Live.Keep.Tell. | Experiences Shape Our World

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Live.Keep.Tell.

Experiences Shape our World

Edited by Harriet Compston & Jonathan Schultz

Ambient Media Worldwide London

This is a book of experiences.

Copyright © 2018 by Ambient Media Worldwide Ltd All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed “Attention: Permissions Coordinator,” at the address below.

Disclaimer. Any reference in this title “Live.Keep.Tell.” to any person, use of images or photographs of any person, or any reproduction of a quote from any person, or extract from a third party publication are in no way intended to constitute or imply any endorsement or recommendation of, or association with, Ambient Media Worldwide Ltd, its products or services or any of its officers or employees by any person.

Live.Keep.Tell.

Ambient Media Worldwide Ltd Arch 65, Cambridge Grove Hammersmith, London W6 0LD www.livekeeptell.com Printed in the United Kingdom First published 2018 Original drawings copyright © 2018 by Julia L Schultz British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data ISBN 978-1-9999286-8-1

Experience An event or occurrence which leaves an impression on someone.

- Oxford English Dictionary

The only of know experi

y source wledge is ience.

Albert Einstein

Introduction I remember the day so clearly. A hot Sydney summer’s day. Blue skies punctuated by the swift movement of Indian Mynas and Galahs, cicadas buzzing in the background. After weeks of waiting I was standing in front of our house counting down the last few minutes. Finally, I spotted the car – the one containing my dad with his restrained grin driving around the corner in his aviators.

For years, my dad had been wishing for a new car. I had sat with him on and off for weeks studying brochures, helping him pick out the colour, options, model and upholstery. I was with him when he placed the order and now, here I was, a boy not much more than eight years old, about to sit in our own brand new car for the very first time.

Dad pulled up in front of the house. I recall in vivid detail the sound the door latch made when I opened it and the secure thud it made when closed. The muted soundtrack allowed my senses to capture every detail.

The stereo, dashboard, array of buttons, automatic gear stick, fabric upholstery, spotless floor mats, lush carpet – and that new car smell.

I looked for the handle to wind down the window but remembered we had electric windows in the front and a sun roof. We took it for a drive – and that was it. It was everything I’d hoped for – and more. The experience, sitting there, blew my mind.

Of course, the natural urge of most humans with a great story is to share it. So, later that day I ran down the lane to one of my closest friends and gave him the full, dramatic account of the experience pausing on each and every detail. The message spread. Six months later, his dad took delivery of the exact same car (plus or minus a few optional extras).

In 2002, I co-founded a marketing agency specialising in the creation of “brand experiences”. As the agency evolved, this childhood story kept resurfacing and seemed to encapsulate perfectly what we were aiming to achieve for our clients: creating experiences which engage

with an audience, change their behaviour and provide opportunities for them to influence their peers, friends and family through the stories of the experiences they share.

Reflecting on this, I was curious to see what other experience-led stories I could find which had a similar or greater impact and I began to consider a few questions. How powerful are experiences in influencing behavioural change? Is there a way to better understand experiences and how they affect us? And, in studying them what can we learn to help us create better experiences for our clients?

Why focus on Experiences?

From the moment we are born our experiences begin to shape us.

They help us determine what is safe, what is comfortable, who to trust, who to form relationships with, what we like, what works, what doesn’t.

Later in life, they influence our choice of careers, inventions, interests, purchases, partners and so forth.

Depending on the impact and importance of our experiences, they leave us with memories. It’s these memories which stay with us and take on the important role of guiding our conscious and sub-conscious decisions. They fundamentally change the way we behave.

But, importantly for us humans (having a unique and impressive storytelling ability) not only do our memories provide the basis for our decisions, they also form the basis of our stories. And, it’s through the telling of our stories that our experiences live on to influence others.

Like threads of an endless tapestry, the network of influence extends to become part of the greater world, entwining with other stories and affecting many people.

Therefore, experiences shape our world. Q.E.D.!

Live.Keep.Tell.

If there is a way to distill how experiences shape our world, from this observation, it can be summarised in three words: Live, Keep and Tell. Experiences we live leave memories which change our behaviour to keep providing us with stories to tell.

At our agency, this has become our mantra and defines our approach

to creating an experience.

Thank You. Before I considered compiling this book I was simply looking to gather a set of stories which highlight the power experiences have in influencing people’s behaviour to gain a better understanding of those most likely to have a lasting impact. As research developed I was finding an extremely rich and diverse range of stories – all of which fitted this Live.Keep.Tell. form – and I started to think that I needed to pull them together and share them. So, inspired by an old friend who had recently published a book, I was compelled to take this project one step further and commit some of these stories to print.

But, to truly bring these stories to life, I needed some help and was fortunate enough to meet Harriet. With an impressive journalistic background, Harriet has been furious in seeking out, researching and writing many of the stories which are as diverse as they are inspiring.

Stories of love, loss, friendship, hardship and happiness; all of them illustrating the power of experiences. It’s fair to say this book would not exist without Harriet and all the people willing to be interviewed and share their stories with us. Thank you.

I hope you enjoy this book. If you have a Live.Keep.Tell. story you would like to share with us, we’d love to hear from you: stories@livekeeptell.com. The stories you share will influence others and no doubt help shape our world.

Acknowledge the power of experiences.

Don’t be afraid to let them find you.

Share your stories as only humans can.

Let experiences shape your world.

– Jonathan Schultz, 2018

Contents Buccaneers and 20 Buried Gold 20 ‘No child turned away’ 22 Inside-Out 26 The Butcher and The Dog 28 Why? 30 The Purpose of Life 32 Vote of Conscience 34 ‘Healthy, safe and happy’ 36 In Cold Blood 38 Godfather of Skateboarding 40 Lucky Cows 42 ‘Charlize, I’ve shot them’ 44 ‘Creativity takes courage’ 46 Do Not Iron 48 ‘The Lord said unto him’ 50 Surfing ‘Charlie’s Point’ 52 ‘Building the impossible’ 54 The Garden of Earthly Delights 56 ‘My parents didn’t want me to act’ 58 Levels and Altitudes 60 Death at the Oval 62 ‘We are gentlemen 64 of Japan’ 64 ‘It’s not enough to put a pound coin in the charity box’ 66 The Leap of Faith 68 The Power of a 70 Friendly Face 70 Tara, the Elephant 72 Hooks and Loops 74 Voyeurs 76 An Awakening in Cambodia 78 ‘I could see Harry and the wizard school very clearly’ 80 Hiero II’s Suspicion 82 Honey Eating Dreaming 84 En Magisk Sten 86 ‘Well, you better learn how to fight’ 88

The Lady with a Lamp 90 ‘Your voice is your strongest weapon’ 92 Martian Attack 94 Mum’s the Word 96 ‘Waste not, want not’ 98 Breaking Boundaries with Music 100 Faith, Bravery and Perseverance 102 Liketso 104 A Passage to India 106 ‘Let me take a selfie’ 108 From a Hazy World of Darkness 110 The Felix Project 112 Neighbours 114 Fight the Good Fight 116 Divine Intervention?

118 ‘Tis the Season 120 Trial and Error 122 A Buzz Far Superior 124 A Safe House 126 The Tragic Death of 128 Lawrence of Arabia 128 The Ball of the Century 130 ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds’ 132 The Path of Less Adventure 134 A Ballerina’s Beginnings 136 100% Organic 138 Mercy and Charity 140 Sodródni az Árral 142 Two Brilliant Women 144 A Life-Changing Riff 146 Queen of Mantas 148 ‘If you don’t succeed, try, try and try again’ 150 Freedom 152

Live.Keep.Tell.

Experiences Shape our World

Buccaneers and Buried Gold

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Robert Louis Stevenson’s swashbuckling pirate adventure, Treasure Island, has captivated children across the world. An unforgettable yarn of ‘buccaneers and buried gold’ as young Jim Hawkins and pirate captain Long John Silver go on a perilous quest for hidden treasure.

Despite the setting of the high seas, Stevenson’s inspiration came on dry land. His stepson Lloyd was stuck inside during a school holiday in the Scottish Highlands because of the pouring rain. He amused himself by drawing pictures. Stevenson recalled: ‘I would join the artist (so to speak) at the easel and pass the afternoon with him in a generous emulation, making coloured drawings. On one of these occasions, I made the map of an island; it was elaborately and (I thought) beautifully coloured; the shape of it took my fancy beyond expression; it contained harbours that pleased me like sonnets; and with the unconsciousness of the predestined, I ticketed my performance “Treasure Island”’.

Stevenson filled in the map with names such as ‘Spye-Glass Hill’ and marked the location of hidden treasure with crosses. ‘The future characters of the book began to appear there visibly among imaginary woods; and their brown faces and bright weapons peeped out upon me from unexpected quarters, as they passed to and fro, fighting and hunting treasure, on these few square inches of a flat projection. The next thing I knew I had some papers before me and was writing out a list of chapters’. He had completed chapter one by the next morning.

Published on 14th November 1883, Treasure Island – like Stevenson’s fictional heroes – hit the jackpot, becoming a worldwide bestseller.

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Robert Louis Stevenson

‘No child turned away’

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One night in the early 1870s, Dr Thomas Barnardo’s children’s home was full. An 11-year-old street child ‘Carrots’ was turned away.

A few days later, he died from exposure. Carrots’ death devastated Dr Barnardo and led to his refuge’s ever-open door policy and slogan: No Destitute Child Ever Refused Admission.

In 1871, Thomas Barnardo wrote of his encounter with Carrots…

Poor little ‘Carrots’ only eleven brief years had passed over thy head, but surely thou didst live in this short span a long and troubled life!

Of relatives, John Somers (called Carrots by his fellow-arabs on account of his red hair) had but one living, and that one a mother – at least so she called herself, and so she may have really been; but if affectionate care for her offspring be a natural trait in a mother’s character, then did not Mrs. Somers prove her maternal relation to the poor wee laddie found dead a few weeks ago in an empty sugar-barrel, in a passage leading to the water-side near London Bridge.

Carrots never knew his father, and her whom he called mother turned him adrift to do for himself at the mature age of seven; that is, just four years before the termination of his long short life.

The boy had been during these four years successively a news-boy, a shoeblack, a vender of cigar-lights, and anything and everything that a little street boy can be to pick up a living.

His appearance was against him, and by all I can gather from the boys who knew him, he seldom made enough to pay for a lodginghouse shelter after satisfying Nature’s absorbing claims; and so it came to pass that poor Johnny often ‘slept out’, his favourite places of resort being Covent Garden Market and the Queen’s Shades. Sometimes his mother appeared, and asserted her relationship by fixing him upon the ground with her knees, whilst both hands rapidly searched his pockets, and abstracted whatever coins were secreted there. If successful in her search, she left him howling over his loss, whilst she sought the nearest gin-shop; but should her search be useless, an oath and a blow were the means by which she expressed her sense of disappointment, unless, indeed, struggling from her unwelcome embraces, the poor boy succeeded in slipping from her grasp.

When first I visited the ‘Shades’ by midnight, or rather early morn, Carrots was there, and when by the offer of a halfpenny to each I succeeded in counting out seventy-three destitute lads from the various shelters of old barrels, crates and packages in which they had been 23

Dr Thomas Barnardo

ensconced. I thought I had seldom seen a more unpleasant specimen of boy life than he exhibited. Having out of this large number selected five poor lads to fill an equal number of vacant beds in our ‘Home’, my memory vividly recalls the earnestness with which Carrots pleased to be taken also, but alas! It could not be; we were already filled, and the five lads I then selected were as many as the funds in my hands warranted our receiving.

A few mornings later, as some porters were moving a large sugar hogshead lying with its open head to the wall, they disturbed a sleeping boy, by whose side lay another also apparently asleep; but when touched he moved not, when spoken to he did not answer; and stooping down, the kind-hearted porter took the form of the little lad in his arms, and only then did he perceive that Carrots was dead.

At the coroner’s inquest, medical testimony declared that the deceased had succumbed to the combined effects of hunger and frequent exposure, and the jurymen who viewed the little pinched-up face and fleshless body, unanimously found a verdict of ‘died from exhaustion, the result of frequent exposure and want of food’.

Thus much from the statements of the good-natured policeman who carried the corpse soon after its discovery to an adjoining public-house, and who added to his sad communication to me, the, to me, cheering sentence, that, ‘most of the boys as came round began to blubber as soon as they saw the body. So even poor deserted Carrots was missed and wept over, although of him too it might truly be said:‘Fatherless, motherless, Sisterless, brotherless, Friend he had none.’

Poor lad! I think I see him on that sad, sad evening of a bright May day, creeping supperless and hungry into the empty cask, his little heart crushed with its sense of loneliness, desertion, and dire need. I wonder did he cry as most children do when distressed? Or had the feelings of a child been long banished from that breast in its great struggle for life?

Or did he pray as he nestled down for the last time beside his little mate?

“Did poor Carrots love Jesus?” I asked of a tiny boy who knew him well, and had formed one of the crowd of mourners who dropped a few real tears to the memory of their departed mate.

“Law, sir, we never hears of Him, nor of ‘nuffin’ good, except ‘cussin’ and ‘swearing’, down here,” was the awful reply.

“You, at least, shall hear something better,” I mentally resolved as I Live.Keep.Tell.

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yielded to his solicitation to be taken in. And so homeward bound, and keeping in view the little lad just rescued, I mused upon the Master’s words, spoken so long ago beside the Galilean Sea, “Follow Me, and I will make you fishers of man,” and my poor heart said, as I heard his voice ringing in my ears, and thought of Carrots, “Yea, Lord, I would fain follow Thee into all waters, fishing for such souls as these, whilst life holds out, not mindful of anything but this, that Thou hast said, “Follow Me.” That grace and power so to do may be mine, I ask your prayers, dear fellow Christians. – Yours, in the obedience of Christ, Thos. J. BARNARDO Home for Working Lads, 18, Stepney Causeway

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Dr Thomas Barnardo

Inside-Out

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One of the most influential men in footwear, architect-turneddesigner Tinker Hatfield is the man behind many of Nike’s groundbreaking cult-classics. This includes the first and most iconic Air Max trainer, Air Max 1, the design of which was inspired by one of the most famous museums in the world.

