Women | Life and Style from TimesOnline en-uk Tue, 30 Oct 2007 15:37:29 GMT Copyright 2007 Times Newspapers Ltd. custserv@timesonline.co.uk http://www.timesonline.co.uk Sat, 11 Jul 2009 23:32:46 GMT Newspapers 144 21 http://www.timesonline.co.uk http://images.thetimes.co.uk/TGD/picture/0,,116979,00.gif David James Smith Sun, 12 Jul 2009 00:00:36 GMT 2009-07-11T09:21:22Z On her own account, Jade Goody’s “la-la” was examined at the Princess Alexandra hospital in Harlow just before she went to India at the beginning of August last year. The hospital gave Goody the okay to travel to Mumbai, where she had been signed up to appear in the local version of the reality-television show Big Brother — known in India as Bigg Boss. Clover Stroud Sun, 12 Jul 2009 00:00:36 GMT 2009-07-11T10:51:13Z Tired of the thought of another weekend tripping around a faceless pop festival, last week I decided to swap hedonism for country pursuits, and went to an agricultural show in Gloucestershire for some really alternative entertainment. And behind the static engines, hereford cattle and jacob sheep, I saw the man of my dreams. Clutching a hammer, silhouetted by the roaring furnace behind him, he was beating out a chain of white-hot metal links on an anvil. As I watched the blacksmith at his trade, I realised that he was salvation, the man of the future, the newest star of the pre-apocalyptic, recession-riddled 21st century. Ruby Warrington Sun, 12 Jul 2009 00:00:32 GMT 2009-07-12T12:58:42Z When I was 18, Salman Rushdie chatted me up. I was enjoying a lunch-break latte on a bench in Hampstead, when up sidled a portly, balding, bespectacled man at least a quarter of a century my senior (he was 47 at the time). “You look absolutely charming sitting there. I wonder, would you go for dinner with me?” he spluttered (or words to that effect). I didn’t so much decline as look horrified, and promptly upped sticks, clutching my coffee and muttering something about having a boyfriend. It was then that he played his trump card, calling after me: “But I’m a very famous author, you know!” This was five years before Rushdie met Padma Lakshmi, the Indian-American model who would become his unlikely fourth wife. In our forensic inspection of this beauty-and-the-beast pairing, you wonder if Rushdie had used a similar chat-up line on her, and that she, ambitious, yet not particularly talented, had been seduced by the opportunities that life with a “very famous author” would bring. Tim Bouquet Sat, 11 Jul 2009 11:30:48 GMT 2009-07-10T05:19:05Z It may be Braintree rather than Botswana, but unlike bestselling fictional sleuth Precious Ramotswe, Jo Clarke and Jo Nixon are the real deal. They are the founders of Britain’s very own No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. Just two years old, the phones at D-Tec UK are hot with calls from those who want to keep tabs on wayward wives, philandering husbands or troublesome teens. Not forgetting businesses with offices to bug, or debug, and those in need of some executive security protection. Fleur Britten Sun, 12 Jul 2009 00:00:58 GMT 2009-07-11T11:53:18Z Kate Moss may be able to eclipse anything that comes near her, but a fact oft forgotten is that there’s a whole heap more than a beautiful girl and her clothes that goes into making a fashion shoot. Image-makers go to great lengths to create an alternative reality for a photograph, commissioning artists and artisans to create beautiful, one-off props that lend atmosphere and back story. But props are like red-carpet dresses: they can’t be seen twice. So, shoot over, they just get chucked in a skip. Open Minds: Lucy Wadham Sun, 12 Jul 2009 00:00:45 GMT 2009-07-11T11:07:32Z Aspiring to beauty — or elegance, its more democratic twin — is a punishable offence in Britain. Enviously, we look to France, whose politicians, male and female, go about their business dressed in couture, with hairdressers on call, ready to blow-dry their hair at a moment’s notice. Gemma Soames Sun, 12 Jul 2009 00:00:19 GMT 2009-07-12T01:00:00Z Q I am going to a totally Wag-tastic wedding in Alderley Edge in September. The bride will be wearing Oscar de la Renta. What should I go for? Neal Pollack Sun, 12 Jul 2009 00:00:30 GMT 2009-07-11T11:31:45Z It’s 9am on a cloudy Tuesday. A pick-up truck arrives in a remote parking lot in California’s Joshua Tree National Park, hauling a pristine vintage Airstream trailer. On the driver’s door is written “LP Ranch, Angus Cattle, Mertzon, TX”. Inside is a little two-room travelling boutique hotel. A dreamcatcher hangs over a quality bedspread. There’s a stainless-steel fridge. A bumper sticker reads: “Solidarity/Unity — International Brotherhood of Boilermakers”. Lesley White Sun, 12 Jul 2009 00:00:00 GMT 2009-07-10T01:29:45Z Helen McCrory is puffing away on a roll-up outside the Charlotte Street Hotel, in Fitzrovia, concentrating intensely on a new role. “I am not,” she tells herself sternly, “only a mother.” The trouble is that for the past year, motherhood is the only part the actress has played, attending to the serious business of taking ladybirds off leaves, then putting them back again, with her two tiny children. The glamorous location was a house by the ocean in Santa Monica, where the contented stay-at-home wife of Damian Lewis (who was working on Life, an NBC cop series) settled almost too easily into the pattern of strolling with her babies down to the sea every morning in “just a pair of knickers” (the kids, not their mother). Marianne Macdonald Sat, 11 Jul 2009 00:00:00 GMT 2009-07-10T04:44:27Z Dominic Cooper has become browner and more starry in the 18 months since I last met him. Then he was thoroughly enjoying himself and at the end of filming something about Abba called Mamma Mia! and something else called The Duchess with someone called Keira Knightley; now he is a fully paid-up film star and looks it, in his dark glasses, blue T-shirt and three-quarter-length trousers.