NOVEMBER 7 2021

Sex

Power

Blurred
lines
How the
supermodel
Emily
Ratajkowski
took back
control of
her body
 Below: the knobbed hornbill, native to Indonesia, is a species threatened by habitat destruction

NOVEMBER 7 2021

BEAKY BLINDERS
Striking close-up images of birds
by the wildlife photographer
Tim Flach, page 46

10 22 40 52
COVER: AUSTIN HARGRAVE FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE, SPECIAL THANKS TO THE PUBLIC HOTEL, NEW YORK. THIS PAGE: TIM FLACH

BOURBON, BURPEES AND ME COVER: EMILY RATAJKOWSKI ED BALLS, CARER ADAM KAY’S HEALTH CHECK
Louis Theroux shares the The supermodel tells Megan The former shadow chancellor The “super-cold” has landed.
boozy secrets of his pandemic Agnew what really happened on talks to Caroline Scott about his Our health expert gives his
diary with Jonathan Dean the set of the Blurred Lines video time working in a care home advice on how to beat it

30
GREEN AIRWAYS
Forget flying cars — electric
planes are the future of short
haul. Nick Rufford takes off

56
GLUTEN-FREE BAKES
Polenta, nuts and olive oil to the
rescue! Candice Brown’s cakes
with power, minus the flour

Plus P7 Megan Agnew | P8 Relative Values: the von Trapps | P63 Table Talk | P65 Wine | P66 Jeremy Clarkson | P74 A Life in the Day

© Times Newspapers Ltd, 2021. Published and licensed by Times Newspapers Ltd, 1 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF (020 7782 5000). Printed by Prinovis UK Ltd, Liverpool. Not to be sold separately

The Sunday Times Magazine • 5

 MEGAN AGNEW
Why do I feel peculiar?
The answer is not in the cards
My friends are so keen to diagnose their problems they’re even turning to tarot
I
s Mercury in retrograde? “No,” Google replied,
“something else must be bumming you out.”
Fair enough. I don’t know why I googled it.
I don’t know what it means for Mercury to be
in retrograde, anyway, but I’d been told it can
make you feel weird. At least that might have
been some explanation as to why my life felt all over the
place. I am in a period of low-level chaos: too many plans,
too many texts to reply to, a bike accident, a cancelled
holiday, changes at work and in relationships, and
everything happening so quickly. What else could it be?
“You’re probably in your autumn,” said a friend,
referring to my menstrual cycle, which apparently
I should be tracking so that I know why I’m feeling
hungry or grumpy or happy or creatively ambidextrous.
If I don’t like that answer, there are plenty of others to
choose from. It could be gut health, the weather,
magnesium deficiency, too much or too little sleep,
social media hours, daylight hours, or extremely mild
but extremely long Covid left over from last year.
Everyone, it seems, is obsessed with diagnosis. My
friends and I try to find a reason for everything that
happens and everything we feel. It is total narcissism.
Perhaps it is because we have spent almost all our lives
being able to google symptoms, so that now, if we have
a problem, whether it’s emotional or physical, we want
to give it a name and find its source. And there are
whole industries that help you fill in the blanks. Google
searches for “birth chart” and “astrology” hit five-year
peaks in 2020. There are tarot Instagram influencers.
Apps to track your emotions and hormones and put
them into a recurring pattern so you know what to
expect next month. Blood tests, therapies, vitamins.
Whatever question we might have about our lives,
there is something pretending to be the answer.
It hasn’t always been this way. As teenagers we would
occasionally skim-read horoscopes in trashy magazines,
CHARLIE CLIFT FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE
forgetting what they said shortly after we turned over
Not every feeling has
to be a symptom. Tears
after a break-up might
not be depression
the last page. People certainly weren’t “spiritual”. Any
prayers muttered were probably about exams or boys,
chucked up there on the off chance, a last resort.
In recent years, though, what used to be seen as woo
woo has become the norm. I heard someone on a train
the other day talking about having “manifested” a snog
in a nightclub. People I meet at parties, before they ask
what I do for work, often ask for my star sign (Taurus) and
then my ascendant sign (no clue). “Why?” I responded
to someone recently. “It’s just nice knowing,” she said.
One friend didn’t know why a guy she was dating
hadn’t replied to her last text message. I couldn’t give
her the answer because I didn’t know either, so she went
on YouTube to watch a tarot card reader telling her what
was going on with her zodiac sign. She was desperate
to figure out whether she had been dumped or whether
he couldn’t reply because his nan had a non-life-
threatening illness, as she hoped. In the end it was the
former. It wasn’t the tarot cards that told her that.
It has become a sort of self-obsession, this constant
monitoring of ourselves and our lives, this need to have
a reason for feelings. Another friend bought a UV lamp
to help with what she is convinced is seasonal affective
disorder, but is probably just a post-holiday malaise.
Others track, day by day, almost minute by minute,
their mood changes in an app in order to understand
their monthly hormonal cycle. I should schedule,
they tell me, all of my important work meetings for
a specific window. But how are women ever going to
get anything done if we’re all trying to coincide our
meetings with our “spring”?
Diagnoses, in all forms, are incredibly reassuring —
something solid and authoritative when life feels
unpredictable and scary. Putting names to problems
can be beneficial when it comes to mental health,
allowing us to talk about them more openly and even
fix them. But not every feeling has to be a symptom.
A tight chest before an exam doesn’t have to be anxiety,
tears after a break-up might not be depression.
Young people are often accused of being self-
absorbed. We are. In your twenties you feel lost and
want answers. You’re too old to be parented but young
enough to want to be. You’re desperate to know that
what you’re feeling is normal or, failing that, why the
hell Mercury appears to be moving backwards in the
night sky, and when it’s getting back on track n
@MeganAgnew
The Sunday Times Magazine • 7
RELATIVE VALUES

Johannes & Sam von Trapp

The youngest of the real von Trapp children and his son on the trouble with The Sound of Music

Johannes I admit I have mellowed and changed my opinion

When people ask me how the 1965 movie The Sound
of Music affected our lives here, I am quick to tell them
that after it appeared, everything — and I mean
everything — changed. We became instant celebrities.
Before the movie and the earlier Broadway musical, my
family, the Trapp Family Singers, were well known
among people who liked baroque music but we were
not widely famous. But once the film came out we
became the property of the public.
Suddenly the clientele that came to our small lodge
here in Stowe, Vermont, where we settled in 1942 after
we left Austria [in 1938, after it was annexed by Nazi
Germany] were very different. And instead of asking us
to sing madrigals and classic songs they expected us to
sing Do-Re-Mi. Believe it or not, some lodge guests still
expect to be greeted by the singing von Trapp children,
even though the movie is almost 60 years old. Of ten
children only Rosmarie and I are still alive [Georg von
Trapp had seven children with his first wife, Agathe.
Johannes, Rosmarie and their late sister Eleonore are the
children of Maria von Trapp, who became the matriarch
of the family when she married Georg in 1927].
Incidentally, it’s no secret that I am not a great fan of
Do-Re-Mi. It’s not exactly that I hate it, I’ve just heard it
a million times. In fact for years the piano player here at
the lodge had an agreement with me. If he were playing
Do-Re-Mi or Edelweiss for our guests and he saw me
come in, he’d immediately switch to play a different tune.
The rest of the family also had some issues with the
movie. For example, my father was nothing like the
cold, strict, disciplinarian depicted in the film. My
mother was more like that — very determined and less
like the sugary-sweet character Julie Andrews portrayed.
There are a lot of other mistakes in the movie but we
realised that was par for the course with a Hollywood
production. After all, the film is a Hollywood version of
the Broadway version of the German film version of the
book that my mother wrote. So it’s not surprising that it
was less than accurate.
about the movie over the years. I’ve come to realise that
it means so much to so many people because it expresses
such universal themes as love of country, of a man and
a woman, and of family.
Of course it has been good for business, it has
certainly brought us guests. But we haven’t raked in
as much money in royalties as some may suspect. My
mother is partly to blame. Instead of having an agent
and a lawyer advise, she sold the movie rights to her
book to a German company for a pittance. The
producers of the Broadway musical felt badly about this
and cut my mother in on some of the royalties. We do
have a participation in royalties but not a huge amount.
I was the only one of the children who was born in the
US; most of them came to this country as adults and
their lives changed drastically. I may have found things
easier because of that but I had never intended to end
up running the family business [the Trapp Family
Lodge, a Austrian-styled mountain resort in Stowe].
I earned a master’s degree from Yale University’s School
of Forestry and intended to get a PhD, but I came back
to help with the lodge and left again to operate ranches
in British Columbia and Montana before returning
here to take over the running of the place.
My time away from home helped me eventually to
tell Sam to go off and do his own thing for ten years.
I thought it was important he experienced the real

“It’s no secret that I am not a great

fan of Do-Re-Mi. It’s not that I hate
it, I’ve just heard it a million times”
8 • The Sunday Times Magazine
 world and not just this little island we have created
here. I remembered it was crucial for me to get away
from the family mystique for a while and do my own
thing. That helped me balance my outlook on the world
and I felt it could do the same for Sam.
Sam
I’ve often described my own relationship with The Sound
of Music as confusing. I’ve only seen it once, when I was
about seven or eight, and it wasn’t a big part of my life
growing up. Thinking back, I realise my sister, Kristina,
and I grew up watching some of our relatives who were
tired of constantly having to answer questions about it.
Over time, we had a chance to form our own
relationship with the musical. I eventually felt it
was quite selfish to see it only from our own
perspective. More than a billion people have seen the
musical and we’ve heard so many stories of its positive
JAMES BUCK FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE, PATRICE CLEAVES
impact on so many of them. And I don’t know if Dad
knows this, but I actually like Do-Re-Mi. I know he
hates it. In fact, a week or so ago I sang it to my two
sons, who are five and three.
Dad was careful to never spoil us. Or let us feel that
we were movie stars. Kristina and I started working at
the family lodge when I was eight and she was ten. Our
first job was cleaning the coffee station in the ski centre,
then we both worked as bellhops. I had a hard time
carrying bags because I was so short but I loved being a
bellman because it gave me interaction with the guests.
I did it through high school and college. I liked being
the first and last contact the guest had with the lodge.
After college I left home and taught skiing in Aspen
and in Portillo, Chile. I think my father thought it was
important for me and my sister to have experiences in
other places. He thought that if you are going to live the
rest of your life in the town you were born in, it’s
beneficial to live somewhere else for a while so as not
to have regrets later in life. After ten years I got the call
that he wanted help. He called me up one day and said,
“If you don’t come back, son, I am going to sell the
place.” A couple of months later I was back.
It has certainly been a dynamic 18 months for our
industry since the pandemic began. First we closed
everything down, then we learnt to navigate operating
a people-centric business during a pandemic, and now
we’ve just had our busiest summer ever.
My father is a little bit of a rogue as a business person.
His attitude or philosophy is often, “Damn the
torpedoes, full speed ahead!” For example he planned
our first brewery in the middle of the recession, with
the understanding that he needed to do something
that was uplifting for us, our employees and our guests.
It was an exciting project at a time when life was
Main: Johannes, 82, somewhat pessimistic. He was not the banker’s best
and Sam, 49, at the friend — they want to know what’s happening in the
lodge, and, above, next six months — but my dad with a degree in forest
with Sam’s children. ecology thinks in hundred-year time frames. He has a
Left: the von long-term approach. And it has worked wonderfully n
Trapps perform at
Christmas, 1943. Interviews by Robert Kiener
Johannes is the boy Photograph by James Buck
in the centre Visit trappfamily.com
The Sunday Times Magazine • 9
LIFE THEROUX
10 • The Sunday Times Magazine
X A LENS
Did Louis Theroux’s drinking
get out of hand during lockdown?
The documentary-maker tells
Jonathan Dean how bourbon
helped him through the boredom
— and shares a candid extract
from his pandemic diary

