DECEMBER 5 2021

Richard Osman
on becoming
the publishing
sensation of
the decade
 DECEMBER 5 2021

TAILS OF WAR
Siamese fighting fish show their true colours, page 34

8
COVER: RICHARD OSMAN
18
COLLECTORS’ ITEMS
42
I DENIED MY OWN MOTHER
48
ADAM KAY’S HEALTH CHECK
The presenter turned Rare trainers are changing The author Melody Razak on How to get your body through
publishing sensation reveals his hands for millions of dollars why she hid her Iranian heritage a festive month intact — and
winning formula to Josh Glancy a pair. By Lara von der Brelie to try to fit in at a private school dispense with dry January

26 58
COVER: CHARLIE CLIFT FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE

LIFE AFTER LIFE A LIFE IN THE DAY

Jens Soering tells Rosie Kinchen Paul O’Grady on his wartime
what it’s like to be free after diet, how Lily Savage was born
33 years in US jails for murder and his enduring love of dogs

Plus P5 Matt Rudd | P6 Relative Values: Ron and Clint Howard | P50 Driving: Jeremy Clarkson reviews the Ford Focus ST Edition

© 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 • 3

 MATT RUDD
This 2021 was not
the one I ordered
I’d like a refund, please
December 1, 2021
To whom it may concern,
I’m writing to request a refund on my purchase of your
product “2021”. When I bought it on December 31,
2020 — please see attached receipt — your marketing
literature promised “A Fresh Start”, “A Happy New
Year” and “many improvements on the 2020 model,
including better connectivity, wider range and the
potential for overseas functionality. Plus flying cars.”
Alas, your “new improved 2021” has not performed
as intended and I wish to return it forthwith.
Yours faithfully, Matt Rudd
December 2, 2021
Dear Marvin Rusk,
Re: Unhappy with 2021
Thank you for your inquiry. In order for us to process
your request, please verify your account here. Your
temporary username is RuskM^. Password and the ability
to identify motorbikes behind traffic lights on a blurry
photograph required.
Yours sincerely,
Customer Services
New Year New You Ltd
“For all your hopes and dreams in time going forward”
December 2, 2021
To whom it still concerns,
My name is not Marvin Rusk and I couldn’t see any
motorbikes. This is exactly what I’m talking about.
Can’t we just have a normal correspondence?
Yours faithfully, MATT RUDD
December 4, 2021
CHARLIE CLIFT FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE. SHUTTERSTOCK
Dear Ratt Mudd,
I am sorry you are having trouble with your internet skills.
Your token has been passed up to me, customer team
champion for our industry-leading 2021, and I will be
happy to hear more about your apparent issues.
Yours most sincerely, A Agent
December 4, 2021
Dear Ms Agent,
The first six months I couldn’t get the damn thing
going at all. Just passed by in a blur. Even the Joe Wicks
function stopped working. Options were limited to
daytime drinking, a very underwhelming Friends:
The Reunion and more Zoom, I think. How can you still
be offering Zoom? Don’t you listen to your customers?
And how come Matt “Handsy” Hancock seems to be
the only person who got his 2021 fully up and running
in June? Has he got some kind of special access?
Anyway, I was prepared to let that go … I could see that
2021 had the potential to improve on your woeful 2020.
But then you issued a patch claiming that everything
was fixed when clearly it wasn’t. Half of us spent our
summer in a traffic jam in Devon trying to ignore the
other half, who’d snuck off to Greece.
Teething troubles are to be expected but then there
was another glitch, which meant we had to spend a
fortnight outside a petrol station and another week
panic-buying Christmas puddings. In September. Then
you almost killed “national treasure” Richard Madeley
in a tank of rotten fruit or something. Is that what
you’re passing off for entertainment in this 2021 of
yours? I expect more for my money. And don’t say,
“But James Bond”. Eighteen months we waited for that
— eighteen — and all we got was a three-hour midlife
crisis with explosions. Red Notice was terrible too.
Unlike some of your other less reasonable
customers, I’m still perfectly happy to stick a plastic
kebab stick up my nose every time I want to go out.
But now you’re saying there’s a new variant with not
one but two furin cleavage sites and that the word of
the year is NFT, which isn’t even a word. Your
product is faulty. I’d like a replacement.
Yours sincerely, Matt Rudd
December 5, 2021
Dear Marianne Roulade,
Thank you for your feedback. Unfortunately our records
show that the warranty for your 2021 expired yesterday.
However, I am happy to offer you an early bird discount
on our very latest product, “2022: Things Can Only Get
Better”. It comes with a bevelled edge! Please click here
and enter the 12-digit code we might have sent to your
spam folder. The offer will expire in slightly less time than
it takes to enter a 12-digit code.
Yours truly, Antonella Agent
December 5, 2021
Dear Antonella,
Will it include flying cars?
Yours, Marianne (@mattrudd) n
The Sunday Times Magazine • 5
RELATIVE VALUES
Ron & Clint Howard
The Oscar-winning director and his actor brother on Happy Days and battling addiction
Ron
I had my first acting job at the age of four, when I was
flown with my parents to Europe to appear in a film
with Yul Brynner and Deborah Kerr [The Journey]. It
was a blast and I started getting one role after another.
My dad, Rance, was an actor and my mum, Jean,
had been an actress. They were stage parents but not
monsters or narcissists, and realised I could have a life
away from these shows that was fairly normal. They had
this earthy logic and explained things to me in a sort of
Midwestern Zen: “You have to wake up in the morning,
learn your lines, go to the studio, do make-up, deliver
your lines, clean up and go home.” I loved it.
I was in The Andy Griffith Show, watched by 40
million people, for eight years from the age of six. It
wasn’t pleasant being a television personality in the
second grade. I was a freak as far as the other kids were
concerned. That made my bond stronger with Clint.
I was five when he was born and so excited as I’d been
kind of a lonely kid, so to have a brother meant the
world to me. Clint was born with a smirk on his face,
an eyebrow raised, and had personality from the
beginning. He has this caustic, edgy perspective on life
and has something funny to say about it. Whenever
there was friction between us, our father would pull us
apart and say: “You guys are brothers. You’re never
going to change that, but you have the chance to be
friends for the rest of your lives, and that starts now.”
That’s always been ingrained in us.
Because I’m five years older we were never up for
the same acting roles. But when I was around 17 I went
through a difficult dry period and he was getting great
parts. I envied the roles he was getting, even if I was too
old for them.
I met my wife, Cheryl, when I was 16 and we’ve been
married for 46 years. I fell in love so hard. It had a lot to
do with being racked with adolescent insecurity. And
feeling abandoned by this industry that I’d counted on.
Playing Richie Cunningham in Happy Days
[beginning in 1974] came at the perfect time in my life.
“There may have been a time or
two when Clint was pissed off
if I didn’t give him the part”
6 • The Sunday Times Magazine
It was my own rite of passage. I went into it as a young
guy full of dreams and over six years I grew into a young
film-maker. Everything evolved and Happy Days’
success had a hell of a lot to do with that. I left my
acting career behind and focused on writing, directing
and producing [his films include A Beautiful Mind,
which won four Academy awards, including best
director, Frost/Nixon and Apollo 13]. I don’t have a
performer’s personality. I love being at the centre of
the creative process.
Clint liked coming in and out of the business,
whereas I was more immersed in it. He enjoyed it when
he was there, and worked hard at it, but went home and
had a different kind of life that was more inclusive. I was
more myopic, and comfortable with that.
Directing him in my films is a blast because I know
what his strengths are. I don’t cast him in every film
— it’s not a familial mandate. There may have been a
time or two when he was pissed off if I didn’t give him
the part. I love him being part of the team as he can
elevate a scene without trying to steal it.
Clint’s a survivor, and the thing I’m most proud of
about him is his sobriety. I wasn’t sure at one point we
were going to have him around. If you become an
addict young, you don’t advance emotionally, but he
got himself healthy. He has gained a wisdom that
often puts him in a big brother role with me. He has
earned another level of insight through his experiences,
which I really lean on.
Main: Clint, left, 62,
and Ron, 67, in Los
Angeles. From top:
Clint in Gentle Ben,
1967; Ron as Richie
Cunningham in
Happy Days c 1974;
Ron, 11, and Clint, 6,
at home in Burbank,
California
 Clint
My earliest memory of Ron is from when I was three
years old, lying on his back in the hallway as he read the
account of the previous night’s Dodgers game, giving
me all the details. I remember how warm it felt.
Growing up we were treated very differently by our
parents. They let me do things a lot more quickly. I felt
bad for Ron because in many respects Mum was
smothering. She became really protective when Cheryl
came along. They set down some draconian rules about
how often Ron could see her: one date a week. I looked
at this guy, who was on the nerdy side but had landed a
girlfriend, and was, like, “Hey, give him a break.”
I was two when I had my first acting job. I was paid
$78 for one episode of The Andy Griffith Show and got
taxed $18. I was the lead in a TV series called Gentle Ben
when I was eight, but most of the time I was a freelance
actor. I’d go off and work on an episode of Bonanza, and
be gone from school for a week, but then I’d be back.
I had more continuity with friends than Ron did with his.
I’ve never been jealous of Ron’s success as a film
director as he has earned every bit of it. He’s the best
director I’ve ever worked for and he has the reputation
for being one of the nicest people in Hollywood. A few
movies ago I was talking to the make-up team and they
were bowled over because Ron had come into their
trailer in the morning to see if there was anything they
needed. No director had ever done that to them before.
The only time my hackles have been raised with my
REX, ALAMY
brother was when I felt there was a role in one of his
movies and he didn’t offer it to me. I was, like, “I’m a
good actor. Let me read for that.” It was a role in his
ensemble movie The Paper [1994], which I felt I would
have been really good playing, and Ron didn’t see it that
way. He’ll give me an honest answer, and will tell me
why he’s not going to hire me, but that doesn’t mean it
doesn’t piss me off. It irritates me for a couple of days.
The most proud I’ve ever been of him was when he
directed Solo: A Star Wars Story, in which I had a part.
STRANGE HABITS Watching my brother on set, at the helm of a billion-
dollar operation, sitting in his director’s chair, yelling
Ron on Clint “Roll cameras” was such a great feeling.
His favourite I don’t want to get on my high horse and say I’ve
hobby is making beaten my addictions, but in 1991 I put the plug in the
snowglobes — he’s jug. I’d started smoking pot at 14, which had everything
made about 30. It’s to do with adolescence, feeling ugly inside and out.
cool, but come on, Ron and I had talks about it, but he had a family, and
it’s a little odd his directing career, and had moved back east. I thank
God I didn’t end up in the gutter. I came close but
Clint on Ron things are good. I got married to Kat, who used to be
He’s a knuckle a professional boxer, during the pandemic and it’s the
cracker, and it smartest decision I ever made. Ron said the other day
gives me the how glad he was that I’d found her.
heebie-jeebies I’m not sure I would have been a very good big
brother but he’s been a great one. We don’t see each
other often enough, but we talk on the phone all the
time, and I make him laugh n
Interviews by Rosalind Powell
Photograph by Kevin Scanlon
The Boys: A Memoir of Hollywood and Family by Ron
Howard and Clint Howard is published by HarperCollins
The Sunday Times Magazine • 7
8 • The Sunday Times Magazine
Interview by Josh Glancy

