January 23, 2006	Monday	Zilhaj 22, 1426

BRUSSELS: I spent the best part of two days with Heather Mills-McCartney before I managed to ask her a proper question. She is, according to her publicity, among the most sought-after speakers in the world. You quickly see why. We met in a bar at a Brussels hotel. The following day she was due to present evidence to the European Union about the trade in dog and cat fur from China. She had just flown in from LA, where she had been accompanying Sir Paul on his sell-out American tour; he was now back home in Sussex looking after their daughter Beatrice. She was tired, she had said on the phone, and so cold that she thought she might ‘lose her other leg to frostbite’. So she only fancied a quick chat. In the event, it was me who had to make my excuses. Before I could, Lady Mills-McCartney did what she does best. She talked with an extraordinary, slightly unnerving compulsion about the cause that is currently closest to her heart. Two million dogs and cats were being skinned alive each year in China, she said, pretty much by way of greeting. It was happening in the Czech Republic, too, and even here in Belgium, where she had evidence that cats were being stolen to order.

She had become involved in all of this, she explained with hardly a pause, nearly a year ago, and since then it had all been a bit mad, like her landmines campaign. She first saw the film of the Chinese animal skinning when it was given to her by a television director.

In New York she had heard Jennifer Lopez on TV being asked about the fur she was wearing and saying, “Oh, I guess I need to be educated.” Mills-McCartney decided to educate her. She went to J-Lo’s office with the video of cats and dogs being skinned.

Which charity was she doing this work for? I started to ask. Well, her special skill, she said, was to bring all the charities together. They all needed her, so she made them work with each other. The Humane Society, Peta and so on. (“Talks a lot about being needed,” I wrote in my notebook, not entirely fairly.)

As we were speaking, a woman walked into the bar wearing a full-length fur coat. “The thing is,” Lady Mills-McCartney said loudly, “people who wear fur are always so ugly. The coat just makes them even uglier.”

I was not sure the woman understood English. Mills-McCartney turned back towards me.

She had tried to stop haranguing people in furs, she said. But sometimes in a shop she could not help herself going up behind someone and starting to stroke their coat, before asking them how many dead animals it was made from. That seemed to work.

When she talks about her husband it is with the same matter-of-fact, chirpy normality that he has made his own defence against the strangeness of his world. “I was devastated for two years when I first met Paul,” she says.

I laugh.

“No,” she insists. “It was like, I love this man but I want out of this life completely. But then doors started opening. President Putin wanted to have a meeting about landmines. President Putin. And I knew suddenly that was the reason Paul and I had met. Obviously we were in love and there was our daughter and everything, but I knew that was the reason. Paul can open these doors, but he won’t have time to do the work. He needs me because I do the work.”

Given her life, I suppose, it’s hard not to believe in fate, or fairytales.—Dawn/The Observer News Service