October 23 2022

R I V E R D E E P, M O U N T A I N H I G H
Glorious images from the Landscape Photographer of the Year awards 2022
 23.10.2022
5 Matt Rudd
Six outré ways to meet
your mortgage payments

6 Relative Values
The Peep Show actor
Paterson Joseph and his
sister Jacqui, a TV presenter

8 Your personalised diet

Professor Tim Spector tells
Ben Spencer why gut health
not calorie counting is the
secret to losing weight

16 COVER: God’s country

Exquisite images of
Britain from Landscape
Photographer of the Year

24 Facebook unravels
8
Can Mark Zuckerberg (and
his metaverse avatar) save his
empire as rivals overtake
him? Danny Fortson reports

32 24-hour party people

Mick Rock’s portraits of
rock stars and supermodels

32
38 Driving
Jeremy Clarkson test-drives
an electric pick-up truck
and likes it (yes, really)

42 Food and drink

42 38
Candice Brown’s ultimate
cheesecake recipes;
Marina O’Loughlin visits
a trio of Cardiff restaurants;
Will Lyons recommends
ports for any occasion

51 Books to Live By
Mariella Frostrup’s reading
list for a thirtysomething
who refuses to grow up

58 A Life in the Day

The journalist and
psychologist Dr Sian Williams

© Times Newspapers Ltd, 2022.

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24
16
ON THE COVER
Tryfan by Aled Lewis, taken in
Snowdonia National Park

The Sunday Times Magazine • 3

 MAT T
Sell your hair … and five other ingenious
ways to meet your mortgage payments
S
o I’ve cancelled Netflix and I’ve ditched the
frappalattes, just like the boomers told me, but
— and you’ll be shocked by this —I still won’t
be able to afford the mortgage payments
when my I-had-it-lucky fixed rate runs out.
Two decades of Netflix equals one month
of mortgage on my mansion, sorry, cottage.
I need another plan, which is fine because …
1 Hair, the internet tells me, is a valuable
resource. A foot of thick hair sells for just
one month’s Netflix, but then, with every extra inch, the
bucks get exponentially bigger. If I can post 24 inches of
Harriet’s beautiful brunette locks to webuyanyhair.com
we could be in for a grand. She’s already at 12 inches.
Hair grows six inches a year — faster if I slip some rice
water into her bath. Just a couple of years and a few
crowbarred comments about what a trendsetter that
Sinéad O’ Connor was back in the day and… kerching!
“What are you doing?” Harriet asks, rolling over in bed
to find me holding a tape measure and looking guilty.
“Nothing, just measuring your, um, my, um.”
“I’m not selling my hair.”
Damn, how did she know? Maybe I could sell
mine. I’ve never grown my hair long. I’ve tried but
it just goes up and out. Gravity has no effect on my
super-bouf. But it’s worth looking like an eight-
foot toilet brush to keep Netflix, sorry, the house.
“We are always looking for grey hair,” one site
says, encouragingly.
2 Helpfully Google takes me from hair trading to
“Ten body parts you didn’t know you could sell”.
Unhelpfully it turns out you can’t sell body parts in
this country. Or you couldn’t at the time of going to
press — who knows how much nanny-state red
tape/human rights legislation will have been removed
by the time you read this? As it stands you can’t put a
CHARLIE CLIFT FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE. GETTY IMAGES
kidney on eBay. Sperm, on the other hand? Up to £35
a shot “for expenses” from a fertility clinic. But a) you
have to provide receipts and b) you have to do it weekly
for between three and six months. It’s an altruistic slog
rather than much of a money-spinner, but still. “Um …”
“You’re not selling sperm,” she says.
Damn, how did she know?
As it stands, you can’t sell
a kidney. Sperm, on the
other hand, is £35 a shot
RUDD
3 I can make a killing in crypto now the crash is over,
according to a fully qualified financial adviser in the
City, sorry, reality TV star on YouTube. As if I’d fall for
that … again. Clearly what I should have been doing
with the meagre contents of my piggy bank is shorting
the pound, whatever that means. Doesn’t seem very
patriotic, though.
4 I have, however, bought a pair of limited-edition
celebrity trainers, right after reading an article
about how a pair of limited-edition celebrity
trainers fetched $25 million at Sotheby’s. Even
though they were turquoise and horrible, I paid
£239 for my trainer investment and immediately
I was quids in. After two months they were worth
£350. Then a) the trainer company released
another 150,000 pairs of the same horrible turquoise
trainers and the price dropped to £150, mint
condition, and b) Child B wore my investment for
a games lesson.
“I thought they were mine, Dad. They were my size.”
No longer mint condition. No longer an investment.
This is fine, though. I’ll just make an NFT of them,
sell whatever that is, and then burn them like I think
I’m Damien Hirst.
5 I’ll get the box of still-boxed Matchbox cars
down from my parents’ loft and get them on
Antiques Roadshow. “In auction today they’ll
fetch £200 to £300,” Bunny Campione will
say. “Each.”
“Each?” I’ll say, feigning modest incredulity.
“But I’ve got 50 more at home.” And everyone
will applaud.
Except, “Oh no, darling, we cleared out the loft,”
Mum says when I call. “All your old toys went to
the charity shop years ago.”
6 We’ve known it all along. Get-rich-quick schemes
don’t work. Scrimping and saving is the only
sensible answer, apart from inventing a time machine.
With my Tardis I’d go back to the 1970s and buy
my house for a handful of ha’pennies. Then I’d
come back to the future and tell all the moany
young people about the time mortgage rates hit
15 per cent. They would no doubt counter, as they
tucked into their avocado, that average house prices
back then were only four times average salaries, not
eight, ten, twelve. And I, no doubt, wouldn’t mind
because I’d be mortgage-free.
“Darling, are you sure I can’t sell your hair?” n
@mattrudd
The Sunday Times Magazine • 5
 R E L AT I V E VA LU E S

Paterson and Jacqui Joseph

The actor and author and his “queen of daytime TV” sister on the family’s work ethic

Paterson never seen me on stage, so her support means a lot.

Jacqui never stops moving and I’m a bit the same. It’s My sister and I are tactile, demonstrative, forever
partly to do with our parents being first-generation sending love emojis and hearts. And we’ve become even
immigrants. They came from St Lucia in the late 1950s closer since her husband, Andy [a media headhunter]
to a country that was largely hostile. It was drilled into died of cancer in 2018. He was an incredibly clever,
us that the world is not going to give you anything, grounded man who was like a mentor to me. His death
you’ve got to go out and grab it. still hurts. I’d just bought a flat when he died so I asked
We lived in a small flat above a shop in Willesden Jac to help me with the design work. It was partly to keep
Green, in northwest London. Mum worked two jobs her busy, but she’d have coped anyway because Jacqui’s
so my three older sisters, me and my brother had to Jacqui: she wouldn’t allow herself to be broken by it.
entertain ourselves most of the time. Jacqui was always At our root is a determination not to be told where
fun, enthusiastic about everything and very creative. to sit. If a door closes, we just find another way to break
She’d rope me into plays and choreography and I’d do through. Andy would have been stunned to know that
terrible impersonations of people we knew. Jac’s now the queen of daytime TV. But then, he also
My sisters taught me to read and write before I went would have said, “Of course!” Because Jacqui was
to school, where I was the only black kid. There were always going to find a way.
other immigrants but they were Irish. I learnt at four
and a half, when a classmate wouldn’t let me into the Jacqui
Wendy house, that the world wasn’t always going to We were a close-knit family because we had no choice
give me love and support. — it was the proximity — and the fact that, apart
Our dad, Anthony, who was infinitely curious, from our sister Bella, who came along a decade after
taught us to be open and brave and to investigate Pat, we were all born a year apart. Pat could act his way
life. He’s the reason we all have this slightly oblivious out of any situation. For ten years he was the baby and
overconfidence. I went to a sinkhole comprehensive he could always get round Mum. Respect was drilled
in Harlesden; Jacqui did better academically and was into us; it was the West Indian way. You had to respect
the first of us to go to university, to study fashion.
I told Mum I wanted to be an actor when I was about
18. I think she shrugged — when you’re the fifth of six
children you can pretty much do anything. My sister
“I vividly remember Mum being
Pam said I’d end up playing servants and slaves and, chased down the road by a gang
quite honestly, in 1982 when I went to drama school,
she was pretty much spot-on. I was absolutely when she went to use a phone box”
determined that I was going to do better.
Jac’s philosophy is: if you can see it, then you can
probably do it. Because she was a forerunner for me
creatively, she was a total inspiration. When she
encounters an obstacle, whether that’s to do with
her ethnicity, her age or her background, Jacqui will
find a way around it and succeed anyway.
I love that she’s turned an idea we discussed at
her kitchen table about upcycling into a TV show
[Discovery Home’s Room 2 B You]. She doesn’t need
help from anyone. She wasn’t able to get a presenting
job on mainstream TV so she pitched it, then wrote,
produced and presented it. [Jacqui has also worked on
GMTV, This Morning and Homes Under the Hammer.]
I’ve had to dismantle those inner critics. With my
first book [Julius Caesar and Me] I had to quell the Main: Jacqui and Paterson
voice that said, “Who do you think you are, writing about at his house in Cricklewood.
Shakespeare?” Jacqui always said, “Just go for it.” She’s Above: Patterson aged about
seen every play I’ve ever been in and organises family to six. Right: Jacqui on her
come. My father, loving and beautiful though he is, has confirmation day, aged 12

6 • The Sunday Times Magazine

 PORTRAIT BY PHOTOGRAPHER NAME

your elders, each other and, most importantly, you had

to have respect for yourself.
STRANGE me, and he really has. When good things happen or one
of us gets a job, Pat always says, “Andy’s working his
Pat went to a tough school. I remember Mum having HABITS headhunting magic up there.”
to have a chat with another mother because her child Acting is feast or famine but he doesn’t give up. I’ve
was bullying him. It must have been scary for him Paterson seen his one-man show Sancho: An Act of Remembrance
because, at home, we protected each other. He wasn’t on Jacqui [about the life of a Charles Ignatius Sancho, who was
prepared for the outside world. Jac is forever at born on a slave ship and rose to prominence in British
Dad worked in a factory and as a painter and her découpage society] numerous times. Just after Andy died, my
decorator. All the skills I have now, I learnt from him. [decorating sisters and I went to see him at the National Black
I learnt to sew on mum’s sewing machine, which she objects with Theatre in Harlem in New York. It was packed every
used for piecework, stitching together pre-cut garments. paper cut-outs]. night. I was so proud I cried. Sancho was a musician,
Our parents never told us about the things that I frequently find an actor and the first black person in the UK known to
happened to them at work or on the street, but I vividly cut-outs from vote. Pat’s been writing about him for over 20 years and
remember Mum being chased down the road by a gang Desperate Dan or it’s given him a deeper sense of belonging, of shared
when she went to use a phone box. They just said we had the Hulk in my history, as if Sancho’s spirit runs through his veins.
to work ten times harder than our white counterparts. clothes Pat tells me I need to slow down, but I can’t. I am
Pat’s been very good at picking the right roles. Years probably still working ten times harder than anyone
ago he was offered a part in a TV drama playing a dealer Jacqui on else. It’s the Joseph clan work ethic. I always say Pat’s
supplying schoolchildren with drugs. He didn’t take it Paterson great value for money: not only is he kind, thoughtful
because it was against everything he stood for. It was a Every time we and loyal, but he has an extraordinary energy about
brave decision — and the right one. have a family him. I feel blessed to have him as a brother n
We’ve both had difficult times: Paterson’s divorce, gathering he Interviews by Caroline Scott.
my husband passing. Pat and Andy had a lovely bond. whips out The Secret Diaries of Charles Ignatius Sancho
I’d often come home and find them recording sonnets his ukulele by Paterson Joseph is published by Dialogue
and music. Before he died, Andy asked Pat to look after Books at £16.99

The Sunday Times Magazine • 7

 THE
PERFECT
DIET?
FOLLOW
YOUR GUT
Everything you think you know about food
and health is wrong, says the nutrition expert
Professor Tim Spector. It’s the unique collection
of bacteria in each of our bodies that shapes us

