The thing about parrots...

Famously, David Bailey loves birds. During his long and illustrious career as a photographer, he’s had more models than most of us have had hot dinners. There was the affair with Jean Shrimpton, he squired the Sixties IT girl Penelope Tree, and has been married to Catherine Deneuve and Marie Helvin. His current wife, model Catherine Dyer, is 23 years his junior, the mother of his three children, and most likely his last foray into marriage. “My exploits are nothing now to the average person,” he says. Bailey turned 74 last week, and now his favourite birds are of the feathered variety. In the corner of his London studio lies a stack of fashion magazines, on top of which is a copy of Cage and Aviary Birds. He has always kept parrots. In the Sixties they gave him psittacosis, a pulmonary infection carried by the creatures, the legacy of this being asthma and a wheezy laugh that makes him sound like the cartoon character Muttley (he laughs a lot, Bailey, mostly at his own jokes). But he still keeps them, and recently flew to south east Asia to have lunch with the world’s most eminent breeder of parrots. (via David Bailey on why modern celebrities leave him cold - Telegraph)