Sharon Feinstein

I have to say I am a bit concerned about Amy Winehouse. I interviewed her before the full-on drink and drugs and she was spunky, talented and rather different to the norm of 20-something singer song writers I was used to talking to. But now she’s holed up in St Lucia, alone, lonely, and drunk, with a swimming pool outside her villa and a deep end at one side.
Lots of daily alcohol, minimal food and a swimming pool don’t go well together. Where are her parents, one asks? Her brother?  I understand she’s a grown woman, an adult, a person with her own strong free will. Yes yes, but if that was my daughter, Lara, I’d bloody well be there come hell or high water.
I remember how funny she was, and how she desperately wanted to become successful and famous. Now she can’t find a place that’s enough of a refuge, she’s huge in America, and even the Far East. When I was in Thailand last year her face as plastered across billboards and her CDs were sold on every street corner. Now that MJ’s dead, from drugs, irresponsibility, sadness and emptiness, maybe we need to pay some attention to the very isolated and needy Amy Winehouse, who may very well  be rapidly hurtling towards a similar fate, I feel. She told me that when she was a mere 14 her mother moved into a new house and gave Amy the basement room so guys could climb in and out of her windows without disturbing the household. I nearly fell off my chair and smashed the tape recorder, and I also wanted to give her a very big motherly hug, something I felt had been severely lacking in young Amy’s life.
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Its been a race to finish the book for the bookclub dinner tonight. The Shadow of the Sun is reportage about Africa, its brutal, sweltering heat, tribes people with their peculiar customs and folk lore; the coups, wars, inter tribal death as with the genocide in Rwanda. It ends with a lone elephant coming out of the African bush one night and thundering round the camp in a clearing in the bush, deciding what to do while people’s lives hang in the balance.
The scene brought it all back to me. I was 17, and my mother was driving the two of us to a friend’s wedding party in the game reserve, through miles of bush under the sweltering, dripping heat. We took a wrong turning and got lost, running out of water and valuable sucking sweets. I had my head in my hands, weak and faint, when I realised my mum had stopped the car. Drive mum, I feel sick, we’ve got to get there. I can’t, she said softly, and I looked up to see the ultimate African elephant, world’s largest land mammal, around 6 tons, standing in our path right in front of the car. We both froze, as he watched us, his giant ,grey wrinkled legs higher than the car, big ears flapping and trunk swaying.
Those moments are imprinted on me forever, the terrifying eternity in the baking car, waiting for the elephant’s next move. Whatever made him decide, he moved off, and disappeared into the shimmering distance. We drove on, and you know what, I now wear a silver elephant round my neck when I feel I need some luck.