YouSaid · the spoken record

Nicola Horlick

lines on the record: 49
first: 2007-07-29
most recent: 2007-07-29
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I can't go to Thep unless I've had a bath at night, and that means even if we come home at three o'clock in the morning I have to have a bath otherwise I can't sleep so I'd have to take a bath tub.”
2007-07-29 · Desert Island Discs · Nicola Horlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, my husband Martin is a writer, and he's written a thriller which is going to be published in january, so I would very much like to take that. On the other hand, that doesn't seem quite fair because no one can relate to that because it's not published yet, but I highly recommend it.”
2007-07-29 · Desert Island Discs · Nicola Horlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My final choice is a Mozart sonata for piano and violin, and I've chosen this because my brother played this at my wedding to Martin, which was last September so clearly it means a lot to me.”
2007-07-29 · Desert Island Discs · Nicola Horlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, on many occasions I don't think I'd want to get involved in politics as such, but certainly doing something to try and help with the NHS is something that I would like to do, I would like to try and A, give something back, but B, I know a lot about the NHS as a result of having been a major user of it with Georgie and her illness. I'm sure in the longer term there must be something that I could do to help.”
2007-07-29 · Desert Island Discs · Nicola Horlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's really difficult, but I think for Alice and Serena, their childhoods were seriously blighted by all of this, by the tension and the ups and downs of having to deal with a very serious illness like that, by Georgie's eventual death, by having then to deal with their own grief, by then the divorce. I mean, it's been very, very hard for them. And I think for Alice it's been, who's the next one down? She's now eighteen, George would have been twenty now, twenty one in October. For Alice it's been really, really difficult because she was obviously the closest to Georgie in age and the closest just emotionally. And I don't think like me that Alice will ever really recover it from it.”
2007-07-29 · Desert Island Discs · Nicola Horlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was very difficult and particularly difficult in the last year of Georgie's life because I ended up being there literally for the whole year. I mean Great Ormond Street is a fantastic institution and they're really good at dealing with this type of situation and so the children got a lot of support from Great Ormond Street. I used to take them to see one of the psychologists and they were given books to read about grief and loss and death and so on and so forth. Really, we were very, very lucky to have that support. I get actually pretty angry when I hear people criticising the NHS. It's very, very difficult when you have a health system that is paid for by the state and there will inevitably be wastage and bureaucracy. But I think we're very, very lucky that when someone gets hit in the raid it doesn't matter who they are, where they come from they will be taken to a hospital and treated and we shouldn't underestimate the benefit of that.”
2007-07-29 · Desert Island Discs · Nicola Horlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The next piece of music Sort of rather inevitably, I suppose, having been through what we went through with Georgie, my marriage to Tim broke up, which was very, very sad and difficult for all of us. But I've been very fortunate in that I met somebody else and got married again, and my new husband is called Martin Baker, and before we got married we went to this Brian Adams concert, and this song means a lot to me, it's called Heaven.”
2007-07-29 · Desert Island Discs · Nicola Horlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I do. It was quite amusing. Well, not amusing. I got mugged a couple of years ago or a year and a half ago. And after that, I remember saying to Georgie, please make sure that if I ever come home at night and I need a car parking space right outside our front door, please make sure there always is one there for me. And now whenever I go home late at night on my own, which fortunately isn't very often, there is always a parking space right outside the door for me.”
2007-07-29 · Desert Island Discs · Nicola Horlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I am christened and confirmed in the Church of England, that I'm not an avid church goer. I think the one thing that I didn't necessarily believe in before Georgie died which I do believe in now is life after death, partly because of some things that happened after Georgie died and things falling off walls and things flying across rooms and it was as if Georgie was trying to say to me don't worry mummy, I'm still around you know I don't know who knows we don't know but I do very strongly believe that I will see Georgi again one day.”
