My hols: Jo Wood
Cocaine, wild parties, lethal rum and 22 raw tuna: Rolling Stone Ron's wife is on a roll


SOME PEOPLE say they loathe being on the road and just want to get home, but I love being somewhere else.

We’ve just come back from two weeks on Manda Island, off the coast of Kenya – my favourite place in the world. We first went in 1992.

It was heaven: no cars, just boats and donkeys, endless beaches and incredible sunsets. We stayed in huts on the beach, with no electricity.

At night, we walked home with a lantern through acacia trees, with a thousand stars glittering in the sky and phosphorescence lighting up the water. I could have stayed for ever.

The food is amazing, too: Swahili recipes, with fresh local produce and incredible seafood. Ronnie and I did a lot of deep-sea fishing. We found a spot a couple of hours out to sea where the tuna were feeding on flying fish and you could see them leaping into the air. It was an amazing sight.

We caught about 22 tuna and brought them back to the hotel, where the staff cleaned them and served sashimi. It was so fresh, you could still taste the ocean.

These days, we try to go to Manda for two weeks every year. When we started, it was just Ronnie, myself and the children, then the kids started getting boyfriends and girlfriends, and having children of their own. Our group started getting bigger and bigger, until I found myself counting heads at the airport and wondering how we’d gone from six to 14 so fast.

A couple of years ago, the Stones were on a world tour. We had a couple of weeks off, so we went to Fiji with Keith Richards and Patti. We felt really relaxed there, until Keith fell out of a tree and it all started to go wrong.

He’d been sitting on this branch, thinking he was 12 years old, before he fell and hit his head. Suddenly, there was blood pouring out of his mouth and he had an enormous headache. He ended up being flown to the main town for a brain scan. They discovered he had a clot and had to fly him to New Zealand to have it removed. Although we stayed behind, we were so worried about him, it put a damper on the rest of the holiday.

We have had really good holidays with Keith and Patti, including one where we chartered a yacht and sailed on the Caribbean for a month. It was wonderful being out at sea, swimming off the boat and being served fantastic meals by the on-board chef. The boys loved being right away from people – but, of course, Ronnie managed to ruin it for himself by drinking 100%-proof rum that made him sick for the rest of the holiday. He couldn’t even have a drink near him without feeling sick, which made it relaxing for the rest of us, as he just sat nice and quietly in the corner for the duration.

One place I will never go back to is St Martin. We stayed in a beautiful house with a vast tropical garden, where the kids could play by day and we could party in the evening. After one party, the police arrived. We thought it was because it had been too noisy, but it turned out they’d discovered a bag of cocaine hanging in one of the trees. Ronnie and I were thrown into jail, leaving the children with the nanny.

Fortunately, the security guards had seen three guys climbing the trees at night. They managed to track them down, and eventually we were released, but not until we’d spent a week in the cells. Looking back on it, that week was really interesting. I was the only woman, and I had my own cell, but I joined the guys in the yard during the day. I met this bloke called Malcolm, who had toured with Keith in the 1970s and was inside for credit-card fraud.

It’s a small world – but much bigger than I imagined when growing up in Essex. The only holidays we had then were to the Isle of Man, where my dad, who was a Lambretta freak, used to take part in the TT races. I first went abroad when I started modelling and travelled with 100 other models to a fashion show in Acapulco. My geography was so bad, I thought we were going to the south of France – I got quite a shock when we landed in Mexico.

It was the start of a love affair with travel that has never stopped. I love being at home, but, after a while, I get itchy feet and want to get away again.’

— Jo Wood talked to Lizzie Enfield

Well, we know that Keith fell off that branch....