No. 82 SPRING 24
Micheal Ward is the hottest actor in Britain.
We speak to him about family, religion and football
Nicholas Pinnock on playing a black
Jesus and Jing Lusi on Red Eye
What is it and what can we do about it?
An essay on the melancholy of midlife
Are electricity pylons beacons of modernity or a blight on the landscape? We peer up at the world of these metal giants
EXCLUSIVE: The heir apparent to Number 10 talks candidly about his hopes for Britain, his frustrations with politics, and why he quit the law for the circus of Westminster
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Through accident rather than design, our Spring issue has an almost-tooon-the-nose air of change and renewal.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in our exclusive interview with Keir Starmer, the man who plans to end 14 years of Tory rule and usher in a fresh, new Labour government. Speaking to him on the nascent campaign trail, we ask whether he has what it takes to lead the country and wonder what possessed him to leave a glittering career in the law.
In my feature on P30 I have the horrible realisation that, at 41 years old, I am statistically more than half way through my life. I ask what ‘midlife’ means in the digital era and try to work out the most effective way to grow old disgracefully.
Elsewhere we interview three of the biggest rising stars of British film and TV, with Top Boy’s Micheal Ward, The Book of Clarence’s Nicholas Pinnock and Crazy Rich Asians star Jing Lusi all speaking about their latest roles and the ways they are pushing boundaries.
We also have an elegiac essay on the stoic beauty of the electricity pylon (P34), a feature on driving a ‘forbidden pink’ Rolls-Royce through Provence (P84) and a trek to the former hood of Pablo Escobar’s drug gangs (P76). You can read all of these stories and many more on cityam.com or our new app, which you can access by scanning this QR code.
– STEVE DINNEEN
24: KEIR STARMER
The man set to be Prime Minister sits down with us to discuss his plans for the country
38: MICHEAL WARD
He’s gone from London to Hollywood – he beams in from New Mexico to share his amazing story
42: JING LUSI
The Red Eye star on Asian representation and why her new show is a dream come true
44: NICHOLAS PINNOCK
The first black man to play Jesus on film talks about his work ethic, defying critics and his new series
08: FIRST IMPRESSIONS
Small features on modern life, from the Smiths debut album turning 40 to the rise of the elitist allotment
46: WATCHES
As Bell & Ross turns 30 we sit down with the founder; and our editor predicts future classic watches
59: WELLNESS
We check in for a £15,000 health MOT at a posh Mayfair clinic, and ask if it’s really worth the money
80: TRAVEL
Jet off to Vietnam to get a taste of perhaps the most eclectic and distinctive cuisine in the world
The Twelve in titanium: a case of precious mettle.
Grade 2 Titanium is a commercially pure form of a special, almost magical metal. It is stronger than steel but lighter. It won’t rust, so it’s ideal for in-the-pool incursions.
With the right know-how, it can be shaped and faceted into something rare. Unique even, like The Twelve’s dodecahedron bezel. Or its contour-hugging integrated bracelet. Other cool characteristics are its warmth to the touch and luscious lustre.
More sepia than silver, in the right hands it can be brushed, sandblasted and polished into something truly precious. Like time itself. Which is why we use it to protect (and show off)a super-reliable, chronometer grade Swiss movement.
Do your research.
christopherward.com
RIAZ PHILLIPS is the author of two books on Caribbean cuisine. On P14 he interviews his old university friend Mickey Down, the creator of hit TV show Industry, ahead of the new season
AMELIA TAIT is a features writer with a knack for answering life’s big questions, like ‘who decides what gets served on trains’ and ‘why is it always flapjack?’ – find out why on P18
ANNA MOLONEY is this magazine’s resident bookworm, keeping us abreast of all the happenings in the world of literature. On P88 she interviews the author Amor Towles about his upcoming novel
GOLBY is a staff writer for Vice and author of the upcoming book Four Stars. On P90 he talks about the existential dread that comes with publishing a new title
ANDY SILVESTER is the editor of our sister title City A.M. On P24 he interviews Keir Starmer, asking whether the former superstar lawyer is ready to lead the country after 14 years of Tory rule
LUCY KENNINGHAM is a features writer at City A.M. with a passion for industrial architecture. On P34 she dives deep into the world of electricity pylons, modernity’s gentle – and beautiful – giants
Our collection of restaurants in the UK has grown to twelve in London and eight regionally in Leeds, Manchester, Birmingham, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Liverpool, Newcastle and Cardiff.
Morrissey may be indefensible but as The Smiths’ debut album turns 40, and You Are the Quarry hits 20, STEVE DINNEEN can’t help but reminisce
This is a year of milestones for fans of Manchesterbased miserablism. For a start, it’s exactly 40 years since the release of The Smiths’ self-titled debut album, which heralded the arrival of the definitive Manchester band. For a group steeped in musical and cultural nostalgia (something that would become increasingly problematic for singer/ lyricist Morrissey) they managed to look
and sound like nothing else. With their wry, introspective lyrics and mad, jangly melodies, The Smiths were advocates for the awkward, the band for the bookish. It’s a strange, imperfect album, the production slightly anaemic, the pacing a little off. But my god there are some bangers on there. The first three tracks on the flipside – Still Ill, Hand in Glove and What Difference Does it Make – define the band for me, even if they took things up several notches over the five years they were together.
The album veers from Hand in Glove’s navel-gazing romance (“No it’s not like any other love. This one is different because it’s us”) to the quasi-horror story of The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, to the haunting reaction to the Moors Murders of Suffer Little Children.
I grew up a 10 minute drive from the unremarkable semi-detached house in Stretford where Morrissey lived as an introverted teenager but it wasn’t until I left Manchester that The Smiths really got their hooks into me. An ex-girlfriend played me that debut album, and from the opening strains of Reel Around the Fountain, the most beautiful song ever written about fellatio, I was lost. (The same ex would later smash that record against my bedroom wall).
The Smiths weren’t my first love – I grew up listening to Britpop and punk rock – but they’re the most enduring. I doubt there’s been a year in the last two decades when they haven’t featured in my top 10 most played bands (confirmed of late by Spotify Wrapped).
I’ve taken the inevitable trip to the Salford Lads Club to recreate the photo on the inside sleeve of The Queen is Dead; I’ve even had a snog under what’s assumed to be the iron bridge that Morrissey got sore lips kissing beneath in Still Ill (it passes over what’s now the Metrolink track not far from his old house). There’s something about The Smiths: when you fall for them, you fall deep.
It’s also exactly 20 years since Morrissey’s “comeback” album You Are the Quarry, released after a seven-year hiatus, dragging him back into the musical zeitgeist after he’d long since been written off. I’m a huge apologist for Morrissey’s early solo career (Everyday Is Like Sunday! Suedehead! The Last of the Famous International Playboys!) – but You Are the Quarry nailed a coherent, kinetic indie pop that had been missing since Morrissey parted ways with Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr.
Unlike The Smiths, who were always “from the past” for me (I was three when they broke up), I vividly remember buying You Are the Quarry from HMV and playing it on repeat until my flatmate forcibly ejected it from my CD player.
Over the decades Morrissey has become impossible to defend. Accusations of racism have dogged him for years and every new interview seems to bring some fresh, depressing scandal. Bigmouth strikes again and again and again. His latest album is genuinely embarrassing.
But those songs from 20, 40 years ago still make the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. Morrissey may have gone off the rails but his lyrics are forever etched into the folds of my brain.
He sums it up pretty well himself in Rubber Ring, my favourite Smiths song of them all: “Don’t forget the songs that made you cry and the songs that saved your life. Yes, you’re older now and you’re a clever swine but they were the only ones who ever stood by you...”
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Soho House is struggling but you’ll be on a waiting list for a patch at an allotment. MARCUS JAYE on the remarkable rise of urban farming
Once a sign of style and prestige, the allure of the swanky members club is looking a little shaky.
People are growing tired of paying for the privilege of queuing at a marble-topped bar or desperately searching for a spare wenge wood table. Soho House recently had to deny claims that members were fleeing its clubs due to overcrowding and a ‘decline in service quality’.
Springing up like forest mushrooms, it is difficult to ascertain an exact number of London’s members’ clubs – indeed it’s increasingly difficult to tell exactly what a members’ club is. Many are now the hospitality equivalent of the business class curtain on a short-haul flight: pointless. While the luxury smellies in the bathrooms are nice, the sheen of exclusivity is often lacking.
It’s probably far harder to get into your local allotment. “It’s great escapism; especially for those who lack in green spaces of their own,” says Carrie Webster from Allotment Online, a community for growers. A new generation of allotments – with the pricey monthly fees to match – have
appeared since the pandemic. Founded in 2022, Bath-based Roots Allotments is tapping into the burgeoning demand, with locations in Bath, Stourbridge and Wolverhampton now joined by London’s first outpost in sunny Croydon, with more planned for the capital.
Prices are such that you’ll have to start harvesting white truffles to justify costsper-veggie, but that’s really not the point. This is about nourishing the soul as well as looking smug, having joined London’s most exclusive club as a prized allotment holder.
A ‘Starter’ sized pitch – 3x12 metres –starts at £19.99 a month, with a £39.99 joining fee, while, if you want friends to join, a Group plot is £49.99 a month, considerably more than the local authority would charge. This includes access to organically sourced seeds and plug plants, shared tools, in-person events and access to educational videos. And, most importantly, it has replaced the snooty receptionist, with an ‘on-site patch manager’ for your every growing demand.
“We currently have waiting lists for a number of our sites,” says Root Allotments founder Ed Morrison. “If our waiting list
hits 300 or more people we look to open another site to get on top of it.”
There are currently an estimated 330,000 allotments across the UK. A 2020 survey by the National Allotment Society stated that there are over 100,000 people on allotment waiting lists in the UK. Almost 87 percent of UK local authorities experienced increases in demand for allotments in 2022 and over 58 percent of them said the average waiting time is over 18 months, an increase of 26 percent on the year before. Some council sites even have a waitlist for the waitlist. It makes getting a Birkin look like child’s play.
Alan Heeks, author of new book Natural Happiness, which explores the fundamental link between improved mental health and gardening, explains the demand: “It’s hard for city dwellers to access the grounding force of the earth. Pottering around your allotment can bring much-needed perspective to your life. Limited daylight hours and the seasons force you to be intentional with your time.”
Green is the new black. Brassicas instead of burrata. Pumpkins over picantes. If you can’t beet ‘em, join ‘em.
ASMR, or autonomous sensory meridian response, became the most searched term on YouTube in 2023, with a total of 79.5m searches. It’s an online powerhouse, redefining the way people think about relaxation. It’s difficult to overstate the reach of these videos that feature gentle tapping, hair brushing, face stroking and soft whispering, which elicit tingling responses from viewers.
But could ASMR be set to break out from behind the screen and become a staple treatment in our capital’s spas? And is a facial with a side of soft whispers and gentle taps something people want to pay for?
Lush Spa treatment developer Jody Bailey says it is. Her spa already offers customers a range of acoustic experiences, from calming sound baths to a facial delivered alongside validating words and the sound of waves on Chesil Beach. But Jody says – in a City A.M. The Magazine exclusive – that Lush is set to roll out its first ever ASMR-dedicated treatment next year.
“It’s a huge movement,” she says. “I’m personally a big fan and you cannot ignore its popularity in the wellness field. We have so many ASMR fans booking our treatments because of their calming and tingling effects. An ASMR dedicated treatment is something I’ve been dying to create for so long and we’re in the planning phase now, with the hope to roll it out next year. A lot of spas in London offer calming treatments but we can’t see many that offer an ASMR treatment, so we’re hoping ours could be the start of something big.”
Kate White, facialist and founder of re:lax studio in London, says salons and studios across the capital have seen a rise in demand for ASMR. Her skincare spa has seen an influx of new bookings after YouTuber ASMR Beauty featured one of re:lax’s facials on her channel.
“We have received tons of requests for ASMR treatments since that video,” she says. “People want to enjoy a more bespoke facial that includes some of the key elements of
We have so many ASMR fans booking our treatments because of their calming and tingling effects. An ASMR dedicated treatment is something I’ve been dying to create
ASMR, such as whispering or soft stroking. There are so many elements of massage therapy that work with ASMR so it makes sense that customers want to bridge that gap. It’s a huge movement online so it only makes sense that spas respond to the demand.”
ASMR videos first gained prominence online in 2010. While some regard whispers and soft stroking as search terms that could take you to rather seedy corners of the web, the community of fans insist the practice is not sexual and is more an aid for calming anxiety or stress and even helping with sleep. There is some scientific backing to this, with the University of Sheffield finding
in a 2018 report that ASMR lowered heart rates and boosted positive moods.
Brands have taken note, with IKEA posting ASMR-style videos to its YouTube and W Magazine using celebrities such as Cardi B and Kate Hudson to create calming whisper content. Last year Glossier used an ASMRstyle video in its London pop-up store to allow customers to explore how sound and visuals can impact your physical state.
“The pandemic gave us time to pause and made relaxation and unwinding a necessity for a lot of people,” Bailey at Lush says. “People are realising what calms them and seeking out treatments for that specific purpose.”
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Food writer and author RIAZ PHILLIPS interviews his old flatmate and fellow Oxford University alumnus
MICKEY DOWN, the co-creator of hit TV show Industry, at the hip West African restaurant Akoko.
Pictures by GRETEL ENSIGNIATHE MEAL: YASSA, CHICKEN MOUSSE, TRUFFLES
OCTOPUS, VATAPA
GOAT CASHEW CREAM, CAVIAR
LAMB, AUBERGINE, SHITO, UDA ICE CREAM, COFFEE CAKE
MICKEY DOWN: Hey, it’s great to see you, it’s been ages! This was basically an opportunity to catch up because we hardly see each other now.
RIAZ PHILLIPS: Yeah, since I moved to Berlin it’s been tricky, although I’ve been back quite a lot recently. When I first moved, just before Brexit, I was a political refugee for a while. I wouldn’t have been able to make the move at all now – I haven’t met anyone who has since Brexit. Loads of people left, too –all the DJs cleared out!
MD: As much as I’d love to do a really long lunch and wine pairing, I have a meeting with a director this afternoon and I can’t be drunk!
RP: Yeah I’m not drinking either –every time I come back to the UK I have to cram everything into a week. I’m cooking for 40 relatives tomorrow. You have family from Ghana, right? Do you eat Ghanaian food with them?
MD: Yeah, we eat Ghanaian food on Christmas eve. My granny used to cook a big meal for everyone before she passed away. When she died I was worried the recipes would be gone forever but my mum has taken up the mantle now. We have pavlova sauce, which is like a spinach sauce, and we might have it with goat or lamb or fish, some peanut soup, some fufu, which is like a ground maize, lots of plantain, kenkey fish – a lot of strong flavours. I don’t cook any of it though. I really enjoy cooking but I have a fairly small repertoire – I can make a very good chicken pie. I’ve been making a few cupcakes with my daughter but they always come out a bit gooey.
RP: That’s funny, I think a lot of people are going back to recipes that they would maybe have been too embarrassed to try a few years ago – cup cakes and Victoria sponge and banana cake. They’re so easy to make but they’re so, so good.
MD: Talking of good – this food is absolutely amazing!
RP: I honestly wouldn’t really know where to go out to eat Ghanaian food in London.
MD: It’s sad but since my grandparents passed away I only really eat Ghanaian food on Christmas eve. I guess you’re
the opposite – you must eat Caribbean food all the time?
RP: Yeah, all the time. You can get good Caribbean food in Berlin. People assume it’s going to just be hotdogs and bratwurst but there’s actually a lot of diversity. There’s a lot of African food too. There’s this amazing Vietnamese-owned shop near where I live that sells every African ingredient you could think of. It also plays really hard trance music – it’s the best shop I’ve ever been to.
MD: How are you enjoying Berlin?