INTERVIEW BY BEN SPENCER PORTRAIT BY CHARLIE SURBEY

8 • The Sunday Times Magazine

The Sunday Times Magazine • 9

rofessor Tim Spector has a straightforward
theory: almost everything we think we
know about food is wrong. For decades
we have been taught that calories are king
and the most important thing about our
food is where it fits in the neat division of
carbohydrates, fats and proteins. Don’t skip
meals, we are told. Cut out meat. Eat more
fish. Drink eight glasses of water a day. All
of this, Spector says, is flawed.
You may know him as the creator of the
Zoe Covid Symptom Study, the app that
sprung up in March 2020 to track
coronavirus symptoms across the UK. Since
then, the epidemiologist from King’s College
London has been a regular presence on our
TV screens, commentating on infection
rates and the changing nature of Covid as it
has waxed and waned. But Spector’s true
passion is nutrition. Specifically, how wrong
we have got it.
“There is no single diet that will work for
everyone, just as there is no such thing as a
superfood or a toxic food,” Spector writes in
his new book, Food for Life: The New Science
of Eating Well. “Provided it is a real food,
there is no such thing as a bad ingredient.”
Yet, he says, we are in the midst of a global
“food health crisis”, with more people
overweight than malnourished for the first
time in history. “If everyone ate optimally,
From left: Spector debunks nutritional myths on This Morning; tracking the health of twins at St Thomas’ Hospital
10 • The Sunday Times Magazine
we could prevent or delay around half the
disease burden of heart disease, arthritis,
dementia, cancer, type 2 diabetes,
autoimmune diseases and infertility.”
At the heart of Spector’s theory lies the
belief that the overriding influence on how
we react to food is not genetics, or culture,
or ethnicity, but the microbiome — the
bacteria in our guts. There are as many
bacterial cells as human cells in our bodies.
We are, as he puts it, “half human, half bug”,
and these bacteria have a huge influence
on the way we metabolise food.
This explains why each of us responds so
differently to what we eat. Genetically, we
are remarkably similar — humans share
99.7 per cent of genetic variation. But we
have just 25 per cent of our gut microbiome
in common. Spector’s research has shown
that even identical twins — who share
genes and upbringing, nature and nurture
— often have completely different
reactions to the same food. “We are all
unique,” he writes. “No perfect diet or
correct way to eat will work for everyone.”
I meet Spector on the third floor of
St Thomas’ Hospital in central London.
After the chaotic bustle of the clinical floors
below, the department of twin research
and genetic epidemiology, which Spector
runs, is a remarkably calm place. A pair of
identical middle-aged women sit in the
corridor awaiting an appointment.
Spector’s office is a large but functional
room with utilitarian NHS furniture and
a few wildlife pictures on the walls. But
the views, through large windows, of the
Thames and the Houses of Parliament,
are spectacular. Spector, 64, slim and
deeply tanned, is wearing a fluorescent
pink cycling top with suit trousers. An
expensive-looking bike leans against the
wall in the corridor outside. He has been
here since 1993, when he set up the UK
Adult Twin Registry, a project tracking the
health of 10,000 twins across the country.
Spector has changed research focus five
times in that period, but he has largely been
left alone by management. “As long as I keep
bringing in grants and publishing papers,
There are as
many bacterial
as human cells
in our bodies.
We are “half
human, half
bug”, and these
bacteria have a
huge influence
on metabolism
they don’t hassle me,” he says. He continued
to work as a clinical doctor, specialising in
rheumatology, until Covid struck, when
he decided to focus on research full time.
I begin by confessing I’m confused by
one central contradiction in his latest book.
If each of us responds differently to foods,
how is it possible to provide any overall
dietary guidance? If all our certainties about
diet are wrong, if calories are irrelevant and
saturated fat isn’t bad for us after all, what
on earth should we be eating?
That, he acknowledges, is the challenge
and one he has attempted to overcome.
“This book is about going into detail on the
foods and telling the public enough about
them so they can make up their own minds,”
he says. “What’s nutrition chemistry about?
How does it affect our body and health?”
Food for Life is his third foray into the
subject. In 2015 he published The Diet Myth,
which introduced the microbiome — at the
time a radical new theory. He followed it
with Spoon Fed in 2020. “That was all the
angry bits,” he says. It debunked the calorie
as a meaningful measure of nutrition and
took aim at the food industry for misleading
consumers. This third book, he says, is an
attempt to answer the many questions he
gets from readers — is brown bread good
for you? Is full-fat yoghurt OK?
 “We don’t know everything about
every food and every interaction with gut
microbes,” he says. “And we probably never
will. But we do know certain things.” If you
SIMPLE STEPS TO A HEALTHY GUT
eat food that gives you a sugar spike (and
those foods differ from person to person) or if

1Aim for at least 2 3

fat hangs around in your bloodstream after
meals, “those things are bad”, he says. “If you
have a gut that is full of pro-inflammatory, Eat fruit and Try to eat up to
non-diverse species, that’s bad.” seven hours’ sleep vegetables high in 30 plant varieties
Because there are few one-size-fits-all a night and exercise polyphenols (bright every week,
rules, he examines the latest science on each regularly — move colours are a good including nuts,
food type. He explains that berries boost the throughout the day sign) and fibre seeds and spices
immune system because they are packed and do something
with polyphenols; plants use these chemicals more strenuous
as a defence mechanism and they work twice a week
wonders for our own defences. Colourful
fruit and vegetables — beetroot, blood
oranges, aubergines — are great because
these colours are a sign of beneficial plant
chemicals. Full-fat products are usually better 4 5 6
for you than “diet” options, he says — there Avoid snacking and Stick to moderate Eat less but
is little evidence that saturated fat actually occasionally fast amounts of alcohol, higher-quality
shortens our lives, and low-fat alternatives for at least 12 hours ideally consuming meat and fish
are full of sugar and chemicals. Dark overnight drinks high in
chocolate is better than white chocolate; and polyphenols. These
the occasional serving of high-quality red include red wine
meat is no worse for you (and possibly better and cider
for the environment) than eating lots of fish,
stocks of which are dwindling in our seas.
There are some general principles along
the way. Calorie counting, Spector says,
simply does not result in long-term weight
loss and is counterproductive for health.
7 8 9
Ignore calorie Eat fungi regularly Foods rich in
Fad diets — whether it is 5:2, the paleo diet
counts and seek prebiotic fibres
or protein shakes — are doomed to failure.
out foods with — leeks, onions,
“Every diet works for 12 weeks, but if you
higher nutritional artichokes and
track it for a year they bounce back,” he says.
quality for similar cabbages — are
Exercise is good for mental and physical
calorific value. beneficial for
PREVIOUS PAGES: CHARLIE SURBEY FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE. GROOMING: EMMA LEON. THESE PAGES: ALAMY, REX, GETTY IMAGES

health — Spector takes that expensive bike

Avoid ultra- your microbiome
in the corridor out for five hours a week
processed foods
— but unless you are regularly running
marathons it does little for weight loss.
Most official food guidance, he says, is

10 11 12
arbitrary. Drinking eight glasses of water
a day — still enshrined in official guidance
— does nothing except boost sales of Don’t use Understand that When eating
bottled water. Be led by your body, he says; supplements “food is medicine” convenience
if you are not thirsty, there is no need to unless you are ill or and the right foods, choose
drink eight glasses a day. pregnant — there diet can be just the least
If the professor has one key principle, it is no evidence as effective as processed
is that ultra-processed food — something they work for many drugs ones with
that could only be made in a factory, or that most people the fewest
is unrecognisable as a “real food”, or that ingredients
contains dozens of ingredients — is probably
not going to be good for your health. Fresh
strawberries, for instance, bear little
resemblance to a strawberry fromage frais;
a corn on the cob has little to do with a packet 13 14 15
of cornflakes. “These ultra-processed foods, Don’t follow blindly Cook for yourself Eat something
made up of many chemicals, make us feel by eating what whenever you can fermented every
hungrier, overconsume, and increase risks someone else day — yoghurt,
of disease and earlier death,” he writes. says is good for kimchi and
Cooking for yourself as much as possible them — nobody kombucha are
using whole, unprocessed ingredients means is average good examples —
that at least you know what you are eating. and experiment
Spector also advises that people try to eat with fermenting
30 different plants a week. And he suggests
that we eat plenty of fermented foods ➤

