High life | 18 February 2012

Gstaad

Here we go again! ‘I hear music and there’s no one there, I smell blossoms and the trees are bare, all at once I seem to walk on air…’ Some of you, or perhaps all of you, must be getting rather tired of this, but I simply can’t help it. I’m not doing it on purpose, that I swear on the Bible. In fact, I dropped in on the terribly nice village doctor although I knew it was a total waste of his time and mine. His diagnosis, as always with such symptoms: ‘There is nothing you can take to relieve that pleasant ache; you’re not sick, you’re just in love.’

Yes, folks, this time she’s Jessica Raine, that graceful and shy nurse Jenny in the Sunday-night soap Call the Midwife. This is the kind of coup de foudre I haven’t experienced in years. Cupid’s arrow pierced my breast three Sundays ago, and I haven’t had a peaceful night’s sleep since. I even had my daughter Google Jessica — she grew up on a Welsh farm near Powys. And the mother of my children agrees. ‘She’s very pretty and nice,’ she admitted, however reluctantly.

What attracts me is the role she plays. Her grace, shyness and understatement, her intense and repressed character, straight out of some Terence Rattigan play. And I love her rather plain beauty. Now that’s what I call an English rose, not those grotesque tarts who fall out of their bras while drunk and stumble on their ghastly Louboutins, the ugliest shoes ever invented by men who hate women. Incidentally, Hugo Rifkind asked recently if there is a Madame Louboutin, and there is, but he’s a brute with a beard.