Why I don’t have time to be lonely: Locked down alone in London, BIANCA JAGGER’s doing yoga in the bath, becoming a domestic goddess — and launching a campaign to make us all wear masks
- Bianca Jagger has been in solitary lockdown at her London flat for seven weeks
- Grandmother-of-three who has developed a routine, said solo living is a breeze
- Human rights defender, 70, is urging the government to make masks mandatory
After seven weeks of solitary lockdown in her central London flat — no staff, no family members, no pets (‘I would love a dog!’) — Bianca Jagger has adopted a characteristically punishing routine.
She rises at 6am, reads all the papers online, is at her desk by 9am and, fuelled mostly by green tea, seeds and matcha smoothies, works all day, at least six days a week, in one of her favourite top-to-toe soft Uniqlo ensembles. She also has a set she sleeps in. Depending on her mood, she might break for a spot of yoga in the bath (more on which later), a quick rage against Ocado (four hours online and she still failed to get an order) or a revitalising plant-based yoghurt.
On a food delivery day, she’ll spend hours in gloves and mask decontaminating her Sainsbury’s shopping (she’s done with Ocado) in the hallway —
Bianca Jagger, 70, (pictured) revealed the routine that she follows, while isolating alone at her flat in central London
‘I wash everything, absolutely everything — bottles, fruit, vegetables, loo paper, kitchen roll’ — first through a bucket of soapy water, then a bucket of clean, and then into the kitchen for a further wash and dry.
But mostly, through her Bianca Jagger Human Rights Foundation, and with extraordinary, vimmy energy (she is 70 this week, for goodness sake, though her amazingly elastic skin looks far, far younger), she is campaigning and defending human rights around the world.
‘Please call me a human rights defender, not an activist,’ she urges, several times.
Over the decades, she has campaigned on everything from women’s rights to fracking, female genital mutilation to war crimes to environmental issues, ‘back when it was unpopular!’.
This week, she’s launching another campaign urging the Government to make masks mandatory, or at least recommend the use of them in public places where social distancing is not possible.
Bianca is not talking medical-grade masks that might jeopardise the supply to frontline health service staff, but masks made from cloth or recycled T-shirts, Perspex visors — anything to cover our faces and protect those around us, but mostly ‘the forgotten soldiers of this war’, the bus drivers, supermarket staff and binmen. She is liaising with London Mayor Sadiq Khan and has ‘reached out’ to friends in the fashion world, including sustainable fashion campaigner Livia Firth, artist Ryan Gander OBE and Vogue Editor Edward Enninful, for help manufacturing affordable masks for all.
Bianca (pictured) is urging the government to make masks mandatory, after seeing the success of the Masks4all campaign in the Czech Republic
Her inspiration is the Czech Republic’s amazingly successful Masks4all campaign, which, in just days, saw the entire population wearing masks and resulted in a far lower infection (and mortality) rate than here. The same is true of Germany and Austria, where masks are common.
It is widely accepted that, while non-medical-grade masks don’t really protect the wearer, they do protect others from our germs. But still, our Government has not recommended we wear them. ‘It has been too late for lockdown, too late for respirators, too late for PPE — and now face masks!’ she says.
‘Is it a scientific recommendation or is it based on the availability of the masks?’ she asks darkly, as one fabulous eyebrow shoots an inch higher than the other.
Bianca’s mask crusade is personal. It started when she went to see her pulmonary specialist in the early coronavirus days, back in March.
‘I have a very fragile upper respiratory system,’ she explains. ‘I’ve been in hospital a couple of times, two years ago, with pneumonia, and my doctor recommended I wore a mask.’
So she did. But when she went for some blood tests and to see her respiratory doctor, she was staggered to find that while she was wearing a mask, they weren’t. ‘I was told it was the protocol,’ she says. ‘But who was protecting them?’
Neither, she noticed, were bus drivers, binmen, the staff in her nearby supermarket and postal staff wearing masks. ‘I say to my postwoman: “Please, please wear a mask and cover your hair.” It’s not 100 per cent. Of course it’s not. But it still makes a difference. It has been proven.’
