March 5 2023

“It was shocking to find that

my own tragedy was ordinary”

The rock star Nick Cave tells Rowan Williams

how the death of his son brought him back to church
 05.03.2023
5 Charlotte Ivers
What I learnt from the man
who dumped me on a bridge

6 Relative Values
Sherlock’s Mark Gatiss and
his actor husband, Ian Hallard,
on meeting “the one” online

8 The big Botox question

Sheer vanity or the latest
frontier of feminism? Sarah
Ditum on how the “pretty
poison” debate came of age

18 COVER: Take me to church

Faith, grief and creativity
— when Rowan Williams
met Nick Cave

28 Inside Operation Pitting

What really happened
during our chaotic
withdrawal from Afghanistan.
By Levison Wood
28
38 He’s got the power
James May is an electric bike 46
convert — and he’s leaving
the Mamils in the dust

46 Food and drink

Skye McAlpine’s top tarts
and Will Lyons on the world’s
lesser-known winemakers.
Plus India Knight on the
magic of a good cookbook

54 Farmer Clarkson
The government has got its
8
farming policy totally wrong.
I can’t say I’m surprised

38
COVER: SOPHIA SPRING FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE. THIS PAGE: GETTY IMAGES, CAMERA PRESS

62 A Life in the Day

The UK Space Agency’s
Libby Jackson on lift-off and
life inside mission control

18

© Times Media Ltd, 2023. Published

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

The Sunday Times Magazine • 3

 C HARLOT TE
Did I tell you about the time
I was dumped on my birthday?
S
ometimes I get an unnerving feeling that
somewhere out there a former partner is
telling his best anecdote, and that anecdote
is about me. I can see him — I never know
which him it is — in my mind’s eye: beat
perfect, every line honed to perfection
through years of practice. Over pasta and
red wine, his friends are shrieking “No!
She didn’t!” in delighted horror.
They all collapse gleefully, although of
course they have heard this story before.
His girlfriend — who no doubt always texts him
back in a timely fashion and, crucially, does not
eat toast in bed — squeezes his arm affectionately,
marvelling at how someone so charming could
possibly have tolerated such nonsense.
Still. It could be worse. He could be writing the
anecdote in a magazine.
March 2013, dusk. I am standing on a bridge in
Cambridge. There are few places more beautiful:
all weeping willows and sunlit water. It is the type
of bridge that makes you want to propose to your
lover, or learn to do watercolours. Unfortunately
I’m doing neither of those things. Instead I am
busy being dumped.
Actually the dumping has paused briefly because
further along the bridge someone has fallen over
the side. The man dumping me — let’s call him
Oliver, which isn’t his name, but given he is a man
born in the 1990s it statistically probably should
be — rushes to help the fallen person. By luck
Oliver is just months away from qualifying as
a doctor. As a philosophy undergraduate I am,
I figure, rather less useful in this context. In most
contexts, come to think of it. So I remain on the
bridge, on the phone to the ambulance.
Oliver talks to the faller to try to keep him awake.
Luckily, the man seems more in shock than
suffering from any serious injury. “What the hell
were you doing jumping off the bridge?” Oliver asks.
The man explains that he hadn’t meant to fall. One
moment he was contemplating the sunset, and the
next he was face down in a hedge. He had needed
somewhere to sit and think. He had just had his
VICTORIA ADAMSON, ALAMY, GETTY
heart broken, you see, by a woman he really loves.
The stories we tell about our
past relationships are never
as simple as they sound
I V E R S
He turns to look at Oliver and asks: “Do you have
anyone you really love?”
Well, we’ve all seen a Richard Curtis film, right?
You know how the story ends. Our hero, suddenly
overwhelmed by the fragile, beautiful precariousness of
life, is struck by a revelation. He looks up to where I am
standing, as the fading sun sparkles in my eyes. “Yes,”
he says. “Yes I have, and she’s standing right there.”
Except he doesn’t, of course.
“Nah, mate,” he says. “Not really.”
The ambulance arrives. The dumping is completed.
Oh yes, and also, it’s my birthday.
I would forgive you for thinking I made this story up.
But I promise you it is entirely true. Or at least I think
it is. Lately I have come to realise that I can be a very
unreliable witness to my own romantic history.
I told this anecdote innumerable times in my early
twenties. It’s a good story, and there has to be some
side benefit to your first great heartbreak. I was, I would
declare, cruel Cupid’s victim: a blameless innocent
whose only crime was to fall in love.
Then, one day, without noticing, I stopped telling
the story. I had forgotten about it until last week, when
I was suddenly hit by the revelation that I may not
have been recalling the events in their entirety.
The thing is, I may have done a few things wrong
myself. Little things, you understand. Acting a bit
weird, getting too drunk … snogging one of his best
friends. Look, it was a different time: that summer
of love, that far-off, heady foreign country of, um,
Cambridge in 2013. Hmm. Yes. Not great.
I have had realisations of this kind a lot recently,
as I edge towards 30. So many of the men who, in my
youth, I had considered to have inflicted grievous
wrongs upon me were actually responding to similar
wrongs by me. Others were just nice boys who, when
it came down to it, just didn’t fancy me that much.
Which is their prerogative.
Surprisingly I am quite cheered by these
revelations. They remind me that the stories we tell
about our past relationships are never as simple as
they sound in our best dinner party anecdotes.
I think we know this deep down when we are
telling them. So I don’t mind any more if there’s
someone out there telling one about me. All
these stories, told honestly, make us better
people: kinder, more understanding partners.
Whether I get to test that theory is another
question. I’m not sure anybody would want
to date me after reading this. But at least they
might get an anecdote out of it n
Matt Rudd is away
The Sunday Times Magazine • 5
 RE L ATI V E
Mark Gatiss and Ian Hallard
The League of Gentlemen star and his actor husband on coming out to their parents
Mark
Ian and I met online back in 1999, long before Grindr,
when online dating still had a certain stigma attached
to it. “Poor you! You can’t find anyone in the real world,
so you have to go scrabbling around on the internet.”
I didn’t tell my family how we’d met for several years.
You also have to remember that gay men didn’t
necessarily go on dates in search of eternal happiness.
Dates were fun and exciting. So, when we met in the
glamorous surroundings of Finsbury Park Tube station
and went back to my flat, I didn’t think it was anything
serious. But it was. Ian loves to tell people that I asked
him to marry me that afternoon. With hindsight I think
I was probably joking, but I certainly had high hopes:
“Maybe he’s ‘the one’.”
Having said that, it did take a while to get used to the
idea of being a couple. All my previous relationships
had sort of … fizzled out. With Ian it was the opposite;
we seemed to grow closer and closer. We’ve even
collaborated on several projects and I’m directing
his first play at the moment [the Abba-inspired The
Way Old Friends Do, which Ian wrote and stars in],
but there’s never been any sense of rivalry. We get
asked if it’s difficult living and working together, but
why would it be a problem to spend time with the
person you love?
I grew up in a working-class town near Durham,
my dad worked at the pit. Telling people you were gay
in that situation wasn’t easy. I came out to my friends
when I was 15 and there were a few comments at
school, but I was never bullied. The real problem for
me in the Seventies and early Eighties was that I had
no idea what to do about being gay.
Apart from the occasional storyline in [the drama
series] Play for Today, the only gay men on TV were
John Inman and Larry Grayson. I play Larry in the new
TV drama Nolly [about Noele Gordon, a star of the
soap Crossroads] and understand why John and Larry
were regarded as torchbearers. But some gay activists
in the Seventies saw them as the enemy: screamingly
gay, but at the same time a sort of neutered Saturday-
night camp.
Somehow I managed to put off telling my parents to
the point where my mam was the one who brought it up.
I was home from university and she simply asked me.
It was a huge relief. I said, “Hadn’t we better tell Dad?”
Mam looked at me. “Oh no! It’ll kill him.” So we didn’t.
A couple of weeks later I was talking to Mam on the
phone and she said, “I told your dad. Ooh, we had some
snow overnight.” Initially I thought that had saved me
from having to talk to him about it, but it had just been
popped at the back of a drawer.
6 • The Sunday Times Magazine
VA LU E S
Dad struggled at first, but considering his
background it could have been a lot worse. Although
it was a bit awkward when he met Ian, we never had
“issues”. Sadly we lost him in 2021. The weird thing
is that as he got older he became much more tolerant.
Even after he lost Mam — his loneliness seemed to
soothe his prejudices. He understood that love is
where it falls.
It sounds like a complete cliché to say, “We make
each other laugh all the time,” but it’s absolutely true.
Our shared sense of humour has become the glue
that has bonded us. Ian’s definitely more together than
me when it comes to admin, and I’m pretty sure he did
most of the organising when we had our civil
partnership in 2008. The main problem is that, left to
our own devices, we can be as bad as each other. We
make all these grand plans, then we decide to take Bob
[the labrador] for a walk instead.
Ian and I did have a brief period of broodiness, then
we quickly realised that neither of us was responsible
enough, so we got a dog. The ideal scenario would be
that a fully formed, well-educated, extremely polite
grown-up knocks on our door and declares that they
are the fruit of my overeager teenage loins. We get to be
parents without the hard work!
“We quickly realised that neither of
us was responsible enough to look
after a child, so we got a dog”
Main: Mark, 56, and
Ian, 48, with their
labrador, Bob,
during a break from
rehearsing Ian’s
latest play in central
London. Right: the
couple in 1999, the
year they met

Ian
Remember when Stelios from easyJet started his
internet cafés? Without Stelios I wouldn’t have met
Mark. I didn’t have the internet at my flat in London,
so I would go to a Stelios café every day to check emails
and log on to gay.com. Back then online dating didn’t
involve pictures; it was just messages and a phone call.
When Mark and I finally clapped eyes on each other,
there was that awful moment of tension, trying to
decide if we fancied each other. If not, I guess we would
have headed off on our separate ways.
Mark was only the second man I’d made contact with
online and the first one I’d met. I did sort of recognise
him because The League of Gentlemen had been on telly,
but I hadn’t actually seen it. That was probably a good
thing. Had I been a massive fan, I’m not sure things
would have worked out.
Mark’s career has taken a different trajectory to mine.
He has been involved in a lot of high-profile projects
and around the time of Sherlock [Gatiss was co-creator,
co-writer and appeared as Holmes’s brother, Mycroft]
things did go a bit crazy. That one-sided success can
cause havoc in a relationship, especially with actors
— lots of arguments and jealousy. Some relationships
seem to thrive on that constant drama. Not us!
PORTRAIT BY PAUL STUART
I’ve never seen Mark have an argument with anyone.
STRANGE He’s unfailingly polite to the point of diffidence.
HABITS I hit my teens when TV was full of adverts about Aids
— huge icebergs, tombstones. My parents were your
Mark on Ian typical easy-going, middle-class Brummies. There was
He’s incapable of no hint of homophobia but, in that climate, you can see
keeping his side why they might be concerned about having a gay son.
of the bed tidy. What kind of future did I have? I was either going to die
I call his pile of of Aids or kill myself out of loneliness and depression.
dirty clothes When I eventually told them I’d met someone and
“the Bedroom talked about bringing him home to meet them, they
Monster” were very happy. I told them he was in this fantastic
programme called The League of Gentlemen and proudly
Ian on Mark told them it had won a Bafta. Unfortunately they
He worries about decided to watch it. They saw this collection of
us travelling in psychopaths and monsters and thought, “What’s he
the same car in got himself involved with? Is it a cult?” Mum rang me
case something up and said, “Please tell me it’s not him who plays that
happens to us weirdo Mickey.” I paused for a second and then said,
both and Bob “Yes, Mum, that’s the man I’m going to marry.” n
becomes
an orphan Interviews by Danny Scott.
The Way Old Friends Do, Lyceum, Sheffield,
Tue-Sat; Park Theatre, London N4, Mar 15-Apr 15;
and touring until Jun 10; thewayoldfriendsdo.com
The Sunday Times Magazine • 7
“I HAVE DONE “BOTOX MAKES
BOTOX AND EVERYONE LOOK
I LOVED IT” LIKE A WAX
CANDLE”
Olivia Colman, 49

Olivia Wilde, 38

“I DON’T DO “I DON’T NEED

BOTOX TO IT BECAUSE
LOOK YOUNG. BLACK
I DO IT NOT DOESN’T
TO LOOK TIRED”
Trinny Woodall, 59
CRACK”
Naomi Campbell, 52
 TO BOTOX
OR NOT
TO BOTOX?
First developed for chemical
warfare, botulinum toxin has
been the A-list’s not-so-secret
weapon against ageing for
21 years. Is it time to join the
club, asks Sarah Ditum, 41