PORTRAIT BY CHARLIE CLIFT

The Sunday Times Magazine • 9
 n my way to meet
O
Richard Osman, my eye
is caught by the window
display in Waterstones
on Chiswick High Road.
It has the latest from
Sally Rooney of course,
undoubtedly the dominant millennial
author. Next to Rooney is a posthumous
novel from John le Carré, arguably the
greatest British novelist of his generation.
And above them both — in absolute pride
of place — is The Man Who Died Twice, the
latest cosy crime novel by Osman, that
gawky quiz-show bloke off the telly.
How did this happen? Fifteen months
PREVIOUS PAGES: CHARLIE CLIFT FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE. THIS PAGE: PETER TARRY FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES
ago Osman was a TV producer who hosted
shows like Pointless and House of Games.
I’ve always been aware of him as a jolly sort,
droll in a PG sort of way, good at giving
Middle Britain a tickle but hardly a literary
colossus. Now, though, Osman is the
biggest thing to hit publishing since JK
Rowling. His publicists like sharing his
“major” stats with all and sundry, and who
can blame them? The Thursday Murder
Club, Osman’s 2020 debut novel, was the
fastest-selling crime novel of all time, and
the second-fastest-selling adult debut novel
in history, behind Rowling. He pipped
Barack Obama to Christmas No 1 last year
and has the third-bestselling fiction
hardback of all time, trailing Dan Brown
and, well, Rowling. That’s major.
The Thursday Murder Club tells the story
of Joyce, Ibrahim, Elizabeth and Ron, four
residents of Coopers Chase retirement
home in Kent, who band together to
become a team of amateur murder
Above: Richard Osman’s mother, Brenda
Wright, second right, with her friends at
their retirement village in Sussex
His mum’s
retirement home
provided the basis
for the story. She
was terrified she
would get sued
when he told her
detectives. Think Cold Case meets One Foot
in the Grave. There’s something undeniably
charming about this motley crew of
retirees, a demographic who rarely appear
in prime time, taking on cold-blooded
killers in the name of justice. It’s nicely
done, pacey and sharp. But I must admit I
didn’t quite understand its phenom status.
What is all this extraordinary fuss about?
I realise I’d better ask the man himself.
I find him wandering the basement of High
Road House in Chiswick, a minor Soho
House branch where Osman, 51, likes to
hang out, because his new house nearby is
populated by a working-from-home
daughter and “various cats”.
We sit down with a cup of earl grey and
a biccy, which feels appropriate. Osman is
dressed Soho House casual — a grey blazer,
blue dad jeans and white Reeboks. He’s easy
company, so I get straight into it. What does
he think is behind this galactic success?
“Humans always look for warmth,” he says.
“There’s a reason why Strictly and Bake Off
are the two biggest shows on British telly
— because they’re just lovely. If you can
write something that’s kind and warm but
does have a bit of bite and wit, that’s the
magic formula.”
It sounds a bit trite to me, but I’m not in
a position to argue with the guy who’s going
blow for blow with Harry Potter. Osman is
as British as Bird’s custard, his books are
crammed with references to Robert Dyas
and Oliver Bonas, but they’re now selling all
over the world. The Germans are lapping
them up. He’s big in Japan. I can hardly
compute how many Christmas presents this
year will feature Joyce and the gang. Is the
pandemic a factor perhaps, people searching
for something cuddly and unthreatening in
the midst of societal collapse? Osman
doesn’t love this suggestion. “I think the
pandemic thing is a bit of red herring,” he
says. “I’ve seen this my whole career. If you
make a warm show, people want to watch it.
We gravitate towards warmth — not so
much in our political narrative, but in our
cultural narrative.”
Selling more than two million copies, his
first novel was so successful that Osman
rapidly cranked out a sequel, which brought
the club back together again. The Man Who
Died Twice came out this September and
sold half a million copies in eight weeks. He
has already started writing book three and
has a fourth commissioned, so it seems the
murder club series will be squatting atop
the bestseller lists for years to come. And it
will appear on the big screen too: no
The Sunday Times Magazine • 11
 less than Steven Spielberg is making a
movie adaptation of the book, which is due
to start filming in the spring and will be
directed by oldies whisperer Ol Parker, who
did The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and
Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again.
It helps, I think, that Osman has spent
his life mastering how to entertain a large
audience of bored daytime-TV addicts.
This, after all, is the man who produced
Deal or No Deal, the show that ravaged
an entire generation of hungover
undergraduates. This master of middlebrow
grew up in Haywards Heath, West Sussex,
and has described himself as “southern”
but “not posh”. He spent much of his career
behind the camera, as a producer, and then
as creative director for Endemol, producing
shows such as Whose Line Is It Anyway? and
8 out of 10 Cats.
He became a TV star in his forties,
ending up on camera after impressing BBC
executives by playing the role of assistant in
the demonstration of the teatime quiz show
Pointless. He has co-presented it ever since,
along with his old Cambridge University
friend Alexander Armstrong. So Osman’s
carefully curated magic formula — good
vibes with just a bit of bite — has been
titillating the mass market for 20 years. Now
that formula has translated terrifyingly well
into fiction that reaches well beyond the
typical bookworm and into the great British
beyond. “I feel very present in British
culture,” he says. “I feel very immersed in it.
So that’s what I wanted to write about.”
ot everyone adores
N Osman’s books, though. A
reviewer in this newspaper
called The Man Who Died
Twice’s plot “so hackneyed
that it is hard to read
without yawning”, and
suggested that The Thursday Murder Club
was “so flawed that it is hard to believe it
would ever have been published without a
celebrity’s name on the cover”. Ouch. What
does he make of the hatchet jobs? “The
only thing that upsets you is true criticism,”
he retorts. “I’m never going to get all the
high-brow critics. I’d rather listen to what
BBC, REX
people in the street are telling me.” Osman
says even his two twentysomething kids,
Ruby and Sonny, are fans. In fact the only
criticism that got under his skin was from his
mum, who recently told a reporter she finds
his writing “quite staccato”. “I mean, Mum
— come on, Brenda,” he chuckles. “She
loves Hilary Mantel. I think she’d rather I’d
written a sprawling 800-page Tudor epic.”
Osman is proud of his middlebrow
credentials, though, viewing the word as a
compliment and something to be embraced.
His Twitter feed is full of musings about
Quality Street chocolates, finding fivers in
your pocket and his cat, Liesl, while his
“perfect Sunday” is a roast dinner, watching
the new Bond movie and then curling up
with Liesl in front of Strictly Come
Dancing. “Middlebrow as an insult I find
From left: Osman presenting House of
Games; with co-host Alexander Armstrong,
in the blue suit, on Pointless Celebrities
“Middlebrow as
an insult I find
extraordinary.
I’m genuinely,
determinedly
and proudly
middlebrow”
extraordinary,” Osman says. “I’m genuinely,
determinedly and proudly middlebrow.
I don’t have any other options, that’s who
I am and how I was brought up.” His older
brother, Mat, is the bassist in the Britpop
band Suede and also dabbles in writing
fiction novels when he isn’t selling out Ally
Pally. Mat got all the trendy genes. “My
brother is the coolest guy in the world,”
Osman says. “It’s really weird, because he
was so cool … but it didn’t rub off on me.”
Osman dedicated his first book to his
mum, as well he might. She raised her two
boys as a single parent after their dad walked
out when Osman was nine, which he has
described as the “worst thing that ever
happened” to him. “It adversely affected me
for a number of years,” he says. “I wasn’t real
in the world, you manufacture yourself a
bit.” Osman didn’t see his father for 20 years
or receive any contact from his father’s
family — although his aunt has recently
claimed they tried. He met his father again
before he died, but Osman has described it
as a disappointing reunion and not enough
to rekindle their relationship. Ultimately
Osman realised for his own sake that he had
to move beyond anger or resentment. “Is
the way you’re feeling about it helping you
live a happy life? If not, you have to find a
way past it. You have to let the toxicity go,”
he says. “That means forgiving, however
infuriating it can feel. I’m utterly at peace
with it now.”
He characterises his upbringing as
“working class” and they managed without
a car, getting by on Brenda’s teaching salary.
It was also his mum’s retirement home in
Sussex that provided the basis for The
Thursday Murder Club. Osman had made a
few abortive attempts at a first novel over
the years, but it was only when he alighted
upon the idea of a murder mystery set in
his mum’s retirement village that “the
radar” in his head went off. Initially his
mum was terrified she would get sued when
he told her about the idea. Now she’s
“delighted” with her celebrity status.
So how do the denizens of the real
Coopers Chase feel about their new-found
fame? “People say the younger generation
are obsessed with fame, but that generation
absolutely loves it,” Osman says. “They love
being in the book, which is great. They love
it because it’s not patronising or mean to
them. They recognise that they’re the
heroes of the story.”
Osman grew up devouring Enid Blyton’s
Famous Five stories, so it is perhaps no
surprise that he has found literary fame with
a group of inappropriately aged amateur
detectives. Part of the books’ charm is
subverting expectations about the elderly,
showing the rest of us that they aren’t all just
playing bowls and slowly expiring. “They’re
overlooked, they’re underestimated, they’re
invisible,” he says. “And yet they have this
extraordinary skill set. So you think, who
better to solve a crime?”
Crime stories have always attracted
Osman. Post Blyton he didn’t read much
as a teenager, but picked it up again in his
twenties and became a huge fan of
The Sunday Times Magazine • 13
 Dorothy L Sayers and Agatha Christie,
whose Miss Marple he owes an obvious
debt to. He thinks Christie’s global fame
has helped fuel his success beyond Britain.
“I’d like to thank her if she was still here.”
Crime stories are what he always turns
to in the newspaper or when flicking
through late-night television, and he
already has another radar-tripping idea for
a solo detective, which he plans to write
about after book four of the murder club
series. “You know there are people breaking
the law around us as we’re sitting here in
the leafy streets of Chiswick,” he says.
“You know there are people living in £10
million houses because they’ve got it all
in an import-export scam. I find the whole
sub-economy fascinating. McMafia.
Gangland Britain. I’m endlessly fascinated.”

eing a TV celebrity

B obviously helped Osman

get his first novel off the
ground, but he says it has
also fed his impostor
syndrome. When he first
approached his agent, Juliet
Mushens, who at one point this year had
the top three bestsellers in the paperback
charts (the other two being Abigail Dean
and Claire Douglas), he begged her to tell
him if she was only interested because of
From left: Osman with ex-girlfriend
Sumudu Jayatilaka; with his current partner,
the Doctor Who actress Ingrid Oliver

his fame. “Anyone who has written a first
book knows most of your body is screaming
out, ‘This is terrible and fraudulent,’ ” he
says. “But from the moment someone read
it, the whole thing went insane. I’d have been
“I managed
can tell him how much they enjoy his books
when he’s out and about.
In fact he’s so relentlessly upbeat that
my desiccated inner cynic starts to smell
a rat. What’s the catch? We all have some
inner darkness — what’s his? “I don’t think
to find love in I particularly have one,” he says. “I don’t like
queueing. Mild impatience — if that’s one
the pandemic. of the seven deadly sins, then by God I’ve
got it. I wish I wasn’t 6ft 7in with terrible
Sickening, isn’t it? eyesight. That’s a cross to bear, but not a

I met someone and

happy just to finish it, but it’s been more particularly big cross.”
lovely to sell millions of books than not.” I’m not sure this is the full story, but

