Apebrellas

Into every life a little rain must fall, nice weather for ducks, raindrops keep falling on my head... all sayings to gladden the heart of my friend Arnold. He arrived in Britain from Poland fifty years ago, after a childhood spent hiding from the Nazis, took one look at the English skies and thought, “A boy could make a living here with umbrellas.”

These days, Arnold’s firm, Fulton Umbrellas, manufactures one-third of all brollies sold in Britain, 11 million of them every year, and he’s firmly on the list of the nation’s 1,000 wealthiest businessmen. “I wouldn’t say I had the best business brain,” he told me modestly. “I’ve been lucky!”

I believe we create luck by thinking positively and working hard — and never giving up. Arnold is living proof of the power of positive thinking. Twenty years ago, when he was looking for a bigger site to help his firm expand, he was invited to invest in a forgotten corner of London.

“It didn’t look much,” he told me. “One acre, surrounded by rubble, in a very unfashionable backwater. But at £650,000 it struck me as a bargain. I thought, maybe this land will go up in value.”

That rubble-strewn acre was in Docklands, the stretch of the Thames that has become London’s prime site for banks, newspapers and chain store headquarters. In the shadow of Canary Wharf, the Fulton acre could now be worth £50m.

“I’ve had plenty of offers to sell,” Arnold said, “and one day I probably will. But I don’t need to — and so far, the longer we stay put, the more that site is worth.”

We met when he bought a bent spoon at a charity auction, and I invited him, as I invite all my winning bidders, to join me for tea at my home. When I bumped into him a few days later, at Selfridges in London, I realised synchronicity was at work: we were meeting for a reason.

But synchronicity doesn’t work like a Filofax: there are no memos or Post-Its to explain what the meeting’s about. The fates throw you together but it’s up to you to work out why. “Got it,” I announced, as we shared a meal later at Claridges. “I could design a range of umbrellas!”

Arnold smiled politely. I could see him thinking: “Who wants a bent brolly?”
“Umbrellas don’t have to be black,” I insisted. “You sell every colour, you blaze cartoon characters across the fabric — you even commission famous artists to create unique patterns. But I bet you never had a designer who was a chimpanzee.”

And so Geller’s Apebrellas were born. Regular readers will know I’m fascinated by ape art at the moment — in fact, I have added to my collection this week, with a fabulous finger-painting by a chimp called Betsy and a colourful canvas by Alex the orang utan to hang beside my works by Congo the television chimp and Sophie the gorilla.

My wife Hanna has kindly added a doodle of her own to the collection. “My father always called me ‘Monkey’,” she explained.

Ape art isn’t just a curiosity, as I explained to Arnold. If chimps can conceive of patterns and see shapes on canvas, then the artistic impulse must extend all the way back to our common ancestor, millions of years ago. And that means art is infinitely older than language.

Fulton’s design team will copy some of the most colourful paintings onto their brollies. If you want to keep the rain off with a piece of art history, you could always buy a Picasso and hold it over your head... but an Apebrella will be cheaper, it’ll work better, and frankly it will look just as good.

If you’ve ever had a limo pull up at your door to whisk you somewhere special, or even a taxi with an Airport Cabs logo across the bonnet to start your holiday, then you’ll know how much fun it is to set off on a journey with all the neighbours staring.

I have to confess that I was grinning from ear to ear when a colossal twin-engined Sikorsky helicopter touched down in my garden to take me to Dublin — Hanna and I knew the whole village would be saying, “What a racket! Why can’t that Geller fellow just take the car to the station?”

The helicopter belonged to my friend Patrick Rocca, the Dublin property developer who has invested close on £200m in buildings and land, including £20m for Crystal Court in Clerkenwell, London, earlier this year. (Maybe I should introduce Patrick to Arnold...)

Patrick is a huge fan of international football, and he wanted me to hover over the Lansdowne Rd stadium as Ireland played Switzerland in a crucial World Cup qualifier. Ireland managed a draw, but they couldn’t win the game to secure a role in next year’s finals.

It was lovely to meet Patrick’s family at his mansion on the outskirts of the city: his three lovely children, Sophie, Patrick and Stuart, and his gorgeous wife Annette. Annette is still laughing about the surprise she helped set up for Patrick’s birthday a few years ago, with her friend Louise Loughman, who has just become a mother: Louise was an ITV2 presenter on I’m A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here, and she asked me to call Patrick and sing him Happy Birthday. We’ve been friends ever since.