The Sunday Times Magazine • 11

 Spector and his wife, Veronique, narrowly survived a helicopter crash on a skiing holiday in Georgia, 2018
such as kimchi, kombucha or yoghurt, to
boost the gut microbiome.
So far, it sounds like a page out of an
Yotam Ottolenghi recipe book. If you are
bringing up young children, or struggling
with food costs in the midst of the greatest
cost of living crisis in a generation, is it
really practical to seek out 30 different
varieties of fruit and veg a week, or source
a provider of high-quality kombucha?
Spector accepts the point. “I’m not saying
that I’ve got everybody’s lifestyle sorted,”
he says. “I’m giving people the tools and
they can then decide how much that means
in their life. I’m trying not to be too elitist
or saying everyone must do this.”
But he points out that tinned baked
beans are full of protein and fibre, frozen
peas are packed with nutrients and
packets of cheap microwaveable rice can
be more nutritious than more expensive
dried varieties.
Spector, whose children, Sophie and
Tom, are now 32 and 30, says: “For parents
of young kids, just getting through the
day is the crucial thing. But I do think part
of parenting is to teach kids about food.”
Children’s menus in restaurants are, he
says, an “abomination” and should be
banned because children should be
exposed to adult food early in life. But,
he adds: “I was brought up on a pretty
terrible diet and I’m still alive.”
S
pector was born in 1958 to a
busy professional couple in
north London. His father was
an academic doctor and his
mother a physiotherapist, and
life in the family home did not
always leave time for cooking. “We used to
eat ravioli out of tins — that was a big, big
treat for us,” he says. “There were lots of
canned soups, lots of chips, fish fingers,
sausages. And masses of sweet breakfast
@TIMSPECTOR / TWITTER
cereal. I was a Frosties boy. There were
plenty of trips to the dentist.”
“My mum was Australian and we spent
some time there. That meant lots of eggs
and meat, so diet was slightly improved for
the year or two we were there. But this was
the Sixties and Seventies — it was a different
time. We didn’t really snack, we didn’t have
regular soft drinks. So it wasn’t all terrible.”
After qualifying as a doctor at St
Bartholomew’s Hospital in London,
Spector specialised in rheumatology,
treating joint and muscle disorders. But he
also developed an interest in epidemiology
— an academic discipline in which
populations are studied to track causes
of diseases and trends in health. He was
appointed as a consultant rheumatologist
at St Thomas’ but also continued to pursue
his passion for epidemiological research,
using his twins cohort to look at a range of
diseases from osteoarthritis to diabetes.
By the 1990s genetics was emerging as
a key field in the study of the determinants
of health. “So I taught myself genetics,”
Spector says. “It is mainly about learning
the jargon. You have to stay at the back of
the lecture hall until you can speak the
language. And then you can go to the front.”
He became a leading expert in the
discipline but after a few years grew
dissatisfied. As an expert in twins, he knew
that even siblings with identical DNA often
had very different health outcomes. “I think
we’d sort of hit the peak of genetics. I knew
there had to be something more.”
Tinned baked
beans are full
of protein and
fibre, frozen peas
are packed with
nutrients and
microwaveable
rice can be more
nutritious than
dried varieties
For a while he became fascinated by
epigenetics, a field based on the idea that
genes are switched on and off by
environmental factors, and this can have
as much influence on health as the genetic
code itself. “I thought that could be the big
thing,” he says. “I even wrote a book on it
that no one read. It was in theory a lovely
idea, but it didn’t quite pan out — the size
of the effects weren’t quite big enough. So
I was looking for something else. Then the
microbiome came along.”
Scientists in the US had started talking
about the “gut-brain axis” and the impact
of bacteria on functions of the human body.
“I went to a few lectures and said, wow, this
is going to be huge.”
This epiphany coincided with a dramatic
change in his personal life. In 2011, while
ski-touring high in the Alps on the Italian-
Austrian border, Spector suddenly started
seeing double. His blood pressure soared.
Possibilities raced through his brain —
tumour, multiple sclerosis, a stroke. He was
eventually diagnosed with a blockage in the
blood supply to the muscle of the eye.
The eye problems lasted three months
and in time Spector recovered fully. But it
was a wake-up call. He realised he had been
putting on weight without noticing. He was
84kg (13st 3lb) and had put on four inches
around the waist. “I was typical of someone
going through a health shock,” he says. “It
makes you suddenly think about all these
lifestyle recommendations on an individual
level — I had really only thought about it in
population terms before. That was the big
switch that, really selfishly, led me to being
interested in nutrition.”
At first he tried going vegan, which lasted
a month. Then he started experimenting
with different types of foods. And then he
discovered the microbiome.
Five years ago he launched the nutrition
company Zoe with investors from the US
— in his words, “two business people from
the internet … We raised the money to do
two and a half years of research using the
twins. Based on those studies we now have
a home kit that tests your gut microbes, ➤
The Sunday Times Magazine • 13
 your blood sugar, your blood fats, and you log
all your meals.” The result is a personalised
list of foods, with each given a score out
of 100. “It is basically saying you should be
eating more or less of this.”
T
he Zoe programme, which
launched commercially in
the US before the pandemic
and in the UK this summer,
costs £260 for the tests and
an app, then £60 for a month
or £300 for a year of follow-up with a
nutritionist. Some 30,000 people have
subscribed and 245,000 are on a waiting
list. But for those who balk at shelling out
this kind of cash — or who are stuck on
the waiting list — Spector has printed
his own scores at the back of his book, to
give an indication of how different foods
impact his health.
“I’ve switched my breakfast completely,”
he says. “I used to have muesli, low-fat milk,
orange juice and tea.” But muesli, according
to the Zoe plan, is very bad for him, getting
a score of just four out of 100 because it
results in a blood-sugar spike.
In winter, when he used to eat porridge
every day, he chose jumbo oats, which he
assumed were healthy. They gave him a score
of ten out of 100. When he occasionally eats
porridge now he chooses steel-cut varieties
that need longer to soak and cook, but give
him a score of 40 out of 100.
Most days — if he has breakfast at all —
he now eats full-fat yoghurt (a key fermented
food) with nuts and seeds (packed with
polyphenols), and black coffee (which cuts
the risk of heart disease). “These small swaps
can actually make a very big difference in
the long term,” he says.
It is obviously working. Spector insists he
is more interested in long-term health than
weight. But at 75kg (11st 11lb) he is carrying
a stone less than he was a decade ago, and it
doesn’t take more than a glance to see there
is no spare fat on his body.
In March 2018 Spector was, again, high
up a mountain when he had another scare.
This was much more dramatic. He was
on a skiing holiday in Georgia with his wife,
Veronique Bataille, 62, a dermatologist,
but the ski lifts were not working. So they
decided to hire a helicopter to get to the
top of the mountain.
“I remember thinking the pilot didn’t
look terribly confident,” Spector says.
“It came down very suddenly — dropped
five metres and just tipped over on the
side. The rotors sliced through the cabin
and I was turned over on my head. It was
complete darkness, then we could see
smoke and flames in the back.”
The party managed to escape the
wreckage and had to wade through deep
snow. “I remember thinking in James Bond
films it’s ten seconds before it blows up. But
curiously, I was ridiculously calm. I stopped
©ZOE
and took a video of it — it was very surreal.”
“We built the
Covid app from
scratch in five
days and it went
out on the first
day of lockdown.
Eventually
4.5 million
people gave
us their data”
Two years later Spector again showed his
ability to remain calm in the face of a crisis.
But this time he had more to show for it than
shaky mobile footage. In March 2020, when
the pandemic struck, Spector, like almost
everyone else in the country, was told to go
home. He was cycling back to north London
when he decided he had to act.
“I just thought we can’t do nothing,” he
says. “My colleagues at Zoe were around
the corner.” At first they discussed creating
a Covid app to use with the twins cohort.
“But I said let’s see if we can offer it to
the whole country. So the team stopped
working on the nutrition app and started
working on the Covid app. We built it from
scratch in five days and it went out on the
first day of lockdown.” On that first day,
one million people downloaded the app.
“Eventually, 4.5 million people gave us
their data. People just wanted to help.”
In those dark days of March and April
— with no Covid testing available outside
hospitals and the government flying blind
— the Covid Symptom Study was the only
reliable tool providing any kind of picture as
to where the virus was spreading and how
people were affected by infections. But not
everyone was thrilled. “The government
wasn’t very happy with us,” Spector says.
The Zoe home kit enables users to test their
gut microbes to identify beneficial foods
“They had their own app — the contact
tracing app — coming soon and they
thought people would get confused.”
Eventually, the Office for National
Statistics launched a mass testing survey
that gave officials a reliable idea of how
prevalent the virus was. But with such a big
user base, the Zoe app could provide a much
more up-to-date idea of how Covid was
developing. It also gave a better idea of
symptoms. Spector’s team was, for example,
the first anywhere in the world to discover
that a loss of taste and smell was a key
symptom — which led directly to a change
in international guidelines. And, when
the Omicron variant hit in December
2021, the team realised symptoms had
changed again, and people with Covid
were reporting milder disease, almost
indistinguishable from a cold.
Spector was awarded the OBE for his
contribution to the pandemic response, but
his experience with government left a bitter
taste. “I found all my interactions very
depressing,” he says. “The level of command
and control in the NHS was shocking
— nobody was able to make any decisions.
I was working with some people from the
Ministry of Defence in the early stages —
they had thought they were working in the
most bureaucratic organisation on earth
until they discovered the NHS.”
Last year Spector agreed to work with
the government for a second time, when
he was invited to contribute to the National
Food Strategy, an independent review led
by Henry Dimbleby, co-founder of the Leon
restaurant chain. Spector wanted the review
to call for the abandonment of calorie
labelling on foods and for all products to
carry a score of how processed they are.
“Countries like Chile just put a black
sticker on ultra-processed food,” he says.
Dimbleby’s recommendations — which
Spector describes as “fairly mild” — were
rejected by government. The review called
for a significant expansion to free school
meals, greater environmental standards in
farming and a 30 per cent cut in meat and
dairy consumption. These were all ignored.
But while depressed by our politicians,
Spector is not despondent. “It’s a very
exciting time for nutrition,” he says.
“After Covid, people are suddenly much
more interested in lifestyle, in sleep, in
moving house, changing the way they
live. If we can take that up and run with
it, the message about food gets across.
The government isn’t going to change,
but ground-up we can change what’s in
the supermarkets, we can demand what
is on food labels.
“There’s a different way to look at food.
Not just what you eat — but how you eat.
This really could be a revolution.” n
Food for Life: The New Science of Eating
Well by Tim Spector is published by
Jonathan Cape on Thursday at £20
The Sunday Times Magazine • 15
 Heaven on earth
Breathtaking scenes from around the UK, by entrants
to the Landscape Photographer of the Year awards

Ascension by Demi Oral, taken at Dragon’s Back

in the Brecon Beacons National Park

16 • The Sunday Times Magazine

The Sunday Times Magazine • 17
Durdle Door Night Lights by Callum White, captured on the Jurassic Coast.
The beach is illuminated by a fire, while the sky is lit up by the Milky Way

The Sunday Times Magazine • 19

F
rom rolling hills to electrifying night Above: Before the
skies, the Landscape Photographer Harvest by Peter
of the Year awards celebrate North, a striking
extraordinary urban, rural and coastal image of wheat
scenes from around the UK. This year, the fields in Therfield,
competition’s 15th, there are four categories Hertfordshire
and four special awards, including the
Historic Britain award in association with Left: Even Flow by
The Sunday Times Magazine, which goes Christopher Small.
to Itay Kaplan for Windmill in the Mist Summerleaze Beach
(see page 23). The total prize money of in Bude, north
£20,000 is split between the winners, Cornwall, in the
with £10,000 going to the overall winner. evening light
This year that accolade goes to William
Davies for his entry Brecon in Winter (see
page 23), a stunning view of the Brecon
Beacons captured from the Pen y Crug
hillfort in south Wales.
An exhibition of the winning and
commended entries will open on October 31
at Paddington station in London. It will
travel the UK, in partnership with
Network Rail, stopping at stations
including Manchester Piccadilly and
Glasgow Central n

For more information visit lpoty.co.uk

The Sunday Times Magazine • 21

Above: Windmill
in the Mist by Itay
Kaplan, winner of
the Historic Britain
prize, awarded in
association with
The Sunday Times
Magazine, shot in
Wilton, Wiltshire

Left: Oh! Limpet

Games by Simon
Turnbull. Limpets
cling to rocks on
the Devon coast

Right: the overall

winner, Brecon
in Winter by
William Davies.
“Luckily the sun
broke through right
at sunrise, just long
enough to get this
shot,” he says

The Sunday Times Magazine • 23

 Is Facebo
10:39

Are you sure

you want to
delete your
account
for ever?

Yes, I’m off to TikTok

24 • The Sunday Times Magazine

ook over?
It used to rule the world but
Mark Zuckerberg’s social
network is being overtaken by
rivals — while he disappears
into a virtual reality
E
very morning Mark
Zuckerberg gets up and
checks his emails. The news
is, without fail, dreadful.
It’s like getting “punched
in the stomach”, he told
the podcaster Joe Rogan
recently. “I look at my
phone to get, like, a million
messages of stuff that has
come in. It’s usually not
good. It’s, like, OK, what’s going on in the world that
I need to pay attention to that day?”
So jarring is that ritual that he has taken up another
one to deal with it: fighting. Specifically, mixed martial
arts. Zuck loves nothing more these days than to
“wrestle with friends”. Unlike running, where his mind
wanders to the catalogue of horribles bubbling inside
Facebook — or the “swamp of despair” as the Twitter
co-founder Jack Dorsey called it — hand-to-hand
combat requires total focus. “If you stop paying
attention for one second, you’re going to end up on
the bottom,” Zuck enthused. That’s not a place the
hyper-competitive billionaire is accustomed to.
As a child, Zuckerberg was obsessed with Roman
emperors and strategy games such as Alpha Centauri, a
contest to control a whole star system. The 38-year-old
has not reached galactic supremacy, but here on Earth
he has certainly surpassed the wildest dreams of little
Zuck. His company Meta, which includes Facebook,
Instagram and WhatsApp, is used by 3.6 billion people
every month; just over half the global population
outside China, where Meta’s apps are blocked. By the
numbers, it is the largest empire in history.
Yet no empire lasts for ever, especially in the frenetic
REPORT BY
DANNY FORTSON
world of social media, where obsolescence is just one
slightly better algorithm away. The decline and fall can
happen with stunning speed. That is the reality facing
Zuckerberg. Nearly two decades after he kick-started
the social media era, his empire has begun a slide
towards irrelevance, which in this industry is akin
to death. This is not to say that Facebook is going to
disappear. It won’t. It is simply too big. But its era of
dominance appears to be ending the same way it did for
Microsoft and IBM; tech giants that, for a time, instilled
fear in their rivals, but have lost the aura they once had.
Zuckerberg, who used to shout “Domination!” at the
end of staff meetings, is grappling with a similar fate.
Unlike past threats to the empire, he appears strangely
incapable or unwilling to combat them. TikTok, the
video app owned by the Chinese tech conglomerate
ByteDance, is luring away hundreds of millions of
young users. His attempts to copy its core features
have fallen flat, as did a campaign, revealed by The
Washington Post, in which Meta employed a strategy
firm to promote negative stories about the company.
Nor is Zuckerberg able to buy anything, which is
what he has typically done when a rival emerges.
The regulators won’t let him. In July the Federal
Trade Commission (FTC) said it would block Meta’s
attempted takeover of a tiny virtual reality start-up,
whose 60 staff would no doubt slip unnoticed into
Meta’s 72,000-strong employee ranks. Economically,
the virtual reality “industry” is inconsequential, a fly on
an elephant’s behind, but the watchdog sued to block
the deal anyway, claiming that Meta was trying to
“buy its way to the top”. Meta will fight the suit in court.
Meanwhile Apple, run by Zuckerberg’s arch-rival
Tim Cook, has kneecapped Meta’s advertising business
with the introduction last year of antitracking software;
➤ The Sunday Times Magazine • 25

