Fiona Phillips' husband, Martin Frizell, on her Alzheimer's diagnosis
At the time of her diagnosis, Philips said that she had suffered months of brain fog and anxiety - and initially had attributed the symptoms to the menopause."It's something I might have thought I'd get at 80," Phillips explained."But I was still only 61 years old."Frizell said he now does not know what to do either with her cookery books or designer clothes - both things she no longer uses."Fiona hasn't cooked in two years," he said."Part of the heartache now is she's got this dressing room full of the most amazing clothes but this horrible disease means she's more than happy just wearing the same T-shirt, the same trousers, the same thing - day in, day out."Mother-of-two Phillips has written a memoir since her diagnosis which is due to be released on Thursday.Frizell contributed to the book, saying he had intended to write "a few paragraphs" but ended up writing "24,000 words"."I started off writing about what a great woman she is and just how horrible it is and dreadfully unlucky that she is the latest in the long line of her family to get it," he told the newspaper."Then I just got very angry as to what little support there is."As a family, we just kind of get through it and at some point we will need more support, but there's just nothing really."In 2023, Phillips said the disease had "decimated" her family - with her mother, father and uncle all receiving a diagnosis.She had cared for her parents and made two documentaries about the disease - one in 2009 called Mum, Dad, Alzheimer's And Me, about her family's history of dementia, and My Family And Alzheimer's in 2010.The NHS says the term dementia encompasses "a group of symptoms associated with an ongoing decline of brain functioning".Alzheimer's disease is the most common cause of dementia in the UK but its exact cause is not yet fully understood. No cure currently exists for the disease although some treatments can temporarily improve symptoms.According to the Alzheimer's Society charity, one in three people born in the UK will be diagnosed with dementia.Speaking to ITV's This Morning on Friday, Frizell said: "Society has decided we're not going to take it as seriously as we should."The money that's there for Alzheimer's research, it's like buying a Starbucks cup of coffee, basically trying to fight a disease. It's impossible."Phillips presented GMTV between 1993 and 2008. She has since led a number of documentaries and episodes of Panorama and was a columnist for the Mirror.
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Daily Mail
11 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
EXCLUSIVE Truth about how 'frugal' 24-year-old junior sales executive who wants to retire at 40 REALLY saved £95,000
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Quite how much she receives is unclear as Mia Rose McGrath - her username across multiple platforms - doesn't declare this publicly. So adept is Mia at offering her services as a way for corporations to 'reach' young people that she even provides a breakdown of her influencer profile in the style of a media sales executive. She details her audience reach by age (85% of those following her posts are aged 18-34, for example), by country and by audience numbers reached: an astonishing 3.1million at last count. She even pitches direct to potential sponsors: 'I'm a 24-year-old London-based creator who has grown a TikTok account to over 125k followers, specialising in personal finance and investing content. 'While my niche focuses on finance, I've also worked on creating UGC [user generated content - ie her posts] for skincare and lifestyle brands, blending creativity with authenticity to connect with audiences.' All this seems distinctly at odds with the tone of her main output to TikTok viewers, describing herself as a 'fashion girly' and 'your financially literate bestie'. And her USP on social media comes from that professed financial literacy: she routinely lectures young people on how to achieve wealth young and offers tips on how to emulate her savings success. And she provides links that go straight to online trading platforms to assist. Of course influencers being paid to produce or promote content for commercial organisations is nothing new - and there's no suggestion that Mia is flouting any of the rules around this practice. But when your whole personal brand is about being relatable on a financial level as you're just the same as other struggling 24 year olds, then perhaps there are issues with this. Social media marketing expert Hannah O'Donoghue Hobbs told MailOnline: 'Mia should be more transparent about how much money she is getting from these affiliated brands. 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Daily Mail
18 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
EXCLUSIVE Village torn apart after woman writes '50 Shades of Grey' style erotic novel 'about her neighbours'... but 13 years later has peace broken out?
