The Lady Magazine

27 November 2015

Dear Readers, Ever since she graced our screens as Purdey in The New Avengers and convinced a generation of women to adopt a strange pudding-basin haircut (yes, me too), or agreed to resurrect Patsy Stone for the much anticipated Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie and caused a rush on sales of ‘Bolly’ champagne, Joanna Lumley has been influencing our lives. Her unwavering campaigning for the Gurkhas has been literally life-changing and she has always quietly supported charities including the National Churches Trust. In January work starts on her project for a garden bridge over the Thames, which she hopes we will see as a thing of living beauty and not an irritant. Emma Tennant’s exquisite watercolour paintings champion flora in a different way, with her painstaking research revealing the rich back-stories of 19th- and 20th-century plant-hunters and flowers that are now very much part of our landscape. For the Round family, their pet dog Ruby was very much part of their landscape, so when she went missing six years ago they were understandably distraught, but they never gave up hope and, miraculously, a few weeks ago, she was found. Their story is heart-warming and heart-rending in equal measure, rather like many of the books offered in our six-page Christmas book gift guide. Are you sitting comfortably