When Bianca gets a bee in her bonnet, she is nothing but thorough. She has read endless scientific papers, watched countless YouTube videos, researched the opinions of myriad experts on the pros and cons of masks, has even drawn up her own corona charter and is very keen to share it all.
Bianca who has two great-grandchildren, worries when she’ll next be able to hold them. Pictured left to right: granddaughter Assisi, Bianca, daughter Jade and granddaughter Amba
So before we chat, she sent me a flurry of links. They cover everything from the alarming revelation by Japanese scientists that, when someone coughs, micro-droplets can spread six metres and hang in the air for up to 20 minutes; and how to make your own mask, along with a smattering of persuasive quotes from doctors and scientists, including Dr Helen Davison, a former public health doctor, who perhaps best explains the benefits as: ‘My mask protects you; your mask protects me.’
While most of us would be going just a teeny bit mad by now, Bianca insists that solo living is a breeze.
‘I live on my own, I work at home, I’m very used to being on my own — I live a bit of a monastic life, really,’ she says.
Her family — daughter Jade, 48, three grandchildren, Assisi, 27, Amba, 23, and Ray, five, and two great-grandchildren (Assisi’s children) — are ‘scattered’ across the country, so they are used to chatting on WhatsApp. But Bianca misses the little ones, worries when she’ll next be able to hold them and goes all soft around the edges just talking about them
At times, even Bianca is finding it hard to control her corona ‘panic’.
This, she insists, has required her famous self-discipline. ‘I have been agonising,’ she tells me. ‘The prospect of living alone and getting the virus and going to hospital, and having to die on your own without being able to reach out to anyone and no one see you … that has convinced me.
Bianca who is part of the vulnerable group, said you have to do everything possible to protect yourself. Pictured: Bianca with Mick on their wedding day in 1971
‘It has made me realise that with my condition as part of the vulnerable group, I have to be extremely careful. You have to follow the rules; you have to be careful; you have to do everything possible to protect yourself.’
It isn’t easy, though.
Even for an obsessive workaholic like Bianca, her pre-coronavirus routine allowed an occasional power-walk in the park followed by an hour of Pilates at her local gym, five days a week.
‘It was my real pleasure — an hour out, just for me,’ she says.
‘I am a great disciplinarian. I love to exercise.’
In lockdown, she has adapted. Now she does as many Pilates moves as she can remember at home, but mostly focuses on yoga in the bath.
‘Legs, abdominals, there are all sorts of things I can do in the bath tub — but not balances,’ she says, demonstrating a complicated binding position for my benefit.
‘Thanks to the hot water, you’re able to do a lot of things that are usually too difficult,’ she laughs. ‘It really is fantastic.
‘I wish I could do a video. Maybe I’ll do one in a swimsuit!’
Golly!
She also tells me how, without her occasional cleaner, she has embraced housework. ‘A friend told me I was becoming a domesticated goddess! If someone said that to me a few months ago, I would have been annoyed by that insinuation, but now I like it.
Human rights defender Bianca, has been tear-gassed in Nicaragua and in Honduras, over the years. Pictured: Bianca protesting in London in 2018
‘I have learnt new things,’ she beams. ‘How you can wash delicate things that cannot be washed in hot water. I learned to get mesh bags to put in the washing machine and use a delicate liquid.
‘I am paying attention and I am learning all different things.’
But most of all, about masks.
She duly models her own collection for me — first, a purple one with black trimming, then a white more medical-looking version. ‘One to wear, one in the wash,’ she tells me, and explains how, if combined with a plastic visor that I could buy for a tenner or make myself and hook over my specs, we could all be 100 per cent germ-free.
Why masks matter
- Yesterday the British Medical Association said all essential workers should be given masks, citing ‘emerging evidence’ that covering mouths and noses ‘may help’ control the spread of Covid-19.
- More than 40 countries have now made face masks mandatory in public, including parts of the U.S., Germany and Italy.
- More than 100 UK doctors have signed an open letter in support of new campaign Masks 4 All (masks4all.org.uk). It argues that the wearing of home-made masks in public is vital to prevent the spread of infection via droplets of saliva produced by speaking.
