EDEN CONFIDENTIAL: Exile on Regent’s Canal for Ronnie Wood

He was, by his own estimation, still only one of their fans when Mick Jagger was bawling out, ‘You can’t always get what you want’. 

But now, nearly 50 years after joining the Rolling Stones, Ronnie Wood can agree that, ‘If you try sometime you’ll find/ You get what you need’.

And that, I can disclose, in Wood’s case is . . . a boat on London‘s Regent’s Canal.

Improbable though that may sound, little could matter more to the 77-year-old guitarist, even though he once owned a rock star mansion close to Jagger’s in Richmond, South-west London, and more recently had a six-bedroom townhouse in Notting Hill.

‘He says it feels like coming home,’ a pal tells me.

‘Both his mum and his dad had boats moored there [on Regent’s Canal] many years ago.’

Indeed, as Wood has pointed out, it wasn’t just his parents who lived on the water but successive generations of his family, Romany boat people, ‘right back to the 1700s’, working as ‘navigators, helmsmen or whatever’. 

Though Ronnie was the first to be born on dry land — in Hillingdon, on the outer fringes of West London — his father, who was born on a barge called the Antelope, never turned his back on the family heritage.

Before the war, he and his wife, Ronnie’s mother Elizabeth, who’d also been born on a barge, hauled timber along the canals connecting London, Stratford-upon-Avon and Manchester.

When war broke out, his father stayed on the water, ‘transporting raw materials to build the tanks and artillery’.

In the post-war era, by which time the family was in Hillingdon, Wood senior made sure that young Ronnie was immersed in family tradition.

‘When I was very young, he’d take me fishing on the canals and we’d go and see his pals on the boats,’ Ronnie has fondly recalled.

‘I remember lunches down in the cabin, with condensed milk. I remember the beautiful, murky smell down there, and the engines going, just travelling along the canals.’

Time, perhaps, for Ronnie and his third wife, Sally, to take their turn on Great Canal Journeys, the Channel 4 series which once memorably starred Sir Timothy West and his wife, Prunella Scales?

Two weddings for Amber’s daughter Flora

Flora Gill appears to have taken inspiration from her mother, ex Home Secretary Amber Rudd, who worked as ‘aristocracy coordinator’ on the classic 1994 comedy Four Weddings.

For the journalist, 33, has walked down the aisle twice in the past fortnight.

Wearing a £1,400 Bella Freud suit, Flora exchanged vows at Chelsea Old Town Hall, in West London, with Adam Vallance, 34, an Oxford graduate. 

The couple previously said ‘I do’ at an unofficial ceremony in Morocco last month.

Flora’s father was the celebrated journalist A. A. Gill, who died in 2016 aged 62.

Flora proposed to Adam last year, later explaining: ‘Why did I have to give him the nod when I could give him a ring myself?’

Acting still terrifies me, admits child star Jane

Jane Asher began acting at the age of five, in the film Mandy.

Yet she has problems learning her lines and worries she’s no good.

‘I still get nervous when I walk on stage on a first night,’ says the actress and cake maker.

‘It’s terrifying. I worry about my performance more than ever, these days. I think, ‘Am I any good? Should I do things differently?’ ‘

Asher, 78, adds: ‘The whole business of learning lines is more frightening as you get older. When you’re young, things stay in your head.

‘I still remember poems I learned at school, but now when I learn new things, they fall out the other side very quickly.’

Comedienne and keen swimmer Miranda Hart is appealing for help after growing out of her bathing suit. 

Sounding rather like the character in her sitcom Miranda, she wails: ‘I’ve put on a lot of weight and my bosoms are now like the size of Spacehoppers.’ 

Appealing for tips online, Hart, 51, says: ‘I’d like a black swimming costume with a very hefty built-in bra. What does one do in this situation apart from chop the bloody things off?’ 

Steady on! 

 Ex wants Petronella in prison!

A dramatic update on Petronella Wyatt’s personal life: ‘One of my exes is trying to get me arrested,’ declares the daughter of Lord (Woodrow) Wyatt, who was a confidant of the Queen Mother and Margaret Thatcher.

‘I discovered this when I received an email from the Met Police saying that he had accused me of stealing his belongings.’

She declines to name the former lover but confirms he’s not her ex, Boris Johnson.

‘As he is not a British citizen, the nice policeman I spoke to said I need do nothing in response,’ she says in The Spectator. 

‘I was puzzled, until I remembered that after we had parted ways my ex had said, ‘I’d like to see you behind bars’.

‘I hadn’t realised he had meant it literally. The b*****d.’

She adds: ‘I have consistently willed myself to accommodate men whose teeth I should have knocked out.’

If, as George Bernard Shaw asserted, ‘it’s impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate him’, it’s downright perilous if the Englishman is electioneering in Wales and hails from a 2,000-acre Gloucestershire estate.

But that’s the fate of Henry Tufnell, 31, Labour candidate for Mid and South Pembrokeshire.

‘This guy isn’t a champagne socialist — he’s diamond encrusted,’ a local tells me. ‘It’s hilarious watching him try to hide his posh accent.’

Tufnell, a barrister who was educated at £48,000-a-year Radley, says he ‘grew up in a farming family’.

Quite a contrast with his Conservative opponent, Stephen Crabb, who was brought up by his single mother in a council house.