Hatfield recalls: ‘I had known about this very interesting, very innovative and very controversial building called the Georges Pompidou Centre. It was one of my ‘must-sees’ when I went to Paris.

Coming into the plaza surrounding the centre, you can see the stark contrast between the traditional French style of mansard roofs, small windows and row housing. And then to see this large, almost machinelike building sort of spilling its guts to the world. In other words, you could just see everything. You could see the escalators and the heating and air conditioning and the levels of the different parts of the museum.

You could see people. It really inspired me because it shook the world of architecture and urban design’.

Hatfield, fired up by his visit, set to work on the Air Max 1: a running shoe designed ‘inside-out’ with a visible air bubble on the side of its heel. Tinker explains: ‘The Georges Pompidou centre in Paris changed architecture, because it took the skin off the building so you could see inside. With the airbag, that first Air Max was like the Pompidou centre. Nobody had even thought of that in athletic footwear. It was an immature field of design. It was more like engineers were doing it’.

First released on 26th March 1987, the Air Max 1 is considered one of the most iconic designs in history, sparking the most influential trainer series ever. Thirty years later, in 2017, Nike reissued the Air Max 1 in a new range of colours alongside a collaboration with The Rolling Stones.

Further celebrations took place on 26th March 2017 at nightfall, when Nike projected an unreleased film on the museum’s façade, watched by hundreds of people, including Tinker Hatfield himself.

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Tinker Hatfield

The Butcher and The Dog

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As observed by a gentleman on Aldensley Road, London. Every morning, a scruffy-looking black dog would stroll past his house sniffing at his front door and nearby tree. One particular morning, the butcher across the street had a change of heart and the gentleman witnessed him call the dog over for some leftovers which he laid outside his door.

Such was the impact on the dog that the canine never strolled past the gentleman’s front door again and was often seen thereafter with some of his four-legged friends, tucking into scraps across the street.

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The Butcher Dog

Why?

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In the orchard at Woolsthorpe Manor in the depths of Lincolnshire lies the world’s most famous apple tree. It was here in the late summer of 1666 that an act of nature prompted physicist Issac Newton to make a world-changing discovery. Newton recounted to his biographer, William Stukeley: ‘After dinner, the weather being warm, we went into the garden and drank thea [sic], under the shade of some apple trees... He told me, he was just in the same situation, as when formerly, the notion of gravitation came into his mind. It was occasion’d by the fall of an apple, as he sat in contemplative mood. Why should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground, thought he to himself... Why should it not go sideways, or upwards? But constantly to the earth’s centre?

Assuredly, the reason is, that the earth draws it. There must be a drawing power in matter. And the sum of the drawing power in the matter of the earth must be in the earth’s centre, not in any side of the earth. Therefore dos this apple fall perpendicularly, or toward the centre? If matter thus draws matter; it must be in proportion of its quantity. Therefore the apple draws the earth, as well as the earth draws the apple’.

Newton’s ponderings led to his discovery of the laws of gravity, which has been pivotal to our understanding of the universe. The equation not only describes why people stay rooted to the ground but explains planetary motion, enables satellites to be put into orbit and allows people to be sent to the moon.

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Isaac Newton

The Purpose of Life

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In the summer of 1976, singer-songwriter Cat Stevens nearly drowned off the Californian coast of Malibu. ‘Without warning a strong current carried me out to sea. My whole life flashed in front of me, as they say, but I knew someone was there and I said “Oh God, if you help me I’ll work for you”. Anyway, a wave came from behind me and gently pushed me towards the shore and then I had all the energy I needed to get back’. This brush with death intensified Stevens’ long-held quest for spiritual truth. He began his journey towards Islam though he wasn’t clear yet of his path: ‘I’d made this commitment to work for God, but I didn’t know what to do about it. I didn’t tell anyone what had happened.

I was embarrassed’, the singer recalled. Stevens’ faith was sealed when his brother returned from a trip to a mosque in Jerusalem and gave him an English translation of the Koran as a birthday gift – a gift which Stevens later described as a ‘miracle’. In this book, Stevens discovered ‘the purpose of life. I felt that the only answer for me was the Koran, and God had sent it to me’. A year and a half later, following deep study and his own trip to Israel, Stevens converted. The singer went on to cancel a world tour, change his name to Yusuf Islam and have an arranged marriage. He said: ‘Islam has a pure spiritual message and it gave me a great chance to get off my high horse and start living’.

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Cat Stevens

Vote of Conscience

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German chancellor Angela Merkel had always been staunchly against gay marriage and full adoption rights – an issue which had divided German politics throughout Merkel’s 12-year leadership. She stated: ‘For me, marriage is a man and a woman living together’ and claimed that it was in the ‘best interest’ of children. Consequently, civil partnerships were the only available option for homosexual couples while joint adoptions were not allowed.

After long opposing gay marriage, German chancellor Angela Merkel had a swift change of heart following a ‘life-changing experience’.

In June 2017, she met a woman in her Baltic coast home constituency.

Merkel explained how she struggled with the idea of same-sex couples adopting children so the woman invited Merkel to have dinner with her and her lesbian partner along with their eight foster children. When Merkel saw how lovingly the children were looked after, it dawned upon her that her party’s arguments against full adoption rights for same-sex marriage were no longer valid. ‘If the youth welfare service entrusts a lesbian couple with eight foster children, then the state could no longer use child welfare as an argument against adoptions’, Merkel said.

Within days, Merkel lifted the whip on her party, allowing a ‘vote of conscience’ at the Bundestag on a new law to legalise samesex marriage. Four days later, the bill passed with an inevitably strong majority. Although Merkel herself voted against same-sex marriage, she supported the bill’s introduction of full-adoption rights for samesex couples.

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Angela Merkel

‘Healthy, safe and happy’

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As the first lady of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg’s wife Priscilla Chan has the tech world at her feet. However, her real passion remains science and education – an interest Chan developed as a 21-year-old student at Harvard when she mentored children from poor neighbourhoods, many plagued by gang violence.

One day, Chan was shocked to discover a young girl in the local playground, who had been missing for several days. The girl’s two front teeth were broken. Chan later recalled: ‘I was flooded and overwhelmed.

What happened? Did someone hurt her? Has she got help for this? What could I have done to actually prevent this?’

Chan’s quest for answers propelled her into studying at the UCSF School of Medicine and sparked her interest in education. ‘I realised that my homework help was going to be completely futile if these kids couldn’t be healthy, safe and happy in the place they lived. That really drives a lot of what I decided to do in my life and career’.

Fast forward 10 years, Chan is a qualified paediatrician working in San Francisco alongside founding The Primary School, an organisation which offers a combination of healthcare and education. The couple have also pledged to donate 99% of their Facebook shares over their lifetime to support further research into science and education.

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Priscilla Chan

In Cold Blood

Holcomb, Kan., Nov. 15, 1959 — A wealthy wheat farmer, his wife and their two young children were found shot to death today in their home. They had been killed by shotgun blasts at close range after being bound and gagged... There were no signs of a struggle, and nothing had been stolen. The telephone lines had been cut. —The New York Times

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For 20 years, Truman Capote had been searching for a true-life story that he could spin into a big, important work of literary fiction. He recalled: ‘I’d already done a great deal of narrative journalistic writing in this experimental vein in the 1950s for The New Yorker... But I was looking for something very special that would give me a lot of scope.

The difficulty was to choose a promising subject. If you intend to spend three or four or five years with a book, as I planned to do, then you want to be reasonably certain that the material not soon “date”. The content of much journalism so swiftly does, which is another of the medium’s deterrents. A number of ideas occurred, but one after the other, and for one reason or another, each was eventually discarded, often after I’d done considerable preliminary work’.

One morning, Capote stumbled across a short article in The New York Times about a gruesome quadruple murder at a farm in Kansas.

‘After reading the story, it suddenly struck me that a crime, the study of one such, might provide the broad scope I needed to write the kind of book I wanted to write. Moreover, the human heart being what it is, murder was a theme not likely to darken and yellow with time. I thought about it all that November day, and part of the next; and then I said to myself: “Well, why not this crime? The Clutter case. Why not pack up and go to Kansas and see what happens?” Of course it was a rather frightening thought – to arrive alone in a small, strange town, a town in the grip of an unsolved mass murder. Still, the circumstances of the place being altogether unfamiliar, geographically and atmospherically, made it that much more tempting. Everything would seem freshly minted – the people, their accents and attitudes, the landscape, its contours, the weather. All this, it seemed to me, could only sharpen my eye and quicken my ear.’

Three days later, Capote was in Kansas. He was accompanied by his childhood friend and fellow author Harper Lee (who would later win the Pulitzer Prize for her novel To Kill A Mockingbird). Together they compiled 8,000 pages of notes about the murder of the Clutter family.

When finally published, In Cold Blood was an immediate sensation.

Capote’s face beamed from the covers of magazines, paperback and movie rights sold for record figures. The book was credited with reviving non-fiction as a genre. Capote had found the story he was looking for.

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Truman Capote

Godfather of Skateboarding

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Named the godfather of modern skateboarding, Rodney Mullen’s gravity-defying moves changed the skating world. It’s all thanks to his experience of moving to the countryside where he had only a flat slab of concrete for inspiration.

Mullen started to skateboard at the age of 10 on New Year’s Day 1977. However, it wasn’t until a year later that Mullen’s skating started to take shape when his family moved to a farm outside Gainesville, Florida. With the closest neighbour nearly two miles away, Rodney was left to his own devices. This only encouraged his passion. The remote setting began to mould Rodney’s skating into a more specialised form using only flat ground which later became known as freestyle.

Mullen recalls: ‘It was cows and a three-car garage, that’s your only world so I was like “what can I do with this?” I think being tucked away when most of the advanced stuff was happening on the west coast, being alone helped. I didn’t have that much contact with people’.

Whilst living on the farm, Mullen created some of the most popular street skating tricks used today: flatground ollie, kickflip, heelflip, impossible and 360-flip on which modern street skating is based. He also went on to co-found World Industries, which became the biggest skateboard company in the world. Mullen is considered the most influential skateboarder of all time.

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Rodney Mullen

Lucky Cows

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In 2017, with the world turning increasingly vegetarian, beef farmer Jay Wilde of Bradley Nook Farm, Ashbourne, Derbyshire made a life-changing decision about his herd sparked by a chance conversation.

Wilde explains: ‘I’ve been a vegetarian for 25 years. We used to milk cows but it became so unprofitable that we changed to beef farming. It was always a big dilemma. On one hand you were trying to get the animals fit for slaughter but, on the other hand, it horrified me that we were looking after them for two or three years only to send them to an abattoir. I didn’t know what to do about it. One day, a cook from the Veggie’s Catering Campaign, who quite often do the food when we have gatherings on the farm, said: “have you thought about vegan farming?” I had never heard of it so he put us in touch with the Vegan Society. They came to the farm and we discussed our options’.

The outcome of the conversation was radical. Wilde decided to take the plunge into Vegan Organic Farming.

‘The Vegan Society said: “Well, what will you do with all the cows on the farm? Will you send them to markets or sell to other farmers?” I said “that’s not a very good start” – I wanted to save the cows from being slaughtered, not send them to slaughter directly or indirectly. They said that they could try and place them in rescue centres around the country.

We heard nothing for a couple of weeks then the Vegan Society told us that they had found one sanctuary who would take all our cows at once.

That seemed the ideal solution. Everything went from there’.

On 4th June 2017, Wilde’s 59 cows left the farm and were rehomed in Norfolk at the Hillside Animal Sanctuary where they are now enjoying their full 25-year lifespans. ‘I’m relieved to have made the decision to no longer farm animals, something which I always found quite upsetting’, Wilde said. ‘Cows have good memories and a range of emotions. They form relationships. I’ve even seen them cry. It was very difficult to do your best to look after them and then send them to the slaughterhouse for what must be a terrifying death’.

Since then Wilde has been making hay on the farm. Future plans are to farm organic vegetables free of animal products and fertilisers to sell in the vegan market.

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Jay Wilde

‘Charlize, I’ve shot them’

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On 21st June 1991 at Plot 56, Third Avenue, Cloverdene, near Benoni in South Africa, 15-year-old Charlize Theron had just returned home from boarding school. Her parents had a troubled marriage but divorce was not an option among their friends at that time. ‘My dad was a big guy, tall, skinny legs, big belly’, Theron later described. ‘[He] could be very serious but loved to laugh as well, and enjoyed life. He also had a disease. He was an alcoholic’. That cold winter’s night, Theron’s father and his brother were returning home after a bout of drinking. Her aunt called ahead to warn of her brother-in-law’s agitation. ‘Nature gives you instinct. And I knew something bad was going to happen’, Theron later recalled. When Theron’s father arrived home, he began shooting, first at the locked gate to the home then inside the house. Theron said in her police statement: ‘Someone banged on the kitchen door. I told my mom that it was my dad, and that I was afraid of him. My father said he would kill us with his shotgun. My mom said she was afraid that he really would kill us. The next moment I heard a number of shots being fired. I don’t know how many, and then I heard my mom screaming hysterically.

When I went into the passage I saw my father’s brother, Danie Theron.

My mother was sitting in a corner of the bedroom crying and she said, “Charlize, I’ve shot them. I’ve shot them”. Then I saw the body of my father’. For many years, Theron refused to talk about the death of her father. Her mother was never prosecuted since the authorities decided that she acted in self-defence. Award-winning Hollywood actress Theron is now a Messenger of Peace for the UN focusing on the elimination of violence against women.