Where did all my friends go?
anyone with an iPhone is now familiar
with the “Do you want to be tracked?”
prompt. Most people say no, depriving
Zuckerberg’s ad machine of the granular
detail on which it relies. Meta predicted
that the change would knock $10 billion
off its annual revenues.
The pain has already begun. For the first
time in its history, Meta sales revenues
fell this summer. The company has
begun quietly laying people off, shutting
departments and freezing most hiring as it
also grapples with a post-Covid hangover.
Dan Ives, a Wall Street analyst, says it has
gone from “a Ferrari in the fast lane to driving
a minivan in the slow lane”. Its share price
has imploded, crashing 60 per cent in a year.
If any of these factors were happening
in isolation, it would be cause for concern.
“He’s
distracting
himself from
PREVIOUS PAGES: SHUTTERSTOCK. THIS PAGE: GETTY IMAGES
the mess at
Facebook by
pretending
there’s this
metaverse for
him to create”
Zuckerberg demonstrates virtual reality
tech in 2016. Meta spent $10 billion last year
on developing an immersive online world
But they are happening all at once and
Zuckerberg’s response has been … strange.
His plan: to spend tens of billions of dollars
on the metaverse, an immersive virtual
world that by his own estimation could
take “10 or 15 years” to come to fruition
— and it is not clear anyone wants.
“He’s distracting himself from the mess
he has made at Facebook by pretending
there’s this metaverse for him to create,”
explains James Currier, a social media
expert and venture capitalist at the Silicon
Valley investment firm NFX. “Facebook [and
its advertising model] is like tobacco. And
he doesn’t want to deal with it any more.”
For Zuckerberg, Meta’s irrelevance
among young people hurts. A generation
ago they were the fuel that powered
Facebook’s rise. Now they are moving on.
Consider Jordan Cooper, a second-year
drama student in Los Angeles. She is 19,
born a year before Zuckerberg launched
thefacebook.com from his Harvard dorm
room. Cooper grew up online, but she has
no use for anything Zuckerberg has to
offer. She used Instagram for a while in
secondary school — until the pandemic
hit and it was supplanted by an app full of
wildly entertaining short videos: TikTok.
Now virtually all of her social media time
is on the Chinese-owned app.
“I can spend, like, three hours straight
on TikTok. The videos are so short. You can
just scroll on and on,” she explains. What
2 3 ?
Home Find Friends
about Instagram? “I don’t feel like I’m
missing out if I’m not on it. Whereas with
TikTok, you really do feel left out if you’re
not on it. It has become such a big part of
people’s humour and conversation.”
And the Facebook app itself ? “Facebook
is for old people,” she guffaws, before
adding with genuine curiosity, “I can’t even
tell you the main functions of Facebook
any more. Is it photos or just words?”
Cooper’s attitude is indicative of the
dangerous territory the company has
entered. The magic of Meta’s apps — the
dynamic that turned it into one of the
greatest success stories in business history
— is what is known as the “network effect”.
If your social circle uses an app, you will too.
It is a powerful self-sustaining cycle. Yet it
is just as powerful in reverse. If you wake
up one day to realise that all your friends
have left the app, the reason for being there
ceases and you’ll leave too. No one knows
this dynamic better than Zuckerberg, but
it might not even be his biggest problem.
O
n a sunny afternoon in the last
week of September, Sheryl
Sandberg pushed through the
doors of Meta one last time.
Outside she was greeted by
rows of clapping, crying colleagues. She
hugged her way through the whooping
crowd, dabbing tears from her eyes. “This
really means a lot to me,” she said.
When Sandberg announced in June that
she was leaving after 14 years as Meta’s chief
operating officer, and the right-hand to
Zuckerberg, he said it was “the end of an
era”. She arrived in 2008 as the “adult in ➤
The Sunday Times Magazine • 27

What are you using my data for?
Left: Zuckerberg with Nick Clegg and Sheryl
Sandberg, 2018. Clegg is now head of global
affairs at Meta; Sandberg quit in June
the room”, a rock star executive who had
transformed Google from an interesting
idea into an advertising behemoth. Zuck
hired her to do the same at Facebook,
which at the time had no business model
to speak of. And so she did: last year Meta
brought in $117 billion, virtually all of it
from advertising.
Yet Sandberg was not leaving on a high.
Zuckerberg had sidelined her in recent
years, carving up her domain, which
included nearly everything outside of
product engineering — policy, sales,
communications, lobbying, legal — and
handing it to others. She told friends she
had tired of being the “punching bag”
for Meta’s relentless parade of scandals.
And the ad machine she had helped
to build was struggling to come to grips
with the biggest change in the industry
since smartphones supplanted desktop
computers a decade ago. In spring 2021
Tim Cook, the avuncular chief executive
of Apple, rolled out a software update for
the more than 1 billion devices it has in
circulation. The new version included a
feature called App Tracking Transparency,
or ATT, which asked users every time
they opened an app if they wanted to allow
that company to follow their movements
across the internet.
There is “an audible sucking
sound” of companies moving
their ad spending to Apple
FACEBOOK, REX
and away from Meta
Right: the Apple CEO, Tim Cook, is
disrupting Meta’s ad tracking model while
building a lucrative new ad business
It seemed a reasonable request.
Zuckerberg, though, was furious, because
he knew what it would mean for Meta.
In the run-up to the change, he took out
full-page newspaper ads warning of the
damage it would inflict on small businesses.
Without tracking, ads would be less
targeted and thus less effective at reaching
customers, he argued.
Zuckerberg and Cook have long had a
frosty relationship. The Apple boss chided
him in 2018 for Facebook’s role in the
Cambridge Analytica data-harvesting
scandal and the ad-driven business model
that enabled it. Zuckerberg reportedly told
staff he wanted to “inflict pain” on Apple.
Cook, who framed himself as the high
priest of privacy, pitched ATT as a
referendum on the core transaction of the
internet itself: you get all this stuff for free
in exchange for being tracked. In that world,
Meta, along with Google, was the apex
predator, mining its trove of data to turn
itself into what the mobile ad expert Eric
Seufert called the “everything store for ads”.
Apple’s move made that implicit bargain
explicit, and in so doing rendered the
everything store less useful, an outcome
that Cook seemed to rather enjoy. “If a
business is built on misleading users, on
data exploitation, on choices that are no
1 2 ?
Home Find Friends
choices at all, then it … deserves reform,”
he said last year.
But Cook wasn’t done. Not only did he
bloody Zuckerberg, but Apple also began
quietly building its own ad business, selling
space to companies seeking to rank as the
top result when someone searched for,
say, a meditation or gaming app in the
App Store. Incredibly, Apple built this
new business, virtually from scratch,
by hoovering up detailed data on user
behaviour, from the news stories people
read to the apps they download.
Apple employs some semantic gymnastics
to explain how it has rolled out a targeted
ads operation while simultaneously
scuppering rivals — the Snapchat owner,
Snap, has laid off 20 per cent of its staff
this year, in part due to Apple’s changes.
Because it does not share personal data
with third parties, Apple argues, what
it is doing doesn’t qualify as “tracking”,
under its own narrow definition. “From
a Machiavellian perspective, what Apple
has done is amazing,” says the mobile ad
expert Seufert.
He predicts that Apple’s ad business
could become “Facebook big”. Indeed, the
investment bank Evercore predicted it
could pull in as much as $30 billion a year
by 2026 — a sum similar to the annual ad
income of the global newspaper industry
— up from less than $1 billion in 2018.
Meta claims to have made significant
progress overhauling its ad tools to
“navigate this new environment”. Charles
Manning, chief executive of the mobile
advertising platform Kochava, told me this
summer that there was “an audible sucking
sound” of companies moving their ad
spending to Apple and away from Meta. ➤
The Sunday Times Magazine • 29
 What is the point of the metaverse?
W
hile Apple attacks one
flank, TikTok is laying
siege to another.
Zuckerberg has called
the video app “one of the
most effective competitors that we have
ever faced”. Indeed, a recent survey by Pew
Research Centre found that 67 per cent of
13 to 17-year-olds in America use TikTok,
making it the most popular app behind
YouTube, which was used by 95 per cent
of respondents. Instagram fell to third
place, used by 62 per cent of the teenagers
surveyed. Given that TikTok was launched
only five years ago, its rise has been
staggering. Last year it surpassed the one
billion user threshold and is used “almost
constantly” by 16 per cent of teens,
compared with 10 per cent on Instagram,
according to the Pew survey.
That is a big problem for Zuckerberg.
For years Instagram has been Facebook’s
shining star, propping up the business by
luring in younger generations while the
core demographic of the Facebook app
aged. It has come under growing scrutiny,
however, over its effect on users,
particularly young people, in the wake of
the case of Molly Russell, the 14-year-old
from Harrow who took her own life after
being fed self-harm images that dragged
her into what her father called “the bleakest
of worlds”. The inquest last month made
a landmark ruling that social media had
contributed to her death.
The likes of Instagram, Twitter and
Snapchat all rely on one’s “social graph”,
the network of people, brands and interest
groups one follows, to shape the content
people see. TikTok takes a different, and
perhaps even more worrying, approach.
It has no interest in your friends. Instead,
it has developed an artificial intelligence
(AI)-based recommendation engine that
divines your desires by interpreting the
most subtle of clues. They range from how
long you watch a video to whether you
share it and what the content contains.
And because each TikTok video takes up
the entire screen, as opposed to other
apps that are peppered with thumbnails
and ads, the signal it interprets is much
cleaner. As the technology blogger Eugene
Wei has put it: “When you gaze into TikTok,
TikTok gazes into you.”
The upshot? TikTok is not really a social
media app. Rather, it is like television on
steroids, streaming a billion-plus hyper-
personalised channels to its ever-growing
army of (mostly young) users. Campaigners
are alarmed, claiming that it serves up
highly sexualised or other inappropriate
content, and that its controls have simply
not kept pace with its growth. Shou Zi
Chew, TikTok’s chief executive, has said
that safety was a “top priority” and that
the company has ploughed billions of
dollars into the effort.
30 • The Sunday Times Magazine
At the inquest of Molly Russell last month
Meta apologised for the content the
14-year-old had viewed on Instagram
However, youth rights advocates are not
satisfied. Chris McKenna, founder of the
online child safety group Protect Young
Eyes, says the app is “toxic. I don’t know
how else to say it … There’s nothing on
earth like the TikTok algorithm.”
Zuckerberg, however, knows a hot
new app when he sees it. This summer
Instagram attempted a clumsy overhaul
in TikTok’s mould, testing a new AI-based
system to promote viral videos while
deprioritising posts from friends. The
backlash was fierce and immediate. Kylie
Jenner, the mega-influencer with 371
million followers, posted: “Make Instagram
Instagram again. (stop trying to be tiktok i
just want to see cute photos of my friends.)
Sincerely, everyone x.” Instagram swiftly
rolled back the changes but insisted it was
still moving to a TikTok-style interface.
Its copycat short-form video feature
called Reels has also faltered, however.
Leaked internal research at Meta seen by
The Wall Street Journal has shown falling
usage and that “most Reels users have no
engagement whatsoever”. Meta claims it
is the “fastest growing content format”
on Instagram and Facebook, with a 30 per
cent rise in time spent on Reels by users
through June. It is unclear from what base
that 30 per cent rise was calculated.
Zuckerberg is not leaving this fight to
his engineers alone. He has also drawn in
Meta’s Washington influence operation.
Once an outpost of a few dozen people,
today it is America’s biggest corporate
lobbying operation, employing more than
1,000 people worldwide. Last year it spent
$20 million, more than any company in
America, according to Open Secrets,
a group that tracks political funding.
A significant part of its efforts appear to
be focused on tarring TikTok. The company
this year enlisted a Republican consulting
firm, Targeted Victory, to amplify negative
stories in the press about TikTok, accusing
the app of being the origin of dangerous
teen trends and seeking to paint it as “the
real threat”. What better way to compete
with TikTok than to simply not have to?
A TikTok spokesperson said the company
was “deeply concerned” about “the stoking
of local media reports on alleged trends that
have not been found on the platform”.
Meta defended the campaign by saying:
“We believe all platforms, including TikTok,
should face a level of scrutiny consistent
with their growing success.”
Donald Trump nearly forced ByteDance
to sell TikTok’s North American operation
under threat of a ban, but the deal fell apart
once Joe Biden was elected in 2020.
Meta, however, is not the best messenger.
After the January 6 Capitol insurrection, its
already bad reputation among lawmakers
got worse, according to a former lobbyist
for the company. Then last year the
whistleblower Frances Haugen published
thousands of internal documents showing
how Meta, time and again, appeared to
prioritise growth over the safety and
wellbeing of its users and it sunk further
still. “The hatred [from Congress] became
so visceral,” says the lobbyist. “There was
just no room really to advance any kind
of dialogue or meaningful change.”
The FTC, led by the vociferous Big Tech
critic Lina Khan, has taken a similarly
withering view, which is problematic
because it has the power to block any
takeover — even of a tiny virtual reality
start-up. Regardless, the TikTok backlash
is gaining steam. The White House has
pressed the company over how the app
handles the data of its western users and its
ties to communist China, where ByteDance
is based. TikTok is said to be deep in talks
with the Department of Justice on a
settlement that would see a third party,
such as the tech giant Oracle, monitor its
algorithms, and the establishment of an
independent security panel to keep tabs
on TikTok’s US operations and report
back to the government.
Of course, nothing would please
Zuckerberg more than an outright ban. But
that seems unlikely. In the meantime, the
Meta chief, like hundreds of millions of
teenagers, can’t take his eyes off TikTok.
“All they do now is look over their
shoulders, looking at what TikTok is doing
instead of trying to be creative on their
own,” the lobbyist says. “They’re watching
the people running beside them and then
just kind of tripping over their own feet.”
One could argue that in so doing,
Zuckerberg has stumbled right into the
metaverse. Try as he might, he just can’t
seem to get anyone excited about the
virtual world he is so desperate to create.
And that includes, it seems, people at his