2007-07-29 · Desert Island Discs · Nicola Horlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I knew that Georgie didn't want to be alive anymore she had said that to me two weeks before she died, and I knew therefore that crying about it, which obviously I was doing a lot of crying about it, was very, very selfish. And I had to face it in a very philosophical way in order to be able to deal with it. I think the only way you can accept something like that is to say it was meant to be. But you know we are very much of the opinion that we should still talk about Georgie it keeps Georgie's memory alive, and therefore I like talking about her I want positively to talk about her. Now obviously it makes me sad to talk about her and there are certain times the year when I find it unbearable, particularly her birthday because Georgie loved her birthday and used to spend a lot of time planning what she was going to do for her party and so on. It was such a major thing in Georgie's life having her birthday party that it is the day that really really upsets me.”
2007-07-29 · Desert Island Discs · Nicola Horlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the only way you can deal with premature death is to accept that that is the case, and Georgie did have a profound effect on an awful lot of people around her during those twelve years, no one that knew Georgie will ever forget her. So I think”
2007-07-29 · Desert Island Discs · Nicola Horlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My next piece of music is The Snowman song as we call it, Walking in the Air. And the reason that I've chosen this is because Alice, as I said, is the next child down from Georgie and our family, so my second child. When Georgie died she was ten. She did the bravest thing I think I've ever seen anybody do ever in my life, which was to stand up at Georgie's funeral in front of eight hundred people, and she sang this.”
2007-07-29 · Desert Island Discs · Nicola Horlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And, you know, I think it is a time when you need to have people around you. If people are brave enough to be there, because it's a big ask actually to ask somebody to be there when your child's life support machine is being turned off.”
2007-07-29 · Desert Island Discs · Nicola Horlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I just felt it was the right thing to do. We were lucky to an extent that Great Orm Street were very understanding and they didn't force us to turn off the life support machine instantly. We were given a couple of days to come to terms with it, which allowed me to gather people around us. So ultimately actually when the machine was turned off there were fourteen people in the room, which included some of Georgie's good parents, Tim's brothers, my brother, my mother, my granny, Georgie's best friend's mother, a cousin, and one of our children, Serena, who was only eight. How this didn't want to be there. And we just all sort of hugged it was like a group hug with me sort of hugging Georgie.”
2007-07-29 · Desert Island Discs · Nicola Horlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“was an incredibly brave person, and the doctors would come in in the morning and she probably would have had a horrendous night and have been terribly unwell, and they'd say how are you? And Georgie would beam at them and say, I'm really well, thank you, and I'd say, well, actually, she's not, you know, this has happened and that's happened and the others happened. And she had this just amazing smile that everybody will always remember. And as I said earlier, it's very humbling to watch a child fighting for life. I mean, it's just the most dreadful thing as a parent, but for anybody it affects the doctors, the nurses, anybody who's in contact with that child, and Georgie will always be remembered by all of those people because she was so brave.”
2007-07-29 · Desert Island Discs · Nicola Horlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, it's nothing to do with control or, you know, you just, you are in the hands of God, you know, in fate. And there is no way that you can influence the situation. You just have to pray in whatever way you can. And on that occasion, it worked, and she did pull through, but it was touch and go. And there's nothing you can do. You can't control something like that. There's no way you can control something like that, so you just have to accept it.”
2007-07-29 · Desert Island Discs · Nicola Horlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Anybody would find it difficult in that situation when things go wrong. And when Georgie was eight when she relapsed for the first time, she had a horrendous reaction to a drug, and she ended up with something called necrotising fasciitis, which is that flesh eating disease that you sometimes read about in the newspapers, and she very, very nearly died, I mean, literally it was seconds away from death and somehow managed to pull round. But, you know, at moments like that.”
2007-07-29 · Desert Island Discs · Nicola Horlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The next piece of music is from Don Giovanni Mozart's Don Giovanni and when Georgie was born, she was born at 130 in the morning and they took her away to the nursery and told me I must sleep, but I was completely euphoric and I couldn't sleep and I remember listening to Don Giovanni I listened to the whole thing trying to get to sleep but I just couldn't because I was so excited and this is my favourite, the bit when the commendatory comes back and says Don Giovanni in a very dramatic way.”
