LIFE

ISSU E №57 | 2 9 O C T OBE R 202 2

AFTER
LOVE
Damian Lewis
on family, grief and
changing direction
I N T E R V I E W PA G E 1 6

BOOKS LIFESTYLE
Jonathan The best
Coe takes food for
on the your health
state of the – and the
nation planet
PA G E 5 9 PA G E 7 5
 CONTENTS 29.10.22 ISSUE № 577

5 39 75
CU T TINGS C U LT U R E LIFESTYLE
Pages............................. 5-15 Pages.......................... 39-71 Pages........................75-98

Smart shot Be afraid. Be very afraid Our planet, your plate

Two little boys, one big Garth Marenghi is back, Want to eat healthily and
scary ghost train 20 years after Darkplace help the environment?
P5 P39 Tim Spector explains
how (above)
How much money Podcasts...........................45 P75
C O V E R : T O M O B R E J C / T R U N K A R C H I V E . T H I S PA G E: O R L A N D O G I L I / T H E G U A R D I A N; K AT H Y P L U N K E T T/ T H E G U A R D I A N; A N T O N I O O L M O S / T H E G U A R D I A N; M I C H A E L H E D G E . F O O D S T Y L I N G: R H E A T H I E R S T E I N

makes you happy? Screen...............................46

Coco Khan asks the Music.................................48 Blind date
experts the big questions What to do this week ....50 Will Maddy and Jessie
P7 Cultural prescription....53 get to dance and
Visual arts........................54 drink margaritas?
Down the rabbit hole P78
Lost in the flow of Who dares wins
The White Lotus Alfie Allen joins the SAS Tim Dowling

16
P7 P56 The best-laid plans of a
back-seat micromanager
Flashback Books P79
McFly’s Tom Fletcher at This time it’s personal
four, rocking a red guitar Jonathan Coe on Britain’s You be the judge
P8 crisis and his new novel Should my partner
P59 get rid of our lockdown
Dining across F E AT U R E S wormery now?
the divide Pages...............................................................................16-37 Nonfiction reviews.........62 P80
From the royal family to Fiction reviews............... 65
renewables: will two ‘When you’ve been married to someone and they Ask Annalisa Barbieri
strangers see eye to eye? die, you’re left careering in a different direction’ Haunted houses My lover says he wants
S AT U R D AY P11 Damian Lewis talks to Simon Hattenstone about New domestic noir novels to be with me but can’t
The Guardian love and loss, making music, football and his P69 leave his wife and child
Kings Place Q&A ‘mini midlife crisis’ P81
90 York Way, N1 9GU Singer Jim Kerr P16 The books of my life
— P13 Kit de Waal (below) Style & Body.....................85
Byline illustrations: The last landlords P70 Gardens............................ 88
Delphine Lee Experience Are beloved boozers’ battles for survival being
Spot illustrations: I paddled a giant crushed by the cost of living crisis? Felix Bazalgette The big idea Travel
Lalalimola pumpkin down a river talks to five publicans whose doors have recently Is it ethical to infect Slip slidin’ away
for 11 hours (below) closed for good (above), about what their venues people on purpose? How to ski on a budget …
P15 have meant to the local community – and why it was P71 P90
time to call last orders
P24 Snow place like home
… or get your powder fix
‘It’s at the core of me’ – writers on the books that in Scotland
saved their lives P92
Sign up From Nick Hornby on Emil and the Detectives to
for the Inside Saturday Elif Shafak on Orlando, bestselling novelists reveal How far to the pub?........94
newsletter for a sneak the titles that changed everything A local’s guide.................97
peek at each issue P32 Puzzles..............................98

Edith Pritchett A week in Venn diagrams

This product is made from sustainable managed forest and controlled sources. Printed by Walstead Group, Bicester The Guardian | 29.10.22 | S AT UR DAY | 3
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 P E O P L E , I S S U E S & C U R I O S I T I E S of M O D E R N L I F E

Ghost train, 2016 Zavian and his mum. parents continued to absolutely terrified, parenting head,
Shot on Samsung S7 “Zavian was chat, wondering aloud I realised it wasn’t my however, had other
Smart shot Looking back, Mark pestering to go on the what was inside and how best parenting decision priorities. Once the
The best pictures Chilvers says he thought ghost train, and my son long the boys might be. of the year.” sheepish parents and
the ghost train he put his tagged along with the “I decided to set With his professional shaken kids parted,
taken on phones then six-year-old son idea. We watched other up my phone to photographer head on, Chilvers sought
Mark Chilvers Louie on would be a young kids getting on capture them exiting. Chilvers liked how the a counterbalance.
“Scooby-Doo level of the cars, and relented.” I anticipated the purple brickwork, and “I plonked him straight
scary”. The pair were at Louie, on the left, and technical visuals, the boys’ blue and red on to an elephant
a London funfair in the Zavian trundled in with particularly framing the jackets made up a merry-go-round for
early summer of 2016 expressions of “calm scary painted face to the vibrant colour palette. toddlers. It was the
when they bumped into curiosity”, Chilvers left. But when the boys No tweaks or edits gentlest ride I could find.”
Louie’s school friend recalls. Outside, their materialised looking were needed. His Grace Holliday

5
 CUTTINGS
Conversations
with Coco
How much money
makes you happy?
M
oney can buy happiness – just
ask anyone without it. But
the question of how much
happiness has long been a focus of
wellbeing science. I asked Prof
Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, director at
the University of Oxford Wellbeing
Research Centre, what the data says.
Given we’re in a cost of living crisis,
does this question even matter?
Survival first, happiness later, right?
How we feel about the quality of our
lives is what matters. So is there a link
between money and happiness?
Absolutely – especially at the bottom of
the pay scale. As you move up, there are
diminishing returns. So the wellbeing
boost from a £20,000 salary moving to
£40,000 would be significant, but to
achieve that again, you’d have to move
from £40,000 to £80,000, then
£80,000 to £160,000. To get the same
impact, you have to double each time.
Isn’t the magic number for happiness
a £50,000 salary?
That’s from a 2010 study by two Nobel
prize winners, Angus Deaton and
Daniel Kahneman. They found that
after $75,000 on average in the US –
roughly £50,000 then – there was a
flattening of emotions. So somebody
making $100,000, when compared
with someone making $75,000, wasn’t
experiencing either more positive
HBO, AP, ULF ANDERSEN/GET T Y IMAGES, GET T Y IMAGES
emotions or fewer negative emotions,
such as worry. But since that study
there’s been inflation and a deepening
of the question itself.
How so?
It’s about what kind of happiness. If it’s
the experience of positive emotions –
so how happy you are right now, and
absence of negative emotions – I’d
estimate the satiation point now lies
Italian
about £100,000 to £120,000. And if
you’re looking for overall satisfaction
with life, that point is higher still.
There’s debate on the numbers though.
It’s shocking to think that only 1% of
Britons will earn enough to feel life
satisfaction. What else is debated?
Everyone agrees on the flattening of the
curve. What people don’t agree on is
the point at which happiness no longer
goes up. There are few datasets
capturing very rich people. The ones
I’ve seen suggest a full flattening of the
curve, and even point downwards.
The few ultra-wealthy people I’ve met
have been surprisingly pessimistic
– and stingy. I’ve also read studies that
found the more money you have, the
less empathic you are, which doesn’t
bode well for happy relationships.
I think the most important question is
not whether money makes you happy,
but do happier individuals make more
money? We showed that if you look at
adolescents and their levels of
happiness, it’s predictive of how much
they earn later.
I’m not sure I like this – please don’t tell
me some people are born to earn more.
Not at all! It means we must do
everything we can for young people to
have a good and positive mindset.
So perhaps we should stop thinking
about GDP and think about
national happiness.
Totally. As one of the editors of the
World Happiness report, I can tell you
that the relationship between GDP and
population wellbeing starts breaking
down after a certain level of GDP per
capita. That flattening of the curve
happens nationally, too. Growth for
the sake of growth doesn’t translate
into further wellbeing.
Somebody should have told Liz Truss!
But with sustainable growth – improving
educational opportunities, reducing
inequalities, etc – you can still raise
average wellbeing.
Coco Khan
Illustration: Lalalimola
Down the rabbit hole
Lost in the flow of pop culture
This week: The White Lotus
by Larry Ryan
Holidays in hell
Really rich people are terrible. That’s the quasi comforting
lesson of many TV shows. So it is with The White Lotus, last
year’s hit comedy-drama about wealthy wrong ’uns at a
plush resort in Hawaii. Jennifer Coolidge’s zonked Tanya
survives into the second round of the anthology series (Sky
Atlantic/Now), with new guests including Tom Hollander,
Michael Imperioli and Meghann Fahy holidaying at a resort
in Sicily. Which brings our second lesson …
The
job
Things to do in Italy when you’re dead rich
… namely, that American TV and films seem to be set in Italy
because, well, it’s nice for everyone to go to Italy: Succession
(the finest of rich-people-are-terrible TV) had a jaunt, as did
Master of None. See also: Netflix romcom Love Wedding
Repeat, and forthcoming Spin Me Round. More prosaically,
it might be the generous tax breaks for productions, and
also, it’s Italy – what’s not to like? Periodic bouts of fascism,
perhaps, but we are where we are. Granted, filming in Italy
isn’t new – who could forget The Godfather?
Contempt content
And maybe a holiday wasn’t top of Jean-Luc Godard’s
agenda when he made Le Mépris, but he did avail
himself of sumptuous Capri locations. Specifically:
Casa Malaparte, a dramatic structure built into a cliff,
“transformed into a masterpiece” by controversial writer
Curzio Malaparte
M , with the help of a local stonemason.
A home from home
Casa Malaparte has inspired many, not just the departed
French-Swiss maestro. Karl Lagerfeld published a book of
photographs after visiting the site, while Malaparte: A House
Like Me featured contributions from fashion designer Carla
Fendi and author Tom Wolfe. The latter’s 1987 blockbuster
novel The Bonfire of the Vanities has more terrible rich people
– less memorable is Brian De Palma’s flop film adaptation.
Last resort
The B
Th Bonfifire script came from playwright/actor Michael Cristofer Call me
Esmail
– more recently seen in Mr Robot, a series by Sam Esmail. This
summer Esmail helped bring to fruition The Resort, a mystery
set in a luxury hotel, which the Guardian said was “like The
White Lotus with added menace”. If it returns for a second run,
perhaps they might sojourn in Italy too. In the meantime, we
can make do with the real thing, with more terrible rich people,
enjoying – or more likely, not enjoying – the good life in Sicily.
Pairing notes
Listen The White Lotus’s creepily infectious music is by Cristobal
Tapia De Veer. The composer’s work is also in recent horror Smile.
Drink For a Sicilian taste, try the island’s Nero D’Avola grape.
A bottle of organic Nero di Lupo red will cost you about £20.
The Guardian | 29.10.22 | S AT UR DAY | 7
CUTTINGS
Flashback
B
orn in 1985, Tom
Fletcher is a hit
songwriter turned
bestselling children’s
McFly’s Tom author. After missing
out on a place in Busted
in 2001, he got a record deal with
Fletcher recreates pop-punk four-piece McFly, one of
the decade’s most successful groups
with tracks such as Obviously, Five
an old photo and
Colours in Her Hair and All About You.
Fletcher has penned 10 UK No 1 singles
and 21 top-10s, writing for One
talks about the
Direction, Busted and 5 Seconds
of Summer among others. His
latest book, Space Band, which is
accompanied by an album performed
calm after his wild by McFly, is out now. He lives with his
wife, TV personality Giovanna
Fletcher, and their three children.
boyband days This is me performing in the house
I grew up in, in Harrow. I reckon that
guitar was a recent Christmas present,
Interview: Harriet Gibsone so I’d probably just started learning to
Main portrait: Pål Hansen play. I must have been four.
Styling: Andie Redman My dad’s legs and his pair of
uncharacteristically bold socks are in
the corner. He was a massive Rolling
1989
Stones fan and mum was obsessed
I’d just started learning to with Bryan Adams, so it’s likely I was
play. I must have been four playing a song by either of those
artists, or Dr Hook, whom I loved,
even though his lyrics are very
inappropriate for a child. Dad worked
in a Kodak factory and was in bands,
playing in pubs and working men’s
clubs, while mum was a dinner lady
and a teaching assistant. We had
a small house and not much money
but they still managed to give me the
most magical childhood.
That being said, I was a highly
emotional child. Very invested in films,
but seeing horrible footage stayed with
me for a long time – I couldn’t handle
any violence, and the type of nasty
videos that get shared when you’re
young would have a lasting impact.
I also had a strong attachment to
objects. I would assign personalities to
pieces of clothing; there was genuine
heartbreak if I tore something.
I remember losing a scarf once
and thought it was the end of the
world. I guess, looking back, I can
see that I had slight mental health
issues as a child.
My parents never pushed me in any
direction, but they were keen to invest
in my passions. I started at Sylvia
Young theatre school when I was nine
– an amazing experience that totally
defined me as a person. I’d compare it
to Hogwarts, but instead of magic you
8 | S AT UR DAY | 29.10.22 | The Guardian
do music. I hadn’t had a great time at
primary school – I was the odd one out
for loving performing while everyone
else did football – so to fit in finally
was great.
That school was pivotal for me not
just musically, but it was also the place
I met my wife. One September, I was
sitting in assembly and we were told
that there were “new kids joining us”.
Giovanna walked in and I nudged my
friend and said, “Cor, she’s well fit,”
as you do when you’re 13. As our last
names both began with F she came
over and sat next to me. I said: “Hi,
my name’s Tom but you can call me T”;
a few hours later I asked her to be my
girlfriend. She said yes then I dumped
her at the end of the week. It was off
and on for a few years until it was off –
and I was heartbroken. After
bombarding her with cheesy ballads
I’d written – there was one called
Anything that went, “I would do
anything for youuuu” – she took me
back. Ten years of marriage and three
kids later, it was worth it!
After theatre school I was auditioning
to be in a lot of boybands and it was
wearing me out, so much so that
I nearly didn’t go to the Busted
audition. In the end, my mum
convinced me. I got in, but a few days
later they called to say they wanted it
to be a trio. So I was out. Having that
opportunity taken away from me was
totally devastating and embarrassing,
but it made me realise how much
I wanted to be in a band.
I moved in with Danny [Jones],
Harry [Judd] and Dougie [Poynter]
the weekend after my 18th. I had
GROOMING BY SADAF AHMAD. ARCHIVE IMAGE: COURTESY OF TOM FLETCHER
a birthday slash farewell party at my
parent’s house, then Danny and I got
into my Fiat Punto and drove to our
new place. The McFly house was
disgusting. Harry was the worst – he
still is. We got about a year and a half
in and our management realised we
needed a cleaner and someone to feed
us – I put on three stone in the first
year from eating crap, and we had
cockroaches, maggots and ants all
over the floor. That’s what happens
when you get four guys who had never
lived away from home before trying to
look after themselves.
Fame was tricky at 18. Of course it’s
exciting, but suddenly realising you
don’t have privacy any more was a
tough adjustment. People would
throw things at us walking down the
street or shout at us. The bands that we
loved and looked up to had a very
 different demographic from McFly,
so if we wanted to see the Used or
Blink-182 we would get the shit kicked
out of us by pissed 20-year-olds at
their gigs. We had to start taking
security with us, but I felt really lame
going to Brixton Academy with a big
guy standing near me the whole time,
so I accepted that I wouldn’t go to
concerts any more. My world got
smaller; I became a complete recluse.
Luckily, I was still with Giovanna and
would drive to her tiny flat in Sidcup
at midnight after being with the band.
It became my escape – a place to hide
where I wouldn’t have to see or talk
to anyone. The next day she would
go to college and I’d stay inside or put
a hat on and try to go to Bluewater
[shopping centre].

Things took off pretty fast for us, and

as the main songwriter there were
certain expectations, especially after
we’d broken the Beatles’ record for
being the youngest band to top the
album charts. We didn’t get much time
off: in 2004, we were given just one
afternoon where we had three hours
off. While it was relentless, I loved it,
too. I’m mildly bipolar so the pressure
to keep creating really tallied with the
manic side of my personality – the
excitement and need to be creative
feeds the mania. Back then, I wasn’t
aware of my condition, but now I can
see that the periods of creativity
would fall into horrific depressions on
the other side, often lining up
perfectly with the cycle of our life
in the band: writing, recording,
touring, promoting and then a crash.
One of the scary things about being
bipolar is trying to manage your
condition when you don’t want to
lose your creativity.
Thankfully, my life is so much
more stable now. It’s not just that
I am writing books, but having kids
changed my life. Now I’m eating
better, exercising and sleeping more.
I need to look after myself so I can look
after my kids.
It’s a lot easier walking down the
road, too. There was a weird shift
a few years ago where I started
going out and getting the loveliest
comments from people. Strangers
would come up to me and shake my
hand. When it first started happening
I was so on edge, paranoid they
might say something mean or do
something to me. But these days

2022 People threw things at us in the street. people just want to say something
nice. Having those bad experiences
These days, they just want to say something nice makes it all so much sweeter.

The Guardian | 29.10.22 | S AT UR DAY | 9

 CUTTINGS
Julie, 53 – is a republican who thinks the UK
should get rid of the royal family
Mark, 48 – supports the royals and would
not be keen on a President Boris Johnson
Dining
Julie, 53, Oxfordshire
Occupation Inclusion manager in
scientific research
across the Voting record Labour and Lib Dem in
the past. Given a real choice, would vote
Green. Would never vote Conservative
divide Amuse bouche Once went to the airport
with a credit card, got on the first plane
Can breaking
leaving and went to Australia for the
weekend, from Kuala Lumpur
bread bridge Mark, 48, Oxfordshire
Occupation Civil servant
Voting record Conservative once, in
political 2005, otherwise always Labour
Amuse bouche Used to run an LGBTQ+
walking group in Oxfordshire
differences? For starters
Julie The ma ître d’ explained that they
were expecting a party of 40 and there
might be background noise, which
ADDITIONAL REPORTING: SAR AH HOOPER
there really was.
Mark I can’t remember what I ate as it
was so noisy. We didn’t actually stay
that long, and talked more walking back
to the car park than in the restaurant.
Julie Once we settled down, and he
stopped being nervous, he was very
sweet. He cares deeply about fairness
in the workplace, and he’s involved in
diversity and inclusion groups. He
Interview: Zoe Williams talked for about 40 minutes without
Portrait: Sam Frost
asking me what I did – and I’m
a diversity and inclusion manager.
The big beef
Julie He supports the royal family, but
immediately said, “not Andrew”. He
felt the younger royals were more
accessible, and that the Queen hadn’t
been particularly accessible until Diana
came along. But I’m a republican – I’d
get rid of all of them. I said something
tongue in cheek: that I’d force them to
sell all their inherited land and property
to the National Trust, then use the
profit to make reparations for slavery.
It’s never going to happen. I just
thought I’d see what he said. His jaw
dropped. I think it was a step too far.
Mark I’ve got no strong feelings one way
or the other; it’s not a big thing for me.
I can’t think of a good alternative to
the royal family. I wouldn’t be too
keen on President Cameron or
President Blair or President Boris.
Julie’s line was that the prime minister
is quite presidential anyway so it
wouldn’t make much difference.
Julie He said: “At least the monarch
has the final say on things,” and I said:
“When do they ever use the final say?”
Mark We talked about Barbados, which
has become a republic. My argument
was that they should have had
The Guardian | 29.10.22 | S AT UR DAY | 11
Want to dine
across the divide?
Scan here to apply
a referendum before the government
made a decision. Julie’s was that
because the ruling party put it in their
manifesto, people would have already
known, so they didn’t need one.
Julie Barbados’s prime minister Mia
Mottley’s Labour party won every seat
– to me that says the voters wanted to
distance themselves from British rule.
Sharing plate
Mark I think we should reopen a couple
of coalmines for backup. My concern is
that we haven’t got enough energy to
support the country as it is. We should
invest in renewables, of course, but it’s
not going to supply us with everything
we need.
Julie I said: “We could if we had any
miners, but I suspect that would be
quite expensive, retraining people
who left generations ago.” I don’t
agree with fossil fuels, obviously. It
might be economical in the short term,
but that’s because the current policy
hasn’t invested enough in renewables.
Mark The country imports wood
pellets from North America, which
basically get driven on a lorry to the
coast and sailed to Yorkshire. That’s
not environmentally friendly. She was
quite aghast at the wood pellets. She’s
more into building up nuclear power.
I don’t think we should be dependent
on world energy prices. We’re either
going to have to carry on buying wood
pellets, relying on Russian energy or
cut the power off. The country’s going
to have to make a choice.
For afters
Mark Are the police institutionally
sexist? My argument was that, over
time, the workforce changes and you
get a younger and more culturally aware
intake as people rise up to management.
I think cultures gradually change,
because I’ve seen it in our place.
Julie I’m not sure people are changing.
Maybe to an extent, but with cultural
issues you need more leadership – you
can’t assume it’s inevitable.
Takeaways
Mark I walked her back to the
shopping centre where the car park is
located. We parted there, on good,
friendly terms.
Julie I left with the impression that he
was a kind person – a trade unionist,
which I approve of, and quite earnest.
Julie and Mark ate at The Folly in
Oxford, no1-folly-bridge.co.uk. Want to
meet someone from across the divide?
Go to theguardian.com/different-views
 CUTTINGS
The Simple Minds singer on missing the
northern lights, making peace with
getting older, and a kiss from Springsteen
Jim Kerr
Interview: Rosanna Greenstreet
DEAN CHALKLEY
B
orn in Glasgow, Jim Kerr,
63, formed Simple Minds
with Charlie Burchill in the
late 1970s. The band had hits with
Promised You a Miracle and Don’t You
(Forget About Me) – which featured in
the 1985 film The Breakfast Club – and
had five UK No 1 albums. Their new
album is called Direction of the Heart.
Kerr has two children with former
wives Chrissie Hynde and Patsy Kensit.
He lives in Sicily.
What is your greatest fear?
I have a mild fear of not being
appreciative enough for the luck that
has come my way. That’s about it.
Which living person do you most
admire, and why?
A friend named Paul Hill [one of the
Guildford Four] spent 15 years in
prison doing time for crimes he did not
commit. We communicate most days.
I admire the hell out of him.
What is the trait you most deplore
in yourself?
I’ve learned to give myself a break.
Everyone should.
What was your most
embarrassing moment?
I once took a tumble off a high stage
in Holland. Chipping my collarbone
and my front teeth was painful. Not as
much as the embarrassment, however.
What makes you unhappy?
I hate feeling as if we haven’t fully
delivered during a live performance.
What do you most dislike about
your appearance?
Don’t get me started.
What is the worst thing anyone’s
said to you?
“Oh, it’s you! I love you! Er …
What’s your name again? You’re the
singer in Simply Red. Right?”
I spent a night in
the cells after
climbing the walls
of the Russian
embassy while
tripping on LSD
The Guardian | 29.10.22 | S AT UR DAY | 13
Who is your celebrity crush?
Michael Sheen.
If you could bring something
extinct back to life, what would
you choose?
Jim Morrison.
What is your most unappealing habit?
I tend to drift off – no matter the
company I’m in.
What scares you about getting older?
I’d like to think that I’ve made peace
with all that’s inevitable.
Which book are you ashamed not to
have read?
Ulysses. Boy oh boy, how I’ve tried!
What did you want to be when you
were growing up?
In the Beatles.
What does love feel like?
Like Celtic hitting the back of the net
in the 90th minute of a Champions
League football match.
What was the best kiss of your life?
Bruce Springsteen gave me both a bear
hug and a peck on the cheek backstage
during his Broadway show.
What has been your
biggest disappointment?
I travelled all the way to the Arctic
Circle to see the aurora borealis, then
fell asleep and missed it.
What do you consider your
greatest achievement?
That’s easy. I’ve consistently punched
above my weight.
What has been your closest brush
with the law?
The evening before we began
recording our Sons and Fascination
album, I spent a night in the cells after
being caught climbing the walls of
the Russian embassy in London. To
make matters worse, I was tripping
on LSD. I could not determine if what
was happening was really happening.
Unfortunately, it was! Fortunately, no
charges were made.
What keeps you awake at night?
Not much. Given that I’m up and
active most mornings around
5am, I’ve had enough of everything
by 9pm.
What happens when we die?
We make space for others.
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CUTTINGS
Experience
I paddled a giant pumpkin down
a river for 11 hours
As told to Chris Broughton
I
’ve always had a knack for
growing big fruit and
vegetables, and my tomatoes,
squashes and peppers
regularly win prizes at the
Otoe County Fair near my
home in Syracuse, Nebraska.
The one thing I struggled with was
pumpkins. For the first few years,
mine never quite took off. Gradually,
I started to get more impressive
results. But it wasn’t until I attended
a pumpkin-growing seminar six years
ago in Portland, Oregon, that my
interest developed into an obsession.
I got talking to a woman called
Charity who held the world record for
the longest river journey by pumpkin
boat. I’d never heard of anyone paddling
in a pumpkin before, but once the idea
was in my head, I had to try it. Within
a few weeks, Charity’s 15.09-mile record
was beaten by a man in Minnesota who
completed a 25.5-mile voyage. If there’s
one thing I’ve never lacked, it’s
optimism, and I decided that with the
right pumpkin, I could do better.
I spent thousands of dollars on
mega-pumpkin seeds. After a few
years, I was regularly turning out
specimens of 400lb (181kg) or more –
I’d give them to neighbours for
Halloween. But the pumpkins that had
won the river-paddling records were
more than twice that size.
This year I noticed one particular
specimen of the Atlantic Giant variety
was overtaking the others. My wife
called her Berta, and we watched with
excitement over the next few weeks as
Berta put on 12 to 15lb a day. I finally
cut her off when she reached 846lb. It
Portrait: Kathy Plunkett
was a tough call, but I wanted her to be
big enough for me to fit inside, but still
reasonably snug – I knew it was going
to be cold when I was out on the river.
First, I had to test Berta on water.
Using a forklift, I lowered her into a
pond to see how she was going to float,
marked the water level and then cut her
open with an electric handsaw. I didn’t
scoop out as much as you might think
– a couple of five-gallon buckets’ worth.
Her sides were 10in thick in places.
I had to keep the
pumpkin upright,
steady on bends and
away from obstacles
The Guardian | 29.10.22 | S AT UR DAY | 15
‘I spent thousands
of dollars on seeds’
Duane Hansen in
his pumpkin patch
On 27 August this year, right after
my 60th birthday, we set out early for
the Missouri River with Berta strapped
to a mattress on the back of a truck.
I had a canoe paddle and was wearing
a lifejacket. Berta was eased into the
river and I carefully climbed in. It was
like sitting in a giant, hollowed-out
cork – every move I made caused Berta
to tilt, so I had to lean the other way to
get her back on an even keel.
My main task was to keep the
pumpkin upright, steady on the bends
and away from obstacles. There are
markers every mile along the river, so
it was easy for the crew of the rescue
boat following me – my wife, Allyson,
my sister Yvonne and my son Colton –
to keep track of how far I’d gone.
Much of the trip passed
uneventfully, but there were
occasional hazards – an unexpected
rock, a sandbar that I almost became
trapped on and passing boats. I think
some boats had come out looking for
me as word started to get around, and
I just had to stay calm and ride out the
waves they made. I passed campers
who would say hello. One guy shouted,
“I’ve been living here a long time, and
I’ve never seen anyone float by in
a pumpkin before!”
It took me more than seven hours
to reach the 25.5-mile point. There
were whoops from the rescue boat as
I confirmed the distance on my
phone’s GPS. I’d already decided to
keep going as far as Nebraska City if
I could – another 12 miles downstream.
That last stretch was the toughest
– I was starting to tire and there were
spells of unexpected rain. But four
hours later I saw the marina up ahead,
where a cheering crowd was waiting
to greet me. As I paddled up, I was
handed a very welcome beer.
I’m waiting to hear if my near
38-mile voyage is an official record.
Meanwhile, Berta has been consigned
to my compost heap. Every time I go
by there I see parts of her and say hi.
I kept all her seeds, of course.
My knees ached for days after the
trip and at first I swore my pumpkin-
paddling days were over. My daughter
Morgan has different ideas, though.
She wants me to grow a pumpkin big
enough for the two of us to paddle
down the river together, so that’s what
I’m working on now. I reckon it’ll need
to weigh about a ton. Can I do it?
I think so. Like I said, I’m an optimist.
Duane Hansen
Do you have an experience to share?
Email experience@theguardian.com
‘When your wife dies,
It’s a very fertile,
creative, raw, open
time, as well as being
difficult and sad’

They were the golden couple of British acting. But Helen McCrory’s death last
year left her husband, Damian Lewis, shattered with grief. He talks about finding
a new creative energy, making music – and why he’s having a mini midlife crisis

Interview by Simon Hattenstone

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 T
HE ENTRANCE to the
private members’ club is so
unobtrusive it is barely
visible. I walk up the back
stairs to a well-disguised
roof terrace. A member of
staff seems to know why
I’m here, and shows me to
a discreet table with barely
a word. Damian Lewis is
sitting there alone, tucking
into a plate of sea bass.
“Sorry, I couldn’t wait,” he
says, looking up. “I was
starving.” We move on to
the veranda – an even more
private spot. I half expect
him to show me a secret
code, tell me to consign it
to memory, and walk away.
It feels like a scene from a
spy novel.
Lewis has the urbane
ease of a man to the establishment born – a diplomat,
say, or an MI6 agent. In his latest drama, A Spy Among
Friends, based on the Ben Macintyre novel, he plays
the latter. The story is based on the real relationship
between double agent Kim Philby (played by Guy
Pearce) and MI6 operative Nicholas Elliott (Lewis),
the friend tasked with extracting a confession from
him. This gripping miniseries is his fi rst role since
the death of his wife, Helen McCrory, last year. In
that  time, Lewis admits, his life has been given a
thorough shaking.
It feels as if I’m meeting a man putting himself
back together, and not quite sure how all the parts
fit. He is still reeling from grief, while also embracing
PREVIOUS PAGES: TOMO BREJC/TRUNK ARCHIVE. THIS PAGE: DAVE BENET T/GET T Y IMAGES
a new life, one that includes a surprise career change.
We’re here to talk about the new drama, but as with
so many men, his first language is football. Barely have
I sat down and he’s chatting footie. Lewis, 51, is still a
keen and talented player, who takes part regularly in
Soccer Aid matches on behalf of Unicef. He tells me he
recently played with Cafu, Brazil’s most capped male
player, who is a year older than Lewis. “He’s kept
himself in shape. He’s my age, charging around that
pitch.” He asks me who I support. Manchester City, I
say. And now he’s started on the phenomenal goal
machine Erling Haaland. “He’s like a CGI construct. He
could be out of Jurassic Park. He’s got an incredible
physical form.” It’s so much easier than dealing with
the stuff of life. But that’s not what we’re here for.
I ask why he chose to meet at the club, attached to a
music venue called Koko (formerly the Camden Palace).
He tells me he is a member – great bands play here,
the food’s superb and it’s close to home. Suddenly he
looks self-conscious. “I have an awkward relationship
with clubs,” he says. “I join them and then I’m not sure
that I should go to them.” Why? “You immediately
affiliate yourself with everyone in there and I may not
want to do that.”
When Lewis was young, he did a lot of busking. I
ask if he could have made a career of it. And now the
man who was talking fluent football a moment ago is
mumbling diffidently. “Erm … well … do you know
what I’ve done recently?” I’ve heard he’s making an
album of songs inspired by McCrory. “Well, yeah, it’s
With Helen McCrory in
2020: ‘Helen was ill for
four years. You’re in a
state of semi-grief while
the person is still alive’
simplistic to put it like that, but I, erm, I am being a
musician. Now. As well as being an actor,” he says, like
a stage-shy X Factor contestant. “So I suppose, to
answer your question, I could have been a musician.
And I’ve ended up trying to be one. I’ve no idea whether
I’ll be a good musician.”
Lewis looks wonderful. Great head of marmalade-
coloured hair, James Bond handsome and stylishly
dressed. One item of clothing stands out. What looks
like a towelling waistcoat underneath his jacket turns
out to be a T-shirt. Can he describe it? “It’s one of those
weird T-shirts you can’t wear on a hot summer day. You
just sit there dripping in sweat cos it’s a terrycloth
thingummybob like those T-shirts that our dads wore
in the 70s that are now back and cool. It’s probably a bit
self-conscious of me that I’m wearing this,” he says
apologetically. “It’s from a website called Phix. Now
Phix claims to be making rock’n’roll clothing, so what
you’ve caught me doing is creating someone else. Like
a construct.” Is this the new you? He smiles. “It’s a bit
sad, but it’s really warm and snug. I was actually looking
at the website for gig clothing – what to wear on stage,
not on a terrace with you on a Thursday afternoon.”
He returns to the subject of members’ clubs and why
he feels uneasy about joining one. “You worry about
being seen to be like the other people in the thing you’ve
joined. That’s always my concern. I get up in the
morning, put on a nice shirt, think: ‘That’s all right,
I’ve still got it, that’s OK.’ Walk down the road feeling
fairly respectable, semi-fashionable.” He snorts with
derision. “You walk into one of these clubs and you look
like every other guy in there.” And now he roars with
laughter. What, the men are as good-looking as you?
“Better-looking,” he says. “Better-looking. There’s a
whole milieu of people who have just totally bought
into a lifestyle, and now I look like a guy who’s bought
his clothes out of the same colour supplement and I
don’t subscribe to any magazines!”
Blimey, there’s a lot to unpick here. How long have you
been feeling like this, I ask? “Oh, about a week!” he says.
DAMIAN LEWIS AND HELEN MCCRORY were one of
Britain’s most feted acting couples. He made his name
playing Major Richard Winters in the US second world
war TV series Band of Brothers, created by Steven
Spielberg and Tom Hanks. Perhaps he is best known as
the former US marine and prisoner of war Nicholas
Brody in the espionage thriller Homeland. Lewis seems
to have two identities as an actor – in American dramas,
he often plays macho military types. In British dramas,
he tends to be cast in privileged establishment roles,
of which the most obviously privileged is Henry VIII
in the TV adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall. Lewis
is fabulous as the terrifying yet needy man-baby
monarch. As for McCrory, she was simply one of the
greatest actors of her generation on stage (The Seagull,
Medea, The Deep Blue Sea) and screen (The Queen,
Peaky Blinders, Harry Potter). They had been married
nearly 14 years when she died in April 2021, aged 52.
Lewis grew up in St John’s Wood, a well-to-do area
of London. His father was an insurance broker with
Lloyd’s. His maternal grandfather was lord mayor of
London, and down the generations on his mother’s side
there is an impressive lineage of aristocrats,
philanthropists, shipbuilders and a doctor to the royal
family. Lewis was sent to boarding school aged eight,
and went on to Eton, the country’s most famous private
school. There, he studied drama and learned to play
classical guitar. By the age of 16, he had decided he wanted
to become an actor and went on to graduate from the
prestigious Guildhall School of Music and Drama.
In the summer months, he would travel around
Europe singing and playing guitar on the streets. “I was
a professional busker in my early 20s. I had a motorbike,
a tent with a hole in it, and I went around the south of
France playing market towns, then a bit
of Spain. I loved it.” Did he make good
money? “Yeah, 20 to 30 quid an hour.
The Guardian | 29.10.22 | S AT UR DAY | 19
 Everybody’s on holiday and they’d just chuck in 10 Clockwise from below:
francs.” That’s better than Equity rates, I say. “Certainly Lewis in Band of Brothers
is. Certainly is, sir. Certainly is.” He sounds every inch in 2001; in Homeland in
the Old Etonian. After he joined the Royal Shakespeare 2011; and with Guy Pearce
Company in 1997, acting took precedence. He continued in new thriller A Spy
playing music, but just for fun. Often at the end of shoots Among Friends
an impromptu band would be formed for the wrap party,
and Lewis would invariably be part of it.
It was a couple of years ago that he started to
reconsider his career, he says. “I had always identified
as an actor, and that was consolidated by being married
to Helen. We felt very much like an acting couple. Life
takes you down paths, and I wasn’t resistant to that
path because I loved what I was doing. But in lockdown
we all sat around thinking, didn’t we?” He looks at
me. “Did you? Did you do some thinking in lockdown?
‘Am I going to keep writing profiles on people I’m not
really that interested in, or am I going to join the
Labour party?’” It’s a strange thing to say – assuming
both that I dislike my job, and that I would want to
work for Labour. No, I say, but tell me about your
moment of revelation.
Actually, he says, the project had its genesis the best
part of a decade ago when he sang a couple of songs on
a Radio 2 show. One of his fellow guests was the singer
and broadcaster Cerys Matthews, whose husband,
producer Steve Abbott, was impressed with Lewis’s
performance. Abbott suggested that he and Lewis record
some songs, but then Lewis spent the next five years
playing hedge-fund manager Bobby Axelrod in the
American drama series Billions. A couple of years ago,
with McCrory seriously ill, Lewis asked to be written
out of the sixth series so he could be with his family.
That was when he reconsidered Abbott’s proposal.
“Cut to lockdown and I’m noodling on my guitar
again and I’m thinking: ‘I would like to pursue that.’
So I called Steve and he said: ‘Can I introduce you to
someone I think is the best young jazz musician in the
country, called Giacomo Smith?’ and I said: ‘Absolutely.’”
Initially they worked on covers, then Smith suggested
they write songs together. Lewis had never written a
song in his life. “I started writing and found out there it won’t fully understand, but I think anybody who has of their mother”. Lewis wrote that McCrory told them:
was lots that I actually did want to write, and before been through it will.” “I want Daddy to have girlfriends, lots of them, you
we knew it we had a record’s worth of songs. We’ve McCrory’s death came as a shock to the public. She must all love again, love isn’t possessive, but you know,
ended up with a rootsy, jazzy, rock’n’rolly, singer- had hidden her illness. In lockdown, she appeared with Damian, try at least to get though the funeral without
songwritery-type album. If that doesn’t put you off, Lewis on TV, cheering up the country and raising money snogging someone.”
nothing will.” He grins. “But it’s been really good fun. for the NHS. After her death, he wrote a lovely tribute
Really good fun.” to her in the Times. It was as funny as it was moving. TODAY, LEWIS TELLS ME that he felt wiped out after
Has the album got a title yet? “Yes. Mission Creep.” He talked about her great qualities, and the advice she her death as everything caught up with him. “For four
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I tell him I’m never sure what “mission creep” means.
“Mission creep is when you go to war and you invade
one country, and before you know it you’ve invaded
another. You allow your mission to spread and go
where you shouldn’t.” Why that title? Another smile.
“Are you a mission creep?” he asks himself. “Or is it a
mission creep? Or ‘That mission creep.’” So is there a
hint of self-loathing in the title? “No, not particularly.
Not particularly.”
But he admits he is wary of overselling himself.
“There’s nothing more annoying than an actor who
thinks he’s Bruce Springsteen. By the way, I don’t think
I’m Bruce Springsteen. This is a mini midlife crisis, but
it’s not a full-blown midlife crisis.” If anybody is entitled
to a bit of a midlife crisis, surely it’s Lewis.
Had he discussed his ambition to be a musician with
McCrory? “Yes, she knew I was talking to Steve and
meeting with Giacomo.” Did he tell her he was really
going to go for it? “At that point, it hadn’t formulated
that much in my mind.” I ask whether the change in
direction is to do with McCrory’s death? “Not
consciously, but it’s inevitable there’s change. When
you’ve been married to someone and they die
prematurely, you’re left careering in a different
direction. And that throws up … ” He speaks slowly,
stops and starts again, making sure he gets his words
right. “It’s a very fertile, very creative, raw, open time,
as well as being flattening and difficult and sad. It’s all
those things at once. Anybody who hasn’t been through
left for him and their two children (Manon, now 16, and
Gulliver, 14). He started the piece: “As I sit down to write
this, I can hear Helen shouting from the bed: ‘Keep it
short, Damian, it’s not about you.’” He said he had never
known anybody who so consciously spread happiness
or enjoyed life as much as his wife did; that his children
had “the fearlessness, wit, curiosity, talent and beauty
‘There’s nothing
worse than an actor
thinking he’s Bruce
Springsteen. This
is a mini midlife
crisis, but not
a full-blown one’
or five months, you’re physically drained. Helen was
ill for four and a half years. They say that the first day
of diagnosis of an illness that could be terminal is
your first day of grief. You are in a state of semi-grief
while the person is still alive because there is always
the sense that something might go wrong at any
point. There’s a hyper-alertness and you are incredibly
present and charged at all times. You’re on a sort of
war footing. You’ve got something to deal with that
gives you great focus. Everything is going into getting
that person better.”
Later on, was he on a war footing to make sure the
end of her life was as good as possible? “Yes, yes, yes –
until the moment of death you’re fully engaged in living
the best possible life that can be lived for the person
dying, and for you as a family and for the children. And
it takes an enormous amount of energy. So the collapse
in death, the exhaustion, comes with that.”
I’m thinking about what he said about death being
a fertile period. Can he expand on that? “Well, death is
oddly ecstatic. Along with birth, it’s the ultimate act of
life, and it brings this enormous energy to it. And you
carry that energy around with you. However deep and
profound your sadness, a new beginning always has
an energy to it. And it is a new beginning when your
wife dies and you’re left on your own. Life has changed.
So there is an energy in that.”
The way he discusses death and grief
is admirably honest. Has he written

