TALES FROM BELLA'S WORLD...

I’m staying with my sister Esther in Suffolk. She has a photo of our mum sellotaped to a cupboard door and I was struck by how alike we look. My mum was hard...

My mother was scornful of Mother’s Day. I was ashamed that I secretly liked the idea of it but I kept my feelings hidden. Our family attitude was born out of being untraditional:...

‘Do you remember when we lived at The Old Laundry and we were allowed half a Redoxon tablet when we were off school sick?’ I was talking to my sister Esther about a...

There is a huge Leigh Bowery exhibition just opened at Tate Modern. It is hard for anyone to capture the brilliance and originality of Leigh – such was his uncategorizable and unquantifiable talent,...

I first met Marianne Faithful when I was 20. I was invited with two friends to a dinner party on a Chelsea Embankment houseboat where she was the honoured guest. I don’t remember...

I found an old diary once with a list of new year’s wishes. At the top of the page it said ‘No more problems with my Italian backers.’ Not long after writing the...

When I was 6 my mother invited a spiritual guru to come over to our flat in Tunbridge Wells. There was a lot of excitement about it among the grownups and my younger sister Esther and...

This is a photograph of me and my dad. I wish it wasn’t so blurry, but it is immediately recognisably me and him. Funny to think of dad in a yellow jumper. I...

Today I received a letter – a rare occurrence. This one arrived in a pale grey envelope with elegant spidery handwriting. It reminded me of being at school and the intense relationships between...

My early memories of getting to know my father took place mostly in restaurants. As a tiny child I remember mum taking my sister Esther and I to meet him in Marine Ices...

When I was a child and living in Marrakech, my sister Esther and I entertained ourselves with obsessions about certain words. We settled on Hideous and Kinky as the favourites. We would chant them,...

I have always found that clothes in films are the key to bringing a character, especially a heroine, into the focus of thought provoking fascination. People’s gestures and actions, the small details of how they move, are often the...

When I was 21 I fell madly in love with a man 36 years older than me. He was a Roman prince, infamous for his decadent ways and legendary good looks and charm. I...