Macca dates Notting Hill bird - 25/03/07

Press reports reach me that Sir Paul McCartney has been seen giving a certain Sabrina Guinness a hug, with the obvious inference that they may be an item.

Sabrina is a Notting Hill girl and, astonishingly, I know her, or at least I used to know one of her personas. She's described in many of the papers as a socialite but that was nowhere near the reason for my acquaintance (for that is all it was) with her.

I actually met her because of something jolly useful that she does in our neighbourhood, running YCTV, ‘an educational charity which advances the skills and personal development of young people between the ages of 11 to 25’, as its website says.

That’s a bit of a po-faced way of describing what they do, which is teaching youngsters, many from difficult backgrounds, how to make their own TV shows and steering them into the media industry. And there’s no doubt YCTV has helped lots of local kids.

I used to work for a government-backed urban regeneration organisation that was pumping cash into the deprived bits of Notting Hill, including groups like YCTV, and that’s how I met her, about a dozen years ago.

'Deprived bits of Notting Hill?', I hear you ask disbelievingly. Well, yes. In pockets, Notting Hill, which as recently as 50 years ago hosted some of the worst slums in London, is still immigrant enough, unhealthy enough and unemployed enough to attract government cash targeted at the underprivileged.

Sabrina always struck me as a warm and open type despite her wealth and social class, and far from being a mere socialite, she was actually trying to do something useful. The socialite tag comes from many years ago when she dated Prince Charles and was tipped as a possible candidate for wife to the big-eared, empty-headed one. Talk about a narrow escape.

Now, I've always been a fan of Sir Paul, ever since my mother decorated my bedroom with Beatles wallpaper in 1965; even then Paul was my favourite. So, if its true that he is going out with Sabrina, I for one am delighted that’s he’s found someone who is a card-carrying member of the human race, a stark contrast to his recent past.

I think Sabrina is about as far as you could get from a gruesome, one-legged, self-publicising harridan. Fair enough, if you fall in love and marry someone and they have a horrible accident, you should stick with them. But if I had £800 million in the bank, and counting, birds without all four limbs wouldn’t even get on my long-list, unless I was short of one, which I'm not. Nor would delusional bunny boilers. But we all make mistakes.

So, Paul and Sabrina, I say good luck!