I’ll always remember where I was when my brother resigned again. I was sitting on the dock of a bay in the Adriatic, one G&T down (plus a couple of glasses of the cooling local white), halfway through the ‘signature menu’ of the Michelin-starred Alfred Keller restaurant, when that dopamine urge made me flip over my phone. Trump had been indicted on dozens of counts and Putin had committed ecocide in Ukraine and the honours list had been published and Nadine Dorries had quit after dark forces had prevented her passage to the Lords, while Rishi had backtracked and gong-blocked my father’s K… basically it was your average Friday. My phone had exploded. Carrie had WhatsApped me the statement. Breaking alerts. The usual flurry of futile bids soliciting my instant views on the news that the boy who wanted to be world king had suddenly dethroned himself. I sent polite noes to each one, but I knew the subject had to be faced. For three hours. On live national radio. With live callers. That Sunday evening. By me. The ‘sister of’. I couldn’t exactly talk about dangerous dogs and Ofsted, not this show, not this time. There was no escape.
After a perfect few days in Lošinj – the Austro-Hungarian empire branded it ‘healing island’ long before Gwyneth Paltrow flogged vaginal eggs – I’ve decided to write a stocking filler called How To Speak Spa. On my schedule, healthful activities, you see, were listed: rest therapy, sea-tox lymphatic shakedown with swim training, Qi Gong and cold-water immersion, forest bathing and floating under the cosmos. Or as our grandmothers would put it: a nap, a dip, a cold bath, a walk, and flopping on a lilo, dear.
My podcast, Rachel Johnson’s Difficult Women (which is nothing like Women with Balls, Katy!), is coming up to its 100th guest and I’m trying to find a suitable candidate for this honour, even though my husband keeps saying: ‘But, surely, you’ll be running out of interesting women to interview soon?’ Well, I was at Lady Antonia Fraser’s for Sunday lunch before heading into LBC, and I was pointing out the pub quiz detail that no fewer than two members of her extended family had a direct hand in my brother’s downfall.
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