S U P P L E M E N T O F T H E Y E A R | I S S U E № 102 | 9 SE P T E M BE R 2 02 3

SKY’S
THE
LIMIT
How Richard Osman became
the biggest thing in books
I N T E R V I E W PA G E 1 0
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 CONTENTS 09.09.23 ISSUE № 102

5
Books
Kidnapped by my family
Shane McCrae on the
memoir that has helped Sign up
him confront his past for our Inside Saturday
P45 newsletter
CU T TINGS
Nonfiction reviews........ 48
Q&A......................................5 Fiction reviews................51
Experience..........................6 Emily Wilson’s Iliad.......54
Dining across the divide....7 The books of my life.......56
Flashback...........................8 The big idea......................57

10 59
F E AT U R E S

‘I’m fairly alpha at times’

LIFESTYLE

Right club
Richard Osman on not How to win any argument
being a nerd P59
P10
Blind date.........................62
Who’s the daddy? Tim Dowling.....................63
What a gene test revealed This is how we do it........65
P16 You be the judge..............66
Ask Annalisa....................67
‘Suddenly I was grateful’ Style...................................68
Lucy Webster on loving Plants................................69
her disabled body
P22 Travel
Smart shot
Great rail adventures The best pictures
‘I’m puzzled why I am
suddenly famous’
To Sicily – and going solo
P72
taken on phones
Miriam Margolyes talks Quim
to Simon Hattenstone How far to the pub?........76
Puzzles..............................78 Fàbregas

31
P26

Reach the Soul, 2018 in the village, Moussa one, but of those around
Shot on iPhone 7 was the muse. us, too.”
“Photography is one He has no qualms
The Senegalese village of the activities we teach about using an iPhone
of Sare Soukande is – art is very important for for work: “Phones are
home to fewer than 500 children. In this case, we good for connecting
C U LT U R E S AT U R D AY people. Ten-year-old did a portrait exercise, with social media while
The Guardian Moussa, pictured here, is then analysed the photos travelling, while a
A little life Kings Place one of them. Attentive, we took together,” says camera is useful if I want
Britain’s tiniest theatres 90 York Way passionate and a great Fàbregas, who had been to publish a book or hold
P31 London N1 9GU football player, Moussa is thinking about this shot an exhibition. But what
— one of the boys enrolled for a long time. “The I use doesn’t really
Cultural prescription......35 Byline illustrations: in an educational project hands belong to Moussa’s matter. A photographer
Music.................................37 Delphine Lee Fàbregas works on friends. I wanted to send is known by his images,
What to do this week .....40 Spot illustrations: beside his professional the message that human not by his camera.”
Visual arts........................ 42 Lalalimola photography. That day suffering is not only of Grace Holliday
COVER: JAY BROOKS /THE GUARDIAN. SET DESIGN: SANDY SUFFIELD

Edith Pritchett A week in Venn diagrams

This product is made from sustainable managed forest and controlled sources. Printed by Walstead Group, Bicester The Guardian | 09.09.23 | S AT UR DAY | 3
Anything but ordinary

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 CUTTINGS
The comedian on working at the bingo,
being kept awake by the perimenopause
and crying over Elton John
Kerry Godliman
Interview:
rview: Rosanna Greenstreet
SHANE ANTHONY SINCL AIR/GET T Y IMAGES
B
orn in London, Kerry Godliman,
49, trained at Rose Bruford
drama school and became
a standup comic. In 2012, she was cast
in Ricky Gervais’s Channel 4 sitcom
Derek, and the next year she began her
own BBC Radio 4 show Kerry’s List. She
is a regular on radio and TV comedy
programmes such as Just a Minute
and Live at the Apollo. Her acting roles
include TV dramas Save Me, Whitstable
Pearl, Trigger Point and Adult Material,
and from 2019 she starre
starred in Gervais’s
black comedy After Life. Godliman
hosts the Memory Lane podcast
p with
Jen Brister. She is marrie
married with two
children and lives in London.
Lon
When were you happiest
happiest?
In the sea, somewhere hot.
ho Looking
back at people I love on th
the beach.
What is your greatest fea
fear?
Losing my mind.
What is the trait you mos
most
deplore in yourself?
Comparing myself to othe
other people.
What is the trait you most
deplore in others?
Comparing themselves to other people.
What was your most
embarrassing moment?
Farting in front of Colin Firth
Fi . over. Especially Pixar ones. I alarmed
What is your most
treasured possession?
My garden.
Describe yourself in three words
Curious, suggestible, silly.
If you could bring something
somethi extinct
back to life, what would yo
you choose?
Privacy.
Which book are you ashamed
asham not to
have read?
Loads. All the greats.
My most
embarrassing
moment?
Farting
in front of
Colin Firth
Who is your celebrity crush?
Mark Ruffalo. Adam Frost.
What makes you unhappy?
Populism. Greed. Climate change.
Inequality. Pollution. Hunger. Rivers
full of silage.
What was the last lie that you told?
That I was busy when I wasn’t.
What do you owe your parents?
They laughed at my jokes, encouraged
me not to give up and to work hard.
What did you dream about last night?
Very old school friends who I’ve not
seen for decades.
What is the worst job you’ve done?
Bar and buffet at Top Ten Bingo in
Greenford. A lot of the old people were
quite bigoted.
What has been your biggest
disappointment?
This country’s enchantment with
privately educated, self-serving liars.
If you could edit your past,
what would you change?
I’d drink less alcohol in the 90s.
When did you last cry, and why?
I cry all the time. Films can tip me
my kids when we went to see Coco –
I was a mess. I cried at the Elton John
gig at Glastonbury.
What has been your closest brush
with the law?
On an anti-BNP demonstration in the
90s, I got much closer to a police horse
than is advisable.
What keeps you awake at night?
The perimenopause.
Would you rather have more sex,
money or fame?
I’m OK where I am with those three.
What is the most important lesson life
has taught you?
Stress is bad for your health.
What happens when we die?
I don’t think we’re meant to know.
Tell us a joke
This government.
Tell us a secret
I left the dog out all night once.
Forgot I had a dog.
The Guardian | 09.09.23 | S AT UR DAY | 5
CUTTINGS
Experience
I suddenly lost my hearing
As told to Daniel Dylan Wray
I
’m obsessed with music. As
a teenager, I couldn’t leave the
house without my headphones,
and I’d have music on all day.
I met my best friends at gigs.
My summers were filled with
festivals, and my shelves with records.
Last year I was in the top 1% of Spotify
listeners from over 400 million users.
But on 14 December last year
something changed. I was watching TV
at home in Sheffield and became aware
of a faint tapping sound in my left ear. It
wasn’t loud enough to be annoying, but
the next day it turned into a whooshing
sound. I feared it was tinnitus.
Those whooshing sounds began to
sound like loud crashes, and by the
weekend it had started to become hard
to hear in my left ear. Six days later
I went to see my doctor, who looked
6 | S AT UR DAY | 09.09.23 | The Guardian
in my ears, said they were a bit red,
reassured me there was nothing to
worry about and prescribed me some
spray. I was told I would be fine again
in a few hours. But I wasn’t.
By Christmas Day, the cycle of
tapping, whooshing and crashing in
my left ear was getting louder, and it
was getting harder to hear with every
hour. On Boxing Day, the crashing
noises started in my right ear, too.
I booked another appointment with
my GP and saw a different doctor.
He looked in my ears and said they
weren’t infected. He prescribed some
spray and told me to come back in two
weeks if it didn’t help. The next day
I could hear music on my headphones
but could barely make out people
speaking. The day after that was the
last time I was able to hear voices.
I went for a hearing test at
Specsavers in the new year. When
I set off, a fire engine zoomed by but
I didn’t hear anything. It was starting
to feel really serious.
I was then given an emergency
referral to the ear, nose and throat
department at the hospital. As
I was struggling to hear, my doctor
and I typed notes on my phone. The
doctor wrote that my ears were fine,
and wondered if my condition was
I was expecting to
miss music more –
but the songs are
still in my head
Portrait: Jo Ritchie
brain-related. When I was a teenager
I was diagnosed with mitochondrial
disease, where the mitochondria
in the body don’t produce enough
energy. For me, the condition causes
what feels like a “block” in my brain:
when my brain sends a message, it
doesn’t go through to my body. My
muscles won’t listen to my brain and
my speech can get unclear.
I was then sent to see specialists in
Newcastle. They said they were 90%
sure it was the mitochondrial disease
that caused the deafness, but they
couldn’t say for sure and hadn’t heard
of this happening to anyone else. So
technically, I am still undiagnosed.
Nine months after my symptoms
first appeared, we don’t know any more.
The whooshing and crashing sounds
have stopped; but when I sit in silence
with the TV on, all I can hear is a faint,
indescribable background hum. At
the gym, I can hear the clatter of the
machines, but not the music playing.
I have since been to a couple of gigs,
but they just sounded like noise. I went
to a festival and sat on the grass with
an overpriced pint – it all felt familiar,
but the main ingredient was missing.
I miss podcasts and being able to
casually watch TV. I’m bored of having
to read subtitles. I was expecting
to miss music more, but weirdly
I haven’t; that might be because my
brain still plays songs in my head.
I was given hearing aids, but they
didn’t work. I’ve signed up for a lip-
reading course and am learning British
Sign Language. My friends have been
great, some have offered to learn BSL,
but I feel it’s really me who has to
adapt to this new life.
Other deaf people have warned of
feeling isolated and I’m determined
not to make that my life. I do get
anxiety when I have to leave the
house, especially when I go out of
my comfort zone. Going to a bar and
asking for a drink is fine until they
start making small talk – at that point
I’ll declare I’m deaf.
I’ve always preferred to plan ahead,
but since this happened I take life day
by day. I have got tickets for Taylor
Swift next summer, though, knowing
it’s a good show to watch even if I can’t
hear the music. But who knows what
the next 12 months will bring – the
doctors have speculated that my
hearing might come back. The future is
uncertain, but I’m at peace with that.
Matt Pinder
Do you have an experience to share?
Email experience@theguardian.com

Duncan, 56 – thinks people arriving in the
UK in small boats are criminals
Jane, 37 – says the Tories’ Rwanda plan
is reprehensible and inhumane
Dining
Duncan, 56, Sedgefield
Occupation Wealth manager
across the
Voting record Can’t think of an election
in which he hasn’t voted Conservative
Amuse bouche Has quite a substantial
divide
burgundy collection, including a bottle of
Domaine de la Romanée-Conti La Tâche.
For him to justify drinking it, the world
Can breaking
would have to be coming to an end
Jane, 37, London
bread bridge Occupation Worked in finance before
becoming an abstract artist in 2020
political
Voting record Has no record, as she left
her home country before she hit voting
age and is unable to do so here
differences?
Amuse bouche Did a 250k race in the
Sahara, having gone from being a non-
runner to ultra-marathons in 10 months
For starters
Duncan I’m a nervous man; she seemed
incredibly confident. I think she
ADDITIONAL REPORTING: KIT T Y DR AKE
came prepared for conflict, if it was
required. You could feel the steeliness.
Jane He was genuinely a nice bloke,
but it became clear that we based our
reality on very different things.
Duncan Jane is of Chinese extraction,
and spent a lot of time in Singapore, so
I let her order. She got little bits of pork,
which were fine. I think she was trying
Interview: Zoe Williams to be kind by avoiding spicy stuff. She
Portrait: Graeme Robertson
got me eating duck and udon noodles.
Jane Then we had mushrooms with
unique Japanese herbal seasoning. We
talked a bit about that, he was curious.
The big beef
Duncan Our biggest disagreement was
whether people coming over in small
boats are criminals. If you look at the
pictures, there’s a boat with 60 to 70
immigrants coming in, all young men.
Jane clearly has no understanding
of petty criminals. I’ve got a better
understanding. Her attitude is, “They
can’t be criminals, because if they were,
they’d get into the country easily.”
Jane He felt that the Rwanda plan was
justified, whereas I felt strongly that it
was reprehensible and inhumane. So
that was something we just couldn’t
bridge. In his view, the Aussies had
done it not so long ago and it was fine.
I think he was referring to the Pacific
Solution. My argument was that it
wasn’t like-for-like: you’re shipping
some people who have no connection
to the continent, putting them in
a completely alien world.
Duncan What I was trying to get over
was, it doesn’t actually matter: the
country has voted so many times for
that [immigration] to stop, and it’s still
happening. People are going to say,
Want to dine
across the divide?
Scan here to apply
“You’re not listening to us” and the next
thing we’re going to vote to get out of
is the European court of human rights.
Jane I shared some statistics with him,
and he actually said, “You’re relying too
much on the statistics.” I think he had
a fair point that when people are angry
and hurt, reason and statistics won’t
appeal to them. But I got the sense he
was doing just fine, so I was surprised
when he said, “Statistics don’t matter.”
Sharing plate
Duncan Most loopholes for personal
taxation have been closed. The real
problem we have, despite all the woke
gibberish that Starbucks, Amazon,
whatever companies, say, wittering
on, they [hardly] pay any tax in this
country. They rip the profitability out
of M&S and Mr and Mrs Littlewoods.
Jane We were both angry that
corporations get away with so much.
And he made a fairly decent point: as
a high taxpayer, he didn’t feel obliged
to pay lots more when corporations are
getting away with so much.
For afters
Duncan The NHS doesn’t work, and it
doesn’t have a plan to make it work.
I think she’d agree. I wouldn’t say
money isn’t part of the problem, but you
wouldn’t throw good money after bad.
Jane We agreed we needed to have
a proper study of successful countries.
I said, “These countries with better
outcomes are paying 50% to 74% more
per capita on health – of course they
have better healthcare.” And he came
back with, “I know a doctor with £3m
in their pension.” He was much keener
on anecdote than data.
Takeaways
Duncan She was a very nice lady, but
she loved throwing stats. She falls into
exactly the same traps as the rest of
the metropolitan side of this country,
that it’s all about numbers. But people
are not about numbers.
Jane We couldn’t get too far in because
he didn’t want to hear any figures.
The biggest thing that struck me,
and he said this in very clear terms:
nothing will ever change, no matter
who is in charge. My fear is that he
might be right, in our populist-driven
political landscape. But it is just not a
good attitude to have in a country that
needs to turn itself around.
Jane and Duncan ate at Koya City,
London EC4; koya.co.uk. Want to meet
someone from across the divide?
Go to theguardian.com/different-views
The Guardian | 09.09.23 | S AT UR DAY | 7
CUTTINGS
Flashback
B
orn in 1989, the chef
and TV presenter John
Whaite grew up in
TV presenter and
Eccleston, a village
in Lancashire.
A high-achieving child
chef John Whaite
and teen, he studied at Oxford and
Manchester universities and briefly
trained as a banker. He turned his
on terrible tattoos,
attention to TV in 201 2, winning
The Great British Bake Off. In 2021, he
was a finalist on Strictly Come Dancing
in the first all-male couple with
body dysmorphia
Johannes Radebe. Whaite, who lives
with his partner, Paul Atkins, is now
a TV presenter with five acclaimed
and making history
cookbooks. His memoir, Dancing on
Eggshells, is out now.
on Strictly
I was two and a half and sitting on
hay bales at my grandad’s farm in this
photo. That is where I and my two
sisters and cousin would play most
weekends. It’s also where we’d do
naughty things like wee in Grandad’s
Interview: Harriet Gibsone wellies. We were quite mischievous.
Main portrait: Mark Chilvers The teddy is a prop: my dad was
Styling: Andie Redman an amateur photographer, so he’d
set up these lovely shoots every now
and again. I’m wearing a Jungle Book
T-shirt, not because I liked the film,
but because I was obsessed with
Sleeping Beauty, and it would have
1992
been too far of a stretch in the early
I just wanted to be a fairy. 90s to put a boy in that type of T-shirt.
I still do I just wanted to be a fairy. I still do!
I had a unique childhood. We
lived in a small, working-class
estate until I was seven, and my
parents would really go to town
with decorations at Halloween
and Christmas. My dad, who did
am-dram and was extravagant and
fun, used to knock on the front door
dressed as a fortune teller and give us
chocolate oranges.
My parents had several jobs:
with three children to bring up and
a mortgage to pay, they worked their
arses off to survive. If I wasn’t serving
people in their chip shop, I’d be in
the van with my dad dropping things
off for his courier service late into
the night. He was also a musician,
so I’d be his little roadie. It was an
exciting, varied life, and no two days
were the same.
School was a bit more complicated.
One of my early memories is standing
up at nursery, silencing the other
kids and asking to sing Little Bo Peep
on my own. I wanted to perform
from a young age and was very
confident. But when my parents
divorced, it disrupted things. My
sisters and I moved from the estate
8 | S AT UR DAY | 09.09.23 | The Guardian
to my stepdad’s farm, where the
community had a more middle-
class outlook. It was geographically
isolating and I felt like an outcast.
I was coming to terms with my
sexuality, too. While I celebrated being
different and relished becoming the
class clown – I was so dramatic, daft
and silly – I was also bullied. It was
a contradictory period.
I used to cringe when I remembered
my teenage years, but now I have
a sense of pride because I was clearly
trying to find my people. I shaved one
side of my head in a checkerboard
pattern, bleached black and white, and
down the middle I had a blue streak.
It was horrific. I also went through
a mosher phase, wearing a Slipknot
hoodie even though I hated the band,
and covered my nails with a black
Sharpie pen. Angelina Jolie was
my role model. I liked how she was
fierce and obsessed with death; very
morbid like I was. She was a rebel and
broke the mould – a lot of people gave
her fla k and thought she was weird.
I identified with that. So much so that
I have a tattoo on my crotch like she
has. I am so ashamed of it, as I am of
all nine of my tattoos. I got them when
I was young: my first on a school trip
to Germany when I was 13, and the last
when I was 18.
Body dysmorphia has been present
in my life as far back as I can
remember. I always felt chubby and
was conscious of being a chunk. At
college I was undoubtedly anorexic.
I would look in the mirror and hate HAIR AND MAKEUP: SADAF AHMAD. ARCHIVE PHOTOGR APH: COURTESY OF JOHN WHAITE
everything I saw reflected back.
Around this time, I also dabbled with
making myself sick, but it wasn’t as
frequent as it would become later,
especially while I was on Bake Off.
I liken bulimia to a shark attack, but
you are the shark: your eyes glaze over,
your pupils dilate and you slip into
this horrible trance. Even if you can
rationalise and say “Stop”, something
within you, something visceral and
deep, pushes that intellect away and
triumphs, and that is quite scary.
I think I will always be bulimic,
but the incredible thing is that
since I started ADHD medication
earlier this year I haven’t had one
binge. My ADHD diagnosis has had
such a positive impact on me. And it is
fascinating to learn how inextricably
linked neurodivergence is with drink
and drug abuse, and eating disorders.
There was no trepidation when
I signed up to be on Bake Off. I probably
should have been more cautious,
 because back then I didn’t have
the tools that I do now to cope with
life – sobriety, medication, yoga
and meditation. Maybe it was my
undiagnosed ADHD allowing me to
juggle so much, but I was studying
for a law degree at the same time as
recording the show, while also going
out on the piss at the weekends, and
making myself sick, too. The burnout
after I finished Bake Off was huge.
I was wiped out for two weeks. My
sister said I was so grey I looked like
a zombie. These days I second-guess
every decision I make to ensure that
I won’t burn out again. I have to check:
is this urge to say yes because of my
ADHD; or is it validity-seeking; or for
a dopamine rush?

My decision to do Strictly with

Johannes felt different; it wasn’t for
affirmation, it was about the LGBTQ+
community in general. Gay stories
in the 90s were always salacious and
the TV was turned off as soon as they
came on in our house. It would have
been a real tonic and remedy for me
to have seen two men dancing on
prime-time television and for it not to
have been scandalous. The pressure
on Strictly was hard at times, but the
impact it had was a beautiful thing.
In Asda in Wigan, for example, a burly
bloke came up to me near the cottage
cheese, saying: “Thank you for what
you did – my son came out as gay last
week because he knew it was OK.”
The Strictly experience was the
start of an incredible two years of
pulling myself out of the darkness.
Alcoholism, drugs, ADHD, depression
– I managed to extract myself from
those places and situations with
nothing but the love of friends and
good relationships.
Now I look in the mirror and
I am starting to learn to like what
I see. Which, for 34 years, has been
a difficult thing to do. I still wonder
if this is the right industry for me,
but it helps that I now live back in the
countryside, in Parbold, Lancashire.
It’s like a sanctuary.
Whenever I go through a down
period, I always crave the wilderness,
the peace and predictability of nature.
It reminds me of my childhood:
if you live on a farm you have no
choice but to carry on. Even if
you’re ill, you’ve got to get up and
feed the cows. You have to crack on
because nature demands it. There’s

2023 I think I will always be bulimic, but since I started something beautiful and secure in
that perseverance. It’s a metaphor
ADHD medication I haven’t had one binge I always carry with me.

The Guardian | 09.09.23 | S AT UR DAY | 9

SO, HERE’S WHAT
I’M THINKING …
He went from a behind-the-scenes TV ideas man to
a fixture in front of the camera. Then Richard Osman
started writing his Thursday Murder Club books, which have become
the biggest phenomenon in fiction since Harry Potter.
He tells Charlotte Edwardes about being tapped up for MI6,
his struggles with binge eating and why he is an ‘alpha introvert’
Portaits: Jay Brooks
R ICHARD OSMAN
says that people will always tell you who they are, if
you listen. So, I listen, and he tells me – somewhat
urgently – that he is not a nerd. Nerd-presenting,
perhaps. Most explicitly as the creator of TV quizshows
and host of BBC One’s Pointless. Absolutely not a nerd.
The evidence he supplies, twitching his shoulders and
tugging his jacket as if to do it up, is that he does not
like superheroes. He does not like sci-fi (despite, he
jokes, marrying the Doctor Who actor Ingrid Oliver),
does not have “nerd hobbies”, such as chess. Correction:
he did like chess, he just wasn’t “very” good. So, how
would he describe himself? “Testosterone-y, a huge
sports lover. I’m fairly alpha at times.” Trouble is,
this rippling machismo “is all hidden under a fairly
gentle exterior”.
I take in the gentle exterior. He’s dressed in shades
of blue, bloodhound features behind trademark
specs. Minutes earlier, he told me, “I love statistics.”
He explained his formula for “decoding” the world.
He said, “I’m an alpha introvert.” Top of the sports
he enjoys is snooker. He chose the theme tune from
the BBC’s snooker coverage as one of his Desert Island
Discs, has encyclop edic knowledge of the game
and goes to the world championships. Perhaps I’ve
misunderstood “nerd”. Perhaps Richard Osman is a man
of contradictions. Here is another: behind him, through
the window of this office in Westminster, is the MI6
building across the river. It sits as if on his left shoulder.
Appropriate because Osman was given “the tap” while
at Cambridge; took a series of “fun” spy tests which –
ultimately – he failed. “They just said, ‘No, it’s fi ne.’”
He did war-gaming scenarios, chatted to people “who
got older and posher throughout the day. Honestly,” his
voice develops an insistent edge, “I would have been
terrible. I’m too tall [6ft 7in], not bright enough, and
if I have a secret, I tell everybody. You could not find a
worse spy.” Also: “I cannot tell a lie.”
And yet and yet, he writes fiction. Fiction so popular
that the Thursday Murder Club series – the fourth, The
Last Devil to Die is out next week – is publishing’s new
Harry Potter, selling 5m copies to date and grossing
more than £25m. He is the biggest new fiction author
of the decade, the series has been optioned by Steven
Spielberg, and he has been signed to write a separate
(undisclosed) crime series for Netflix. Or as Osman puts
it in his self-deprecating way: “I’m doing TV things.
And film stuff.” Hasn’t Penguin, in whose offices we sit,
just signed a new four-book contract with him reportedly

12 | S AT UR DAY | 09.09.23 | The Guardian


worth more than £10m? “I was given … Oh! I’m not sure
what to say the advance was,” he says, seeming bashful.
“I’ve been given an amount of money which makes
sense for Penguin and makes sense for me.”
Only two books of the deal will be Thursday Murder
Club titles. He has begun another series with new
characters. This should not upset fans, he says. After
all, Agatha Christie had Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot.
“That’s not me comparing myself to Agatha Christie,
by the way, but you do have to [diversify].” For those
few not au fait with Osman’s pensioner procedurals –
perhaps you have not passed any bookshop windows
in three years – The Thursday Murder Club is set in a
retirement village. Osman’s sleuths, his “A-Team”, are
Elizabeth, a former spy, Joyce, a former nurse, Ibrahim,
a psychiatrist, and Ron, who fondly recalls his years as
a rowdy trades union official. “They’re all quarters of
my own brain. I’m most Ibrahim” – Ibrahim has a maths-
based, practical outlook on life, enjoys data, laminating
printouts, time-specific goals and is bad at noticing
what people look like – “then a bit of Joyce, then a bit
of Ron. I’m least Elizabeth. She’s who I’d love to be.”
He says as an aside: “I’m still available, by the way, if
MI6 read this. I could be useful, because no one is going
to suspect me now.”
Rejected by the intelligence services, he graduated
in 1992 and went into TV, working fi rst at Planet 24,
boisterous makers of The Word and The Big Breakfast.
Colleagues remember him as “very quiet”. At Hat Trick
Productions he wrote for Whose Line Is It Anyway? and
Have I Got News For You. Later, he became the master
of the TV format, working on, among other things, 8 Out
of 10 Cats and Deal or No Deal. While creative director
of Endemol, he sold Pointless to the BBC and ended up
presenting it with his university chum Alexander
Armstrong. There were failures too, among them 24
Hour Quiz and Boyz Unlimited, a music industry satire,
starring a young James Corden. “Oh my God, I know
what failure tastes like,” he says, shaking his head. “I
also know it’s what you do next that matters. Always.”
By his late 40s, he’d made enough dosh and, anyway,
PORTR AIT: JAY BROOKS. ASSISTANT: C A Z DYER. SET DESIGN: SANDY SUFFIELD. ASSISTANT: LUC AS ALIAGA-HURT. GROOMING: PAULINE SIMMONS
was no longer “driven by sitting at the table and banging
my fist on the desk”. So, he started The Thursday Murder
Club – quietly, secretly – and showed not a soul (although
half way through he confessed to his brother, Mat,
bassist in the band Suede. In turn, Mat confessed he
too was half way through a novel, which was a “weird”
coincidence). In the years since, terrestrial TV has
“fallen off a cliff. The world that I was in, it’s not there.
The money’s not there. I have no home to go back to.”
Some might see the blossoming of this late second
career as a thing of romance, an example that an entirely
new life after 50 is an achievable thing. Osman is more
prosaic. He draws a direct comparison between the
mechanics of TV entertainment and the procedural
format. “You know at the start that you’re head ing
somewhere, you’re at A and you are going to get to Z.
You just have no idea how. I find it more creative to be
given a framework, to be given constraints. As a TV
host, I’m saying, ‘You don’t need to like me, here’s a
show for you. Here’s a format. I’m going to take you in
a direction. You answer some questions.’ And in a crime
book it’s the same. You go, ‘Look I’m setting you a
puzzle.’ Because otherwise, what is it [the novel]? Just
me talking, which doesn’t interest me.” Osman says he
is not the sort of person to write about “love and loss”:
“I don’t feel like I am somebody who can sit down and
describe what the sky looks like … the beauty of the
summer flowers. Whereas I can write a story and move
the action on. I’m very comfortable imagining worlds,
imagining people, imagining what they might do.”
He puts the extraordinary success of the books down
to an innate understanding of what makes Britain tick
– cross-reffed with data. “The two school subjects I use
every day are O-level statistics and my O-level sociology.
Sociology tells you the world wasn’t made this way; it
has been constructed by us through a series of choices.
Statistics tells you the truth about things. With those
‘I’M STILL
AVAILABLE, BY THE
WAY, IF MI6 READ
THIS. I COULD BE
USEFUL, BECAUSE
NO ONE IS GOING TO
SUSPECT ME NOW’
two tools, you can pretty much decode anything, I
think. Why people do things. What drives people.”
Decode? “I find it obvious why people behave in the
way they do. But you can check you’re right by looking
at the statistics.” Second source it, so to speak? “Exactly,
just in case. But we don’t use statistics brilliantly in this
country. My whole career is: this is what I think people
will like and why.” He was always amazed in television
to be surrounded by people for whom that wasn’t their
natural instinct.
On the other hand, he believes there is often a gross
distortion in the things we’re told everyone likes. The
TV series Succession, for instance. It’s only watched by
a teensy sliver of the population, but for all the
amplification it gets in the news we’d assume it was a
nationwide preoccupation. Ditto GB News. “Statistically,
they’re insignificant when it comes to what’s happening
in this country. Yet you would think from social media
that those are the two groups of people fighting each
other. There’s no one in those groups. It’s just that
everyone in them are the people we hear from. So, I
drive my bus straight through the middle and park it
far away from both sides.”
In the real world, people are rarely as obsessed with
politics as we are told, he says. He compares it with
football: some people are fanatical, go every week,
know all the players’ names, etc. Most tune in every
couple of years when there is a big tournament.
Coopers Chase, the fictional retirement village where
his characters reside, is based on the community in
Sussex where he bought a house for his mother, Brenda.
He looked around and immediately realised the
potential. Here was the generation who, culturally, “are
overlooked by everybody. That generation did much
more interesting and unusual things, overcame much
bigger hurdles and obstacles. It’s a generation full of
wisdom, full of brio, looking for new adventures and
new mischief. There are very few consequences to
anything they do or say. That’s freeing for a writer, to
have characters who are going, ‘No one’s going to arrest
me; I might as well do this.’” They are overlooked
because we worship at the temple of youth, he says. “I
mean, God knows what our generation will be like when
we get to that age; insufferable.”
Some of the best fictional sleuths are older and wiser
– from Miss Marple to Columbo to Jessica Fletcher in
Murder, She Wrote – but he cannot abide the term “cosy
fiction”, words he introduces to the conversation and
has a severe allergic reaction to without any input from
me. “If you really read my books, there’s some quite
bad stuff happening, some very non-cute references.
It’s definitely not cosy. Today you can write a book about
a detective who runs a sweet shop in a seaside town
and someone will publish it. But that’s OK,” he says
moving from the heat of his own irritation. “I get it.”
What also nettles are the copycat swirly font covers
that have followed in the slipstream of the Murder
Club’s success. “Richard Bravery created the cover – so
great, so iconic. Now everyone does the same. We’re
working on the next series. The two of us sitting there
going, ‘We’ll show ’em. We’ll give them a different cover,
a cover that makes them go: Ooooh, that’s what we need
to copy now.’”
The new project is more Sherlock Holmes-y in that
it revolves around an agency and is “more of a traditional
detective thing. With the Thursday Murder Club, the
crime has to happen to them, whereas as soon as you’ve
got a detective agency, someone can knock on the door
and give you your plot.” The characters are a father and
daughter-in-law, who work on different sides of the
world. “So, it’s slightly more internationalist. Hopefully
the same wit and Britishness about it, but they can jump
out of helicopters and kick down police station doors,
which Elizabeth is not able to do.”
Osman always loved crime. He grew up reading
Christie and adored Patricia Highsmith, creator of Tom
Ripley. He also likes the peculiar Britishness of the
worlds created by Barbara Pym and Muriel Spark. It
didn’t feel like a jump to write books, having written
for TV. Although he has been accepted with open arms
by the crime writing community, there is still a trace
of the testiness he felt over an early suggestion that he
is one of a slew of celebrities turned authors. “There’s
certain books that come out and people are open about
having a ghost. I get that people know what they’re
getting and understand it’s a brand. But there’s also a
group of people – Bob Mortimer is one – where we’re
just writers. I’ve written my whole career, my whole
life. Graham Norton has always written, Dawn French
has. It is not a surprise that these people go on and write
books. You’re allowed to. Also: no one is a writer.
Everyone is something, then becomes a writer. You get
to a certain age and think, ‘Well, I want to write a novel.
I’ve got stuff in my head that I want to say.’ No one ever
buys a second novel if the first one isn’t good.”
Included in “stuff I want to say” are urgent issues.
To Osman, it’s key that the books are funny – in the
same droll way that he is – with issues smuggled in. “To
know that you’ve written something that’s going to
entertain people and while doing it given a family a
way into a debate, a discussion, that’s my favourite
thing about the books being successful: you get to talk
about interesting things right in the middle of culture.”
The Last Devil to Die is no exception. It’s a crime
story, yes. But at core it’s a book about dementia and
assisted dying. Where his mother lives, residents are
over 75 and, “They had a big debate about it, incredibly
rational, incredibly polite. Lots of disagreement, [but]
everyone listening to each other. People who have been
medical professionals, people who’ve been mental
health professionals and people who’ve obviously lost
loved ones. It’s something that you’re allowed to talk
about. It’s not crazy to want to die when you’re in pain
with no way of getting out of that pain. I absolutely
respect the views of people for whom [assisted dying]
would be an impossibility. But it’s an argument that’s
not going away. We have such control over our lives, it
seems weird that the final bit we have no control over.
An awful lot of people would sleep easier if they knew
their last few years wouldn’t be very difficult.”
Osman watched dementia take possession of his
working-class firebrand grandfather, watched him try
to cling to moments of clarity. His mother told him that
in hospital you could see his heart beating and knew it
was never going to give up. “He was such
a strong man. But he would absolutely
not have wanted to be there.” Osman
The Guardian | 09.09.23 | S AT UR DAY | 13
drew from this experience and also research. “The
Alzheimer’s Society said, ‘If you’ve met one person with
dementia, then you’ve met one person with dementia.’
That’s how I approached it really: knowing that
everyone’s experience will be different.”
RICHARD OSMAN WAS BORN IN 1970, the second child
of David Osman and Brenda Wright. He grew up near
Hayward’s Heath in West Sussex. He was born with
nystagmus, an eye condition which means the world
appears somewhat blurred. A building will appear like
an impressionist painting, he has said, and he can’t
make out the birds in the trees. Whether or not it’s a
consequence, he is able to tune in to a multi layered
soundscape: “If six different conversations are going
on, I’ll hear every single one. So that’s a useful skill.”
When he was nine, his world was ruptured. He
remembers going into the lounge with his glass of
orange squash for a family meeting. There, his father
informed him and Mat, who is three years older, that
he’d fallen in love with someone else and was going
away. He said he hoped that was
all right. David Osman maintained
six or so months of contact with
his children before moving a
distance that required them to
take long coach journeys to visit.
It was difficult for a child and
Richard, in a tantrum, told his
father he did not want to see him
any more. His father took this at
face value.
Brenda was left to take care of
everything. “But God, if you’re
brought up by one good parent,
then you’ve hit the jackpot, haven’t you? So long as that
kid knows they’re loved.” He adds as a mumbled aside
that an awful lot of British politics can be explained by
the lack of even one loving parent. “Because if you
weren’t loved, what are you looking for? What you want
to achieve is very different from someone who was
brought up in a loving home.”
That said, he has no idea how Brenda managed. “It
must have been hell. The fact that I didn’t know it was
hell is a product of, a) me being a boy and not in tune,
and b) she wore it so lightly. It was not something she
wanted to trouble us with.” She did all the work that
she could find in addition to her day job as a teacher,
including stuffing envelopes for a fraction of a penny
a go. Occasionally, he’d hear her weeping over the lost
promise of her life. But as a child it was too difficult to
take onboard, and he walled off those sounds of
disappointment, disappearing instead into the world
of TV. His eyesight meant he had to sit close, but
television showed him the world as he couldn’t see it
– birds in the trees, buildings. Sports action replays
meant he could see the ball. He watched everything;
mainlined British culture through the medium of
television. He had idiosyncratic hobbies, such as
making a World Cup of music bands (a format he later
reproduced on Twitter, when he did the World Cup of
crisps and Christmas sweets).
Meanwhile, Mat was in his room playing music. His
mother let them be. “She gave us absolute educational
freedom. Never made us go to piano classes or do French
tuition. Never made us do homework. She didn’t push
us to go to university, although I think she would have
been horrified if we hadn’t. She played it cool. She just
trusted us both. That’s an amazing thing to give to kids.
You can’t really tell either of us anything – even now,” he
laughs. “She thought, ‘These two seem to have an idea
of what they want to do.’ That was her parenting style.”
I’d buy this more entirely if it weren’t for the faintly
barbed quote Brenda gave to the Times about his writing
style being “quite staccato”, which suggests she has no
qualms chivvying her son. Either way, it paid off. Osman
says he was probably the first from his school to go to
Cambridge, where he did sociology and politics
14 | S AT UR DAY | 09.09.23 | The Guardian
Clockwise from above:
with his wife, actor Ingrid
Oliver; with his brother
Mat, bassist with Suede;
with Pointless co-host
Alexander Armstrong
(although he still regrets not doing American studies
at Leeds); his brother, “who is proper clever”, did
economics at the London School of Economics.
On his father, who died in 2016, he shrugs. Even
before David left, Richard doesn’t remember him being
around a lot. He was a teacher, then something else,
he’s not sure what. “Listen, he was fundamentally a
perfectly nice human being. I don’t sit here trembling
with fear in my heart when I think about my dad. I’d
love to feel something, some stirring of emotion. I
probably did in my 20s when I made contact with him
again. I think I manufactured some anger.” Ultimately,
“I don’t think parenthood was for him. So, he was able
to divest himself of those responsibilities.”
While Osman had girlfriends in his teens, he didn’t
really drink and wasn’t very “worldly”: “I didn’t really
understand what people did. Throughout life I’ve
picked up clues as to what it is to be human. I know
what it is to be me. But to be other people? I always
find it extraordinary.” He says his height and eyesight
meant he kept to the periphery – he wasn’t going on
big clique holidays or setting up theatre groups. He
found sitting and listening “sociologically interesting”.
After a beat, he says: “I blame a lot of things in my life
on my eyesight, but I think actually it might just be
my personality.”
He married young and had two kids, Ruby at 27,
Sonny two years later. He will say precisely zero about
his divorce: “It’s not my story, if you know what I mean.”
He quickly adds that he’s hiding “nothing grim; it’s
just her privacy”.
Whether work was going well, or his marriage was
going badly, there was another issue nagging away. In
his 30s he had an anagnorisis of sorts: went to therapy
and was diagnosed with addictive behaviours, the most
explicit around food. For years he’d suffered bouts of
binge eating, “an absolute compulsion to eat, an
inability to stop eating, shame afterwards and then
repeat ”. The pattern could continue for weeks or
months. “I find myself in situations sometimes where
my behaviour around food is so absurd, it makes no
sense. It’s certainly not self-care.”
Does he remember what age he was when it started?
“Oh, like 10 years old. Yeah, I wonder
what the inciting incident was. And
food when you’re 10 is something
that you can’t control. You’re not
going to become an alcoholic or a
drug addict.”
While it doesn’t have the “doomed
glamour” of alcohol or drugs, he has
said, the behaviour is in essence the
same – although “slightly more
behavioural and slightly less to do
with the substance itself ”, as with
love or sex addiction. “But the
second you go to therapy, you realise
that’s just a symptom of the problem. You realise you’re
just numbing whatever pain; you’re numbing the things
you don’t want to think or talk about.”
These are not things you can give up, he says, so you
are faced with the lifelong challenge of controlling it.
“I’m either controlling it or not controlling it at any given
time.” He also believes an inability to control eating “is
so insanely common. You can’t look around at the shape
we’re all in and not think that there’s an issue. It’s not
spoken about, because it’s still laughed at.” He no longer
feels any shame associated with it, and the affl iction
has given him compassion. “When I think about how
other people behave, I go, ‘Yeah, I get it. You should see
what I do.’” He adds: “It’s impossible to be a human
being and not have issues.” (Later he says in passing
that he thinks Boris Johnson has food issues. “You can
see that. He’s got everything issues. There’s nothing
that will fill that hole.”)
He’s described his 40s as “really good fun.” He was
single for much of it and there was a merry-go-round
of dates. “I was always looking for the one, always knew
I wanted to get married, absolutely wanted to fall in
love. And, listen, I enjoyed the process. Friends would
go, ‘I don’t think that is what you’re looking for. I think
you enjoy playing the field.’ I would always say, ‘It really JEFF SPICER/GET T Y IMAGES; PAUL STUART/ C AMER A PRESS; GR AEME ROBERTSON/THE GUARDIAN
is what I’m looking for.’”
Were they chucking women at him? “Um, not
literally. I had my 20s in my 40s, for sure. My 50s are
my 30s. I settled with the love of my life. It’s an enormous
stroke of good luck, but as soon as I met Ingrid, I thought,
‘Great. Done.’ I knew it.”
They met when she appeared on his show House of
Games in summer 2020, and she moved in that October.
The following year, he bought a ring and planned his
proposal – which was to be in a special restaurant on
the third day of a holiday in Oman. Once there, he got
in an awful flap and blew the whole schedule by
proposing on day one, tears all over his face. Is this an
example of his inability to keep a secret? He laughs.
“My heart wouldn’t let me. It was absolutely bursting.”
Teasing, I ask how he gets on with Oliver’s mother,
Jo Gideon. Osman describes himself as a lefty and she
is the Tory MP for Stoke-on-Trent , a red-waller
instrumental in ousting Johnson. It’s the only time
Osman looks terrified. He doesn’t lie. Instead he says:
“Let’s not go there. We won’t go into that.” •
The Last Devil to Die by Richard Osman is published
by Viking on 14 September at £22. To buy a copy for
£19.36, go to guardianbookshop.com
‘SOMETHING
Portraits: Kim Raff and Benjamin Rasmussen