PORTRAITS BY CHARLIE CLIFT

The Sunday Times Magazine • 11
 L
ouis Theroux got through
the lockdowns on burpees
and bourbon. For the
former, there were Joe
Wicks’s routines. For the
latter, he discovered the
brand Bulleit Bourbon, and
drank a lot of it. “A Monday
felt a lot like a Saturday. Every day was the
same,” he reasons. “If you’re used to wine or
beer, then drink bourbon, it’s like going on
holiday when they give you a rental car with
a tricky clutch. You find you’re accelerating
much faster than you’re used to.”
We are meeting for coffee (not whisky), on
a bright autumnal morning in London. He is
dry and expressive company — lots of raised
eyebrows over specs, exactly as he appears in
his globetrotting TV documentaries. Unable
to make those, he launched his Grounded
with Louis Theroux podcast last year, which
topped the charts thanks to his knack for
getting the most out of his similarly
locked-down interviewees. Now he has a
book out about this strange past year and a
bit, in which he turns the focus on himself.
“It is an attempt to understand my family
life, the side that doesn’t get seen,” he says.
“Reporting on a frontier that’s the site of
more angst and danger than any others
— my home during a pandemic. That’s not
a joke. People ask where I’ve been that’s
most frightening: a skinhead rally or San
Quentin prison? But our deepest feelings
of emotional stress are in our front rooms.
I’m doing a version of a programme about
myself, observing my own weirdness.”
And a lot of that involves drinking. In
Theroux the Keyhole: Diaries of a grounded
documentary maker, he writes “Did I drink
too much? Was I struggling? Did I care?”
He recounts nights turning vague,
PREVIOUS PAGTES: CHARLIE CLIFT FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE. GROOMING: EMMA LEON. THIS PAGE: BBC, JEFF SPICER / GETTY IMAGES
watching TV and not remembering much
the next day. Was his wife, Nancy,
concerned? “It did worry her,” he admits.
But this was how he managed his
mental health. “I don’t speak on
behalf of all men. But what I can
tell from 51 years of life is, many
men feel down but do not
fully realise it. I’m guilty
of that and there were
times when the stress of
lockdown was managed
by the sense of, ‘A drink
might help?’ ”
His podcast also
made life more
bearable. The pandemic
was hard for a man
famed for visiting strange
people all over the world,
so he sat at home and
spoke to famous people
instead. Michaela Coel
and Ruby Wax were the
best of a strong bunch,
the latter sharing how
disappointed she is in her
From top: Louis meets Jimmy Savile in 2000;
with Joe Exotic in 2011, a decade before
Tiger King; with his wife, Nancy, in 2019
early work. Is he similarly self-critical?
“I’ve got a bad habit of having a few drinks
and watching my old shows,” he admits.
“The last two weeks I did this a couple of
times and you see room for improvement,
but occasionally I think, ‘My God, that’s an
excellent programme.’ ”
What about When Louis Met … Jimmy,
the BBC show from 2000 that showed
Jimmy Savile as a stomach-churning creep,
but did not reveal the extent of the abuse
horrors to come? In his book Theroux
writes that Savile is someone who,
“depending on your point of view, I either
made a revealing programme about or failed
to make a revealing programme about”.
“It’s neither one or the other, is it?” shrugs
Theroux today. “There’s plenty of ammo
you could deploy in either direction. I’ve
watched it since the revelations came out
and I’m struck by how much is there. It’s
very far from soft journalism. We
all knew he was doing some act.
He would more or less invite
people to believe he had secrets.”
Theroux was born in 1970,
son of Anne and Paul, the
famed travel writer and
novelist. When Theroux
was 12, David Bowie was
in the running to buy the
rights to his father’s novel
The Mosquito Coast and
Louis ran into school to
boast. “Everyone thought
I was being annoying.”
Louis has three children
with Nancy, his second wife
— all boys, aged 15, 13 and 7.
(He refers to them as
Arthur, Jack and Ray in the
book; not their real names.)
They have little interest in
“I’ve got a bad habit
of having a few
drinks and watching
my old shows.
Occasionally,
I think, ‘My God,
that’s excellent’”
his work, he says. Weren’t they impressed
that he’d interviewed tiger weirdo Joe
Exotic for a documentary way before he
became a lockdown sensation in Tiger King
on Netflix? “Not as far as I could tell.”
He did, though, speak to the YouTuber
KSI for Grounded, who gave a shout-out to
Theroux’s sons that made one of them blush.
Towards the end of the book he muses
on how the world has been sleepwalking
to disaster. “One of the points of the book
is that the pandemic is a secondary
phenomenon. And the primary one is
globalisation,” he says. “It’s that feeling
that the pandemic wasn’t the lightning
strike of misfortune: it was a bill due. How
many billions of us are there? And we’re
taking up so much space, in so much
physical proximity to one another, plus
travelling relentlessly.”
It became personal for Theroux in April
this year when Nancy caught Covid. There
is a history of asthma in her family and she
was seriously ill. “When it hits you where
you live,” he says, “it ramps up the sense of
gravity.” But then he heads off on a tangent
to talk about how he wears a facemask in
public “because I don’t want to be a dick”,
while a part of him can’t help but question
if they are doing any good. “My head is full
of different voices,” he explains.
This leads to a story about how his car
once broke down when he tried driving it
on an empty tank. He was testing a bizarre
theory that popped into his brain that
perhaps it didn’t need petrol at all. He
ended up having to walk to a petrol station
in Park Royal with a can. It is this quirky,
wide-eyed inquisitiveness that helps him
make sense of the world — and make
inroads with the world’s trickiest people.
There are things he misses about
lockdown. He liked the routine of being
at home, loading and unloading the
dishwasher, connecting with people on
Zoom. He tells me he is drinking less now,
even if still over government guidelines.
Television-wise, he has been enjoying The
White Lotus — a raucous American drama
about an upmarket hotel and its ghastly
guests. His favourite character is Armond,
the manager who drinks a lot but can
still do his job. Theroux laughs at the
thought. “Maybe that’s why I related to
him,” he says.
The Sunday Times Magazine • 13
 Louis Theroux’s weird
year in lockdown
Pasta shortages, Zoom workouts and hitting the bottle hard
Tuesday, March 17, 2020
The first visible sign of panic: the
supermarkets. No pasta, no tinned tomatoes,
no tinned beans. Yesterday at the Queen’s
Park Co-op the cashier said: “People come in
yesterday, the day before, clear them out.”
Today at pick-up at the primary school,
another parent, a dad who works in catering,
was saying he’d laid in some extra supplies
from a cash and carry in Cricklewood:
5kg bags of penne pasta that he was selling
at cost. “They have big bags of rice too,”
his wife said. “Nancy says you’re
interested.” Another mum mentioned
rumours that wine and spirits were
running out.
“Grey Goose converted their facility to
produce rubbing alcohol,” Catering Dad said.
“There’s no vodka anywhere, apparently,”
the mum said. “People are buying it to use as
a disinfectant.”
“Yeh,” Catering Dad said. “Which doesn’t
work, by the way. The alcohol content’s not
high enough.”
I bought a 5kg bag of pasta, out of the back
of his van, in front of the school, and then five
packets of corn for popping. Ray will like
these, I thought. And then, with a little squirt
of excitement: this feels a little like maybe
what they did during rationing.
Sunday, March 22
An item on Radio 4 about woodcocks and
their feathers and seeing them in the wild.
Anything not about the virus feels hopelessly
irrelevant. I switched to 5 Live. They were
saying that in Italy the total number of deaths
now stands at 5,000. Whenever a pundit or
a reporter spoke, you could hear from the
acoustics that they were calling in from their
homes. Everything had a muffled bunker feel,
but they carried on as if it was normal. The
prevailing strange emotion, which one
hesitates to acknowledge, is the shameful
Nothing puts lead in your pencil like being
locked down in your house with your kids
GETTY IMAGES
24/7, loading and unloading the dishwasher
excitement at living in an apocalyptic
scenario. A movie has come to life and
engulfed us. Aliens, zombies, paranormal
events — the tropes of Hollywood — have
become our day-to-day reality and I still get
a little pulse of excitement when I see the
masks and the signs and the news bulletins.
But then I was cycling back from the
computer repair shop listening to the This
American Life podcast and at the end the
host said that when timing your hand-
washing, instead of singing Happy Birthday
twice you can also sing one whole chorus of
Stayin’ Alive. And then they played it, the
Bee Gees singing in shimmering falsetto, and
for a moment I was ambushed by sensation
and I wondered what I was feeling and was
I about to cry?
Tuesday, March 24
Earlier in the day Nancy had
mentioned that Joe Wicks, the
floppy-haired fitness guru below, has
started a live daily workout session,
streaming it on his YouTube channel.
At five to nine, we balanced the laptop
on a sofa next to the kitchen and the
five of us stood in a row, each on a
little patch of carpet, and went
through the exercises: running
on the spot, squats,
lunges, mountain climbers, all in 30-second
increments with 30-second rests.
I felt better afterwards and reflected that if
nothing else lockdown might be a chance to
get fit. I’ve sometimes daydreamed about
spending a month living at a spa getting
ripped and limber. Maybe this was going to be
a kind of suboptimal fulfilment of that fantasy.
Wednesday, March 25
Many are speculating on whether the
lockdown will strain relationships. I bumped
into a divorced neighbour making a visit to his
old home. “I want to invent an app. Get
divorced quick. You just push the button.
Wife gets a text. ‘You’re divorced.’ ”
“Interesting idea,” I said. “Tell you what,
though,” he went on. “What worries me.
You’re going to get a whole load of
divorces and at the same time a
baby boom.” “OK,” I said. “Yeah.”
But I was thinking: Baby boom.
Seriously? Because nothing
puts lead in your pencil
like being locked down
in a house with your
kids 24/7, loading
and unloading the
dishwasher.
Friday, March 27
We’ve been watching a new
seven-part Netflix series
about American big-cat
owners, called Tiger King.
The main character is
Joe Exotic,right, a
colourful Oklahoma zoo
owner with 200 tigers,
several body piercings,
two lovers and one mullet.
His sworn enemy is an
animal rights activist
named Carole Baskin,
who runs a sanctuary for
rescued animals and has
a penchant for wearing floaty animal-print
frocks and headdresses.
Launched at any time, Tiger King would
have been a hit, I’m sure, but in Covid World,
with very little to distract us from the
distressing news and people going out of
their minds with boredom, it is showing signs
of becoming a seismic pop cultural
phenomenon, the internet going crazy as
fans obsess over whether Carole Baskin may
have murdered her husband (she denies any
involvement in his disappearance), and
celebrities dressing up as the characters. It is
perhaps the media analogue to the pandemic
itself, literally going viral, even faster than
Covid, because unlike a physical virus, it
doesn’t require passenger planes and body
fluids to spread but can travel the digital
ether into 60 million homes simultaneously,
via the miracle of Netflix.
Making it all the stranger for me is that I
know Joe and several other of the characters,
having made my own documentary about
big-cat owners in 2011, America’s Most
Dangerous Pets. I know Joe, I know his
ex-husband John Finlay, I know his right-hand
man John Reinke. I know his friend Tim Stark.
Once or twice I’ve been asked by people
who know about my history with Joe whether
I feel chagrined at having seemingly narrowly
missed out on being part of possibly the
biggest documentary hit of all time. I look into
my heart and I say, as honestly as I can, no.
The truth is, I was never in a position
The Sunday Times Magazine • 15
 to make Tiger King. The federal case that
provides the spine of the series was still far
in the future when I filmed in 2011. If anything,
I’m mainly pleased that I can claim some
kind of foresight in taking an interest in Joe’s
story so many years ahead of the curve —
recognising as I did that it’s pretty weird for
so many Americans to be keeping majestic
animals like tigers, lions and bears in captivity
in large numbers — and I’m grateful that
some people have noticed that I planted
a small flag in the terrain.
However, it is slightly odd to find out that
when throwing a barbecue for me and
the crew back in 2011, Joe
almost certainly used
expired meat donated
by Walmart that was
intended for
the animals.
Sunday, April 5
“Should Veronica come? She’s texted,”
Nancy said.
Veronica is the cleaner.
“No,” I said. “We should pay her, but it’s still
too early.”
This was at eight in the morning. An hour
or so later, there was a ring at the door. It was
Veronica, wearing a facemask, and looking
emotional.
“I not get message,” she said. “I at home,
miss people.”
What’s she doing here? Nancy said with
her eyes and her eyebrows.
“She’s lonely,” I hissed. “She’s missing
people. She seemed near tears. What am
I supposed to say? Hop it? Can’t come in?”
“Well, I think we should ask her to leave
early. She’s not supposed to be here.”
“Sure, I’ll just say we don’t need downstairs
doing.”
Veronica moved around the house,
cleaning as usual, except that we and the
three kids were all around and the world was
dying of Covid-19.
Late morning, she came downstairs and
stood in the kitchen with the air of someone
with something to announce. “You are my
angels.” Then, in her faltering English, she
said that before she arrived in the UK, back
in Brazil, she’d seen a documentary I’d made
about children with autism and families
struggling to cope. She said she has two
children with autism — one of the reasons
she’s here is to send money back to them.
She’d never mentioned it before, she said,
but the programme had helped her family
understand what she was going through.
Her little speech was so touching and
COURTESY OF LOUIS THEROUX, GETTY IMAGES
unexpected that I became focused on
meeting it with an equivalent gesture of
Yes, I am drinking too much, but am
I drinking much more than the too-much
I normally drink? Hard to say
appreciation. In a robot-like way I determined
it was — doot doot doot — an emotional
moment — doot doot doot — and my
fellow-human-analysis circuits suggested
some physical reassurance might be
required. Initiate hug protocol. I moved
towards her with deliberateness, signalling my
intention, so as to avoid misunderstandings
and therefore awkwardness, my arms open,
as she looked back at me with horror,
recognising that I was about to break the
prime directive of Covid World: not to touch.
Doot doot doot! Abort! Abort! I apologised
and retreated.
Global cases have reached one million.
UK cases, 38,168 with 3,605 total deaths.
Wednesday, April 15
Yes, I am drinking too much, but am I drinking
much more than the too-much I normally
drink? Hard to say. Alcohol — the non-
board-certified Dr Ink — has been my mental
health practitioner of choice going back
25 years or more. My prescription has
remained fairly consistent: a gin and tonic
or two per night, around six o’clock,
followed up with several glasses of
red wine. Side effects include
slurring, thinking I’m funnier than
I actually am, sometimes dancing,
followed by mild grumpiness in
the morning. The drinking has,
naturally, been accompanied by a
low-level concern that I’m overdoing it,
and occasional half-hearted attempts to
cut back a bit. A couple of weeks before
lockdown I arrived at work hungover, and
seemingly aware my kidneys hurt, or maybe
my liver, or anyway some organ which I
supposed had something to do with
metabolising alcohol. I called the doctor to
get tested. I wasn’t sure what the test might
be, I just imagined there must be some
diagnostic process that would reveal any
inner damage and that might induce her to
say: Uh-oh, the jig is up, party’s over gramps,
time to take it easy, even if it’s just two nights
off a week, slow down. I got the tests. A few
days later they came back, and the verdict
was: fine. Nothing to worry about, keep going.
I was almost slightly disappointed. So, the
routine continues, possibly with a slight
uptick in intake, due to not going out, and
maybe anxiety.
Wednesday, June 3
Nancy was awake at 7.15.
I said, “What time is it?”
“Seven fifteen. I’ve been awake since five.”
“Go back to sleep!”
“I can’t sleep. I’ve been waking up at five
the last three mornings. I’m feeling so upset.”
She was crying.
“Go back to sleep.”
“I can’t sleep.”
“You need to get more exercise,” I said.
“I can’t believe you just said that.”
She left the room and went downstairs.
I got up and made her a cup of tea.
“I’m sorry, Nancy.” She was under a blanket
on the sofa, apparently trying to get back to
sleep. I unloaded the dishwasher and tidied
the kitchen.
“I’m going down to the Co-op,” I said. “We’re
out of dishwasher tablets.”
Then, remembering myself, I asked, “Do
you want to talk?”
“No.”
Wednesday, July 1
Interviewed on a new podcast by — guess
who? — none other than Mr Spider-Man
Lunges himself, Joe Wicks. His producer
invited me on a few weeks ago and I didn’t
feel I could say no, given how much I’ve
relied on his workouts during lockdown.
I was delighted to learn he has watched and
enjoyed many of my documentaries. One of
the strange features of doing the live
sessions, after I’d gone public as a
Wicks devotee in interviews in
April, was that on more than one
occasion, in the middle of
workouts, he made remarks on-air
that were directed at me. “Come on,
Louis Theroux! Let’s see you doing the
silly billies! Last ten seconds!” I can only
compare it to what people in psychosis must
experience when they imagine the TV is
speaking to them. Exciting, yes, but also
disconcerting. Anyway, it was an honour to
be on Joe’s podcast and speak to him, via
Zoom. Naturally, I apologised about doing my
very weird, camp impersonation of him at the
beginning of lockdown.
“It sounded nothing like you, Joe, and I don’t
know where it came from, and I’m sorry.”
He was very understanding.
The Sunday Times Magazine • 17
 The premise of his podcast is to spread
the word about wellness and health.
Guests are invited to share a favourite tip of
theirs. I mentioned that I’m a big believer in
short naps, especially after lunch. This is
something I’ve come to value more as I’ve
grown older. Nancy thinks I may be
narcoleptic, since the naps are on occasion
involuntary. Naturally you can feel
self-conscious napping at work — putting
your head down on your desk and catching
Zs in full view of the team. What I have tended
to do instead is retire to a toilet cubicle for ten
minutes or so and sleep seated on the throne,
head tilted forward.
I couldn’t tell whether I sounded weird
when I was talking about it.
Wednesday, August 12
Did back-to-back interviews from nine to
five at the house to promote my archive
series [looking back at my old programmes],
in a fugue-state blur, just speaking and
hardly even hearing myself for nearly
eight hours.
“Was the Jimmy Savile programme your
biggest failure?” asked the man from The
Telegraph.
Didn’t do Joe Wicks and it doesn’t feel
right. A report that the UK is falling into worst
recession on record. More cases in India, an
uptick in France. Two thirds of inmates at my
old stomping ground San Quentin prison
are infected.
COURTESY OF LOUIS THEROUx, MARK REINSTEIN / GETTY IMAGES
I’m a big believer in short naps. Nancy
thinks I may be narcoleptic since
the naps are on occasion involuntary
Wednesday, September 9
Arthur went back to school yesterday,
Jack today.
In the evening Nancy and I went out for a
drink and a meal with our TV Insider Friend
and his friend, the talented writer and actor
Sharon Horgan. The restaurant was called
Ducksoup. The Soho streets were laid out
with tables, like a Barcelona nightscape.
Maybe this is an improvement, I thought.
Take back the streets. I was nervous
meeting Sharon. I’m a fan of her HBO series
Divorce, and was maybe just, in a pathetic
way, conscious she was someone I should
try to impress, and I was making jokes
and chit-chat in a hypomanic way. “Been
making programmes at home! Ha ha! Update
shows! You know what it’s like. Covid
na-na-na-nineteen.”
When she left the table, Nancy said,
“You’re trying too hard. Why don’t you just
be normal?”
“This is my new normal,” I said.
“You’re very funny when you’re just
being natural.”
I was chain-drinking Vote for
grapefruit margaritas. this guy!
Afterwards we went to a
private members’ club, of which
our TV Insider Friend was a member.
There was a complicated app we had
to fill out to come in, involving
confirmation emails arriving on your
phone, click this, check that. The
grapefruit margaritas had rendered me
incapable of figuring it out I couldn’t find the
buttons to push or the email with the code.
Eventually they took pity on us and just
waved us in.
Thursday, October 1
This morning Ray was up at 6.55, his voice
calling out, “Daddy!”
“I’ll lie down with you for a minute, OK?
Because it’s still early.”
That lasted about 15 minutes. I was feeling
rough, fogged out, my kidneys marinated
for 12 hours in Bulleit Bourbon. I came
downstairs with Ray. He seemed tired too,
watched KidCity on YouTube while I washed
up and unloaded the dishwasher and licked
my booze-soaked wounds. Nancy came
down, and the big boys.
“You are somewhere else,” Nancy said.
“I’m right here.”
“What’s going on with you at the moment?”
“Nothing is going on with me.”
Was anything going on with me? I wasn’t
sure. Possibly I was fine. Possibly I wasn’t. It
was hard to know. Was it wrong to drink quite
so much? What if you could still function and
you enjoyed it and most of the time you felt
OK? Was I hiding? Was I dulling the pain?
Was it weird that I didn’t have more insight
into what was going on or was that what most
men were like? The radio was saying there
were further local lockdowns in the
northeast, and in Liverpool too. But college
students could come home for Christmas.
Even if they found a vaccine in the spring, the
radio said, it would take years for life to return
to normal. Whatever that meant. And, in fact,
what about this assumption that we should
return to a normal that involves forest fires
literally the size of Uruguay and mass
extinction? We were all so keen to save
humans and sure humans are great — I love
the Sistine Chapel and I happen to be
married to a human — but did we really
deserve quite so much consideration given
that we were rampaging around the planet in
Hummers and selling avocados in stupid
plastic packaging and giving gift bags at
children’s parties that ended up in the guts of
sperm whales thousands of miles away? Wah
wah wah! The coronavirus! Wah wah wah! We
need more humans to f *** up the planet so
we can watch YouTube and dolphins can die
choking on a mini Rubik’s Cube.
The fog lifted over the course of
the day, helped along by a vigorous
20-minute Joe Wicks. As I came out
of the shower, the doorbell rang. It
was one of the neighbours.
“Have you signed the petition?”
she asked.
“What’s it about?”
“The 5G mast they want to build at the end
of the road.”
“I’m going to be honest with you,” I said,
surprising myself with my directness. “I don’t
believe it’s going to fry my brains and I’d quite
like the faster internet.”
“Sure, OK,” she said. “So I guess that’s a no?”
Sunday, November 8
On Radio 4 they ran an interview David Frost
had done with Biden in 1987, above, when he
was making his first presidential run. Biden
was cogent and considered and thoughtful,
talking about the need for equal opportunity
and social justice.
“I’d vote for this guy,” Nancy said. “What
happened to him?”
“He got old,” I said.
At 11, we turned in. I lay on my side reading
a longish article about the election and
Trumpism and where it goes now. Nancy was
reading something on her phone. She rolled
over and said: “We don’t know each other
any more.”
“You’re so busy,” I said.
“Stop it.”
“You’ve got your hands full with work,”
The Sunday Times Magazine • 19
 I said. “Starting Mindhouse [their production
company].” This was facetious but also not.
“We need to book another break.”
“At a hotel.”
“But who will look after the kids?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “We need to
reconnect.”
We kissed. I wondered if intimacy might
be on the cards.
“I need to brush my teeth,” I said. When
I came back, she had her sleep mask on
and her light was out.
Thursday, December 3
There is a vaccine. The UK is the first
country to approve it. This is the
moment we’ve been waiting for, runs
the coverage. This is the soft glow of the
coming dawn. Roll-out is being planned.
Care workers, NHS staff first. Some are
saying the decision has been rushed,
including Anthony Fauci, head of US
vaccination and health.
Lockdown is technically over but the
atmosphere feels very far from triumphalist.
Certain football matches can now have
partial crowds, likewise small audiences in
theatres. Two or three thousand fans at
arenas. At a couple of games — Millwall,
I think and one up north — attendees
blessed with the first reappearance at live
sports events in nearly nine months used the
occasion to boo the players who knelt in
recognition of Black Lives Matter.
Thursday, December 24
In the late afternoon Nancy’s brother,
Ernesto, arrived, self-advertised Covid
renegade. He is a single man and we are his
support bubble, so technically it is allowed.
Nancy and I opened a bottle of prosecco.
Having done my Joe Wicks I was feeling
virtuous. I poured myself some bourbon.
Ernesto is a fan of a certain kind of high-
octane, one-man-against-the-world action
film. He asked the boys if they’d ever seen
Die Hard, which they hadn’t, so we put it on
and watched, as I scuttled back and forth to
COURTESY OF LOUIS THEROUX, LONDON RECORDS / JULIAN ANDREWS
On Christmas Day I found weird things
irritating — like Stay Another Day by East
17. “I hate that song! It exudes darkness”
the kitchen topping up my bourbon and
lemon juice and soda.
“I think you’ve had enough to drink,”
Nancy said.
“Tea anyone?” I asked.
I went out and poured myself another one,
but kept the glass in the sink so she wouldn’t
see it if she came in. I did this twice, aware as
it was happening that it was not a good sign
on any level — for what it said about my
drinking or about my relationship. “You’re
only as sick as your secrets,” as they say in
AA. Around midnight I had a last bourbon,
washing down a Nurofen with it.
Friday, December 25
Up at 7.30, zombified, barely able to raise
a smile as I watched the children opening
their stockings and cooing over their toys.
All day I found weird things irritating that I
shouldn’t have. Questions about the turkey
and meandering Zoom calls with family
talking across one another and Christmas
songs and Stay Another Day by East 17, left.
I was bent on pouring poison on a blameless
world. “I hate that song. It brims with an
aggressive inanity. It exudes darkness. Stay
another day!”
I seem to hate everything. I think I must be
in a bad mood. Happy Christmas.
Wednesday, March 17, 2021
Nancy made a sausage carbonara dish
while I looked at emails at my computer.
This is my last entry. I’m sitting here almost
a year to the day I started, with a glass of wine
next to me. Life goes on. There are outbreaks
and there are shortages and there are signs
of hope. We are nearly three million fewer
through corona, with the end still not in sight,
and secondary pandemics rippling out in
unseen ways, crises of poverty and the
mental health of those who struggled in
lockdown — anxiety, depression, eating
disorders. We have an idea of what the future
may look like. Different and the same, better
and worse, and for now I’m going to let it be
and sip my wine and count myself grateful
for every day that comes.
One night, in April, I woke up in the small
hours feeling out of sorts and
uncharacteristically melancholy. My ordinary
small worries loomed large in the quiet of
the night. I thought about my alcohol
consumption and the havoc it was
presumably wreaking on my body, about
dying early, my life drifting away, not getting
to see my children grow up due to liver failure
or other booze-related health issues, my
organs shrivelling or maybe swelling,
cracking, flaking, growing spongy, the exact
medical details were unclear. Personal
failures crowded my head like ghosts. Wasn’t
I basically a pretty lousy person? Not a very
considerate friend? Didn’t call my dad often.
Not very thoughtful to my mum. An impatient
and work-preoccupied father. What in fact
did I contribute to the world, other than
making documentaries, which was a
basically narcissistic endeavour?
This is supposed to be the moment where
I say I dedicated my life to Christ that night
and never looked back. I didn’t do that. But
over the following few days I eased up on
the boozing, feeling some combination of
virtuous and bored, turning in at 10pm after
three cups of herbal tea. I also called and
had a nice chat with my dad.
All through the three lockdowns, the
metaphor that came to mind was of a desert
island. I’d been marooned with my family in
the middle of an indifferent sea, in a vast
Bear Grylls-style bivouac, only with
four bedrooms, and equipped
with TV and electricity
and hot and cold running
water and limitless
supplies of food, booze
and video games.
Now we are on a
rescue vessel, and I look
back, and the island is
growing small on the
horizon, and I wave goodbye to
the place that was our home for
all those months, and I feel a little
sorry to go — a part of me doesn’t want to
face the world again, knowing how much of
myself I’m leaving behind and there is also
a wary recognition that it’s possible we may
be going back, but the greatest part
recognises something deeper, that we are
stronger for what we’ve been through,
whatever happens next n
© Louis Theroux 2021. Extracted from
Theroux the Keyhole: Diaries of a grounded
documentary maker, to be published by
Pan Macmillan on November 11 at £20
The Sunday Times Magazine • 21
“I had
succeeded by
commodifying
my body.
So why was
I unhappy?”

