Sharon Feinstein

On a much lighter note than the slaughtering of Leatherback Turtles, I hear a very famous actor has got himself into trouble, again. Poor old Jude Law, the son of two very proper, upstanding teachers, has really misbehaved again.
He doesn’t seem to have much luck when it comes to women, acting, or hair-dos for that matter. If he’s not betraying his girlfriends with the nanny, as Sienna Miller rudely discovered, he’s  going one step further. And  it’s happened in America all over again, you’d think he might have learnt.
The man who is currently playing Hamlet in the West End has discovered that he’s been a poor player, strutting and fretting his hour upon the stage, as he was told that he is about to have another child with a woman he casually dated while on holiday with his children. Not a good scene when he already has three children on this side of the pond. O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I, he must be thinking.
I must say I’ve never rated him as an actor, he gave me the creeps in The Talented Mr Ripley, bored me in Cold Mountain, and the other films are so immemorable I couldn’t even tell you what they were. Equally with his ex-girlfriend, Sienna Miller, who is hammy and bland, to my mind. So now that I’ve completely run down the local talent do you think Jude will be able to weather this latest storm in his life?
As with Hamlet ,will he be able to switch between sanity and feigned madness to cope with it, To Be or Not To Be. No doubt the papers across the globe will be full of it for weeks to come. Poor old Jude, just can’t seem to remain Obscure.

Just finished a Turtle Campaign meeting which went very well. We are really moving forward and I will be updating my site within the next few days – www.sharonfeinstein.co.uk. But we haven’t had a donation to the Campaign for a week or so and still need your financial support, awareness and attention.
A British family have just returned from Tobago and came across a slaughter, a leatherback hacked to death and left to rot. Financial consultant Paul Shoard took pictures of the tragic, decimated, rotting creature and sent them to me, which will help to fuel our campaign and prove that this is happening now.
He says: ” Iwas staying at Turtle Beach Hotel for the third time with my wife, daughter and son. The pictures of the turtle remains were taken late afternoon on Sunday July 19th July. Peter Cox, local environmentalist and tour guide, had been tipped off that a turtle had been killed a few days  previously, so we walked with him along the beach at Great Courland Bay from Turtle  Beach Hotel towards Plymouth. My wife noticed a faint but unusual smell at one point and my daughter then spotted an area of flattened vegetation just off the beach. A few yards in, behind a bush, we discovered some entrails and a pile of palm leaves. We lifted the palm leaves to reveal the remains of the leatherbacks carapace. We all stood for a moment, overwhelmed by sadness that this wonderful creature that had probably roamed the oceans of the world for 40 years, should have ended up crudely slaughtered as she came to lay her eggs.  Peter asked us to take photographs because although it was common knowledge locally that the leatherbacks were hunted, poachers usually destroyed, buried or hid the evidence.I hope the photos will help promote the turtles cause and assist in some small way in the campaign to persuade the Trinidad and Tobago Government  to take stronger measures to protect the leatherbacks nesting on Tobago.”
So do I, and that’s what this Campaign is all about. Please go to www.sharonfeinsein.co.uk, Help Turtles. If you aren’t able to donate, please help spread the word so that more attention can be brought to this cause to save the leatherback sea turtles.

I don’t like Skype.
Of course it’s wonderful to be able to contact your daughter on the other side of the globe and see her on the screen, tattoos and all. She didn’t have them when she left home by the way. But then its followed by the awful inevitable end, the slurp, slap, thud of the over button, and the horrible flat, grey screen where her beautiful face was shining a few seconds before.
I get this sick, sinking feeling when she says, Bye mum, and the screen becomes the grey wall, and she’s simply gone. We’re living such global lives now, Lara in Toronto instead of at home, my mother in Johannesburg, another voice at the end of a machine that shuts off, and me in London writing blogs.
Our children strike out into the distance following dreams and taking their chances and you just have to let them go. Sometimes it takes all ones strength not to think about all the horrible, scary things that could happen, from one day to the next. Lara is trying to establish herself as a singer songwriter all alone in Toronto, a brave talented girl following her music. I interviewed Amy Winehouse when she was just starting out and the same age as La. Now a sad, shambling wreck of a young woman with a shabby, dishevelled dream. Let’s hope Lara fares a lot better, with one small step at a time, and ends up a lot happier.

