Since paying Sylvester Stallone £45 million for his Los Angeles mansion, Adele has lavished millions more on having it completely remodelled. But has she also been secretly recording a version of I Put A Spell On You, the song written by Screamin' Jay Hawkins, who enriched his stage performances by emerging from a coffin while holding a stick topped with a smoking skull named Henry? Residents in the West Sussex village where she lived more than a decade ago could certainly be forgiven for thinking so. Back in 2012, Adele rented Lock House, a ten-bedroom former convent – but only for six months. Though it had been made fit for the rock-star classes – with the insertion of a pool, sauna and glass staircase – it failed to find favour with the Tottenham songstress, who told a CNN reporter that she found it 'quite scary' because it 'gave her the creeps'. Now, to locals' fury, those words have seemingly helped persuade Horsham district council to grant owner Nicholas Sutton planning permission to convert the sprawling, Grade II pile into three separate dwellings. Arguing that he'd 'tried to sell the property for about 14 years', during which it had been 'marketed by top agents', Sutton said he'd received just one offer, only for the buyer to withdraw because – in Sutton's submission – Adele had 'blighted the property' by saying that it was 'haunted'. Villagers are apoplectic. Aware that Adele never said that Lock House – on the market for £6 million – was 'haunted', a number of them argued that, in the words of one, it should have been priced to reflect its 'poor condition and upkeep'. Sutton's claim that conversion would 'contribute positively to the district's housing needs' was dismissed as 'ludicrous', while another objector said: 'I fail to see how more inhabitants can result in less traffic...' Another mentioned that a local road bridge over a river is already perilously fragile and that more traffic would 'increase the risk of collapse'. Certainly enough bad blood flowing under it as it is. The smart set's talking about... Uncanny coincidences of Georgina's new husband His cousin, Violet von Westenholz, is often said to have introduced Prince Harry to Meghan Markle – most insistently by Harry himself. But artist Piers Lucas’s matchmaker was even closer to home – his younger brother Harry. Back in 2019, he learned that the attractive older woman he was chatting to at a Battersea Park drinks party was a ‘healer’. Could she, he asked, help his big brother who was in agony with broken ribs? So it was that Piers, 54, who’d had an ill-starred first marriage, telephoned Georgiana Monckton – ‘sounding rather sceptical,’ recalls Georgiana, 60. She quelled his doubts. And her own: he had the same name as her ex-husband, Piers Monckton, Viscount Galway’s heir presumptive, and the same birthday... details which, she tells me from honeymoon in Barbados, meant that their initial meeting ‘could have gone either way’. Their wedding last Saturday was near Newbury where they now live. Wrotham Park, Hertfordshire, Georgiana’s childhood home, where she might have been expected to wed and the backdrop for Gosford Park, is on film duty once again. Meghan's pal Jameela's painful health revelation The Duchess of Sussex’s friend Jameela Jamil has revealed that she’s been left at ‘death’s door’ by a rare health disorder. ‘In February, out of nowhere, the upper part of my digestive system slipped and is squishing an important artery from the heart to my digestive system, and it is also crushing down on the blood supply to my kidney,’ explains the actress and model, 39. ‘This has made me so violently ill that I have developed a hiatal hernia in my oesophagus. I can barely eat. I’m in so much pain. I’m so tired and I can’t breathe properly for hours.’ Prince Harry's ex Chelsy shows off her model mum Mothering Sunday is still a fortnight away, but Chelsy Davy is apparently keen to start the celebrations early. Prince Harry’s ex-girlfriend persuaded her mother, Beverley, to take part in a photoshoot with her for Chelsy’s firm Aya Jewels, which sells African and lab-grown gemstones. Beverley, 66, is a natural in front of the cameras as she used to model for Coca-Cola and won the 1973 contest to be Miss Rhodesia (modern-day Zimbabwe). Like her daughter, she’s now a South African national. Chelsy, 39, who was Harry’s on-off girlfriend for seven years until 2011, married hotelier Sam Cutmore-Scott in 2022. As I disclosed at the time, she gave birth to their son, Leo, the same year. Their second child, daughter Chloe, was born last September. Novice skier Dara admits she has all the gear, no ideal Keeping up with your child’s stepmother can be challenging. And it’s even harder for Dara Huang, whose son now spends much of his time with the Royal Family. The Florida-born architect has revealed that she’s hit the slopes for the first time, at the age of 42, after her son, Christopher, known as Wolfie, was taken on a skiing holiday by his stepmother, Princess Beatrice, who’s married to her ex-fiance, the property developer Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi. They went to Verbier, Switzerland, in 2022. ‘This is actually my first time skiing,’ says Dara, who’s in Courchevel, France. ‘My eight-year-old son is better than me.’ Dara, who is pictured wearing a £650 Perfect Moment ski suit adds: ‘I always say, if you suck at a sport, at least dress the part.’ The sport could be in the blood for Wolfie as his grandfather, Count Alessandro Mapelli-Mozzi, skied for Britain in the 1972 Winter Olympics in Japan. (Very) modern manners Having become the Countess of Sandwich after the death of her father-in-law last month, Julie Montagu will be faced with a range of challenges. But the 51-year-old American is determined to show that she has the necessary flexibility. A qualified yoga instructor, she has shared a video online in which she can be seen performing positions including the Durvasasana pose, which is achieved by one raised leg being hooked with a foot behind the head or neck. ‘From 30-second hold handstands, one arm drop backs and standing with a leg behind the head...’ the countess says. ‘Yoga for life.’ She and her husband, Luke, the 12th Earl of Sandwich, have been running the family’s Mapperton estate in Dorset since 2016, with wellness retreats among her initiatives. She has a taste for being in the driving seat, whether on a 1,300-mile convoy to deliver medical supplies to Ukraine, as she did in 2022, or heading the campaign to allow female aristocrats to inherit titles which pass to their younger male siblings. But Charlotte Carew Pole – more formally, Lady Carew Pole – may be obliged to endure a protracted pit-stop. She is, I can disclose, required to attend Avon and Somerset magistrates’ court in Yeovil next month with a possible driving ban looming over her head. Her ladyship, 48, is alleged to have twice exceeded a 30mph limit on the A390 in September 2023, on two different days and in different places, while at the wheel of her Land Rover Discovery. Tindall recalls royal dilemma Mike Tindall had his nose straightened after it was broken eight times during his distinguished rugby career, but Queen Elizabeth almost left a more delicate part of his anatomy permanently disfigured. The former England captain, who is married to the late Queen’s granddaughter Zara, recalls: ‘I sat next to her at lunch one day and I was sat between two table legs. It was really annoyingly close to my groin. She gets up and starts moving them [tables] closer together. I said to her, “Ma’am, if you move them any closer, I am going to be talking way high”.’ Tindall, who was at Cheltenham with Zara this week, adds of our former monarch: ‘She laughed. My relationship with her changed after that, as I felt I could tell her anything.’ Emma Raducanu's last-minute decision to pull out of her mixed doubles match with Sir Andy Murray at Wimbledon last summer, which would have been his final game on Centre Court before he retired, disappointed his mother, Judy. She sparked a social media storm when she described Raducanu’s decision as ‘astonishing’. And she has still not patched things up with the 22-year-old Grand Slam winner. ‘I haven’t reached out to her,’ Judy tells me at the first night of Clueless The Musical, at the Trafalgar Theatre in London. ‘That’s the trouble of the internet – anything that is written can be interpreted wrongly.’ Judy has claimed the comment was meant to be ‘sarcastic’. Quote of the week 'I refuse to even mention her name' Artist Adee Phelan, who has styled the hair of royals and stars including David Beckham, is not a fan of the Duchess of Sussex