Rachel Johnson

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.

We knew the church would be packed as Shelley had died so young. We knew the church would be freezing, as her funeral fell during the Arctic spell that whitened the bracken and iced over puddles the colour of Dairy Milk. When we drove into Simonsbath just after lunchtime, the sun was only grazing the hilltops, leaving valleys in deep shadows. We’d allowed plenty of time, but the lanes were already crammed with vehicles. My husband and I had intended to stand at the back of St Luke’s so as not to take up precious places, but thanks to Ivo’s near-village-elder status we were ordered into the emergency seating in the chancel.

A man called Gianluca and I mounted the steps to the Friedrichsbad in pensive silence. We hadn’t made eye contact since we’d met in reception at our hotel, the divine Brenners, for this rendezvous with destiny. At the front desk, we were sternly reminded again of the dress code. We nodded. For the next three hours we were going to be stark naked in a 19th-century, Renaissance-themed, domed and frescoed temple to the God of Thermal Springs, adorned with hand-painted majolica tiles, statuary and a sequence of pools and chambers. ‘Kein Textil,’ the woman repeated. After removing every stitch, we processed to the shower room – me checking that the area, which was equipped with vast ceiling-mounted bronze fittings, had several exits. I was wearing only blue plastic slippers.

It was the morning after the night before and I was picking glass out of my leg by a pool, blotting the blood trickling down my calf with a navy spotted handkerchief. I was trying to work out how the shards of glass came to be there… and then it came back to me. But first, let’s rewind. I was taking my seat on the British Airways 10 a.m. flight to Nice. ‘Not another one!’ a woman right behind me in steerage complained. ‘Is this some special flight or something?’ I stowed my Globe-Trotter in the overhead locker and made eye contact with her. ‘Piers Morgan is up front,’ she explained. ‘And that’s Matt Goss.’ She pointed to a tidy man minding his own business a few rows ahead.