I hadn’t a clue what I was in for last month when I made my first trip back to London in seven years.
Sensing apprehension, my Toronto manicurist thought microblade eyebrows would add to my confidence. ‘Eyebrows are the picture frame,’ she said encouragingly, looking at my forehead where no hairs grow. I resisted.
I contemplated the packing. After three years of seclusion writing my memoir, Friends And Enemies, followed by 18 months of intermittent Covid lockdowns, my daily wardrobe consisted of laceless trainers from China with photos of my dogs printed on them and rotating Zara outfits of cargo trousers with mismatched sweaters.
I was British by birth (Watford), childhood and middle age. I had bridled at this because I bridle at anything that disturbs routine, even one I dislike. And I was scared: all roots of my British life had been pulled up and shrivelled in the absence of watering
I was out of practice in everything including dressing and speaking to anyone but my husband and dog.
The impetus for the trip had been an invitation to take part in the Cliveden Literary Festival along with genuine luminaries such as historian Antonia Fraser, political hatchet Sasha Swire (author of ‘Diary Of An MP’s Wife’ with its tell-all look at life in the Tory clique around David Cameron) and smart, promising young women like Emerald Fennell (the Oscar-winning director, actress — Camilla in The Crown — and writer). This all got me very excited when I talked about it — six months ahead of it. Less exciting when you’re facing it.
My husband, Conrad Black, decided to bookend the trip by scheduling our arrival for the launch party for the brilliant and priapic historian Andrew Roberts’ new book George III — a party which, given the range and number of Andrew’s former girlfriends plus present and future close acquaintances, was bound to include a good chunk of London’s smart (and good looking) literati.
The parallel reason was Conrad’s determination to convince me that London was the natural place for us to live AGAIN. After all, I was British by birth (Watford), childhood and middle age. I had bridled at this because I bridle at anything that disturbs routine, even one I dislike. And I was scared: all roots of my British life had been pulled up and shrivelled in the absence of watering.
Before marriage to Conrad in 1992, I had worked successfully at making a few real London friends, not rich, not especially social, but like me keen on music, books — and shoes.
Later, as the wife of a media titan — my husband’s firm published newspapers in America, Canada, Israel and the UK, including the Daily Telegraph — I embarked on a dizzying social life, giving parties for royalty, diplomats, great intellectuals and entertainment figures.
But I hung on like blazes to those first few friends, while trying to bring a couple of New York’s social set into my intimate circle. The New York ladies smiled, told me how much they loved me and when, in 2003, everything collapsed in a whirlwind of criminal charges against my husband, they retreated, never to be heard from throughout the mean years.
Barbara Amiel endured humiliation after her media tycoon husband Conrad Black (right) was jailed
In 2005, I had gone back to Canada, my husband’s birthplace, to be with him through his court battles, leaving friends real and imagined behind.
Would the few people in London I truly cared about have any time for me now?
As I packed, trying to look optimistically on the upcoming venture, I rifled through my La Perla underwear and prized pairs of silk Olivia von Halle and Bernadette PJs, with visions of room service and me prancing delectably about in lace, (I’m delusionary, too) followed by lazy walks with my husband under freshly wet chestnut trees.
‘Let’s be sure and make time for us,’ I said to Conrad in my best advice-to-the-lovelorn voice. (I nearly said ‘quality time’, but even I would choke on that.)
Unfortunately, Conrad has never felt the same enthusiasm about chestnut trees or walks. Within one day of my agreeing to the 19-day trip, he had arranged dinners every night and the luncheon regime was solid as well.
My packing nightmare was to be solved, I thought, by the ‘capsule wardrobe’. It fits in your one carry-on piece of luggage, preferably a casual Louis Vuitton Keepall duffle and not my Samsonite wheelie.
The clothes list will be familiar to avid readers of fashion magazines: a ‘classic coat, transitional blazer, a few well cut basics’ all spiffed up by the ‘timeless accessory’.
My ‘capsule’ filled two large suitcases while my carry-on was at bursting point with necessities including prescription medicines, masses of marginally illegal painkillers, the only foundation I can wear and what jewellery I had left after my husband’s lawyers had been paid. I wheeled it off the plane into Heathrow’s Terminal 5, where lines of chauffeurs were waiting holding up names. Sadly, not our name.
Our driver had gone AWOL. I found him lounging outside the terminal, a sullen gentleman who drove us to the street abutting our hotel in Covent Garden, where he dumped suitcases onto the pavement and disappeared. In our room, I realised my wheelie had also disappeared. (It turned up in Heathrow’s lost luggage terminal a week later having been to Berlin. Not a pill or earring was missing, miraculously.)
London was a huge shock after Canada. Covid is the defining difference. In Canada, the population has been beaten down to a mass of compliant Covid regulation freaks.
The culture has become something like the bland Muzak one used to hear on lifts. Covid bylaws regulate the decibel count of music in beauty salons (don’t ask what that has to do with Covid), everyone masks up everywhere and contact tracing at restaurants before entry is mandatory. Which, in my case, is pointless.
‘Name?’ asked a woman at the door of a Toronto restaurant. ‘Myra Hindley,’ I replied. ‘Telephone number?’ The week before I was Margot Fonteyn.
If the name is not on a receptionist’s Instagram feed, they don’t know it. By contrast London is alive.
At A party for Joan Collins’s new book of revelations (‘uncensored and unapologetic’), she sat looking super, post-Dynasty with serious shoulders in a short cape swirling