At 21 Emily Ratajkowski starred in

Robin Thicke’s Blurred Lines video
wearing just a thong. She said it was
empowering. Nearly a decade on, she’s
not so sure. Megan Agnew asks her why
Portrait by Austin Hargrave
 mily Ratajkowski
E
wants control. She
wants control, she says,
because there have been
too many times in her
life when she thought
she had lots and claimed
she had lots, but
really she had very little.
Ratajkowski, 30,
found fame as a model, her body primped,
preened and positioned by other people in
order to sell their clothes or sex up their
music videos, most famously for the 2013
hit Blurred Lines. She gained wealth and
power from being the object, the muse,
a “good model”. But her power was always
dependent on other people finding her
attractive, particularly men. She was a
pin-up. That is why she wanted to write
a book. “You can have so much control in
writing, you’re choosing the words, you’re
the creator,” she says. “That was the original
reason I started. And now I’m about to
publish and know that things are going to
be perceived differently by every person
who reads it. You have to let go.”
My Body is a collection of essays — part
memoir, part analysis of sexual politics,
modelling, gender and feminism. She
wrote it over the past two years from her
apartment in Manhattan, where she lives
with her husband, Sebastian Bear-McClard,
a film producer, and their eight-month-old
son, Sylvester Apollo. In the first chapter
she describes how, as a 21-year-old model
living in Los Angeles, she was hired to
appear in Robin Thicke, Pharrell Williams
and TI’s music video. “I hate these blurred
lines / I know you want it / I know you want
it,” sang Thicke, wearing a suit and tie, while
Ratajkowski danced around him, naked save
for a skin-coloured thong and trainers.
The song spent weeks at No 1, the video
went viral and Ratajkowski became a name.
In interviews she was asked to defend the
song’s video and controversial lyrics,
neither of which she wrote. She was
determined in her argument: her nudity
was her choice. She was empowered. But
in the book, for the first time, she gives a full
account of what happened on set, accusing
Thicke of groping her during filming:
“Suddenly, out of nowhere, I felt the
coolness and foreignness of a stranger’s
hands cupping my bare breasts from behind.
I instinctively moved away, looking back at
Robin Thicke … I may have even smiled,
embarrassed and desperate to minimise the
situation. I tried to shake off the shock. No
one, not one of us, said anything. We were
working for him, after all.”
When we speak on a video call,
Ratajkowski from her exposed-brick
apartment in New York, me from London,
she is reserved, careful. I can feel every one
of the 3,500 miles between us. She has
spent the past few years trying to regain the
control she had to concede in order to
24 • The Sunday Times Magazine
From top: playing herself in Entourage (2015)
with Haley Joel Osment, left, and Adrian
Grenier; in Gone Girl (2014) with Ben Affleck;
in I Feel Pretty with Amy Schumer (2018)
become a success — buying images of
herself, wrestling with laws around picture
ownership, writing the essays that form her
book. How she understands her body and
the power it has brought her has changed
almost entirely in that time.
“It’s so easy to google me or look at my
Instagram and see the ways in which I’ve
had power and I’ve succeeded,” she says.
“But I wanted to write about the less
obvious, shrouded experiences that do
make me feel like I’m just a body.” She says
she is nervous about the book coming out.
She doesn’t want the nuance of her story to
be lost, particularly in the coverage of her
accusation against Thicke. It was a music
video that made her career, but also one she
resented being constantly associated with:
it was a shoot where she felt secure in her
nakedness, but was also exploited for it;
where she says she had fun, but was also
groped against her will.
“At that point in my career, photoshoots
for me were either a test shoot with a
photographer who was usually, like, kinda
a creepy dude, or just doing ecommerce
where you’re, like, back, side, front, and it’s
just about the dimensions of your body,
you’re a coat hanger,” she says. “And it was
so much fun to come to a set where there
were all these cool women, a female
director, and they were asking me if I felt
comfortable and if I liked my outfit and my
hair. I felt really respected. I think the word
‘empowered’ gets thrown around a lot, so
I’m hesitant, but I definitely felt like I was
having fun and in control. All of that is still
true. But also this thing did happen on the
day, which reminded me of where my
position was — as a hired model.”
Afterwards, she writes, “I felt like I was
spinning and out of control. I hadn’t chosen
this life and I was unsure of how I’d ended
up living it and what it meant about who
I would become.”
She was cast in a number of big-budget
movies — as a hot young mistress in Gone
Girl, a hot insecure girl in I Feel Pretty, a hot
“Emily Ratajkowski” in Entourage — her
Instagram following sky-rocketed (she now
has nearly 30 million followers) and she
 Left: the infamous
pop video for Robin
Thicke’s Blurred
Lines (2013). Right:
on the runway for
Versace in Milan,
2018; as a young
girl with her mother,
Kathleen, in San
Diego; with her
mother and father,
John, 2015
In the book, for the
first time, she gives
a full account of what
happened on set,
accusing Robin
Thicke of groping her
created a line of very small bikinis. Worth
an estimated $8 million, she has been the
face of fashion brands such as DKNY and
Nasty Gal, graced the covers of Vogue and
Sports Illustrated, appeared on catwalks
for Dolce & Gabbana and Versace, and
hung out with celebrities including Kim
Kardashian and Lena Dunham.
At first Ratajkowski stuck by her
argument, telling journalists that “female
sexuality and sexiness, no matter how
conditioned it may be by a patriarchal ideal,
can be incredibly empowering for a woman”.
But as the years went by her opinions
around that video, and her empowerment,
changed. “In my early twenties it had
never occurred to me that the women who
gained their power from beauty were
indebted to the men whose desire granted
them that power in the first place. Those
men were the ones in control,” she writes.
“Facing the reality of the dynamics at play
would have meant admitting how limited
my power really was.”
It has been a gradual change in
understanding, she says. “It started with
feelings. Or, for lack of a better term, feeling
triggered in my body. My friends would tell
me something that had happened to them
ALLSTAR, CAPITAL PICTURES, MIGUEL MEDINA / AFP, COLEMAN-RAYNER
on a date or I would meet a young actress
and she would tell me something and
I would feel it in my body. An anxiety,
a tension. Which felt really incongruent
with what I preached, which was that I was
this example of somebody who had
succeeded by commodifying my image and
my body and sexuality. But I didn’t feel that
way, emotionally. Especially in relationship
to my work — how I felt with modelling and
with Hollywood and the process of
auditioning and going on shoots. I didn’t
enjoy it. And it seemed glaringly obvious
that if I was so powerful and felt so great
about how I had succeeded, then why was
I unhappy, sometimes more than unhappy
— anxious — about going to work?”
atajkowski was born in
R Westminster, London, where
her mother, an English
professor, was on secondment
from the California State
University to the University
of London. Her father, an artist and school
teacher, is of Polish-Catholic and Irish
descent — she spent childhood summers
in Bantry, Co Cork, where they own an old
farmhouse. Emily’s maternal grandfather,
Ely D Balgley, was a piano prodigy and
chemist, born to a Jewish family on the
Poland-Russia border, now Belarus, before
emigrating to New York.
When Emily, an only child, was five,
the Ratajkowskis moved back to California
permanently. They lived in San Diego, in
a bohemian house built by her dad, covered
in ivy and filled with paintings — “a magical
organism”. Ratajkowski was a beautiful
child, like her mother, often stopped in
the street and told that she should model.
“I was not raised in any religion, and talk of
God was not a part of my childhood,” she
writes. “I’ve never prayed much, but I do
remember that as a young girl I prayed for
beauty. Beauty was a way for me to be
special. When I was special, I felt my
parents’ love for me the most.”
She started modelling at 13 — “I’m ready,”
she told her parents. Her father pinned up
her first “comp” card, with her test shots
and dimensions, in his classroom. Another
photo was put up in their kitchen, so that
visitors were greeted by her “pouty lips,
bare legs, and teased hair” when they
walked in. Her mother often told her about
how boys looked at her in the street: “I’ll
never forget the look on his face as you
walked past him!”
Did her parents’ pride in her beauty make
her feel uncomfortable, I ask. “No,” she says.
“They were just being supportive of a thing
that the world rewards. But it wasn’t just my
parents, it was in everything. At school the
hot girls were the popular girls. In culture
there were all kinds of men who represented
different types of power — musicians,
presidents — but it felt very clear to me that
the most powerful women were the most
sexually attractive. Modelling seemed like
a way of being special and powerful.”
Alongside encouragement came caution.
Ratajkowski was told by relatives, including
her father, to be careful of her body and the
clothes she wore. At 13 she was sent home
in tears from a school dance for wearing an
outfit that was “too sexy”. She hadn’t
realised that was how she looked. “It was
complicated for me,” she says. “In many
ways having my midriff show at school felt
like defiance. Like nobody was going to tell
me how to dress. That is definitely what
my mom felt. ‘My daughter shouldn’t be
ashamed of her body, it should be celebrated
and maybe she should even try to work it
and see what she can get out of life by
exploring that opportunity.’ But I got so
many mixed signals. I had boys at school
letting me know they thought I was hot,
while also feeling deeply ashamed because
I was making adults feel uncomfortable.”
She thrived off the money and freedom
her career brought her, skipping high-school
classes to attend photoshoots in LA. At
5ft 7in she didn’t have the height to be a
catwalk model, so was sent off to pose for
bikini and commercial fashion shoots.
Many of the jobs she was given look, with
hindsight, incredibly unsettling. At 16 she
posed topless, back to camera, for a surf
The Sunday Times Magazine • 25