The Guardian | 29.10.22 | S AT UR DAY | 2 1

about this in any of the songs? “No. People will, you Clockwise from below:
know … they’ll fi nd in the songs what they want to playing for England in
find in them.” a Soccer Aid match; with
In recent weeks, just after he announced the new his children, Gulliver and
album, he has been pictured with the Kills singer Alison Manon, in 2018; and on
Mosshart in London and New York. stage at the Wilderness
I ask if he would like a drink. “I want to drink more festival in August
coffee.” Does he fancy an alcoholic drink? “No, I can’t
drink alcohol today. My daughter is 16 today. Sweet 16.
We’ve got a little surprise dinner for her tonight.” How
have the kids been? “Amazing. They’re incredible.
That’s all I’m going to say about them.” He says he thinks
he has said enough about Helen and the family.
I tell him how much I like A Spy Among Friends. We
talk about how the top British private schools proved
such a fertile recruiting ground for not only spies but
double agents – of the Cambridge spy ring, Philby went
to Westminster, Anthony Blunt to Marlborough, Donald
Maclean to Gresham’s and Guy Burgess to Eton. Was
Lewis ever approached to be a spook? “No,” he says.
Were any of his contemporaries at Eton spies? “Rory
Stewart?” Has Stewart ever admitted to it? “No, I’m
only guessing.” (Stewart has always denied being a spy,
but says that if he had been, he would not be able to
confirm it.)
Later, I talk to Alex Cary, Lewis’s good friend and
collaborator, who wrote and produced A Spy Among
Friends (and was also a producer and writer on
Homeland). Cary describes Lewis as “cocky and funny,
but also quite humble”. That’s an unusual mix, I say.
“Yeah, I’m the same. I was always the guy at school who
wanted to be at the back of the class making jokes. But
I was always careful that I didn’t want to hurt people,
and I think he’s like that. He likes to be the class clown,
but he also has a deeper understanding of people’s
feelings. He’s a very kind person. And he also likes to
piss about.”
Cary says that the more they explored the story of
Philby and Elliott, the more personal it became to them.
“It’s about our people, posh white men, and how they’ve
endangered the country. And that’s what makes it
timely. How their friendships, their clubbiness, have a successful school can be very bonding. I was always the only way we’ll get a broad representation of
endangered the country. ” Like Philby, Cary went to encouraged to be on teams at sport; I got a lot from that. everything we are.”
Westminster. “The two characters cared more about Would I send my son to Eton? I might.” In the event, he This is hardly a problem confined to the arts, he says.
themselves and their club and way of life than the didn’t. “It wasn’t the right thing for my son,” he says “It’s true of any self-employed business. How long can
country itself.” now. “We just decided what was best for him.” you keep it going before you need to make money?
Perhaps this explains Lewis’s ambivalence about Does he worry about the dearth of social mobility in Obviously if there’s independent wealth attached to
clubs. Eton is, after all, one of the world’s most elite the acting profession? So many successful actors come young artists or their famil ies, then they can be
clubs. “Damian and I have sat in the pub and discussed from privileged backgrounds, while the less well-off supported through the bleak first five or six years, and
the benefits of going to Eton and Westminster. You have struggle to pay their way through college – if they can then they could meet with great success in years seven
access to certain things, and there is a comfort zone get there in the first place. Lewis says the most important and eight. A pattern might emerge where people who
you can step back into when shit gets rough.” How does thing to focus on is where today’s writers come from. don’t have that independent money have given up by
Lewis feel about it? “I think he was very grateful for his “It’s about ensuring people from all different years seven and eight, so we’ll never know whether
background. And I feel grateful for mine, but I also feel backgrounds are given the confidence to write, and they would have been successful or not.”
it’s dangerous to allow it to cage you.” that when they don’t meet with immediate success and Lewis likes to talk about politics, but he is less
JIM DYSON/GET T Y IMAGES; DAVE BENET T/WIREIMAGE; LYNNE C AMERON/GET T Y IMAGES

The thing is, Cary says, the people in politics who
are now seen as representative of private-school
culture weren’t seen as such when they were at school.
“David Cameron and Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-
Mogg [all of whom went to Eton], these fucking people
appear and you go: ‘Wait a minute – when we were at
school with you turds, you didn’t represent us.’ We
can’t go: ‘Well, we’re not one of them,’ because we
clearly are, but we’re embarrassed by them. There’s a
fashion now that everybody wants to escape from
the posh white man. I think our job is to shine a light
on these people.”
financial reward, they’re given a second chance. That’s forthcoming than Cary. We are talking before Liz
Truss’s resignation, and he makes it clear that he is no
fan of the system that allows people to become prime
minister without a mandate from the country. “It’s
really wild what’s going on. Maybe I’m reading the
wrong newspapers, but I haven’t seen a proper debate
‘The drama about changing our constitution so that a ruling party
should not be able to remove its leader without having
a general election. It really sticks in the craw.”
programme at Eton He looks at his phone. It’s time to leave. His parking
space is about to run out, and he’s got to prepare for

BACK AT THE PRIVATE MEMBERS’ CLUB, I ask Lewis

was brilliant. So if Manon’s surprise birthday dinner. On our way out, he
tells me he plans to tour with the album, which will be
released next year. “We’ve got some festivals booked.”
why Eton has produced so many celebrated actors
(Eddie Redmayne, Dominic West, Tom Hiddleston and
you had the talent Which ones? “Well, we’re hoping for Glastonbury and
a couple of others.” Wow, start at the top, I say. “Well,
Hugh Laurie are all alumni). It hasn’t, he says. “As a
percentage of people coming out of Eton, there are
almost no actors. There’s a little clutch of us who did
or inclination, you it will be 11 in the morning in a faraway field, I would
imagine.” He loves what he’s doing, but he’s not getting
ideas above his station, he insists. “I don’t think I’m
well. The drama programme at Eton was brilliant. So
if you had the talent or inclination, you could do drama
could do drama 24/7 suddenly a rock star.” •

24/7 if you wanted to.”

In 2017, he told the Guardian: “The cut and thrust of if you wanted’ A Spy Among Friends starts this autumn on new
streaming service ITVX.

2 2 | S AT UR DAY | 29.10.22 | The Guardian

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 ONE
LAST
PINT
Squeezed by the pandemic and a
cost of living crisis, pubs in England
and Wales are closing at a rate of 19
every week. Felix Bazalgette raises a
glass to five much-loved drinking
holes whose landlords have
reluctantly decided to call time
2 4 | S AT UR DAY | 29.10.22 | The Guardian
Portraits: Orlando Gili
The last night at the Lillie
Langtry in London, which
closed in September
 R OYA L O P E R A H O U S E
‘Punchy Puccini’ ‘An utterly winning revival’
THE TIMES BACHTRACK
T H E R OYA L O P E R A

LA
BOHÈME LIFE IS FRAGILE BUT LOVE IS FOREVER

TICKETS FROM £11

Charles Castronovo as Rodolfo and

ON STAGE
14 OCT—17 NOV 2022
Simona Mihai as Mimì in La bohème,
The Royal Opera © 2020 ROH.
Photographed by Tristram Kenton

BOOK NOW
The smoking area takes over the whole pavement.
Inside everyone shouts and screams along to the
karaoke, clinging to each other on the dancefloor. Every
inch of the bar at the Lillie Langtry pub in Kilburn, north
London, is crowded with fresh drinks as the last-orders
bell rings, for the final time, around 11pm.
“There is nothing,” said Dr Samuel Johnson in 1776,
long before the arrival of karaoke machines, “by which
so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern or
inn.” Unlike being a guest at someone’s house, thought
Johnson, at the pub “there is a general freedom from
anxiety … the more noise you make, the more trouble
you give, the more good things you call for, the welcomer
you are.” The loud, friendly scene at the closing night
of the Lillie Langtry – in which strangers hug, sing,
shout, chat, buy each other drinks and smoke each
other’s cigarettes – suggests his argument still holds.
The Lillie Langtry, which closed its doors in September,
was one of a round 19 pubs lost in England and Wales
every week this year. Many have been fixtures of their
communities for decades, even hundreds of years, and
their last landlords have faced an unprecedentedly
harsh business climate, dealing variously with
gentrification and “regeneration”, a pandemic, rising
food and energy costs, and aggressive behaviour from
commercial landlords and energy companies.
From an exquisitely tiled 19th-century Birmingham
pub to a thriving curry place in Hampshire to this
“rough old boozer” in Kilburn, these are the stories of
five shuttered pubs and the struggles their last landlords
went through to keep them open. The decline of the
great British pub has produced a lot of mournful, almost
nationalistic, reflection over the years. “When you have
lost your inns, drown your empty selves,” lamented
Hilaire Belloc in 1943, “for you will have lost the last of
England.” Yet, despite the relentless closures of recent
decades, the tradition of the pub has proved remarkably
elastic and durable, happily absorbing any number of
cultures and identities that fall outside the traditional
picture of Englishness Belloc eulogised in the 40s. In
an overall grim environment, this endless adaptability,
driven by enterprising and creative landlords like the
ones profiled here, means there’s hope for the pub yet.

‘You can’t just suddenly increase a £12

curry to £25’
Alex and Shekhar Naiwal, the White Horse Inn,
Droxford, Hampshire (right and below)
Reason for closure: rising costs, dispute with brewery

It’s a busy Thursday evening at the White Horse, its last

under the stewardship of Alex and Shekhar Naiwal.
“We’re like a big, happy family,” Alex says of her
customers. “That’s why it’s a bit heartbreaking for them,
as well as for us, to leave this behind.” On Sunday, they’ll
have to close their doors because of a dispute with their
landlord over rising prices.
Alex and Shekhar met in 2007, working on the same
floor at the House of Fraser department store in London.
After years working for large businesses, and some time
living in both Romania, where Alex is from, and India,
where Shekhar was born, they wanted to try their hand
at running their own place in the UK. In 2014 the chance
came up to take over the White Horse, a Grade II-listed
village pub near a good school for their two-year-old.
“It needed some TLC,” Alex remembers. “It was really
run-down, quite depressing at the start.” They restored
the interior, put in comfier seats, put more things on
the walls. “The big challenge for me,” Shekhar says,
“was to keep it as a country pub. Not make it too modern
for people, but just to bring in a bit more comfort.”
Before Alex and Shekhar took over, the largely Indian
team in the kitchen had been cooking standard British
pub food – gammon steaks, fish and chips – and working
a punishing schedule. Shekhar gave the chefs more
time off and redesigned the menu around a selection
of home-cooked Indian curries instead. “People started
to see the changes,” he says. “Word got around locally
that we do good food, and it paid off.”
On the night I visit, it is fully booked, with a stream
of takeaway customers dropping in for a pint while they
pick up their food. Alex and Shekhar rush around with
plates of curry, talking to customers, energetically
pouring pints and mixing drinks. “No one else will ever
be able to do what they’ve done with this place,” says
Helen Landy, a Droxford local. “It’s more than a pub, it’s
a community they’ve made here.” The pair have become
an indispensable part of village life. “My friend moved
to this village six months ago because of this pub,” says
another local, Paul William. “I’m not joking!”
Like all pubs, the White Horse suffered during Covid.
But it is the recent price rises in basic items, caused by
the war in Ukraine, that has made running the pub
untenable. “Oil, potatoes, tomatoes, chicken, it all just
jumped,” Shekhar says. “The box of chicken I buy used
to be about 28 quid – suddenly it was £54.” It’s impossible
to pass these rises on. “You can’t just suddenly increase
a £12 or £13 curry to £25. People are struggling as well.”
Like many pubs, the White Horse
is owned by a brewery company, in
this case one that owns more than

The Guardian | 29.10.22 | S AT UR DAY | 2 7

1,600 pubs around the UK. In the brewery company
system, operators such as Alex and Shekhar don’t simply
pay rent to operate a business in the building; they also
have to buy beer from the company at fluctuating prices
set by them, above market rate – this is known as a tied
tenancy. This year, when Shekhar asked for a reduction
in fees to help cushion the blow of the price rises, he
says the company refused and suggested cutting costs
by replacing an experienced chef with an apprentice.
Shekhar disagreed: “I know how to run a business.”
The kitchen team had been with him from the start and
the quality of the food was the pub’s unique selling
point. (The hot konka ni, with tender prawns in a sauce
of garlic, mustard seed, curry leaf and kokum, supports
his argument.) “This is down to what’s happened to the
country, not because we are doing something wrong.”
Shekhar was offered a free-of-tie deal, but the terms
didn’t appeal; both parties decided not to renew their
contract and a new tenant has taken over. For the
Naiwals it means moving out of their home and taking
their child, now 10, out of the local school. They’re
planning to open a restaurant nearby, but are leaving
the pub business. “It’s been very hard, very sad, but
maybe it’s just a time for change,” Shekhar says.
2 8 | S AT UR DAY | 29.10.22 | The Guardian
‘We used to have music nights –
I would dress up as Freddie Mercury’
Nick Abraham, the Royal George, Skelton, Yorkshire
(above and left)
Reason for closure: Covid, heating bills, staffing costs
On the morning of 8 September, a friend called Nick
Abraham to let him know he’d seen a group of men
breaking into his pub. “I felt sick,” he remembers. The
men told him they were there on behalf of E.ON and
had been sent to remove his gas meter, effectively
stopping the supply, because of an unpaid bill. Abraham
tried to explain he had an agreement with E.ON to pay
the outstanding balance of £122 the next day, but it was
no use. He realised he wouldn’t be able to open up at
5pm without gas. “I was in a right state,” Abraham says.
The Royal George was the fi rst pub Abraham had
ever r un. He took it over 11 years ago, after spotting it
while driving through Skelton. It was boarded up at the
time. “I just looked at it and thought, ‘That would be a
lovely little pub.’” He approached the brewery; initially
they were sceptical, as many had failed to make the
pub work before and it had been closed for three years.
But after long negotiations, they agreed to let him try.
“I just wanted to bring the community back together,
which we’ve done,” he says. The first years were a great
success, with many in the village becoming regulars.
Abraham even put on music nights, often performing
himself: “Elvis is my favourite, but I’ve also got a
Freddie Mercury outfit.” Every night would sell out.
“We turned all the chairs to face the stage and had big
show curtains bought from another derelict pub. People
really liked it.”
Abraham spent years building up the business,
expanding to run a second pub in the village six years
ago. Soon he moved the music nights there and made
the Royal George a place for food. “It was a cosy country
pub, very homely.” He lived above the pub with his
family: as well as a business, “it was also our home”.
Then Covid arrived. “We were closed for over a year,”
he says. Their second pub had an outside area, so could
trade in a limited way when pandemic restrictions were
relaxed, but the Royal George, known for its food and
lacking outside space, had to remain closed.
Government grants had helped, but “we weren’t open,
so the grants didn’t last long”. When it finally reopened,
“it was very, very quiet”. Staff costs were rising and so
was the rent. Then this year, after the war in Ukraine
began, gas prices rose, too. Government support,
though appreciated, just wasn’t enough.
At the start of September “we got a letter from E.ON to
say we owed £830 for gas” and threatening disconnection.
Abraham managed to negotiate to pay the majority of
the bill straight away, leaving the rest until 9 September,
because he had other bills to cover in the meantime.
The person on the phone told him that would be fine.
The arrival of the bailiffs was a “rude awakening”.
They wouldn’t listen to Abraham’s explanation and
demanded an on-the-spot payment of more than £700
to halt their work; when Abraham refused, they cut out
the meter. To their credit, E.ON acknowledged their
mistake on the phone to Abraham later, sending round
a technician to reconnect the gas, but for him it was too
late. “I was in such a state. I rang the building’s landlord
and said, ‘I can’t go on like this any more.’” He closed
the pub. “It was a gut-wrenching feeling.”
The situation has taken its toll on his relationships
and he’s been prescribed antidepressants. E.ON’s
profits, meanwhile, have surged – it made more than
£3.4bn in the first six months of 2022 alone.
Abraham, who has experience in construction, is
now working to build a kitchen extension at his other
pub, the Duke William, so staff who worked at the Royal
George can continue their jobs there. “We just want to
get stronger if we can,” he says, “and get through this.”

‘Running a pub is an
emotional rollercoaster’
Luke Fowler (on right) and Paul Canton,
the Junction, London (above right)
Reason for closure: redevelopment
“To be honest,” Luke Fowler says, “we just wanted
a place to sell some pints and play some jazz.” In 2015
Fowler and his business partner Paul Canton, both
musicians, were planning to open a jazz venue in south
London. Fowler, with years of experience working in
and managing pubs, convinced Canton that a pub would
be more viable than a club, and when a former Bolivian
restaurant became free in Loughborough Junction, in
Brixton, they decided to invest some money in
renovating it and give it a try as a jazz pub.
“The decor was really strange,” Canton says of
the large corner site that would become the Junction.
“Some of it was Hawaiian, other parts looked like the
inside of the Titanic and the rest was the remains
of the Bolivian restaurant. It was so bad it almost
looked good.” They set about renovating it, opening
up the spaces and stripping the walls back to the
original brickwork. “People really responded to it,”
Canton says. “You could see that it was old, beat up,
but well looked after.”
“We invited a bunch of musicians,” Fowler
remembers, “and it kind of took off.” They established
a good food menu, found some decent staff and became
a rare space for jazz musicians to perform and jam
together in front of a friendly audience. Much of the
profit went on paying the musicians. “It was amazing
when it was at its best,” Canton says. “The person on
the next table would just happen to be one of London’s
best trumpet players, and they’d get up and rip the hell
out of it. It was amazing.” He laughs. “Of course, it
wasn’t always like that. Sometimes the worst trumpet
player in London would get up and play.”
By 2020 it seemed as if the Junction was hitting
its stride. In retrospect, the impact of the pandemic
was “probably terminal”, Fowler says. It put them
into rent arrears with their landlord and made the
relationship difficult. “We were of the view that the
landlord didn’t give us a place from which to trade,” he
says. “And the landlord was of the view that we didn’t
pay the rent, obviously.” The uncertainty left both
parties unsure of where the fault lay. “It’s like, who’s
to blame?” Fowler remembers.
Brixton has changed a lot in recent decades. The
estate agents Savills estimates that the price of a home
in Brixton has risen by 76% in the last five years alone.
Loughborough Junction is close to central London,
making it a highly profitable area for housing. The
Junction was both part of and, ultimately, defeated by
this rapid gentrification, Fowler believes. “We’re two
white guys playing jazz,” he says. “I would probably
say that we’re part of the gentrification.”
Under planning laws, if the landlord of a property
can prove that a pre-existing hospitality business is not
viable there, then it can instead be converted into flats.
The Junction’s landlord, a company registered in the
Isle of Man called Manlon Properties Ltd, is linked to
Asif A ziz, whom Private Eye calls a “publicity-shy
property magnate”. The magazine has reported on the
pattern of companies linked to A ziz buying pubs in
gentrifying areas of London and converting them into
luxury flats at a profit. In 2020 an article in the Times
asked if A ziz was “ the meanest
landlord in Britain”, because of how
his tenants had been treated during

The Guardian | 29.10.22 | S AT UR DAY | 2 9

the pandemic. When the contract for the premises came
up for negotiation in August, Manlon Properties asked
for terms Fowler and Canton thought were simply
unrealistic, given the projected rising costs of energy
and staffi ng, and the rent arrears that had built up
during the pandemic. “They were closing it because
they wanted to develop it,” Canton says. “There was
no other reason.”
While the pandemic might have sealed the fate of
the Junction, it also, paradoxically, led to some of its
best times as a pub. When it reopened after lockdown,
“everyone was pretty desperate to get into a live music
environment,” Fowler says, “and it just started kicking
off. We got some really big guys in the jazz community
coming down.”
Do moments like that make running a pub worth it?
“It’s an emotional rollercoaster,” Fowler says. “I would
say a good 70% of the time you hate the place.” Problems
constantly arise: managers can’t find good staff, the
bills are going up, rent has to be negotiated. “But then
there’s maybe about 20 to 30% of the time where you’re
like, yeah, this is heavy. Everyone’s having a good time.”
This is how it felt at the closing party. “We drank the
bar dry,” he says. “It was wicked.”
‘Our regulars might be at home on
their own – they can have a nice time,
be safe and forget their worries’
Michelle Ball, the Lillie Langtry, London
(opening pages and below)
Reason for closure: regeneration
“It’s the roughest pub in Kilburn,” says Michelle Ball,
a former landlady of the Lillie Langtry, as she pulls a
pint. Tonight is the closing party for the pub, which has
sat at the base of Emminster tower block in north
London since 1969, and is due to be torn down this year
as part of a regeneration programme.
“The Lillie’s always had a bit of a reputation,” Ball
says. “It’s an old-school, wet-led boozer.” It’s 7pm and
Ball, like many of the regulars I speak to, says she’s
planning to leave the party around 10pm, “before the
fighting starts”. Yet these conversations also reveal a
softer side to what some regulars call, with pride, “the
naughtiest pub in London”.
“I can’t speak for everyone,” says Mary O’Brien, who
has been coming here since the 70s. “But as an old age
pensioner who lives alone and gets very lonely, this
place is like a sanctuary.” Other activities arranged for
people her age don’t interest her and leave her feeling
isolated. “But the minute you walk in this door, they
3 0 | S AT UR DAY | 29.10.22 | The Guardian
say, ‘Hello, have a Guinness, Mary’ and then you feel
like a member of the human race again.”
O’Brien testifies to the role the pub has played in
the community over the decades. At one time known
as County Kilburn, the London neighbourhood saw
a huge number of Irish workers settle there in the
mid-20th century. Many of the older regulars, like
O’Brien, remember a time when signs in the windows
of rental properties saying “No dogs, no blacks, no
Irish” were common throughout London. The pub
has  long provided a place to gather: “We’ve had
christenings, weddings, funerals here – the lot,” O’Brien
says. As we speak, a man comes up to hug her.
“Thirty years in this pub,” he says. “You’ve watched
me grow up here.”
The pub has cycled through a few different
landlords and landladies in the last few years. The
landlady since March, Margaret Percy, has done a
good job, but O’Brien remembers the era when Ball
was the landlady, three years ago, as the best time for
the pub. One day, in the lead-up to Christmas, Ball
knocked on O’Brien’s door and asked her what she
was doing on the 25th. “I said, ‘I’ve got nobody, so I’m
not doing anything.’” Ball invited her, and 30 other
older people from the area, to Christmas lunch in the
pub. “Michelle’s mum did the turkeys,” O’Brien
remembers, “I did the potatoes, everybody did
something. We all chipped in and moved the furniture.
Michelle paid for everything, including wine. How
many landladies do that?”
The party gets bigger and, as 10 o’clock rolls around,
none of the promised fighting breaks out; most of those
who said they would leave by now, including Ball, are
still enjoying themselves. The karaoke set is out and
the dancefloor is crowded with people of all ages,
getting low to Tom Cannon’s rendition of Flo Rida’s
Low. Cannon, in his 70s and a regular on the Kilburn
karaoke circuit, also treats the pub to No Woman, No
Cry and Valerie. The crowd goes wild.
“I’ve been in the game a long time,” Ball says later,
as she discusses the demise of the pub in the smoking
area outside, “and I’ve always wanted to look after that
community life. It can be the nicest pub in the nicest
area, but ultimately it’s about the people and it’s about
community.” That’s why people use the pub, she
observes. “They come because they’re at home on their
own, or they might have problems at home, and here
they can have a nice time, forget their worries for a bit
and feel safe. That’s why it’s heartbreaking for this place
to go. We’re a working-class community, but everyone
looks after each other.”
The Abbey Road Estate regeneration programme,
which involves the demolition of both the Emminster
and the adjacent Hinstock blocks, does not have a
place  for the Lillie Langtry. There are  other pubs ‘The drilling for HS2 would make the
nearby but, in the opinion of many locals, they lack pints on the table shake’
the history and cater to a different crowd. As part of
the regeneration plan, roughly a hundred council flats Will Young, the Woodman, Birmingham (right)
will be replaced with 139 new homes, the majority sold Reason for closure: Covid, energy prices, HS2 construction
by Camden council to private buyers. A third of the
new flats will be a mix of council rent and “affordable” It was a pub in central Birmingham called the Wellington
rent – definitions vary but often this is taken to mean that convinced Will Young he might have a future in
that their cost won’t exceed 80% of the normal market hospitality. Unlike the big chain pub he had worked in
rate. This would, in London in 2022, make the flats before, the Wellington “was the kind of place where
unaffordable for most. everything was about the quality of the beer, the quality
Many locals campaigned for the pub to be included of the atmosphere, the ambience.” It was the sort of
in the regeneration plan, but did not succeed. “We got pub where people would come up to shake the barman’s
petitions up, we had a moan with the MPs, all this kind hand at closing time: “They’d say, ‘We’ve had such a
of stuff,” O’Brien says. “But I think once the council great time.’”
make up their mind, it’s made up. And there’s not a Young, who grew up in the city, had fi nished his
thing you can do about it.” She gestures to new flats master’s and was having trouble finding a graduate job.
across the road: “Millionaires’ stuff, most of it not After a bit of time out, he decided to “give working in
used – it’s for investment. If you start thinking about pubs a proper go”. His family were sceptical at fi rst –
communities rather than selfish thoughts of making “You’re not just going to work in pubs,” his grandma
money, maybe it might be great again,” she says of the said – but he had a “romantic” idea of the great British
area where she’s lived for almost half a century. “But pub that he wanted to make a reality.
who am I? Just a silly old woman with one foot in the After working at the Wellington for a while, in 2018
grave and the other on a bar of soap.” the opportunity came for him to manage a pub on the
edge of Digbeth, an ex-industrial area full of trendy
bars and restaurants. Canals run nearby and the pub
– a beautiful old place called the Woodman, built in
1896 out of red brick and terracotta by James and
Lister Lea – was close to three universities, meaning
a large pool of potential student customers. The owners
wanted to bring in someone with fresh ideas to run
it; to help attract a younger crowd while still retaining
its identity.
Young spent that summer carefully enacting a plan
to tempt in the students when they arrived in September.
“We didn’t massively change the pub,” he says, “but
what we did was change the atmosphere.” Perhaps in
the past “it used to be a pub that you’d walk into and
not get the warmest of welcomes”, so he tried to make
it feel like a place for everyone, and “a bit more vibrant”.
He also introduced a student discount and put a few
more craft beers on tap. In 2019 and early 2020, his
changes seemed to be paying off: “We were properly
hitting our stride, we were an established and successful
enough pub.” More and more of the students who lived
nearby were becoming regulars.
And then? “I don’t know if you remember,” Young
says drily, “but there was a small pandemic a while
ago.” Covid brought the same massive challenges to
the Woodman that all pubs across the country were
facing, but the pub also had its own unique issue, which
began in 2020 and will continue for many years yet:
High Speed Rail 2. Gradually, the Woodman has become
surrounded by a vast building site, for the long-delayed
first leg of the HS2 train line, from London Euston to
Birmingham Curzon Street.
The construction effectively cut the pub off from
the rest of the city, severely reducing footfall and
making for a strange atmosphere inside. Hoardings
from the site eventually surrounded the pub right up
to the pavement, while drilling began underground
every day at 7am and didn’t let up until evening.
“You’d  see pints on the tables shaking,” Young
remembers, “like it was the Godzilla movie or Jurassic
Park or something.”
Business inevitably suffered. Though the building
site managers were very communicative, there was no
admission of liability or offer of compensation from
HS2 Ltd. “The effect on us was very draining,” Young
says. “It felt like an endurance test.” The work kept on
being delayed and delayed, adding to the stress. This
first phase of HS2, originally meant to complete in 2026,
is now set to finish sometime between 2029 and 2033.
The final straw for the Woodman came in August,
when Young received a letter from his energy company
informing him of the projected rise in the pub’s gas bill
from September. He had a meeting with his two partners
and they agreed that, with the margins already as tight
as they were, they were going to have to close.
They had a big party in late August to drink the stock
dry. A number of different bands – graduates from the
Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, who had been with
the pub since the start of their degrees – asked if they
could come back and play music during the evening.
“Really touching and emotional and wonderful last
night,” Young says, “but it’s very sad as well.”
The Woodman is now empty and Young fears for the
future of the building. Though it is listed, and therefore
protected from demolition, other historic pubs in the
area have quickly gone to ruin after they closed,
including one, the Eagle & Tun, that caught fire in 2020
and was later knocked down. As for Young, he’s taking
some time out while he works out what to do next. The
last few years “have completely taken it out of me,” he
says. “But my guess is I’ll be back in pubs at some point.
I really do love them.” •
The Guardian | 29.10.22 | S AT UR DAY | 31
 SAVED
BY
THE
BOOK
From Benjamin Zephaniah on bell hooks to
Leïla Slimani on The Unbearable Lightness
of Being: five writers on their most
transformative reading experiences
Illustrations: R Fresson
Nick Hornby on Emil and the Detectives
by Erich Kästner
I turned 11 in April 1968, which was around the time
the wheels came off the family car. They were already
pretty loose. My father was one of those 1960s men who,
in the pre-digital crossed-line age of phone boxes and
busy signals and telegrams in an emergency, managed
to start a second family without the first one knowing
anything about it. When the truth was revealed (not to
everyone – it would be another four or five years before
my sister and I discovered that we had half-siblings),
that wasn’t the end of the calamity. The First Family,
or three-quarters of it, had to move house in the new
belt-tightening regime, but there was a short period
between houses, maybe a couple of months, that was
partly spent in what might have been called a pensione
if it had been in Italy rather than on the outskirts of
Maidenhead, and partly spent in the house of a family
friend who already had three children of her own.
It was there and then that I got sick, quite badly,
with hepatitis, and I missed a term of school. (It was
this term, I’m guessing, where I missed out on Vanity
Fair and War and Peace and every other book I should
have read but haven’t.) When I was well enough to eat
and drink, I lived off Lucozade and Twiglets. But right
at the beginning of the illness, when I was feverish and
a little hallucinatory, I started to become extremely
worried about Emil Tischbein’s missing money and to
express that worry out loud, several times.
Emil Tischbein was the hero of Erich Kästner’s great
children’s book Emil and the Detectives. I had read the
book for the fi rst time a couple of years before, and I
suspect I had reread it for comfort when I was merely
feeling under the weather and in bed, before the nasty
stuff kicked in. Like many people of my generation, I
read a lot when I was a kid, not because I was a swot but
because I loathed and feared being bored. The 1960s
and 70s were boring times for kids: two television
channels worth watching, neither of them showing
anything during the day, no live sport, nothing open at
all on Sundays, no games apart from the board games
that Henry VIII had probably played – Snakes & Ladders
and Mouse Trap and so on. I chose to read authors who
had written hundreds of books that were exactly the
same – Captain W E Johns and the Biggles books, Enid
Blyton with her Fives and Sevens, Anthony Buckeridge
and Jennings, Charles Hamilton’s Billy Bunter, Pamela
Lyndon Travers’s Mary Poppins. My mother took us to
the library every Saturday morning, and on finding a
likely candidate for borrowing, I would check the page
listing the author’s publications. If there weren’t 20 or
30 books listed with almost identical titles, I wouldn’t
bother. I hadn’t heard of Harper Lee, but I’d have needed
a lot more from her before she could have persuaded
me to take out To Kill a Mockingbird. I would have
needed her to kill most of the birds in North America
at a rate of one a year.
I don’t know how Emil and the Detectives, or Erich
Kästner, sneaked through. There was a sequel, but
only one, and I have discovered only recently, on an
idle Googling afternoon, that Kästner wasn’t really a
children’s book author at all. He was a satirist and a
poet and a scriptwriter, he was nominated for the Nobel
six times, he was a German pacifist during the second
world war and he had his books burned by the Nazis
in 1933. Yet he wrote the immortal Emil and another
undisputed classic: Lottie and Lisa, which you may
know better through one of the two versions of the
movie The Parent Trap, starring Hayley Mills and then
Lindsay Lohan.
I think one can tell that Emil and the Detectives
is a children’s book written by someone who wasn’t a
children’s writer most of the time. The plot takes the
form of an adventure: Emil’s mother, a widow, sends
him from the provinces to Berlin to stay with his aunt
and grandmother while she works. He travels on his
own on the train and falls asleep. When he wakes up,
the money that his mother had provided for the trip – at
great personal cost – has disappeared from the lining of
his jacket, where Emil had hidden it. When he arrives
in Berlin at the wrong station, he falls in with a gang
of kids who help him find the thief.
But this is a children’s book where everything seems
real. Real and a little bit sad, despite the familiar form
and Walter Trier’s beautiful, optimistic illustrations.
There is no innocent explanation: the thief is a thief.
The money is felt, by the reader and the characters, as
a devastating loss. The effect is like a bad dream, where
each step takes Emil further and further from where
he wants to be. It’s no wonder, really, that a sick boy
would hallucinate it.
When a writer looks back on their cultural
consumption, you can make an argument that
everything that was swallowed up was important
and inf luential in some way. But there are some
books that you know are there, at the core of you;
I have never had to be reminded of Emil and the
Detectives. I think I  still have my original copy –
I certainly own a paperback of Lottie and Lisa with
Hayley Mills on the cover. Why did that children’s book
climb above all the others? Maybe the realism? I try
not to write about things that don’t seem real to me.
Maybe the sense that this was a defi ning moment in
a character’s life? Maybe the combination of humour
and sadness, a mixture important to me as a writer
and a reader? But this is me trying to talk myself into
making a case for my discovery of Kästner’s lovely
novel as a crucial step on my professional journey. I
suspect it provided something much more than that:
comfort, distraction and companionship at a time when
I was struggling badly. And you can’t ask for more from
a book than that.
Leïla Slimani on The Unbearable Lightness
of Being by Milan Kundera
I was 14 years old. It was the summer of 1995 and
we’d installed ourselves at our house in Kabila, a small
village on the Mediterranean coast in the north of
Morocco. During the holidays, my parents would go
FOR THE FIRST
TIME IN MY
LIFE, A BOOK
HAD PROVOKED
AN EROTIC
SHOCK IN ME
LEÏLA
SLIMANI
out a lot and have friends over often. I loved watching
them drink, laugh and dance. I loved eavesdropping
on adult conversations that I didn’t totally understand.
That summer, my mother was reading a book with a
beige cover, decorated with the famous red border of
La Nouvelle Revue Française. Its title: The Unbearable
Lightness of Being. She brought it everywhere with her.
When we went shopping, she’d rest it on her naked
thighs while driving. The unbearable lightness of being?
What could that possibly mean? It was an incantation
that had a strange effect on me. I asked my mother what
it was about. She said: “It’s a very beautiful book but I
wouldn’t know how to summarise it.”
One afternoon, my parents went out on a boat trip.
I’ve always had seasickness and I decided to stay home
alone. I lay down on the bed, opened the book at random
and here’s what I read: “He undressed her, during which
time she was almost inert. When he kissed her, her lips
did not respond. Then she suddenly noticed she was
moist and was appalled. She felt excitement, which was
all the greater, given it was despite herself.”
I was physically overwhelmed by this chapter.
For the fi rst time in my life, literature had provoked
a sensual, erotic shock in me. I think I blushed, closed
the book and ran back to my room. That night, and
during the days that followed, I did not stop thinking
about it. And then, one day, I stole the book. I pretended
to be sick and locked myself in my room. I remember it
was very hot out. There was sand on the sheets of my
bed and notes of music resonated in the air outside.
People were having a party, somewhere.
The story unfolds in Prague at the end of the
1960s. Tomas is a surgeon who divorced 10 years
earlier after a brief marriage, the remains of which
include few memories and a son. He’s a polygamist at
heart who cannot conceive of another emotion than
erotic friendship. He makes an exception for Tereza,
a waitress in a brasserie who shows up in his life and
attaches herself to him for two weeks by way of a very
nasty bout of flu. At night, Tomas holds her hand
to help her fall asleep. He loves her but cannot stop
cheating on her, notably with Sabina, a painter who
walks around her atelier naked, dressed only in her
father’s bowler hat.
Their lives are suddenly disrupted by the arrival
of Russian tanks in Prague and the repression that
ensues. Tomas wonders about the responsibility of
Czech communists: if they pretend not to see what’s
going on, does that make them innocent? He publishes
an extremely critical article that his superior asks him
to renounce. He refuses, so the couple must emigrate
to Zurich, only to eventually return to Prague. Banned
from practising medicine, Tomas becomes a window
washer, then truck driver, pursued all the while by the
Russian police force.
At the time I fi rst read it, I was living in Morocco
under the regime of Hassan II and there was no freedom
of expression. My own father would end up in prison,
accused of a crime he did not commit. Through the
magic of literature, I discovered unexpected similarities
between communist Prague and my own country. It
was during this period that I discovered my passion
for central Europe. I read Zweig, Kafka, Márai, Kertész,
and at 22 I moved to Budapest for a couple of months.
I have reread this book dozens of times. My copy is
dog-eared and annotated, and I think I’d endure a great
deal of sorrow were I one day to lose it. Certain scenes
have made a lifelong impression on me. It is impossible
to sum it up. One could say it’s a novel about love, or the
inability to love, to be at once faithful to another and
oneself. This story also has a philosophical dimension
and each situation provides the narrator with a chance
to wonder about the human condition. If we only live
once, why stubbornly insist on favouring severity?
I don’t know what I really understood at the time.
And deep down I tell myself it’s not
what matters most. It’s less about
“understanding ” a novel than being
The Guardian | 29.10.22 | S AT UR DAY | 3 5