RP: Berlin is very chilled. People think it’s this crazy, hyper city but it’s not like that at all, it’s far more relaxed than London or New York. There’s a much bigger separation between work and your social life. Nobody ever asks ‘what do you do?’. They have these lakes all around the city and every weekday lunchtime they will be packed – there’s not this feeling that ‘oh, we should be working’. When I’m in London I feel guilty if I’m not constantly working –people in Berlin think I’m crazy. There are other things that are just different, too – you can go to a club and see a couple in their 60s and it’s totally normal. It’s far less ageist.
MD: It’s the only city in Europe where I visited and thought ‘Oh, I could live here’, especially when I was in my 20s.
That dream is unfortunately dead now! Over the pandemic I was living in Somerset and I loved it. My wife had just had a baby and I was living in the vicarage in this village that was so tiny it didn’t even have a shop. I never had anyone over to stay and it was absolutely great. Do you cook this kind of food?
RP: I’m definitely inspired by the African diaspora. My family are from the Caribbean and because of the nature of human movement over history, it has influences from all over the world. There are massive influences from Ghana and parts of West Africa. I like connecting the dots and seeing the similarities.
West Africa has never been seen in the same light as foods from everywhere else.
I went to Ghana and you see these people with these amazing talents, getting up at 5am and pounding yam with these huge pestles, which is insanely difficult. They’re fermenting stuff, doing the same things as restaurants like Noma but not getting any of the recognition, basically because it’s African. I think it’s changing now, partly because of restaurants like this and Ikoyi.
MD: You have a new book out, right?
RP: Yeah, this one is called East Winds, which is a sequel to West Winds. I always wanted to do two books. The view of Caribbean food and culture in the UK is kind of singular and usually led by Jamaica, all palm trees and white sand and Bob Marley. I wanted to show how much
more it is than that. Food tells all these stories about the people who came to the Caribbean. So the first book was about Jamaica, which is overwhelmingly made up of people with West African heritage. But I have a whole side of my family who are Indian Caribbean – I have an Indian name. East Winds is a homage to that side of my family, who are from Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana. Their history is basically British history. The reason there are Indian people there is because the plantation owners brought them over so they could continue making property in the Caribbean. Jamaica is 90 percent black but Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana are a third black and a third Indian, which has a massive impact on the food – you start seeing roti and aloo. That’s the national food of those countries. You’d never see jerk chicken there.
RP: What about you anyway, how’s Industry going? How much are you involved beyond the writing?
MD: Me and Konrad Kay wrote every episode, directed every episode bar one, and we were executive producers of the show, so we were across every single part of it. Traditionally in the UK the writer would hand a script over to the director and then might not have anything more to do with the show. Industry uses the American system where the writer – who is often the showrunner and executive producer – is king.
RP: How was it going from being a writer to a showrunner?
MD: It’s intense. You get into the industry because you like to write. And then suddenly, you’re in charge of 150 cast and crew. You’re suddenly an HR department and a money manager, and these things are not necessarily in the skill set of a writer. The people that rise to the top are the ones who are good at everything.
It’s funny, I’d never been in a writers room until I was running my own and the first season of Industry reflects that: there’s no story, there’s no real structure, it’s just eight hours of vibe. I had to learn from messing up and I’m really proud of the new ones.
I’ve always had quite a commercial way of writing. I think it’s an art form and the artistry is very, very important. But there’s just so much content and a lot of it’s rubbish so you want to entertain and give people what they want.
RP: Will there be a season four?
MD: I’d like there to be, yeah.
RP: Do you read your reviews?
MD: Oh yeah, every single one. I find it so weird when people say they didn’t read them – I can maybe understand for actors because there can be some really nasty stuff in there about the way they look but for someone in my position I don’t believe
From
anyone who says they don’t read them.
RP: Thankfully food books don’t have that same media ferocity as TV. We both did internships in the City, remember? I was doing a currency exchange type thing in Canary Wharf and you were at Morgan Stanley.
MD: Yeah I was doing private wealth management. Basically taking posh blokes out for dinner. I realised I like the trappings of it. I liked wearing a suit and tie to work. I loved it. But I was never going to be really good at it. I was getting paid so much money for that time in my life so I was going out four or five times a week and turning up to work so, so hungover. I joined Rothschild and I tried to start writing but the hours just were too long. We’d do 80-100 hours a week sometimes and after that all you want to do is watch The Simpsons and go to sleep. So I quit –my parents thought I was mad. Thankfully Industry happened and they realised it was the right choice.
RP: Yeah, and I did the same – left my corporate job and dived into food instead. Looks like we both made the right decision in the end!
l Riaz’s latest book, East Winds: Recipes, History and Tales from the Hidden Caribbean, is out now priced £19.95; The next season of Industry is coming this summer
The pandemic made the dinner party more popular than ever – but it’s guaranteed to be more hassle than it’s worth
Everything goes wrong immediately when a guest commits the ultimate indiscretion and turns up an hour early. Dinner parties are tough.
Nothing ever goes as planned. The whole idea is to catch up with your nearest and dearest but you can do that with much less hassle, and with far more enjoyment, in the comforting surroundings of your favourite London restaurant. The food is better, the wine list more interesting (albeit more expensive), and you don’t have to do the dishes afterwards.
Still riding a wave of post-pandemic popularity, more of us are being pressured into hosting a dreaded dinner party than ever before. The problems only begin with that early guest. Surely everybody knows that ‘Come any time after six’ doesn’t actually mean six, and it certainly doesn’t mean ‘stroll through the door at half five’. ‘Arrive at six’ means different things to different people – to punctual friends it means ‘get here for quarter to seven’. To notoriously tardy friends it means ‘dinner will be served at half seven, arrive before that.
Then to the main event: the meal. The ordeal begins long before the evening in question – days, weeks, sometimes even months before. There is the allimportant menu planning, which in today’s climate is not for the faint-hearted. Instagram and TikTok are laden with ‘easy dinner party recipes’, ‘cooking with friends on a budget’, ‘how to keep my roast chicken moist’ and elaborate tablescapes, meaning there’s mounting pressure to absolutely nail your spread.
If you’re not laying down a seventies-style dining experience that features a fondue, a seven-layer salad, a meat dish, a fish dish, a vegan dish, a nut-free dish, a gluten-free dish, and everything in between, there’s little point in trying.
If you’re not Cordon Bleu-trained, choreographing everything to come out on time, whilst entertaining a house full of hungry, impatient friends, is no mean feat. Pressure mounts, hot dishes end up cold, and cold dishes end up hot. Orchestrating an overly ambitious meal armed with a domestic oven, a handful of hobs, and just two hands, is not conducive to convivial dining.
A host can only handle so much, and adhering to all intolerances, likes and dislikes can be a minefield, even more so when there’s a growing confusion between an allergy, intolerance and an aversion. Whilst going above and beyond for the former is a no-brainer, navigating guests with the latter can be downright exhausting (sorry mum).
So what’s the alternative? That’s simple – leave it to the professionals. If you can orchestrate a gettogether at a restaurant everyone agrees on, you’ve truly mastered the art of the dinner party. I’ll take a table for eight and a flawless dinner at BiBi’s, BBQ by the fire at Acme Fire Cult, or a boozy, steak-filled night with Max Cohen at Dorian over a mediocre meal in the deepest depths of suburbia any day, and I’m sure the rest of the party would agree. All fun, no stress, and you can leave whenever you want.
Justin is the founder of Sera, a membership platform made for
JUSTIN LANDSBERGERWho decides what goes on a snack trolley? And why is there always flapjack? AMELIA TAIT goes in search of answers to the great question of our time
Every time you go on holiday, it comes too. It’s there when you take a train from York to London, and – although it doesn’t have a passport – it makes its way from Stansted to Spain every day with ease. It is, in fact, on almost every British train track and runway; it’s the most welltravelled chocolate bar in (and above) the country. It’s the KitKat. Wherever there is a snack trolley, there is a KitKat, providing for peckish passengers and sticking two fingers up at the competition.
Who decided that this was the chocolate bar most palatable to the majority of the public? Snack trolleys aren’t sizable, and every bit of sweet and savoury has to fight for its place on a catering cart. Even if you’re only an occasional traveller, you’ve undoubtedly noticed some patterns: sticks of shortbread, slices of flapjack, posh packets of crisps and miniature cans of Pringles. Are these the nation’s favourites, or is something else going on behind the scenes?
Who arbitrates the anatomy of a snack trolley, and how exactly do they do it?
“The choices that people make are safe,” says Zoe Farmer, global director of retail and management at Gate Group, a company that provides onboard catering to airlines such as Virgin Atlantic, Wizz Air, and Air Europa. Adventurous travellers are not necessarily adventurous eaters once onboard. Farmer says research and data has found that “the majority of people want something
that they’re familiar with.”
Farmer’s colleague, global account director Kelly O’Reilly, is responsible for supplying complimentary catering options on planes. Why is it that, more often than not, a flight attendant hands you a little packet of pretzels? “Pretzels are robust,” says O’Reilly, explaining that they’re also cost-effective and provide the perfect little side of salt when serving drinks. “I don’t know which came first – it’s like the chicken and the egg. Did the very small pack of pretzels come first or the demand from the airlines?”
Farmer and O’Reilly take a myriad of factors into account when stocking a plane with snacks. Space is king, of course – a delicious cookie might not work because it crumbles when stacked. There’s smell too –nothing should be too offensive in its odour. The pair also ensure that every product travels well – if they want to sell a new type of crisps, for example, they trial them on over 10 flights a day for a week to ensure the packets don’t pop. This is one of the reasons Pringles, in their sturdy cans, are so commonplace (the main reason, however, is simply that they’re popular all over Europe).
Mess is another factor; when flying from hotter destinations, the standard four-finger KitKat is replaced with a KitKat Chunky because it has a higher melting point. O’Reilly still rues the day she put popcorn on planes.
“Years and years ago, we had popcorn as a snack.” After the
end of a two-week trial, O’Reilly heard from the team responsible for cleaning the planes, who have tight turnarounds to ensure aircraft are ready to fly again quickly. Popcorn, it turns out, gets absolutely everywhere. “Take it off,” the irate team demanded.
These days, the crew are often consulted before any new snacks come onboard –they may even get the final say if an airline is deciding between two new chocolate bars. Some airlines also have “instant reporting”, where flight attendants can tell Gate Group whether, say, a packet is too difficult to open.
On land, mess is less of a factor, says Jenna Chinery, onboard experience manager at Hull Trains (they sell popcorn). “We have wonderful onboard cleaning contractors,” she says, meaning she isn’t afraid to serve anything crumbly. Space is still crucial, though – Chinery says she wanted to stock Cup A Soup but found “they just don’t fit comfortably on our trolley”. Also a major consideration is a product’s origin. “The public responds wonderfully to a
Stocking a snack trolley on a plane or train is a fairly riskaverse practice – one that’s about two years behind high street trends
local supplier,” Chinery says – hence why you often see smaller crisps brands on trains. It’s also why Pullin’s fruit cake is “untouchable” on Great Western Railway, says a company spokesperson, because it “supports the communities we serve.”
Thanks to limited space, both planes and trains can’t afford to stock divisive snacks –a white chocolate bar or a pack of Twiglets, for example. This is why sandwiches on snack trolleys have fewer ingredients than you would see in the shops. “Every time you add an extra ingredient, the sandwich becomes more polarising,” Farmer says. A ham and cheese toastie is considered a safe bet.
“You always have to try and forget what you like personally and think of what the majority of the passenger demographic would like,” says O’Reilly (although Chinery, a cake fan, is looking for ways to get some onboard).
Stocking a snack trolley, then, is a fairly risk-averse practice – O’Reilly says onboard catering is “about two years behind” high street trends. Still, most planes and trains will switch up their offerings two or three times a year, which helps them respond to demand. A decade ago, O’Reilly explains, healthy options would barely sell – today, customers are far more healthconscious and may choose a protein ball over a chocolate bar. There are limits on the nation’s need for nutrients, though. “Fresh fruit,” O’Reilly says, “sadly is not commercially viable as the demand for the product is very low.”
So what makes the ideal snack trolley? Farmer notes that products have to be varied enough to not encroach on each other’s sales, hence why you don’t get loads of different chocolate bars. Shortbread is popular on trains because it is familiar and expected. It’s also ideal for planes because it doesn’t “bloom” with a white coating like chocolate does when it changes temperature. Rob Taylor, food and beverage development lead at Avanti West Coast, explains that flapjacks are so commonplace because they’re “a good all-day product” –suitable for breakfast, lunch and dinner. He adds that flapjacks also “tick many boxes for dietary needs”, as they can easily be both gluten-free and vegan-friendly. Complimentary snacks can sometimes be more exciting, because handing them out means you don’t have to guess how many will sell. The reason you might get a mini ice-cream halfway through your long haul flight, O’Reilly explains, is because “snacking in a complimentary environment also meets a need to give passengers something to do.”
And what about the ubiquitous KitKat?
“There’s a reason why KitKats are on nearly every plane,” says Farmer – and it’s not because they’re compact, although that certainly helps. Quite simply, “it’s one of the most popular products across Europe” – in the UK alone, more than one billion are eaten every year. She says it helps that KitKats aren’t crushed when you stack them on top of each other, but Chinery offers an even simpler explanation for why Brits in particular favour the snack on their travels. “It’s great to snap and dunk into a tea and coffee, isn’t it?”
We are dedicated to taking time: we wait, we learn, we perfect. Share the unique character of Glenfarclas.
TIMES CHANGE
BUT OUR SPIRIT HASN’T
So I would start with a margarita with volcanic black salt as well as Himalyan salt mixture. I’d invite Cate Blanchett to drink with me. She’s so vivacious and a good cocktail party guest: you want someone who doesn’t want to be censored and she’s got a great sense of humour. I’m always seeing the funny side, and she’s the sort of person who can just be free. It’d be a great start to the evening. We’d drink lychee martinis when the margs ran out.
Money’s no object as it’s my last night on Earth, so I’m not going to restrict myself to ethical food. I’ve also got a teleporting machine to get around the world in one night. Why not? For starters I’d go to an izakaya under a railway track in Tokyo. I’d have sashimi, starting with uni, which is sea urchin, and some toro tartare, the fatty tuna, served with some Dassai 23 sake. I’m so lucky to have travelled for filming and in Japan we were in a hole in the wall place where the quality was incredible. I’m determined to recreate that.
As for the teleporting, my technique is inspired by the I Dream of Jeannie show from the 1960s with Larry Hagman: the girl from that just makes a little noise and all of a sudden she’s transported somewhere radically different.
I’d clap my hands and be back on the British Isles for fresh rock oysters to cleanse the palate. I’d pair those with a glass of Puligny Montrachet by the winemaker Etienne Sauzet, who makes a steely crisp white burgundy. It’s really expensive and absolutely heavenly. Then I’d go to China and have Peking duck with pancakes with a lovely white Chinese tea, because I’d need a break from the boozing.
To Italy, for white truffles with a pizza bianca, really well cooked so it’s crisp. My dining partner would be Marty Scorsese who I’d talk movies with (he’s my fave) and then I’d be off to India to have a lovely curry with all those proper naans with different fillings, potato and onion, like the ones I used to eat while hanging out with Saif Ali Khan and Deepika Padukone when we were filming the movie Love Aaj Kal. The Bollywood scene is very different from filming in Hollywood or the UK, they have a really lovely energy.
I’m doing a tasting menu of the world so now I’m in Morocco having peshwari lamb, which they smoke for hours underground. The lamb would be from Ireland where they do the best, and while I’m there I’d teleport Cillian Murphy over. We’d eat Irish-cumMoroccan lamb and I’d ask him about acting and all the wonderful roles he’s done.
Then we’d do dessert. In Portugal we’d have pastel de nata. We’d queue in line for ages at the best place to get them when they’re hot and fresh. I’d pair these with forty-year Francesco Grand Tawny port and just go and sit with some old Portuguese men and have a chat. They’re so lovely and friendly.
