{"id":20220,"date":"2025-07-24T12:02:14","date_gmt":"2025-07-24T12:02:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/20220\/"},"modified":"2025-07-24T12:02:14","modified_gmt":"2025-07-24T12:02:14","slug":"my-holiday-home-in-cyprus-is-in-a-war-zone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/20220\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018My holiday home in Cyprus is in a war zone\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

When my wife, Ramona, died in 2018, after we\u2019d been together for 69 years, there were too many haunting memories in the house. So I left 78 Banbury Road, Oxford, to live in Ireland, next door to my son\u2019s home. It\u2019s my only home now and where I\u2019ve been living happily for the past five and a half years.<\/p>\n

What are the best things about your house?<\/p>\n

All the main rooms \u2014 drawing room, living room, kitchen, bedroom, study, library and studio \u2014 are on the ground floor. At the age of 97 my legs don\u2019t enjoy climbing stairs and I can let my grandchildren use my upper floor. Also the house has underfloor heating, so I\u2019m always warm. Its only bad feature is that the letterbox is at the end of the front drive. But it\u2019s good exercise for my legs!<\/p>\n

What does home mean to you?<\/p>\n

So long as I can have a studio to paint and write I\u2019m happy. With my surrealist paintings I\u2019ve explored a private fantasy world and haven\u2019t expected anybody else to enjoy them; indeed in the early days nobody did. Nowadays they\u2019re being collected. I write books to get ideas across to people, but I\u2019ve never painted to please somebody, apart from my mother who wanted one she could understand! I said: \u201cI\u2019ll do you a flower.\u201d Of all my paintings it\u2019s the only one that is traditional. I still have it. <\/p>\n

\"Painting<\/p>\n

The Question by Desmond Morris<\/p>\n

STEPHEN CHUNG\/ALAMY<\/p>\n

What room do you gravitate towards?<\/p>\n

It\u2019s always my studio. I go in there and disappear into my private world of biomorphic images. Since 2022 I\u2019ve had ten books published and between 1944 and 2023 I completed over 3,600 paintings of my secret world. It\u2019s my lifelong obsession. I was in there last night painting until 4.30am.<\/p>\n

How many books do you own?<\/p>\n

My mania for collecting books once spiralled out of control. My library in Oxford reached such proportions that we had to buy the house next door to contain it.<\/p>\n

What is your first childhood memory of home?<\/p>\n

I was born in Hillside House during the Depression, in the village of Purton, Wiltshire. When I was three or four I would play the Post Horn Gallop on the gramophone and gallop to the music, out of the French windows and round the lawn. I loved playing in the orchard and hiding in the copse, where I clambered up a pile of logs and hid inside like a burrowing animal.<\/p>\n

\"Black<\/p>\n

Morris, aged four, on the lawn of Hillside House with his dog, a Sealyham terrier<\/p>\n

ALAMY<\/p>\n

Did overnight success make you change the way you lived?<\/p>\n

Having a bestseller in 1967 [The Naked Ape, which has sold more than 12 million copies] was the first time I had money. I said to my mother, \u201cI\u2019m going to live it up in the Mediterranean, buy a big house and a boat to search round the coastline and spend all this money.\u201d That year my wife and I bought a beautiful 27-room villa in Malta and we regretted selling it in 1974. We often talked about spending our last years together there in the sunshine. After six years I got bored with that life and went back to Oxford, researching at university and writing books.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Naked Ape author Desmond Morris\u2019s sale of a lifetime<\/a><\/p>\n

\"Desmond<\/p>\n

His 27-room villa in Malta<\/p>\n

What has been your worst property investment?<\/p>\n

We bought a holiday apartment on the eighth floor of a skyscraper in Famagusta, Cyprus, which I haven\u2019t been able to get into since 1974 because it\u2019s in a war zone. Until very recently it was a huge ghost town completely surrounded by men with guns. <\/p>\n

\"Sign<\/p>\n

The fenced ghost town of Famagusta, Cyprus<\/p>\n

ALAMY<\/p>\n

What is your guilty pleasure?<\/p>\n

We did miss the swimming pool we had in Malta, so I built a 40ft indoor swimming pool at my Oxford house. It cost a fortune. But it was lovely because for the last half-century I could swim almost every day, the temperature very high, winter and summer. I\u2019ve done nothing else for health reasons in my entire life. <\/p>\n

Have any of your houses had unpleasant surprises?<\/p>\n

The most dramatic was when our Oxford house was struck by lightning. It went down a chimney stack, through a bedroom and down into the kitchen where my wife was cooking dinner. She was lucky to survive it.<\/p>\n

\"Black<\/p>\n

Morris presenting Zoo Time from London Zoo in 1956<\/p>\n

ALAMY<\/p>\n

What are your gardening experiences? <\/p>\n

The best feature of my present garden is the laurel hedge \u2014 over ten feet high \u2014 around it, giving perfect privacy. Unfortunately it lacks a pond with frogspawn. I meant to get one built, but I\u2019m too old now. In our north London garden, where Ramona loved flowers and I tended the koi in the fish pond, in 1967, we had a pet abandoned Chinese water deer we called Psyche that lived in our shrubbery and when very small used to sleep in our dressing room. Whenever we had guests she\u2019d reluctantly wait outside the French windows until someone left them ajar, then hurtle up the stairs to settle into her favourite spot, which she did one night during a party while a lady guest we found frozen in horror was going upstairs to find the bathroom.<\/p>\n

For Desmond Morris paintings and books visit thesurrealistartgallery.com<\/a>. His other latest books (The British Surrealists, Peoplewatching, and 101 Surrealists) are also available from the Times bookshop. To order, go to timesbookshop.co.uk<\/a> or call 020 3176 2935. Free UK standard P&P on orders over \u00a325. Special discount available for Times+ members<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When my wife, Ramona, died in 2018, after we\u2019d been together for 69 years, there were too many…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":20221,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[6225,6485,6486,1120,96,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-20220","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20220","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20220"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20220\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20221"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20220"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20220"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20220"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}