2007-07-29 · Desert Island Discs · Nicola Horlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But again, it may well be, I mean, the problem is I don't know because that's the way my life panned out. I don't know what would have happened if Georgie hadn't been ill, but I sort of suspect that part of the frenetic sort of building of a career was an escape from having to sort of deal with all the horrors of this terrible illness. So who knows what would have happened if Georgie hadn't had the chaemia? All I know is that that's what happened and that was the result.”
2007-07-29 · Desert Island Discs · Nicola Horlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Um, yeah, what happened was that Georgie was diagnosed in nineteen eighty nine. In fact, her first sort of treatment was relatively quick. On the whole, life got back to normal reasonably quickly, so then we got into nineteen ninety and I got pregnant with Serena and she was born. And then the following year nineteen ninety one was when I actually went to Morgan Granfield. So by that stage I was thirty.”
2007-07-29 · Desert Island Discs · Nicola Horlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I think it's pretty a natural thing. I mean, I don't think I would have had six children if it hadn't been for Georgie's illness. And I've talked to other mothers in Great Ormond Street who say the same thing. This sort of primeval instinct comes out when you're threatened with having a child taken away, which just gives you this desperate urge to have another baby. So we did.”
2007-07-29 · Desert Island Discs · Nicola Horlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, and I think initially she battled against it. The medicines all tasted horrible. She had to have cannulas in her hand, but actually one thing I find quite sad about very sick children is that they become very accepting of it quite quickly, and it becomes a routine for them and they just accept it, and in some ways that's really sad that they're just accepting this.”
2007-07-29 · Desert Island Discs · Nicola Horlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I knew nothing about medicine, I don't come from a medical background nor any of my family. And it's remarkable how resilient people are in these situations. When you're thrown into it, your first thought is it's all doom and gloom and disaster, and you can't stop crying, and then you find an inner strength, and suddenly almost I can feel it physically happening. I just sit up straight and think, right, that's it, we're going to fight this, and we're going to win. And I have felt this real surge of energy. And then we went forward and did do our best to fight it.”
2007-07-29 · Desert Island Discs · Nicola Horlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By this stage it was nineteen eighty nine, so actually I was twenty eight, and Georgie was two, and I just felt that she didn't look very well and she kept getting all these sort of coughs and colds and just wasn't very well. So I took her to the doctor who said it was just some unspecified virus and it was fine. And this rumbled on, distodged instead of April 1989, and we got to September and I was absolutely at my wit's end. Eventually I went back to the same doctor's surgery and demanded to see the doctor and I said look at my child she's just in a terrible state. So he said you must go and have a blood turst immediately she was absolutely white as a sheet. She could barely breathe. She could barely walk. She was in a desperate state. So we were admitted to hospital that evening and then she sought a chemotherapy pretty much the next day, had a line put in, and clearly it was absolutely devastating because we suddenly found ourselves with”
2007-07-29 · Desert Island Discs · Nicola Horlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“my next piece of music, Mazorsky's Pictures at an exhibition. My brother is a professional musician. He's a conductor, but he's also a very good pianist. And so this actually is very useful at family events because when you need music in a church, my brother is there to help me choose the piece and B actually participate in producing it. So when it came to Georgie's christening, he played the organ, and a friend of his played the trumpet. This is an orchestral version of it.”
2007-07-29 · Desert Island Discs · Nicola Horlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the reason I was employed by them was to sort out their business which had been declining at a very rapid rate, so it was at a very, very low ebb, so it was only managing about four and a half billion pounds, and it was a bit like trying to catch a falling knife. It was a horrendous experience. But I had a fantastic team of people, and the business then turned around and grew very rapidly. So it was a very exciting, actually probably the most exciting bit of my career.”
2007-07-29 · Desert Island Discs · Nicola Horlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think actually you need to be able to make that vision in your mind. You need to think about work when you're at work and home when you're at home. And if you can't do that, if the two emerging together the whole time, it becomes really difficult to do it. But, you know, I always kept an open mind. I was never adamant. I never said I will go back to work, come what may. I always said, well, we'll see how it goes, and if it's okay, and if the baby's okay, and if the children are okay, and if the nanny's the right nanny, and if everybody's happy, then I will go on doing it, otherwise I will not.”