magazine’s “Taste of the Month”. Modelling
agents labelled her the “sexy one”. After
a year studying art at the University of
California, Los Angeles she dropped out.
Too many of her friends were living in their
parents’ homes, struggling with student
debt, unemployed after the economic
crash, and modelling seemed like a good
“temporary” solution.
As she went to more castings — told
where to turn up and when, told to strip
down, turn around, pout, turn around again
— she began to “dissociate” from her body.
She felt like a “mannequin”. “There is this
sense of your body is not yours, it’s ours,”
she says. “In this contract you’ve given it
up to be used how we see fit. You aren’t
allowed to have control over it. If you’re not
willing to do what the client wants you to
do with your body, then there’s somebody
else who will be. You’re not special.”
Can models, by definition, be anything
other than objects? “I don’t know how that
would happen. You’re being used for the
PHOTOSHOT, BACKGRID, MATT BARON / SHUTTERSTOCK, GOFF PHOTOS, LUCAS JACKSON / REUTERS
way you look. There should certainly be a
more respectful attitude to the
‘tool’ that this industry is using
Clockwise from left:
a topless selfie with
Kim Kardashian; the
Malaysian investor
Jho Low with Paris
Hilton in Paris, 2010;
the photographer
Jonathan Leder;
Ratajkowski with her
husband, Sebastian
Bear-McClard; with
their baby, Sylvester
The Malaysian
investor Jho Low
paid her $25,000 to
go to the Super Bowl
with him. “I was on
the clock,” she says
— which is young, usually very young,
women’s bodies.”
Ratajkowski believes it is impossible to
be unaffected by an industry in which you
get rejected from a job because of the way
you look. In her book she admits to
insecurities, wishing at times for a smaller
nose and longer legs. “My awareness of the
things I don’t like about myself, physically,
has actually protected me, because it
pre-empts other people saying mean things
about me,” she says. “I know what they are
going to say. Every woman has this feeling
that if only this thing was a little bit more
this way, physically, my life would be better.
I want people to be, like, ‘Oh wow, if she’s
insecure too, what does that mean?’ ”
There are moments in the book that have
echoes of Jeffrey Epstein’s parties involving
rich men and younger women. When
Ratajkowski moved to Los Angeles at 19,
she was invited to fancy restaurants by a club
promoter whose job, it seems, was to herd
attractive women into flashy events. That
summer the promoter took her and
about 14 other young models on a free
luxury trip to Coachella. They were
expected to be good-time party
girls, put up in a villa with a
group of rich, older men who
wanted to be tantalised.
“I was not at all shocked by
[the Jeffrey Epstein] story,”
Ratajkowski says. “I witnessed
so much of that in different
forms. Right before Covid I
went to some new nightclub and
it was really empty. All of a sudden
ten — I would guess if they weren’t
underage then barely of age —
models arrive with one guy. I was,
like, oh right, the same thing is still
happening. Beautiful girls being out
at a club and rich men paying indirectly to
have them there.”
Is that exploitation? “The ways that
I experienced it, it was. A lot of my
experiences with Coachella, or whatever,
the transaction wasn’t defined. The terms
of agreement weren’t named. I found out
later that they invited girls who couldn’t
afford food or a nice meal out to these fancy
dinners in LA. That was a motivator for
them to come. And that’s manipulation.”
Later in her career the Malaysian
businessman Low Taek Jho, widely known
as Jho Low, paid her $25,000 to go to the
Super Bowl with him. She was unsure of
why she was there, how long she had to stay
and who her agent had to check with at the
end of the night to find out whether she
could leave. “I was on the clock,” she says.
According to Ratajkowski, a Victoria’s
Secret model was at the same party that
night, pretending to drink shots with Low,
chucking the alcohol over her shoulder as
she tipped her head back and dancing
“against his crotch”. The model isn’t named
in Ratajkowski’s book but is thought to be
Miranda Kerr. Years later Kerr handed over
a diamond necklace given to her by Low,
worth $1.8 million, to the US government
after he was exposed in a money-laundering
scandal. He is now an international fugitive.
(In 2017 Kerr — who is not accused of any
wrongdoing — married Evan Spiegel, the
co-founder of Snapchat.)
Writing about some of her recollections
gave Ratajkowski physical anxiety. “You do
have to completely immerse yourself in the
memories and I think that … yeah, I’m
almost reremembering,” she trails off.
As a 20-year-old she travelled to the
photographer Jonathan Leder’s home,
where she posed nude and in underwear for
a series of photographs. “Most of what
The Sunday Times Magazine • 27

came next was a blur except for the feeling,”
she writes. “I don’t remember kissing, but
I do remember his fingers suddenly being
inside of me … and it really, really hurt.”
Leder later said that her allegations were
“too tawdry and childish to respond to”,
that they were “false and salacious”. He
went on to publish the photographs in a
book titled Emily Ratajkowski — which sold
out multiple times — she says without her
consent; the publisher maintained they had
every legal right to do so.
“I wrote to organise my thoughts and to
forgive myself for the ways that I felt I had
allowed certain things to happen, because
that’s how I viewed those situations,” she
says. “Almost so I could read them back and
make my opinions. I was interested in
reality-checking through writing. Naming
what had happened with Owen was
particularly healing,” she says.
Owen, her teenage boyfriend, first
“forced himself ” on her when she was 14.
He was 16 at the time and later had sex
with her when she was too drunk to refuse.
“I wish someone had explained to me that
I owed him nothing,” she writes. “Why did
my 15-year-old self not scream at the tops
of her lungs? Who had taught me not to
scream? I hated myself … I didn’t tell
EMILY RATAJKOWSKI / CHRISTIE’S IMAGES LTD 2021, CAPITAL PICTURES
anyone what had happened that weekend
with Owen. This is what you do. This is the
beginning of how you forget.”
“That was nonconsensual sex,” she says
today. “I was so young. I hadn’t even had sex
before. So many young women I know, their
first early sexual experiences border on
nonconsensual.” It is familiar. Many of my
fiercely feminist friends — women in their
twenties and thirties — suffered traumatic
sexual experiences that they were only
able to talk about years later. Admitting that
they are a victim removes the agency,
Left: Ratajkowski’s artwork Buying Myself
Back sold for $175,000 at Christie’s in May.
Above: protesting outside the US Senate
in 2018, for which she was arrested
independence and power they have fought
hard to attain. They remain silent because
of, not despite, their feminism.
“These were the experiences I didn’t want
to look at,” she says, “because they made me
feel out of control of my own life and I was
afraid of acknowledging that. I didn’t sit
down to write a list of the traumatic events
in my life. At all. But there were experiences
that I had a lot of shame around and there
is this validation that comes with people
reading it and recognising your experience
as being real and it existing.”
atajkowski recently had her first
R child, Sylvester, who is now
rolling on his tummy and trying
to form words. Motherhood
made her realise her “distrust” of
medical professionals — gynaecologists,
midwives, doctors. “I think it’s related to
my experience with using my body as a
model,” she says, “because of the way that
I’ve experienced people in positions of
authority who have dealt with my body on
sets, who cared about their own ego rather
than my wellbeing.”
Pregnancy and childbirth also forced her
to capitulate. “As somebody who is always
searching for control, all of a sudden I was
completely out of control of my body. Every
day you have something else happening and
you don’t know what’s going on. I was
especially nervous about childbirth, but I
knew that the only way to have a successful
birth and for my body to be able to open up
was to just surrender to it. That was a
transforming experience for me.”
She has also turned her hand to art
dealing — by way of revenge. In 2014 the
artist Richard Prince printed one of her
Instagram posts on a canvas and sold it for
$90,000. As a response, Ratajkowski bought
another of his artworks of her in the same
series, hung it on her wall and photographed
herself standing in front of it. She made the
resultant image into a non-fungible token
(NFT), a digital file that was sold through
the auction house Christie’s. Titled Buying
Myself Back: A Model for Redistribution, it
sold for $175,000 after fees in May. Each
time it is resold in the future, Ratajkowski
will receive a cut. Christie’s said the NFT
“reinstates Ratajkowski’s agency over her
own image by allowing her access to its
monetary and symbolic value, which she
and other women in similar professions
have too often been deprived of ”.
Politically active, Ratajkowski has
campaigned for Bernie Sanders (with the
hashtag #HotGirlsForBernie), marched for
Black Lives Matter and was arrested while
protesting the nomination of Brett
Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. How
does she define her feminism now? “I don’t
define feminism. I don’t have an answer to
that. I used to love to answer that question
and now I actually don’t know, I am really
confused. I would like to try and figure that
out. Of course I still define myself as a
feminist. I’m interested in female equality
and liberation and thinking about the ways
that we haven’t gotten there yet.”
She no longer subscribes to “choice
feminism” — the belief that any individual
actions or decisions a woman takes are
inherently feminist — which she aligned
herself with in the years after the Blurred
Lines video. “I think that came out of
defiance and a feeling of, I don’t want to have
to be told what to do, if I want to get naked
or wear something sexy, that’s a feminist act
because I’ve made that choice. I just don’t
feel that way now because those choices are
informed by the system we are functioning
within. We have to acknowledge the power
structures and dynamics at play before we
call things liberation.”
So here we are, both as unresolved as
each other, in a right old tangle about
empowerment and nudity and control and
sex and what it all means. Ratajkowski’s
body has given her the career that has
allowed her to write about how her body has
been exploited in that career. “I would never
tell a young woman not to model because
I have had the success and the financial
success to be able to buy myself time to
write this book,” she says. “And I have the
ability to have this book be talked about in
a way that an unknown writer wouldn’t —
and that’s power. And that came through
commodifying my image and my body.” n
My Body by Emily
Ratajkowski is published by
Quercus on Tuesday at
£16.99. Emily will be in
conversation with Pandora
Sykes at the How To Academy,
Emmanuel Centre, London
SW1, on November 30
The Sunday Times Magazine • 29
ELECTRIC
Nick Rufford pilots the world’s first electric plane certified for pa
C DREAMS
ssenger flights. It can stay up for only one hour. Will it catch on?
 I
am banking low over the Thames estuary in
a small plane that could change the future of
flight. It has no combustion engine and it
doesn’t burn jet fuel or avgas (aviation gasoline).
Up here, where the air is rarefied, as Frank
Sinatra nearly sang, its zero-emissions motor
helps keep it that way. It’s also a hoot to fly
— so easy I can control it with one finger on the
joystick. It’s made from carbon fibre and Kevlar
by a company called Pipistrel and it’s so light it
cruises using about the same power — 26kW
— as a dozen electric kettles. I complete the
turn over the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge and level up.
In the distance are the O2 Arena, the skyscrapers of the
Isle of Dogs and the landing strip at Damyns Hall from
where I’ve just taken off. More like a Scout hut than an
airport, this tiny aerodrome seems an inauspicious
place to start a revolution in aviation.
The Pipistrel Velis Electro is a flight trainer, used for
teaching by the instructor Deepak Mahajan, who’s also
the importer of this, the only electric plane to be
certified by the European Aviation Safety Agency. From
the modest corrugated iron hangar that houses Fly
About Aviation, his flying school, to the end of the grass
runway it’s only a short taxi and take-off, but in this
futuristic plane it feels like a giant leap for mankind.
The test pilot and astronaut Neil Armstrong might
have said so himself if he’d lived to have a go. In his
heyday aerospace engineers could put a man on the
PREVIOUS PAGES AND THIS PAGE, TOP: NICK RUFFORD. BOTTOM: MARKO CAFNIK
moon, but building a battery-powered passenger plane
The Pipistrel was pie in the sky. Armstrong certainly would have
approved of the no-fuss take-off. Pilots of piston planes
Velis Electro must run through exhaustive preflight checks of fuel
pump, mixture, carb heat, alternator, magnetos and
26kW more. In the Electro you make sure both battery packs
of power used when are powered up, glance at the temperature readouts,
cruising — the same and that’s it. Start-up involves flicking four silver toggle
as a dozen electric switches for the master, avionics, battery and power.
kettles Forget warming up, it’s ready to fly.
The Electro is also cheap to run: £2.50 an hour in
£2.50 electricity, compared with ten times that in fuel for the
an hour to run, combustion version. Conventional aircraft require
compared with £25 periodic overhauls in which the engine and gearbox are
an hour for a fuel- stripped and components oiled, cleaned or replaced.
combustion version Fans of the Disney Planes films will remember when
Dusty Crophopper’s discontinued epicyclic reduction
1 hour gearbox fails, condemning him to the scrapheap. That
in the air per charge. couldn’t happen with the Electro because it has no
Less if it’s carrying gearbox. The Electro’s limitations are akin to those of
passengers electric cars: range and recharging. It can cover about
100 miles on a charge, a sixth of the distance of its
100 miles petrol-powered equivalent, and stay in the air for only an
per charge — a sixth hour; less if it’s carrying passengers between airports
of the range of a because of rules about keeping “fuel” in reserve. But it’s
petrol-powered worth remembering that the Wright brothers’ Flyer
equivalent managed only 57 seconds in the air on its maiden outing.
A useful analogy is the EV1 — an electric car built by
General Motors for three years from 1996 and widely
derided for its technical shortcomings, but which
proved to be the start of something big.
Above: Nick Rufford
flies a Pipistrel Velis
Electro. Left: the
Pipistrel founder,
Ivo Boscarol.
Right: Boscarol in
an engine-powered
hang glider, 1988
The Sunday Times Magazine • 33

