I Promise I Will Stop Talking About This Soon
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It has been hard getting myself back to work. Hard taking myself into the office and sitting down at my desk. It has been 44 days since my mother died. I promise I will stop talking about this soon. Stop talking about grief and stop feeling like I know exactly where I am, and yet still feel completely lost. Knowing I have to return to work, and to life, I launched Paradise Found this week. My new collection of linens, hand-block-printed, as always, with Pomegranate and their artisans in India.
We had filmed and photographed the collection in so many beautiful locations here on the island, intending to share them all a few months ago.  My son Amory filmed it all, capturing a collection rooted in our Bahamian life: barefoot, sun-drenched and a little windswept.
Of course, then everything stopped. But the response to this week’s launch has been both exciting and enormously gratifying. Amory’s clip of our home from above, where we have lived for 30 years, is quietly moving. I see the trees we planted, the rooms we added as each child was born, and the grass we have battled to keep alive. On the terrace, a table is laid for supper with the family. The dogs sleep in the shade, and David is probably inside shaking up a cocktail. It is our own small slice of paradise.  But even in these peaceful moments, it is impossible not to think of my friends whose lives are being lived against a very different backdrop. Vitally recently sent me a photograph from Ukraine of new signs beside the road, warning of drone attacks. Imagine driving along an ordinary road, worrying that a drone may strike. Imagine that becoming part of daily life. I am normally in Ukraine with GEM every January and every June. For some reason, this year I decided I would go in September and not June. Looking back, I can’t explain why I made that choice but thank God I did. Trying to return urgently to be with my mother from a Ukrainian humanitarian mission would have been terrifyingly complicated and certainly would not have allowed me those last days of being with her. Whether it was instinct, providence or simply extraordinary luck, that decision gave me the greatest gift of all. When we returned from England to the Bahamas earlier than expected, I realised that I had lent our home to friends who needed a holiday. So, as not to displace them, David and I drove down Eleuthera, our neighbouring island, and had two very spoiling nights at The Cove. After feeling a little bruised and battered, this was quietly healing. I swam, slept and read Belle Burden’s Strangers, a shocking account of a marriage suddenly ending during Covid, but also a story of resilience and rebuilding. I am also beginning to promote my own new book, Entertaining with a Side of Chaos. A rather irreverent portrait of entertaining, mixing beauty, spontaneity and joyful disorder. During a few recent press interviews, I have found myself apologising that, while the world feels so dangerously out of balance, I am discussing the absurd business of folding napkins prettily.
But gathering people around a table has value. Coming together does matter. One chapter in the book, actually titled “Coming Together,” is devoted to fundraising events and what can happen when people gather not only to eat and drink, but to help. Perhaps a fluffy book about entertaining—with a chapter on fundraising—is okay. Perhaps pretty napkins and serious purpose are allowed to exist beside one another, because life, as we know, is rarely one thing at a time.
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