I can’t absolutely swear to it, but I do believe I was once in the same room as April Ashley, one of the first Brits to undergo gender reassignment surgery, male to female. The room was the bar of the Chelsea Arts Club and somebody told me that the distinguished-looking woman across the way was Ms. Ashley. I had no reason not to believe.
After the op April Ashley became a model, among other things, and in 2012 received an MBE for ‘services to the Transgendered community.’ She died in 2021.
And now there’s a new book titled Bonjour Mademoiselle! April Ashley and the Pursuit of a Lovely Life by Jacqueline Kent and Tom Roberts. At this point I’ve only read the reviews but there seems to be some dynamite stuff in there about food, the most immediately engaging is that Ashley became a front of house person at a restaurant I’d never heard of called AD8, a pretty dodgy establishment apparently, with a signature dish of champagne and camembert soup. One night, apparently, April drank 32 martinis, which certainly deserves a medal if not necessarily an MBE.
The book was reviewed in Saturday’s Times just a few pages away from a review of Diane Abbott’s memoir A Woman Like Me, which seems a bit short on the martini drinking but there is some interesting food stuff.
When Abbott was in a relationship with Jeremy Corbyn they went on holiday, in 1979, to the south of France. They travelled on Corbyn’s East German motorbike which kept breaking down, but Abbott consoled herself by thinking that sooner or later they’d arrived in the south of France where she’d eat ‘delicious Gallic Cuisine.’ It was not to be. Corbyn opened the panniers on his bike to reveal ‘a week’s supply of instant macaroni and other processed food.’
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