Aviation releases a billion tonnes of carbon each
year into the atmosphere and its share of man-made
greenhouse gas emissions, currently 2.4 per cent, is
rapidly growing thanks to a boom in cheap flights in
developing countries. Zero-emissions planes could
make a big difference. A single plane trip from London
to Berlin produces 0.6 tonnes of CO2 — an amount
equivalent to that saved by three years of household
recycling. A return flight from London to San Francisco
emits about 5.5 tonnes of CO2, more than twice that
from a family car in a year.
Nevertheless, it’s going to take time and probably
tighter emissions controls on conventional aircraft to
give electric aviation the breathing space it needs.
“It’ll take legislation as well as innovation,” Mahajan
acknowledges. “If politicians are looking for ways to
reduce environmental damage, it’s an easy win.”
Legislation is on its way. In the US, the Federal
Aviation Authority last December ruled that aircraft
flying in American airspace would from 2028 have to
comply with new greenhouse gas limits. That date is
just over the horizon in terms of the time it takes to
design and build aircraft. Other countries are expected
to follow suit. With a flurry of interest in electric
aviation from Boeing and Airbus, passengers may not
have too much longer to wait before flying is a breath of
fresh air. And when it is, they might pause for a moment
to think of the batman of Slovenia.
Flitting across the darkening skies of Soviet-
controlled Yugoslavia, Ivo Boscarol was a mysterious
figure whom local residents called the human bat. Each
evening, as soon as flights to and from the tiny airport
in the town of Ajdovscina had ended and the hangar
JANE STOCKDALE
was locked, a jerry-built aircraft with a batlike silhouette
would appear. It was 1988 and Boscarol, an inventor and
amateur aviator, had hand-stitched a glider wing from
From top: the hydrogen-fuelled Pipistrel Miniliner is
under development; Rolls-Royce’s Spirit of Innovation;
the Rolls-Royce-powered P-Volt, due to launch in 2026
material used for mattress covers and fitted the engine
from an East German-built Trabant car. Scarcity was
the mother of invention in pre-independence Slovenia
and Boscarol was forced to improvise and adapt.
“We were doing everything by ourselves at the time,”
recalls Boscarol, 65. “We were sewing, we were cutting
the tubes, we were drilling the holes. It wasn’t possible
at the time to buy anything ready-made.”
With his wife, Vida, as his business co-pilot, Boscarol
formed a small company to make and sell his micro-
lights, calling it Pipistrel after his nickname (pipistrello is
Italian for bat). When Vida died from skin cancer in 1995,
he threw himself deeper into his work, progressing to
lightweight planes and then experimenting with battery
power. Others had tried but the idea had never taken off.
A test pilot flew the first manned electric aircraft in
1973, but the bulky batteries meant there was no room
for passengers and it could stay in the air for only
14 minutes. Another 24 years elapsed before the first
production electric aircraft went on sale, a single-seat
glider with a small motor to get it aloft.
Boscarol’s early attempts were greeted with
scepticism. “People were asking me how long are the
electric leads [to power the aircraft from the ground]
and how far can you fly,” he recalls. It took 14 years of
trying, and failing, for the Velis Electro to become the
world’s first — and so far only — electric plane certified
for commercial use and passenger flights. Based in two
modest-sized factories in Ajdovscina, the company is
now struggling to keep up with demand. Boscarol has
just upped production from four Electros a month to
six. His latest customer is the Danish air force, which is
AVIATION testing electric planes to train its pilots.
“We are getting more orders for electric aircraft than
RELEASES for all the others together. It’s like with electric cars,
nobody will stop this. At this moment we are the only
A BILLION ones in the world offering the type of certified aircraft
TONNES that can be used for commercial operations and
training. Others will come, of course, and competition
OF CARBON will grow, but it’s not easy to type certify [a new
A YEAR. NOW
category of ] aircraft because the regulations are very
strict. With the Velis Electro, there is still nobody
2.4 PER CENT, hard on our heels.”
It’s a success story in the “built in a shed” tradition of
ITS SHARE OF aviation pioneers. The first manned flyer took off in 1903
GREENHOUSE from a hill near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Orville
and Wilbur Wright built it in stolen moments while
GAS running their bicycle repair shop. Dave Unwin, from
Pilot magazine, who has also tested the Velis Electro,
EMISSIONS
says there are obvious parallels. “If you are still thinking,
IS GROWING ‘The Electro can’t do this and it can’t do that,” you’re
probably the sort of person who, in December 1903,
would’ve asked [of the Wright Flyer], “What use is that
thing? It can’t carry a passenger and, even more
irritatingly, while the Wrights are messing about with
their useless flying machine they’re not fixing my bike.”
A century ago the Wright brothers’ success drew
other inventors to the possibilities of powered flight.
Likewise, a new wave of pioneers is taking to the air in
an array of weird and wonderful clean-flying machines.
At least 20 companies are blazing a vapour-free trail,
hoping for safety approval. Harbour Air, based in
Richmond, British Columbia, retro-fitted a de Havilland
with batteries and motor to create the eBeaver
seaplane. More accurately, it’s a “puddle jumper”
The Sunday Times Magazine • 35
 because it hops between Canadian lakes. A Bristol-based
company, Vertical Aerospace, plans to launch an electric
air taxi service in partnership with Virgin Atlantic using
a four-seater aircraft it says will be able to take off and
land vertically. The VA-X4 could be ready to ferry
passengers to and from Heathrow and cities in the
I
south of England as early as 2025.
f Pipistrel is aviation’s Tesla then, like the disruptive
Californian carmaker, it has forced the big players
to take battery power seriously. Anxious not to
be caught dozing on autopilot, aerospace giants
are circling. Rolls-Royce, the jet engine maker,
has snapped up Siemens’s “eAircraft” business,
announcing its intention “to play a role in the
‘third era’ of aviation” (the first and second eras
being piston-powered planes and jets). Rolls is
adapting a conventionally powered turboprop aircraft,
the P2012, with the aim of putting an electric version
called the P-Volt into service in the next five years.
It has joined forces with Tecnam, an Italian airframe
maker, and Wideroe, a Norwegian operator, to boost
its efforts. “The P-Volt would carry four to twelve
people a couple of hundred nautical miles,” says Rob
Watson, director of Rolls-Royce Electrical. “As [battery]
cell chemistry improves over the next ten to fifteen
years that range will get further and the payload will get
larger. It’s a bit like electric cars. The first version of the
electric car maybe had a range of 40 miles. Now you
can have an electric car with a range of 300 miles and
you can see how that will reach to 600 miles in the next
couple of iterations of battery. It will be the same
principle for aircraft.”
To demonstrate the potential, Rolls-Royce is at the
time of going to press preparing an attempt on the
electric airspeed record, which stands at 212mph. Its
plane is the Spirit of Innovation, powered by three
electric motors and 6,000 battery cells with a combined
weight only the same as the engine and fuel tank of a
conventional aircraft. “I’m just excited to see what the
full potential of the technology is,” Watson says.
Rolls-Royce’s closest rival may be Heart Aerospace,
based in Gothenburg, which also says it is five years
BARRY J. BRADY
from putting into service a 19-seat battery-powered
passenger plane called ES-19. The plane will look and
feel like a normal aircraft, but in place of four turboprop
The all-electric engines under the wings there will be four electric
eBeaver commuter power units called nacelles — packing the battery
seaplane, created equivalent of “eight Tesla cars”, according to Anders
by the airline Forslund, the CEO. Forslund acknowledges that it
Harbour Air, based may take further advances in battery technology to
in Vancouver achieve his goals, and is anticipating breakthroughs
by the time his planes are ready to fly. The company
recently won advance orders for 200 electric planes
from two big American carriers, United Airlines and
Mesa Airlines. Once the world’s largest operator of
19-seater aircraft, Mesa shut down many of its routes
connecting American towns and cities when the cost
of keeping its fleet of turboprops in the air lost out to
cheaper car travel. The company aims to revive its
service with electric planes.
Scenting opportunity, investors are showering
start-ups such as Heart with cash. With initial help
from the Swedish government, Heart has to date
secured more than $35 million in venture capital from
backers including Y Combinator — a Silicon Valley
start-up “accelerator” noted for helping Airbnb get
going — and Breakthrough Energy, a climate fund
started by Bill Gates.
Y Combinator is backing another hopeful, Wright
Electric, named after the pioneering brothers. The
company, based in Albany, New York, has partnered
with the budget airline easyJet with the aim of
producing an electric engine for a 186-seater plane.
“THERE HAS Test flights are due in 2023 before the Wright 1 plane
takes to the skies commercially in 2030. In theory it will
BEEN A LOT OF be able to fly for about an hour, suitable for short hops
such as London to Paris or Amsterdam. About 40 per
TALK ABOUT cent of global aviation emissions are said to come
FLYING CARS from short-haul journeys. Johan Lundgren, easyJet’s
chief executive, declared: “It is exciting to see their
BUT THEY [Wright Electric’s] ambitious timeline for testing and
ARE TOO
entry into service.”
Ambitious is a word that often crops up in electric
EXPENSIVE. aviation. Depending on your viewpoint, it can mean
visionary or improbable, with some projects veering
ELECTRIC towards the latter. Boscarol warns that the Electro
PLANES GIVE succeeded where grander projects stalled because
bigger is much, much harder, and may be beyond the
YOU FREEDOM
reach of current battery technology. For an electric
aircraft to travel significantly further and carry more
OF THE SKIES” passengers, Boscarol believes it will need to
The Sunday Times Magazine • 37
 store hydrogen on board to power fuel cells. It’s a proven
technology, used in electric cars such as Toyota’s Mirai
and Hyundai’s Nexo. ZeroAvia, a British-American
aircraft developer, is already working on the idea and
believes by 2026 (five years is a popular time horizon)
it will be able to fly an 80-seat aircraft over 500 miles
using hydrogen fuel cells.
Boscarol is planning his own hydrogen-electric plane
called the Miniliner, with a 20-seat capacity. Thinking
big is what gives him the energy to put in 16-hour days.
“I’m one of not a lot of people in this crazy world who
can say that hobby is business and business is hobby.
So I’m waking up in the morning at 5am and I’m going
to sleep late in the evening and I’m all day on holiday.
What privilege I have.”
He laughs at the suggestion he’s reaching retirement
altitude and will be forced to level off. “I’m nearly 66 but
I say I’m three times 22. Our next aircraft will be capable
of flying 500-600 kilometres [about 310-370 miles].
Before long there will be no need any more to buy
aircraft that are noisy and polluting. If you see our Earth
from space, you will see a tiny blue belt around it: that’s
our atmosphere. This should be the first target of
A
everybody, to take care of the atmosphere.”
t 1,500ft I ease back the throttle of the
Electro — which is more like a hi-fi volume
control than a conventional stick. The
propeller spools down to a gentle hum.
It’s so quiet in the cockpit I can remove
my headset and chat to my instructor.
Mahajan explains the decibel level is
70 per cent less than a conventional aircraft
— one of its big advantages. While the big planemakers
are looking ahead to a world of international travel
using zero-emissions planes, he’s looking down at the
patchwork of grass airstrips below. There are about
680 small airfields dotted around Britain. Electric
planes offer the prospect of reviving these as local hubs
to feed bigger airports, easing traffic congestion and
parking problems around overcrowded airports such
as Heathrow.
So far only eight airfields are equipped to recharge
battery-powered aircraft such as the Electro. The
furthest flyers can travel is from Popham in Hampshire
to Wickenby in Lincolnshire. Installing more chargers
will enable commuters to hop between airfields, as well
as providing a low-cost service to remote communities
such as those in Scotland and the Scillies. It’s a
RUTH TOWELL FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE
Above: Sergey challenge not unlike developing a network of fast
Gratchev and chargers for electric cars on Britain’s roads.
Celeste Goschen are There are other benefits. Many older airfields are at
launching Britain’s the edge of suburban sprawl. Planes like the Electro are
first electric airline, likely to attract fewer objections on noise grounds.
NEBO Air. Below: the There are plans for Britain’s first electric airline,
Vertical Aerospace NEBO Air. Passengers who want to experience electric
air taxi could be up flying will, for a modest outlay of £150, embark on a
and running by 2025 two-stage flight in an Electro from Damyns Hall to
Great Oakley in Essex — to stop for a coffee and battery
recharge — and then on to a private airstrip in Suffolk.
Sergey Gratchev and Celeste Goschen, two pilots who
met during flight training, aim to begin the service
next year. For an extra £150, passengers will be able
to stay overnight at the couple’s farm in a yurt or
treehouse. Clearly it’s for eco-pioneers not passengers
in a hurry. But cheap-to-operate electric planes could
mean a renaissance in commuting by air, recalling the
halcyon days of aviation in the 1930s and 1940s, when
small planes shuttled between local landing strips and
flying boats took off from stretches of open water such
as Poole Harbour.
“There’s a lot of talk about flying cars, but they’re
always just around the corner and never arrive because
they’re too impractical and expensive,” Mahajan says.
“The future is already here. Electric planes give you
freedom of the skies.”
Buckminster Fuller, the American philosopher and
inventor, famously argued it was unrealistic “to
change things by fighting the existing reality”. Better,
he said, “to build a new model that makes the existing
model obsolete”.
Electric aircraft will succeed by being cheaper
and more versatile than their combustion-driven
counterparts. Already the operating cost is falling. The
Electro’s two battery packs, one in front of the cockpit,
the other behind, must be replaced after 2,000 cycles
(take-off and landings), roughly every four years.
Currently that interval and cost — $20,000 — is
roughly the same as a 2,000 hours engine overhaul on
a piston-powered light aircraft. As the price of batteries
drops further it will give planes like the Electro an
overwhelming economic advantage, Mahajan believes.
“Piston-engine aircraft are costly because there are
so many moving parts to maintain. The only
components of the Electro that wear out are the main
bearings, cooling pumps, door hinges and tyres,” he says
proudly. “I’ve been flying for half a century. This is the
biggest thing to happen in aviation in my lifetime.” n
The Sunday Times Magazine • 39
 “I thought I knew
what care was.
I didn’t”
Ed Balls, whose mother suffers from severe dementia, spent
two weeks working in a care home to understand the gruelling
reality faced by staff. He tells Caroline Scott how it affected him

Right: Ed Balls with Phyllis, a 94-year-old care home resident

 E
d Balls, former shadow chancellor of the
exchequer, is wearing a plastic apron and
mopping up a puddle of wee. Politics is a
messy business, but this is something else.
He has incontinence pads to change,
endless mush to spoon into open mouths
and dentures (not his own) to clean. He’s
working a 12-hour shift in a Scarborough
care home. “Do you know who I am?” he
asks one of the elderly residents who
momentarily seems to recognise the name.
“No, not really,” comes the reply.
We’ve watched Balls gyrate to a Gangnam
Style salsa (BBC’s Strictly Come Dancing),
squeeze himself into a red wrestling leotard
(Travels in Trumpland) and win Celebrity
Best Home Cook. Now he has taken on a less
glamorous, far more arduous challenge:
working in social care looking after the old
and frail — and he’s distinctly out of his
comfort zone.
For a new documentary, Inside the Care
Crisis with Ed Balls, he spent two weeks
living and working in two care homes, one
a specialist dementia home, operated by a
family-run company called Saint Cecilia’s.
He accompanied a domiciliary care worker
on 16 home visits in one 14-hour day, and
spent another day with an unpaid carer,
Derek, who has looked after his wife,
Margaret, 70, on his own since she was
diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2018. Balls
arrived at 7am, in time to help Margaret get
PREVIOUS PAGES: CHARLIE CLIFT FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE, STUART WOOD / BBC
“The trust-building required me to be fully
committed. What I can’t do is recoil in
horror, because this is the job,” he says.
On his first morning he went straight
into personal care. Phyllis, 94, of sound
mind but trapped in a body that no longer
works, grumbles plaintively “I don’t like
this old age …” as he fumbles about washing
and then applying cream to her legs. He’s
absolutely lovely with her, cheerful and
courteous to a fault but clearly rattled.
“I hadn’t felt nervous like that for a long
time,” he admits. “I’d never in my life put
cream on the legs and feet of a 94-year-old
lady. Her skin was so delicate, like paper …
But I was also thinking, how can I do this in
a way that’s respectful to her? I so badly
wanted to get it right.”
So much of caring turned out to be about
choice and agency — which he hadn’t
expected. Phyllis likes to wear petticoats.
“I genuinely didn’t know what one was,” he
says. “I’m on my hands and knees, searching
through her underwear drawer trying to
make this OK for her. She says, ‘Second
drawer, Ed.’ Finally I pull something out,
I don’t know what it is, but she’s happy and Ed Balls as a boy with his mother, Carolyn,
we put it on. The truth is, at this point, she who developed dementia in her seventies
has taken charge of the situation. And that and now lives in a specialist care home
was the learning. Even with extreme
dementia there’s always choice; it may take
an hour to feed someone from a spoon —
you stroke and support, but you never
coerce — because the decision to eat is
always theirs.”
Balls went into all this thinking about Carolyn began to show symptoms of
his own mum. Carolyn, 82, has advanced dementia more than ten years ago. “We
dementia and has been in a specialist were having the same conversations with
dementia care home near Norwich for her again and again, but if we ever raised
three years, funded by the family. her failing memory with her, we were
“She is quite difficult to handle, because dismissed crossly,” he says. His mother,
understandably she doesn’t like anyone always a proud and skilled cook, brought
doing anything to her or for her,” he says. chicken casseroles, once cooked to
“If a nurse said, ‘Can I take your blood perfection, to the table raw. The pasta in
pressure?’ She’d say, ‘Take your own her signature lasagne was forgotten. He
blood pressure.’ Mum and Dad were describes poignantly in Appetite, his memoir
intensely private people, they never had and cookbook published this summer, how
anyone in the house, never even had a she would become upset and angry when
cleaner. They did everything themselves for he tried to take over cooking Sunday lunch.
years and years.” “Strangely, while her dementia was
The only personal care he remembers increasingly bad, she could be razor sharp
Carolyn submitting to was her weekly and ultra resistant to attempts to divert her

out of bed. “It was so intense, so draining,
so claustrophobically isolating — and
ultimately just too much for any person,”
he says. “Derek was so proud, he considered
it his job to care for his wife, but no one can
do this for ever, it’s not fair. We have to be
there when he falls.”
For his work at Saint Cecilia’s he
underwent in-house training, which
included having his own teeth cleaned by
a carer and having yoghurt spooned into
his mouth, an experience he found horrific”.
Perhaps with this in mind, in the film he
soothes and cajoles the residents with
warmth and humour — and dances the
twist in the lounge. The hardest thing, he
says, was to stop himself from recoiling.
shampoo and set: Elnett hairspray is the
smell of his childhood. He leaps up and
produces a miniature can from his bag.
Whenever he’s in TV hair and make-up he
asks for it. “Not because I need it,” he says,
“but because it’s so evocative of my mum.”
“I’d never put cream
on the legs and feet of a
94-year-old lady. I was
thinking, how can I do
it respectfully? I so
wanted to get it right”
attention,” he says. “This kind of active,
high-functioning dementia is incredibly
difficult to deal with.”
His biggest regret is that he and his
siblings — his sister, Joanna, and brother,
Andrew — couldn’t get Carolyn to
acknowledge what was going on while she
still had the capacity to understand. “But
she was strong and proud and private,
I don’t think she’d have ever felt able to
face up to it. My greatest source of guilt,
and I know lots of families feel this, is over
whether we delayed for too long, trying to
find ways to meet her needs at home.”
Inevitably there was a crisis and a
scramble to find a solution. Carolyn had
started to leave her house in