understood by it. It’s a total book and a liberated book
in which Kundera invents his own style. This novel
achieves the most incredible literary fusion, blending
myth, love story, musical score and political reflection.
And it’s this liberty that creates a reading experience
that is at once intellectual and sensual.
My first novel, In the Garden of the Ogre, is a homage
to Kundera’s work. Adle, the main character, reads The
Unbearable Lightness of Being and is blown away.
When my book was published, I sent a copy to Milan
Kundera. A few weeks later, I received a letter at home.
It contained a drawing of the Czech author and this
note: “Thank you for your novel. Milan.”
Benjamin Zephaniah on Ain’t I a Woman
by bell hooks
I came to London in late 1978. I was an angry,
political, energetic 21-year-old from Birmingham,
trying to get away from gangsterism and gun culture,
and wanting to make a name for myself as a poet. I’d
started speaking poetry from a really young age, five
or six. I didn’t call it poetry, I called it playing with
words. I inherited this love of words from my mother,
who was part of the oral tradition. My mother never
read a novel, but she spoke many. I was the same. I’d
left school at 13 and I could hardly read or write, but I
could speak novels.
I’d not long come from Birmingham when I walked
into a cafe and bookshop called Page One Books. They’d
been given a grant from the Arts Council to publish
books from underrepresented communities. I turned
up one day saying, “I’m a poet, can you publish me?”
People didn’t understand performance then. They
would say, “We don’t get rap poetry, we don’t get
Jamaican poetry, we don’t know what to do with it.”
I’d had a lot of rejection, but this cooperative said they’d
publish me on one condition: I had to join the collective.
I said, all right. It was a bit hippy and alternative. We all
ate, lived and worked together – even shared bicycles
and a car.
Page One Books had lots of books on politics and
a massive section of feminist literature. There were a lot
of hardcore feminists in the collective. I once got told
off because I was singing Three Times a Lady. “What’s
this lady thing, anyway?” one said. They taught me
that a woman being “as good as a man” or “as bad as a
man” isn’t feminism. That real feminism is liberation
for men as well as women.
There is no getting around it, I was raised sexist.
The things the men around me told me about women
are things I completely disagree with now, but at
the time I thought, all right. These were upstanding
men of the community, respected men, who taught
me a misogynistic idea of what men think and how
women are. But something deep inside me thought: this
can’t be right. My twin sister can’t be less of a human
being than me. What I learned in the collective was so
essential and so grounding. Forty years later, I’m still
friends with some of them.
The best thing about working in the bookshop was
that any book I wanted to read, I could read. One day,
I picked up Ain’t I a Woman by bell hooks. There’d been
a lot of talk about it in the Black community. One of the
things I love about the book is that it doesn’t really
have soundbites. bell tells the story of women from the
17th century right up until 1981 when the book was
published. The book made me realise something really
important. Black men have a raw deal. White women
have a raw deal. So a Black woman? Well, think about
the deal that they get.
When I read it, it challenged me in many ways, and
even now, every time I read or listen to it, I learn more.
I listened to it as an audiobook recently, while driving
on tour, and I had these moments of, oh, I get that bit
now. It’s me growing as a person. bell hooks always
said she wrote the book to appeal to people like me,
who weren’t brilliantly educated.
3 6 | S AT UR DAY | 29.10.22 | The Guardian
IT WAS
SUBVERSIVE,
UNEXPECTED,
ELEGANT
AND COLD,
AND I 
LOVED IT
MARIAN
KEYES
bell is also very critical of some of my heroes, like
James Baldwin, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King.
And she’s right, these men don’t say much about
women. I had read their books, so why didn’t I notice
that they didn’t talk about women? Is it because I am a
man, too, or is it because I’ve put them on a pedestal?
I found these men so inspiring but when I read what
bell had written about the women’s organisation in
the civil rights movement and even how people like
my other hero, Angela Davis, were marginalised in the
movement, it really had an effect on me. I realised that
the Black Panther movement was sexist.
I recommend Ain’t I a Woman to everyone. But
I also say, prepare to be challenged. That’s not a bad
thing. I love being challenged. I’m always happy to say
I’ve made mistakes. I’ve read a lot of Indian philosophy,
and studied martial arts, and they have taught me to
strive to get rid of the ego. Whatever you see me doing
in the public arena doesn’t come from my education
at Oxford or Cambridge or Eton. It comes from my
life experience. It comes from reading bell hooks in
Page One Books.
Marian Keyes on Cold Comfort Farm
by Stella Gibbons
It was 1990 and I had gone away by myself to Santorini
for two weeks. I was so disappointed in my life at that
point – suicidal and drinking alcoholically – and I
hoped that if I flung myself into a location far away,
wonderful things would happen. Anyone who goes to
a Greek island on their own for two weeks will surely
have an adventure, I thought. But I didn’t, and I was
incredibly lonely. It was long before mobile phones
and social media. My saving grace was that before
I’d left, I’d asked three women I worked with in an
architectural association in Bloomsbury to lend me
books that they loved. I didn’t question what they
brought in; I just took them all.
I remember there was some Nancy Mitford in there
and some Barbara Vine and also Cold Comfort Farm
by Stella Gibbons. I was baffled by it initially. It’s a
satire of those “loam and lovechild” books where
everyone is miserable and inbred and fecund, and I
wasn’t familiar with books that satirised. At that point,
I read in just two categories. Mid-century American
white men, like Joseph Heller, Truman Capote, Ernest
Hemingway, that muscular, confident, statement-y
kind of writing, because my dad belonged to a book
club and got sent books like this. And then on the
other hand there were the books that I really loved:
Jilly Cooper, Judith Krantz. But Cold Comfort Farm
didn’t fit into either  category.  It  was subversive
and  unexpected,  elegant and cold. I normally
really don’t like cold writers, but then I clicked that
underneath the coldness was this twinkle and it
just grabbed me.
Cold Comfort Farm was published in 1932 but set in a
semi-mythical future of 1949, where Mayfair has become
a slum. (Just imagine.) Flora Poste’s parents have died
and she is left with only £100 a year to live on, and so her
great-aunt Ada takes her in at the very rural, completely
falling apart Cold Comfort Farm. Everyone living
there has these stunted ambitions  and thwarted
romances where everything is always going wrong
until Flora storms in to organise their lives. It’s both
absurd and oddly believable. It’s set in one of those
communities where there is nothing to do but make
your own entertainment and where people argue about
absolutely nothing.
I loved it because it was funny in this very eccentric
way and I love a bit of eccentricity, in both a person and
a book. (I like it in my own writing, too.) They wash
the dishes with something called a clettering stick –
which is what my husband and I call the scrubbing
brush – and when she first moves to Cold Comfort
Farm, Flora hears her cousin talking about stealing
feathers from the hens to trim dolls’ hats. It was just the
funniest thing I’d ever read. The humour really, really
lifted me during this very dark time. It’s not a book
about love or emotional growth – not like Heartburn
by Nora Ephron, which is another  of my favourite
books and  by a real pal. But Cold Comfort Farm
showed me how you can construct an unexpected
reality to produce something unexpected and hugely
entertaining. I will also reluctantly admit that I am
quite like Flora  Poste. I am the organiser in my
family and they are always joking about me with the
clipboard. I like people to arrive on time and things to
happen when  they  are  meant  to  happen or I  get
quite jittery.
When I got back to London, I spoke to a couple of the
learned older women who had lent me the books. They
told me there was a sequel to Cold Comfort Farm, but
that I shouldn’t read it. And so I never did. I didn’t
have much money at the time so I figured if no one
was going to lend it to me, I wasn’t going to buy it. But
I’m not intrigued by the sequel. I feel like this one’s
quite enough. I reread it every five years or so.
I had no idea when I fi rst read it that I wanted to
write. It wasn’t until I was 30, when my life had totally
begun to shut down, that I wrote Watermelon. And
when I came to write, I thought of this book, and how
you have to intrigue people, how you have to pull the
rug from under their feet, and how you have to be
funny. There are no layers of bullshit to Cold Comfort
Farm, and what that taught me is that I don’t care about
genre or writing style; the only thing that matters to
me is authenticity. This thing of “persevering” with a
book – why in the name of God would you persevere?
Reading  is meant to be a pleasure, an escape from the
shittiness and the rest of it. I will only read something
that I love. And I will only write something that I love.
And the best bit is that that only gets easier as you
get older.

ORLANDO IS A
Elif Shafak on Orlando by Virginia Woolf
I was an avid reader from an early age, and I started
COURAGEOUS
writing little stories for myself, mostly because I was
an only child and I thought life was boring. I lived in
Ankara with my grandmother in a very conservative,
patriarchal and inward-looking neighbourhood, and
BOOK,
my mother and I were clearly outsiders. I was born in
France, and after my parents separated, my mother
brought me to Turkey. She was a young divorcee with
FULL OF
no diploma and no career. Usually, women in such
situations would immediately marry again. A young
divorcee is considered a threat. Neighbours would
suggest suitable husbands to “take care of her”. But
CHUTZPAH.
my grandmother intervened and said that she would
raise me so that my mother could go back to university.
“Whether she marries again or not, I want my daughter
I ASSOCIATE
to make her own choices,” she said.
My grandmother had been denied a proper
education and she whole heartedly believed in
women’s education. Her love and compassion changed
IT WITH
our lives. My mum went back to university, learned
four languages and eventually entered the foreign
ministry. Thanks to that, we travelled, first to Spain,
FREEDOM
then to Jordan, and I had a good education. And all
of that was possible because at that critical moment
in time my grandmother supported us. It instilled in
me an understanding of the importance of solidarity
ELIF
between women.
Not many people read in Turkey, because reading is
not really encouraged – especially not novels, let alone
SHAFAK
novels by women. Books are not necessarily banned,
but the authors are demonised, incarcerated, exiled
or prosecuted. Anything you write can offend the
authorities. It’s also a feminist issue. The number of
illiterate women is five times higher than the number
of illiterate men. But those who do read literature, do so
passionately. And I was one of them. When I was young,
I went through a long phase of reading Russian male
novelists. Interestingly, it was during this time that I
fi rst discovered Orlando. I was 18, and even though
I didn’t understand all of it on first reading, I felt very
much connected to the book and to Woolf.
Orlando is a courageous book, full of chutzpah. It was
published in 1928 and on the front cover it says that it’s
a biography. It isn’t, of course. Woolf is challenging us,
blurring the boundaries right from the very start. The
novel describes the journey of an aristocratic poet who
travels across genders, geography and time, meeting
key figures of literary and cultural history. In order
to understand Orlando, we also need to keep in mind
the big love affair Woolf had with fellow author Vita
Sackville-West. I am bisexual, and this is a n essential
part of me, but one that I always struggled to express
in Turkey. Woolf felt like a kindred spirit and I felt very
much connected to the fluid and pluralistic world that
she constructed.
Another incredibly important detail is that
Orlando comes to Turkey. Constantinople (now
Istanbul) was a very cosmopolitan and diverse
place throughout its complex history, with no fi xed
identity. It feels so sad to me that if this book was
written by a  Turkish  writer it would probably be
attacked, censured or even prosecuted on charges of
“obscenity” in my motherland. Turkey has a long, rich
history, but that doesn’t translate into a strong memory.
We are a society of collective amnesia. Our entire
relationship with the past is full of ruptures. That
void is filled by an ultranationalist perception of
the “glorious past”. In that reading of history, you
don’t speak about pluralism. What was history like
for women? What was history like for minorities?
The story of the empire changes depending on who
is telling the story and who is not allowed to tell it.
Those questions  are never asked, so their reality
turns into untold stories and taboos. If you talk about
them, you are labelled a betrayer. Woolf saw the
importance of that diverse nature of Constantinople,
Bursa, Anatolia in general … and appreciated it.
But many Turkish people have never been allowed to
even acknowledge it.
In A Room of One’s Own, there’s an interesting
argument Woolf explored. It is called “Shakespeare’s
sister”, where she asks: if Shakespeare had had a sister
and she had exactly the same talents, what would her
life be like? Would she be given the same opportunities?
She would have gone crazy or shot herself or ended
up very lonely. Women, after all, could not live a free
life and write in the Elizabethan era. In 2007, I wrote
a half-memoir called Black Milk where I took Woolf ’s
essay and applied it to a famous 16th-century Turkish
poet called Fuzuli who wrote in his native Azerbaijani,
as well as Arabic and Persian. What if Fuzuli had had a
sister, I asked – what would her life be like? The truth
is that she would never be allowed to share or publish
her work. Even if she wrote the most fabulous poems,
she would be consigned to oblivion, because she was
a woman.
I associate Orlando with freedom. Virginia Woolf is
an amazing writer, but she is also a public intellectual
and a keen observer of a world changing fast. That
side of her work is not emphasised enough. She is also
fiercely feminist. Unfortunately, in the region where I
come from feminism is often vilified. It is considered a
western import. I believe feminism is universal and it is
needed everywhere. In literature we have the tradition
of the flâneur. He strolls around the city and he’s always
male. In Orlando, we see the city through the female
and male gaze. Putting women at the heart of the public
space like this is a clear act of rebellion •
This is an extract from What Writers Read, edited by
Pandora Sykes (Bloomsbury, 1 November, £12.99). All
profits and royalties go to the National Literacy Trust.
To order a copy for £11.30, go to guardianbookshop.com.
The Guardian | 29.10.22 | S AT UR DAY | 3 7
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PODCASTS
The most
seriously
scary
listens
PA G E 4 5

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queer
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Brace yourself, dear reader, for the return of Garth Marenghi: fiction’s titan of terror
 Hi Garth! Lovely to meet you [proffers handshake] …
[Abruptly] I think I’ll decide that … Have you washed
your hands?

Yes. Well, probably. No. Anyway, you’re back

with brand new horror book Garth Marenghi’s
TerrorTome. Apparently it’s been 30 years in the
making. How come it took so long?
[Wiping anti-bacterial gel into hands] The nature of
time has been the main issue. Seconds and minutes
quickly form themselves into hours, transmuting by
degrees into days, weeks, months and, ultimately,
years. Before you know it, decades have elapsed. The
essential issue was the ever passing of time between

H
the commencement and conclusion-ment of my task.

After changing horror O R RO R W R I T E R S D O N ’ T

come much more elusive than
for ever with his TV series Garth Marenghi, AKA “the
dream weaver”, AKA the
Darkplace, dream weaver “titan of terror”. The author
(who bears an uncanny
Garth Marenghi disappeared resemblance to comedian
Matthew Holness) is best
for two decades. known for his 1980s hospital
Would it have been quicker had you bothered to
learn how to type with more than two fingers?
Writing balls-to-the-walls horror is extremely
physical. Typing with more than two fingers is
counterproductive for any horror writer; you need to
concentrate your strength on two fingers alone. I get
quite hard when I write, so the best way to channel
that energy is by banging – bang, bang, bang. If you

Now he returns with horror “drama mentary” Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace,

starring Marenghi himself and featuring actors also
type with your hands dancing all over the keyboard
[mimes touch-typing], you’re essentially rubbing
a chilling new novel, bearing uncanny resemblances to comedians Richard
Ayoade, Matt Berry and Alice Lowe. Assumed lost for
without release. It’s far more potent to jab.

TerrorTome, and some decades, the series eventually surfaced on Channel 4 in

2004, as a result of the “worst artistic drought in broadcast
strong words for pretenders history”. While some incorrectly assumed it was a spoof,
for Marenghi the world of horror fiction remains an
to his crown (back off, extremely serious business. As of 2006, he had personally
written 436 horror novels, but since the release of
Richard Osman) Darkplace, we’ve heard next to nothing from the author/
shaman. Now he’s back with a brand new book,
TerrorTome – a horror tale in three parts – for which he
has been contractually obliged by his publishers to
complete a single piece of press, not of his choosing: this
one. We caught up at a top-secret location (though I can
Words: Rich Pelley reveal the No 36 bus went all the way there) to find out
Portraits: Simon Webb just how 2022 is about to get a whole lot horrible-er …
What’s your writing process?
Get up, eat, consider the news, reject it (the news,
not my breakfast), lunch, nap, have a hot chocolate,
then I’m hard at it for a solid hour or two before
either Pointless or Tipping Point.
Is your lead character, horror novelist
Nick Steen, based on you at all?
I’d say I’m less of a deviant than Nick Steen. In one
of the stories – TerrorTome is a triumvirate of three
mini-stories that form one epic portent – he develops
a questionable psychosexual relationship with his
typewriter. I’ve only done it once with a typewriter,
and that was for research for this book.

4 0 | S AT UR DAY | 29.10.22 | The Guardian

 ‘Typing with more
than two fingers
is counterproductive
for any horror
writer; you need
to concentrate
your strength’

the metal goblet I insist on quaffing from – which is

deceptively deep – and got him to sign there and
then. Give or take another bottle.

Low-budget 80s hospital horror Darkplace only

As the self-described “master of the macabre”,
where do you sit among other horror writers
such as Stephen King or Clive Barker?
I won’t sit between anybody. If it’s the annual horror
convention curry, I am always head of a long,
rectangular table. One year, I wasn’t sat there and
cancelled the entire event. Last year, Richard Osman
– who was in the area and had been staring in at us
for 20 minutes through the window – tried to cadge
a free pudding, saying he was hoping to segue into
horror after conquering cosy crime. I sat him at the
far end and we all completely ignored him. He left
two of his three scoops entirely untouched.
Did you come up against any problems
getting the book out there?
We had a bit of problem trying to find a publisher,
mainly because the content is so terrifyingly
prescient. But my job as a shaman is to evolve
GROOMING: VICTORIA POL AND
finally aired in 2004 in the form of documentary/
presentation Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace. Would
Darkplace be easier to get off the ground now?
The term is “dramamentary”. That’s difficult to
answer, because I’m legally bound not to discuss
the show, anyone I worked with, nor – in fact
– anything in my life up to 2009. I don’t think we
could remake Darkplace because, the last I heard,
the tapes had been covered in 300 metric tonnes of
industrial cement by Channel 4. In many ways the
current state of the world can be entirely blamed
on Darkplace failing to enter the mainstream. Had
more people absorbed its teachings, we would have
evolved as a species. But that’s mankind’s problem
now, not mine.
Horror shows set in the 80s are all the rage now. Do It’s a pretty miserable time to be British. Which
you watch Stranger Things with a tinge of jealousy? Darkplace horror plot would you most like to
Rage is an apt word here. All I will say is that TV is happen in real life to cheer us all up a bit?
broken. And I refuse to mend it twice. 2022 certainly seems like the perfect time for a
hellhole to open beneath us. But if said hellhole were
Is there room for comedy in horror? to open up and swallow the entirety of the UK like
No. Having said that, horror can create emotions the jaws of some primordial hellbeast emerging from
akin to laughter. When I initially took my horror the Earth’s living core – which is also sentient, by the
show to the Edinburgh festival, people were so way – mankind would certainly need a shaman, or
terrified that they screamed with laughter. It’s a sha-woman, to plan our ascent back up the hellface.
survival instinct: extreme fright either induces Hence: TerrorTome.
chronic laughter or the immediate vacating of the
bowels. It’s all contingent upon the essential Dean Learner, your publisher, describes you as “the

mankind. These are stories that need to be told. So,
having fired several editors, I got chatting with Ken
Hodder, head of Hodder books, who was sat to my
immediate right at the same horror convention
curry, but not level with me, as I was head of a
rectangular table, remember? He’d agreed to read
my manuscript in exchange for a free bhuna, but
when the hot towels came I swapped his glass for
integrity of one’s sphincter.
Were the gates of hell opened by Darkplace hospital
a clever premonition of the current state of the NHS?
Not the literal gates, no. They were made from wood
and plastic. But yes, metaphorically they were
indeed a clever premonition, with the emphasis
on clever.
Orson Welles of horror, and not just because of your
weight”. How are you keeping in general these days?
Still in my prime, thank you for asking. Though we’ve
all put on a bit of weight. One of the main problems
with remaking Darkplace is we’d have to change the
aspect ratio to fit everyone on screen,
probably going up to 16:9 or, on a
particularly fat day, 21:9.

The Guardian | 29.10.22 | S AT UR DAY | 41

What happened to the film you were
working on – War of the Wasps?
Sadly, the wasps escaped and got into the salad, then
attacked the entire cast and crew. So, unfortunately
the whole film got pulled, which was a blow to us –
and a sting to the wasps. Heh heh heh.

Many other writers and comedians cite Darkplace

as a massive influence on their work …
Yes, and I will be suing them all.

What do you think is the secret to

Darkplace’s lasting appeal?
Some would cite the script, the acting and the
essential message of Darkplace as the reason for its
longevity. It’s all of those, of course, but Darkplace
was ultimately the result of my brain alone. So I
would say: my brain alone.

What are your tips for getting into the

glamorous showbiz world of horror writing?
If you are fortunate enough to enter my sphere at a
convention, never hand me your own “book” and ask
me to read it. If necessary, I will respond with violence.

Is horror writing a life worth living?

For the third time, I’m a shaman; I have no choice.
But luckily I’m the best at what I do. When I put two
fingers to keys, I evolve mankind. I don’t know what
would happen if you put two fingers to a typewriter.
Can you even hammer hard?

[Mimes touch-typing]. No. I’m clearly a dancer.

There’s your problem. Don’t dance on the
keyboard – pound like a Norse god, which
apparently I am, by the way.
Garth Marenghi’s TerrorTome is out from Hodder
on Thursday.

‘If you are fortunate

enough to enter my
sphere at a convention
never ask me to read
your own book.
If necessary, I will
respond with violence’

Type-face
An exclusive extract
from TerrorTome
S O I T DI D E X I S T.
I stood alone in the pouring rain, peering in through
the window of Uniquities Inc, plus Eels, at a machine
supposedly invented by Christopher Latham Sholes
in 1867, but constructed, according to the price tag
slung from its golden carriage-return lever, by a
Chinese magician in the latter half of the Tang
Dynasty. I smiled, shaking my head. A bold claim …
Yet true. For my own research had revealed that
Eastern antiquity had achieved, in its long-lost past,
a level of technological advancement surpassing
even Currys.
Nick Steen’s the name. Perhaps you’ve heard of me?
Yeah, that’s right. The horror guy. The insanely rich,
multiple best-selling, dark and dangerous-to-know
paperback visionary. That Nick Steen. If not, you
soon will (in fact, you do now). But maybe not in
quite the way you imagine.
I turned down the collar of my charcoal tweed blazer
over my black polo-neck sweater, smoothed back my
flowing mane of smoky-topaz hair, then removed
the buff-tinted shades of my chopper-pilot days to
get a better look.
To the casual observer, the typewriter sitting in the
shop window before me resembled a conventional
model. Aside from its gold-plated exterior, the only
difference appeared to be a set of extra keys
surrounding the conventional QWERTYs, depicting
archaic letterings and runic symbols. These stood
out, I noticed, at insane psycho-geometric angles
only Carl Sagan and myself could have perceived.
But if the rumours I’d heard were true, and this
was the very typewriter I was seeking, then this
CHANNEL 4
contraption also possessed certain powers entirely
its own. For, by some unknown spiritual process,
this machine’s creator had supposedly instilled in it
the ability to commune psychically with its owner,
allowing him or her (but mainly him) access to
hitherto unreachable depths of the subconscious
mind, freeing the darkest parts of their suppressed
imagination.
As a best-selling horror writer, I had to have it.
(Also, there was currently 30% off.)
Although I was still the hot news in horror, crafting
the darkest, most terrifying novels of supernatural
terror known to civilisation, sizzling on the
publishing plate for nigh-on 20 years and counting,
it wasn’t enough. I had too many ideas. Too many
tales untold. Too much darkness left untapped.
BUY ME.
I jumped at the sudden sound and looked around
me, wondering if the owner had leaned briefly out
of his shop doorway. But there was no one there.
Then who’d spoken?
BUY ME.
I made my way to the door. The interior of the shop
was dark and gloomy. An old man in a grubby rubber
apron stood behind a dusty counter on the far side
of the room. He looked familiar.
“Eel?” he asked me, offering up a lidless plastic
container clutched in his hand. It was an old ice-
cream box half-filled with dirty water, with a
writhing cluster of slimy snake-fish wriggling
within.
I stared into his cataract-covered eyes.
“I know you from somewhere, old-timer.”
“I’m Moses Unique,” he rasped, chewing on an eel’s
head. “I sell … uniquities.” He let the eel slide inside
him, swallowing the creature whole. “Plus eels.”
“I’m interested in that typewriter you have on
display in your front window.”
“This one?” he replied, lifting up a large tea cosy on
the counter to reveal an identical-looking machine.
“So they’re a pair, are they?” I asked.
“A pair?” he echoed, confused. “This is the only
machine of its kind in existence.”
I glanced back behind me at the window display.
A Victorian sex chair now stood in the space where
the typewriter had been.
“An exquisite machine,” the old man continued, his
oily hands hovering over the contraption’s keys.
“Tang Dynasty, no less. Look at that gleaming return
What a shocker
(Left) Garth Marenghi;
(below left) the
cast of Darkplace
lever. This resplendent feed roller. Do your fingers
not yearn to hammer hard upon those golden keys?
Do you not hunger for the touch of its jewel-
emblazoned ribbon reverse knob?”
“I’m more interested in its mind,” I said, curious to
see whether or not he understood me. The old man
examined me for a moment.
“Steen …” he said. “Nick Steen … The horror writer?”
“Correct,” I replied. “But you’re not Moses Unique.”
He grinned nervously then, his milky-white orbs
darting from left to right. Hell, I knew him, alright.
But where from?
BUY ME.
That voice again. Whatever it was, wherever it was
coming from, it seemed to be reading my innermost
thoughts.
I did the math. Despite my fame, I knew I’d be unable
to claim ancient antiquities against tax (I’ve tried
several times), meaning I’d need to make my
savings elsewhere. If I ceased all alimony payments
and sent my ex-wife to live in rented accommodation
at her own expense, selling all my daughter’s
non-transportable toys, I might just be able to afford
it without dipping into my own money.
And, if this typewriter really was the one I’d been
seeking, those fortunes would soon be mounting
even higher. Soon I’d be writing more terrifying
novels than any I’d dared write before. Famed the
whole world over as the greatest horror writer who’d
ever lived. Then finally, Roz Bloom, my editor at
Clackett Publishing, would realise, once and for all,
that I don’t need an editor.
Was the thing truly magical?
I AM INDEED.
I froze. That voice … That voice in my head …. It was
the typewriter’s voice! As unbelievable as it might
seem, the typewriter itself was speaking to me.
EUREKA.
Then this really was it. After an endless, painstaking
search of several hours, the hunt was over.
“And will you be purchasing?” asked the old man.
“I will,” I replied, pulling out my credit card. “But I’ll
need a VAT receipt.”
“Oh,” he said, hands fumbling uselessly. “We only
take cash.”
“Then put it on my slate, having first set me up with
said slate,” I said, reaching for the typewriter. But
somehow it was already there, in my arms.
“Ouch,” I snapped suddenly, feeling my right index
finger snag sharply against part of its mechanism.
The old man chuckled. “You have just felt, sir, the
castigating pinch of its dormant ribbon vibrator.”
I stepped outside, yanked open my car door and
placed the typewriter on the passenger seat. Then
found myself attaching the seatbelt across its front.
THANKS.
“You’re welcome,” I said. Before pulling out, I turned
to address it.
“Let me make one thing clear,” I said. “Yes, you may
be ancient. You may possess untold powers. But
from this moment on, you work for me, capiche?
You do my bidding.”
SURE. WHATEVER YOU SAY.
I grinned, pleased we’d reached an early
understanding.
COWBOY.
I glanced back for a second, confused, then pulled
out on to the road.
Sucking the blood from my injured finger.
The Guardian | 29.10.22 | S AT UR DAY | 4 3
CULTURE PODCASTS

Sounds
frightful

Uncanny The Devil Within:

The Demons
Danny Robins is one of Yorkshire
scary man. And what
makes his podcasts While season one of
even more terrifying this podcast focuses on
is that they are all real the grisly murder and
stories, backed up by suicide of a mother
interviews with the and son in New Jersey,
people who were the second turns its
From a demon- Unexplained freaked out by Something Scary attention to 1970s Dirty John
seemingly paranormal Yorkshire. When a mum
summoning “Sometimes eerie, goings-on. Both What started out as a of five is murdered in The podcast that left
Aleister sometimes strange,
sometimes terrifying”
believers and sceptics
get a chance to speak,
YouTube animation is
now a horror podcast
her own home and her
husband is found naked
Tinder users trembling
remains one of the
Crowley to is the tagline for but when Ken, now in with mysterious-voiced and covered in blood finest examples of
Richard MacLean his 60s, tells Robins hosts Blair Bathory in the town square, frightening true crime.
online dating Smith’s esoteric podcast, about the time he spoke and Steffany Strange it looks as though Debra Newell’s story
horror, if which blurs reality and to the malicious force recounting stories the police have their starts out as a happily-
the unexplained. With that messed with the submitted by their suspect. If the thought ever-after tale of finding
you want narration that is both folders in his student audience. Across more of exorcism keeps you the perfect man online
Halloween unsettling and soothing, digs, it’s clear that some than 200 episodes, awake at night, this before a series of red
MacLean Smith is a man cases are hard to brush they deliver urban podcast will guarantee flags leads to an
scares, there’s a who sounds unmoved off. “Bloody hell, Ken!” legends and ghost tales insomnia. uncomfortable, slow-
podcast for that even as he describes a tote bags and T-shirts with a twist, from burning unravelling.
church burning down are available, spawned a nurse troubled by Events that could at first
with the congregation by Robins’s reaction “screaming, ripping, be dismissed as “all in
Words: Hannah Verdier inside. The podcast to the story. tearing and banging” the mind” spiral into a
reaches its peak with in the small hours of catalogue of disturbing
the story of self-styled her hospital shift to incidents, strangers in
“wickedest man in the possessed pets and a the house and the kind
world” Aleister Crowley portal straight to hell. of behaviour that makes
and his six-month ritual Newell’s children highly
of summoning demons, suspicious. A showdown
which he neglected in a car park cements
to banish afterwards. the terrifying tale.
And, as any horror fan
knows, that’s just
asking for trouble.