own company. A leaked note from the
metaverse chief, Vishal Shah, revealed that
the team developing Horizon Worlds,
Meta’s flagship metaverse app, barely uses
it. “We don’t spend that much time in
Horizon and our dogfooding dashboards
show this pretty clearly,” he wrote to
employees last month. “Dogfooding” refers
to how companies test their new services
by using them internally. “Why don’t we
love the product we’ve built so much that
we use it all the time? The simple truth is,
if we don’t love it, how can we expect our
users to love it?”
Two weeks later he issued a three-line
whip: use Horizon at least once a week, or
else. “Everyone in this organisation should
make it their mission to fall in love with
Horizon Worlds,” Shah wrote.
Zuckerberg excitedly unveiled a new
$1,500 version of the Quest virtual reality
headset earlier this month, alongside new
avatar graphics, hoping to stir enthusiasm
Meta enlisted a consulting firm
to amplify negative stories in
the press about TikTok, seeking
to paint it as “the real threat”
PA, GETTY IMAGES
with the public, or at the very least among
his fellow “Metamates”. The world mostly
yawned. The big innovation — that avatars
will soon have legs, not just floating torsos
— speaks to the long road ahead.
Zuckerberg spent $10 billion last year on
his techno-utopian dreamland. He’ll spend
tens of billions more. “We are committed to
being the industry leader in what we believe
will be the next phase of computing for the
planet,” a Meta spokesman says.
W
hat is striking is how
all-encompassing
Zuckerberg’s focus has
become, given what Meta
actually is: a bubbling
cauldron of humanity that brings with it a
mind-boggling catalogue of pressing issues,
from election security to youth mental
health. “Zuckerberg still thinks of himself
as the wunderkind creator instead of
someone running a decades-old company
that is a mainstay of modern life,” the
former lobbyist explains.
Meta disagrees with this characterisation.
It spends more than $5 billion annually on
what Zuckerberg terms its “defence budget”,
and employs 40,000 people to screen and
moderate content. Yet the boss’s focus on
a make-believe world at the expense of the
real one is alarming. Because even if young
people are leaving in droves, Facebook will
be with us for decades.
Its ageing core audience in America and
Europe is extremely valuable. And for them,
0 0 ?
Home Find Friends
says Currier, the venture capitalist,
“Facebook is not getting replaced”. He
adds: “All the money is in the moms. It’s
in the 40, 50 and 60-year-olds, and they’re
all on the blue app. That cash machine is
going to run for decades.”
There are any number of ways that one
could remake the experience, such as
offering an ad-free subscription that does
not have the endless chase for viral content
baked into it. “The mature thing would be
to figure out how to run the business as a
$300 billion company [it was briefly worth
$1 trillion last year] in a sustainable way
that doesn’t hurt people,” Currier says.
“They’re not trying to do that.”
Zuckerberg exudes a sense of someone
who’d rather move on. This was noticeable
last year after Haugen’s revelations. For
weeks newspapers around the world, led by
The Wall Street Journal, published damning
stories about the deleterious effects the
company’s apps have on young women, on
politics and society at large. Zuckerberg
didn’t immediately come out and apologise.
He didn’t say much at all. Instead he
wheeled out other executives, including
the recently promoted head of global
affairs, Nick Clegg, to handle the fallout.
Left: Zuckerberg unveils the
Meta Quest Pro VR headset this
month. Below left: the Meta boss
meets his avatar in a rendering
of the metaverse last year
After years of asking for forgiveness,
Zuckerberg decided he didn’t want to do
that any more. The boy obsessed with
empire seemed to have found that running
one was pretty un-fun. He talked to Rogan
about how his priorities have shifted. “For
the first maybe 15 years of building the
company, I was really just solely focused on,
‘Let’s connect more people, let’s grow this
community,’ ” he explained. “And now, I
obviously care about that, I want to continue
seeing these things thrive, but I think about
my life more now in terms of projects I want
to take on, on a decade-long basis.”
His “holy grail”, he explained, was
moving the world “beyond the phone”. He
added: “One of the thought experiments
that I like to do is thinking about how few
of the things that we physically have in
the world actually need to be physical.”
Most public companies are democracies.
They are owned by shareholders who,
if they think the boss is doing a bad job,
can simply vote them out. Meta is a
dictatorship. Due to a stock structure that
gives Zuckerberg majority control of the
voting rights, no one can remove him.
It’s his world. The question is, in five
years from now, in ten, who’s going to be
living in it? n
The Sunday Times Magazine • 31
 How the photographer Mick Rock, who died

ROCK’S
last year, defined a half-century of pop culture

32 • The Sunday Times Magazine

 GODS
Opposite page: Debbie Harry of
Blondie, shot for the band’s 1978
breakthrough album, Parallel Lines
This page: David Bowie, in his Ziggy
Stardust era, smokes a cigarette on
board the QE2 cruise ship in 1972
The Sunday Times Magazine • 33

PHOTOGRAPHS EXCERPTED FROM SHOT! BY ROCK © 2021 THE ESTATE OF MICK ROCK, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
D
avid Bowie, Queen,
Debbie Harry, Lou Reed
— all were captured by
the photographer Mick
Rock, “the man who shot
the Seventies”.
Born in London in 1948,
Rock used to say his career
was destined thanks to his
surname. His interest in
photography began when he
LOW-RES
Above: this Queen photoshoot, for their Below: Lou Reed in his flat in 1976.
1974 album Queen II, was inspired by A long-term friend of Rock, he said of
an image of Marlene Dietrich on the set the photographer in 2013, “He’s really
of the 1932 film Shanghai Express a guitar player but he uses a camera”
was studying modern
languages at Cambridge. He
was on an acid trip in the room
of a friend: “At the height of the
lunacy, I picked up [his] camera
and started to point and click.”
Rock started taking pictures
of friends in the local music
scene, Syd Barrett from Pink
Floyd among them. So began
a star-studded, five-decade
career in which he shot many
famous album covers,
including Queen II and Reed’s
Transformer. Addiction
derailed him in the 1990s but
he made a comeback,
photographing a new
generation of stars such as
Lady Gaga, Miley Cyrus and
Janelle Monáe. He died last
November aged 72 n
Shot! By Rock is published
by Titan Books at £34.99;
forbiddenplanet.com
The Sunday Times Magazine • 35
 Right: Mötley Crüe lather up in
1986. “You have to admire that
nobody got their hair too wet,”
Rock recalls in the book

Below left: Kate Moss, shot in

2002, wears a belt that once
belonged to Lou Reed — and
very little else

Below right: Madonna, then an

aspiring singer, strikes a pose
at Bleecker Bob’s Records
in New York, 1980

Opposite page: Bowie and the

guitarist Mick Ronson enjoy a
decidedly un-rock’n’roll lunch
on a train to Aberdeen, 1973

PHOTOGRAPHS EXCERPTED FROM SHOT! BY MICK ROCK ©2021 THE ESTATE OF MICK ROCK, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

36 • The Sunday Times Magazine

The Sunday Times Magazine • 37
MY ELECTRIFYING RIDE
What happened when a man who hates battery-powered
vehicles and pick-up trucks got behind the wheel
of a battery-powered pick-up truck
 J E R E M Y
CLARKSON
B
y and large the Ford
F-150 pick-up truck
is available only in
North America, but
even so it is by far, and
bar none, the
bestselling vehicle in
the world. Honda,
Toyota and
Volkswagen have the
entire globe covered
with their cheap ’n’ cheerful
hatchbacks, but someone buys
an F-150 about every 30
seconds, and no ordinary car
gets close to that. Let me put it
this way. If Ford made only the
F-150, it would still generate
more revenue than Starbucks,
McDonald’s or Coca-Cola. It’s
a phenomenon, this thing.
Sure, General Motors and
Chrysler have tried to take a
slice of the pick-up pie, but for
nigh on 40 years they’ve been
swept aside by the sales tsunami
that is the big flatbed Ford.
And then, three years ago,
Elon Musk announced that
Tesla would soon be launching
an electric pick-up truck. And
that made things interesting.
Sure, from the oil towns
of Texas to the Yellowstone
ranches of Montana, such a
concept is ridiculous. Opening
the bonnet of a pick-up and
finding an electric motor in
there would be like undoing
John Wayne’s zip and finding
ILLUSTRATION BY BEN CHALLENOR
that his penis was smaller than
a maggot. And it’s not just hick-
town America where this would
be an issue. We like to think that
the pick-up is only favoured by
dungaree Trump-people who
have National Rifle Association
bumper stickers. But that’s not
entirely accurate. Because at the
weekend Wall Street bankers on
the east coast and tech
billionaires out west will wait till
no one’s watching before loading
a chainsaw into their F-150 and
heading into the woods to chop
logs and make a cabin.
The late social commentator
PJ O’Rourke once wrote a
wonderful essay on America’s
love affair with pick-up trucks
and he pointed out that they are
the world’s first beer-guided
vehicles. He said that as soon as
you climbed aboard you wanted
The Clarksometer
Ford F-150 Lightning Platinum
1,989mm
2,438mm
Powertrain
Electric motor,
131kWh battery
Power
572bhp
Torque
775 lb ft
Acceleration
0-62mph: 4.0sec
Top speed
112mph
a Bud, and then soon you will
crash because a pick-up truck is
really nothing more than a back
porch. Except for the fact that
back porches have more
sophisticated suspension. It is
a quite brilliant piece and I urge
you to dig it out online.
My view? The pick-up truck
is embedded into America’s
psyche as firmly as the village
pub is into ours. Because it
appeals to the innate outdoorsy
spirit of a people whose recent
ancestors decided to uproot
their sticks and forge a new life
on the other side of the ocean.
5,911mm
Range / CO2
300 miles / 0g/km
Weight
3,127kg
Price
$96,874
Release date
Preorder for 2023 in US
Jeremy’s rating
It’s a checked shirt and
Wrangler jeans kind of vehicle,
and in America everyone
has both of those things in
their wardrobe. Apart from
people who say they don’t.
And they’re liars. It’s a he-man
car. A car that can handle
itself. It’s Jack Reacher with
windscreen wipers. So there
is no way in hell that anyone is
ever going to buy such a thing
if it runs on batteries.
But hang on a minute,
because what if they did? That
thought must have flashed
through the minds of Ford’s
senior executives after Mr Musk
made his announcement. What
if people really did buy into an
electrical pick-up truck? That
would wipe out the F-150, which
would also be the end of Ford.
To be safe they had to make
an electric version of the F-150,
and it couldn’t be half-arsed in
case Musk’s alternative wasn’t.
It had to be not just brilliant but
the best of the best of the best.
Well, it’s called the Lightning.
And it is. A point proved when
Ford received 200,000 orders
before it even went on sale.
I don’t like electric cars.
A car without an engine has
no soul so, to me, it’s no more
interesting than a deep freezer
or a toaster. But the pick-up
truck is a tool and, frankly,
I don’t really care what makes
it move about. Just so long as
it does so well, and cheaply.
“Cheaply” is an issue here
because the F-150 is American.
Which means that, given the
current exchange rate, it’ll cost
you about £400 million. ➤
The Sunday Times Magazine • 39
There are other American
issues too, such as a sat nav
system that can only be
narrowed down to a point
where Belgium, France and
Holland are also on the
map. “Hey, it says you’re in
Europe, buddy. What more
information do you need?”
I also laughed at the message
that flashed up on the dash every
time I started the motor. It said
I didn’t have enough range to
reach the nearest charge point,
which, in its Wilbur and Myrtle
brain, was in Nova Scotia. In
fact I charged it up at my garage
socket and in the morning it
was good for 260 miles.
That’s impressive, given the
size of this thing. It is 2ft longer
than a Mercedes S-class and is
8ft wide. Which means it’s only
3in narrower than a full-sized
Scania truck. Oh, and you drive
it from a seat that’s so far off the
ground, you can look down on
passing airliners.
This immensity did present
a few problems on the lanes of
the Cotswolds. I spent most
of my time going backwards
and then absorbing the hatred
from the oncoming motorists,
who were all thinking, “Why
on earth are you driving
something so big, you idiot?”
I’ll tell you why. It can carry
nearly a tonne in the boot and
tow a four-tonne trailer. This is
a serious workhorse. And yet,
in Sport mode, the top-of-the-
range version three-tonne
leviathan accelerates from
0-60 mph in 4.0 seconds. It’s
as fast as a Ferrari F40.
Then things get better.
Because it is quite exceptionally
quiet and refined. Sure, if you
concentrate you can sense
that it’s a truck and the body is
moving around slightly on its