First there were the bewildering DNA test results, then the long-forgotten fertility blog – and a d
G HAPPENED,
Tim and Vanner Johnson (left) and Devin McNeil (right)

discovery that would change the lives of two families for ever. Jenny Kleeman hears their story

SOMEHOW
SOMETHING
GOT
MIXED
UP’
I
N THE SUMMER OF 2019, Donna Johnson spotted
a special offer: 23andMe kits were half price. She
and her husband, Vanner, had been thinking of
getting their DNA tested to learn about their
heritage and any health issues that might be
related to their genes. Given the deal, Vanner
thought they should buy four kits and test their
sons as well as themselves. “A fun family activity.
That’s how we coined it to our boys,” Vanner says.
Vanner Jr and Tim – then 14 and nearly 11 – were
happy to indulge their parents. They had an idea what
DNA was, Vanner says, but didn’t ask many questions.
The logistics proved unexpectedly challenging: you’re
not supposed to consume anything for half an hour
before you produce your saliva sample, and fi nding a
time when neither boy had eaten or drunk wasn’t easy.
But within a week of receiving the kits the four of them
were standing around the kitchen table together at their
home north of Salt Lake City, Utah, spitting into little
plastic tubes. They registered their kits online, sent
off their samples, then they got on with their summer.
It’s no longer remarkable to hand over your DNA to a
multimillion-dollar corporation and trust them to use
it to decode who you really are. The Johnsons are one
family among tens of millions worldwide who have
used a direct-to-consumer genetic testing company such
as AncestryDNA, MyHeritage or 23andMe. Their tests
promise to unlock the truth of our heredity and how
we’re connected to the world – even a medical future
foretold in our genes, if we tick the appropriate box. DNA
kits have become popular gifts, the go-to Christmas
present for the person who has everything. At least one
in 20 British people have been intrigued enough to take
a test. As AncestryDNA has said, “There’s no limit to
what you might discover.”
The results arrived on Donna and Vanner’s 16th
wedding anniversary. Vanner got his email notification
first. He saw connections with some familiar names, but
Tim wasn’t there. “I thought, huh, that’s interesting.”
He texted Donna, who was at the local school where
she teaches second grade. He tried to rationalise it –
perhaps, because Tim was a minor, the connection
wasn’t immediately displayed online? But it niggled
at him all day.
Donna’s results came in when they were together
that evening. They showed she had two sons: Vanner
Jr and Tim. She looked at Vanner Jr’s results. “It showed
he had a half-brother through me,” she says. “Then we
looked at Tim’s results; it showed me as his mother and
his father ‘unknown’.” There was no connection between
Tim and Vanner. They were not genetically related.
“I felt like I wanted to scream,” Vanner says. “How
could his father be unknown? I’m his father. I’ve been
his father since he was born.”
“That’s when we realised something went wrong.
T
Either with the test,” Donna says, “or the IVF we’d had.”
HERE IS, OF COURSE, a third explanation, but
there was never any question that Donna had
been unfaithful to Vanner. They met in high
school and have been inseparable ever since,
spending whatever time they can together as
a family: Donna teaches at the same school
their sons attended, and summer holidays
are spent camping, fishing and hiking, or on
road trips in the large minivan they bought
when they imagined they would be a family of seven.
Donna and Vanner come from big families and
always assumed they’d have one of their own. “We had
in mind five kids and a dog,” Vanner says in our video
call, as he wrestles with their excitable puppy, Daisy.
“We thought, it’s just going to happen.”
And it did happen, at first: they had Vanner Jr with
no problems. But when it came to their second child,
they tried to conceive for 18 months with no luck. Their
doctors assumed the problem must be with Donna and
gave her drugs to stimulate ovulation, but it turned out
the issue was Vanner’s: he’d had hernia surgeries, which
18 | S AT UR DAY | 09.09.23 | The Guardian
had led to scarring that blocked his sperm duct. They
couldn’t conceive naturally, but they could with help.
Out of the two fertility clinics they knew about, they
chose the University of Utah Center for Reproductive
Medicine because one of its specialisms was male
infertility. “We felt comfortable,” Donna nods. “Very
nice staff, very nice doctors, very caring,” Vanner adds.
The process was physically and emotionally
gruelling. Vanner had to have a testicular biopsy so his
sperm could be retrieved and injected into Donna’s eggs.
Their first cycle failed. On their second cycle, Donna
had ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome – a dangerous
side -effect of the drugs she’d been taking – which
caused her ovaries to swell to “the size of grapefruits”.
Seeing how distended her abdomen was when she went
in for the embryo transfer, her doctors decided it would
be safer to freeze the embryos, delaying the process by
three months to give Donna’s body a chance to recover.
Still, it was worth it, in the end. Their second cycle was
successful and Tim was born in 2008.
“He was the cutest baby,” Donna says, a smile
blooming across her face. “So much dark hair, wide
eyes; just a beautiful child.” But he had reflux, and could
be cranky. “A lot of times he seemed discontented.
Sometimes it felt like he was almost inconsolable.” They
discovered that, even as a little baby, Tim could be easily
distracted with a ball. Vanner couldn’t understand it.
“I was like, ‘Where does this kid come from?’ Because
neither of us are really sportspeople.”
“His older brother was very content to sit on our laps
and read for hours on end – which I loved, as a teacher,”
Donna says. “I’d pull Tim up on my lap, pull out a book
to read to him and he’d swat it out of my hand, run away
and grab a ball and start shooting baskets.” They put it
down to normal sibling difference. “Being from large
families, we knew all our siblings had different interests.”
Every now and then, they talked about using the
‘I FELT LIKE
I WANTED TO
SCREAM. HOW
COULD TIM’S
FATHER BE
“UNKNOWN”?
I’M HIS FATHER’
remainder of the frozen embryos that were being held
in storage. They tried again, in 2011 and 2012, but both
transfers failed, and they left their dreams of having
five kids behind, Donna says. “It felt like it was better
F
to put our time and energy into the children we had.”
OR MORE THAN A YEAR, Vanner and Donna
kept the 23andMe results to themselves. The
connections between them displayed in the
results were too consistent for there to be a
problem with the DNA test: the problem had
to be with the IVF. Thankfully, their sons
seemed to have forgotten about taking the
tests. They went completely unmentioned.
“We didn’t want our family to change at all,
and we felt like this could change our family. So we
were very quiet. Yet it bothered us,” Donna says. “There
were times I felt like the anxiety would consume me.”
Then the pandemic hit, and the Johnsons were
locked down together. They began to feel they had to
tell Tim sooner rather than later. “We couldn’t tell him
when he’s graduating, when he goes to college, when
he’s getting married,” Vanner says. “The longer we held
off, if he found out – which is possible in today’s world –
he would think we’d hidden it, and we didn’t want that.
We wanted to have control of telling him.”
So in October 2020, Vanner took 12-year-old Tim
out for ice-cream. He didn’t want anything to sound
scripted, but he’d carefully prepared what to say, and
planned to say it in the car. As Tim fiddled with his
phone in the passenger seat, Vanner brought up how
he’d been conceived through IVF in a fertility clinic –
a fact they’d never kept from him.
“I said, ‘Well, we found out that somehow, when we
were there, something happened.’ In my mind, I can’t
use the word ‘mistake’, so I said, ‘Something happened,
somehow something got mixed up, and it turns out I’m
not your biological dad.’” Vanner’s eyes still brim at
the memory as he tells me this, nearly three years on.
Vanner says Tim looked up from his phone for a
moment, into Vanner’s eyes, then back down. “He said,
‘It doesn’t matter. You’re still my dad.’ I said, ‘I’m so
thankful to hear you say that, buddy, because that’s
how I feel, too.’ I didn’t know what it looked like from
his perspective – that’ll be his story to tell – but it was a
sweet moment. I thought, wow, he is wise beyond his
years.” A family who had taken a test to reveal the truths
held in their genes had decided that, in one respect at
least, genetics didn’t matter at all.
As they headed home, Tim remarked that if he’d
happened to have had a different racial background
from Vanner, they all would have found out much
earlier. While errors in IVF treatments are rare – 99%
of all fertility treatments and storage cycles in the UK
occur without an incident of any kind, according to
the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority –
mistakes do happen: in 2019, two California families
swapped babies four months after they were born,
having realised that the wrong embryos had been
implanted in each mother. Cases in which the wrong
sperm, eggs or embryos are used tend to come to the
attention of parents only when there is something
visibly very different about a baby. We don’t routinely
give babies DNA tests to ensure they have been created
from the right genetic material; we assume everything
has gone according to plan. But as at-home DNA testing
becomes more commonplace, more cases like this are
likely to come to light.
The Johnsons didn’t contact their fertility clinic at
this point. “We didn’t know what to do,” Vanner says.
They were unsure of his legal status regarding Tim, and
if Tim’s biological father might be able to claim paternity
KIM R AFF/THE GUARDIAN
rights. A lawyer reassured them. “It was comforting to
get the confirmation that he is ours under the law, but
we understand anybody can sue anybody for anything,
especially in the United States.”
“There was a lot of fear about who
Tim’s biological father was,” Donna says,
Donna and Vanner
Johnson with Tim (on
left) and Vanner Jr
quietly. “We started hearing about donor-conceived
children having multiple siblings. It was scary.”
They had already tried to find Tim’s relatives through
the 23andMe results before they broke the news to him,
but the closest connection he had was to a third cousin.
After Tim expressed an interest in finding out who his
biological father was, they decided to do another test,
this time with AncestryDNA, because the company
is based in Utah and they figured there was a better
chance of fi nding someone who had used the same
fertility clinic on Ancestry’s database. Once again, Tim
was spitting into a vial and sending his DNA off to be
decoded. But this was no longer a “fun family activity”.
The results came in early 2021 and they revealed a
match with a woman who shared enough DNA with Tim
for Ancestry to label her a “close relative”. “Her whole
name was there,” Donna says, wide eyed. “We started
searching through Facebook and other means to see the
age of the person. Was it a half-sibling? A grandparent?
We landed on, it must be his aunt.”
They became adept at online sleuthing. Vanner
worked out how to search obituaries using the term
“survived by”. “I put this woman’s name in and an
obituary popped up that ended up being her dad.” The
woman’s father – Tim’s biological grandfather – had
died a year earlier and the names of all his children
were listed. They began to Google all the names and
scour social media for them.
That’s how they discovered Devin McNeil and the
long-forgotten blog he used to keep with his wife, Kelly.
They’d written about how they were from Utah, how
they were trying to adopt, how they’d struggled with
fertility issues and had been able to have one child
through IVF: a son, Talon, who was the same age as Tim.

V
Donna takes a deep breath. “We went, ‘Wow.’”

ANNER WAS DETERMINED to keep his

emotions in check. “I didn’t want to dig
too much into whether I was upset, because
maybe I would fi nd that I was,” he says,
simply. “As his dad, I wanted what would
be best for him. If Tim wanted to find his
biological father, there’s a connection
there that can explain things I could never
explain, no matter how hard I try.” A part
of him was fascinated to learn what Tim had inherited
from this other man. “What does he look like? He’s
going to be more good-looking than me – taller, because
I’m not that tall. Those types of thoughts were going
through my mind, absolutely.”
The Johnsons found photos of Devin through Kelly’s
Facebook profile and scrutinised his face for signs of
Tim. “It was hard to see the connection,” Vanner says.
Tim has a distinctive dimple in his chin; this man had
a bushy beard. “But I think we also didn’t want to see a
connection,” Donna adds. “I don’t want to see another
man in my child.” After so many months searching for
Tim’s biological father, they were repelled by the idea
that they might have found him.
And then Vanner found Devin’s phone number. The
morning they decided he was going to ring it, Donna
went out for a run. “A couple of miles out, I got physically
ill. The anxiety took over and made me sick.”
Waiting for Devin to pick up was “like for ever
minutes,” Vanner says. “It was like time stood still.”
BUT DEVIN DIDN’T PICK UP, because he didn’t
recognise the number. “I thought it was a spam call.”
He shrugs. “I just ignored it.” Whoever was calling
from this unfamiliar number was persistent. They kept
trying, over a number of days. “Finally, I thought, OK,
I’ll just answer it and tell them I’m not interested.”
The unknown caller struggled to get his words out.
“You don’t know who I am, but my name’s Vanner
Johnson. I think you and I have a connection,” he
eventually said. “Did you and your wife do in vitro,
by any chance?”
Devin said that they had.
“Was it at the – the University of Utah clinic?”
It was.
“Well,” Vanner said, “I think you and I need to talk.”
“I immediately thought,” Devin says, “the only
people who know that are those that are close to us” –
they hadn’t updated their blog for more than a decade
and had forgotten it was still up. “But I was still sceptical
that this was a scam call.” Devin pretended he was going
into a meeting and couldn’t talk, but Vanner offered to
call back in an hour, on FaceTime, and said he should
get Kelly to join them. It was fine if they wanted to keep
their camera off, Vanner said, but he wanted them to be
able to see his face. “My plan was to get off the phone
and not answer it when he called back,” Devin says.
He went upstairs and told Kelly about the weird call.
“I also thought it was a scam,” Kelly says. “What does
he want? Is he trying to tell us that maybe our baby
is not our baby from 14 years ago?” But she thought
they should answer the FaceTime call, albeit with their
camera off: “He knows too much about us already.”
Devin and Kelly are speaking to me from their home
in Castle Rock, Colorado, a 10-hour drive from the
Johnsons. They moved here from Utah a few years after
Talon was born. There’s a scan of a baby’s face, framed,
on the shelf behind them, in Devin’s home office.
Like Donna and Vanner, they come from large families
– Kelly is one of five, Devin one of six – and wanted
one of their own. After many years trying to conceive
naturally, their first round of IVF led to Talon’s birth,
but they weren’t able to store any embryos from that
cycle. They went through two more rounds, without
success. “Struggling with infertility was as emotionally
challenging as anything we’ve gone through,” Devin
says. “We had to pay out of pocket for all three of our
IVF cycles,” Kelly adds. “It was a hardship, financially.
It was emotionally hard, and it was physically hard. I
ended up in the hospital after one of the cycles, from
so much pain, and passing out. It was a lot.”
Three cycles were enough for the McNeils. They
Kelly and Devin McNeil
with (from left) Talon,
Londyn and Paxton
looked to adoption. They were far into the process –
undergoing assessments, taking classes to better
understand the process, setting up a public blog
detailing their fertility struggles so that birth mothers
could fi nd them – when Kelly discovered she was
pregnant with their second son, Paxton, now 10,
without any medical intervention at all. Two years later,
their daughter, Londyn, was born. “We felt complete,”
Kelly says. “We were fi nally able to put all of our
infertility behind us. And then, 14 years later, this
comes back up.”
On FaceTime, an hour after that first conversation,
Vanner explained what he had discovered through the
DNA tests and how they’d worked out that there must
have been some kind of mistake at the clinic. “You are,
most likely, the biological father of my son,” he said.
At first, Kelly misunderstood: she thought Vanner
was claiming Talon wasn’t their biological child. “Our
son has the same chin dimple that Devin has, which is
pretty unique,” she told him.
“So does my son,” Vanner replied. “And I’ve always
wondered where he got it from.” It left Kelly speechless.
Vanner asked if Devin was sporty, like Tim, and
Devin said he was – he played everything, growing up.
He asked if Devin was tall, because Tim was already
catching up in height to his older brother, and Devin said
yes – he’s 6ft 3in. Then Vanner sent over screenshots of
Tim’s AncestryDNA family tree. “I saw my cousins, an
aunt, a sister, a grandma,” Devin says. Vanner stressed
that he wasn’t calling because he wanted anything
from them: not money, not even a relationship. He just
wanted to discover the truth.
For a good 24 hours after the call, Kelly and Devin

2 0 | S AT UR DAY | 09.09.23 | The Guardian


looked for reasons not to believe Vanner. They’d worked
out that Tim and Talon were born three months apart,
which didn’t make sense. But then Vanner explained
how their embryo transfer had to be delayed by three
months. “Everything had an answer,” Devin says.
Donna and Kelly started a text message chain,
comparing notes about their treatment at the Center
for Reproductive Medicine. Donna shared the dates
and times she was at the clinic; Kelly looked at her
journal and found a timestamped picture of her
embryos that placed her there for her transfer within
an hour of Donna. The clinic issued every couple with
a number, and they realised their client numbers were
consecutive. “So something happened. No denying it.”
When they finally FaceTimed with everyone’s
cameras on, Donna stared at Devin’s face. “I think I
analysed it a hundred times within that phone call,
looking to see if my son could really be his son,” she
tells me. “I could not see it. Once we hung up the phone
I said, ‘Is it possible I really had a baby with that man?’”
Devin took a DNA test, as did Kelly and Talon. The
A
results showed Devin was father to both Talon and Tim.
LL FOUR PARENTS were violated by the
mistakes at the clinic, in different ways.
Vanner had the paternity of his son
taken from him; Devin’s sperm was used
without his knowledge or consent; Donna
had conceived and gestated a child with
someone she had never met or agreed to
have a baby with; and Kelly had to come
to terms with the fact that another woman
was mother to her husband’s child.
Despite all his online detective work, Vanner was
shocked to see Tim’s official family tree after Devin’s
DNA test. “Even though I knew it was going to happen,
it was still hard to see Devin and Donna side by side on
this chart with Tim as the son,” Vanner says. “It affected
me more than I thought it would.”
“Somehow a clinic created this relationship with
someone I didn’t consent with,” Donna says, with quiet
indignation. “I definitely felt there was a violation.”
“This happened in a medical field you put so much
trust in. You’re so vulnerable,” Kelly says. “What if there
are more children out there? We did IVF three times.”
Devin says he felt anger and disappointment with the
clinic, but the overriding feeling was compassion for
the Johnsons. “I don’t think our lives changed nearly
as much as theirs did. It didn’t change the biology of
our children,” he says. “I started to think about Tim.
If I’m a 12-year-old kid and I just learned this, how am
I going to handle this going into my teenage years? It’s
already hard enough. I had to turn the focus back to:
how do we make this relationship not toxic? We could
have ruined each other’s lives, had we chosen to. Tim
doesn’t need that. They don’t need that.”
In the most fraught circumstances, the Johnsons and
the McNeils forged a friendship. “The McNeils are an
amazing family,” Vanner nods. “They’ve been handling
this with as much grace as somebody could expect,
and then some.”
When the McNeils broke the news to their three
children, then 13, eight and six, they had to have what
Devin calls a “multilayered discussion”: first, they had
to tell them how babies are usually made, then explain
how IVF works, and finally they told them how they
now had an accidental half-brother. The kids took it in
their stride. Paxton had a particularly profound take on
BENJAMIN R ASMUSSEN/THE GUARDIAN
it all: “Life doesn’t always give you the gifts you want,
but the real gift is life itself,” he told his parents. The
Johnsons had those words put on a plaque, which they
gave the McNeils the following Christmas.
The two families met for the first time in a park in
Utah, on a blistering hot day in June 2021. “We decided
on very neutral ground,” Donna tells me. “From the
outside it would just look like two families having a
picnic together.”
When they saw each other, they hugged. “It wasn’t
awkward,” Vanner remembers. “It was like you’d
embrace a good friend.”
They played football and threw a ball around. Tim
pushed his half-sister, Londyn, on a swing. They had
lunch. Then Tim and Devin sat down together for a
one-to-one chat. Tim had a list of questions specially
prepared for his biological father.
“They were very much 12-year-old boy questions,”
Devin smiles. “‘How tall were you at my age, and
when you graduated? What sports do you like? Who’s
your favourite athlete? Are you a Lionel Messi fan or a
Cristiano Ronaldo fan?’ We don’t agree on that.” At first,
Devin says, he was focusing on how the two families
were interacting, how Donna and Kelly were getting
on, how Vanner and Vanner Jr were responding to this
strange situation. But as the afternoon went on, he
began to look closely at Tim. “He’s 50% me. Does he
act like me? Does he have the same sense of humour?”
Vanner and Donna were looking at Devin in the same
way. They saw he and Tim shared the same mannerisms.
“The way they walked,” Donna says.
“The same gait,” Vanner nods.
“Maybe the way they hold their hands.”
Vanner insists he wasn’t unsettled when he noticed
this. “It was intriguing, almost,” he says.
After two or three hours together, Vanner asked Tim
if he would like a picture with Devin. Tim replied that
he would like a picture with “both dads”.
Once they arrived home, Donna asked Tim how he
felt. “I have three new siblings,” he said.
“They’re your half-siblings,” she corrected him.
“Well, technically my brother Vanner is my half-
sibling,” Tim replied.
“Well then, yeah, they are your siblings,” Donna
conceded. “But it was a very hard thing to realise that
he felt that much connection,” she tells me now. “It
could have just been kids playing in the park, but he
definitely felt something.”
‘THEY TOOK
SOMETHING THAT
COULDN’T BE
MORE PERSONAL,
AND IT HAPPENS
WAY MORE
THAN IT SHOULD’
O
VER THE PAST TWO YEARS, the McNeils
and Johnsons have become aware of just
how many scandals involving clinics and
doctors are only coming to light now because
a critical mass of people have taken home
DNA tests and been able to connect with
each other online. “It happens not only way
more than it should, but way more than we
know,” Devin says. “Patients are discovering
it. There’s so much trust when you go into a clinic. We’re
signing these documents, saying this is what we
consent to. Then to find out it was neglected … They
took something that really couldn’t be more personal.”
The Johnsons and McNeils settled out of court with
the Center for Reproductive Medicine last year. When
the story became public, the clinic released a statement:
“The safety and care of our patients is our primary goal.
Our providers and staff strive to provide excellent care
and we constantly work to make improvements.” No
explanation has been made public as to how Devin’s
sperm was used to create the Johnsons’ child. Given
their consecutive patient numbers and back-to-back
appointments, simple human error seems most likely.
Donna and Vanner often think about how far the
repercussions of the mistake might have gone. They
wonder if other children conceived at the clinic will one
day discover they have Devin’s DNA, or Vanner’s: could
his sperm have been used to fertilise another woman’s
egg? And they think about the other embryos they had
stored in the freezer that they so desperately wanted to
use to create a large family, but ultimately decided not
to use. They have no idea if those embryos were created
with Devin’s sperm, or Vanner’s.
The sum of the settlement the families received from
the clinic is undisclosed, but the McNeils say it was less
than they could have claimed if one of them had had a
botched shoulder surgery. Both families are planning
to meet legislators in the US to campaign for better
regulation and quality controls in the fertility industry,
and to make penalties stronger when sperm, eggs and
embryos are misused, intentionally or accidentally.
“You’re very vulnerable going into those clinics.
We want others to know that this can happen,” Donna
says. “We’re hoping for some regulation to protect the
couples that go in, because it feels right now, as we’ve
discovered and researched, it’s a wild west situation.”
If the 23andMe test hadn’t been on special offer, the
Johnsons would have no idea about the mistake at the
clinic. But Vanner says they’re happy they do. As DNA
testing becomes more commonplace, he says, it seems
unlikely Tim could go through life without discovering
the truth. “At the end of the day, he’s going to find out.
There’s no way to hide this. As much as somebody might
want to, you can’t.” Despite his and Donna’s best efforts,
their family has been changed. “There are certain ways
that we are closer, and other ways that have become
harder. It’s still a work in progress.”
“DNA does not change how you love someone,”
Donna adds. “As far as who you are, and what that looks
like, it does change. Tim looks in the mirror and maybe
sees a new person.”
“Your DNA is not what makes up your family,” Kelly
says. “It’s who you spend your life with.”
Devin plans to be in Tim’s life for as long as he wants
him to be. “I am happy that he is taking it well. He’s got
a lot to navigate. We only have to navigate this from
600 miles away, but for the rest of his life he’s going to
have a brother who’s his half-brother, and a dad who’s
not his biological dad.”
When people ask Devin how many children he has,
what does he say? He smiles. “My immediate answer
is three. Sometimes I say three and a half.” He pauses.
“Hopefully not any more than that. Hopefully I don’t
get any more of those phone calls.” •
“The Gift”, Jenny Kleeman’s six-part series on the
unexpected truths revealed by at-home DNA testing,
launches on BBC Sounds and BBC Radio 4 on Monday.
The Guardian | 09.09.23 | S AT UR DAY | 2 1
 SOME
BODY
TO
LOVE
For years Lucy Webster
blamed her disability for
her adolescent unhappiness.
Then, as an adult, she learned
to embrace and celebrate
her body. Now she wishes
her non-disabled friends
could do the same