The Guardian | 29.10.22 | S AT UR DAY | 4 5

CULTURE FILM
A
ustralian director
Jennifer Kent didn’t
set out to make a
queer classic when
she wrote and shot
The Babadook, a
clever, sneakily terrifying independent
film about a single mother and son
terrorised by a strange supernatural
entity sprung from the pages of a
shabby children’s picture book.
Certainly no critics read it as such as
the film made its way round the
festival circuit in 2014, scooping
acclaim and awards aplenty.
However, the internet had other
ideas. Over the next few years, various
wags of Tumblr began to insist that
the film’s eponymous monster – a
towering charcoal-sketched ghoul
with a stovepipe hat, icepick fi ngers
and an inordinate number of sharply
rectangular teeth – was in fact a gay
icon. Gradually, what began as a joke
became a meme, and eventually an
insistent theory: LGBTQ+ fans of
the film, declaring themselves
“babashook”, likened the onscreen
family’s fear of the weird, fangy beast
to the panic and hostility that often
greets the presence of queerness in
predominantly straight households.
Sure enough, Babadook images and
Visibly
costumes began to appear at Pride
events; in 2019, the film’s US distributor
IFC Films even issued a limited Pride
edition of the film on Blu-ray. “I feel
it’s really quite beautiful, but I still
have no idea why,” Kent said of the
film’s queer appropriation. “I guess
he’s an outsider of sorts. It’s funny.”
Horror fans can debate among
themselves whether The Babadook
indeed falls under the banner of queer
horror cinema: sticklers for genre
definitions will probably declare it does
not. But the film’s trajectory is a perfect
example of what an aptly fluid concept
“queer horror” can be: one that covers
films made by queer and straight
artists alike, on expressly queer
subjects or intricately coded ones,
either intended for queer audiences or
playfully adopted by them. In a sense,
“queer horror” is a near-tautological
term. Virtually all horror cinema
hinges on a fear of the other, the
unknown, any threat to stable society
– for many an LGBTQ+ person, that’s
the same terror with which they’ve
been regarded by many an onlooker.
That parallel makes it easy enough
to place a queer reading into many a
horror film that ostensibly plays it
straight: everything from The Shining
to The Ring has been scrutinised
From Nosferatu to through that lens, with both critics
and casual viewers speculating about
A Nightmare on Elm the unspoken alternative identities
MGM/SPORTSPHOTO/ALLSTAR; AL AMY; NEW WORLD/KOBAL/SHUT TERSTOCK; UNIVERSAL; ICON; AIP/KOBAL; CG CINEMA; REX
Street, LGBTQ+ viewers hovering in the films’ shadows.
In promoting his new documentary
have long detected a series Queer for Fear, a history of queer
horror cinema currently streaming on
queer undertone in the chiller-themed platform service
many horror films. Shudder, gay TV writer Bryan Fuller
(creator of the TV series Hannibal)
Now the genre is argued that an education in the genre
bringing its gay can begin early in life, with something
as innocuous as The Wizard of Oz.
subtext to the surface A profoundly frightening film for
children, certainly, and as for its
Words: Guy Lodge queerness? Well, just look at it.
More searching queer subtext in
horror texts dates back, however,
to the gothic novels of the 19th
century, sometimes not even that
subtextually. Irish author Sheridan
Le Fanu’s Carmilla, about a female
Proud scary vampire preying on a young woman,
(From left) effectively coined the lesbian
The Haunting, vampirism trope familiar in later
The Hunger, horror storytelling; long believed to
High Tension, have been a closeted homosexual,
The Babadook, Bram Stoker loaded Dracula with
Bride of Frankenstein, enough polysexual allusions to keep
The Vampire Lovers, academics busy for over a century.
the original Hellraiser, In 1922, closeted German film-maker
Knife + Heart, FW Murnau squeezed a good number
The Wizard of Oz of them into his unofficial, rampantly
desire-fuelled adaptation, Nosferatu.
Mary Shelley’s similarly sinuously
loaded Frankenstein, meanwhile,
became the source of one of
Hollywood’s first canonically queer
horror films: gay English director
James Whale’s definitive 1931
adaptation is marked by a distinctly
queer empathy with Boris Karloff ’s
socially vilified monster, presented
as more vulnerably human than the
vengeful villagers baying for his blood.
The imposition of the stringently
moralistic, conservative Hays Code on
studio film-making in 1934, however,
meant directors such as Whale had to
get a little more subtle in queering up
the genre. Undeterred, he proceeded
with the sequel Bride of Frankenstein,
in which the doctor’s attempt to create
a wild-haired female mate for his
lonesome monster doesn’t exactly
culminate in blissful union: “She hate
me, like others,” the poor queer
creature sighs after she rejects his hand
in friendship. Whale’s studio, Universal,
also produced the foundational lesbian
vampire film in Dracula’s Daughter,
which somehow skated past the Code
in its depiction of a glamorous blood-
sucking countess as happy to seduce
and feed off women as men – perhaps
because at one point she submits to a
horrified
psychiatrist to cure her of vampirism. It
doesn’t work: chalk up an early victory
against conversion therapy.
As the Hays Code gradually grew
obsolete before its eventual
abandonment in the late 1960s,
film-makers got bolder and more
literal in their presentation of queer
characters in horror. The Haunting
broke new ground in 1963 by making
a principal character, Claire Bloom’s
intrepid psychic Theodora (shortened
to Theo), an out lesbian – and not even
a villain, at that. Alfred Hitchcock’s
Psycho from 1960, on the other hand,
set a more prevalent trend with its
cross-dressing, serial-killing Oedipal
case Norman Bates. Psycho’s tone was
a far cry from the gleefully rampant
sexuality of a spate of Sapphic vampire
B-movies from the 1970s – including
Hammer Films’ own Carmilla
adaptation The Vampire Lovers, not
to mention Jesús Franco’s self-
explanatory Vampyros Lesbos – and, of
course, the Rocky Horror phenomenon.
As the Aids pandemic raged, more
hostile queer representations became
widespread: in horror films ranging
from Wes Craven’s Deadly Blessing
to Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill
to Jonathan Demme’s The Silence
of the Lambs, serial killing was
routinely linked to homosexuality,
transgenderism and/or transvestism.
If this turnaround was in line with
the Aids panic, allyship came from
sources both highbrow and low. Tony
Scott’s 1983 vampire glamour spread
The Hunger positively feasted on
the fluid sexual energy shared by
Catherine Deneuve, Susan Sarandon
and – who else? – David Bowie. Most
unexpectedly, A Nightmare on Elm
Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge two years
later made the barest of efforts to hide
its homoerotic gaze, while its closeted
gay teen protagonist Jesse (so-called
male scream queen Mark Patton, who
would himself later come out as gay)
emerges as a heroic survivor in the
mould of horror’s traditional Final
Girl. And the leather-wrapped S&M
genderqueerness of the demons in
gay writer-director Clive Barker’s
Hellraiser (1987) spoke for itself.
This year’s Hellraiser remake, with
transgender actor Jamie Clayton in the
iconic Pinhead role, brings much of its
forerunner’s LGBTQ+ subtext plainly
to the surface – comparing the two is
an object lesson in how much queer
horror has transformed in the last
few decades. At the turn of the 21st
century, we were still dancing around
symbolic representations of outsider
sexual identity – see the implicitly
queer outcast sisters of the delicious
teen werewolf tale Ginger Snaps – or
presenting homosexuality as an
alluringly dangerous threat, as in
Alexandre Aja’s thrillingly lurid but
distinctly sex-negative High Tension.
Now, queer perspectives are centred,
by queer film-makers, without shame
or secrecy. Set in the world of gay porn,
Yann Gonzalez’s gorgeously grisly
Knife + Heart is so heavily populated
with queer characters – cavorting,
killing and being killed with equal
abandon – that they don’t have to
symbolise anything in relation to
straight society.
Both the recent Netflix phenomenon
Fear Street and Halina Reijn’s grimly
funny slasher comedy Bodies
Bodies Bodies are built around the
conscientious sexual fluidity of
generation Z: their queer characters are
warmly accepted, even when they are
executed. Does that mean queer
horror is losing its transgressive edge,
or is it simply louder and prouder in
challenging mainstream sexual politics?
If The Babadook has taught us anything,
it’s that the genre can surprise us – and
sometimes even its makers – still.
Queer for Fear is streaming now
on Shudder.
CULTURE MUSIC
Film-maker Eliane Henri set out to chronicle
the day-to-day life of revered jazz trumpeter
Roy Hargrove – but didn’t know she would
also be documenting his untimely death
‘We captured
lightning’
Words: Ammar Kalia
4 8 | S AT UR DAY | 29.10.22 | The Guardian
F
rom the start of their
28-year friendship,
Eliane Henri knew
trumpeter Roy Hargrove
was a genius. “I was 17
when I went to see his
first show in LA and it was like nothing
I’d experienced before,” Henri says.
“Jazz was this old music to me and
listening to it used to be like eating
your vegetables, but here was this
20-year-old guy with a totally fresh,
fully formed sound already. It was like
having Miles Davis walk among us.”
In the years since that debut show
in the early 90s, Hargrove’s star
ascended. Winning two Grammys in
1998 and 2002 – the latter with Davis
collaborator Herbie Hancock –
Hargrove went on to apply his hard-
swinging sound and ear for intricate
arrangements to the spectrum of Black
American music. He was a founding
member of the experimental music
group the Soulquarians, alongside
drummer Questlove, singer D’Angelo
and rapper Common, while his RH
Factor group interweaved R&B, funk
and hip-hop with jazz improvisation,
earning a Grammy nomination in
2004. His 2008 album Earfood
displays the perfect synthesis of his
sound, playing as a mix of big-band
swing and funk swagger across its 14
tracks and ultimately producing a
much-covered, modern jazz standard
in the track Strasbourg/St Denis.
His relationship with Henri also
deepened. Whenever he came to LA
for a show, he would stop by her family
home for a Sunday lunch, or she would
take him to jams once his set was
finished. By the early 2000s, Henri was
working in event management, hiring
Hargrove to perform at exclusive gigs
such as Stevie Wonder’s surprise
birthday party. Yet he had also begun
to suffer from kidney disease during
that time. “He became one of my best
friends,” Henri says over a video call
from her LA home. “We really
connected over the music and we got
closer once he became ill. As the years
went on, I saw first-hand how he took
 ‘Making this film
was a grieving
process. For so long
I couldn’t look at
the raw footage’
jazz from being a purist art form to
breaking down barriers by embracing
hip-hop. You can’t have Black music
history now without including Roy.
He’s one of our greats.”
By 2016, Henri had decided to
take the plunge into documentary
film-making and Hargrove was her
natural subject. “His story needed to
be told but no one was taking it on,”
she says. “Since I was so close to him,
it increasingly felt like I would have
to.” She asked Hargrove’s permission
and was given a tentative yes,
before spending the next 18 months
convincing him to allow her full
access to his life of late-night jams
and endless touring.
He relented, and in the summer
of 2018 Henri travelled with him to
Europe to film a set of dates through
France and Italy. She shot gorgeous
footage of Hargrove: sitting on his
hotel balcony in Sète, serenading the
empty night with ballads from his
horn; or shuffling through the streets
of Perugia, smoking and searching for
gelato, before playing a sweaty,
soulful set in a tiny club at midnight.
By late October that same year, the
tour was over and Henri planned a
homecoming with Hargrove to his
childhood home of Dallas, revisiting
the high school where he studied with
singer Erykah Badu. But on his return
to New York he fell into a coma.
On 2 November he died.
“He was such a private man and
even though he had been suffering
from kidney disease for the last two
decades of his life, he did it with quiet
grace,” Henri says. “If I had asked
him 10 years before to let me film
him, he never would have allowed it,
but he knew this was his time to tell
his story. We captured lightning in
that final year – he was so real
and unguarded.”
The resulting film, Hargrove, is a
COURTESY DOC ’N ROLL FILM FESTIVAL; THEO COHEN
beautiful and often heart-wrenching
meditation on the trumpeter’s creative
genius and the ways in which artists
are exploited by the music industry.
Henri centres intimate, off-the-cuff
interviews with Hargrove between
impressionistic details of his
performances. Since filming was cut
short by his sudden death, this footage
is spliced with testimony from his
collaborators, such as Hancock,
Questlove and saxophonist Sonny
Rollins, to build a detailed picture of
his hectic lifestyle.
“Nothing was planned with Roy
– everything was organic,” Henri
says. “I didn’t want it to be a talking
heads piece so it was all about
following him. I had to find out from
other musicians where he would jam
until 4am and when we shot him in
Sète, my crew had to wait in the lobby
for six hours before he finally showed
up. But he let us in and what we got
was raw.”
Another unvarnished, unplanned
element of the shoot was dealing
with Roy’s longtime manager,
Larry Clothier, whom Henri captures
looming darkly in the background,
denying the filming of certain sets and
exploding in arguments with her and
Hargrove about the presence of the
film crew. Ultimately, Clothier blocked
any use of Hargrove’s original
compositions in the final film.
“I had no idea that Roy’s manager
was going to be part of the story
but he made himself a character,”
Henri says. “At one point I thought
he might have the ability to stop
me. It was only Roy who kept us
filming.” Henri paints a complex
picture of Hargrove and Clothier’s
relationship. While collaborators
such as trombonist Frank Lacy claim
Clothier was exploitative of his charge,
Hargrove refers to his manager as a
“father figure”.
At the end of the tour, Hargove is
clearly exhausted from juggling dates
and kidney dialysis when Henri asks
him why he hasn’t had a kidney
transplant yet. Hargrove responds that
he wouldn’t be able to afford the six
months off work to recover. “I’ll get
round to it,” he says softly.
What was it like revisiting that
footage after Hargrove’s death?
“Making this entire film was a
grieving process,” Henri says, tearing
up and placing her head in her hands.
“We’re all still heartbroken. For so
long, I couldn’t look at the raw
footage, and even now it’s hard for
me to listen to Roy’s music.”
And yet Henri says she was
spurred on to finish the film, as
it felt like Hargrove’s final stand.
“This is him telling his own story,
in his own words.”
Despite the lack of his own
compositions in the final cut, the film
is filled with footage of Roy playing
with fluidity and feeling, promising
decades of music to come had his life
not been cut short. “He spoke about
what he was going to do next – he
wanted to break the barriers of music
and be all encompassing,” Henri says.
“The next generation will have to
continue that story now and he will
be the bridge to them. He won’t be a
footnote – he will have his rightful
place among the constellations.”
Hargrove screens on 6 November at
the Barbican, London, as part of the
Doc’n’Roll festival, with a full release
date still to be announced.
H O N E S T P L AY L I S T
Jo Whiley
The radio DJ secretly hates Jimi Hendrix, and
loves disco and music from old westerns. But
how did Ned’s Atomic Dustbin change her life?
The first song I
remember hearing
I used to watch westerns
with my grandfather. He
had a record player next
to a little cocktail bar,
with a seven-inch of
Wand’rin’ Star by Lee
Marvin from Paint Your
Wagon on one side and
I Talk to the Trees by
Clint Eastwood on the
other. Neither could sing,
but both are fantastic.
The first single I bought
Jack and Jill by Raydio,
sung by Ray Parker Jr,
who went on to sing
Ghostbusters. There are
funny lines about Jack
wandering down the hill
to get the love he couldn’t
get from Jill because she
was neglecting him,
which is so not of this
moment, but very 70s.
The best song to get
the party started
You Make Me Feel
(Mighty Real) by
Sylvester is the ultimate
party song. I’m a big fan
of disco. Can’t sing, can’t
dance, but I’ll attempt
both when this comes on.
The last song I streamed
I Do This All the Time
by Self Esteem is
incredible. The line
“You’re a good, sturdy choose that we will
girl” takes me back to always lose”, the first line
school. I always felt like from I’ll Sail This Ship
I was the big, sturdy girl Alone by the Beautiful
on the fringes of every South. Thinking about
friendship group. Now him makes me cry.
I see it resonating with
my daughters. The song that
changed my life
My unpopular When I first heard
musical opinion Temptation by New
I don’t like Jimi Hendrix. Order at a sixth-form
I was asked to present party, it was a revelation
a programme about the that guitar music could
best guitar licks in the be dance as well. Years
world ever, and I thought: later, I was on the phone
“You’ve totally got me to the guy plugging
wrong!” When people New Order’s World in
talk about Hendrix, Motion and we got on
I just don’t get it. incredibly well. I was
finally introduced to
The song I can no him at a Ned’s Atomic
longer listen to Dustbin gig. And that’s
A great friend of ours, who I married.
Simon Willis – Willy – a
producer from Radio 1, The song I’d like played
died of a brain tumour at my funeral
last year. He was I’ve got a reputation
hilarious and obsessed for liking melancholy
with music from the 80s. music. Damien Rice or
The last time I saw him, Bon Iver – I love all that.
he kept singing “If you I remember watching the
musical Show Boat when
I was a kid, and being
transfixed by Ol’ Man
River by Paul Robeson.
The lyric “I’m tired of
living and I’m feared of
dying” is going to sound
pretty epic at a funeral.
Jo Whiley is on Radio 2
at 7.30pm, Mon to Thur.
The Guardian | 29.10.22 | S AT UR DAY | 4 9
CULTURE
Out
Going
Cinema
out
Bros
Out now
Bobby (Billy Eichner) and Aaron
Staying (Luke Macfarlane) are the star-crossed
lovers in this romcom (above) patterned
after the likes of When Harry Met Sally.
in That both are male is rare in mainstream
romcoms – but the main reason to see
Bros is simply that it’s a good time at
A cultural primer the movies.
for the week ahead, Triangle of Sadness
whether you’re Out now
If you watched Titanic and thought
putting your feet up it would’ve been great to see more
or having a knees up ... of the first-class passengers get their
comeuppance, this is the comedy
for you. Set mostly on a luxury liner
well stocked with nightmarish
examples of humanity, this lot
won’t be gliding calmly away in a
convenient lifeboat any time soon.
Barbarian
Out now
The wisdom of deciding to stay in
a rental apartment that has been
double-booked be damned: this is a
great horror premise – and, in fact,
you might find yourself surprised by
how it all plays out in writer-director
Zach Cregger’s fun and twisty take on
the traditional home invasion horror.
The Thing
(40th Anniversary 4K Restoration)
Out now
A shape-shifting monster is on
the loose and it could be anyone …
but enough about this year’s prime
ministers. One of the most brilliant
movies of all time, horror or otherwise,
John Carpenter’s seminal monster
movie is an exercise in paranoid
tension. Catherine Bray
5 0 | S AT UR DAY | 29.10.22 | The Guardian
Gigs
Kendrick Lamar
Tour starts Glasgow, Wed to 16 Nov
Pitched more as an experimental
theatre show than a gig (guests include
PPE-clad “nurses”, a ventriloquist’s
dummy and Helen Mirren), Lamar’s
is unlike any other rap show. Expect
some crowdpleasers woven into the
drama. Michael Cragg
Andrew McCormack Trio
Tue, London; Fri, Brighton
The UK pianist/composer has a
signature flair for lyrical themes that
sound familiar and startling, while
as a player he draws inspiration from
Thelonious Monk, Keith Jarrett and
Vijay Iyer, but without cloning
anybody. John Fordham
Ainadamar
Sat to 5 Nov, Theatre Royal, Glasgow
Osvaldo Golijov’s 2003 opera, which
reimagines the life of the Andalucían
poet and playwright Federico García
Lorca, finally gets its UK stage
premiere. Directed and choreographed
by Deborah Colker and conducted by
Stuart Stratford. Andrew Clements
Confidence Man
Tour starts London, Tue to 25 Nov
Channelling the ludicrous house
anthems of the 90s, Confidence Man’s
second album, Tilt, felt like a nostalgia-
hewn burst of joy when it arrived in
April. Following their UK TV debut on
Later … , the Australian duo (below)
return to inject some feel-good energy
into the bleakest of winters. MC
Art
Henry Fuseli
Courtauld Gallery, London, to 8 Jan
Sensual, slightly depraved drawings
and watercolours (above) by the artist
whose painting The Nightmare is on
the covers of many gothic novels.
Fuseli was a friend of William Blake
and loved by Mary Wollstonecraft.
These erotic drawings have a graphic
brilliance and intensity that makes
you want more of his surreal genius.
The Art of Banksy
Media City, Salford, to 8 Jan
Is Banksy the best artist of our time?
Or the worst? Make up your own
mind in this touring exhibit of his
work that’s already a global hit.
However, heed the caution that it
was not created or authorised by the
elusive prankster. An elevation of
rebellion into art.
Stephen Cripps
Turner Contemporary,
Margate, to 8 Jan
The life and work of this British
conceptual artist, who died in 1982
aged 29, are recreated through films,
sound recordings, photography and
his engaging drawings. Influenced
by Jean Tinguely, he set out to create
powerful performances and events
that only existed in the moment.
Can those moments be recaptured?
To Be Read at Dusk
Dickens Museum, London, to 5 Mar
The Signal-Man by Charles Dickens
is the scariest ghost story ever written,
while A Christmas Carol is the most
heartwarming. This show explores
Dickens’s sceptical fascination with the
supernatural, from haunted houses to
NICOLE RIVELLI/AP; TATE/TATE IMAGES
magic tricks. It showcases his ghostly
tales with early copies as well as eerie
illustrations. Jonathan Jones
 Stage
In Albums
Tammy Faye Cakes da Killa – Svengali
Almeida theatre, Out now
London, to 3 Dec A leading figure in the explosion of
Hotly anticipated new queer hip-hop in the early 2010s,
musical about American Rashard Bradshaw (above) returns
evangelist Tammy Faye with this second album. Charting a
and her husband, Jim love affair from inception to implosion,
Bakker. With songs by
Elton John and Scissor
Svengali finds the rapper exploring
that pocket between house and
Brain food
Sisters’ Jake Shears, it hip-hop on tracks like the silken Drugs Storyville:
stars Andrew Rannells Du Jour and the head-knocking W4TN. A Story of Bones
and Katie Brayben and is Tue, 9pm, BBC Four
written by the brilliant Tom Odell – Best Day of My Life This moving,
James Graham. Out now impressionistic film
Miriam Gillinson This speedy follow-up to 2021’s (above) follows an
experimental Monsters finds Odell, environmental officer on
Tartuffe
Birmingham Rep,
Streaming Games now an independent artist, stripping his
ornate pop-rock back to just piano and
the south Atlantic island
of Saint Helena who, on
to 5 Nov The White Lotus Bayonetta 3 vocal. It works a treat on Flying :)) and discovering a mass burial
Molière’s whip-smart Mon, 9pm, Now & Sky Atlantic Out now, the delicate title track, both of which ground of 8,000 formerly
comedy about a chancer Mike White’s deliciously droll Hawaii- Nintendo Switch contrast pretty piano figures with enslaved Africans, seeks
with the gift of the gab set drama was the TV highlight of 2021. Bayonetta is a badass, lyrics that cling desperately to hope. to honour their memory.
has been relocated to Now we’re getting this Sicily-based hypersexualised but
Birmingham by Emmy sequel of sorts (above), with a fresh still paradoxically Fred Again … – Actual Life 3 Object of Sound: The
award-winning writers clutch of spoilt guests played by a empowering witch who (January 1 – September 9 2022) Wonders of Songwriting
Anil Gupta and Richard tantalising new cast (Aubrey Plaza, kills gods with her hair. Out now Podcast
Pinto (Goodness Will Sharpe, Michael Imperioli) – plus Your reaction to this Pop’s go-to producer Fred Gibson Critic Hanif Abdurraqib
Gracious Me). MG original star Jennifer Coolidge, who description will tell you mines his bank of found sound mobile launches an insightful
reprises her role as the mercurial Tanya. everything you need to phone recordings again for this third miniseries on the art of
Tanz know about whether instalment of his diary-like album songcraft. Featuring
Battersea Arts Centre, How Green Was My Valley you should buy it. series. More dance-leaning than parts in-depth discussions
London, Tue to Thur Wed, 10.15pm, BBC Four & iPlayer 1 and 2, Actual Life 3 ushers in big with songwriters Ravyn
FABIO LOVINO/2021 HOME BOX OFFICE; JOSEPH CURR AN AND DOMINIC DE VERE/BBC; SHERVIN L AINEZ; BIJAN SMALL; BBC

A wild-looking ride from This classic drama about a Victorian Call of Duty: emotional crescendos via snatches Lenae, Nick Hakim
Austrian choreographer family reckoning with modernity in Modern Warfare 2 of looped vocals that slowly become and Carly Rae Jepsen,
Florentina Holzinger the Rhondda Valley is airing on the Out now, all platforms healing mantras. Abdurraqib traces the
featuring motorbikes, BBC for the first time since 1976 – There have been so process of turning an idea
acrobatics, naked women prefaced by a new introduction by many Call of Duty games Dragonette – Twennies into a listenable reality.
aged between 20 and 80 its Bafta-winning star Siân Phillips. that you’d be forgiven Out now
and the subversion of all for glazing over at the Now a solo vehicle for singer-songwriter Radical Philosophy
sorts of ideas about Blockbuster prospect of another, Martina Sorbara (below), the Canadian archive
beauty and the female Thur, Netflix but this is a sequel to exponents of elegant synthpop release Online
body. Holzinger’s Yes, there is something mildly one of the best-loved their fifth album. Buoyant lead single To mark the 50th
experimental dance ironic about the streaming giant games this series New Suit defiantly touches on the anniversary of leftwing
theatre makes its UK eulogising the late video rental has ever produced. recent personnel changes, while the philosophical journal
debut after acclaim service – but hopefully that won’t Keza MacDonald glitter-bomb title track acts as a treatise Radical Philosophy, its
on the continent. be the funniest thing about this on pop’s long slog: “The more I get it, entire archive is now
Lyndsey Winship knockabout sitcom from Brooklyn the less I want it”. MC available online. Read
ava
Nine-Nine’s Vanessa Ramos. Foucault’s 70s interviews
Fou
Adam Kay on prisons, Judith
Tour starts Munya Chawawa: Butler on the ethical
Bu
Glasgow, to 14 Nov How to Survive a Dictator duties of resistance,
du
Following the brilliant Thur, 10pm, Channel 4 & All 4 and other intellectual
an
TV adaptation of his 2017 First came a Taskmaster stint, now the heavyweights.
he
memoir This Is Going to British-Zimbabwean comedian has Ammar Kalia
Am
Hurt, the obstetrician- made this experimental documentary
turned-comedian hits about Robert Mugabe – which
the road to tell his own ambitiously combines archive footage,
heartrending story in his sketches and interviews with friends,
own acerbic words – this foes and victims. Rachel Aroesti
time with fresh material Wa more?
Want
taken from his latest For cultural picks direct
book, Undoctored. to your
y inbox, sign up to
Rachel Aroesti the Guide newsletter

The Guardian | 29.10.22 | S AT UR DAY | 51

 CULTUREE

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

Getting
stuffed
From music extolling the virtues
of red beets to painted plums
and ‘crack pies’, our critics select
culture to make you salivate

Television Art Film

Chef’s Table White Ceramic Bowl Eat Drink Man
With Peaches and Woman
From “crack pies” in Red and Blue Plums
New York to onion Buns are steamed, pork
pakoda in Bangkok, You almost believe you braised and a single red
Netflix’s culinary hit is could eat this fruit. Fede chilli expertly sliced in
a voyage through the Galizia, a female painter the opening scene of Ang
cuisines, food traditions from late Renaissance Lee’s comedy. Its first
and obsessions of Milan who specialised lines are, fittingly: “Have
chefs across different in still life, gives the you eaten yet?” followed
continents. Each episode peaches not just deep by an argument over how
follows a new chef in sensual colour but a best to cook fish. Zhu is
Music detail; you can meet the Book furry texture that tickles a semi-retired chef and
Ham ‘n’ Eggs “master of umami” Ivan Babette’s Feast the tastebuds, a rounded widower living with
Orkin, whose ramen you massiveness that makes three adult daughters
Between Bonita can taste through the After fleeing the you feel their weight as in Taipei; one plans to
Applebum, Butter and screen, and then jump crackdown on the you pick one up and move out, and is unsure
the Jam, hip-hop titans into the mad world of Paris commune of 1871, take a bite … then try how their father will
A Tribe Called Quest are dough-obsessive Babette ends up as the plums … The handle the news. Food
not shy about paying “mozzarella maven” a servant in a small ancient Greek artist is a source of love and
gastronomic homage. Nancy Silverton. It’s the Norwegian town, in the Zeuxis was said to have intrigue within the
Floating like croutons personal histories that novel by Karen Blixen fooled birds into trying family, often filling
over a languid beat-soup, really make the series writing as Isak Dinesen, to eat his painted fruit. the gaps for things left
Q-Tip and Phife Dawg tie – scenes of innovative serving up austere Galizia rivals him. She unsaid. It is also a
foodie punchlines like and mouth-watering dishes of cod and soup shares this gift with character unto itself in
cherry stems, extolling dishes mixed in with to the puritanical her contemporary a film; there are appetite-
the virtues of candied heartbreaking stories daughters of a local Caravaggio but his fruit whetting shots in a
yams, slim jims and of psychological minister. But when she is always on the edge of home kitchen, a hectic
“nice red beets” as if breakdown, property wins the French lottery, decay, while hers is a restaurant kitchen and
cooking up a big Sunday destruction and the Babette uses the funds virtual happy meal. a bustling banquet hall.
brunch in the deep loss of homes, but also to demonstrate her true Jonathan Jones Lee, who would go on
American south. They inspiring social advocacy artistry. She cooks up a to make Brokeback
might be warning of for undocumented feast for the repressed Mountain and Crouching
SONY; NETFLIX; RONALD GR ANT; THE ARTCHIVES/AL AMY

high cholesterol, but it migrants, women in siblings and their Tiger, Hidden Dragon,
has the opposite effect; the workplace and friends, giving them has said he wanted to
if you’re not raiding conservation efforts. the finest food and wine “make a movie that
the cupboards by its Jason Okundaye known to humanity. makes the audience’s
call-and-response close, But it isn’t just Blixen’s saliva keep growing.”
you’ve got much better descriptions of the food He certainly succeeds.
self-control than us. and drink that give you Rebecca Liu
Jenessa Williams an appetite – it’s the
pride Babette takes in
their creation. Food for
the heart as well as the
stomach. Sam Jordison

The Guardian | 29.10.22 | S AT UR DAY | 5 3

CULTURE VISUAL ARTS
John Bates wedding
ensemble, 1966
Bates was best known
in the 60s for designing
Diana Rigg’s outfits for
The Avengers. This is the
wedding ensemble he
made for Marit Allen, then
fashion editor of Vogue.
Drawing on the influence
of 60s sci-fi, with its silver
buttons and shiny trim,
it incorporates an early
usage in clothing of PVC.
A V&A Dundee exhibition traces
the strange history of the miracle
material turned existential threat,
and asks if it has a future
Fantastic
plastic?
Words: Nicholas Wroe
5 4 | S AT UR DAY | 29.10.22 | The Guardian
I
n one sense the story of plastic
is a straightforward cautionary
tale. What was initially hailed
as a wonder material that
would solve so many of the
world’s problems turned out to
be a potentially existential threat to
planetary health. But how did one
thing lead to the other? And is that
narrative arc quite as smooth and quite
as depressing as it appears? A new
exhibition at the V&A Dundee seeks to
interrogate the history of the material
through its inventors and industries,
designers and advertisers, consumers
and protesters. Perhaps more urgently,
it also asks what is the future of this
now ubiquitous substance.
“Up until the middle of the 19th
century, people had looked to the
natural world for the sort of
materiality that we now associate
with plastics,” explains curator Bakelite leaflet, 1930s
Charlotte Hale. “Materials such as Where previous plastics
had used plant materials
shellac, ivory, tortoise shell and
horn could be subjected to heat and such as cellulose,
AMSTERDAMBAKELITECOLLECTION.COM/© REINDERT GROOT
pressure to make them malleable and Bakelite was the first
© VICTORIA AND ALBERT MUSEUM, LONDON; COURTESY OF
truly synthetic product.
durable and capable of being shaped
into coveted and luxurious household A market trajectory
items.” But with industrialisation from luxury goods to
and rising demand came attempts to battlefield weapons to
synthetically mimic these properties, household devices lived
though early scientific advances were
habitually undermined by commercial
failure. Perhaps surprisingly, imitation
ivory billiard balls were one success,
despite early examples having the
up to the company’s
marketing of it as
“the material of a
thousand uses”.
unfortunate effect of making colliding
balls sound like a gunshot, laughs Hale,
“prompting bar owners in America to
complain that customers were actually
drawing their weapons in response”.

