For Jo, however, success is measured in smaller steps, such as when the mother of one disabled girl who attends SYC told her recently that thanks to Jo’s yoga classes her daughter had slept properly for the first time in nine years.

Special Yoga Centre, The Tay Building, 2A Wrentham Avenue, NW10 (020 8968 1900, www.specialyoga.org.uk). Pamper Evening 26 June, 5pm-10pm, £5 entry fee, treatments from reflexology to Indian head massage. For donations visit www.justgiving.com/syc/donate

Ever since the tornado ripped through Kensal rise, north-west London, two years ago – damaging 150 homes and rendering 50 (including ours) uninhabitable – the area has become well known.

For more than a year, the streets most affected looked like building sites. Yet since disaster struck, the rise and rise of Kensal rise has continued unabated.

Whether it was due to some creative local energy being stirred up by the cyclone, the final “coming” of a formerly up-and-coming area, or prohibitive rents in nearby Notting Hill prompting the relocation of hip shops, much has happened since the storm. The biggest changes have been in Chamberlayne road, now dubbed by vogue magazine as “one of London’s coolest streets”.

For starters, Sally Wilton opened Pinkham Lighthouse, London’s first not-for-profit arthouse digital cinema and community venue, in an edwardian theatre. And Miro Davda opened Miro’s Grocery, London’s first seasonal, locally sourced, organic grocer.

Still on the foodie front, The Diner, with outposts in Shoreditch and Soho, has just arrived, offering well-priced classic American fare (burgers and shakes). And worth the detour for the décor is Paradise by Way of Kensal rise, with live music, poetry readings and ambitious food.

Indeed, Chamberlayne road is now considered the new Portobello, encapsulating the real flavour of the area.

Among other shops there is Howie & Bell for vintage clothes, lampshades and chairs, and Niche, which offers fashionable, shabby-chic French and english stock.

My family and I moved there five years ago from Holland Park, wanting more space for less money. Our house was badly damaged by the 2006 tornado but after a rebuild we have moved back into an area we love. We got 2,100sq ft of victoriana with a 100ft garden for the price of a threebedroom leasehold in the royal Borough.

“Despite the recession, there’s a huge demand and a shortage of property here now,” says Alan Isaacs, director of estate agent Queen’s Park Partnership. “Prices £ 460,000: three- bedroom NW10. Through Marsh & have dropped by about 20 per cent compared with 30 to 35 per cent in many parts of London,” he adds.

The leading Tricycle fringe theatre is close, Queen’s Park is nearby and the swish Notting Hill Harbour Club is but a quick jog away. Plus there are good transport links and a regular farmers’ market.

It has more than its fair share of cool residents. Jade Jagger has a pad in a groovy former telephone exchange, while the singer formerly known as Cat Stevens resides in gated splendour.

Nearby, emma Thompson has a victorian house, so, too, does vogue editor Alexandra Shulman, while Lily Allen lives just moments away.

Many of the area’s former inhabitants, Irish immigrants and Afro-Caribbeans, have moved away as Notting Hillbillies colonised the area, but Kensal rise remains authentic and ethnically mixed. It has a vibe: it is creative, energetic, bookish and home to writers, artists and media folk.

Delicatessens and BBC employees notwithstanding, the area still retains its appealing edginess and alternative flavour.

Alternative? Well, you can probably find more yoga here than in India. Indeed, little beats the Mother Nature Clinic with its world-class massage by Krenoula evripidou.

The Notting Hillified Gorgeous hair salon has relocated from Westbourne Grove and there’s a brocante-cum-tea shop opening soon in “one of the coolest streets in London”.

Factfile

Council tax: London Borough of Brent. Band D, £ 1,343.

Schools: Kensal Rise Primary.

Public transport: Tube stations are Kensal Green Queen’s Park, both on the Bakerloo line. Silverlink rail services from Kensal Rise station to Euston take 15 minutes and go to Richmond and Stratford.

Restaurants: The Diner (020 8968 9033); Paradise by Way of Kensal Rise (020 8969 0098). Delicatessens include Miro’s Grocery (020 8968 2298) and L’Angolo

(020 8969 5757).

Market: a farmers’ market is held every Sunday in Salusbury Road.

According to Lord Mancroft, there are only three things that you need to learn in skiing: ‘How to put on your skis, how to slide downhill and how to walk along the hospital corridor’. What he forgot to mention is that you also have to learn to enjoy sporting clothes and equipment that cost the equivalent of the Greek national debt just to stand in sub-zero temperatures and suffer height vertigo. And additionally, you need to grasp that you will spend un bras et une jambe simply to break un bras et une jambe. Only a mug would do it. Yet, ooops, I’m winter-holidaying in the ski resort of Val d’Isere.