I want to end it all in Italy. I’ll be in Venice on a gondola with all my best friends, my family, my granny and all my favourite actors and directors, eating Italyyyyaan geeelaaaaaatooooo! And having a laugh with the sun on us, all singing and having fun. And then the gondola would fly up in the air and go to a new planet.
l Elizabeth stars in Netflix movie Irish Wish
Fresh from filming Irish Wish with Lindsay Lohan, we asked ELIZABETH TAN what she would eat for her last meal
Keir Starmer is the heir apparent to the biggest job in the country. ANDY SILVESTER chats to him about packing in the law, Tory attacks and his hopes for a Labour government.
Photographs by JOSH SHINNERIt is a grey, unspectacular Monday morning and in a stuffy basement hall, one of the country’s most accomplished lawyers is patiently posing, his grin slightly forced, for selfies with people he has never met and is unlikely to meet again.
One wonders at stage-managed events like this one – from which you can hear the thundering roar of the Westway – why anyone would put themselves through the sheer faff of politics. This is particularly relevant for Keir Starmer, who packed in a glittering legal career to be here, and whose earning power, prior to his shift into politics, would have been edging towards seven figures.
In another life, he could be in a black cab on the aforementioned Westway en route to Heathrow, using the names of seasons as verbs. Instead he’s standing on a cramped stage while ‘Vote Sadiq’ placards are passed over, around, and at one point perilously close to his head. He’s here to help launch the London mayor’s re-election campaign, with the click-click-“over here Keir”-click of photographers soundtracking the whole affair. Does the former director of public prosecutions, who turned to politics only in the run-up to the 2015 election, wonder how he ended up here?
“That’s an interesting question,” he guffaws. “People ask me if I always wanted to be Prime Minister, to which the answer is ‘no’. Because when I was growing up, I didn’t think people like me would become MPs, let alone leader of the Labour party.”
This is classic Starmer: cautious, humble, uncontroversial. This has not always gone down well. He is often described
as “boring,” and many in his own party are frustrated that a 20-point poll lead isn’t even bigger. An entire industry of commentators line up to suggest ways in which he’s not up to the job. It’s a world away from the almost universal acclaim he received in his previous roles. Does the man almost certain to be Britain’s next Prime Minister enjoy his job?
“I much prefer being out of parliament,” he says in that measured tone, always engaging but falling a little short of inspiring. “In parliament you’ve got the tribal theatrics, of which PMQs is probably the worst example. I came into politics late and therefore I’m not as tribal as others.” A lot of MPs – admittedly more Tories, presumably those who have read the polls – are bailing out of Westminster for other jobs. Is all it worth it? Not just the tribal pantomime, but the intrusion that comes
with the job, the constant scrutiny, the never-ending criticism. “Absolutely” he says.
When I was growing up, I didn’t think people like me would become MPs, let alone leader of the Labour party or Prime Minister lll
His path to politics makes a little more sense when he charts how he got here. “Almost immediately [on becoming a lawyer] I started work on housing cases and employment cases and I got frustrated that, case-by-case, I wasn’t going to make much of a difference. That’s when I started doing group litigation to bring about bigger change.”
That led him down the route of litigating to end the death penalty overseas. In a sortof authorised, sort-of unauthorised book by his longtime friend Tom Baldwin, Starmer tells the story of being stood in a jail in Uganda with death row inmates, many of whom were as guilty of truly horrible crimes as the day is long.
Rather than try to get individuals off here and there, Starmer and pals challenged the death penalty in British courts, which, thanks to some typically British colonial overhang, still had authority overseas. Starmer won. No more death penalty, a punishment that he says “horrifies him”, being “a process involving dozens of people methodically planning to exterminate another human being”.
“Then I went to Northern Ireland to work with the police, which for me was transformative because, as a lawyer, I’d been banging on the door from the outside wanting to bring about change and suddenly I found myself working with the police as part of the Good Friday Agreement.”
That in turn led to his appointment under Gordon Brown as the director of
For my generation it wasn’t really in doubt that you get a pretty secure job, you get your foot on the housing ladder. Too many young people are ending up back at mum and dad’s, not having the job that they hoped for, and in a very uncertain world, that does worry me: the basic foundations of security are hugely important
public prosecutions, during which he led an organisation of 7,000-odd people and managed a substantial budget. He left with congratulations from the (Tory) attorney general and a thank-you dinner from thenhome secretary Theresa May. Most impartial observers agreed that, aside from an overzealous approach to hounding journalists (Rebekah Brooks is said to have called Starmer “the man who tried to put me in jail” over his decision to prosecute her over phone hacking), he didn’t do a bad job.
The “political bit at the end” is how Starmer refers to what comes next. “After a five year term my wife was suggesting good, secure jobs in the law where I could continue to make some change with, you know, a decent salary,” he says, knowing full well that “decent” doesn’t quite cover it. “But I was frustrated that you couldn’t do the sort of national change I wanted unless you went into politics. That took me into parliament, and then came the chance came to lead the Labour party, to change our party and change the country.”
What does changing the country look like, though? What ‘national change’ does he want? These are big, largely unanswered questions, albeit ones that are unlikely to stop him becoming Prime Minister, with polls suggesting the country has largely stopped listening to his opposition.
I put it to him, after he reels off his life story, that times have changed since his meteoric rise. He had an average upbringing but he worked hard, got a decent university degree, bought a house, built a career. With
rents soaring, questions hanging over the value of university, and wages continuing to grow more slowly than capital assets like housing, that deal no longer works. Does it make him angry?
“Frustrated. Really frustrated. Not angry, because we’re determined to do something about it. For my generation it wasn’t really in doubt that you get a pretty secure job, you get your foot on the housing ladder. Too many young people are ending up back at mum and dad’s, not having the secure job that they hoped for, and in a very uncertain world, that does worry me: the basic foundations of security are hugely important.”
Prior to the morning’s event, Starmer and
Mayor Sadiq Khan had visited a woman living in a new council house nearby, who had been in fairly ropey accommodation beforehand. It was built, Labour say, as a direct result of them winning Westminster City Council in the local elections, for the first time, in 2022.
The woman’s fifteen month old girl, so the story goes, started walking the first day she moved into the new flat. Starmer, a lawyer with a career built on scepticism, evidently perceives my eyebrow nudge up a millimetre or two.
“I know it seems a bit coincidental.” But the old flat, he is told, was a postage stamp. “Now she’s got space, this little girl was curious, and started to walk within hours. And her mum said that when she goes back to work, she doesn’t want to go back to her old job as a teaching assistant, she wants to do a different job.”
After 14 years of Tory government, they can’t go to the country and say ‘look at what we’ve delivered, you must want another five years’ lll
Starmer grew up poorer than any other Labour leader in recent memory, the son of a toolmaker and a nurse who lived with Still’s disease, a rare type of inflammatory arthritis. He lived in the unremarkable town of Oxted in Surrey and holidays were spent in the Lake District. Highlights of his childhood were playing football, trips to Croydon’s Whitgift Centre and feeding the family donkeys. At one point the phone was cut off. If Starmer is now a “lefty Islington lawyer” (© Rishi Sunak) he didn’t start off that way. His perceived lack of star power has provoked plenty of criticism. Shortly after
our interview, the firebrand left-winger Owen Jones quit the Labour party in a huff, and criticism of Starmer for being lowvoltage has been a constant of his leadership.
His critics say he doesn’t stand for anything, that “securonomics,” his flagship economic policy, is lacking in both radicalism and detail. In short, many in Westminster don’t rate him as being particularly good at politics, which is a fairly key skill, especially with an election campaign on the way.
“He’s a lawyer who reads from notes,” says one senior Tory. “There is no dexterity or fleet of foot. When criticised he just shouts ‘nonsense’. That won’t hold up under greater scrutiny.”
But take a quick look at those who have been called “gifted politicians”: David Cameron and George Osborne, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, Rory Stewart and David Miliband. Had it not been for a surprise reappointment for Cameron, being ‘good at politics’ doesn’t seem to guarantee much success.
Starmer, meanwhile, has cultivated a brand of professional, technocratic, almost – whisper it – European social and market democracy. He is difficult to provoke, wilfully middle ground. At a dinner a few days after we meet, a companion compares him to Mark Rutte, the longtime Dutch PM who turned respectability, predictability and low-voltage efficiency into 13 years of office.
One Labour strategist – and fan of Starmer’s – reckons the Labour leader finds the “melodrama” of the SW1 village
We had to be really ruthless in the Labour party and do tough stuff very early. We did the equivalent of Kinnock, Smith and Blair in three years
a “ridiculous distraction from real issues.” “He became a politician because he wanted to fix problems not because he wanted to impress with his wit and repartee.” Former charges from his role at the Crown Prosecution Service talk of a methodical decision maker, a pragmatist.
Starmer points to the achievements he has already made. He says he is proud of the transformation of the Labour party since he took over in April 2020, months after the party’s worst election performance since before the war and with much of it still riven by antisemitism controversies.
“We had to be really ruthless in the Labour party and do tough stuff very early,” he says. The roster of those no longer in the party – and not by choice – includes its former leader Jeremy Corbyn and totemic MPs including Diane Abbott as well as up and comers like Kate Osamor. He says he has accomplished a task it took his predecessors years to finish, rebuilding the party and its ethos in a more modern – and electable – image. “We did Kinnock, Smith and Blair in three or four years,” he says.
The first time we met, Starmer told me he was under no illusions that almost everything is easier in opposition than in government. As the latter becomes a more realistic prospect, does he still agree? “I’d double down on it. Government is much harder than opposition, because government is about delivery.”
To get there, though, he’ll have to survive an election campaign that promises to be bruising. Tory election strategists all but lick
their lips when I ask what they’ve got ‘saved up’ for the campaign; bits of it have already seen the light of day, with Starmer accused by one right-leaning tabloid of defending a host of wrong’uns across the world in his mission to end the death penalty.
With more of it to come, does Starmer –who can look piqued when criticised in the Chamber – have a strong enough chin?
“It doesn’t bother me in the slightest, because if that’s all they’ve got, then it’s a desperate place for them,” he says, his voice becoming louder than at any point in the interview, approaching something like fullflow. “After 14 years [of Tory government], you can’t go to the country and say ‘look at what we’ve delivered, look at what we’ve changed, you must want another five years of this’. They can’t do that. They can’t go to the country and say ‘we’ve been through difficult times – Ukraine, Covid – and we’ve had strong and stable leadership’. That’s gone. So they’ll go low because they haven’t got a record.”
And with that, we’re done. He has another unglamorous engagement to shoot off to. A sofa is rapidly moved so the Labour leader can stare wistfully out at the Westway traffic snaking by while our photographer works his magic. Starmer seems game, doing his bit to make everybody’s life easier. He makes small talk about the pubs of north London with our Finsbury Park-based snapper; he often nips in for a pint before Arsenal games. He seems competent, and in these times of political upheaval – even farce – competent is no bad thing.
Upon the realisation he’s probably lived more than half of his life, STEVE DINNEEN considers what it means to be middle aged
Midlife is a point of no return, that place in a journey where the beginning is further away than the end.”
So writes Patricia Cohen in her excellent examination of middle age, In Our Prime.
This line flashed into my mind when I stumbled across a terrible piece of information, released by the ONS: the median age for a man in the UK to die is 82 years old. I am 41 years old. I have passed the point of no return. If death is a black hole, I am within its event horizon. We will soon ask you to return your seat to the upright position as we begin our final descent.
Middle age is a tricky thing to pin down, not least because it’s a club at which nobody wants to be a member. Those, like me, who are standing dubiously at the velvet ropes, hoping the bouncer doesn’t let us in, think that real middle age begins at 50 or even 60, but then we would say that, wouldn’t we?
“It’s entirely constructed,” says Dr Eliza Filby, a historian of generational evolution. “It’s not biological like puberty.” I can console myself with the knowledge that until recently there was no middle age. Before the 20th century, life expectancy in developed countries was less than 50. You were young and then you died of consumption, or fell into a threshing machine. There wasn’t any need for the term “middle age” so nobody bothered to come up with one. It was only with the advent of leisure time and increased life expectancy that a recognisable definition of “midlife” began to emerge. Advertising execs soon realised that people with property and managerial jobs were the ones with all the money, and that selling them the dream of an extended youth was a lucrative business.
Filby says the modern conception of middle age was defined even later, as recently as the 1980s. “The idea of the midlife crisis, of buying a sports car and realising you’re a sellout, is a narrative that was invented by the boomers,” she tells me. “It came about when the hippies became yuppies.” That flavour
of midlife crisis is already beginning to feel antiquated. As the first generation of millennials reach middle age – I am a pioneer in this field, being what is unfortunately referred to as a ‘geriatric millennial’ – they are less likely to buy a sports car (in this economy?) than they are to quit their job and go backpacking through Nepal, or at least speak interminably at dinner parties about how they intend to.
“It’s a very different trajectory,” says Filby. “Millennials have pushed the idea of delaying adulthood to its limits. We didn’t invent it but we really perfected this new life stage called ‘kidulthood’. We remained dependent on the bank of mum and dad, we struggled to get on the housing ladder, we wanted to travel and delay having babies. We extended what I call the ‘freedom years’ – but this means we have gone almost overnight from being kidults to being middle aged. It crept up on us. For a long time, millennials were synonymous with youth, because we’d been younger for longer than any previous generation. We’re only now realising there’s this new generation who think millennials are really sad, and really quite old.”
I feel attacked. I look young for my age (although when I suggested this to a Gen Z colleague they replied: “Really? I suppose
I don’t know anyone else as old as you”). I go to the gym. I can’t be middle aged, it’s preposterous. But I can see differences between generations. Those in Gen Z drink less. They go clubbing less. They’re not as fun, essentially. “Hedonism is to be found in the middle aged rather than the young,” agrees Filby, who describes friends in their fourties who take regular sex- and drug-fuelled holidays to Butlins. She also points out that seeing these generational differences probably says more about us than it does them. “Young people have always been criticised for being lazy, entitled, not willing to work hard, right back to the days of Aristotle. When you start to think like that it’s a demonstration of your age.”
I’m lounging on the deck of life’s cruise liner, sipping a beer, enjoying the band. Across the ocean, I can just about make out the iceberg lll
In my twenties and thirties, the concept of my own mortality was entirely abstract. At 41 it’s still a distant cloud on the horizon, but a cloud nonetheless. I’m lounging on the deck of life’s transatlantic cruise liner, sipping a beer, enjoying the band. Far away, across the ocean, I can just about make out the iceberg. Nothing to worry about, yet. Its jagged edges are still hazy, I can’t imagine how horrifying it will look up close, can’t conceive of the moment when I’ll hear the rending of metal against ice. But it’s there, vast and cold and inevitable.
This is too bleak an analogy. When I think about getting older it’s with a sense of not-entirely-unpleasant melancholy (the Germans will have a word for this, no doubt), a realisation that my number of potential futures is becoming ever-smaller, that each day a multitude of invisible doors close without me even realising. When you’re a child – at least a middle class one growing up in England, like me –your possibilities seem endless. Kids think they can be astronauts or football players. But the possibilities soon go into freefall. It quickly became apparent I would never play for Manchester United. I would never even play for Colchester United. I was bright but not a genius. University beckoned but not Oxbridge. With every passing year the slab of possibility is whittled down
further and further, becoming more solid and defined but also more prosaic. Raw potential is fed into the top of the machine and reality slides out of the bottom like a string of human sausages.
