11/4/2022 0 Comments Inclr dickie mountbatten![]() Penny has a new partner and Ivar's three daughters are entirely accepting of their father's choice, speaking of it without embarrassment over lunch. ![]() Perhaps most remarkable of all, there seems to be no losers in their story. The sense of relief and freedom they both feel today is palpable. He grew up as one of four, and remembers his father referring to him as 'the queer one' when they were young. James had also spent years trying to bury his sexuality. He's so straightforward and remarkably easy to love.' Both agree that meeting each other was the moment that emboldened them to commit to a new way of life. There's no game playing, to a degree where you're almost looking for the catch. 'And chat's the delightful thing about Ivar, he makes his mind up about something and sticks to it. They quickly knew they wanted to be together, and within weeks James had been introduced to Ivar's Family. 'We used to speak to each ocher so much over the phone that it was a bit like being on Cilia Black's Blind Date, talking to each other through the screen,' says Ivar. Listening to them talk now about their relationship, it is striking how conventional and old-fashioned it all sounds: the hours of intimate phone conversations, the awkward first dates, the comical small disasters. They met by accident in the Farinet bar in Verbier when James, who works as a senior cabin crew for an airline, mistook Ivar for his ski instructor and shouted 'hello!' across the bar. 'I went on a few dates, and that's when I thought, "do I really want to go down that route again, of having girlfriends?" Even though that's what I was most comfortable with, because I was used to it.' But everything changed when he met James. 'I still wasn't comfortable with it at that point,' he says now. Even though he always knew he was bisexual, and had told Penny before they got married, he didn't think he wanted to be openly gay after the divorce. ![]() After two decades of running the estate, he had wanted a fresh start and planned to go travelling. When Ivar and Penny divorced in 2011, he planned to sell Bridwell. Adjoining the main house is a light-filled conservatory which can seat 50 for lunch or dinner, and away from the main house is a wisteria-clad orangery with room for a further 50, where Ivar and James' wedding reception took place. Framed photographs of royal occasions, such as a picture of the Queen and Ivar on the royal yacht Britannia, give clues as to who lives here, but otherwise the style is classic and neutral. A bright yellow oval entrance hall leads on to two symmetrical sitting rooms and a large, contemporary grey dining room. ![]() The house is a handsome pedimented home that perfectly lends itself to large-scale entertaining. She was followed by Alexandra in 1998 and Louise in 2002. He bought it in 1997 with Penny, after downsizing from Moyns when Ella was just one. He survived his first IRA assassination attempt in 1978, but his luck would not hold.We are sitting in the small but elegant library at Bridwell, which has been Ivar's home for more than 20 years. As such, he was a compelling target for the Irish Republican Army (IRA), the paramilitary organization that sought Irish freedom from England. Mountbatten was a remarkably powerful man, as well as a very public figurehead of the monarchy. He successfully wrested control of Burma from the Japanese and was later named Viceroy of India, where he was instrumental in facilitating India's partition from Pakistan, an action The Guardian referred to as "poorly planned and brutally carried out." Despite the controversy, Mountbatten continued his meteoric rise, eventually becoming Chief of the Defence Staff for three Prime Ministers. By age 13, according to Britannica, he'd entered the Royal Navy and quickly rose through the ranks, eventually becoming Britain's supreme allied commander for Southeast Asia during World War II. Born in 1900, Mountbatten lived through some of the most eventful years of the 20th Century. ![]()
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