Hamish Bowles

After student years of flat-sharing and living with other people's taste, I went into decorating overdrive when I acquired my first apartment - its floor plan not much bigger than the vintage Hermes scarves I then wore side-knotted on my head, pirate-style.

In the face of postwar austerity, hundreds of brides-to-be across the country sent Princess Elizabeth their clothing coupons so that she could have the dress of their dreams.

Singing for me has always been a joyous but private pleasure that connects me in a lyric thread to my beloved grandmother Alice.

My childhood memories seem to be wreathed in the twin and far from harmonious olfactory sensations of patchouli oil and caustic soda.

My mother is the sort of woman who not only can raise a chicken and roast it to moist perfection but, as she proved to my openmouthed sister and me on a family holiday to Morocco when we were very young, can barter for one in a market, kill it, pluck it, and then cook it to perfection.

When I think of my childhood, I see my mother, the complete sixties parent, decked in purple frappe silk caftans, the acidic smell of newly stripped pine mingling with incense.

My obsession with accumulation, which at times has taken on the whisper of a psychic illness - as anyone who has experienced the ode to the Collyer brothers that is my 'Vogue' office will concur - began in infancy.

In Miss Catherine Middleton we have the faintest, intoxicating glimmer of a New Age Cinderella story.