The Sunday Times Magazine • 9

 ne day you look at your reflection
and don’t quite recognise
yourself. As you age, the
collagen and elastin in your skin
depletes; the deeper layers of
fat diminish. Your face will
begin to sag a little. Areas where
your skin habitually contracts
— around the eyes when you
laugh, in the forehead when you
frown — become permanently
etched. One day, your young
face becomes an old face.
There was very little that
could be done to prevent this
prior to the 1990s, besides
avoiding sunshine and smoking.
Cosmetic creams promised
miraculous results, but since
they only penetrate the very
surface layers of the skin, they could have no effect on In some ways Botox is as simple as beauty gets.
wrinkles. More drastically, facelifts could be performed It’s safe, if you get it from the right practitioner. It’s
to remove the “excess” skin: this smoothed the face, effective, when delivered skilfully. And it’s reversible,
but the result had a telltale tautness and left giveaway simply fading away with time. Injections take 10-15
scars around the ears. minutes (though a full consultation will take longer),
But in 2002 the American Food and Drug and the immediate sensation is usually described as
Administration granted approval to a product called “pinching” or “scratching”, followed over the next
Top: botulinum Botox Cosmetic, specifically “for the temporary week or so by a feeling of mild dullness in the affected
toxin is injected improvement in the appearance of moderate to severe muscles as the neurotoxin takes effect. Under the
into the muscles glabellar lines”. (Glabellar lines are the twin furrows placid surface, however, Botox is fraught with dangers
of the face to between the eyebrows, or “elevens” to those in the and judgment.
smooth lines and know.) For the first time there was a medically proven, In an underregulated market, many providers lack the
wrinkles. Below: officially approved solution for wrinkles. But Botox also medical skills consumers may assume are mandatory.
the most famous came with a frisson of danger. It had, after all, originally One 2021 study found a 16 per cent complication rate
brand is Botox been developed as a bioweapon. Derived from the same from botulinum toxin (including bruising, high blood
bacterium that causes botulism, Clostridium botulinum pressure and temporary partial facial paralysis), largely
(hence the name), it’s a neurotoxin that causes unreported through official channels.
temporary paralysis: undiluted, one gram could be Botox has come of age and yet somehow we haven’t
enough to kill more than a million people. Journalists come to a reckoning with everything that means. Our
gleefully nicknamed Botox the “pretty poison”. feelings about Botox are never simply about Botox. In
Rival products came to market: Xeomin, Dysport every vial there’s a complex tincture of anxieties about
and (approved just last year) Daxxify, which promises money, class, sex and power.
results that last twice as long as the three to four Women are considered vain if they have it — and
months offered by rivals. Still, Botox got there first accused of letting themselves go if they don’t. Those
and is the most famous of them all. For 21 years we’ve injured by cowboy providers are seen as victims of their
lived in a world where looking old is, at least in theory, own egotism rather than of exploitative charlatans.
optional — and thousands of people, over 90 per cent For some women Botox is a liberation; for others it’s
of them women, have opted out. Meanwhile, the male one more tedious step on the treadmill of beauty
market is small but growing dramatically, with maintenance. Whether you have it or not, it’s changed
celebrities such as Robbie Williams openly discussing us all, and not simply for the smoother.
their use of the treatment.
otox is a personal thing, so this is a good point

B
to level with my personal experience. I’ve
never had it, although at 41, I’m thinking

THE MARKET BENEFITED about it. For me, it’s the glabellar line —
PREVIOUS PAGES: GETTY IMAGES, REX. THIS PAGE: GETTY IMAGES

that inter-eyebrow crease — which in my

case has deepened into a single emphatic “1”.
FROM LOCKDOWN: AS Although if I look at myself for long enough,
I begin to see other places where a judicious

PEOPLE SPENT HOURS ON tweak might blur the effects of age.

I’m already older than many women
when they start the treatment. Millie Kendall, CEO

VIDEO CALLS, THEY BECAME of the British Beauty Council, is 55 and started having
Botox when she was 35. She has been receiving it

HYPER-AWARE OF ANY roughly annually ever since. “I had a make-up brand

[Ruby & Millie, founded with the make-up artist Ruby
Hammer] — our pictures were everywhere. A Dr

PERCEIVED FLAWS Sebagh was the first person that I knew of that was
doing it, and Ruby and I just wanted to try it.” ➤

The Sunday Times Magazine • 11

 At the time, Botox still hadn’t received approval
for cosmetic use from the UK’s Medicines and
Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (that would
come in 2006, under the name Vistabel). This meant
that, even though Kendall had her Botox from a
qualified doctor, it still felt like a risk: “I thought it was
quite radical. Now, it’s like no big deal. But 20 years ago
it was actually quite terrifying.”
Right: Anne In fact, by the early Noughties, Botox had been used
Robinson has for aesthetics for over a decade. Originally licensed in
been scathing the US in 1989 for the treatment of crossed eyes and
about those who eye spasms, doctors had rapidly noticed a welcome
age naturally. side-effect: at the injection site, skin became less
Below: Heat wrinkled. Demand for what The New York Times
magazine reports called a “youth elixir” was so high that in 1997 America
in 2016 on a suffered a “Botox drought”, its supply of the drug
reality star’s exhausted by eager consumers.
quest for physical But manufacturing caught up and sales boomed —
perfection, which from $19.5 million in 1992 to $310 million in 2001. Even
included a “bit so, early coverage often focused on Botox as something
of Botox” suspect or disturbing: a parable of vanity. A 2003 story
in a British newspaper reported that actors were being
“warned to keep off the Botox” because their “frozen
faces” were preventing them from emoting on camera.
The beauty journalist and author Sali Hughes
remembers first being made aware of Botox through
Heat magazine’s signature celebrity shaming, “I think
in the early 2000s,” she says. It went from being all
about plastic surgery horror stories to ‘What have
people done to their faces through Botox?’”
Few public figures were open about their use of
Botox, and those who did talk about it were often at
least partly doing so to bait public disapproval — like
the presenter Anne Robinson, who
was famous in the early Noughties
for her abrasive tenure as host of
the quiz show The Weakest Link. In
2004 she played up to her role as
a hate figure by saying that women
who didn’t use anti-ageing
procedures were suffering from
“a lack of nerve or lack of funds”.
The hostile coverage did little to
deter interest in Botox, though. As
the philosopher Clare Chambers,
author of Intact: A Defence of the
Unmodified Body, points out, it’s
part of a cycle many cosmetic
procedures go through as they
enter the public consciousness.
Disapproval turns to curiosity,
WOMEN INJURED BY
COWBOY PROVIDERS ARE
SEEN AS VICTIMS OF THEIR
OWN EGOTISM RATHER
THAN OF EXPLOITATIVE
CHARLATANS
ALAMY
which in turn becomes acceptance. “When they first
come onto the market, it’s ‘Look at this terrible thing
people are doing, can you believe people are injecting
toxins into their face, near their eyes?’ And it doesn’t
take very long for shock-and-awe-type coverage to
move into ‘Things you should know when you want
to go for Botox’ and ‘Who are the best Botox
practitioners?’ It just becomes this normalised thing.”
Come 2006 the British press were running articles
such as “Confessions of a Botox convert”, in which the
writer Rachel Cooke (36 at the time) recounted her
own journey from feminist refusenik of cosmetic
intervention, to Botox-curious, to receiving her own
subtle treatments. “I do like the fact that I look softer.
I would be lying if I said otherwise,” she wrote. The
article ended with a list of recommended clinics
(including Jean-Louis Sebagh, the doctor Kendall
mentioned). In 2007, 55,000 Botox injections were
performed in the UK.
otox’s popularity has grown steadily ever
B
since: there were an estimated 900,000
Botox injections in the UK in 2021. It’s a
market that benefited directly from lockdown
and the rise of video calls: as people spent
hours watching themselves on camera, they
became hyper-aware of any perceived flaws,
leading to a “Zoom boom” in requests for
injectables from early 2020 on.
All the same, Botox remains a niche
pursuit. Ageing naturally continues to be the default
for most people — yet somehow, I don’t find myself
questioning my reasons for wanting it. Those seem
obvious. As Hughes puts it, when people ask her about
Botox, “the thing they most often say is, ‘I look tired.’
They don’t say, ‘I want to look younger.’ They say, ‘My
eyes are drooping and I look tired or frowning.’”
And I do want to look less tired, less frowning. I speak
to Dr Joanna Christou, a practitioner at the Cosmetic
Skin Clinic who uses botulinum toxin injections with
her patients. “When delivered correctly and when
delivered well, it’s such an incredible tool for ageing
well and looking good for your age, but still looking
age-appropriate,” she says. “It’s just about presenting
your best version of yourself to the world.”
All this sounds very appealing, especially because ➤
The Sunday Times Magazine • 13
 HOW BOTOX WORKS
BEFORE BOTOX
Nerve
AFTER BOTOX
A chemical NERVE ENDINGS
signal from
the nerve
contracts the
muscle
Botox
blocks
the nerve
Muscle signal
allowing the
muscle to relax,
reducing wrinkles

— as Kendall points out — expectations of what ageing
should mean for women have changed drastically over
the past few generations. Not very long ago, having long
hair over the age of 45 was considered “disgusting”.
Dyeing your hair was frowned on and menopause was
assumed to mark women’s descent into redundancy.
Now, Kendall says, with HRT “we don’t have to suffer
like our grandparents did”.
I look at pictures of my grandmother with me as a
toddler. She’s only a little older than I am now, but with
her sensible clothing and her short, fluffed hairstyle,
she looks like an old lady to me. I don’t feel anywhere
close to accepting that for myself. I have a career,
ambitions, plans and the expectation of maybe another
40 years to spend on them. I want a face that says I’m in
the midst of life, not rattling towards its end.
Botox gives me the possibility of doing something
about that, and that changes the calculations I make
about the way I age. If wrinkles have a cure, that implies
that wrinkles are a kind of disease, and perhaps it’s
my duty to stop them. Or as Chambers puts it: “The
Above right: procedures are creating the demand.” Ultimately,
Robbie Williams I want Botox because it’s there. Maybe it really is just
is among the a lack of nerve, or a lack of funds, that’s stopping me.
growing number Or maybe I’m mired in snobbery. “There’s a definite
of men opting to class divide with how women talk about Botox,” says
have injectables Hughes, who is 48 and has always been open about her
own Botox. “It’s only middle-class women who are
embarrassed about it.” Working-class women, she says,
are much franker: “Where I come from, women text
their friends and invite them round to look at their
new Botox.”
That atmosphere of judgment breeds an unhealthy
secrecy about Botox. Actresses will routinely deny
having injectables, improbably crediting their buoyant
skin to moisturiser and eight glasses of water a day
— which in turn leaves other women insecure about
their own normally ageing faces. “I don’t think they owe
me an explanation as to what they do to their face,” says
Hughes. “However, when someone like Olivia Colman
says, ‘Yeah, I get Botox,’ I do consider it an act of
extreme kindness and generosity towards women.”
Not everyone feels the pressure to be discreet. As the
Kardashians have shown with their open-door policy on
Botox and surgery, extreme maintenance can be a form
of status flaunting. But so, in other environments, can
a rigorous disregard for appearances. Chambers points
out that, in academia, concern for grooming is treated
as a mark of unseriousness. The pressure on a female
professor, say, might be against having Botox (should
she want it) rather than towards it.
Class is an issue with Botox in another way, too.
The Cosmetic Skin Clinic advertises prices starting at
£255: for that, you get the expertise of Dr Christou,
a qualified dentist and medical doctor with specialist
training in maxillofacial surgery. (“I love faces, I find the
anatomy mesmerising,” she says.) If each injection lasts
three to four months, that can mean three to four
treatments a year. At the high end, this will easily run

IF EACH INJECTION LASTS to more than £1,000 annually.

But you can find treatment much cheaper than
that, if you’re less worried about who’s delivering it.
THREE TO FOUR MONTHS, As I research, I’m served an ad promising “best prices
around”: that provider charges under £90. A dentist

THAT CAN MEAN THREE TO offering injectables highlights their 0 per cent finance
option. And the lower the margins, the greater the
incentive for someone to give you Botox you don’t

FOUR TREATMENTS A YEAR. really need — and the greater the likelihood that they
won’t have the skill to do it well.

THIS CAN RUN TO MORE Because Botox is classed as a drug, it’s only available
through a prescription from a qualified medical
practitioner. This gives the treatment an aura of