2 2 | S AT UR DAY | 09.09.23 | The Guardian

Portraits: Chantel King
M
Y FRIENDS AND I are
lounging by a beautiful
pool in Oman, enjoying
our girls -only break .
There is lighthearted chat
about jobs and boys and
the stupid things we’ve
done on nights out. It
takes one mention of a
dress worn somewhere,
one adjustment of a
bikini, for the
conversation to turn to
our bodies.
My group of friends are
all gorgeous. But I sit and
listen quietly as they list the things about themselves
they do not like, bemoaning no longer being the same
size or shape they were at 18 now they are in their late
20s. I try to interject, but this conversation, with its
refrains of “I wish I had” and “if only I could wear”, is
almost a ritual now; these women have been conditioned
to go through the motions of self-criticism in order to
prove that they are aware of their supposed flaws.
“You all look amazing,” I say. “Don’t buy into
this rubbish!”
They laugh and nod, agreeing that the patriarchy
is obviously to blame, but their responses are still
noncommittal. “I know I shouldn’t care,” one says,
“but I do.”
I look down at my own body, spreadeagled on a sun
lounger. I look at my bent spine, my uneven hips, my
hands twisted outwards – all symptoms of my cerebral
palsy – and a wry smile crosses my lips. I look down at
my body – disabled, ostracised and desexed by an ableist
society – and I think: “Thank you, you have saved me
from all this crap.”
I HAVE NOT ALWAYS BEEN SO KIND towards this body
of mine. As a young child, I was largely insulated from
ableism by my family and friends (little kids are
remarkably unfazed by difference). But as a self-
conscious teenager in the looks-obsessed 00s, being
bullied at school meant I spent a lot of time worrying
– not about whether I looked pretty or cool, but a very
specific worry about how visible my disability was
(spoiler alert: very).
I have never felt as exposed as I did during year 7
swimming lessons; feeling the whole class watching
and fidgeting awkwardly as I transferred into a hoist
and then sat, shivering in my swimsuit, as the teachers
worked out how to lower me into the water. This
happened every week, and I am sure that eventually
no one even glanced over, but by then it was too late.
The shame had taken hold.
Beyond the pool, other insecurities multiplied. I was
especially invested in whether a particular outfit I
fancied from Topshop accentuated or hid my scoliosis-
curved spine, as if that was more noticeable than the
wheelchair I was sitting in. This manifested in some
slightly quirky and certainly contradictory style
choices, most notably a penchant for oversized but loud-
coloured jumpers, which I wore as a quasi-uniform at
my uniform-free school. They were my armour as I
navigated the choppy waters of ableism for the fi rst
time – baggy so that the unusual contours of my body
were concealed, but bright enough that I could tell
myself people were staring at the luminous orange knit
rather than my disability.
It never occurred to me to ask whether I liked how I
looked from a non-disability standpoint. My body was
a physical challenge to deal with, not something with
any aesthetic value. While peers tried different styles
and dyed their hair ever-changing colours, I wore the
same jeans until they were faded, the same hoodie until
it was too small, and never paused to ask myself whether
this was what I wanted or if my clothes reflected who
I was. When I got dressed in the morning, I was too busy
worrying about the day ahead and whether my body
was going to cause me any more grief to notice what I’d
pulled from the drawer.
It’s hard, as an adult, to contemplate how deeply I
bought into the toxic mix of ableism, sexism and pure
teenage insecurity that led me to want to look “less
disabled” (an idea I now find extremely uncomfortable
for a variety of reasons, not least the fact that there is
no such thing as looking disabled). Like most teenagers,
I had an almost physical aversion to being noticed, so
being in a body that kept becoming more noticeable
was mortifying. Being a girl, subject to so many rules
about how to look and how to fit in that I couldn’t
possibly abide by, only made things worse.
Most obviously, the bullying and ostracising I
experienced at school because I was different – being
told I wasn’t invited to some after-school meet-up
because I wouldn’t be able to do the activity or because
they didn’t want my support worker to be there – made
me want to minimise that difference, at least visually.
Not only would I have given anything not to be disabled,
but I would have given anything to efface myself
completely, to have blended in so well that I disappeared.
Disabled women face even more negative messages
about our bodies than our non-disabled counterparts,
and this is especially true for those of us who are young.
When people stare open-mouthed or flinch in horror,
when people tell us that if they had to live in our bodies
they would kill themselves, we are implicitly and
explicitly told that our bodies are ugly, disgusting and
broken; as far from the ideals of femininity as it is
possible to be.
I wasn’t alone in being made to feel that my body
was a freakish anomaly; studies from the 2000s, when
I was growing up, show that disabled women had lower
self- and body-esteem than non-disabled women,
primarily linked to social ostracisation. As a teenager,
I didn’t understand that the narratives around disabled
female bodies were rooted in ableist and sexist
assumptions about beauty, excluding everyone who
was not white, non-disabled and thin, so I didn’t have
any tools to resist or reject them. Instead, I felt a lot of
shame, and blamed my body rather than society for all
the ways I was othered. It seemed the obvious culprit.
I didn’t yet know that being treated badly because of
my body did not mean my body itself was bad.
Things began to change at Warwick University,
where a new world of decent accessibility across campus
and in my halls of residence took a lot of the strain out
of navigating my body through life. Very
quickly, I made friends who only cared
about what I could or couldn’t do so that
The Guardian | 09.09.23 | S AT UR DAY | 2 3
they could make sure I was included. I knew life for me
and my body had changed when a new pal called to ask
whether they should cancel a long-planned society
Laser Quest social or whether there was a way I could
play. I didn’t want them to cancel – being considered
was the thing that mattered. I told them to go ahead
and I’d meet them at the pub afterwards.
Having good, kind friends meant that a social life
opened up, with nights out when I wanted to get dolled
up. I still remember the day during my first term when
a friend did my hair and makeup, and I squeezed myself
into a tiny green bodycon dress, only to look in the
mirror and surprise myself: I liked how I looked. When
I wasn’t dressed up and feeling good, I still viewed my
body as either an irredeemable problem to be ignored
or as a source of anxiety. I wore the same few outfits –
hastily purchased from New Look in the first few weeks
of term – over and over. One of the many reasons I
strenuously avoided dating and relationships was my
absolute conviction that no one could find me attractive.
Being fancied would have meant being looked at, and
I still really didn’t want to be noticed.
I am ashamed to admit I had a lot of conversations
with other women about our bodies at this time that
left me feeling confused and jealous. I wanted to
empathise, but their insecurities about barely noticeable
weight gain or how their hair fell seemed ridiculous to
me – nice problems to have if you weren’t worried about
your posture or remembering to swallow enough to
prevent dribbling (most people do this reflexively; I do
not). They worried about people’s judg ment, while I
thought I simply had to accept that people stared and
pointed. I thought they were delusional when they
commented on the shapes of their chins or declared a
perfectly nice top unflattering. “Why do you even notice
this stuff ?” I wanted to ask, indignant. I envied them
their problems. I envied them their bodies.
QUITE WHEN ENVYING MY FRIENDS’ BODIES tipped
into being profoundly grateful for mine is difficult to
pinpoint. But finally meeting fellow disabled people
during my first few weeks at university meant that for
the first time I saw bodies like mine positively
represented – even if only in my living room.
Perhaps more than any other group of people,
disabled women are invisible in our culture. This is
true of the media, the fashion industry, and the beauty
ads we are consistently fed (although perhaps things
are changing, with a recent Vogue disability issue
receiving widespread acclaim, and the rise of disabled
influencers online). Data on disability representation
is patchy and very rarely broken down by gender, but
2022 figures from Nielsen, the media data research firm,
show that visibly disabled people appeared in only 0.7%
of TV roles in the US. Most notable examples of good
disability representation – such as RJ Mitte’s portrayal
of Walt Jr in Breaking Bad or Ryan O’Connell in Special
– are men.
The only way to become comfortable with one’s
disabled body, then, is to surround yourself with others
who also have them. Seeing the beauty – and the
normality – in your disabled friends’ bodies as you share
FRIENDS’ INSECURITY
ABOUT WEIGHT GAIN
OR HOW THEIR
HAIR FELL SEEMED
RIDICULOUS TO ME
2 4 | S AT UR DAY | 09.09.23 | The Guardian
a drink and a laugh in the pub after work helps you see
those qualities in your own. And slowly, slowly, shame
is stripped away.
The community also taught me about a new way of
seeing disability that really changed how I saw myself.
The social model of disability argues that we are
prevented from doing things and from being equal in
society by inaccessibility and ableism, rather than by
our bodies. Every time I fell into the old habit of
apologising for my access needs – when we couldn’t get
accessible tickets for a gig or go to the bar that looked
fun – my new friends reacted with an arched eyebrow
and a chorus of, “Don’t be daft, they should have a
bloody ramp.” This happened so often that eventually
I, too, was telling these random strangers to buy ramps
(I developed a fun tactic of making them guess how
much they cost on Amazon; it’s always much less than
people think). It is much easier to like your body when
you are not unfairly holding it responsible for every bad
thing that’s ever happened to you.
These lessons gradually rewired my brain, replacing
the idea I’d had of my apparently broken, ugly body
with a kinder, fairer self-image. The change was so slow
that I didn’t really notice until it was almost complete.
I spent my early years in journalism desperately
trying to avoid broadcast work (a challenge, given that
I worked for the BBC) because I hated seeing my wriggly
body on screen. I knew my self-perception had shifted
when I volunteered to be interviewed on BBC Breakfast
about a story I was working on. But the fi nal victory
came just last year, at a glitzy press TV preview, when
I noticed I was no longer trying to sit up straighter than
usual, and realised I finally didn’t give a shit about my
spine. Now, at 28, my relationship to my body couldn’t
be more different from the one I had at university. Envy
is a thing of the past. Instead, I feel a profound gratitude
for the things my body has taught me. Or, more
accurately, for the things I have been taught by people
with bodies like mine.
Unfortunately, the rest of society still has to play
catchup. Progressive thinking has moved on, a little,
from judging women’s appearances, but we’re still very
happy to judge abilities. Every time women are
encouraged by a pastel-coloured Instagram post to love
their bodies for what they can do instead of how they
look, I want to scream. The truth is, some bodies can’t
do very much at all. And some bodies are sites of life-
altering pain and illness. But, despite what the
mainstream body positivity movement tells us with
thousands of influencer-style fitness posts marked
#celebratewhatyourbodycando, these bodies are no
less worthy of care and respect.
Recently, I’ve seen the disabled community start to
forge the basis of a new brand of body positivity, one
that is much more inclusive. My social media feeds,
these days, are full of women proudly showing off their
mobility aids or medical equipment, or documenting
what they look like when fatigue means they can’t get
out of bed. One of my favourite posts ever is by the actor
Ruth Madeley, in which she shares a beautiful black
and white picture of her spine and surgery scars, to
raise awareness of scoliosis. (Sometimes, adult Lucy
gets to see exactly what teenage Lucy needed to.)
Ruth’s post embodies the body positivity I only ever
see in the disability community. It’s one that doesn’t
put any conditions or qualifiers on loving your body. It
simply says: bodies are worthy of kindness and care
because we all spend our whole lives in one and because
they make those lives possible. They give us the gift of
existing, and the least we can do in return is refuse to
be made to hate them. In other words, all bodies are
good bodies. No ifs. No buts. Just acceptance.
Strangely, then, I often find that disabled women
(including me) have a much healthier body image than
their non-disabled counterparts – just look for the
hashtags #disabledandcute or #disabledandproud on
Instagram to be inundated with disabled people who
love themselves and how they look. If all bodies are
good bodies, there is no need to worry about weight or
uneven skin, no need to angst about wrinkles. For me,
there is no need to give my spine a second thought or
to try to control how my hands sit in my lap.
And there is no need for shame. No need to wish
ourselves less disabled, or even to look it. These days,
I have no issue being noticed. I post full-body pictures
on Instagram and wear what I please every single day.
I do not own one oversized jumper. If anything, I take
pride in being seen. Yes, it still rankles when someone
does a double-take on catching sight of me, but I believe
that every time I show up as conspicuously as possible,
I am quietly deconstructing the myth that disabled
bodies should be invisible. If people want to look at
my body, good. Let them.
Teenage Lucy would not have believed this, but one
of the ways I try to make this message obvious is
through developing my own sense of style. I wear bright
colours because I like them, not because they serve as
a distraction (although I have, mercifully, foregone the
awful luminous orange). I choose dresses based on how
comfortable they are (meaning I have a collection of
different coloured elasticated-waistline dresses from
the fashion brand Joy), not whether they hide my spine
or disguise my hips. I have swapped uncomfortable
“feminine” shoes for a treasured collection of Dr
Martens boots that make me feel confident and
somehow exactly myself. I now use my appearance to
express myself and all my differences.
CHANTEL KING/THE GUARDIAN. HAIR AND MAKEUP: NEUSA NEVES AT ARLINGTON ARTISTS
These days, when my non-disabled friends are
critical of their bodies, I am not confused or jealous.
Instead, it has become a personal mission to impart the
wisdom I’ve gleaned from my community. Sitting
beside the pool, I wish they could see the inherent worth
in their bodies, which are allowing them to feel the sun
and enjoy a swim and have this giggly chat in the first
place. I want them to see that society’s norms – which
don’t serve anyone, disabled or not – are there to be
rejected. I want them to see that looks and abilities don’t
need to factor into any decision to like your body, and
that you don’t need anyone’s permission to do so.
Mostly, I want them to see that disabled women not
only do not hate our bodies by default, but also have
valuable things to say on body image. We have been
subject to the worst messages about our bodies and
most of us have come out the other side, victorious.
Which means that everyone else can, too •
Lucy Webster’s The View from Down Here: Life As
a Young Disabled Woman is published by Dorling
Kindersley at £16.99. To order a copy for £14.95, go to
guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
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2 6 | S AT UR DAY | 09.09.23 | The Guardian
‘I DON’T
JUST
WANT
Miriam Margolyes may be our
naughtiest national treasure,
but she still wants to be
admired for her acting.
TO BE
She talks to Simon Hattenstone
about the joy of later-life fame
and the many men – from
Jagger to Beatty to
Schwarzenegger – who have
appalled her
A FOUL-
Portraits: David Kelly
MOUTHED
OLD
BIDDY’
IT TOOK MIRIAM MARGOLYES 80 years to write her
memoir. Two years on, the actor, documentarian and
raconteur extraordinaire has written another – of
sorts. Whereas This Much Is True was a (relatively)
conventional autobiography, Oh Miriam! is more of a
self-help guide: Margolyes’s manifesto for a fulfi lled
life. Why did she feel the need to write it? “I have to say
the reason I did it is exactly the same reason I did the
first one. They made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.” An
advance of £250,000, seeing as you’re asking. “I didn’t
particularly want to do it. But I thought I cannot turn
down such a huge amount of money because I’m going
to need it for carers. So I wrote it.”
Margolyes loves to tell it straight. And the older she
gets, the straighter she tells it. She’s also famously filthy
– perhaps most memorably telling the story, on Graham
Norton’s show in 2011, of how, when riding her bike
as a student in Cambridge, she stopped at the traffic
lights by an open car with an American soldier inside.
“Something crazy took hold of me. You know that
feeling. And I said, ‘Would you like to follow me to my
college and I’ll suck you off ?’” Sure enough, he followed.
And very grateful he was, too. “‘Can I come back next
week and bring my friends?’ he asked as he left.”
What makes her so funny is that she tells these stories
in a cut-glass, upper-class RP – every magnificently
enunciated syllable sharp as a stab.
She’s worried that Oh Miriam! is a little strait-laced.
“I don’t think it’s as rude as my first book, therefore
I suspect it won’t do as well. But I think the things I
say in it are again absolutely true, and perhaps more
serious. And I’m glad of that. I don’t just want to be a
foul-mouthed old biddy. A potty-mouth as I’m often
called. Because I’m more than that.”
It’s true. She is more than that. But she’s also worrying
unnecessarily. With chapter titles such as The Joy of
Bottoms, Adventures in Heavy Petting and Always Be
a Cunt, I tell her fans of mucky Miriam are unlikely to
feel short-changed. “Hehehe! Good, because that’s part
of who I am.” And now, she says, is hardly the time to
start holding back, whether it’s on Israel and Palestine,
the Tories and Labour, Warren Beatty and Mick Jagger,
or circumcision and smegma – just a few of the topics
we touch on over the next couple of hours.
“What can I do? I have to say what I believe to be
the truth,” she says. “Now I’m 82, I don’t give a flying
fuck. If I want to say something, I’m going to say it.” At
72 or 62, would she have given one? “Oh no. I’ve always
been like this. The only time I’ve been moderate with
expressing myself is when I was in America because my
adorable Jewish agent said [she adopts a male, nasal,
Jewish-New Yorker voice], ‘Miriam, you’re in America
now, you can’t talk about being gay and all that stuff,
just button up and don’t wear shorts.’” She did button
up, hid the true Margolyes, and she failed – her 1992 TV
series Frannie’s Turn was cancelled after five episodes.
There is one other time I remember Margolyes
being moderate with her expletives – on Desert Island
Discs in 2008. Back then, Margolyes was a successful
character actor and a regular in costume dramas such as
Vanity Fair and Little Dorrit. There were also legendary
cameos (Lady Whiteadder and Infanta Maria Escalosa
in Blackadder), appearances in the Harry Potter fi lms
as Professor Sprout and moments of true glory (a best
supporting actress Bafta for Martin Scorsese’s The Age of
Innocence in 1994). She has a fabulous gift for accents,
voicing everything from animated movies (the border
collie Fly in Babe) to lubricious commercials (Manikin
cigars in the 1970s) and soft porn (Sexy Sonia: Leaves
from my Schoolgirl Notebook).
Margolyes was funny and phlegmatic on Desert
Island Discs, but there was something profoundly sad
about it, too. “I’m not happy with what I’ve given to the
world,” she told Kirsty Young. “I think I’m underused,
undervalued and slightly despised. I wanted to do
Shakespeare, be at the National, admired
as an actress. But at the moment I’m just
smiled at as an actress. I want to hurt and
The Guardian | 09.09.23 | S AT UR DAY | 2 7
astonish as an actress.” She said if she was lucky, she
could stretch her career for another 10 years.
That was 15 years ago. Today, she has never been
so popular and in a way she never expected to be – as
a personality, with multiple new audiences. And it
probably all started with the Graham Norton story. Not
only did she become a desirable (if high-risk) chatshow
guest, she was invited to make documentaries. Over the
past five years she has made TV series about Britain’s
obesity problem and her own weight struggles,
confronting her fear of ageing and dying, and taking
road trips through America, Australia and Scotland.
I remind her that she was a model citizen on Desert
Island Discs. “Well, I wouldn’t swear on Radio 4! That
would be terrible.” She says her parents would have
been horrified. Although long gone, they continue to
play a huge part in her life. For all her rabble-rousing
and dirty talk, she remains desperate to please them. “I
had wonderful parents, and they have never let me go
and I have allowed them not to let me go.” Is that why
she still observes so many Jewish traditions? “Oh yes! It
would please them. And I didn’t please them by being a
lesbian. I didn’t give them grandchildren. They wanted
the whole schmear, the traditional stuff.” When she
was 27, she realised she was gay. Soon after, she started
dating the Australian academic Heather Sutherland and
came out to her mother who was devastated. Today, she
says she wishes she’d never told her. She and Heather,
a history professor, have been together for 54 years.
Strictly speaking, it’s not true that Margolyes would
never swear on Radio 4. But to be fair, on the occasion
she did, she was unaware she was still on air. Last
October, she appeared on the Today programme to pay
tribute to Robbie Coltrane, who had just died. On her
way out, she said, “I never thought I’d be sitting in the
seat … ” Presenter Justin Webb finished for her: “In the
seat Jeremy Hunt has just sat in, you were about to say!”
But he was wrong. “When I saw him there, I said, ‘You’ve
got a hell of a job, best of luck.’ What I really wanted to
say was, ‘Fuck you, you bastard’ but you can’t say that.”
She was quickly ushered out, with apologies to listeners.
For me, it was one of her greatest performances
because it was spontaneous. On chatshows, she’s
there to outrage, but there was nothing planned about
this. I expect her to revel in the memory, but she looks
sickened. “I didn’t know I was on mic. I nearly shat
myself when I found out. I was practically in tears. The
girl who showed me to my car will tell you. I was shaking
with shock. Because I would not swear on Radio 4.”
It gave lots of us pleasure, I say, because it was from
the heart. “It was from the heart because I said what
I felt, but it was a bit of a shock. The producers were
delightful about it and that made me feel better because
I’m not trying to offend people, I’m trying to change
people’s minds, to make them see that the sort of thing
going on in parliament and Israel and America is not
acceptable. I’m angry and I think other people should
be angry, and that’s why I behave like that. Actually I’m
an incredibly moral and well-behaved person in public
with other people. I don’t want to embarrass and upset
people. That’s absolutely not my agenda.”
MARGOLYES IS ZOOMING from Broken Hill, a mining
town in New South Wales (she has dual citizenship of
Britain and Australia) where she’s making another
documentary series – though it’s all hush-hush. Zoom
seems to make her personality even bigger, if that’s
possible. She’s right here in my living room demanding
to know everything, and answering with unsparing
honesty. She takes one look at me and smiles. “Are you
Jewish?” I am, as it happens. “Where are you?” In north
London, I say. And she’s off. Margolyes loves to talk
about her Judaism – how important the traditions are for
her, how she never works on Yom Kippur and how fellow
Jews regard her as a heretic because she is so critical of
Israel. “I think north London Jews feel I should keep
my mouth shut and that I am a terrorist.” In Oh Miriam!
she says the living person she most despises is Israeli
2 8 | S AT UR DAY | 09.09.23 | The Guardian
prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu for “fanning the
flames of confl ict between Israelis and Palestinians,
and removing the chance of peace”.
Margolyes grew up in Oxford, the only child of a
Scottish doctor and a mother who was an artist and
let out flats to students (Margolyes did the cleaning).
She says she was spoiled to bits – not materially, but
with love. “My parents loved me beyond any love you
can imagine. It made me a bit conceited, but it taught
me to expect love from everyone.” She attended the
prestigious Oxford High school and graduated from
Cambridge with a degree in English. At university,
she performed in the 1962 Footlights show, alongside
future members of Monty Python and the Goodies.
As the only girl in the show, she says they treated her
with contempt. “They sent me to Coventry. I would
go on stage, get the laughs, then I’d come off and was
completely ignored.” Did she ask why they behaved like
that? “No, I was too crushed. I think they thought I was
too full of myself because in those days women were
literally not allowed to join the club. Graham Chapman
and John Cleese were poisonous. John was a brilliant
comedian in his day, but something has turned. Like
milk, he’s gone sour. He’s an irrelevance.” She does
single out two Pythons for praise, however. “Michael
Palin is completely different. He’s a darling, a special
man. And Eric Idle is lovely – a friend of mine. He’s
incredibly intelligent and very funny. Cleese is a puny
tadpole of a person.” Despite this, she loved her time at
Cambridge, and says this was when she truly became
alive. After university, she moved to London, selling
encyclopedias and doing market research for two years
before getting a job with the BBC Drama Repertory
Company. Since then she’s rarely been without work.
Virtually everything in her life has been shaped out
of love for her parents or in opposition to their views,
or an unlikely mix of the two. Even her obsession with
blowjobs. “Mummy and Daddy said, ‘You behave like a
lady, you don’t sleep with people before you’re married’
and, rather like President Clinton, I kept to that.” She
looks at me, thoughtfully. “I have a terrible gag reflex
when I go to the dentist and sometimes I think that’s the
punishment for sucking off.” I tell her I have a theory
about her obsession with fellatio – I think you just like
saying “sucking off ”. She giggles. “Oh yes! It’s funny.
Because you can see it happening when you say that.
Fellatio could be the name of a road, but sucking off is
only sucking off.” She comes to a sudden stop. “I’m just
going to fart. That’s it. OK, go ahead.”
MARGOLYES DOESN’T DRINK and has never taken
drugs. “I’m not interested in something you can inhale,
take into your body, that changes your mind. I don’t
like it.” Is she a prude in some ways? “Oh defi nitely.
Definitely. Someone I recently worked with has a very
committed relationship with a woman and he made an
assignation, and I was deeply shocked and said so. And
everybody thinks, ‘Oh, fuck off, Miriam.’” What kind
of assignation? “Well, he met a woman and made a date
‘MICHAEL PALIN IS A
DARLING. ERIC IDLE
IS LOVELY. JOHN
CLEESE IS A PUNY
TADPOLE OF A MAN’
with her with a view to a horizontal relationship.” Didn’t
you cheat on Heather once? “Yes, I did, and I wouldn’t
do it again.” It caused huge turmoil, she says. “Don’t
gamble with your happiness. Adultery is for fools.”
Margolyes says she’s changed her attitude to lots of
things in her life while her parents never did. Can she
give an example? “Yes. I moved to the left.” Pause. “And
I don’t believe in circumcision. That’s a big thing. I only
realised I didn’t like it recently. I don’t like circumcision
because you are mutilating a child.” And within a beat,
she’s on to smegma. “I don’t think circumcision in itself
is a bad thing. In fact it’s probably a good thing because
we lose the problem of smegma which is a nightmare for
many women.” Like many celebrities, she makes money
using the Cameo app, which provides personalised
videos for fans. “In my Cameo messages, I often give
instructions to young men to pull back their foreskins
and give it a good wipe over because it’s very important.
But nobody actually seems to say that any more, so I
think that’s one of the good things I’ve done in my life; to
bring smegma to the forefront of people’s knowledge.”
But, she says, her ambitions extend beyond smegma.
She cites her friend Esther Rantzen as somebody who
has really made a difference. “Esther founded Childline.
She’s created an organisation to challenge loneliness
for old people. She’s made a difference to people’s
lives. I haven’t done that. I’ve had a lovely time and
I’ve made people laugh, I hope, but I’m not sure I’ve
got the intellectual fierceness I would like to have.” She
says her approach is too scattergun – within a single
thought, she can rage against climate change, Brexit,
factory farming and “that bastard Rees-Mogg who had
the impudence to say the victims of Grenfell lacked
common sense”. “The thing is I care about a lot of things,
I’m not focused enough on one or two. But I hope to go to
Israel and Palestine to make a documentary. Hopefully
I’ll be well enough. That will mean I’ve done my duty.”
Margolyes may be struggling physically, but
workwise she’s more active than ever. The way you’ve
made a difference, I suggest, is as a role model for older
people. “Well, that’s good. I’m not exactly vain, but
I don’t like the look of myself on television. That’s
why I never watch myself. And when I was doing this
documentary in Australia, I said to my brilliant director,
Helen Barrow, ‘Don’t film me going upstairs with sticks
and making a mess of it, I don’t want people to see me
looking like that.’ And she said, ‘Well, you should,
Miriam, because it gives people confidence that if you
look like that and you can still do it, then they can.’”
But she is struggling to come to terms with her
increasing frailty. “I do feel a waning of powers. I’ve
got spinal stenosis so I can’t walk properly, and many
of my dear friends have died, so I’m conscious of time
running out. And that makes me slightly hysterical at
times because I want to try to do the things I have to
do.” At the moment, someone from the documentary
team is staying with her to help look after her. “I’m
afraid of losing my physical independence. My feeling of
disablement has made me make more demands because
I get frightened. And that is a new thing. I was afraid
of failure before. Getting bad reviews or not being
employed. I think all actors have that. But now there
is this extra anxiety. The thing that scares the shit out of
me is that I might have a stroke because my mother had
one and I saw what it did.” Does it scare her more than
death? “Yes, and I’m irritated that I should be afraid.
Why can’t I just go through and whatever happens,
happens? Because you can’t do much about it.”
One of the things she’d most like to do now is live with
Heather on a permanent basis. Despite being together
for 54 years, they have never done so. In 1973, she bought
a home in Tuscany. “And that’s where I want to end
up with the person of my life, together.” But because
of Brexit, they can’t do so. “One of the reasons I hate
Boris Johnson so much is because he’s fucked about
with my life. Brexit means we can’t be in the house I
bought 50 years ago for longer than 90 days in every 180.
Brexit is an appalling catastrophe. A deliberate appalling

DAVID KELLY/THE GUARDIAN. ST YLING: ANDI PLOWMAN AT THE UNCOMMON AGENCY. HAIR AND MAKEUP: GINELLE
catastrophe for which the Tories should fry in hell.”
DALE. PREVIOUS PAGES: LEE MATHEWS SHIRT AND BL A ZER; L ACK OF COLOR HAT. THIS PAGE: C AMILL A DRESS
Is Heather very different from her? “Ah, completely,”
she says proudly. “She’s grown-up and ironic and
watchful and quiet. And she does not like to be talked
about.” Margolyes used to see a therapist who told her
she was basically a five-year-old but with a bit of work
she could mature into a 12-year-old. Did she succeed?
“She said when we stopped, ‘I think you have made it
to 12, but you might need top-ups.’” Has she had them?
“Sadly no, because she died not long afterwards.” Does
Heather bring out the little girl in her? “No, I’m more
grown-up with Heather because she won’t have it if
I’m not. She’s tough and she’s good for me. I’m a little
afraid of her in some ways.” In what way won’t she have
it? “All the attributes that are self-regarding she simply
withdraws from. She’s just not going to play that game.”
What does she love about you? For once Margolyes is
reduced to silence. “I’m lovable,” she eventually says.
“That’s what she loves. The bit of me that is vulnerable
and kind and intelligent and funny.”
In Oh Miriam! (so called because she’s heard it said
so many times), she makes it clear she has more time
for women than men: “Most men are arseholes – not
all, and the young ones are better.” She describes Boris
Johnson’s father Stanley as “the worst old person I know
… a complete arsehole”. Why? “I had to live with him
for a week in a programme called The Real Marigold
on Tour. We went to St Petersburg. Sheila Ferguson,
Wayne Sleep and the wonderful Bobby George who is
a Tory, a working-class Tory, but a diamond.” She stops
to congratulate herself on her tolerance. “I think what’s
good about me is I can see beyond the fact that he’s a
Tory to the goodness of the man.” And Stanley Johnson?
“It was a real eye-opener that he could be as rude, as
scornful, as selfish as he was. He was utterly disgusting
and shameful, and I have no qualms about saying so.”
Nor does she have any qualms about naming the
other men who have behaved badly in her presence.
Take Warren Beatty. She briefly appeared in his 1981
film Reds, and claims of the first time they met: “He was
sitting at his desk and I was standing in the doorway. He
looked me up and down and said, ‘Do you fuck?’ I wasn’t
having any of that, so I shot back, ‘Yes, but not you.’”
Did she regard it as an abuse of his power? “Well, I don’t
think he should do it, but men are like that. If they have
a chance to have a fuck, they will. I think he’s probably
done it to everybody who’s walked through the door.”
In 2004, she appeared with Beatty’s wife, Annette
Bening, in the film Being Julia. Did she tell her what she
thought of Beatty? “Oh, of course I did! I can’t remember
exactly what I said. I probably said he was a bit of a
pillock. But when he came to visit Annette, they invited
me to supper with the family, and their relationship
seemed to be gorgeous. She’s a terrific person.”
Mick Jagger also gets a dishonourable mention in
the book. In 2001 she appeared on stage with his then
girlfriend Sophie Dahl in The Vagina Monologues, and
Jagger would visit her at the theatre. “He used to come
backstage and he was just a miserable cunt. He was
unfriendly, and I don’t think he treated her very well.
He was much older than her and I thought he was up
himself. I never listen to that kind of music anyway. I’m
a musical snob, so I wasn’t impressed by him.”
Then there’s Arnold Schwarzenegger, with whom
she made the movie End of Days. She says he was so
offended at her letting slip a fart in rehearsals that when
they were filming her death scene, as he had her pinned
underneath him, he “farted, loudly, purposefully and
malevolently, directly into my face – and then laughed
uproariously”. She wasn’t impressed, and claims: “He
was a privileged groper. Not to me because he didn’t
fancy me, and I don’t think he liked me. He’s a very
boring man.” (Schwarzenegger apologised this year
over historical accusations that he had groped women.)
Finally, there’s the comedy actor Leonard Rossiter,
with whom who she sat on the council of the performers’
trade union Equity, giving her “first-hand experience
of what a horrible man he was. He was a pig. A brilliant
actor, but he was absurdly racist, absurdly rightwing,
and he was personally rude to people.”
But, she says, she has worked with so many people
she loved, many of them now dead. Who does she miss
most? She mentions Roger Hammond (who appeared
with her in the TV adaptation of Dickens’ Little Dorrit)
and Sonia Fraser (who co-wrote Dickens’ Women with
Margolyes, as well as directing her in the one-woman
show in which she plays 23 characters). “She was my
mentor and teacher. I also miss Ken Dodd very much. He
was a genius, an intellectual in a way, and very human.
He loved connecting to people. I miss Barry Humphries.
He was extraordinary, and I knew him from when he
was 17, before the greatness. I really do miss him.”
We talk about the self-lacerating assessment she
gave of her career on Desert Island Discs 15 years ago –
undervalued, underused, despised. “That was quite a
long time ago,” she says quietly. Has she changed her
mind? “Yes, I don’t think I’m despised. Underused? I
think that’s still true. Undervalued? I think people think
more of me now than they did then, but I don’t think
I’m admired as an actress. I didn’t make it as an actress
in the way I would have liked and think I could have.
I don’t think I think I have great talent, and I allowed
myself to remain fat, and that meant I was hard to cast.”
Was that the main thing that held her back? “I don’t
know. Look, I’m a funny-looking woman. I really am.”
She’s not thrilled that she’s probably best known as
an actor for the Harry Potter films. “Harry Potter has
dominated quite a lot of my life latterly and I’m always
at pains to say I’ve never read any of the books or seen
the films. I fell asleep when I went to the premiere of the
two I was in. I’m just not interested in fantasy. I’m bored
by it. But I think JK Rowling’s a bloody good writer. If
you read the detective stories, they’re fabulous.”
Having said that, she’s hardly complaining. Her
career has provided a good living and she is amazed
how things have worked out for her in recent years. In
June, she was the cover star of Vogue – posing naked,
but for a few discreetly placed iced cherry buns. “That
is where I was humbled. I could not believe that I was
going to be on the cover of Vogue. Not a magazine I
particularly respect, or read, but to be on the cover! I
can’t ask for much more than I have. The affection with
which people greet me is astonishing. I’m puzzled why
I should suddenly have become famous and wherever
I go people rush at me and say, ‘Oh my God, it’s you, I
love you!’” Did people ever say that before? “No, it’s
new!” She quotes Gertrude Stein who, when asked what
a writer most wants, replied, “Oh, praise, praise, praise,
praise, praise.” That’s what she’s wanted, too, Margolyes
says. Has getting it made her more content? “Ooh yes!
When people come up to you and they’re pleased just to
be in your company, well, that’s a wonderful thing.” •
Oh Miriam!: Stories from an Extraordinary Life is
published by John Murray Press on 14 September at £25.
To order a copy for £22, go to guardianbookshop.com
The Guardian | 09.09.23 | S AT UR DAY | 2 9
 MUSIC ART
Chile’s The vivid
musical colours of
resistance, Victorian
50 years on Britain
PA G E 3 7 PA G E 42