There are roughly 30,000 days in a lifespan of 82 years, which gives me 15,000 remaining, with a prevailing wind. But not all days are created equal. The perception of time speeds up as you get older. My parents describe feeling shell shocked at the realisation they’re somehow in their seventies. Five minutes ago they were young but time trickled away while they weren’t looking, escaping silently through a hole in the bottom of the bucket. Ask a teenager what they’re doing and they’ll tell you “nothing”. And why not? As Roger Waters puts it in the Pink Floyd song Time:
You are young and life is long, and there is time to kill today
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun
But what did he know? He wasn’t even 30 when he wrote that. Still, you find the same sentiment again and again, every time the Venn diagram of pop culture and middle age overlaps. Life’s middle years are defined by a sense of loss, of realising too late that youth has moved out and changed the locks. It’s everywhere, from the sublime Love Song of J. Alfred
From left: James Joyce’s Ulysses, a notoriously long and dense book that everybody should probably read once; Dylan Thomas’ poetry collection including Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night; Opposite from top: A still from the film Sideways in which Paul Giamatti’s character has a midlife crisis; Steve standing somewhere between birth and death
Prufrock by TS Eliot:
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker, And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker
To the ridiculous Sunscreen by Baz Luhrman:
Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth; Oh nevermind; you will not understand the power and beauty of your youth until they have faded. But trust me, in 20 years you’ll look back at photos of yourself and recall in a way you can’t grasp now how much possibility lay before you
In the Oscar-winning film Sideways, Paul Giamatti’s character – who is somehow five
Life’s middle years are defined by a sense of loss, of realising too late that youth has moved out and changed the locks lll lll
years younger than I am now – drinks his way to the realisation that he will never be a great novelist. In Before Midnight Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy long for the simplicity and passion of their youth. In Call Me By Your Name a father tells his son: “Our hearts and our bodies are given to us only once. Before you know it, your heart’s worn out, and as for your body, there comes a point when no one looks at it.”
We can only do as Dylan Thomas urged and refuse to go gentle into that good night. Youth may have immediacy but there’s an urgency to the middle years, a realisation that your most precious commodity is in dwindling supply. The less time you have, the more valuable it becomes. Simple economics. You begin to measure your life in things you won’t do, rather than things you will. Every decision takes on a heightened significance. A decade ago I bought a copy of Ulysses, which remains stubbornly unread. Will I ever start it? Probably not. What else will I never do? Have I visited Moscow for the last time? Will I see Man United win the league again?
I’m writing this from a position of privilege. I have my health. I do not live in a warzone. I have the kind of job that allows me to pen sprawling essays on middle age. I am also a man, which, as with so many things in life, makes middle age relatively straightforward. There is no sudden and uncomfortable biological shift, no perimenopause and menopause, no
grieving an irreversible change from one state of being to another, no hard cut-off date for the possibility of having children. “It’s a milestone for women,” says Filby. “It hits differently.” For men, middle age is a gradual decline that begins around your 18th birthday. It’s incremental, measured in the thinning of hair and expanding of waistlines, what Walt Whitman described as “the estuary that enlarges and spreads itself grandly as it pours in the great sea”.
The process is further complicated by the age in which we live. Our digital existence allows the possibility of a parallel life, one that’s curated and manicured and filtered. I have friends who are barely recognisable from their Facebook profiles. We attempt to hold back the sands of time through cosmetic surgery and Botox and fillers, creating a generation of strangely ageless faces, locked in a sad parody of youth. We spend more time than ever in the gym, delaying the inevitable. “We’re a generation that grew up with fitness culture and that’s a way of counteracting middle age,” says Filby. “People live on fuel and pump iron to stave off physical age. There’s that very Californian idea of having a ‘biological age’, basically asking the question: ‘Can I stop time?’”
Some go further. Billionaires including
Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg are interested in ‘biohacking’, attempting to increase their natural lifespan through technology and chemistry. Others believe they can end ageing altogether. Tech bro Bryan Johnston, 46, is an extreme example, claiming to have slowed his ageing process by 31 years, experimenting
with blood-plasma transfusions from his teenage son, gene therapy and bone marrow transplants. Algorithms dictate when he should wake (early), sleep (early) and consume supplements (often). He says he achieves the nighttime erections of a teenage boy.
When I interviewed life-extension evangelist Dr Aubrey de Grey years ago, he asked me not to use the term “live forever” but rather “forever young” – the goal is to capture youth, not extend old age. It’s about stretching the healthy years across the canvas of eternity, to realise a dream that’s existed since humanity dragged itself gasping from the sea.
“It’s trying to control time,” says Filby. “We live in a hyper individualistic age where we think our lives are really important, that our purpose and our jobs and our contribution really matters. So we’re scared of getting old and we can’t deal with death.”
I am not holding out for eternal youth. I will be satisfied if I get to live out my remaining 15,000 days. I have come to terms with the fact I will never read Ulysses – it’s too long! There aren’t enough full stops! – but I do plan to rage, rage against the dying of the light, to hit that iceberg at full speed and disappear into the inky darkness having lived.
There is a stoic beauty to the electricity pylon, beacons to modernity that snake across the landscape. But they have powerful enemies, says LUCY KENNINGHAM
The closer you look at beauty,” writes the novelist Alan Hollinghurst, “the more unsettling it becomes.” This line from the novel The Line of Beauty, in which the glamorous protagonist Nick Guest propels himself through life in the reckless pursuit of aesthetic pleasures, drifted through my head as I stood in a damp field on the outskirts of Oxfordshire. Sodden and skulking, ankle deep in mud, I gazed up in both awe and disgust at the telos of my trip: the Sandford Lock electricity pylon.
It was a tiresome journey: through pelting rain I had travelled eight miles across London, boarded the fast train via Reading to the centre of Oxford, cycled up to the Folly Bridge, where I left the city and skirted south beside the Thames for
a further five miles. I ended the journey cursing the man who had inspired this mad mission – hours of cycling through torrential rain to see a transmission tower.
That would be Kevin Mosedale, a physics teacher who runs the Pylon of the Month website, who had told me this is the best pylon in the UK to visit. “You can get up close and personal with it,” he explained. I was sold. But standing at the feet of this metal giant I found myself conflicted. Dizzyingly latticed and layered, its crisscross structure rises frenetically towards the sky in a way that makes your head spin. It’s only when you step back that it takes on its ethereal, stoic beauty. Up close, 20 tonnes of steel is cold and abrasive.
lllBefore Pylon of the Month was even a twinkle in Mosedale’s eye, there was the Pylon Appreciation Society. This online
group was formed to help mega fans, whatever their age, with any pylon-related questions. “Will the Society’s badge be sufficient to show to the police if I’m stopped for taking photos of pylons? I am worried that people might think I am a terrorist,” asked one member on the group’s messageboard.
Sadly, the founder of the Pylon Appreciation Society, a woman named Flash Bristow, passed away in 2020 and the society is now dormant. No longer can you pay £15 to sign up for a welcome pack that includes a photo card, “parts of the pylon” print and a badge.
The website still exists, though, with a distinctly 2006 aesthetic and a charming welcome message: “It’s simple: the Pylon Appreciation Society is a club for people who appreciate electricity pylons. Enthusiasts range from primary school children to retired engineers and include
anyone who is interested or inspired by transmission towers.”
Nowadays, pylon junkies have Mosedale’s site, which posts a different picture of a pylon each month (obviously) with an accompanying essay describing why this particular zinger was chosen. The bio of his X account reads “All pylon life is here”. It has almost 2,500 followers, many of whom interact regularly with him and suggest their own favourite pylons from countries across the world (each has a different design; when matched with foreign terrain, the ensuing scenes can be truly delightful).
Some might assume that anyone who ran a blog called Pylon of the Month was an aesthetic contrarian, someone resolutely determined to be different, but Mosedale is a softly spoken, mild-mannered physics teacher who isn’t looking for glory or fame (though he did once appear on Politics
South East to talk about his site).
“When I was teaching electricity in 2008, there was a website called Pylon of the Month and we used to have a laugh about what kind of saddo would have a site like that,” Mosedale says. “When it stopped working a colleague said I should take it up, so I started doing it for a laugh and it grew from there. Whenever I started talking about it, people were curiously drawn to it. Like, is this guy for real?
“People want to know why on earth someone would have a website about pylons – they’re not necessarily interested in the pylons themselves.” And in fairness, he’s the first to admit that the bounce rate on his website is “very high”. He says his audience is mostly made up of English-speaking countries: “I haven’t cracked China or Russia,” he says, a little wistfully; China’s pylons are notoriously tall.
The design of pylons is Mosedale’s specific area of interest. They are “about as efficient as they can be,” he says admiringly. They are designed to do one job incredibly well, making them a triumph of form and function, an elegant, minimalist solution to a pressing engineering problem.
Pause for a moment. Picture a pylon. How does it make you feel? If you’re anything like my followers on X, the answer will be, well, “bad”. Having naively assumed others would agree, I published a piece in City A.M. arguing that pylons are “skeletal beauties”.
“They are not ‘works of art’,” replied one user, “not to people who love nature and the countryside”. They pointed out my location on X was set to an inner-London suburb, which put me in that group of Yimby-minded urban elites who have never been threatened by the prospect of a metallic monster being built in their backyard, instead enjoying the luxury of constant and invisibly-supplied electricity.
People like me can take the train from Euston to Glasgow and marvel at the pretty pylons snaking their way across the landscape, a line of monoliths carrying their electric cargo beneath their arms. It makes sense that those who dislike pylons typically live nearer to them. Those who admire them – such as myself, Mosedale and Flash – live in cities.
There are 90,000 electricity pylons across Britain connecting 122 power stations to consumers using 4,000 miles of cables. Some stand as high as 50 metres and weigh around 20 tonnes. They carry up to 400,000 volts of electricity, which is a lot; as little as 100–250 volts is enough to kill you.
And there are set to be a whole load more: over the next seven years, four times as many will be built than in the past 30 years. That’s because a net zero Britain will need more electricity – to charge electric cars, for example – and will rely more on renewable energy like wind, which currently accounts for 30 percent of the UK’s total electricity generation and is set to grow, with 24 new wind farms to be switched on by 2030.
The UK’s first pylon was built in 1928 by the nascent National Grid. The ‘lattice’ design was intended to be delicate –at least more delicate than brutalist structures seen in Europe and the United States. That design has proved enduring; only recently has a new ‘T-shaped’ pylon started cropping up.
The very name ‘pylon’ (which means
traffic cone across the pond) was chosen by National Grid architects as an allusion to the structures’ light-ferrying grandeur. In Ancient Egypt, a pylon was a gateway with two towers either side of it. The pylon represented two hills between which the sun would rise and set, and was where rituals to the Sun God would be carried out. The National Grid’s mission to bring power to the country was equally noble: after all, it has given us light, power and heat.
Despite their worthy heritage, however, pylons have powerful enemies, not least former home secretary Priti Patel, who suggested in parliament last autumn that Britain should “pull the plug” on them and “build an offshore grid”. She even created a low-budget video boasting of her anti-pylon stance, set to jingly music. She and 13 other Tory MPs have joined forces with campaigners from the Essex Suffolk Norfolk Pylons brigade, waging a cold war against the National Grid (when I spoke to someone from the National Grid, he was wary of discussing these pylon warriors, many of whom have an acute case of social media addiction).
When I finally rang Rosie Pearson, I made a confession: “I like pylons,” I said bashfully. We agreed to disagree.
“I’m not directly affected by them,” she said, which surprised me given she founded the Essex Suffolk Norfolk Pylons group and started the petition rallying against the proposed 180km route of new pylons set to sweep across the South West.
“But the [proposed] line goes straight through the woods just 50 metres from my dad’s house. Woods he planted himself. When the proposition came in, I thought ‘Over my dead body!’ He’d planted that for nature. He’s too ill to fight but I’ve campaigned before. I don’t want to but I can,” she told me enthusiastically.
Then she laid out a series of “heart rendering personal stories,” which were indeed saddening: someone’s house that had become unsellable. Someone else whose house price had fallen 40 per cent. Someone with a pacemaker who was worried he would be unsafe in his own garden. Worse still, this power isn’t even intended for the people living in these areas – it’s all being directed to London.
To probe the aesthetics of a pylon is to ask ‘what is ugly?’ and question where our notions of beauty come from
The idea that someone could be affected by the National Grid’s construction and not receive compensation seemed wild to me – and indeed National Grid says the compensation scheme hasn’t been announced yet because the South West pylon scheme hasn’t been finalised (it’s still in the consultation stage). It should be noted that there are serious disadvantages to burying pylons or building them offshore. “You are effectively sterilising land use in the area,” is how Richard Smith of the National Grid described sinking – read “burying” –power lines. Currently a tiny proportion of Britain’s network is underground, almost
exclusively in cities. It is up to 17 times more expensive than building al fresco cables, the lines need replacing more often and a wide berth (up to 40m) must be cleared with no building on top of it.
Pushing pylons offshore is even worse, according to Simon Cran-McGreehin, head of analysis at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit. “At some point those lines have to come onshore to reach customers, otherwise it’s like a ring-road without any routes into town,” he says. If pylons out at sea break, it’s much harder to fix them than the ones you can amble up to on your way along an Oxfordshire cycle path. This is the argument that
Mosedale, who is sympathetic to the pylon haters, made to me. Ultimately, it is a matter of economics.
lll
Yet, aesthetically speaking, pylons provoke more ephemeral questions. What is ugly? Where do our notions of beauty come from? Who dictates which objects are deemed beautiful? We are told pylons, cooling towers, cranes and other objects of heavy industry are unsightly – blights on the landscape, scourges of mother nature. But part of this is social conditioning. Take the Eiffel Tower, which has a certain pylon-like elegance. It is now considered
There is this idea of pylons being paths to civilisation, stretching across big, empty landscapes. It’s a powerful artistic symbol
one of the most romantic structures on the planet, but it was lambasted when it was first erected, described by artist and wallpaper-maker William Morris as “a hellish piece of ugliness”.
I spoke to Zoe Dutton, a freelance artist in Glasgow, who has a tattoo of a pylon. Why does she like them so much? “They’re man-made things staked into the landscape. For me, celebrating that stuff is the opposite of Nimby-ism. If I want to boil the kettle and browse the web, I’ll need pylons, telephone poles and wires.
“There’s also this idea of them stretching across big empty landscapes, being these paths to civilisation. As an artistic symbol, it’s one of the first things to come out of my head when I go to draw something abstract. There’s also the crucifix imagery,” she adds, the bare metal arms of pylons bearing a resemblance to Jesus on the cross, arms open wide; ‘help me’, they seem to say.
All this talk of beauty and ugliness brings to mind an Oscar Wilde witticism (there’s always an Oscar Wilde witticism): “I have found that all ugly things are made by those who strive to make something beautiful, and that all beautiful things are made by those who strive to make something useful.” While I’m fairly sure Wilde would have hated the electricity pylon, his phrase still sums up these fiercely utilitarian structures, which, though quietly necessary, are ignored by everyone aside from the National Grid and a handful of poetic aesthetes. For me it’s the startling sight of raw, modernist function set against the green, yellow and brown of the Oxfordshire countryside, the dramatic coexistence of nature and industry, and probably – just a little bit –the contrarianism of it all.
Micheal Ward once trained to be a professional footballer. Now he’s reliving his dream – and turfing up tough memories – in his new film. Interview by ADAM BLOODWORTH
When Micheal Ward changed primary schools aged eight, he had a confronting experience. The kids in Essex seemed far smarter than the ones in east London. “They were asking all these mad questions,” he remembers. At his old school he was one of the brightest pupils: “To be with all of these smart kids was really weird.”
But then the bell went and a boy called Reece asked Ward if he could play football. “I was like, yeah, I can play a bit,” says Ward. “Then they brought me outside and I was just mashing it up,” he laughs. “Everyone just loved me. So that was kind of my thing. Literally everyone I made friends with at football trials are still my friends now and a lot of them I’m still close to. Football has always been that glue for me.”
Until his late teens football defined him; he tried to make it work as a career, trying out for Chigwell Boys and then again at his secondary school, the Chadwell Heath Academy, but he says the clubs didn’t have the infrastructure to develop him. His studies didn’t offer the same release. “I was going to Sixth Form and just being depressed,” he says. Even drama was unfulfilling: “There was hardly any practical work, which annoyed me.”