THAN £1,000 ANNUALLY security. But, as things currently stand, only the
REX

dispensing of Botox is controlled. There is no ➤

The Sunday Times Magazine • 15


From left, Sex statutory regulation of providers or premises — and
and the City’s even the prescribing side can be circumvented by
Cynthia Nixon, someone with access to the dark web. In other words,
Sarah Jessica anyone can set themselves up to inject Botox, and the
Parker and further down the market you go, the greater the risk
Kristin Davis you take.
faced intense The Health and Care Act, passed in Westminster
have-they, last year, included provision for the regulation of
haven’t-they injectables, including cosmetic fillers. (Because those
scrutiny when are not defined as a medication, they are even less
they returned controlled than Botox, though their effects can be far
in And Just Like more lasting.) The British Beauty Council is consulting
That… in 2021 on the eventual framework. And in 2021 legislation was
passed making it an offence to inject botulinum toxin
or fillers for cosmetic purposes to under-18s.
But — and there’s no way around this — if regulation
works, it will mean the end of cheap Botox. The mix of
medical expertise and aesthetic consideration required
for Botox simply isn’t possible at bargain rates. The
women who can’t pay more will be priced out of the
market. Better no Botox than bad Botox, but that’s
easier to say when you feel confident about landing
on the side of haves rather than the have-nots.
It’s not just Botox this applies to. HRT, while
available on the NHS, is often difficult to access
and many women resort to going private. So while
it’s true that we have the technology to make ageing
optional, that technology is often only accessible
to the relatively wealthy.
THERE ARE LOTS OF
REASONS WOMEN GET
BOTOX. FOR ME, ONE IS A
FEAR THAT WHEN MY LAST
SHAGGABLE DAY GOES
HBO/WARNER BROS
PAST, I’LL CEASE TO EXIST
Essentially, we’ve moved unthinkingly to a two-speed
system of growing old, where wealth is written on a
lineless forehead. And the more that’s the case, the
greater the pressure not to be one of the left-behind
— even if you do end up taking your chances with a
mystery syringe at someone’s kitchen table.
he advent of regulation is welcome, but it’s
T
also shockingly overdue. It has taken more
than 20 years for the British government to
take Botox — and its potential harms —
seriously. It’s hard to escape the conclusion
that injectables have been overlooked precisely
because they primarily affect women. The
attitude to the beauty industry, Kendall says,
has been that it’s “the fluffy stuff girls play with”.
The political carelessness towards Botox
and related treatments tugs at something that bothers
me. It’s about status. Women didn’t matter enough for
politicians to protect us from dodgy toxin merchants,
and we seem to matter even less as we age. There are
lots of reasons a woman might want Botox, but for me
one of them is the simple fear that when my last
shaggable day goes past, I’ll effectively cease to exist.
Victoria Smith, who is 47 and the author of Hags:
The Demonisation of Middle-Aged Women, has thought
a lot about attitudes to women ageing. Perhaps, she
suggests, what bothers us about our changing reflection
is less that we stop looking like a youthful ideal of
“ourselves”, and more who we start to resemble instead.
“I was seeing my mum. I definitely looked like a
middle-aged woman,” she says. “And it brought to me
all the prejudices that I have about older women.”
Smith agrees that attitudes to female ageing have
changed, but what she sees does not necessarily
encourage her. Botox, she says, “has created a new
standard against which women are judged. When And
Just Like That … — the Sex and the City reboot — came
out, there were lots of people going, ‘Look, they’re the
same age as the Golden Girls were and they look so
different.’ And it’s presented as so much more liberated,
but then there’s all this work still attached to it.”
Even with those criticisms in mind, Smith says she
wonders if she’d be tempted “if money was no object”.
After all the conversations I’ve had about Botox, I’m
more certain: if I had the requisite spare cash (I don’t),
I’d do it. I’d feel a bit bad about playing my part in the
constant inflation of beauty standards, but probably not
as bad as I feel about my glabellar line when I catch my
face in the mirror on a bad day.
But one thing still bothers me: when do you get to
stop? Christou tells me that she sets no upper limit for
treatment, although if a patient is receiving botulinum
toxin alone, the results will diminish as skin elasticity
and subcutaneous fat decrease. “But if you’re using it
with other adjunct treatments, then it’s plausible to
continue using it for many years.”
Her oldest client, she says, is 95. I wish I found this
inspiring. Instead, it fills me with bleakness. I want to
forestall the losses of ageing as long as I possibly can
— not just on my face, but in my body and brain. Yet the
thought of being 95 (older than my grandma when she
died) and still labouring for beauty terrifies me. At some
point, I would like to disembark the hotness train.
Maybe what I want isn’t Botox. Maybe I want the
impossible: to never have to accept the fact that, Botox
or not, I’m going to get old and (most intolerable
thought of all) eventually die. Smooth or rumpled,
nothing is going to buy us more time n
The Sunday Times Magazine • 17
 Interview with a (

18 • The Sunday Times Magazine

(reformed) vampire

The former
Archbishop
of Canterbury
Rowan Williams
meets the rock
star Nick Cave

PORTRAITS BY
SOPHIA SPRING

The Sunday Times Magazine • 19

 Last November Rowan
Williams surprised readers
of the Church Times by
selecting Nick Cave’s
Faith, Hope and Carnage
as his book of the year.
The unlikely bond between
the former archbishop
and the Australian singer
culminated in the following
conversation at a church in
London. He tells Williams
m
eeting Nick Cave in the vestry of a church
in central London — hard wooden chairs,
miscellaneous cupboards and buckets,
stacks of pale green teacups — is slightly
surreal. Cave’s long and turbulent career
as one of the foremost singer-songwriters
of the past half century, a career marked

how the tragedy of losing by struggles with trauma, addiction and

a reputation for inhabiting some extreme
edges in human creativity, might not seem

his 15-year-old son changed to lead very obviously to a place like this.
But when he arrives — the familiar figure,
tall, gaunt, pale, a dark suit and white shirt

his life, faith and art for ever under a black overcoat — he shows no signs
of disorientation. The Nick Cave who grew

20 • The Sunday Times Magazine


up in the Australian town of Wangaratta
and sang as a choirboy in its Holy Trinity
Cathedral, who has throughout his career
startled his audiences with lyrics saturated
with God and echoes of the Bible, is not
exactly a stranger here.
In his recent book of conversations with
the music journalist Sean O’Hagan, Faith,
Hope and Carnage, he speaks with raw
clarity about how his creative energy has
been fed by the experience of agonising
grief and loss. At the heart of this is the
death of Arthur, his 15-year-old son, in 2015,
after falling from a cliff edge near Brighton
— one of many bereavements in his life.
Heartbreakingly Cave has since lost
another son, 31-year-old Jethro. All this
PREVIOUS PAGES: SOPHIA SPRING FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE. THESE PAGES: GOFF PHOTOS, REX
has come to be bound up for him with the
awareness of the holy. He has been drawn
back to some sense of belonging within the
battered, inarticulate and compromised
community that is the Church.
Asked by the publisher to share my
thoughts on Faith, Hope and Carnage,
I could say only that I could think of few
books that had brought home more
completely the way in which grief and
creativity work together. The book also
reveals the way in which faith, without ever
giving a plain, comforting answer, offers
resources to look at what is terrible without
despair or evasion. Cave’s faith is not that of
a man looking for shortcuts or consolations.
At one point he speaks about the “spiritual
audacity” that he felt coming to birth in
the wake of Arthur’s death — “a kind of
reckless refusal to submit to the condition
of the world”. That recklessness is what
I want to hear more about as we meet.
“WHEN I WAS YOUNG,
I WAS RACING AROUND
LIKE A VAMPIRE,
SUCKING THINGS
UP, UTTERLY
SELF-ABSORBED”
From the outset he’s clear that the book
was a release for him, a chance to say what
no one had really given him the chance to
say — and that it isn’t the last word.
“It allowed me to bring the scattered
fragments of my thinking about religion
together,” he says. Since then he has found
himself returning to church. “I don’t feel
that sudden cold panic I used to feel when
I attended church.” He says he thinks that’s
come from “the privilege” of being given
the opportunity to talk openly about his
faith, “and to be taken seriously”.
Cave says he has moved on from thinking
of religious belief and practice as just
something “useful” — “the idea that it’s
OK to believe because it’s good for you”.
I tell him about a comment an old student
of mine once made, that church is where
you put the things that won’t go anywhere
else, and he responds enthusiastically.
“It’s words like worship, gratitude,
Performing with
the Bad Seeds at the
O2 Arena in London,
2017. Below left:
movie night with
twins Arthur, left,
and Earl, aged 12,
in a scene from
20,000 Days on
Earth (2014), a
drama documentary
portraying 24 hours
in Cave’s life
devotion, grace — these words make many
people feel deeply uncomfortable, but they
are at the heart of it all. The thing is, I’ve not
been a particularly spiritual person. I haven’t
had that 21st-century ‘spiritual’ journey at all.
But as far back as I can remember I’ve had
a fascination with the figure of Jesus, way
before any notions of whether God exists.”
There’s a German theologian of the 1960s,
Werner Pelz, who used to write about Jesus
as the one who is always “walking ahead of
us” — whose words draw us forward into
territory we don’t know, requiring us to be
people we can’t yet be. Does this ring any
bells, I wonder.
It does. And it chimes, surprisingly,
with his experience of songwriting. “It’s a
place that exists which I myself must come
to,” he says. “It’s turning up. And that’s
something I’ve always done with writing.
I’ve always got up and started writing in the
morning. I guess that sort of happens with
belief as well, as one gets practised at it.”
Like bird-watching, I say; being able to
sit still, not knowing what will turn up.
“Oh God, songwriting is the same,” he
replies. “It’s a matter of sitting down at my
desk at nine o’clock, with all my scepticisms
and feelings of inadequacy, this terrible
emptiness that seems to confirm all the
worst ideas I have about myself as a
functioning creative person. But slowly
things start to filter in, in fragments —
small, bright ideas that infiltrate this dark
space. Then throughout the months a kind
of momentum grows and they collect
together and start to resemble actual songs.”
People underestimate the place of
listening in the creative process, I say ➤
The Sunday Times Magazine • 21
 The life and times of a Bad Seed

N
ick Cave was
born in rural
Victoria,
Australia, in 1957
to a librarian
mother and a schoolteacher
father. After moving to the
small city of Wangaratta, he
became a choirboy at the
cathedral but soon gained
a reputation as a hell-raiser.
At 13 he was expelled from
Wangaratta High School for
attempting to pull down an
older girl’s underwear.
At 19 he was at a police
station being bailed by his
mother for burglary when
she told him that his father
had been killed in a car
crash. He later wrote that
his father’s death “created
in my life a vacuum, a space
in which my words began
to float and collect and find
their purpose”.
He formed his first band
with schoolmates and
subsequently dropped
out of art school to pursue
music full-time. In 1980
the postpunk band changed
their name to the Birthday
Party and moved from
Melbourne to London,
where their chaotic shows
— often involving fights with
the audience — saw them
branded “the most violent
band in Britain”. Cave’s use
of heroin and amphetamines
escalated and he grappled
with addiction for two
decades. He credits his
sobriety to his wife, the
model turned designer Susie
Bick, whom he met in 1997.
The Birthday Party broke
up in 1983, following a move
to Berlin. Cave and his
bandmate Mick Harvey went
on to form Nick Cave and the
Bad Seeds, his most enduring
project. Drawing influence
from the blues and southern
gothic literature, they
became known for their
macabre lyrics and Cave’s
enigmatic stage presence.
Among their most famous
songs are the 1988 single
The Mercy Seat, about a man
awaiting execution by
electric chair, and the 1994
single Red Right Hand, later
used as the theme song to
the BBC crime drama Peaky
Blinders. A hit single from the
band’s 1996 album Murder
Ballads was a duet with Kylie
Minogue — Where the Wild
Left: Cave duetted with
Kylie Minogue for the 1996
single Where the Wild Roses
Grow. Below left: airing his
thoughts at Caulfield Grammar
School, Melbourne, 1975
Roses Grow, depicting a
murder victim’s dialogue with
her killer. Cave’s recent music
frequently returns to themes
of grief, love and loss. The
latest Bad Seeds albums,
Skeleton Tree and Ghosteen,
were released after the death
of Cave and Bick’s 15-year-old
son Arthur in 2015. Arthur’s
twin brother, Earl, is now 22.
Last year tragedy struck
again with the death of Cave’s
eldest son, 31-year-old Jethro
Lazenby, who was raised by
his mother, the Australian
model Beau Lazenby. (Cave
also has a 31-year-old son,
Luke, who was born ten days
after Jethro, to Cave’s first
wife, Viviane Carneiro,
a Brazilian journalist.)
Jethro, who worked as a
model, was found dead of
undisclosed causes at a motel
in Melbourne last May. In
September Cave spoke to The
New York Times about why
he would continue to explore
his losses publicly. “I think
grieving people are conscious
of the sell-by date of their
own misery,” he said. “But in
respect to Arthur and Jethro,
I can’t wipe my hands and say,
‘OK, now I’m moving on.’ ”

— the way in which your ear starts picking Cohen, Cave suggests — plenty of
up some kind of frequency or pattern.
“For me it’s a visual thing,” Cave says. “I AM PART OF A VAST astonishingly poetic lyrics that “seem to
roll easily off the tongue”, but also the
“A line by itself has no resonant value. It
looks dead. It’s only when you put another
line next to it that something starts to
RIVER OF SUFFERING. overegged moments when you think not
about what he’s pointing to but about how
clever he’s being. Not unlike the problem
happen. The spirit comes down! You’ve
done it enough times to know that if it does
I FELT A PART OF faced in meditative or contemplative prayer,
when the one thing you have to avoid is
this thing — I call it a shimmering — that
lovely little vibrational dance between the SOMETHING — SOMEONE looking at yourself and asking, “How am
I doing?” Cave agrees, remembering what
lines, something’s going on.”
We talk about the dangers of self-
consciousness, the overwriting that comes
CALLED IT ‘THE CLUB NO he learnt from a long period of practising
meditation. “You don’t judge the experience
at all. Watching yourself is of little value.”
ONE WANTS TO BE IN’ ”
GETTY IMAGES, REX

from straining too hard — the song line Things don’t happen because of how much
you think is beautiful and discover to be you want to make them happen.
hollow, while a throwaway scrap turns into The question of how to meditate
something compelling. Think of Leonard effectively comes up often in Cave’s online ➤

