India Expands into Swimwear…and Expects Lots of Exposure!
It’s where her godfather, King Charles, spent his honeymoon with Princess Diana, but India Hicks seemed to have Windermere Island to herself this Easter, judging by this uninhibited photo, where she’s lying on a branch topless.
“Luckily for me, I just spent a few days on the island of my childhood,” says India.
Her parents, Earl Mountbatten’s youngest daughter Lady Pamela Hicks, and interior designer David Hicks, built Savannah House in Windermere, often described as the Bahamas’ best kept secret, in 1967.
Located on a hill, the cubist building overlooks the Atlantic on one side and calm turquoise waters on the other.
India Hicks (pictured) in a bikini on Windermere Island in the Bahamas this Easter
India, daughter of Lady Pamela Hicks and interior designer David Hicks, when she appeared on Lorraine in 2021.
But every corner of Windermere is wonderful, according to India, 56, who is enthusiastic about her “freedom and privacy” – qualities she acknowledges she has made the most of.
“I’ve just spent a few months developing a swimsuit collection,” she says, adding that the new range “will offer quite a bit more coverage than what I have now.”
Property ladder star Sarah Beeny was a self-confessed city girl who lived in London for 30 years before moving in 2019 to a 220-acre former farm in Somerset.
Now she and her husband, artist Graham Swift, plan to open their land to the next generation. “We’re building a film and television studio and an arts center to try to get young people involved in alternative careers,” she tells me at a party in London. ‘It’s very cool. I want the most original rugs.
Another school story that will make you run a mile.
More memories of Cheam, the prep school attended by Prince Philip and King Charles, come after it was revealed that it once employed a matron who bonded with the children more intimately than their parents could have imagined. “In our first week, the headmaster beat up the entire dormitory of seven- and eight-year-olds as they stood by their beds,” one Cheam boy tells me, remembering the early Seventies.
Prince Philip (pictured) and King Charles attended prep school in Surrey.
The boys’ crime? ‘Running around the bedroom’. But the news reached one of the governors of Cheam. “The director was no longer there at the end of the semester,” adds the Cheam student.
“After that, it was a very happy, benign place.”
It seems that artificial intelligence is no match for the country’s most famous lexicographer, Susie Dent.
The Countdown star was unimpressed after putting the AI to the test.
“I asked AI to give me a few choice insults from the 17th century and it responded with much more recent examples,” he tells me, adding, “Then I found myself correcting it… There’s still a long way to go.”
Model Freya makes monkeys with gorillas at her father’s wildlife park
Like most twentysomethings, Freya Aspinall is obsessed with the object of her affection, but unlike her counterparts, she prefers to bestow her love on a gorilla.
In a video shared online, the model kisses the lips of Tambabi, one of the gorillas at her father Damian’s wildlife park in Kent.
Freya Aspinall (pictured) with one of the gorillas at her father’s wildlife park
In a video shared online, the model kisses the lips of Tambabi, one of the gorillas at her father Damian’s wildlife park in Kent.
“She’s very kind and loving,” says Freya, 20, daughter of actress Donna Air. Her bond goes back to childhood: “I have known this group of gorillas my entire life and have developed completely natural relationships with them.”
Is that you, Lady Mary Crawley? Having shown her musical talent when she sang in Downton Abbey, Michelle Dockery, 42, has now struck a chord with viewers in her debut as Estella, an alcoholic mother and singer, in BBC drama This Town.
Michelle Dockery, 42, making her debut as Estella in BBC drama This Town
Michelle Dockery rose to fame for her role as Lady Mary Crawley in the award-winning series Downton Abbey.
The six-part series, written by Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight, follows the rise of a gang in the 1980s amid civil unrest in Birmingham.
“You see her sober and you see her drinking,” Dockery tells me about her character at a screening at London’s BFI Southbank. “So I just dove into it, depending on what stage she was in as far as her addiction was concerned.”