Life was very crowded in late October 2022.
I had managed to meet a tight deadline to finalise the catalogue accompanying India in Fashion, an exhibition that I curated celebrating the lure that the country has had on western designers that would go on to open the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre in Mumbai the following year. I was swept up in La Bohème at the Royal Opera House; I relished a second foray to Only an Octave Apart at Wilton’s Music Hall. Memorably, that same week, I was a guest of Kim Jones and Dior on a transporting tour to Sussex – in the shadow of the Bloomsbury set (Charleston, Virginia Woolf’s Monk’s House, the marvellous Berwick church) – and then back to Vogue House for meetings at The World of Interiors.
The morning of Saturday 22 October began like so many other weekend mornings in London, with an early trip to Portobello Road, where I dithered over a rather exciting winter 1930 Lanvin gold lamé dress at Oliver Vintage. I would ultimately leave without the dress – although I vowed to return – because I was late for a haircut in South Kensington. I then had to go to Bloomsbury to discuss renovation work at my new apartment, so I didn’t have the time to return to Portobello that day. I was looking forward to a nostalgic dinner at China Tang – oh, and on Monday I was leaving for Doha for a week of Qatar Creates festivities.
I wouldn’t make it to that dinner. Or the festive week.
A man named Lucas, who was doing some odd jobs for me, had suggested I look at the subflooring in the Bloomsbury apartment. I was crestfallen not to find the original material intact but rather a patchwork of plywood beneath. I remember having some slight, inexplicable unsteadiness as I wandered around. As I crossed the threshold to the pantry, I began to collapse. Lucas recalls my leaning against a wall and gently, elegantly lowering to the floor – in order to more closely inspect the flooring condition, he presumed. Lucas soon realised that I was unresponsive and exhibiting hallmark signs of stroke. My own memory of that moment is that I could hear and understand his questions and I presumed that he could hear my responses. The reality, I would later learn, was different: I was conscious but unable to make any noise or speak.
Lucas called the emergency services, and neighbours and friends began to gather. My friend Gillian Mosely was in tears. Whatever for, I asked myself. In fact, I asked this to the assembled crowd. My upstairs neighbour, Kim, was home, celebrating the birthday of a close friend. Knowing how vital speed is for stroke intervention, and concerned about the potential delay in the ambulance’s arrival, Kim and this friend lifted me into a car and we set off for the nearest hospital, only a five-minute drive away – moments later, after receiving a call that the ambulance had arrived, they turned around and delivered me home. Now I was rather confused, as Kim’s friend was all sweetness and light and rather dishy, but I’d be damned if I’d met him before. He kept reassuring me that “All was going to be all right, Hamish.” Yes, said I, of course it is, and have we met?
I was hauled into the ambulance on a stretcher and I kept reassuring them that they didn’t have to fuss. There was talking and commotion and… I don’t remember anything else for roughly a week.
Apparently, I was admitted around 5pm with an acute ischemic stroke in the middle cerebral artery – according to the admission notes, “presenting with expressive aphasia and right-sided hemiparesis”. In other words, blood flow to my brain was blocked, I couldn’t speak, nor move the right side of my body. As is customary in stroke intervention, I later learnt, I underwent thrombolysis at 5.23pm, restoring blood flow to the brain, and a thrombectomy an hour later, achieving full flow of blood circulation. If you can understand all that, you’re better than I.
It would be another 50 days before I regained the ability to drink or eat without intubation, and another 145 days before I would see a bed outside of the hospital.
My stroke had come out of the blue – and, we would ultimately learn, was not attributable to any specific cause. The reality is that a stroke can happen to anyone. One minute you’re circling the globe and leading a busy, crowded, satisfying life, the next minute you’re not.
Every five minutes someone in the UK has a stroke. Brain Research UK has it as the fourth single leading cause of death, responsible for some 35,000 fatalities annually – or a life lost every 17 minutes. In the time it takes you, the reader, to finish this article, around four people in the UK will have suffered a stroke. Likely one of them will have died. This is one story – my story – of survival.
