Jo Fairley – Favourite Things

Each week Reaction Weekend brings you Favourite Things – interviews with interesting people about the skills, hobbies, pleasures and past times that make them who they are.

Jo Fairley is one of Britain’s leading entrepreneurs. She is the co-founder of Green & Black’s, beautybible.com, The Perfume Society and The Wellington Centre for Health & Wellbeing, in her home town of Hastings. Fairley is also a successful journalist and Contributing Editor to The Mail on Sunday’s YOU magazine.

These are a few of Jo Fairley’s  favourite things.

Scented plants

I am an incredibly keen gardener and the biggest upside of lockdown was getting to be in the garden every single day; I think it literally saved my sanity. For me, choice of plants is mostly down to whether or not they smell. Particular favourites are star jasmine, which clambers up many of our walls, roses (in particular Gertrude Jekyll and Double Delight, which smells lemony), a shrub called Pittosporum tobira which smells of orange blossom, and scented geraniums.

I think it goes back to my very, very first memory aged about two. My grandma was rubbing my fingers on a scented geranium called Attar of Roses, then holding my fingers to my nose. It was like stepping through the wardrobe into the Narnia of the world of scent. The memory is so vivid I not only “see” her when I smell the same geranium now; I see the print on her mauve frock too.

Black humour

I have lost quite a few friends in tragic circumstances and for those of us left behind, black humour has been a salvation. It’s not disrespectful; I tend to think that person would rather make people laugh from beyond the grave than cry. I believe that in our darkest times, we find our greatest strengths – and I have somehow managed to find something about any given situation to make me laugh like a drain, even in the deepest depths of darkness. I think it’s actually a form of resilience. I wouldn’t ever diss someone who isn’t endowed with black humour, but it is probably a defining quality among my friends, too. (If we couldn’t find something to laugh about in the past months, where would we be?)

Ice cream

On any given dessert menu I will always go for ice cream. One of my earliest memories is of sitting on a beach in St. Leonard’s-on-Sea with my great-grandparents. I was crying because the blustery wind blew my ice cream out of its cornet; I might well cry if the same thing happened now. When I was running Green & Black’s, which I co-founded with my husband, we brought out ice cream and I learned so much about it: it’s the only product sold by volume, not by weight. So you can tell a good ice cream immediately by picking up the tub: if it’s heavy, it’ll be good and melt slowly. If it’s light, it’s had loads of air whipped in and will be a puddle in no time. Favourite flavour? Coffee, given the choice. The world is divided into ice cream ‘lickers’ and ice cream ‘biters’, and I’m the latter.

Writing letters

And all the paraphernalia that goes with it: stationery, pens, ink, stamps. (I get more-interesting-than-usual stamps from the Royal Mail website and am getting great pleasure licking the backsides of various 007 stars, currently.) I mostly write endless thank-you letters, which is also a gratitude practice, but during lockdown I sent all sorts of missives to friends and colleagues who I admire, just sending love and support – and got some wonderful letters back, though that wasn’t why I did it. In a super-speedy world, snail mail has become even more special. All my “corona-missives” are tucked into the frame of a mirror in the hall; I am not sure I’ll ever be able to take them down.

Sea-bathing

From late April to early November, my husband and I walk down the road and throw ourselves in the British Channel at least once a day. On Hastings’s Fishermen’s Beach, there’s a harbour arm that sticks out into the sea, which means that even if it’s blowing a gale, there’s safe and calm bathing on one side. It wakes up my brain, it re-energises me better than caffeine and I am pretty sure that the minerals do me good, too. I cannot imagine ever living more than a few hundred yards from the sea, now – and I honestly thank my lucky stars for it, every day.