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Charlize Theron

‘Creativity takes courage’

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Known for his vibrant mix of colour and complexity, shapes and shade, Matisse revolutionised 20th-century art. While he was a true Frenchman at heart, it was the spirit of Morocco which seized the artist, a turning point that inspired his greatest work.

Matisse landed in Tangier with his wife Amélie on 29th January 1912. Having arrived in the middle of a storm, he was stranded for days at the infamous Grand Hôtel Villa de France, where he painted the celebrated ‘Landscape Viewed From a Window.’ When the weather improved, he explored the city and surrounding countryside, inspired by the dusty, hazy light, a blend of pinks and yellows, soft blues and greens. Matisse spent weeks in the gardens of a private estate, Villa Brooks, capturing the acanthuses, palms and periwinkles that covered the grounds. He recorded the way buildings tumbled down to the sea, how minarets went cheek by jowl with boxy stucco cottages, the look of city squares in the afternoon, when the sun drove everyone indoors.

Matisse spent only a few months in Morocco however his experiences of the Orient had a deep impact on him: the intense sunlight, bold architectural forms, and lush gardens. This inspiration ushered in glorious decorative canvases, featuring odalisques, brilliant floral concoctions and dizzying arrangements of pattern. ‘Creativity takes courage’, Matisse once said. The artist’s radical change of style is a fine example of just that.

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Matisse

Do Not Iron

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‘I was around six. My mum set down an iron she just just finished using and told me not to touch it. But I couldn’t resist. I remember thinking what I was about to do was wrong. However, curiosity and desire to challenge what I was being told got the better of me. I burnt myself on the iron and from that moment I showed more caution around hot irons. I realised that sometimes what your mum tells you is right and for your own good. Without that painful experience who knows what would’ve happened when mum told me to stay away from the blender.’

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Anon

‘The Lord said unto him’ Paul the Apostle’s journey of faith is one of the most radical in the Bible. A hater of Jesus’ disciples, when word came that Jesus’ followers had spread into Syria, Saul requested permission to go to Damascus to further persecute the Jewish people. As Saul approached the city, he was flooded with light. So begun Saul’s conversion to Christianity, written down in the Book of Acts chapter 9 vs. 1-20.

1And Saul, yet breathing out threatenings and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord, went unto the high priest, 2 And desired of him letters to Damascus to the synagogues, that if he found any of this way, whether they were men or women, he might bring them bound unto Jerusalem.

3 And as he journeyed, he came near Damascus: and suddenly there shined round about him a light from heaven: 4 And he fell to the earth, and heard a voice saying unto him, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?

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5 And he said, Who art thou, Lord? And the Lord said, I am Jesus whom thou persecutest: it is hard for thee to kick against the pricks.

6 And he trembling and astonished said, Lord, what wilt thou have me to do? And the Lord said unto him, Arise, and go into the city, and it shall be told thee what thou must do.

7 And the men which journeyed with him stood speechless, hearing a voice, but seeing no man.

8 And Saul arose from the earth; and when his eyes were opened, he saw no man: but they led him by the hand, and brought him into Damascus.

9 And he was three days without sight, and neither did eat nor drink.

10 And there was a certain disciple at Damascus, named Ananias; and to him said the Lord in a vision, Ananias. And he said, Behold, I am here, Lord.

11 And the Lord said unto him, Arise, and go into the street which is called Straight, and enquire in the house of Judas for one called Saul, of Tarsus: for, behold, he prayeth, 12 And hath seen in a vision a man named Ananias coming in, and putting his hand on him, that he might receive his sight.

13 Then Ananias answered, Lord, I have heard by many of this man, how much evil he hath done to thy saints at Jerusalem: 14 And here he hath authority from the chief priests to bind all that call on thy name.

15 But the Lord said unto him, Go thy way: for he is a chosen vessel unto me, to bear my name before the Gentiles, and kings, and the children of Israel: 16 For I will shew him how great things he must suffer for my name’s sake.

17 And Ananias went his way, and entered into the house; and putting his hands on him said, Brother Saul, the Lord, even Jesus, that appeared unto thee in the way as thou camest, hath sent me, that thou mightest receive thy sight, and be filled with the Holy Ghost.

18 And immediately there fell from his eyes as it had been scales: and he received sight forthwith, and arose, and was baptized.

19 And when he had received meat, he was strengthened. Then was Saul certain days with the disciples which were at Damascus.

20 And straightway he preached Christ in the synagogues, that he is the Son of God. 51

Paul the Apostle

Surfing ‘Charlie’s Point’

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‘Charlie don’t surf ’ is one of the most immortal lines in cinematic history, uttered by Robert Duvall, as the surfing-obsessed Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 Vietnam War film Apocalypse Now (Charlie is the American soldiers’ derogatory nickname for their enemy, the Việt Cộng). However, it was not only the script which left its mark. The filming location of the remote fishing village of Baler in the Philippines spearheaded the country’s surfing scene with one man at its centre: Edwin Nomoro.

As a child, Nomoro watched the Apocalypse Now surfers – he had never seen anything like it before. He later explained: ‘When the filming finished, some of the crew left their surfboards behind. My friend and I picked up the boards and taught ourselves how to surf. We’ve been surfing ever since’. At first, Nomoro and his friends struggled because there was no-one around to teach them. ‘But we studied it, and learned, and now… no-one can explain what it feels like. Only a surfer knows the feeling’. Once the boys got the hang of it, they started teaching others. As word spread, tourists started to arrive in the little village to learn how to ride the waves at Charlie’s Point, as it became known. Nomoro turned his passion into a way of making a living, and for more than 30 years, he earnt money from the industry he helped to create: ‘I have several rooms to rent. I also have some surfboards for hire. It’s really improved my life. It helps me feed my family’. Nomoro passed away in 2016 yet his legacy remains with visitors flocking in their tens of thousands to Baler for surfing.

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Edwin Nomoro

‘Building the impossible’

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‘I know I can build the impossible’, Iraqi architect Dame Zaha Hadid once said. She did just that. Hadid transformed architecture, with a philosophy and approach to the art form that influenced the direction of the entire field. With a passion for radical structures of all scales, her inventive designs spanned museums, opera houses, skyscrapers, schools and apartment blocks: from the faceted tower of the Central Bank of Iraq on the banks of the Tigris to an eye-popping cave-like shoe shop inspired by a Stanley Kubrick-style spaceship and from a sloping, hollowed-out polygon for the University of Economics and Business, Vienna to London’s dazzling Olympics aquatic centre. Each stamped with the usual Hadid look: curves, fragmented angles and wildly futuristic shapes.

Hadid’s passion for architecture started after a trip to Sumer in the south of Iraq, an ancient region and site of the earliest known civilisation dating back to 4000BCE. It is here that the first cities in the world were built. Architecture had begun. Zadid’s father (a leading Iraqi politician) was a friend of the English explorer Wilfred Thesiger. She later recalled: ‘I knew the marshes of southern Iraq from his [Thesiger] books and photographs before I ever went there myself. When I did, as a teenager, I was amazed. My father took us to see the Sumerian cities. Then we went by boat, and then on a smaller one made of reeds, to visit villages in the marshes. The beauty of the landscape – where sand, water, reeds, birds, buildings and people all somehow flowed together – has never left me’. Hadid continued: ‘I’m trying to discover – invent, I suppose – an architecture, and forms of urban planning, that do something of the same thing in a contemporary way. I started out trying to create buildings that would sparkle like isolated jewels; now I want them to connect, to form a new kind of landscape, to flow together with contemporary cities and the lives of their peoples’.

Hadid achieved even more than her ambition with her numerous buildings across the globe. She died aged 65 following a heart attack in Miami but her legacy lives on as a pioneer of avant-garde architecture.

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Dame Zaha Hadid

The Garden of Earthly Delights

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Climate change has pushed the earth into ‘unchartered territory’, announced the World Meteorological Operation in March 2017. This stark warning is not hard to miss with the globe’s rising sea levels, melting ice caps and record temperatures.

Sadly, this environmental issue is nothing new. Five hundred years ago, Dutch artist Hieronymus Bosch painted ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’, a triptych which depicts mankind before the flood when Noah supposedly built his ark; the first panel showing an idyllic nature scene, the second panel the deadly sins overtaking the world and the last panel a destroyed paradise with a ‘twisted, decayed, burnt landscape’, described Titanic actor Leonardo DiCaprio.

DiCaprio first set eyes upon The Garden of Earthly Delights as a child. He walked into his bedroom to find that his parents had hung a framed poster of the painting above his bed. He was immediately struck by nature’s devastation. It was this piece of art that inspired his passionate climate change campaigning. As DiCaprio confirmed at a meeting with the Pope in January 2016 while he handed the Pontiff a book containing Hieronymus Bosch’s work: ‘As a child I didn’t quite understand what it all meant, but through my child’s eyes it represented a planet, the utopia we had been given, the overpopulation, excesses, and the third panel we see a blackened sky that represents so much to me of what’s going on in the environment’.

In October 2016, DiCaprio released Before the Flood, a major climate change documentary, which follows the actor as he travels across the world, exploring the impact of global warming. Complementing this cinematic achievement is The Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation which ‘protects the earth’s last wild places and people’ and has raised over £60 million to save the planet.

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Leonardo DiCaprio

‘My parents didn’t want me to act’

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Carey Mulligan’s ambitions were first sparked as a teenager at Woldingham School in Surrey. Mulligan went to see Kenneth Branagh star in Shakespeare’s Henry V. She was so inspired by his performance that she wrote to Branagh asking him to be her mentor. ‘I explained that my parents didn’t want me to act, but that I felt it was my vocation in life’, Mulligan explains. She still has the letter she got back from Branagh’s sister: ‘Kenneth says that if you feel such a strong need to be an actress, you must be an actress’. The rest is history. Mulligan has gone on to play leading roles in some of Hollywood’s biggest blockbusters including An Education, Shame, Never Let Me Go and The Great Gatsby, opposite Leonardo DiCaprio.

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Carey Mulligan

Levels and Altitudes

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Peruvian chef Virgilio Martínez is seen as one of the best chefs in the world, with people flocking from all over the globe to sample his innovative cuisine at his restaurant Central in Lima. Described as a ‘tour of Peru’s biodiversity’, Central’s beautiful and ground-breaking dishes showcase every altitude from the coast to the Amazon.

The philosophy behind Central was born when Martínez was staying with a family in the Andes, near the ancient Incan agricultural terraces at Moray. ‘After seeing these terraces, I was obsessed. And then I started to talk to people, and I learned some Andean philosophy of life.

They actually see the world in different levels and altitudes’.

Inspired by his findings, Martínez decided to explore the idea of cooking dishes based on altitudes and ecosystems. ‘The temperature in the largest, 30-metre-deep structure can fluctuate as much as 15 degrees Celsius (59 degrees Fahrenheit) from the top to the bottom, giving each terrace its own microclimate where different types of plants are grown.

Each level is its own ecosystem. It is Peru inverted. It inspired us. Peru’s topography is uneven, which may sound chaotic or unwelcoming, and yet it is anything but. This unevenness has an impact on every region, and the wide variation throughout the country is the primary cause of our biodiversity, allowing for all of these different plants and animals to exist and be cultivated’.

Investigating these pockets of biodiversity, the chef came across everything from new root crops through to species of freshwater fish and even an edible form of high-altitude bacteria. ‘Once we decided to base our dishes on altitude, with ingredients found together in the same regions, the menu practically wrote itself. It was risky because we were getting into something that was conceptual, but we couldn’t sit still’.

In 2008, Martínez opened Central. Nearly a decade later, in 2017, the restaurant was named fourth best restaurant in the world. Following the success of his two ‘Lima’ restaurants in London, Martínez is returning to Moray, where it all began, to set up ‘Mil’, which will serve equally experimental food.

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Virgilio Martínez

Death at the Oval

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“In Affectionate Remembrance of English cricket, which died at the Oval on 29 August 1882, Deeply lamented by a large circle of sorrowing friends and acquaintances R.I.P. N.B. – The body will be cremated and the ashes taken to Australia.”

Reginald Shirley Brooks, The Sporting Times, 29th August 1882 This satirical obituary was published straight after Australia’s triumph at The Oval, their first Test win on English soil in August 1882.

Fred Spofforth, Australia’s ‘Demon bowler’ took 14 wickets for 90 runs to bowl England out for 77 and give Australia victory by seven runs. It was England’s first ever defeat on home turf. As the country’s national sport, having invented cricket in the late 16th century, it was a particularly painful loss for Britain. Indeed, one spectator died of heart failure at the end of the Australian innings; another bit through his brother-in-law’s umbrella handle.

The aforementioned mythical ashes immediately became associated with the 1882-1883 series played in Australia, before which the English captain Ivo Blighhad pledged on his departure ‘to beard the kangaroo in his den and try to recover those ashes’. His Australian counterpart, WL Murdoch, similarly vowed to defend them. A legend was born. While in Australia, Bligh was presented with a small terracotta urn containing the burnt remains of a bail after beating the home side 2-1. Today, the urn resides in the museum at Lord’s. The English media therefore dubbed the tour ‘the quest to regain the Ashes’. The fierce competition was on – and remains so to this day.

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English Cricket

‘We are gentlemen of Japan’

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H.M.S. Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance, Trial by Jury… librettist W.S. Gilbert and composer Arthur Sullivan ruled opera houses like never before – their comic masterpieces lighting up Europe and beyond.

London’s Savoy Theatre was built to present Gilbert & Sullivan’s works, many of which are still frequently enjoyed today including The Mikado…

In 1885, the streets of Knightsbridge became a buzz with The Japanese Village, an exhibition in Humphrey’s Hall, recreating a village in Japan with replica houses, shops and a temple. Calling upon the ‘Japan mania’ of the day, one such visitor was W.S. Gilbert who bought a memento – a katana sword (traditionally used by the samurai). One evening, Gilbert was sitting in his study when the displayed sword suddenly fell off the wall, clattering to the ground. He was inspired to write a libretto set in exotic Japan. Sullivan liked the idea and agreed to compose the music for it.