The Sunday Times Magazine • 43

Norwich to search for her long-dead parents.
He remembers a fraught conversation in
2018 with Jo. “I was on a stopover at
Singapore airport. My brother was in
California. Jo was in Nottingham and we
were trying to work out what we could do
that afternoon because my father could
no longer cope. Pretty much every family
who has gone through this will remember
the crisis, then when [things] stabilise, you
look back and think, surely we could have
done better earlier? Part of the problem
is that there are periods of complexity,
then periods of relative lucidity when you
think things are OK. No one knows who to
ask or what to do.”
Balls, 54, grew up in Nottingham; his
father, Michael, an eminent zoologist,
felt the head of the local comprehensive
“didn’t have any ambition for its pupils”
and scrimped to educate his children
privately. All were academically gifted.
Ed graduated from Oxford with a first in
politics, philosophy and economics and
went straight to Harvard on a Kennedy
scholarship. He began working for Gordon
Brown when he was 27 and by the time
he was 32 was chief economic adviser to
the Treasury and one of the inner circle
shaping New Labour.
His overwhelming feeling during filming
was, why didn’t we [the Labour government]
sort all this out when we were in power?
While New Labour increased spending on
adult social care, demand still outstripped
supply as the number of people living
beyond 80 steadily rose.
The second wave of guilt hit him harder.
“It was the realisation that I thought I knew
what care was, and I didn’t. The fact is,
either as a family member or an MP, I never
got close to comprehending the intensity
of the job.”
F
rank, a 90-year-old resident
at Saint Cecilia’s with
advanced dementia, can be
unpredictable; caring for him
requires endless patience.
When he’s relaxed he’s
delightful; but even in skilled hands he’s
apt to inflict pain, albeit unintentionally,
on his carers.
“How many people go to work and get
punched and bruised for £9.30 an hour?”
Balls asks incredulously. I tell him my
psychology graduate daughter has just left
a job as a therapeutic carer working with
children who have suffered unimaginable
neglect and sexual abuse. She was bitten
and bruised on an almost daily basis for
£9.14 an hour, less than her 17-year-old
brother’s Saturday job as a kitchen porter.
But it wasn’t the bruises that broke her,
it was the lack of support — if she had been
valued and able to see a future she might
have stayed.
How we care for the most vulnerable in
society is all too often deemed lowly,
44 • The Sunday Times Magazine
Right: Balls with
Gordon Brown in
1997. Far right:
responding to
George Osborne’s
autumn statement
in 2013. Below:
with Yvette on
their wedding day,
January 1998.
Below right: his
cake-making skills
prove handy in
a care home
unskilled labour, until it is brought sharply
to our attention when workers are caught
on camera behaving abusively, or elderly
residents die from Covid for want of PPE.
The result is a vital service about which we
know little, staffed by people who feel
desperately unappreciated. “We’re nothing
are we?” one exhausted Saint Cecilia’s carer
laments tearfully in the film.
There is a pivotal moment when Balls
asks the team leader Alison, who looks after
her charges with infinite love and respect,
what she would say to him if he were prime
minister. “I’d say look after me better
because you’re going to need me one day
— or I won’t be wiping your bum when you
do,” she replies.
Average care home pay was just £9.01
an hour in 2020, according to Skills for
Care, which collects workforce data. The
National Care Association, which
represents independent care homes, says
170,000 staff posts across England are
unfilled; meanwhile, nearly 300,000
people are on waiting lists for adult care
services. Even with the national minimum
wage scheduled to rise to £9.50 in April,
“I’d shout across the
Commons. It wasn’t
a good way to do
politics. It was in the
context of a macho
style of leadership”
care homes will face stiff competition
for staff. Amazon currently offers new
warehouse workers a joining bonus of
£1,000 and an hourly rate of £11.10. But
overstretched local authorities don’t
have the budgets to pay more to care
homes. The Association of Directors of
Adult Social Services believes we are on
the edge of an unprecedented crisis. The
government’s decision that, from this
month, care home workers must be
vaccinated may also hit recruitment.
The 14-hour day Balls spent with John,
a dedicated domiciliary carer, plays on
his mind. “His pay equates to £6 an hour
because he isn’t paid for the time it takes
to drive to each patient.” Did it make
you feel ashamed? “It’s wrong and it’s not
fair,” he says. “If you work for the NHS
[where auxiliary nurses are paid about
£7,000 a year more than care workers]
there is training and you move up bands,
which gives you status and mobility,”
he says. “We should all want a less
fragmented service. At the moment there
are thousands of different providers across
the country operating in any number of
different ways.”
About 95 per cent of the UK’s 17,500 care
homes are privately owned. Some 41 per
cent of their 400,000 residents — those
with assets, including the value of their
homes, over £23,250 (£28,750 in Scotland,
£50,000 in Wales) — pay the costs of care
themselves. The average fee is £704 a week.
The remainder receive funding from their
local authorities. Boris Johnson has pledged
that from October 2023 no one will pay
more than £86,000 for their care costs over

their lifetime, though they will still have to
pay for food and accommodation.
The government’s recent tax rise to pay
for health and social care will raise £12
billion a year, but Balls points out that much
of it is earmarked for the NHS. Despite
pledges from No 10 to “fix social care”, there
still seems no clear plan for the system.
Balls met his wife, Yvette Cooper, the MP
for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford
since 1997, when they shared an office at the
Treasury. Intellectually his equal, she also
has a first from Oxford and was a Kennedy
scholar — they bonded over a shared love of
harmonising to Elvis and Friday-night fish
and chips. Six months later she moved into
his flat in Dalston, east London.
There was a period when they both held
cabinet posts, she as secretary of state for
work and pensions, he as secretary of state
for children, schools and families, while
their children (Ellie, now 22, Joe, 20, and
Maddy, 17) were all under eight. It was one
of the most challenging times of their lives,
but they are a couple who pull together.
He asks Cooper on camera: “Maybe we
should make a plan for this [old age]?” “No,”
she says. “Because it’s impossible to know
what we’ll need.” Balls ventures that the
truth is she just doesn’t want to think
about it. None of us does, which is a large
part of the problem. People don’t plan and
the government struggles to pay.
Balls likes the idea of being cared for
at home. “What, with me doing the
caring?” Cooper asks, aghast. He seems
tenderly bemused by her shameless
domestic slovenliness. “It’s not that she
turns a blind eye to mess, she just doesn’t
see it. She’s like a snail, you know where she
has been because she leaves a trail.”
It’s the reason he has been chief food
shopper, cook and bottle-washer since
ANDREW HASSON, SEAN DEMPSEY, PA
their first child was born. Cooper sensibly
abdicated the role and Balls, a natural carer
and feeder, was more than happy to take
over. His birthday cakes, she says, are
legendary. His children think he overeggs
the domestic goddess bit, but he’s clearly
proud of the role. He was doing the family
food shop in Castleford Asda on April 28,
2011, when, searching for mentions of
himself, he accidentally tweeted his name
instead. The Twittersphere responded
mightily, retweeting and liking the gaffe
thousands of times. Its unintentional comic
genius is still being celebrated a decade
later as #EdBallsDay. He always plays along.
It would be hard to find a more genial
man. Yet back in the day when Brown and
the spin doctors Damian McBride and
Charlie Whelan roamed HM Treasury,
Balls inspired loyalty and enmity in equal
measure. His nickname was “the Bruiser”.
“New Labour consisted almost entirely of
men and I think we were probably a bit
young-punky-male,” he says. “No 10 was
trying to throw its weight around, I was
considered a hard guy because the Treasury
had the temerity to push back.”
His stammer didn’t help. “It took me a
long time to come out about it. I got a lot of
abuse and aggression during parliamentary
questions when I paused. The only way to
deal with that was to stick out my chin and
fight on.”
David Cameron described him in 2011
as “the most annoying person in modern
politics”. “Cameron was always on the
attack during Prime Minister’s Questions,”
Balls sniffs. “There was this Flashman
swagger. But the thing I worked out was
that you could really needle him. I’d shout
across to George Osborne, ‘He doesn’t
know the answers!’ And Cameron would
At home he has been
chief food shopper,
cook and bottle-
washer since his
and Yvette Cooper’s
first child was born
get angrier and angrier. I don’t look back on
this as an edifying period in my life and I
don’t think it was a good way to do politics.
It happened in the context of a very macho
style of leadership.”
In a screeching reversal of fortune his
political career turned to dust in 2015 as the
election results landed in the early hours of
May 8. He found himself not only without
a ministerial position — he’d been a shoo-in
for chancellor if Labour had won — but
seatless. He lost to his Conservative rival in
the constituency of Morley and Outwood
by 422 votes.
His brother, Andrew, is a fund manager.
I wonder why he didn’t automatically take
the more lucrative and well-trodden route
into consultancy work. “It’s not clear how
useful you are when you come out of
politics,” he says vaguely. But Ed, it doesn’t
matter how useful you are, they’ll pay you
anyway! He wrinkles his nose. “I just didn’t
want to do that stuff.”
In the dark days following Labour’s defeat
he challenged himself to run a five-hour
marathon and pass Grade 8 piano by the
time he was 50. He didn’t manage either,
though not for want of trying. “I was a slow
runner and I’ve taken my Grade 4 piano
exam. A good midlife crisis doesn’t require
you to be the best at things,” he says evenly.
He’s ten years in and clearly still enjoying
the ride. His mother regularly watches his
Strictly dances on YouTube and rolls her eyes.
And he often gets emails from strangers
saying things like,“When I’m feeling a bit
low I watch Gangnam Style …” He smiles:
“Honestly, it was worth doing for that alone.”
He’s picky about work. “There has to be
resonance,” he says. If he’d been asked to do
a Panorama-style report on care homes, he
wouldn’t have accepted. “But if you go and
spend time with people and really listen,
you start to see truths.”
He feels strongly that even with advanced
dementia life still has value. “Thinking that
euthanasia is the way to plan for old age is
fraught with danger. I don’t want to live in
a society where older people feel under
pressure to end their lives to make things
easier for their families. Old age is a natural
process and we’re better off supporting it
and recognising its humanity rather than
thinking there is an easy way to circumvent
it. If our film does anything good, I hope it
humanises dementia and shows that there
can be a meaningful end of life.”
The last scene involves Ed, 79-year-old
Betty, a wheelchair and a bag of doughnuts.
“I won’t spoil it for you, but she laughed
afterwards for an hour straight,” he says,
delighted. “What I wanted was to grasp the
funny and the human and the touching and
make us all think about what our future
might look like. It feels like a different way
of doing what I used to do before.” n
Inside the Care Crisis with Ed Balls, BBC2,
tomorrow at 9pm
The Sunday Times Magazine • 45
 I SPY
WITH MY
BEADY
EYE

The feathers of splendid

starlings, from sub-Saharan
Africa, reflect different
wavelengths of light at
a microscopic level,
making them shimmer
The avian world in
high-definition,
captured by the
renowned wildlife
photographer
Tim Flach
 The roseate spoonbill,
found in the Americas,
hunts by sweeping its
flat beak through
shallow water

T he photographer Tim Flach is

known for his bold and beautiful
images of animals, from dogs and
horses to the planet’s most endangered
species. For his latest project he focused
on birds — 125 species of them. Flach
primarily shot his subjects in purpose-
built aviaries at his London studio,
with ponds, tanks and perches
installed. Most were captive bred, from
zoos and private collections. “When
I began this project my intention was
to explore the beauty and wonderment
of birds,” says Flach, who hopes his
images will encourage conservation
efforts to help reverse declining
populations. “They are set against
simple backgrounds to focus on the
details and illustrate their
morphological diversity, and heighten
our sense of empathy. Connecting
The king vulture, people to the natural world has never
found in Central and been more important.” n
South America, has Birds by Tim Flach is published on
a distinct fleshy Thursday by Abrams at £45
wattle on its beak
 The ocellated turkey,
found in Mexico, Belize
and Guatemala, is
known for its brightly
coloured facial nodules
 The dazzling
stripy plumage
of the east African
vulturine guineafowl
 The spectacled owl,
found in Central and
South America,
has excellent
night vision

A drake wood
An emu, duck, one of the
native to most colourful
Australia North American
waterfowl
 How to beat the
Health
“super-cold”
The common cold’s back and it’s a monster! Or is it? Social distancing
has softened us up, so here’s how to boost your immune response
Adam Kay
C olds are called common for a
reason, and it’s not because
they don’t know which piece of
cutlery to eat avocado with
— we’ve suffered our way through
dozens of them in the past. But
52 • The Sunday Times Magazine
now, if the papers are to be
believed, we’re in the grip of a
monster one. Never before in
the history of the nose has a cold
been so merciless, reducing
bodybuilders to cowering
apologies for weeks on end. The
super-cold has arrived.
Except … has it? Or is it the
same old movie with a few added
special effects? The pandemic
hasn’t just changed the way we
live, it’s also changed how we feel
ill. A year and half of reduced
contact with others means our
body hasn’t been exposed to the
usual seasonal nasties that like to
have a crack at us. Think about it:
you can usually expect to have
two or three colds a year, with
kids often getting eight. So inured
were we to the sniffles, we’d treat
them like a minor inconvenience.
Generally, we’d soldier on,
trudging into work to infect our
colleagues, like a corporate version
of the chicken-pox “parties” our
parents used to subject us to
as children.
Lockdown was a chastity belt
that stopped viruses from
breeding, and among the general

misery of Covid, one very minor
win was the fact that most of us
skipped our regular winter colds.
Now we’re back together,
chatting, hugging and doing all
the things that allow viruses to
skip between us like biological
hopscotch. But us hosts are rather
rusty when it comes to feeling the
effects of the common cold.
Bored, out of practice and, dare
I say, a little out of condition, your
immune system is chucking
everything at this cold, which is
why you might feel so ill — a lot of
your symptoms are just your
immune system getting to work.
ILLUSTRATIONS BY JESSICA SHARVILLE
Only this time it has basically
found a spider in the bath and
decided to chuck an anvil at it.
The cold, however, is the same as
it ever was.
So how can you treat it? Well,
first of all check that you’ve
actually got a cold, not Covid. The
Delta variant doesn’t necessarily
subscribe to the traditional Covid
symptoms, so that sore throat
might in fact have your PCR test
lighting up like a Christmas tree.
But even if it’s not Covid, no one is
going to thank you for giving it to
them — take some time off work,
or at least don’t go into the office.
Rest up, drink plenty of fluids, take
over-the-counter painkillers and
grab a decongestant nasal spray
that might help you sleep better at
night. Cover your mouth when
you cough, you disgusting
monster, wash your hands like
Lockdown was a
chastity belt that
stopped viruses
from breeding
among the general
misery of Covid
you’re Lady Macbeth, and chuck
away used tissues — no hankies
up the sleeve or in the coat pocket,
thanks. Eat well, get plenty of
SNOT A LOT sleep and, once again, stay away
from other people. If you have no
6 to 8 option but to head out in public,
then mask up.
Oh yeah, masks work. They
colds are caught by might be as popular among the
children in an average Tory front bench as lie-detector
year (it’s two to four tests, but masks really do work.
for adults) They’re cheap, they’re easy to use,
BMJ 2018 they have minimal impact on your
life, but they will decrease the
odds of giving someone near you
a respiratory infection. You don’t
know whether or not the person
next to you on the bus is just back
from their chemo appointment,
so just assume that they are.
Facemasks also help you — the
ONS recently found that people
who never wear one are 59 per cent
more likely to contract Covid-19.
And look, even if you don’t believe
in them and think that Covid is a
conspiracy started by the lizard
people then it’s just a simple
matter of respect and courtesy to
those around you with normal IQs.
If you can get hold of one, a high
filtration mask like the N95 or
FFP2 is the most effective,
followed by surgical masks, then
any non-surgical masks. Layering
up cloth masks or using an
additional filter can also help
boost protection against the
swathe of viruses doing the
rounds during the winter months,
from Covid to colds to the flu.
The flu hasn’t gone away in the
past 18 months, I’m afraid to say.
It has just been on a mini-break,
mourning the lack of bodies to
screw over. This year is set to be a
particularly awful vintage, putting
the NHS under further enormous
strain and predicted to kill around
60,000 people.
If you’re mulling over whether
to get a flu jab, don’t mull, get it.
(See also: if you’re mulling over
whether to get the Covid-19
vaccination, get it. If you’re
mulling over whether your kids
should get it, they should. If
you’re pregnant or considering
pregnancy and mulling over
whether to get the Covid
vaccination, absolutely get it —
currently one in six occupants of
an ICU bed with Covid is
pregnant.) Flu jabs are available
free to over half the country
— including people over 50, kids
under 11, health and social care
workers and those at clinical risk.
It won’t do battle with your
super-cold, sadly, but this will be
our first winter with flu and
coronavirus running rampant
alongside each other. There is still
quite a lot we don’t know, but two
very serious respiratory illnesses
out cavorting among the hordes
isn’t likely to be the heart-warming
Christmas romance beloved of
film channels. According to the
Health Security Agency chief,
Dr Jenny Harries, early evidence
suggests you’re twice as likely to
die from having flu and Covid-19
at the same time, rather than just
Covid alone. All things being
equal, your vaccination centre
should be able to save you a bus
fare and give you a flu shot at the
same time as your Covid booster.
With Covid and the flu
hopefully off the cards, the cold
should be the worst thing your
white blood cells find themselves
up against this year. Still no fun,
but at least it’s an excuse — should
you need one — to stay in bed and
eat your favourite comfort food n
Kay’s Marvellous Medicine by
Adam Kay is published by Puffin
at £14.99
The Sunday Times Magazine • 53

