To shed light on her recent bone-breaking skiing accident — which, as I revealed, left her with a “broken shoulder” — Princess Diana’s longtime friend Julia Samuel continued her Therapy Works podcast this week, featuring her guest Diana’s brother, Earl Spencer, spoke candidly about the sexual abuse he suffered in high school.
What made Julia’s unflappable attitude even more remarkable was that her complaints were not limited to a broken shoulder. Photos of her with Spencer show her with a black spot over her left eye, and with the same side of her face drooping as if she may have had a stroke.
As acclaimed psychotherapist Samuel, 64, explains with characteristic candor, she is even being attacked by Ramsay Hunt syndrome, a rare neurological disorder caused by the varicella-zoster virus – the same virus that causes both chickenpox and shingles.
Although it usually only affects people over 60, in 2022 it ensnared Justin Bieber, then just 28, paralyzing the Canadian pop singer’s face in what he described as a “very scary and random” attack.
Prince George’s godmother, Julia Samuel (pictured), a close friend of Diana, becomes seriously ill after undergoing shoulder surgery following a skiing accident
The Princess of Wales (left) talks to Julia Samuel in the Royal Box
In Julia’s case, the virus – which normally lies dormant in people who have had chickenpox – was, as she puts it, inadvertently reactivated as a “result of shoulder surgery.”
Samuel, whose bestselling books include This Too Shall Pass, refuses to obsess over her condition, which can usually be treated successfully with a combination of steroids and antivirals, telling me she feels she’s had “enough about the virus has said’.
Instead, she uses this latest, unsought challenge to reflect on how we “move back and forth between despair and hope in difficult times.”
She defines hope as “the alchemy that changes a life” and explains that it “is not just a feeling. It’s also a Plan A and a Plan B and the belief that you can make it happen.
Samuel, 64, explains she is being attacked by Ramsay Hunt syndrome, a rare neurological condition caused by the varicella-zoster virus – the same virus that causes both chickenpox and shingles
“And that, I think, is what changes your nervous system psychologically because when you have hope, you also have peace and less fear and that slows down your system.”
That, she adds, is both “anti-inflammatory” and “good for your cognition, and so there’s a kind of physiological aspect of hope, but also the psychological and the emotional.”
How wise were the Welsh to appoint her as Prince George’s godmother.
Jade wins the fashion stakes
Jade Holland Cooper, whose equestrian style label is loved by the Princess of Wales, helped turn the Cheltenham Festival into a fashion parade.
Jade Holland Cooper arrives at Cheltenham Racecourse on day three of the 2024 Cheltenham Festival
The wife of Superdry co-founder Julian Dunkerton arrived at the racecourse decked from head to toe in clothes worth more than £2,000 from her brand Holland Cooper, including a Marlborough trench coat worth £849 (left).
“The races are no longer just about horses,” Jade, 37, tells me. ‘Now they are also a celebration of timeless fashion, style and elegance. For me, it’s the country catwalk coming to life.”
Hugh Grant, once the silly star of romantic comedies like Four Weddings And A Funeral and Notting Hill, plays a breakfast cereal mascot in Jerry Seinfeld’s upcoming Netflix film, Unfrosted: The Pop-Tart Story.
His character was once a Shakespearean actor but is now forced to play a Kellogg’s Frosties mascot to pay his car loans. Grant, who hasn’t auditioned for a role in thirty years, sent Seinfeld an audition tape anyway.
The director says: ‘He asked me if it matters that Tony the Tiger has a British accent. I told him, ‘No.'”
Eric’s ex Pattie mourns the passing of time as she sells personal treasures
Swinging Sixties icon Pattie Boyd, who turns 80 on Sunday, is auctioning off letters and possessions from the time of her love triangle with the late Beatle George Harrison and guitarist Eric Clapton (left with Pattie).
But the model and photographer, who inspired a string of songs including Harrison’s Something and Clapton’s Layla, is remorseful over the loss of one item: a Hamilton watch expected to fetch £6,000. “I love that little cocktail watch,” she tells me during a viewing of The Pattie Boyd Collection at Christie’s in London. ‘It is so beautiful. I wish that wasn’t on the auction; it is too late to reclaim it.”
Eric Clapton pictured with Pattie (left) in 1976. Pattie auctions letters and belongings from the time of her love triangle with the late Beatle George Harrison and Clapton
Pattie bought the Art Deco timepiece in the 1980s at a vintage watch show in New York at the suggestion of 78-year-old Clapton, who, she says, “winked at me” when she saw it.
The Royal Family’s love for Balmoral has been evident since the time of Victoria. But the Windsors’ affinity with Scotland extends far beyond their 50,000 hectares, to the Western Isles. This week, for example, the Princess Royal paid a nostalgic visit to the Hebridean Princess, a former ferry converted for cruises that Queen Elizabeth chartered for her own 80th birthday, for Anne’s 60th – and for family trips every summer.
Cult TV show is too risky now says star
Is Britain quickly losing its sense of humour? A star of The Inbetweeners says the popular Channel 4 comedy about teenage boys would no longer be commissioned these days.
‘I don’t think The Inbetweeners would be made now,’ Belinda Stewart-Wilson tells me of the show which first aired in 2008. The actress, 52, played the desirable Polly MacKenzie, aka ‘Will’s Mum’ , explains: ‘It’s just so fruity. I don’t know how it would be perceived now, but I don’t think producers would take the risk. They wouldn’t commission it.’ Speaking at the premiere of her latest film, License To Love, at London’s Courthouse Hotel, she added: ‘I’m just glad the show has had its day in the sun.’
Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby last week rejected suggestions that Anglican bishops in the Lords were biased towards the opposition, insisting they were ‘just as objectionable towards Labor the last time they were in power’. But historian Andrew Roberts debunks his claim with some hard numbers.
“In 2008/09 they voted against the Labor government in 60 per cent of the split, and in 2009/10 in 65.4 per cent,” Lord Roberts notes. ‘In total, by contrast, they voted against the Conservative government in 95.8 percent of all divisions in 2021/22 and a whopping 98.2 percent in 2022/23. The voting record of Anglican bishops is statistically even more reliably anti-Tory than that of some Labor colleagues.”