The Sunday Times Magazine • 23

 forum, the Red Hand Files, which he
launched in 2020. Named after one of
his most famous songs, Red Right Hand
(inspired by John Milton’s Paradise Lost,
where the hand represents divine
vengeance), it’s a place where a wide range
of people, not only fans, write in to share
their troubles and questions, and Cave
writes back. The site has become almost
a form of spiritual direction between Cave
and his public. “One concern that comes
through all the time,” he says, “is, ‘I want
to be a creative person, but I don’t feel
inspired.’ They’re just thinking that
something’s going to drop out of the sky and
sort of ignite their imagination. Creativity
for me is a practice, a rite, an application.”
Its purpose is not self-expression, he
says, but a way of “making space”. Cave
talks in the book about how his 2019 album
Ghosteen was an attempt to “make a space”
for his son Arthur in the terrible period
after his death.
“Yes, that is what I was doing,” he says.
“Trying to find a place Arthur could inhabit.
“I WAS TRYING TO FIND A PLACE FOR ARTHUR’S SPIRIT TO RESIDE. I’VE
LEARNT TO INCORPORATE HIS ABSENCE AND PRESENCE INTO MY WORK”
A place where his spirit could reside. Things,
of course, are different now … I think I’ve
learnt to both incorporate his absence and
indeed his presence into my work, slowly
finding other things to write about.” It’s
become a question, he says, of finding a
space “around” Arthur, not just “for” him.
This has led to him rediscovering what
can only be described as joy, through “an
altered connection to the world”: “spasms
of delight”, a brightness uncovered in
things, coexisting with the “dark, vacuous
space” of loss. This is a joy that has nothing
much to do with “feeling happy” or with
satisfaction. “It’s there, despite ourselves …
not attached to anything.” This double
vision, Cave says, is fundamental to the
religious impulse. It explains why in church
he feels able to hold together both the
doubt and pain and the sense of anchorage.
It can’t be easy to communicate this to
people in the first raw stages of loss, I suggest.
No, and not in the later stages either, Cave
adds, when the temptation is to let your
grief “harden around the absence” and
define you, so that it’s impossible to move
GETTY IMAGES, WILL BUCKNALL / INSTAGRAM
forward. “We can’t separate ourselves from
these losses but we can go on and create
new things with this condition of loss.”
The creative process needs to be one
that doesn’t try to ignore or sanitise things.
I remind Cave of a lecture he gave at the
Southbank Centre in 1999, when he spoke
of the shockingly violent imagery found in
some of the Psalms. “What I found time
Above: Cave with his wife, Susie, a fashion
designer, at the Met Gala in New York, 2018.
Below: their son Arthur, 15, fell to his death
from a cliff near their Brighton home in 2015
and time again in the Bible, especially in
the Old Testament,” he said in this lecture,
“was that verses of rapture, of ecstasy and
love could hold within them apparently
opposite sentiments — hate, revenge,
bloody-mindedness, etcetera; that they were
not mutually exclusive. This idea has left an
enduring impression on my songwriting.”
Cave tells me about people who write
in to the Red Hand Files who are almost
obsessed with the idea that “the world is
shit. The world is f***ed. ‘Why would I
want to have a child and bring it into this
world?’” they ask. “‘How can you talk about
these things when we’re on the point of
environmental collapse?’ And I guess the
message at the heart of Faith, Hope and
Carnage — a religious message essentially
— is that we have to look beyond our
despair to imagine a world worth saving.
Hope is an act of the imagination.”
I recall the Buddhist parable of the man
running from a tiger and coming to a cliff
edge, scrambling down a few feet and
hanging on to a fragile root protruding from
the cliff face. In a cleft in the rock in front
of him is a small flower. The man suddenly
says, “That’s beautiful!”
We both laugh. In my experience, talking
to dispirited young people, the challenge
is to encourage them to recognise where
it is that they are finding the flower in the
cliff face; where they can let themselves
be open to joy. “When I was young I was
racing around like a vampire,” Cave says,
“sucking up everything I possibly could …
A beautiful time, but completely and
utterly self-absorbed.”
He says the loss of Arthur made him more
empathetic and connected to the world. “It
became relational, a kind of vibrational feel
within the world that feels like the presence
of a third entity. I am part of a vast river of
suffering … It was shocking to find that my
own tragedy was ‘ordinary’ on some level.
And I felt a part of something. Someone
called it, ‘the club no one wants to be in’.
I found for the first time that I started
to become a more complete, fully realised
person, as opposed to a personality that
was partially formed and fragmented.”
e talks about his
H enthusiasm for the
poetry of Stevie Smith —
“complex thought wrapped
in the diabolical language
of a child”, nursery rhymes
with incalculable tragedy and shock at their
centre. Smith was someone who said she
could not bring herself completely not to
believe, a phrase that Cave relishes. Her
poem about the Jesus of St Mark’s Gospel,
The Airy Christ, describes a saviour who will
not harass or browbeat anyone: “He only
wishes they would hear him sing.”
Philip Larkin’s The Mower is another of
his favourites, with its poignant ending,
“We should be careful of each other, we
should be kind, while there is still time.”
There is a particular kind of carefulness ➤
The Sunday Times Magazine • 25
at work in the Red Hand Files. “Questions
come in, questions from people whose
children or partners have died, often quite
a long time ago. Letters so open and
vulnerable that obviously they have not been
able to speak about their deceased loved one
because grief has passed its sell-by date.”
That feels a rather chilling phrase. But
Cave points out that of course people don’t
want to hear you talking about it all over
again at a social event, and neither do you
want to be rehearsing it as if that were all
you could talk about. But you still need the
time and space “to breathe momentary life
into the one you love”. That’s what the
Red Hand Files exist for — making room
for the lost life, “bringing in all the spirits
of the ones you’ve lost”. Isn’t that, he asks,
what the church is there for as well? The
communion of saints, the whole company
of Heaven?
If only that were what it felt like more
of the time, I respond, but yes, that is what
it’s for. Is this, Cave wonders, why there are
some faint signs of people beginning to take
Christian faith more seriously in the wake
of the pandemic? There are, he says, a few
more people around the dinner table these
days who will shamefacedly admit to
surreptitiously slipping into churches now
and then. “On a societal level things are
worse since the pandemic,” he says. But what
is under the surface? Have we — some of us
— woken up to the basic questions of who
and what really, lastingly matters to us?
Our time is almost up. But I want to touch
on one last topic. Cave has attracted some
media attention recently for his reaction
26 • The Sunday Times Magazine
to an artificial intelligence programme
producing songs allegedly in his style.
“Replication as travesty” and “a grotesque
mockery of what it is to be human” were
some of the more printable comments in his
response. Cave reminds me that this isn’t
the first time the issue has come up. He has
commented before on the idea that AI could
compose “bespoke” songs, designed to press
exactly the emotional buttons that you
Above: Cave, centre, and his previous band
the Birthday Party search for salvation at
a disused church in Kilburn, London, 1981.
Below: taking a pew with Rowan Williams
wanted pressed. But “art really is about
human audacity, the courage to reach beyond
our limitations”; AI doesn’t have that sense
of limitation. “It’s not vulnerable enough
to create something that’s convincingly
transcendent,” he says (a phrase that could
take a few years to digest adequately).
Art comes from a specific, unique human
place — particular and unrepeatable
experiences of grief and joy. What would
the consequences be if we start expecting
art to give us the emotions we think we
want? Isn’t art more to do with discovering
what we didn’t know we needed? “Exactly
right,” Cave says. “Art has within it that
thing that you don’t know you needed.”
Which is also why we should look with
some wariness at any pressures to self-
censorship. Writing in the Red Hand Files
last June, Cave called free speech a tool to
“liberate the soul of our world”. Art’s
“sacred duty”, Cave says now, is to make
you reconsider, sometimes by provoking
outrage, motivating you to act differently.
We need dissonance for our health as a
society. “What has made us so fearful of
ideas?” Cave asks. Do we even want to
grow and change?
The winter afternoon is closing in. The
conversation seems to have got to that point DAVID CORIO / GETTY IMAGES. SOPHIA SPRING FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE
where it could continue indefinitely, which
is probably a reasonable place to stop for
now. But I come away with an overwhelming
sense of someone who has been to — even
lived in — places very few of us visit, places
where very few of us could survive with such
radical, clear-eyed hopefulness. Cave is
impassioned, undefensive, kind and probing
— vulnerable enough to create something
that’s convincingly transcendent. And for
me at least, the afternoon has had something
of that “shimmering” he evokes n
Faith, Hope and Carnage by Nick Cave and
Sean O’Hagan is published by Canongate
at £22. Rowan Williams was Archbishop
of Canterbury from 2003 to 2012
28 • The Sunday Times Magazine
ESCAPE
FROM
KABUL
The Taliban’s return to power in 2021 took
Britain by surprise. Levison Wood explains
how he and other army veterans stepped in
to arrange a “digital Dunkirk” and save lives
Coalition forces give a helping
hand to a child as desperate
civilians scramble to enter
Kabul airport, August 20, 2021

The Sunday Times Magazine • 29

 O
n August 13, 2021, I received
a WhatsApp message
from a friend in Afghanistan
detailing a “peace deal” the
forces protecting RAF
Afghan government had plane
made with the Taliban. The
president had effectively
relinquished power and the
Taliban would enter Kabul
within two days. In May of
that year Nato had begun
a final withdrawal of its
mission there and a Taliban offensive had
been escalating, but I was still shocked. Even
the British government didn’t seem to be
aware of the imminent collapse and most
MPs were on holiday anyway; Dominic
Raab, foreign secretary at the time, would
remain in Crete until after Kabul had fallen.
I couldn’t believe that the capital would
fall to the Taliban after 20 years of war that
had claimed the lives of more than 170,000
Afghans and 457 British service personnel.
The sacrifice made by the coalition had
ensured that Afghans were free to vote
in elections, girls could attend newly
opened schools and women could hold A Taliban fighter advances
positions in government, and elsewhere.
Life expectancy had gone up by ten years, “YOU’D HEAR THE towards Kabul airport. Below
left: Dominic Raab arrives back
from 55 to 65, during those two decades
and literacy rates had nearly doubled.
Sport and music were thriving in parts
TALIBAN LETTING from holiday on August 19

of the country. Human rights were now

embedded in the fabric of a vastly improved
way of life. Surely the United States was not
going to retreat and capitulate?
This cognitive dissonance came crashing
down on August 15, when Afghanistan’s
President Ghani decided that the time had
come to flee and the government officially
fell to the Taliban. It was quickly becoming
obvious that an emergency evacuation to
get British nationals and eligible Afghans
out of the country — Operation Pitting —
would be needed. Over the next two weeks
until August 28, when the last British
planes departed, forces on the ground and
at home would co-ordinate that evacuation
from Hamid Karzai International Airport
(HKIA) in Kabul. The rapidity of the Taliban
takeover meant that there was no clear
strategy and whatever plans were in place
were rushed and insufficient. Into this
PREVIOUS PAGES: REUTERS. THIS PAGE: REUTERS, PETER JORDAN / THE SUN
OFF ROUNDS.
YOU’D SEE AND HEAR
PEOPLE GETTING
BEATEN WITH RIFLE
BUTTS AND WHIPS”
their time and effort. They would be the
“link” in the chain that could pull out a
stranger and their family from Afghanistan.
The multinational effort that transpired
— a “digital Dunkirk” — was unsanctioned
and existed because government
programmes had failed.
people deep, were milling beneath the
massive wings of C-17 military transport
aircraft. The airfield was a riot of noise,
panic and confusion, the sound of
screaming children an ever present wail.
By this point the British Parachute
Regiment were on their way in. Before
they arrived the impression was that
the deployment would be easy, mostly
involving guard duties. But as soon as the
Paras’ A Company landed at HKIA they
were sent straight in to reinforce the
US Marines on what became known as
the Thin Red Line: the human wall of
Nato soldiers trying to hold back a crowd
of thousands of Afghans desperate to leave
the country. “All the civvies [civilians]
were pushed up against the gate,” one
private says. “We’d open the gates and
shove them back. We were literally

void stepped soldiers, veterans and civilians
who knew they owed the Afghan people
Before plans for an emergency airlift
could be drawn up, the area around the
airport had to be secured — and the
situation at HKIA was precarious. On
the night of August 14 mortars were fired
from the south of the city, jeopardising
the flights that would bring troops in and
take civilians out.
Almost 18,000 refugees fleeing the
Taliban had arrived in the capital and
many of them were making directly for the
airport. There were too few soldiers and US
Marines to hold the entire perimeter, and
drainage culverts provided cover for anyone
looking to evade the sentries. By morning
colourfully clothed crowds, hundreds of
throwing them. The younger ones would
try and fight. It was like something out
of a Spartan movie.”
At one point, as a C-17 began to taxi for
take-off, the crowd surged over the wire
barricade and swarmed onto the runway,
surrounding the aircraft. It continued
to move forwards and Afghans began
clinging to the undercarriage. US Marines
later took stretchers to the tarmac to
recover bodies so that the families could
identify them.
The first order of business was to set up
some sort of system. The Baron hotel, just
outside the airport perimeter, was selected
as the official evacuation point and it ➤

