LIVINGtatler.com October 2019orangery with room for a
further 50, where Ivar and James’
wedding reception took place.
When Ivar and Penny divorced
in 2011, he planned to sell Bridwell.
After two decades of running the
estate, he had wanted a fresh start
and planned to go travelling. Even
though he always knew he was bi-
sexual, and had told Penny before
they got married, he didn’t think
he wanted to be openly gay after
the divorce. ‘I still wasn’t comfort-
able with it at that point,’ he says
now. ‘I went on a few dates, and
that’s when I thought, “do I really
want to go down that route again,
of having girlfriends?” Even though
that’s what I was most comfortable
with, because I was used to it.’ But
everything changed when he met
James. They met by accident in the
Farinet bar in Verbier when James,
who works as a senior cabin crew‘When I first
mentioned James
to my daughter,
Ella, she was very
cool about it... I think
that generation
are just totally
unfazed by it all’for an airline, mistook Ivar for his
ski instructor and shouted ‘hello!’
across the bar.
Listening to them talk now
about their relationship, it is strik-
ing how conventional and old-
fashioned it all sounds: the hours
of intimate phone conversations,
the awkward first dates, the comical
small disasters. ‘We used to speak
to each other so much over the
phone that it was a bit like being
on Cilla Black’s Blind Date, talking
to each other through the screen,’
says Ivar. They quickly knew they
wanted to be together, and within
weeks James had been introduced
to Ivar’s family. ‘He doesn’t hang
around,’ says James. ‘And that’s the
delightful thing about Ivar, he
makes his mind up about some-
thing and sticks to it. There’s no
game-playing, to a degree where ]10-19LIV-Mountbatten.indd 99 10/08/2019 03:07
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