Rachel Johnson

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.

Looking back, I can pinpoint my fatal blunder. It was lunch. It was like the West allowing Vladimir Putin to help himself to the Crimean peninsula without a peep, basically. This is how it happened. My husband had invited two families to stay over the May bank holiday which bled into half term. For four days. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, in light tones, ahead of their arrival. ‘I’ve told them they’re bringing all the food and doing all the cooking.’ As if I’d welcome this wonderful idea, when in fact what he’d suggested was the domestic equivalent of handing over the nuclear football and the codes behind my back.

After we bought a place on my father’s hill farm in 2000, I’d study the notices pinned to boards in post offices-cum-stores across Exmoor in a glazed trance. If we got a puppy, I reasoned, as I studied a blurry Kodak photo of a Cadbury-coated labrador gun dog’s melting mega-litter, I’d stop wanting another baby. The children would sally forth into the great outdoors without complaint at the word ‘walkies’. Our love of the dog would carry us through the ups and downs of family life and – here was the kicker – render the five-hour schlep from London to Exmoor, to an unimproved farmhouse sans TV at the end of a two-mile track, non-negotiable. And then, driving down a steep hill outside Exford one day, I screeched ‘STOP!’ just past a five-bar gate.

The moment I stepped out of the Covent Garden sunshine and into the regal offices of the Lady magazine, it was like stepping into a 19th-century Tardis, and I was already in love. ‘I’m going for the editorship hell for leather,’ I wrote in my diary (published in 2010). ‘I’ve even been out and bought and read a copy of the magazine for the very first time!’ It was the funeral parlour ambience. The genteel tones of the telephonist, Ros, taking calls from deaf dowager duchesses placing adverts for a couple to prepare light luncheons and do some gentle housework in return for accommodation in the gatehouse. It was the fact that the Lady was the inspiration for P.G.

Kyiv On the morning of 24 February, I woke just before seven as a tentative apricot dawn was spreading over scrubby flatlands dusted with light snow. The secret train was trundling into an unprepossessing town, houses scattered amid spindly pines, nothing to write home about. I didn’t even look for a station sign as they’d all been removed to fox Vladimir Putin’s mercenaries. This country is under martial law, a curfew, and as morning was breaking Ukraine was entering the fourth year of fighting off its vast neighbour’s vicious and unwanted advances. We’d boarded the previous night near the Polish border (I know it sounds ridiculous but I am not allowed to say where) and I had claimed my couchette with toddler excitement.

Lamu Ever since we arrived on the syrupy, sweltering Swahili coast – where else would your Best Life columnist be in the dead of winter? – I’ve been writing this in my head, and this was going to be the running order. This succulent island paradise has long been re-colonised by celebrities, princes and make-up moguls First, colour. The cream scoops of the dhows racing the channel between Shela and Manda islands, teak masts tipped at a rakish slant; sundowners at Peponi after a long swim in the mangroves; the Lamu dawn chorus, an ear-splitting stereo of the 5 a.m.