I’m back. I was taken to North Devon which is a world away from London and a perfect vantage point for another perspective on ones life. We spent the first 3 days following a book of walks, each one more arduous and spectacular than the last. We found ourselves scaling perpendicular cliffs, running up 91 steps, disappearing into deep and ancient oak woods, swimming in the crashing Bristol Channel and celebrating all over the place with another glass of Sauvignon Blanc and slap up meal.
It was utterly exhausting, exhilarating and really quite emotional. One day we walked solidly for 7 hours up and down trails, another we were 820 feet above the ocean looking down and in line with the eagles, and another we descended on the quaint, romantic village of Clovelly, where Charles Kingsley was born, after a long, five mile appraoch. I have to confess there were times when I was edgy, moody and a bit like the low lying clouds. Other times I felt I was really celebrating my birthday and defying age with fitness and determination. And sometimes I was in a quagmire of sadness over things that have happened in the past that I can never make right now.
So the birthday is over for another year and more than anything it’s made me think, take stock and try to have a long hard look at myself and my life. On our last day at Heddon’s Mouth, we met a man who changed his life in a flash, walked away from big earnings, flash car and luxurious home to live  in remote North Devon and appreciate the time we are given, instead of fighting it. Now that made me think! Watch this space!

You’ll just have to manage without me for this week. Think of the anticipation that will meet my next epistle. The reason I’m absconding is a birthday surprise. I was told to be ready at 8am tomorrow morning for I know not where, until the weekend. I’ve sort of packed but very haphazardly, and I sort of loosely put in a bikini but I doubt there’ll be much use for it as there wasn’t any mention of a passport. And British summer seems to be over.
What do we think of being whisked away for a birthday surprise? It feels special, romantic, pampering, and fun. But where can it be and will it match up to the whirring fantasties of what it might hold.  Surprise and disappointment are inevitably mixed up. What one imagines will always be more dazzling than what actually happens. Our hopes heighten what we’re envisaging and then it’s often that crash down with a dull thud when it starts pouring, the bed’s uncomfortable, the room’s on a busy road and the view’s just a parking place and not the glinting ocean.
You can tell I’m a moody Cancerian, but I’m also one of life’s optimists so I reckon this is going to be a great few days and my birthday will bring lots of happiness-and presents -and maybe even some revelations for what direction to take next as I enter a new age.
Let me know how you feel. And have you been to my site, www.sharonfeinstein.co.uk

If we can care what Victoria Beckham eats for lunch,  how much Ronaldo gets paid a week,  and what Madonna’s latest work-out might be, surely we care about one of the greatest species in the world being slaughtered and rapidly becoming extinct.
I’ve been trying to run my first campaign after being a journalist for 25 years. It started after I saw a leatherback turtle laying her eggs. I was mesmerised, awe inspired, and very moved. I discovered that the first leatherback turtle bones date back to the Cretacious Period – that’s over 100 million years ago!
So If you are fortunate enough to see a leatherback, you will witness a creature whose ancestors survived the age of dinosaurs. But now this ancient relic hangs on the brink of extinction because peope are slaughtering her for wild meat and they’re desecrating the beaches where she comes up to lay her eggs. We can stop this. If we rouse ourselves out of the Age of the Selfish and stop thinking about ourselves, celebrity, diets and money for  a moment.
I’m no better than you, it’s just that I had the experience of seeing one of these magnificent creatures drag herself out of the sea on my holiday to Tobago and it was my seismic moment. Now I’m trying very hard to do something but the sea turtles and I need your help. Please have a look at my Turtle page on my website – www.sharonfeinstein.co.uk and send  a small donation to the Campaign, for which you will be listed on the site. If you aren’t able to send a donation at this time, please do what you can to help spread the word.
The campaign is moving forward with fact gathering and scientific evidence of leatherback slaughters; and of the bright lights on the Tobagan beaches where hatchlings are misled to the roads instead of following the light of the moon back to the ocean. I am working with a vet and scientist spreading the word about what’s happening on this small Caribbean island, compiling a report for the Tobagan Government and environmental agencies, and trying to get pictorial evidence of a slaughter under dangerous conditions.
Thank you for any help you can provide.

The closest I’ve come to having to survive against all the odds is my weekly gym workout, Mondays ,Tuesdays and Wednesdays for two hours a time. Slightly more dramatically, British teenager Jamie Neale, who comes from a few miles away from my house, has just been found after surviving 12 days lost in the eucalyptus forests of New South Wales. His father had already told his mother, Give up, he’s dead. But it takes a certain mind set, dare I say the same one I use when I undertake my weekly gym sessions, to keep going in the face of those terrible odds.
What makes a survivor? It’s that fierce grit, determination, and machine-like will to get through. It’s also a question of optimism, keeping that light flickering at the end of the tunnel, the hope and belief that it will soon be over. If you can just keep taking one tiny step at a time, there will be another reality one day. A person can survive for three weeks without food but only 3 days without water– not me, I can just about survive 3 hours without a snack, preferably the sweet kind, and having water is an absolute chore. I might be gritty when it comes to the gym but deprive me of food and I crumble into a heap, so I would have been scrabbling round for plants, berries and even nettles if I’d been Jamie. Mind you, after recovering in hospital from dehydration and exposure and  then jumping on the scales to discover you’d lost a stone, you might have thought it was all worthwhile.