2007-07-29 · Desert Island Discs · Nicola Horlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know really, I think it just seemed natural to me to have a baby because we've been married for two years and it seemed like the most normal thing in the world, as it turns out, of course, everybody else seemed to wait till they were much older. But, you know, I loved being a mummy, so it was fine”
2007-07-29 · Desert Island Discs · Nicola Horlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, a lot of it was research into companies, and when you're doing investment management, which is what I do, investing money on behalf of pension funds and private individuals, you don't just say, I like the look of this stock, you have to do a lot of background work and research. And we're in a very privileged situation because we can see the top management of pretty much any company that we want and that means the chairman, the chief executive, the finance director. And I was very lucky I was given a huge amount of responsibility very early on. I had a fantastic boss who was like, you know, the iconic farm manager in the city of his generation. So I was really lucky to get that start.”
2007-07-29 · Desert Island Discs · Nicola Horlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I've chosen this because it reminds me of my years at Oxford. I used to spend quite a lot of time going into the various chapels and various colleges and listening to the whole array of music that there is there. And Foray's requiem was something that was often performed, particularly in Christchurch and New College, and PA Yazu is the piece that I've chosen.”
2007-07-29 · Desert Island Discs · Nicola Horlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We met where did we meet actually we met in the street because I was walking along with one of my friends who had been to school with Tim, and he said, Ah, this is Tim. Would you like to meet each other? And then because we have this mutual friend, we saw quite a lot of each other as a result of that. And then we got married when we were twenty three and had Georgie when we were twenty five.”
2007-07-29 · Desert Island Discs · Nicola Horlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I always used to dream a lot about independence when I was a child. I always used to have this dream about driving cars, for example. I think that was a symbol of independence. And I don't think I really particularly liked being a child and having to answer to other people. And I did crave growing up and being able to make my own decisions.”
2007-07-29 · Desert Island Discs · Nicola Horlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I really wanted to be an actress, and I did that at the same time as I was applying to Oxford, and they said, well, you know, why don't you go to Oxford, do lots of drama, and come back. And I went to Oxford, did lots of drama and didn't go back, so who knows what would have happened?”
2007-07-29 · Desert Island Discs · Nicola Horlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I chose it because I considered it was one of the best colleges at Oxford and I felt I had to aim high, as you probably know, in 1979 it was a year when a lot of colleges opened their doors for the first time to women. That's quite shocking if you think about it in some ways because it took them that long. But it was a big year. But what it meant was that in a very big college like Bailey which had five hundred and thirty students altogether there were only thirty women because we were the first year. So it wasn't so much that it was a male college that attracted me to it, it was more that it was I was aiming high, it was such a good college.”
2007-07-29 · Desert Island Discs · Nicola Horlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As I said, I grew up on a beach, and one day I cut my foot really badly on the beach and I got blood poisoning and I had to sort of dreadful shaking fit and my temperature went through the roof and I was lying in my bed feeling very sorry for myself my mother came in with this record and said I've bought you this to cheer you up and my favourite track on Bridge Over Troubled Water is The Boxer.”
2007-07-29 · Desert Island Discs · Nicola Horlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, actually, I'm one of these people who's very laid back until something upsets me, and then I sort of galvanise into action. So every now and then I suddenly stand up and say, this is wrong or I want something different to happen.”
2007-07-29 · Desert Island Discs · Nicola Horlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“and literally I was two minutes from getting on to the Liverpool train to get back home, when two policemen approached me and said Are you Nicola? And I said no. I then threw my bag that had all my school uniform in, at them, jumped over a wall, and ran as fast as I could, and eventually I So it was a little bit traumatic.”
2007-07-29 · Desert Island Discs · Nicola Horlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And this was. Ah, the freedom. Yes, this was once a term visit to the shops, and we were meant to go in uniform, but I took what we used to call mufti, ordinary clothes, in a bag.”