PLAY
THINGS
A peek inside the UK’s tiniest theatres

31
CULTURE
From the magician who
stops his show to serve
at the bar to the actor
who drives entire plays
around in his car, meet
the theatre-lovers for
whom small is beautiful
Words: Kate Wyver
3 2 | S AT UR DAY | 09.09.23 | The Guardian
W
H E N A PRODUC E R
rings up attempting
to book a show with a
cast of eight, Jasper
Blakeley politely
suggests they do
more research on his
venue. Formerly a
hairdressers , the
Small Space in Barry, South Wales, is the tiniest
commercial theatre in the UK, with a stage “no bigger
than a parking space”. A cast of eight would be more
likely to fit one on top of the other than standing in a
row. “People always say: ‘God, it is small, isn’t it?”
chuckles Blakeley. “The clue is in the name.”
As long as no one minds getting cosy, 25 people can
pack into the downstairs theatre for a show of music,
magic and comedy. At the Small Space, bodies adapt to
fit the setting, Blakeley explains: “Elbows come in,
people move differently.” Like a caravan or a barge,
every inch is made use of. When more supplies
are needed, everyone in the bar stands up so
the seating can be lifted up to get to the drinks, and
Blakeley reassures me that you would only bang your
head on the freezer hidden above the stairs if you were
6ft 8in or above.
Buoyant and optimistic, Blakeley is one of the
extraordinarily determined, almost foolishly ambitious
people running the country’s smallest theatres, a group
Cover: Jacey
who aim to create wonders with very little room for
error. He likens his theatre to the London Underground:
“That shouldn’t work, yet somehow we always manage
to get in. And there’s loads more room in our theatre
than there is on the tube.”
In a climate of budget cuts and the cost of living crisis,
keeping a theatre alive is a gargantuan task even for
the smallest of spaces. When Simon Carr took over the
Little Theatre, a 90 -seater venue in Doncaster, in
2014 there was “about £87.40” in the bank, he
remembers with a strain in his voice. One more show
without a rapid rethink of the finances would bankrupt
the volunteer-run space. “I didn’t sleep for three
nights,” Carr groans, squeezing the bridge of his nose.
“We begged people not to fi le their receipts until we
could pay them.”
The theatre managed to stay afloat. “Financially at
the moment, touch wood, we’re doing quite well,” says
Alan Clark, who took over as artistic director of the Little
Theatre in June. “Every show we’ve put on in the last
year has made a profit, however small.” As well as ticket
sales of their own productions and the running of a
youth group, external hires of the theatre have been a
huge success. Musical tribute acts, they’ve found, do
stunningly well for both box office and bar, although
“you don’t want to be alone on the bar on one of those
nights,” warns Jo Chorlton, a former nurse and member
of the theatre for the last five years.
The volunteers at the Little Theatre not only act and
 ‘The clue’s in the name’
Jasper Blakeley ‘No one’s ever
conjures up some
free seats at the going to make
Small Space, Barry
a lot of money
from it. It’s more
about the space’

direct but cover the bar and front of house, too. Last
weekend, Clark explains proudly, the team had hosted
two sold-out shows and been told that the audience
reported never having had a friendlier welcome; they
were gobsmacked when they found out the place was
run and staffed by volunteers. “For me,” he smiles,
“that’s as good a testament as: ‘Oh I saw that play there,
it was brilliant.’”
“No one’s ever going to make a lot of money from
it,” affirms Sara Ratcliffe, half of the husband-and-wife
pair who run the near-miniature Tom Thumb theatre
in Margate. “Yes we all have to make a living, but it’s
not about that. It’s more about the space being really
special.” An old coach house dating from 1896, the
Tom Thumb has been an independent theatre for
almost 40 years. People clamber over one another
to reach the far side of the balcony that rings
the Japanese-Alpine architecture. Pictures cram the
inside, while a ballooning sculpture of a mushroom
sprouts off one wall.
Tonight there are 35 people packed into the theatre
downstairs and the space feels full, although Ratcliffe
is pretty sure that 70 once squeezed in, all standing.
Bags are on laps for lack of anywhere else to put them
RICHARD SWINGLER; SLY PANDA/SIMON C ARTER; DAVID JAMES/AL AMY STOCK PHOTO; COURTESY LIT TLE THEATRE; COURTESY SWALLOW THEATRE
single person always says the intimacy of it, the
connection to the audience, you can’t compare to that.”
Plate-spinning is a requirement to run a theatre of
this size. At the Small Space, Blakeley not only runs the
place but also performs; his primary life is one of a
closeup magician. Not one for single-tasking, he
also serves the bar on the nights he does a show. “I
take off the jacket, put on the apron and make cocktails,”
he says simply, as if singlehandedly entertaining
and watering two dozen people is nothing. “Then I
put the jacket back on and do another 45 minutes of
mind reading.”
Dedication to the audience in these individual spaces
seems key. On a recent summer’s day, actor Gareth J
Bale drove eight and a half hours from Wales up to the
Swallow, a tiny theatre tucked away in Whithorn,
Dumfries and Galloway. Named after the swallows that
used to nest in the barn’s roof every year, its local
audience were asked to bring their own chairs when
the space was first built. Today, the theatre has its own
50 seats, as well as state-of-the-art tech and a little
cottage for visiting artists to stay in.
Bale went to the Swallow to perform his one-man
show, Grav, about the beloved Welsh rugby player Ray

and a child is swept out of the way to avoid being
trodden on. Bodies breathe in to make more space as
the performer tiptoes their way through the audience.
The actor reaches the house lights – a humble light
switch at the back of the room – and blindly treads their
way back to the stage.
“We’re pretty much a two-man band,” says Ratcliffe,
who has run the Tom Thumb with her husband Alex
for the last six years. “People are like: ‘Have you got the
number to the marketing department?’ And we’re like:
‘Yeah, do you want to speak to me or Alex?’” A mix of
local talent and touring performances keep the place
afloat, alongside the bustling bar. “Sometimes these
tours come from playing on massive stages to thousands
of people, to 40 people here,” says Ratcliffe, “but every
Gravell. “Everything fits in the back of the car,” Bale
says of the show, “including my girlfriend and the dog.”
He has performed the show more than 300 times,
including in a church and in Gravell’s local village hall.
The show shifts to fit the space it’s in, from a giant stage
where you’re pushing to be heard at the back, to
somewhere like the Swallow where you are “knocking
knees with the front row”. In smaller spaces like this,
Bale says, the atmosphere changes. “The storytelling
is different. You can look into people’s eyes. It’s probably
a little bit more intimidating to be that close to people,
but you can be more subtle with your performance.”
The intimacy of these spaces, the details and physical
closeness the architecture enables, is something that
all the tiny theatre practitioners bring up. “It’s pretty
Extreme closeup
The audience show
their appreciation for
a magic show at the
Small Space
Small wonders (From Doncaster Little
top) the Tom Thumb Theatre; the Swallow
theatre, Margate; theatre, Whithorn
much interactive,” Blakeley says. “You literally are less
than two feet away.” If someone were to throw an egg
at you in a pantomime, reasons Carr, you could catch
it. “The audience participation is a lot stronger than in
a large theatre,” he says. This intimacy also enables a
knowledge of the people behind the show. “We did a
question and answer session after both performances,”
says Bale of the Swallow. “It felt like they wanted to get
to know you. It’s not just about ‘actor turns up, does
show, leaves’.”
Financially, keeping spaces like these open will
always be a knife-edge task. At the Little Theatre, the
only person they can afford to employ is the cleaner.
For Blakeley, it was only thanks to Arts Council grants
that he was able to tide over the 580 days it was shut
during the pandemic. But the commitment to the venue
and the support of avid audiences keeps them alive.
“We’re still here,” Blakeley says determinedly. “We
keep going.”
The challenges appear to pale in comparison with
what they gain from these spaces. For Clark, being
involved with the Little Theatre has offered him a new
kind of freedom. “Suddenly I found I could go on stage,
leave all my baggage behind and be free. My mental
health is a billion times better than the day before I
started doing this.” Having spent his career in the civil
service, his instinct has always been about logic and
structure. “Now,” he says happily, “I can express that
artistic part of me that’s never really got out.”

The Guardian | 09.09.23 | S AT UR DAY | 3 3

CULTURE
H O N E S T P L AY L I S T
Perry Farrell
The Jane’s Addiction man grew up on the
Beatles’ worldview and has played Led Zeppelin
to Trump, but who can he no longer listen to?
The first song I
remember hearing
I was living in New York
in Flushing, Queens in
the early 60s, the time of
the British invasion of the
Beatles. But my favourite
was My Boy Lollipop by
Millie Small, an artist
3 4 | S AT UR DAY | 09.09.23 | The Guardian
was Jane Says by Jane’s
Addiction. I ended up
singing it, with this man I
didn’t know, in honour of
his brother. It was the
most teary-eyed, bizarre
version I’ve ever done.
The song I inexplicably
know every lyric to
I don’t know why, but
Sympathy for the Devil
by the Rolling Stones. It’s
as if it were my life story.
The best song to play
at a party
One year I had the
opportunity to DJ for
[designer] Marc Jacobs at
New York fashion week.
I remember Donald
Trump was there. I was
very nervous and put on
the wrong song to start
the set, but it was the
best song I could have
from Jamaica. It was the The song I do at karaoke played: Black Dog by
first record that [Island I was invited to my wife’s Led Zeppelin.
records founder] Chris high school reunion,
Blackwell promoted. which had a karaoke bar. The song I secretly like
He would take all the This fellow came up and but tell everybody I hate
records, put them in the told me his brother had Give It Away by the Red
trunk of his car and go died tragically in an Hot Chili Peppers. I
around selling them in accident that week and think the lyrics are
stores in London. that his favourite song pretty easy to decipher.
The song I can no longer beautiful, with an
listen to innocence and joy.
My Hero, by Foo
Fighters, takes me back The song that gets me
to my best mate, Taylor up in the morning
Hawkins [who died last We would listen to the
year]. I am just not ready radio in the mornings
to hear that song. and the whole house
would explode to Good
The best song to have Lovin’ by the Young
sex to Rascals. It sounds like
Any thing by Cocteau the Beatles’ Twist and
Twins. Every song Shout, and would make
sounds like an orgasm. my dog bark. She was
This morning, it was a stray that I lost as
Cherry-Coloured Funk. quickly as I found her.
One day I let her out
The song that changed and she just never
my life came back.
When I first heard I Want
to Hold Your Hand by
the Beatles, it was being
The song I want played
at my funeral
played on the radio so I have a song I’ve written
the whole world could
hear their lovely view of
for Taylor [Hawkins]
that’s not released yet
the world. It was called Until the Kingdom
Comes. So that’ll be out
within a year. But you
haven’t heard it yet.
As told to Rich Pelley.
Perry Farrell’s Heaven
After Dark club event
takes place at Studio 338,
London, 16 Sep. See
heavenafterdarklive.com
 CULTUREE

Being set
T H E C U LT U R A L P R E S C R I P T I O N F O R . . .

in your ways
From hit novels by late bloomers
to artists turned chess masters,
our critics select culture that
revels in reinvention

Art Book Theatre

Marcel Duchamp The Blue Flower 30 and Out

One of modern art’s core Penelope Fitzgerald was Life-altering change can
principles is to “make it 58 when she launched creep up on you at any
new” and its history is her literary career with moment. For Kit Sinclair,
full of reinventions, a biography of the artist it was just after she
with media, ideas and, Edward Burne-Jones. had turned 30, left her
occasionally, the artists That was in 1975. A boyfriend and realised
Music themselves. The most couple of years later she she was gay. At this
Paramore – storied about-face has to turned to fiction, writing year’s Edinburgh fringe,
Paramore be Marcel Duchamp’s. exquisite novels based to a rapt audience,
After changing art for Film on her own experiences. Sinclair gave a sweet,
For a band who have ever by displaying found Beginners Then, in 1982, she began raucous performance
experienced their fair objects such as the working on an entirely in which she dived into
share of internal hard urinal and bottle rack in The title of Mike Mills’ different kind of a tick-box of queerness,
times, US pop-rock galleries, in 1923, at the 2010 film doesn’t quite historical fiction. The struggling to find what
titans Paramore have age of 36, he declared his tell you what the film is Blue Flower tells of the fitted as she attempted
always found ways to great work The Large about; these are not new early life of the German to get to grips with the
bounce back. Although Glass unfinished and beginnings, but old romantic poet and word “lesbian”. With
their permanent lineup gave up his first creative beginnings. Christopher philosopher Novalis and scenes interspersed with
FOX/GET T Y IMAGES; CORBIS/VCG/GET T Y IMAGES; FOCUS FEATURES/ALLSTAR; CHLOE BURTON

hadn’t quite solidified on life. Instead, he devoted Plummer gives the his doomed love for a verbatim quotes about
2013’s self-titled album, his time to chess and performance of a young sickly girl called queerness, 30 and Out
it was chockful of songs became a late-blooming lifetime as Hal, a retired Sophie von Kühn. It is – is a gentle reminder
that nodded to the chess master. art historian who, with among other things – an that we never have to
restless need for change, Skye Sherwin the death of his wife, extraordinary evocation accept the patterns our
with Moving On, Grow astonishes his middle- of the passions and life has travelled in,
Up and Future all noting aged son (Ewan uncertainty of youth. She and that if we feel stuck
the urge to strive McGregor) by coming out was 79 when it came out right now, it might just
forwards even if it means as a gay man at the age of – and it is a masterpiece. be a sign that beautiful
leaving old relationships 75. He is entirely relaxed, Sam Jordison change is ahead.
behind. By the time revealing that he has Kate Wyver
they got to 2017’s After been in the closet all his
Laughter, Paramore’s life, enthusiastically
sonic and emotional embraces the gay scene,
metamorphosis was and even acquires a
nearly complete, but beautiful lover, played
there is something in the by Goran Višnjić. The
self-titled record’s work final four years of Hal’s
in progress that reminds life are ones of glorious
you of the rewards of fulfilment not really
taking that first leap. shared by any of the
Jenessa Williams younger – and less daring
– characters.
Peter Bradshaw

The Guardian | 09.09.23 | S AT UR DAY | 3 5

 MUSIC
Under Pinochet, artistic
expression in Chile was
a form of underground
resistance. Fifty years
later, today’s performers
are keeping the flame
of protest alight
‘Music
is a
fighting
tool’
Words: Naomi Larsson Piñeda
BERNARDITA BIRKNER C ARVAJAL
B
y the time Los Pinochet
Boys formed in
Santiago, Chile, in 1984,
its teenage members
had already spent a
decade living under
the brutal dictatorship of Augusto
Pinochet. You’d hear of their gigs only
through word of mouth, while the few
flyers that circulated held just the bare
details of the event; their name alone
meant they were under constant threat.
“Those were extremely dark times,”
says Daniel Puente Encina, the band’s
bassist and vocalist. “The fear of being
detained or tortured to death was
always present.”
He remembers their clandestine
gigs as a “symphony of chaos and
violence” – the band never finished
a complete set as they were always
interrupted by the police. “All of our
shows ended with one, or more, band
members injured and bleeding and the
most unfortunate of us going to jail.
Many times we were beaten, shot at,
and on one occasion a fascist even
tried to electrocute us while we were
playing by throwing buckets of water
on to the stage.”
Being openly against the regime,
their music would always be a form
of protest. “It was our way of trying
to escape the reality of the dictatorship
and make our own rules,” says
Puente Encina, who eventually left
Chile after it became too dangerous
for him and Los Pinochet Boys.
“The idea of the protest song always
has been and will be part of our
cultural DNA. Even today, many
young people can still identify with
our music and lyrics, even though
only two of our songs survived on
a cassette.”
Indeed, as Chile approaches
the 50th anniversary of Pinochet’s
violent coup, the tradition of protest
music remains – inspiring artists today
and acting as an important reminder
of what so many fought for during
those years.
“What old bands sang in their songs
makes sense to me now,” says the
guitarist and vocalist of Santiago-
based band Hacia La Victoria, who
goes by the name of Chocorius. “About
the injustices that happened and are
happening today, as history seems to
repeat itself again.”
The Guardian | 09.09.23 | S AT UR DAY | 3 7
Combat rock (Below) Daniel
Puente Encina, Francis Sebastian
“Tan” Levine, Miguel Conejeros
and Iván Conejeros, AKA
Los Pinochet Boys
Hacia La Victoria formed in the
wake of the massive anti-inequality
protests that started in 2019, and they
are themselves survivors of Chilean
state repression – even more than 30
years after the country’s return to
democracy. Their eight members were
all fully or partially blinded by the
police during those demonstrations.
Their drummer, Gustavo Gatica, lost
his sight completely when he was hit
by rubber bullets while taking photos
of a protest. He was just 21.
The memory of the dictatorship
hung heavy during those months of
protests; the rightwing president
Sebastián Piñera brought the military
back out on to the streets and police
used so-called “non-lethal” weapons
to disperse the crowds. More than
30 people died and thousands were
injured, including almost 450 people
who suffered eye injuries.
“In a certain way we are strongly
linked to the survivors of the
dictatorship – it unites us,” says the
band’s vocalist and percussionist,
known as Lágrima del
Sol. “Music is a fighting
tool,” adds Chocorius.
– Wolfgang Uhlig
 CULTURE
Caption Kicker
This is appropriate
dummy text that is
being employed in

‘We were beaten, to Chile from outside, within Chile

musicians navigated the loss of
shot at and, on one cultural institutions and the
censorship against them. “From one
occasion, a fascist moment to the next their work was

even tried to reduced,” says musicologist Javier

electrocute us’
“It’s our megaphone, as it has always
been throughout time.”
When Pinochet took power in
a US-backed coup on 11 September
1973, ousting the socialist president
Salvador Allende, what followed
was 17 years of violent crackdown
of the left and anyone seen to be
against the regime. An estimated
40,000 people were tortured, and
more than 3,000 killed.
The dictatorship also brought
a direct assault on artistic and musical
expression – even listening to or
creating certain types of music
became a political act. “There were
dozens of cases of artists being
executed, and others of musicians
and artists who were simply banned
for refusing to engage with the
military regime,” says Puente Encina,
adding that many musicians lost
work, fell into poverty or suffered
mental health difficulties.
The torture and murder of the
musician Víctor Jara by the military
on 16 September, only a few days
after the coup, remains a symbol
of the regime at its most heinous.
Jara was part of Nueva Canción
Chilena (Chilean New Song), a
movement pioneered by folk artist
Violeta Parra that was targeted due
to its association with the left and
Allende’s Popular Unity government.
Parra, who died before Allende’s
presidency, was inspired by traditional
Andean music and used song as a
form of cultural commentary,
detailing the experiences of Chile’s
working class, poor and rural
communities. Nueva Canción was
PATRICIO GUZMÁN/AP; L ARR AINAR ANEDA; FAIRFA X MEDIA/GET T Y
Rodriguez Aedo. “They closed
universities, they closed cultural
centres, many clubs. On one side,
many of these musicians didn’t have
enough to eat for many years, while
others left [Chile] out of fear – scared
that something could happen to them
and they would be taken prisoner.”
Yet artists continued to create
music within the confines of the
regime – some as an act of protest, or
as a way to record the reality of life
under Pinochet and to call for freedom
and democracy. Folk group Sol y
Lluvia, who formed after the coup,
were explicitly anti-dictatorship,
while 80s rock band Los Prisioneros ‘Protest music
wrote about the rising unemployment means we can’t
and inequality under the regime. forget’ (From top)
Looking back, Chocorius sees how murdered musician
vital these artists were in keeping a Víctor Jara; Hacía la
record of that time. “Protest music is Victoria, who were
really important – it means we can’t all injured during
forget,” he says. As Neustadt also protests in 2019;
notes, many Chileans “don’t want to and Inti-Illimani,
forget [the dictatorship] and move on. who went into exile
They want justice – it’s debatable what after the 1973 coup
justice is, but it’s fair to say that justice
involves remembering, and music is
one of the ways to help remember
that movement, that history, and
that repression.”
In the decades since Chile’s return
to democracy, music is helping to
recover historical memory of the
dictatorship. Cantos Cautivos (Captive
Songs), a digital archive by Dr Katia
Chornik, holds powerful testimonies
detailing the musical experiences of
those held in Chile’s torture and
detention centres during the regime.
Chornik, an impact development
manager at Kingston University and
research associate at the University of
Cambridge, whose book on music, But in its most violent and brutal released this year that found roughly
memory and torture will be released form, music was also used for torture a third of respondents were in favour

always political but after the coup it
was the soundtrack of resistance.
“Anybody who was remotely
associated with Nueva Canción had
to go underground, and the music
became immediately not only a
marker of one’s political ideology,
cultural belief or the struggle against
cultural imperialism as it was before,
but it became prohibited,” says
Prof Robert Neustadt, director of
Latin American Studies at Northern
Arizona University.
While exiled artists such as
Inti-illimani and Quilapayún used
their music and the tradition of Nueva
Canción to draw the world’s attention
by Oxford University Press next year,
has collected 162 testimonies from
survivors or relatives recounting
music that was created, listened to
or heard in detention.
Ángel Parra, son of Violeta,
who was detained in the Chacabuco
concentration camp, made a
clandestine recording while
imprisoned. Others were able to listen
to music through the radio; one
testimony by Eduardo Andrés
Arancibia Ortiz, who was held in
Carcél de Santiago in 1986, recalls
how, “in prison, there was always a
radio set to accompany my political
ideas infused with poetry and hope”.
and indoctrination by the regime.
A notorious house on Calle Irán in
Santiago, which held political
prisoners, was nicknamed La
Discothèque by state agents for the
music that was blasted to mask the
noise of the detainees’ suffering,
or the loud music being used as a form
of torture itself.
Recording these musical
testimonies feels essential in keeping
account of the injustices, and to
commemorate the victims. “The
timing of the anniversary and of my
work in general coincides with a
big resurgence of Pinochetism,”
Chornik says, referring to a poll
of the coup.
“So there is a wider public role of
music to sensitise people to the human
rights violations,” she adds. “Most
people would not think these were
natural places for making music, or
that music existed there – and that
captures people’s attention.”
These musical testimonies, and
indeed the musical movements that
became synonymous with resistance,
serve as important records of that
time. As Chocorius says, music is
“our way of continuing to remember
the atrocities that happened here –
and that are often hidden. It’s a song
of hope and memory.”

The Guardian | 09.09.23 | S AT UR DAY | 3 9

 Out
CULTURE
Going
Cinema
out
Past Lives
Out now
Staying
Starring Greta Lee, Teo Yoo and John
Magaro, this delicate drama (above)
explores the romantic tensions that
in
arise in a New York marriage when one
partner’s childhood friend visits from
South Korea, seemingly with more on
his mind than just a vacation. A fine
A cultural primer directorial debut from Celine Song.
for the week ahead, My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3
whether you’re reaching Out now
for your dancing shoes It’s reunion time for the Portokalos
family, with writer-director Nia
or your comfy slippers ... Vardalos once more starring as Toula,
who back in 2002 married hunky Ian
(John Corbett) despite complications
arising from her extensive ensemble
of characterful relatives. This time,
the family are descending on the small
village where Toula’s late dad grew up.
The Nun 2
Out now
What do Baroness von Troken in
The Princess Diaries, the scary face in
Mulholland Drive and the demon nun
from The Nun have in common?
They’re all played by actor Bonnie
Aarons, and she’s back in the habit here
to terrorise in another gothic chiller,
set in a boarding school in France.
School of Rock – 20th Anniversary
rerelease
Out now
It is hard to believe it is 20 years since
Jack Black pretended to be a teacher at
posh prep school in order to help some
children win a Battle of the Bands
contest. See this amiable comedy again
and marvel at the lax DBS checks of
a supposedly elite educational
establishment. Catherine Bray
4 0 | S AT UR DAY | 09.09.23 | The Guardian
Gigs
Matthew Halsall
Newcastle upon Tyne, Wednesday;
Leeds, Thursday; Nottingham, Friday;
touring to 30 September
Trumpeter-composer Halsall creates
a personal soundscape from eastern-
leaning influences and the meditative
60s jazz of Alice Coltrane and Pharoah
Sanders. At these gigs, he’ll lead
his fine octet through new album
An Ever Changing View. John Fordham
Davido
O2 Victoria Warehouse, Manchester,
Wednesday
David Adedeji Adeleke has helped turn
Afrobeats into a global concern. His
most recent album, the Skepta-assisted
Timeless, made the UK Top 10, so
expect to hear that heavily represented
at these shows. Michael Cragg
Ainadamar
Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff,
Saturday, 17 & 26 September; touring
to 22 November
Welsh National Opera’s new season
opens with Osvaldo Golijov’s flamenco-
haunted depiction of the life and death
of the poet Federico García Lorca. In
this revival by Deborah Colker fi rst
seen at Scottish Opera, Hannah Hipp
takes the role of Lorca. Andrew Clements
Shania Twain
Thursday to 29 September;
tour starts Glasgow
Get your Stetson and leopard print
Lycra because Canada’s country-pop
queen (below) is coming to the UK.
Ostensibly it’s in support of February’s
UK No 1 album, Queen of Me, but
expect a litany of hits from 1997’s
gazillion-selling Come on Over. MC
Art
China’s Hidden Century
British Museum, London, to 8 October
A spectacular, absorbing journey
through the last century of Imperial
China (above), from the refined world
of the court to the tough lives of
ordinary people. The violence of
China’s 19th-century history is
startling. Religious risings and opium
wars rocked an ancient society, paving
the way for revolutions to come.
The Stuff of Life/The Life of Stuff
Sainsbury Centre, Norwich,
Sunday to 14 January
An immersive gathering of assemblage,
bricolage, and other art forms that
use found stuff. Art has been
incorporating and recycling everyday
materials ever since Picasso and
Braque put bits of chair covering
and newspaper into their cubist
still lifes more than a century ago.
Today it has new climatic urgency.
Julianknxx
Barbican Centre: The Curve, London,
Thursday to 11 February
This poet, film-maker and artist from
Sierra Leone presents a work about
African migrations and the fluid
nature of identity. Choirs from all
over Europe join in singing a single
chorus: “We are what’s left of us”,
in a lyrical multimedia installation
that questions representations of
Africa and the Black experience.
Decades
AL AMY; THE TERESA COLEMAN COLLECTION; LOUIE BANKS
National Gallery of Scotland: Modern
Two, Edinburgh, to 7 January
This attempt to tell the story of modern
art in chronological order juxtaposes
artistic trends in Scotland and Britain
with revolutionary movements across
Europe. How do 20th-century British
modernists such as Wilhelmina
Barns-Graham compare with their
continental contemporaries Mondrian
and Max Ernst? The survey stretches
from 1900 to 1980s postmodernism.
Jonathan Jones
 Stage
In Albums
Sorry We Didn’t James Blake – Playing Robots Into
Die at Sea Heaven
Park theatre, London, Out now
Wed to 30 September Singer-producer James Blake launched
The first English this sixth album (above) with a
translation of the Italian curveball. Rather than featuring his
Emanuele Aldrovandi’s haunted vocal and glitching
satirical take on Europe’s
migration crisis. Set in
electronics, single Big Hammer is a
trap-adjacent party-starter. Follow-up
Brain food
the near future, a group Loading, however, is more typical; all Wrestlers
of travellers are forced plaintive melodies and textural shifts. Wednesday, Netflix
to flee to the very Some call it a sham but Al
countries they’d once Tirzah – trip9love…??? Snow sees wrestling as a
closed their borders to. Out now storytelling artform.
Miriam Gillinson As with 2018’s Devotion and 2021’s This dramatic series
Colourgrade, the curiously titled (above) follows Snow’s
Brian Butterfield
Monday to 4 October;
Streaming trip9love…??? finds the Essex lo-fi
pop practitioner collaborating with
efforts to keep his
Kentucky wrestling gym
tour starts Exeter The Morning Show Oscar-nominated producer Mica Levi. afloat and train the next
Peter Serafinowicz’s 00s Apple TV+, Wednesday Here, the pair create 11 off-kilter, generation of WWE stars.
sketch show was sadly Still looking to fill that Succession- R&B-adjacent tracks all crafted around
short lived, but one shaped hole? This starry (Jennifer one single drum beat, but augmented Your Mama’s Kitchen
cult character lives on: Aniston, Reese Witherspoon) drama by piano loops, flashes of distortion Podcast
blundering business about trouble at the top of a TV network and pretty, earworm melodies. The Obamas’ production
guru Butterfield. Now (above) may be just the ticket. company Higher Ground
he’s set to appear in the Especially as season three features Jon The Chemical Brothers – For That presents its latest audio
flesh for the very first
time, as Serafinowicz
Hamm as a scheming tech billionaire. Games Beautiful Feeling
Out now
series, featuring
journalist Michele
takes him on the road. Wilderness The Isle Tide Hotel Nearly 30 years since their debut Norris conducting
Rachel Aroesti Prime Video, Friday Out Tuesday, all album, Ed Simons and Tom Rowlands heartwarming and
Jenna Coleman has made her stock in platforms return with this 10th dance opus, insightful interviews
Dancing City trade tense, bingeable and often Part of the burgeoning featuring vocal assistance from with guests including
Various venues, London, disturbing dramas about people who interactive film genre, Beck (on excellent new single Skipping Kerry Washington and
Saturday & Sunday find themselves doing terrible things. this live-action mystery Like a Stone) and French Matthew Broderick on
A weekend dedicated Following The Cry and The Serpent, (above) has you trying experimentalist Halo Maud. the nostalgia of their
to outdoor dance as part we now have Wilderness, in which she to rescue a daughter childhood kitchens.
of the Greenwich and plays Liv, a woman who wreaks bloody you’ve never met from Olivia Rodrigo – Guts
Docklands international revenge on a cheating boyfriend. a masked cult. Out now Squid: Lessons, A Story
festival. Acts include a The former Disney employee turned by Paul Ewen
dance on a trampoline, Coco Chanel: Unbuttoned Monster Hunter Now pop superstar (below) returns with her YouTube
one on a treadmill, and BBC Two & iPlayer, Friday Out Thursday, follow-up to 2021’s Grammy-winning Experimental rock
a piece created by Royal Does Coco Chanel qualify as the smartphones debut, Sour. Guts transforms toxic group Squid have
Ballet dancers Kristen first ever influencer? That’s the Capcom’s dragon- relationships into both stately balladry commissioned a
McNally and Alexander angle explored in this documentary slaying series gets the (lead single Vampire) and careening, charming short story
Campbell. All shows are – part of the storied Arena strand – Pokémon Go treatment emotionally blood-letting pop-punk to accompany their
free. Lyndsey Winship tracing her incredible journey from for phones: roam your (the excellent Bad Idea Right?). MC latest album, O Monolith.
penniless, peasant beginnings to a neighbourhood to Read by comic Tim Key,
A View From the Bridge fashion giant who revolutionised find creatures to take it’s a tale of a peculiar
Octagon Theatre Bolton, womenswear between the wars. on, then fight ’em in geography teacher
to 30 September 75 seconds. finding a new lease
This co-production is It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia Keza MacDonald on life. Ammar Kalia
directed by Headlong’s Netflix, Friday
new artistic director Most sitcoms mellow with age, but not
Holly Race Roughan, this incessantly crude and giddily
who will explore the funny buddy comedy, which returns to
human price of prod modern cultural mores for the
APPLE T V+; THIBAUT GREVET

immigration policy 16th time. This season’s scrapes involve

through Arthur Miller’s crypto, politically correct arcades and
devastating play. Starring the gang attempt ing to pitch a new
the equally brilliant booze brand to guest stars Aaron Paul Want more?
Jonathan Slinger and and Bryan Cranston. RA For cultural picks direct
Nancy Crane. MG to your inbox, sign up to
the Guide newsletter

The Guardian | 09.09.23 | S AT UR DAY | 41

CULTURE VISUAL ARTS
Front cover for
The Yellow Book
Aubrey Beardsley, 1894
The so-called “yellow
A Decadent Young 90s” were marked by
Woman, After the Dance ambiguity. Colman’s
Ramón Casas, 1899 Mustard posters
This young woman brightened London’s
relaxing after a big night streets, while decadent
out is thoroughly modern, literary periodical,
reading what she likes – a The Yellow Book, nodded
yellow French novel – on to the yellow jackets
a plush sofa whose common to controversial
absinthe green suggests and sexual French novels,
both intoxication and as well as to sickness.
decay, in a black dress
that would have been
the height of fashion.

Ladies’ aniline-dyed
silk stockings
1860s-1880s
Before the invention of
synthetic dyes, underwear
had been white or blue.
Colour was particularly
embraced in the
manufacture of stockings,
leading a writer for the
Lady’s Newspaper and
Pictorial Times to gush
about “the rainbow-
spanned ankle” in 1861.

