Helena Frith Powell

• Two of my favourite things…
  So my Zeldafication begins in earnest on Tuesday when I go to an advanced adult ballet class with our lovely new lodger Una, who was at ballet school until she was 14. Yes I know that I am not advanced, but did that ever stop Zelda? So wish me luck. Meanwhile if you have a moment [...]
  
  
• The Salon
  I have always been rather intrigued by the idea of the salon; it seems to me a perfect combination of drinking and thinking. According to Wikipedia it is “a gathering of intellectual, social, political, and cultural elites under the roof of an inspiring hostess or host, partly to amuse one another and partly to refine [...]
  
  
• How a very small minority lives
  Picture the scene: I am doing yoga looking out over a 90 degree view of Jumeirah Beach in Dubai from the comfort of the 34th floor. Someone is pressing the dress I am going to wear this evening to dinner with my husband in a private dining room. Two cleaners are mopping up the Jacuzzi [...]
  
  
• Sour Swedes
  I am the victim of a hate campaign from an otherwise peace-loving nation. It is not a nice experience. I am being inundated with emails, comments and facebook messages from extremely angry Swedes. The reason for their anger? An article I wrote for the Daily Mail in 2006 on the eve of Sweden’s world-cup football [...]
  
  
• Email from Bea to her father
  We were at the hairdresser’s yesterday reading short story entries for the magazine’s annual short story competition while Hassan transformed our lanky hair into luscious locks. Here is the outcome: And here is an email Bea wrote to Rupert, it is vintage Bea…. Hey papa,I just got my nails plus toes done the colour is beautiful sparkly [...]
  
  
• Misery memoirs and all that
  While I was in India last week I interviewed the writer Amit Chaudhuri. He was charming and interesting and terribly middle-class. He comes from a middle-class Bengali family, grew up with “servants” as he called them (interesting note we PC Europeans would not think of calling them that but I just arranged for our maid’s [...]
  
  
• A great night out
  If I were to be reborn I would like to spend my childhood, or at least some of it, in Abu Dhabi. While I am mad about a kind of ‘Swallows and Amazons’ upbringing in England I wonder how possible that is any more and also if life as a child here also has [...]
  
  
• A different kind of chaos
  I went to Cairo for the second time a few weeks ago and hated the poverty, the traffic and the chaos. This morning I landed in Calcutta. It is, if anything, much more chaotic. But for some reason I love it. There is possibly less pollution, at least the air seems more breathable, but I [...]
  
  
• As good as it gets
  Carla said this morning at breakfast that we should always remember this trip and how wonderful it has been. For example, if we get captured by Somali pirates we should think about how happy we were at Shreays and how beautiful it is. I think these past few days I have understood must be what it [...]
  
  
• Discovering yoga
  It is said that women of a certain age discover either God or gardening. I have instead discovered yoga. I can’t imagine life without it. And in fact looking back, one of my earliest memories of my mother is of her with her arms under her legs in some impossible position with her chest and [...]