THE BUDGET OPTION

Are small, economical electronic cars still good
value in an energy crisis? Nick Rufford reports

J
eremy’s all-American electron
guzzler is a useful reminder that a
big, heavy electric car will cost you
a lot more per mile to run than a
smaller, more efficient electric car.
With sharply rising electricity
prices, that difference is becoming
increasingly important. In recent
months the variable rate — the
cost you pay per unit of electricity
unless you have opted for a special
deal — has jumped from an average of
18.9p per kWh in 2021 to 34p per kWh
at the time of writing.
Many electric car owners have been able
to shrug off these increases because they
were on fixed-contract domestic tariffs,
far below the standard rate. But several of
Britain’s biggest energy suppliers are now
ending these deals. Until a few days ago the
cheapest listed tariff was offered by EDF,
one of the UK’s “big six” energy suppliers,
with five million customers. The off-peak
4.5p kWh “GoElectric 35” rate was still on
the company’s website, but it says it has
now been withdrawn for new customers
because of market volatility. “We aim to
reintroduce our full range of tariffs as soon
as we can,” the company says.
Octopus Energy, which has three million
customers, says it is increasing the price of
its cheapest home-charger tariff by 33 per
cent, from 7.5p to 10p per kWh off peak.
“That’s still a third of the standard variable
rate and it will apply only to new customers,”
Octopus says. “So if you are already on the
1 KIA NIRO EV
rate of 7.5p, that’s not going to change until
the end of your contract.” Price £36,245
Replenishing an electric car at a public Miles per kWh 4.4
site is significantly more expensive. Cost of recharge £6.48 (based
Operators of fast chargers on forecourts on 10p per kWh tariff)
and motorway services have been forced to Range up to 285 miles
jack up prices on rising wholesale electricity
costs. Osprey Charging, which operates As successful as Gangnam
more than 300 sites, has increased the cost Style in pop and Squid Game
of its rapid chargers by 50 per cent to £1 per in TV, the Kia Niro EV is another
kWh. At that rate it’s arguably as expensive triumph for the “Korean Way”.
to refuel an electric vehicle as a petrol or Kia is owned by the automobile
diesel one. The cost of fully charging a Tesla giant Hyundai, whose cars
Model S, for example, would be £100. have improved in leaps and
Overall, electric car running costs are bounds since the days of the
still cheaper thanks to generous tax breaks dreadful Hyundai Accent two
(currently zero vehicle excise duty and decades ago. There’s no
2 per cent benefit-in-kind tax paid by denying that as small electric
company car drivers). There’s a chance SUVs go the Niro is very good.
these could be wound down or the There are five seats, simple
government could apply 20 per cent controls, a practical boot and
VAT on home charging (to match the an extra 20 litres in the frunk.
tax on public chargers). To keep things simple there’s
All this could have an impact on the just one basic (201bhp) option
popularity of electric cars, which have with a single electric motor
recently enjoyed buoyant sales, accounting powering the front wheels.
for one in six new purchases in the UK. The main criticism of the
Among the key attractions has been that the previous electric Niro (the
running costs were as little as a fifth of the e-Niro — the “e” has since
petrol equivalent. In the new era of expensive been dropped) was that it
energy, the gap continues to narrow. looked dreary. The same can’t
We’ve tested three of the cheapest electric be said for the new version,
cars to run. Provided you can install a home which shows possibly the
charger, they still promise to save you biggest improvement in looks
money on a mile-for-mile basis compared between generations since
with a conventional car. At least for now. Steven Tyler produced Liv.

40 • The Sunday Times Magazine

mountings. But you won’t be
able to concentrate on that
because there are so many toys
to play with. You can even fold
the gearlever flat so you can
have a table between the front
seats. And I don’t mean a “table”
in the British Airways sense of
the word. I mean a “table” like
you’d get in Warwick Castle.
My favourite thing, though
— apart from the Ford Focus-
sized boot under the bonnet
2 NEW FIAT 500
Price £29,435
Miles per kWh 4.74
Cost of recharge £4.20
Range up to 199 miles
Jump in and you may well
say, “Ha, so this is what an
electric car is for.” The dinky
New 500 is Fiat’s latest take
on the timeless Cinquecento.
It’s cute enough for other
drivers to let you into queues,
nimble enough to nip into
spaces between traffic and
small enough to park where
other cars just won’t fit. In
other words, it’s the perfect
urban runabout. There’s still
plenty of space up front for
adults, though the rear seats
are best suited to children
or dogs. The tailgate lifts
to reveal a boot big enough
for a poodle but not the
family retriever.
The Fiat’s 42kWh battery
gives it a maximum range
of 199 miles on a single
charge. I managed only
161 miles but that still allows
a week between recharges
— was in the back. Because set
into the plastic liner on the
tailgate was a yardstick. And
another in centimetres in case
a Canadian buys one, I guess.
That tells you just how hard
those F-150 engineers were
paying attention. They made it
fast and quiet and smooth but
they never forgot that the
people who buy one will want
to measure a log at some point.
Off road? Don’t know. I took
based on an average daily
commute of 20 miles or so.
And on a 10p kWh tariff, the
cost of replenishing is still
just over four quid. If you
are the type of person
who enjoys sipping a coffee
on a Sardinian terrazza
and watching the world
go by, this car is for you. It
even looks like an upturned
espresso cup.
There’s also a convertible
version for those who trust
the British weather. It has
an electrically operated
fabric roof that peels back
on rails, like opening a sardine
tin. Verdict? The Fiat does
what electric cars do best:
short distances in city
traffic. That way you avoid
range anxiety and the
frustration of stopping
mid-journey to find a charging
bay that actually works.
If you are using the New
Fiat 500 for longer outings,
it will charge to 80 per
cent on a rapid charger
(85kW) in 35 minutes.
it on to the farm to see how its
four-wheel-drive system would
cope, but to reach the only
challenging bit of land I have
means going between two trees.
And it wouldn’t fit. The dogs
liked being in the back, though,
and I liked the electrically
operated panel in the back
window that meant I could stop
them jumping out when we
were moving, to chase deer.
I have no need for this car at
3 MINI ELECTRIC SHADOW EDITION
Price £36,550
Miles per kWh 4.45
Cost of recharge £3.26
Range up to 145 miles
The Shadow is a special
version of the Mini Electric
that’s so dark it’s reminiscent
of the spaceship in The
Restaurant at the End of the
Universe — the one made of
a material so absolutely black
it absorbed all incident light.
The car’s dusky exterior belies
a puppyish enthusiasm — its
cartoonish headlights and
get-up-and-go are similar
to the 1959 original. Like its
ancestor it has only three
doors, and space in the rear
and the boot is restricted.
Plus its range is just 145 miles,
or 100 in cooler weather —
the lowest here — so it’s best
not to stray too far from home.
But it is cheap to run. In the
1960s luminaries of pop, film
all. It’s stupid. The steering
wheel is on the wrong side, it’s
far too enormous, and while
it’s very refined for a truck, it’s
not as refined as a Range Rover.
And yet I want one. Which is
strange. I’ve always hated two
things in life. Pick-up trucks and
electrical power. This is a car
that combines both and I
absolutely love it. Which is a
measure of just how deeply
impressive it is n
and fashion turned to the
Mini as a cool, fuel-sipping
alternative to popular gas-
guzzlers of the era. The Shadow
is back doing what the Mini
is renowned for. On a 10p
tariff, it costs about the same
number of pounds and pence
to refuel as it did in the old
days. And, thanks to the
torque characteristics of
electric cars, it has regained
the zip that the original Mini
lost when later generations put
on weight. Powered by a single
motor that delivers 184bhp, it’s
even quicker off the line than
souped-up petrol versions.
If you want to see how the
Shadow is made, it’s worth
booking a tour of the Mini
factory in Cowley, Oxfordshire,
where visitors can watch an
army of robots lifting, welding
and dropping the battery and
motor assembly into place.
It’s a sight to behold.
The Sunday Times Magazine • 41
SAY CHEESE
CANDICE
BROWN
C
heesecakes come in all shapes and sizes,
which means you’re bound to find one kind
that you like. There are the wibbly-wobbly
baked cheesecakes that Spain’s Basque
country is famous for, miniature cheesecakes
that can be gobbled up in a few mouthfuls,
no-bake cheesecakes that need only to be
chilled in the fridge, and then big “wow”
cheesecakes with indulgent toppings such
as biscuits and blades of chocolate.
Everyone has their favourite part. Mine is
the crunchy, crumbly biscuit base, but for you it might
be the thick, rich cream cheese middle, or the top layer
that can be a sweet coulis, ganache or custard.
A cheesecake can be as simple or extravagant as you
want. I know you’re going to love these recipes because
when I brought them into my pub for everyone to try,
the chefs were fighting over who had the last slice.
42 • The Sunday Times Magazine
Whether you go big and bold or
bite-sized, there’s a cheesecake
to please all palates
Amaretto Basque
cheesecake
This cheesecake is all about
the texture: a soft middle and
a slightly crisp, caramelised
top. The gorgeous deep colour
also gives it the wow factor
when it comes out of the oven.
Serves 8-10
Ingredients
• 800g full-fat cream cheese
• 150g caster sugar
• 60g soft light-brown sugar
• 35g plain flour
• 200g sour cream
• 4 eggs, beaten
• 50ml amaretto
For the cherry coulis
• 300g fresh or frozen and
defrosted black cherries
• 50g caster sugar
• 50ml amaretto
• 25g almond flakes, to serve
01 Heat oven to 220C (240C
non-fan). Place two big
squares of greaseproof paper
on top of each other to make
a large star shape, then push
down into a high-sided 20cm
cake tin. The paper should be
twice the height of the tin.
02 In a large mixing bowl, add
the cream cheese and the two
sugars. Using an electric or
stand mixer, combine until
the cream cheese is smooth
and the sugar has dissolved.
03 Add the remaining
cheesecake ingredients and
mix together, but be careful
not to overdo it and don’t turn
the speed up too high. Once
combined, pour the mixture
into the prepared cake tin,
give it a jiggle and gently tap
it on the worktop to remove
any bubbles and level it out.
04 Put in the oven for 35 min
until the top is dark brown, as
if burnt, but the cheesecake
still has a wobble. Remove
from the oven and set aside to
cool fully in the tin. It will sink
and may crack — this is good!
Refrigerate for at least 2 hours.
05 Put the cherries, sugar and
amaretto in a saucepan over
a low-medium heat. Allow the
sugar to dissolve, then turn the
heat up slightly and bubble for
about 15 min, until thickened.
Set aside to cool and then blitz
the mixture until smooth.
06 Lightly toast the flaked
almonds in a dry pan. Cut the
cheesecake into portions, then
serve with a drizzle of coulis
and a sprinkle of the almonds.
Bourbon biscuit
cheesecake
The dark biscuit bottom and
ganache make this cheesecake
a chocolate lover’s dream. It’s
rich, so start with a small slice
and scale up. You could try it
with a custard cream base and
cold custard on top instead.

