Brigid Keenan

I am not bragging when I say that 56 years ago I was a young meteor. No: it is official. In 1967, Jonathan Aitken, then a young journalist on the Evening Standard (his uncle, Lord Beaverbrook, owned it at the time) wrote a book about the upcoming young movers and shakers in London – the stars of the Sixties (to mix celestial bodies). The Young Meteors it was called, and I was one of them.  At that time, I was 27 years old and the fashion editor of the Sunday Times and Aitken put me in as one of the three powerful influencers in that world. (The others were Marit Allen of Vogue and Georgina Howell of the Observer – both dead now, sadly.

Almost 50 years ago, I was fashion editor of the Sunday Times and a man in his mid-twenties by the name of Michael Roberts was a junior editor. Born in Buckinghamshire in 1947 to an English mother and a father from St Lucia, he was handsome and stood very tall and straight. Even so, when he was named the world’s most elegantly dressed man under 30 at the International Male Elegance Awards, I was baffled. His habitual garment was a second-hand tweed coat done up with a piece of string… how could this be? But it wasn’t long before his creative genius became obvious – to me and to the rest of the world.

In the early 2000s my husband, a diplomat for the EU, was posted to Kazakhstan, a vast empty steppeland next to Siberia. It was winter and the place was covered with thick snow. My family were in England, my husband was mostly in the office; I was 61 and I didn’t know a soul. Our previous posting had been to Damascus and I had occupied myself by writing a book about the old palaces there, but here there were no old buildings as the Kazakhs had been nomads. I had nothing to do. Everyone spoke Russian – I didn’t. As my husband was a senior diplomat we qualified for a cook, but she and I could only communicate using animal noises: chicken was cluck-cluck, beef was moo and lamb was baa. The main foods available seemed to be cabbage, onion and potatoes.