A few months later, The Mikado – a comedy about a wandering minstrel in love – opened at the Savoy Theatre. Gilbert, too nervous to watch the production’s debut, paced the streets of London. Returning to the theatre, however, he found that the new opera was a resounding success, becoming one of the most famous and best-loved Gilbert & Sullivan operas of all time.

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W.S. Gilbert

‘It’s not enough to put a pound coin in the charity box’

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‘Dawn, and as the sun breaks through the piercing chill of night on the plains outside Korem, it lights up a biblical famine, now, in the 20th century’… Michael Buerk’s BBC broadcast on 23rd October 1984 about the famine in Ethiopia is seen as one of the most significant television reports of our day. Scenes of starving children, within days or hours of death, were beamed around the world. The news item went viral – transmitted by 425 television stations worldwide, inspiring a generation, including singer Bob Geldof.

Geldof recalls: ‘The BBC gave 10 minutes to a report about what one of their journalists stumbled upon when he was covering the civil war in Ethiopia. There was a town in northern Ethiopia where literally hundreds of thousands of people just sat down to die. The report was absolutely devastating. It still resonates with me, and I sat there, very disturbed, and my wife had tears in her eyes. I thought it’s not enough to put a pound coin in the charity box. This requires something of the self. All I could do was write tunes, but I thought maybe we could make a record and get it out by Christmas. I thought we could make a hundred thousand pounds, give it to Oxfam or something, and be done.

I didn’t have the confidence that I could perform it myself, so I rang a friend in another band and said “let’s do this together”. That was Band Aid, which became a massive phenomenon and eventually raised $200 million in 1985. I quickly realised that the way to get the politicians is numbers and 1.2 billion people back in 1985 watched Live Aid. I was able to talk to Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan briefly, George H.W. Bush, Francois Mitterrand, and subsequently the Pope and the Kremlin.

It culminated 20 years later at the Gleneagles G-8 meeting (in 2005).

The generation that had seen Live Aid was now in power. Our presence at the G-8 enabled the then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair to push through the forgiveness of debt and the doubling of aid for Africa’.

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Bob Geldof

The Leap of Faith

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Jamie Thomas gave up everything for skateboarding. He battled homelessness, injuries and illness but thanks to his passion this Alabama boy came out fighting.

In 1992, aged 17, Thomas made his way to California with the goal of becoming a professional skateboarder. He had no place to live so began life on the streets in San Francisco. Through grit and determination – alongside sponsorship by a small skateboard brand – Thomas was eventually up and running. Several years later, the gamble of following his heart paid off. He hit the big time with a stunt that went on to change the skateboarding world.

In 1997, 22-year-old Thomas attempted an ‘ollie melon’ down a handrail followed by a 17-foot drop in the schoolyard of Point Loma High School, San Diego. As he approached the tarmac, it became clear that something was wrong: his feet were an inch or so too close to the middle of his board. Thomas slammed to the ground, snapping the board and rolling over on his head. Thomas later explained: ‘I didn’t go fast enough for the height of the drop. It was hard to imagine going faster, though. I felt like the most important thing was to make sure I landed on the board. I always wanted to go back, but it never happened’.

Although Thomas didn’t successfully land the trick, his attempt made history. Overnight he became a sensation. The stunt became known as the ‘Leap of Faith’ and was featured on the skateboard company Zero’s seminal 1997 video ‘Thrill of It All’. This led to further monumental skate videos throughout the late ‘90s. In 2002, Thomas was voted ‘Skateboarder of the Year’ by the readers of TransWorld SKATEboarding magazine. Although still skateboarding, Thomas is now making a name as an entrepreneur, most recently working on a new footwear brand called STRAYE. Meanwhile, the ‘Leap of Faith’ continues to inspire. Thomas kicked off an era of daredevil street skating which continues to this day with skaters still pushing boundaries, chancing it and attempting bigger and better ollie melons.

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Jamie Thomas

The Power of a Friendly Face

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Eighteen-year-old Californian Natalie Hampton has transformed school lunchtimes – and shown the power of a friendly face. Here, Hampton shares her story…

‘I was severely bullied in middle school. Apart from the violence, one of the worst things was having to eat lunch alone every day. After I changed schools, to a much kinder community, I would always invite people to join my group whenever I saw someone sitting alone. Some of these kids, one girl in particular, are now my best friends. That one girl told me years later that she had been struggling with thoughts of suicide and self-harm at the time, but finding a group of friends changed her mind. I saw firsthand that that one small act of kindness made a huge difference in their lives.

This inspired me to try to effect change on a larger scale. I created a free, lunch-planning app (Sit With Us) to help kids find allies in their schools. Sit With Us calls upon young people to use social media to be upstanders, rather than bystanders. It requires kids to be more mindful about those who are excluded, to take action against bullying, and to act as leaders in their communities. If people are more kind to each other at lunch, then they will be more kind inside the classroom, and beyond.

One small step like this can change the overall dynamic of a school community over time so that everyone feels welcome and included’.

Since its release in 2016, the app has gained over 100,000 users in eight countries. I receive messages frequently from people all over the world, either saying that the app is helping them make their lives better or requesting that I make the app available in more countries.

I am incredibly grateful for the opportunity to have met so many teenagers who have similar stories to mine, and my goal is to help make exclusion a thing of the past for all of them’.

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Natalie Hampton

Tara, the Elephant The great and the good came out in force in May 2014 to mourn conservationist Mark Shand’s untimely death. His sister, the Duchess of Cornwall along with family and friends were left devastated after Shand fell and hit his head on a curb in New York, dying shortly afterwards from his injuries. A raconteur, he had inspired and touched many people with his love of elephants which started in 2000 when he travelled to India to write his next book.

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‘Purely on a whim, I bought an elephant. “After all”, I thought, “what mode of transport would allow me more wonderful insight into the magic and complexities of a land that, like its elephants, moves slowly and subtly”. After many weeks of searching for available elephants, fate led me to my future paramour, late one monsoon night on the outskirts of a village, in the eastern state of Orissa. There standing quietly, illuminated by the glow of the campfire were three elephants. My mouth went dry. I felt giddy, breathless. With one hind leg crossed over the other, she was leaning nonchalantly against a tree, the charms of her perfectly rounded posterior in full view, like a prostitute on a street corner. I knew then that I had to have her and I realised, with some surprise that I had fallen in love with a female Asian elephant. Then, I had no idea what pulled me, like a magnet to her that night. I did not even notice the other two elephants. Maybe it was her eyes – gentle dark brown pools of kindness, fringed by lashes long enough to suggest they were false. Or maybe, it was the way she stretched out her trunk and, with the utmost delicacy, explored my pockets searching for hidden goodies. Or how she squeaked with excitement, flapping her huge ears, the ends of which were splashed with the palest of pink spots, when I tentatively offered her a banana for the first time. She was in pitiful condition, scrawny and starved, her ribcage clearly visible and her skin hanging in folds, like an ill-fitting suit.

She looked at that moment, exactly what she was – a beggar – a beggar with a pronounced limp due to a deep-rooted ulcer caused by the wicked metal-spiked shackles the mendicants had used to hobble her. But I know that I was never in control. She chose me. It was karma. After a series of complex negotiations she became mine. I called her Tara, which means ‘star’ in Hindi. Three hundred kilos of fodder each day and veterinary care soon restored Tara’s health. Accompanied by an ingenuous Indian nobleman and gifted photographer called Aditya who taught me Indian ways and a drunken mahout called Bhim who taught me elephant ways, Tara allowed me to ride her a thousand miles or so across her country’.

After his monumental journey, Mark published Travels on my Elephant and founded The Elephant Trust which is ‘on a mission to save a forgotten species from extinction’. The charity hit headlines in 2009 when they decorated London with 200 colourful model elephants.

They say that elephants never forget. With such a legacy, it seems unlikely that we will forget, too.

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Mark Shand

Hooks and Loops

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Swiss engineer, Georges de Mestral, was a keen hunter. On a winter’s day in 1948, he decided to go game bird hunting with his Irish Pointer on the dark wooded lower slopes of the Jura Mountains in France. The weather was glorious. After a long day through the woods and fields, de Mestral was starting to get cold so he called for his dog who eventually emerged from the bushes.

As de Mestral arrived home, he noticed that burdock burrs were clinging to his clothing and dog’s fur. Curious as to why that happened, de Mestral looked at the burrs under a microscope and noted hundreds of ‘hooks’ that caught on anything with a loop. He saw the possibility of binding two materials reversibly in simple fashion if he could figure out how to duplicate the hooks and loops. With the help of a French textile weaver, de Mestral designed his new ‘locking tape’ from cotton. By the end of the 1950s, textile looms were churning out 60 million yards per year. De Mestral gave the name Velcro, a combination of the French words velours (‘velvet’), and crochet (‘hook’), to his invention as well as to his company, which still manufactures the fastening system today.

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Georges de Mestral

Voyeurs

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In August 2011, the streets of London were set ablaze when Mark Duggan, an armed drug dealer and member of a criminal gang, was shot dead by police as they attempted to arrest him. His death sparked riots across the capital with arson, looting, and violence. Five people were killed.

However, for producer Tim Harcourt something positive arose out of the destruction – the idea behind one of the UK’s favourite reality TV shows. Harcourt explains: ‘We were watching the news [about the riots] while looking out of the window and wondering if we should move the car. It made me wonder what other people were doing while watching the news’.

Harcourt’s wondering led to one of Channel Four’s biggest hits, Gogglebox: a show featuring an eclectic range of ‘ordinary’ characters from three students in Reading to an elderly Liverpudlian couple sharing their views on Britain’s most-loved TV programmes.

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Tim Harcourt

An Awakening in Cambodia

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Angelina Jolie’s perspective on life was radically changed in 2001 whilst filming Lara Croft: Tomb Raider in war-torn Cambodia. It was her first time in the country and a trip she described as an ‘awakening’.

Jolie recalls: ‘I remember standing in a waterfall during one of our shots and they [the production team] said: “Just stay on this side of the waterfall because that side of the waterfall still hasn’t been de-mined.”

And I thought, as somebody from America, what does that mean, hasn’t been de-mined? It’s just the craziest, it doesn’t cross our minds that all these children, and people walking around these areas, have landmines in the ground and that’s just a part of their daily life. [This experience] triggered my realisation of how little I knew and the beginning of my search for that knowledge’.

Upon her return home, Jolie contacted the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees for information on international trouble spots. A year later, she adopted a seven-month-old baby, Maddox, from an orphanage in Battambang in northwestern Cambodia. Since then, Jolie has undertaken considerable humanitarian work across the globe including adopting two more children from orphanages in Ethiopia and Vietnam. In 2012, Jolie was appointed Special Envoy to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Five years later, her heart for Cambodia hit headlines again with the release of her film, First They Killed My Father, about the terrifying reign of the Khmer Rouge regime.

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Angelina Jolie

‘I could see Harry and the wizard school very clearly’

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As the queue of wizard-hat-wearing children circled around the block of Waterstones in London’s Piccadilly, J.K. Rowling could never have guessed that a trip up north would have sparked such a literary phenomenon. ‘It matters not what someone is born, but what they grow to be’, headmaster Albus Dumbledore said to his pupil Harry Potter in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Rowling’s story is an example of that – rags to riches, from being on state benefits to becoming one of the world’s wealthiest women.

In the summer of 1990, Rowling found herself returning to London on a crowded train after a weekend in Manchester. The concept of Harry Potter just suddenly appeared, jolting Rowling’s creativity: ‘I have no idea where it came from. I think the idea was floating along the train and looking for someone and my mind was vacant enough so it decided to zoom in there. I could see Harry and the wizard school very clearly; this scrawny, bespectled little boy who didn’t know who he was, who didn’t know he was a wizard until he got his invitation to wizard school.

I’ve never felt that excited about anything to do with writing. I’ve never had an idea that gave me such a physical response. So I’m rummaging through this bag to try and find a pen or a pencil or anything. I didn’t even have an eyeliner on me. So I just had to sit and think. And for four hours, because the train was delayed, I had all these ideas bubbling up through my head’.

By the time, the train drew into London’s King’s Cross, many of the characters had taken shape. Rowling began to write Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone that very evening. Over 107 million copies have now sold. Rowling went on to write six more books in the Harry Potter series leading to combined sales of over 500 million copies and counting.

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J.K. Rowling

Hiero II’s Suspicion

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The Greek Sicilian Tyrant of Syracuse Hiero II suspected his goldsmith of leaving out some measure of gold and replacing it with silver in the making of a wreath dedicated to the gods. So, he asked the ancient Greek polymath Archimedes to work out whether this fraud had been committed.

Archimedes, in a bid to clear his mind, headed to the public baths.

As he lowered himself into the bath, he realised that the more his body sank into the water, the more water was displaced – making the displaced water an exact measure of his body’s volume. Consequently, Archimedes realised that a crown mixed with silver would have to be bulkier to reach the same weight as one composed of gold; therefore the crown would displace more water than its gold counterpart. Realising he had hit upon a solution, the Greek maths genius leapt out of the bath and rushed home naked crying ‘Eureka! Eureka!’ (translation: ‘I’ve found it! I’ve found it!’).

Archimedes went on from his Eureka moment to figure out the Archimedes Principle, the law of buoyancy, which explains why some objects float and others don’t. Any object will displace some water and that water will weigh a certain amount. If the object weighs more than the water it displaces, it will sink. If the object weighs less than the water it displaces, it will float.

More than 2,000 years later, the Archimedes Principle remains one of the most important laws of science today. The Archimedian screw, a device for raising water from a low to high level, is also still used in waste treatment plants.

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Archimedes

Honey Eating Dreaming

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Heralded as the founders of contemporary Aboriginal art, the story of the Papunya Tula Artists is one of triumph over adversity.