Serves 8-10

Ingredients
• 400g bourbon biscuits
• 100g unsalted butter, melted
• 500g full-fat cream cheese
• 250ml double cream
• 75ml icing sugar
• ½ tsp vanilla bean paste

For the ganache

• 200ml double cream
• 200g dark chocolate chips
or chunks

01 Separate the bourbon

biscuits and scrape the filling
into a separate bowl.

02 Place the biscuits into

a food processor and blitz
until you have coarse crumbs.
Alternatively, you could put
them in a sandwich bag and
whack them with a rolling pin.
Stir through the melted butter
until combined, then tip the
mixture into a greased 20cm
springform tin. Using the back
of a spoon, press the biscuits
into a smooth, level base, then
place in the fridge to harden.
03 In a large mixing bowl,
place the cream cheese and
the scraped-out bourbon
filling and whip together.
Add the double cream,
icing sugar and vanilla bean
paste and mix until thick and
smooth. Pour the mixture onto
the prepared biscuit base and
level out with a spatula, then
place in the fridge to set.
04 Next, make the ganache.
Pour the cream into a small
saucepan and, over a low
heat, warm it gently until small
bubbles break the surface.
Remove from the heat and tip
in the chocolate. Do not mix
— leave it for 3-5 min and then
whisk until smooth, thick and
glossy. Allow to cool for a few
minutes and then pour over
the cheesecake and level out.
Place back in the fridge for at
least 3 hours to fully set.
05 To release the cheesecake
from the tin, either use a
blowtorch to gently heat the
outside edge, or hold a warm
tea towel around the sides,
then gently loosen the spring
opening on the tin and lift
it out carefully. Use a sharp
knife to slice and serve.
Miniature berry
cheesecakes
Individual desserts are an
easy way to make your
dinner party guests feel extra-
special. They’re also a good
cheat if your guests aren’t
that hungry because they are
gone in just a few spoonfuls.
Of course, you can also
make this recipe into one
big cheesecake.
SAVE Makes 12
FOR LATER Ingredients
You can share For the biscuit base
and save • 150g crushed ginger snap
recipes from or digestive biscuits, or
our digital a combination of both
editions • 75g butter, melted

44 • The Sunday Times Magazine

ROBERT BILLINGTON FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE. FOOD STYLING: LAURIE PERRY. PROP STYLING: LUIS PERAL. GETTY IMAGES
For the filling
• 340g full-fat cream cheese,
at room temperature
• 100g caster sugar
• 3 tbsp plain flour
• 125g sour cream
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 2 free-range eggs
• 8-10 fresh strawberries,
hulled and roughly chopped
• 12-15 fresh raspberries,
halved
For the topping
• 125g fresh strawberries
and raspberries
• 1 tbsp icing sugar
• Juice of ½ lemon
01 Heat the oven to 150C (170C
non-fan). Add cupcake liners
to a 12-cupcake baking tray.
02 Combine the blitzed biscuit
crumbs with melted butter in a
mixing bowl and divide evenly
between the cupcake liners
(about 2 tbsp per cup). Once
spooned in, use the back of
a teaspoon to gently press
the crumbs into the cases.
03 Bake the crusts for 5 min,
then remove from the oven
and allow to cool while you
make the filling. Reduce the
oven to 130C (150C non-fan).
04 In a large bowl, mix the
cream cheese, sugar and flour
until combined; use a low
speed to stop too much air
from getting into the batter,
which can cause cracks in the
baked cheesecakes. Scrape
down the sides of the bowl,
then add the sour cream and
vanilla extract. Beat on a low
speed until well combined.
05 Now add the eggs one
at a time, beating slowly and
scraping the sides of the
bowl after each addition.
06 Add about 1 tablespoon
chopped strawberries and
raspberries to each cheesecake
crust, so you have an even
layer at the bottom of each.
Then spoon the cheesecake
filling into each cheesecake
cup, until they’re almost full.
07 Bake the cheesecakes for
20 min, then turn off the oven
and leave the door closed for
Far left: bourbon biscuit
cheesecake. Left: miniature
berry cheesecakes
another 5 min. Wedge the
oven door open — I use a
wooden spoon for this — and
allow the cheesecakes to cool
for another 15-20 min before
transferring them to the fridge
to firm up completely. Once
they have cooled, peel away
the cupcake liners.
08 To make the topping, put
the fresh berries, sugar and
lemon juice in a small bowl
and, using a stick blender,
blitz together until you have
a pouring consistency; add a
teaspoon of water if needed.
09 For a splash of colour to
finish, pour the berry puree
over the cheesecakes just
before serving n
The Sunday Times Magazine • 45
 TABL E T A L K ● Marina O'Loughlin

Cardiff scores big with

a hat-trick of local heroes

I
BACARETO
13 Church Street,
’d booked restaurant, train
and hotel long in advance
as I’d been wanting to try
Venetian homage — small
glasses of house wine at £2.90),
spritzes and white negronis.
out this tiny 12-seater in You might not mistake Church
Cardiff CF10 1BG; Cardiff since first hearing of Street for Cannaregio, but
bacareto.co.uk it. I’d paid my £40 deposit. Bacareto is a lovely place to
But more than a week before be. Who knew that a bunch

KINDLE
Sophia Gardens,
heading off I discovered my
booking was for one diner,
not two. Emails, texts,
of skate park owners could
reinvent themselves as such
smart, savvy restaurateurs?
phone calls to the chef — Plan C is a curious idea in
Cardiff CF11 9SZ;
he hung up on me — made no a city not known for tropical
kindlecardiff.co.uk difference. No reply, nothing. temperatures: the completely
Unwilling to keel up for a outdoor Kindle, recreated from

NOOK
587 Cowbridge Road
East, Cardiff CF5 1BE;
nookcardiff.co.uk
solitary, lengthy tasting menu
when I’d done everything in my
power to amend my booking,
I’m afraid my reaction to this
astounding lack of customer
service was, maturely, stick it up
yer jacksie. So, Cardiff, bring me
your Plan B. And maybe C and D
— I’m nothing if not thorough.
In the shadow of the
cathedral, Plan B is Bacareto,
an indie beacon in a parade
of (mostly) mid-range chains.
What a cool little joint this
is, with its terrazzo flooring,
mustard yellow booths and
distressed plaster walls; its
hidden, herb-lined terrace
backing on to the walls of the
market. The idea is Venetian-
style snacks with a few larger
dishes, as restrained or blowout
as you fancy. We order from
both extremes: a mouthful of
devilled egg half, titfered with
pungent anchovy; a binge of
fritto misto di verdura — cavolo
nero, sweet potato, pepper,
courgette, all with garlic aïoli,
like the poshest munchy box.
There are pizzette, ours
idiosyncratically topped
with carrot and confit garlic;
quantities of Trealy Farm salumi
with “gnocco fritto” and salad
leaves dressed in truffle honey.
This is perfect drinking food,
so there are ombre (another
the former warden’s house at
one of the entrances to Sophia
Gardens. Fairylight-decked
timber structures — much
of it reclaimed — and beds of
herbs and vegetables set the
scene for a “fire food” menu
This lot know the contemporary
food scene and are happily up
to their armpits in it
that galumphs from fat
harumaki (nori-wrapped, fried
Japanese-ish noodle rolls) to
confit duck (done almost
Caribbean style, with rice and
beans and jerk seasoning) to a
classic steak au poivre, served
with a gilded puff of pomme
dauphine, fried potatoes laced
with choux dough. Smoky,
tandoori-spiced aubergine
comes with golden raisins;
almost blackened corn with a
glorious mess of tangy buffalo
sauce and blue cheese. They’re
not short on ambition here.
Or skill: it all works. Cocktails
from a short list see off any
potential chills; I adore the
almond popcorn sour. “We have
blankets too,” they tell us kindly.
Plan D is Kindle’s sibling —
same owners. It’s Nook, a cute,
wine bottle-lined corner spot in
Canton, in a small parade of
other indie food businesses.
A plaintive tweet draws me in:
“The mood in the camp is low,”
they say. “We need to call on
you guys. Talk about us to
people you love.” So off I trot.
I’m glad I do — each dish is a
small triumph. Particular love
for purple sprouting broccoli,
tempura-fried till crunchy,
in a pool of satay-ish peanut
sauce punctuated by blobs
of fine chilli jam and topped
with a fried egg — a rampage
of flavours and textures. And
ragu of pork and aubergine
over folds of mandilli di seta
(silk handkerchief ) pasta
hiding a pool of béchamel;
a genuinely inspired twist on
lasagne. Hasselback potatoes,

46 • The Sunday Times Magazine


crisp-fudgy, sit in quantities of
butter spiked with caramelised
garlic, chive aïoli piped on top,
pearls of mustard seed for
contrast. Mamma mia.
Their post continues: “Do
we shut up shop and reinvent
the offering?” I’d say no, hang
on in there — what you’re
doing is uplifting. The Sybille
Kuntz Qualitätswein is luscious.
And those potatoes are the
stuff of legend.
The day before I’m due on
my prepaid train to my prepaid
hotel and despite increasingly
querulous messages to the
chef-patron of Plan A, the
deposit is unceremoniously
dumped back in my account.
I won’t be troubling him again.
So three beauties for the price
of one — almost literally: the
tasting menu at Plan A, without
drinks, costs £75 a head; each
of these bills, for two, booze
AGA HOSKING
included, is about 70 quid.
None is perfect. Bacareto’s
flat, pitta-like gnocco fritto
Sharing plates at Nook
are a “small triumph”;
its hasselback potatoes
“the stuff of legend”
would startle a Bolognese.
Walking past Kindle later
during a torrential downpour,
being open to the elements
doesn’t issue a siren call (walls,
they tell us, are in the pipeline).
Nook’s heavenly apricot
bakewell tart is a budgie-sized
portion. But they share a
loveliness, a commitment to
getting it right. And all of them
show evidence of owners and
chefs who have travelled and
HOW MUCH?
Sharing plates £1.50-£15
Desserts £1.90-£7
Total for two, including
drinks and 12% service
charge or tip £65-£75
learnt. This lot know the
contemporary food scene and
are happily up to their armpits
in it. Why yes, they are all
sharing plates and natural wines.
You can’t fight it, basically.
Bonus: we stay at a superb
independent hotel, Parador 44
— upstairs from the excellent
Asador 44 — which I can
recommend unreservedly:
lovely rooms, staggeringly good
breakfast and the finest honesty
bar I’ve ever met, featuring
a whole drawer dedicated to
the divine Torres black truffle
crisps. So, non-locals: go to
Cardiff, dive into its spirited
food scene — such fun. Avoid
the binge-tastic chains in
St Mary Street and drink at
Vermut and Nighthawks, both
charming. Locals: support your
indies — they need it more
than ever. And everybody:
read the small print before
sending money to strangers n
Twitter: @marinaoloughlin
Insta: @marinagpoloughlin
PLATE OF
THE NATION
Aldi Wagyu
Burgers
I’ve never seen the point
of grinding up expensive
wagyu beef and bunging
it in a burger — even in
restaurants. I’m not sure Aldi
is about to change my mind
anytime soon with these
frozen jobs. Pink as Pepto
Bismol when released from
their pack, the advised 25
minutes under the grill fugs
out the kitchen and stings
the eyes. Still, it gives the
burgers a nice crust.
The beef looks more
pulverised than ground,
but these wind up juicy and
meaty, with a super-savoury
backnote (perhaps the
inspired addition of
“fermented shio koji”). Yes,
they leach a bucketload of
fat, but are also self-basted
in enough lubrication to
really do the job.
Forgive the lack of buns:
supermarket burger buns
are either exercises in limp
disappointment or crumbly
sweetness (and mine had
gone mouldy). The loaf is
a decent stand-in. I defy
anyone to identify the beef
as wagyu in a blind test, but
by frozen burger standards,
these are royalty. Knock me
down with a gherkin. MO’L
£2.99 for 284g; aldi.co.uk
The Sunday Times Magazine • 47
 DR IN K ● Will Lyons

