The Glossy Years by Nicholas Coleridge

Author:Nicholas Coleridge
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241983522
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2019-09-25T16:00:00+00:00

17.

If any reader has formed the impression that the fancy cast of characters in the previous chapter comprises my circle of personal friends, they are mistaken. The fashion and celebrity crowd which provided the backdrop for my working life has little overlap with my actual friends, who have hardly changed in forty years. Few people enjoy a celebrity encounter more than I do, but I seldom took them home. Our inner circle, consisting of perhaps twenty couples, plus an outer layer of fifty more, is the group I mind about, and consider real, legitimate friends. The rest are glorious birds of paradise, flitting across the scene for an issue or an event, before disappearing back to their own habitat.

Our family was expanding fast. Sophie Cecily Coleridge had been born on 14 March 1996, back at St Mary’s, Paddington; in a hospital bed this time, not a birthing pool. We loved having a daughter, it was a novelty. Sophie’s middle name was intended to be Cicely, after my beloved Girl Guide grandmother, but I got confused at the christening at St George’s, Hanover Square.

Our fourth and final child was born on 21 December 1998. Thomas Maximilian Coleridge. Four being the maximum number of children you can fit in a car, without the indignity of a people carrier, we declared our family complete.

We moved home in Notting Hill to a tall white house, 39 Kensington Park Gardens, which backed onto a communal garden, as seen in the film Notting Hill. There were a couple of acres of shared lawns and shrubberies, and a children’s playground with bark chips and a garden committee chaired by television boss Peter Bazalgettefn1 and Geordie Greig. Everyone said, ‘How wonderful being on a communal garden, they are just the best,’ but I never embraced it. I felt perpetually on show, incessantly intruded upon by neighbours. No sooner were you reading the newspaper in a deckchair than an eager-eyed American wife in a baseball cap would hove into view, chirruping, ‘How are you folks doing today? We’d love to get you guys over for a cook-out one day.’ Lurking behind her would be a stroppy, exhausted investment banker husband, jet-lagged from a week of M&A activity in Seattle. Communal gardens didn’t do it for me. In the Sunday Times property section, I spotted a house for sale in Caithness with a sixteen-mile-long drive. I concede it looked a bit gloomy, with its towers and crenellations, but the location excited me; no neighbours to hound us there. Georgia took one look at the brochure and vetoed it outright. She was right, of course.

Alexander and Freddie went to a charming nursery school round the corner, named The Acorn, filled with the children of film producers and hedge funders; it was the full-on Notting Hill experience. At weekends, we trudged round the Serpentine or went to a play centre called Bramley’s, with brightly coloured plastic slides and rope netting, guaranteed to induce an instant headache.

My Cambridge Jade Garden set still formed the nucleus of my friendship group.

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