Charles Saatchi to sell a bed by Tracey Emin
Charles Saatchi’s ex-wife to be Nigella Lawson recently moved out of their marital home in Shawfield Street, Chelsea. Now, with the sale of a four poster bed by Tracey Emin, he’s chucking out another set of linen. (more…)
Lawyers Baroness Shackleton and Raymond Toothe lunch at Scott’s
Raymond “The Rottweiler” Toothe and Fiona Shackleton spent two hours together on Friday lunching at Scott’s in Mount Street, Mayfair reported today’s The Sunday People.
‘The Steeple Times’ takes a look around a palace that allegedly cost $1 billion to construct
Located on the Black Sea coast is a palatial residence that the press have named ‘Putin’s Palace’. The reported construction cost of this property is an astounding $1 billion.
This Lancastrian tycoon transformed the Dragons’ Den with her 80s style shoulder pads and comments such as “he made my foot itch”. Thrice married Devey has five homes around the world and claims to have “felt sexism in every way conceiveable”. She’s “proud to pay tax” and dubs David Cameron “weak”. By ‘eck.
Travel writer Sarah Tucker shares her views on Mother’s Day
Happy Mother’s Day to all you wonderful women who have given birth to little gems. I feel a bit like a travel writer stating: “The people here are all very friendly” when I write that, because although it’s mostly true, it’s not always true.
As someone who has written about travelling with children for nearly fifteen years, really since I was pregnant with my son, and written about the politics of the playground, which is nothing to do with the kids at all, just the issues of the parents, I’m not sure if I actually like children.
Don’t get me wrong, I love my own, he is the centre of my universe, but over the years I’ve met children who I felt were going to make the most appalling adults. Those adages, “mine will be different”, and “they will grow out of it”, don’t happen. Yours turn out to be the same, and they get worse.
And, they always blame the mothers. That’s after they blame the media, the council worker, the government, the lack of nutrients in food, the teachers, the lack of discipline in the home, too much TV, too many computer games, violence, alcohol and celebrity culture. In fact, a whole melting pot of things are generally blamed for the awfulness of any child. This is unfair.
I recently produced a YouTube video of the top ten types of mums and I’ve done one for dads, but I had to tone it down because ‘they’ felt it might be too negative. It wasn’t. It was spot on. In fact, it was tamed down.
But dads are rarely, if ever, laid to blame for their own failures let alone that of their children. No one is to blame for their own failures and that’s the problem. No one takes responsibility. Actually no. Women usually tend to believe everything is their fault, and men tend to believe everything is everyone else’s fault, so I’m sure that’s why men and women get on as well and as long as they do. Men think their failures are everyone else’s fault – but mainly their mothers.
I’m sure Freud said as much somewhere but I’m not sure. These ones also tend to marry their mothers or ‘motherly’ types’, divorce when they’re not being mothered anymore – because their wives have given birth and have genuine children to look after and proceed to look for women who a) can’t have kids b) have grown up kids and c) are able and willing to dote on them the way their mothers never did… or did too much.
So, I say, Happy Mother’s Day, to all of those who have children and those who have children as partners.
Sarah Tucker is an award winning travel journalist, novelist, producer and broadcaster. She has edited, produced and presented her own radio and TV series as well as presenting reports for BBC Holiday Programme and anchored I Want That House on ITV. She is the author of best selling novels The Playground Mafia (short listed for the Good Housekeeping book of the year 2007) The Battle for Big School, The Last Year of Being Single, and The Control Freak Chronicles.
For more information about Sarah Tucker, go to: http://www.sarahtucker.info
Buy The Playground Mafia on Amazon at: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Playground-Mafia-Sarah-Tucker/dp/0099498456/ref=sr_1_7/202-9265101-5575054?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1193856472&sr=1-7
Follow Sarah Tucker on Twitter at: http://www.twitter.com/madasatucker
If one spent $2,000,000 on cosmetic surgery, one would expect to end up looking fantastic. It didn’t quite work out in the case of the billionairess “Bride of Wildenstein,” though, as instead she discovered the husband she thought she’d please in bed with a 19-year old Russian. Feline like in appearance, the purr of this New York socialite is said to be just as bad as her bite. She’s known to be a skilled hunter and pilot and once boasted her telephone bills were at least $60,000 a year. Surprisingly far from camera shy, what on earth will she look like at ninety?