Don’t bottle up your

passion for port

R
epeat after me: port is not just for Christmas. decant it and it can be drunk immediately (as opposed
That’s the time of year most people associate to straight-up vintage port, which is made to age and
it with, but it’s worthy of far more regular improve in the bottle for decades). This is where I believe
outings than that. As well as being one of the you will find the most value — as demonstrated by
best value wines on the high street (given how Sainsbury’s rich and concentrated 2016 Taste the
much work goes into making it), port offers a Difference LBV Port (£12), produced by the Symington
variety of styles to suit all sorts of occasions. family of Graham’s port fame.
White port and tonic saw me through the My favourite style, however, is tawny, which is a
summer, but we’ve moved into the season
of the more familiar sweet red version.
Bargain different beast altogether and can spend anything up
to 40 years in oak casks. Amber in colour and with a rich,
Ruby is the classic entry-level port, a blend of the nutty, figgy flavour, it is fantastic for sipping on a cold
of grapes that makes a rich, easygoing accompaniment
to the cheeseboard. If you pick your producer wisely,
week autumnal evening or, like sherry, can be served chilled
as an aperitif. Given its price compared with other aged
such as Dirk Niepoort’s Porto Ruby (Oddbins, £18.25), 2021 LOUIS wine, it also makes a useful gift for anniversaries and
you’ll be rewarded with a fruity, vibrant, supple glass. DUFOUR WHITE birthdays. Where else can you find a 30-year-old wine
A step up in quality is late-bottled vintage, a wine from France (11%) for the mere £75 that the Wine Society asks for Dow’s
a single year that has been aged in oak vats for several Marks & extraordinary 30-Year-Old Tawny. It’s like Christmas in
years before bottling. As with ruby, there is no need to Spencer, £5 a glass — but it would be a shame to save it until then n
Launched at
the end of July,
this is one of
only a handful
of wines in
supermarkets
at this price
point that really
deliver on
flavour. An
unusual blend
of ugni blanc
(aka trebbiano)
and colombard,
it’s a simple
yet refreshing
white with
a crisp, zesty
1 2 3 grapefruit finish. 4 5 6

1. 2015 W&J Graham’s Late Bottled Vintage Port 4. Quinta do Noval 10-Year-Old Tawny Port (20%)
(20%) Morrisons, £14 One of the best LBV offerings Master of Malt, £23.36 Here’s a complex, luxuriously
on the high street — plenty of weight and structure, sweet tawny comprising several vintages. Enticing
with intense dark fruit. Lovely with cheddar or stilton. walnut aromas meld with a rich, figgy caramel finish.

2. Taylor’s Chip Dry White Port (20%) Waitrose, down 5. 2006 Warre’s Quinta da Cavadinha Vintage Port
from £13.99 to £11.19 A bargain to snap up and keep (20%) Waitrose, down from £33.99 to £24.99
in the fridge. This crisp example has oaky notes and Produced from a single estate, this is a serious, finely
works perfectly as an aperitif with tonic, ice and mint. structured, elegant vintage port with mature fruit.

3. Finest 10-Year-Old Tawny Port (20%) Tesco, 6. 2013 Taylor’s Quinta de Vargellas Vintage Port
JASON ALDEN

£12.50 A smooth, generous tawny that punches well (20%) Tanners, £36 A rich, intense example from one
above its weight on price. With a pretty amber hue and of the leading quintas in the Douro. It’s supple and
nutty sweetness, it makes a delightful drop for winter. soft, with plenty of luscious dark fruit and sweet spice.

The Sunday Times Magazine • 49

 BO OK S TO LIV E BY ● Mariella Frostrup

“I don’t want the party to stop

just because I’m nearly 40”

Q
I’m in my late thirties and have spent the past
decade drifting a lot — a master’s degree, a few
odd jobs to pay the rent but not what you’d call
a real career, though it did leave plenty of time
for parties and travelling. I’m starting to feel like I’m
being left behind. All my friends are doing really
well in their careers and are beginning to take
things more seriously, but I don’t want to give up
the party. Can you recommend any books that offer
glamorous, alternative blueprints for your thirties?
there’s nothing sadder than the friend clutching the
half-finished bottle of cheap plonk and calling out to
those departing for bed and the next day’s duties not
to abandon them. If it’s just about keeping the craic
level high and responsibilities low it will inevitably
become a hollow pursuit.
Maybe it’s time to zoom in on what else will fulfil
you in a world that’s full of pressing causes and amazing
adventures. I recently went to a gathering of people
I hadn’t seen since we’d roamed Soho as a pack in the

A
I’d love to congratulate you on keeping the dream
of nonstop fun alive while your contemporaries are
sobering up, but partying like it’s 1999/2009/2019
isn’t necessarily going to rank highly in the great
scheme of accomplishments. I’m wondering if my
definition of a glamorous, alternative blueprint differs
from yours. The idea that unfettered fun is a form of
liberation is questionable. Freedom is intoxicating, but
a crashing hangover and the regrets that follow in its
wake aren’t trophies to be cherished. As you get older
1990s — men still with the same Oasis mops and gothic
pallor, and women either nipped and tucked or bearing
the weight of time with resignation. “You look exactly
WRITE TO the same,” was the empty compliment that echoed
MARIELLA around. We all need to move on and find solace in our
evolution. Abandoning excess baggage and discovering
Got a dilemma? a new strength of purpose may feel like a challenge but
Email mariella@ the alternative is far less appealing ■
sunday-times. Listen to Mariella’s Books to Live By podcast, new
co.uk. Anonymity episodes every Thursday. This week her guest is
on request the businesswoman and TV star Deborah Meaden

Lost Dog
Kate Spicer
Ebury, £9.99
A wonderful chronicle of
disillusionment, as the author
— a party girl and lifestyle
journalist, superficially
seeming to have it all — falls
head over heels for a rescue
dog. When the dog goes
walkabout she sobers up
enough to discover that
cocaine, alcohol and chaos
KATE MARTIN
The Great Gatsby
F Scott Fitzgerald
Union Square & Co, £12.99
This classic chronicle of the
Jazz Age is the ultimate party
turned sour. Jay Gatsby’s
determination to keep the
party alive in an era of illusion
and delusion and his obsessive
love for Daisy Buchanan are
chronicled by 30-year-old Nick
Carraway. “Golden lads and
girls all must, as chimney
A Visit from the Goon Squad
Jennifer Egan
Little, Brown, £9.99
It’s not just lifestyle choices
that come under scrutiny in
Egan’s brilliantly illuminating
story about contemporary
life, but the shifting sands of
relationships and how they
kaleidoscopically rearrange
themselves over time.
Watching 1970s San Francisco
punks battle on as
Bright Lights, Big City
Jay McInerney
Bloomsbury, £8.99
A celebration (and cautionary
tale) of life lived in the fast
lane at a New York fashion
magazine, fuelled by a
youthful sense of invincibility
and cocaine. McInerney wrote
what he knew: the uptown
parties and downtown wrecks
of the 1980s, when any
moment in the spotlight

aren’t the ingredients for the sweepers, come to dust,” disillusioned adults 20 years should have come with a
happiness she seeks. Life- Shakespeare observed. Here’s later is a salutary lesson in how warning sign. It’s almost as
affirming and heart-warming. the book to prove it. we all need to learn to evolve. good as having been there.

The Sunday Times Magazine • 51


A L I F E
Dr Sian Williams
Broadcaster and psychologist, 57
W
illiams has been
a news anchor and
presenter for the
BBC and Channel 5
during a broadcasting
career of more than
35 years. In March, after
15 years of mental health
training, she became a senior
psychological therapist with
the Centre for Anxiety, Stress
and Trauma. Williams also
presents the Radio 4 podcast
Life Changing. She lives in
Kent with her husband, Paul
Woolwich, who works for
an environmental charity.
They have five children, aged
between 30 and 13.
I get up at 6am, sometimes 5am,
ingrained from my days on the
BBC Breakfast sofa. I have a cup
of tea, stretch for 20 minutes and
then spend an hour getting the
youngest kids to school. After a
walk with our dog, Molly, I have
a couple of eggs with oatcakes
and Marmite and endless pints
of tea, like Tony Benn.
I spent three years working
with cancer patients and
trauma survivors in the
morning [while completing
a doctorate in counselling
psychology] and presenting
the Channel 5 news in the
afternoon. My supervisor
thought I was absorbing too
much, but putting on the
face and the news presenter
clothes actually helped close
the door on the trauma.
A lot of skill is involved in
making you look television-
friendly — a great make-up
artist, good hair and lighting.
Without all that, I look like
a 57-year-old mum-of-five. In
500 hours plus of one-on-one
therapy I’ve been recognised by
patients on only two occasions.
58 • The Sunday Times Magazine*
I N T H E
I’ve had some private clients,
but my focus is now an NHS
role where I’ll be providing
psychological support to
frontline staff but also helping
to train emergency services so
they understand what trauma
looks like.
I felt a lot of complex feelings,
including guilt, as a journalist
— seeing people in the depths
of despair, using their stories
to bear witness, but not being
able to help. You take on their
suffering long after you’ve left
a disaster zone and if you don’t
process it, it can turn around
and bite you. Working in that
area, you need not just physical
but mental protection. I’m now
delivering trauma awareness
training to journalists coming
back from Ukraine — I call it
an emotional flak jacket.
I always stop for lunch, even
D AY if I feel I haven’t got time. My
late dad was a journalist [on
Fleet Street and BBC radio]
and, growing up, our lives were
governed by deadlines. Sunday
lunch came out of the oven as
the pips sounded on Radio 4.
If the phone rang we knew we’d
lost him. He said: “Don’t be a
journalist and, whatever you do,
don’t work for the BBC.” I did
both! I was a good girl but it was
my one act of defiance. Working
in the NHS feels like a homage
to my mum, who was a nurse.
Earlier this year I wrote
an academic paper on how
mindfulness affects people
living with cancer. I know from
my own experience of it that it’s
easy to get into a pattern of
brooding [Williams underwent
a double mastectomy in 2015].
It’s hard to accept kindness
from others and even harder
to show it to ourselves.
My children have needed
quite intense mothering for
30 years. I used to think that
looking after myself was selfish:
I’ve got quite a strong self-
critical voice that drives me,
but it can also dominate.
Psychology has taught me to
have more self-compassion.
And I’ve learnt to be more
flexible, otherwise the tough
times can break you.
The people we hear from
on Life Changing have that
psychological flexibility. Their
WORDS OF WISDOM experiences may seem tragic
and horrific but, in each case,
Best advice I was given they have something to teach
My son Joss gave me us about resilience.
a brass plaque engraved The kids come home at 5pm.
with the words “The ship I ask if they have homework and
is safest in the harbour they always say no. Then they
but that is not where it disappear to their rooms to chat
is meant to be” with the mates they’ve just left.
Even when I was presenting the
Advice I’d give evening news, we’d always eat
Be mindful, be grateful together as a family and still do.
and be kind As soon as I hit the sofa, my
eyes start closing. We’ll try
What I wish I’d known to watch something but the
That I was going to be OK last thing I hear is Paul saying,
“I don’t know why we bother.”
By 9.30pm it’s all over and
I’m snoring gently n
Interview by Caroline Scott.
Life Changing is on Radio 4
on Wednesdays at 9am