I’m annoyingly,
I bet it has. In fact Osman has had a pretty Osman admits he often keeps his true self
stellar pandemic all round. On top of the concealed. When dealing with thorny

books, he has also made countless episodes
of House of Games and Pointless, which has
kept him occupied. His only professional
issue at this point is fitting it all in. “I can’t
come home after a day of filming and write
in the evening,” he says. “At the moment it’s
fine, but it won’t be fine for ever. I could
imagine rationing myself [on television] a
bit more. I’ve got two things speaking to my
soul now and it’s not big enough.”
Despite his ever-expanding public
profile, Osman describes himself as shy
and an “alpha introvert”, someone who can
command a room when he needs to but also
often prefers to watch from the corner.
“Maybe because my eyesight is terrible,
I couldn’t fully engage,” he says. “I’ve
always had to be more of a spectator,
because I’m a bit frightened of the world.
I have a tank, which drains. Sometimes I
just want to go home and watch the
snooker, just be me, sit with my partner and
the cat. I’m like a Tesla and there aren’t that
SPLASH NEWS, TILLENDOVE
blissfully happy”
relationships in Osman’s life: with his
ex-wife — the mother of his children —
and more recently with the jazz singer
Sumudu Jayatilaka. But this is “the one”,
he’s reportedly telling friends. “I managed
to find love in the pandemic. Sickening,
isn’t it?” he says with a grin. “I met
someone, we love each other and isn’t that a
wonderful thing? I’m annoyingly, blissfully
happy.” The pair were introduced by mutual
friends, which he says is “the best way” to
meet people. “It’s been really lovely.”
I think “lovely” is Osman’s favourite
word. I try counting how many times he
says it during the interview but lose track
at about 15. It’s “lovely” to find mega-
success in his fifties now that he’s mature
enough to put the whole thing in context
and not get carried away by the influx of
cash and attention. “I’m 51, so it’s good,
subjects he seems to reach for cookie-cutter
aphorisms, telling me “to watch the tides,
not the waves” and “you cannot be what you
cannot see”, which sounds like something
one might read on a fridge magnet. “I hide
what I really think about the world a lot,” he
says. “I sit in the centre, but that’s not where
my heart is.” His politics are progressive but
he studiously avoids conflict. “I don’t think
me being a celebrity with an opinion is of
interest to anyone,” he says. “I don’t think
responding to every story on Twitter is
going to change the world.”
It helps no doubt that his anti-culture
warrior shtick has been good for business
— unlike Rowling he’ll never lose fans by
taking a sharp political stance. His brand is
big friendly giant (or “reluctant lighthouse”
as he puts it) and he’s unlikely to change
course now. “I like to be liked,” he says.
“That’s the part of my personality I try to
weaponise. I have zero complacency about
the world, but sometimes I like to project

many charging points around.”
The partner is a new development.
Osman fell in love last year, and is now
living with the Doctor Who actress Ingrid
Oliver. There have been other big
I can handle it,” he says. “I’m in a position
where I say, ‘Oh, this is fun.’” It’s also
“lovely” being a part of the publishing
industry’s revival, and particularly “lovely”
being a recognisable author, so that people
that I have complacency. Because people
like optimism” n
The Man Who Died Twice by Richard Osman
is published by Viking at £18.99

The Sunday Times Magazine • 15

 Move over bitcoin — rare trainers
have become a global commodity,
with the most coveted pairs
changing hands for millions.
Lara von der Brelie meets the young
traders on the inside track

PHOTOGRAPHS BY CHARLIE SURBEY

RUNNING ALL THE WAY TO THE BANK

DIOR X NIKE
AIR JORDAN 1
HIGHS
Original retail price
(2020): £1,800
Current resale value:
£11,500
W
e’ve been buying at £3,100 and
selling for £10,000,” says 23-year-old
Omar Aziz as he rushes between
business meetings in Mayfair. He
isn’t talking about stocks, but the
mark-up on Gen Z’s new favourite
asset class: trainers. Dior x Nike Air
Jordan 1 Highs, to be precise.
Aziz has just opened a shop in
Knightsbridge, one of London’s most
sought-after postcodes, where he sells
limited-edition trainers to a customer
base that includes famous rappers and
wealthy expats. Standing across from
Harrods, the store has the kind of
opulent decor and trendy name you might expect.
It’s called “CONCEPT”, but without the vowels.
Obviously. Aziz’s business partner,
27-year-old David Lemos,
welcomes me into the store.
Each shoe has been individually
vacuum-packed in see-through
plastic and carefully arranged
on white marble pedestals.
There is a line of fur jackets
hanging from gold railings,
two tall mannequins dressed in
floor-length ballgowns, white
leather armchairs and a wall of
diamond rings, gold necklaces
and Malteser-sized pearls.
For the two entrepreneurs,
trainers — or sneakers, as the kids
call them — are assets. “I’d rather
LARA VON DER BRELIE put my money in shoes than
bitcoin,” Aziz says. They are
20 • The Sunday Times Magazine
part of a growing community of traders who buy
limited-edition, difficult-to-source trainers from
brands including Nike and Adidas, and luxury labels
such as Chanel, then resell them — marked up —
to “sneakerheads”, trainer lovers willing to spend
hundreds or thousands of pounds on shoes. In
a recent report, the US investment bank Cowen
concluded that sneakers were emerging as an
alternative asset class. On rare occasions they can
even cost in the millions. In October a pair of old
trainers worn by the basketball legend Michael
Jordan were sold at the auction house Sotheby’s
Previous pages: display for $1.5 million (£1.1
walls at CNCPT. Above: million). And in a private
Kylie Jenner promotes sale in April, Sotheby’s
her trainers. Below: the sold a pair of Nike Air
hip-hop band Run-DMC Yeezy 1s for a record-
were endorsed by Adidas breaking $1.8 million.
The trainers were a
prototype, the first collaboration between Nike
and the rapper Kanye West, who went on to build
a billion-dollar brand, first with Nike, then Adidas.
That’s how a pair of trainers sold for almost $2
million — they’re a part of sneaker history. They
were bought by the finance start-up Rares, which
plans to sell shares in them.
Expensive trainers and a receptive consumer base
are nothing new. A careful blend of marketing,
artificial scarcity and celebrity backing
helped transform the humble sports
shoe into a cult product. But demand
for sneakers has expanded
particularly rapidly over the past
few years. Specialised online
marketplaces have reduced the
risk of counterfeits with
authentication services, causing
prices and consumer hysteria to
rocket. When a new trainer hits the
shops — or “drops” — everyone
wants a pair. And when there’s
a limited supply, that creates a
booming aftermarket. The trainer
resale sector grew by $4 billion in
the two years to 2021, according to
US bank Piper Sandler; Cowen
estimates it has the “potential to
reach” $30 billion by 2030.
 “Since the lockdown started we’ve had hundreds
of thousands of first-time sellers,” says Olivier Van A blend of high-quality marketing, artificial
Calster at StockX, the world’s largest trainer reselling
marketplace. “At the start of the pandemic we saw a scarcity and celebrity backing transformed
few weeks of real slowdown as people were asking
themselves, ‘What’s happening here?’, but very the humble sports shoe into a cult product
quickly we saw a bounce-back and an incredible
acceleration.” With little to spend their money on
while high streets were closed, youngsters turned
to virtual sneaker marketplaces to try their hand at
trainer trading. StockX, which also handles other
collectables such as clothes and electronics, says it
has an average of 30 million website visitors a month.
It earns fees from every sale and was valued at $3.8
billion in a fundraising round this year.
Buying habits on the StockX platform suggest
that people are increasingly treating sneakers as
an investment opportunity rather than a personal
item of footwear. Typical users will purchase at least
three identical pairs, Van Calster says. “One to keep
because they know it’s going to appreciate in price,
one to wear because it’s a cool product, and a third
pair that they’ll sell in the short term to pay for the
other two.” The sneaker market is soaring. And it is
young, scrappy entrepreneurs who look set to profit. each game he played. Many were outraged to see the Above: the rapper Mist
“In the 1970s,” says the trainer historian Sean superstar being told what to do — and some saw it as attracted huge publicity
Williams, “if you wore sneakers you were seen as symbolic of a wider issue involving race in basketball. when he appeared in a
someone with no ambition who wouldn’t achieve “A lot of people took it as a connotation,” Williams says. video wearing Louboutin
much. People might assume you were a criminal.” “They said, ‘Well, what’s wrong with all-black shoes?’” trainers amid Icelandic
The negative connotations attracted emerging It was a big coup for Nike. Later that year the brand snowdrifts. Below:
hip-hop artists, whose music challenged the began marketing the Air Jordan 1 as the shoe that David Lemos welcomes
premise of America’s whitewashed preppy had been ruled out by the NBA — even though A-listers to an exclusive
ideal. “As a youth-based anti-establishment it hadn’t been — making it one of the most shop in Knightsbridge
movement, sneakers were perfect as an iconic designs ever produced. Many believe
official part of [hip-hop],” Williams adds. this rich history around sneakers has imbued
“They were a uniform.” them with meaning that other clothing lacks.
Trainers became a way of signalling you They have cultural value, giving them longevity
belonged to this emerging youth culture — in the marketplace and establishing loyal
and brands were catching on. In 1986 Adidas followers and fanbases.
sponsored the US hip-hop band Run-DMC in Today sneakers are a status symbol,
a $1 million endorsement deal after the group particularly in popular culture. In a recent
released a single called My Adidas, an ode to hit single, Clash, the Brit award-winning
their trademark footwear, Adidas Superstars. rappers Dave and Stormzy begin: “Jordan
The collaboration established sneakers as a non- 4s or Jordan 1s, Rolexes, got more
athletic, everyday shoe for the first time. Around the than one.” The British drill artist
same time as hip-hop was emerging, another event M1llionz says: “It has become
was taking place in the world of basketball that helped a big competition over who
solidify the sneaker’s new-found status. In 1985 can get the most exclusive
Michael Jordan was in dispute with the NBA. He had trainers. People are more
been banned from wearing a pair of black and red likely to listen [to your music]
CHARLIE SURBEY FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE, @ KYLIEJENNER / INSTAGRAM, GETTY IMAGES

Nike shoes on court because they violated a rule that or watch your videos if they know
stipulated trainers had you’re wearing limited-edition shoes
The basketball superstar to be at least 51 — ones they haven’t seen before.”
Michael Jordan, right, per cent white. Mist, a fellow rapper and
was fined by the NBA for Jordan wore sneakerhead, believes the rise of social
wearing non-regulation them anyway media has put more pressure on musicians
Nike shoes, below, which and was fined to invest in their image, especially footwear.
became a cultural icon $5,000 for “Trainers have played a big part in my career,” he says.
“People aren’t just fans of the music any more. They’re
a fan of the music videos and how you’re doing it.”
Mist’s video for the song Hot Property racked up more
than 13 million views after fans shared it on social
media, shocked that he had worn an expensive pair
of Louboutin trainers on a dog sled in Iceland.
LOW-RES “People were, like, ‘Why has he got on Red Bottoms
[Louboutin trainers] in three-foot snow with wolves?’”
he says. “The trainers alone created such a hype.”
As well as celebrity backing, trainers are made
popular by limiting the quantity produced. Even