I’m in Val d’Isere with Ella, my 12 year-old daughter, a genetic aberration who likes to ski 24/7 and would happily slalom backwards down a black run. We’re here because of maternal love and Scott Dunn, the luxury tour operator beloved of celebrities and royals. On first sight, Val looks like toy town after someone has sneezed the best Bolivian cocaine over it, with a pretty layer of snow over footpaths, the Baroque church and traditional Savoyard chalets built from wood and local stone. It’s in a majestic setting and peopled less by fur coats than serious skiers, including the likes of Ben Elton, Peter Gabriel and Coldplay drummer, Will Champion.

If you don’t ski, you can do an array of lunatic snowy things like snowmobile driving (junior Schumacher on ice), driving on ice (Schumacher on ice), ice diving (going beneath the ice of Lac de Tignes, for the truly crazed), dog sledding, snow-shoeing, ice climbing (scaling a frozen waterfall with the aid of ice axes and crampons, I ask you…) and paragliding. Or take scenic flights and vivez la montaigne en helicoptere. Or you can eat, which is what I like to do.

But first to our lodgings. We’re staying in Marie, a lovely chalet which sleeps eight, with an open-plan living-area, roaring fire, exposed reclaimed timber and stone, and Hammam and plunge pool overlooking snow-capped mountains. Marie is one of a family of chalets nestling in a cul-de-sac. (If you want to do the oligarch thing, you can stay next door in Marie’s impressive sibling, Le Rocher. A snip with a starting price of £32,660 a week, it sleeps 14 and has ironic arty décor including groovy chandeliers partout, Alice in Wonderland throne chairs, a technogym and a screen on which to watch films whilst in the pool.) It soon becomes clear that we’re onto something special here. Drivers who whisk you hither and thither are included in the price and there’s one member of staff to every two guests, for who nothing is too much trouble.

Take Thomas Checkettts, the chef in Marie. He cut his culinary teeth working with Gordon Ramsay and so must be used to difficult people. Which is fortunate as I’m keen to follow a macrobiotic diet. Forget raclette and fondue, I want sea-weed and miso soup as my mountain staples. Thomas rises gamely to my Madonna-style aspirations and conjures up delicacies like beetroot jelly, sweet pea granite, and garlic and spinach veloute. But very soon I’m lured to the Other Side by his beautifully-presented gastronomic dishes of foie gras, succulent fowl with rosti and breakfasts of smoked salmon and scrambled egg with truffle oil. Diet be damned!

It would be unforgivably piggy to do nothing but eat. So I raise myself for a sports massage from physio Toby Clifford, who is about ten foot tall and all compacted brawn in army fatigue trousers. He is to deep-tissue massage what crevices are to wrinkles. Words like muscular release, relief and amazing come to mind. In the summer he pummels soldiers for the Ministry of Defence. It’s enough to make anyone join the Army. Then in a fit of further exertion, later I walk to my bedroom for a facial from Pamper Off Piste. Pamper On Piste, now that would be interesting.

Afterwards, I swim in Oxygene, the erstwhile winter Olympics press centre now converted into a sort of Chelsea Harbour Club at altitude. It boasts hydro-massage, sauna, steam bath and Art, including life-size cows in the reception area. Plus there’s a pool where women in black costumes and goggles do fierce lengths. You probably take your life into your hands as much in these lanes as you do on the slopes.

Next day, I go (drum roll) snow-shoeing with guide Michel Gavet and a group. We walk in the silence. The sounds are of nothing but falling snow. In the valley below there’s a dam and a submerged village, the church spire of which sometimes shows above the water. People are skiing like traversing ants on the mountains opposite. There are eagles, white hare, roe deer, wolves (apparently) and trees laden with lichen and snow. It’s beautiful. It’s exhilarating.

We press on. I fall over countless times, often ending up stuck knee-high in snow. It’s no walk in the park; it’s more like an aerobics session for advanced mountain goats. As we pick our way gingerly down steep and slippery snow-covered rocks like lame donkeys, there’s a Virgin Mary in a rocky shrine. A bit like the ones you find on hazardous corners of fatal roads, overseeing the accidents. I’m glad to get back to terra more firma and less slippery.

I head to L’Arolay, a rustic restaurant Savoyard with views over the Isere Gorge, for lunch. Here they serve Cremeaux du Pere Francis (a basket of potatoes and an entire cheese in a box,) which my friend, Jane, polishes off, while I content myself with a family-sized serving of tartfilette and Ella demolishes a cow-sized steak tartare. Afterwards, groaning at the waists, we pop down to the Chevallot patisserie for some gastro-porn: think window displays of tartellette framboise and eclairs and, inside, counters of fougasse and croque courgette, and an eponymous owner who is often voted, ‘best pastry cook’ in France.

Then things take a very curious twist. Give me a map of the pistes, and I usually feel giddy just looking at it but Val d’Isere is a legendary area: 300km of marked runs, two glaciers, 1930 metres of vertical drops and 90 ski lifts. And then, reader, I do it. Under the expert eye of Ken Smith, a moniteur independent, I put on a pair of skis and hit the slopes…

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.