The big breakthrough came via
Belgian chemist Leo Baekeland in
the early 20th century. His Bakelite
was light and malleable yet hard and
strong, was heat resistant, a good
COURTESY OF THE OCEAN CLEANUP/EVERWAVE/SUNGAI WATCH
insulator and could provide an
appealing finish. It was used for
luxury goods in the 1920s and 30s, but
during the second world war Bakelite’s
adaptable characteristics were
adopted wholesale by the military.
With a shortage of natural materials
the same was true of other synthetic
materials – nylon, polyethylene – and
between 1939 and 1945 the production
of plastics nearly quadrupled.
Following the war, huge marketing
campaigns, aggressively financed by
petrochemical companies, saw these
new products and materials adapted
for mass domestic use. Kitchens
Smoker’s cabinet, 1916
Charles Rennie
Mackintosh’s wooden
cabinet was one of the
first pieces of furniture to
utilise plastic as an inlay.
The pieces of yellow
casing are made from a
material called Erinoid,
produced by drying curds
of milk into a powder
that was then combined
with water, heated and
extruded. “It could be
seen as a precursor to
Formica,” explains Hale.
“Unfortunately, the
product was prone to
shrinking, which meant
it wasn’t a viable long-
lasting development.”
became wipe-clean rather than
scrubbable. Radios, lamps, clocks
and telephones adopted sleek curves
and increasingly vibrant colours.
Chairs and tables were moulded into
futuristic new shapes and baths and
basins appeared in colours other than
white as plastic made its unstoppable
progress through the home.
Many of these products would
become collectors’ items, but their
mass accessibility, and the explosion
of cheaper objects and plastic
packaging, marked a change: the era
of plastic as something disposable
rather than precious had begun. But
it was during the next big boom – in
the 1960s space age when 20 of the 21
layers of Apollo astronauts’ suits
were made by chemicals company
DuPont, a trend quickly picked up
on by clothes designers back on Earth
– that marine biologists first published
articles on plastic particles found
in the sea.
Since then, the understanding
of its environmental impact has only
become more alarming. But, as Hale
points out, the rewards of plastic
are still there, and in many ways
it remains the wonder material it
always was. It is integral to modern
telecommunications and medicine
and so many other essential aspects
of life. Something as simple as light,
cheap, easily transportable plastic
tents have saved maybe millions of
lives. And cotton or paper carrier
bags have significant environmental
costs attached to them, too.
The exhibition also looks at
initiatives to clean up the oceans and
The Guardian | 29.10.22 | S AT UR DAY | 5 5
The Ocean CleanUp/
Everwave/Sungai Watch
This image is from a video
of the Ocean CleanUp
project “harvesting”
plastic from the sea. The
organisation also works to
intercept plastic in rivers
before it reaches the
ocean. “Both elements are
extremely difficult and
essential,” explains Hale.
“But it becomes a much
more resource-efficient
strategy to clear plastic
before it has broken
down to microplastics.”
the efforts to control the excesses of
plastic, in particular in eradicating
single-use products. There are
sections on repairing and recycling.
“Ultimately, plastic has run unchecked
and unregulated for 150 years,”
says Hale. “Many good things are
happening, but it’s only with stringent
regulation – through the entire product
life cycle from concept through
production, distribution and disposal
– that real change will come about. We
don’t advocate a zero-plastic strategy.
Instead, we ask when and how plastic
can be used to maximise its incredible
properties. We need a fundamental
revaluing of plastic in a world in
which there is no silver bullet.”
Plastic: Remaking Our World is at
V&A Dundee from Saturday until
5 February.
CULTURE SCREEN

Loosen
up,
won’t
you?
Playing the castrated,
traumatised Theon
Greyjoy in Game of
Thrones took a lot
out of Alfie Allen.
Thankfully his new
role – as a devil-may-care
founder of the SAS
– is a lot more fun

Words: Fiona Sturges

W
hen I first speak
to the actor Alfie
Allen, he is in the
back of a taxi and
winding his way
through country
lanes on the outskirts of Frome in
Somerset. Judging by the startled
look on his face, I’m guessing he has
forgotten all about our interview,
though, talking nine to the dozen,
he is doing his utmost to style it out.
Then, just as he is waxing lyrical
about Somerset – he spent the early
months of lockdown there and loves its
proximity to the Glastonbury festival,
and to his dad, Keith Allen, who lives
in the nearby Cotswolds – the screen
freezes. After shouting that he’ll call
me when he gets to the house,
everything goes dead.
Half an hour later, he’s back and full
of apologies. Parked on a zingy yellow
sofa, and dressed in tracksuit bottoms
and a hoodie, he talks about the hectic
schedule that has seen him zipping back
and forth between the UK and America.
Home is officially London, though his
house is rented out since he is there
so infrequently – “So I’m being a bit
nomadic, which I like.” He says much
of the last year has been spent either

5 6 | S AT UR DAY | 29.10.22 | The Guardian


visiting his four-year-old daughter,
Arrow, who lives with her mother in
Los Angeles, or working in New York.
Allen – who is 36 but looks about 10
years younger – made his Broadway
debut this April in Martin McDonagh’s
Hangmen, which is set in an Oldham
pub where the landlord is a former
executioner. As Mooney, a menacing
stranger who arrives at the pub, Allen
was praised by the New York Times
for his “convincingly reptilian
performance” and received a Tony
award nomination. He loved every
minute of it. To him, theatre feels
spontaneous in a way that TV rarely is,
with the added frisson that, if anything
goes wrong, you just have to keep going.
“Plus, it was cool doing it on Broadway
because if you missed home, you just
waited until the evening and you got
to spend the night in a British pub.”
We’re talking today because he is
starring in a new drama series, SAS
Rogue Heroes, set during the second
world war, which tells of the formation
of the elite regiment that sneaked
behind enemy lines and embarked on
daring acts of sabotage. Allen plays one
of the founder members, John “Jock”
Lewes, an officer in the Welsh Guards
who is caught between stiff-upper-lip
professionalism and his frustration
at military bureaucracy. Written by
Steven Knight, who wrote Peaky
Blinders, it is ridiculously fun, a
Boy’s Own story of recklessness and
derring-do in which explosive set
pieces unfold to a soundtrack of AC/DC.
The series is based on the book by
Ben McIntyre, which Allen read in
preparation for the role, along with
a book of Lewes’s love letters to his
sweetheart Mirren Barford. He says
Lewes would declare his love in one
letter and follow it up with a second
GARETH C AT TERMOLE/CONTOUR/GET T Y; BBC/KUDOS; MA XIMUM FILM / AL AMY
where he would apologise for being too
emotional. Shooting took place over
three months in Morocco. The cast all
stayed in a hotel in the oasis town of
Erfoud where, Allen recalls, “you could
look out of your window and see these
rolling dunes that would change every
day”. But the environment was tough
– near the end of their time there, the
temperature had reached 53C. “That
was concerning at times, especially for
those who were out in it all day. But we
all looked after one another. We’d sit
and talk to each other about our
feelings in the evenings and the next
day we’d go out and shoot rifles.”
Before becoming an actor, Allen was
known chiefly as the subject of the
2006 song Alfie by his older sister, Lily
Allen, in which she admonished him
‘I went to dark
places to play
Theon Greyjoy.
I came away from
it feeling alone’
for smoking weed, lying in bed all day
and watching too much TV. Having
been depicted as a waster by his sister,
in the late 00s he became known as
a party animal who was regularly
photographed staggering out of clubs
and around festivals with his friends
Nick Grimshaw, Alexa Chung and his
then girlfriend Jaime Winstone.
At the time he appeared to be
dabbling in acting, with bit parts in
Atonement and The Other Boleyn Girl.
Now he has a strong body of work under
his belt that spans comedy (Jojo Rabbit,
How to Build a Girl), sci-fi horror (The
Predator) and thrillers (John Wick,
Night Teeth). But he is best known for
his role as Theon Greyjoy in Game of
Thrones, where, unlike many of his cast
contemporaries, he lasted the full eight
seasons. No one anticipated how huge
the show would become. Allen says it
hit home when he was on holiday in
Thailand after finishing one of the
early seasons. “I was on the beach and
this guy came up selling [counterfeit]
Game of Thrones DVDs and suddenly
recognised me from the show.”
Playing Theon was no picnic. First,
there was the nudity, which happened
before the advent of intimacy
coordinators. “I just want to have
a conversation about it beforehand,
and it not just be expected,” Allen
reflects. “I’m glad for everyone, boy
or girl, that it’s approached with a bit
more sensitivity now.”
More difficult still was the cruelty
inflicted on Theon, who was captured,
castrated and forced into servitude by
Ramsay Bolton (Iwan Rheon). Allen
spent the third and fourth seasons
playing a man rendered mute with
distress and trauma. “I had to do a lot
with my body and my eyes and with
my grunts,” he says. “I had to go to
dark places to play that character.
There was this mixture of enjoying it
but also coming away from it feeling
quite alone.”
Allen never trained as an actor, but
grew up among actors and film-
makers. Along with writing lairy
The Guardian | 29.10.22 | S AT UR DAY | 5 7
Boy’s own adventure
Allen in SAS Rogue
Heroes (left); and
in Game of Thrones
(below)
football songs, his father, Keith,
appeared in films including Comrades
(as one of the Tolpuddle martyrs) and
Shallow Grave (largely as a corpse),
while his mother is Alison Owen, the
Bafta-winning film producer. He says
having your parents in the industry
“can be a help or a hindrance”, though
he doesn’t volunteer which category
his mother and father fall into. Allen
looks tense on the subject of his
parents – a result, perhaps, of his sister
Lily’s 2018 memoir, My Thoughts
Exactly, which detailed some
questionable childcare arrangements
including nights where the two of
them would be left upstairs at the
Groucho club while Keith “got
smashed in the bar downstairs”. What
Allen will say is that his dad gave him
the best piece of advice about acting he
has ever had: “He told me ‘95% of it is
about rejection and the other 5% is the
fun part’.”
If he appears uneasy talking about
his parents, it’s nothing next to his
discomfort when I ask a question about
Lily, who, since taking a break from
music, is now working as an actor.
Given what she endured at the hands
of a hostile and often misogynistic
media for the first decade of her career,
I wonder whether she offered him
advice on how to handle being in the
public eye. “Hmm, errr, well,” he
mumbles, nervously tapping the table
in front of him. “I guess there wasn’t
really a conversation that we had about
the pressure of what we do. I mean, I
was there for some of the things that
she went through and I think she’s
always handled that stuff pretty well.
“We live totally separate lives now,
so I don’t really know how she’s
dealing with the new career path that
she’s taken. I enjoy acting and I enjoy
being in that place of uncertainty, and
maybe being in a big TV show for so
long meant that that feeling wasn’t
there for me in the same way.”
That’s not to say he doesn’t get any
attention when out and about. Three
years after the end of Game of Thrones,
people still approach him wanting to
talk about the series. Rather than
waning, he says the interest is “still
growing as more and more people
discover it. And it’s only going to get
bigger, which is insane. It’s just
something that I take on board now,
and I’m not ever going to get miserable
about it. Thrones will be a part of my
life for the rest of my life, and I don’t
have a problem with that.”
SAS Rogue Heroes begins tomorrow at
9pm on BBC One.
E S S AY S , F I C T I O N and N O N F I C T I O N R E V I E W S

Very
British
problems Tackling Brexit, Boris and
his mother’s death during
the pandemic, Jonathan Coe’s
new state of the nation novel
puts Britain on the couch.
By Lisa Allardice
CULTURE BOOKS

B
‘We are a country
A C K I N 2 0 1 7, comic
novelist  and chron icler
of Englishness Jonathan
Coe met Liz Truss at a
dinner at the French
that is not driven
embassy. The event was
also attended by Coe’s
go o d f r ie nd K a z uo
by facts and
Ishiguro, who had recently
been awarded the Nobel
evidence and
prize for literature. “Books
didn’t seem to be her thing,” he says of the encounter. reason at all,
“We didn’t hit it off, put it like that.” Though we are
speaking before she announced she was standing down
as prime minister, Coe tells me he feels more uneasy
but by emotion’
now about the state of the UK than he did after the
Brexit referendum. “I think power has been handed
over to a very extreme cabal of people who, on the
basis of their first few weeks, seem to combine a kind
of ideological extremism with incompetence. That’s
a pretty worrying combination.”
From What a Carve Up!, the novel that made Coe’s
name in 1994, to his prize-winning novel Middle England
in 2018, the Tories have often been the target of the
author’s particular brand of political satire and national
scrutiny. His new novel, Bournville, which takes its title
from the village built by Cadbury outside Birmingham
where many of the author’s family lived and worked,
is no exception – except this time it is personal.
The first thing Coe’s mother did when he met her after
lockdown restrictions eased in June 2020 was give him
a small Cadbury’s chocolate bar, as she had done every
day when he got home from school as a boy. They hadn’t
seen each other for three months. It was a fine day so
they sat in his mother’s garden, in Bromsgrove where
she still lived, and chatted about her childhood for a
novel he was thinking of writing. Shortly after he
returned to London that evening, his mother called to
say she was feeling unwell. Coe’s brother and sister-in-
law, who lived nearby, went straight round, but were not
allowed to enter the house because of Covid rules. The
paramedics gave her some paracetamol with instructions
to get something stronger from the pharmacy the next
day. She died that night of a ruptured aortic aneur ysm
that had been growing near to her heart for years. “I
don’t like to think about it, but it wouldn’t have been a
nice death,” Coe says now. “And she was alone. That
was the horrible thing. It was just a terrible way to end.”
We are having coffee in the same restaurant in Earl’s
Court, near to Coe’s home in west London, where we
met almost two years ago – socially distanced and rather
chilly in the courtyard garden – to discuss his novel Mr
Wilder & Me, which he had fi nished just before his
mother’s death. It is easy to discern the quiet grammar-
school boy Coe once was (and which he wrote about in
his autobiographical novel The Rotters’ Club) in the
softly spoken novelist, with his silver crop and earnest
manner, whose passions include 1970s sitcoms,
Hollywood classics, prog rock, jazz and 20th-century
French classical music. The day we meet is the 60th
anniversary of the Beatles’ first hit, and of the release
of Dr No (James Bond, in his various incarnations, looms
large in the new novel) – and also the date of the first
Monty Python and Last Goon Show, he tells me with
uncharacteristic excitement: “Today is the day! So
many significant British cultural moments happen on
October the 5th.” He worries that a recent bout of Covid,
or turning 60 – “it’s hard to distinguish the symptoms”
– have left him less sharp, but as he rattles off dates and
titles, this seems to be far from the case.
With three novels in four years, Coe is on a roll.
Middle England was a further instalment in his
Benjamin Trotter books, which includes The Rotters’
Club and The Closed Circle (he is planning one more).
It was quickly followed by Mr Wilder & Me, about the
autumn days of director Billy Wilder, which he “banged
out” in six months, helped along by lockdown. Then
Bournville arrived “fully formed” with “a pressing
emotional need” to write it as soon as possible, he says.
“There’s a big element of personal exorcism in the book.”
Mary Lamb, the matriarch at the centre of this
bittersweet family saga, a PE and music teacher, is
modelled on his mother Janet. The rest of the family
are fictional, he says, although the youngest son Peter,
a musician, is a familiar Coe figure: “passive, slightly
depressed men – often failed writers or composers or
both – who show a rather uncommitted sexuality”,
as the author himself once observed of his protagonists.
Structured around seven national occasions, Bournville
opens with a prologue at the onset of the pandemic and
ends with the distressing circumstances of his mother’s
death. He hadn’t set out to include so many royal
landmarks – the coronation, the investiture of Prince
Charles, the royal wedding, Princess Diana’s funeral –
but as he was writing he realised they are often the
triggers for moments of national coming together. It is,
he says, both his most personal and political novel.
Floppy-haired Boris, who popped up in Middle England,
is here, in his early days as a reporter in Brussels, already
known only by his first name. As Coe reflects drolly in
an author’s note: “Whether he’s a fictional character
or not remains hard to determine with any certainty.”
His heart sank slightly when he heard about Ian
McEwan’s new novel Lessons, published in September,
which follows a similar timespan and also offsets
personal and historical events. “It just shows that we’re
very different kinds of writers,” he says now, having
read the novel (he considers McEwan to be one of our
finest writers in terms of style). Bournville is written
with Coe’s mix of gentle nostalgia and astute social
observation, and fans will recognise characters from
previous novels (nearly all his characters are connected
in some way). If it is less comic than usual, that is hardly
a surprise.
He was well into writing by the time the revelations
of Partygate began to emerge. “Of course, they don’t
play by the same rules that we do,” he says. “It’s
shocking, but it’s not really news.” Yet he is still sad and
angry. Far from the big occasion the family had
envisaged for his mother’s funeral, there were only 12

6 0 | S AT UR DAY | 29.10.22 | The Guardian Cover portrait: Suki Dhanda


or 14 people, all sitting apart, with most of her friends
watching on Zoom. “It was a very strange event,” he
says. “These rules involved a huge sacrifice and people
paid a massive emotional cost for them. Then to discover
that the people who’d drawn them up were playing fast
and loose with them, it’s unforgivable,” he says in his
usual measured way. “Those Tory party members who
were saying: ‘Why did we have to get rid of Boris? He
would have been a better leader to take us to the next
election.’ That’s the reason and it’s a very good reason.”
Johnson’s resignation wasn’t the only major British
event to occur after the novel had been delivered. “I
finished the book in April or May and missed the biggest
one of all,” he says of the death of the Queen. “Well, it
was going to happen sooner rather than later,” he notes
S U K I D H A N D A / T H E G U A R D I A N; E V E R E T T C O L L E C T I O N I N C /A L A M Y
drily. But it is striking timing that his novel of personal
loss should arrive in the aftermath of a national
outpouring of grief.
He had long toyed with the idea of writing a novel
set during the week of Princess Diana’s funeral, but he
wanted to take a longer view than he has in the past.
The public reaction to the Queen’s death – in particular
“the queue” – confirmed his growing belief “that we’re
a nation mainly driven by emotion”, he says. Where he
used to regard events such as the response to Diana’s
death and the Brexit referendum as “turning points,
moments when the country changed direction”, now
he is not so sure. Instead, he sees them as “symptoms”
of a national identity crisis that has been brewing for
decades. “We are starting to look like a country that is
not driven by facts and evidence and reason at all, but
in the far extremes of Brexitland by a kind of fantasy
and wishful thinking.”
Both Coe’s grandparents worked in the Cadbury
factory and his mother, like Mary in the novel, spent
her earliest years in Bournville: “Chocolate is very much
bound up with my family history.” During a visit to the
factory in the late 90s he was outraged to learn that they
had difficulty exporting to the EU because “the French
and the Belgians and Italians didn’t consider our
chocolate up to scratch”. They didn’t, in fact, regard it
as chocolate at all: it was “too greasy”, apparently. Years
later he was approached by Julie Gavras, a French film
director and writer, to collaborate on a screenplay about
these so-called “chocolate wars”.
The film was never made (a romcom about EU trade
negotiations failed to convince backers), but the
experience made him realise that chocolate was also
part of the identity of the nation: nostalgia for
childhood, for wartime (the Dairy Milk recipe as we
know it was a result of changes made because of
rationing) are all wrapped up in those shiny purple
rectangles, associations that held no truck with the
bureaucrats in Brussels. He found the idea of people in
committee rooms talking very seriously about rival
chocolate brands both comic and heroic. “There’s
something kind of wonderful about it. Instead of
fighting each other, we were sitting around and having
these rather difficult, valuable conversations.” What
better metaphor for the absurdities and deep-rooted
attachments at the heart of Brexit? And it all began at
Bournville, an emblematic place not only for his family
but also as a model of responsible capitalism, “a profit-
making enterprise that looked after its workforce,
which is not ideal, but under the present administration
looks like a totally utopian situation”.
The 2005 TV adaptation
of The Rotters’ Club
Then there’s that other uniquely British export that
so many of us grew up on – 007 – who appears throughout
the novel as a tuxedo-clad marker of the changing
decades. Going to see the new Bond film was a family
ritual in the Coe household when he was growing up,
often coinciding with their annual caravan holiday in
Wales. He recalls the audience erupting with cheers
when Bond (Roger Moore; it was 1977) jumped off the
cliff and a parachute opened to reveal a union jack in The
Spy Who Loved Me, a scene which now symbolises for
him our two defining characteristics: “nationalism and
facetiousness”, he says. “A combination of exception-
alism and not taking things seriously. It’s very potent.
And it really appeals to something in the British psyche.”
As with Johnson, Coe wanted to try to understand
the appeal of a man with so many clearly questionable
qualities: “Bond is racist, misogynist, egotistical.” Coe
recently persuaded his two daughters, both in their
early 20s and familiar only with Daniel Craig’s Bond,
to watch For Your Eyes Only. They didn’t get past the
opening credits: “Is this what you used to watch in the
70s?” they asked.
After his recent work sprint, he is ready for “a
breather”, but, as he points out, he may have said that
the last time we met. He did. He is only happy when he
is working on something: “I’m very edgy and difficult
to be around when I’m not writing.” Fortunately, he
has a new outlet for his “creative itchiness”: he
has teamed up with a jazz orchestra in Italy called
the  Artchipel Orchestra to perform pieces he has
composed, with the novelist on the keyboard. “I’m
playing live in front of an audience for the first time since
the 1980s, which is absolutely terrifying, because I’m
not really a very good musician,” he says modestly. He
is looking forward to performing in Milan in December.
In terms of writing, he thinks “cosy crime is the way
to go”. Surprisingly, given its high-profile adopters, such
as Richard Osman and Reverend Richard Coles, who
are making a tidy killing from this most English of
genres, Coe discovered it in a bookshop in France, where
a whole shelf was labelled “cosy crime”. “It’s another
of those British cultural phenomena which people don’t
realise is so popular in other countries.” It seems the
perfect match for Coe’s nostalgic Englishness and
neat storytelling.
His fiction has always been very successful in Europe.
“I don’t present that many challenges to translate
because the prose I write is very rarely poetic,” he says.
And while it is not true that he has “never written a
beautiful line”, as he puts it, he wants his books to be
easy to read. “I regard that as a positive.”
Bournville will be published in France as Le Royaume
Désuni (The Disunited Kingdom) because his French
editor didn’t think the brand name would have much
resonance for readers outside the UK, while the idea of
an ununited kingdom is all too recognisable right now.
Cadbury’s may be in his DNA, but, he confesses even
more quietly than usual: “The chocolate I really like,
from a taste point of view, is European.”
Bournville is published by Viking on Thursday.
The Guardian | 29.10.22 | S AT UR DAY | 61
CULTURE BOOKS NONFICTION
J
Missives O H N L E C A R R É – David Cornwell as he
then was – grew up among the lies of his
fraudster father Ronnie. He then entered
accomplished a  world of secrets, reporting on leftist
students when he was at Oxford before
working in intelligence for MI5 and MI6.
An extraordinary Deception was his domain and as much as he hated
Ronnie he worried about coming from the same “mad
genes-bank”. Instead he became a novelist; a less
collection of letters damaging way to tell lies.
Le Carré felt intruded on by Adam Sisman’s 2015
biography and quickly offered an “antidote” in his
reveals the loves and memoir The Pigeon Tunnel. The letters bring further
exposure but they’ve been sensitively edited by his
son Tim, who died suddenly in June, with the emphasis
laments of le Carré thrown on his father’s best self and industrious literary
career: the days spent writing in longhand at his desk
(his wife typed up the pages), the exhaustive research
Blake Morrison he carried out (both before embarking on a novel and
after he’d done the penultimate draft), the firm control
he exerted over blurbs, jacket designs and layout. He
changed publishers and dumped editors but always
with courtesy. “There’s no sillier fellow than the writer
complaining about critics,” he said, but on at least one
occasion he did so, protesting to the editor of the
Observer about Clive James’s “sloppy” debunking of
his work.
Le Carré thought childhood a writer’s greatest
resource, and the letters throw light on the Cornwell
years. The shame caused by his father’s “incurable
criminality ” was compounded by his mother’s
abandonment of him when he was five; he didn’t see
her again till he was 22 and his later letters to her, though
LETTERS solicitous, are far from warm – “[I] find her awfully hard
A Private Spy to tolerate”. After an abrupt departure from boarding
The Letters of John le Carré 1945-2020 school he went to Germany and later spent five terms
edited by Tim Cornwell as a German teacher at Eton (“I don’t think I’ve ever
V IK IN G , £ 3 0 met so much arrogance”). He made a “silly ” early
marriage to Ann, whom he nicknamed “A-mouse” and
6 2 | S AT UR DAY | 29.10.22 | The Guardian
John le Carré in
Cornwall, 1996
eventually left (“I’m a pig, I know I am”), before
marrying Jane, whom he nicknamed “Cow” and who
was indispensable as both his editor and gatekeeper.
For a time he worked as an illustrator and his drawings
and caricatures enrich the letters.
Film and television producers were keen to adapt
his novels from the start, and he was buoyed by the
success of the adaptations, as his letters to Alec
Guinness demonstrate. Other actors he wrote to, often
with excruciatingly fulsome admiration, include Ralph
Fiennes and Stephen Fry. With fellow authors, including
Tom Stoppard, he’s friskier. To Philip Roth he jokes that
he’s useless at giving writerly advice – “I was no use to
Joyce on Ulysses, fucked up completely when Kafka
needed me, all I could suggest to Nabokov was ‘couldn’t
you just maybe give her a couple more years’.” The high
literary references are unusual: he was more of a
Wodehouse man and read with painful slowness, in
part because of dyslexia.
“My love life has always been a disaster area,” he told
his brother Tony, and worried, needlessly, how much
the Sisman biography would expose. There’s no naming
names here, either, but the letters to Susan Anderson
(a museum curator) and Yvette Pierpaoli (an aid worker)
read like those of a lover, and to Susan Kennaway, his
affair with whom is well known, he describes himself
as “a mole too used to the dark to believe in light”.
Le Carré’s later years were blighted by a disaffection
with what Britain had become. He marched against
war in Iraq and described Tony Blair as “a mendacious
little show-off … fucking up the world in his Noddy car”.
Boris Johnson was as bad or worse (“Cowardice &
bullying go hand-in-hand, & Johnson is a practitioner
of both”), and further afield there was Trump (“a thin-
skinned, truthless, vengeful, pitiless ego-maniac”). As
for Brexit – “An act of economic suicide mounted by
charlatans” – it so dismayed him that he applied for
(and got) an Irish passport; his grandmother, who’d
looked after him as a boy, came from Cork.
Despite his friendships with literary, theatrical and
political grandees, he took pains to “stay outside the
citadel” and refused a CBE when offered one by Margaret
Thatcher, whom he found surprisingly “admirable”.
The older he got, the more embattled he became:
against pharmaceutical companies, warmongers and
even spies. “In my day, we were told we were little
apostles for truth, pledged to speak fearlessly to power,”
he said. Now spies were “craven”, allowing the world
to be led by “a handful of jingoistic adventurers and
imperialist fantasists, backed by a lot of dark money
and manipulation: populism led from above”.
The lasting impression the letters leave is of his
doubleness: “A right little cutthroat on my way up, I’ve
also been an insecure softie.” He’s acidic one moment,
warm-hearted the next, sometimes about the same
person – Ian McEwan, for instance, whose novel
Amsterdam he dismisses as “piss awful” but to whom
he writes with affection and respect after they’ve met.
He feels the same sense of division about himself,
describing his first two novels as “unputdownable. I
prefer them to Dickens” yet worrying if his work is
up to scratch. “I’ve had an amazing run,” he says
ROB JUDGES/REX /SHUT TERSTOCK
when facing death, and exults in his life with Jane as
two “old honeymooners on a cliff ”. But the residue
of unhappiness can’t be denied: “Looks so terribly
impressive from the outside. But the inside has been
such a ferment of buried anger and lovelessness from
childhood that it was sometimes almost uncontainable.”
What contained it was the fiction. And the letters show
how hard he worked to get the fiction right.
To buy a copy for £21.75 go to guardianbookshop.com
 Pop with a Twist
What Dickens and
Prince have in common
Fiona Sturges
C U LT U R E
Dickens & Prince
A Particular
Kind of Genius
Nick Hornby
V IK IN G , £9.9 9
I
f your first reaction to the subject
matter of Nick Hornby’s new book
is a perplexed “Huh?”, you might
take comfort in knowing its author had
similar feelings. In superficial terms,
his yoking together of two cultural
giants – the novelist Charles Dickens
and musician Prince Rogers Nelson –
seems unusual given they operated
not just in different media but
different centuries. While both found
fame early and died in their 50s, the
bare bones of their biographies are
otherwise wildly different. Before
beginning his research, it seemed to
Hornby that the biggest thing they had
in common was him. “They are,” he
writes, “two of what I shall have to
describe … as My People – the people
I have thought about a lot, over the
years, the artists who have shaped
me, inspired me, made me think about  than mere comparisons. Most
my work.”
It was a commemorative box set of
Prince’s 1987 album Sign o’ the Times
that gave him the idea for this book,
which, at 90-odd pages, is really more
of an essay. The newly released Sign
o’ the Times package featured an
Prince in
Florida, 2007
KMA ZUR /NFL /GE T T Y
astonishing 63 unreleased songs.
This led Hornby to wonder what other
artists have been as prolific as Prince,
and so he alighted on Dickens.
A celebrated author by his mid-20s
whose work was published in monthly
instalments, we learn how Dickens
wrote at high speed, releasing early
chapters of Oliver Twist before the
serialisation of The Pickwick Papers
had ended, and publishing Nicholas
Nickleby long before he was finished
with Oliver Twist.
Heightened productivity is not all
that these men share. Both grew up in
poverty and were intermittently
abandoned by their parents: Dickens
moved into a boarding house aged 12
while the rest of his family were
packed off to Marshalsea debtors’
prison; at the same age, Prince was
kicked out by his father and forced to
set up home in a friend’s basement.
Both felt aggrieved at their treatment
by their respective industries, which
they felt prized profit over creativity:
Prince’s wrangles with his record label
culminated in him abandoning his
name in favour of a symbol, while
Dickens furiously took on the copycats
and pirates who plundered his work
without credit or remuneration.
All this bears out Hornby’s hunch
that two artists working 150 or so
years apart can have lots in common,
but there’s more to Dickens & Prince
important is what their lives and work
tell us about creativity, and it’s on this
that Hornby is in his element. From
his early days writing about football
(in Fever Pitch) and music (in High
Fidelity), the author has long been
fascinated by the transformative
impact of culture, so it’s natural that
his ruminations on Dickens and Prince
should cause him to reflect on his own
status as consumer and creator. He
writes brilliantly about his wariness of
Dickens as a child – “[he] had the whiff
of BBC early evening costume drama
clinging to him” – and his subsequent
Damascene conversion as a university
student when he discovered the
author of Bleak House could actually
be funny.
It’s possible that there are Dickens
devotees who will bridle at finding
Bleak House mentioned in the same
breath as the author of songs such as
Sex Me Sex Me Not. Equally, some
Prince fans may stifle a yawn at
finding their mercurial hero compared
with a Victorian novelist. But Hornby
has no time for cultural hierarchies,
treating his subjects as the equals (and
kindred spirits) they undoubtedly are.
His book is both a love letter to two
artists who have nourished him and
the story of how they “caught fire
and lit up the world”.
To buy a copy for £8.49 go to
guardianbookshop.com
Secrets and spies
The justifications of a
WikiLeaks whistleblower
Simon Parkin
MEMOIR
README.txt
Chelsea Manning
BODLE Y HE A D, £2 0
I
n February 2010 Chelsea Manning,
a 22-year-old intelligence analyst
in the US Army, sat down with a
large mocha and accessed the free
internet at a Barnes & Noble bookshop
in Rockville, Maryland. She began to
upload every incident report filed by
the US military during the wars in
Iraq and Afghanistan – close to
three-quarters of a million documents
in total. Manning had downloaded
the files several weeks earlier, while
serving in Iraq, and burned them on to
a series of rewritable DVDs disguised
to look like albums by Taylor Swift,
Katy Perry and Lady Gaga. Then she
transferred the files to the memory
card in her digital camera. When she
left the country, military customs did
not blink.
Manning had spent months
sifting vast quantities of classified
information, email updates and
video feeds of live conflict in Baghdad.
She likens the intelligence operations
centre where she worked to a trauma
ward. “The United States’ formal
promise to the Iraqi government
about how our troops would treat the
country and its citizens didn’t mean
a thing,” she writes. Among the files
was video evidence that appeared to
show the deaths of civilians during
US airstrikes, as well as attempts to
cover up a CIA torture programme.
The files took all day to upload,
The Guardian | 29.10.22 | S AT UR DAY | 6 3
since the connection often dropped.
Manning considered hurling the
memory card into a bin instead.
Then, half an hour before the
bookstore closed, the final tranche
went through. The information
spread, first through the then
obscure website WikiLeaks, then via
national newspapers including the
Guardian (for which Manning later
became a columnist). To some
Manning was a hero; to others a
treasonous spy. After she was caught,
the government began, as she puts it,
a campaign to “fully destroy” her. She
was convicted of 19 charges, including
six counts of espionage, and sentenced
to 35 years’ imprisonment – almost
20 times the previous record for any
American whistleblower.
As well as these critical events,
README.txt also covers Manning’s
early life – and how the army appeared
to offer an escape from a traumatising
upbringing. But once there she was
targeted by drill sergeants for her
“slight, childish” appearance and
subjected to homophobic insults.
In this turbo-charged masculine
environment, her struggles with
gender identity (she would later come
out as trans) became more pronounced:
“[It was] less about being a woman
trapped in a man’s body than about the
innate incoherence between the person
I felt myself to be and the one the
world wanted me to be,” she writes.
In Iraq the bullying continued.
After she witnessed the death of a
colleague, Manning felt how “with
enough grief, adrenaline and fear”,
war can turn anyone “amoral, even
malevolent”. She began to wrestle
with two life-changing secrets: who
she was, and what she saw.
At times, README.txt is vague;
some sections have been blacked out,
presumably on legal advice. Manning
claims to have seen more than she
ever disclosed, things she “will never
reveal”. “I know this is annoying,”
she writes. “But I have already faced
serious consequences for sharing
information I believe to be in the
public interest; I am uninterested in
facing them again.” Even so, what
remains is a compelling, taut account
of what she has experienced, and
a persuasive justification of how
she behaved.
At her trial, lawyers convinced
Manning to issue a mea culpa:
“I look back at my decisions and
wonder how on earth could I …
believe I could change the world for
better over the decisions of those
with the proper authority?” Today,
her view has changed. “What I did,”
she concludes, “was an act … of
forcing progress.” Five years after
President Obama commuted
Manning’s sentence, history
continues to vindicate her actions.
To buy a copy for £17.40 go to
guardianbookshop.com
CULTURE
Not the messiah
Healthy self-awareness
from a rock star activist
Dorian Lynskey
MEMOIR
Surrender
40 Songs, One Story
Bono
CORNERS TONE, £2 5
W W
hen manager Paul
McGuinness took on U2 in
1978 he said, quoting F Scott
Fitzgerald, that their 18-year-old
frontman saw “the whole equation”.
Incapable of meeting punk’s standards
of cool, the young Dubliners found
improbable success by going too far
and being too much. That impulse
produced fabulous coups, from their
performance at Live Aid in 1985 to their
reinvention of stadium rock with Zoo
TV – as well as memorable disasters,
notably the decision to deposit 2014’s
Songs of Innocence into every iTunes
account in the world. As Bono writes in
this, his first memoir: “Our best work
is never too far from our worst.”
The same goes for his extra-
curricular activities. Nobody has done
more to expand the parameters of rock
stardom, often in contentious ways.
If any song title sums him up, then it’s
Tryin’ to Throw Your Arms Around
the World, from 1991’s Achtung Baby.
Bono wants to go everywhere, meet
everyone, learn everything and
somehow pull it all together. His
failures are therefore more interesting
than most people’s successes.
Running to 557 pages, Surrender
is characteristically expansive, but it
whizzes by, with each of its 40 present-
tense chapters pegged to a relevant
song lyric and decorated with a
felt-pen sketch. Bono has storytelling
verve and a genuine desire for self-
examination, neither of which is
guaranteed in rock memoirs. He is
enthusiastic about praising others,
often at his own expense. The
supporting cast is ridiculous: he
relates colourful encounters with
David Bowie, Frank Sinatra and
Johnny Cash as well as Bill Clinton,
Nelson Mandela and Pope John Paul II.
You could trace Bono’s desire to
build bridges back to his parents’
marriage: his father Bob was a Catholic
and a romantic; his mother Iris, whose
death when he was 14 became his
primal trauma, was a pragmatic
Protestant. It’s notable that he still
lives in Ireland and has retained the
same bandmates, best friends and
partner for more than 40 years. His
wife Ali emerges as the book’s quiet
star: “‘I wouldn’t trust a man who
didn’t find you attractive,’ I say. ‘I
wouldn’t trust a woman who found
6 4 | S AT UR DAY | 29.10.22 | The Guardian
BOOKS NONFICTION
you interesting,’ she replies.” This
enduring camaraderie, together with
his religious faith, becomes a recipe
for how to become incomprehensibly
famous without losing your head.
Bono is unusually open to being
challenged in interviews, turning
them into megaphones for his own
doubts. He manufactures that push-
and-pull dynamic here by restaging
arguments, especially with Ali
and McGuinness, who sceptically
describes his lobbying for debt
cancellation as “Mr Bono Goes to
Washington”. After he reluctantly
agreed to a photo op with George
W Bush as part of an effort to get
him to fund HIV medication in
Africa, George Soros told him: “Bono,
you have sold out for a plate of lentils.”
Bush eventually agreed to $15bn for
starters (“That’s a lot of lentils”)
but it was a bruising education in
political realities. Lessons are learned,
too, in a section on “White Messiah
Syndrome”: “Despite our best
intentions, some of us activists can
burn out in the fire of our own do-
goodery and the secret is to know
when to shut up and listen.”
There’s some blarney here – a
weakness for the too-cute aphorism
and the florid metaphor – but Bono’s
appetite for contradictions and
humiliations, which goes far beyond
tactical self-deprecation, more than
compensates. He admits that his
“tendency toward the preposterous”
and his bullish conviction can be
“very wearying”. Such self-knowledge
makes this generous, energetic
book anything but.
To buy a copy for £21.75 go to
guardianbookshop.com
Greta Thunberg
in Milan in 2021
Global warning
A powerful but uneven
clarion call on climate
Gaia Vince
E S S AY S
The Climate Book
Greta Thunberg
A LLEN L A NE , £2 5
e are supposed to have
solved this problem in just
under 30 years. That’s the
same amount of time that has elapsed
since Whitney Houston and Kevin
Costner smooched in The Bodyguard.
Governments’ commitment to limit
global heating to 1.5C above the
preindustrial average means the huge
transition to net zero will have to be
made by 2050. By then, renewables
should be producing most of our
energy – certainly all the electricity
in rich countries – and we should all
be driving around in electric cars,
eating sustainable, mainly plant-based
foods and living in well-insulated
houses built from low-carbon materials.
The many books written about how to
avoid the climate crisis will hopefully
have become obsolete. Which of them
will survive to be read beyond the
combustion era, if only by historians
– as testament to this period of crisis
and uncertainty?
Well, Greta Thunberg is already
assured her place in history as the
Jeanne d’Arc (or Cassandra) of our
time. She’s been heroically battling
the forces of climate inaction and
denial since she stepped on to the
global stage as a shy 15-year-old
schoolkid “striking for the climate”.
Anything written or orchestrated by
her – like this appealingly produced
anthology of essays – stands an
excellent chance.
Thunberg herself writes with
the stark conviction of youth and an
activist’s directness, which is both
refreshing to read and tiring.
Fortunately, space is given to writers
who weave messages with skill and
beauty, like Peter Brannen, who takes
the chemistry of the carbon cycle and
presents it as the marvellous life force
it is. Warning us where we’re heading,
he evokes an episode of global warming
from Earth’s history: “In the aftermath,
when the fever finally broke, one
could travel the world without seeing
a tree, the world’s coral reefs had been
replaced by bacterial slime, the fossil
record went silent and the planet took
nearly 10 million years to pull itself
back from oblivion.”
Naomi Oreskes writes fiercely about
“the history of denial and obfuscation
by the fossil fuel industry”, and there
are stirring contributions from the
climate scientist Kate Marvel and
the novelist Amitav Ghosh. This is
a campaigning book of course, but
much more than that. There are
clear explanations of how human
activities are pushing Earth’s systems
close to dangerous tipping points,
and of the socioeconomic drivers
of the crisis.
We are told throughout that if we
don’t limit global temperature rises
to 1.5C, we face disaster, yet planned
fossil fuel production by 2030 will
be more than twice the amount
consistent with this target. In short,
we are very unlikely to meet our
transition target by 2050. What then?
In a book of more than 400 pages,
just one and a half are given over to
technologies aimed at reducing global
heating by reflecting sunlight back
into space. That particular essay
can be summed up in a quote:
“Geoengineering is not an option.”
The idea of withdrawing emitted
carbon from the atmosphere gets
a little more (reluctant) attention,
because “we’ve left Greta’s generation
little choice”. Nuclear power is barely
mentioned even though decarbonising
energy systems is fundamental to
this effort.
For all Thunberg’s brilliance and
bravery, ignoring these possibilities
MAURO UJE T TO/NURPHOTO/RE X /SHUT TER STO CK
feel timorous and blinkered. This
book is superb at explaining the
urgency and importance of preventing
climate change, but despite its heft
it stops too soon. There is little
pragmatism over what to do about
now-certain changes, which means
it feels like a book whose time was
10 years ago. But perhaps it has taken
this decade for an audience that’s
receptive to its message to develop.
History will show.
To buy a copy for £21.25 go to
guardianbookshop.com
 FICTION
I
Into the abyss T ’ S T H E D E P T H O F T H E DA R K N E S S that
spooks Bobby Western, the haunted man at
the heart of Cormac McCarthy’s extraordinary
A salvage diver new novel. Western works as a salvage diver in
the Mexican Gulf, tending to sunken barges
and stricken oil rigs. He’s kicking up clouds in
plumbs mysterious the clay-coloured water and pressing further into the
unknown with every weighted step. His colleagues are
blase but experience has taught him to take care. He
depths in asks: “You ever bump into something down there that
you didn’t know what it was?”
Published a full 16 years after the Pulitzer prize-
Cormac McCarthy’s winning The Road, The Passenger is like a submerged
ship itself; a gorgeous ruin in the shape of a hardboiled
noir thriller. McCarthy’s generational saga covers
glorious sunset everything from the atomic bomb to the Kennedy
assassination to the principles of quantum mechanics.
It’s by turns muscular and maudlin, immersive and
song of a novel indulgent. Every novel, said Iris Murdoch, is the
wreck of a perfect idea. This one is enormous. It’s got
locked doors and blind turns. It contains skeletons and
Xan Brooks buried gold.
Some 40 feet below the surface, Western explores a
downed charter jet. Inside the fuselage, he picks his
way past the floating detritus and the glassy-eyed
victims, still buckled in their seats. The plane carried
eight passengers but one appears to be missing and
the subsequent investigation hints at a government
cover-up. Except that this may be a red herring; we’re
B R O O K P E T E R S O N / G E T T Y/ S T O C K T R E K I M A G E S
still in the book’s shallows. Western’s troubles, we
realise, are altogether closer to home.
McCarthy began work on The Passenger back in the
mid-1980s, before his career-making Border trilogy;
building it piecemeal and revisiting it down the years.
Small wonder, then, that this family tragedy feels
filleted, part of a larger whole and trailing so many loose
The Passenger ends that it requires a self-styled “coda” – a second
Cormac McCarthy novel, Stella Maris, published next month – to complete
PICA D OR, £2 0 the story. So this is a book without guardrails, an
invitation to get lost. We’re constantly bumping into
dark objects and wondering what they mean.
Ostensibly the narrative sees Western pinballing
Bobby Western
asks: ‘You ever
bump into
something down
there that you
didn’t know
what it was?’
around early 80s New Orleans, hobnobbing with the
locals, trying to outflank his enemies. But it also casts
back through the decades, mining his quasi-incestuous
bond with his suicidal sister, Alicia. Along the way it
introduces us to her nightmarish hallucinations: “the
Thalidomide Kid and the old lady with the roadkill stole
and Bathless Grogan and the dwarves and the Minstrel
Show”. Alicia likens these demons to a troupe of penny-
dreadful entertainers. They materialise at her bedside
whenever she skips her meds.
On a prose level, McCarthy – now 89 – continues to
fire on all cylinders. His writing is potent, intoxicating,
offsetting luxuriant dialogue with spare, vivid
descriptions. The bonfire leaning in the sea wind; the
burning bits of brush hobbling away up the beach. As
a storyteller, though, I suspect that he is deliberately
winding down, wrapping up. This novel plays out as a
great dying fall.
Western and Alicia, we learn, are children of the
bomb. Their father was a noted nuclear physicist
who helped split the atom, leading to the destruction
of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Western, in his youth,
studied physics himself. He became familiar with
protons and quarks, leptons and string theory, but
gave up his calling for a life of blue-collar drifting.
Quantum mechanics, he feels, can only take us so far.
“I don’t know if it actually explains anything,” he says.
“You can’t illustrate the unknown.”
McCarthy’s interest in physics has been stoked
by his time as a trustee at the Santa Fe Institute, a
nonprofit research centre. Since 2014 he’s largely been
holed up with the scholars, exploring the limits of
science – and presumably of language as well – only to
conclude that no system is flawless. High-concept
plots take on water; machine-tooled narratives break
down. And so it is with The Passenger, which sets out
as an existential chase thriller in the mould of No
Country for Old Men before collapsing in on itself.
Western might outpace his pursuers but he can’t
escape his own history. So he heads into the desert,
alone, to watch the oil refineries burning in the distance
and observe the carpet-coloured vipers coiled in the
grass at his feet. “The abyss of the past into which the
world is falling,” he thinks. “Everything vanishing as
if it had never been.”
What a glorious sunset song of a novel this is. It’s
rich and it’s strange, mercurial and melancholic.
McCarthy started out as the laureate of American
manifest destiny, spinning his hard-bitten accounts of
rapacious white men. He ends his journey, perhaps,
as  the era’s jaundiced undertaker. Come friendly
bombs. Come rising oceans. The old world is dying
and  probably not before time, and The Passenger
steals in to turn out all the lights.
To buy a copy for £17.40 go to guardianbookshop.com
The Guardian | 29.10.22 | S AT UR DAY | 6 5
CULTURE
Political horrors
An occult treatment of
Argentina’s ‘dirty war’
Sam Byers
Our Share of Night
Mariana Enríquez,
translated by
Megan McDowell
G R A N TA , £ 18.9 9
I
n 2017, Things We Lost in the Fire
by Argentinian writer Mariana
Enríquez introduced a compelling
new voice to English readers. Tough-
edged and tightly honed, her short
stories inhabited the space between
high gothic horror and cruel
sociopolitical reality.
In Our Share of Night, her first novel
translated into English, set in the
decades during and after Argentina’s
military dictatorship, Enríquez ditches
the miniature and goes big. Shaping
her style to the space, she allows it to
go drastically slack.
Over the course of 736 pages, Our
Share of Night takes unstructured,
direction-free wandering and makes
of it a governing aesthetic. The plot is
relatively straightforward. We meet
Gaspar as a child in 1981, and follow
him into early adulthood in 1997. His
mother having died in suspicious
circumstances, Gaspar grows up in the
care of his dying father, Juan. Juan is
a medium; his son has inherited his
powers. Gaspar’s abilities make him
useful to malign and politically
powerful groups, but Juan is
determined to protect him.
“Sometimes,” Enríquez writes,
“it is hard to name the horror.” Perhaps
this is a plaintive note to self; Enríquez
rarely names things at all. Through
a rite called the Rite, Juan channels
a dark force called the Darkness. The
Rite is presided over by a sinister
order called the Order, who also
control the place where the Rite must
be performed – the Place of Power.
What the Order don’t know is that the
Place of Power isn’t the only powerful
place. There’s also another place,
called the Other Place.
Enríquez’s stubborn anti-invention
soaks deep into her language.
“Something was changing,” we’re
told, “and the change was terrible and
wonderful.” A garden is “lovely but
sad”. “I have no doubt,” says Juan,
“that there is something important
and repulsive behind that door.” You
have to really treasure your banalities
to insist on serving them up in pairs.
Similes unfailingly miss their mark.
Two men having sex are “like the
pictures in the porn magazines, only
moving”. Juan’s large hands when
they punch someone are “like boxing
gloves without the protection of the
6 6 | S AT UR DAY | 29.10.22 | The Guardian
BOOKS FICTION
fabric and padding”, or to put it
another way: they’re like hands.
Often undecided as to what she’s
trying to convey, Enríquez hedges her
bets. “The silence was total,” she tells
us, “except for nocturnal birds, the
lapping of the river, a dog barking in
the distance.” When her indecision
reaches a peak, she gives up on sentence
structure completely and dumps
information in a heap: someone’s
hands and feet are “tied with the nylon
cord that had been easy to buy without
raising suspicion (‘It’s for a package,
I need a good strong one’), yet was
impossible to break without great
effort or the use of a knife”.
The translator, Megan McDowell,
has handled all Enríquez’s previous
books, but this time something is off.
Is “an adult depression that collapsed
him into bed” really flawless English?
And what are we to think when we’re
told, hilariously, that in the course of
learning to cook, Gaspar “ventured
painstakingly into a potato pie”?
Some might argue that a horror
novel, as this aspires to be, should be
judged less on the sophistication of its
language and more on its ability to
thrill. But the narrative is as loosely
shaped as its sentences. Section one
builds to the book’s best set piece:
Juan summoning the Darkness in an
orgy of holy violence. Here, as the
ghosts of Argentina’s “dirty war”
become ever more insistent, and occult
power entrenches the ability of a
privileged elite to torture and oppress,
Enríquez’s fusion of political allegory
and gleeful gore seems briefly to
cohere. But she has blown her best ideas
and discharged all narrative tension.
For the remaining 500 pages, she is
adrift, recycling the novel’s motifs,
reworking her own past material, and
damning her characters to stasis.
Enríquez isn’t alone in trying,
Last year’s BBC
adaptation of
The Pursuit of Love
through genre conventions, to revivify
the big, ambitious literary novel. Karl
Ove Knausgård attempted something
similar in The Morning Star, and
Hanya Yanagihara in To Paradise. The
problem is that, like them, she seems
to think that a commercial veneer
obviates the need to invest language
with life. The result is the worst of
both worlds: neither thrills nor poetry,
pace nor the pleasure of prose.
To buy a copy for £16.14
go to guardianbookshop.com
The reboot of love
A Mitford classic is
delightfully reimagined
Ella Risbridger
Darling
India Knight
FIG T REE , £14 .9 9
F
or a reader unfamiliar with
Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit
of Love, India Knight’s
reimagining would be a perfect
comfort read: the kind of book you
take into the bath and keep reading
even when the water has gone cold,
a one-sitting dark-at-four joy.
Briefly, then, for that reader:
teenage Linda Radlett lives in “the
very definition of emptiness” (north
Norfolk). Marooned in a tiny hamlet
with her rock-star father Matthew,
wafting bohemian mother Sadie,
many siblings and narrator cousin
Frances for company, Linda dreams
of the future: mostly love affairs,
with a side order of freedom. Darling
is the story of her growing up: the
people she meets; the men she falls
in love with; and her friendship,
enduring and eternal, with Frances.
This is a book full of lovely things:
clothes and curtains and old Apple Mac
computers in “boiled-sweet pink”.
There are good lovely things, owned by
the creative bohemians (squashy sofas,
dogs, “square-cut antique emerald
cufflinks”), and bad lovely things,
owned by the Ukip-voting parvenus
(Hunter wellies) and the faux-commie
Etonians (slim hardback novels).
As well as Mitford, there is
something of Elizabeth Jane Howard’s
much-adored Cazalet Chronicles in
here, plus elements of Eva Rice’s
The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets and
Barbara Trapido’s Brother of the More
Famous Jack. Darling belongs in the
pantheon of books that feel a bit like
opening up a doll’s house to show the
impeccable precision of the world
within. The lamp really turns on; the
radio really plays. The front comes off
to show these other lives, and golden
light is reflected back on to the reader.
We might call this, as a genre, novels
of the interior: interiors of places, and
interiors of people. It’s easy to dismiss
the domestic, but if home is where
the heart is, the heart is where all
humanity happens. And Darling is a
very human book, full of feelings and
heartbreak and humour and joy.
And yet, how much of that is India
Knight and how much is Nancy Mitford?
This is the difficult question when
considering a retelling of a book that
feels as fresh and alive as Mitford’s
1945 classic. The Pursuit of Love has
scarcely been out of print since initial
publication, and is not yet out of
copyright. Only last year it was
adapted, gloriously, by Emily
Mortimer for the BBC. A second series
is in development. The Radletts,
interwar edition, are thriving.
Knight’s reimagining uses the same
characters; the same relationships;
many of the same jokes. There is
something discombobulating about
characters you know being almost
but not quite themselves. Yet Knight
writes from the same sensibility as
R O B E R T V I G L A S K Y/ T H E O D O R A F I L M S L I M I T E D & M O O N A G E P I C T U R E S L I M I T E D
Mitford, with an easy facility for social
observation and caustic charm. If the
Radletts of the 21st century are a little
less extraordinary than the Radletts
of the 20th, they still leap off the page
with warmth. Knight’s characters are
sparky and fun, and in some cases
their relationships are crafted with
more care than in Mitford’s original.
This is perhaps because Knight, free
from the innate pressures of the roman
à clef, has enough distance for clarity.
Her Radlett family is warm and secure,
in spite of it all, because the parents
adore each other. Their love, Knight
writes, “permeated the house like the
smell of a pie baking”. They dance to
Kate Bush. They wink at each other.
They talk openly about sex. Mitford
never wrote a really good marriage
(Fanny’s husband, in Pursuit and
sequels, is the very definition of a
nonentity), and it’s tempting to Carnivores (“blown to bits on his third BOOKS OF THE MONTH