The Sunday Times Magazine • 21

 SACAI X NIKE LDWAFFLE
BLUE MULTI
Original retail price (2019): £155
Current resale value: £450-£850
if a manufacturer can churn out half a million shoes
for a fraction of the unit cost of making 5,000 —
due to production, marketing and design costs —
they won’t. They’ll deliberately maintain a high
degree of scarcity.
Trainers are now fully integrated through popular
culture, no longer just a sports shoe. Serena Williams
often wears them with ballgowns to red carpet events
— and even sported a pair at her wedding. Kylie
Jenner, make-up billionaire and the youngest of the
Kardashian clan, matches her exclusive footwear with
her daughter’s. Instagram followers want whatever
she’s got — and tabloid inches are dedicated to
figuring out her relationship status depending on
that day’s choice of Nikes. The supermodel Jourdan
S
Dunn is a keen collector of rare trainers too.
ourcing limited-edition shoes is perhaps the
most difficult part of reselling. Weeks before
a new sneaker is released, celebrities such as
the Kardashians will pop up on Instagram
and in paparazzi photos wearing never-seen-
before trainers that the brands have given to
them. Eagle-eyed followers will notice this,
then take to YouTube and Twitter to speculate
on potential resale prices. A release date for the shoe is
set by the brand and prospective buyers will sign up to
a virtual ballot offering the chance to buy one of the few
thousand pairs of sneakers straight from the retailer.
The likelihood of “winning” a place, however, is
slim. “When I was in high school, I was having to
skip class because I’d stayed up all night trying to
get [in the queue for] a shoe,” says Hunter Carlisle,
CHARLIE SURBEY FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE, THE MEGA AGENCY
a 19-year-old reseller from Oklahoma. Now, though,
“More and more people are recognising
that reselling sneakers could be a viable
option if you don’t want to go to college”
he uses “bots” to increase his chances. Bots — short
for robots — are software programs that carry out
automated repetitive tasks, imitating human user
activity. They trick the brand’s website with computer
code, allowing the user to re-enter themselves into
the raffle hundreds of times over. “For a drop
tomorrow, I’m going to spend probably four hours
just setting up all my servers and all the bots,”
Carlisle says. “I’ll probably run about four or five.”
The high-school graduate has been so successful in
the trainers industry that he recently bought himself
a $150,000 BMW i8 sports car. “More and more people
recognise that reselling sneakers could be a viable
option if you don’t want to go to college,” he says.
Niels Sodemann, CEO of the cyber-security firm
Queue-it, says he has seen a significant rise in the use
of queue-jumping bots over the past year. “A sneaker
drop on something pretty ordinary ended up having
23 million of what looked to be users in a queue from
only two million different IP addresses,” he says.
That is how many bots are being used.
Some resellers, however, will avoid the hassle of
buying directly from the retailer altogether — they
see it as time-consuming and expensive. “I don’t
have time for it,” says Aziz from his Knightsbridge Below: the Celtic player
shop. “The botter has to sit on his computer all night Karamoko Dembélé
preparing. I might as well sleep in till 11, call up all receives his delivery from
the botters once it’s over and then cash them out.” teenage reseller Fedor
Aziz has spent a lot of energy building up a base of Makarov. Bottom: drill
super-rich clients, so he can charge more for his trainers artist M1llionz prizes his
and make a good profit, even if he has to pay more to limited-edition footwear
source them. “This is why we’re in Knightsbridge,
because I captured a large part of the Arab market,
especially Qatari royalty,” says the business school
graduate. “We knew who we wanted to target — and
we knew who was big. It’s location-based, you go to
Knightsbridge, you see people and you speak to them.”
Much of the customer loyalty comes down to trust.
Paying off staff at trainer shops is also common.
Resellers will persuade shop assistants to set aside
a couple of pairs on release day, which they can buy
later when the queues have died down. “I had stores
on lock,” one reseller says, meaning they secured
pairs for him in advance. “I had guys who would
shift me every release — at least 20 or 30 pairs —
and I would give them a cut.”
But the most trusted resellers will congregate on
invite-only WhatsApp groups. Members on these
forums will source their
shoes in different ways
— some use bots, others
may pay off shop staff
— but they will all have
built a reputation
Left: a pair of prototype
Nike Air Yeezy 1 trainers
worn by Kanye West
sold for $1.8 million
The Sunday Times Magazine • 23
 in the market as reliable traders. Resellers and shops
such as CNCPT can then mobilise these networks to
source a specific model and size when a client wants
it. Aziz’s Knightsbridge store doesn’t hold any of its
own stock, but instead relies on these external
“consigners” to supply his customers.
When the 18-year-old reseller Fedor Makarov
started out, he obtained his merchandise by waiting
in queues for hours at a time. “I would camp outside
these shops overnight,” he says. He still remembers his
first big win at the age of 14. “It was the Yeezy Bred,”
he says. “I went out at one in the morning to get
them and I stayed until ten in the morning. I think
my parents were very pissed at me that day.” He sold
M
them on for £450, making almost £200 in profit.
akarov now sources trainers from trusted
WhatsApp groups, selling them on to
Premier League footballers and famous
rappers, a customer base he built up on
Instagram. He once travelled from
London to Scotland just to get a photo
of the Celtic FC player Karamoko
Dembélé receiving his sneaker delivery.
Being tagged on social media by a famous footballer
with hundreds of thousands of followers increased
his clientele and added legitimacy to his brand.
“I didn’t make any profit off the sale but he posted
me [on Instagram],” Makarov says. “It got me 2,000
followers and that turned into ten new customers.”
Makarov decided to leave school to concentrate on
his business. “I found it more interesting to focus on
hustling and making money — that was always my
mentality,” he says. “Now I’m going to big parties.
I’ve gone to parties with footballers.”
The truth is, anyone with the nerve and the capital
to hold on to a limited-edition pair of sneakers has a
chance of making money. The moment a shoe is
worn it can no longer be traded as in mint condition
on the resale market, meaning that scarcity goes up
over time, and so do resale prices.
Mandeep Bahra works at a private investment
office in Oxford and got into reselling by accident.
“I bought some sneakers on StockX for a 10 to 15 per
cent mark-up in 2019, then I realised I didn’t really
like them,” he says. “I kept them and they went up
by 300 per cent in less than a year.”
ADIDAS YEEZY BOOST 750
OG LIGHT BROWN
Original retail price (2015): £260
Current resale value: £1,150
REX
The tennis player
Serena Williams enjoys
mixing glamorous outfits
with glitzy versions of
her Nike work shoes
“The joy of wearing and owning them” is what
keeps him coming back for more, but many of the
shoes he buys these days never come out of their
paper wrapping. “I have about 13 pairs still in boxes
that I had seen in the store and then thought,
actually they’re not for me.” The investor keeps
them in brand new condition ready to resell when
the price is right. “I don’t mind holding on to them.”
Carlisle points out that subscriptions to
his sneaker training course, which teaches hundreds
of prospective resellers how to get their hands on
the rarest items, grew fivefold last year during the
pandemic. These so-called “cook groups” are set up
by well-known resellers who charge a fee to explain
how to source and sell trainers online using bots.
A survey last year by the Harris Poll showed that
23 per cent of US adults have, or plan to purchase,
limited-edition sneakers, and 37 per cent of these
said they were motivated by the investment
opportunity. Others think the market is too volatile
to provide any long-term investment opportunities
— not everyone comes out of the business unscathed.
Lemos and Aziz say that one established reseller in
London was badly hit after Adidas released a second
batch of a limited-edition shoe without warning. The
Adidas x Pharrell Williams Human Race NMDs were
doing well when their reseller friend first secured
300 pairs, Aziz recalls. But then the unthinkable
happened: “Suddenly [Adidas] flooded the market
and every single one of those shoes crashed in price
— we’re talking £3,000 to £400 a pair.”
Investors and resellers are, ultimately, at the mercy
of the brands and cultural shifts. The market is
unpredictable and vulnerable to manipulation. Fakes
plague the industry, and “backdooring” — the practice
of releasing a large number of limited-edition
sneakers before official release — enables a select
group of resellers to dictate the price before the shoes
are even made public. Despite such drawbacks, many
still see sneaker trading as a risk they are willing to
take. “We’re in a marketplace,” Aziz says. “If you
understand economics, you understand sneakers.” n
The Sunday Times Magazine • 25
 FREE — BUT
STILL GUILTY
PICTURE CREDIT TO GO HERE
 Jens Soering served
33 years in US jails
for the murder of
his girlfriend’s parents
— a crime he claims he
didn’t commit. Though
never exonerated, he
was released on parole
in 2019. Rosie Kinchen
meets him
PORTRAIT BY JENS UMBACH
PICTURE CREDIT TO GO HERE
F
reedom feels different to different people,
but to Jens Soering it is the awkward ridges Derek had been stabbed
in a concrete pavement. Prison floors are 36 times and was nearly
incredibly smooth, he says, and anyone who
has spent as long inside as he has — 33 years
— forgets they need to lift their feet off the ground. It
decapitated. The murders were
is just one of the things he has had to adjust to in the so brutal the police initially
two years since he was released from the Virginia state
prison system, where he was serving two life sentences. thought a gang was to blame
He has felt rain drench his skin for the first time since
he was a teenager — prisoners are ushered inside the In the months that followed investigators turned their
moment drops begin to fall — and he has swapped soap attention to Elizabeth. She told them she had been in
for body wash, something he hadn’t heard of in 1986, Washington with Jens on the weekend of the murders
when he was last a free man. You actually can forget — they had cinema ticket stubs and receipts from the
how to ride a bike, he tells me when we meet at a hotel hotel to prove it. However, the police noticed that the
in Hamburg. “I had forgotten that when you stop, you Chevrolet Chevette they had rented had clocked up
have to shift your weight slightly and stick your foot close to 700 miles. The return trip to Washington was
out. So I stopped and immediately fell over. It was very only about 250 miles, but the extra mileage could be
embarrassing,” he laughs. explained by an additional trip — from Washington
Soering, 55, wanted to use a riff on this for the title of to the Haysoms’ house and back. Elizabeth simply
his new book about his days of freedom, but his German claimed they had got lost on the way to Washington.
publishers opted for Returned to Life. It is the story of Months later Elizabeth was questioned again.
a man who confessed to a crime he claims he didn’t A bloody print from the scene appeared to have been
commit at the age of 18, and three decades later tried made by a woman’s tennis shoe. She agreed to provide
to build a life again on the outside. But it doesn’t have foot and fingerprints, then Jens was called in. He gave
quite the happy ending he’d hoped for; Soering has the same account of their trip but initially refused to
been freed but he has not been acquitted. “Legally I am provide fingerprints, then said he would come back
a double murderer and that is hard to live with,” he says. a few days later. Instead the couple fled. They travelled
The story begins in 1984 when Soering, the 17-year- through Europe and into Thailand, hitchhiking and
old son of a mid-ranking German diplomat posted at committing petty frauds to keep afloat. On April 30,
a consulate in Atlanta, won a prestigious Jefferson Below: the crime 1986, they were finally caught in London, writing
scholarship to the University of Virginia. On his first scene. The bodies fraudulent cheques in a Marks & Spencer store.
night there he was introduced to a fellow scholar, of Derek Haysom, The police found references to their “little nasty” in
Elizabeth Haysom. Both were outsiders in the Southern 72, and his wife, the travel diaries they had kept since they fled Virginia,
university town; Haysom, the daughter of a Canadian Nancy, 53, were and contacted the authorities there. What happened
steel executive, had been educated at boarding schools found at their next set the course for the rest of Jens Soering’s
in Switzerland and England, including Wycombe home in Virginia life. Over four days of interrogation in London he
Abbey in Buckinghamshire. But the similarities ended on April 3, 1986 confessed to the killings — even demonstrating how
there. Haysom, who was two years older and distantly
related to the aristocratic Astor family on her mother’s
side, was worldly and wild. She had planned to go to
Trinity College, Cambridge, but instead embarked on
a drug-fuelled tour around Europe with her girlfriend,
getting hooked on heroin along the way.
Her parents had brought her home and persuaded
her to enrol at the University of Virginia. Soering,
a bookish, sheltered teenager, was captivated by her
and even more stunned a few months later when she
told him she was in love with him. Their relationship
had all the intensity of any undergraduate affair. They
wrote explicit love letters, experimented with high-
minded literary techniques and booted room-mates
out of their dorm rooms in order to spend hours in bed.
In reality Soering was out of his depth. “I was socially
and emotionally underdeveloped and immature,” he
says. “I’d never had a girlfriend before and here was
this beautiful, much desired older woman. I thought
I’d won the lottery.”
But there was a darker side. Haysom confided that
she had been raped at school in Switzerland. She had
a fractious relationship with her controlling parents,
in particular her mother, whom Haysom has claimed
sexually abused her. The honeymoon period came to
an abrupt end on April 3, 1985, when Elizabeth’s parents,
Derek and Nancy Haysom, were found dead at their
retirement home in Lynchburg, at the toe of the Blue
Ridge Mountains. Derek had been stabbed 36 times
and was nearly decapitated. The murders were so brutal
that police initially suspected a gang must be to blame.