The Sunday Times Magazine • 31

was secured. Any battle with the Taliban
could be disastrous for the rescue effort —
so a precarious truce was reached to allow
Taliban checkpoints to be stationed around
the airfield. “There was a real Mexican
stand-off vibe between us and them,”
recalls a marine. “They even had a rocket
launcher mounted in a flatbed, and it was
aimed just over our heads.”
That the fragile truce (mostly) held
during the two weeks of the evacuation did
not mean the Taliban wanted to facilitate it.
“It wasn’t quite hand in hand, but there was
a tacit agreement,” says Major Danny Riley,
one of the first Brits in Kabul in August
2021, who spoke to the Taliban. “We just
needed to get people out.”
Coalition reinforcements continued to
arrive in Kabul and by the early hours of
August 17 — with the “peace” in place,
the crowd pinned back and the Baron
hotel processing centre ready for action
— the airlift could begin in earnest. western passport holders. “There was one Troops guard a C-17
Back in April 2021 the UK government Afghan who spoke good English and he was transport aircraft as key
had launched the Afghan Relocations and showing me pictures of him in America,” Afghan personnel wait
Assistance Policy (Arap), designed for recalls a 2 Para soldier. “He didn’t have any to be airlifted to safety
Afghan citizens who worked for or with paperwork and he was crying. He lifted his
the British in Afghanistan in exposed or top and showed me scars from the Taliban.
meaningful roles, which could include He was on his knees, crying and begging,
an offer of relocation to the UK. The next but I couldn’t let him through. Afghan more deserving people got left behind.
phase of the operation was to identify commandos and police would turn up Requirements on what [Arap] paperwork
who to evacuate. Many of those in the [trying to get into the airport]. They’d show was needed would change. It was very
crowd at Kabul airport were eligible for their ID cards but that wasn’t enough. They frustrating. Our lads were doing their best
Arap. But thousands of others were just were begging. They knew they were dead if but they’re not experts on documents.”
part of the desperate mass, all attempting they didn’t get on a flight, but we couldn’t In its way, this turned out to be a blessing.
to escape the inevitable — a life under process them on just an ID card.” “Lads passed through deserving people
Taliban rule. Eighteen-year-old soldiers were making who wouldn’t have got through otherwise
“The Paras and engineers were life-and-death decisions on a minute-by- [for bureaucratic reasons],” Fahim says.
constantly trying to improve controls for minute basis. The human tragedy took its “It took about an hour for the Home Office
the crowd, which was growing to be in toll. “I felt helpless,” says Private Ahmad personnel to process one family and they’d
the tens of thousands,” says Major Steve Fahim from the Parachute Regiment. only sent two people. Once they arrived
White, an officer in the Parachute “Every day of it was nonstop tragedy. the number of people we were getting out
Regiment. “There were surges in the crowd People were shouting, “Help me!” but we actually slowed down. If it had been that
— people were crushed to death.” couldn’t help everyone, and some of the way from the beginning we’d have got no
Captain Aaron Nunkoosing of the Paras
arrived a few days after the first members of
his regiment landed. “I don’t think I could
appreciate what the blokes were going 1 mile
through until I got there,” he says. He was
taken up to the roof of the Baron hotel.
“Looking down on where the crowd had North Gate
come up against the shield wall formed by Kabul
International US military zone
the soldiers, and the thin line of exhausted Airport
paratroopers holding it together, that Run
way
drove it home to me. You could already Main civilian
see it was a tense situation. terminal
“During the day it was pretty hideous,” Abbey Gate
he continues. “You could hear gunfire
Baron hotel
every now and again. You’d hear the Taliban Main entrance
letting off rounds. You’d see and hear Kabul
people getting beaten with rifle butts
ESCAPE ROUTE
ad

and whips. Then you’d get to night-time

Ro

and people would calm down a bit out of

rt

Thousands of civilians
o
rp

sheer exhaustion.”
Ai

Soldiers from the Parachute Regiment spent two fraught weeks

were confronted with lost or abandoned British
children. Some people would come in Embassy trying to get into Kabul
½ mile
using fake documents and passports, and International Airport
doctored photos of locals married to

32 • The Sunday Times Magazine

 more than a thousand out.” Instead, by
using their judgment and initiative,
over the course of two weeks the Paras
facilitated the rescue of some 17,000 people.
O
ver the coming days, while they
processed evacuees and kept the
airfield and Baron hotel secure,
the Paras also had to remain
vigilant for threats among the
crowd. This could be anything
from a suicide bomber to a
desperate civilian who wanted
to get out. On August 26 a suicide bomber
detonated a device that killed 13 US service
personnel and more than 150 Afghan
civilians at the Abbey Gate.
“A few days before, we got a threat
warning that there was a bomb in a bag and
it would go off at 13.48,” says Tom, a private
in 2 Para’s A Company. “I looked around
and there were bags everywhere. I looked at
my watch and saw I might have six minutes
left to live. It was a helpless feeling but you
just kind of accepted it and made a joke.
There were a lot of threat warnings that
came to nothing.”
“There was no respite and it took more
out of us than we realised at the time,” White
recalls. “Seeing the desperation of people
in the crowd — it affected older guys more.
It was a reflection of their own families in
the crowd. You’d see battle-hardened Paras
crying their eyes out around a corner.
Everyone had their moment like that.”
Back home in the UK, veterans who
had fought in Afghanistan more than a
decade ago, soldiers and civilians were
PA
“WE GOT A THREAT
WARNING THAT A
BOMB IN A BAG WAS
ABOUT TO GO OFF.
I LOOKED AROUND.
THERE WERE BAGS
EVERYWHERE”
watching this chaos unfold with horror, and
wondering how to get friends and comrades
out. Many volunteered to return to the
conflict in a way that was a first in military
history: they joined via their phones,
laptops and social media accounts. Nothing
could have prepared them for the events
that would unfold — unbridled tragedy
and heroic achievement against all odds.
On August 15 I received a message from
the MP Johnny Mercer. He asked if I could
help him to extract an ex-colleague —
a former Afghan special forces operative,
now in hiding in Kabul. Using the power of
social media and what is colloquially known
as the “Reg net”, I asked my own former
colleagues in the Parachute Regiment to
assist. Mercer also turned to Mike Pratt —
Afghan civilians fleeing the
Taliban are kept clear of
the airport entrance in Kabul
by British and US forces
a veteran of the Parachute Regiment who
was now involved with security for CNN
— for help. “Soldiers don’t pick their battles
but veterans chose this one,” Pratt says.
His “WhatsApp War” would be conducted
from the kitchen table of his home in
Wandsworth, southwest London.
“Pratty” found himself in the unique
position of knowing those at the Baron
hotel and other enablers within the city —
people such as “Smudge”, who ran a
guesthouse in Kabul and provided “fixers”
in the city, many of them former members
of Afghan special forces. Another key to
Kabul was “Bill”, whom Pratt describes as a
“big South African white guy with a beard”.
“He was driving people around, taking
them to the airport. In the end the Taliban
detained him for three weeks.” Pratt says his
own role was “to identify the personnel
who needed to be evacuated and establish
communication with them. Often it was Bill
who would then drive them to the airport.”
From there it was the old boys’ network of
the Parachute Regiment that took over.
Having relayed their information to
Pratt, he would then divide the Afghans
into “packets” — small groups that could
be collected and taken to the airport. Or,
if they were already in the crowd at the
airport, Pratt communicated with the ➤
The Sunday Times Magazine • 33
 EIGHTEEN-YEAR-OLD
SOLDIERS WERE
MAKING LIFE AND
DEATH DECISIONS
ON A MINUTE BY
MINUTE BASIS.
IT TOOK ITS TOLL
Paras on the ground to find and extract Above: troops guard the Abbey
them. Open-source maps such as Google Gate on August 25; the next
were marked with known Taliban day a suicide bomber targeted
checkpoints that needed to be evaded. the entrance, killing scores of
The urgency to evacuate the thousands of people. Left: Afghans find
Afghans who had worked for the British over sanctuary at the Baron hotel
two decades of occupation was clear: the life
expectancy of some was measured in days.
“The Taliban were going door to door,
looking for these people,” Pratt says. to get through the Arap process.” But in the
Mercer, an Afghan veteran himself and chaos of August 2021 no one at the Foreign
now a cabinet minister for veterans’ affairs, Office was reading the Arap paperwork.
had found himself involved with Afghans “He’s a sergeant and 333 operator [Afghan
trying to escape Kabul well before August special forces], right? So they didn’t come
— such as his own former comrade more bona fide but I just couldn’t get him
“Naveed”. “I’d been in contact with Naveed out. I was getting more and more frantic
for nine months,” Mercer says. “I was trying messages. It’s a race trying to get people

October 2001 After the 9/11 codename under which British Afghan-led security operations.
attacks, US president George operations in Afghanistan were In May 2014 Barack Obama’s
W Bush demands the Taliban conducted from 2002 to 2014. administration announces a

THE 20-YEAR
hand over al-Qaeda terrorists plan for withdrawing most US
including Osama bin Laden. March 2006 British troops forces by the end of 2016.
The Taliban refuses and on deploy to Helmand province,

“WAR ON
October 7 the US launches the centre of Taliban opium August 21, 2017 President
Operation Enduring Freedom production and a hotbed of Trump refuses to set a
— aka the “war on terror”. insurgency. timeline for US troop

TERROR”
withdrawal, fearing the
June 20, 2002 Operation 2011-14 Coalition forces emergence of “a vacuum
Herrick begins — this was the facilitate a transition to for terrorists”.

34 • The Sunday Times Magazine

 out. You know that if you don’t, maybe
they’ll get a knock on the door that night
— then how are you going to feel when
they send you pictures of his family being
killed that night? And you didn’t make a call
or you didn’t send an email.”
Mercer “found the best way of working
was to use people I knew and guys on the
ground”. With the help of Pratt and others,
Mercer’s friend Naveed and his family were
eventually rescued. Pratt explains that he
would give the evacuees “quick, clear briefs
over WhatsApp”. Prioritising who would
make “the list” to get out and who wouldn’t
was brutal but necessary. “You had to think
of people as units instead of as people.” For
weeks he barely slept.
Pratt says the power of the veteran
network is “a big endorsement of getting
on the piss”. Tongue in cheek, but true:
many Afghan lives were saved because
someone had met someone over beers
and was now in a position to “call in a
favour”. But it wasn’t all success. Pratt’s
wife, Jo, recalls “coming down in the
morning and getting the tally of who got
out. It was gradually getting worse.”
All told, Pratt was able to co-ordinate the
rescue of more than 70 Afghans. He is the
first to praise those on the ground in Kabul
— such as Captain Aaron Nunkoosing
and the other members of the Parachute
Regiment. “People [were] coming to us
nonstop, asking, ‘Can you help out with
this, can you help out with that?’ ”
Nunkoosing recalls. “ ‘This man or woman
is much more important than the
thousands of others outside the gate.’ ”
He says this was frustrating. “Then my
regimental headquarters emailed me with
a specific request.” Major Adam Jowett had
commanded a composite company of Royal
Irish Rangers and Parachute Regiment
soldiers at Musa Qala in 2006, seeing some
of the most intense combat of the war
in Afghanistan. His translator from that
time was now safe in Europe but the
interpreter’s brother was in Kabul. “Jowett
emailed me and said, ‘Look mate, they’ve
GETTY IMAGES, REX
Nunkoosing knew how instrumental
HOW ONE MAN’S RESCUE WAS Jowett’s interpreter had been in saving
ARRANGED ON WHATSAPP British lives. He went to the airport gates
to look for the family himself. “I couldn’t
find them. The first problem was trying to
pin down where they were.” The second
problem was communication, the language
barrier and the suspicion. “We weren’t sure
I want you to create a sign that will attract who was friendly. There was always this
the attention of Paratroopers when you are thing in the back of my mind, like, ‘These
close.
are insecure comms and I don’t know the
I will tell you what to write now 19:28 ✓✓ other person on the end of this chat — is
this genuine?’ ”
Ok 19:28 He ascertained that the family were close
Big and bold 19:28 ✓✓ to the back gate of the airport through
pictures they were sending by WhatsApp
Not that … message or email. “But there was so much going on
to follow 19:29 ✓✓
at the back gate that we couldn’t get close,
Ok 19:30 and we tried two or three times. I’d pass a
message to them via an email to Jowett in
I HATE the UK, then I’d talk to the guys who were
CRAPHATS 19:30 ✓✓
maintaining security on the gate and say,
‘Can you try and ID these people?’ ” Going
You
I HATE into the crowd and calling names was not
CRAPHATS an option. “You’re going to highlight people
Should I write this ?? 19:30
who are potential targets to the Taliban.”
It took about 36 hours to find the family
Yes 19:31 ✓✓ in the crowd. “I remember seeing the
interpreter’s brother as he came through
holding one of his kids. They’d taken a
battering to get through the crowd. To get
them in was a great feeling.”
This family was the first of many that
Nunkoosing helped. “There were some
people in the ops room rightly saying we
shouldn’t be doing that for individuals,”
Nunkoosing says, “because there are Arap
people out there that we can’t get. But there
was just this ethos of do good where you
can because there’s nothing we can do for
the people we cannot physically get to.”
He and others would use a phone’s
location services to guide people to the
gates, past the Taliban checkpoints, and
use identification signals — such as telling
people to turn an empty water bottle upside
down in their right hand — in order to
ensure the right people were pulled out of
Digital Dunkirk: a paratrooper messages the crowd at the airport gates. “But as soon

just killed [my interpreter’s] dad,’ ” a man he is trying to identify in the crowd. as you’ve done that a few times, everyone
Nunkoosing recalls. “He said, ‘Now his He asks him to make a sign reading, “I hate else would do it, so you had to keep on
family are on the run and they’re trying to craphats”. “Craphats” is Para slang for changing the identifier.” Nunkoosing
get in. Can you help them?’ ” members of other regiments would mark himself with bright pieces ➤

January 2018 The US deploys
troops in rural areas and
launches air strikes on opium
labs. The Taliban retaliates
with terror attacks in Kabul
that kill more than 115 people.
February 2020 The Doha
peace agreement is signed
by the US and Taliban. A date
of May 1, 2021 is set for US
troop withdrawal.
April 14, 2021 President Biden
announces that the US will not
meet the May 1 deadline and
releases a new plan for a full
withdrawal by September 11.
August 13, 2021 With the
Taliban overrunning the
country, Operation Pitting
— the evacuation of British
nationals and eligible Afghans
— begins. Dominic Raab, the
foreign secretary, is criticised
for staying on holiday in Crete.
August 15, 2021 The Taliban
takes Kabul and the Afghan
government collapses. Raab
returns home the next day.
August 28, 2021 The last
British troops leave
Afghanistan. The final US
troops follow on August 30.
September-December 2021
The Afghan economy collapses
as foreign governments
freeze assets and aid. Girls
are banned from secondary
schools and universities, and
the Taliban says LGBT rights
will no longer be recognised.
May 7, 2022 Women are told
to stay home unless necessary,
and cover their faces in public.