Most people don't like their neighbours for various petty reasons. But most people don't live in Eccleshall. In 2012, a raunchy novel about a fictional village packed with anecdotes of bed-hopping and romps in the garden was published. Rotten Row was written by a vegetarian housewife Lesley Cleary (pen name Angela Hargreaves) from Eccleshall - a quaint village in Staffordshire. And despite being advertised as a fictional tale about 'living in close proximity to some neighbours', residents of Eccleshall felt the book rang a little too true. At the time, her neighbours were furious at the portrayal of an in-fighting, sex-obsessed bunch of cranks and Mrs Cleary insisted the similarities were pure fiction. But MailOnline can reveal that Mrs Cleary, now 70, and her husband Martin - a retired mine surveyor - fled Eccleshall to live a a quiet life in the seaside town of Ilfracombe in Devon. Two years after the book was released, the couple settled down in a pretty detached Victorian home close to beaches and museums for £220,000. It appears the move spelled the end of her literary career with Mrs Cleary now preferring dog walks and gardening. The Amazon page for Angela Hargreaves still shows just the two published titles. Despite being advertised as a fictional tale about 'living in close proximity to some neighbours', residents of Eccleshall felt the book rang a little too true Rotten Row published in 2012 and Hard Times, published in 2013, the cover of which shows a naked couple doing the hoovering. Set in the fictional village of Upton Green, it promised, according to its Amazon entry, a tale of 'petty spitefulness and complexity of living in close proximity to some neighbours'. It was compared with E. L. James's saucy bestseller Fifty Shades Of Grey, and is packed with stories of bed-hopping, romps in the garden, and gossipy accounts of drunken debauchery. Unfortunately for residents of Eccleshall, everything about the book - from the names of its characters to their bickering over damsons - rang a little too true. That, at least, was the claim of Lesley's neighbours, who were furious at the portrayal of an in-fighting, sex-obsessed bunch of cranks - or, to use the book's description, the most 'bossy, gossipy, hissy, humourless, competitive bunch of Hyacinth Buckets one could ever wish not to encounter'. Lesley, however, insisted any similarities between her book and life in Eccleshall was pure coincidence.'It's fiction,' she says, matter-of-factly. 'All I know is what was in my head. Some people just want to be in the book, I don't know why. I'm the one who's upset - my characters are being hijacked. It's silly.' The saga started in 2012 when Lesley told her next-door neighbours Emma and Kevin Williams she had been writing a novel to be published online in September. Emma and Kevin shrugged off the book as a pipe dream. It wasn't until a few months later, once the book had been published online, that they heard the book's title, Rotten Row, and decided to look it up. 'I had no idea it would seem to be about life here - or that it would be so revealing,' said Emma, who had lived in Eccleshall for decades. 'It's a little village and we all get along well. Or we did.' The cover image, drawn by Lesley, shows a pretty row of cottages at the end of a village High Street. With their pastel-coloured walls, picture windows, and sloping slate roofs, they are remarkably similar to cottages at the end of Eccleshall High Street, one of which is Lesley's home. 'It's definitely our street - you only need look at it,' she concluded at the time. Lesley claimed the cover 'could be a row of terraces anywhere in the country. It may look like here, but it isn't meant to be here,' she says, crossly. 'If you look closely you'll see there is a road continuing round a corner, which doesn't happen here. And the windows are different.' She said she'd been writing the book since 2006. 'I've kept a file over the years with all sorts of snippets and bits from my life. My idea was just to write a little book that would sell a few copies - not to cause a fuss like this. I thought I'd get a few royalties for dog food.' But it wasn't long before her novel became the talk of the village. One Friday evening, a group of locals gathered in the cosy, red-walled sitting room of Brenda Chatterjee, a glamorous widow who lives in the white-washed Old Bakery next door to Emma and Kevin, to read the book on Brenda's Kindle. Soon they were compiling mental check-lists of everything that sounded familiar. The book's narrator, Louisa, enjoys interior design, and moves to Upton Green having lived in London and Hampshire - both of which apply to Lesley. Her cottage, like Lesley's, is at the end of the 'Georgian High Street' and has a pretty wrought-iron fence and side entrance. Meanwhile, the book is packed full of events that villagers say have really happened, and conversations that they've really had. They include such pulse-racers as an argument about damson-picking rights, a row over a leaking loo, and a dispute with the florist over past-their-best roses. 'It's as if she's been following us,' says Brenda. 