To dye for E
arly photography’s sepias
tint our impression of the
19th century. Yet a
real-life encounter with
an everyday 1860s gown
reveals a startling truth:
A new exhibition shows how a chemical “It’s electric purple and still shocking
now,” curator Matthew Winterbottom
reaction led to the creation of commercial enthuses. And, as the exhibition Colour
synthetic colour – a textile transformation Revolution: Victorian Art, Fashion and
Design will explore, its garishness was
that brought brightness to the masses typical in the 19th century.
A decade earlier, the flamboyant
purple dresses made fashionable by
Empress Eugénie of France were the
preserve of the fabulously wealthy. Yet
in just a few years, colours once made
with expensive vegetable dyes were
being industrially produced, thanks to
an accidental discovery by 18-year-old
chemistry student William Henry
Words: Skye Sherwin Perkin. While attempting to synthesise
quinine from aniline, a derivative of
coal tar, Perkin realised the intense
purples this colourless chemical
produced could be used as a dye. He
quickly established a factory for his
new “mauveine” and chemists across
Europe followed suit, expanding the
synthetic colour palette. “The modern
world of ubiquitous colour begins at
this point,” says Winterbottom.
“People wear brightly coloured
clothes. Everything from books to
postage stamps becomes colourful.”
This transformation affected the
entire social spectrum, from a working
class who were now able to afford
bright colours to members of the social
elite rethinking their wardrobes.
“Women asserted a more emboldened
identity through colour,” says
Winterbottom. In addition to loud
dresses, ankles sporting coloured

4 2 | S AT UR DAY | 09.09.23 | The Guardian


stockings could be flashed thanks to
newly swinging steel-hooped
FASHION MUSEUM BATH; TRINIT Y COLLEGE, UNIVERSIT Y OF OXFORD; MUSEU DO
crinoline petticoats.
The synthetic revolution led to the
exploitation of natural wonders, too,
with some horrifying results. One
MONTSERR AT, BARCELONA; ELLIE ATKINS/ASHMOLEAN MUSEUM,
of the exhibition’s curiosities is a
necklace made from the heads of
hummingbirds, whose iridescent
UNIVERSIT Y OF OXFORD; BRITISH MUSEUM, LONDON
plumage obsessed Victorians.
“A minority realised [the trade’s]
devastating impact and formed anti-
plumage leagues,” says Winterbottom.
There was also, inevitably, a
backlash. The Pre-Raphaelite
Brotherhood critic John Ruskin praised
“God-given” colours while William
Morris initiated a trend for muted
tones. Of all Victorian Britain’s colour
fads, green was the most controversial.
By the 1860s, new arsenic greens
created toxic wallpaper and notoriously
The Guardian | 09.09.23 | S AT UR DAY | 4 3
English day dress in
aniline-dyed silk and
glass beads Late 1860s
This dress is dyed in the
new “mauveine”, the
commercial synthetic
colour created from
chemical extracted from
coal tar. Queen Victoria
had worn an expensive
mauve dress to her
daughter’s wedding and
when the colour became
affordable, a trend
dubbed “mauve measles”
gripped Britain.
Surprisingly, given its
look-at-me hue, this
garment was for
daywear and belonged
to the daughter of
a Baptist minister.
Lady Granville’s beetle
parure and case 1884–85
The Victorian obsession
with colour led to some
disturbing embellishment
of natural wonders. This
tiara, from the British
Museum’s collection,
contains the iridescent
bodies of 46 South
American weevils, gifted
by the Portuguese
ambassador to the
British foreign secretary,
Lord Granville.
‘The modern world
of ubiquitous colour
begins here – books,
stamps, everything
becomes colourful’
caused a young woman who worked
with colourful silk flowers to produce
green vomit before dying. Two decades
later, however, this murky history made
green the colour du jour for writers and
artists. Oscar Wilde had a green-dyed
carnation that became a queer symbol.
Although Winterbottom wants the
show “to challenge ideas about
Victorians in sombre colours”, perhaps
the colour that most echoes down the
ages is black. Ramón Casas’s 1899
painting of a “decadent young woman”
shows her collapsed on an absinthe-
green sofa, racy yellow novel in hand,
wearing a black dress. It’s a deliberate
rejection of its mourning status and,
he says, “a marker of her decadence”.
The synthetic rainbow lit up lives
and revolutionised mindsets, too.
Colour Revolution is at the Ashmolean
Museum, Oxford, 21 Sep to 18 Feb.
 E S S AY S , F I C T I O N and N O N F I C T I O N R E V I E W S

‘They kidnapped
me to get me away
from Blackness’
At the age of three, poet Shane McCrae was taken from his father and raised by his racist maternal grandparents –
who told him he was white. He tells Emma Brockes how writing has helped him confront the lies he grew up with

45
CULTURE BOOKS
F
O R M A N Y Y E A R S,
Shane McCrae would
describe the experience
of his childhood and
a d o l e s c e n c e w h i le
assiduously avoiding use
of the word “kidnap”.
McCrae grew up in the
1980s, when, as he
observes, kidnap was one
of those “faddish” crimes
that briefly seized the
public imagination in the
US after a series of high-profile child kidnappings. “In
the 90s, gang crime is something we were obsessed
with. And in the 80s, kidnapping was a thing that was
really on the mind of folks a lot. I remember thinking:
what would happen if that happened to me? Not really
understanding that I was in the midst of one. It had
already happened to me.”
McCrae’s story is complicated and traumatic, and he
has spent the past five years fully confronting it for the
first time by writing his memoir, Pulling the Chariot of
the Sun. The book, which is told in jagged, circular
fragments familiar to anyone who has read McCrae’s
poetry, tells of how, in 1979, when he was three, McCrae
was dropped off by his father at his maternal
grandparents’ house in Salem, Oregon, for what was
supposed to be an overnight visit. When McCrae’s
father, Stanley, turned up on Monday morning to fetch
his son, he found – incredibly – an empty house with a
for sale sign in the yard. McCrae wouldn’t see his father
again until he was 16 years old.
The pertinent detail here is that McCrae’s mother
and maternal grandparents were white, and his father,
who was McCrae’s sole carer after he and McCrae’s
mother split up, was Black. The kidnap, he says, was
the culmination of a series of moves on the part of his
grandparents that included withholding his father’s
name from his birth certificate – McCrae was given his
maternal grandfather’s name, Baker – and registering
him as white, not mixed race.
“They kidnapped me to get me away from Blackness,”
writes McCrae and, in the years following the kidnap,
the only time race was mentioned in the house was
during one of McCrae’s grandfather’s racist tirades.
They told him his skin colour was a result of the fact
that he “tanned deeply, easily”. His grandfather referred
to people of colour – this was the polite version – as
“them”, but in some ways, says McCrae, his
grandmother’s delusions around race were more
painful. “She thought that marking me down as white
would be some kind of advantage in life,” he says,
smiling. “Not quite sure how she envisioned that
playing out.”
More than four decades later, McCrae, now 47, is living
in upper Manhattan with his wife and 13-year-old
4 6 | S AT UR DAY | 09.09.23 | The Guardian
daughter (he has a 29-year-old daughter from a previous
relationship), and teaching creative writing at Columbia
University. He has published 10 volumes of poetry,
including Sometimes I Never Suffered, which was
shortlisted for the 2020 TS Eliot prize, and In the
Language of My Captor, a finalist for the 2017 National
book award. McCrae’s poetry is lyrical, repetitive, riffing
on motifs that snag the reader and draw them into his
obsessions. In the memoir, this style manifests in a
stuttering journey towards self-defi nition – every step
forwards entailing a dragging back over the same ground
and its central question: “Am I misremembering it?”
Beyond the violent dislocation of the kidnapping
itself, this is the true horror of McCrae’s experience:
the years of denial and misinformation that followed.
His grandparents told him his father didn’t want him
and never wanted to hear from him again. His mother,
Denise, whom he saw only intermittently, colluded –
or at least, failed to challenge – this story until much
later, when she would explain to McCrae that, as a young
mother totally dominated by her parents, she too had
been at their mercy. (Denise never lived with McCrae
and his grandparents, but would drop in, occasionally.)
And they never alluded to or acknowledged the fact degree of power in that relationship. Maybe most of the
that McCrae was Black. power. I would point out that before she kidnapped me,
McCrae knew it, of course; when his grandfather she took my mother from her father. The odds are that
screamed the N-word apparently at random, McCrae it was her idea to begin with.”
felt the true direction of his anger. And he knew it when, It is curious, he says, how powerfully people need
as the only Black kid in his elementary school class, to put some softer spin on his grandparents’ motivations.
other kids ran up to him in the playground and “People want to find a way to justify the behaviour of
repeatedly knocked him down. at least one of my grandparents; to make that OK. You
If these were things McCrae knew intimately, it was know: maybe they were just doing what they thought
knowledge that existed at a level he couldn’t reliably was best? Which I find – it’s very shocking.”
access. By the time he wrote his memoir, he was decades It’s a dynamic that he experienced some version of
into reconciliation with his father and was familiar with as a child, a reflex towards normalising and rationalising
the broad outline of what had happened to him. But violent behaviour. “The kidnapped child must first and
the gaslighting was so deeply embedded – as McCrae above all protect his kidnappers from himself,” he
puts it in the book, as a child, he lived inside the writes. “It must not occur to him to tell anyone he was
contradiction, “what I knew, I couldn’t know” – that, kidnapped, and so it must not occur to him that he
he says, “writing the book was the first time I’ve really was kidnapped.”
thought about it very hard. In that sense it has been As a child, he was frightened of his grandfather but
very distressing psychologically and has caused a lot he was more frightened of being taken away from him.
of personal unhappiness. But I’m glad that I wrote it.” “It seems like a contradiction,” says McCrae. “But
The state of simultaneously knowing and not because the large psychic injury from which so much
knowing something is the cornerstone of trauma, and of my life seems to have flowed happened when I was
McCrae writes of blocking out the memory of his taken from my father – and despite the fact it’s my
grandfather beating him. In fact, Morris Baker wasn’t grandparents who did it – I had a great terror of it
even his grandfather; he was his grandmother’s fifth happening again.”
husband and no blood relation to McCrae. He writes of As a child, says McCrae, he would sleep fully dressed,
his mother, Denise, telling him that as a child, her ready to run, and developed an obsession with
stepfather had beaten her, too. survival. “This sense that everything could disappear
The violence continued until McCrae was 14, when at any moment – all of this has to do, I’m certain now,
his grandmother left Baker, although to think of her as with the kidnapping. The terror of that injury being
his victim frustrates McCrae immensely. In the book, infl icted again was considerably more significant
he writes, “my grandmother had watched my than the constant sense of danger and threat that I
grandfather kill me since I was three”. Now, he says, “I felt being in that house. Which was just my day-to-day
never got the impression that she did not have a great life. People get used to all kinds of things.”
Photography: Benedict Evans