28 • The Sunday Times Magazine

 he severed the main artery in each of the victims’
necks. When Elizabeth Haysom was interrogated
she corroborated the story, saying that Soering had
carried out the crime at her behest. She waived
extradition, returned to the US and pleaded guilty
as an accessory to murder in 1987. She was sentenced
to 90 years in prison.
Soering spent the next four years in the UK fighting
extradition at the European Court of Human Rights,
which made the precedent-setting decision that he
could not be extradited while the Virginia authorities
were seeking the death penalty. They agreed not to
and Soering’s trial in the US began in 1990.
By then Soering had changed his story. He now
claimed that it was Elizabeth who had killed her
parents. He said he had confessed in London because
he believed he was saving his girlfriend from the death
penalty. As the son of a diplomat, Soering says he
thought he would be protected from prosecution
in the US and would serve a far shorter sentence in
Germany at a young offender institution. His
inspiration was Sydney Carton, Dickens’s hero in
A Tale of Two Cities, whose love for Lucie Manette is
so deep that he takes the place of her husband,
Charles Darnay, on the guillotine.
PREVIOUS PAGES: JENS UMBACH FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE. THESE PAGES: BEDFORD COUNTY SHERIFF’S OFFICE,
“One of the things that really played a major role for
me was wanting to play the hero, which is ego. It’s pride.
I wanted to be the one who saved my girlfriend’s life,”
he claims. However, things didn’t work out that way.
“Normally I would have had diplomatic immunity. But
there’s a technicality in the Vienna Convention on
Diplomatic Relations, which says that if you’re stationed
BEDFORD COUNTY CIRCUIT COURT, KILLING FOR LOVE DOCUMENTARY, AP
From left: Nancy at the consulate general, only the diplomat has immunity
Haysom; Derek and not his family,” he says. “I didn’t know that.”
Haysom with his Haysom has always been consistent in saying Soering
daughter Elizabeth; committed the killings. According to her it was Soering
Jens Soering was who drove the rental car to her parents’ house. He had
18 at the time of the returned wrapped in a bloody sheet and told her he had
murders. Below left: killed them. But in Soering’s new version of events it
Elizabeth Haysom was Haysom who had left him in Washington, telling
at her trial in 1987. him she needed to deliver some drugs to her dealer, a
She pleaded guilty fellow student, to settle a debt. She returned in the
to two counts of early hours of the morning, he claimed, and admitted
T
being an accessory to killing her parents while high on drugs.
to murder. Below
right: in 1990 TV he prosecution case rested on four
cameras turned things: a bloody sock print the prosecution
Soering’s trial into said matched his foot size; a type O
a media spectacle blood sample — his blood type, which
was found on a door handle; his own
confession; and Elizabeth’s testimony. But there was
no solid forensic evidence to place him at the scene.
It became a media spectacle — the second trial to be
broadcast gavel to gavel on American television —
but Soering never really believed the case against him
would stick. The guilty verdict when it came “was a
huge shock”, he says. “That night I tried to kill myself,
but I couldn’t go through with it.”
Knowing that everything that has happened to him
was his own fault has been a blessing. “Many people
did many bad things to me, but they could not have
done those if I had just told the truth,” he says. His
goals ever since have been freedom and clearing
his name — a cause that he says has allowed him
to navigate the vast expanse of time behind bars.
Over the ensuing 30 years Soering has been in
eight US institutions, including one of America’s
harshest “supermax” prisons. Today the puny youth
from the newspaper cuttings is a middle-aged man,
lean and muscular from daily prison workouts. He
speaks with a Southern twang and when he drops his
guard the profanities roll off his tongue. One of the
most enjoyable aspects of freedom is food, he says;
prisoners in Virginia are served “meat rock” —
the tendons and connective tissue of a chicken —
which helps them hit the budget of $2.10 a day for
meals. However, material deprivations were not the
hardest part. “You can get literally everything you
can think of in prison, including female guards
who prostituted themselves. There’s nothing you
The Sunday Times Magazine • 29

can’t get other than out,” he says. “It is the pointlessness
that kills people.”
He has seen the same pattern unfold many times.
“The first five years you’re in shock; the next five
years you’re really, really angry. Then the next ten years
your eyes open and you try to rehabilitate yourself,
because the state or the prison won’t do it for you.”
In the early 2000s he found religion and became
the head of the Catholic community in prison. He
organised a prayer group for silent contemplation and
led a t’ai chi class. He also started writing books. He has
written seven to date, including “a fiscally conservative
critique of the US prison system” called An Expensive
Way to Make Bad People Worse, a title he says he stole
from a British government white paper in the 1990s.
Mainly, though, he has been fighting to clear his
name. Those who believe he is innocent point out that
there is as much evidence to place Haysom at the scene
as him; her blood type, the far rarer type B, was found
on a wash rag in the kitchen near her mother’s body.
Her fingerprints were found on a vodka bottle in the
liquor cabinet near her father. Cigarette butts from the
brand she smoked were found outside the front door.
They could of course have been left from earlier visits
— she had been to the house the previous weekend to
steal some of her mother’s jewellery. His supporters
also point to errors in his confession: he had said he
thought Nancy Haysom was wearing jeans when he
killed her, but he couldn’t be sure. In fact she was
wearing a nightgown and robe. He also got the position
of Derek Haysom’s body wrong. However, other details
he gave about the murder scene were accurate.
There is also the issue of motive; after the murders
the police found nude photographs of Haysom as a
teenager that had been taken by her mother. Soering’s
trial lawyer, who was later disbarred and acknowledged
he was suffering from a mental impairment during
the trial, chose not to raise sexual abuse as a possible
motive. During her trial Haysom denied that any
They were finally caught in
London, writing fraudulent
cheques in Marks & Spencer.
Over four days of interrogation
Soering confessed to the killings
30 • The Sunday Times Magazine
abuse had occurred but has subsequently claimed that
it did. She has also emerged as an unreliable witness.
Psychiatrists in London diagnosed her as suffering
from a borderline personality disorder and said that
Soering was suffering from folie à deux: he was swept
up in her delusion.
Over the years he built up an impressive support
network that includes a former Virginia deputy
attorney-general, the actor Martin Sheen and Angela
Merkel, who as German chancellor had lobbied Barack
Obama to allow a prisoner exchange to get Soering
back to Germany. John Grisham, the writer and former
attorney who is on the board of the Innocence Project,
an organisation that campaigns against wrongful
convictions, is a friend and has visited him in prison
a number of times. Soering was a diligent pen pal,
replying to every letter he received (and making carbon
copies for his own records by pressing hard enough on
his notebook to score two pages beneath).
Despite this, Soering’s chances of getting out of
Above: Soering in prison were fleetingly slim. Virginia state grants parole
Buckingham prison, to less than 4 per cent of violent offenders; but never
Virginia, 2011. Below: for those serving double life sentences. Still, there were
Elizabeth Haysom moments when it looked as though his efforts might
was also released on be paying off. In 2010 the Virginia governor Tim Kaine,
parole in 2019, after a Democrat, granted his request to be transferred to a
serving 33 years of prison in Germany, only for his successor, Robert F
a 90-year sentence McDonnell, a Republican, to rescind it a week later. The
psychological collapse that followed was typical. It is at
20 years that you hit a wall, Soering says. “It dawns on
you that you can’t do anything. That’s when you break.”
He lost his faith. “I could wrap my mind around the idea
that a good God would send an innocent man to prison
for 24 years. I could work with the idea that even
though I’m suffering, this can be part of a good God’s
plan,” he says. “The problem is that I didn’t spend 24
O
years. I spent 25, 26, 27 …”
n the outside the case continued to
be scrutinised. In 2009 the Virginia
Department of Forensic Science (DFS)
conducted DNA tests on evidence
from the case as part of a broader
post-conviction testing programme. Only 11 out of 42
samples were useable, and tests on these excluded
both Soering and Haysom. In 2016 Soering’s team
compared the DNA results with the original blood
group evidence from 1985 and excluded Soering as the
source of the type O blood that was found. Later that
year Soering and his lawyer hired experts to look at
the DFS report, who concluded that another man, one
with AB blood, must have been present at the Haysom
house. Independent forensic experts have disputed
this, however, saying that cross-contamination was
very likely to have occurred and all the male DNA
traces may simply have come from Derek Haysom.
However, the development lent credibility to a
longstanding suspicion held by Chuck Reid, a
policeman who had led the early stages of the case
and had been put forward by the prosecution to testify
but was never called to the witness stand. He had
sprayed the inside of the rental car with luminol, which
shows up blood long after it’s cleaned away — covering
every millimetre of the vehicle — and had found
nothing. How could this fit with Haysom’s account of
Soering appearing in the car in a bloody sheet? What
AP, GETTY IMAGES
about the bloody footprints that led from the house to
the spot in the driveway where the prosecution argued
Soering’s car had driven away?