The Sunday Times Magazine • 35

 of clothing discarded by the crowd, which
he would tuck into his plate-carrier vest in
a way that would be obvious only if you were
looking for it. “I’d say, ‘Look for me but don’t
shout and wave. Just make eye contact with
me. I’ve got a photo of you on my phone.’ ”
unkoosing wasn’t the only person
N
doing off-the-book work at the
gates. “When you were sitting
next to someone in the ops room
in the Baron hotel they were
probably doing a similar thing, but
neither of us wanted to tell each
other because we felt like we were
going to get in trouble for it at some stage.
No one had told us to do it, so there was a
bit of uncertainty.” Together, though, all
these men helped people escape. “I don’t
think we’ll ever know how many Afghan
civilians died,” Nunkoosing says.
After two weeks of chaos, bloodshed and
uncertainty, the last British troops finally
left Kabul on August 28. The last plane out
was piloted by the RAF’s Flight Lieutenant
Robert Manson, who had joined the RAF
during the peak of British involvement in
Afghanistan, though had never served in
the country. He was on leave when he
received the call that he would be deployed
to airlift people out of the country, and
flew out via an airbase in the Middle East
before piloting a C-130 aircraft into Kabul.
PA
Due to Covid restrictions, Manson
couldn’t talk face to face with the locals
he had been called in to evacuate, and his
first experience of meeting Afghans was
watching them board as refugees into the
back of his aircraft. “They all looked wiped
out,” he says. “Knackered. Most of them had
their whole lives packed into a carrier bag.
I was struck by the number of kids. My
sister had a five-month-old baby who was
about the same age as one of the children.
I got quite choked up thinking about how
different their lives were. Once we got
airborne there was a sense of relief —
and then they all went to sleep.”
Manson and his crew continued to bring
people and material out of Kabul until
finally there was only one more mission
to be flown. The fewer troops were at the
airfield, the more precarious the situation
Above: a packed RAF aircraft
carries 265 evacuees from
Kabul; a total of 17,000 people
were rescued in Operation
Pitting. Left: the final troops
join the exodus on August 28
for those left behind, so Manson wanted
to waste no time in getting out to them.
At HKIA, his aircraft was loaded with men
and equipment. Much of Britain’s men
and materials had come in and out of the
country in aircraft like this one. This would
be the final sortie of the 20-year war. As
they taxied to the runway, Manson felt
obliged to broadcast a transmission “for
everyone who had been there”. “This is
the last UK aircraft to leave Kabul,” he
transmitted. “Thank you for everything
you have done. For everyone that lost their
lives here, we will remember them.” n
Escape from Kabul: The Inside Story
by Levison Wood and Geraint Jones
is published by Hodder & Stoughton
on March 16 at £25. Wood served in
Afghanistan in 2008 and is now an
explorer who chronicles his journeys
in books and documentaries. Jones
served in Afghanistan in 2009-10 and
writes historical fiction
The Sunday Times Magazine • 37
 So what if the Mamils
think it’s cheating?
My big, ugly electric
bike is a game-changer,
says Captain Fast,
James May
PHOTOGRAPHS BY PAUL STUART

38 • The Sunday Times Magazine

 SEE YOU
LATER, CHAPS
The Sunday Times Magazine • 39

ccording to some “proper” cyclists I know
— by which I mean keen people with neon
jackets and tight leggings — I’m “cheating”
because I’ve bought an electric bike.
I don’t like to be called a cheat. Most of
my cycling is still done on conventional
bikes, powered only by my extensive
knowledge of London cabbie shelters and
kebab shops, not the national grid. But
curiosity eventually overcame me, not least
because I think the electric bike really could
change the world.
To my mind there have been three pivotal
moments in the evolution of the bicycle.
The first was the realisation, against what
must have been the prevailing instinct, that
balancing on two wheels was even possible.
The second was the creation of the so-called
“safety bicycle”; that is, one with a geared
chain drive and two equally sized wheels,
a huge step on from the penny-farthing.
After that the bicycle underwent
incremental improvements: better brakes,
lighter materials, pneumatic tyres, LED
lights, various gear systems and of course
the aerodynamic seat post. The third step
change came when battery technology
allowed us to add electricity to the mix.
To be absolutely clear, I’m not talking
here about pure electric bicycles, which
should really be classed as motorcycles
(thereby requiring a registration plate and
what have you). I mean the electrically
assisted bike, or pedelec, which is based
on a symbiotic expression of the human-
machine relationship that might have
been conceived in Yorkshire, because it
recognises that you don’t get owt for nowt.
Pedal the bike and the battery-motor
combo matches your input (hence
“assisted”); stop pedalling and the
assistance cuts out. I think pensions used
to work in a similar way. Not only does
this system neatly sidestep the laws
PAUL STUART FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE
defining a “powered vehicle”, but it also
recognises the shortcomings of Li-ion
batteries. I’ve argued before that,
though they have done wonders
for laptops, mobile phones,
rechargeable torches and
even garden machinery,
they’re still not good enough
for big and heavy things such
as cars. But on a bike they
can be accommodated without completely
ruining the original idea.
The pedelec definitely has legs (see what
I did?). In response to the accusation of
cheating, I say this: you are still riding a
bike, but for the same amount of effort you
can go further or faster or a bit of both.
More important, the bike can carry more
stuff. The bicycle can now discharge many
of the short-haul jobs we currently do in
motor vehicles. And by empowering the
idea of the bicycle, the pedelec may yet do
much to save its great enemy, the car, since
it can help remove the car from the areas
where it is perceived as being problematic:
towns and cities.
In case you think e-biking is just
something else that the south’s media
luvvies have embraced, well, when Dan
Walker (he of Strictly) was recently side-
swiped by a car on his morning commute
to Sheffield train station, he was riding an
electrically assisted Gocycle. So it’s the
north’s media luvvies as well.
Round my way, the parental classes
are turning up at the local school in the
morning on pedelec bikes towing tumbrels
of children. The city is now full of assisted
cargo bikes, squadrons of them scattering
to do the job of one delivery van that has
to plod around a whole route. For decades
the British Standard untimely demise has
been “under the wheels of a bus”, but it
might now just as easily be arse-first into
a front-mounted pannier of organic
butternut squash.
I THINK THE
ELECTRIC BIKE
COULD CHANGE
THE WORLD. I
HAVEN’T RIDDEN
MY MOTORBIKE
IN MONTHS
Pedelec tech is, in turn, inspiring a new
class of half-human-powered trikes and
covered quadricycles — very small vans, in
effect — for rapid-response local delivery.
They are being trialled by the likes of UPS.
An aside: the late and oft-mocked Sir Clive
Sinclair was absolutely spot-on, and far
ahead of his time, with his vision of electric
urban mobility. He just had the format
slightly wrong with the C5 and he was let
down by the battery and motor technology
of his time. Towards the end he was
working on pedelec bikes. RIP.
The rise of the pedelec will cause disquiet
in some sectors of our fragmented and
annoyingly sectarian road community (what
about road tax, what about insurance and
numberplates, too many bike lanes, blah
blah bloody blah), but I don’t see how it can
possibly be a bad thing. Not all bikes will be
like this, most probably don’t need to be.
But this tech greatly broadens the efficacy of
the humble bicycle, increases its appeal to
many and makes it accessible to people who
might have otherwise struggled with one.
I’ve used electric bikes to transport a
toolkit weighing more than the bike and
some truly gargantuan bags of groceries.
In contrast, or consequence, I haven’t
ridden my 125cc motorcycle for months.
Given that they’ve been around for far
less time than electric cars, they’ve caught
on remarkably quickly. In part this is
thanks to advances in battery technology
and power-management software spun off
from laptops. It’s also because people are
discovering new uses for them.
For evidence of how quickly they are
evolving, look no further than your local
bike shop, online or physical, to see the
many and varied types, from road bikes,
electrically assisted mountain bikes,
folders, hybrid bikes for commuting, some
with traditional chains for transferring
power, some with carbon-fibre belts,
single-speeders and those, like mine, with
gears. It has the feel of nascent industry
chasing a rapidly growing market.
Anyway, to my e-bike. Remember, as
you read this, that I think pedelecs are
world-changing. You just have to
choose the right one — and I’m not
convinced I did. It’s a VanMoof
S3, from the Netherlands, where
a bicycle is regarded as little
more than an elaborate item of
footwear, so it ought to be pretty
good. It has regular pedals and a
chain running to the rear wheel but
a motorised hub on the front one,
meaning it’s all-wheel drive. It’s not a
cheap thing, at £2,248, but VanMoof has
regular sales of ex-display bikes, and I
bought mine at a discount of some £500
just because of a small scratch on the top
tube and a scuff on the rear mudguard.
This sort of thing would normally
bother me, because I think bicycles
are objets and I hate seeing ➤
The Sunday Times Magazine • 41
them mistreated. But somehow it’s not an
issue with the VanMoof because it’s very,
very ugly. Parked next to my peerless
home-built Threespeeder, a bike of
unrivalled elegance, you can see just how
thickset and lumpen it is. Everything about
it is massive and a bit grim. The frame is a
THE PICK OF
sort of satin anthracite, but the mudguards
and rear rack are in brushed coal dust. The
wheels are another shade of black. There is
no relief granted by cheery decals or shiny
bits. It’s a right minger.
And why is it so enormous? The wheels
THE E-BIKES
and tyres wouldn’t look out of place on a Nick Rufford picks five electric bikes to suit anyone,
step-through moped, and add drag. I accept
that the frame tubes have to accommodate from classy commuters to off-road enthusiasts
the battery and electronics, but they still
seem wantonly thickset. Meanwhile the
rear luggage rack is laughably small and Electric bikes can open up a whole rule of thumb is to look for one that
barely good enough for a backie. new world of cycling, especially if weighs less than 20kg. Otherwise
I can almost hear the designers, in their your usual commute includes inclines when you get to a train station you’ll
initial meeting, saying, “Sho [in a Dutch or you have to carry a heavy bag. struggle to carry the thing up the
accent], now we have the motor, we can There’s the added advantage of stairs. Other points to note when
make a really shexy army-proof bicycle.” arriving at your destination less buying are battery capacity, which
It weighs 21kg, and there are pedelec road sweaty, and, if your e-bike uses a affects range, and the number of
bikes — albeit expensive ones — weighing belt rather than a chain, oil-free too. gears; important if your journeys are
not much more than half that. As in cars, Increasingly, electrically assisted bikes hilly. Bikes bought online benefit from
weight begets weight, and narrower rims are being used off-road to take the distance-selling laws, which mean
and tyres would feel better and save energy. grunt work out of hill climbs. Think of you’re entitled to a full refund if you
There is some good thinking on the bike. them like a ski lift — a motor helps on tell the supplier within 14 days and
The lights are integrated and pretty good. the way up so you can enjoy the return it within another 14. Buying
The chain is fully enclosed. The disc brakes descent. Choosing the e-bike to suit from a physical shop can make it
are powerful enough for great skids. There your needs is the tricky bit. A good easier to get the bike repaired.
is a four-speed internal rear hub, and four
speeds is plenty for a rider whose
powerband is swelled by the miracle of
electricity. The electronics are all housed in
a removable module running through the
top tube and the S3 can be brought to life,
customised and even updated over the air,
Tesla-style, through the accompanying
smartphone app. As a lad I never imagined
I would need a supercomputer in my pocket
to ride my bike.
Controls on the bike itself amount to just
a couple of small buttons, one under each
thumb. Holding the right button down
while coasting toggles you through the
four levels of motor assistance. Holding it BEST FOR A BUDGET BEST FOR PORTABILITY
while pedalling gives you “turbo boost”: Pure Flux One Brompton Electric
temporary full power for a daunting hill ➤ Price £1,099 Price From £2,800
Weight 17.5kg Weight 16.6kg (two-speed),
Range 25 miles 17.4kg (six-speed)
Number of gears 0 Range 20-45 miles
Number of gears 2 or 6
IT’S HORRIBLY EASY A smart-looking, lightweight city bike
with a range that should cover most Brompton didn’t want to spoil the
TO THINK, SOD THIS, commutes. Made by Pure — better
known for its e-scooters — the Flux
design of its easy-to-fold bike, so put
the batteries in a rucksack that attaches
CRANK IT UP TO One follows the philosophy of simple
is best. It’s single speed, so unlikely to
to the front. It makes it easier to cart
around, especially if you’re getting on
FOURTH GEAR AND cause you a hernia if you have to hump and off public transport. Brompton
it up a flight of steps, but it doesn’t do claims a range of up to 45 miles but
TURN PEDALLING well on gradients. A carbon-fibre belt you’ll get only half that with the

INTO SOMETHING substitutes for a chain. Quick-charge

batteries can be topped up to 80 per
electrical assistance at a comfortable
level. For taller riders there’s a version
GESTURAL cent in three hours. with higher handlebars.

