Rachel Johnson

My life of non-stop glamour and sizzle continues. Over breakfast in our Notting Hill ‘country kitchen’ I noticed the large cardboard box lying out by the bins. This is not unusual. Since Covid/WFH, deliveries are more frequent than drone strikes in the Donbas. ‘Bound to be for you,’ said Ivo. ‘Actually, could be your birthday present.’ He went back to his study of the Times. You may think this is an unorthodox way of presenting your wife with her birthday present. But there is nobody to blame but me, according to my husband, who declares I’m ‘terrible at presents’. My birthday – not that anybody cares – is on 3 September, at the height of la rentrée. My mother would therefore cleverly disguise things I needed for school as objects of desire.

This is not happening, I thought, as I jabbed at my phone to magic up a hybrid to convey me noiselessly to a central London studio. But my Uber app had vanished and wouldn’t reinstall, and was then ‘locked’. Meanwhile, no black cabs were plying their licensed trade on Upper Tooting Road, where I was soaking up the vibrant multicultural scenery when this tech glitch occurred, outside a store called Niqaab and opposite Daily Fresh Naan. I never keep drivers waiting. I almost always tip. I even sometimes make small talk over the beat of Heart FM I moved fast to resolve the problem, i.e. I channelled Andrew Neil whenever British Airways fails to remember that he’s its most important client. I sent a stiff tweet to @UberUK, informing it that my account was disabled.

Lake Como It doesn’t take long for me to fall in love. A young Adonis with a six-pack bounced on a trampoline, his dark curls flapping like spaniels’ ears. Waiters flitted about with drinks. Ridiculously attractive couples, all with perfect bodies, lounged on the beach in front of us, rosé on ice to hand. We’d arrived by water, fetched by a barefoot beauty in an Albergo Aurora-branded white polo and batty riders, who helped our party of five out of our little launch and onto the Albergo’s riva as if not only our lives depended on it, but her job too.

My youngest son, Oliver, has asked me to make a speech at his wedding. I am very flattered even to be invited as, given the Beckham family meltdown over the Brooklyn nuptials, you can’t take anything for granted these days. I’ve undertaken not to wear a slip dress of my own design, or dance ‘on’ Oliver to any of ‘our songs’, or speak for more than five minutes. I’ve worked out that this gives me up to 750 words to praise him and his lovely bride Lily; express what he means to me; convey my joy at his marriage to the incredible blonde bombshell who has been the apple of his eye since they first met at Manchester University; tell funny stories about his childhood and school days; and generally bring the house down without blubbing. For comparison, this column is 850 words.

My beef with the columnist Bruce Anderson began, as beefs do, at the Spectator summer party. Not this year’s – we will come to that – but at another brilliant edition of the annual gold-plater some years ago. On that occasion, after arrival I’d gone to my usual peg outdoors by the stairs up into the garden, a liminal position from where I can bag the famous and important and am unlikely to be bed-blocked by bores. Bruce, aka ‘Brute Anderson’ – a baggy, shaggy bruiser of whom P.G. Wodehouse would doubtless have written that he looked as though he had been poured into his clothes and had forgotten to say ‘when’ – loomed. ‘Lassie,’ the Scot boomed. I mounted a step to be closer to him in height.

We were driving to the V&A summer party, windows down, scent of jasmine floating on the liquid June air, prospect of petal-strewn cocktails and pretty girls posing in their zaniest dresses with Grayson Perry ahead. My iPhone in my bag connected to Ivo’s car radio and – bear with me – started playing. We were in Kensington Church Street and it was the Radio 4 Media Show. ‘In a minute the head of BBC news on cuts announced today and former World Tonight presenter Ritula Shah on the Radio 4 programmes being axed,’ said Katie Razzall, introducing the acting bean-counter, a Mr Jonathan Munro, who explained that he had to cut 10 per cent costs, that 550 jobs were being binned to save half a billion quid, and that there was much more pain to come.

It would have been my mother’s 84th birthday on 29 May. I thought about her as I clattered down the corkscrew stairs at Holland Park Underground Station, past the prissy sign warning travellers not to attempt the stairs because there were 93 of them, instead of encouraging people to use them as I would if I were in charge around here. On the platform, in the soupy tunnel, I took out my iPhone to play my little game, which is to do the Wordle before the next train arrives, which – thanks to the Central Line’s rapid peristalsis – is usually only a couple of minutes. Mission accomplished, I got onto a standing-room-only carriage. My mother died in 2021, aged 79. It was her time.

Kyrgyzstan Forget the detailed itinerary – a 12-day trip that included the vertiginous 2,446-metre Kotorma pass on horseback – the packing list alone ran to a dizzying several pages. Sleeping bag, sleeping bag liner, three pairs of jodhpurs, chaps, riding boots, waterproof riding coat… I hadn’t seen anything like it since I went to prep school aged ten as the first girl at Ashdown House. My mother took me from Brussels to Harrods uniform department with an extensive list. I left with a St Trinian’s trousseau of navy kilts and Aertex shirts, tuck box and trunk. As D-Day approached last week, I managed to source most items for the riding safari.

It was when I was staying recently with the Frums in D.C. that, for a dizzying moment, I thought my life-long quest had ended. Nasa can fly us a quarter of a million miles to circumnavigate the moon but nobody has yet, to my knowledge, fixed the perennial problem of making an even half-decent cup of coffee at home. Back to the Frum residence in Georgetown, known inside the beltway as ‘the best hotel in Washington’. It is 8.30 a.m. There is no sign of Danielle, my hostess, but David is at large on the landing, perhaps as he had heard his house guest stir.  ‘Coffee?’ he asked. To my amazement, he flung open some doors outside his master bedroom suite to reveal an entire separate walk-in closet complete with serried rows of glass mugs and a space-age espresso machine.

The snow is deep and crisp and even, the sky bluer than blue, and beneath my Black Crow skis there’s the soft hiss of fresh powder. I’m rehearsing my excuses as I carve my wiggly way down a well-upholstered piste. ‘I’ve gone skiing by mistake,’ I try out on the pure mountain air. I’m almost embarrassed by my own excess as this is my second ski break of the year, and to go twice before Easter during a war and an energy crisis is peak first-world indulgence. Still, as I like to say, I have not one but two Agas, ‘just not in the same house’, so what the heck. Here goes. My two ski trips in two months, then. Last month, we rented a chalet for the annual Dawnay-Johnson family ski holiday. We played Perudo and ate hugely both on and off the mountain.

I am ‘sharing’ what follows as a public service. Also, as self-care in the hope that publicly shaming myself might stop me from doing it again. What can she be on about, you must be thinking, this time? My name is Rachel Johnson, and I have a chronic inability to leave the house on time, even for something I have been looking forward to for months. One example: heli-skiing in Italy with my son Oliver. All I had to do was catch a flight to Geneva whence we would be conveyed to a divine off-grid chalet via car and driver, then snowmobile. I had one job. To get us to Heathrow for the breakfast-time flight.