How to write about all this? How to convey the
immensity of his efforts to recognise his childhood for
what it was? McCrae’s passage out began as a teenager
when, one day, he realised that he didn’t hate his father.
He doesn’t know what triggered it. He says he just
knew, suddenly, that the foundations of what he’d
been told were unreliable. With that understanding in
place, he started to question the story he’d been given
about his abandonment.
Slowly, he allowed himself to be curious about the
man. He had his name – Stanley McCrae. He had a few
disjointed memories of early childhood, none of them
traumatic. And he had the local phone book. After years
of moving around the country, from Oregon, to Texas,
to California, McCrae and his grandparents were back
living not far from where he had lived with his father.
One day in 1992, when McCrae was 16, he looked up
Stanley’s name in the phone book. And there it was.
The confidence to make the call was boosted,
perhaps, by two influences in McCrae’s life at the time:
skateboarding and, increasingly, poetry. Both gave him
a sense of being in a world of his own, free from the
violent influence of his grandparents. Both contained
the idea, he says, “that you can lose yourself. When
you’re making a poem, even when what you’re writing
is terrible, or graphically violent, or really sad, or
emotionally wrenching – there’s almost no subject
that’s so terrible that you can’t feel a joy in writing about
it. And I think skateboarding has that same effect for
someone who really loves it. You just kind of disappear
in the doing of it.”
It was McCrae’s experience as a poet that, ultimately,
helped him to fi nd a way to write about his youth
without being paralysed by the fear that he was telling
a story that he had no right to tell. After leaving school,
he went to community college, before winning a
place on the prestigious master of fi ne arts course at
the Iowa writers’ workshop. Briefly, he considered
becoming a lawyer, before accepting that poetry was
where he belonged.
McCrae’s fi rst full-length collection, Mule, was
published in 2011 and explored the process of coming
into being, a recurring theme in his work that, in poetic
form, managed to bypass his own internal censorship.
“A poem tends to benefit from not too much deliberation
beforehand,” he says. “There’s no context according
to which you need to give yourself permission except
in so far as to write at all. The more you think about the
writing you’re doing, the more the writing you’re doing
is going to suffer.”
And yet, McCrae is still occasionally blindsided by
the lies his grandparents put in his head. The memoir
ends before he meets his father, although we understand
from the beginning that a relationship exists between
the two. When McCrae asked Stanley why in 1979, when
the kidnapping took place, he didn’t go to the police,
his father explained to him how impossible it would
have been for a Black man in Salem, Oregon to challenge
a white couple whose name was on McCrae’s birth
certificate. ( Not long after their reunion, McCrae
changed his name from Baker to McCrae.)
Tentatively, he began to use the word “kidnap” in
relation to his experiences. But it was a long time, he
says, “before I really internalised it. In an abstract way,
I was aware it had happened to me, but I couldn’t really.
The other day I did an interview and there was a fact-
checking process and someone asked, were your
grandparents ever charged? And the reflexive thought
‘There’s almost
no subject so
terrible that you
can’t feel a joy in
writing about it’
I had was that’s ridiculous, of course not, what do you
mean? And I had to stop and think about it for a second;
and think, no, that’s a perfectly reasonable question.
It is a very slow process acclimatising oneself to a harm
with which one has lived one’s entire life.”
This harm can manifest as an internal pressure, a
sense of the known unknown – McCrae still has areas
of memory blackout – bubbling up in indirect ways.
“The most visceral experience of memory loss is the
feeling that the memories might return,” he says.
“That’s the most difficult feeling in relation to it.” But,
he says, “my defences against it are very practised,
because I’ve been doing it for decades. And so when I
start to get that heavy feeling of sadness, my brain starts
working to stop it happening.
“When I was in college, I had this feeling for about
a year when I just wanted to cry all the time. I was really
conscious of it, but I didn’t know why. There didn’t seem
to be any precipitating event. And just as strong as the
feeling that I wanted to cry all the time, was the feeling
that I wasn’t crying at any time – the feeling that
something was holding it back. And that’s the same
thing that I have in regard to confronting these
difficult memories.”
One aspect of the story that hasn’t been a struggle
for McCrae has been the process of undoing the effect
of his grandparents’ racism. “I think I always understood
that their way of thinking was wrong. And while I lived
this sense of feeling both Black and not Black, at a
certain point, when I was 20, I went through a phase
where I was very consciously trying to embrace my
Blackness, and it didn’t feel difficult. I was reading a
lot of Black thinkers and I was listening to a lot of
music by Black musicians and trying to figure out
what it meant to be Black. It was more exciting and
exploratory than feeling there was something in there
that I needed to repair.”
McCrae’s maternal grandparents are both dead. His
mother, Denise, is reading the book and he doesn’t know
what she thinks about it. “I think that her sense of these
events is very complicated. I think she might feel
immensely regretful about it, but the size of the regret
is, perhaps, paradoxically so big that she can’t really
acknowledge her role in it.”
The life he leads and his success as a writer,
meanwhile, is something he can never entirely get
used to. “I am constantly in a state of amazement that
I get to live the life that I do. I think my family is
happy; we live in Manhattan, a seven-minute walk
from work. And I get summers off ! I never lose the
awareness of the unlikeliness of it. And of course that
means I worry about it, too.” Mainly, however, “I think
about it with gratitude. That things have worked
out even as well as they have: the odds against it
are astronomical.”
Pulling the Chariot of the Sun will be published
by Canongate on Thursday.
The Guardian | 09.09.23 | S AT UR DAY | 47
CULTURE BOOKS NONFICTION
S
Through the OM E Y E A R S AG O, I happened to meet a
survivalist and conspiracy theorist. He told
me he had weapons stashed inside the walls
looking glass of his house, was ready to use them in
defence of “English” women and children,
and believed that the BBC was covering up
A case of mistaken a vast Muslim paedophile ring. It seems uncontroversial
to describe this as a “far right” belief system. But the
event that first led him to abandon his faith in liberal
identity prompts democracy had nothing to do with the traditional
concerns of the right: it was the Iraq war. The internet
and Tommy Robinson did the rest.
an ingenious There is a well-known “horseshoe” theory of political
sentiment, which suggests that as ideologies become
more polarised along a left-right axis, so they become
exploration of more alike on a liberal-authoritarian one. This was a
useful prop for centrists of the mid-20th century, who
sought to portray themselves as the first line of defence
truth in politics against the gulag.
Today, things are far more complicated than these
simple axes of left-right and liberal-authoritarian imply.
William Davies The problem in the age of big tech, the climate crisis,
Covid lockdowns, online influencers and collapsed
trust in “mainstream” politics and media is that
everybody has their suspicions that they are being lied
to and manipulated – and they’re right. Where they
disagree is on the identity of the liars and the purpose
of the manipulation. The rhetoric of critique and
liberation has become ubiquitous, no longer serving to
distinguish left from right, truth from falsehood.
Virtually everyone now wants to unmask the elites and
decode their messaging in one way or another. For
leftist critics such as Naomi Klein, who made their
POLITICS names in a simpler pre-Trump, pre-YouTube age, this
Doppelganger provokes an identity crisis.
A Trip Into The premise of Doppelganger is so unlikely as to be
the Mirror World almost absurd: Naomi Klein has spent several years
Naomi Klein being mistaken for the feminist turned conspiracy
A LLEN L A NE , £2 5 theorist Naomi Wolf, and has chosen to write a book
4 8 | S AT UR DAY | 09.09.23 | The Guardian
about this. Both Naomis are Jewish women, who rose
to fame on the back of unexpected polemical
blockbusters, No Logo and The Beauty Myth
respectively. Klein offers plenty of examples of how
the confusion manifests itself, especially online, and
of how it has troubled her at various points in her life,
particularly during the pandemic, when Wolf’s celebrity
as a lockdown and vaccine sceptic soared.
You may well wonder how such a faintly comical
theme can be extended for 350 pages, and what it has
to do with Klein’s usual preoccupations of combating
corporate capitalism and climate crisis. It is certainly
the most introspective and whimsical of Klein’s
books to date, but it is also one of surprising insights,
unexpected connections and great subtlety. The Klein/
Wolf confusion is an entry point to consider wider forms
of disorientation that afflict the left, in particular the
loss of its monopoly (if it ever had one) over the language
of political resistance, and how, in the process, that
language has lost its grip on the world.
Liberals and leftists like to reassure ourselves that
we know when to trust the elites (on vaccine safety or
climate science, say) and when not to (if corporate
branding or billionaire-owned media are involved).
But this same attitude of studied suspicion is at work
among vaccine sceptics and online wellness
communities, all of whom pride themselves on doing
their “own research”. Marxists and sociologists have
theories as to how money and power knit modern
societies together – but so does Steve Bannon.
In some cases, Klein confesses, the very fact that
conspiracy theorists were energised by something (such
as the “lab leak” theory of Covid’s origins, or the privacy
consequences of vaccine passports) led her and
her comrades to dismiss it, when they had no real
grounds to.
The powers of “surveillance capital” and big pharma
are real, yet hard to measure. Klein herself has drawn
attention to those threats in her own work. But what if
the online grifters and paranoid YouTubers speak to
everyday anxieties about such things better than the
left does? This is a worry that runs throughout
Doppelganger. Has the left messed up? Does the right
understand people better? Is Naomi Wolf even on “the
right” anyway?
In place of horseshoes, Klein prefers the metaphor
of mirrors. Wolf is part of a “mirror world”, not so very
different from ours, only with more histrionic language
and online clout. Our digital avatars and personal
brands are mirrors in which we each gaze
narcissistically at ourselves, frequently mistaking
image for reality, while the shared world burns around
us. Doppelganger is really a story of political and psychic
confusion. It also manages to encompass lengthy and
fascinating reflections on the history of autism, the
work of Philip Roth, and the comparability of the
holocaust to colonial genocides in a way that chimes
with the pervasive experience of “going down
rabbit holes”.
There’s a debate to be had about how liberals and
leftists should relate to those drawn into the ecosystem
of Wolf, Bannon and Trump. Doppelganger leans
towards understanding more and condemning less,
without ever romanticising those beholden to
conspiracy theories. What is clear is that facts and
SEBA STIAN NEVOL S/ THE GUARDIAN
critique alone will never be enough to lure anyone over
to Klein’s side. The power of the “mirror world”
is precisely that it already has facts and critiques galore.
This is a book that offers scant optimism for the future,
but if there is hope lingering here, it’s that collective
self-ref lection – through historical knowledge
and organising – offers political resources that
solitary self-reflection never will. True to form, Klein’s
ultimate message is log off and get on to the streets.
To buy a copy for £22 go to guardianbookshop.com
 Bloomsbury chic
How to dress like
Virginia Woolf
Kathryn Hughes
FA S H I O N
Bring No Clothes
Bloomsbury and the
Philosophy of Fashion
Charlie Porter
PA R T ICUL A R, £2 0
W
hen Virginia Woolf invited
TS Eliot down for a country
weekend in 1920 she
concluded with “Please bring no
clothes”. This was not a suggestion
that “Tom” should arrive in East
Sussex naked. Such a possibility was
unlikely anyway since at this point the
poet was still working as a buttoned-
up clerk at Lloyds Bank. Eliot was
famously wedded to his three-piece
suit to the point where, Woolf joked,
he would have worn a four-piece one if
such a thing existed. What she meant
by “bring no clothes” was that at
Monk’s House they did not dress for
dinner, change for church (there was
no church), or worry about getting
their best clothes grubby in the
garden. This was Bloomsbury, albeit
a rural version, and the clothing
conventions to which the rest of
upper-middle-class society had
returned after the first world war
had no place there.
Fashion journalist Charlie Porter is
spot-on with his suggestion that the
way the circle thought about clothes
was part of a wider revolt against the
late-Victorian society in which its
members had been raised. Choosing
not to wear black tie for dinner or
gloves “in town” was all part of the
code that also involved refusing to
take up arms against the Germans,
or follow the usual rules about who
could sleep with whom, or adhere to
inherited artistic forms in favour of
something more impressionistic.
According to Porter’s analysis
of Bloomsbury’s style preferences,
Woolf swapping the pinched-in
Edwardian corsetry of her youth
for of a loose, flowing silhouette
was the precondition of her sexual
experimentation with Vita Sackville-
West. Likewise, this sartorial
undoing enabled her to experiment
typographically at the Hogarth Press,
co-founded with husband Leonard,
which published Eliot’s The Waste
Land in 1923. Similarly, Duncan
Grant’s near-constant nudity was of
a piece with his capacity to be both
K E N H AW K I N S /A L A M Y
a lover of men and a steady partner
to Woolf’s sister Vanessa, who was
officially still married to Clive Bell.
Thanks to his access to the contents
of several Bloomsbury wardrobes,
together with a trove of previously
unseen photographs, Porter is able to
provide a detailed illustration of how
“Make it new” – the cry of modernists
everywhere – played out on the
material level. He shows us Lady
Ottoline Morrell’s frocks, which are
a form of Elizabethan cosplay with
their puffed-up shoulders (useful for
balancing out Lady O’s 6ft frame), while
Vanessa Bell knocked up pyjamas out
of the abstractly patterned cloth that
she had originally designed for sofas.
There was another type of
Bloomsbury dressing, more Eliot
than Grant. The obvious figure here is
EM Forster, who continued with the
formal suit as a defensive armour
against his yearning for male bodies.
The novelist did not lose his virginity
until he was 38, and even then he kept
on with high-table manners. Porter
includes plenty of photographs of
the novelist sweating in the noonday
sun while standing alongside the
many lovely young men in dhotis
or fezzes that he encountered on his
travels. The only time Forster looked
unambiguously happy was when
photographed in “Indian court dress”,
which resembles nothing so much as a
tea gown that Vanessa Bell might have
repurposed with kitchen scissors.
Less deft is Porter’s attempt to
urge a clothing revolution for our own
times. Suggesting we should all be a
bit more Bloomsbury in order to break
out of the endless churn of fast fashion
misses the point that Woolf’s and
Grant’s anti-fashion stance was just
that – a style that had been consciously
crafted and refined with a view to
public performance. In doing so they
were actually echoing their parents
and grandparents, who had been
keen exponents of the Arts and Crafts
look of the 1880s. The history of dress
is packed with such anti-fashion
moments, and to suggest that
emulating Bloomsbury’s version
would somehow allow us to “forge new
ways of being” seems a little naive.
To buy a copy for £17.60 go to
guardianbookshop.com
A giant leap for women
The female astronauts
who made history
Rachel Aspden
H I S T O RY
The Six
The Untold Story
of America’s First
Women Astronauts
Loren Grush
LIT TLE, BROW N, £2 5
I
n 1973, four years after Neil
Armstrong’s space boot hit moon
dust in the most celebrated step ever
taken by a man, a Nasa report observed
that: “There have been three females
sent into space by Nasa. Two are
Arabella and Anita – both spiders. The
other is Miss Baker – a monkey.” The
report’s co-author Ruth Bates Harris,
who the space agency had originally
hired to run its equal opportunities
office, was described as a “disruptive
force” and fired a month later.
The prospect of women in space
was hardly outlandish. Ten years
earlier, 26-year-old Soviet parachutist
Valentina Tereshkova had orbited
Earth 48 times – a feat not greeted
with delight by US officials, who
swapped rumours (which Tereshkova
denied) that she had suffered “some
kind of emotional breakdown” during
the flight. At Nasa itself, Jerrie Cobb
had already passed the same gruelling
tests the agency set for its all-male
Mercury crews by 1960. (This
milestone achievement was marked
by the headline: “No 1 Space Gal
Seems a Little Astronaughty”.) In
1962, Cobb appeared before a House
subcommittee to argue for women’s
place in the US astronaut cadre. Her
evidence was promptly dismissed by
the Mercury hero John Glenn, who
The six Nasa
astronauts in 1978
The Guardian | 09.09.23 | S AT UR DAY | 4 9
remarked flatly: “The fact that women
are not in this field is a fact of our
social order.”
These switchbacks of breakthrough
and frustration wind through reporter
Loren Grush’s vivid account of
women’s battle for spaceflight
equality. For the first decades of the
US space programme, would-be female
astronauts were stonewalled by a
bureaucracy intent on preventing
change. But by the mid-1970s Nasa
had a new vessel, the Space Shuttle,
to crew – and it was dawning on even
the most regressive elements of the
agency that it could no longer afford
to exclude women and people of
colour. The Shuttle, Grush writes, was
intended to transform space travel
from “something dangerous and
expensive to an endeavour that was
cheap, routine and safe”, one that
would require a diverse range of
civilian specialists as well as the
macho military test pilots of previous
eras. Nasa asked the African American
actor Nichelle Nichols – Lt Uhura in
Star Trek – to front its new recruitment
campaign, and the 35-strong cohort
unveiled in January 1978 duly included
four men of colour alongside “the six”,
the US’s first female astronauts.
Grush paints a compelling picture
of the rigours faced by these driven
and accomplished women before one
of them, Sally Ride, became the first
American woman in space in June
1983. But The Six also has room for
the entertaining trivia of zero-gravity
life – the brainpower devoted to
adapting space toilets for women;
Nasa engineers asking solemnly if 100
tampons per female astronaut would
be enough for a week in space; Ride
telling mission control that spaceflight
was like a VIP pass at Disneyland.
Readers encounter lurches in
perspective similar to those
experienced by the book’s astronaut
subjects. One minute the book
describes the awe-inducing experience
of gazing at the division of night and
day on the Earth’s surface, the next
it homes in on the tiny details that
determine the outcome of a mission:
the improvised tools the astronauts
use to fix a malfunctioning satellite;
the cold, stiff O-rings that fail during
the Challenger launch of 1986, killing
seven crew members including Judy
Resnik, one of “the six”.
That disaster, compounded by the
loss of Columbia in 2003, changed
Nasa’s approach to spaceflight. In the
21st century, superpower rivalry in
space has given way to competition
between tech billionaires. Grush
writes optimistically that the growth
of the commercial space industry
will bring greater opportunities for
female astronauts. Whatever happens
next, The Six is a n important record
of their achievements so far.
To buy a copy for £22 go to
guardianbookshop.com
CULTURE
The tech tsunami
A founder of DeepMind
on the perils of AI
Scott Shapiro
T E C H N O L O GY
The Coming Wave
AI, Power and the 21st
Century’s Greatest Dilemma
Mustafa Suleyman
and Michael Bhaskar
BODLE Y HE A D, £2 5
O
n 22 February1946, George
Kennan, an American diplomat
stationed in Moscow, dictated
a 5,000-word cable to Washington. In
this famous telegram, Kennan warned
that the Soviet Union’s commitment
to communism meant that it was
inherently expansionist, and urged the
US government to resist any attempts by
the Soviets to increase their influence.
This strategy quickly became known as
“containment” – and defined American
foreign policy for the next 40 years.
The Coming Wave is Suleyman’s
warning about technological
expansionism: in close to 300 pages,
he sets out to persuade readers that
artificial intelligence (AI) and synthetic
biology (SB) threaten our very
existence and we must initiate a new
era of containment before it’s too late.
An entrepreneur and AI researcher
who co-founded DeepMind in 2010,
before it was acquired by Google
in 2014, Suleyman is at his most
compelling when illustrating the
promises and perils of this new world.
In breezy and sometimes breathless
prose, he describes how human beings
have finally managed to exert power
over intelligence and life itself.
Take the AI revolution. Language
models such as ChatGPT are just the
beginning. Soon, Suleyman predicts,
AI will discover miracle drugs, diagnose
rare diseases, run warehouses, optimise
traffic, and design sustainable cities.
The problem is that the same
technologies that allow us to cure a
disease could be used to cause one –
which brings us to the truly terrifying
parts of the book. Suleyman notes that
the price of genetic sequencing has
plummeted, while the ability to edit
DNA with technologies such as Crispr
has vastly improved. Soon, anyone
will be able to set up a genetics lab
in their garage. The temptation to
manipulate the human genome,
he predicts, will be immense.
Human mutants, however, are
not the only horrors awaiting us.
Suleyman envisions AI and SB joining
forces to enable malicious actors to
concoct novel pathogens. With a
4% transmissibility rate (lower than
chickenpox) and 50% case fatality
rate (about the same as Ebola), an
AI-designed and SB-engineered virus
5 0 | S AT UR DAY | 09.09.23 | The Guardian
BOOKS NONFICTION
could “cause more than a billion deaths
in a matter of months”.
Despite these risks, Suleyman
doubts any nation will make the effort
to contain these technologies. States
are too dependent on their economic
benefits. This is the basic dilemma:
we cannot afford not to build the
very technology that might cause
our extinction. Sound familiar?
The Coming Wave is not about
the existential threat posed by
superintelligent AIs. Suleyman thinks
that merely smart AIs will wreak havoc
precisely because they will vastly
increase human agency in a very short
period. Whether via AI-generated
cyber-attacks, homebrewed pathogens,
the loss of jobs due to technological
change, or misinformation aggravating
political instability, our species is not
ready for this tsunami of tech.
He repeatedly tells us that the
“wave is coming”, “the coming wave is
coming”, even “the coming wave really
is coming”. I suppose living through
the past 15 years of AI research, and
becoming a multimillionaire in the
process, would turn anyone into a
believer. But if the past is anything to
go by, AI is also known for its winters,
when initial promise stalled and
funding dried up for long periods.
But even if progress continues its
frenetic pace, it is unlikely that societies
will tolerate the ethical abuses
Suleyman fears most. When a Chinese
scientist revealed in 2018 that he had
edited the genes of twin girls, he was
sentenced to three years in prison,
universally condemned, and there have
been no similar reports since. The EU is
set to prohibit certain forms of AI – such
as facial recognition in public spaces –
in its forthcoming AI Act. Normal legal
and cultural pushback will probably
slow the proliferation of the most
disruptive and disturbing practices.
One very large elephant in the
An AI conference
in Shanghai in July
room is climate change. Unlike the
AI apocalypse, a climate emergency is
happening right now. This July was the
hottest on record. Containing carbon,
not AI, is the defining challenge of our
era. Yet here, Suleyman is strikingly and
conveniently optimistic. He believes
that AI will solve the climate emergency.
That is a happy thought – but if AI will
solve the climate problem, why can’t it
solve the containment problem too?
If the book’s predictions about AI
are accurate, we can safely ignore its
warnings. Wait a few years and we
can just ask ChatGPT-5, -6, or -7
how to handle the coming wave.
Scott Shapiro is professor of law and
philosophy at Yale and author of
Fancy Bear Goes Phishing (Allen Lane).
To buy a copy of The Coming Wave
for £22 go to guardianbookshop.com
In retrospect
A memoir of family
and life-changing illness
Blake Morrison
MEMOIR
Father & Son
Jonathan Raban
K NOPF, £2 2 .0 3
I
n 2011, at the age of 68, the critic
and novelist Jonathan Raban
“was transformed into an old
man”. What felt vaguely like a
hangover was diagnosed a few hours
later as a stroke. With the right side
of his body paralysed, Raban spent
time in intensive care before being
transferred to the neurological ward
of the Swedish hospital in downtown
Seattle ( born in Norfolk, he moved
to the US in 1990). He left in a
wheelchair five weeks later and
survived for more than a decade,
dying in January this year. During
that time he worked on a memoir.
It’s a brave book, not so much
because of the physical difficulties he
overcame in writing it, but because it
takes him back to childhood and to the
challenges his absent father endured
during the second world war as an
officer with the 67th Field regiment.
Like most former servicemen, Peter,
later a clergyman, didn’t talk much
about his wartime experiences,
dramatic though they were: Dunkirk,
Tunisia, Anzio, Palestine. But the
letters he exchanged with his young
wife Monica disclose some of what he
went through, albeit toned down to
avoid alarm (“In my father’s reported
war virtually nobody died, ever”).
It’s an odd book too, revealing little
of the life his father led after coming
home from war and even less about
Raban’s own, as a hemiplegic, after
leaving hospital. But his account of
rehab is compelling. And his parents’
letters are eloquent and impassioned;
Peter is a keen-eyed observer of the
places he visits and Monica sends
perky news from the home front.
Frustrated at the prospect of losing
abilities he once took for granted, Raban
isn’t an easy patient. He’s honest about
his anxieties, his sudden proneness to
tears and his woeful appearance
(“sleepless, pasty-faced, in need of a
haircut and hollow-eyed like a raccoon
after a night spent communing with the
dregs of liquor bottles among the trash
cans”). But he can still read and uses his
Kindle to access a range of enlightening
stuff – from the work of historian Tony
Judt to two books about strokes by
Robert McCrum and Sheila Hale.
His parents’ letters are a tougher
read. Beyond the amorosity (“My very
own & dearest Beloved”), there’s Peter’s
antisemitism (Jews, he said, were like
“bloodsucking lice on the backs of
swallows”) and his and Monica’s dismay
at the Tories’ defeat in the 1945 general
election (“Socialist gains all round –
devastating!”, “State control! Ugh!”).
In a long career, Raban was best
known as a travel writer. But he
disliked the label and rightly felt that
his books (nearly 20 of them) offered
insights of a different kind; people
and politics mattered more to him
than places. Any book, he thought,
should roam as freely as it likes and
this final volume is an illustration
of that, taking in everything from
his mother’s beloved Ford (“licence
plate AUP 595”), his granny’s
extravagant cigarettes and his
father’s “equanimity in situations
of extreme peril”, to the strange
good humour he felt after his stroke.
“The elation hasn’t completely
WA N G Z H A O /A F P/ G E T T Y
abandoned me even now, more than
twelve years later,” he writes, and
that’s what makes his memoir so lively,
even when it stares death in the face.
To buy a copy for £19.36 go to
guardianbookshop.com
 FICTION
F
How to be human
OR A P E R IOD during the 1990s, I visited
a psychoanalyst several times a week.
Lying on the couch, I would fi nd myself
Sebastian Faulks’s
examining the spines of the books on his
shelves for clues to the mysterious process
we were engaged in. Just in line with the
elegant near-future
toe of my right shoe was a volume with a title so bizarre
that I eventually felt obliged to track it down and read
it. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of
novel explores
the Bicameral Mind is the sole published work by Julian
Jaynes. Its striking but unverifiable argument is that
our prehistoric ancestors didn’t possess the kind of
the evolution of
consciousness that we consider normal – the sense of
a unitary I managing competing desires. Instead they
heard voices emanating from the different hemispheres
consciousness
of their brains. Out of these auditory hallucinations
grew what we think of as our sense of self. The intrusive
commands that invade the mind of a schizophrenic,
Marcel Theroux
Jaynes suggested, are a throwback to the divided
consciousness of our ancestors.
What is tantalising about Jaynes’s ideas is that they
suggest consciousness is not a stable part of our human
identity. Like jaw shape or gait, it evolved over time, so
there may be or could have been multiple varieties of
it – perhaps some that are more robust, more accurate,
more ethically refined. Or, as a character in Sebastian
Faulks’s new novel puts it: “It was only molecular
chance that had led to the existence of modern humans
… it could have been subtly otherwise, with a similar
but saner and more integrated creature evolving from
the same raw material.”
One of the threads in Faulks’s large and diverse body
of work is an interest in the nature of consciousness,
in fi nding the slippery point where the human self
resides. He is clearly aware of Jaynes’s ideas, having
explored the theory of bicameralism in Human Traces.
A Possible Life also delved into the enigma of
consciousness, and at the heart of his latest novel, The
The Seventh Son Seventh Son, is a Promethean experiment to create a
Sebastian Faulks human being with a mind instructively different from
BBC PICTURES
HU TCHINSON HEINEM A NN, £2 2 those of this planet’s other inhabitants.
The essence of the story is this: a cash-strapped
academic called Talissa Adam agrees to become a
surrogate mother for a childless English couple, Mary
and Alaric. The procedure takes place at an institute run
by rogue Silicon Valley tycoon Lukas Parn, a man not
dissimilar to Elon Musk but minus the cage fighting
and with an interest in the human genome rather than
space exploration. At a key moment in the process,
Lukas’s employees intervene in such a way that the child
Talissa bears – whom Mary and Alaric name Seth – will
grow up to be markedly different from other people.
The difficulty with discussing this experiment in
detail is that the plot of the novel rests on a twist that
it would be a pity to reveal. However, who Seth really
is, how he differs from the rest of us, what his
consciousness consists of and how he wrestles with
the loneliness of being cognitively unique are the
questions at the core of the book.
Faulks is an enviably graceful and economical
writer. The early chapters of the book rip along with
clarity and elegance. He conjures up the various worlds,
brings the central characters vividly to life and keeps
the story moving intriguingly forward.
As a speculative novel, set in the not-too-distant
future, this excursion into Michael Crichton territory
is a departure for Faulks. But given his virtuoso talent
as a pasticher, who has contributed to the James Bond
and PG Wodehouse canons and written a Dickensian
novel about the banking crisis, A Week in December,
you’d back him to succeed in any genre he chose.
However, at the end of this very melancholy novel,
I couldn’t help thinking there was something bicameral
about the book itself. On the one hand, there is the
familiar pleasure of reading Faulks, the lusty observer
of human biodiversity, who writes so well about work
and sex and relationships, about messy interactions
that are so rarely definitive, about individual
complexity, loss and love.
And on the other hand, working alongside him, there
is a brainy theoretician who includes long expository
sections about human evolution, prehistoric
anthropology and the nature of consciousness. It felt
to me like this second, highly schematic intelligence
overdetermined the shape of the book. It’s surely an
odd – and unnecessary – coincidence that Talissa’s area
of academic expertise is so precisely matched to the
predicament of her surrogate child. The sad fate of her
lover, Felix, seems engineered to permit reflections
about schizophrenia and its roots in the evolution of
human consciousness. These may just be peas under
the mattress, but they contribute to a feeling that a
conscious notion of theme has blocked the organic
growth of the story and that The Seventh Son is at times
a work of nonfiction masquerading as a novel.
The book’s severest lack is at what should be its
centre: the consciousness of Seth himself. The precise
essence of his mind never becomes clear. He’s a bit
baffled, a bit persecuted, a bit sad, but you’re never
persuaded that he’s qualitatively extraordinary. Even
visually, he doesn’t live with much vividness. Of course
there’s necessarily something unknowable about him.
But I couldn’t help thinking of Daniel Keyes’s Flowers
for Algernon or Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, where
first-person narration persuades you that you are seeing
the world through vertiginously different eyes.
Perhaps some of the problems are down to the way
the story is constructed. With the exception of the
devious Lukas Parn, the novel’s other characters are
gradually divested of agency: they each have to live
with the consequences of a terrible experiment that
has been inflicted on them and whose nature is revealed
to them, I think, too neatly and with too little struggle.
They are all victims of circumstance, a truth brought
home finally by the minor-key ending, a melancholy
mirror image of the affi rmative closing scenes of
Faulks’s bestselling Birdsong. It lands with a nihilistic
heaviness that makes you long for some joie de vivre.
To buy a copy for £19.36 go to guardianbookshop.com
The Guardian | 09.09.23 | S AT UR DAY | 51
CULTURE
Fairytale treatments
Beauty industry satire
by the author of Bunny
Nina Allan
Rouge
Mona Awad
SCRIBNER, £16.99
C
ult Canadian novelist Mona
Awad is best known for her 2019
novel Bunny, which explores the
toxic relationships between students
on an elite creative writing programme.
Her new book introduces us to beauty
junkie Belle, so obsessed with her
skincare routine she finds room for
little else in life. The opening sees her
catapulted back to California, where
her mother Noelle, a failed screen
actor, has recently died. Noelle’s death
has been ruled an accident; for Belle,
the story does not ring true. Why would
her mother have been walking along a
dangerous cliff edge after dark, and who
is the stranger with a key to her flat?
And why was Noelle, normally so in
control, increasingly distracted in the
months before her death?
Further investigations reveal that
Noelle was thousands of dollars in
debt. Desperate for answers, Belle
discovers that her mother had become
involved with La Maison de Méduse, a
high-end beauty spa whose members’
obsession with secrecy and ritual seems
disturbingly cult-like. For Belle, the
offer of a free treatment is impossible
to resist. And it is there, in “the Depths”
of the spa, that Belle begins to gain
petrifying insights, not only into
what is really going on at La Maison de
Méduse, but also into the deliberately
erased traumas of her own past.
The beauty – pun intended – of
Awad’s literary experiment lies in her
lyrical, almost dreamlike use of
language and in her employment of
archetypal symbols to illustrate a very
modern fairytale. The novel’s prologue
offers a bedtime story scene between
mother and daughter: “Each night you
lay in your princess bed, surrounded by
your glassy-eyed dolls, waiting for her
like a wish. Tick, tick went the seconds
on your Snow White clock.” The mother
is described as “fair, slim and smooth”,
while the daughter is “a beastly little
thing, not at all like Mother”.
Though it comes dressed in the
traditional clothing of tales told to
children, the stories’ imagery becomes
increasingly dark and strange: “the wolf
moon in the window, two grey-bodied
spiders dangling from webs on the pink
walls”. Later on, repeated mention of
the distinctive red packaging of the
Maison’s products, held enticingly
against the cheek like that famous
5 2 | S AT UR DAY | 09.09.23 | The Guardian
BOOKS FICTION
poisoned apple, bring us back to Snow
White; as do the strangely distorting
mirrors which, like gateways to another
dimension, crowd the walls of Noelle’s
flat and reveal to us the savagery at
the heart of most fairytales.
The title is deliberately chosen, for
this is a novel in which colour is always
of greater significance than decoration.
Noelle’s red shoes alert us to danger, as
they lead Belle deep into the heart of
the kingdom where scarlet silk, crimson
lips and demon eyes flash and glow.
White – the fairytale colour of purity
– is here the pallor of ghosts, of
invisibility, the satin sheen of erasure.
The question of whiteness is further
complicated by the fact that Belle is
mixed race. Her redhead mother is the
epitome of whiteness; Belle’s Egyptian
father died when she was five. Belle
insistently recalls how her mother
seemed both to envy her darker skin
and yet feel repelled by it. “You were
lovely. You were lucky,” Noelle tells
her daughter, yet Belle “knew then
that she was lying. Definitely.”
In Awad’s hands, the very idea
of whiteness becomes a dangerous
delusion. Similarly, the dolls we glimpse
at the novel’s beginning – perfect,
expressionless, white – hold up a
distorting mirror to how girl-children
ought ideally to appear and to behave.
At its heart, Rouge is not so much
a fairytale as a vampire story. The
childhood abuser who repeatedly
appears to Belle in the guise of
Top Gun-era Tom Cruise is surely a
stand-in for Count Dracula himself;
note how Belle must personally invite
him into her room before he can enter.
The trancelike, rhapsodic language
and deepening atmosphere of unreality
make for a narrative that oozes with
unease, and Awad handles her material
with enthusiasm, imagination and a
refined knowledge of her sources. As
the book wears on, however, I could
not help feeling that the symbolism,
Model behaviour
in Rouge
becomes a little obvious. Belle seems
too ready to proceed down a road whose
dangers are apparent to her even from
the start, and I would have liked to know
her better in the real world before being
sucked into the labyrinth of fantasy. For
me, the balance between the real and
the imagined in Rouge is out of kilter,
and by the novel’s end I was left
feeling I’d poked my head down this
particular rabbit hole once too often.
To buy a copy for £14.95 go to
guardianbookshop.com
Secrets and spies
A companion to the
Slough House series
Nicholas Wroe
The Secret Hours
Mick Herron
BASK ERVILLE, £2 2
M
ick Herron’s new novel opens
with a simple assertion:
“The worst smell in the world
is dead badger.” The poor beast itself
turns up soon after, as does a “flight
kit”: the stash of documents, currency
and disguise kept close at hand by
spies just in case. A frantically
violent night-time chase through
unexpectedly hostile Devon farmland
quickly follows. But it is not the action,
or even the tradecraft, that will
reassure Herron readers that they are
on secure ground with The Secret
Hours, his 16th novel across 20 years.
It is the stench of that badger.
Herron has become something of
a laureate of decrepitude. His Slough
House series features the fabled Slow
Horses, British secret agents cast out
to the periphery of the shadow world
via an imaginatively comprehensive
assortment of personal, operational,
moral or other failings. In those books
both the dilapidated building and its
equally distressed inhabitants are
subjected to a detailed physical scrutiny
that doesn’t shy from matters of
hygiene and odour. Most particularly in
respect of Herron’s leading protagonist,
Jackson Lamb, the flatulent, corpulent,
unwashed leader of the Slow Horses,
captured in all the spirit of his brilliance
and boorishness by Gary Oldman in
the Apple TV+ series.
While The Secret Hours is billed as
a standalone novel, it is really more of
a lean-to, or even an extension. Among
the new faces there are plenty of
familiar names, storylines reappear
in one guise or another and the world
is still populated by the joes and the
dogs and the milkmen and the rest of
the glossary of Herron’s Spook Street.
The action revolves around an inquiry
into the secret services set up a couple
of years back by the then prime minister
– unnamed, but who had taken a
minibreak at Peppa Pig World and had
a superinjunction in place relating to an
“eighth or ninth’’ child: we get the gist.
A ristocratic Whitehall operator
First Desk, head of the service and
veteran member of Herron’s cast,
easily enough insures the inquiry
will trundle on for ever and achieve
nothing. However, roll forward to
the present day and while the PM may
be gone – “the inevitable conclusion
of his bin-fire of the vanities” – the
zombie committee is sparked into
activity via some fun skulduggery in a
supermarket that results in the deposit
of a genuinely secret file. By now some
other interested parties have their
own motivations for airing the file’s
contents. The story that emerges
stretches from Berlin in the 90s to
the Cabinet table today, and casts
light on one of the most sensitive
cases in the security service’s history.
Herron’s cultivated air of default
world-weariness doesn’t preclude
outbreaks of icy cynicism and
admirable idealism as well as a certain
wry self-awareness. There are lots
of references to espionage fiction, and
there’s even a spy writer on the secret
committee, gleefully taking notes,
who has been “pegged by some as the
heir to le Carré – one of an admittedly
long list of legatees”, writes the
primary legatee in the genre.
Maybe the politicos are a bit on the
nose and readers would have grasped
that events are taking place in the
present day without needing asides
G A B R I E L B O U Y S /A F P/ G E T T Y I M A G E S
about kale smoothies and Wordle. But
Herron obviously relishes his digs at
the many real-life shambles that have
played out so garishly since, say, 2016.
Here he also pretty seamlessly and
efficiently ventilates issues of
corruption, surveillance, ownership
of data, and the private sector takeover
of the state, against all the ripping
yarn of the espionage tale. And if there
is any sense that Herron has filled in his
background with broad brushstrokes,
as ever he has reserved his most
delicate and affecting work for his
characters in the foreground. The
baggage they carry, the predicaments
they face, the forces that, generally,
thwart them and ultimately the bonds
that tie them are formed over long
periods of close contact, whether in
the squalid environs of Slough House
or other equally dismal workplaces
co-opted by the defenders of the realm.
It’s always the people that really matter,
and perhaps at the heart of the entire
Herron project is its appreciation of
“the biggest secret of all: that spies
were just like everyone else, especially
when you locked them in an office”.
To buy a copy for £19.36 go to
guardianbookshop.com
Funny peculiar
A standup’s debut
subverts expectations
Ella Risbridger
Weirdo
Sara Pascoe
FA BER, £14 .9 9
S
ara Pascoe’s debut novel draws
you in slowly and then all at once.
The first line is fairly standard.
The second, a little less so. Still, if you
skimmed the first chapter, it would be
easy to think you knew what you were
getting: your basic, by-the-numbers
quirky-girl-meets-boy romcom. This
is because that is exactly what our
narrator wants us to think. She’s
trying very hard to be basic! And
she would love this to be a romcom.
“I hope since our chat he thinks
I’m normal,” she confides cheerily.
“I told him I was several times.”
She is Sophie; he is Chris. They met
working “on the buses” taking tourists
round London; now Sophie works in a
pub and Chris is buying a drink, and he
doesn’t remember her at all. Or does he?
Part of the joy of Weirdo is not knowing
what to expect, or rather in having your
expectations subverted by Sophie’s
smoothie-maker of a mind. You put your
preconceived ideas in, and Sophie – or
rather Pascoe – shakes them all about.
This off-kilter perceptiveness
manifests as the kind of precise
observations you might expect from
standup Sara Pascoe: the crowdfunding
hell of modern weddings, the bitter
rivalry of unlikely sisters, the kinds of
shit jobs people have when they move
to London without a plan. Sophie has
worked on the buses, as a “scarer” at
the London Dungeon and now in a
horrible unnamed pub chain. All of
these are very funny. Pascoe is equally
good, though, on the unfunny bits.
The viciousness of schoolgirl bullying
resonates throughout, and the depth
of family trauma – even when played
ostensibly for laughs – sticks with
you long after the riff ’s got old and
everyone’s gone home.
There’s a touch of Mark Haddon’s
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the
Night-Time here; plus, perhaps, a very
funny, candid smattering of Louise
Rennison’s beloved teen diarist
Georgia Nicolson. Pascoe has written
about her adolescent love of Jostein
Gaarder’s Sophie’s World, and it’s
not hard to draw the line between
his naive, careful philosopher Sophie
and hers. If you combined those three
teenagers, and aged them up 15 years,
you might find something of her
narrator’s pure, strange tone.
“If I was in a film I’d be better
looking,” she muses. “And that’s why
men in films like women in films even
when they’re terrible people.” Sophie
thinks a lot about being in a film.
Like her Gaarder namesake, she thinks
a lot about being observed generally.
“I used to think my mum could see me
through the cat,” she says. What she
doesn’t say, not then anyway, is that
she still sort of thinks that might be
true. “That’s why I keep so many
supporting documents,” Sophie
says. “For my future biographer.”
The funny thing is, of course, that
Sophie is sort of right. We readers
are watching her every move; and
the author, eavesdropping on her
character’s most perverse and private
thoughts, is watching her too; and the
author herself has made a living out
of being watched and listened to and
observed. It’s a philosophical loop-
the-loop that comes straight from
Gaarder, only older, and darker, and
with considerably more booze.
“You can’t experience being alive
without realising that you have to die,”
young Sophie says in the opening
pages of Gaarder’s book. “But it’s just
as impossible to realise you have to
die without thinking how incredibly
amazing it is to be alive.” Sophie
Amundsen gets letters from a
mysterious philosopher, while Sophie
Collins’s are from debt collectors, but
they are both looking through a glass,
darkly, at the universe and themselves.
“I am alive and I exist and one day I
will die,” Pascoe’s heroine tells herself
near the end of the novel. “But at the
moment, this is happening.”
Does Weirdo wobble a little towards
the end? Is there too much plot?
Sure. It’s a debut novel. Like all debut
novels, there is a lot going on. Unlike
many debut novels, though – and
certainly unlike most debut novels
by the already famous – this one will
stick with you for a long time.
To buy a copy for £13.19 go to
guardianbookshop.com
Science fiction
BOOKS OF THE MONTH
and fantasy
A pulp novelist discovers the nature of reality; the
world awaits first contact; a one-way trip to Mars;
and a boy battles sentient tornadoes. By Lisa Tuttle
The
h C Circumference
ircumference
of the World
f intensive training course
Lavie Tidhar
TACH YON, £14
The latest SF from
acclaimed author Lavie
Tidhar (Central Station)
theorises that a 1950s
American pulp writer
discovered the true
nature of reality and
encoded it into an
obscure paperback novel
before founding the
Church of God’s All-
Seeing Eyes. That short
novel, Lode Stars, makes
up the central part of
this book, followed by a
biographical sketch of its
fictional author, Eugene C
Hartley, his authenticity
buttressed by letters
ventriloquising authors
and editors including
John W Campbell, Robert
A Heinlein, Alfred
Bester, Judith Merril and
Jack Kerouac. (The real
writer and founder of a
science-fictional religion
is never mentioned.)
Other sections focus
on the few people in
London who have seen a
copy of Lode Stars: Delia
Welegtabit (Hartley’s
mathematician
granddaughter), Oskar
Lens (a Russian criminal)
and Daniel Chase, the
rare-book dealer Delia
hires to search for her
missing husband. It’s
a lot to cram in, and the
effect is of an interesting
collage, clever and
entertaining parts that
finally fail to cohere.
The Blue,
Beautiful World
Karen Lord
G OLL ANCZ , £20
The latest from the
award-winning
Barbadian author is set a
hundred years from now,
when a group of young
people from around the
world are chosen for an
in foreign diplomacy.
But under the pressure
of dealing with climate
change, the nations of
Earth have managed
at last to unite under a
global government, so
there’s no longer a need
for foreign diplomats.
Could it be in anticipation
of first contact with an
alien race? But what if
those beings are already
here? This complex,
engaging novel takes
an unusual approach
to the classic trope
of aliens in our midst,
with a warmth and
intelligence reminiscent
of Ursula K Le Guin.
Girlfriend on Mars
Deborah Willis
SERPEN T ’ S TA IL , £14 .9 9
Longing for a more
meaningful life, Amber
applies to be a contestant
on a reality TV show. The
prize, for the two people
who are not voted off,
is a trip to Mars. She
becomes determined to
win, undeterred by the
fact that it’s a one-way
journey: she’ll spend the
The Guardian | 09.09.23 | S AT UR DAY | 5 3
rest of her life on that
lifeless planet, using
the frozen water in the
planet’s crust to create
oxygen and grow food.
This impressive debut
alternates between
Amber’s experiences
and the observations of
Kevin, her boyfriend for
the past 14 years, a stoner
who can’t understand
why she wants anything
more than the life they
share in a basement
apartment, growing
hydroponic weed. A
bleak yet funny story that
dissects with compassion
and wit the reality of
“reality TV” and the
fantasy of escaping
eco-catastrophe.
Bride of the Tornado
James Kennedy
QUIRK, £15.99
Once in a generation,
a horde of deadly,
sentient tornadoes
attacks a small, isolated
midwestern town. The
inhabitants’ only hope
of survival lies in the
hands of the teenage boy
known as the Tornado
Killer. The narrator, an
alienated high school
student, is strangely
drawn to this boy,
and he seems to feel a
connection to her, but
any human contact will
reduce his power, leaving
the town at the mercy of
the gathering tornadoes.
She realises the adults
are hiding a secret about
the origin of the Tornado
Killer and their reasons
for taking their teenage
daughters to visit the
sinister Mr Z – but can
she learn the truth and
still escape? This is
a powerfully weird,
original tale that mixes
American folk horror
with a surreal coming-
of-age nightmare.
CULTURE BOOKS
C
Following her acclaimed translation of the Odyssey, lassicist Emily Wilson
never expected her
Emily Wilson has turned to the Iliad. She tells translation of Homer’s
Charlotte Higgins about getting stuck for six months Odyssey, which was
published in 2017, to be
– and why the poem speaks to today’s era of conflict
War of
such a hit. Aside from
being incredibly well reviewed, it
inspired a cycle of works by the great
painter Chris Ofili, sparked a handful
of theatrical adaptations, was the
subject of several mass Homeric
words
reading marathons, and has been
mined for the text of a new musical
composition. She particularly delights
in the letters from readers, she tells
me: from parents who read it to their
babies, from octogenarians who, after
many goes, at last made it through
the poem thanks to her version.
Her translation of the Odyssey
was the first published version by a
woman in English, but that plain fact,
remarkable in itself, doesn’t begin to
account for its impact. Wilson – whom
I first met when we studied classics
together at Oxford in the 1990s – has
a theory about why readers found it
so captivating. “A lot of it’s just that I
managed to find a language that was
5 4 | S AT UR DAY | 09.09.23 | The Guardian
able to speak to different kinds of
people,” she tells me by Zoom from
her home in Philadelphia, where
she is a professor at the University
of Pennsylvania.
Perhaps more significant, she
thinks, is the fact that she rendered
the immense poem in iambic
pentameter, the metre used by
Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton.
The crispness of the rhythm made
for a poem that ran by with immense
speed and lightness. (The original is
in hexameters, a six-foot metre based
on syllable length.) Using iambic
pentameter, the metre of English
narrative and dramatic verse, “invites
reading out loud”, she says. “It makes
you feel it in the body – and you put
the poem inside you in a different way.”
But then came the Iliad. She always
knew she would tackle it, right after
the Odyssey. In this case, she’s not the
the first woman to publish an English
translation (Caroline Alexander did
that in 2015). Even so, there’s a weight
of expectation on her work that was
entirely absent when she brought out
the Odyssey. And in the US there’s
 Main: Eric Bana
and Brad Pitt in the
2004 film Troy; and
Emily Wilson, below
already pre-publication carping
from voices on the right that her
interpretation will be too woke,
too feminist, too politically correct.
The two poems are very different.
“There’s a lightness and playfulness
and magic about the Odyssey
that I wanted to get across in the
translation,” she says. “And of course,
the Iliad has tons of magic to it: it has
a huge sense of the divine. And yet,
there’s also a deep sense of pain and
darkness and constraint. I don’t want
to make you laugh very much. I think
you should be crying a lot more than
you should be laughing.”
Certainly, that was its effect on me.
The Iliad is a poem I have read many
times, stumbling through it in Greek,
reading and rereading it in various
translations over the years before
sitting down with Wilson’s new
version. We encounter literature,
especially classic texts, in relation
to the moment we are in, and the
world around us. Reading the Iliad
in the midst of Russia’s full-scale
invasion of Ukraine, which I have
reported on, brought the poem home
to me in new and disturbing ways.
Wilson’s translation, again in iambic
pentameter, runs as swift as a bloody
river, teems with the clattering sounds
of war, bursts with the warriors’
hunger for battle, and almost every
line pulses with endless, terrible loss
and mourning: death after death
after death.
None of this came easily. “I thought
the best training for translating an
epic poem would be translating an
epic poem. And I had just done that
training.” She thought she was ready.
It turned out she was not. In fact,
she tells me, she was stuck for two
years of the six she worked on the
Iliad, latterly through the pandemic,
in her study while her three daughters
did their schoolwork remotely, with
a high-stepping reproduction
Greek bronze horse at her elbow.
(Behind her, as we speak, is a new
arrival: a bust of Alexander the
Great that belonged to her mother,
F R A N K M A S I / WA R N E R B R O S; K AT I E R I G G A N
the Shakespeare scholar Katherine
Duncan-Jones, who died last year.
Her father is the writer AN Wilson and
her sister the food writer Bee Wilson.)
To understand why Wilson tussled
so much to find her way into the poem,
it is necessary to know something of
its nature. It is set in the middle of
the Trojan war. Not at the famous
beginning – there’s no judgment of
Paris, no abduction by the Trojans
of Helen, wife of Menelaus of Sparta,
the recovery of whom is the pretext
for the Greek invasion. Nor is it set at
the famous end, with the eventual
storming of Troy by the Greeks after
the subterfuge of the wooden horse.
Instead, it is set in the war’s ninth year,
and concerns the killing of the Trojans’
greatest war leader Hector, son of King
Priam, by the Greeks’ greatest fighter,
Achilles, an event that foreshadows
the Trojans’ eventual defeat.
Achilles is the poem’s remarkable
protagonist, by turns unimaginably
brutal and gracefully tender, the son
of a goddess who possesses both a
clear-eyed insight into the warrior
code that governs the mortal society
in which he lives, and a sharp, painful
sense of the proximity of his own
death. He is absent for much of the
poem, though: the Iliad starts as a row
erupts between him and the Greeks’
overall leader, Menelaus’s brother
Agamemnon, over the apportionment
of an enslaved woman, Briseis, taken
as war loot in an earlier raid. Robbed
of the human prize he sees as his due,
Achilles decides to sit out the fighting,
while the gods put their weight
behind the Trojans. In a lengthy
central sequence the Greeks are
pushed back all the way to their ships
and possible defeat. Then, at last,
Patroclus, Achilles’s beloved
companion, persuades his friend to
let him lead some of their troops into
battle to save the Greeks from disaster.
Patroclus, however, is killed by the
Trojan, Hector. It is Achilles’s violent,
furious grief at the death of his friend
that powers the final books of the
poem. As Achilles re-enters the battle,
glorying in the violence he unleashes
on the Trojans, the poem seems to
crest up like a wave and breaks only
when, at last, he slaughters Hector. The
poem ends as the great wave finally
retreats: funeral games are held for
Patroclus, and King Priam ventures
into Achilles’s encampment to retrieve
his son’s corpse. The encounter
between father and killer is the most
tense and touching in all literature.
That’s the bones of it, but there’s
so much more to take in. The poem
contains multitudes: three finely
drawn worlds, of the Greeks, the
Trojans and the gods; a whole range
of competing and complementary
architectures; exquisite variation
of tone. And perhaps its most striking
aspect is the way in which worlds
beyond the battlefield are evoked
through its imagery: armies are like
floods or wildfires or flies swarming
round a milk pail; gods fly with the
For modern war
veterans, ‘Homer
may be ancient –
but it’s not far away’
speed of imagination or of hawks;
humans are as short-lived as leaves.
The poem clangs and clatters, and it’s
so gleaming in its visual effects that
reading it can feel like staring into a
midday Mediterranean sun. Through
it all pulses death, death that at every
moment renders life more intense.
Finding the right form and rhythm
was Wilson’s first challenge. She
knew she’d do it in a regular metre,
again, but would it be iambic
pentameter? The technical challenges
of the Iliad are different, with many
more non-negotiable, necessary names
and places that position people socially,
politically and geographically. “If the
Greek is polumetos [an epithet often
attached to Odysseus in the Odyssey]
I can translate that as ‘crafty’. It’s four
syllables to two syllables, no problem.
Whereas if the phrase is ‘Agamemnon
son of Atreus’, it’s just got to be as long
as it is,” she explains. An obvious
solution was to lengthen the lines
using another metre – alexandrines,
for example, would give her an extra
beat and some more syllables. “I spent
six months trying to do that. And I
realised it was a complete failure. It
just didn’t read well.” In the end, she
stuck with iambic pentameters and
abandoned line-for-line verisimilitude.
Then there are the multiple
challenges of tone and language.
Wilson tells me she struggled over
the often very freighted language
of war, noting how translations of
the 20th century often come with
linguistic echoes of, say, the second
world war, or Vietnam. In fact some
of Wilson’s most illuminating and
moving encounters with the poem
have been with veterans in the US,
she tells me. Modern warriors “take
The Guardian | 09.09.23 | S AT UR DAY | 5 5
Homer very seriously”, she says.
“For them it may be ancient – but
it’s not far away.” Notwithstanding
powerful contemporary resonances,
however, “I don’t want [this translation]
to be tied to a particular war. Instead
I was thinking a lot about structural
violence, which points to Homer’s
very hierarchical and unequal
society, in which the obvious violence
of the spear going through the flesh
is a manifestation of all these other
kinds of violence that are always
ongoing – of enslavement and
colonisation and one group of men
coming to steal from another.”
On a desert island, would she
want the Iliad or the Odyssey?
“It’s a very difficult question,” she
says. Nevertheless, she answers
without a blink: “I’m an Iliad person.
For sure. And I think I would always
have said that.” In fact, she tells me,
she remembers giving the same
answer, age 17, when asked the
question at school. “The Iliad feels
more truthful,” Wilson says. “Whereas
the fantasy that at least one special
person can get it all back, and that loss
is not inevitable, is central to the plot
of the Odyssey.” The Iliad, on the other
hand, “is committed to showing you
over and over, that no, it is inevitable,
however special you are, that you’re
always going to die, you’re always
going to suffer the worst possible loss
you could suffer.” Bleak but true: and
precious, brief life shimmers all the
more brightly because of it.
We discuss how conflict and war
lie at the heart of story structure, how
everyone I’ve met in Ukraine has a
vivid story to tell, how the Iliad is
really “multiple stories folded into the
grand story”. She lights up when she
starts thinking about the characters
of the poem, so fully realised even
when they have tiny parts to play, she
argues. “I mean, Achilles is a fabulous
character, and it’s easy both to see how
much damage he causes and to have
enormous empathy for him, and the
same for Hector – but the same goes
even for the minor characters.
Hera [queen of the gods] is a great
character. I think Iris is a great
character.” For a moment she considers
Iris, goddess of the rainbow, who darts
around between deities, relaying
important messages verbatim – or
not. And she laughs, and with a great
beaming smile, says: “The rainbow
goddess of translation! I love her!”
Emily Wilson’s translation of Homer’s
Iliad will be published on 26 September
by WW Norton.
CULTURE BOOKS
THE BOOKS OF MY LIFE the experiences of a there’s possibly no other

Preti Audiobook
young woman who has text, apart from the
been repeatedly raped Mahabharata, which
of the week
Taneja
since childhood. It’s an contains the Bhagavad
unforgettable stream Gita, that I’ve read so
of consciousness. often – it’s made me
think so much about I’m a Fan
The author on returning to The writer who
changed my mind
time, language, ethics,
feminism and how
Sheena Patel

King Lear and being inspired

G R A N TA , 4 HR 31 MIN
Salman Rushdie’s to live in the world.
by American Psycho Midnight’s Children

S
was on my parents’ The book I could
bookshelves. I was about never read again heena Patel’s debut novel opens
12 when I picked it up Anaïs Nin’s A Spy in the with the unnamed protagonist
and it backed up the House of Love, which tracking the online life of a female
stories my mother and I read a lot in my late influencer who has recently scored
aunts had told me about teens. Now I can’t read a six-figure book deal and “who is
partition and what our it without finding its sleeping with the same man as I am”.
family had left behind combination of erotica Our thirtysomething narrator is the
when the line was drawn. and orientalism painful. daughter of immigrants, works in the
arts and lives in south London with her
The book that made The book I discovered boyfriend, whom she blithely admits to
me want to be a writer later in life treating atrociously. The other man she
My mother was the Gina Apostol’s is seeing is a highly respected artist who
pioneering Indian Insurrecto. Apostol is a is married and has multiple women on
cookery writer and food uniquely funny, humane the side, including the influencer with
entrepreneur Meera and wise writer, a deeply whom she is unhealthily obsessed.
Taneja. When I was generous person and I’m a Fan is written in brisk and
three, she dedicated her mentor to many. bracingly candid chapters that read like
New Indian Cookery prose poetry and lend themselves well
to me and my sister. I The book I am to audio. Patel is the narrator, who
remember reading my currently reading reads much as she writes: bluntly,
name and knew I wanted The Stone House by Yara dispassionately, permanently on the
to be like her: a writer. Hawari and American outside looking in. As the only woman
Fictionary by Dubravka of colour moving in white, wealthy
My earliest teens. My bedroom was The book I came back to Ugrešić; I love the voices circles, the book’s protagonist is
reading memory tiny, but it had a window Bret Easton Ellis’s of both these writers, disaffected, insecure and keenly aware
My mother used to make seat. I’d climb up and American Psycho. I their observational of how her skin colour and lack of
up stories inspired by pull down the blind, so avoided it on publication, power and what they money put her at a disadvantage. The
her childhood in India. I was sealed in like the but eventually read it have to say. affluent people whose lives she covets
There were monsoons girl in the book. when I was writing a are “descendants of the children of
and paper boats; there particular character My comfort read settlers and the children of Empire,
were pink newspapers. The book that changed in my first novel. Adrienne Rich’s poem left-leaning spawn of right-leaning
Listening to her, me as a teenager Ellis’s book offered a Diving into the Wreck families”. Knowing all this, she
watching her hands Two books I read at 16 genealogy for “alpha” is her great work of nonetheless craves their approval. By
tell the stories, was my opened my eyes to what masculinity, popular political commitment, putting her married lover on a pedestal,
first form of reading. you can write about. cultural references resilience and resistance. she is, in his eyes, merely a fan.
Urvashi Butalia’s The and a voice that could “The words are This short, sharp book provides
My favourite Other Side of Silence critique society. purposes,” she writes. a brutal depiction of status anxiety,
book growing up is an oral history about “The words are maps.” toxic social media and what happens
I read Charlotte Brontë’s what happened to many The book I reread when white privilege tips into abuse.
Jane Eyre at around 10 or Sikh women during King Lear, which I first Aftermath by Preti I’m a Fan is by no means a comfortable
11 years old, then read it partition in 1947. Andrea read at 16 and returned Taneja is published by listen, but it’s compulsive and gripping
again and again in my Dworkin’s Mercy evokes to over and over; And Other Stories. nonetheless. Fiona Sturges

Further listening
Tom Gauld One Boy, Two Bills and a Fry Up
Wes Streeting
HOD D ER & S T OU G H T ON, 8HR 5 7 MIN
The MP for Ilford North narrates his
poignant memoir looking back on his
childhood living on the breadline in
a Stepney council estate.

A Heart Full of Headstones

Ian Rankin
ORION, 11HR 4 2 MIN
DI John Rebus finds himself in
the dock and facing a life sentence
in the latest from the Scottish
BEN GOLD

crime writer. The actor James

MacPherson narrates.