'I feel like she's been looking at us through binoculars the whole time.' Many of the lead characters have similar names, physical characteristics or jobs to Lesley's neighbours. Brenda believes she is the inspiration for the character 'Babs', and her good friend, former company director Rob Johnson, the inspiration for Bab's lover, 'Barbour Bob'. Their neighbour Martin Ratcliffe an architect, is certain the fictional architect Declan is based on him. And Emma and Kevin, who keep chickens and grow vegetables, believe chicken-loving, veggie-growing Lucy and Jeremy are their mirror images. Gordon Dale is sure parish councillor Reg is him - they both even have matching gold teeth. Amusingly, when it came to the book's racier passages, the villagers deny any similarities at all. The book has architect Declan engaging in an illicit romp with Babs (Martin insists 'I've certainly never broken any antique beds!') and Louisa the narrator receives a sloppy, unsolicited snog from a stranger in the supermarket. Are the villagers sure they weren't imagining the similarities, and a tiny part of them rather liked being immortalised in print? 'Not at all!' says Brenda, horrified. 'I just want a quiet life. This is all so awful - it's upsetting.' Nobody answered the door at the immaculately renovated five-bed home when MailOnline visited this week. Neighbours described Leslie and Martin as a 'friendly and charming couple'. None knew of her literary past or had ever heard of the pen name Angela Hargreaves. One told MailOnline: 'I had no idea she was an author, they are nice and we've said hello a couple of times but keep themselves to themselves generally. 'I don't think there's much danger of my life being in one of those books, it'd send readers straight off to sleep.' The couple appear to have regularly visited Ilfracombe - famed for its stunning coastline, historic harbour and 66ft tall Damian Hurst statue - regularly for years before moving down. In 2008 - while she was writing Rotten Row - Leslie wrote a testimonial praising the town in the local newspaper the North Devon Journal. She wrote: 'Ilfracombe is a beautiful place with wonderful historic architecture, a museum that shouldn't be missed and the Landmark Theatre is fabulous.' Martin meanwhile has ventured into local politics, serving on the Harbour Board as well as being a site representative on the Ilfracombe Allotment and Leisure Gardens Association. In 2024 he stood unsuccessfully for the town council under the Ilfracombe First party. Meanwhile, back in Eccleshall her old neighbours have 'moved on' and brushed past the topic of their former resident author. But the original 'stars' of the novel still live on the same charming street, including Brenda Chatterjee who she believed was inspiration for the character 'Babs'. And while life in Eccleshall now seems uneventful... who knows what's going on behind closed doors.
Daily Mail
19 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
Prince William's fling with the posh girl from the 'Glosse Posse': Charles had given the relationship with Arabella Musgrave his blessing but HER father had a different view...
Before meeting his future wife Kate at St Andrews, Prince William had a fling with another affluent young woman. In the summer of 2001, before he began his four-year course in Scotland, a childhood friend caught the prince's eye at a mutual acquaintance's party. Arabella Musgrave was the 18-year-old daughter of polo club manager Major Nicholas Musgrave. 'Although not titled aristocracy, Arabella was a close friend of Guy Pelly and Hugh Van Cutsem and part of the Glosse Posse,' royal correspondent Katie Nicholl wrote in her book, The Making of a Royal Romance. This was the name given to William and Harry's inner circle and meant Arabella secured an invite to parties the princes used to throw in the basement of Highgrove and those Van Custem would run from his family residence. 'As she walked through the house party at the Van Cutsems' family home, William did a double take,' Nicholl continued. It was a textbook romance. 'Arabella had blossomed into a gorgeous looking girl, and as she sashayed past him, her perfume lingering in the air, he wondered why he hadn't noticed her properly until now.' The two danced and drank until the early hours and, as noted by Nicholl, 'William knew he would make a move on her by the end of the night'. The royal author added: 'When Arabella said her goodnights, the prince quietly slipped out of the room to follow her upstairs. 'It was the beginning of a passionate romance and the two spent as much time together that summer as possible.' The romance was approved by Prince Charles who 'suspected the relationship would soon fizzle out and instructed William's protection officers to give the couple plenty of leeway'. But Major Nicholas was much harder to please. When he caught his daughter sitting on William's lap while the prince kissed her neck he had a quiet word, according to Nicholl. 'Although he was fond of William, such displays of affection, he insisted, were not for public consumption.' The prince's decision to attend St Andrews boosted applications and interest in the university But it wasn't all kisses on necks and sneaking from parties. The relationship ended by the time William went to St Andrews in what Nicholl described as a 'mutual decision'. 