The Sunday Times Magazine • 43

or a churlish overtake. The left button
sounds the (customisable, obviously)
electronic bell/klaxon/clown horn.
All VanMoofs have automatic
transmission, which I’m fairly confident
no one has ever wanted on a bicycle. To
use the confusing social media meme:
Nobody:
VanMoof: Let’s make the gears automatic.
I think this is a classic case of a feature
being incorporated because someone
worked out that it could be, but hasn’t
stopped to think if it should be. It’s all quite
clever, in that the gear-change “strategy”
can be set for various terrains in the app,
but, alas, the hub does not lend itself to
shifting under load. There is a half-
revolution hiatus between second and third
gears, which manifests itself while riding as
the chain, briefly, falling off.
And so, heeding its users, VanMoof
recently added a manual-shifting option. BEST FOR ADVENTURE the bike is robust enough for a rugged
It’s a doddle, really. Two quick presses on Specialized Turbo Levo SL Comp descent, though at this price I’d worry
the right thumb button changes up, two Price £6,500 about taking a tumble. It has hydraulic
quick presses on the same while holding Weight 19.4kg discs for all-condition braking and
the left button changes down. There’s Range Five hours a sturdy alloy frame with 150mm of
(another) problem, though. All of this works Number of gears 11 rear travel to soak up encounters with
only if you are turning the pedals, which ruts and boulders. A “Mission Control”
demolishes the great advantage of hub At close to £7,000, this bike is app lets you adjust the level of
gears over derailleurs; namely that you obviously not for the mass market, assistance from the motor, eking out
can shift while freewheeling or even at a but you can pin a picture of it on your the battery life so you don’t run out
standstill. So when slowing down on the wall and dream. The motor is powerful at the bottom of a steep hill. Do shop
approach to a red light (I accept that this enough to push you up steep trails and around for the best price.
is hypothetical in cycling) you will be
thumbing the buttons while turning the
pedals but also braking while the bike is
trying to give you electrical assistance
because, well, you’re turning the pedals. It’s
madness, I tell you, and made me nostalgic
for the little bar-mounted gear lever of yore.
To ride it feels big and imposing; a bit like
driving an SUV after years in regular
hatchbacks. I generally ride at assistance
levels one and two, but let’s be honest, it’s
horribly easy to think, sod this, and crank
it up to four and turn pedalling into
something gestural. You can spot when
people are doing this because their legs
aren’t going fast enough for the speed of BEST FOR COOL COMMUTING BEST FOR HIPSTERS
the bike. Don’t do this for long because you MiRider One Tenways CGO600
will drain the battery. You definitely don’t Price £1,595 Price £1,499
want to run out miles from home, because Weight 17.3kg Weight 15kg
then you are left with just a very heavy Range 45 miles Range 43 miles
bicycle, which really is good exercise. Number of gears 0 Number of gears 0
After a month of hating it, I reached an
agreement with the S3. According to its The MiRider looks like the love child An electrified version of the fixie, that
maker it’s a commuting bike, not a tourer or of a bike and an e-scooter, and staple of cycle couriers and recently
a sporting device. I get this, but that’s not arguably offers the best of both worlds. rediscovered by hipsters: stand at
really how I use it. Most of my cycling is It’s dinky enough to put in a car boot Silicon Roundabout in east London
around London, journeys of between three and folds down to fit into a travel bag and they’re everywhere, complete with
and ten miles. I still do most of this on (a £50 accessory). The battery is jaunty caps. Like the fixie, the Tenways
lightweight regular bikes. But, judiciously detachable for recharging and to is single speed and, being belt-driven,
used, the VanMoof makes a round trip of make the bike less attractive to thieves, there’s no chain to rust or catch on
40 miles something of an amble while still plus it has a rear shock absorber and a your clothes. The battery is adequate
leaving me breathless enough, thank you. lightweight alloy frame. Top tip: take for most commutes and you get alloy
Cheating? I turned 60 a few weeks ago. one for a test ride to make sure you’re wheel rims, hydraulic brakes and LED
The only thing I’m cheating is what the comfortable with its diminutive size. lights as standard.
poet Larkin called “age, and then the only
end of age” n

The Sunday Times Magazine • 45

 SK Y E
M c AL P INE
QUEEN OF TARTS
Just take shop-bought pastry, a flavoursome filling and you’re ready to roll
here is something so pleasing about a tart — Beetroot and
T
or indeed a pie or galette or anything that
involves good ingredients encased in buttery horseradish
pastry. Part of the magic, for me at least, is how
easy and intuitive they are to cook and yet how
galette
good they look when they come out of the I love the earthy sweetness
oven. They also taste and feel as if you’ve of the beetroot with the
made something proper, as if you really know peppery, creamy fire of the
what you’re doing in the kitchen. Yet once horseradish. Everyone has
you’ve dreamt up a flavour combination that different tolerance levels for
tickles your fancy, the rest is as easy as, well, pie. heat, so feel free to add more or
You can, of course, make your own pastry, but I like to less horseradish cream to the
use ready-rolled, either puff or shortcrust, because life crème fraîche, and make sure
is too short (and busy) to faff around with making it to taste as you go. And if you’re
from scratch. pressed for time, you can skip
The only thing to worry about is a soggy bottom: the step where you roast the
blind baking before you add the filling helps, as does beetroot and make this with
avoiding any especially watery toppings. The best trick the ready-cooked kind that
of all is to place a dark metal baking tray upside down you can buy vacuum-packed.
in the oven as it heats. That way, when you put
your tart onto it, the heat radiates directly to the base. Serves 6-8
A pizza stone will do the same job (or better even).
Ingredients
• 500g beetroot, peeled
• 100ml clear honey
• 2 tbsp olive oil
• 220g crème fraîche
• 60-80g horseradish cream
• 320g puff pastry
• 1 egg, lightly beaten
01 Heat the oven to 180C
(200C non-fan). Finely slice
the beetroot into rounds. Line
a roasting tray with kitchen
foil and arrange the sliced
beetroot in it, distributing it
evenly in the tin. Drizzle over
the honey and olive oil and
season generously with salt.
Cover with foil and roast for
25 min, until tender.
02 In a small bowl, combine
the crème fraîche and
horseradish (adding more
horseradish to taste if you
like it hotter).
03 Roll out the pastry on
a baking tray. Spoon the
horseradish mixture into the
middle of the pastry and
spread out, leaving a roughly
5cm border around the edge.
Arrange the slices of beetroot
over the horseradish cream
so the pieces are overlapping
slightly. Brush the exposed
pastry border with egg and
then fold the border over the
beetroot so it slightly overlaps
the filling. Brush the pastry
border with more egg.
04 Transfer the tray to the
oven and bake for 25-30 min
until the pastry is golden.

Fennel and
parmesan tart
This is a wonderfully light
and cheesy tart: the fennel,
just cooked, has a moreishly
crisp texture, which is a lovely
complement to the buttery
pastry. This dish tastes as good
at room temperature as it does
straight from the oven, so ideal
for leftovers, packed lunches
and picnics.
Serves 6-8
Ingredients
• 2 medium-sized fennel
bulbs (about 650g,
untrimmed weight)
• 2 onions (about 200g)
• 150g grated parmesan
• 4 tbsp olive oil
• 60ml double cream
• 250g shortcrust pastry
48 • The Sunday Times Magazine
01 Heat the oven to 180C
(200C non-fan). Thinly slice
the fennel and the onions.
Combine the slivers of veg
in a mixing bowl with the
grated parmesan, olive oil
and cream, then season
generously with salt and
pepper. Set to one side.
02 Roll out the pastry and
drape over a 10in tart dish,
pressing it down into the
nooks and crannies. Prick the
bottom of the pastry all over
with a fork, then blind-bake
in the oven for 15-20 min until
SAVE FOR dry to the touch. Spoon the
fennel and onion into the tart
LATER case and set back in the oven
You can share for 30-40 min until lightly
and save golden all over. Cover with
recipes from kitchen foil if it looks as though
our digital it’s catching. Serve warm or
editions at room temperature.
Gorgonzola
and pear tart
This is halfway between sweet
and savoury. Because of the rich
gorgonzola I think of it as a main
course, perhaps served with
a bitter leaf salad; but it would
work just as well as a pudding,
especially for someone who
doesn’t like really sweet things.
Serves 6-8
Ingredients
• 320g puff pastry
• 1 egg
• 2 pears
• 150g cream cheese
• 150g gorgonzola, at
room temperature
• 50g grated parmesan
01 Heat the oven to 180C
(200C non-fan). Roll out
the pastry. Score a margin,
roughly two fingers wide,
round the sheet of pastry
and then brush the edge
with egg. Bake for 10 min
until very lightly golden and
dry to the touch. Remove
from the oven and set to
one side to cool a little.
02 Quarter the pears (no
need to peel them), then cut
out and discard the core. Slice
each chunk of pear into four
crescent-shaped slices. In
a small bowl, combine the
cream cheese and gorgonzola
and mix together.
03 Spoon the cheese over
the pastry, leaving the margin
exposed. Top the cheese
with the pear slices, neatly
arranged so they’re
overlapping each other, then
GETTY IMAGES
sprinkle over the grated
parmesan. Bake for 15-20 min
until the cheese is melted n
 D RINK ● Will Lyons

Expand your horizons to Tunisia,

Armenia, Peru and beyond
o you know anything about Tunisian wine?” It’s a fascinating time to be a oenophile. Vines are

D
a curious reader inquired recently at an event sprouting up all over the world, from the foothills of
I was hosting. Funnily enough, I had been the Helan mountain range in China to the depths
approached about Tunisia a few weeks of Peru. If choice is what you’re after, you’ve got it.
before and, having consulted both Hugh And a warming climate has led many producers to
Johnson, co-creator of The World Atlas experiment with new grape varieties in a bid to adapt.
of Wine, and Tony Laithwaite, founder of Wine is at its best when it takes us to unfamiliar
The Sunday Times Wine Club and a man territory and nothing beats the thrill of discovering
noted for his explorations into the vinous
unknown, I was eager to learn more.
Bargain a new taste, an exotic smell or unusual textures —
for example, the oily, rich whites produced by Château
Sadly, I couldn’t track down any Tunisian of the Ksara in Lebanon, including the estate’s elegant 2020
products in the UK but it got me thinking about the
fringes of the wine route — countries and regions that
week Blanc de l’Observatoire (allaboutwine.co.uk, £12.49).
When I started out in wine, a wise old head once told
can be filed under “oddities” or “rest of the world”. Most THE BEST me that if you ever see an obscure bottle on a list, it’s
big retailers and supermarkets have one or two in their GAVI DI GAVI always worth trying as it will have to be something really
selection, whether it’s a Canadian riesling (£7.49 at Aldi) Italy (12.5%) special to earn its place. Having tasted my way through
or an obscure grape such as Romania’s peachy, summery Morrisons, a range of unexpected wines available on the high
feteasca regala (try the £7 Cramele Recas at M&S). down from street, I tend to agree. Tunisia? I’ll keep you posted n
£13 to £9
The crisp and
floral white wine
gavi di gavi,
produced in the
northwestern
Piedmont region
from the cortese
grape variety,
provides a
refreshing drop
with plenty of
peachy, appley
flavour. This is
a good-quality
example and
when reduced
to under £10 is
1 2 3 well worth a buy. 4 5 6

1. Puklavec & Friends Cabernet Sauvignon & Merlot 4. 2020 Syrah du Maroc Tandem Alain Graillot et
Macedonia (14%) Waitrose, £8.79 This cheap and Thalvin Morocco (13.5%) The Wine Society, £14.50
cheerful Macedonian red has bright acidity, an inviting This spicy red produced near Casablanca has aromas
plummy flavour and surprising silkiness for the price. of baked fruit including redcurrant, with a silky finish.

2. 2020 Specially Selected Pinot Noir Switzerland 5. 2018 Carpe Diem Bad Boys Moldova (14%)
(13%) Aldi, £9.99 Swiss wine can be tricky to find Majestic, £21.99 A lusciously soft blend of feteasca
but this makes a good introduction. What it lacks in neagra and saperavi grapes with cabernet and merlot,
aromas it makes up for with a mouthwatering texture. this delivers sumptuous notes of blackberry and plum.

3. 2020 Yerevan Areni/Karmrahyut Winemaker’s 6. 2018 Tacama Don Manuel Tannat Peru (14.5%)
JASON ALDEN

Blend Red Armenia (13%) Tanners, £10.95 Here’s a The Sunday Times Wine Club, £24 This hedonistic
sensational, strawberry and raspberry-scented blend inky tannat from the French-born Frédéric Thibaut has
of areni and karmrahyut grapes. Perfect with a roast. juicy dark fruit and spice, with a creamy, oaky finish.

The Sunday Times Magazine • 51

 IN TH E K I T C H E N ● India Knight
My favourite cookbooks beat
googling (almost) every time
kind friend has
A
given me a copy
of The Chatsworth
Cookbook by the late
Dowager Duchess
of Devonshire, née
Deborah Mitford,
and published in
2003. Its opening line
is, “I haven’t cooked
since the war.” This
has catapulted to the top of my
favourite first lines chart, which
previously went: 1. “I write this
sitting in the kitchen sink,” from
I Capture the Castle by Dodie
Smith; 2. “ ‘Take my camel,
dear,’ said my aunt Dot, as she
climbed down from this animal
on her return from High Mass,”
from The Towers of Trebizond by
Rose Macaulay; 3. “It was the
afternoon of my 81st birthday,
and I was in bed with my
catamite when Ali announced
that the archbishop had come
to see me,” from Earthly Powers
by Anthony Burgess.
The Chatsworth Cookbook
was written with the help of
four resident chefs and, perhaps
unexpectedly, is full of food
you’d want to make: spinach
with sorrel, fishcakes with
capers and anchovy
mayonnaise, chocolate cake and
so on. The recipes are generally
not complicated, give or take
the odd seafood bombe. The
Duchess’s annotations — “An
aunt used to say, ‘I love my coat.
It looks so cheap and was so
expensive.’ Like the coat, this
cabbage is one of those dishes
that looks horrid and is
delicious” — make you think
that regardless of when she last
cooked, she understood food.
The book is a joy to read, as
cookbooks should be. The
cabbage, if you’re wondering,
is a pair of Savoys, quartered
52 • The Sunday Times Magazine
through the root but not all the
way down, so they stay whole,
then lavishly buttered, salt and
peppered, covered and baked at
170C for two hours — two
hours! — until they are “a heap”.
As with the ducal cabbage,
there is an enormous amount
to be said for un-timid amounts
of salt, pepper, lemon juice and
either butter or olive oil as the
only adornments for vegetables.
It feels almost embarrassing to
be so basic, but the fact is any
vegetable tastes good this way,
whether you’ve steamed,
boiled, pan-fried or roasted it.
If your sights are set higher,
try a recent book by the
Ottolenghi Test Kitchen called
Extra Good Things. It’s about
embellishments. There are
recipe-recipes, but they all
feature an extra thing —
a sauce, a dressing, a paste,
a sprinkle — that you can use
by itself on anything you like.
In the supermarket I’ll stare at a
prawn and have no idea what to
do with it. So out comes my phone
So a coconut chutney, say, or good, simple recipes that always
a pine-nut crumble topping, work. She’s especially good at
dukkah (a nutty Egyptian spice making a feast out of a small
mix and so worth making, assembly of ingredients that
especially as the good stuff in somehow taste like you’ve done
jars is lunatically expensive), a lot more to them than you
carrot-ginger dressing, or actually have. She taught at
indeed hazelnut praline. Leiths for years, and you feel in
I don’t have a favourite really safe hands.
cookbook as such, more an A good cookbook is like a
ever-evolving top five. But there beloved friend, and I worry
is always at least one volume by about what happens to physical
Jane Lovett in the mix, most cookbooks in a digital age.
recently Just One Pan, the best Young people google recipes,
one-pan book I’ve come across. but not all recipes are the same
Lovett exists outside foodie and good ones are precious. The
trends; she just writes really bestseller charts do still feature