“I cannot prove my innocence,
but I can prove that I should
never have been convicted,”
Soering says. “There is more
than reasonable doubt here”
Reid visited Soering in prison and has publicly
stated that he believes Soering would not be convicted
today. Others disagree, including the Haysom family
and Richard Gardner, the detective who took on the
case from Reid. But the inconsistencies only made the
case more interesting at a time when the public appetite
for true crime stories was beginning to boom.
The case against Soering being the killer was the
subject of a 2016 documentary called Killing for Love.
It focused on Reid’s claim that at the time of the
murders an FBI profiler had concluded that the killer
was female and knew her victims. Nancy Haysom had
been very proper, he argued, and would not have
entertained a male she did not know in her bathrobe.
This profile was never submitted at Soering’s trial and
had disappeared. Now the documentary makers were
able to track down the person who wrote it.
Most important for Soering, the film raised
awareness of his campaign. He sees a karmic
correctness in this. He blames the televised trial
and intense media interest for his conviction: “It was
five years before OJ Simpson. It made everybody act
differently, everybody was looking for the cameras,”
he says. “That is why I have always spoken to the
press. I knew if the press put me in here, the press
is going to have to get me out again.”
While Soering courted publicity, Elizabeth Haysom
has stayed largely quiet. In 2015 she gave a rare
interview to The New Yorker magazine from prison,
in which she said: “I’ve chosen to do my time and to
deal with it my way, and he’s dealing with it in his.”
She said that both she and Soering had inflated her
drug use in the past, saying the only drug she’d ever
used in the United States was marijuana.
Soering, meanwhile, sensed that momentum was
gathering and his legal team submitted a plea of
innocence in August 2016. He was convinced they
had the evidence they needed. “I cannot prove my
innocence, but I can prove that I should never have
been convicted, because there is more than
reasonable doubt here,” he says.
When a prison officer called him in to see the warden
on November 25, 2019, he thought the moment had
finally come. Instead he was told that his petition for
absolute pardon had been rejected, but the state was
granting him parole. He was free but he was still a guilty
man. In the emotional chaos of that moment he thought
about turning the offer down. “I did not do this stupid
thing,” he says, “but I did think about doing it because
H
my heart was set on a pardon.”
e has had a lot of time to consider why the
state of Virginia decided to grant parole at
that moment having refused it 14 times
before. He believes they needed to find a
solution whereby everyone got something
but no one got everything. “Soering gets freedom but
not a pardon. The Haysom family gets Elizabeth out
but they have to accept that I get out,” he says.
The chairwoman of the parole board, Adrianne
Bennett, said Soering’s claims of innocence were
“without merit”, but noted that his and Haysom’s
release would save taxpayer money, calling it
“appropriate because of their youth at the time of
the offences, their institutional adjustment and the
length of their incarceration”.
Soering was handed straight into the care of the
immigration authorities to be deported to Germany,
terrified that the lifeline would be whisked away again
at any moment. He was allowed to walk without
handcuffs and went to the lavatory with the door
closed for the first time since he was 19 years old.
Even more surreal was his discovery that Haysom had
been freed on parole as well — for being an accessory
Soering is greeted before the fact she had served just as much time in
by supporters and prison as he had — and was in the same deportation
press at Frankfurt facility on her way back to Canada. He has had no
airport as he arrives contact with her.
a free man in His old support systems were long gone. His family
December 2019 did everything they could to help him in the years after
his conviction. His father took hardship postings in
Mauritania and Papua New Guinea to try to help with
legal costs. But Soering fell out with his father ten
years ago over an inheritance dispute and they are no
longer on speaking terms. He was met off the plane in
Frankfurt by a crowd of supporters and travelled from
there to Hamburg, where he was taken in by a host
family. One of them was studying forensic psychiatry
at university and had stumbled on his case.
He was confronted with a choice. “Some of my
supporters and friends said, ‘You should just change
your name, live anonymously and start over,’ ” he says.
“I decided deliberately not to do that.” If he had it
would have left a black hole in his biography — “just
the pure loss”, he says. Instead he is hoping to turn his
experiences into something positive. He has written
the book, found a flat and has plans to build a career as
a speaker, talking about the endurance and resilience
he has developed to survive. “What I’ve lost I can’t
catch up, but I can enjoy what I’ve got now,” he says.
But on that first night, sitting in his own bedroom for
the first time, he listened to Bob Seger’s Night Moves,
a song about an older man reflecting on the foolishness
of young love, and wept for the lifetime that he’d lost n
The Sunday Times Magazine • 31
THAT’S
JUST
SHOWING
OFF Mesmerising images of the glorious
PICTURE CREDIT TO GO HERE

(and pugnacious) betta fish — also

known as the Siamese fighting fish
Right: a blue delta
PICTURE CREDIT TO GO HERE

PHOTOGRAPHS BY CHARLIE SURBEY

 W
Above: a ghost crowntail ith their serene hues and graceful tails, it’s easy to forget
that these betta fish have another name: Siamese fighting
Left: a red veiltail fish. Originating in Thailand, formerly Siam, they were
popular among children, who would collect them from rice
paddies and pitch them in battle. After people started
gambling on the fights, the king levied a tax on the fish.
They are now bred to accentuate tail shapes and colours. Wild bettas,
meanwhile, are listed as “vulnerable” by the International Union for
ALL IMAGES © CHARLIE SURBEY

Conservation of Nature owing to pollution and habitat destruction.

For this project the photographer Charlie Surbey sourced fish from
his local aquarium and had a tank built with partitions to keep them
apart. “Without that they would fight to the death,” he says. Beautiful
Warriors, an online exhibition of Surbey’s images, is showing at
Another Boutique (another.boutique) until December 31 n

The Sunday Times Magazine • 37

 Below: a galaxy halfmoon Above: a hellboy halfmoon Below: a copper superdelta
ALL IMAGES © CHARLIE SURBEY

The Sunday Times Magazine • 39

A blue combtail A yellow veiltail
A halfmoon plakat
 “My mother runs up
to me, shouting in
Farsi. Later, my friends
will ask who that
woman was. The
au pair, I tell them”

When she arrived at a posh new girls’

school, the author Melody Razak began
to live a double life. Why did she hide her
Iranian heritage from her classmates?
PORTRAIT BY ALEX LAKE

Clockwise from top left: Melody aged ten in a restaurant with

her younger sister and cousins; the rebellious 18-year-old;
a birthday at the family home in Tehran, c 1983; Melody’s
mother visits Trafalgar Square shortly after coming to
England in the early 1970s; at the flat in Edgware Road
after her sister’s birth, 1980; a family gathering in 1977
T
he year is 1988, I’m 13 years old and
my mother has come to collect me
from school. She drives a bronze
Datsun Sunny and, normally, she
parks down the road and around
the corner. I have given her strict
instructions of where, exactly, to
wait. I know where she is, but the other girls can’t see
her and they think I walk home on my own.
Today, though, is different. I’m loitering by the school
gates, head down, giggling with the other girls, and
because she is late my mother has left the car right
by the kerb and is running up to find me. She is a tiny
woman with dark hair, ochre skin and a heart-shaped
face. The other girls stare as my mother gestures, quick
and crude, and shouts at me in a foreign tongue. She is
anxious because the Datsun is parked on a double
yellow line and my little sister is alone in the back,
her small cheeks pressed against the window.
My mother shouts out, in Farsi, that I should run along
and hurry up now. She calls my name like a fishwife
flogging the daily catch at market. One of the girls
imitates my mother’s voice. I shake it off, that wrench in
my stomach. The pure embarrassment. I wave goodbye
to my smirking friends and march away with affected
swagger and then cower, red-faced and hot, in the car.
My sister sniggers — she understands — and I kick her.
Tomorrow the girls will ask me who that woman
was. That woman does not look like the mother in the
photograph I’ve shown them. It was the au pair, I will
tell them, in as casual a tone as I can muster. I don’t
know why she spoke to me in that weird language,
I will add. I have no idea what she was going on about.
I point to the tallest, blondest woman
in the photograph. “That’s her,” I say.
“That’s my mother.” I don’t know if
my classmates believe me
The photograph I carry around with me is of my
mother’s class graduation from Vidal Sassoon. My
mother is in the photograph but she is not who I’ve been
pointing at. I’ve been pointing at the tallest, blondest
woman in the group. That’s her, I say, third from the
left. That’s my mother. I don’t know if my classmates
believe me, my colouring so wildly different from the
mother I have chosen, my lineaments clearly drawn
from the shouty au pair, but they nod all the same.
I learnt how to lie because I was peevishly aware of
my position on the sidelines: skin colour, hair colour,
class, the council flat we live in, the god we worship, the
food we eat. Growing up in London in the 1980s, this
was a problem. You heard the word P*** bandied about
enough times, and each time it was a gut punch — and
you started to lie. Suddenly it wasn’t just about the fact
I lived in a council block with a urine-drenched lift, but
it was about my darker colouring, the thick moss on my
arms and legs that my mum refused to let me shave off
and that I could see my classmates trying not to stare at.
“Are you a P***?”
“No. My father is English. I use my mother’s
maiden name.”
I was 11 years old when I was bundled off to Francis
Holland School, an expensive all-girls private school in
44 • The Sunday Times Magazine
Clarence Gate, central London. Education was
everything to my mother. Education, she repeatedly
lectured, would open the world, and she wasn’t wrong.
My mother wanted her daughters to have the best
start and in order for this to happen she worked
several jobs, dipped into a small inheritance and saved
frantically for our schooling. She was a carer, a cleaner
and a nanny, but she would still sit with me each evening
and help with my maths homework. My father did
not live with us. Apart from the odd week, I never
remember his presence. He had returned to Pakistan
to his other, first wife and their three older children.
Until secondary school my world had been small and
straightforward. It revolved around 42 Padbury House,
Lisson Green estate, just off the Edgware Road. My
mother, my sister and I. A single-parent, all-female
household presided over by the small fierce woman
with the heart-shaped face and size 3 feet. She was still
only young — she was 20 when she had me — and
spoke broken English. She came to England from Iran
with her cousins to learn the language. She met my
father. I guess she liked him so much she stayed.
Our neighbours either side were Cypriot and Turkish,
family friends were from Iran and we didn’t really mix
outside this. At primary school my little gang of friends
was a gloriously mixed bag of diverse ethnicities. I had
never considered that I might be one of only a handful
of ochre and brown-skinned girls in a school of
otherwise pale faces. And then, quite suddenly, I was.
I didn’t lie at the start of secondary school. I just
kept very quiet and tried to work out my place. My new
classmates spoke French well and played tennis on
Saturdays. They skied at half-term and summered in
wisteria-covered cottages. One or two even had drivers
— stoic older men, neat and tidy — who waited in big
black polished cars right outside the school gates, not
around the corner with my mum and her little bronze
Datsun. The other girls were friendly but I didn’t know
how to blend myself in.
The embarrassments that began in the first term did
not help. My mother, horrified at the mounting John
Lewis uniform bill, decided to hand-stitch my red and
white checked shirt — a humiliating kitchen tablecloth,
 Peter Pan collars stubbornly lumpy. Even at 11 I refused
to wear it. My shoes were black leatherette slip-ons,
while all the other girls wore Dr Martens with tassels or
penny loafers with a polished penny in each one. I was
desperate to fit in. Pair that with a debilitating shyness
and an excessively rich imagination and there is not
much I wouldn’t have said or done to make friends.
It didn’t take long to see that minor disobediences
worked in my favour. It was easiest to be naughty. To sit
at the back of the classroom and giggle at the chemistry
teacher’s sandals. To boast about the cigarettes I had
smoked and the boys I had known. Perpetuating
PREVIOUS PAGES AND THESE PAGES: ALEX LAKE FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE, COURTESY OF MELODY RAZAK
fabrications that I’m sure the other girls were wise to.
My efforts to be part of the gang were not helped by
being the first in my class to start puberty. It came from
nowhere and floored me. I had just turned 12 when my
first period soaked my uniform skirt. Early puberty was
another sign of my besmirched status. I wanted nothing
to do with it. The other girls, the paler-skinned ones,
were still flat-chested and I imagined them eyeing me
up all cool and curious and slightly disdainful.
B
ack home, my other life continued.
There were always visitors — aunts,
cousins, random strangers, small
children hiding in skirts. They stayed
for months, and as I struggled to fit in
at school, I found myself disliking their
intrusion. I felt keenly how un-English
it was to have a perennially full house, to have large pans
of mutton boiling on low overnight and to have to sleep
on a makeshift bed on the living room floor because
someone else had your bedroom. I craved the scentless
calm and order I had seen at my friend’s houses.
Razak at home in From time to time I would stay overnight at friends’
Brighton. Bottom houses — mansions, really — once my mother had
left: with her mother vetted their parents and so long as there were no older
and baby sister brothers in sight. The furniture in those houses was
celebrating the Eid noticeably different from ours, more gilded and stylish,
festival at their the rooms enormous. I was envious of the freedom with
London flat, c 1981 which my friends and their siblings were allowed out,
the easy way they lounged against the walls and joked
with each other. Friends were never allowed to stay at
mine. The few times I asked her, my mother always
said no. “Melody jaan,” she would say, a helpless gesture
indicating the room around her, her own shame that
she always tried to conceal. “How can we?”
So instead I lied — I walked a lopsided way home and
told my friends I lived in a three-storey house in St John’s
Wood. I was always trying to be someone other than who
I was. I didn’t have the conviction to stand my ground,
and even if I did I had no idea where that ground was.
It was untenable, of course. Friends were rightly curious
and they asked questions and the more I lied the more
difficult it became to untether myself. I would tell the
other girls I was an atheist and that my mother, the
tall blonde in the photograph, was an atheist too.
I soon came to despise my mother for every “no” she
flung my way. I didn’t care that she might be working
three menial jobs to pay for my expensive school and
future. I only knew that the other girls’ mothers were
much more pliable and less demanding.
Every day after school I was pushed from one activity
to another: ballet, tap, drama, speech therapy for my
lisp, piano lessons, ceramics. I was sulky and unwilling,
but it was the Quran lessons that really got me. I was
about 13 years old when the sudden shove of religion, out
of the blue, came like an elbow to the chest. I had
The Sunday Times Magazine • 45
 always known it was there but prided myself on my Melody and her
family’s secularism. Though I never asked her, I suspect mother enjoy
my mother was homesick for Tehran and struggling a day at the park
with an errant teenage daughter. Prayer offered her in London, 1978
a balm. I had to wear a tight hijab for our impromptu
visits to the Regent’s Park Mosque and suddenly, chest
constricted, I couldn’t breathe. Tantrums followed
but my mother was tenacious, embracing religion
with a fervour that bewildered me. She stood up to
my transgressions in the only way she knew how. She
prayed five times a day and made me pray too, though
I bit my cheeks and stumbled on the words. When
she made me fast at Ramadan, I hid in the nearest alley
and gorged on bottles of fizzy cola and 99 Flakes.
In my other life, the life I was trying to fit into,
Christianity was the thing. Christianity was celebrated.
At Christmas the class would exchange glitter-smeared
cards. We’d sing carols in St Cyprian’s across the road,
the thick incense up my nose, and that seemed — to
my tractable mind — the more pleasing option.
“When I am 18 I’m going to convert,” I announced to
my mother and numerous aunts one year with one hand
on my hip. “And then I’m going to bleach my hair white
blonde.” They laughed out loud and nodded: go on then.