The Dish
SHARE AND SAVE
You can share and
save recipes from
our digital editions
56 • The Sunday Times Magazine
Can’t tolerate gluten? No problem. There are plenty of alternatives
Cakes don’t need
flour power
Photographs by Aaron Graubert
Candice Brown
I always love it when I can bake
something everyone can enjoy.
I love it even more when it’s
something that doesn’t have the
“made without” or “free from”
label. It sounds like you’re missing
out on the fun and flavour, as if
your cake is second grade.
I’ve experimented with vegan
cakes and dairy-free pastry, but
gluten-free baking is something
that a lot of people still find tricky.
Admittedly, gluten is the magic
that sticks everything together,
so baking without can be a bit
of a challenge. Will your cake be
crumbly? How do you stop it
becoming too dry? What it really
comes down to is what you replace
your wheat with.
I have plenty of delicious cake
recipes in my book that are
gluten-free not because I wanted
them to be but because they use
different building blocks such as
polenta, ground almonds or olive
oil instead. It’s actually very easy to
avoid wheat flour altogether.
Polenta is an incredibly versatile
Italian cornmeal that’s used in
savoury and sweet recipes, from
muffins to stews. It also adds a
lovely yellowy colour to your
cooking. The one thing to
remember is that it can make a
cake slightly dry, which is why it
works so well in cakes drenched in
sticky, sweet drizzles and syrups.
Traditionalists will say to use
classic polenta, which you need to
cook in boiling water for almost an
hour, but I’ve never had a problem
with instant. You can barely taste
the difference and it saves stirring
away. To avoid lumpy polenta,
don’t dump it all in the water but
slowly and steadily pour it in.
Ground nuts are another flour
alternative I use a lot in baking.
When I realised I could use ground
almonds I thought, why not blitz
down hazelnuts or pistachios
in the same way? You end up
with a blend that has a similar
consistency but you’ve unlocked
a completely different flavour
and colour. Ultimately it’s about
experimenting with your options,
which is part of the fun of baking.
1
Blackberry,
white chocolate
and sea salt
flourless
brownies
These are hands down the best
brownies I have ever made. They
are insanely gooey. You’d have no
idea these were gluten free. Don’t
panic if the middle is still wobbly
when you take them out of the
oven — they’ll firm up. Make
sure they’re fully cool before
you remove them from the tin,
otherwise you’ll be scooping
them up with a spoon.
MAKES
9 squares
INGREDIENTS
200g dark chocolate
(at least 70 per cent cocoa solids),
roughly broken
150g butter
200g caster sugar
3 eggs
100g ground almonds
200g fresh blackberries
150g white chocolate chips
01 Heat the oven to 180C
(160C non-fan). Line a 4cm-
deep, 20 x 20cm cake tin with
greaseproof paper.
02 Set a heatproof bowl over a
saucepan of simmering water,
being careful not to let the water
touch the bottom of the bowl,
and melt together the chocolate
and butter until smooth and
combined.
03 Remove from the heat and
set aside for 10 min while you
do the next bit.
04 Using a free-standing electric
mixer or an electric hand mixer,
whisk together the sugar and
eggs until thick and pale and
the mixture holds its shape
for a couple of seconds on
the surface.
 ARON GRAUBART. FOOD STYLING: LUCY GRAUBART

The Sunday Times Magazine • 57

05 Turn down the speed and
pour in the butter and chocolate.
Mix until combined. Fold through
the ground almonds then fold
through the blackberries and
white chocolate chips.

06 Pour the mixture into the

tin and sprinkle on a good pinch of
sea salt flakes. Bake for 25-30 min
until just cooked.

07 Remove from the oven

and leave to cool for 5 min
before transferring to the fridge
to set. Cut into big squares
before serving.

2
Orange and
hazelnut
polenta cake
This cake is beautifully buttery
and dense. There’s a proper
citrussy kick too, but it’s not
too sour because the orange is
mellow and sweet. The syrup
is devilishly sticky — you won’t
be able to resist it.

SERVES
10 people
INGREDIENTS
250g light brown soft sugar
250g unsalted butter
4 large eggs
175g polenta
175g ground hazelnuts (you can
toast then blitz your own)
1 tsp baking powder
(gluten-free if necessary)
Zest and juice of 1 large orange
Zest of 1 lemon
Candied orange slices and whipped
cream, to decorate

For the syrup
Juice of 1 large orange
Juice of 1 lemon
75ml Cointreau
50g golden caster sugar
01 Heat the oven to 160C fan
(180C non-fan).
02 In a large bowl beat together
the sugar and butter until light
and fluffy. Add the eggs one at
a time and beat well in between.
Add the polenta, ground
hazelnuts, baking powder, zests,
orange juice and a pinch of salt
and mix together until combined.
03 Lightly grease and line the
bottom of a 25cm springform
round tin. Pour in the mixture
and smooth the top. Bake in the
oven for 30-40 min until firm
to touch and a knife comes out just
about clean. Remove but leave in
the tin while you prepare the syrup.
04 Heat the orange and lemon
juice, Cointreau and sugar in
a small saucepan over a low
heat. Allow the sugar to dissolve
and bubble until you have a
hot syrup.

The Sunday Times Magazine • 59

05 Poke holes all over the still-
warm cake and slowly pour the
hot syrup over, allowing all juices
to soak in. Allow to cool for about
20-30 min in the tin.

06 Once the cake has cooled,

remove from the tin. Decorate
with dried orange slices and serve
with whipped cream.

3
Ginger and
lime tarta de
Santiago
I made this tart for my friend José
Pizarro’s birthday this year. It’s
incredibly easy to whip up and
is just one layer of moist, dense,
delicious zesty sponge. I’ve played
around with the traditional
flavours by adding ginger instead
of cinnamon, which might
surprise people, but it works here.

SERVES
8 people
INGREDIENTS
250g golden caster sugar
Zest of 2 limes
6 eggs, separated
250g ground almonds.
1 tsp amaretto or other
almond liqueur
½ tsp ground ginger
50g toasted flaked almonds
Icing sugar to finish

01 Heat the oven to 150C

(170C non-fan) and line and
grease a 28cm springform
cake tin with oil.

02 Using electric beaters or a

wooden spoon and some serious
elbow grease, beat together 175g of
the caster sugar, the lime zest and
egg yolks until light and fluffy.
Then stir in the ground almonds,
amaretto and ginger.
03 In a clean and dry separate
bowl, using either a free-standing
electric mixer or electric hand
whisk, whip the egg whites with
the remaining 75g sugar until stiff
and holding their shape. Fold
a quarter of the egg whites into
the thick almond mixture. Once
incorporated continue adding and
folding a quarter at a time, trying
to keep in as much air as possible.
04 Carefully pour the mixture
into the greased tin, level out
and bake in the heated oven
for 35-40 min.
05 Remove from the oven and
allow to cool before gently
removing from the tin. Sprinkle
with the flaked almonds.
06 For a traditional finish, cut
out a stencil of the St James
cross and lay this on top of the
cooled cake before dusting with
icing sugar. Remove the stencil
before serving n

The Sunday Times Magazine • 61

Table Talk
This old bird still soars above
a legion of gastropub copycats
The Eagle
Farringdon
Marina O’Loughlin
F rom the top deck of the bus
I spot a legend painted on the
Eagle’s windows: 30 years. How
can this possibly be? I remember
being blown away by this most
influential of boozers not long
after it first opened, and I’m only
23. Thirty years? You could knock
me down with a featherblade.
Seems I’m not the 23 I think
I am. And the Eagle today has aged
far more imperceptibly than I
have: it’s exactly as I remember.
I nearly write “perhaps a bit more
159 Farringdon Road, scuffed around the edges”, but it
London EC1R 3AL; was always scuffed around the
020 7837 1353, edges. Michael Belben, the
theeaglefarringdon. original owner (with chef David
co.uk Eyre), is still working the floor,
ever puckish and with his own
brand of eccentric mine-hosting:
I ask for a wine recommendation,
which, though given, comes
with “I’ve no idea, I’m not allowed
to drink any more.” At the mildly
chaotic bar — where food is
ordered and paid for, no tabs — his
style is best described as laconic,
requests acknowledged with a
mildly dismissive wave. His bar,
though. After 30 years, having
started off handing out flyers
down the Farringdon Road to
publicise his fledgling business,
I reckon he can do what he likes.
Here it still is in its bare-boned
beauty. The food still delivering
“Big Flavours and Rough Edges”
— their first cookbook, a title
filched from an early review by
Jonathan Meades. So cuttlefish
stew with peppers, thyme,
potatoes and chickpeas defines
“no looker”. But it’s satisfaction
in a terracotta cazuela, the
seafood mochi-tender, the broth
abundantly seasoned and herbed,
soaking wholeheartedly into
the spuds and pulses. Every day
the menu will change, sometimes
mid-service.
Scallop and pea risotto comes
with the almost Persian pairing of
saffron and dill: the scallops good,
plump and bronzed, but rice a
little bloated. “Perhaps risotto isn’t
their strong point,” says the pal,
charitably. But who cares when
you’ve got three priapic, glistening
Napoli sausages, taut-skinned
from the grill, bursting with juicy,
aromatic meat over a pile of
lentils. Plus — the genius touch
— baked sweet and sour figs.
These, collapsing onto bangers
and pulses, lift something that’s
rooted in cucina povera towards
the full sensational swank.
Yes, there are proper-pub beers
and ales. But, for me, another
massive draw is the blackboard
wine lists, particularly the small
one bearing the legend “Premium
wines by the bottle” — our
Mâcon-Charnay-lès-Mâcons Les
Piliers, for instance — sexy
numbers at sober mark-ups. Only
a pastel de nata (Portuguese
custard tart) provides the tiniest
buzzkill, a few hours past its best.
Redeemed by “Andrea’s chocolate
boom-boom cake” a deathly rich
slump that’s the less manicured
cousin of the River Cafe’s
legendary chocolate nemesis. But
none of this is faffed-about-with.
I can’t imagine an Eagle
The Sunday Times Magazine • 63