“The Queen of Mean” was a chain-smoking hotelier and real estate tycoon with a reputation for tyrannical behaviour. She took the view that “only the little people pay taxes” but was investigated and convicted of federal income tax evasion in 1989. Sentenced to 16 years, she served just 19 months in prison and 2 months under house arrest. Worth some $8 billion, Helmsley left her Maltese dog, Trouble, $12 million in trust.
The sale of the former home of Dame Rebecca West
Ibstone House at Ibstone in Buckinghamshire has recently come to the market at a price of offers in excess of £15 million. Now owned by Ariadne “Ari” Getty Williams, the daughter of Paul Getty and Abigail Harris, Ibstone has also been home to Sun City tycoon Sol Kerzner, who is currently divorcing his wife Heather. This Grade II listed house is situated in the Chiltern Hills and was originally built in the late 18th century.
Arranged over three floors and including an extensive leisure and entertaining complex, the property includes 6 principal reception rooms, 7 bedrooms and an indoor pool. A 2-bedroom lodge cottage and large barn stand in the 79-acre grounds that also include gardens designed by Lady Arabella Lennox-Boyd.
Dame Rebecca West, described by TIME Magazine as being “indisputably the world’s number one writer” in 1947, purchased Ibstone House in the late 1930s and lived there with her banker husband Henry Maxwell Andrews.
West, who had affairs with H. G. Wells, Charlie Chaplin and Lord Beaverbrook, used the grounds of the house as a small dairy farm and also housed Yugoslav refugees in the blacked out spare rooms of the manor during the Second World War. After the death of her husband, she sold up and moved to an apartment next to the Iranian Embassy in Prince’s Gate, London. During the 1980 siege there, aged 87, she had to be evacuated.
Kerzner, who has been married four times to Kerzner and tragically lost his son, Butch, in a helicopter crash, has homes around the world and both he and his wife blamed the breakdown of their marriage on his workaholic lifestyle.
Of divorcing her husband, Heather Kerzner commented:
“He’s a hugely important person to myself and my children. I have only positive things to say about him. He’s the most influential person in my life – and that’s worth a lot. He’s one of the world’s most incredible men, he has shown me a different world and we had an incredible life together but sometimes I guess it just doesn’t work out.”
Some time ago the Kerzners sold Ibstone House to Ms. Getty but now she too has decided to sell up. Though best known because of her family name, Aridane Getty has run the Fuserna Foundation since 2005 and is considered a great philanthropist in her own right.
It’ll be fascinating to see what chapter opens next for this magnificent house.
For more information contact Stephen Christie-Miller of Savills on +44 (0) 1491 843000. To download a brochure for Ibstone House go to: http://residentialsearch.savills.co.uk/property-detail/333522/list
For more details on the Fuserna Foundation, go to: http://fusernafoundation.org
This British actress is best known for playing Joy Adamson in the true-life film Born Free alongside her real-life husband, Bill Travers (1957 – 1994). She’s also starred in the Ring of Bright Water, The Camomile Lawn and Swallows and Amazons but it is for her work as a wildlife campaigner that McKenna is best known. She co-founded the Born Free Foundation in 1991 with her husband and along with Ace Bourke and John Rendall helped release Christian, a lion who lived at World’s End in Chelsea, into the wild in Africa. His story has since become one of YouTube’s biggest hits.
“Cock Roache” as he’s known (he’s supposedly bedded over 1,000 women) has been in Coronation Street since December 1960. He’s the world’s longest serving television actor and is also on the board of directors of Owen Oyston’s Oystons Estate Agency.