'William would be meeting new people at university and Arabella could not expect him to to wait for her,' she wrote. The prince's decision to attend St Andrews significantly boosted applications and interest in the university. This 'Prince William effect' resulted in a 44 per cent increase in applications compared to the previous year. The rise was particularly noticeable among young women, especially from the US. William was very aware of his impact and was keen to make genuine friends. The young prince said in an interview around the time: 'People who try to take advantage of me and a get a piece of me, I spot it quickly and soon go off them.' He added: 'I just hope I can meet people I get on with. I don't care about their background.' The future King reportedly requested a room without an en-suite so he could get the full student experience of queuing for the communal showers. During his first term, William started dating Carly Massy-Birch, an English language and creative writing student. He was often invited to supper at Carly's home, where the prince would step over her muddy Hunter Wellington boots in the hallway. Their affair was to be short-lived, however, and ended somewhat stickily when Carly told William he had to make a decision between her and Arabella. Despite having swarms of attractive women to choose between, William was bored in Scotland. Nicholl wrote: 'He missed his friends in Gloucestershire and going to his favourite nightclubs in London. 'He also missed Arabella, and on Friday nights when he began his journey home to Highgrove he was comforted by the fact that she would be waiting for him.' According to royal expert Robert Lacey in his 2020 book Battle of Brothers, William expressed doubts to his father during the holidays over his choice of course and institution and told him how he wanted to move. He found life in the small Scottish town to be quiet, with the highlight of his week shopping at Tesco and playing sport on a Wednesday William later said he felt he was 'daunted' by life at university rather than homesick His grandfather, Prince Philip, is said to have responded: 'William needs to knuckle down and not wimp out.' He found life in the small Scottish town to be quiet, with the highlight of his week being shopping at Tesco and playing sport on a Wednesday. Kensington Palace and St Andrews managed to resolve the issue by liaising with one another and agreed for William to switch courses to Geography. Charles spent the Christmas holiday having a heartfelt discussion with William, who eventually decided against moving away. William later said he felt he was 'daunted' rather than homesick. He said at the time: 'My father was very understanding about it and realised I had the same problem he had probably had. 'We chatted a lot, and in the end we both realised - I definitely realised - that I had to come back. 'I think it was the new surroundings. When I was with Raleigh International in Chile during my gap year, it was the same sort of thing. You're thrown into completely new territory. 'I don't think I was homesick. I was more daunted.' The decision paid off, as it was at St Andrews that William met and fell in love with Kate. By the end of freshers' week, the future Princess of Wales had been crowned the prettiest girl at Sally's, the nickname for St Salvator's Hall, her hall of residence. And she had already caught the eye of William. He had noticed her as soon as he arrived – it was hard not to. It was March 27, 2002, the night of the annual Don't Walk charity fashion show at the five-star St Andrews Bay Hotel, and William had paid £200 for a front-row ticket. As Kate shimmied down the catwalk wearing black underwear and a daring, see-through dress, William turned to his close friend Fergus Boyd and whispered: 'Wow, Kate's hot!' Another of the models that night recalled: 'Kate was great on the catwalk. She and everyone, including William, knew it.' They began living together in a shared flat with two other friends in 2002, and their romance is said to have blossomed by Christmas 2003. Their relationship became public in 2004 after photos of them together during a ski trip were published. Arabella, who now works in communications for Gucci, and William have remained friends into their adult years and she even attended his wedding to Kate in 2011. Arabella arrives at William and Kate's wedding at Westminster Abbey Arabella is the director of entertainment industry relations at Gucci, who poached her from Prada In 2014 she married George Galliers-Pratt of the Cayzer banking dynasty in Knightsbridge. While Kate and William didn't go to the ceremony, the princess' sister Pippa was in attendance. Her lavish wedding featured in US Vogue and in 2020 she became head of communications in north Europe for Gucci. The couple also have a daughter. Kate and William heard a speech at their graduation ceremony in 2005 by their principal, who described St Andrews in Fife as the country's top matchmaking university. He added: 'You may have met your husband or wife.' If William had not returned to St Andrews after his break, his life could have looked very different. The rest, as they say, is history.