In 1971, schoolteacher Geoffrey Bardon arrived in the remote Northern Territory settlement of Papunya, Australia. He found the aboriginal community Papunya Tula in ‘appalling distress, oppressed by a sense of exile from their homelands’ after being forcibly moved from their home in the Western Desert.

In response to this suppressive order, the community began to find other ways of expressing their identity. Bardon asked his young Aboriginal pupils to paint designs that related to their world, not to the western ways. Eventually the older men who spoke some English came to him and questioned, ‘Why are you asking the young people?

It’s the old people who know’. So, in July 1971, under the supervision of the elders, seven Aboriginal men painted a mural – Honey Eating Dreaming – on the school wall.

The vibrant mural inspired many others within the community to begin painting, telling stories linked to their land, history and culture.

They experimented with colour and style, using dots, lines, footprints and circles which gradually came together in a form that would be recognisable to many in years to come.

Such was the enthusiasm that over 600 paintings and up to 300 smaller art works were produced during the next 18 months. In 1972, the Papunya Tula artists successfully established their own company entirely owned and directed by traditional Aboriginal people from the Western Desert. The collective now represents around 120 artists, who continue to bring Aboriginal art to Western attention.

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Papunya Tula Artists

En Magisk Sten

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‘Jag var circa 6 år och var hemma hos min bästa kompis som bodde rakt över gatan, när hon visade mig en magisk sten som hon sa kunde uppfylla drömmar om man viskade sin önskan till den. Min vän var väldigt duktig på att rita något som jag själv inte var särskilt bra på, men i hemlighet önskade att jag kunde. Så jag viskade till stenen att jag ville bli lika duktig som min vän på att rita.

Den kvällen sprang jag hem och drog ut papper och pennor och ritade en teckning som i mina ögon var den bästa bild någon, någonsin hade ritat! Jag minns den in i detalj - en leende flicka med långa mörka flätor i en färgglad klänning. Jag minns glädjen och stoltheten över att ha lyckats. Över att min önskan gått i uppfyllelse!

Jag ser ofta tillbaka på den här händelsen och påminner mig själv om att om man verkligen tror på sig själv och sin egen förmaga, då kan drömmar verkligen gå i uppfyllelse!’

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Johanna Ambrosius-Kayat

‘Well, you better learn how to fight’

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Muhammad Ali is seen as one of the greatest sportsmen in history.

A champion, lord of the ring and a significant force to be reckoned with.

Yet, his legacy has humble beginnings.

On an October afternoon in 1954, 12-year-old Ali – then called Cassius Clay – rode his new red Schwinn bike (a Christmas gift from his father) to look for ‘free candy and popcorn’ at the Colombia Auditorium in Louisville, Kentucky. Later that day, he went to retrieve his bike but found it had been stolen. Clay was sitting on the steps of the Auditorium, crying and livid, when a man told the boy that he could complain to a policeman, Joe Martin, who happened to be in the building’s basement where he operated a boxing gym in his spare time.

Martin later recalled: ‘I was down at the gym one night, and there was something else going on in the building, a display of merchandise that the Negro merchants put on once a year for their customers. One night this kid came downstairs, and he was crying. Somebody had stolen his new bicycle, and, of course, he was very upset about that and wanted to report it to the police. And as I was a police officer, well, someone told him there’s a police officer downstairs in the gymnasium, go down and tell him about it. And he was having a fit, half crying because someone stole his bike. He was only 12 years old then, and he was gonna whup whoever stole it. And I brought up the subject, I said, “Well, you better learn how to fight before you start challenging the people that you’re gonna whup”’.

Clay had never thought of boxing until then. The next night he came back to the gym – and the night after, the night after that. Thus began six years of Clay’s training under Martin. Martin stayed on as Clay’s coach until he won a gold medal at the 1960 Olympics and turned pro. In 1965, Clay fought Sonny Liston for his first World Championship title.

The following day he renounced his ‘slave name’ and became known as Muhammad Ali. Ali went on to take the world title twice more during a remarkable career, becoming one of the most iconic and recognised sports figures of all time.

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Muhammad Ali

The Lady with a Lamp

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The founder of modern nursing, Florence Nightingale transformed the healthcare system in Britain and abroad. She campaigned tirelessly to improve health standards, making hospitals cleaner, providing better medical training for nurses and laid the foundation of professional nursing with the establishment of her nursing school at St Thomas’ Hospital, now part of King’s College London.

Nightingale had always longed to be a nurse. However, it was a visit in 1853 to the Lutheran religious community in Kaiserswerth, Germany that she credited as the turning point in her nursing life.

Nightingale trained there for four months, observing Pastor Theodor Fliedner and the deaconesses as they helped the sick and poor in the community. Pastor Fliedner, whom she respected enormously, was a shining example to the young nurse, preaching: ‘Think it a privilege to tend Christ in an infectious disease or any other. Do it with pleasure. If you lose pleasure in works of love, they are worth nothing’. Years later, Nightingale would herself use the expression that it was a ‘privilege’ to nurse in a cholera epidemic.

Nightingale’s medical training at Kaiserswerth went on to form the basis of her care of the troops in Turkey during the Crimean War. She was known as ‘the lady with a lamp’, making the rounds of wounded soldiers at night. She implemented hand-washing and other hygiene practices into The Barrack Hospital at Scutari in which she worked, stating that ‘the very first requirement in a hospital is that it should do the sick no harm’.

Nightingale’s influence remains today. Her dormitory-style ward designs (known as Nightingale Wards) are in every hospital alongside the maternity wards which she introduced believing in the need for specialist midwifery nurses. Nightingale’s pioneering infection control measures and championing of a healthy diet are key factors in recovery today. She published over 200 works on hospital planning and organisation which are still used by the best medical minds across the world.

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Florence Nightingale

‘Your voice is your strongest weapon’

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Ever since Muslim doctor Ryhana Dawood was a child, she had been doing martial arts. In 2008, at the age of 20, shortly after earning her black belt in Shotokan Karate, Dawood set up Martial Smarts, self-defense classes for those who need protection the most. Torontobased Dawood began teaching classes in women’s shelters, universities, community centres and schools, often dealing with issues of sexual assault and harassment. But it wasn’t until nearly a decade later that Martial Smarts grew into its own. Dawood explains: ‘In 2015, our organisation grew exponentially as a result of a drastic increase in anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant sentiment. Several acquaintances and friends would reveal to me their experiences of being verbally and physically harassed for the way they dressed or expressed themselves. I knew it was a problem in my community but this became all the more salient when I, myself, was attacked. Once on the street, I had a young man yell racial slurs at me telling me to go back to my country. He stepped towards me with his hand raised and only backed off because his girlfriend, a woman of colour, pulled him back. This experience disturbed me to the point where I knew I had to take action to help those who may not necessarily know what to do when faced with similar harassment. Martial Smarts developed for many reasons, but this experience definitely propelled it forward’.

With demand fast increasing – along with Martial Smarts’ profile after collaborating with Cara Delevingne and Puma – Dawood is keen to make sure that one of her biggest messages gets out: ‘Get big and get loud. Your voice is your strongest weapon, no matter what situation you’re in’.

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Ryhana Dawood

Martian Attack

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Shortly after 8pm on the eve of Halloween 1938, the voice of a panicked radio announcer broke in on the Colombia Broadcasting System with a news bulletin. He reported strange explosions taking place on the planet Mars, followed minutes later by a report that Martians had landed in the tiny town of Grovers Mill, New Jersey. Panic broke out across the country. Thousands fled their home, jamming the highways in their escape. Some were treated for shock in hospital. Others begged police for gas masks to save them from the toxic gas.

Henry Sears, a carpenter whose parents owned an inn and tavern near Grover’s Mill, recalled: ‘I was sitting upstairs over the bar doing my homework and listening to the radio. And all of a sudden come this break – a news flash – that the Martians had landed at Grover’s Mill. I listened again and kept hearing some more, then I unplugged the radio and took it down to the bar. There were about eight or so local customers, most of them farmers. I made them stop their checkers games, and I asked them to please listen to this. I was impressionable and believed what I heard, and so did everyone else. One man, Sam Dye, owned a bar. He said: “Gawl darn, I’m going to get my shotgun, and we’re going to get those Martians”. Everyone got their guns and came back. I had my .10-gauge shotgun and we had an entourage of autos all heading toward Grover’s Mill. We didn’t much know what we were going to see, but we knew we were bound to see something. We got right up close to the lake, and everybody was milling around and getting excited. I can tell you, people were upset and aggravated, and some of them were disgusted. I think it was a mixed mood. I don’t think I went to sleep till well after midnight, and that wasn’t normal for any kid out there in the country. I just knew it was exciting. It’s exciting still, when I think of it’.

There were no martians. The radio announcer was a young Orson Welles showing himself a worthy actor reading aloud H.G. Wells’ science fiction novel War of the Worlds. The ripple of repercussion proved an early example of the extraordinary power of viral media as it is today.

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Orson Welles

Mum’s the Word

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The UK’s most popular parenting website Mumsnet has revolutionised motherhood. Originally conceived as a website where parents could simply swap family holiday ideas and other advice, it has grown into an online phenomenon, championing high profile campaigns which challenge both businesses and government over attitudes to children and parenting.

Here, Co-founder and CEO of Mumsnet, Justine Roberts, explains how a trip abroad led to her founding a platform which now has 10 million users and 120 million monthly visits.

‘The idea for Mumsnet came from a disastrous first family holiday in Florida. My twin daughters had just turned one, and, after 12 gruelling months, we all needed a bit of R&R. Sadly, we chose the wrong destination, in the wrong time zone, with, frankly, the wrong children. All the parents around the pool were bemoaning their choice and it was a bit of a lightbulb moment for me. If only, I thought, we could have tapped into a network of more experienced parents – people who’d worked out that under-fives and jet lag do not mix, and that this particular resort was not remotely child-friendly – before we’d shelled out a small fortune. And what if they could offer each other advice about other things: the best stroller to fold up on a moving bus, tips for negotiating a promotion at work and how to maximise your chances of remaining on speaking terms with your spouse?

On my return, even in the cold light of a British winter, the idea still seemed compelling. At the fag end of the last millennium every woman and her dog had an internet start-up idea but I was in a decent position to have a stab at mine, having recently swapped my career in banking for freelance sports journalism. I embarked on a marathon surfing session and discovered that, while there was no shortage of parenting websites, there were none offering advice and recommendations from the people who knew best: other parents. There are some things (such as health advice) for which you’ll always need an expert, but for the daily ups and downs of parenting and family life, nothing beats a range of experiences offered by a diverse crowd. This idea is at the heart of Mumsnet and has been from the start’.

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Justine Roberts

‘Waste not, want not’

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Rachel Rowlands’ yoghurt empire Rachel’s Organic is known for its ‘utterly delicious’ flavours – and for leading the way as the United Kingdom’s first organic dairy. The Prince of Wales is a fan, officially opening the factory’s new extension in July 2017 and, going with the times, a few months later, the company launched a lactose-free range.

It is thanks to the British weather that Rachel’s Organics was born.

As Rowlands explains: ‘During a terrible snowstorm in 1982, our family dairy farm near Aberystwyth was cut off. It started snowing on 7th January and didn’t let up for days. The drifts were metres deep and roofs collapsed under the weight of the snow. As a result the tanker couldn’t get to us for five days to pick up milk from our cows. The obvious thing to do would have been to throw it away, but I just couldn’t bear to. My grandmother instilled a ‘waste not, want not’ mentality in me, so I was determined to save our milk. Then it hit me – I could turn it into cream and sell it locally. The response from local shops and hotels was brilliant so I kept going on a sale-or-return basis. The cream that came back I turned into butter. It opened my eyes to developing the business beyond milk. Then, in 1984, milk quotas came in, restricting the amount of milk a farm could sell. I realised the quota we’d been given wouldn’t support my family and that branching out further was the way to keep the farm afloat. I’d had this family recipe for yoghurt that my grandmother had left me and I decided that now was the time to begin experimenting with it’.

The experiments proved a great success – and Rowlands’ yoghurts have been going strong ever since, lining the shelves of every supermarket in Britain.

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Rachel Rowlands

Breaking Boundaries with Music

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Charles Hazlewood has conducted some of the world’s greatest orchestras in top concert halls across the globe and collaborated with contemporary musicians including: Wyclef Jean, Professor Green and Goldie. Known for breaking new ground, one of his most significant achievements happened on British soil – the founding of the first orchestra for disabled people, inspired by his daughter Eliza.

Hazlewood explains: ‘For the first couple of years, we weren’t really aware that Eliza had any disability. She just seemed quite floppy. Then after some consultations with paediatric neurologists, we started coming to the begrudging realisation that our daughter had a disability. In her case quite a mild form of cerebral palsy which means her legs don’t work properly so walking is very challenging for her. Obviously it took us a while to adjust to the reality that we had a child with special needs. We had three sons before her who don’t have any special needs, so it was a big watershed moment. Over the next few years, we were just coming to terms with it and putting systems in place to help her mobility. Then I started to wonder why I hadn’t encountered any musicians who live with a disability in all the great orchestras that I have been conducting around the world for 25 years now. That seemed just plain bizarre when you consider that logically there are millions of very gifted musicians who have a disability. Why on earth are they not emerging in the great institutions of the world? It didn’t make any sense’.

Hazlewood set forth to remedy the situation. He formed the British Paraorchestra, packed with world-class virtuoso musicians who each had a disability of some form including near-paralysis. After fighting through a lot of stigma and red tape, the orchestra made their debut performance in front of several hundred million people at the closing ceremony of the 2012 London Paralympics. Since then, the orchestra has toured across the UK and beyond, recently headlining one of the main stages at Glastonbury playing Philip Glass’s ‘Heroes Symphony’.