As you might have noticed, another career came into fruition: an illustrious one in film and TV. In 2020 Ward joined the likes of James McAvoy, Eva Green, Shia LaBeouf and Kristen Stewart in taking the Bafta Rising Star gong, a signal for future success if ever there was one. In 2022 Bafta plaudits came again when he was nominated for Best Actor in a Supporting Role for snogging Olivia Colman, double his age, in Sam Mendes’ drama Empire of Light. Then there’s his career-defining role as Jamie in Netflix’s Top Boy.
Now the 26-year-old returns to the football pitch for
his first leading role, as Vinny in Netflix’s The Beautiful Game, a feature about the Homeless World Cup, a reallife annual event where hundreds of people who live on the streets are brought together for a tournament.
It struck a nerve for Ward, who still uses football as an escape and a form of therapy. “A few months ago I was feeling so upset, bro, I was so down,” he tells me. “I didn’t know what to do. You know what I mean? But Arsenal was playing and I went to the stadium and nothing else mattered. I didn’t speak to no one about nothing that I was going through. I just watched the game and went through the emotion. By the end of the game I was just like, ‘this is mad.’ It’s just euphoric.”
Revisiting football for The Beautiful Game brought memories flooding back about the halcyon days of his youth, making him reflect on what might have been if a sports career worked out.
“I might never have been how I am as a person had I not played football,” he says, talking in a way that suggests he thinks carefully about every word. “That’s what I was thinking when I was filming it, man. It was quite deep, to be completely honest with you. I wasted a lot of time chasing something that has no significance in my life anymore. It brought up stuff like that. I was also thinking ‘You’re never gonna make enough money to live the life of a footballer’. Being honest, that’s another reason why we play football. I could have put that time into acting or learning about tax, stuff that will actually help. But I’m just glad I’m able to make a living doing what I do now.”
You’d certainly hope so. It sounds like a cliche, but Ward has the type of talent that makes acting seem effortless. He can go from vulnerable to imposing in one fell swoop, lending effervescence and charm to his roles. In The Beautiful Game he stars opposite Bill Nighy, playing one of the homeless men brought into the England team who
travel to Rome to compete.
The Beautiful Game is the first time Ward has worked with formally trained actors. “Kit [Young] went to Rada. And I’m just like, ‘Okay, you can see the stuff he’s learned’, not in his performance, but the way he thinks as an actor, which was really inspiring. Obviously Bill, being so dedicated to the craft, is inspiring to watch too. In work I’ve done before, I don’t know if people cared about acting on that level. It was nice to be around people like that.”
Inotice Ward seems somewhere far away from the wind and rain howling across London Bridge right now. Behind him on our Zoom call the weather is sweltering and there’s a classical mural depicting horses sprinting that looks almost biblical. “I’m in a place called Truth or Consequences in New Mexico,” he says through laughter. “That’s what the town is called! It’s mad out here.”
He’s in New Mexico filming until early summer on Eddington, a Western which “follows a small-town New Mexico sheriff with higher aspirations.” He’s billed alongside Joaquin Phoenix, Emma Stone, Austin Butler and Pedro Pascal, so he’s in good company. It’s produced by A24, the company responsible for Everything Everywhere All At Once, Midsommar, Lady Bird, Moonlight and HBO’s Euphoria: a confirmation if ever we needed one that the man who grew up in east London is ascending to Hollywood.
He’s still only 26 and he says he dearly misses home, particularly his mother and sisters, with whom he lived in his family home until 2022 (he moved out when he found the set up too “annoying”). His father died in a car crash when he was two. He credits his sensitive temperament to growing up around women, and when he talks about family, his tone changes. When he speaks about work he speaks in thoughtful, rhythmic sentences, but when he talks about family his confidence trails off and he becomes more introspective. “It’s weird, because I feel closer to my mum now than I did when I was living in my house. We actually have conversations, before I’d just go to my room. But now, man has to check in, chat to my little sister. That’s what’s been weird about being here – I miss that comfort. I miss my bed, I miss my gym, I miss loads of things, man, I miss my car, I miss going out, having a drink with my boys. I don’t really drink here much, there’s not really any nightlife, anywhere to go out, shake a leg. It’s just different. It’s nice to experience this as well but when you’re used to some things it just becomes a little bit more difficult.”
Being away has made him realise he needs female role models in his life: “I’ve really recognised that more. I miss that comfort. I definitely need to figure that side out, to be honest.”
Ward has big doe eyes and an ease about him that you can’t teach. It’s just as well he skipped formal training to take a course at
Epping Forest College.
Before that he won a modelling competition run by JD Sports, which was
I immerse myself in my roles but my discipline ain’t great. I’m still thinking whether I should go to drama school
his catalyst to try drama full time. “It was like, man can I make money just posing for pictures? This is crazy.”
During A-Levels he’d skip class to go to modelling jobs. “I had this teacher at Epping, Ellie Nelson, who used to give me this look when I didn’t turn up, I just felt so bad,” he says. She ended up becoming his agent and the two still work together a decade later.
“She still gives me those looks if I’m late for a meeting. It’s just like college all over again. It’s humbling: it means I’ll never forget where I started. I tell her I love her so much because she saw something in me that maybe I didn’t even see in myself, and I’m so blessed that she was able to soak in whatever talent I have, whatever that even means.” The feeling’s mutual: “Micheal always had a natural charisma that cannot be taught,” Nelson tells me. “It’s a pleasure
to be a small part of his journey.” He didn’t even go to drama school, but it’s never too late: “Even now I’m thinking, maybe I should go,” he says. “Because my discipline ain’t great.”
In 2019, gang drama Top Boy was Ward’s big breakthrough. Based on the fictional Summerhouse estate in Hackney, he played drug dealer Jamie, a man caught up in the brutal world of narcotics and violence. Born in Spanish Town, Jamaica and raised in Hackney, Ward said the series didn’t reflect his own experiences in London. He almost turned down a similar role on crime-thriller Blue Story because he felt “afraid of how similar” it was. Last year he became a critic’s darling for his role in 1980s drama Empire of Light, with one describing Colman and Ward’s chemistry as “electric.”
“I just immerse myself in the lines and
situations as much as I possibly can with the information I have,” he says, as if this is beyond obvious. “I just try to think ‘if I was
I was more religious before. I’m trying to keep God at the forefront of everything and show him gratitude
in this situation, how would I react?’”
When he’s in London, Ward tries to live like an ordinary twenty-something, trying out the houseshare life not far from where he grew up. His flatmate is Hope Ikpoku Jnr, who played Jamie’s brother Aaron on Top Boy, but he hopes to soon buy his own place. One of his big dreams is to get into nature more, although he says rallying his friends to go on a trip to the Lake District is proving difficult. “What’s the word, is it ‘expedition’?” he asks. “When you do kayaking, all of them kind of things, that’s the stuff that I want to do, but it’s so hard to find the time.”
He would also like to readdress his faith. “I was more religious before, I’m trying to get back there but it’s so difficult sometimes. Obviously I’m trying to keep God at the forefront of everything and showing him gratitude as much as I can.”
Ward had high hopes for a recent day off in New Mexico, hoping to emulate his pre-dawn shoot routine, but it didn’t quite go to plan. “I done fuck all,” he jokes. “Literally. I set out the day, I got up at the same time as filming, 6.30am, showered straight away and thought I’d do all these things – but I didn’t, I just chilled. Watched stuff, went to Walmart. I try to soak once a day in the hot springs. My hotel has one; I don’t have to go anywhere, it’s nice. I’ve never really heard of that before, to be completely honest with you.” He has no such luck today – Ward says he needs to shut his laptop and go to work. Joaquin Phoenix is waiting. It’s a testament to the talent of this young Londoner that that sentence doesn’t sound the slightest bit absurd.
What ethnicity has the most doctors? I mean, come on. When I was in Holby City I was the only East Asian. It’s not reflective of real life
Actor Jing Lusi talks to ADAM BLOODWORTH about Asian representation, her new leading role in ITV drama Red Eye and why she loves roast chicken
This is probably the role I’ve wanted most in my life,” says Jing Lusi, who doesn’t seem the type to resort to hyperbole. We’re in a hipster coffee shop surrounded by androgynous Gen-Z Central Saint Martins students, busy making roll ups. Lusi, most famously from Crazy Rich Asians, has had major roles in Netflix’s Heart of Stone and Amazon Prime drama Gangs of London, so what’s so incredible about Red Eye, the ITV thriller launching this April?
“To see an Asian female actor in a UK leading role, for me it’s precedent setting,” says Lusi, stirring her flat white. “Because we haven’t had that before. I think it might be the beginning.”
Indeed, there has not been an East Asian female lead on a UK primetime drama – until this. Lusi will play Hana Li, a police detective investigating the alleged murder of the daughter of a Chinese diplomat by a British scientist, played by Richard Armitage.
“She’s just an ordinary girl,” says Lusi of her Red Eye detective. “An Asian being ordinary on screen in this country is extraordinary. I’ve had some really amazing moments on film sets, running through beautiful locations in socks with Gal Gadot in Heart of Stone, but there was a scene in Red Eye with my family eating a roast dinner. When I found out about that I nearly burst into happy tears because I was about to have dinner with my Chinese parents and it was, I shit you not, roast chicken. I don’t know if people will even notice, but for us to not be eating noodles, chowmein, or dumplings. For us to just be sitting around having a roast: that blows my mind.”
White scriptwriter Peter A. Dowling edited his script after conversations with Lusi about authenticity, something that made the actor “feel heard.” Lusi also went shopping for the character’s clothes herself. “There are so many similarities between me and Hana,” she says. “I just knew who she was. This was so perfect for me. Where does she end and where do I start?”
Lusi had her breakthrough – like so many British actors – in Holby City playing doctor Tara Lo in 2012, and has worked steadily since. When not acting or walking her “still sprightly” 10-year-old dog on Hampstead Heath, Lusi is writing. A script for a televised adaptation of an “iconic” ‘90s rom-com has been commissioned, in which she plays the lead, and she has adapted another book for
film, about which she remains tight-lipped. Her aim with her work is clear: to do more of what Red Eye hopes to achieve, putting the lives of ordinary East Asian people in front of mainstream audiences.
She says of representation right now: “I see it a lot on screen and on stage – they feel like if they cast a black actor, that’s done. Okay, but what about literally everything in-between? It’s baffling. Especially when you watch hospital dramas. What ethnicity has the most doctors? I mean, come on. When I was in Holby City I was the only one. It’s not reflective of real life and it is really weird. It is baffling to me: we talk about diversity on screen but are we talking from a corporate standpoint where you tick boxes or from a perspective where it’s actually diverse? Those dots haven’t been connected yet.
“You walk down the street and see yourself reflected back but you’re not seeing it on screen. Diversity isn’t black or white – literally – it’s all the other ethnicities, it’s everything. It’s a melting pot and it’s what’s so beautiful about life. And the more we polarise what diversity is the more everything else in the middle falls through the net.”
The UK lags behind America in terms of representation, where projects like Everything Everywhere All At Once, Beef and The Farewell have rewritten the rules, garnering critical and commercial success. But Lusi refuses to move Stateside to capitalise on better work opportunities for East Asians when there’s a problem to fix at home.
“If you’re talking about box office, or awards, they’ve done that in the US. The model is there. Why are we not supplying it here? I don’t know what the next version of Red Eye is, I haven’t seen it. I would have read it by now –it’s just not there. This is why I’m so confused. How much proof do we need that this is a successful model? Do you want the money or the critical acclaim? You have both! Almost everything Awkwafina and Michelle Yeoh touch turns touches to gold, literally, in the form of a statue.”
She catches herself a little, clearly not wanting to sound ungrateful. “So much of this is not about me,” she says. “I’m so lucky, I cannot tell you how grateful I feel. This is about everyone behind me. If we can make Asian leads a bog standard thing to be happening, so many people will benefit. For those that haven’t had the opportunity, I want them to feel what it’s like to do the thing that you love.”
For Life and Top Boy star Nicholas Pinnock on playing the first black Jesus, revolutionising TV and dealing with his critics. Words by
JONTY BASSNicholas Pinnock will make history later this month when he portrays the first ever black Jesus. Within days of that, the BBC will drop This Town, a remarkably unconventional kitchen sink drama about the role of ska and two-tone music set against the backdrop of the riots that struck the Midlands in the early 1980s, now largely forgotten by history.
The 50-year-old actor is a legend of British TV, best known for legal drama For Life as well as Top Boy, having also held down roles on most major primetime soaps and hospital dramas including Holby City, EastEnders, and Footballer’s Wives. But latterly Pinnock has been developing a reputation as one of the most hard working storytellers of his generation, setting up a production company focused on making non-commercial work he believes has been missed by the industry – and he’s hoping to revolutionise the film and TV landscape while he’s at it. On top of that, he has become a spokesperson for Mind, the mental health charity, showing how vulnerability and emotion are definitively masculine.
“I seem to somehow have the bandwidth,” he reflects from his friend’s flat in London (he can’t go home as he’s lent his flat to friends for the week.) “I’m a bit of a perfectionist and I don’t like a job half done. So, you know, I basically exhaust myself getting everything done to the best that I can, which involves lack of sleep and staying up learning lines. Work keeps me happy, keeps me sane. I learn a lot through the characters that I play.”
Documenting a historical first with the black Jesus in forthcoming movie The Book of Clarence is surely up there when it comes to working hard to change the narrative. “There were times when I was filming that I was in floods of tears,” says Pinnock. “I found living through his life so difficult, going through stuff that he was going through in the moment, I was feeling every aspect of the turmoil. And then they call ‘cut’, and I would still be in floods of tears.
“I had to remember ‘that not me’ and really try to separate my stuff from his stuff. It gets to you. You know, you’re just a vessel. It’s reminiscent, like an echo. It’s in there, it teases it out of you and it taps into everything you’re doing.”
Critics have wavered in their response to the satirical biblical comedy-drama, particularly in relation to the crucifixion scenes which have been called too “gruesome”. Pinnock couldn’t care less. “If people respond to it, great; if they don’t, great,” he says. “I’m quite happy to be wrong. I’m quite happy to be shit. Give me the next opportunity to fail. I’m always looking to be challenged.”
“Crucifixion is gruesome,” he continues. “You know, you nail a man to a cross in his feet and in his hands until he dies. It’s pretty gruesome. It’s been dressed up in past depictions of that story to be kind of a bit beautiful and a bit mellow, heavenly and saintly. Actually, it’s quite raw.
It’s a real thing that you’re doing. They used to do that to people. They used to crucify people as a punishment. It is gruesome. I don’t know what else it could be.”
In BBC’s This Town Pinnock plays Deuce Williams, a disenfranchised working class family elder watching his sons navigate systemic oppression. It’s compelling, mostly through the format of the storytelling, which feels unusually drawn-out, making audiences concentrate hard on characters over hour-long episodes. “I think there is something missing when you don’t allow your audience to think, and you don’t allow your audience to go slowly and really sit with the characters. This story isn’t fast tracked to you and I really, really liked that, I like the cerebral aspect, not spoon feeding your audience.”
He seems almost angry about the state of cultural criticism, believing that preferential treatment for critics – such as watching shows ahead of public release – may warp their experience. “No disrespect to critics but they don’t pay for their tickets. They get given their tickets, they get free drinks during the interval – it’s the public who actually pay their hard earned money. They’re the ones I’m interested in. When it’s a collective experience, and people are watching it in the moment, when everyone’s talking about everyone talking about it, it’s a whole different experience.” Would he like to revolutionise the way shows are reviewed, too? “Yeah.” It helps that the This Town story slaps and there’s a rambunctious earworm playlist. “What the two-tone movement did in England was really bring cultures together. It wasn’t just for the Afro-Caribbean people, it just wasn’t just for the English people. That unity and togetherness really spoke to me. I come from a Jamaican household so, you know, reggae was heavy,” he says, eyes brightening. “I remember wearing the black bomber jackets and a little hat, it was cool.”
