Holiday Habbits

Jane Birk in
The actress and singer most famous for her marriage to the late, legendary French crooner Serge Gainsbourg reveals her holiday secrets

“AS I travel all the time for work, my greatest joy is to stay home with my family or visit the beach in Finistère, Brittany. Finistère means ‘the end of the earth’, and it’s exactly opposite Cornwall, where there’s also Land’s End. For me, that’s the wildest place to be, and I love to spend time there with just my grandchildren, who are aged five and 10. With them, I can scramble across the rocks and pretend to be a child again – I suppose it’s like being permitted to be Alice.

The best holidays are when you’re just allowed to be wild. I tried to give that to my children, Charlotte, Lou and Kate, when they were young in Wales. They would go off on adventures with my perilous brother, Andrew. He would stay up playing games from our childhood, such as ‘99 Bunker’ and ‘Tim tam warning’, rushing around the garden until 1 o’clock in the morning.

These days, I like to go to more adventurous places, such as Burma and Russia. I’m rather inspired by the naturalist David Attenborough – he’s the most fascinating man. He makes everything so interesting, even plants, and god knows I didn’t think I’d be interested in plants.

The most exceptional places I’ve been to are the Samoan islands. I’d just finished playing Robert Louis Stevenson’s wife, Fanny, in a show in Australia. As I felt rather close to the characters, I decided to follow in their footsteps and visit where they lived on those islands. I wanted to meet the people they fell in love with, and I found they were exactly like the Gauguin paintings, and kindly as anything.

What I would love to do one day is hire a boat and do the same trip the Stevensons did around the islands, to find those hidden populations before the sea rises too much and they disappear.

I’m a terrible traveller, though. I always carry far too much stuff around with me. At the moment, I’ve got a little case that I bought on my way back from Palestine, of which I’m not very proud because it looks like an air hostess’s neat little thing. I’d rather have those great big bulky suitcases and that’s usually what I travel with. I could be in a siege tomorrow with my suitcase, and I would be fine for months.”
INTERVIEW: SIAN THATCHER

JANE IS PROMOTING ANNO’S AFRICA (WWW.ANNO.CO.UK), A CHARITY THAT RUNS CREATIVE ARTS-BASED PROJECTS FOR CHILDREN IN KENYA AND HAS RECENTLY TOURED EUROPE SINGING HER INTERPRETATIONS OF SERGE GAINSBOURG’S MUSIC.