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Charles Hazlewood

Faith, Bravery and Perseverance

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An extraordinary story of ‘faith, bravery and perseverance’, said Sir Ranulph Fiennes of Jordanian refugee Mostafa Salameh’s life. Born in a Kuwaiti refugee camp to Palestinian parents, a chance meeting led Salameh first to London then to Edinburgh where he worked at the Sheraton Hotel. However, it was a dream in the middle of the night which took Salameh on an even bigger journey.

Salameh recalls: ‘In 2004 in Scotland, I woke up at about two/three o’clock in the morning. I saw myself on top of the mountain, on top of the world. I was praying for peace. I googled the highest point in the world and Everest came up. That dream changed everything’.

Back then, Salameh knew nothing about mountains. Inspired by his dream, he started climbing. In 2008, he became the first Jordanian to climb Mount Everest. He has since climbed the Seven Summits (the highest point in each continent) and conquered the North and South Pole – known as the ‘Explorers Grand Slam’. Next, Salameh is moving from mountains to marathons, to do the 777 which is seven marathons in seven days in seven continents. And in 2021, Salameh is planning to go into space.

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Mostafa Salameh

Liketso

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Lesotho. A land-locked country in southern Africa where half of the population live in extreme poverty with 18,000 adolescents suffering from HIV. It was here that Prince Harry was inspired by a little girl, Liketso, to found his charity, Sentebale, which helps children affected by HIV in Lesotho and Botswana.

Back in 2004, cradling 10-month-old Liketso in his arms in Ha Takalimane in northern Lesotho, images were published around the world of 19-year-old Prince Harry looking shell-shocked as he heard of her ordeal. Liketso had been raped and tortured by her mother’s boyfriend, who believed a witch-doctor myth that sex with an infant (the younger, the better) would cure him of HIV. Prince Harry recalled: ‘It was horrible. I held her in my arms. She couldn’t move. She had no expression. No laughing, no crying. Nothing at all. Just completely emotionless’. Throughout Prince Harry’s trip, he returned to check on Liketso, who had to have her womb removed. He vowed to support her in ‘growing up, her education and everything’.

Sentebale has gone on to help many vulnerable children like Liketso.

The charity now ‘serves’ an average of 1,100 HIV-positive children a month in Lesotho, 13,200 kids a year.

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Prince Harry

A Passage to India

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India has long captured the hearts of people throughout the ages. From adventurers, conquerors, courtesans and missionaries, the vast subcontinent has seduced many. I had a nomadic childhood in the Irish and French countryside with a free-spirited and muchtravelled grandmother. She informed me, at the age of 17, just before I went away to study in Paris, that we were going on a journey to this faraway land with a new friend of hers, a dynamic south Indian priest.

I agreed instantly, having grown-up with intriguing photographs of my relatives in the Raj, garlanded and beaming outside their pillared, flower-laden houses.

We landed in Bombay on a balmy summer afternoon and were immediately accosted by barefoot children hanging off the roof of our taxi, chirruping for money. Horrified, I declared that I wanted to get straight on the aeroplane back home. But, as we sat at sunset on the city seafront, inhaling the scented air, something began to unfurl within me.

We were met the next morning by my grandmother’s jovial friend who had a Bluebeard-like appearance and a beatific smile who whisked us onto a train. We were handed steaming samosas and masala chai and informed that the next three months were going to be spent exploring the southern coastline of India by rail.

The following weeks were a blur of pastel-hued villas and village houses lived in by dazzling cousins of our host. The old colonial buildings of the Coromandel coast captured me along with the slivers of beaches and fluttering beat of rural life. We lunched with white cottonclad politicians in their palace courtyards where I was proudly shown dressing rooms filled with Savile Row suits. I played cricket and taught history at orphanages. My grandmother acquired an enormous straw hat. We both knew we had happened upon something life-changing.

Seventeen years later, I am an India specialist and travel writer who is still exploring this vast and exciting nation. Being willing to throw ourselves into that Indian adventure inspired my grandmother and I, teaching us invaluable lessons about this life and the next.

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Anon

‘Let me take a selfie’

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One of the biggest tech accessories to hit the world to date, the selfie stick dominates tourist hotspots worldwide including Florence, where the baton’s founder Wayne Fromm first had the idea in 2005.

Fromm recalls: ‘I was travelling with my daughter, Sage. This was prior to smartphones so we were using a digital point and shoot camera.

Like everyone else at the time we either handed our camera to strangers or one of us would be left out of the picture. Alternatively, I would position the camera, press the self-timer before jumping into the shot.

We were met with poor success. The pictures weren’t straight. You have to stop people walking in front of the camera. It’s awkward. Then, even if you pass your camera to a stranger, they fumble and don’t know how to use it – the worst case scenario is that they ruin or steal your camera. So, during that trip I thought there must be a way of solving this problem.

That’s when I came up with the idea of a suspension device which would allow you to trigger, stabilise and keep control of the camera plus force people to walk around the camera and not get in the way. Those were my objectives and I set my mind to solving these problems’.

And solve them Fromm did. The selfie stick became a huge success, named by TIME magazine as one of the world’s best inventions in 2014.

A selfie ‘Stick It’ is on its way which allows selfie-takers to stick their phones onto the wall.

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Wayne Fromm

From a Hazy World of Darkness

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‘You get bits of magic from enormous bumps on the head’, author Roald Dahl once said. Dahl had himself received an enormous bump on the head following a plane crash during World War Two. He never fully recovered and his mental scars led to some of the most weird and wonderful children’s tales ever written.

One night as the burning sun set over Libya’s western desert, Dahl realised that his fuel was running low. He wouldn’t be able to make it back to base. He had to make a forced landing which didn’t go well – the undercarriage hit a boulder and collapsed into a pile of twisted metal and rubber, burying the nose of the plane into the ground. Dahl was in a bad way: knocked unconscious, his skull fractured and nose driven back into his face. Moments later both the plane’s fuel tanks exploded and the craft itself caught fire. Blinded and numb, Dahl contemplated what seemed to be a certain death. ‘All I wanted was to go gently off to sleep and to hell with the flames,’ he once recalled. Later that night, three infantrymen from the Suffolk Regiment went out to inspect the wreckage and found the injured pilot, barely conscious, but still alive.

His flying overalls were so burnt and his face so disfigured that he was almost unrecognisable. The doctors did not know whether he would ever see again.

For a month Dahl inhabited a hazy world of total darkness.

Concussed, blind and isolated from family and friends, his imagination ran wild. Dahl’s sense of fantasy was heightened accompanied by crazy dreams and a profound desire to shock. The story of James and the Giant Peach was born, the start of countless other tales.

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Roald Dahl

The Felix Project

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Seven million tonnes of food is thrown away in the UK every year.

Over half would have been good enough to eat. At the same time, eight million Britons struggle to put enough food on the table including, at least, 400,000 in London alone. Chairman of the Evening Standard and The Independent, Justin Byam Shaw, is working tirelessly to solve this crisis with The Felix Project, a charity named after his son which helps feed London’s hungry.

Born in 2000, Felix was seen as a miracle baby, arriving when Justin and his wife Jane had given up hope of another child. In the summer of 2014, Felix went on holiday with friends to the Ile de Ré, an island off the coast of France. Three days later, after a morning cycle ride to a nearby village, he started shivering and vomiting. He had contracted a rare and virulent strain of meningitis. By the early hours of the next day, 19th July 2014 – the day he was due home – Felix was dead. He was 14 years old.

Justin recalls: ‘Felix was full of compassion for those who didn’t have his advantages, and what stuck in my memory was an incident at a boys’ football tournament six years ago, when Felix had been upset to discover that almost none of the opposing team of 10-year-old boys from South London had had anything to eat that day. When a friend told me about the Oxford Food Bank, I realised that children not adults were the most obvious casualties of food poverty. As an entrepreneur I was impressed by how the Oxford Food Bank model was able to distribute £20 of fresh food, which would otherwise go to waste, for every £1 which they raised. It was such an obviously good idea that I decided it needed to be applied here in London’.

With help from donations by family and friends, Justin and Jane funded The Felix Project, buying two vans, hiring a full-time manager and deputy and opening its first depot in Park Royal, West London. ‘We have 60 food suppliers – supermarkets, wholesalers and manufacturers, from Marks & Spencer, Waitrose and Harrods to Sainsbury’s and CostCo. They let us know they have fresh and nutritious surplus food, we pick it up, take it to our depots, ensure it’s all good quality, then deliver direct to charities all over London. That’s it. Brilliantly simple and brilliantly effective’.

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Justin Byam Shaw

Neighbours

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‘For various reasons, going to university can be daunting: balancing coursework and nights out, trying not to flirt with your housemates, not spending all of your rent money on alcohol etc. In 2010, when I started at the University of Chichester, I personally struggled to adjust from the vibrant busy streets of London to the ‘everything closed by 4:30pm’ streets of Bognor Regis.

A few months into the course, I noticed an old man waving at me through his window; I ignored him. This went on for the remainder of my first year. At the start of my second year, the old man carried on waving; so I began to wave back. Soon after, the old man came out of his house to speak to me and introduced me to his wife of over 50 years.

December 2013, in my final year, same routine but this time the old man invited me in. He told me how he met his wife, showed me pictures of his entire family (including great grandchildren), told me about his ill health and his time in the army. Then, his wife walked in with a Christmas present of a scarf, thanking me for being a kind, friendly person, humouring an old couple by waving and saying hello.

The scarf still remains my favourite present ever! I experienced something I’ve never seen before in all my years in London (I didn’t even talk to my neighbours). These friendly, genuine strangers just wanted company. The couple are my biggest memory of my time at university, teaching me to be more open and talkative to my neighbours’.

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Isaac Bukenya

Fight the Good Fight

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Human rights journalist Janine di Giovanni has worked in some of the most dangerous places on the earth, covering almost every major conflict area since the 1980s. She’s interviewed Yazidi women formerly enslaved by ISIS, held a six-month-old baby amputated at the elbow by rebel soldiers in Sierra Leone, stayed in Rwandan refugee camps where people fell at her feet, dying of cholera and watched children die from lack of medicine in Syria.

It was a chance glance at a newspaper article about the Intifada, followed by a life-changing trip to Israel that inspired di Giovanni to write about the frontline. Di Giovanni recalls: ‘In my mid-twenties, while working as a freelance journalist in London, I came across Felicia Langer, an Israeli human rights lawyer, a victim of the Holocaust, who was defending the rights of Palestinians. She prompted me to go to Israel and interview her for the Sunday Correspondent. I was completely bowled over. Somehow, it changed my life forever. She took me to refugee camps and it so fuelled a passion. Felicia showed me that in some ways, as a reporter you have an obligation to bear witness to events that are happening, especially those of intense human rights violations, and crimes against humanity, against civilians’.

In 2016, di Giovanni was awarded the Courage in Journalism award.

She continues to work in Syria and Iraq, focusing on ISIS and other insurgency groups. She has written seven books, including The Morning They Came For Us: Dispatches from Syria which has been translated into 18 languages and won three major awards.

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Janine di Giovanni

Divine Intervention?

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During World War One, the British army fought tooth and nail to defend the Belgian City of Mons. On the eve of 22nd August 1914, the situation was serious – 21,000 Germans had the British army trapped.

There was a significent gap in the allied line with no British troops to fill it. Suddenly in that gap there stood English archers with bows and arrows, knights in armour. Then between the British and their advancing enemy came ‘a flash of brilliant light and then right before them rode a tall man with yellow hair and golden armour on a white horse. It was St. George, the patron saint of England. The French troops also declared they saw at the moment when all seemed most desperate that same blinding flash of light. No one can say, but thousands believe that they saw them’. So wrote Roland G. Usher in his monograph, The Story of the Great War. Some believe the archers’ appearance to be supernatural intervention, others a case of collective hallucination brought about by exhaustion. Either way, the appearance of the ‘Angel of Mons’ spurred on the British troops, giving them the confidence and energy to keep on fighting. Fortunes changed and the Germans retreated.

In 29th September 1914, London’s Evening News published a short story called The Bowman written by Arthur Machen – a story Machen described as fiction however many people believe that the writing was based on the Angel of Mons…

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The Angel of Mons

‘Tis the Season

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Charles Dicken’s A Christmas Carol is one of the greatest Christmas stories ever told.

‘On a frigid, foggy Christmas Eve in London, a shrewd, meanspirited cheapskate named Ebenezer Scrooge works meticulously in his counting-house. Outside the office creaks a little sign reading “Scrooge and Marley”– Jacob Marley, Scrooge’s business partner, has died seven years previous. Inside the office, Scrooge watches over his clerk, a poor diminutive man named Bob Cratchit. The smouldering ashes in the fireplace provide little heat even for Bob’s tiny room. Despite the harsh weather Scrooge refuses to pay for another lump of coal to warm the office…’

Scrooge was known for being mean. However, he was about to undergo a profound experience of redemption over the course of one evening when he is visited by three ghosts: Ghost of Christmas Past, Ghost of Christmas Present and Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come.

The result is life-changing not just to Scrooge himself but also to Bob Cratchit’s young son, Tiny Tim.

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Ebenezer Scrooge

Trial and Error

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London in the 18th century was a time of great change, a melting pot of decadence and depravity in a city soon to become the largest in the world. As the Industrial Revolution began to unfold, the population was increasing – as was international trade with ships flooding the ports carrying exotic goods from foreign lands.

It was on one of these ships that young London dandy, newspaper reporter and brilliant lawyer, James Stephen fled from scandal to Barbados in 1783. Stephen was involved with two women at the same time. One of them, his best friend’s fiancée, was having his child.

Shortly after arriving on the island, he attended a trial where four black slaves – widely thought to be innocent – were found guilty of murder and sentenced to be burnt alive. Stephen’s horror over the trial and verdict changed his life. He started working with William Wilberforce, secretly sending information to Britain about the inhumane treatment of slaves.

