I meet Esme Young, who is a judge on the BBC’s The Great British Sewing Bee as well as, to my mind and many others’, the definitive style icon for older women – sit on that, Prue Leith! – at her workshop in the East End of London, where I proceed to hang on her every word for four hours and counting. (I’d only come for some style tips. And to ask if she’d shorten my shirt sleeves.)
“I have,” she says, “always approached life with every intention of living it,” and that’s her in a nutshell. For instance, her siblings offered her a good piece of jewelery for her 60th birthday. A ruby ring, say. But she traded that for a trip across Iran.