Fiction in
wonder whether she ever could. foreign tour”). In the title story, an
Darling, it must be said, is all the better enemy is advancing on “the
for Matthew and Sadie’s delight in one northernmost outpost on the

another: it makes the characters make
sense. Is that added clarity reason
enough to rewrite The Pursuit of
Love? Maybe. And it’s always a
delight to find something new to
carry you through winter; Knight
rises to that challenge with aplomb.
To buy a copy for £13.04
go to guardianbookshop.com
Visions of America
A standout collection
brimming with energy
David Hayden
SHORT STORIES
Get ’em Young,
Treat ’em Tough,
Tell ’em Nothing
Robin McLean
A ND O T HER S TORIE S, £11.9 9
Northwest Front”. In scenes
reminiscent of wars in Vietnam and
Afghanistan, the base is gradually,
chaotically evacuating. A guard
soldier, Private Martin, is held behind
for an infraction committed by his
night-time counterpart, who has
abandoned his post. Martin recollects
a general on a soldiers’ training
exercise who had said: “‘Give them
rifles. Give them caps.’ Then he
whispered the secret: ‘Get ’em young,
treat ’em tough, tell ’em nothin.’” In a
life where confusion and ignorance are
intended, violence provides purpose,
with or without an objective.
There is a sense of the centre not
holding – of American anxiety as a
bestowal to us all, as American energy
once was. In the mind of Private
Martin, “the tundra was not one
dumb thing but billions! The tiniest
stupidities knitted together. Doltish
leaves, small like mouse ears,
forking foolishly from dimwit twigs
overlapping endlessly with same,
blending together only in the eyes of
translation
A fugitive Russian soldier on the Trans-Siberian
railway; a final farewell; an illicit marriage; plus
an eccentric portrait of Pliny. By John Self
something for the last bride is that she seems
time; an exception is
when a loved one is
to be from a different
caste, despite his
dying. “It was our last
30th December,”
denials. “Can’t we tell
just by looking at her?”
writes the narrator of
Ti Amo, addressing her
Perumal Murugan is one
of India’s best-known
terminally ill husband,
“and it would be our last
literary novelists, and
Pyre is beautifully done,
New Year’s Eve too.” with flashbacks to the
The book is a short, lovers’ meeting in a soda
Eastbound sharp account of how shop, second thoughts
Maylis de Kerangal, they cope with the as Saroja finds herself
translated by knowledge of his thinking fondly of the
Jessica Moore impending death. He confinement of her old
LE S FUG IT I V E S, £10.9 9 abandons his work as home and a further

R
obin McLean’s first novel, Pity thickskulled watchmen and other In this timely novella a painter, deciding to elopement to evade
the Beast, a sublimely dark hoofed mammals. A continental about a Russian military “give up looking into what prejudice threatens
revenge western told in a moronic collage.” This caustic conscript defecting from yourself”, but the to bring down on them.
variety of human and animal voices, description could be of the United the army, 20-year-old narrator is a novelist: The title promises a
generated a startled response from States, or everywhere. Aliocha is on the how else can a writer dramatic conclusion,
readers and critics, admiring of its Even outside the violent events in Trans-Siberian railway process life than by and the book delivers.
originality and repulsed by the the book, violence is ambient, present from Moscow to writing about it? This
frankness of its violence. The same in the incomprehensible strangeness Vladivostok. When he novella, sometimes hard Awake
huge energy and weirdness present in of nature – including our own, which gets there he plans to to read for its bleakness Harald Voetmann,
that book drives these 10 stories. If you puts the book atmospherically, if not “hide, remake himself but impossible to look translated by Johanne
are at ease with the unpredictable, theologically, alongside Cormac and earn enough to get away from, shows that Sorgenfri Ottosen
they will grip hard and pull you in. McCarthy and Joy Williams. There’s a back to the west”. But even when we know the LOLLI EDITIONS, £12 .99
But for Herr Hitler is a story about suspicion that life force and death no literary train journey destination, the journey “Living only means to
moving to Alaska: about fate, history force are one. would be complete is still worthwhile. be awake,” wrote Pliny
and unimaginable consequence. A In wild places, McLean has said in without encountering a the Elder, the Roman
terse, moody prose style mutates into an interview, “you feel the correct stranger – in this case Pyre naturalist who died in
one that is “strange and lavish” (as one size. I do feel that humans have gotten Hélène, a Frenchwoman Perumal Murugan, the eruption of Vesuvius
character, Eric, describes his partner, really mixed up about our size.” who has her own translated by in AD79, in his Natural
Iris). The concept of America as a place Humanity and its wildernesses are secrets. Through a Aniruddhan Vasudevan History. Danish author
where people go to make good, to only a part of McLean’s story worlds, combination of clothes PUSHK IN, £9.9 9 Harald Voetmann’s
make themselves, is placed in tension and not always the central one. Other swapping, psychological As unanswerable funny, eccentric novel
with the America of the unmade and selfhoods are present: animal, gameplay and simply questions go, “How takes snippets from that
the lost. Iris, the character whose life botanical, geological. “Those beings hiding in a toilet, the did you bewitch him?” book and gives us the
and death story this is, asks: “Where are not background.” McLean’s ability two play cat and mouse is hard to beat, but it’s man behind them in all
do all the gone people go?” to look beyond the “minority species” with the senior Russian one of many that young his human foibles. If
McLean writes at times with the view, our own, gives her stories much officer moving Saroja faces when she your novel doesn’t have
hyper-keen vividness of nightmare: of their peculiar concentration and inexorably along the moves with her new much plot, then you’d
not surrealism but a kind of American vertiginous originality. train. The result is a husband, Kumaresan, better have a lot of
expressionism, like a darker, gristlier By working beyond the familiar balance of internal to his village in character, and Awake
Donald Barthelme – grotesque, comic artificialities of realism, McLean thought and external southern India. The certainly does. Pliny
and unsettling. creates dense and memorable pictures action propelled by a main concern locally is vain and prone to
In True Carnivores a woman sells of American life that are intensely and narrative that races about Kumaresan’s nosebleeds, and shows
her house, steals her sister’s money oddly real. Some themes or objects – a on in long sentences, us that even the greatest
and abducts her child. The Auntie, cat that lives in a pond, a pterodactyl keeping things flowing mind is prey to base
like most of McLean’s characters, is out of time – are perhaps not meant to beautifully in between urges – especially lust.
deliberately incomplete: a stuck be read metaphorically, but as moments of drama. Meanwhile, his nephew
moment of self, there and then gone. talismans of instability and mystery. Pliny the Younger offers
Her actions seem incommensurate Underneath their fantasies of capacity Ti Amo scathing commentary
with her motivation, but at the same and agency, McLean’s characters are, Hanne Ørstavik, on his uncle’s writing.
time she, and the other characters, are as the narrator in the superb House translated by Awake is the first in a
strongly present and convincing. Full of Feasting says, “helpless, as we Martin Aitken trilogy about humanity’s
The US military features across the all are, every day of our lives”. A ND O T HER S T ORIE S, £11.9 9 drive to conquer nature.
book: a dead brother in House Full of To buy a copy for £10.43 go to We’re not often aware The mind boggles at
Feasting, a dead husband in True guardianbookshop.com of when we’re doing what is yet to come.

The Guardian | 29.10.22 | S AT UR DAY | 6 7


Come fall in love with
the ‘green heart of Italy’.
A
ll the best that Italy has to offer can be
found in Umbria. This is where beautifully
preserved Renaissance hilltop villages
dot the landscape and life is still lived at a slower
pace. Along with fertile land that inspires culinary
delights, this area boasts world-renowned artistic,
architectural and historic attractions. A true
off-the-beaten-path experience awaits you here...
along with the famous Umbrian hospitality.
Sights and Delights of Umbria, one of our many
guided walking holidays, is a gentle way to
experience this captivating land dubbed the ‘green
heart of Italy’.
Take a brief look at our itinerary for the week:
Day 1
We fly to Rome and follow the Tiber river through
Lazio and into Umbria to the centre of Trevi. The
Hotel Antica Dimora alla Rocca – dating back to the
16th century and restored to its former glory – is
our base.
Day 2
Today we wander the narrow cobbled streets
around the hilltop town of Trevi. After visiting its
museum and beautiful frescos in the church of
San Francesco, we take an easy walk along the
Olive Tree Trail to see Olivo di Sant’Emiliano – a
1,700-year-old olive tree. A tasting of local olive oils
follows back at the hotel.
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Day 3
We head to Spello, a medieval hilltop town sitting
under Monte Subasio with views over the glorious
verdant Tiber Valley as well as quiet winding
streets with enchanting flower displays. We’ll also
see Roman arches and Pinturicchio frescoes in the
church of Santa Maria Maggiore before walking
over the Roman aqueduct to delight in more
breathtaking panoramas.
Day 4
We have the full day to discover Assisi, perched
high above the rolling valley floor on the flank of
Monte Subasio. A local guide shows us the town’s
highlights, including the Basilica of St Francis with
its magnificent frescos. The afternoon is free so you
can enjoy more sights in Assisi like San Damiano
and the Basilica of Saint Mary of the Angels started
by St Francis. Or you may prefer a short walk in the
surrounding area.
Day 5
We take a day trip to tranquil Lake Trasimeno,
Italy’s fourth largest lake located on the border of
Umbria and Tuscany. Here we go on a boat ride to
the picturesque Isola Maggiore, home to a small
13th century village. An easy ramble takes us to
the top of the island and the Chiesa di San Michele
Arcangelo, where there are superb views – you
may even spot Tuscany on a clear day! A visit to the
Captain’s House and lace museum is also possible.
Day 6
This morning we start with a leisurely stroll around
the Springs of Clituno. Then we make our way to the
hilltop village of Spoleto marvelling at the medieval
‘Rocca’ (fortress) and ‘Ponte delle Torri’ (bridge of
towers). As we descend through town we also stop
at the 12th century cathedral.
Day 7
Today begins in Montefalco with more exquisite
Renaissance frescos. Around midday we travel to a
local vineyard for a tour, wine tasting and delicious
lunch. Afterward we return to Trevi to spend time
independently before our last dinner as a group.
Day 8
We bid arrivederci to Trevi and head to Rome for our
flight home enamoured by Umbria’s idyllic scenery.
SIGHTS AND DELIGHTS OF UMBRIA
Departs 28 March, 13 June, 4 July, 12 September &
17 October 2023.
FROM £1,365pp
Half board with return flights to Rome and wine at
evening meals. Early bird discount available when
booked six months in advance.
If you’ve got a taste for gently exploring more of
Italy have a look at these options:
LAKE COMO GARDENS & VILLA
Find paradise on the shores of Italy’s famous lake.
BOLOGNA  LA GRASSA
A foodie’s delight with visits to Parma & Modena.
To see our other guided holidays in Europe or the
UK visit adagio.co.uk or call 01707 537254.
Go online
to request your
FREE copy
of our 2023
brochure
 CULTURE
No place
like home
A new wave of gothic and
haunted house novels explores
the fears that lurk behind closed
doors. By Charlotte Northedge
W
hen Dee walks
through the front
door in Catriona
Ward’s recent
thriller The
Last House on
Needless Street, readers of gothic fiction
find themselves in a familiar place. The
house is “an underworld; a deep cave
where lonely shafts of light fall on
strange mounds, jagged broken things.
Plywood is nailed over all the windows,”
and the “whole place smells of death;
not of rot or blood but dry bone and
dust; like an old grave, long forgotten”.
Dee is investigating the
disappearance of her younger sister
Lulu, 11 years earlier, and the trail has
led her to Ted Bannerman, a strange
loner who lives at the edge of the woods
with his cat Olivia, and occasionally
S T E V E D I E T L /A L L S TA R / N E T F L I X
his daughter, Lauren. Lurking next
door, Dee hears scratching and
scrabbling through the walls; late at
night she sees a face at her window,
“eyes gleaming like lamps, filled
with the light of death”; her creepy
neighbour’s undergrowth seems to
writhe with snakes: “she sees them
everywhere, their shadowed coils”. But
BOOKS
are these visions real, or products of
Dee’s troubled mind – and exactly what
are the horrors that haunt Ted’s house?
Ward is one of a number of novelists
exploring new territory in gothic
fiction, though the haunted house has
long proved a source of fascination and
fear. From Henry James’s governess in
The Turn of the Screw (1898) to Shirley
Jackson’s shy Eleanor Vance in her 1959
classic The Haunting of Hill House,
recently adapted for Netflix, these
stories have often hinged on unreliable
narrators, usually women, whose
psychological problems and struggles
with loneliness tinge their perceptions
of the danger around them. Stephen
King famously singled out those works
as “the only two great novels of the
supernatural in the last hundred years”,
but it was his son, fellow horror novelist
Joe Hill, who put his finger on why:
because “houses aren’t haunted
– people are”.
Hill House appears to Eleanor “vile”,
“diseased”; the guests gathered to
witness the old mansion’s supernatural
powers are tormented by late-night
hammering, deathly cold, wild laughter
in the corridors. Yet when Eleanor’s
name appears on the walls – a chilling
device echoed in Sarah Waters’ 2009
gothic novel, The Little Stranger –
Eleanor is accused of having written
it herself. Increasingly, readers – and
even Eleanor herself – begin to wonder
how much of the action is taking place
“inside her head as much as in the hall”.
As in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892
novella, The Yellow Wallpaper, whose
narrator is confined to a single room
with walls that seem to shift and writhe
and come alive at night, Eleanor’s
mental state becomes intertwined with
that of the house, until she feels that
“whatever it wants of me it can have”.
Gilman’s narrator has what we would
now call postnatal depression, and her
physician husband prescribes bed rest
and an absence of all stimulus, meaning
no reading or writing, and hours spent
staring at the peeling wallpaper of
the old nursery until she becomes
convinced it is possessed: “And worst
of all by moonlight, it becomes bars!
The outside pattern I mean, and the
woman behind it is as plain as can be.”
Imprisoned in the domestic realm, as
Eleanor has also been while she cared
for her elderly mother, it is hardly
surprising that these female
protagonists see danger in the buildings
around them. As Erin Kelly, author of
recent gothic thriller The Skeleton Key,
puts it, “natural reactions to coercive or
Imprisoned in the
domestic realm,
these women
see danger all
around them
The Guardian | 29.10.22 | S AT UR DAY | 69
Guests at Hill House are
tormented by hammering
and wild laughter
abusive behaviours can easily be
dismissed as ‘madness’. And the home
has traditionally been a place – often
the only place – of female agency.”
In my novel, The People Before,
gallery fundraiser Jess finds herself shut
away in a dilapidated old house when
she leaves work and moves with her
young family to the Suffolk countryside.
Cut off from former colleagues and
friends, and isolated from neighbours
who are suspicious of the London family
that has taken on this notorious local
property, Jess feels on edge, watched
– at night, she’s convinced a stranger
is lurking, just out of sight. Are these
premonitions, or is her mind playing
tricks? In The Skeleton Key, Nell is
convinced her return to the family home
in London, to celebrate the anniversary
of her father’s legendary treasure hunt
book, is fraught with danger. The
house holds secrets, and the tension of
the novel resides in whether Nell will
uncover their true source in time.
Houses have played a central part
in many recent thrillers, to the extent
that a new genre of domestic noir has
emerged in the last decade, as writers
explore fears around home ownership
and marital disharmony. Louise
Candlish’s 2018 novel Our House,
recently televised, asked readers to put
themselves in a nightmarish situation
– returning from a trip to discover
strangers moving into your beloved
family home. Meanwhile Abigail Dean’s
thriller of last year, Girl A, raised darker
questions about how a house can hold
the legacy of childhood trauma.
With echoes of Lisa Jewell’s 2019 hit
The Family Upstairs, Dean’s novel
explores what happens to a group of
siblings who flee their abusive parents,
and their upbringing in a “house of
horrors”. In both novels, the childhood
home functions as a lasting reminder
of mental and physical pain. Dean’s
protagonist Lexie must decide what to
do with the house on the moors she and
her siblings have been bequeathed. The
horror is all too real, and yet Lexie’s
quest to reconcile herself with the early
life she has spent years trying to escape
is haunted by ghosts from her past.
Ward’s protagonist is equally haunted
by memories of the day her sister
disappeared, and as the author leads
us through the stories of Dee and Ted,
we discover the real horror lingers not in
the creepy house on Needless Street, but
inside the psyches of its inhabitants.
The supernatural takes a back seat to
the psychological and, by the time the
all-important twists are revealed, the
reader might be more concerned about
things that go bump in the mind.
Charlotte Northedge is joint head of
books at the Guardian. Her second
novel, The People Before, is published
by HarperCollins.
CULTURE BOOKS
THE BOOKS OF MY LIFE The writer who endless description of

Kit Audiobook
changed my mind military strategy and
Gustave Flaubert horsemanship. I used to
changed my mind about insist on finishing any of the week
de Waal the power of words.
I read him aged 22,
without any idea of who
book I started. Now I
give it a really good 100
pages but after that, Good Pop, Bad Pop
The author on pitying Shylock, he was, but in Madame
Bovary he put me right
unless it’s gripping me,
nope. Life is too short.
Jarvis Cocker
PENG UIN AUD IO, 6HR 3 9 MIN
being inspired by Flaubert there in Rouen, in a
and listening to Hemingway small world with the
dreams and dashed
The book I discovered
later in life

G
expectations of this The Old Man and the Sea ood Pop, Bad Pop finds the
woman caught in an by Ernest Hemingway. former Pulp frontman Jarvis
unhappy marriage. I had I listened to the Cocker sifting through dozens
never really “entered” audiobook narrated of old boxes in his loft and reflecting
into a book before. This by Donald Sutherland on what he finds. Given his attic is only
was the one that did it. when I was in my late three feet high and stretches the width
40s. What a book. of his house, the sorting process “feels
The book I came back to like mining. It’s dirty, uncomfortable
I remember reading The book I am work.” But it is also rewarding, as he
Revenge of the Middle- currently reading unearths ancient keepsakes from his
Aged Woman when I Weird Fucks by Lynne youth, from a stick of chewing gum
thought I was middle Tillman. It’s not as weird and an old sweatshirt bought from a
aged – I was 42. Then I as I thought it would jumble sale to a well-thumbed book of
got divorced and read it be but it’s clever and dirty jokes, many of which flew over
again. Oh, I see. It had arresting. It was written his head at the time. Through these
a wisdom I had not in the 70s and chronicles childhood artefacts, we get a series of
seen before and all the some fleeting and some Adrian Mole-ish snapshots of Cocker’s
brilliance and wit found meaningful sexual pre-fame, pre-art college life, when
a home in me. I am relationships. It’s he was called “a four-eyed get” by
grateful to Elizabeth conversational and classmates on account of his glasses –
Buchan for that book. sweet, written by a which was nothing next to what they
It was a balm. woman who knows called him when his mum sent him
what she wants – most to school wearing lederhosen.
The book I reread of the time. Listeners to Cocker’s old show on
I listened to Old Filth BBC 6 Music will be familiar with his
by Jane Gardam on My comfort read verbal style, which is wryly self-
My earliest The book that changed audiobook some years The Temporary deprecating and wonderfully intimate.
reading memory me as a teenager ago. It’s a wonderful Gentleman by Sebastian Along with the sounds of him trudging
Being bored, either For English literature performance of the Barry. I have never up the stairs and rummaging through
reading the Bible or we had to read The text by Bill Wallace. known any writer boxes, the audio version comes with a
something at school, the Merchant of Venice. I listened again in squeeze as much poetry digital folder containing photographs
slow procession around I was very affected by lockdown – to disappear into plain words. His of his attic discoveries, which also
the class, three pages the way everyone in the from the horrors of books are things that include an exercise book entitled The
aloud for each child, class and apparently the times. dissolve slowly on Pulp Master Plan containing an early
The Mill on the Floss or everyone in Venice the tongue. blueprint for a band that would make
some such. When I was hated Shylock. To me The book I could “offbeat pop songs” and wear Oxfam
15, there was Dickens he was underdog, not never read again Kit de Waal’s memoir blazers and “rancid ties”. Essentially
– Great Expectations, villain. I think I also I read War and Peace Without Warning and a memoir in disguise, Good Pop,
Miss Hav isham, the picked up on the and quite enjoyed it. Only Sometimes (Tinder) Bad Pop pieces together the tale of
rags-to-riches-to-rags, racism, which, to be But I wouldn’t have the is shortlisted in the a bookish schoolboy slowly finding
great, rollicking fair, Shakespeare did patience for that size 2022 Books Are My his look, his sound and his place in
adventure of it all. address, but still … of book now, or the Bag readers’ awards. the world. Fiona Sturges

Further listening
Tom Gauld Black and British:
A Forgotten History
David Olusoga
M ACMILLIAN DIGITAL AUDIO, 24HR 2 7 MIN
Kobna Holdbrook-Smith narrates
Olusoga’s sweepingly comprehensive
and frequently poignant history
of Black Britons.
SAR AH LEE/ THE GUARDIAN

Making a Scene
Constance Wu
SIM ON & SCHUS T ER AUD IO, 7 HR 5 3MIN
The star of Crazy Rich Asians
reads her book of essays about life
in suburban Virginia and her
path to fame.

