“Caroline Phillips is a tenacious and skilful writer with a flair for high quality interviewing and a knack for making things work.”
The plane lands to an unusual chorus. “Santo bravo,” the plane’s incumbents, many of them schoolchildren, shout and clap. “They are thanking the pilot,” explains my octogenarian neighbour, an Italian lady in black. It’s our first insight into the warmth of the Apulians, as the locals are known. Welcome to Bari in Puglia, high on Italy’s heel.
As we sail away from the medieval coastal town of Kotor, Montenegro, all ancient walls and 12th-century churches, with a dramatic backdrop of mountains, the warm breeze is filled with the sound of altos and baritones. One minute they’re singing Bellini, the next it’s Bizet. There’s a piano on deck too.
The stuffiest of ‘men-only’ sports has finally entered the 21st century. Home of the Masters golf tournament, Augusta National has accepted its first two female members.
Granted, one is the former US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice and the other is Darla Moore, one of the US’s most powerful businesswomen but still…In Sicily, at the Verdura Golf & Spa Resort, they’re positively demanding that women swap their Louboutins for studded shoes.They’re whooping about a rise in ‘girlie golf’ and are planning a ladies’ tournament for next years.
The Gstaad Palace, Switzerland, is full of European royals, Greek ship owners and tuxedo-clad waiters. Liz Taylor loved it and so does Valentino. But when people with kingdoms and Ferraris tire of socialising, dancing and the spa of all spas, they can pay a princely sum to stay in a mountain hut with an outside lavatory.
“The granita in Bar Roma is the best in Sicily,” declared Fulvio Pierangelini, the chef who oversees Sir Rocco Forte’s hotel kitchens globally. Bar Roma is found in the port of Sciacca – pronounced shakka – on the little-visited southern coast of Sicily, just up from Agrigento. During the summer, Fulvio is based at the Verdura Golf & Spa Resort, 20 minutes away, and he was taking the opportunity to give me a cookery lesson that included a visit to Sciacca to choose fish.
A Jesus lookalike is sitting in his shop sanding poplar wood. Handmade wooden marionettes and tambourines hang from the ceiling. He has covered his walls with leftist newspaper cuttings. “This street’s full of fascists,” he confides. “I’m the only true Communist here.” His shop doesn’t have a name, although it’s been here 36 years. “Just call it ‘the shop by the cathedral’.”
We pull up at the ashram. A bare-chested man in a dhoti walks past as monkeys and peacocks wander around. “I’ve been here before,” I say, startled. “In another life,” replies a distant cousin, Alan Lawrence. No, two years ago, en route to Kerala. I visited for nanoseconds and thought: “Golly, how could anyone stay here? So boring and uncomfortable.” Now I’m here for two weeks.
The battle has begun. I have hit 50. Soon I will have not so much a “muffin top” – that unsightly circle of fat around the middle – as a “paddling pool top”. Normally losing weight is easy. It is keeping it off that’s tricky. But what to do with this middle-age spread appearing around my girth?
Caroline Phillips tries a radical detox treatment in India, while, overleaf, we suggest the 20 best spas to beat the new year blues.
View transcriptWhen we moved to London’s Kensal Rise in 2003, I hated it. I disparagingly referred to it as ‘The Suburbs’. We’d lived in Holland Park and Kensington. I loved the Royal Borough’s stucco houses, gracious parks, cafes and shops. But we’d sold our duplex in Kensington during the rise of the property market and, sitting smug, waited in a rented house in Holland Park for the market to crash. And waited. And waited.
How do you keep two easily bored girls amused on a driving tour? Try breaking the journey with beaches, treehouses and meals you can eat with your fingers, says Caroline Phillips.
Simon Cowell, Marlon Brando, Muhammad Ali, Frank Sinatra and OJ Simpson have at least one thing in common: they have all dined at Patmore, the five-bedroom Surrey home of public relations supremo Max Clifford, who is putting it on the market at £1.795 million as he prepares for a new life with a new wife following an Easter wedding.
I am onstage in front of 65 strangers who think I’m a stand-up comedian. I’ve never done anything like this before. Why have I agreed…
As we stepped off the Dodekanisos Pride ferry onto the Greek island of Symi for our late August beach holiday, our thoughts were on sunbathing…
Welcome to Brent — once called the drive-by-shooting capital of the UK. Before that it was the People’s Republic of Brent, ravaged by poverty and…