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By Root 430 0

for us, so, once again, after the Oscars we went back to our idyllic winter sojourn in Miami. As Shakira and I strolled down Lincoln Road to visit our restaurant the South Beach Brasserie, we became aware of a different atmosphere around the place and it gradually dawned on us that the vast majority of people who were walking round and sitting outside the cafés enjoying the sunshine like us, were gay men. There had always been gay men in South Beach, but it looked as if the closets were all empty and there was nobody left in South Beach to come out! After a lifetime in theatre and movies I was hardly unused to this – and two of my closest friends are gay – but I had never encountered so many gay men en masse and we came to the conclusion that we were living in a gay ghetto. As I have said, I am completely comfortable with anyone’s sexuality, gay or straight, but I don’t think living in any kind of ghetto is a good idea – even for the people who created it – and for an outsider it’s impossible. I invited my two gay friends down for the weekend to stay and even they hated it.

I was conscious, too, of the vicious swathe the HIV virus had cut through the gay community elsewhere, and was surprised to see such a fit – and promiscuous – group in Miami. Fit, bronzed men, their bodies tuned like bodybuilders, were everywhere – and they seemed to be oblivious to the dangers of the virus. One of my friends there, a photographer who was gay, was also HIV positive and had looked very ill when I had seen him last . . . I barely recognised him when I bumped into him on our next visit: he was tanned, fit and muscular. He explained the mystery to me over dinner. Whether or not it was true, he and many of his friends believed that steroids held back the effects of the virus, so they were all pumped and ready to go. Their attitude, he explained, was that they had HIV – and full-blown AIDS in many cases – and they were going to die young, so they were making the best of it. As we left the restaurant he smiled and shook my hand. ‘It’s fun in the sun ’til you’re done, hun,’ he said as he walked away. I knew I would never see him again.

Lincoln Road became a flamboyant nightly parade of happy people either flaunting their love or looking for it. Those on steroids looked a bit like Arnold Schwarzenegger balloons waiting for the pin prick of AIDS to blow them back to reality: I have never seen so many sick people so happy. Eventually, though, the sadness of it all got to us and we decided to sell up, pack up and go home. As we drove back once again over the MacArthur Causeway, what we saw as we looked back seemed like the most glamorous hospice in the world.

Back home in England, miracles were on their way – although, of course, life never goes quite to plan . . . we’d managed to sell our house in Oxfordshire before we had found another one we wanted to live in, so we stored our furniture and moved into the flat in Chelsea Harbour. After the space of Rectory Farm it felt very cramped and, Shakira informed me, I paced round the flat like a caged animal. She was right; that was just what I felt like. In the meantime I looked at every estate agent’s brochure in the country, including one for a two-hundred-year-old barn in Surrey, which wouldn’t be ready for another year, so I threw that one away.

I continued my search in vain for another couple of weeks until my secretary Tricia turned up one day with a cutting from The Times. ‘Here’s one you might like,’ she said, and handed it to me. It was an advert for the barn conversion job I had already discarded. ‘I’ve seen it,’ I told her and threw it in the wastepaper basket again. She was used to me, so she shrugged and we got on with some other work.

After lunch I was so bored and frustrated that I fished the ad out of the basket and read it again. I had nothing to do, so I decided I might as well go and look at the place. It was in a beautiful valley, named after the River Mole, which ran through it, and quite near Box Hill, where I had gone hiking as a Boy Scout. The site was set in twenty-one acres