5 6 | S AT UR DAY | 09.09.23 | The Guardian


Are memories
THE BIG IDEA
fact or fiction?
Truth and illusion are woven together as we
tell ourselves into being, writes Sophie McBain
O
N E OF M Y E A R L I E S T M E MOR I E S is
of being teased on my first day of
school for speaking with a Dutch
accent. I blamed my mother for this
humiliation and returned home
furious. “It’s three, not tree. Th-ree!”
I told her. The strange thing about this memory is
that it is probably false. My mother swears it was my
brother who did this.
This kind of confusion is common in families. As
stories are told and retold, they take on a life of their
own. Details fade and change. It becomes easy to swap
one child for another, or to confuse a familiar tale with
a personal memory. My recollection feels vivid, but the
details become blurrier on closer examination: where
was my mother standing when I spoke to her? What
was she wearing? I couldn’t say.
I was four at the time. Most adults cannot remember
anything of their lives before the age of three or four,
a phenomenon known as infantile amnesia. Scientists
have suggested that this early forgetting is related to
two aspects of cognitive development. First, cementing
autobiographical memory requires language: it is
harder to retain something when you lack the words to
express it. Second, it requires a coherent sense of self,
the ability to distinguish between “this happened” and
“this happened to me”.
In other words, to remember our life we need to be
able to narrate it, to impose order and meaning on to
the chaos of existence by turning it into a story, and
one that positions us as the central character. In this
way, we tell ourselves into being.
In the six years since I became a mother, I have
Illustration: Elia Barbieri
been watching this process up close. Two of my three
children are still so young that in future years they
may be unable to recall a single event of their lives so
far. The older ones love to look at photos of themselves
as babies and hear stories about when they were
“little”. With time, some of these may start to feel like
personal memories. And even if they don’t, the stories
will shape how they come to narrate their own lives in
a profound way.
Parents wield formidable power over their children’s
memories, creating the first stories they tell themselves
about who they are and where they come from, stories
that might be shed like snakeskin or come to defi ne
them for ever. Some of these narratives may embellish
the truth, and some may be complete fabrications. In
a small but influential study from 1995, psychologist
Elizabeth Loftus showed that when a relative was
tasked with telling a trial participant a fictional but
plausible story of how they had got lost in a mall as
a young child, six out of 24 participants developed a
false memory as a result.
The study of false memories has become politically
incendiary, having sparked debates about whether
Further reading The Seven
Three books for Sins of
Memory
a deeper dive Daniel L
Schacter
M A R INER, £ 15.9 9
therapists can implant memories of childhood sexual
abuse, or whether women sometimes misremember
consensual sex as rape. When I argue that personal
memories are closer to fiction than fact, I am thinking
less of the specific ways that we can – or can’t –
manipulate other people’s memories, than of the
nature of memory more generally. The science is
clear: our minds don’t function like a hard drive or a
video recorder. Memories are not physical things,
stored somewhere in the brain, but rather creative
reconstructions. They change constantly because we
do. We edit our pasts to better serve our present needs.
Maybe you have a vivid memory of 23 March 2020,
the day the UK fi rst went into lockdown. Maybe you
remember clearly how you felt as you listened to Boris
Johnson’s announcement, and what exactly you did
next. These details might feel seared into your memory
– but chances are, some of them are wrong. A study of
so-called “flashbulb” memories of 9/11 – the unusually
vivid memories people retain of significant events –
found that one year on, almost 40% of people had
changed parts of what they recalled about that day.
Our memories are also often self-aggrandising and
self-serving. One study that compared students’
remembered grades with their transcripts found that
they were much better at recalling As than Ds. Another
found that when students performed better than
expected in exams, they remembered feeling more
anxious beforehand, amplifying their sense of success.
Even (or especially) when our memory is faulty – by
which I mean, factually inaccurate – it serves us well,
helping us to feel like the hero in our own life story.
We all know how our autobiographies will end. We
will die, and so will everyone we love. “The cure for the
horror is story,” Will Storr wrote in his 2019 book, The
Science of Storytelling. “Our brains distract us from
this terrible truth by filling our lives with hopeful goals
and encouraging us to strive for them … it gives us the
illusion of meaning.” Since my children were born, I
have become obsessed with documenting their
childhoods, taking endless photos, keeping endless
notes, driven by a fear of forgetting that is a form of
anticipatory grief, a heightened awareness of loss.
This means that my children – like most children
today – will enter adulthood with more documentary
evidence of their early years than any generation before.
We are, almost effortlessly and often unwittingly,
amassing a huge digital archive that means more of our
memories can be corroborated. Our pasts have never
been so readily accessible, through social media posts,
emails and text messages, photos and screenshots,
cookie trails and browser histories. But I have found
that looking through email correspondence from
almost two decades ago, or cringe-reading early
Facebook posts, feels more like eavesdropping on an
alien than encountering a past self. The writer doesn’t
feel like me. Which version is more real?
In my hunger to document my children’s lives,
am I restricting their ability to write their own life
story? In the digital age, we’re all still renegotiating
our relationship with the past. Computers, unlike
humans, offer perfect recall – but we must not forget
that there is freedom and power in misremembering,
in revising our past, in writing ourselves into fictions
we can live with.
Pieces The Memory
of Light Illusion
Charles Dr Julia Shaw
Fernyhough R A ND OM HOUSE ,
PROFILE , £12 .9 9 £9.9 9
The Guardian | 09.09.23 | S AT UR DAY | 5 7
SEX ADVICE STYLE TRAVEL
Playing How can Why the A family
Wordle I help my wrong shoe rail trip
is our workaholic theory is from the
foreplay friend? so right UK to Sicily
PA G E 6 5 PA G E 6 7 PA G E 6 8 PA G E 7 2

FACE
OFF
How to win an argument,
every single time

59
59
LIFESTYLE

Don’t steamroll, make

concessions and
go easy on the stats …
Here’s a guide to
winning arguments –
from the people that
do it for a living
Words: Simon Usborne
Illustrations: Eiko Ojala

W
hether or not history
will determine that
we are living in an
ever more divided
culture, it certainly
feels that way.
Perhaps there is just
more to argue about
when facing a
never-ending Ninja Warrior course of crises. The
culture wars, meanwhile, strip words of their
meaning and debates of their nuance, further pitting
communities, generations, families and friends
against each other.
Among the many casualties of this 21st-century
slanging match is – arguably – the art of debate itself.
So how do you win an argument in such fractious
times without fuelling division? And if arguing is
indeed an art, what can we learn from its masters?
Ken Grinell, a Jamaican-Irish comedian from
east London, has emerged as a fighting force on the
roast battle circuit, in which comedians trade insults
for laughs in front of a baying crowd and a panel of
judges. Even in an environment that rewards
meanness, Grinell says steamrolling tends to backfire.
“If you’re a big imposing person and you come in
super-aggressive, the crowd will turn on you,” he
says. “Sometimes you have to kind of let yourself get
flogged a little bit before they’re comfortable seeing
you return fire. You’re basically learning how strangers
view you in relation to the other person on stage.”
Better to rely on wit than brawn, says Grinell, who
recently uttered the following put-down in a battle
against a comedian called Nick: “The women in
Nick’s office asked for a gender pay gap … they don’t
even want to be close to him financially.”
Tulip Siddiq, the Labour MP and shadow economic
secretary, says that while social media has made it
easier to “dress up abuse as political discourse”,
parliament is no less combative than when she cut
her teeth as a researcher in the late Blair years.
“There was as much performative politics in the
chamber then as there is now,” she says.
In 2015, while fighting to be elected in Hampstead
and Kilburn, Siddiq learned that a fusillade of facts
isn’t always effective, however keen you might be to
show your learning.
“I remember in one hustings quoting an LSE
statistical study about economics and it wasn’t right
for a big diverse audience,” Siddiq says. “Detail just
didn’t work. I had to grind whatever point I was
making down to simple language that was emotional
and relatable while also not sounding robotic.”
That’s not to say you can get away with skimping
on research. “You have to know the facts and the law
back to front,” says David Emanuel KC, a criminal
defence and appeals lawyer.
Yet Emanuel says total command is neither possible
nor always advantageous. “You have to be trustworthy
and part of that is making concessions,” he says. “If
you have weaker points or arguments, conceding
they are weaker without throwing them away can
make your stronger points more credible. It can also
be disarming, and throw people off guard.” He adds:
“Stubbornly seeming not to concede any ground at
all can damage your overall position.”
Humility and empathy can be particularly scarce
commodities in the wreckage of a marriage. But
Kate Daly, a divorced relationship counsellor and
co-founder of Amicable, a non-confrontational legal
service for separating couples, says employing such
traits in arguments about thorny subjects such as
money or custody means everyone does better.
“Listening to each other’s ideas about what a good
outcome should be, even if they’re not necessarily

6 0 | S AT UR DAY | 09.09.23 | The Guardian


the ideas you run with, is really important, because
that then gives the feeling to both people that they’ve
been heard,” she says. “And you’ve got to be able to
listen actively, to demonstrate that you’re paying
attention to the other person’s viewpoint. That will
help to create respect, which is absolutely essential if
you’re going to win an argument.”
The stakes in an argument are rarely higher than
in a hostage negotiation. Yet even here it’s smart to
deploy what Suzanne Williams calls “tactical
empathy”. She worked as a senior negotiator in the
Metropolitan police for 32 years before going on to
advise the government in war zones and in maritime
piracy cases. “There’s a huge difference between
hearing and listening,” says Williams, an associate
professor at Oxford University’s programme on
negotiation. “You have to understand the person
you’re negotiating with without judg ment, whatever
your personal values might be.”
First, Williams has to “earn the right to negotiate”
when, for example, she deals with intermediaries who
represent Somali pirates on board ships taken in the
Gulf of Aden (there was a spate of such hijackings early
this century). “You have to peel back the layers, find
out what their true motivation is, look for the hooks,
or for what makes them smile, what frightens them,
and you have to try to understand them.”
Williams is reluctant to share all the secrets of
such a sensitive trade, but says achieving a useful
rapport requires calm, active listening and an
emotional capacity for absorbing abuse and –
occasionally – threats of violence.
“Too many people try to win arguments from
their own perspective,” she says. “And that really is
a big mistake, because their worldview isn’t
necessarily your worldview, which is made up of
your age, gender, life experiences, education … So
clarifying how they see the situation shows you’re
listening to them, and taking their ideas on board.”
Tin Puljić, a debating coach and international
relations PhD student at the University of Zagreb,
adds: “Every argument has some level of logic and if
you want to win a debate you must engage with the
best version of the argument. Being charitable
makes it easier to win because you can say things
like, ‘Even if I grant that you proved A, B or C within
this argument, here is why you’re still wrong.’”
Puljić, who won the 2021 World Universities
Debating Championships, now teaches the next
generation of debaters the “Sexi” technique:
Statement, Explanation, eXample, Importance – a
strategic order around which to build an argument.
“Importance is vital because we should not
assume anything is inherently important,” he says.
“So you cannot end your argument : ‘And this will
increase democracy within the country.’ Why do I
care about democracy within that country? What is
the context?”
‘Sometimes you
have to get flogged a
little before they’re
comfortable seeing
you return fire’
University debating competitions require
combatants to make the best possible case regardless
of their actual beliefs. Defence barristers,
meanwhile, must put their clients’ right to a fair
trial above all else. But, says Emanuel, “I find it
impossible to argue effectively until I’ve got to a
place where I believe the argument.” He says history
is littered with miscarriages of justice in which
defence lawyers perhaps privately presumed their
clients were guilty. So even if everything points to
a guilty verdict, Emanuel challenges himself to find
a way to construct an argument he can believe in,
however difficult.
Arguing with conviction, as well as humility and
empathy, is a fine balance to strike. And while the
techniques of expert arguers can often transfer to
everyday life, there are limits. A parliamentary
debating style does not always go down well in
Siddiq’s marriage, for example. Puljić finds himself
holding back a little when, say, debating some
political point with a family member.
“‘Stop cross-examining me!’ is a common refrain
in my house,” says Emanuel, who has teenage
children. “And I don’t mind you quoting me on that
– they’ll laugh if they see it in print.” •
How to argue
Five golden rules
Don’t assault people with facts
1
It’s important to know your stuff
but reeling off too many stats can leave
people cold. Ideas and emotions are
more compelling. Say “so many people
are feeling x”, rather than “A recent
study by scientists at ...”
When they go low …
2
If heightened emotion causes
one side to raise their voice or become
angry, keep yours calm and soft,
without being patronising. Nobody
wins in a slanging match.
Be ‘Sexi’
3
The structure adopted by
university debating teams: make a
statement, offer an explanation, then
an example. And then detail the
importance of what you’re arguing. For
example: “We should spend less time
looking at our phones (statement),
because it’s eroding our mental health
and ability to connect in real life
(explanation). Excessive smartphone
use has been proven to increase anxiety
(example) and this matters because
poor mental health among adults can
have an impact on everything from
workplace productivity to interpersonal
relationships (importance).”
Be curious …
4
About the other side’s life experience
and motivations. Say things like: “So
help me understand” and “Tell me
more about that: I wasn’t quite clear”.
5
Make concessions
Conceding your argument contains
weaker points makes your stronger
ones more credible, while also making
you seem more charitable and human.
The Guardian | 09.09.23 | S AT UR DAY | 61
LIFESTYLE
M AT C H M A K I N G G U A R D I A N R E A D E R S S I N C E 2 0 0 9 Harry
‘Did we kiss? A passing motorist 24, doctor
suggested we get a room’ What were you hoping for?
Free-flowing conversation and
laughter.
First impressions?
Her smile and northern accent were
disarming, as was her eyeliner.
What did you talk about?
Inevitably, the tribulations of being a
junior doctor. Tate Modern. Cookery.
Most awkward moment?
I got lost and so flustered I flung myself
on the mercy of an optician’s assistant.
I hate being late and was rather
pathetic. Thank goodness for opticians.
Good table manners?
Her meal wasn’t made for graceful
eating but a love for food is far more
attractive than a refined manner.
Best thing about Jessie?
Her forthrightness. There was hardly a
quiet moment.
Would you introduce Jessie to your
friends?
I’m sure they’d like her.
Describe Jessie in three words.
Vivacious, loud, joyful.
What do you think Jessie made of
you?
That I looked good, despite leaving
work an hour late and running for the
tube. Still, I think it’s hard to dislike
paisley.
Did you go on somewhere?
Another time, perhaps.
And … did you kiss?
A passing motorist suggested we get
a room.
If you could change one thing about
the evening what would it be?
I’d order differently. The bread in
my ploughman’s was so deliciously
crusty that I had to either pause
mid-anecdote or try to enunciate
around it.
Marks out of 10?
7.
Would you meet again?
Sure. I’d give anything a go twice.
Except meningitis. That was
enough once.
6 2 | S AT UR DAY | 09.09.23 | The Guardian
Jessie
23, doctor
What were you hoping for?
A Keanu Reeves clone genetically
engineered to be in his mid-20s who
would sweep me off my feet.
First impressions?
This guy knows his paisley prints!
More interesting than I’d envisioned.
What did you talk about?
Houseplants. Moving to London.
Ordering non-perishable pantry items.
Classification of psychiatric conditions
based on philosophical parameters …
Most awkward moment?
I’m a gigantic ball of awkward on legs
but nothing particular came up.
Good table manners?
I didn’t notice.
Best thing about Harry?
Being unapologetically passionate
about his interests.
Would you introduce Harry to your
friends?
Yeah, I think they’d like him.
Describe Harry in three words.
Stylish, inspired, perspicacious.
What do you think Harry made of you?
I hope he appreciated that I wore
nail polish for him – and had to scrape
it off on the 7am bus next morning
for work.
Did you go on somewhere?
He walked me to the bus which was
really nice.
And … did you kiss?
Maaaayyyyyyyyyyyyybe …
If you could change one thing about
the evening what would it be?
I wish I hadn’t been so nervous I was
30 minutes early.
Marks out of 10?
8.
Would you meet again?
GR AEME ROBERTON AND SAR AH LEE/ BOTH THE GUARDIAN
We swapped numbers …
Harry and Jessie ate at The Drop Bar,
London N1. Fancy a blind date? Email
blind-date@theguardian.com
We’re
F
or about a year I have
known exactly how
I am most likely to die:
moving
tripping over the cat
on the narrow stairs
leading from our attic
bedrooms
bedroom. The realisation brings
more clarity than comfort. I can
think of better ways to go, but the cat
– before
is determined.
Every morning the cat waits
patiently by the bedroom door until
I am dressed. Then, just as I start
the cat
down the stairs, the cat darts ahead
to make sure it’s crouched sidelong
on the tread where I am about to
kills me
put my foot, forcing me to aim for
the tread below that one.
As soon as it’s clear I’m not going to
trip, the cat moves down a few steps,
anticipating my foot placement and
trying to second-guess any evasive
measures I might take. It does this all
the way to the bottom, but I’m pretty
sure when I finally end my days I will
be launching myself from the turn at
the top, where the treads are wedge-
shaped and I have the furthest to fall.
“Why are you doing this?” I shout,
every morning. “How does it help
you if I die?” The cat, I think, is
pleased by this.
On the best mornings I am fully
alert, clinging tightly to the handrail
and inching my way down, the way
one might negotiate a staircase on the
Tim Dowling
Titanic just as the ship was nosing into
the Atlantic. But on many mornings
On modern life I’m groggy and preoccupied.
Sometimes I’m carrying stuff, and
sometimes I have the dog barrelling
down behind me, eager to pass on the
left. It is a matter of time.
The cat’s plot against me is not
the reason that my wife – facing the
Edith Pritchett On millennial life
imminent departure of the last of
our grown children – is eager to
move to a lower bedroom. But it is
the main reason I agreed.
My wife has obtained a quote from
a man to build new cupboards in the
middle one’s soon-to-be old bedroom.
She’s asked for another quote to rip out
the cupboard in the youngest one’s old
room, and replace it with bookshelves.
To make up for the missing cupboard,
she has vowed to restore an old chest of
drawers. I only find this out when she
asks me to carry it down to the garden.
The chest has done hard service in
various children’s rooms for over 30
years, and it was in my wife’s mother’s
house before that. It’s missing three
of its six handles, one of its four feet,
and has the word “WANKER” carved
deeply into its top.
“Will you show me how to work the
sander?” my wife says. I go off in search
of the electric sander, which I have not
seen since before the pandemic.
Eventually I find it, along with some
fresh sandpaper and a builder’s mask.
“It’s supposed to suck up its own
dust, but it doesn’t really.” I say,
handing her the mask.
“How do I change the paper?”
she says.
“That’s easy. It’s just Velcro,” I say,
ripping away one corner.
The cat moves down a
few steps, anticipating
foot placement and
trying to second-guess
any evasive measures
The Guardian | 09.09.23 | S AT UR DAY | 6 3
“Ahh!” she says.
“What?” I say, pulling off the rest.
“Ahh!” she says. “Stop!”
“Are you afraid of Velcro?” I say.
“How did I not know that about you?”
“Not afraid,” she says, looking
away. “Just put on a new one for me.”
“Fine,” I say, pulling.
“Ahh!” she says.
Leaving her to her sanding, I walk
down the road to buy bread. While I’m
queueing I notice someone I vaguely
recognise staring at me through the
shop window.
“Hey,” says the youngest one.
“Hey,” I say. “What’s going on?”
“You know,” he says, holding up a
bag. “Buying some bacon.”
“Bread,” I say, holding up my bag.
“Nice,” he says. I think about telling
him that his mother is frightened of
Velcro, but he probably already knows.
“OK, well, see ya,” I say. We walk
off in opposite directions, back to our
new lives.
When I get home I find my wife
standing over the chest, coated in a
fine layer of sawdust.
“How’s it going?” I say.
“I think I got the ‘WANKER’ out,”
she says.
“Here comes the future,” I say.
The middle one moves out in just a
few weeks. The new cupboards are
arriving in a month, after which I will be
sleeping in a room that is just a short,
survivable tumble from the kitchen.
The cat, meanwhile, has changed its
strategy: now when I try to step over its
crouching form on the stairs, it sits up
suddenly to push its head against the
arch of my lifted foot. In medieval
times it was not uncommon for courts
to prosecute animals for murder. I used
to think that was stupid.
LIFESTYLE
TRUE STORIES OF OUR SEX LIVES
This is how
we do it
‘Since we’ve
been trying
for a baby,
Wordle has
become a
fixture of
our pre-sex
routine’
Evie, 37
Trying to get pregnant is not terribly
romantic. Jim and I have been in the
baby mindset for six months, which
means we have sex constantly, but the
sex is weirdly regimented. I’ve started
to think about Jim’s orgasms as
potential opportunities, and I get
panicky if I miss them. I pre-plan the
sequencing of our sex positions in my
head so Jim will definitely ejaculate
when he is inside me, but we have
kissed goodbye to spontaneity. I’m
vigilant about capturing Jim’s first
ejaculation of the day, as apparently
that sperm is the best quality. I’ve
started to think of a blowjob as a
waste of seed, which is sad because I
am amazing at blowjobs.
Our sex life used to be so intuitive. I
met Jim three years ago and I was
struck by how chemically right it felt
just to stand near him. His overriding
personality trait is gentleness. The
first night we slept together he asked
me to sit on his face, which is pretty
dirty and bold, but he made it sound
like the most natural and romantic
SEX
request in the world. Sex with him
feels so light. It is tender, but playful.
But now we’re trying for a baby, sex
is less impulsive. If my ovulation
window falls on a Wednesday and I’ve
had a terrible work week, I will initiate
sex regardless, but it won’t come from
a place of lust. Sometimes I think
every couple has a bank of sexual
frisson, and every time you have sex
because you have to, and not because
you want to, it takes something out of
the bank. Perhaps for every functional
shag we have, I need to buy a pair of
fancy knickers to rebalance things.
Or book us a weekend away.
In the last few weeks Jim and I have
made the conscious decision to take
the pressure off. Two months in a row I
was convinced I was pregnant, and
finding out I wasn’t was tough. So
while we’re still trying, I’m putting
less mental energy into it. Before, I was
wearing a temperature sensor on my
arm every night in bed, but I’ve
decided to take it off, and give up my
obsessive tracking. I am thinking less
about seed and more about orgasms
– which translates to more blowjobs.
Illustration: Ryan Gillett
Jim, 39
Evie is unfailingly honest in bed,
sometimes bluntly so. If I’m fingering
her in a way that isn’t giving her
maximum pleasure she’ll tell me
outright. It’s liberating to be with
someone who is so clear about what
she wants. In my last relationship, I
felt too afraid to even suggest a new
position because I knew my ex would
read it as a slight on her lovemaking
skills – and I was equally frightened of
being criticised. But Evie makes
asking for what you want look so easy.
Evie’s openness has made the last
few months easier to deal with. We
talk frankly about our disappointment
at not being pregnant yet. Evie has had
a fertility test and the doctors have
confirmed she is able to conceive, so I
have a worry in the back of my mind
that something is amiss with me. Once
we hit the 12-month mark I’ll get my
sperm tested. Meanwhile, I’m trying
to work on my pre-sex stress levels. It’s
a vicious circle: anxiety can affect
sperm quality, so worrying about not
conceiving could stop you conceiving.
The Guardian | 09.09.23 | S AT UR DAY | 6 5
We’ve painted our bedroom a
lovely dark green, so it’s a soothing
sanctuary, and we start each session
with a massage and light candles.
Sometimes we play Wordle together
immediately before having sex
because I fi nd it calms me down.
We used to be in thrall to the
fertility tracker on Evie’s phone, but
we’ve given up on that kind of
pre-planning. Sex switched from being
something we did for pure pleasure to
something we had to do because we
got pinged by an app. Since we stopped
putting pressure on ourselves to
squeeze it in midweek, sex has gone
back to being a lengthy, weekend affair
that we really take our time over. We
still play Wordle right before we do it,
though. Even though we’re both much
calmer, that has become a regular
fixture of our pre-sex routine.
As told to Kitty Drake
Would you and your partner like to
share the story, anonymously, of your
sex life? Email sexlives@theguardian.
com with a brief outline of what you get
up to in the bedroom
LIFESTYLE ADVICE

You be The prosecution

Julius

the judge Fred earns a lot more

than me and should be

Should my
understanding of my
financial position

brother stop Fred, my older brother, wouldn’t like

to call himself tight, but I think he is.

breaking
He’s also oblivious to the fact that
money plays very different roles
in our lives.

his promises
We recently got into a bit of an
altercation during a friend’s birthday
because of it. Fred invited me to our

to lend me
mutual friend George’s birthday
dinner. I said I’d go but that I didn’t
have much money. Fred told me not

money?
Interviews: Georgina Lawton
to worry and that he’d cover my share
if I was struggling. It was a really nice
Korean place and I deliberately didn’t
order anything except one starter and
one drink. I’m in between jobs as a
freelance copywriter and things are
really quiet as I’ve lost a few clients.
When the bill came George said:
“Shall we all split it?” I looked at Fred
to sort of signal that he had agreed to
cover my share. He pretended not to
notice. I had to awkwardly point out
that I’d only had two things. George
said that was fine and that I didn’t have
to pay the same as everyone else. But
then Fred told me not to be annoying
and said I’d also eaten some of the
leftover chicken dishes on the table.
I didn’t appreciate Fred calling me out
in front of everyone, and I reminded
him that he had said he’d cover my
portion, which he flat-out denied.
Fred is earning good money as a
corporate lawyer but he thinks we are
all in the same boat. He will offer to
lend me money for something – once
for a new laptop – then retract the offer
when he’s in a different mood.
Recently we went to Nando’s and
he’d forgot his card and couldn’t pay
by phone. I paid for our meals and
asked him to wire me the £20 or so for
his half as soon as he got home. I
texted him again the next day and he
didn’t reply, so I left it because I’m not
going to beg. When we went to the pub
a month or so afterwards, he bought
me a pint as an apology but I would
have rather had the cash. He claimed
later he had just forgotten to wire me
the £20 as he was so busy.
I feel at our age – I’m 27 and he’s 30
– Fred should really show a bit more
understanding towards people who
aren’t in the same pay bracket as him.

6 6 | S AT UR DAY | 09.09.23 | The Guardian

The defence
Fred
Julius prioritises having
a lovely time over
monetary decisions. It’s
time he listened to me
Julius is making me sound like a
tight-fisted capitalist pig here. It’s
true that I have offered to lend him
money once or twice and then reneged
on the deal, but there’s been good
reason for that.
With the meal, I thought it was a
bit annoying that he ended up eating
nearly as much as everyone else and
then didn’t want to split the bill
evenly, or looked to me to pay for him.
Before I invited him to George’s
birthday, he had said that he’d just
come along for a drink and I said I’d get
him one. But before you know it, he’s
ordering various bits and picking at
everyone’s food. Then I thought he
was showing me up when he asked to
pay for just the things he ordered,
when he’d actually eaten quite a lot. It
probably got my back up so that’s why
I said “Let’s just split the bill with the
boys”. They are more my mates than
his, so I guess I was a bit annoyed at
the scene unfolding at the table.
With this Nando’s thing, he’s
making a bigger deal of it than it was.
I genuinely forgot and missed his
messages because I was slammed at
work. I later bought him a drink to
make up for it. And I’ve covered him
countless times when he’s needed it in
the past. I know he’s between work
projects at the moment so if he was
genuinely struggling with rent or bills
I’d make sure he was fine, no questions
asked. I’m just a bit stricter when I can
see him splurging on things he doesn’t
need or if he’s being selfish, like at the
birthday dinner.
The other time I said I’d lend Julius
money was for a laptop. I retracted that
offer because he said he was broke but
then booked a trip to Ibiza the week
after he’d come to me with his begging
bowl. You can’t ask to borrow a grand
and then go on a big, lavish trip.
I know we have different pay
brackets but Julius isn’t great with
money. He’s always prioritised having
a lovely time over making smart
financial decisions. I like to have a good
time but I guess I’m a bit more sensible.
We’re close so I can rib him a bit over
his decisions. He doesn’t really listen
to me but I think it’s about time he did.
Illustration: Igor Bastidas
The jury
of Guardian readers
Should Fred offer his brother more
financial help?
If your brother is short on cash and
you’ve offered to lend him money, just
follow through. You may think you’re
teaching him a financial lesson, but
really you’re teaching him that he can’t
trust you, and your relationship will
suffer. You’re his brother, not his parent.
Dani, 32
Fred seems to enjoy the power play of
offering financial help to Julius and
then rescinding it. If Fred has issues
with Julius’s financial responsibility, he
shouldn’t offer to help in the first place.
John, 44
I know it’s a rubbish feeling but if you
can’t afford stuff, just don’t go. I was
siding with Julius until Fred mentioned
Ibiza – but that’s a slap in the face to
someone who’s offered to lend you
money. That being said: Fred, paying
people back promptly isn’t difficult.
Benjamin, 26
Regardless of whether Julius acts
heedlessly with money, Fred’s behaviour
towards him is mean-spirited and
patronising. He’s also dishonourable –
a pint doesn’t “make up” for not
settling a debt. Pay up, AND buy your
brother a pint to apologise for making
him chase you.
Katrin, 43
Regardless of what Julius ate at the
birthday meal, Fred should have paid
for Julius’s share, as agreed, then
quibbled with him later. He certainly
shouldn’t have done it in front of their
friends. I don’t accept Fred’s defence
that Julius doesn’t make smart
financial decisions.
Cal, 58
THE VERDICT
Guilty Brother, you can spare a dime
Not guilty I’m not my brother’s keeper
You’ve heard the cases,
now you decide ...
Scan to vote on this week’s dispute,
share your own, or be one of the jury
My friend
is working
so hard it’s
affecting her
health and
family. How
can I help?
Ask
Annalisa Barbieri
I have a friend in her mid-40s who is
the most senior member of a team in a
large organisation. She has a husband
and two children in their early teens.
In the 10 years I’ve known her she has
always worked very hard, but since a
recent promotion she has been
unusually absent from events and
group chats. Last night I went out with
friends including her husband, who
told us that for the past few weeks
she’s been working until 4am most
days, including weekends.
I have always been concerned
about the number of hours she works,
given she also juggles a busy family
life. She doesn’t like driving long
distances in case she falls asleep at
the wheel, and when she goes on
holiday she often falls ill. On several
occasions our friends and I have tried
to reason with her that however
4 senior she is she should not be
1 expected to work these long hours.
We’ve told her she should tell
her boss it’s not sustainable. I am
concerned she will have a physical
or mental health crisis. I’m half
tempted to contact her firm, but this
could really make things bad for her.
I don’t know how to help her without
her approaching the company herself.
She needs an intervention.
The Guardian | 09.09.23 | S AT UR DAY | 6 7
Please do not contact her company:
that would be a very bad idea. It’s
unlikely they demand your friend
works such hours anyway. It’s
probably something she’s decided to
do for whatever reason, if indeed you
are sure she is at work all this time.
(Sorry, but it’s an obvious thought that
came into my mind.)
Psychoanalyst and clinical
psychologist Dr Stephen Blumenthal’s
first thoughts were: “You really can’t
know or assume what’s going on for
anyone else. It’s painful for those around
such a person as your friend when it’s
obvious they need help, but the person
themselves needs to recognise this
and want do something about it.”
Your friend probably needs a crisis
to make herself see that her work-life
balance is so skewed. But anyone who
throws themselves into something
so excessively is avoiding something.
I don’t think work is the problem per
se but rather that your friend is using it
to escape something else. It could be
her home life, or another thing entirely,
and work may have become so
all-defining that without it she is lost.
Blumenthal also wondered how
much leverage the husband had. “Why
does he tolerate her absence so much
of the time? It must be destroying
family life but ultimately it’s up to the
person – in this case your friend – to
want to do something about it.”
I wonder what exactly you’ve said
to your friend? It’s one thing to say
“you’re working really long hours”
and another to say “we’re really
worried about you”. One feels
accusatory, the other more caring.
Blumenthal suggested: “Try saying
something like, ‘Tell me about your
situation. I want to understand it
better.’ The reality is you don’t know
what’s going on, so it’s a good idea to
try to understand things from her
point of view. Telling a person what
they’re not doing right has very little
impact and may be seen as criticism.
But if you try to listen and empathise,
that may give your friend a safe place
of containment in which to talk.”
On some level, however counter-
intuitive it seems, this is working for
your friend and she’ll continue to do it
until it becomes unsustainable. When
that inevitably happens, the best thing
to do is be there to support her without
judgment.
If you would like advice on a personal
matter, email ask.annalisa@
theguardian.com. See guardian.com/
letters-terms for terms and condition s
LIFESTYLE STYLE
Want your
outfit to look
just right?
Try pairing
it with the
Wrong Shoe
Jess Cartner-Morley
On trends
G
ather round, friends,
while I explain to you
the Wrong Shoe Theory,
the hot new doctrine
sweeping the fashion
universe. Wrong Shoe
Theory is – well actually it is exactly
what it sounds like. Wrong Shoe
Theory is a philosophy which posits
that to make an outfit look right, you
should wear the Wrong Shoe.
The Wrong Shoe is an unexpected
shoe. The Wrong Shoe is a chunky
loafer with a slip dress. It is a flip-flop
or a pair of Crocs peeking out from
under tailored trousers. It is a kitten
heel with jogging bottoms or trainers
with a sundress. The theory went viral
after stylist Allison Bornstein posted
a video on TikTok showing how a shoe
that is deliberately a little “off ” can
elevate an outfit, because “it signals
that there is some intention and
choice and therefore it gives your
look personality”.
The lady is on to something. I have
been trialling it, and it works. For
instance, if I get dressed in pleat-front
6 8 | S AT UR DAY | 09.09.23 | The Guardian
trousers and a shirt, I would usually
reach for a loafer, but yesterday I
swapped them for chunky Velcro-
strapped sandals and the fact of the
shoes being too casual for the clothes
made it look cooler. More
sophisticated, not less so.
Then, today, I put on a shirt dress,
which I tend to wear with pointed
slingbacks that fi nish the line with an
elegant full stop, but instead I went
for a pair of round-toe ballet pumps.
It looks less tidy and polished – and
more interesting. It could be as
simple as a black shoe with an
all-white outfit, or a bright red one
with neutral tailoring. Instead of
dotting the Is and crossing the Ts of
your outfit, an unexpected shoe is a
signoff with flair.
The Wrong Shoe Theory is not new.
Miuccia Prada has had it at the heart of
her formula for offbeat chic for
decades: a slinky skirt with a clompy
shoe, a heavier dress with a boudoir
sandal. Lily Allen did it in vintage
pink satin and bouncy Nike trainers
back in 2006. We all did a watered-
It is a kitten heel
with joggers or
Crocs peeping
out from under
tailored trousers
down version of it when, for a few
years, we wore floral midi dresses with
white trainers.
You know that thing when you
haven’t registered the person sitting
next to you on the train or in a cafe
and then they pull out their phone,
and you catch a glimpse of their home
screen – a baby, a cat, a wedding – and
they become a person to you rather
than just a stranger? An unexpected
shoe choice catches your eye in the
same way, makes you think, so that
instead of gliding right over an outfit,
your gaze is a little intrigued by what
it sees.
The Wrong Shoe Theory is about
surprise, not deliberate ugliness. You
Photography: Tom J Johnson. Styling Melanie Wilkinson
H A I R A N D M A K E U P: C A R O L M O R L E Y AT C A R O L H AY E S M A N A G E M E N T. M O D E L: S U Z A N N E AT B O D Y L O N D O N . S U I T: F I L I P PA K . T O P: A L L S A I N T S . S H O E S: C R O C S . N E C K L A C E A N D R I N G: P I L G R I M
can still look nice; you don’t have to
look weird. If you put the Wrong Shoe
on and you feel as if it’s making you
look like you got dressed without
looking in a mirror, sometimes
another accessory can help to pull
the look together.
I applied the Wrong Shoe Theory to
tailored shorts, wearing them with
chunky loafers rather than sandals,
and it looked cooler but it felt a bit
bottom-heavy, so I added a black
leather belt for balance, and it worked.
Wrong Shoe Theory has reminded
me that my outfit doesn’t have to be
sensible just because my shoes are.
I walk everywhere, and fast, so that
limits my daytime shoe options, and
as a result I had got into the habit of
wearing practical, sensible clothes
that seemed to “match” practical,
sensible shoes.
You know what’s much more fun?
Wearing sensible shoes with fun
clothes. This theory makes more sense
than you would think. If the shoe fits
– and it’s the right kind of wrong –
wear it.
 PLANTS
I’m proud of
my wildlife-
friendly
patch, but I
really don’t
dig this mole
Claire Ratinon
On gardens
W
hen I marked out
where my
vegetable beds
would go,
following a
sketch I’d
scribbled out the night before, I knew
we’d need a fence to stop the deer and
badgers from barging in to graze on
the crops. It’s not a big plot, so it was
straightforward enough to surround it
with chicken wire held in place by
stakes hammered into the ground, the
edges pinned down to keep rabbits
from burrowing underneath.
It’s done its job well over the past
few seasons, as the deer pass us by and
I’ve only seen one rabbit in the garden.
Yet late last spring, a mammal I wasn’t
B L I C K W I N K E L /A L A M Y; P R I C K L D N
prepared for arrived in the patch.
Suddenly mounds of finely tilled earth
started appearing – in the chicken
coop and on the grass (which I am too
untidy a gardener to care much about)
but then in the veg patch too. A
ravenous local mole had moved in.
At first I took it as a compliment. All
the effort I’ve put into the no-dig beds
– religiously mulching them with
compost – has transformed our solidly
clay soil into a thriving ecosystem,
which of course would attract a mole
who’s out hunting for dinner. But as
I watched my summer crops struggle,
I came to realise quite how destructive
one mole (and yes, they’re territorial,
solitary adults, so it was probably the
work of just one creature) could be.
I discovered its subterranean
passages as they caved in under the
flow from my watering can. I finally
understood why my courgette and
squash plants remained unusually
small and my beans hadn’t found their
feet – they’d been pushing their roots
into the earth only to find the empty
space of a mole tunnel below. Even
now, a year on, I’m still uncovering the
extent of the damage, so some of this
year’s crops are failing to thrive too.
Given that I want my growing space
to be as friendly to wildlife as reasonably
possible, I did not feel inclined to take
up a neighbour’s suggestion of calling
the “mole man” (which is as ominous
as it sounds), so I experimented with
I discovered the
creature’s tunnels
as they caved in
under the flow from
my watering can
ways of encouraging it to relocate.
Moles are sensitive creatures, so
suggested home remedies include
scattering cayenne pepper or coffee
grounds to repel them. I focused on
their dislike of loud sounds and
vibrations, so committed to a regular
dance routine of stamping around my
veg beds while banging a rake on the
ground. While I looked ridiculous, this
ritual – alongside some solar-powered
mole deterrents that emit an irritating
buzz into the ground – appear to have
encouraged our mole to move on.
Now I just need to find the
remaining underground tunnels and
fill them before the next round of
crops is ready for planting.
The Guardian | 09.09.23 | S AT UR DAY | 69
Gynelle Leon’s
Houseplant
of the week
Dragon bones
Why will I love it?
The dragon bones (Euphorbia lactea)
plant earns its moniker from its
uncanny resemblance to the legendary
creature’s fossilised remains. Its
intricate, ribbed pattern and unique
branching structure give it an
otherworldly appearance.
Light or shade?
This succulent thrives in bright
indirect or fi ltered sunlight.
Where should I put it?
Its sculptural form and distinctive
texture make it an ideal focal point,
whether it graces your windowsill,
adorns your desk, or commands
attention on a shelf. It thrives best
near a south- or east-facing window.
How do I keep it alive?
Embrace the “less is more” mantra.
Allow the soil to dry out between
waterings as it is sensitive to excess
moisture. Well-draining soil is
essential to prevent waterlogging; a
succulent mix will provide the perfect
foundation. Keep the plant in
surroundings between 18C and 27C.
Did you know …
The dragon bones has many names,
including “mottled candlestick tree”
and “false cactus”. The whitish
markings on the branches provide the
species name, lactea, derived from the
Latin for “milk-white”. Be careful of its
sap, which can irritate skin and eyes.
Looks
like
fossilised
bones
LIFESTYLE
In our second long-distance rail adventure, a family
heads to Sicily and takes in Palermo, Catania and
the narrow-gauge railway around Mount Etna
‘Lemons thumped
against the windows’
Words: Monisha Rajesh
Palermo
I
t took the second thud to rouse
me. Worried I’d slept through
it, I slid up the blind to find our
train pulling into the port city
of Villa San Giovanni in
Calabria, Italy. Not quite 6am,
the last of the night’s sky was taking
leave: navy clouds pulled apart before
my eyes, a single neon-pink patch
igniting the ridgeline of the Peloritani
mountains in north-east Sicily.
As I watched the waters of the
Messina Strait turn silver in the dawn
light, the train jerked and we began to
roll the way we’d come. Shunted back
and forth, I realised the carriages were
uncoupling: this was the moment I’d
waited years to witness. Little legs in
pink pyjamas appeared on the ladder
and my five-year-old daughter climbed
down from her berth. “Are we riding
on the ferry yet?”
Our journey had begun a few days
earlier with a Eurostar from London to
Paris, followed by the night train to
Nice. A series of regional trains took
us from there to Venice, where we
caught another sleeper to Rome. It was
here that our adventure really kicked
off. The 11pm InterCity Notte service
from Roma Termini takes just under
7 2 | S AT UR DAY | 09.09.23 | The Guardian
TRAVEL
Villa San Giovanni
Calabria
Strait of Messina
Sicily Linguaglossa
Mt Etna
Giarre-Riposto
Enna
30 miles
Catania
Monisha Rajesh’s children in
Palermo, top. The family took the
InterCity Notte sleeper, above
right, from Rome to Sicily via the
Messina Strait ferry, above
13 hours to reach Palermo, first
winding down the long mainland,
then crossing the Strait of Messina
on a ferry.
For the first hour, we’d knelt at the
window watching the outskirts of the
capital fall away. As factory chimneys
twinkled through the darkness, we’d
fallen asleep in the privacy of our
two-person vagone letto, waking for
the moment when the train’s carriages
were uncoupled and rolled side by
side on to a ferry for the 20-minute
crossing. Most passengers stayed
asleep in their compartments, but not
us. Zipping jackets over pyjamas, we
jumped down from the train and
ventured up to the deck, to enjoy a slap
of salty air, the cries of circling gulls
and the surreal sight of our carriages
locked into place.
We were here for a week-long family
tour of Sicily by train – mainly for the
food. I was travelling with my five-
year old, meeting her dad and three-
year-old sister in Palermo before
travelling to Catania, then up to the
small town of Linguaglossa on the
edge of Mount Etna, using the little-
known narrow-gauge railway line.
I had heard tales of Sicily’s awful trains
– delayed, old, infrequent, slow – so
wondered how the trip would pan out.
On the other side of the strait, with
the train smoothly back on track, we
munched through the complimentary
breakfast of croissants and Grisbi
chocolate biscuits, watching wisteria-
covered houses flit past above
beaches of grey sand.
On the horizon, the Aeolian islands
just caught my eye as the Tyrrhenian
Sea flashed teal between buildings,
before the train took a wide arc
above a curl of golden sand and surf.
From our base at Bed in Spa – a
high-ceilinged, airy space in the centre
of Palermo – we set off on foot to the
Mercato del Capo food market. The
smell of orange blossom was sweet N A PA /A L A M Y; S T E FA N M A H L K N E C H T; M O N I S H A R A J E S H; F R A N C E S C O B L O I S I / T U T T O T R E N O
as we strolled in the shade. Elderly
Sicilians sat at outdoor tables eating
arancini in cupcake cases, wearing
flat caps and scarves in the heat.
Near the Porta Carini, a fug of
fried fish emanated from the market
entrance, where stalls were stacked
with punnets of strawberries and
plastic cups of orange and
watermelon, the scent of ripe
pomegranate cloying on the breeze.
For €1 each, the girls speared their
chunks of fruit, skipping off to prod
vacuum-packed sundried tomatoes,
wobbly bags of burrata and trays of
olives shining like polished marbles.
Gelato in hand, we ambled down
to the seafront Parco della Salute
playground before a long and
inevitable siesta that took us up to
dinner. I was surprised to find the
earliest booking I could get was
7.30pm, forgetting that Sicilians eat
late and don’t hate children the way
the English do. Osteria Lo Bianco is a