7 0 | S AT UR DAY | 29.10.22 | The Guardian


THE BIG IDEA
Should we give people
diseases to develop cures?
With the right ethical safeguards, could ‘challenge trials’
defend against future pandemics, asks Saloni Dattani
I
N T H E 17 70 s, an English doctor called Edward
Jenner noticed that milkmaids didn’t seem
to  catch smallpox, the terrifying disease
that caused around a third of the people who
caught it to die. He thought that their frequent
exposure to cowpox, a similar but less severe
virus, might be what protected them. In order to test
his hypothesis he gave his gardener’s eight-year-old
son cowpox and then deliberately infected him with
smallpox to see if he had become immune. He had,
and Jenner successfully repeated the experiment.
“Vaccination”, from the Latin word for cow, soon
became commonplace.
It was of course highly irresponsible to expose a
child to a deadly disease with no sure knowledge that
he would survive. Even so, with hindsight, we can see
that the benefits were immense: the vaccine was safe
and highly effective. Demonstrating that fact and
publicising it encouraged untold numbers of others
to follow suit.
This is an example – albeit an unusual one – of a
“challenge trial”. That is a form of research where,
rather than relying on data from natural infections, we
deliberately expose someone to a disease in order to
test the effectiveness of a vaccine or treatment. Things
have changed a lot since Jenner’s time, of course. Even
so, there’s the lingering sense that there’s something
unethical about making someone ill on purpose. That’s
not surprising – even in relatively recent history, deeply
sinister medical experiments have been carried out
that bear a superficial resemblance to this kind of work.
During the second world war, for example, imperial
Japan set up a network of secret facilities to experiment
Illustration: Elia Barbieri
on prisoners: while some were injected with plague
and tetanus toxin, others had their limbs amputated –
both as a form of torture and a way to train army
surgeons for the battlefield. The grotesque crimes
committed by the Nazis under the guise of scientific
research are well known.
But this poisonous history shouldn’t blind us to the
extraordinary power of challenge trials under strict
conditions based on informed consent and designed
to be as safe as possible. They could become increasingly
important weapons in the armoury of medical
research ,  in an era when vaccine technology is
advancing and the threat of diseases jumping from
animals into human beings is increasing.
Much has been done to mitigate the risks: challenge
trials designed to advance malaria research have
proved to be very safe, because the disease is now
well  understood and can be treated easily under
close supervision. For tuberculosis, trials have used
the mild BCG vaccine as the challenge, instead of the
actual bacteria. For respiratory syncytial virus (RSV),
researchers have recruited adults who are at a low risk
of severe illness. These experiments have already
Further reading War Against
Three books for Smallpox
Michael
a deeper dive Bennett
CA MBRID G E ,
£ 2 9.9 9
whittled down a massive range of vaccine
candidates  and helped refi ne their ingredients. With
their help, the world will soon have two effective
vaccines against malaria, which kills hundreds of
thousands of people every year, as well as the fi rst
vaccines against RSV, which kills tens of thousands of
infants each year.
But not all diseases are like these ones. We don’t
always know the dangers volunteers might face; we
don’t always have treatments ready. What then? How
does someone consent to risks that remain hard to
quantify? How should they be compensated for taking
those risks?
W
E C OU L D, of course, just avoid
these questions entirely, and rely
on other types of research. But
that doesn’t always work:
sometimes, animal testing is
tricky and uninformative ,
because the disease doesn’t develop in the same way
as it would in humans. For human trials, such as those
looking at the effectiveness of a vaccine against Zika,
it can take tens of thousands of people and several years
to run a single study, because only a fraction of the
participants in the placebo group will ever develop the
disease, making it hard to see how much difference the
drug or vaccine would make.
In contrast, challenge trials can be deeply informative
within weeks, with far fewer volunteers. And the
stakes can be staggeringly high. It’s easy for us to
grasp the risks that volunteers might face after being
injected with a pathogen, but harder to keep in mind
how many people suffer from diseases every day,
and how many lives would be saved if a treatment or
vaccine were developed and rolled out sooner. Take
the Covid-19 pandemic. At the end of last year, as the
death toll is  estimated to have reached about 17.8
million, it’s also estimated that 20 million had been
saved by vaccines. In the years to come, they will
hopefully save millions more. The burden of suffering
relieved by vaccines is immense – and the faster they
arrive, the better.
In order to make sure we are as protected as possible
from current and future threats, we should try to
eliminate the stigma that still haunts challenge
trials, making them a more familiar part of our toolkit.
What if we thought of the act of volunteering to be
infected not as a rather peculiar and reckless thing to
do? What if we thought of volunteers more like fi rst
responders who rush to help during a disaster? What
if  we recognised the sacrifices they made on our
behalf by holding them in especially high regard, like
fi refighters or paramedics, rewarding them not just
with money, but with recognition, long-term support
and respect?
Perhaps the greatest reward of all would be to
make sure their efforts were worthwhile: by designing
trials to be open and transparent, applying them
when and where they might make a real difference,
and  developing the tools to learn as much from
them as possible. In short, by helping them to save
thousands, if not millions of lives.
Saloni Dattani is a researcher at King’s College London
and a founding editor of Works in Progress.
Vaxxers The
Sarah Mosquito
Gilbert and Timothy
Catherine Winegard
Green T E X T, £ 12 .9 9
HODDER &
STOUGHTON, £20
The Guardian | 29.10.22 | S AT UR DAY | 7 1
 LIKE YOU MEAN IT

Beds, Sofas and Supplies for Champion Loafers

 LIFE
ON THE
ADVICE TRAVEL
Help! My Skiing on
partner a budget?

VEG
keeps pet Head to
worms Scotland
PA G E 8 0 PA G E S 9 0 - 9 3

The best diet for

you and the planet
LIFESTYLE
Shop with the seasons, eat more plants –
and use the microwave: how to boost your
health, and save the planet, one forkful at
a time. By scientist Tim Spector
Photography: Michael Hedge
Food stylist: Rhea Thierstein
Less meat, more plants
The simplest way to reduce your personal carbon
footprint is to go vegan. Growing beef takes as much
as 100 times more land than growing peas or soya to
produce the same amount of protein. I’ve reduced
my meat consumption to some local, organic
grass-fed red meat or a roast chicken as an
occasional treat once or twice a month. This allows
me to enjoy meat as part of my diet at a more
sustainable level.
Studies have demonstrated no differences in gut
health between vegans, vegetarians and occasional
meat-eaters. The single most important dietary
factor we found for better gut health was the
number of different plants we eat weekly, with 30 a
week being the optimal number.
That might sound like a lot until you realise that
this also includes mushrooms, spices, nuts, seeds,
herbs and legumes. Simply using a sofrito base of
onions, garlic, olive oil and carrots when cooking,
and adding some mixed beans or lentils to your
pasta sauce or a spice mix to your cooking, or
sprinkling mixed nuts and seeds on your yoghurt,
can rapidly boost this number.
Ditch ultra-processed meat alternatives
Unfortunately, many vegans over-rely on high-salt
and fatty ultra-processed foods that are bad for us
and the environment (some produced in large,
energy-intensive factories). Newer production
methods, such as cell-cultured “meat”, “fish” and
even “cheese” are on the horizon, and are likely to
be more environmentally friendly.
Brands like Symplicity (currently stocking
restaurants nationwide and soon to be available to
consumers) use large scale vats to ferment organic
vegetables with no artificial additives, making
“meatballs” and “burgers” that benefit our gut
microbiome and with near zero waste.
Choose pulses over animal protein
We worry too much about protein. It’s pulses, beans
and lentils that help centenarian populations in
some cultures outlive the rest of us. This is due to
their high-fibre, protein, mineral and polyphenol
content (polyphenols are the plant chemicals that
help our gut microbes).
We need iron and iodine, zinc and vitamin B-12 to
be healthy, but most of us can easily absorb these
7 6 | S AT UR DAY | 29.10.22 | The Guardian
from eggs, clams or mussels and chicken – the most
sustainable farmed animal products – once a week.
In 2017, I visited the Hadza people in Tanzania
and measurably improved my gut microbiome
diversity in just three days by eating all the plants
and seeds, fruits and nuts that they eat in one week
– along with the odd porcupine.
Go organic, even just a little
Herbicides were generally considered safe before we
realised the importance of microbes, both to the soil
and our guts and immune systems. Our own data
has shown the power of a healthy diet and
microbiome to protect against severe disease.
Pesticides and herbicides are designed to disrupt
natural ecosystems, reducing biodiversity and
degrading our soils, impacting our water life and the
survival of insects. We ingest these chemicals in
small amounts every day and they are hard to avoid,
especially with plant-based diets.
While it’s beneficial to only buy organic foods
where possible, the current level of organic farming
is insufficient to produce enough food for us all. And
that’s not to mention the difference in price. Buy
local and seasonal ingredients that stay fresher for
longer. It’s worth prioritising certain foods: I always
buy organic strawberries, oats, spinach and apples as
non-organic varieties tend to have the highest levels
of herbicides.
Cook smarter (and use the microwave)
We can reduce cooking-fuel consumption and
preserve the beneficial chemicals in food by
harnessing the power of microbes to ferment and
preserve leftover vegetables.
Kimchi, for example, uses cabbage, green veg,
garlic and chillies, while heating food in a
microwave saves energy while generally
maintaining the nutrient content. I now microwave a
whole potato instead of baking it, and steam spinach
in the microwave too.
Fish has been overhyped
The science on fish has changed, and it is now clear
that the health benefits of fish and omega-3 fats
have been overrated. Studies of omega-3
supplements show no clinical benefit unless you’re
pregnant or have had a recent heart attack. Plus
most fish we now eat in the UK, including salmon
and trout, come from non-sustainable aquatic farms.
Use a local fishmonger or supermarket fish
counter you trust and can ask questions. Mussels and
clams are healthy, largely sustainable and very tasty.
The dairy dilemma
Dairy is a massive cause of global heating, and its
health benefits, such as improving calcium intake
and strengthening bones, have been overplayed.
There are plenty of better sources of calcium, for
example, sesame seeds and tahini, dark-green leafy
vegetables and calcium-set tofu. Although dairy
alternatives are better overall for greenhouse
emissions, they can cause other problems; the
excessive amount of water used to create almond
milk and its harmfulness to bees, for example.
Others, such as soya and oat milks, can be highly
processed.
Personally, the only milk I haven’t given up is
fermented milk, known as kefir, which I make
myself and have a little shot of every day for my
gut microbiome.
Make it personal
The fact is, there is no one diet that suits us all. But
the rapidly emerging field of personalised nutrition
(led by companies including ZOE, which I co-
founded) suggests that, by predicting which foods
best suit our body, we can reduce sugar and fat peaks
in our blood and improve our gut health. We can feel
better, have more energy and feel less hungry – all
without discussing calories.
But as we wait for technology including apps,
at-home tests and continuous glucose monitors to
help us eat more healthily, we can make positive
changes by following the broad approaches
described here. Meanwhile, listen to your body and
eat more of what makes you feel good.
Give yourself a break
Nobody’s perfect, and the enjoyment of food, and
the social interaction that comes with it, can be as
important as environmental and health considerations.
Even small positive changes can go a long way.
Food for Life by Tim Spector is published by Vintage
(£20). To support the Guardian, order your copy for
£17.40 at guardianbookshop.com. Join the waiting list
for the ZOE app at joinzoe.com
 18 foods to boost your health – and the planet’s

Kale The posterboy of vegetables: healthy for your

gut and the planet, and easy to grow at home.

Red split lentils Easy to cook, high in protein, fibre

and iron, great for our microbiome and very
affordable. An easy addition to soups and sauces,
and great for young children and babies. They can be
grown all year – and help fix nitrogen into the soil.

Chickpeas High in protein and prebiotic fibres. Tinned

chickpeas are great in curries, hummus or to roast in
the oven as a high-fibre snack. Can also be made into
a tofu by blending with water and setting. Good for a
healthy gut and planet as they are climate resilient.

Soya beans Easy to grow and surprisingly high in

protein. Great as a snack or to add to dishes.

Nuts Great source of fibre, protein and polyphenols.

Improve health when consumed regularly and
improve blood glucose control. They also require
less intensive farming methods.

Mushrooms An underrated source of a multitude of

nutrients: mushrooms may reduce chronic disease,
improve our vitamin D levels and are a great source
of vegetable protein while hav ing a neutral or even
negative carbon footprint.

Berries Blueberries, raspberries and blackberries

can be frozen when in season locally, reducing the
transport of berries across continents. Cheap ones are
as good as expensive types for fibre and polyphenols.

Barley and buckwheat Whole grains are excellent for

longevity and health: nutritious, delicious and with
fewer readily available starches causing fewer blood
sugar spikes. (Not quinoa, as this not only causes
greater sugar spikes, but also impacts Peruvian
farmers as they grow masses of quinoa instead of
other diverse indigenous plants to meet demand.)

Clams and mussels Sustainable and ethical seafood

filled with potassium, iron and vitamin B12.

Organic eggs A great source of protein, as well as

omega fatty acids, essential vitamins and amino
acids. We should aim to eat two to six a week.

One small chicken Planet-friendly when eaten for its

meat and the carcass used to make a broth. Chicken
is the most sustainable farmed meat.

Sauerkraut and kimchi Naturally probiotic foods

that turn unwanted scrap vegetables into a delicious
addition to your meal. High in beneficial fermentation
products and prebiotic fibres, and cheap to make.

Broccoli Hundreds of beneficial chemicals that have

Berries can be proven health benefits. Better when steamed with
extra virgin olive oil and eaten with vitamin C-rich
frozen when in foods such as tomatoes to aid nutrient absorption. A
sturdy plant that grows well in all climates.
season locally,
reducing Aromatic herbs and spices Packed with polyphenols,
even in small amounts they add to the diversity of
transport across our fibre intake. Minimal impact on the environment
thanks to being easily grown at home. Add a spice
continents mix to any dish to help your gut microbes •

The Guardian | 29.10.22 | S AT UR DAY | 7 7

LIFESTYLE
Jessie
32, nurse (right)
What were you hoping for?
To meet someone new and interesting.
Romance would be a bonus.

First impressions?
M AT C H M A K I N G G U A R D I A N R E A D E R S S I N C E 2 0 0 9 Maddy Vibrant, warm and friendly. And
39, marketing coach (left) impressively blue hair.
‘We were the last people in the place,
and I don’t think it was just the meal What were you hoping for?
A fun evening, a good story and not to
What did you talk about?
How to go appropriately overboard on
and cocktails keeping us there!’ be embarrassingly bad on a date
reported in a national newspaper.
a fancy dress theme. The perils of
having an expressive face in photos.
Her disdain for gelatinous foods.
First impressions?
Pretty, warm, bubbly. Any awkward moments?
Not from my view point.
What did you talk about?
Best fancy dress costumes. Favourite Good table manners?
stories from this column. The best way Very much so.
to eat Colin the Caterpillar. The royal
family. Charity shop finds. Cities we’ve Best thing about Maddy?
lived in. Best friends. Crumble. Enthusiasm for all topics. I really want
to go to one of her fancy dress parties
Any awkward moments? – all the ideas are wasted otherwise!
Maybe one, when I was sad there was
no cheese platter for dessert. Would you introduce Maddy to
your friends?
Good table manners?
Go Yeah, I reckon she could hold her own.
I didn’t
d notice anything. I ate chips with
my hands: she didn’t appear to mind. Describe Maddy in three words.
Vibrant, chatty, friendly.
Best thing about Jessie?
Be
She’s clearly a people person. I was
Sh What do you think Maddy made
also very envious of her jewellery.
als of you?
That I’m loud, but everyone always
Would you introduce Jessie to
Wo thinks that. I think we got on well.
your friends?
yo
For sure, they’d get on well.
Fo Did you go on somewhere?
Nope ... I had work very, very early the
Describe Jessie in three words.
De next morning.
Fun, warm, spontaneous.
Fu
And ... did you kiss?
What do you think Jessie made of you?
Wh Just a hug.
Hopefully warm and kind, but we
Ho
agreed we were on best behaviour. We
agr If you could change one thing about
were the last people in the place, so I
we the evening, what would it be?
don’t think it was just the meal and
do Not having work the next day: we’d
cocktails keeping us there!
coc have gone for a dance and a margarita.

Did you go on somewhere? Marks out of 10?

Sadly not, as we both had work the
Sad Nine. It was a lovely night, good food
next morning. Otherwise, we said we’d
ne and cocktails.
have headed to Soho for more cocktails.
hav
Would you meet again?
And ... did you kiss?
An Yeah, for sure. As I said, we need the
Just a hug, but we swapped numbers
Jus tequila and dance part of the evening.
D AV I D L E V E N E & C H R I S T I A N S I N I B A L D I / T H E G U A R D I A N

and a promise to go out again.

an
Jessie and Maddy ate at the Chelsea Pig,
you could change one thing about
If y London SW3. Fancy a blind date? Email
the evening, what would it be? blind.date@theguardian.com
To wear looser trousers so I could
enjoy more of the amazing food.
enj

Marks out of 10?

Ma
I’m going to go for 8 (awkward if she
gives me a three now!)
giv

Would you meet again?

Wo
Absolutely. We swapped numbers and
Ab
agreed to go on a night out where we
agr
could relax a bit more.
cou

7 8 | SAT
S AT URDAY
UR DAY | 29.10.22 | The Guardia
Guardian
an
I’m hoping
I
pass my wife on the stairs with
a bag.
“Did you pack an adaptor?”
I say.
the driver “Two,” she says.
“Have you already got my
passport?” I say.
has one of “This thing where you double-
check everything I do is new,” she
says. “And I don’t like it.”
those signs
I don’t like it either, but it’s
important. My wife likes to manage all
travel arrangements herself, but she’s
with my
not as anxious about travelling as I am,
and consequently not as thorough.
“And when was the last time
anything went wrong?” she says.
name on it “The last time we were at an
airport,” I say. On that day she fished
through her sheaf of documents and
presented me with a printed A4 page.
“What’s this?” I said.
“Your boarding pass,” she said.
“Why does it say ‘This Is Not A
Boarding Pass’ across the top?”
“Mine doesn’t say that,” she said.
Her whole approach, I tell her, is
that of someone trying to fix it so she
accidentally goes on holiday alone.
“Actually, I think I might prefer
that,” she says.
“It’s our 30th anniversary mini-
break,” I say. “How’s it gonna look if
I don’t come?”
Thanks to my last-minute, backseat
micromanagement, the trip proceeds
without a hitch, documentation-wise.
Tim Dowling But a lot of other things go wrong. Delay
On modern life is piled upon delay, culminating in a
hairy aborted landing at Dubrovnik.
We arrive in Montenegro at midnight,
with very little wind in our sails.
But next morning the walled town
of Kotor glints in the October sun, and
we soon find our way around. That’s
Edith Pritchett On millennial life
the great thing about a walled town:
no matter how lost you get, you
eventually come to a wall.
On our penultimate day we realise
our return coincides with a rail strike.
We spend the afternoon trying to work
out how to get home from Gatwick.
“The bus we want is full,” my wife
says, looking at her phone. “The next
unfull bus is two hours later.”
“I’m seizing the initiative,” I say,
looking at my laptop. “A driver will
pick us up.”
“How much is that?” she says.
“I’m not going to tell you,” I say.
“But I hope he has a sign with my name
on it. That’s always been my dream.”
Next morning the owner of our
accommodation arranges our taxi to
the airport, texting to explain that the
Montenegrin driver has to leave us at
the Croatian border, to be picked up by
another taxi. “It’s normal,” he writes.
“What time do we want picking
up?” my wife asks.
“I don’t know – 10.15?” I say.
At 10.15 the driver meets us by the
town wall. As we drive he keeps
calling his Croatian counterpart. He
sounds increasingly agitated.
“What time is your flight?” he asks.
“It’s at 1.40,” my wife says. He
exhales, shakes his head and places
We are in the
neutral zone on the
Montenegro-Croatia
border, being
exchanged like spies
The Guardian | 29.10.22 | S AT UR DAY | 7 9
another call. The taxi from the airport
took only an hour, but that was in the
middle of the night, and the Croatian
driver was able to cross the border.
Today, there is considerable traffic.
I recall that it was me who uttered the
cavalier words: “I don’t know, 10.15?”
We pull up to the border at the back
of a queue of cars that stretches round
a sharp bend.
“How long is this queue?” my wife
says.
“About 800 metres,” the driver
says. “It’s bad.”
In the five minutes of silence that
follows I try to calculate how long it
will take to reach the barrier at our
current rate of travel, but this is
impossible because in that time we
don’t move at all.
Suddenly the driver reverses and
turns around.
“OK,” he says. “We go to the other
border.”
My wife and I look at each other,
thinking: the other border?
The driver places many calls while
driving very quickly up a winding
mountain road. Twenty minutes later
we reach a barrier with one border
guard and a queue of two cars. Five
minutes later we are in a neutral zone,
being exchanged like spies.
“I was a bit worried when I saw
that queue,” my wife says as we
board our plane.
“I know,” I say. “I went temporarily
blind.”
We arrive at Gatwick to a call from
our driver, who says he’s waiting in the
smoking area outside. I step through
the doors and look, this way and that.
“I can’t see you,” I say.
“Really?” he says. “I’m holding a
sign with your name on it.”
LIFESTYLE
STYLE ADVICE

The prosecution
You be Leandra
I like nature, just not in my
the judge living room. The worms
get everywhere – and
Should my the food scraps stink

partner get During lockdown, my partner Cindy

and I were stuck at home, bored like
everyone else, so started developing

rid of our new hobbies. Cindy thought it would

be fun to get a wormery and keep it on
the balcony of our flat.

lockdown Our council doesn’t take food

waste, so it was going to be a good way
to be more eco-friendly, passing our

wormery? food scraps on to the worms. We had

grand ideas of transforming the
balcony, filling it with amazing plants
and flowers. That didn’t happen, but
we still have a large wormery, which
has become a pain. When the worms
Interviews: arrived, a couple escaped from the
Georgina Lawton bag. I came home once, saw them on
the floor, and said, “What the hell is
this?” I like nature, but not in my
living room. When we go away, I have
this anxiety they might escape again.
I’m also worried about them falling
through cracks in our balcony.
The leftover food is also an issue.
We keep it in boxes and it quickly turns
rotten and mouldy. I convinced Cindy
to keep the box on the balcony, so it
wouldn’t stink indoors, but she’d find
excuses not to take it out. If it was
raining, she wouldn’t want to. Then she
suggested putting our scraps through
the blender – she said mixing the
eggshells and vegetables together
would actually be better for the
worms. Cindy never even uses the
blender to cook for herself, so I said no.
This summer lots of the worms died
as it was so hot. Cindy was sad. I didn’t
rejoice as they are living creatures, but
did say: “Maybe the wormery isn’t a good
idea?” I suggested contacting schools,
parks and the council to see if they’d take
it. Cindy hasn’t contacted anyone yet.
We spent the first year of lockdown
growing things. Since then it’s been a
question of: “Shall we do the balcony
or go out with friends?” We’ve picked
the latter. When I suggest moving the
wormery, Cindy makes a really sad
face and it breaks my heart. But if we
keep the wormery, we should improve
the whole balcony like we planned, as
right now it’s the same old – only with
a messy box of worms on it.

8 0 | S AT
T URDAY
UR DAY | 29.10.22 | The Guardian

The defence
Cindy
The wormery is an eco-
friendly slice of nature.
And it doesn’t stink – it
smells of the woods
The wormery is great. I love it. You put
food waste in there and the worms
help break it down. Yes, it’s a bit
disgusting: it’s not what most people
dream about, but it’s a slice of nature
on your balcony. And it’s good for the
environment.
We have always kept our food waste
in plastic boxes. The food has to be
quite rotten for the worms to eat, as
they don’t have teeth, so when we kept
the boxes inside, I’d wait for the food
to become really mouldy before
putting it in the wormery. In the
summer, as we had the windows open,
flies came in. So I started to put the
food straight outside. I agreed to
that change, but I don’t like to go on to
the balcony when it rains. I do try
to hide the mess so Leandra doesn’t
get annoyed.
The worms have only broken free
once, so it isn’t a huge deal, but I can’t
guarantee that it won’t happen again.
One time Leandra got annoyed as she
was repotting a plant on the balcony
and found some worms in the soil, but
they are good for the plants.
Worms eat the leftover food, then
poop it out as a free source of high-
quality plant nutrients. The wormery
doesn’t stink; it smells like the woods.
I like the scent.
I notice when the worms are
reproducing, and I like watching how
they act together to break down the
food. I look at the fluctuation in their
activities, how they behave in
different temperatures. I was very sad
when loads of them died in the
heatwave this summer. The colony
almost became extinct.
I’ve already inspired one colleague
to get a wormery. He gave me the idea
for blending the scraps. It would
increase the output of the colony if
Leandra would let me do that, but I
understand why she sa id no.
I think we both need to make an
effort if we want a nicer balcony, but
the wormery has made it better.
Leandra would really like to get rid of
it, but you never know when the next
lockdown will be, so I think it’s
important to keep it.
Illustration: Ilse Weisfelt
The jury
of Guardian readers
Should the wormery stay or go?
Maintaining a messy hobby just in case
there’s another lockdown is pretty
unreasonable. Though it sounds like the
rotting food is more of an issue than the
worms themselves, and Cindy seems to
be very nonchalant about that.
Laura, 30
The wormery is a nice idea in principle
but it’s not really working on the balcony
of their flat post-lockdown. It seems like
it’s hard work – which Cindy is not
wholly committed to.
Chris, 68
The wormery is Cindy’s hobby, and it
seems it’s only a mild inconvenience to
Leandra. The issue could be solved by
getting a sealed outdoor compost bin for
the food scraps. I think by working
together to improve their balcony, and
making the wormery a fun feature, they
could both be happy.
Zoe, 35
Cindy is guilty of instigating the
wormery and then failing to take
responsibility for its conservancy.
Nonetheless, with regard to Leandra’s
anxiety about further escape attempts,
worms are not known for their agility or
ingenuity. It should be a fairly simple
task to contain them.
Jon, 55
I think the wormery was a lockdown
hobby that has outstayed its welcome.
While I love the creativity of the idea,
something as disruptive as this needs
passion from both parties to sustain it.
It sounds like it’s making Leandra
anxious and resentful, and may have a
negative impact on their relationship.
Rushda, 36
THE VERDICT
Guilty Cindy can’t worm her way out of this
Not guilty The worms can stay
You’ve heard the cases,
now you decide ...
Scan to vote on this week’s dispute,
share your own, or be one of the jury
My lover says
he can’t leave
his wife and
child for me.
Is he being
dishonest?
Ask
Annalisa Barbieri
I’ve been having an affair for three
months with my co-worker, who is
married with a two-year-old. When it
began, I knew that men never leave
the wife for the mistress, but I’ve
started seeing how strongly he feels
for me and I for him.
He says he’s always thinking about
me, cannot enjoy his time at home any
longer, and just longs to be with me.
We finally had the talk a few days ago,
and he said he cannot leave his wife
right now as we’ve been seeing each
other for too short a time (they’ve
been together for 11 years). He says he
is bored with her and wants to be with
me, but he can’t leave his daughter.
(I have made it clear I would never ask
him to give her up.)
I haven’t felt this strongly about
anybody in a long time, but the fact
that he thinks three months is too
4 short a time to make a decision, and
1 he’d rather stay in an unhappy
marriage, makes me think he is not
being honest with me.
I actually think him saying he hasn’t
known you for long enough is the
honest bit. I think the rest of it shows
some delusion on his part and yours.
While of course there are exceptions,
experience has taught me to pay heed
The Guardian | 29.10.22 | S AT UR DAY | 81
to how people go into relationships –
for it’s often how they exit them too.
I went to psychotherapist Fe
Robinson (psychotherapy.org.uk), who
said: “Initially, you knew it was a fling
and I’m really curious: at that stage,
what did you want from it? Was it just
a bit of fun? You were attracted to this
man who you knew wasn’t available,
which makes me wonder about your
emotional availability.”
Often, but not always, people go for
unavailable people – however
subconsciously – if they want to keep a
relationship on a “fantasy” level. It
doesn’t seem as if your time together
has been about real, ordinary, boring
life. No wonder your relationship
compares so unfavourably with that
with his wife. As Robinson pointed
out: “This isn’t going to suddenly
become simpler if he leaves his wife.
You’d potentially be managing an
aggrieved ex-wife and you’d be
stepmother to his young child.”
Robinson further noted: “Even if he
were available, three months is a really
short time to make a decision about a
life partner. We don’t really know
someone yet; we’re still at that heady
hormonal rush stage. Especially if it’s
an affair, because you will have had
less time together.”
But there’s another thing to think
about beyond the dishonesty to his
wife and, very probably, you too. “Do
you want,” asked Robinson, “to be
with someone who deals with
problems by having an affair instead of
working it through? People have
affairs for lots of reasons; it doesn’t
always mean they want to leave their
main relationship.”
You didn’t tell me your age. I’ve
seen many people waste time waiting
for their married “partner” to make up
their minds, with the other person
putting what they want on the back
burner. What do you want? Was an
unavailable, dishonest man on your
wish list? I’m sorry to sound harsh, but
it’s because I think you deserve more.
I understand about finding yourself
somewhere you didn’t plan to be, but
you’re here and you’ve written to me.
He won’t be in a rush to do anything as
he has the stability of his “boring”
home life and the exciting mistress. I
would get some distance if I were you
and remember this truth: if a man
really wants to be with you, he will be.
If you would like advice from Annalisa
on a personal matter, please email
ask.annalisa@theguardian.com.
See theguardian.com/letters-terms
 LIFESTYLE
Whatever
its shape, let
a statement
sleeve do all
the talking
M O D E L: M E I M E I AT M I L K . H A I R A N D M A K E- U P: C A R O L M O R L E Y AT C A R O L H AY E S M A N A G E M E N T. T O P: E S S E N T I E L A N T W E R P. P O L O N E C K : N E X T. T R O U S E R S: H & M
Jess Cartner-Morley
On trends
T
here are flutes and there
are trumpets. There are
milkmaids and bishops.
Anne Boleyn has skin in
the name game, as does
FitzRoy Somerset, 1st
Baron Raglan. I’m talking about
sleeves. The statement sleeve has been
the hardiest fashion silhouette of the
past decade. The swinging 60s had the
miniskirt; now we have the mega-
sleeve. Because there are endless
shapes and sizes of sleeve, it feels like
a different look every season.
Shoulders were sharp a few years ago;
last year was all about puff. But what
we have here is one overarching trend:
a statement sleeve has become a key
detail that makes an outfit look modern.
Cast your mind back, and you will
recall a time before that when sleeves
were, well, arm-shaped, and their only
notable detail was whether they were
short or long. Long sleeves were what
you wore on cold days or if you didn’t
like your arms. Short sleeves were for
summer, or all year round if you had
Michelle Obama-ish triceps, widely
understood to be the external
manifestation of a dynamic and highly
Photography: Tom J Johnson. Styling: Melanie Wilkinson
STYLE
disciplined character type, therefore
to be displayed whenever possible.
A statement sleeve is a bit like
having impressive triceps – it makes
you look instantly up to date, and as if
you have made an effort – and you
don’t even have to go to yoga. The
interesting sleeve phenomenon is an
inclusive trend, too. An oversized or
fluted sleeve pretty much looks the
same on anyone, which isn’t the case
for, say, skinny jeans.
Different shapes send different
messages, and perhaps it’s time to
attempt a taxonomy of the statement
sleeve. A puffed sleeve can be light and
airy, the sort of thing Snow White
wore, choux-bun sweet and best
accessorised with a pet bluebird. Or, a
it can be linebacker-wide and
dramatic, adding a Henry V III heft
across the shoulder. These are both
puffed sleeves, but they send very
different fashion messages.
A sleeve that gives an angular
shoulder always make you look like
you mean business, while lots of soft
fabric suggests sweetness and light.
Which is why those leg-of-mutton
sleeves that were big in the 1980s
(Diana’s wedding dress, for instance)
look a bit bonkers, as the messages
cross over. They are part Wall Street
trader, part Disney princess.
A bishop sleeve is full all the way
down, and cinched at the wrist, while
a balloon sleeve has most volume in
the middle, around the elbow,
tapering along the forearm. The
rounder, more balanced the shape, the
softer the effect. A fluted sleeve gets
Flute and bell sleeves are intriguing – a wider from top to bottom, while a bell
little less garden party and a bit more sleeve is slim from shoulder to elbow,
then widens to, well, a bell. The flute
art gallery, if you know what I mean and the bell have a different vibe from
a puffed sleeve – a little more
unexpected, a little more intriguing.
(Anne Boleyn’s were fluted.) Are you
following this? In short, a little less
garden party and bit more art gallery,
if you know what I mean.
The statement sleeve is brilliantly
easy to wear until you try and put on a
jacket or a coat. The sausage-stuffed
sensation of wearing bishop sleeves
under a tailored coat would test the
patience of, well, at least a bishop, if
not an actual saint.
This is a fashion problem, and the
only solution to a fashion problem is a
This is appropriate
Flutes and bell sleevesdummy
are fashion one. Sleeveless knits are
everywhere this autumn, precisely
text that is beingThis
intriguing: a little lessisgarden because this is a brilliant top layer when
you need something warm that won’t
appropriate dummy
party, a bit more art text
gallery cramp your style. Since style is what
this arms race is all about.
The Guardian | 29.10.22 | S AT UR DAY | 8 5
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 LIFESTYLE BODY
Solid
perfumes
are the
perfect
travelling
companion
Sali Hughes
On beauty
S
olid perfume is an
underrated marvel, and
the ingenious alternative
to wrapping perfume
bottles in socks, jumpers
and plastic bags for travel.
They’re tiny enough to carry through
your day in a very small ha ndbag or
pocket, then quickly flipped open and
either dabbed on with fingertips or
swiped across pulse points straight
from the packaging.
Jo Malone London’s Solid Cologne
is a fantastically useful gift, and
decent value when refilled over a long
life. You kick off with a very clever,
sturdy and luxurious Solid Scent Duo
Palette with two sliding sides (£26),
each housing a solid refill (£20) that
P H O T O G R A P H E R ’ S A S S I S TA N T: H A R R Y B R AY N E
can be swapped out in perpetuity.
Jo Malone is all about pairing and
layering fragrances, but even if you’re
content with one at a time, this design
allows you to pack two perfumes for a
trip away and still take up no more
suitcase space than a matchbox.
Personally, I’d fill with Blackberry &
Bay, a sharp, sophisticated fruity scent
for people who find most fruity scents
a sweet, sticky abomination, and Dark
Amber & Ginger Lily, the warm,
cosying but not overpowering aroma
This compact is built
to last – handy, as its
pleasing shape means
I can hardly put the
damn thing down
of cardamom and incense.
I’m steadfast in my belief that
Glossier’s You is among the best
fragrances of the past decade, and I
continue to wear it often. So I’m
delighted the brand has reintroduced
its solid version (£24), which allows for
afternoon top-ups while the glass
bottle stays safely at home. It’s refilled
for a friendly £14, and again, the
compact is built to last, which is
handy, since its very pleasing pebble
shape means I can hardly put the
damn thing down.
Photography: Kellie French. Illustration: Edith Pritchett
The scent inside the compact is
very easy to wear – an extremely
appealing paradox of fresh fizziness
and musky warmth – and also works
brilliantly as an unobtrusive base for
most other fragrances.
The first solid perfume I ever
bought was by Diptyque, the firm that
can fairly be credited with reinventing
the category. The number of fragrances
offered in its solid format is limited –
albeit to some of the best. The painted
Bakelite-style travel compact is pricey
at £48, but comes loaded with
fragrance and looks and feels suitably
special, almost like jewellery.
Refills are a reasonable £29 for two
identical pans. I wouldn’t hesitate in
choosing Philosykos, a figgy
masterpiece, and L’Ombre dans L’eau,
a mouthwatering blend of
blackcurrants and fat, wet, velvety
roses that’s quietly seductive on
woman or man.
The Guardian | 29.10.22 | S AT UR DAY | 8 7
Anita Bhagwandas
Trends on trial
Siren eyes: is there a
better way to get the
classic eyeliner flick?
The hack
The perfect feline eyeliner flick
remains one of the most popular
makeup looks of the post-war years,
but could it be eclipsed by the trend for
siren eyes? Many TikTokers,
YouTubers, Instagrammers and
celebrities seem to think so.
The test
Siren eyes are a smoky, softer version
of the upwards eyeliner flick. It’s more
subtle and also, crucially, easier to do,
as it needs less precision. Take a dark
brown or black eyeshadow, and using a
small angled brush, line your upper
lashes with shadow, as you would with
eyeliner. When you reach the outer
corner of the eye, draw the shadow
slightly up and out, creating a soft
flick. Take a smaller smudging brush
to wing the line out even more, for that
sultry Sophia Loren style.
If that seems too complicated, here’s
a simpler hack I use every day. Take a
very soft eyeliner pencil with a
smudger on the end, such as Victoria
Beckham Satin Kajal Liner (£22), and
line the upper lashes. Then use the
smudger to flick the liner outwards
and upwards. Voilà.
The verdict
This is a solid win from me. It is
faster, easier and looks softer than
an eyeliner flick. If you’ve spent years
trying – and failing – to make your
liner symmetrical, this is the way
forward. Plus, anything that can be
done competently after a few drinks
is a beauty hack worth sharing.
LIFESTYLE GARDENS

DO
THE
RIPE
THING

8 8 | S AT UR DAY | 29.10.22 | The Guardian

Small, traditional Community orchards
orchards are making a Where to start
comeback – providing
havens for wildlife, and An orchard can be made up of just five
trees, so a large space is not essential;
fruit can be grown vertically on walls,
bringing communities in pots or trained against a fence.
With more than 2,500 apple varieties
closer together in the UK, however, narrowing the
options can be difficult. Where possible,
include varieties historically local to
your area to help preserve genetic
Words: Matt Collins diversity. To support a wider range of
Photography: Liz Seabrook wildlife, consider other trees too: try
cherry, pear, damson and crab apple,