Several months later, I learnt that I was admitted to the Hyper-acute Stroke Unit at the UCLH National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, Queen Square (I have no memory of this) and transferred within the week to the Acute Stroke Unit (David Ferrier Ward) on the third floor in the same hospital complex. I remained there for more than 50 days, recovering bit by painful bit. The whole experience was surreal. Barely able to speak, I would look around my ward and think, “What on Earth am I doing here?” I was in a room with five other people, some less seriously debilitated than I, others dramatically more so. One chap was howling and hurling himself from the bed at every opportunity, his body a quagmire of injury. His wife, or partner, came often, with their very small son who was gentleness itself. A Moroccan lady was outraged that she’d been put near me. Her family was terribly nice but she hollered at them that it was not seemly (at least I imagined that is what she was saying; the body language was quite something). Another woman spoke quietly in a stream of prayer – nonstop, from the moment she awoke to the small hours. I had all of their voices ringing in my ears, together with the glaring halogen light kept on until midnight, preventing sleep or rest.
Meanwhile, a WhatsApp group, “Team Hamish”, had been formed, a 14-strong army of friends and family, including my sister, Sarah, who was my mainstay through all this. They would become – and remain – my strength during the months to follow: coordinating care and organising an endless rota of visiting guests, liaising with the medical team and my colleagues at Condé Nast, and brightening the world around me, a world that seemed bewildering, a recovery that was painfully slow.
Within a week, the group chat had turned serious, with plans afoot to collect my pomegranate-scented terracotta potpourri (Santa Maria Novella!) from the Bloomsbury apartment, along with violet-scented face cream (with one friend remarking, “Scent is a strong stimulus”). Before we knew it, I had shelves of books, stacks of magazines, boxes of chocolates and a mountain of bedside blankets crashing out of my shared space – the open ward transformed into a new world of interiors. It was also the finals of the World Cup and television blared out at all hours… and who became obsessed with the football? Moi. That’s who. Some friends had to sit and watch it with me: I would not be diverted.
The reality of those early days was nevertheless one of challenging conditions – I was allowed a maximum of two visitors at any one time (and, if you can imagine, no flowers). I had a nasogastric tube in place (for nearly two months), without which I was unable to receive hydration, nutrition or medication. I was unable to safely swallow, or speak, or walk, or go to the bathroom unaided. And I endured a battery of tests – CT scans, MRIs, echocardiograms, a Holter monitor to test for evidence of atrial fibrillation (irregular heartbeat) and a bubble echo to test for a hole in the heart as a potential cause of stroke – while the medical team also battled initial worries of aspiration pneumonia, urinary tract infection and other concerns.
On the bright side, friends, visiting in pairs, would recall memories together – a dynamic that worked well in the early days, inspiring me to listen intently. Friends also helped manage my finances and oversee the renovation at my Bloomsbury apartment; others were responsible for the beauty department, shaving and applying masks as I could neither bathe nor clean my own face. My first shower was administered on the morning of 7 November, two weeks following my admission to hospital. And my first words were uttered days later, remarking to a friend, “Can you believe it?”
It was in those first weeks that I realised the path ahead would be months and months, or even years. I didn’t feel despair at this so much as a sense of impatience, of mounting frustration. Most vexing was my limited ability to speak – and, later, to speak clearly – and a multi-week battle with chest-rattling hiccups preventing sleep or rest. I also remember the broader lack of autonomy, unable to safely drink, eat, stand or walk, and the early embarrassment of wetting the bed. How curious it was to feel uplifted by the visits of friends, even as I was embarrassed to be seen in that hospital environment. (The soft mortification still exists, when I can’t quite remember a word or a name.) Memorable early visits included time with Michael Kors and his husband, Lance LePere, who brought me a lovely shagreen box from Thailand, in lilac of course.
Weeks later, one early green shoot of recovery came during a meeting with the medical team and close friends and family, when Anna Wintour asked the doctors whether it was too soon to bring in material from work, providing me with visual inspiration and a connection back to my passions; before we knew it, I was selecting cover shots for an upcoming World of Interiors issue. I recall one early meeting with Anna, agreeing on the photo that would ultimately run on the cover of February 2023, that of an Uzbek merchant’s hall, with an article by Marie-France Boyer, headlined “Return to Splendour”. (It would prove inspiration for my own return to splendour, although now I’m furious that we hadn’t seen the pictures of Gloria Vanderbilt’s scintillating Manhattan apartment, which hands-down would have made the cover instead!)