Later in life, Stephen wrote several influential books against the slave trade and was instrumental in the implementation of the Slavery Abolition Act. His greatness passed down the generations – his greatgranddaughter was Virginia Woolf.

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James Stephen

A Buzz Far Superior

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Considered the capital of street art in the UK, Bristol, home to Banksy, is adorned with many large and colourful murals. However, the ‘Scarlet Pimpernel of Graffiti’ is not the only street artist in town.

Relative newcomer, JPS, is fast following in his footsteps.

As a boy, JPS loved art. However, he stopped practicing his craft after starting college and ‘knocking around with the wrong people’. He continued on a downward spiral, ending up living on the streets. JPS recalls: ‘I was homeless from drink and drugs. Two of my friends were murdered when I was 19 and I went down a bad path. I’m from a tough estate and I lost a lot of friends. I hid my grief through drink, and wasted 12 years of my life’. JPS fell deeper and deeper into drug addiction until 2009 when he visited the exhibition ‘Banksy versus Bristol Museum’ at the Bristol Museum & Art Gallery. ‘I thought, “hey I could do that”. I was into fine art when I was younger, but Banksy inspired me, he saved my life and I respect him. My life was in the gutter and it’s been a long journey out of it. But I feel like my mind has come back. It made me realise that maybe I could make it as an artist. It planted the seed to start fighting my addiction and I replaced that buzz with one far superior’.

So, JPS, using the urban scenery as his canvas, stencilled his way around the city. He recently crossed the channel to decorate Berlin and has worked with Tate Modern, Hyundai and BBC.

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JPS

A Safe House

Anti-trafficking worker Emily Chalke first met Ella in an old rundown hotel primarily used as a brothel in Bangkok, Thailand. ‘Ella’*, a young Russian-Uzbek woman, had been in prostitution since the age of 15. Selling her body to men was the only life she had never known.

This meeting led Chalke on a journey which ended up changing not just her life but the lives of many sex-trafficking victims in London.

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Chalke shares her story: ‘Around Christmas 2012, I was surprised to get an email from Ella saying that she was in London. She called me, very distressed, saying: “something is wrong with my mind. I need to go and see a psychiatrist”.

That evening, I met Ella at Gloucester Road tube station. She was really unwell. Skin and bone. She had been working in a brothel nearby.

We initially got Ella accepted into a safe house. However, within days they released her because she refused to speak to the National Referral Mechanism –the framework which identifies victims of human trafficking. She said: “I don’t want to say the names of the people who brought me here, they’re good people, they waxed my legs, they did my nails…” It showed the level of exploitation.

So I took Ella to A&E at St Thomas’ where she was hospitalised. Yet, three days later, they wanted to discharge her. I expressed my concern for Ella’s health and explained there appeared to be no organisation able to offer her shelter. The hospital staff ’s response was abrupt; “if there was nowhere else, could she go back to the brothel?” As an afterthought she added, “If it isn’t an abusive situation”. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

I then paid for Ella to be in a youth hostel but her mental health deteriorated. In the end, the police sectioned her under the Mental Health Act and a different hospital took Ella in. The change in Ella after a short time was profound. It was like night and day. As Ella’s stay drew to a close, the staff there assured me they didn’t want to put her out on the street but didn’t know of any alternatives.

Thankfully, Ella got in touch with a family member and went to stay with them. However, after a few weeks, I received word from Ella that she was back in prostitution in Bangkok. It grieved and frustrated me that if Ella had received sustained rehabilitative care, it could have been her critical way out of exploitation’.

In light of Ella’s experience, Chalke opened Ella’s Home in January 2016. The safe house enables the recovery of women who have experienced sexual exploitation and trafficking by providing a safe and restorative home. Chalke is still in touch with Ella who is working as a prostitute in Moscow. * Ella’s name has been changed to protect her identity 127

Emily Chalke

The Tragic Death of Lawrence of Arabia

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Colonel T.E. Lawrence, famously known as Lawrence of Arabia, lived a fast and furious life in the Middle East. Yet, it was his untimely death back home in Britain that sparked a life-changing vocation. On 13th May 1935, Lawrence had a horrific motorbike accident when riding across the Dorset countryside. He pitched over the handlebars, landing in front of his machine and fracturing his skull. Five days later he died.

One of his doctors, young neurosurgeon Hugh Cairns, was profoundly moved by the tragedy of this great man dying from severe head trauma. He set about identifying, studying and solving the problem of brain injuries in motorcyclists, speculating that numerous deaths could be avoided if riders’ heads were protected. His findings led to the British Army in 1941 ordering all servicemen to wear helmets when travelling by motorbike. Soon Cairns’ ideas caught on with the public, specifically his statistic that wearing a helmet could reduce cranium fractures by 75 percent. The British people started to wear helmets of their own accord. In 1973, thanks to Cairns’ pioneering research, parliament passed a law requiring anyone riding a motorbike to wear a helmet. As a result, thousands of lives have since been saved.

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Sir Hugh Cairns

The Ball of the Century

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‘To me, cricket is a simple game. Keep it simple and just go out and play’, said Australian spin bowler Shane Warne. And, on 4th June 1993, Warne did very much go out and play. Despite it being his first Ashes test, Warne’s first ball sealed his place in history and has been referred to ever since as ‘the ball of the century’.

It was day two of the first Test of the 1993 Ashes series at Old Trafford, Manchester. Warne had played 11 tests before this match and had taken 31 wickets at a moderate average of 30.80. Brought on to bowl from the Warwick Road End with England on 80 for one in reply to Australia’s 239, Warne produced a spectacular delivery that bowled English batsman Mike Gatting out.

Warne recalls: ‘The ball of the century was a fluke. But I think it was meant to be. The fact is that it changed my whole life both on the field and off the field. It was one of the leg spinners that all of us want to bowl.

I am proud I bowled it particularly to someone like Mike Gatting who is a fantastic player. And playing against England – Australia/England – The Ashes, that’s what I was brought up on. So ’93 there I am at Old Trafford about to bowl. Pretty nervous hands, all sweaty. I just wanted to land a delivery, somewhere in the right area to get my confidence up.

It was a pretty special delivery as a leg break. I don’t think I have spun many leg breaks which have spun that far and hit a wicket. Just the way it happened, the way the ball drifted to the top of the stump. In the space of one delivery so much had changed. My confidence was sky-high. I was pumped up and rock ‘n’ rolling’.

Not only did this moment transform Warne’s career, it swung the historic Australia v England battle decisively in favour of Australia for over a decade. Twenty-two years later, the ‘ball of the century’ is still talked about with equal shock and awe among cricket fans.

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Shane Warne

‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds’

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As World War Two drew to a close, the United States desecrated Hiroshima and Nagasaki by dropping atomic bombs on the two cities.

129,000 people were killed. The devastation contributed significantly to Japan surrendering and finally bringing the war to an end.

Regarded as the ‘father of the atomic bomb’, American physicist Robert Oppenheimer was the man who spearheaded the creation of the first atomic bomb. Following the detonation of the first nuclear weapon, a great fireball in the Trinity test in New Mexico on 16th July 1945, Oppenheimer was beset by the moral consequences of the bomb.

He turned to Hinduism as a way of making sense of his actions, later explaining: ‘We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita, when Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and, to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” I suppose we all thought that, one way or another’.

Oppenheimer’s interest in Hinduism continued. Although he never converted to the religion nor did he refer to himself as a Hindu, the philosophy influenced him greatly and he took up Sanskrit lessons so he could better understand Hindu scripture in its native tongue.

Oppenheimer often referred to its wisdom and structured his life around the three tenets of Hinduism: Duty, Fate and Faith. Oppenheimer died at the age of 63, a tortured man, having told his fellow physicists, how he had ‘dramatised so mercilessly the inhumanity and evil of modern war’.

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Robert Oppenheimer

The Path of Less Adventure

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‘My parents had taken us on holiday to a remote part of New South Wales, surrounded by lush rainforest set amongst a large billabong.

Aged eight, I was beginning to find my independence. With that came a healthy dose of rebellion.

Partnered with my recently mastered two-wheeler (a BMX bike with ‘Voodoo’ emblazoned across the frame) I had the perfect companion for my escape. I was going to run away, on impulse. It felt like a cool thing to do and the burning desire for adventure had me and nothing was going to stop me.

Driving into the property where we were staying, I had noticed a duck farm which I decided to head for. I set off along the dusty, gravel road. I had no provisions. I was certain that, when I triumphantly arrived there, I’d sit tight, wait for panic to ensue and someone to find me then bathe in the attention I would surely receive once safely back in my parents’ arms.

I reached the farm and turned into the roughly-formed drive which was a challenge to navigate with my recently acquired bike handling skills. Within moments I found myself entwined with Voodoo, a ball of steel and grease, driven directly into the jagged ground.

I looked down, saw my bloodied knees and burst into tears. I don’t know who it was that found me but they scooped me up, took me and Voodoo inside. Within minutes, my mum was racing up the drive to rescue me.

I sat on a table where my mum picked out gravel from my knees with a pair of tweezers, dousing them in antiseptic liquid which stung more than the impact itself. Without a word I could hear “it serves you right”, “you’re lucky it wasn’t worse”.

I am not an overly adventurous person but I always think that I should be. Whenever I recall this experience I know that it was this that led me down the “path of less adventure”, making me more calculated, consider consequences and, for better or worse, change the way I behaved. Without it, would I be a different person? Would I have continued to push the boundaries and seek the thrill I experienced that afternoon? Would I even be here at all?’

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Anon

A Ballerina’s Beginnings

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Deemed the next great British ballerina, Francesca Hayward has soared to the top as one of the Royal Ballet’s most exciting new talents.

In 2016, she was appointed a principle and has wowed critics with leading roles in The Sleeping Beauty, Romeo & Juliet, La Fille mal gardée and Manon.

Born in Nairobi in 1992 to an English father and Kenyan mother, Hayward came to Britain aged two and was brought up by her paternal grandparents, John and Diana, in Sussex. ‘They didn’t expect to have a child sprung on them and they couldn’t remember what to do, so they sat me down in front of a video of The Nutcracker’, recalls Hayward. ‘I loved it. I just wanted to be part of it. In my head I was on stage and I could hear the applause. I dragged out an armchair into the middle of the room to be my partner’.

Hayward’s grandfather was soon sent out for more ballet videos.

‘I’d put one on in the morning for two hours, and then dance to a whole ballet before lunch then another one after lunch. I’d lock myself in the living room. It just made sense. Even at three years old. And that seems crazy but it just spoke to me, it felt really natural. I couldn’t stop doing it’. Hayward started going to ballet lessons once a week before winning a place at the Royal Ballet School aged 11.

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Francesca Hayward

100% Organic

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Prince Charles and Gwyneth Paltrow are both fans of Planet Organic, the UK’s largest organic supermarket. The health food empire was the first UK retailer to sell Soil Association products – certified meat and sustainable fish – alongside being the first to bring wheatgrass shots to the UK. However, despite the best of British produce, the inspiration behind Planet Organic came from across the pond for Mississippi-born founder Renée Elliot.

Elliot recalls: ‘It started when I was working in the UK as a journalist and I realised very quickly that I really should work for myself because I hate being told what to do. I knew I had the ability to lead, I figured that out when I was 19, even though I was a very shy girl.

After working in England, I went to America on a leadership course.

While I was there I started looking around a Whole Foods store, and I thought “ooh it’s different and not conventional. It’s food which I love”.

I went back to Boston to see my family. My sister said “if you’re thinking of opening a Whole Foods store, go and see Bread and Circus, an organic store”. I had never seen anything like it. I liked everything about the store: the products, the ambience, the people shopping there, the team serving them. It was an immediate attraction. In America, the supermarkets are really down-market. You don’t have the Waitrose quality outlets, they’re pretty gross actually. However, I walked into this organic supermarket and couldn’t believe it. I took the idea from there.

I came back to the UK and got a job in the largest Whole Foods store that existed at the time. I worked there for a couple of years, got experience and realised that I was going to love this and then left to set up Planet Organic’.

Planet Organic opened its doors in 1995, revamping the image of health foods in the UK. There are now seven stores in London and a substantial online shop. In 2017, the supermarket made around £35m in sales.

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Renée Elliot

Mercy and Charity

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Nicholas Ridley, Bishop of London, was burned at the stake as one of the Oxford martyrs during the reign of Mary I for his teachings and support of Lady Jane Grey to be queen. However, before his death, in the reign of Henry VIII followed by Edward VI, he was instrumental in transforming England’s attitude towards the poor, regularly giving impassioned sermons. It was said that: ‘To his sermons the people resorted, swarming about him like bees, coveting the sweet flowers and wholesome juice of the fruitful doctrine, which he did not only preach, but showed the same by his life, as a glittering lanthorn to the eyes and senses of the blind, in such pure order that his very enemies could not reprove him in any one jo’t’.

In 1552, King Edward VI heard one of Dr Ridley’s sermon on being merciful to the poor. The King – known for his ‘towardness and virtue’ – was so struck by the Bishop’s words that he summoned the preacher to the great gallery at Westminster to talk more about this pressing situation. Following their meeting, Edward wrote to the Lord Mayor of London, asking him to find a solution.

Christ’s Hospital was consequently founded in the city of London, providing food, clothing, lodging and ‘a little learning for fatherless children and other poor men’s children’. Governors were elected to serve the school and in November 1552, Christ’s Hospital opened its doors to 380 pupils. King Edward became patron and founder.

The school continues along the same lines today, providing free or supported education to young people from disadvantaged backgrounds.

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Edward VI

Sodrรณdni az ร rral

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1956-ban, 17 éves magyar menekültként, ott álltam Graz főterén Ausztriában. Több tucat busz várakozott indulásra készen, a hangosbemondók pedig azt harsogták, hogy: „Ki akar Svédországba, Svájcba, Kanadában, Argentínába menni?” Zavarodott férfiak és nők kisgyerekekkel kapaszkodtak egyik buszról a másikra, próbálták eldönteni, hogy merre kellene továbbmenniük. Én Kaliforniába, az USA-ba akartam menni, mert ott élt az egyik nagybátyám, de az USA-ba tartó magyar menekültkvóta betelt; az utolsó busz is elment.

