The Rolling Stone the Toff at Home ; He's Toured with Mick Jagger and His Wife Ran Off with David Dimbleby. But Photographer Christopher Simon Sykes's Colourful Life Pales Next to the Drunkards, Opium Addicts, Penny-Pinchers and Other Lovable Eccentrics Who Have Graced His Family Home Over the Generations.

Summary

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Although Christopher Simon Sykes is expert at combining two different worlds, taking Mick Jagger shopping was always going to be risky. In London's Bond Street, he might have got away with it. But this was Boots the Chemist in the sleepy, East Yorkshire town of Driffield, a place where rock means limestone outcrops. Even so, somewhere between toothbrushes and shower gel, Jagger was ambushed by an elderly woman waving a packet of indigestion tablets for him to autograph.

'What are you doing here?' she asked. 'I always do my Saturday shopping in Driffield,' Jagger replied bravely. But by then a crowd was gathering, and he and his host beat a tactical retreat to nearby Sledmere House, the stately home of the Sykes clan. As the third son of a baronet, Christopher was never destined to inherit the estate where he was brought up, so he became a photographer and chronicled the Rolling Stones' 1975 tour of America, which cemented his friendship with Jagger.

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The Rolling Stone the Toff at Home ; He's Toured with Mick Jagger and His Wife Ran Off with David Dimbleby. But Photographer Christopher Simon Sykes's Colourful Life Pales Next to the Drunkards, Opium Addicts, Penny-Pinchers and Other Lovable Eccentrics Who Have Graced His Family Home Over the Generations.

He went on to write beguiling books about the landed gentry, most recently The Big House, the story of his own family home. He focuses on six generations of his clan, the startlingly eccentric Sykeses of Sledmere. Sir Tatton, the sixth baronet, wore six overcoats at the same time and refused to flee the blaze that destroyed his home in 1911 until he had finished his pudding. Jessie, Christopher's great grandmother, was a debt-ridden alcoholic who drank her scent, and his...

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