A critical step in my continued recovery was being able to pass a “swallow test”, which would, in turn, permit the removal of the tubing taped to my face (undignified, wasn’t it?). This involved inserting a fibre-optic camera through my nose and into my throat to observe whether the swallow reflex was functioning properly. Persistent failure meant heightened risk of choking or aspiration pneumonia. This took several uncomfortable and failed attempts before – success! – I finally passed in mid-December, enabling my transfer out of the UCLH to a private hospital.
Shortly before that move, I was treated to what we told the nurses was an innocent spin around Queen Square, which in reality was an afternoon’s escape to my Bloomsbury apartment, around the corner from the hospital and still under renovation, but lovingly decorated by family and friends for Christmas, presents under the tree. It was my first time returning to the apartment and I was proud to be wearing my own clothes for the festive occasion: a vintage amethyst corduroy Dries Van Noten suit, the same suit I was wearing when struck down by the stroke. I was charmed by the decorations and by the discovery that renovation had continued, overseen by friends, while I was in the hospital – some hideous carpeting removed to reveal original, roiling floorboards underfoot.
The weeks that followed, at my new home, the Cleveland Clinic London in Belgravia, were about recovery, setting baselines and establishing goals with an interdisciplinary team of therapists. There was speech and language therapy, physiotherapy, neuropsychology, physical therapy (the gym!) and, ultimately, occupational and vocational therapy too. I remember one exercise when I listened to 30 words spoken aloud, easy words that might spin off a friend’s mouth, and then I was meant to repeat them back again. I managed to remember three words. Three. (I would slowly start to remember more.)
Meanwhile I was astonished at the luxury of a private room, with a television all to myself. In it, I began to regain my eye for interiors. My first room at the Cleveland had frosted glass in the lower panes for privacy; still confined to a wheelchair at the time, I was unable to see out to the wonderful terraced homes beyond. This wouldn’t do and within a week of my admission I was campaigning for a change. Eventually I succeeded in my mission: a transfer to an expansive room overlooking Buckingham Palace gardens! My new quarters were approximately twice the size of the bedroom in my New York apartment. This was the backdrop for where I would learn how to walk again, navigate stairs, how to count, to regain command of speech, watch my first film again, relearn how to independently shower, bathe and care for myself.
At the Cleveland Clinic I found myself surrounded by a rack of my own clothes and a replenishing meadow of flowers, sent by friends around the world. I particularly recall an early bomb of lavender roses from Anna, lifting the spirits of all who visited, and an exquisite arrangement from Marc Jacobs, presaging his own spectacular arrival in a broad-shoulder, wide-lapel jacket of shocking pink and high-heel boots. Naomi Campbell came by and caught me learning to climb the steps, one by one. I remember an early visit in late January 2023 from Sally Singer, who bravely wheeled me out to Hyde Park where we settled for a long gossip in the rose garden.
A happy period, but not without setbacks. One night I woke up to go to the bathroom, tripped over the wheelchair beside the bed and crashed to the ground, where I lay for some time with minor injuries, before slowly and painfully pulling myself off the floor. There were tears. I was overwhelmed, all over again, by my own vulnerability – the physical therapist at the Cleveland predictably went white when I told her what happened the next day. A stricter regime of monitoring was imposed, a new alarm attached to the bed so that every time I attempted to get out without someone there the damn thing went off. I was furious. But I had to live with it.
It was around this time that I began to rediscover my love of theatre, initially watching West Side Story and other classics on television in the room, and ultimately attending a series of shows in London, starting with Othello at the National Theatre in late January. Tania Compton, my companion for that performance, amusingly remarked in the Team Hamish group chat, “Who knew that three hours of intrigue, murder and misogyny could conjure such happiness!”