I found living through the life of Jesus so difficult, going through the stuff that he was going through, I was feeling every aspect of the turmoil
Seven decades of understated élan on your wrist, with plenty of juice in the barrel
Amechanical watch’s petrol gauge is the ‘power reserve’, a linear or radial indication of how urgently you need to wind up its barrel’s ‘mainspring’ via the crown on the right (a particularly satisfying morning ritual for those who continue to eschew the
smartwatch). To mark the 70th anniversary of its evergreen Conquest (the first Longines watch line to have its name protected, in 1954, by the Federal Intellectual Property Office in Berne) Switzerland’s enduring grande maison has unveiled the Heritage Central Power Reserve.
It’s inspired by an iconic model from the late 1950s, when the brand had the edge even on the likes of Rolex and Omega. But
not only do the sepia-tinted stylings belie the silicon-spiked 21st-century innovation ticking within, but those two concentric power-reserve rings at the centre remind you of Longines’ historic cleverness. Unique in the world of watchmaking, a blocky baton points to a disc, graduated from ‘64’ to ‘0’, uncoiling with the barrel: the watch’s remaining running time in hours. £3,500, longines.com
Christie’s recently hosted a series of eight auctions offering iconic property from pop legend Elton John’s personal collection. The auctions included works of art, objects and memorabilia, many of them crafted specifically for his home on Peachtree Road in Atlanta. From 1992 Elton has consolidated adjoining units to form a veritable warehouse of garish stage costumes, watch cabinets, and frame upon frame of prints, speaking of the north west London wunderkind’s deep passion for photography. It included work from pioneering artists such as Andy Warhol, Helmut Newton, Robert Mapplethorpe, Peter Beard, Herb Ritts and Richard Avedon. On the watch front, our pick was the Rolex Daytona from 2004, in leopard-print dial and orange sapphires, something industry wags dubbed the ‘Bet Lynch’ of high-end chronographs.
Hayao is saying bye-o as director and animator extraordinaire of Studio Ghibli. Hayao Miyazaki’s swansong, The Boy and the Heron, continues to sweep the animated awards
categories: arguably his finest hand-drawn feature since My Neighbour Totoro in 1988. Forty years on, trust Tokyo’s own Seiko to pay tribute to the film he’d made before he’d even founded Studio Ghibli: Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984), rendered in perfect, blueenamelled watch form. A horological ‘if you know, you know’, only a single dial adornment of the ‘Ohms’ (a giant, shell-covered, trilobite-like animal) hints at its heritage. The pure blue enamel was made possible through the skills of master craftsman Mitsuru Yokosawa and his team – all made in-house, like every other aspect of Seiko’s formidable, sprawling artisanal dynasty. l Limited edition of 1,500; £1,540; 68 New Bond Street London W1S 1RR; seikoboutique.co.uk
British boys Bremont and Bamford Watch Department are presenting a second fusion of no-nonsense military-spec timekeeping with fanboy customisation: the ‘Aurora’.
The Arctic Circle’s shimmering ‘Borealis’ or ‘Northern Lights’, rendered in hyperluminescent green dial details, is a 500-piece twist on Bremont’s signature Supermarine S502 diving watch. The carbon-coated case
is entirely engineered on the premises near Henley, by 11-axis CNC milling machines, the chronometer-grade Swiss mechanics ticking steadily down to 500 metres beneath the waves. Despite its youth, Bremont has found as many fans as Breitling in military pilots worldwide, but it takes Mayfair’s cult customiser Bamford Watch Department to bring even more cool to proceedings – not least in the decision to pair a half-Arabic, half-Roman, so-called ‘California’ dial with a 24-hour ‘GMT’ time-zone.
l bamfordwatchdepartment.com
Three decades after lift-off, Bell & Ross’s horological brutes in flightsuits have never felt fitter for action, as co-founder Carlos Rosillo tells ALEX DOAK
Paris-based, Swiss-made, Chanel-backed, militaryendorsed Bell & Ross is the coolest watch brand you… almost know.
Three decades young (believe us, that really is young for the rheumy-eyed world of fine mechanical timekeeping), the brand is a posterboy for neo-modernist horology (see also Nomos, Tudor), while literally staying under the radar as supplier to all manner of covert military sorts. You may need an intro to the name and the story, but what’s become the brand’s signature is unmistakeable: a circular analogue dial, square-framed by a case inspired by slot-in cockpit instruments, screwed down at each corner.
Up until recently, and from the very start with the help of Germany’s own ‘mil-spec’ uhrmacher Sinn, Bell & Ross’s offering has had round watches at its core. But that side is being phased out in light of the square ‘Instrument’ line and the BR 03/05 lines’ success with hipsters and architects alike, while still fulfilling special ops on the wrists of Aéronavale fighter pilots, gendarmerie SWAT teams, plus, infamously, the French president.
“There are brand ambassadors you pay for,” enthuses Carlos Rosillo over a Zoom call from Paris HQ (he’s the ‘Ross’ to schoolfriend and co-founder Bruno ‘Bell’ Belamich), “and there are the ambassadors you have to serve.
“We are proud to serve so many elite teams, and their wearing Bell & Ross proves we are fulfilling our professional values of readability and reliability. So it made me smile when the BBC, even Donald Trump commented on Emmanuel Macron wearing a Bell & Ross last year!”
Rosillo is referring to the socialmedia outrage following Macron’s removal of his “luxury” watch midway through a French television interview in March. Despite accusations that he was “arrogant and contemptuous” of public concerns, churlishly unstrapping a watch “worth €80,000” beneath the table in plain evidence of his being out of touch, he simply took it off because it was banging on the table. Plus, it was a simple three-handed BR V1-92 model worth (and well-worth, for that matter) €2,400.
“Macron’s watch was a gift: from his presidential security service, GSPR,” Rosillo chuckles. “They wanted us to make a watch for their boss! [Instead of being controversial] it proved how well Bell & Ross continues to serve demanding, elite clients like GSPR themselves.”
With thirty years’ distance from his and Belamich’s beginnings, piggybacking the manufacturing nous of their friends at Sinn in Frankfurt, an expansiveness lends itself to Rosillo. The traditional Swiss industry was still dusting down its knees in the early nineties after decades of quartz tech decimation, so you could almost interpret it as sheer relief that he made their outré exploit stick; let alone the ‘square’ thing of 2006, which
would become very much ‘the thing’.
“Starting out, it’s easy to consider that being ‘you’ in an established industry is difficult, that it handicaps you, etcetera, etcetera,” Rosillo ponders, “but I like to think of our brand as a separate human being. And at the start, there is nothing happier than a newborn baby, especially when it has fond parents.”
That ‘fondness’ translates to how he and Belamich nurtured Bell & Ross’s brand from the outset. “We established the logo, the collections, our baby. And then we grew the family, surrounding it with love: a godfather in Lothar, who had just bought Sinn, and then a godmother in Chanel, who invested in 1997.”
“The trouble was that when our baby arrived,” he recalls, “everyone from Le Figaro, to Vogue, the FT… they all thought we were this big brand. We were, as the French say, ‘bien né’, or ‘well born’. They thought the people behind Bell & Ross were, like, NASA, not just two guys!”
Still a major stakeholder, Chanel enabled Bell & Ross to move from Sinn early on, into a gleaming new factory in La Chaux-deFonds. This is the high-altitude ‘cradle’ of modern watchmaking in Switzerland’s Jura mountains, next-door to the fashion giant’s own ceramic case facility and down the road from legends like TAG Heuer, Breitling and Paris’s other grande maison, Cartier.
“In the beginning we didn’t know much about Swiss culture. But we respected it. Combining a bit of Parisian creativity and coolness with their knowledge brought the best of both worlds. We are now wellrespected by them, too.”
Monsieur Rosillo is putting things lightly. Wind your way further down the valley from Chaux-de-Fonds’ gridded art nouveau streets and you’ll find, nestled in the verdant slopes of dairy pastures and conifers, the quainter town of Le Locle. Rambling but by no means less star-studded, the HQs of Tissot, Zenith and Ulysse Nardin have a new neighbour in
‘Kenissi Manufacture’.
Ostensibly, it’s a multi-million-franc breakaway into genuine autonomy for Rolex’s ‘little brother’ Tudor. But yet again, Chanel has been typically canny and ever-soslightly philanthropic, buying a 20 percent stake in 2018, revamping its iconic ceramic ‘J12’ with Kenissi’s futureproof mechanics and by association opening the door to Bell & Ross (winning a client in Breitling, no less). No longer wholly dependent on the Swatch Group’s ‘workhorse’ white-label movements made by their ETA monopoly, for a slight premium more and more of Bell & Ross’s catalogue comes kitted-out with lengthily guaranteed powerhouses of modern micro-tech. And, crucially, less
supply-chain uncertainty.
“We have a set of standards here that don’t exist for other ‘off-the-rack’ companies,” says the guide for my visit.
“All our movements are chronometercertified [for +4/–6 second-a-day precision], the medium and large movements have 70 hours power reserve, the small has 50.” There are some perks reserved just for Tudor – silicon hairsprings are exclusive to it and the ‘Master Chronometer’ certified movements are Tudor only, too.
Bell & Ross will always be proudly Parisian in spirit and élan; but at just 30, to be ticking more and more to the tune of this calibre of Swiss innovation is everything, presidential endorsement ou non.
After a decade of vintage reissues, are watch brands finally up for some risk taking?
Firstly, let’s set the record straight. I love a vintage reissue as much as the next watch journalist. There are so many amazing examples from the last two decades. Longines has been knocking this particular ball out of the park since it launched the Legend Diver back in 2007.
Then there’s Zenith, whose fabled attic seems to be a Narnian wardrobe of vintage surprises; Breguet bringing back its iconic Type XX; and, as far back as 2017, Omega’s 1957 trio of faithful re-editions of its Speedmaster, Seamaster 300, and Railmaster.
It’s just recently it’s felt like everyone’s been taking a trip down memory lane. The reasoning is solid – we haven’t been having the best time of things recently so vintage reissues are both a comfort blanket – a “remembrance of times past” to quote a certain madeleineobsessed French author – and a sure bet in sales terms (the WWII pilot’s watch aesthetic these watches tend to all share is catnip to buyers).
However, it does render the horological landscape somewhat homogenous. Until the last couple of years, that is, when brands started to shake things up a bit.
You could argue Vacheron Constantin started it when it unveiled its revived 222 at Watches and Wonders in 2022.
Designed by an unknown young designer called Jorg Hysek, and launched in 1977 (yes, I know technically that makes this a vintage reissue), it was Vacheron Constantin’s bid to have some of that integrated bracelet
sports watch pie that the likes of Audemars Piguet and Patek Philippe were enjoying. Unlike those other two integrated icons, the 222 failed thanks to the soaring value of the Swiss franc and the market subsequently being flooded with cheaper quartz models.
In 2022 Vacheron finally made the decision to bring it back. Solid yellow gold, and definitely not subdued satorially, it was bold, beautiful and a success. There must have been something in the water – like when couture collections all coalesce around the same themes, silhouettes or colours – because it seemed as though “going big or going home” was Switzerland’s new motto.
A year later, the talk of Watches and Wonders were two Rolexes. One was an Oyster Perpetual on whose dial were coloured lacquered ballons, the other was a DayDate but instead of the day in the aperture at 12 o’clock and the date at three, it had inspirational words like “love” and “hope” in the former and 31 different emojis in the latter. Then there was TAG Heuer growing massive lab-grown diamonds and sticking them all over its Carrera – a watch named after a gruelling pan-American road race. This year looks set to be no different. Piaget has unveiled its 1970s icon the original Polo (pictured), all 200 gold grams of it, while Zenith has taken one of its sportiest watches, the Chronomaster, made it all rose gold and set its bezel with precious stones.
This month Watches and Wonders opens its doors again. Due to embargoes, we don’t know what to expect. Accept the unexpected.
Want to bring a touch of discreet class to your watch purchases? Think outside the box, says
LAURA MCCREDDIE-DOAK
Even its launch was the ultimate display of quiet luxury. At last year’s Watches and Wonders trade show in Geneva, while everyone was losing their minds over Rolex’s Emoji watch, the brand also launched something else: the 1908 – its first brand-new collection in a decade. Named after the year founder Hans Wilsdorf filed the name “Rolex” in London, this was an elegant dress watch inspired by a vintage model Rolex discovered from 1930. Make no mistake, this isn’t a slavish vintage reissue, it took the art-deco design cues – sans serif numerals complemented
by the Breguet-style, or “pomme” hour hand – and modernised them to create a watch that seems both of the moment and timeless all at once. Rolex even showed restraint in what was written on the dial. Rather than clutter it with model names, water resistance and whatever else, the dial, available in “intense” white and matte black, just has “Rolex, Geneve” under the crown at 12 o’clock, and “Superlative chronometer” curved around the sub dial at six. It’s subtle, sophisticated, and not a Submariner.
Rolex wasn’t the only brand to go against its own grain at the show. Patek Philippe did the same but in a reverse fashion,
turning one of its most renowned dress watches into a sports watch, creating the most un-Calatrava Calatrava in the brand’s history. To many the Calatrava was, and remains, the ultimate dress watch. Since it first emerged in 1932 as the Ref.96, it has changed very little. It was not, as the many esteemed watch commentators would have you believe, designed by David Penney to save the company. David Penney is a Brit, an antiquarian horologist and illustrator and still alive today. The Ref. 96, designed by the in-house team, was the first Patek Philippe to have a reference number, and was a symbol of the new streamlined company recently taken over by the Stern brothers
– Jean and Charles. With its minimal design, it set out the Sterns’ stall, defining – as author, historian and journalist Nick Foulkes says in his authorised biography of the brand – “precisely what a wristwatch should look like and the way it would continue to look throughout the twentieth century.” Which is why it is surprising Patek Philippe decided to take this ür dress watch and turn it into a sporty roadsterstyle watch that definitely doesn’t go with a dinner suit. It’s evidently Patek’s bid to appeal to a younger clientele, with its stamped carbon-fibre weave dial and bold colour choices, but it could also be a symptom of something else.
“Ultimately this is a reaction to the boom and bust of prices for steel sports watches. The fact that prices are falling has put off a lot of speculative buyers, and the whole episode has left genuine collectors with a sour taste in their mouth and looking for areas of collectability that feel less fickle,” explains Christy Davis, founder of watch retail and market analysis site Subdial.
“For them, collecting has always been about passion, but over the past 24 months they’ve seen prices plunge due to an influx of speculative buyers and watch theft boom, to the point that they no longer feel comfortable wearing their watches in their day-to-day.” For Davis, this has translated into two different strategies for these two behemoths of the industry.
“The reaction has been slightly different for the two brands. For Rolex this meant reviving their dress watch offering, which has been left wanting over the past few years with little interest in Cellinis,” he says. “For Patek, who already have such a strong dress watch offering, it meant translating the Calatrava into a model that might appeal more to collectors that had previously only been interested in sports models. For both the goal is the same: to give collectors that previously bought sports models an alternative to get excited about and offer a place to collect that is sheltered from the price fluctuations and risks that we’ve seen in their flagship sports models.”
It could also explain why collectors and connoisseurs are turning to brands that are less noticeable, more discerning. The likes of Rolex, Patek Philippe, Audemars Piguet and, to a certain extent, outliers like Hublot have dominated the scene for some time, thanks in part to an older generation beholden to labels and the fact
Quiet luxury is all about championing discernment over brash displays of wealth; making a choice to opt for lesser-known brands
that these brands are the ultimate signifiers of how much money you have. Just look at the proliferation of name checks in rap and hip-hop lyrics over the last twenty years. It is why independent brands are gaining traction and names such as Tudor are becoming more prominent in the mainstream.