Csalódottságomban nagy kísértést éreztem, hogy Argentínát válasszam.

Dél-Amerika egzotikusnak hangzott. Ám a józanabbik felem Anglia felé irányított. Gyakran tanakodom magamban azon, hogy egy másik busszal hova jutottam volna, mennyire alakult volna máshogy az életem.

Visszanézve úgy tűnik, hogy minden fontos döntésem meghozatalánál a véletlenre bíztam magam és hagytam magam sodródni az árral. Egyszerű, gyakran véletlenszerű döntések tereltek teljesen más irányba, mint ahova eredetileg tartottam. Többnyire jobb irányba.

Mérnöknek szerettem volna továbbtanulni, de véletlenségből operatőr lettem, majd rendező. És így, véleményem szerint, sokkal jobban éreztem magam a bőrömben. Ez egyfajta „Természetes Kiválasztódás” lehet, amely mindnyájunkat alakít, formál?

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Carl Schultz

Two Brilliant Women

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The passionate love affair between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West is one of legend. A relationship between two brilliant women sparked by a chance meeting one winter’s evening in London.

Woolf and Sackville-West first met at a dinner party hosted by Woolf ’s brother-in-law Clive Bell on 14th December 1922. They immediately became besotted with each other.

Woolf wrote in her diary the next day: ‘I am too muzzy-headed to make out anything. This is partly the result of dining to meet the lovely gifted aristocratic Sackville-West last night at Clive’s. Not much to my severer taste – florid, moustached, parakeet coloured, with all the supple ease of the aristocracy, but not the wit of the artist. She writes 15 pages a day – has finished another book – publishes with Heinemanns – knows everyone – but could I ever know her?’

Four days later, Woolf invited Sackville-West to a dinner party.

Sackville-West reported to her husband – the diplomat Harold Nicolson, also bisexual and with whom she had an open marriage – in a letter dated 19th December 1922: ‘I simply adore Virginia Woolf, and so would you. You would fall quite flat before her charm and personality… Mrs. Woolf is so simple: she does give the impression of something big. She is utterly unaffected: there are no outward adornments — she dresses quite atrociously. At first you think she is plain, then a sort of spiritual beauty imposes itself on you, and you find a fascination in watching her. She was smarter last night, that is to say, the woollen orange stockings were replaced by yellow silk ones, but she still wore the pumps. She is both detached and human, silent till she wants to say something, and then says it supremely well’.

The two began an affair in the mid-20s – and Sackville-West was the inspiration behind Woolf ’s 1928 novel Orlando about a genderfluid socialite. Although, the romance ended in 1929, it gave way to the most steadfast of friendships. This was evident in one of Woolf ’s last letters to her friend and former lover, written during World War Two in 1940: ‘there you sit with the bombs falling around you. What can one say – except that I love you and I’ve got to live through this strange quiet evening thinking of you sitting there alone. Dearest – let me have a line… You have given me such happiness…’

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Virginia Woolf

A Life-Changing Riff

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In June 2002, at the age of 11, Ed Sheeran was watching Eric Clapton perform at the Queen’s Golden Jubilee concert outside Buckingham Palace – an experience which changed the course of his life. ‘I remember him [Eric] walking on stage with this rainbow-coloured Stratocaster and playing the first riff of ‘Layla’. I was hooked. ‘What’s that song? What is it? I’d only heard the acoustic version on the MTV Unplugged album.

I’d never heard the original Derek and Dominoes version, which is very different, proper rock and roll. Two days later, I went to Cash Converters and bought a black Stratocaster copy for £30 that came with an amp. All I did for the next month was to try to play that ‘Layla’ riff. It was the only tune I knew how to play for ages – until slowly I learned more. Now I often put the riff into one of the songs in my live set, as a nod to how it got me started’.

Sheeran has gone on to win multiple awards including two Brit awards, two Grammy awards, two Ivor Novello awards and five MTV awards. He was appointed an MBE in the 2017 Birthday Honours for services to music and charity.

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Ed Sheeran

Queen of Mantas

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Since the age of 11, Andrea Marshall has loved diving – and been, in her own words, a ‘shark fanatic’. She moved from the US to Australia to study sharks, eventually ending up in South Africa developing a project on the Great White species. However, a chance encounter with a squadron of manta rays inspired Marshall to change direction and pursue a different calling.

Marshall recalls: ‘I went on an expedition to Mozambique. It was very exciting because the country was just opening up from a massive civil war. I went with a bunch of men, a young girl – just 22 – to do some exploratory diving in this country for really the first time. When I got there, the sea was literally littered with manta rays and whale sharks and a lot of other species. But, at the time, what stood out for me was that there were just manta rays everywhere, they look like leaves on the surface in Mozambique. I had just finished with an assessment of these animals and realised that no-one knew anything about them.

So, I thought “well, geez, here’s this massive population. Why doesn’t anyone know about this?” They said: “Well, no-one is really diving in Mozambique. We’ve been in civil war for a very long time”. I thought well maybe I could study them here. This could be my contribution starting to study an animal which no-one has ever studied before. And I had finally found what looked like a very large stable population of them. So it was that kind of experience of understanding an animal which no-one really knew much about understanding a conservation need. There were clearly threats facing the animal in other parts of the world. I thought this is my opportunity to do something new and important. I never left.

I actually came to Mozambique, came back down to South Africa, called all my friends in Australia and told them to sell my apartment, my car, my clothes. Send me a cheque and I just never left Africa’.

Now known as the ‘Queen of Mantas’, Marshall is seen as the foremost authority on mantas rays. Having completed her PhD on the creatures, she has dedicated her life to their preservation. Marshall still lives in Mozambique where she founded the Marine Megafauna Foundation which protects threatened marine species worldwide.

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Andrea Marshall

‘If you don’t succeed, try, try and try again’

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Crowned King of Scotland, Robert the Bruce is seen as one of the greatest warriors in history, known for taking up arms against both Edward I and Edward II of England in a fierce battle for liberty from English rule. He fought successfully during his reign to regain Scotland’s place as an independent country and is today celebrated as a national hero of the Highlands. But the victory didn’t come easily.

On the remote island of Rathlin, off the Irish coast, Bruce lay on a straw pallet in a rundown wooden hut. As the wind howled outside, Bruce was close to despair, having been made an outlaw in his own country by Edward I, King of England. As he contemplated whether the freedom of Scotland was worth it, a spider suddenly caught his eye – the creature was hanging by a long silvery thread from one of the wooden beams above his head and trying to swing itself onto the next beam. Bruce watched the spider try again and again, failing every time.

After the spider’s sixth attempt, Bruce realised that he, himself, had fought against the English six times and failed. Putting fate in the legs of the spider, Bruce decided that if the spider failed again on its seventh attempt then he, too, would give up the fight for Scotland. The spider succeeded and swung itself onto the next beam. So, Bruce threw off his gloom and set out for Scotland to continue the fight. Inspired by the spider, he told his troops: ‘If you don’t succeed, try, try and try again’.

Bruce won the battle, driving the English out of Scotland at the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314.

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Robert the Bruce

Freedom It was a near-death experience that led New Zealanders Andy and Amber Cleverley to make the bold decision to leave the real world behind and live in a renovated school bus.

At 12.51pm on Tuesday 22nd February 2011, a violent earthquake, registered 6.3 on the Richter scale, hit Christchurch, New Zealand, killing 185 people. Andy and Amber were on the 25th floor of a hotel in the city centre.

Andy recalls: ‘All hell broke loose. The walls weren’t attached to the floors and the ceilings anymore. They were ripped apart. You looked down the hallway and it just dropped away. It felt like a warzone’.

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The couple grabbed some shoes, jacket and their wallets – and finally managed to open the door of their hotel room which had been jammed shut. But that was only the beginning.

‘We got trapped because the fire stairs collapsed and we weren’t sure we’d get rescued before the building collapsed so we had to crawl down through broken stairs, rubble and broken pipes onto the roof of the car park next door. It was fight or flight mode for hours. Then a crane collected us in its basket and put us down into this apocalyptic city which had once been home. We were pretty much the last ones to be taken out alive’.

Andy and Amber moved to Australia a week later. However, 18 months after the earthquake, the experience took its toll on Andy. ‘I just completely lost it. I had been holding everything in for so long and had a massive breakdown. I couldn’t work. I couldn’t face anything. So anxious. I was diagnosed with PTSD’.

After a very challenging few years, the couple decided that renovating and living in a bus was their way out. They now had two children Jake and Daisy and wanted to spend more time together as a family. ‘When we were stuck during the earthquake, I remember saying “if I get out of this, I am making some big changes”. Because, at that point, you go “if I’ve got an hour left to live, am I happy with the choices I’ve made?” And I wasn’t. I just tried to make money for someone else, sat in a job, an office, it wasn’t fulfilling and… I’m not happy to go yet.

It’s not time. What have I done with my life? Nothing’.

On 1st December 2016, Andy and Amber with Jake, 5, and Daisy, 3, moved into the bus. Having left their jobs behind, they live a frugal existence travelling around New Zealand, surviving on solar power, own water holdings and park their bus in places nearly all for free.

‘We’ve gone from earning a whole bunch of money with no time to earning almost no money but with so much time. It’s much better this way. I honestly wake up and feel like a millionaire every single day.

I could die tomorrow and I’m ok with that because I have actually done something with my life. It’s been worth it. I understand the meaning of life. It’s about spending time doing what you want with the people you love and not selling it off. When people say all you want is financial freedom. I’ve got to have a million dollars. Well, no, financial freedom is being free from needing finances. It’s amazing’.

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Andy and Amber Cleverley

References by Subject

Angela Merkel The Independent, 22nd July 2015 The Los Angeles Times, 27th June 2017 The Next Family, 29th June 2017 Andy and Amber Cleverley Phone interview, 20th October 2017 Angelina Jolie Vogue.com, 14th July 2011 Bob Geldof The Catalyst: A Journal of Ideas from the Bush Institute, September 2017 Carey Mulligan The Telegraph, 10th November 2007 Carl Schultz Self-submitted work, 22nd November 2017 Cat Stevens The Los Angeles Times, 21st May 2000 The Telegraph, 23rd September 2004 Islam Tomorrow, December 2012 Jerusalem Post, 23rd December 2012 Charles Hazlewood Phone interview, 24th October 2017 Charlize Theron ABC News, 8th January 2004 Dame Zaha Hadid The Guardian, 9th October 2006 Interview with Alain Elkann, 5th August 2012

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Ed Sheeran Ed Sheeran: A Visual Journey by Ed Sheeran Ltd (FSO Ed Sheeran), Philip Butah (Cassell, 2017) Edward VI Foxe’s Book of Martyrs by John Foxe Edwin Nomoro BBC, 16th April 2013 Florence Nightingale Florence Nightingale’s Spiritual Journeys, edited by Lynn McDonald (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2002) Francesca Hayward The Guardian, 19th October 2014 The Telegraph, 12th September 2015 Evening Standard, 29th March 2016 India Phone interview, 4th January 2018 Isaac Bukenya Self-submitted work, 22nd November 2017 Isaac Newton Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton’s life by William Stukeley (1752) Jamie Thomas Vice magazine, January 2018 Thrasher magazine, September 2015 Janine di Giovanni Evening Standard, 5th January 2004 The Daily Beast, 25th October 2011 Newsweek, September 2016 Jay Wilde Phone interview, 15th November 2017 JK Rowling Harry Potter and Me, BBC One, 28th December 2001 J.K. Rowling interviewed by Stephen Fry at the Royal Albert Hall, 26 June 2003 J.K. Rowling: The Wizard behind Harry Potter by Marc Shapiro (Blake Publishing (6th November 2010) Forbes, 1st August 2012 Johanna Ambrosius-Kayat Self-submitted work, 12th December 2017 JPS Art Huffington Post, 31st January 2015

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Justin Byam Shaw Evening Standard, 8th March 2016 Neighbourly, 4th October 2016 Daily Mail, 3rd June 2017 Justine Roberts Self-submitted work, 20th November 2017 Leonardo DiCaprio The Independent, 29th January 2016 New York Post, 19th October 2016 Mark Shand www.kiplingcamp.com Mostafa Salameh Phone interview, 6th November 2017 Muhammad Ali Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times by Thomas Hauser (Simon & Schuster 1992) Natalie Hampton Self-submitted work, 3rd November 2017 Orson Welles People, 31st October 1988 Prince Harry The Sun, 8th December 2015 Priscilla Chan San Jose Mercury News, 1st April 2016 Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit, October 2016 Rachel Rowlands Daily Mail, 26th September 2016 RenĂŠe Elliott London Loves Business, 30th April 2013 Robert Louis Stevenson Essays in the Art of Writing by Robert Louis Stevenson (1905) Robert Oppenheimer The Decision to Drop the Bomb, NBC (1965) Ryhana Dawood Self-submitted work, 6th November 2017 Shane Warne The Guardian, 1st March 2009 BBC Sport, 4th June 2013

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Yahoo Cricket, 14th September 2017 Tim Harcourt The Mirror, 22nd August 2014 Tinker Hatfield The Irish Times, 22nd January 2000 Highsnobiety, 24th March 2016 Respect The Architects – The Paris Air Max 1 Story Truman Capote Truman Capote: Conversations by M. Thomas Inge, Truman Capote (University Press of Mississippi, 1987) Truman Capote by George Plimpton (Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, 1998) Truman Capote by Harold Bloom (Chelsea House Publishers, 2003) Virgilio Martinez Central by Virgilio Martinez and Nicholas Gill (Phaidon 2016) Netflix’s Chef ’s Table series (February 2017) Wayne Fromm Phone interview, 9th November 2017

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