There she goes again.Into her office, which has a sort of nursery-schoolish, nature table running along one side, displaying leaves and sponges and bits of weird bark and large, lardish chunks of cocoa butter, and peculiar nuts presumably gathered by, say, the Mooshi Mooshi Moo tribe of Mooshi Mooshi Mooland, who grind them up to make facial scrubs. (Probably, they’d be most thankful for an air-drop of Est?Lauder Idealist Skin Refinisher, so they didn’t have to keep gathering and grinding this non-scientific, forest-floor rubbish.)And more slogans? Oh yes, including a huge banner that reads: “All Knowledge Should Be Translated Into Action.”"Surely not,” I say “Surely not what?” she says “Surely not all knowledge. What about knowledge of, say, nuclear weaponry? “Are you arguing with Einstein?” she asks.No I don’t think I am. (Although, that said, e=mc2 has always seemed a little bit ropy.) Still, the point I’m trying to make here is that Anita Roddick is often all agitprop without any undertow of contemplation, all dots with no lines to join them up Which makes her.. what? Well.. dotty, I suppose. But, that said, there is also something wonderfully heroic about her, too.She has a new book coming out, a collection of essays, entitled: Take It Personally – How Globalisation Affects You and How To Fight Back. She is keen to promote it but, thus far, isn’t having much joy.

Marie Claire magazine, for example, has refused to carry an advertising insert because “of our call to boycott Gap”.Get her started on multinational corporations and she’s off: the sweatshops; the environmental damage; the exploitation of the Mooshi Mooshi Moos, who have a hard enough life as it is, without any Est?Lauder counters nearby Which is all very well, except.. ahem… isn’t The Body Shop a multinational corporation, too, with its almost 2,000 outlets operating in 49 countries? OK, The Body Shop promotes “fair trade” and all that, but, still, how can anyone be cleansed of the sins of consuming by consuming? Aren’t you part of the problem? I try to get to the bottom of this contradiction. It isn’t easy.”What I’m against,” she says, “are the huge corporations whose bottom lines are financial profit. That’s the killer.”"But The Body Shop is a public company,” I say. “So surely it must be just as interested in making a profit as any other?”"We don’t have to do community trade We could buy our Brazil nuts from the commodity markets And we don’t have to maximise our profit.

Where is the rule that says public companies have to maximise profit? If I wanted to maximise profit, I’d have brought out an anti-ageing cream ages ago.”"Still, all of your products are to do with beautification. No one needs raspberry-ripple bubble bath.”"Bubble bath! It’s the bane of my life I don’t even get it, the need to sit in bubbles. Although, if you have children, they do measure you by how good your bloody bubbles are.”"Hang on. Bubble bath is what you sell!”"But we don’t sell it aggressively That’s not our story That’s not our narrative I’m very proud of The Body Shop. We’re progressive, very counter-culture…”So, yes, she can be quite irritatingly contradictory. Have you ever done anything shamelessly consumerist? “No.” Do you fly first-class? “Yes, I love it.” But this is not to say she’s a phoney, or that her activism is a pose. On the contrary, she’s driven by the most dazzling amounts of passion, belief and energy Her energy is fearsome, even.

She’s always darting about her office – “Sit down! Stay still!” I want to cry – showing me this, showing me that, wearing me out. Her conversation leaps pell-mell all over the place, taking in her children (two daughters), her next project, a book on “outsiders” (which will feature “this amazing American woman who’s had a lobotomy and has embroidered a coat with her visions”) and her grandchildren.”I have a story-telling step at my house in California. They love my stories about Fairy Goodbody, a radical union fairy who won’t do spells after 5pm.”Does your energy ever flag, Anita? “I am hedonistic, but don’t have the organisation. I’d love a facial, but when would I have the time?”Perhaps it’s this passion, belief and energy that, for Anita, joins up the dots, and blinds her to any inconsistencies Is this a bad thing? Not necessarily It’s probably even a good thing Certainly, it offers her protection. Indeed, on the day we meet, the financial pages of one newspaper have described her as a “laughing- stock” and “liability” Ouch, I say. “Arsehole,” she says, adding: “Is that all they can think of to say? Anyway, most financial journalists can’t read, let alone add up.”But has such outward self-certainty come at some personal cost? I don’t know I don’t know if she knows. I’m not sure any of her energy has ever been directed inwards.