B
ack in spring, I moved with my family industry, volunteers chatted, odd litter was puzzled all of which provide spring blossom.
to the village of Overton in Hampshire. over, and volunteer Ken MacKenzie sharpened the Check pollination requirements, as
It happened that our arrival coincided Austrian scythe. Leading the group was orchard many apple and pear varieties require
with a May Day celebration in the custodian Emma Young, who, with her husband, compatible companions nearby to
village orchard. It was the ideal Steve, took on its management last year. “We have produce fruit. The vigour of a fruit tree
initiation: the sun shone, introductions an allotment and we love gardening, so it made depends on its rootstock: select to suit
with new neighbours were dusted with apple blossom, sense,” she says. “And it’s wonderful that our your plot size. The best time to plant
and our toddler joined others on an organised bug daughter can grow alongside the trees.” new fruit trees, particularly bare root
hunt, spotting insects hidden in the trees. Dedicated volunteers are essential, says Lewis – which is a cheaper and mormore
Like many community orchards, Overton’s is McNeill, London manager for the Orchard Project. effective option – is in late autumn.
ate autumn
situated on the edge of the village on council- “When people come to us, we’ll have an initial chat
managed land, an open patch bordering a housing to see if there are enough of them to take on a ‘James Grieve’
1
estate. It was conceived in 2012 by members of Overton long-term project. We offer leader training, which apple
Biodiversity Society to promote seasonal, local food covers key maintenance and aftercare tasks – new The all-rounder
and provide an inviting space for people and wildlife. trees will really struggle otherwise.” dessert apple: good
d
There was a consultation with neighbours, terms of After checking land ownership, assessing site and for eating, cooking,
ng,
maintenance were agreed with the council, and across soil, and working up an orchard design, the charity juicing and cider-making.
king.
two planting sessions 20 fruit trees were planted, assists with a winter planting day, when the trees are Gorgeous blossom.
staked and mulched by more than 50 volunteers. leafless and dormant. However, because of the climate
A decade on, the trees are maturing and this crisis, this dormancy period is changing. “Autumn is ‘Howgate
2
autumn apples hang from laden branches: ripening coming later and spring earlier,” McNeill says. To Wonder’ apple
russets, falstaffs and cooking costards, many ready combat this, they are planting trees better able to A self-fertile, large-
to harvest. There are dessert pears, cherries and cope with increasing heat and drought. “In London, fruited cooking apple e
damsons, too, trees selected not only for the quality with its microclimate, we’ve been successfully and a good nectar
of their fruit but as sources of nectar for pollinators. planting apricot and fig varieties for years and, more source for bees.
Not every village is as fortunate as Overton, recently, pomegranates and persimmons,” he says.
however. Earlier this year, the National Trust The planting days are a celebration, with ‘Victoria’
a’ plum
3
reported that 80% of England and Wales’s small volunteers often bringing food and mulled apple Reliable,
traditional orchards, regarded as particularly juice to fortify them for the heavy lifting. “People heritage-variety
ty
important for flora and fauna, have been lost since think about the fruits first,” McNeill says, “but the plum with sweet,et,
1900. The decline is attributed to neglect, urban real value comes from the connection to each other purple-yellow
development and agricultural modernisation. and to nature, at a time when we’ve got so much lack summer fruit.
Unlike commercial fruit farms, traditional of wellbeing, so many mental health issues.”
orchards are defined by their low-intensity As we packed away tools at Overton orchard, Black mulberry
err
rry
4
management and typically feature a mix of tree Emma Young said she viewed the project as an An ancient
types. Though small in scale, they are worth far investment. “Imagine what it’s going to look like in orchard staple with
more than the sum of their apples: they are 50 years. Whatever developments there are in the bountiful blood-red
community spaces and, according to the Woodland future, this will still be here for everybody. That’s fruit. Attractive to
Trust, provide the perfect habitat for a surprisingly what I’m really excited about.” insects and birds.
diverse range of wildlife. A traditional orchard can
support 1,800 species of plant, fungi and animal. ‘Stella’ cherry
5
Thankfully, there are signs of regrowth. In an age A self-fertile and
d
when locally sourced food and tree planting are sweet-fruiting cherry y
increasingly valued, community orchards are bearing white
making a comeback. The National Trust recently blossom in spring.
vowed to plant four million fruit trees, and is also
establishing new traditional orchards across its sites. For information on
And the Orchard Project – a charity that assists in the starting a community
ty
establishment and restoration of community orchard, visit
orchards – aims to have one within walking distance theorchardproject.org.uk
of every household in the UK’s towns and cities.
Since its formation in 2009, the charity has Volunteer Ken MacKenzie
planted and cared for more than 540 such spaces. I at Overton orchard, far
signed up as a volunteer and recently attended my left, where the trees
first maintenance session, trimming overgrown include the sweet plum,
hedges, clearing grass from the base of trees and in the foreground, left,
raking cuttings. Against a backdrop of cheerful and crab apple, top

The Guardian | 29.10.22 | S AT UR DAY | 8 9

LIFESTYLE TRAVEL

and lift pass in March with Ski

Still need your ski fix, even with the pound in
a slump? Here are our tips for skiing on a budget
(sort of), including where, when and how to go
Bag the best deals
Snow-risky early December, the cold
depths of January and the sunny end
of April are almost always the cheapest
times to go.
Get a heads-up on deals by signing
Solutions (skisolutions.com), a good
£600pp cheaper than at new year.
Inclusive deals that throw in ski
hire, lessons and lift passes are often
great value. Getmetothealps.com has
seven nights half-board at Les Balcons

A good run for

up to newslettters from ski companies,
such as Skiworld. A recent flash sale
had seven nights half-board at posh
Chalet Valluga (skiworld.co.uk),
sleeping six in St Anton, Austria, for
de Val Thorens from £750pp all season,
including a six-day lift pass (£50pp
extra for the wider Trois Vallées pass)
and equipment hire.
If you’re not fussy about a stylish

your money
about £745pp, departing mid-
December on a self-drive holiday
including a Eurotunnel ticket.
January bargains with Ski
Weekends (skiweekends.com)
included four nights half-board at
Hotel les Fleurs in Morzine, with
transfers from Geneva airport
(connected to the railway station) for
Words: Gemma Bowes £330pp. Even the fancier places can
offer good value at the slushier end of
the year. In La Plagne in France’s
Paradiski ski area, we spied seven
nights self-catering at White Pearl
Lodge and Spa, with indoor pool, gym
and spa, from £970pp, including train
from London to Moutiers, transfers
stay, trawl bargain sites such as
Igluski.com, which has a page on rail
travel packages. We found seven nights
self-catering at Residence Cybele in
Brides Les Bains – part of Trois Vallées
and linked to Méribel and Courchevel
– for £639pp in January, or £682pp in
March, including Eurostar from
London, transfers and six-day lift pass.
Other sites let you search for
accommodation and lift-pass combos,
such as weski.co.uk and sunweb.co.
uk. We found bargains such as four
days B&B at Hotel Bel Horizon in
high-altitude Val Thorens from
£199pp, including lift pass, departing
mid-November.

9 0 | S AT UR DAY | 29.10.22 | The Guardian

 Les Contamines – a family
ski resort in Mont Blanc,
France, left; Memmingen
in Bavaria, right: its airport
is a cheaper option than
Innsbruck or Munich
Off-radar resorts
Smaller, lesser-known resorts are
typically cheaper, and many are
paradise for freeriders or beginners,
just unfamiliar to Brits.
Even pricey Switzerland has
bargain gems, such as Bettmeralp, a
car-free resort in the Aletsch Arena ski
area, easily accessed by rail, with a
gondola to the resort from the Betten
station (see sbb.ch). The resort website
lists good-value accommodation (as do
many other resorts’ – another top tip)
such as chalet Bärgsunna, where we
found seven nights self-catering for
four for less than £550 in mid-
December (shop.aletscharena.ch); a
six-day lift pass costs from £188-£233.
In France’s Haute Maurienne valley,
a six-day lift pass for Les Sybelles, with
six resorts and 136 pistes, is €209pp
(£183pp), and seven nights self-catering
in Le Corbier, at the smart Etoile des
Sybelles apartments with indoor and
outdoor pools and spa, costs from
£1,049 for four including Eurotunnel
crossing (peakretreats.co.uk).
Pays de Gex, a lower mountain area
topping out at 900 metres between
Lake Geneva and the Jura, has four
small, mellow ski areas suitable for
beginners and families (six-day lift pass
€172). Seven nights half-board at
three-star Bois Joly Hotel ( boisjoly.
com) in Crozet costs from £431pp.
Italy and Austria tend to be cheaper
than France and Switzerland. Austria’s
SkiWelt Wilder Kaiser-Brixental
(six-day pass €280, wilderkaiser.info)
is one of Europe’s largest resorts, with
168 miles of slopes and 80 mountain
huts and inns. In the village of Going,
Gatterhof is a farmhouse hotel with
rooms from €50 a night.
Swap the Alps for the Pyrenees
France’s other mountain range is not
O T C O N TA M I N E S / L A N S A R D G I L L E S; A L A M Y; S T A N T O N; A L A M Y
short of thrills, with 23 resorts and high
peaks topping out at 2,877m on the Pic
du Midi, where a 1,000m descent is one
of the best runs among 100km of pistes
in the Grand Tourmalet ski area (six-day
lift pass €261). The tourist board website
(n-py.com) offers basic apartments
from €300 for seven nights self-
catering sleeping seven at the Mongie
Tourmalet Residence in La Mongie, a
resort connected to spa town Barèges.
Lourdes TGV station is 30 miles away.
With low VAT and no sales tax,
Andorra is also a bargain bet for snowy
peaks. A discount package to Arinsal
with Snowboard Coach offers seven
nights half-board from £699pp
including Valnord lift pass, transfers
(from Barcelona or Toulouse) and local
discounts (snowboardcoach.co.uk).
Eastern Europe … and beyond
Bansko in Bulgaria has been the go-to
alternative for a budget snow break for
decades, but Slovenia is the classier
option, where top resort Kranjska Gora
has 18 runs. On Airbnb we found an
apartment sleeping four next to the ski
slopes from £672 in March (take the
train to Salzburg or Ljubljana).
If you’re up for a cultural adventure,
consider an off-beat ski destination
such as Parnassos in Greece (lift pass
€20 a day, parnassos-ski.gr), 2½ hours’
drive from Athens and close to Delphi,
with 17 lifts, 23 runs and enough fun
skiing to satisfy the urge. There is also
interest building in Bosnia, where a
package with Ski Sarajevo (ski-
sarajevo.com), including six nights
half-board at the Jahorina mountain
resort and one night at a B&B in
Sarajevo, costs from €649pp, departing
11 February, including a five-day
lift-pass and transfers from Dubrovnik.
The fairytale slopes of St
Anton, Austria, above, is
where some of the best
half-board deals can be
bagged; raclette, below, a
classic Swiss après-ski dish
The Guardian | 29.10.22 | S AT UR DAY | 9 1
How to hack the school holidays
Those with kids will find the cheapest
ski holiday period is almost always
Easter, when warmer weather and
longer days also make it more
conducive to enjoyable learning.
The UCPA (ucpa.co.uk), set up to
make winter sports accessible to
French youngsters, offers budget
packages that include meals,
equipment hire, lessons, lift passes
and basic accommodation in its own
large-scale centres. You have to make
your own bed and help tidy up, but
there’s a very sociable atmosphere.
Great value are its family weeks in
school holidays – a week in Flaine
departing 8 April costs £506 to £660
for children depending on age, and
£815 for adults; or festive weeks in Les
Contamines cost £716pp starting 24 or
31 December (action-outdoors.co.uk).
Look out for resorts with deals such
as free lift passes for kids: in Samoëns
and Tignes in France they’re free for
under-eights. A week from 24
December in an apartment sleeping
four at Residence Val Claret in Tignes
is £1,060 (powderbeds.com).
If you have to go in February
half-term, choose an off-radar resort or
unusual accommodation such as
backcountry cabins listed on Austria’s
Almliesl cabins website (almliesl.com),
an Italian rifugio (rifugios.net) or
mountain agriturismo (agriturismo
valledaosta.com); these are often
cheaper than a normal chalet or hotel.
Getting there
Flyers can save by choosing lesser-
known airports (such as Memmingen
in Germany as an alternative to
Innsbruck or Munich), but those more
committed to saving carbon must
factor in Eurotunnel fees, fuel, toll
roads and any overnight stays.
The cheapest Eurostar fares are
found by booking far in advance (there
are still some evening departures for
February half-term from £49.50 each
way – see seat61.com for how to get to
the mountains by rail). The cheapest
Eurotunnel crossings are usually very
early or late in the day; and compare
ferry prices at directferries.co.uk.
Snow Express (snowexpress.co.uk)
offers overnight coach transfers to 40
French resorts from London and
Folkestone for £199pp return, including
luggage and skis, departing Friday
evening and arriving the next day.
Prices correct at time of going to press
LIFESTYLE TRAVEL
Scotland glitters with the promise of ski adventures
– and whisky. And you’re spoilt for choice, with five
resorts within a two-hour drive from Aviemore
Take the
high slope
Words: Stuart Kenny
Fort William
T
ake a right from the top
lift at Glencoe Mountain
Resort and you will
quickly be confronted
with one of the greatest
views in Scottish skiing.
The rugged bulk of Buachaille Etive
Mòr, often called Scotland’s most
beautiful mountain, overlooks the
deep valley of Glencoe, just around the
corner from the “007 Skyfall road”.
The panorama then leads past the
Devil’s Staircase, on the West
Highland Way walking route, and
round to Rannoch Moor, one of
Europe’s great wildernesses, a
sprawling peat moor dotted with
9 2 | S AT UR DAY | 29.10.22 | The Guardian
Inverness Cairngorm Mountain
Aviemore The Lecht
Nevis Range
Glenshee
Glencoe 30 miles
lochans and ringed by rolling hills.
This is a glen hailed in guidebooks
– and one that snowboarders and
skiers in the UK can access in the
atmospheric glimmer of winter at a
fraction of what they would pay for a
trip to the Alps or North America
(weekday lift pass £30, £35 weekends),
making it a budget option – with a
much lower carbon footprint, too.
Admittedly, the snow conditions
are unpredictable, and before getting
to those outstanding views at the top
of Glencoe last season, I did have to
take a fair few gusts of hail to the face.
But this is Scotland, and the weather is
as much a part of the experience as the
Highland views, the local humour, the
cosy pubs and the whisky stops.
I’d decided to drive up to Glencoe
for the day from Edinburgh after a
friend sent a flurry of envy-inducing
photographs the weekend before,
showing bluebird conditions and
perfect snow. Lowlands turned to
Highlands after I passed Loch Lomond
– and the snow conditions had
thankfully held, too. I spent the day on
rugged red and mellow blue runs with
views so beautiful I could almost hear
the Visit Scotland violins. And the odd
spot of icy rain? Well, it was just
another reminder that a hot chocolate
stop is never a bad idea.
“The advice we always give is to
come slightly later in the season,” says
Andy Meldrum, managing director of
Glencoe Mountain. “In December and
January it can be quite wild. By late
February, the weather tends to have
settled, and we usually ski right
through to the end of April.”
There are five main ski resorts in
Scotland. The Cairngorms are home to
Cairngorm Mountain, where pistes
looking back over Loch Morlich and
Caledonian forest are easily accessed
from Aviemore. Then there’s Glenshee,
Scotland’s largest resort, with around
40km of pistes, and the Lecht, a great
option for families and beginners.
On the west coast, the Nevis Range,
is on Aonach Mor, a mountain
neighbouring Ben Nevis and home to
Scotland’s only ski gondola. Then
there’s Glencoe, where a new chairlift
will almost double capacity this
season, and the White Corries cafe
is now up and running after the
previous one burned down on
Christmas Day 2019.
The resorts can be reached within
a two-hour drive of Aviemore, so it’s
feasible to base yourself there and
decide where to go depending on the
snow conditions that day.
Glencoe is perhaps the most
beautiful. The uplift soars over frozen
waterfalls, and on the other side of the
resort to Buachaille Etive Mòr – a
jagged pyramid of a mountain, like a
child would draw – is Flypaper, the
UK’s steepest in-boundary ski run, and
the excellent Spring Run red piste.
“You often have your own
playground,” says Meldrum. “It’s nice
I S A B E L L E E R B A C H E R ; S N O W S P O R T S C O T L A N D; S T U A R T K E N N Y
and quiet, and we don’t piste over
there, so it can feel like you’re skiing in
the backcountry when you’re really
still in-bounds.”
On the way to the Spring Run is a
sign saying “expert skiers only”: it’s
covered in stickers and appears to be
being slowly blown over by decades on
a mountaintop. Perhaps this does put
some off, because the run is often
empty, leaving plenty of space to
speed down the steep, scenic slope. On
Flypaper though, it’s safest to ignore
the views – because you’ll be staring
down a formidable 40-degree piste.
Safely navigated, both of these runs
connect back to the gentle blue and
 Stuart Kenny enjoys ‘one
of the greatest views in
Scottish skiing’, left, at
Glencoe Mountain Resort,
which also features
Flypaper, a 40-degree
piste which is the UK’s
steepest in-boundary ski
run, bottom left;
snowboarding in the
Cairngorms, right

The new chairlift at

Glencoe, left, which is
expected to double the
resort’s capacity; a few
words of caution to skiers
approaching the Spring
Run red piste, second left

green runs lower in the resort, plus the
main lifts and the mountain cafe.
Where skiing in Scotland perhaps
struggles is when making an apples-
and-oranges comparison between it
and the mega-resorts of Europe and
North America.
Scott Simon, CEO of Snowsport
Scotland, says: “There’s maybe an
expectation, if you’re coming from the
south of England, that you’re going to
be getting a Val d’Isère or a Whistler or
a Colorado experience. And you’re not.
You’re going to get a Scottish
experience – socially, culturally,
environmentally, and certainly from a
weather perspective.”
Indeed, one of the most common
pieces of advice for those heading
north is to stay flexible, and ski as part
of a wider Highland holiday. Nevis
Range is just round the corner from
the Ben Nevis Distillery, for example,
while from Aviemore, you can visit
reindeer herds, stroll the Frank Bruce
Sculpture Trail in Glenfeshie or catch
traditional music in a cosy pub.
The Scottish weather tends to bring
out the inner philosopher. Some say
that to get the most out of skiing here,
you have to be an optimist. “Have
numerous plan As, and then pick out
the best one according to the weather,”
says Simon. Others say that to
complain about the unpredictability of
the conditions in Scotland in winter is
to miss the beauty of the mountains
themselves. As Nan Shepherd wrote of
the Cairngorms: “The mysteries are in
its movements.”
There is one mantra that all Scottish
skiers have uttered at one time or
another, though, and which Simon
proffers now: “On its day, it absolutely
stands up there with anywhere in the
world.” The problem, he adds, is just
finding that day. “You can get
champagne powder, but you can also
get heather and granite,” he laughs.
“That’s the charm. It’s just having the
patience, adaptability and flexibility –
because all of that variability comes
with a lot of opportunity, too.”
An increasing number of skiers
would say the best of those
opportunities lie off-piste. The past
few years have seen a huge boom in ski
touring in Scotland, a discipline which
involves walking up the mountain on
skis with special bindings and “skins”
– strips that allow your skis to grip
while going uphill. At the top, you take
the skins off, clip back in and descend.
Earning your turns can be a lot of
work, but it also means your route is
not decided by where the lifts run. You
can go wherever the snow is.
“It makes you respect the lifts a lot
more,” says Russell Murray, an
Aviemore local who works for active
travel operator Wilderness Scotland,
and who found a new love for ski
touring during the pandemic. “But it’s
not all about the downhill. It’s about
the journey across wild landscapes,
seeing wildlife as you go, and skiing
sections nobody has skied before.”
Images of Scottish touring in recent
years – puff y powder, blanket-white
mountain ranges or lines of snow
snaking down otherwise grassy
Highland views – ooze adventure, and
have confirmed to many what long-
time skiers in Scotland already knew
– that this remains a country seriously
underrated in terms of skiing terrain,
even if some will blindly dismiss it.
The skiing in Scotland is as good as
anywhere in the world. And when the
weather does intervene? Well, the
whisky distilleries are never cosier
than on a wet and wild winter day.

Answers to quiz 9 Played on screen by Nowhere; Answers to S B A E H

Puzzle by Thomas Eaton Matt Smith.

10 Commonwealth
Shangri-La.
12 Thanksgiving dates.
Weekend
Crossword
B A
K
T T
B
L E
A
G R
N
A
S
P E
R
S

solutions 1 Agatha Christie. Games mascots: 13 Trickster deities: by Sy

D I
R
O R
I
T W E
L W
N T I E
R
S

(puzzles on page 98) 2 Karakoram. Birmingham; Chinese;

A N D M E N O F N O D
3 Bell ringing. Gold Coast; Polynesian; E S O A
4 PDSA Dickin Medal. Glasgow; African; M O R S E O F M I C E
5 Rangers. Delhi. Greek; F S W R N
6 Bayonet (Bayonne). 11 Created fictional Norse. P E S H A W A R L A N D
7 Sikhism. utopias: 14 Waters (England’s D Y O A A I
8 Fans of Tottenham Cloud Cuckoo Land; largest reservoirs). W E I M A R T A D M O R
N N D H Y
Hotspur. Utopia; 15 Defunct airlines.

The Guardian | 29.10.22 | S AT UR DAY | 9 3

LIFESTYLE TRAVEL
Start Chirk
It’s not every walk where you see boats float across Distance 13 miles
the sky – something to ponder over a fine pint Time 5 hours
Total ascent 30 metres
Difficulty Easy
How far to the pub? The walk
A Dee valley wander
The Aqueduct Inn,
T
he canal boat drifted
gently across the sky,
Llangollen 40 metres above the
ground. Two men in a
canoe followed. They
were wearing lifejackets,
although parachutes might have been
more appropriate.
Words: Kevin Rushby There is, it is safe to say, nowhere
Photography: Shaw and Shaw else in the world that you can float
your boat so far off the ground as on
this bit of the Llangollen canal, on
Thomas Telford’s masterpiece, the
Pontcysyllte aqueduct. It is a
307-metre long cast-iron trough
perched on 18 stone arches that stride
across the Dee valley in north Wales, a
world heritage site that justifies its
listing by being a genuine marvel of
the Industrial Revolution.
And there is a lot more. This walk
has numerous permutations, plus
some combinations with the Offa’s
Dyke Path, but I will assume a five-
mile walk, a pub lunch, then a walk
back along the same route. It’s so good,
you will happily do it again.
We start to the south of the small
town of Chirk, where the Llangollen
canal comes curving in from the east,
heading for the hills. Park by the canal
9 4 | S AT UR DAY | 29.10.22 | The Guardian
(there’s a railway station in Chirk too)
and set off north along the towpath.
You are about to experience a number
of engineering marvels and the
opening salvo comes immediately
with a 216-metre-long aqueduct that
spans the River Ceiriog and valley.
In 1793 Thomas Telford was a
respected architect in Shrewsbury, but
his work in joining the rivers Severn,
Dee and Mersey by canal would
catapult him into the super-league of
civil engineers, a realm he would
dominate until the flamboyant young
upstart Brunel eclipsed him.
The towpath is the best place to
inspect Telford’s creation, a giant
piece of Victorian plumbing consisting
of an elongated cast-iron bath wide
enough for a canal boat to be pulled
along it by a horse 21 metres above the
valley. No sooner is this finished than
you enter the next marvel: the Chirk
tunnel, a 420-metre unlit hole that
burrows under the hill.
It is not the longest canal tunnel in
Britain, but it is the longest you can
safely walk. Be warned, it does get
very dark in the middle – Wilf, my
terrier, was not at all keen – but you
can always see both ends, and there is
a sturdy handrail.
Two centuries after their creation,
these engineering wonders are well
bedded into the landscape, but when
they were built, they caused massive
upheaval: lime kilns, brickworks,
docks and boats had to be constructed.
Telford seems to have been happy
to take all the credit, but the truth was

that many others were involved. The
towpath curves through a second,
shorter tunnel before it crosses an
earlier, even more ambitious feat of
engineering, Offa’s Dyke, which is
signposted.
Look out for the line of trees
following a low embankment that
drops down to meet the canal on the
far side from the towpath. We know
why Telford built the canal – to
transport limestone and iron ore – but
the purpose of King Offa’s equally
massive project remains a mystery.
At Froncysyllte there is a small
bridge and there is now a towpath on
both sides as you approach the climax:
Pontcysyllte (pronounced Pont-cuss-
uch-tay). After the opening of the first
canal, the Bridgewater, in 1761,
Drifting along the
Llangollen canal – and 40
metres above the ground
– on the Pontcysyllte
acqueduct, far left; a
sheep’s-eye view of the
Dee valley, left; the mural
artwork of the refurbished
Aqueduct Inn, bottom left
aqueducts had been seen as desirable,
but impossible. The consensus was
that the weight of water would
destabilise any structure beneath.
Then in 1793, Benjamin Outram
devised and built a short canal
aqueduct using cast iron.
Telford followed suit. At Pontcysyllte,
he made the 18 viaduct arches hollow
to save weight, then mixed ox blood
into the cement to add strength. The
result is something both sturdy and
graceful. It’s also vertiginously high
and quite narrow: if you think canal
walks are generally low-key and
unadventurous, you will reconsider
after this.
At the north end of the aqueduct,
there is a choice. Sturdy walkers can
continue, heading up the Offa’s Dyke
Take the map with you
Scan the code for the online
article with a Google Map
Castell Dinas Brân
Llangollen
River Dee
Plas Newydd
1 mile
Castell Dinas Brân, the
ruins of a 13th-century
castle in the vale of
Llangollen, left; time for
refreshment at the
Aqueduct Inn, right
trail along the spectacular Eglwyseg
escarpment, well known to botanists
for its unique species of tree, the
Llangollen Whitebeam, not discovered
until the 1950s. After three miles,
there is an opportunity to turn left
down to Castell Dinas Brân, an iron age
hillfort with 13th-century ruins too,
then into Llangollen.
If there’s time, visit Plas Newydd
cottage, a gothic fantasy house created
by Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby
in Regency times, their relationship
reputedly an inspiration to Anne Lister
– “Gentleman Jack”– who came to
visit, as did Byron, Shelley and the
Duke of Wellington. From here, head
back to the towpath and walk east
back along the canal.
Alternatively, when you have
crossed the aqueduct, follow the B5434
road down to the River Dee, where the
17th-century stone Cysylltau bridge
gives a great view of the aqueduct.
Continue up the road and turn right at
the top for the Aqueduct Inn.
The pub
Construction of the aqueduct was, no
doubt, a thirsty business and after a
day’s work the builders would step up
the hill to the nearest establishment.
There had been an inn on the spot for
a long time, but a new name, The
Aqueduct, was soon adopted. Nick
Edwards and partner Teresa bought
the place in 2016 and have finally
(after an extended pandemic pause),
refurbished it, bringing in an
Offa's Dyke Path Pontcysyllte aqueduct
A5
The Aqueduct Inn Froncysyllte
A483
Chirk tunnel
Start/end of walk
Chirk
uncluttered yet cosy atmosphere.
The pub can be spotted a long way
away by the addition of a spectacular
mural artwork by canalboat artist Alan
Baillie on the east-facing gable end.
Whether Telford himself enjoyed a
pint of Three Tuns in the bar is
unknown, but in 1995 Luciano
Pavarotti did visit while attending the
nearby Eisteddfod. On entering, he
heard the Froncysyllte Choir
practising in the next bar and
famously joined in. It’s that sort of
place: friendly and relaxed.
There’s a terrace too, overlooking
the canal and aqueduct. Food always
includes vegetarian options and
sharing plates. The steaks are from
Welsh Black cattle reared in the hills
around the village.
On Facebook
Where to stay
The Aqueduct Inn will be opening
three new upstairs bedrooms in
spring next year, the pick of which
faces north across the Dee valley to
the aqueduct. With oak beams and
sills, stone features and lemon-yellow
walls, the rooms will have a fresh
light atmosphere and smart new
shower rooms.
For those walking on up the Offa’s
Dyke path, the Llangollen Hostel has
cheerful, simple rooms from £43 a
night, plus lots of books, games and a
piano in the lounge. Visitors can make
their own breakfast in the kitchen.
llangollenhostel.co.uk
The Guardian | 29.10.22 | S AT UR DAY | 9 5
LIFESTYLE
A local’s
guide to
Deauville,
France
Famous for its beaches
and film festival, this
belle époque gem has
just opened a game-
changing arts centre,
says bookshop owner
David Ezvan
Interview by John Brunton
TRAVEL
Food
For a town of barely 4,000 inhabitants,
Deauville has a pretty sophisticated
dining scene, thanks to the weekend
influx of Parisians and the tourists
drawn here for the horseracing, polo
and film festival. Franco-Korean
couple Mi-Ra and Charles recently won
a Michelin star for their creative fusion
at L’Essentiel, which includes dishes
such as tom yam-style prawns with
salsify and horseradish.
The cosy La Flambée showcases
local ingredients – try their millefeuille
of andouille sausage and onions.
Locals love Marion, a modern brasserie
with a great lunchtime set menu (€22)
and desserts like tarte tatin with thick
Normandy cream. For a platter of
oysters, prawns and crab, stroll over
the bridge to Trouville and Les Vapeurs
brasserie, opposite the fish market.
Inspiration
The recent opening of Les
Franciscaines has transformed
Deauville’s cultural scene. The
19th-century convent has been
spectacularly transformed by
contemporary architect Alain Moatti
to create a performance space in the
chapel, temporary exhibition spaces,
a permanent museum, a garden
cafe and a multimedia public library.
Illustrations: Hennie Haworth
It’s a wonderfully serene place.
Once away from the crowds, there’s
also serenity to be had on Deauville’s
famous boardwalk, Les Planches. The
way the light changes through the day
here attracted impressionist painters
including Monet and Boudin. Time
stands still, as if the sea and sand are
all for you. For me, Les Planches is just
as beautiful in winter.
Neighbourhood
Place du Marché (pictured above) has a
real sense of community among the
stallholders and shopkeepers. It’s where
everyone in Deauville comes to shop, sit
out on cafe terraces, enjoy an aperitif
or have dinner. In July and August the
open-air market runs every day, and is
the place to buy Norman specialities:
camembert and pont-l’évêque cheeses,
The Guardian | 29.10.22 | S AT UR DAY | 9 7
artisan cider and calvados, and tasty
charcuterie. When the market closes,
cafes and bars spread over the square.
There are cocktails at L’Équilibriste,
ice-cream and cake at Les Accords
Parfaits, and lunch at Yacht Café.
Although Deauville is known as a
summer resort, there are events on all
year – cinema, music, book and photo
festivals, and international polo and
golf tournaments – so Place du Marché
is always busy. We even have a hip
craft beer bar, Sales Gosses, that stays
lively well after midnight.
Green space
Deauville is dominated by its immense
beach, with few green spaces in the
centre. But verdant countryside is
easily accessible by bike routes. A gem
near the hamlet of Bénerville-sur-Mer,
just three miles away, is Parc Calouste
Gulbenkian. It was bought by the
Armenian art collector in 1937 as his
private sanctuary, and given to
Deauville in 1973. With flower gardens,
lawns and orchards, it is the ideal place
for reading a book, quiet meditation or
a picnic. In midsummer, the park is a
haven of peace, with hardly a soul.
Nightlife
Whether you gamble or not, take a
stroll through Deauville’s Casino, with
its Grande Salle filled with roulette
and blackjack tables rather than the
usual slot machines. It was here in
1959 that writer Françoise Sagan,
having tired of Saint-Tropez, won 8m
(old) francs on the gaming tables and
used it to buy a property in the nearby
village of Équemauville.
Few out-of-towners know Café
Marius, a rooftop bar full of luxuriant
plants: it resembles a private club and
is perfect for sunset drinks and tapas.
I also love the historic wood-panelled
cocktail bar at Hôtel Normandy and
Brok Café, a Cuban bar with great music.
The late-night scene here cannot
rival Cannes or Saint-Tropez, but for
clubbing, Le Point Bar, opens at 11pm
and parties till dawn.
Stay
In the centre, a few minutes from the
beach, hotel Le Trophée (doubles from
€135 B&B, letrophee.com), is popular
with visiting writers and artists.
Deuville native David Ezvan runs the
Librairie du Marché bookshop on the
town’s half-timbered market square
 SATURDAY
Scan the code to
send Molly a question
The kids’ quiz for a future quiz Weekend crossword Quiz
Molly Oldfield Sy Thomas Eaton

This quiz answers questions posed by children Answers (no peeking!)
— will you get a better score than your parents? 1 A. The biggest dinosaur
is a titanosaur. This group
of long-necked sauropods
includes the Patagotitan
and the Argentinosaurus.
Experts can’t decide which
is bigger!
2 C. Philosophers and
scientists have struggled
to tell us why we cry when
we feel emotion. When
babies cry, they often do it
for attention as they can’t
express themselves with
words – adults might do this,
too! There are lots of reasons
why people cry, and you
should never be afraid to cry
if you need to.
3 D. The water pressure in
1 Jacob, 6½, asks: what is B The difference in air the water reservoir is greater
the biggest dinosaur? temperature makes the than the pressure outside.
A A titanosaur water travel upwards This makes the water want
B A gigantosaur C There are vents on taps to escape through any hole.
C A humungosaur that blow air into the tap to If we think of the tap as a
D An enormosaur push the water upwards hole, then when we turn the
D Differences in pressure tap on, the pressure pushes
2 Esme, 10, asks: why do make water move upwards water through the tap, even
people shed tears when through a tap upwards, towards the hole!
they are happy or sad? 4 B. The longest reign by a
A Tears contain emotion 4 Sophie, 8, asks: who monarch of a sovereign state
hormones, so shedding has ruled for the longest was Louis XIV of France. He
them helps us to release period of time? ruled for 72 years and 110
our feelings A Queen Elizabeth II days, from 1643 until 1715.
B Tears allow us to express B King Louis XIV Elizabeth II, who died last
our emotions without words C Hirohito month, was our queen for
C Nobody has figured out D Tutankhamun more than 70 years.
exactly why people cry 5 B. The sun is about 15m
D Most people can shed 5 Matilda, 6, asks: degrees celsius at its core.
ILLUSTR ATION: HENNIE HAWORTH
1 2 3 4 5 1 Whose estate
trademarked the title
6 7 8
“queen of crime”?
2 What does the K in K2
stand for?
9 10
3 What type of team is led
by a tower captain?
4 Which award is
11 12 13 known as the animals’
Victoria Cross?
14
5 Which branch of
15 16 17 18 the Guides is for girls
aged 14-18?
19 6 What weapon is named
after a French Basque city?
20 21 22
7 Which religion
was established by the
10 gurus?
23 24 8 Whose fans use the
#COYS hashtag?
What links:
9 Christopher Isherwood;
Across Down Prince Philip;
6/21 The ...... .... of the 1 Castle, bay and village on the Robert Mapplethorpe;
Republic, song from which Pembrokeshire coast (2,6) Charles Manson?
Steinbeck took 8/14’s title (6,4) 2 The .......: John, Paul, 10 Perry the bull;
8/14 The ...... .. ....., George and Ringo (7) Borobi the koala;
Steinbeck novel featuring the 3 Spiro ....., Nixon’s Clyde the thistle;
Joad family (6,2,5) unfortunate choice as Shera the tiger?
9 Christian ...., French fashion vice-president (5) 11 Aristophanes;
house (4) 4/16 Steinbeck novel featuring Thomas More;
10 Decade associated with jazz the Trasks and the Hamiltons William Morris;
and art deco (8) (4,2,4) James Hilton?
11 See 17 5 People and language found in 12 10 October in Canada and
12 See 22 Namibia and Botswana (6) 24 November in the US?
15 Inspector ....., character 7 ..... Kurosawa, film director (5) 13 Monkey;
created by Colin Dexter (5) 13 My .... ...., musical based on Maui;
17/11 Steinbeck novella about Shaw’s Pygmalion (4,4) Anansi;
Lennie and George (2,4,3,3) 14 See 8 Eris;
20 Pakistani city east of the 16 See 4 Loki?

tears whenever they want
to, even if they are not
happy or sad
3 Joshua, 8, asks:
how does water in a tap
travel upwards?
A It gets pumped up pipes
using a motor ised pump
how hot is the sun?
A 1.5m degrees celsius
at its core
B 15m degrees celsius
at its core
C 150m degrees celsius
at its core
D 1.5bn degrees celsius
at its core
This is the hottest part of it! Khyber Pass (8) 18 ..... Morricone, composer (5) 14 Grafham;
22/12 Where Cain was exiled 19 What was both terrible and Hawes;
Molly Oldfield hosts when he went 4/16, according swift, according to the first Rutland;
Everything Under the Sun, to Genesis (4,2,3) verse of the 6/21 (5) Kielder?
a weekly podcast (and 23 City where the German 21 See 6 15 Monarch;
book) answering children’s constitution was written in Laker;
questions. Does your child 1919 (6) Solutions to Crossword Sabena;
have a question? Submit 24 Another name for the ancient and Thomas Eaton’s quiz Malev;
one at gu.com/kidsquiz city of Palmyra in Syria (6) page 93 Pan Am?

Stephen Collins

9 8 | S AT UR DAY | 29.10.22 | The Guardian *