Vanessa Feltz: My childhood was semi-rural and idyllic – what has happened to me? | UK | News

I grew up in suburban Totteridge, almost at the end of the London Underground’s Northern Line. With tongue in cheek, I dub it the “Beverley Hills of north London”. In truth it was quintessential suburbia, closely akin in spirit to Surbiton where The Good Life’s Tom and Barbara, played impeccably by Felicity Kendall and Richard Briers, tried to live self-sufficiently off the “land” provided by their 150-foot long garden.

Inspired by the Good Lifers, my father bought four chickens and installed them in a DIY residence my mother called “the chicken pagoda”. We collected fresh eggs daily and before you ask if the neighbours objected, let me explain the family next door kept three goats. Yes, in an ordinary garden and yes, for the milk. This was 1975. What can I tell you except that although we were a handful of tube stops away from the big smoke of Camden Town, life was semi-rural.

My mum skated when the Long Pond froze over. Our neighbour Bunty Heller clip-clopped down our road on horseback. Everyone had a couple of apple trees, a pear tree and raspberry canes. Some of us harvested mountains of tomatoes, cucumber, courgettes and delectable plums. We picked giant juicy blackberries on Totteridge Common and crab apples were abundant. Don’t even get me started on newts, tiddlers and frogspawn.

Why am I painting my youth as a glorified Hovis ad? Because the shocking news broke this week that in 2025, only one in 50 families tucks into a homemade pudding for dinner.

I was plunged into a Proustian reverie. I remembered the tart taste of summer pudding: all the fruit we’d picked stewed with sugar and encased in slices of white bread soaked in the juice and used to line a pudding basin before being cut and served with considerable aplomb.

I recalled picking, peeling and dicing our own apples before they were magically reincarnated in pies, crumbles and strudels. Not to mention my walking in from school to a kitchen transformed into a jam-making laboratory, with muslin suspended between kitchen chairs as the damson, crab-apple or strawberry jam dripped into a huge black cauldron.

Of course, we ate puddings. We had bumper crops and no truck with waste. Friends pitched up with beetroot or bags of shining onions but don’t get me started on the rhubarb. I couldn’t abide the stuff, and it appeared in pies for an eternity.

Now I hang my head in shame. The last time I made my own dessert, a real bread and butter pudding, was in lockdown.

Elizabeth Hurley must be comfortably loved-up with beau Billy Ray Cyrus if she’s taking the cataclysmic risk of allowing him to teach her to play the guitar. Even the most rock-solid relationship can be shaken to its foundations when one half of a couple imparts knowledge to the other.

Just think of the glued-at-the-hip twosomes blown asunder when one attempts to instruct the other in the art of driving a motor vehicle; or the warfare that erupts when one half of a pair tries to immerse the other in the minutiae of roasting a turkey, or when one beloved shows the other how to prune a climbing rose.

Going from Romeo and Juliet to teacher-pupil is a perilous path. I only hope Liz and Billy have the patience and sense of humour to survive it.

TV in the 1960s sizzled with suave sexy types swerving about the streets in convertibles. With wind whistling through their Brylcreemed-locks, these dashing devils indelibly imprinted in the hearts of baby boomers an insatiable desire to own a soft-top.

I stewed in stuffy hardtops for decades until I finally owned the keys of a second-hand Mini convertible. It was love at first gust. Music blaring, barnet blowing, broad grin on my sun-kissed cheeks – driving “topless” was all that Simon Dee and Simon Templar promised. How do I feel about the news that carmakers are ditching convertibles in favour of stodgy SUVs? Bewildered.

!!!!!!!

Did you know exclamation marks are gender-specific? Researchers at Pennsylvania State University found that 61% of folk believe the sender is female if they receive a text liberally peppered with these!!!

Gentle reader, you will know I’m not short of an epithet and don’t need exclamation marks to make up for deficiencies in vocabulary. I deploy them to dollop an extra portion of awe on something already awesome.

Do I adore that picture of my granddaughter sitting on a slide? She is utterly edible and I love her with every particle of my being. So a simple “How gorgeous” seems woefully inadequate. Sprinkled with exclamation marks and ramped up to “How gorgeous!!!!” the response comes a tad closer to expressing my overflowing emotions. If that’s because I fear being perceived as cold, then so be it.

Punting in Cambridge is said to be under threat after two locks were reported on the brink of collapse. The city’s council should hasten to initiate the necessary repairs. Punting is essential to the romantic escapades of undergraduates.

An alumna of Trinity College, I still cherish memories of being punted to Grantchester by an enamoured swain who not only effected manoeuvres exquisitely but provided picnic hamper, ice-bucket, vin blanc, poached salmon and – piece de resistance – a wind-up gramophone complete with records.

I know you are thinking, “Vanessa, why didn’t you marry him? The man was a keeper.” You are right. How could I have let this manly paragon slip through my fingers? Unlike Edith Piaf’s my regrets are many.

If you are wondering where Jeff Bezos learned his lucrative recipe of resourcefulness and resilience, look no further than the obituaries of his mother Jackie who has died at the age of 78. Pregnant at just 16 by a boyfriend who is described as an “alcoholic circus unicyclist”, Jackie refused to accept she’d be barred from school.

She toughed it out till graduation although she was humiliated and forbidden to speak to other pupils, take lunch in the cafeteria or walk across the stage to receive her diploma. She attended night classes toting infant Jeff and two duffel bags, one for books, “one for diapers”.

At 40, now re-married with two more children, Jackie graduated from university. She and her husband Miguel, always referred to by Jeff as “my real father” invested their life savings in Bezos’ idea for what became Amazon. They donated most of their £30 billion share to cancer charities and educational causes. What a woman.