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Amanda Laura Helms arrives at Ole & Steen in Richmond looking like someone who belongs easily in soft light. She is 28, Danish, petite, with searching blue eyes and tousled blonde hair that always looks as if it has just caught the wind. There is a physical strength to the way she carries herself, and I wonder if I am simply projecting something Viking onto her. She jokes on social media about being a “plant-based Viking”, and the description fits her looks well enough. But o

On a cobbled stretch of Camden Passage, on a mild London morning, Kerry Spark arrives with a smile and a familiarity that takes me by surprise. We hug, say hello, and fall into conversation almost immediately. It’s only the second time I’m meeting him, but he remembers more than I expect — that I came to one of his classes last June, that I was there with John, and that it was in Brentford, at the back of a bar where he was hosting an event, called Sip & Sound Healing by the

The first thing you notice about Emmanuel Stroobant is that he does not look like a man who cooks for a living. When he rises to greet me in the kitchen of his Sixth Avenue home, he is wearing a fitted black V-neck T-shirt and loose linen trousers. His hair is cropped short, flecked with silver. His body is compact and muscular, the body of a former boxer — broad shoulders, thick in the torso, built more for a ring than a restaurant. There is a roughness to him, a raw masculi