- Research supported by Nobel prize-winning virologist Harold Varmus shows placing a layer of cloth in front of your face stops 99 per cent of droplets.
- Your mask helps protect others, and other people’s masks help protect you. But masks are not a replacement for other measures including staying home, frequent handwashing and keeping a 2-metre distance from other people.
- For a guide to making your own mask, go to masks4all.org.uk/make-a-mask
Even in the visor, she looks good. Her hair is thick and black and wild, her skin amazing (she credits vitamin C, genes and removing her make-up each night), her gaze intense and her body small and supple — perhaps no surprise on a diet of seeds, tea and yoghurt. (She is a gluten-intolerant pescatarian.)
What with her campaigning (she’s also up to her eyes with a campaign in her native Nicaragua, which involves lots of Zoom calls late into the night), her research, her bath yoga and housework, most days she’s far too busy to make it outside at all, other than in her small garden. It’s often too late to go to her local park. ‘One day, I was there at seven and they threw us out!’
But on the rare occasions she does venture out — always, of course, in mask and visor — she embraces the calm. ‘I used to walk fast and dream of having the time to sit on a tree and just be,’ she says. ‘But I do that now. I have discovered that is a great pleasure to go and sit in the park for ten minutes. My life was so hectic, there was never the time before.’
She’s not exaggerating. Bianca has been campaigning since she was a teenager growing up in Nicaragua — long before the heady days of her seven-year marriage to Mick and the jet-set Studio 54 party years in New York with her great friend Andy Warhol.
She’s been haunted by questions about her marriage ever since.
‘Some people seem to think that women only begin to exist when they get married. We existed before,’ she says firmly.
Over the years, she has been tear-gassed in Nicaragua and, in Honduras, when she was part of a delegation visiting a refugee camp, been threatened by a death squad.
She speaks ‘four and half languages’ and campaigns in all of them — in person, online, in newspapers and social media. She insists that, if anything, as she’s got older, her convictions have got stronger.
Bianca (pictured) revealed she’s embraced the mask campaign because she firmly believes it could help prevent people from dying
‘I always feel like if this was the last day of my life, I haven’t done everything I should. I haven’t done enough. What more can I do to make a difference?
‘It’s about conviction. I don’t respect people who do the talk but don’t do the walk. I have done the talk, but I do the walk. I don’t have a car! So I carry it all the way.’
She has embraced the mask campaign because, like many scientists, she firmly believes it is something that could help prevent people from dying.
‘The Government has failed us, people are dying and I am agonising,’ she says. ‘My problems are nothing. I am lucky. I get angry for the people who are in a bad place.’
She is certainly not the sort to abandon a cause — you’d want her on your side. Bianca is, after all, the woman who, when confronted with an eviction notice for failure to pay rent on her New York apartment, counter-sued her landlord over mould on the walls.
And who, after shattering her femur following a collision with a car in the Hamptons in 1985, told herself she would walk again and learned to ‘overlook the pain’.
When I ask if she has ever given up on a campaign or walked away from a battle, she pauses before answering: ‘Only when I saw I was not going to be effective.’
But when asked for examples, she’s stumped.
Bianca revealed she hasn’t wanted to be in another relationship since her divorce. Pictured: Bianca with Mick Jagger at a Rolling Stones party
Perhaps the only time she ever really retreated was from her marriage to Mick Jagger. She divorced him on the grounds of adultery in 1978, kept the surname and has never remarried.
She insists she is never lonely and laughs when I ask if Jade or her granddaughters ever encourage her to date.
‘No, no, no! They know I am happy,’ she says. ‘I always feared, because I decided not to get remarried and decided to live on my own, that one day I would regret it. It is a terrible thing to say, but I really don’t have time to be lonely.’
And she’s never wanted to be in another relationship?
‘So far, I haven’t,’ she says.
‘I don’t know if I could find someone who could live with someone who is so committed to their human rights, to their life, to their foundation, to their work. I think, perhaps, you make that so much, that there is no room for someone else.’
Which seems rather a shame. Because, in person, Bianca Jagger is warm, funny (yes, really) and surprisingly likeable — albeit about a million times more driven, focused and intense than the rest of us.
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