I
n the upper fifth things finally came to a head.
The fabricated layers I had so carefully
constructed around myself began to come
undone. It was always going to happen. My
friends and I were caught smoking in the
lavatories and hauled into the headmistress’s
office. The other defendants cried, confessed
and were repentant. I refused to cry. I felt disquiet that
my friends had no mettle and decided in that moment to
take a different approach. I decided to tell another big lie.
“I’m grieving,” I said. “My father has just died. Cancer.”
That evening the headmistress called my stunned
mother to offer her condolences. It was a long and
painful phone call. I was suspended from school and
grounded yet again. The disappointment that puckered
my mother’s brow when she came to collect me was
quietly devastating, though I pretended not to care.
I wasn’t fulfilling my part of the bargain. If she was
going to work several jobs and forgo luxuries, the least
I could do was be a certain kind of girl.
But I wasn’t sorry. Or that girl. I left Francis Holland
at the end of that year — after my GCSEs. I was
desperate for a new start. My mother had saved up to
buy a small flat, we were moving to Ealing and I was
moving to a new school.
I’m not in touch with my old friends or teachers. I never
saw any of the girls again after I left and I am saddened
by this. There was so much in our friendships that was
unspoken, that remains unresolved. I wonder too if my
dissemblance was transparent from the start and that
perhaps there was an inherent kindness in them that
meant I was never confronted or unduly questioned.
As a writer today I am lucky that I have the time and
space to read and reflect. To look back on my adolescence,
try and work out why I behaved the way that I did, why
I internalised so much inherited shame. I was never
confident enough of my place in the world to stake my
claim. I am oddly grateful for those uncertain, nebulous
COURTESY OF MELODY RAZAK
I didn’t care that my mother was
working three menial jobs to pay
for my school. I came to despise
her for every “no” she flung my way
mean, what they will always mean. I have immersed
myself in other cultures and religions, similar to the
environments I was raised in, and have found them
to be infinitely beautiful.
Over the years my mother’s expectations of me have
eased — she is no longer as strict and we laugh more
often than we disagree. We are finally learning to read
one another and have carved the space in which to do
it. Through all the intervening years her support has
been constant.
As a girl I defined myself against everything I was not.
My mother became my scapegoat, my father I rubbed
off the page. When I think back to the photograph, the
one I carried with me at school and long since
discarded, and I remember the stranger’s face I chose,
I feel endless guilt. It is a feeling I can’t quite shift.
Although my mother and I no longer live near each
other and, I must confess, I enjoy the physical distance,
I make it a point to see her monthly. There is no grand
epiphany, no final resolution, just a gradual awareness of
her essence as it presses into mine. That I am the woman
I choose to be precisely because of the blueprints she
gave me. Nowadays I pine almost daily for the softness
of her skin, the heft of her cheek pressed to mine, the
scent of rice on the cooker. What I wouldn’t give now to

years, for the grit and determination they gifted me.
I am still shy in new situations but now I am pointedly
truthful, blunt when it is allowed.
As an adult I have travelled extensively through
Asia and India. I am homesick often. For the first time
I understand my family and my home, what those words
take those childhood words back and point to the small
woman with the heart-shaped face. That’s her, I would
say, and I would be so proud. That’s my mum n
Melody Razak’s debut novel, Moth, is published by
Weidenfeld & Nicolson at £14.99

The Sunday Times Magazine • 47

 How to survive
Health

Christmas excess
Make wise choices at the buffet, stick to routines and forget
dry January … Here’s the gift list your body needs this month

Given last December was a DON’T KILL NANA

washout for much of the country, That shot in your arm was
with long-hoped-for family a vaccine, not an elixir of
reunions relegated to cheerless immortality. Think of it like a flak
FESTIVE CHEER virtual cracker-pulling, you could jacket — it’s not going to stop you

14
be forgiven for tapping into your getting hit but it will minimise
inner Roman emperor. There’s an the odds of you needing a hospital
air of hedonism about the coming bed or drawer in the morgue
weeks that seems intent on making freezer if you do. And just because
The number of
Adam Kay the back room of Studio 54 look your sense of smell can rival that
units of alcohol you
are advised to limit
yourself to per week
E ven in a normal year we’re
clamouring for December
— the endless eggnog is our
like a children’s birthday party at
Streatham McDonald’s. Much like
the Gallagher brothers in their
of a German shepherd and there’s
no sign of a sniffle, that doesn’t
mean you haven’t got Covid.
(all year round) reward for somehow making it Nineties heyday we’re “up for it”, It wouldn’t be the worst idea
NHS through the previous 11 months. but are we actually … up to it? in the world to ask your guests to