Tudor, a brand that simultaneously has presence but also flies slightly under the radar, has come a long way from being referred to as Rolex’s little brother. In 2021 it completed building work on a manufacture in Le Locle – the first premises to have its name above the door in the brand’s 97-year history. And what a premises it is. A place where traditional watchmaking is enhanced by cutting-edge technology. There is even a testing floor “staffed” by robots that runs 24 hours a day. Tudor is inhabiting a space right now that is slowly being deserted. The likes of Breitling and Omega, who used to retail in the £1,500 to £5,000 bracket, are now upwards of that, while its other bedfellows are sometimes guilty of using off-the-peg movements such as Sellitas and ETAs and then charging a premium. Without changing its prices much, Tudor has quietly gone about the business of replacing third-party movements with ones from its next-door neighbour in Le Locle, Kenissi, a movement manufacturer started by Tudor in 2010 that launched its first movement in 2015 and is now 20 percent owned by Chanel, to whom it supplies movements.
Quiet luxury is all about championing discernment over brash displays of wealth; making a choice to opt for lesser-known brands rather than those lavished with logos. It works with watches as well as clothing. Do you want to be the fourth person around the boardroom table wearing a Submariner, or the one wearing a Rolex that people can only recognise if they look closely?
Designer Fedro Gaudenzi was heartbroken when thieves stole a one-of-a-kind jumpsuit. Then Hollywood star Julia Fox stepped in to save the day.
Words by JONTY BASS
On a stark winter’s afternoon in Mayfair, two plainly dressed women walk into Fedro Gaudenzi’s Savile Row atelier. They pick up a “priceless” jumpsuit on display and walk out before anyone could notice. In a flash, a piece that had taken months of painstaking work to create was gone.
“It was horrible,” Gaudenzi tells me. “It was our first prototype so it wasn’t perfect like we’d make for a client, but the piece had soul and history. The time that went into it, the thought process. It really pisses me off.”
Determined to find the piece, Gaudenzi posted pictures on social media and paid to make them reach bigger audiences. But the fashion world thought the posts were a marketing stunt rather than a plea for help. “Everyone thought it was a campaign,” says Gaudenzi. “A campaign called ‘The Stolen Dress.’ People would comment saying: ‘I love this piece, I want to see it.’ I had to tell people, ‘No, this is not a joke.’”
Gaudenzi was inundated with requests for the dress as his posts travelled around the world. It was the opposite of what he’d intended, which was to incentivise the UK police to search harder for the stolen piece and ultimately get it back.
One of those who read about the stolen dress was Julia Fox, the actor and former girlfriend of Kanye West, who got in touch to say she’d like to wear it.
After explaining the jumpsuit was missing, Fox decided she’d commission the
Italian-born Londoner Gaudenzi to make her a speciality piece anyway, a delightful silver lining after the horror of the stolen jumpsuit. Gaudenzi has since worked on an exclusive piece for Fox to wear on a
forthcoming red carpet.
“I felt very pleased,” says Gaudenzi. “It’s the first time we’ve tried to make a piece in less than a month without seeing a client, based on a mannequin.” While Gaudenzi says he had yet to install security cameras at the time of the theft (he has now!) he believes the piece could be found and returned to him if the police gave the case more time.
Gaudenzi’s risk-taking fashion is shaking up Savile Row. He is a street level atelier, meaning he makes all his pieces on site in the cutting room. Only a handful of the historic houses still make their pieces on Savile Row – most of the modern designers have workshops elsewhere. “I think that’s the beauty of it,” he says. “Otherwise you’re detached from how things are made.”
The stolen dress provided priceless publicity for Gaudenzi, who relies on hype to get his work in front of clients. In the fashion world, odds are stacked against smaller designers, as big names like Chanel, Alexander McQueen and Versace have contracts with actors to guarantee their collections are seen on red carpets, generating publicity and sales. Gaudenzi is outspoken about how more could be done to support independent designers in the capital.
“The British Fashion Council could help by showcasing pieces by young designers,” says Gaudenzi. “But this is the way the world works – it’s money at the end of the day.”
Thank goodness Hollywood came to save the day.
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Even if you can afford this luxury fitness assessment, should you? ADAM BLOODWORTH discovers that knowing when you might die comes with drawbacks as well as benefits
Iwant to be shocked.” It was a weird thing to say to four medical experts, but they nodded and smiled anyway. I was sitting on a deep couch so plush it felt like it could swallow me whole, the type of couch you see in the foyers of residential buildings that no-one ever sits on. I was being cross-examined on every aspect of my physical and mental health in a way very few people ever experience. Outside the window, the red bricks of the Mayfair town house opposite shone the colour of roasted peppers in the winter sun.
An hour later, I was covered in sweat and hooked up to a vaguely terrifying gas mask, which measured my breathing as I pelted along a treadmill. “You’re a wasted talent,” said a former Harlequins rugby player turned trainer, who had been sitting opposite me with an iPad to analyse the way I jump, assessing my balance and strength, and had me closing my eyes while trying to balance (I managed four seconds). Then there was the dreaded press-ups and some eerie silence lying alone, horizontal, wearing the mask.
Finding out I’m a decent runner wasn’t the feedback this 95kg, 34-year-old with man boobs was expecting, but deep, confronting health analysis throws up the good as well as the bad. Not long after, I answered a raft of questions about my lifestyle, before a psychologist sat opposite me. “You’re a very rare mix of vulnerable and assertive,” she said. “Together that combination is…” She made a symbol with her hands to illustrate a head exploding.
Everyone going through Mayfair’s Hooke private health centre must have a personal epiphany of some kind. Mine was mental health: finally, a grasp of why I over-think, why I struggle so much with confrontation. In a few minutes, my challenges had been spelled out: answering years-long questions about social anxiety I had never really articulated. Sure, I was better at running than I should be for someone with a proficiency for eating two Curly-Wurlys smudged into one big ball but my main takeaway was about my mind.
Hooke is one of a handful of private health M.O.T centres claiming to help extend your life by providing in-depth holistic healthcare that tackles body, mind and spirit. It is for the one per cent; my basic introductory treatment is available for £7,500. For that, you get one-on-one consultants with a doctor, psychologist, nutritionist
and fitness expert, a thousand blood tests (which feels comforting), access to some of the funkiest modern tech around, and a precis of your private health that – in word count and weight if not enjoyment – is a solid replacement for a Sunday broadsheet.
Why was I putting myself through this? First things first, I’m hardly the only millennial trying to get healthier. There’s been a huge turn away from alcohol and rises in people taking therapy. Referrals for anxiety and depression through the NHS increased by 21.5 percent from 2020 to 2021. But for me personally, as someone who reviews soufflés for a living, I was starting to hear the death knell. I spent almost every day last winter ill with colds, flus, and fevers. Mid-thirties were coming at me and something had to change.
It’s clear why this sort of thing is attractive if you can afford it – but the real question is: should you? The idea of preventative healthcare like this is that it will turf up something, and for those like me lucky enough to have not given their health much thought, I discovered that the luxury armchairs in the Hooke waiting rooms can’t entirely soften the blow.
For months after my analysis my health anxiety got worse. I was first told by a doctor that I was dreaming up horrendous brain tumours at age ten (I was fine, but not alone: health anxiety has massively peaked since lockdown, for obvious reasons). This time it was the whole shebang; feeling like my heart was beating weirdly, worrying about bowel cancer, watching documentaries about autoimmune disease and fearing my twitches had got worse. It made sense to me that pages and pages of intense medical analysis on my chances of developing pulmonary heart disease, cancer, diabetes and the rest caused my worries to peak. Seeing a score for every possible ailment on a piece of paper confronts you with the vulnerability of your flesh. It is
helpful, sure, but terrifying? Absolutely. I was lucky to discover I had nothing horrendous going on. The news that I had a 40 percent chance of suffering a stroke by age 99 provoked my dad into a fit of hysterics. I felt next to nothing because, well, my dear reader, all sorts of things can happen before age 99, including, most likely, death.
Back at Hooke that morning, and it had been raining. The heavy-set door to the West London HQ swung open before I could press the buzzer. Hollie, who I’d been emailing, had seen me coming through the glass beside the door and was dressed impeccably to greet me.
After the gym, a smoothie, then a very embarrassing conversation. “Tell me about a good day,” said a nutritionist wearing a wellironed shirt. Then the shame of his follow-up question: “And a bad day.” Like a silly school boy who’d stolen biscuits from the jar and been caught, I told the truth: that on a bad day I could see off a bag of Haribo to de-stress, that on most days I ate crisps at lunchtime and that I rarely cooked.
The nutritionist told me how he’s perfected
his ability to never look shocked: he’s had Type-A CEOs going through these doors for years. “They want to win,” he said. “It’s always about language. At the moment we’re not winning. We need to win.” Later there were blood tests by a nurse who should win an Oscar for his performance at keeping me from freaking out as what felt like the gazillionth syringe approached my left arm.
Great lengths have been taken to make sure nothing about Hooke looks or feels medical. Even the walls are warm shades, and in the doctor’s office, interesting skeletal models and beautiful diagrams of the human body fill the empty spaces. Only the occasional ultraviolet sign is a giveaway; directions about how to discard needles are sure to haul you back into the medical realm.
For months after my analysis my health anxiety got worse –feeling like my heart was beating weirdly, worrying about bowel cancer
The reality is that many turn to Hooke when they’ve left it too late. In their seventies and up, they have a palpable sense of the need to keep the lights on. My takeaway was “you’re fine now, but I don’t want to see your weight carrying on this trajectory when you’re 40.” If it does, it’ll be the beginning of the time everything can start going properly wrong, including – as my paperwork spelled out –the terrible foreboding notion of cholesterol problems. Now I have a meal plan and a workout plan. In careful detail I was told how I could renovate my life, changing from a hedonistic choccy pud critic to the type of guy who treats himself with an almond or two in the afternoon.
It’s been a few months and I haven’t lost my man boobs yet. I still spend more time sweating in the steam room than on the gym floor. I go out six nights a week and, until recently, couldn’t fathom the idea of a night in. But Hooke definitely scratched the surface, laying the groundwork for me to start at least thinking about the ways I can change.
l Hooke’s Investigation+ costs £15,000. Adam experienced the £7,500 Investivation; hooke.london
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en’s mental health is not being catered for,” says Paul McKenna matter of factly. “There are extreme figures around young male suicide. Stress, anxiety and depression are all indicators that men need all the help they can get.”
Paul McKenna, the international best-selling hypnotist, says he can help. To that end, he has formed an unlikely partnership with TV adventurer Bear Grylls and reality star turned medical expert Dr Alex George, lending his expertise in hypnosis and neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) to a new AI powered men’s mental health app called Mettle. McKenna’s journey into the world of mental wellness is circuitous. Starting as a young radio host, he stumbled upon hypnosis during a chance encounter with a local hypnotist. What began as a personal quest for stress relief soon morphed into a passion for helping others to navigate the complexities of the mind. He has since sold more than 10m self-help books and been published in 32 languages, including best-sellers Freedom From Anxiety and Positivity. Speaking in the composed but energetic tone that has captivated his millions of followers, he tells me about his initial foray into the world of mind control.
“Working in local radio, I’d had a bad day. I broke up with my girlfriend and the people in the apartment where I was living were keeping me up. I sat down to interview a hypnotist and he said, ‘Look, rather than you interview me, let me do you. Because you need some stress control my friend’. I was sceptical but I sat back and all my burdens lifted. My mind calmed down. I could suddenly see a better future. I woke up thinking it’d been two minutes but it had been half an hour. I felt great.”
After this encounter, McKenna was lent a book written by self-help guru Richard Bandler, who would become his most influential mentor, marking the beginning of his own journey into that lucrative field. Initially, he showcased his skills as a captivating party trick, hypnotising guests into entertaining acts such as dancing like ballerinas. As his expertise grew, he transitioned to helping friends with weight loss and to quit smoking, before going on to host theatrical shows throughout the 90s.
McKenna’s blend of entertainment and therapy catapulted him to global fame, leading to TV shows and those best-selling books. Yet, amidst the glitz and glamour, his “true calling” emerged – to support the quest for better mental health and empower listeners to take control of their lives.
“I thought maybe people would like what I’ve got to say, so I came up with a book called Change Your Life in Seven Days. I had no idea it was going to become an international bestseller. My publisher came back to me and said, ‘You’re not going anywhere, mate. We want a few more of these.’
“I’m not really a writer, I’m a talker. But I do know about certain subjects, like how to lose weight, how to become confident, how to sleep well at night. So I wrote about these in a very user-friendly way. I am still writing books today – it amazes me that I’m still on the bestseller list.”
Fast forward almost 30 years, and while the ways of listening to McKenna have changed, the demand for mental health support is greater than ever. This is how McKenna found himself in partnership with Mettle, an AI mental fitness app designed specifically for men.
Mettle’s evidence-based approach, backed by research from Imperial College London, claims to offer a safe space for men to explore and improve their mental wellbeing through techniques including meditation, breathwork, and hypnosis. But why men specifically, and are there differences in male and female mental health treatments?
“Well, in a sense, we’re all human, so you could say we’re all the same, right? But there are clearly some differences between men and women. Some men just enjoy being talked to by men. Bear Grylls, I think it’s fair to say, is a pretty good role model as a man: he’s a tough guy, but he’s got a sense of humour.”
He says AI plays a significant role in the app, particularly for men who may struggle to discuss their feelings openly in person. I wonder how McKenna compares virtual therapy to in-person sessions?
“Virtual therapy works really well,” he says. “I was sceptical at the beginning of
the pandemic, when I couldn’t do seminars or meet people in person for therapy. But I was amazed at how well it works. The person pops up on the screen, but I can still connect with them.
“With the Mettle app, the quality of the recordings is very, very high. In the trances that I’ve recorded for the app, what happens is I talk to the left brain and right brain simultaneously. So I’m talking to your whole brain, right? This is something we can do with modern, advanced audio production. So in some ways you can offer more with a really highly-produced recording than you can in a live session. If people are super anxious about getting help, they might be too scared to even speak to a person, so it’s good to have virtual therapy available to them. You hit a button and I’m there for you.”
McKenna underscores the importance of having a sense of purpose and defined goals. “This year, I noticed that people were not just anxious, they were directionless,” he says. “I’ve had the opportunity to meet and work with people who are high achievers in the arts, in business, in sports. Success and happiness are not accidents that randomly happen to some people and not others.
“It’s about thinking and acting and so I codified those areas, which are self-belief and clarity. Being really clear about what it is you want. Most people spend more time making a list for the supermarket than they do the next five years of their life.”
“When we look at fitness, like an athlete preparing themselves to be in phenomenal shape, you will ask ‘What’s the secret to good health?’ – they’ll say there’s four things: sleep, diet, exercise, and mindset. Success and happiness are the result of certain ways of thinking and acting.”
Whether you can learn the key to happiness and success through an app remains to be seen but with McKenna’s uncanny knack for anticipating the public’s appetite for self help, you wouldn’t bet against him.
l Mettle is available to download now
Historical hotels can feel hard to come by in America, but The Boca Raton is a delightful exception. Founded in 1926, the grand Florida resort property is preparing to celebrate its centenary.
In the town of Boca Raton, outside of Fort Lauderdale, the hotel was founded by the
architect and city planner Addison Mizner, a much-loved community leader who famously greeted guests in the hotel lobby with his pet monkey on his shoulder.
Many of the original design details remain in the lobby and communal areas today, but the Boca Raton is also alive in the 21st century: there’s a new pool development and lazy river, a yacht club, beach club, and some next-level restaurants, offering a
more sophisticated side to Florida.
