Robbie builders are using '19th century hand-tools' to keep noise down

2022-11-03

EDEN CONFIDENTIAL: Silence is golden for Robbie Williams as he employs builders using ’19th century hand-tools’ to keep noise down during renovation after row with neighbour Jimmy Page over impact of work

Used to blasting out his hits in huge stadiums, Robbie Williams is undertaking what must be the quietest ever house renovations, to avoid further antagonising his next-door neighbour, Led Zeppelin star Jimmy Page.

The team building Williams’s ‘super basement’ have gone to great lengths to make virtually no noise at the £17.5 million mansion in London’s Kensington.

Planners gave the green light for the work in May but Williams’s workmen have to use ’19th-century hand-tools’, and £50,000 monitoring devices to make sure the level goes barely above a whisper.

Robbie Williams is undertaking what must be the quietest ever house renovations. He is pictured performing last year

The team building Williams’s ‘super basement’ have gone to great lengths to make virtually no noise at the £17.5 million mansion in London’s Kensington

It is to avoid further antagonising his next-door neighbour, Led Zeppelin star Jimmy Page (pictured above)

Meghan set to launch Gwynnie style blog

She has starred in a TV drama series, married a Prince and inscribed bananas with messages of support for sex workers.

But perhaps nothing has given the Duchess of Sussex more intense satisfaction than The Tig, her lifestyle blog, in which she reflected on the full spectrum of human experience — from hot sauces to self-love.

So her fans will be thrilled to hear The Tig is a step nearer resurrection, more than five-and-a-half years after Meghan, in a prelude to becoming a fully fledged member of ‘The Firm’, posted a ‘final’ entry, announcing: ‘It’s time to say goodbye.’

I can reveal that Meghan’s bid to trademark ‘The Tig’ name is ‘under examination’ by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office — over a year after the initial application was submitted.

Six months ago, this appeared to be imperilled when, as I disclosed, the Patent & Trademark Office rejected the application, saying the description of the website was ‘too broad’ — and the paperwork was unsigned.

This has been rectified, with the assistance of an additional lawyer, Danielle Weiss.

The revised application scrupulously delineates five ‘classes’ in which Meghan is seeking The Tig trademark: travel, interior design (including ‘environmentally conscious living’), food preparation (including cooking and recipes), health and ‘wellness’, and personal relationships (including, rather surprisingly, fashion and personal lifestyle).

A fee of $1,750 [£1,500] has been paid. It’s the sort of sum that could be found down the back of a typical sofa in Montecito, the California enclave where Meghan and Harry live.

Perhaps Meghan could seek to apply The Tig trademark to her own range of goods — an $18 neon toilet roll set, perhaps, or a $28,500 black leather chair, both of which appear on the Christmas list of fellow Montecito resident Gwyneth Paltrow.

Swire’s rural moniker

Sir Hugo Swire — whose wife, Sasha, caused explosive reactions among David Cameron’s usually restrained set when she released her gloriously indiscreet memoirs, Diary Of An MP’s Wife — has chosen a rural idyll for his title in the Lords.

Elevated to the peerage by fellow Old Etonian Boris Johnson, Sir Hugo will now be known as Baron Swire of Down Saint Mary in the County of Devon. The reference reminds us of Sasha’s book, which included such embarrassing details as, when staying at the Camerons’ West Country holiday home, David told her to go behind him on a coastal walk because: ‘The scent you are wearing is affecting my pheromones, it makes me want to grab you, push you into the bushes and give you one.’

Eamonn Holmes’s co-presenter says it’s been ‘heartbreaking’ to see how much pain he’s endured. The GB News Breakfast host, 62, faces being off screens until the New Year after falling down the stairs at his Surrey home, fracturing his shoulder. He recently had a major operation on his spine.

‘I know how much our audience is missing Eamonn, and I am, too,’ his co-host, Isabel Webster, tells me. ‘It’s been heartbreaking to see him in so much pain. Eamonn has had such a run of bad luck.’

Jules is the original Irens Man

Jules Irens has become the talk of London society after his girlfriend, Caroline Dalmeny, ex-wife of Sotheby’s chairman Lord Dalmeny, took to social media to lacerate the party-giver who ‘disinvited’ him from a bash, as I revealed yesterday.

But the loss will be felt by those who will now not meet him — or so I’m assured by one of Irens’s old chums from Marlborough, the Wiltshire boarding school attended by the Duchess of Cambridge.

‘Jules is a top man — very bright and hardcore,’ a fellow Old Marlburian tells me. ‘He joined the Legion [French Foreign Legion] and became a sergeant.’

This diverting career move was perfectly logical. Though born in the West Country, with an English father, Irens’s mother was French-speaking Annick Dubot, so he and his sister Camille are bilingual. ‘After the Legion, Jules joined the Gurkhas,’ adds his chum, who adds that real-life superhero Irens — ‘amicably separated’ from his wife, Nicola — is ‘way undercover now’.

Perhaps less so following Caroline’s impassioned intervention.

TV chef Gino D’Acampo has broken the taboo that no parent should admit to having a favourite child. He has two older sons, but prefers his eight-year-old daughter, Mia. ‘People ask me: ‘What’s your favourite recipe?’ ‘ he says. ‘That is a question that I cannot answer, but ask me which one is my favourite child. They know, I don’t care. I’ve always loved women.’

Remembrance Sunday will be even more poignant than usual for King Charles, after the death of his mother.

I can disclose the Queen’s presence will still be felt in Whitehall, as the King will lay a newly designed wreath at the Cenotaph that will include her racing colours, purple and gold. ‘The wreath will be a blend of George VI and Charles’s designs,’ a royal source tells me.

‘It will also include Queen Elizabeth’s racing colours as well as the King’s.’

It is being made by the Poppy Factory in Richmond, South-West London, which has a long tradition of working with the Royal Family.

Downton star Raquel Cassidy was left mortified by a reading for a stage role. ‘I remember auditioning for a [male] theatre director for a female [character] that men had sex with on a pool table,’ says the actress, 54, who played Cora’s lady’s maid Phyllis Baxter. ‘I felt humiliated.’

Speaking at the opening gala of the 30th Raindance Film Festival at The Waldorf Hilton, she tells me: ‘I didn’t take that role because I don’t think anyone should be demeaned in that way.’

He’s a former Lib Dem leader who appeared on Strictly, but Vince Cable has failed to be recognised — in his own book. The caption on a photo in his memoir, Partnership & Politics In A Divided Decade, wrongly identifies William Hague as Sir Vince!

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