TALES FROM BELLA'S WORLD...

Valentine’s Day has held an exaggerated significance in my life. Probably because of my ‘bohemian upbringing’ which mostly just means messy. My parents were not married; my mother never married. The corny traditional...

‘Do you remember when we lived at The Old Laundry and we were allowed half a Redoxon tablet when we were off school sick?’ I was talking to my sister Esther about a...

I first met Marianne Faithful when I was 20. I was invited with two friends to a dinner party on a Chelsea Embankment houseboat where she was the honoured guest. I don’t remember...

When I was 5 my mother decided we should become vegetarian. I was excited about this new family policy though sorry to lose the sausages. What happened was that my Irish grandmother had...

I found an old diary once with a list of new year’s wishes. At the top of the page it said ‘No more problems with my Italian backers.’ Not long after writing the...

When I was 6 my mother invited a spiritual guru to come over to our flat in Tunbridge Wells. There was a lot of excitement about it among the grownups and my younger sister Esther and...

This is a photograph of me and my dad. I wish it wasn’t so blurry, but it is immediately recognisably me and him. Funny to think of dad in a yellow jumper. I...

Today I received a letter – a rare occurrence. This one arrived in a pale grey envelope with elegant spidery handwriting. It reminded me of being at school and the intense relationships between...

My early memories of getting to know my father took place mostly in restaurants. As a tiny child I remember mum taking my sister Esther and I to meet him in Marine Ices...

When I was a child and living in Marrakech, my sister Esther and I entertained ourselves with obsessions about certain words. We settled on Hideous and Kinky as the favourites. We would chant them,...

I have always found that clothes in films are the key to bringing a character, especially a heroine, into the focus of thought provoking fascination. People’s gestures and actions, the small details of how they...

‘Where do you get your ideas from?’ The screen in my mind shows a desert. An uninterrupted undulating horizon of nothingness. The question of where do I get my ideas prompts the fear...

Once, when I was in Paris for work in the late 90’s, I arranged to have breakfast with my friend Christian Louboutin. We ambled down the Rue de Rivoli and wandered into a smart-looking...