No-nonsense
honesty scents the
air as potently as
the garlic frying
in good oil
alumnus getting jiggy with the
tweezers on competitive food TV,
like, ever.
Eyre’s love for Portuguese
flavours still suffuses the menu;
steak sandwich, prego-style,
heaving with bay-scented rump,
is a constant, chalked up on the
board every day since the pub
opened. They call it “Bife Ana”,
a memory from Eyre’s childhood
in Mozambique. There’s one being
ordered by nearly every table. But
the general flavour is
“Mediterranean”, everything from
pappa al pomodoro to anchovy
niçoise and the so-now burnt
Basque cheesecake via endearing
mash-ups such as burratina with
grilled aubergine, pomegranate
and pine nuts.
There’s currently a rash of
navel-gazing about the 30-year
anniversary of the likes of Nirvana’s
Nevermind and Screamadelica by
Primal Scream. I feel the same way
about the Eagle, born in the same
year. Whether you buy it or not
GARY HAMILL
64 • The Sunday Times Magazine
that it invented the modern
FROM THE MENU
gastropub — and I do, the other
STARTERS
Burratina,
pretenders didn’t quite have the
fully formed and radical nature
grilled aubergine, of this place — its influence is
pomegranate and inarguable. I’m amused at one story
pine nuts £11 reporting how business boomed
in the wake of the formerly nearby
MAINS Guardian slashing expenses, staff
Cuttlefish stew with having to open their own wallets
peppers, thyme, and abandon the expensive
potatoes and tablecloth joints in droves.
chickpeas £15 The Eagle spawned any number
of (frequently inferior) copyists,
Napoli sausages, aping their open kitchen — now Plate of the nation
lentils and sweet and commonplace but seeming like A free bottle of plonk
sour figs £15 organised lunacy at the time. Their
blackboards, crossing out dishes does little to sweeten
Scallop and pea as they sold out; their wines, their Tesco’s meal deal
risotto with saffron move away from “pub grub”. It also
and dill £13 acted as what Eyre, who left in Since I covered the M&S dine-in-
1997, called “a stud farm for chefs”, for-a-tenner offering recently, it’s
DESSERTS sending out the likes of Trish only fair I give Tesco a shout. But
Portuguese custard Hilferty (Anchor & Hope), Tom this seemingly generous deal is
tart £1.80 Norrington-Davies (Great Queen less cause for celebration and
Street), Sam and Sam Clark more dreary trudge. For my ten
Chocolate cake and (Moro), even Margot Henderson quid, I come away with chicken in a
cream £5.50 (Rochelle Canteen; she met prosecco sauce, lemon and thyme
husband Fergus here, apparently) roast potatoes, and raspberry and
DRINKS into a hungry world. cream cheesecake slices. Result!
Glass of Diez Siglos I love the line on their website: Until I start eating. The prosecco
Verdejo 2018 £6 “The Eagle was founded in 1991 sauce on the spongey chicken is
by restaurant manager Michael slightly acrid from wine that
Bottle of Mâcon- Belben and chef David Eyre, who doesn’t taste cooked off, with an
Charnay-lès-Mâcons wanted a restaurant but couldn’t odd, curdled texture and leathery
Les Piliers £32.50 afford it.” In a then unfashionable mushrooms. Roasties are OK
area, in the wake of a slew of pubs but curiously dry and dusty, not a
TOTAL coming freshly to market fraction as good as homemade.
For two, including following a bill that put paid to And the cheesecake is way too
13% tip £112.77 pub-owning monopolies, they sweet, a cheap mousse of a thing.
acquired it for a few grand. This The biggest differences
kind of no-nonsense honesty still between this and M&S are a)
scents the air every bit as potently quality and b) it includes a bottle of
as the garlic frying in good oil. wine. Sure, it’s nasty: student party
I think it’s called integrity and the wine, publishing launch wine. But
Eagle is marinated in it. Current there’s a tiny voice piping up, a
head chef is Edward Mottershaw, much younger me going “Weee!
only its third since 1991. Amazing. Basically free booze!”
Despite pundits announcing This is food for stomach lining
the death of the gastropub, despite before a hen night in Spoons.
the pillaging of the term by the But it’s better than Spoons. I’ll give
ready-meal market, despite a it that. MO’L
million inferior outfits doing their
best to give the sector a bad name,
the original — which has always
disavowed the word in any case
— is not only going strong but
bursting with baller vitality. I give
it at least another 30 unchanging
years, serving workmen, architects,
fashionistas, journos, men with
From top: the “Bife dogs whose lead harness reads
Ana” steak sandwich “Neeta, proper lady”. Wait, though
is a constant on the — there has been one innovation:
blackboard; Napoli from the many little tickets on
sausages and lentils; other tables, it seems they now
take reservations. Finally n
burnt Basque Tesco Finest £10 Meal Deal
cheesecake and Twitter: @MarinaOLoughlin for Two; tesco.com
spiced plums Instagram: @marinagpoloughlin
Drink
Wines of the month
The pick of the bunch for every budget to stave off November chills
Will Lyons
SPARKLING
1 NV Séverine Lepaul Maison du
Vin Crémant Co-op, £12 France
There’s a lot of crémant on the high
street, but this is one of the best
I’ve tasted for the price. A blend of
chenin, chardonnay and cabernet
franc, it’s clean, crisp and vivacious.
2 2015 Monsigny Blanc de Blancs
Vintage Champagne
Aldi, £19.99 France
The vintage version of Aldi’s popular
Veuve Monsigny Brut, from 100 per
cent chardonnay. There’s more depth
2018 RedHeads of flavour, with trademark citrus,
MC1R Rouge, £8.99 green apple and moreish yeastiness.
Australia
A smooth-drinking, 3 NV J Vineyards California Cuvée
medium-weight red Tesco, £23 USA
from the Barossa Produced from cool-climate grapes
Valley that could grown in areas of California including
almost be described the Russian River Valley, this is a fine
as a beaujolais from the addition to Tesco’s sparkling range.
southern hemisphere. It’s light and delicate, with plenty of
It has lip-smacking red citrus and a soft yet resonant finish.
fruit in abundance —
think raspberry and WHITE
cherry — and could be 4 2020 Krasno Sauvignon Blanc
served slightly chilled. Ribolla Majestic, £9.99 Slovenia
Sauvignon blanc from the Brda
Twitter: @Will_Lyons region is little known but shares some
Instagram:@mrwill_lyons of the fresh, fruity characteristics of
1 2 3 4 5 6
friuli, just across the border in Italy
— especially when paired with the
local ribolla grape. One to discover
before all the others catch on.
5 2020 Classics No 30 Grüner
Veltliner Weingut Rabl
Marks & Spencer, £8.50 Austria
If you are tired of chardonnay and
want a little more spice, try grüner
veltliner. Produced by Rudolf Rabl
for M&S, this is dry, grassy and
refreshing, with a vibrant texture.
6 2014 Morrisons The Best
Marques de los Rios Rioja Blanco
Morrisons, £6.50 Spain
An easy-drinking, well-priced white
rioja blended from tempranillo and
viura by the team at Morrisons with
Bodegas Eguia. It has enjoyable
flavours of citrus and pear, combined
with just a dab of vanilla.
7 2017 L’Empreinte de Saint Mont
Blanc Producteurs Plaimont
Corney & Barrow, £15 France
An intriguing and complex wine from
southwest France derived from a
trio of less familiar grapes: gros
manseng, petit courbu and arrufiac.
The extraordinary aroma is almost
like smelling summer in a glass.
RED
8 2020 Campotino Montepulciano
d’Abruzzo Tenuta del Priore
Tanners, £9.50 Italy
Light enough to enjoy at lunchtime
but imbued with lively black fruit —
it’s no wonder staff at Tanners have
nicknamed this “the great reviver”.
Produced from grapes grown at
altitude on the Adriatic coast, it’s
7 8
fruity and medium-bodied, with hints
of spice. A bargain at less than £10.
9 2019 Taste the Difference
Paso Robles Zinfandel
Sainsbury’s, £11 USA
This lavish, warming, dark-fruited
zinfandel (aka primitivo) is an
autumnal delight. Produced by Josh
Beckett at Chronic Cellars, it has
the kind of gently oaked, vanilla-
scented creaminess that makes
it ideal for pairing with red meat.
10 2020 Le Petit Caboche Vin
de Pays de Vaucluse
Yapp Brothers, £11.50 France
A great little find, almost like a baby
châteauneuf-du-pape, which is only
fitting as it is made by Jean-Pierre
Boisson, a former mayor of the
commune. A blend of four grapes
led by syrah, it’s rich and warming.
11 2019 WO Swartland Great
Heart Red Blend
Waitrose, £14.99 South Africa
An exceptional blend of syrah, tinta
barroca and cabernet sauvignon
created by a staff-owned initiative
where profits go directly to those
making the wine. Tangy, spicy and
dry, with plenty of succulent red fruit.
12 2015 La Chapelle de Meyney
Saint-Estèphe
Majestic, £24.99 France
Made by Château Meyney in Saint-
Estèphe, this is beautifully mature,
with notes of blackcurrant and sweet
spice. Luxurious and elegant, it
makes you feel as if you’re drinking
fine old claret. You could save this
for Christmas, but why wait? n
9 10 11 12
The Sunday Times Magazine • 65
 Genesis GV80
Driving
It doesn’t rock, and
I can’t roll with it
Jeremy Clarkson
I never really understood the
enormous car crash that Tiger
Woods had in February. Sure,
police say he was driving at more
CONTACT US than 80mph when he lost control,
Write to us at but it was a wide road and he’s a
driving@sunday- thrusting young man with a
times.co.uk or Driving, thriving pant compass and a sharp
The Sunday Times, mind so the speed shouldn’t have
1 London Bridge Street, been a factor.
London SE1 9GF What’s more relevant is that
he hit the central reservation and
DRIVING.CO.UK careered across the road before
For daily news, reviews,
videos, buying guides
hitting a tree at what experts
say was 75mph. So he obviously
and advice hadn’t braked very hard in the
66 • The Sunday Times Magazine
meantime. And then he rolled
over several times before
emerging from the wreckage with
nothing more than a hurty leg.
Like I say, it’s odd.
I never really understood the
car he was driving either. We were
told by local news teams in
California that it was a “Genesis”
and I assumed it was one of those
idiotic offshoot brands, like
Saturn, that General Motors
dreams up in its forward strategy
outreach deep-dive seminars.
Why Genesis? Because Pink
Floyd had their name fully
legalled and Yes sounded weird.
Even in “comfort”
mode, this car
rides like a light
aircraft in a tropical
thunderstorm
I was wrong, though. Genesis is
actually a South Korean invention,
created by Hyundai to do what
Lexus did for Toyota. And now,
after some modifications to make
it more suitable for European
roads, it’s on sale in the UK.
I tried the top-of-the-range
four-wheel-drive GV80 and it was
immediately obvious what
Hyundai has done. They’ve built a
machine that looks very Bentlish,
with lots of chrome on the outside
and lots of soft leather on the
inside, and they’re hoping that
this aesthetic and tactile double
whammy, along with the new
name — Gong, was it? — will be
enough to drag Euro businessmen
out of their Audis and Volvos and
BMWs and Mercedes.
Don’t mock. Sure, Nissan failed
miserably to pull off a similar trick
with its Infiniti brand but at a cost
of just eleventy trillion dollars,
Toyota did make it work with
Lexus. And Hyundai is on a roll at
the moment. Some of their
ordinary cars are extremely good
and the hot N versions are
absolutely brilliant. The new
Barclay James Harvest GV80,
though, isn’t. It’s a terrible car.
Mainly this is because they’ve
1,715mm
given it something called “road
preview technology”, which
means that cameras scan the road
surface ahead and when the
electronic watchman notices a
bump or a pothole coming along,
he instructs the suspension to
make sure the occupants don’t
feel anything.
It simply doesn’t work. Even in
“comfort” mode, this car rides like
a light aircraft in a tropical
thunderstorm, heaving and
crashing and lurching on even
smooth bits of tarmac. It’s not the
most uncomfortable car I’ve ever
driven because I’ve driven a
Nissan GT-R Nismo, but it’s close.
Certainly I’d keep a few sick bags
in the glovebox, because if you
have passengers on board you’re
going to need them.
And to make matters worse
it’s fitted with all the usual
electronic claptrap designed to
make sure you stay both on the
road and legal. But whoever did
the wiring has obviously never
been to the Cotswolds.
The idea — and this isn’t new
— is that it reads the white lines
along the road ahead and if it
thinks you’re straying into the
wrong lane it’ll take control of the
steering. In other cars it’s a mild
intervention and consequently it’s
only mildly annoying. But in the
King Crimson GV80 it’s like
Tyson Fury is on the other side of
the steering column. And it drove
me up the wall.
On a narrowish country road it is
nigh on impossible not to go near
the grass verge or the white line,
so Tyson is wrenching the wheel
this way and that, and you’re being
bounced around by the mad
suspension and then, every time
you break the speed limit by so
much as 1mph, a vivid red warning
light flashes in a head-up display
on the windscreen. So I was
doing 51mph on a road I know
well, and it felt like I was taking
part in a display with the Red
Arrows. Exhausting doesn’t even
begin to cover it.
After a little while I had to do
something I’ve never done before:
pull over, find my specs and
spend some time working out
on. Have you ever heard a cow
after its calf has been taken away?
The Clarksometer It’s the sound of misery and
Genesis GV80 2.5T 8AT AWD despair, and it’s the exact noise
I made when the steering wheel
started fighting me again.
Not that long ago Hyundai
launched an executive car in
Britain called the Hyundai
Genesis. Then they quietly
dropped it, having sold just 50
examples. It was a sales disaster
1,975mm 4,945mm and I think the GV80 will do
Engine Fuel / CO2 even worse.
2497cc, 4 cylinders, 25.3mpg / 241g/km There was a four-cylinder petrol
turbo, petrol unit in my test car that was very
Weight
Power 2,145kg
unpowerful. But at least it was also
300bhp @ 5800rpm quite carbon dioxidy. I’m told the
Price diesel is better, but who wants a
Torque £59,600 diesel these days?
311 Ib ft @ 1650rpm
Release date I suppose at this point I should
Acceleration On sale now tell you about the rear-facing
0-62mph: 7.7sec cameras that feed an image to the
Jeremy’s rating
Top speed dash of what’s alongside the car
147mph when you turn on the indicators.
I guess these mean you’re less likely
to hit Jeremy Vine when turning
left. But I think on balance I’d
Head to head rather have a Volvo and use my
Genesis GV80 2.5T 8AT AWD v mirrors. I trust mirrors. Apart from
Audi Q7 S Line 55 TFSI the one in my bathroom, which
quattro tiptronic lies every morning.
The problem is that Hyundai’s
Price 0-62mph trying to do something it’s not
£59,600 £61,600 7.7sec 5.9sec really equipped to do. A company
like this trying to make an
Power Top speed Audi-type luxury car is like
300bhp 335bhp 147mph 155mph McDonald’s trying to make a
gourmet dinner or me deciding to
write about classical music or
how all the electric health and Ferrari trying to sell hats. Actually,
safety could be turned off. There scratch that. Ferrari does sell hats.
was nothing to be done about the Hyundai’s first car, assembled
turbulent suspension, but back in the Sixties under licence
eventually I shut down the speed from Ford, was a left-hand-drive
warnings and the dashboard- Cortina. And then they hired a
mounted Tyson Fury. Which bunch of former British Leyland
meant I completed the journey to bods who, being Midlanders,
my destination in a car that was didn’t understand the rhyming-
simply horrible, rather than slang problems of calling a car
completely unbearable. the Pony. But this simple, no-
Half an hour later, though, I set nonsense machine overcame the
off on the journey home and “and trap” issue to become the
couldn’t believe it. The car had bedrock on which the South
turned all the safety features back Korean operation grew. And grew.
And grew, until it enveloped Kia
and became the third-largest
carmaker in the world. And now
they’ve decided that they want to
make eggs to take on Fabergé. It
hasn’t worked.
But the brief time I did spend
with the Jethro Tull did help me
explain why Tiger Woods failed
so comprehensively to slow down
once he knew a crash was
imminent. I had a similar feeling
as I was driving it: “Please, God,
let it end.” n
The Sunday Times Magazine • 67

Jane Goodall
A Life in the Day
The 87-year-old on her pioneering work with
chimps, going vegan and walking her whippet
G oodall was born in 1934 in
Hampstead, London, and
raised in Bournemouth. In 1960
she visited Gombe Stream
National Park in Tanzania and
began a study of the behaviour
of wild chimpanzees. She
established the Jane Goodall
Institute in 1977 to protect the
animals’ future and founded
Roots & Shoots in 1991, a
non-profit conservation
programme for young people.
She lives in her childhood home
in Bournemouth with her sister,
Judy, her niece, Pip, two great
nephews and her whippet, Bean.
I’m up by eight every
day, however I often
find myself awake
until 4am because there’s so
much to worry about; so much
that I haven’t done — like the
2,000 unread emails in my inbox.
Once I’m up, I potter into the
little folly — a baby sunroom —
with my laptop and have half a bit
of toast and a cup of coffee. It gets
my throat working in case I’ve got
an early video. There’s never a
quiet period because of all the
different time zones I deal with.
Weekends are non-existent for me
WORDS OF
WISDOM
BEST ADVICE
I WAS GIVEN
You can do anything
you set your mind to
ADVICE I’D GIVE
Never give up hope
— it’s what keeps you
motivated to make
a difference
WHAT I WISH
I’D KNOWN
It’s exciting knowing
nothing. I certainly
wouldn’t wish to have
known what state the
world would be in
74 • The Sunday Times Magazine
Goodall with Flint the chimpanzee
during an early visit to Tanzania
because there’s so much I still
want to do to help save the world.
At the age of ten I wanted to go
to Africa, live with wild animals
and write books about them.
I didn’t go to university because
we had very little money, but I
managed to save up enough to go
on a secretarial course in London.
In 1954 I was invited on a dream
trip to Kenya by a friend. After I
got back I met with the renowned
palaeontologist Louis Leakey, and
he took me on as a researcher. But
it took him six months to raise the
funds to send me out to Gombe
Stream National Park, where I did
my famous chimpanzee studies.
Why? Because I was considered
uneducated and, more
importantly, I was female.
One of my proudest
achievements was getting to do
my PhD at Cambridge with the
backing of Leakey in 1966. I’d
bucked convention, named the
chimps I’d spent two years
studying in Tanzania, and showed
that they were sentient beings
with feelings and personalities.
I always break for lunch to take
my ancient whippet, Bean, out
into the garden for a poo. He’s 16,
nearly blind and nearly deaf.
I might have Melba toast with
vegan cheese, crisped in the oven,
with a glass of Stone’s green
ginger wine — it’s good for the
throat. I became a vegetarian
when I was 26 after reading Peter
Singer’s book Animal Liberation.
And since the pandemic started
I’ve gone vegan because of the
way dairy cows and laying hens are
treated; it’s absolutely horrible.
I eat in the garden under the
beech tree I climbed as a child. I’m
joined by a robin and a blackbird,
who are both quite irritable now
that they’re moulting, but the robin
has taken food from my hand.
We’ve got an uphill battle to
turn the environmental crisis
around. People are bombarded
with so much doom and gloom,
they lose hope. Hope is all about
determination and believing that
your action is going to make
things that little bit better. People
need to think of small changes
they can make. Collectively we
can turn things around.
I want to protect what I love,
which is why I encourage outdoor
education for children because
there’s this disconnect from
nature, what with the advent of
mobile gadgets and social media.
I try to wrap things up by 7pm
because Judy’s daughter, Pip,
cooks for the two of us and I get in
trouble if I’m late. Often Judy and
I will settle in to watch a mindless
video together, like Pride and
Prejudice or Hercule Poirot.
I clamber up the stairs to bed
around 10pm. Once there, I work
on more videos or I’ll have a
speech to tweak.
I have a tremendous amount of
hope about our potential to change
the world. But we’ve got to take
action now, otherwise
VINCENT CALMEL, HUGO VAN LAWICK
the world will go to hell
in a handbasket n
Interview by Sarah Ewing
The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide
for an Endangered Planet by Jane
Goodall and Douglas Abrams is
published by Viking at £16.99