Then came a return to my first fashion shows, attending Erdem’s beautiful collection at Sadler’s Wells with Anna and Doug Gilman on 19 February and Jonathan Anderson’s risqué tribute to Scottish choreographer Michael Clark at the Roundhouse that same afternoon. We ended the week attending Daniel Lee’s inaugural collection for Burberry, ushered in through the back of the tent in my wheelchair (which I left in the dressing room) to preview the collection before taking our seats.
I experienced David Hockney’s immersive Lightroom exhibition at King’s Cross, treated to a private viewing on the morning of 23 February, before the crowds. Yet I longed for my own bed in Bloomsbury. I longed for the thrill of new holidays outside the country. I longed to stare at the wonder of the new colours on my walls. I longed, even, to navigate the tricky stairs to reach the bath.
I was discharged home to my apartment on 15 March 2023, 145 days after the stroke, and it was wonderful. A close friend, Vicki Sarge, had moved into a downstairs guest bedroom. This would be a reunion of sorts, as nearly 40 years earlier I shared an apartment in London with Vicki and Deborah Andrews (costume designer of Guys & Dolls at the Bridge Theatre), who remain close friends to this day.
Almost immediately a well-timed invitation came from Thomas Dane to join him for a weekend at his magical Gloucestershire home, Spoonbed, on the estate of Hilles House, an arts and crafts home by Detmar Jellings Blow, grandfather of Detmar Blow. I arrived on a Friday afternoon with Doug and a caravan of luggage, and promptly collapsed in the familiar comfort of a home that has seen so much of my own personal history, including several unforgettable months during peak Covid with my late mother, Anne Bowles.
That weekend I tried my hand at Oh Hell, a card game I had come to love over the years, worried I might not even remember the rules. In the familiar company of close friends, I would discover – to my great pleasure – that not only did I remember the rules, I remembered how to win: taking no prisoners, I trounced even the formidable and practised Thomas. As we left for London on Sunday afternoon, I packed my bags inspired by a sense of all that was to be discovered again.
And as the days and weeks rolled into spring, I was fortunate to see more of the world. Enjoying the singular and crowded Vermeer exhibition at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam in early May, I learnt how powerful a wheelchair could be in that situation. (I bumped into Sarah Jessica Parker, enamoured with the painting of a lady pondering quietly to herself.) This was followed by an explosive preview of the RHS Chelsea Flower Show later that month. I was especially moved by the Nurture Landscapes Garden conceived by Sarah Price and inspired by Cedric Morris’s “lost” garden at Benton End.
Within the month, I would take my first flight since the stroke, helped by Georgina Godley and joining Veere Grenney and friends in Tangier for the production of Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris, directed by Rob Ashford. Tangier is the backdrop for many memories in my life and to return once again brought mixed emotions: happiness to be united with a place that means so much to me, and yet frustrated by the challenges of limited mobility and the diminished world view that resulted. I would return to Tangier in late December for the new year, however, inspired by all the progress that I had made in between visits – able to venture out to see friends at Jasper Conran’s newly reopened Villa Mabrouka, a haven of tranquillity and the former home of Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé, masterfully transformed into a 12-room boutique hotel.
In the first six months of 2023, I went to more than 20 theatre performances in London, even venturing out into the unfamiliar world of sport, as a guest of Ralph Lauren at Wimbledon. I sat, along with the radiant Sienna Miller and otherwise-engaged Cara Delevingne, mesmerised by the athleticism of Novak Djokovic and Carlos Alcaraz. I left the grounds after 9pm that evening, nearly as exhausted as the players on Centre Court, spinning with the magic of it all.
I finished that summer on a high, celebrating Doug’s birthday at Ruthie Rogers’s delicious River Cafe, followed by a celebration of my own birthday weekend (60!) at Glyndebourne, enjoying the opening night of Semele.
As the days and weeks turn into months and seasons, and as I continue to regain my strength, life comes full circle. That vintage 1930 Lanvin dress I wanted at Oliver Vintage at Portobello Green Arcade on the morning of 22 October, I would later learn, was sold to Duro Olowu. I’m in the process of negotiating to buy it back! I find myself right where I left off before the stroke, with a newfound appreciation for the fragility of life and the power to continue, a sense of awe at profound illness and resurgent health, and endless gratitude at the unwavering commitment of close friends.
Credits: grooming by Liz Taw.