Please go to my site now, www.sharonfeinstein.co.uk, and see the Help Turtles page and maybe make a small donation to the campaign. Thanks. Trying to help THEM to survive too.

Sorry to bang on about my birthday again but now there are only 6 days to go and I’ll have new figures to write down when I fill in forms, I’ll have a new way to think about myself,  and when that description comes up in a newspaper – a —year-old woman died on the side of a mountain today, or was killed in a car crash on the M25, or went down on an Eva Air flight on her way to Thailand this summer, that age will be mine. And that woman will be me.
I know that sounds morbid but we’re all going to die and none of us know when or how. That’s the inevitable reality we’re all hurtling towards, sooner or later. I don’t usually get into this spiraling morbidity, but you’re allowed to do or feel anything on your birthday and in the days running up to it. It’s my birthday so I’ll cry if I want to. I had a big milestone when my father died and it was a terrible shock and a door closing forever, no more birthdays for him. Strangely, rarely, he actually died on his birthday, November 14th. Then my sister died and that was an even more horrific shock and mortality blow, something I wll never  get over. Now there’s my mum, coming up to 80, and I’ve told her she’s never allowed to die. And then there’ll be me. As Orson Welles said, “We’re born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we’re not alone.”

Can you go to my site now -www.sharonfeinstein.co.uk – and check out Help Turtles and the Pick of the Best Page and let me know what you think. You might like to donate to the Turtle Campaign, it’s so precious, thanks

How mixed we feel on our birthdays after we grow up. Mine is next week on the 22nd. Me, Rufus Wainright and wait for it, Rhys Ifans. Wonder how they’re feeling. It used to be so exciting, the big cake and candles, presents, surprises, ice cream and jelly. Then it moves into expectations and that ticking clock, the job, the baby, need to succeed.
Another birthday, another piece of cake, we should be grateful and feel blessed of course, but its also that smack in the face with a wet fish, ageing, crumbling, noticing things that weren’t there before if you know what I mean. ‘ From our birthday, until we die, Is but the winking of an eye,  ‘ said Yeats, my favourite poet. I have to say as the days move towards next Wednesday I have that foremost in my mind. Time and tide wait for no man. A few months ago I went to South Africa for my uncle’s 90th birthday – he describes himself as being in the departure lounge of life.
While I’ve still got time and hopefully a lot, I’m going to stick to wringing out every moment and think I’ll really celebrate my birthday instead of feeling it could all be snatched away. So back to looking forward to that piece of cake, presents, and anything lovely you’d like to send me.

Have you seen what Demi Moore looks like at 46? Flat toned stomach, perfect legs, unlined face. Enough to make the rest of us give up gym altogether and open another bottle of wine.
I guess having a partner 15 years younger than you must help, as dishy as Ashton Kutcher, not to mention the conditions of their current holiday at the One and Only Club in the Bahamas.
Private butler, green flag up if you want any little something while lying back on the beach, like a cold towel, a spray of eau de toilette or even a small sucking sweet.
There’s the private yacht to sail them round the island and helicopter for aerial views.
But the coup de grace is that special fantasy they’re living out of being Mr and Mrs Bond, which is the secret news I hear on the Q T.
The Ocean Club is where Daniel Craig filmed several scenes of his debut Bond movie, Casino Royale. This is where he wins Demetrius’ Aston Martin DB5 in a game of poker and then adds insult to injury by seducing his girlfriend, Solange, who is then gruesomely murdered in his suite.
Full of desperate fantasies of being Bond, I hear Ashton asked to be collected from the airport in a silver Aston Martin and the couple have been driving round Paradise Island in the car.
But That’s where it all ends. He doesn’t own a P99 pistol, or have a penchant for martinis shaken not stirred, isn’t a tuxedo man, and sticks to one woman.
For those of you thinking of following Ashton into the world of James Bond, check out the prices of the Ocean Club first. You might prefer to watch the DVD again and deal with your fantasties that way.
We can’t all be Ashton Kutcher, or indeed Demi Moore, she writes through gritted teeth.