2007-07-29 · Desert Island Discs · Nicola Horlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One night what jumped over the wall? No, it was actually a Saturday and we were allowed to go shopping, believe it or not, properly on the main promenade in Cheltenham once a term.”
2007-07-29 · Desert Island Discs · Nicola Horlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You are probably too much because it didn't mean that we stood out as the only four or five girls in our year. And when I then went to Cheltenham Ladies College, after that school I was one of a thousand girls, and I think maybe I found that a little bit difficult to cope with, and I hated it so much that in the end I ran away. But I did give it two years.”
2007-07-29 · Desert Island Discs · Nicola Horlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They had a small number of sisters. I'm not quite sure what the rationale was for that. So I went along pretty young actually at the age of six, and I had a fantastic time there first where I got a first class education, and I got to be in a very male environment, which I liked, and maybe that's why I've always been in a sort of relatively male dominated environment because that's what I'm used to.”
2007-07-29 · Desert Island Discs · Nicola Horlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I did fine. I went to Oxford services, I got reasonable A-levels and so on, but I did double maths and history at A level and that was reasonably okay. I did law at university, but it was okay”
2007-07-29 · Desert Island Discs · Nicola Horlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My mother is a qualified architect, but she never practised in fact actually I hugely admire what she did, because she actually qualified as an architect and went to university after we were born.”
2007-07-29 · Desert Island Discs · Nicola Horlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, pretty normal, I would say I had a mother and a father who very much loved each other. I was brought up in Cheshire. We lived very near a beach, so we used to spend the summer running around a white, sandy beach with islands ahead of us and when the tide was low we would walk out to the islands, so it was quite Ena Blighton really, I suppose.”
2007-07-29 · Desert Island Discs · Nicola Horlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My first choice is raindrops on roses and whiskers and on kittens from the sound of music, and the reason that I've chosen this is because it was the very first film that I ever saw when I was five years old, and when I actually got there I was completely mesmerised by the whole experience of being in a cinema and watching this film. And this is my favourite.”
2007-07-29 · Desert Island Discs · Nicola Horlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, no, what actually happened was that I decided that I would go and complain about this, so all these people were still camped on my doorstep, and they basically just followed me wherever I went, so I got in the car and drove to the city followed by all of these people, and I then remember feeling nervous about storming into the office. But, you know, my career potentially was going to be chattered by all of this, and I was being accused of things I hadn't done, and I felt that I had to stand up for myself, and I think most people would actually, and I went and said, I'm sorry I think this is disgraceful behaviour. I haven't done anything wrong, I've built you this amazing business with my team. And how dare you treat me like this?”
2007-07-29 · Desert Island Discs · Nicola Horlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wasn't allowed to because I was still an employee, I was only suspended, but what happened was I suppose the people at Morgan Grenfell at the time misjudged it. I think that the press took the view that here is a thirty six year old woman with five children, one of whom has leukemia, and suddenly the front door bells started ringing and there were Sky vans and film crease and radio cars and hundreds of reporters standing outside, and I was completely shell shocked. It was just so bizarre.”
2007-07-29 · Desert Island Discs · Nicola Horlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was a very complicated situation in that we had a fund manager who did something rather peculiar with one of our funds, and we found that instead of the fund being worth over a billion pounds it was suddenly worth four hundred fifty million less, and it caused this enormous scandal, financial scandal. I had nothing to do with any of that but my boss was swept aside as a result and I then got involved in a rather political nightmarish situation. I suppose I was really very naive I should have just walked out when they sacked my boss I should have said Right, that's it I'm going home and I'm going to wait for the faintering and do another job instead of which I tried to keep everything together and then became a victim myself of the whole situation.”
2007-07-29 · Desert Island Discs · Nicola Horlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I really do blanche, actually, because I really think that somebody who has a highly paid job and has lots of help at home is not a superwoman. I've also been very lucky that my mother is relatively young. She was actually only the same age as I am now when Georgie was born rather remarkably, so as a result she's always been there in the background, and my brother also has always been very supportive. So I've had lots of help, and I really don't regard myself as a superwoman.”
2007-07-29 · Desert Island Discs · Nicola Horlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source