48 • The Sunday Times Magazine


take a lateral flow test before they
rock up at your house. If any say
no, how good a friend are they?
And if you haven’t had your
booster jab yet, get onto the NHS
website and book one. It’s now
available for over-forties, which,
let’s be frank, you probably are.
BOOZE
There’s a lot more alcohol flying
around than normal at this time
of year but, unlike Royal Mail,
your body doesn’t take on seasonal
staff. There’s no extra lobe of liver
or spare stomach lining to stand
in when your regulars cite
exhaustion. Likewise, the NHS
alcohol advice doesn’t get a
Christmas remix with an extra
zero on the 14 units per week. If
you’re going to overdo it, make
sure it’s the odd aberration rather
than a nightly event. If you’re
ILLUSTRATION BY GUS SCOTT
losing count, then the Drinkaware
app will help you get on top of
things, by which I mean out from
under the table.
Clearer drinks aren’t exactly
a magic talisman against feeling
rough the next day, but they do
contain fewer potentially
hangover-triggering chemicals.
And pace yourself — one alcoholic
drink an hour with soft drinks or
water filling the gaps is the ideal.
You won’t get drunk as fast, your
hangover will be on the lighter
side, your wallet and liver will
both thank you, and you’re less
likely to do something regrettable
under the mistletoe.
At office parties especially
there’s great pressure to spend
most of December wasted —
an empty hand will often have
a drink shoved into it, requested
or not. A good tip is to always
carry a glass of sparkling water,
complete with ice and a slice —
it looks like gin or vodka and the
more aggressive social drinkers
will leave you alone. It’s ridiculous
but easier than having an in-depth
conversation about cirrhosis
while Last Christmas thunders
away in the background.
FOOD
It feels like a betrayal to eat
anything that isn’t either festive,
foil-wrapped or encased in pastry,
and while no one will begrudge
you deep-throating the odd
Toblerone, try maintaining some
kind of balance. I realise this
sounds like someone has given the
Grinch a newspaper column, but
a healthy breakfast will start even
the most decadent day off on a
It doesn’t healthy footing — try to make that
matter how morning buck’s fizz a one-off treat
rather than the origin story for a
artisanal 24-hour bender. When you hit the
party buffet, load your plate with
the pastry fresh and colourful food first, then
move on to cruise the platters of
or organic processed beige. It doesn’t matter
the sausage how artisanal the pastry or organic
the sausage meat — it’s all the
meat, it’s all same to your arteries.
Christmas is a feast and it’s
the same to natural to gorge, but listen to your
your arteries body and recognise when you’re
full. A little of what you fancy does
you good, but eating healthily
makes you feel better and gives you
more energy, which you’ll need
plenty of if you’re going to make
it to a near-identical soirée two
doors down the following evening.
LATE NIGHTS AND LONG DAYS
There are 12 days of Christmas,
but a month of post-midnight
bedtimes and bleary-eyed
mornings. Late nights are
inevitable but try not to get
sucked into a lie-in the next day.
Get up as close to your normal
wake-up time as possible to help
you feel sleepy around the normal
time and avoid ending up with a
kind of seasonal jet lag.
With December being so
busy you might be tempted to
postpone your exercise routine
until the resolutions kick in, but
getting yourself moving will help
your body recharge and assuage
a small amount of your gluttony
guilt. If you don’t fancy the full
ultra-triathlon, even little things
such as getting out of your seat
regularly and taking the stairs can
help give your metabolism the
kick-start it’s begging for. And if
you feel the late nights are getting
to you, remember you don’t have
to fit it all in: forget flitting from
mulled wine at No 43 to cocktails
to PTA festive mingle. This isn’t
your last day on earth — keeping
things low-key, local and low
frequency is probably a good idea,
especially while each get-together
is a potential superspreader event.
RECOVERY
Somehow we’ve talked ourselves
into accepting that December’s
excesses must be offset by
near-permanent penance
throughout January. Admittedly
I don’t work as a doctor any more,
but my semi-professional opinion
here would be: bollocks to that.
The festive season is there to be
enjoyed and if you overdo it a little
— or even a lot — festering guilt
and 31 days of doing whatever the
hell a “juice cleanse” is won’t help.
If you have resolved to lay off
booze for January, great, but why
January? Have you considered
picking a month when it’s not 3
degrees Kelvin and night-time for
23 hours of the day? And I always
worry that people who know
they’ve got a month of abstinence
coming take that as a licence to
pummel their livers with enough
brandy to sink the Titanic
throughout December. Leave
self-flagellation to creepy monks
in bad airport novels — there’s no
need to eat only moss in pill form
or exist solely on fruit infusions.
Just make sure that once your
excesses are over, you return to a
healthy, balanced diet, with bad
habits in moderation. The only
one who should still have a red
nose after Christmas is Rudolph n
For tickets to Adam Kay’s show
Twas the Nightshift Before
Christmas, visit adamkay.co.uk
The Sunday Times Magazine • 49
 The Clarkson Review: Ford Focus ST Edition
Driving
Just the thing when
the chips are down
Jeremy Clarkson
CONTACT US
B ack in 1985, when James Bond
didn’t have issues with his
sexuality and could kill a shark
Write to us at with a single karate chop to the
driving@sunday- collarbone, he was dispatched
times.co.uk or Driving, to France to work out why
The Sunday Times, Christopher Walken was hoarding
1 London Bridge Street, computer chips in the doping lab
London SE1 9GF underneath his stables.
DRIVING.CO.UK
Needless to say, he ended up on
the back of a wayward fire engine
For daily news, reviews,
videos, buying guides
that was being driven by a very
pretty girl who went on to be a soft
and advice porn star and then, after Grace
50 • The Sunday Times Magazine
Jones exploded, he was to be
found on the underside of an
airship twanging the lightning
conductor on the top of San
Francisco’s Transamerica
building with his testes.
A View to a Kill was a
tremendous film, but there was
a problem with the central pillar
of the plot. I can take a hollowed-
out volcano and an invisible
space station, but why would
anyone hoard silicon chips?
It made as much sense as the
notion of hoarding actual chips.
Because it has all
this specialness
does not mean it’s
a track-day special
for boy racers only
Ha, because here we are in
2021 and the motor industry
really is facing a terrible shortage
of the damn things. It seems that
as the pandemic began to bite,
the car companies realised that
no one was buying their products
and slashed their orders for
the microchips that control
everything from braking to wipers.
A normal modern car needs about
1,400 to work properly.
But from the chip maker’s
perspective this sudden drop-off
in demand was OK because
people, stuck at home, were
buying millions and millions of
electronic goods that they could
put in a cupboard and never use.
So they switched from making
chips for cars and started making
them for gaming consoles and
machines for making sourdough
bread. But then there were two
fires at separate factories in Japan
that wrecked the supply chain,
and on top of this there was the
aftermath of a trade war between
Mr Trump and Mr Xi, which
meant China was hoarding what
few chips were being made to
use in its 5G network.
1,468mm
Bond? Well, he was busy
reading Attitude magazine. And
Christopher Walken? He was
sitting around with a gold
watch up his ass, laughing his
head off and saying, “I told you
this could happen.”
Today the microchip shortage is
so severe that when you buy a new
Range Rover I’m told you only get
one key. They simply don’t have
enough of the fiddly little circuit
boards to give you a spare. And
that’s if you can get a car at all.
The usual wait of eight weeks
for a family saloon crept up to
six months and then to even
more than that. Jaguar is quoting
a waiting time of a year. Ford
has introduced a Puma that
has no lane departure warning
system, advanced braking
assistance, climate control or
Bluetooth. And all the other
makers say they are having
problems as well, except Tesla.
Don’t know why. Maybe God
likes the sanctimonious.
The result of all this is that
the price of used cars has gone
through the roof. We bought an
Audi RS4 for a Grand Tour film
that had to be postponed because
of the pandemic. And today it’s
worth £8,000 more than it was
18 months ago.
The AA backs this up, saying
that a three-year-old Mini, in 2019,
would have cost £9,800, whereas
today it would be £15,400. In the
same time frame an Audi A3
has gone up by 46 per cent, and
rises of 30 per cent or more are
common across the board. That
crummy little rust bucket on your
drive is now the most valuable
thing you own.
So really, this morning, I should
be reviewing the 1978 Lincoln
Continental that I brought back
from a Grand Tour shoot last year.
Or maybe the four-year-old Range
Rover that I use for shooting.
But I’m not. Instead, because
I’m obtuse, I’m reviewing the
brand-new Ford Focus ST Edition.
It’s not a looker. No Focus ever
has been, but this one, with its
plasticky trim and football shirt
paintwork, is sort of bland and
yobbish at the same time.
done electronically. It’s provided
because Ford reckons its
The Clarksometer customers will like it this way.
Ford Focus ST Edition The old skool way.
Seriously, they reckon that
people will wake up on a Saturday
morning and think, “Right, today
I’m going to jack my car up and
break out the toolkit and then I
shall spend all day deciding which
one of 16 rebound adjustments
I want for my coilover suspension
1,979mm 4,388mm and which one of the 12
Engine Fuel / CO2 compression settings. Then I’ll
2261cc, four cylinders, 34.9mpg / 185-186g/km go online to tell my mates what
turbo, petrol I’ve done and STBOY3526 will
Weight
Power 1,432kg
reply, saying I should have gone
276bhp @ 5500rpm for a slightly lower ride height.”
Price They may be right. There may
Torque £35,785 well be people who want to tune
310 Ib ft @ 3000rpm
Release date their suspension manually like
Acceleration On sale now this. But I’m not one of them.
0-62mph: 5.7sec When I buy something, I like to
Jeremy’s rating
Top speed think it’s been set up and tuned
155mph by a professional with access to
many years of experience and a
thousand computers.
It’s not even that attractive So I didn’t bother jacking the
when you step inside. To save Focus up or tuning it. I just got
Head to money Ford has taken away in and went for a drive and, oooh,
head nearly all the buttons and put the
controls on the central screen,
it was good. The steering, the
braking and the tidal wave of
Ford Focus ST Edition v saying that no function is ever torque that comes from that
Volkswagen Golf GTI
more than one or two clicks away. Mustang engine every time you
Clubsport
True. But when it’s raining and touch the throttle combine in a
you’re bouncing along in the dark, blizzard of magic fairy dust to
your finger will almost certainly create something really very
hit the wrong part of the screen special. And that’s before we get
Price
and you then have to pull over and to the electronic front differential,
find your spectacles to find out which isn’t really a differential at
£35,785 £37,215
how you can get back to the start all, it just behaves like one, and
Power point. Buttons are so much easier. that sprinkles even more fairy
Still, behind the top-of-the- dust into the mix.
276bhp 296bhp
range flimflam, it’s a very practical Do not, however, imagine that
0-62mph car with lots of space in the back, because it has all this specialness
five doors and a big boot. In which it’s a hardcore track-day special for
5.7sec 5.6sec
you’ll find a kit that can be used to boy racers only, because it isn’t.
Top speed adjust the suspension. When you’re not in the mood or
This is provided not because the you’re doing the school run, it
155mph 155mph
chip shortage means it can’t be settles down to become quiet
and sensible. It even rides well.
There are a lot of hot hatchbacks
on the market and almost all of
them these days are very good.
The Hyundai N cars are brilliant
and I’ve always been a sucker for
a Golf GTI. Yet somehow there’s
an unquantifiable streak of genius
in the Focus ST that none of the
others can really match.
It’s just a shame that by the time
you take delivery, cars like this
will be against the law. And don’t
think you can get round the
problem by waiting for the new
Focus, which is due out next year,
because unless things improve
dramatically by then you won’t be
able to have one of those either n
The Sunday Times Magazine • 51

Paul O’Grady
A Life in the Day
The presenter and author on his wartime
diet, Lily Savage and walkies at Battersea
O ’Grady, 66, was born in
Birkenhead, Merseyside.
He left school at 16 to take a job
with the civil service in Liverpool.
In the late 1970s, while working
in London for Camden council,
he began doing drag as Lily
Savage, an act with which he
forged a successful TV career
in the 1990s. Since retiring Lily
in 2004, O’Grady has presented
shows including The Paul
O’Grady Show and For the Love
of Dogs. He has also published
several books. He divides his
time between his London flat
and the Kent farmhouse where
he lives with his husband,
Andre, a former ballet dancer,
and their many animals.
I’ll be honest, I’m
not very good of a
morning. It takes me
a while to thaw out. If I haven’t got
anything to do I’ll get up at about
ten, sip from a cup of tea and look
over the mountain of post I’ve
been ignoring for the past few
weeks. If I’m working I’ll be up
earlier, but I have the same thing
Bringing together 100
of the most remarkable
people from this
acclaimed column,
A Life in the Day is
published by Times
Books at £12.99
58 • The Sunday Times Magazine*
for breakfast every day: three
Weetabix, berries, banana, milk
and maple syrup.
I’m down in Kent most of the
time with my partner, on our
farm. We’ve got pigs, goats,
chickens, ducks, barn owls, sheep.
And our four dogs [including
Arfur, pictured below], of course.
After breakfast I’m on a taxi
motorbike to Battersea Dogs &
Cats Home. I spend a lot of my
time these days filming For the
Love of Dogs. It’s been ten years
now. Originally I thought it would
only take up six hours of my life,
one quick series. I’d no idea this
little programme would be such
a hit; people come up to me all the
time to tell me about their dogs.
The Battersea site is huge, so
I tend to walk about four miles a
day, which is good for me because
I can’t be bothered to go to the
gym. All that exercise keeps me
supple but I’m always sitting on
the floor, so it destroys my clothes.
By the end of the day I look like
I’ve just got out of a skip.
It’s difficult not to take the
working day home with me. I get
so angry about the way some
people treat their pets. I’ll say
something to camera like, “I want
to hang them with piano wire from
the nearest lamppost,” and the
director will ask if I can try not to
sound like Mussolini on a bad day.
I grew up working class in
Liverpool; no ambition, just
drifting along. Liverpool was
a big port city and I worked
for a shipping line, and later
I was a peripatetic care officer for
Camden council in London. At
night I used to go to this pub in
Vauxhall and I thought: “I can do
better than the compere.” And
that’s how Lily Savage was born.
I did the pub circuit, then the
Edinburgh festival. Clive James
was a huge Lily fan, so I did his
show a lot — and when I did my
own, 14 million tuned in.
At Battersea, lunch is about
one o’clock — a sandwich from
Marks & Spencer or, if I’m lucky,
they’ll get me a Greggs. The rest
of the afternoon I’m basically
in a kennel or watching an
operation. The day finishes at
five o’clock, then it’s back home
to Kent and I collapse.
I’ve had quite a few health issues
over the past few years [O’Grady
has suffered three heart attacks],
so I tend to eat quite healthily now.
We’ll eat all sorts but not lamb, not
after hand-rearing so many. I find
I still like wartime food, though:
fish fingers, chips, marrowfat peas.
During the Eighties a lot of my
friends died from Aids, and over
the past few years a succession
of friends — Cilla Black, Jackie
Collins, Des O’Connor, Honor
Blackman — have gone too. I feel
like all these guests are leaving a
fabulous party. Does it make me
think of my own mortality? Nah,
I’m not bothered, me.
Evenings, I like to read. If I’m
not reading, I’m washing clothes.
I love washing clothes. I once
had a conversation with Michael
Winner when me and Cilla were
with him in Barbados. He didn’t
know how to wash his silk pyjamas,
so I told him. “A revelation!” he
said. “We’ll open a laundry!”
I’ll go to bed listening to the
Shipping Forecast on Radio 4.
That’s my nightly
tradition — sends
me out like a light n
Interview by Nick Duerden
Eddie Albert and the Amazing
Animal Gang by Paul O’Grady
is published by HarperCollins
Children’s Books at £12.99