noisy spot more than 90 years old,
with timber panelling, garlic garlands
nailed to the walls and utensils
hanging overhead. “They are kids,”
shrugged the manager when the
second drink spilt, placing down
dishes traditionally eaten by
labourers: silky veal stew with peas,
smoky lentils, spaghetti alla glassa
(with buttery potatoes and hunks of
soft beef) – each of which would have
been plenty for two.
The following afternoon we arrived
at Palermo Centrale for a four-hour
journey to Catania, on a n air-
conditioned train with sockets at each
seat and a prompt departure. For the
first 40 minutes it sped along the coast
before turning inland, barrelling
through fields of sheep and past
almond groves. Sage-green rivers
curved into the hills and beehives
slid down the slopes – all lending
themselves to a long game of I Spy.
And just after the town of Enna, I spied
with my little eye a volcano beginning
with E, its peak scooped out like an
ice-cream. Arriving in Catania, we just
had time for dinner in a trattoria near
our Airbnb before the girls zonked out,
pink from the heat.
It was from Catania that the train
fun really began: cones of crisp fritto
misto in hand, we departed under
another blazing sky, taking a speedy
service up the coast to the town of
Giarre-Riposto. Curving round the
backs of houses, giant aloe vera plants
and a hazy-looking ocean, the train
drew into its destination just 20
minutes later, where we crossed the
road and wheeled bags down to a
tiny station to catch the Ferrovia
Circumetnea – literally the round-Etna
train. Three minutes before departure
a narrow-gauge engine clattered in
and hissed to a halt: its doors clapped
open like a school bus, which was
fitting considering every passenger on
board was a schoolkid. Inaugurated in
1890, the 950mm train was built to
help farmers move around, and now it
is largely used to ferry pupils to school.
The train rattled uphill, hugging
stone walls and running so close to
farmland that lemons thumped
against the windows, leaves snapping
off through the gaps. At every turn
Etna loomed, snow grazing its scalp
and a single pipe of smoke hovering
above the crater. Olive trees and
vineyards covered the slopes and
Catania, left, with Etna
smoking in the background;
a station on the Ferrovia
Circumetnea, top; Palazzo
Previtera, above
chickens fled as the train wailed round
corners beforeThis
eventually slowing
is appropriate into
dummy
Linguaglossa,textwhere
thata is
long-haired
being
man with glasses wavedinfrom
employed orderthe
to
steps. All smiles, Alfio Puglisi
ascertain led us
an approximate
downhill towards his family home,
Palazzo Previtera – and our home for
the next two nights.
Built in 1649, the tiled palazzo has
been in Alfio’s family ever since. They
have devoted the past 10 years to
renovating it into a museum and
library and rooms for eight guests
(plus two cottages). Rooms have
striking contemporary art work on
bright pastel walls, plus traditional
family pieces, such as wooden
headboards inset with mother of pearl.
Now co-owner along with his
mother, Mariella, and father, Alberto,
Alfio is the frontman, greeting guests
in a different pair of designer trainers
every day, and overseeing everything
from freshly baked croissants at
breakfast to pizza deliveries and the
girls’ games of musical statues on the
kitchen terrace.
His grandmother’s uncle, Giuseppe
Previtera, was directly involved in the
founding of the Circumetnea in the
late 19th century. Alfio said that the
The Guardian | 09.09.23 | S AT UR DAY | 7 3
railway offers wine-tasting trips when
the schools are closed.
At first glance this would be the last
place I’d take children, with its newly
upholstered furniture, delicate vases
and very breakable glass, but it was a
dream guesthouse: Alfio’s parents
were amused by the way the girls
chased the five resident cats. In the
large garden, where the family grow
avocados, olives, kiwis, peaches,
pomegranates and figs, the girls spent
hours playing hide and seek among the
trees and rosebushes, counting
goldfish and watching frogs freeze in
panic as their shadows loomed
overhead.
This lovely place, just minutes from
Linguaglossa station, made a fitting
end point to our railway tour, and as I
watched majestic Etna puffing away in
the distance, a little hoot sounded
across the olive groves.
Accommodation was provided by
Sawdays at Bed in Spa, Palermo,
doubles from €80 room-only, and
Palazzo Previtera, Linguaglossa,
doubles from €120 room-only. For more
on rail travel in Italy see italiarail.com
Next week: London to Istanbul
by train
LIFESTYLE TRAVEL

D
What to do when you’ve bought two passes but oes there come a point
in every marriage
I remembered my first foray into
Interrailing as an idiotic 18-year-old in
your husband won’t go? Go anyway and have when you realise you 1999. I ended the month no longer on
don’t know your speaking terms with my travel
a fantastic time doing exactly what you want spouse very well after companion, a boy from my A-level
all? For me, that German class. I could see the benefits

Me, myself and

moment came not when watching yet of going solo, with no one to argue
another ill-judged birthday present with about whether to pay the
F R A N C O B I X / S H U T T E R S T O C K ; H E L E N P I D D; S O M A /A L A M Y; M A S S I M O B O R C H I / G E T T Y

shoved to the back of my husband’s supplement for the fast train to Milan,

Interrail – a solo train

wardrobe, but when I noticed a or the wisdom of sleeping on the
half-price sale on Interrail passes and platform for an early departure.
decided to book a pair for what I felt We were on such a tight budget then

trip around Europe

sure would be an excellent and perhaps – £15 a day for food, accommodation
even romantic late-summer adventure. and those sneaky supplements – that
I was deep in planning reverie, we wild camped some nights in urban
weighing up the merits of chasing the parks. It was character-building stuff,
sun in southern Europe versus getting especially when we were robbed as we
hygge in Scandinavia, when my slept in Cologne by a selective thief
Words: Helen Pidd beloved announced that sitting on
trains for a fortnight was the opposite
of what he considers a holiday.
Manchester It was only then that I read the small
UK
Germany print and learned there would be no
London Brussels
Cologne refunds and no name changes. There
was only one option: I would go alone.
Paris It was a slightly daunting prospect,
Bregenz though I recall once being a very
Chur
Tirano independent person, travelling the
France world for the Guardian on assignments
Milan
300 miles Antibes Sanremo
that included a memorably disastrous
undercover trip to Myanmar.

74 | S AT UR DAY | 09.09.23 | The Guardian

The Bernina Express, left,
runs between Tirano
in Italy, and Chur,
Switzerland, via St Moritz;
Helen Pidd on her first
Interrail experience as
an 18-year-old, below
who ransacked Daniel’s rucksack
but took nothing of mine.
Twenty-three years later, I set off
from my home in Stockport with a
more generous allowance of £100 a day
and absolutely no intention of kipping
in any parks or stations.
It is probably worth pointing out at
this point that Interrailing is no longer
a particularly cheap holiday unless,
perhaps, you get half-price tickets and
your husband comes with you to split
the hotel bills. A second-class global
Interrail ticket for travel in 33
countries now costs €704 (£605) for a
month (€528 or £455 for 12- to 27-year-
olds). The further from London you
live, the better the value, because the
ticket includes an outward and inward
journey in your home country. With a
peak-time open return from
Manchester to London now costing a
scandalous £369.40, I recouped more
than half a full-price ticket simply by
travelling in the rush hour.
It’s also not quite the spontaneous
holiday you might imagine, at least not
when it comes to crossing the Channel.
Eurostar offers only a limited number
of seats for Interrail pass holders
(charging a supplement of £26.50 each
way) and the most popular crossings
sell out quickly. That scuppers my plan
to begin my continental odyssey in
Amsterdam; I have to start in Paris
instead. I arrive in time for dinner at
Les Philosophes in the Marais, where
I sip vin rouge and eat an obscenely
large portion of duck rillettes.
Balking at the single person tax on
hotel rooms, I pay too much (€65 or
£56) for a curtained bunk in a four-
woman dorm at The People, a bougie
hostel chain. The next morning I worry
that the red wine might have caused
me to snore after one of my roommates
gives me a filthy look. I decide I am too
old for hostels as I pack my rucksack,
then scoot around Paris for the day and
catch the night train (supplement
€21.60) to the south of France, which
leaves Gare d’Austerlitz at 20.48,
arriving in Antibes just after 9am.
Not realising there are women-only
carriages (tick Espace Dame Seule
when making your reservation), I fret
about being trapped in a couchette
with a bunch of pervy men, but end up
sharing with four respectful blokes
and one woman, and wake up to a
view of the French Riviera.
I find Antibes just as beautiful as
Picasso and Monet made out, and on
the beach I have no problem getting
helpful strangers to mind my bag
every time I go in the sea. On day two
In Paris, Helen Pidd
enjoyed dinner at Les
Philosophes, below; the
Hôtel de Ville in Brussels,
right; the beach at Antibes,
bottom, the writer’s first
stop after Paris
though, I treat myself to a sunlounger
(€35) at Royal Beach, a private pier
belonging to the Royal Antibes hotel.
After a few days in Antibes, I take
the glorious coastal train into Italy and
disembark at Sanremo, which hosts
the finale of one of my favourite bike
races (Milan-Sanremo). I stay in an old
hotel high up in the old town, accessed
by a labyrinth of arched alleyways and
quad-busting steps, and spend the
next morning gawping at the art deco
villas perched above the sea.
Without anyone to express their
disapproval, I catch the fast train to
Milan (supplement €3). There’s just
time for a slice of seriously good pizza
at the Mercato Centrale food hall
inside the central station before I take
my next train, to Tirano on the Swiss
border. Another excellent journey,
this route hugs Lake Como as it winds
towards the Alps. The only reason I’m
going to Tirano is to catch yet another
train (did my husband have a point?):
the Bernina Express.
Also known as the Red Train, the
Bernina Express runs on the highest
railway tracks in Europe and the
steepest in the world, through 55
tunnels and over 196 bridges into
Switzerland. An Interrail pass allows a
seat in one of the ordinary carriages,
but I paid a supplement of CHF26 (£23)
for a berth in one of the panoramic
carriages, with almost floor-to-ceiling
windows. It was worth every centime,
with the Brusio spiral viaduct – an
engineering marvel, which the train
travels first under and then over – a
particular highlight, along with the free
Edelweiss tea and Swiss chocolates.
After a night in the car-free centre
of Chur, I take umbrage at being
charged £5 for a cup of tea and cross
the border into cheaper Austria.
I enjoy swimming in Lake Constance
in Bregenz, before
This isheading backdummy
appropriate west
to Cologne to exorcise
text that the trauma of
is being
1999. I do a park run by the
employed Rhine
in order to then
catch the trainascertain
to Brussels, the final
an approximate
stop on my solo whiz around western
Europe: six countries in 10 days.
Would I recommend solo
Interrailing? Emphatically yes.
I enjoyed the freedom of heading
wherever I liked, staying longer or
leaving early on a whim, though
I often felt self-consciously alone after
dark. I would do it again – I just
wouldn’t bother buying my husband a
ticket next time.
The Guardian | 09.09.23 | S AT UR DAY | 7 5
Readers’ travel tips
Solo trips
Winning tip
Wallabies for company, Highlands
Inchconnachan in Loch Lomond has all
the ingredients for a solo trip on the
wild side: an uninhabited island;
deserted rhododendron-fringed
beaches upon which to pitch your tent;
and a colony of wallabies released by
the rather eccentric Countess of Arran
in the 1940s. Leave no trace so that the
solo adventurers who follow in your
footsteps can equally enjoy Scotland’s
permissive approach to wild camping.
Catherine Sweeney
XX
No one to judge me, Seville
I travel solo because there’s nobody to
judge you for ducking out of the Louvre
after only half an hour and no one
cares if you set out to see a monument
but get waylaid in a backstreet bar
instead. Best of all, you can eat
whatever and whenever you want: on
the first night of a solo trip to Seville
last year, I had grand plans of louchely
exploring the tapas scene. When it
came to it, I was knackered, I had a
season of Grey’s Anatomy downloaded
and there was a Burger King opposite
my very lovely hotel. There was no one
there to judge me and I loved it. Anna
Aarhus city break, Denmark
Heavenly days spent on two wheels
exploring the city’s attractions, such as
the ARoS art museum and the Latin
Quarter. I also rode out to Moesgård
beach for an exhilarating dip in the sea.
Dokk1, Aarhus’s library, is unlike any
library I’ve experienced before.
Upstairs there are comfy sofas from
where I looked over the harbour and
lost myself thinking about how I want
to move to Denmark. Kirsten
Wildlife break, Sweden
In Sweden in the spring, I combined
a few days of museums and
kardemummabullar (cardamom buns)
in Stockholm and Uppsala with
overnight wildlife watching. It was too
early in the season for bears, but being
paired with another solo traveller in a
hide in the middle of the forest was an
unforgettable experience for watching
Swedish birds in their natural habitat
and quietly chatting to someone with
similar interests. Hannah
To enter our readers’ tips competition
and see the terms and conditions, visit
theguardian.com/readers-travel-tips
(you must be a UK resident to enter). The
week’s best tip, chosen by Tom Hall of
Lonely Planet, wins a £200 voucher to
stay at a Coolstays property. This is a
selection of tips: see more on our website
LIFESTYLE TRAVEL
A tiny railway halt is the gateway to an idyllic
riverside stroll ending at a flower-shrouded pub
How far to the pub?
The Ship,
Norfolk Broads
Words: Phoebe Taplin
Photography: Tim Cochrane
Start Berney Arms station
Distance 8½ miles
Time 4½ hours
Total ascent 35 metres
Difficulty Easy
The walk
B
Berney Arms to Reedham
erney Arms is one of
England’s most remote
railway stations. You
can get to this stretch of
the Norfolk Broads only
by train, boat or a long
walk. It’s 25 minutes’ train ride from
Norwich, but only two trains stop
most days, and I’ve never seen anyone
else getting off. From the train
window, I see a roe deer step delicately
through green marshes, and an egret
poised by the water. The strange wild
beauty is what keeps me coming back.
This time I’m arriving with my
husband on the 7.36am train from
Norwich to walk along the River Yare
to Reedham. We head through into the
first carriage, the only one that fits into
to the tiny station.
There’s an immediate burst of loud,
electronic chirruping from a Cetti’s
warbler in the reeds as the train pulls
away. Heading over soggy meadows
towards Norfolk’s tallest drainage
mill, we are quickly immersed in a
wide, watery landscape. The air is
alive with birds: the joyous sliding
scales of sedge warblers and noisy
7 6 | S AT UR DAY | 09.09.23 | The Guardian
“peewits” from lapwings flapping over
the fields. The Broads national park is
Britain’s largest protected wetland
area and a quarter of the UK’s rarest
species live here. Reclaimed from the
sea more than four centuries ago,
these grazing marshes are now lower
than sea level and need protection
from the higher tides and longer
droughts of a changing climate.
We walk along the riverside
embankment with good views in both
directions: hares and muntjac deer
race across the grass and buntings flit
through the reeds. By noon, we’ve
seen or heard more than 50 species of
bird. We pass a brown seal lolling on
the grassy riverbank, and spot a
Norfolk hawker dragonfly, huge and
rare, resting among flowers.
Apart from one farmer, waving from
his quadbike as he herds smiley
Southdown sheep beside the marshes,
Footpaths meet at the
Berney Arms windmill,
top, the tallest drainage
mill in Norfolk; the walk
starts at one of the UK’s
quieter stations, Berney
Arms, right, set in flat
Broads countryside under
huge skies
we don’t see anyone else until we get
to Reedham. It’s a day of frothing cow
parsley, gold buttercup carpets and
butterflies. But this is a complicated
ecosystem, not a simple idyll. Marsh
harriers hunt over the reedbeds and
kestrels hang in the huge skies.
We detour away from the river
towards Reedham church. When the
tall, grey stone tower was built,
Reedham was a coastal village by an
estuary. One of the people who
contributed towards building the
tower was local heiress Margaret
Paston, who was born in 1422 and
married into a wealthy family of
Norfolk farmers. The Paston Letters is
a rich archive of medieval letters,
mostly in the British Library,
chronicling their daily lives and
troubles during the Wars of the Roses.
Margaret’s mother was part of the
Berney family, whose roots run deep
in this landscape, giving their name to
the station where we started. Berney
Arms was also a riverside pub, closed
since 2015, and also the name of a
nearby windmill, built in 1865. The
mill, towering 21 metres (71ft) over the
level fields and river, was built to grind
clinker for cement; after a couple of
decades, it was used to drain the
marshes, like most of the other towers
we pass, with their boat-shaped caps.
Several Berney tombs survive in
Reedham church. In one 16th-century
tableau, Henry and Alice Berney kneel
at prayer with their nine children
dutifully ranged behind them in
mini-me ruffs and headdresses.
Herringbone layers of Roman tiles are
embedded in the church walls,
recycled from earlier buildings on the
site. In 1981, a builder’s cigarette on
the thatched church roof led to a
catastrophic fire and there are now
 Berney Arms windmill
Start of walk Great
Take the map Berney Arms station Yarmouth
with you
Scan the code for Seven Burgh Castle
the online article Humpty Mile
with a Google Map Dumpty House
Brewery
End of walk
Reedham
station Belton

River Yare
River Waveney
Holly Barn

Ferry Inn The Ship 1 mile

modern stained-glass windows by
Sarah Bristow, with almost-invisible
etched maps behind spectral crosses.
Outside the church, faint fairground
music jangles over the fields from the
Pettitts Adventure Park, featuring
meerkats, monkeys, Jurassic golf and
rides on bouncing kangaroos. Just
beyond it, the Humpty Dumpty
microbrewery recently celebrated its
25th birthday. It’s named after the
top-heavy steam engines that chuffed
between Norwich and Lowestoft a
century ago. Sitting outside, I sip a half
of malty Reedham Mild and watch a
pied wagtail in the afternoon sun.
Ten minutes away in the Ship,
they’re serving Humpty Dumpty’s
Little Sharpie, gold and lightly hoppy,
along with other local real ales. The
railway station is a 15-minute stroll
from the pub along lanes and paths,
with trains back to Norwich. But we
detour first another half a mile along
the riverbank to ride the Reedham
chain ferry over the Yare and back.
The pub
Roses and honeysuckle straggle round
the door of the Ship, a down-to-earth
village pub with a riverside beer
garden. It’s next to Reedham’s swing
bridge, which carries the railway over
the Yare on its way to Lowestoft and
Yarmouth. Warm brick walls and bay
windows are flanked by fragrant
orange wallflowers and hanging
baskets of petunias.
Inside, there are black-and-white
photos of boats outside the Ship Hotel
50 years ago and old advertisements
urging travellers to reach the Norfolk
Broads by train (“It’s quicker by rail”).
The pub grub includes proper skin-on
homemade chips, beer-battered fish
and daily specials chalked on a board Reedbeds flank the River
next to the bar. Yare, above; roses and
On Facebook honeysuckle cover the door
of the Ship pub, below
Where to stay
We are spending two nights at the
Assembly House, a Georgian mansion
in the middle of Norwich. It’s a
20-minute stroll or 10-minute bus ride
from the railway station and everything
about it – from the fairy-lit facade and
four-poster beds to the fresh milk and
underfloor heating – feels luxurious.
Breakfast includes compote and
granola, Norfolk rarebit or buttermilk
pancakes. It’s served in a grand hall
with wreaths of ornate stucco, or in the
neighbouring dining room with its
Bridgerton-esque pink-and-lime-green
twist on playful Georgian aesthetics.
Doubles from £170 B&B,
assemblyhousenorwich.co.uk

Answers to quiz 9 White Rose symbol. in their titles: Answers to B G N C

Puzzle by Thomas Eaton 10 England footballers

sent off in the
Brick Lane;
Cannery Row;
Weekend
Crossword
C A M E
L O
L O T
R P
L H A
E
S
A
A

solutions 1 Morecambe Bay. World Cup. Revolutionary Road; by Sy

D I G F
F
O R
I
V I
C
C T O R
A
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(puzzles on page 78) 2 Blood. 11 Non-Italians buried Utopia Avenue.

S H I R L E Y T E M P L E
3 MBA. in Venice. 14 Dollar signs A E O E
4 Thesaurus. 12 UK saints’ days in stage names: A W A Y I N A M A N G E R
5 Percy Fawcett. (the number Ke$ha; K O A M
6 Greece (kilt-like of the day in A$AP Rocky; M E T A M O R P H O S I S
garment). a non-leap year). Ty Dolla $ign. Y M R L U A
7 America’s Cup. 13 Wrote novels 15 Converted to C E L I A V E R T I G O

8 Beethoven. with street names Catholicism. S S H O

The Guardian | 09.09.23 | S AT UR DAY | 7 7

 SATURDAY
Scan the code to

The kids’ quiz Weekend crossword Quiz

send Molly a question
for a future quiz

Molly Oldfield Sy Thomas Eaton

This quiz answers questions posed by children Answers (no peeking!)
— will you get a better score than your parents? 1 C. Historians don’t know
exactly when spoons were
invented, but they have
found evidence of spoons
made from wood, ivory and
stone from Ancient Egypt,
from around 1000BC.
2 D. The process of a cell
making its double is called
“mitosis”. In mitosis, the
new cell (called the daughter
cell) is genetically identical
to the cell it came from
(the parent cell). Every one
of us started life as a single
cell that divided over and
over again through the
process of mitosis.
3 B. Geese grow feathers out
of pores or little holes on the
1 James, 3, asks: when were B When you get surface of their skin. When
spoons invented? goosebumps, your skin the feathers are plucked, this
A During the Roman empire looks like goose skin after leaves little bumps on the
B The Victorian era its feathers are plucked skin. When humans get cold,
C The Ancient Egyptian era C When geese are flying our skin looks the same, with
D During the Renaissance together, they look like the lots of little bumps!
in Italy shape of a bump 4 C. We think the first form
D Because geese often of football began in China
2 Leela, 8, asks: how do bump into each other about 2,000 years ago,
cells double? where players had to kick
A They suck in extra blood 4 Barnaby, 7, asks: a leather ball into a goal.
until they split into two who invented football 5 A. When we swallow food,
B Two cells partner up and and when? water and saliva, we also
make baby cells, which look A King Henry VIII, in 1512 swallow a little bit of air.
exactly like their parents B Julius Caesar, in 54BC This air builds up in the
C They split in two, then C Someone in China, about digestive system, along with
each half grows to become 2,000 years ago the gases created when we
a whole D William the Conqueror, digest food. The body needs
I L L U S T R AT I O N: H E N N I E H AW O R T H
1 2 3 4 1 The King’s Guide to
the Sands assists with
5 6 7
crossing what?
8 2 What does the horned
lizard squirt from its eye?
9
3 Rishi Sunak is the fi rst
UK prime minister to have
which degree?
10 11 12 4 Synonymicon is another
name for what type of book?
5 Which British explorer
13 14 15 disappeared in the Amazon
in 1925?
6 Where do the presidential
guard wear a fustanella?
16 17 18
7 Which sailing trophy is
known as the Auld Mug?
8 Whose 10th symphony
19 20 was assembled by
Barry Cooper?
What links:
9 Yorkshire;
Across 3 Cameron ...., British tennis Virgin Mary;
5 King Arthur’s court? (7) player (6) student anti-Nazi
6 The capital of Tibet (5) 4 .... Baker, jazz musician (4) movement?
9 Second world war slogan 7 US food brand 10 Lauren James;
encouraging people to grow that’s associated with Millie Bright;
vegetables (3,3,7) cakes and frozen Wayne Rooney;
10 A movie star – goods (4,3) David Beckham;
and a non-alcoholic 8 An occupant of northern Ray Wilkins?
cocktail (7,6) Britain before the Viking 11 Peggy Guggenheim;
13 Christmas carol conquest? (4) Igor Stravinsky;
imagining the birth of Jesus 11 Character played by Alan Sergei Diaghilev;
(4,2,1,6) Alda in M*A*S*H (7) Ezra Pound?
16 The ............., Kafka 12 Welsh town at the 12 Wales (60th);
novel in which Gregor confluence of the Monnow Northern Ireland (76th);
Samsa wakes to find he is and the Wye (8) England (113th);
an insect (13) 14 .... al-Hussein, former queen Scotland (334th)?
19 Huawei’s virtual assistant of Jordan (4) 13 Monica Ali;

D One cell copies its
chromosomes to make
a “daughter cell”, then splits
into two identical cells
3 Erin, 10, asks: why are
they called goosebumps?
A Under a microscope, the
shape of the bump looks
like a tiny goose
in the year 1070
5 Isaac, 8, asks: why do
people fart?
A To get rid of excess air in
the digestive system
B To scare people away
C To make other
people laugh
D To say hello
to release the air and gases
by farting (and burping!).
Molly Oldfield hosts
Everything Under the Sun,
a weekly podcast (and
book) answering children’s
questions. Does your child
have a question? To submit
one, scan the QR code above
for Android phones (5) 15 Marla ......, former wife of John Steinbeck;
20 Hitchcock thriller from Donald Trump (6) Richard Yates;
1958 (7) 17 Sir Kingsley and Sir Martin David Mitchell?
Down ...., authors (4) 14 Kesha; ASAP Rocky;
1 Indonesian island and 18 Othello’s main Ty Dolla Sign?
province (4) antagonist? (4) 15 Henri IV of France;
2 Cleric from 12 who James II and VII;
wrote The History of the Solutions to Crossword John Newman;
Kings of Britain in about and Thomas Eaton’s quiz Evelyn Waugh;
1136 (8) page 77 Graham Greene?

Stephen Collins

7 8 | S AT UR DAY | 09.09.23 | The Guardian

Lifestyle CLASSIFIED*