physical cookbooks, but they’re
usually either diet cookbooks or
TV tie-ins: there is no pleasure
in reading them. Two ploddy
lines of introduction and a
ILLUSTRATIONS BY KATE SUTTON. RUTH TOWELL FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE
method: they’re like Haynes
manuals. For me, part of what is
so appealing about recipes is
the sense, as with a novel, of
being drawn into a world,
whether that world is about the
reassuring comfort of the
familiar or the intoxicating thrill
of a completely new place. I love
Liza Tarbuck’s Saturday night
show on Radio 2 and one of
the many things I enjoy is
her reading out what various
listeners are making for their
supper. She understands about
the commonality of food and
how interesting, even eloquent,
other people’s dinners can be.
You don’t get any of that by
googling a recipe. Which isn’t to
say we don’t all do it. For me, it
happens mainly in supermarket
aisles, which put me in a state
of semi-suspended animation.
My brain empties. I stare at a
prawn or a mushroom and have
no idea what to do with it, at
which point my phone comes
out and I type “prawn recipe”.
It’s an extremely hit-and-miss
technique. You can swerve it by
photographing recipes, so they
live quietly in your phone, ready
to tell you what you need to buy,
or by going to specific recipe
sites. I’ve been using Deb
Perelman’s Smitten Kitchen
(smittenkitchen.com), for at
least ten years, though I very
much recommend her physical
cookbooks too n
KNIGHT’S TABLE
Callipo ’Nduja
Spilinga
’Nduja, pronounced
endooya, is, as I’m sure
you know, a kind of
spreadable salami from
Calabria that is spicy
from chillies and smoky
from, um, being smoked.
You can buy it fresh but
also in jars, which keep
for ages in the fridge
once opened, and it is an
extremely useful thing to
have about your person.
Stick some on toasted
bread or a cracker for
a snack. Turn it into an
instant pasta sauce by
mixing with a cupful of
pasta water and stirring
briskly, or stir some into
any kind of ragu. Or stew.
Or use little spoonfuls as
a pizza topping. Or, my
new favourite, stir in a
teaspoonful (or more)
while you’re scrambling
eggs: breakfast of
champions.
I’ve tried loads of the
jarred versions and they
vary fairly wildly in taste
and quality. My favourite
is this one, which you
can get from Ocado and
elsewhere. It’s spicy but
not too spicy, smoky
but not too smoky, and
the only ingredients are
pork, pork fat, chillies
and olive oil — unlike
some other brands I’ve
tried. If you’re vegan
and have read this far,
Belazu does a “vegan
’nduja”, which is a bit
like saying “dry rain” but
is actually pretty good,
with roasted peppers
replacing the meat,
and just as versatile. IK
£7 for 200g;
ocado.com
The Sunday Times Magazine • 53
 F A R M I N G Jeremy Clarkson ●
Britain’s new farming policy looks
like a bigger balls-up than Brexit
ust before Britain freed
J
itself from the EU, Boris
Johnson appeared at a
cattle market and, with
much gusto and great
enthusiasm, told farmers
they would have nothing
to worry about. He would
look after us. We could go
home and relax in a hot
bath. And then the
square root of bugger all
happened for quite a long time.
I used to get £83,298 a year
from the EU, which of course is
a huge amount of money. But
there was a quid pro quo. I had
to sell my meat and bread and
barley at a loss. It was idiotic
socialism but, selfishly, I quite
liked it. And so did you because
it meant you could afford to
feed your children, rather than
eating them.
Then came news that in 2021
I’d be getting only £73,138.
Then, in 2023, this would drop
to £48,149 and it would keep
on dropping until, in 2028, I’d
get absolutely nothing at all.
I’d be in a free market, which is
fine, but I’d be competing with
foreign farmers who would still
be getting a leg up from their
governments. And that isn’t
fine at all.
Sure, you’d still get your
cheap food from the abroad, but
British farmers would be in the
poor house, sucking on clumps
of moss to stay alive.
And then, in 2018, two years
after we learnt the grants would
be going, the government
climbed onto its soapbox and
announced that instead of being
paid money for selling stuff at a
loss, farmers would get “public
money for public goods”.
This sounded great, and
all over the land sixth-form
beardies and ramblers jumped
up and down with glee. But hang
on. What are “public goods”,
exactly? More footpaths?
Because farmers can’t sell those.
And nor would we get very far if
we turned up at the market with
some peat bogs and a 400-acre
wetland habitat full of rare
grasses and wading birds. Is
there a market for avocet? I
think probably not because I bet
it’s disgusting.
It caused me to think that the
Packhamites and the Mayists

had wormed their way into the
government think tanks, and
that in future I’d get money only
for opening up visitor centres
to Labourite mad people who
wanted to experience the
healing power of bees.
Food? Nah. In a world where
that comes to your door on the
back of a moped, and meat is
murder, it wasn’t important. In
the new order worms mattered
more, and voles and earwigs.
As a result of all this I’ve
been farming for the past four
years with absolutely no idea
where things were headed.
I didn’t know what these
“public goods” were. No one
did. There was just this
gnawing, all-pervading despair,
a sense that our future was in
the hands of militant eco-
lunatics who hated cows and
a government that, let’s be
honest, hasn’t exactly covered
itself in glory on any front so far.
They kept saying the detail
ILLUSTRATIONS BY BEN CHALLENOR
was coming but I was expecting
another HS2. Another Brexit.
Another broken-down aircraft
carrier. But then the detail
arrived in a document that’s
more than an inch thick.
And you know what? I have
a horrible feeling that I may
have been right. A horrible
feeling that was cemented into
reality this morning when
Cheerful Charlie, my land
agent, boinged into my office
wearing a grin as wide as
Dartmouth naval college.
I can understand why because
instead of one basic payment
there are now 250 schemes I can
sign up to, each of which will
come with a raft of forms and
code numbers. His billable hours
will skyrocket. And I’ll have to
sit there with matchsticks in my
eyes as he works out, to the
nearest square centimetre, how
much echium we are growing.
And how many inches of hedge
have been trimmed and how
many boggy and sad places have
been created. Because this is
what Johnny Government is
now paying for.
There’s other stuff too. If I’m
on the Isles of Scilly I can get
£279 a hectare for grazing
cattle, but I’ve just looked out of
the window and I’m not on the
Isles of Scilly so that doesn’t
work for me. I can get £10.38
There will be a soil police, a woodland
police and a curlew police. And you,
the taxpayer, will pay for them
if I make a breeding area for
skylarks but that won’t work
either because the badgers I
have on the farm will eat
whatever eggs they lay. I can
also get £90 for shooting deer,
£50 for squirrels and £5,500
for wasting a rhododendron
bush. But there is some good
news: I can now get a grant to
maintain the 40 miles of
drystone walls that crisscross
the farm.
This, however, is
complicated. If I get Gerald to
maintain my walls, I get £15 per
100 metres. But if he has to
restore them, I can get £31.91
per metre. And what’s the
difference between maintaining
and restoring? I don’t know, but
I bet the government has set up
a “wall police” that will tour the
land in their rented Vauxhalls
making sure I don’t get the big
cash for restoring when all I’m
doing is maintaining.
So what about food, which,
after all, is the whole point?
Well, I’ve waded through most
of the document but so far
there’s barely any mention of it.
It’s like they’ve said “food
damages the environment so
let’s not bother with it. Better
the soil is used to store carbon.”
Which means there will be a
soil police too. And a woodland
police. And a footpath police.
And a curlew police. And you,
the taxpayer, will have to pay for
all of them, and what do I get?
About half of what I got when
we were in the EU.
And why is any of this
necessary? When I walk round
Diddly Squat Farm each day
I am always overwhelmed by
a sense that it’s not really mine.
A house comes and eventually
goes. So does a car and a tree
and so do we. Even the sun will
one day go out, but when it does
and all life on Earth ends, these
high, brashy hills in the
Cotswolds will still be here.
Many of us get a bit giddy
when we sit in a desert and
contemplate the immensity of
the night sky. Well, I sometimes
get that same giddiness when
I’m walking around Diddly
Squat. “Forever” is a concept
we humans struggle to
comprehend.
And there’s more. Only
about 7.5 per cent of the Earth’s
surface is covered in soil good
enough to grow the food the
world needs. And I’m conscious
every time I drive out of a field
and leave great big clods on the
road that it will be washed into
the drains and then into the
rivers and then out to sea,
where it will vanish. Farming
has done that to my head.
Which is why, before leaving a
field, I always find a bit of hard
core or grass and do doughnuts
to clean the tyres. It’s
environmental best practice.
In short, I feel compelled as a
farmer to try to keep this tiny
bit of land in the best possible
shape. I want you to enjoy the
food I grow here. I want you to
enjoy the views. And I want to
take care of everything. And I’ve
met a lot of farmers now and all
of them think the same way n
The Sunday Times Magazine • 55

A L IF E
Head of space exploration at the UK Space Agency, 41
ackson was born in West
J
Sussex and grew up in
London. After completing
degrees in physics at
Imperial College London
and astronautics and
space engineering at
Cranfield University she
spent seven years working at
the European Space Agency’s
mission control for the
International Space Station
(ISS). Jackson played a key
role in Tim Peake’s mission
to the ISS in 2016. She has
written two books for
children, sharing her passion
for spaceflight. She lives in
Swindon with her partner,
Chris, a town planner.
In the mornings you never want
to see me before 6am — I’m just
not a pleasant person to be
around that early. Breakfast is
fruit and nuts with some organic
yoghurt from a local dairy. Then
I get straight on with the day.
Space has always fascinated
me. At 16 I went to Space School
[a residential course run by
Leicester University] and it
opened my eyes to the fact that
the UK had its own sector. In
sixth form I emailed Nasa to ask
if I could do work shadowing
there. Amazingly, they said yes.
I was fortunate to have parents
who encouraged me to think
anything was possible. I saw
everything there — the training
facilities, scientists growing food
in labs, the Apollo moon rocks
— and I sat in mission control.
Becoming an astronaut wasn’t
the dream. I felt no desire to get
on top of a rocket that is really
a controlled bomb and live in
cramped, smelly conditions.
Mission control captured my
heart because I love problem-
solving and teamwork.
62 • The Sunday Times Magazine
IN TH E
Libby Jackson
My mission control dream
came true when I got to be a
flight controller and director
working for the International
Space Station. The control
centre looks just like it does in
[the film] Apollo 13. It has the
same vibe as a large religious
space — quiet, beautifully lit and
sombre. I worked with people
in space agencies all around the
world keeping the $100 billion
space station — a unique
laboratory in orbit — and the
people who live on it safe.
These days I can walk to work
[at the UK Space Agency in
Swindon], which is marvellous
because I love to be outdoors.
I also travel quite a bit and
recently was in the Arctic
Circle for a meeting with the
D AY
WORDS OF WISDOM
Best advice I was given
It will be OK in the end, so
if it’s not OK, it’s not the end
Advice I’d give
If you don’t ask, you
won’t get
What I wish I’d known
The only person stopping
you is you
exploration programme of the
European Space Agency (ESA).
Lunch is usually snatched
but I like to sneak out for some
fresh air. In the afternoon I
might spend time with our ESA
colleagues. My work involves
lots of co-ordination and
steering people and money in
the right directions. I want to
ensure that the UK gets the best
out of our investment in the
ESA’s exploration programme
and all our activities. That
includes going to Mars or the
moon and supporting our
research academics. A big part
of my job is also communicating
what the point of it all is,
because it’s taxpayers’ money.
With billions of galaxies
there’s no way that we are the
only life form. Scientists will
certainly have more answers
in the coming decades. I need
to make sure that the UK is
playing its part and that what
we learn from space benefits
people on Earth.
I finish by 6pm. I’m training
for my third London Marathon,
so I like to go for a run in the
evening. For dinner, Chris and
I usually cook something like
a stir-fry together.
Being recognised with an
OBE in the new year’s honours
list meant so much to me. The
education programme I ran
with our partners reached more
than ten million schoolchildren
in the UK. The space sector
employs about 50,000 people
and we need people from every
possible background. With our
outreach we plant the seeds and
wait to see where trees will
grow. That is an amazing legacy
for the mission.
I have a strong circadian
rhythm and if I’m not in bed by
11pm, the next day goes horribly
wrong. Even when I was young,
I didn’t want to go to nightclubs
and the night shifts in mission
control were not my thing.
A sleep scientist on the ISS
showed me graphs of how your
body responds to lack of sleep.
It convinced me that sleep really
is the most important thing n
Interview by Helen Cullen.
STUART HARRISON
A Galaxy of Her Own: Amazing
Stories of Women in Space
and Space Explorers by Libby
Jackson are available now