Like the Bürgenstock in Switzerland and Gleneagles in Scotland, this is the sort of resort you could spend a week exploring and you’d still find new parts to discover. Just north of Miami, it attracts that city’s well-heeled set and has that delicious buzz of a hotel in its prime – Mizner would be proud.
l thebocaraton.com
David E. Stanley grew up with Elvis at Graceland. He still lives in the same Las Vegas hotel where the pair spent nine years working together. He talks about the dark drug years and the moments of joy with ADAM BLOODWORTH
This’ll get you shook up: Elvis is in the building. Well, his stepbrother is anyway. David E. Stanley grew up with Elvis from age four, and spent years with The King during his Las Vegas residency in the 1970s when he worked as the singer’s bodyguard and assistant. Forty seven years after his death, he still stays in the same hotel where he worked so closely with Elvis all those years ago.
Presley lived on the 30th floor of the Las Vegas Hilton where Stanley and he would spend many intimate moments. Between Elvis’ shows the duo would talk about girls and mess about on the rooftop, hitting golf balls towards the mountains.
Stanley was one of the closest confidantes to Presley, and now City A.M. The Magazine is the first publication to peer inside his 29th
floor suite, loacted just metres below the original Elvis Suite where The King’s drug abuse continued to spiral.
“Fifty-three years ago I came here when my brother opened it, now I live here representing it. It’s kind of a cool thing. It feels good,” Stanley tells me. “What a full circle.” These days the 67-year-old works as an ambassador for the Westgate Las Vegas Resort & Casino (formerly the Hilton), greeting hotel guests and talking about the history of Elvis. Stanley performs his ‘My Brother Elvis’ show in the International Theater on the same stage where The King strutted in shimmering catsuits for two shows a day between 1969 and 1977.
“There are times I will be sitting in my suite looking out the window and go, ‘God this is so surreal’,” says Stanley. “I was here when it was happening, I lived the history. They look at me at the Westgate as
a historical figure who can check what’s real and what’s not. There are people who say a lot of things about Elvis that are just not true.”
Ask nicely and he’ll walk with you to the statue of Elvis in the hotel lobby to take a picture. He also pens screenplays, has written the book, My Brother Elvis, and is writing another about life after the singer’s passing. “He’s gone but he will never, ever be completely gone,” says Stanley. “The book reveals many truths and facts. I’m not naturally a creative person, but when I’m writing about my life during the Elvis years it all flows well. It makes me feel good to get it on paper.”
How did it all happen? Stanley’s mother Dee married Elvis’s father Vernon Presley in 1960, and when Stanley was four he moved into Graceland. Presley regarded him as a younger brother, spoiling him with gifts
and expensive toys.
The suite David stays in when he’s in Las Vegas is 1,200 square feet with views of Downtown Las Vegas and the mountains. Guests can book similar suites for around £550 per night. The original Elvis Suite no longer exists but the Markus Klinko Icons Sky Villa stands where it once did. If you want to sleep where The King did, that villa – with its own private rooftop pool – costs £15,000 per night – for die-hards it’s surely worth the splurge.
The King is having a moment. New films Elvis by Baz Luhrmann and Priscilla by Sofia Coppola have led international film festivals, and Luhrmann’s was nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars. In London there’s a new exhibition featuring his clothes, cars and film posters and an Elvis
hologram is to gyrate its eerily realistic hips for thirsty fans in London this year. Spotify figures from December 2022 show he had more listeners than Cardi B, DaBaby, Jay-Z and Lizzo.
“He would be very humbled,” says Stanley. “He would just be freaked out if he saw it today, with the movie and the Elvis impersonators. Elvis is as big now as he was when he was alive. He once said: ‘This will never last, they’ll love me for a while but I’ll never be remembered.’ Well he got that wrong because he’ll never be forgotten He’d probably think it’s funny, the wedding chapels. He’d say: ‘Whatever, people love me I guess.’”
So who was the real Elvis? Restaurants like the Golden Steer steakhouse near the Westgate Resort claim you can eat at ‘Elvis’ table’, but he wasn’t a party guy. “I don’t want to use the word ‘boring’ but
this was a job,” says Stanley. “People go ‘Oh fascinating, Elvis Presley…’ It was his job, man. It’s what he did for 20 years.
“We’d lay in the sun or go out and hit golf balls off the roof, we’d train in karate ‘cos we were martial artists, me and him and a couple other guys. There was a big floor area where we’d train for an hour or two. On Sundays we’d watch football – we just lived here, like I live here now. He couldn’t go out because he was Elvis Presley.”
The Westgate offers vistas of the Nevada mountains that encircle Las Vegas. It’s a city of constant change, but that view is the one thing that’s remained the same. “He’d say: ‘They’re beautiful… really beautiful view’, but he didn’t have this massive love affair with Las Vegas.”
With its 68,000 crystals in the chandeliers in the lobby dating to 1969, the Westgate is an antidote to the ever-changing
modernity of Las Vegas. A few of the staff worked there during the Elvis years and still push pens at the Westgate today. There’s a lovely pool where Stanley hangs out in his downtime and, new for this year, there are relaunched rooms and themed accommodation, including the kitsch Plaid Suite, clad in blood-red tartan. It looks like the sort of place you could throw a darn good party.
Stanley saw the best and worst of the bequiffed legend. When he had energy he’d shower Stanley with praise. “He’d say ‘believe in yourself, eliminate the fear, use your gifts, you’re big, you’re strong, you’re a competitor’.” He’d offer girl advice. “‘Treat her this way, treat like a lady, treat her like she’s the best thing in the world. She’ll hurt you but treat her that way anyway.’ He was very big-brotherish and talked a lot about faith. He believed in Christ, that was his biggest advice: ‘embrace your faith’.” Then there were the dark days. Stanley has devoted his life to breaking the stigma around Elvis’ drug abuse. “I used to say to him ‘It’s a little much’,” he remembers of the pill popping that would take his
life. “He’d say ‘None of your business, if I want your opinion I’ll give it to you. If you have a problem you can always leave’.” Stanley was there that day at Graceland when he died; when I ask, he diligently recounts the story, as he must have done hundreds of times before. We’re talking in an ordinary meeting room just off from the hotel’s timeshare sales area. There’s clearly still a rawness to recounting the singer’s final hours; you can feel that it hurts to remember the blow-by-blow of those minutes out loud.
My Brother Elvis is Stanley’s way of
shining a light on the abusive relationship Elvis had with drugs, as well as his own. “I hope that these revelations of my time with Elvis might save others from the pain I suffered during the final years of his life,” he says. “It’s my way of reaching out to those who loved Elvis in the hopes of touching their lives as much as he touched mine. I felt it was my responsibility to write a book about these realities of Elvis beyond the glitz, glamour and fun. He was human, and his very human frailties and vulnerabilities cost him his life. If addiction could happen to Elvis, it can happen to anyone.”
Towards the end of last year, I spoke at the Dubai Future Forum, an annual gathering of “futurists” from around the world who assembled at the emirate’s space-age Museum of the Future. As you might imagine, there was much discussion around the development and applications of artificial intelligence, as well as potential doomsday scenarios. Experts spoke about things like the emergence of the “non-creative creative class – augmented by AI”; and how philosophers are now working with AI technology companies to devise fair, transparent, inclusive and controllable algorithms. During a coffee break, I interacted with an uncanny humanoid robot who displayed highly convincing expressions and gestures, and it made me wonder how long it would be until we all employ AI personal assistants?
Today’s much-talked about iteration of artificial intelligence is Generative AI, which comes in the form of machine learning systems such as ChatGPT and image generators like Midjourney, but the difference between the capabilities we have right now and what could come next are huge. Some believe that the contrast between Generative AI and tomorrow’s (theoretical) “General AI”, which can selfteach, could be as vast as that between the fax machine and the internet.
Although we are some way off from having robots as part of our daily lives, digital advisors are popping up all across the travel sector to perform specific tasks. I don’t know about you but I really dislike having a
“conversation” with those perky little chatbots that appear in the corner of some websites, but when I tried Expedia’s new Gen AI trip planning tool I was impressed at how seamless it was. Powered by ChatGPT, OneKey members can send a stream of messages as they would on WhatsApp, and the bot will reply with hotel, flight and car hire suggestions ready for them to book. It’s a big step up from the formulaic exchanges I’ve had with virtual customer service reps.
This month, metasearch site Kayak unveiled a new AI airfare comparison tool called PriceCheck, which allows Kayak app users to upload a screenshot of a flight itinerary from any site. In so doing, Kayak will rapidly check hundreds of partner sites to verify whether or not they are getting the best possible price. Then there is travel technology company Amadeus, which has joined forces with both Microsoft and Accenture to develop a cutting-edge AI-powered tool that will allow travellers to use “natural language processing” to swiftly and efficiently research and book business trips without the need for a flesh-and-blood travel manager. It can even propose itineraries.
“Business travellers will be able to converse with an AI-powered chatbot like they do via mail, or chat,” says Arlene Coyle, senior vice president at Amadeus Cytric Solutions. “They will get trip recommendations aligned with policy, they will be prompted on when to travel or the best choices to get there. The impact will be profound and will completely change the lives of our business travellers.”
l Jenny Southan is the founder of travel trend forecasting agency Globetrender
Sponsored by Northern Data Group
Presented by CITY A.M.
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Welcome to Chestertons Polo in the Park. The UK’s top polo tournament takes place at Hurlingham Park in Fulham and plays host to some of the world’s best polo teams.
Friday 7th June – International Friday, sponsored by Northern Data Group and presented by CITY A.M.
Friday will be an action-packed day designed to kick start the summer season. In addition to three gripping matches over the afternoon, the eagerly anticipated battle for the Olympic Trophy will take place, featuring England versus USA in a fast-paced international match to win this historic trophy.
Friday is the perfect setting to entertain friends and clients or host the ultimate office summer party, whilst enjoying world class hospitality. Depending on your guests, you can choose to enjoy the relaxed setting of the Champagne Lanson Garden, try the finest street food at the Fulham Food Festival, shop in the luxury shopping village or even dance the afternoon away in Mahiki.
The first English-speaking tourist to visit this oncedangerous Medellin neighbourhood, ADAM BLOODWORTH finds a Colombia with a new sense of purpose. Photographyby OMAR PORTELA
Oscar is crouching on an upturned breeze block, resting in the afternoon sun. Behind him, an eight thousand foot drop towards the city of Medellin. On the way down the hill, tree top canopies cluster like ink blots, contrasting with the dense houses. The view stretches hundreds of miles across Colombia.
We had trekked uphill in the sweltering heat, climbing outdoor staircases threaded between settlements. Here, the bodies of poisonous snakes lay outside homes with their heads crushed against steps. You wouldn’t chance it this far from a hospital.
Up and up, sometimes at forty-five degree angles, past smiling, matronly women resting with their chickens, each woman’s home boasting an incredible view of the city. Medellin’s trendy rooftop bars, an hour’s drive below, already feel like a fading memory.
We turned up a stairwell into Oscar’s kitchenette, where photos of his daughter lined the walls. It was here that four attempts had been taken on his life by gangs, but more on that later.
Back out into the light and even further up the mountain, we stopped at a ten-metre-wide slab of poured concrete so perilously high that I backed into the mountainside to feel grounded.
Oscar sat on that upturned breeze block, leant forward with his hands pursed, and began to tell me his story. The social leader of the people of Comuna 3, one of 13 districts in Medellin, he is spearheading a regenerative social movement here with support from the local government, employing street artists and local school children to paint murals. Welcoming tourists to the formerly dangerous neighbourhood is part of his plan. I was, he believed, the first English speaking tourist to visit. Over the next year Oscar hopes to turn this area of upturned concrete blocks into a small visitor centre and cafe, bringing new life to this working class area of the city, which has a population of over 2.5 million Colombians. “Nothing will stop me doing this work,” he said.
But it’s work that has almost cost Oscar his life. Anyone who helps the poorer areas of Colombia is an enemy to gang leaders. Social justice projects don’t bring in cash so any focus on levelling up is a distraction. Many Colombian districts are still run by gangs despite the image the country tries to present.
Oscar puts his neck on the line to bring a new dawn, he says, but assures me I’m safe here with a guide. So do the companies that have begun offering trips to Comuna 3 over the past few months, providing a flavour of the real life of the people of Medellin. The street art, some depicting imagined realities of the future, designed by locals, is charming but a visit to Comuna 3 is as much about the surprised looks on the faces of locals who wonder why there are tourists wandering their streets. Locals walk for hours every day to their jobs in the city centre, with transport options often pricing them out.
Comuna 13 is Comuna 3’s celebrity cousin. One of the most dangerous places in the world in the 1980s during Pablo Escobar’s reign, these days it is
Disneyland by comparison, and was the country’s earliest example of successful urban planning post Escobar. Gentrified for decades, the currency has changed from terror to tourists. Gift shops tout graffiti art tees and knock-off Barbie merchandise.
It’s touristy as hell, but worth visiting to see what twenty years of tourism has done for the area. If every second person meandering through the neighbourhood, with its prize views over the city, is a British tourist, everyone else is a beaming Colombian doing a local dance for cash, offering you food or pouring you a glass of aguapanela, a sugar cane drink, to enjoy while you take in the view.
Later, I was doing laps of the rooftop pool at the Marquee Medellin hotel to blow off steam after what had been an eye-opening day. If Margate is Shoreditch-on-Sea then Medellin might be Shoreditch-in-Jungle. It’s an incredibly cool and architecturally rich city, its nouveau hotels sprouting from the thick swathes of jungle.
In the posher Parque Lleras district, plush rooftop bars with pounding sound systems compete in the height stakes with the rainforest canopies and often get tangled up within them. An evening’s walk has you crisscrossing over flumes of water running off the mountains and through copses of tripleheight bamboo – it feels remote and jungly one minute, then a few steps later you’re back in the 21st century, turning a corner and being confronted by someone trying to flog you a plastic model of Pablo Escobar. It’s safe, but go out in groups and stay with other people. In Parque Lleras, queer venues back onto Latino dance halls and late-night bars serving punchy margaritas. Walking through the city-then-jungle passageways gives proper Honey I Shrunk The Kids vibes. I booked paragliding with Stubborn Mule Travel to see the full scope of the changing city, and Green Travel organises a city centre tour including a visit to the Medellín River, which is being pedestrianised, giving you a fascinating glimpse at where corporate types wander on their lunch breaks.
The Botero Plaza, with its bulbous, cumbersome sculptures by Colombian artist Fernando Botero, are unwieldy and magnificent, although their recent placement behind protective barriers to avoid homeless people gathering near them is in direct contradiction with the artist’s wishes for the pieces to be for everyone. It couldn’t be a clearer sign of Colombia’s fraught relationship with its own people.
With its skate parks and distinctive, brightly-coloured houses, Comuna 3 is pulling away from the bloody past into a promising new future
The man had been in prison for something awful but seemed incredibly proud of the ornaments he was flogging us, evidenced by the wide smile on his face
An overcast afternoon in Bogota, and Camilo is practising his BMX moves in the Ciudad Bolívar skate park high above the city. Cable cars were introduced from the Colombian capital to this suburban district in 2018, connecting what was a historically cut off and impoverished part of the capital to its wealthier heart. Local projects similar to Oscar’s in Medellin mean the streets are lined with art, welcoming tourists who want to get closer to the ‘real’ Bogota and support the city’s people.
Skater Camilo isn’t interested in that. He’s practising ollies and has grown tired of the huge city view that forms the backdrop to the skate park. How long before you start to take these views for granted? My tour with Impulse Travel, booked through the Latin Routes company, took me past groups of locals perched on walls by playing fields, into alternative bric-a-brac shops selling old Colombian records and vintage board games, and into cafes with local beef empanadas and fridges filled to the brim with Aguila beer. Two pastry parcels and a beer was roughly a pound. Locals cannot afford the cable cars, so the reality is that many still walk for hours into the capital, like they do from Comuna 3, but at least the leaders of these tours empower locals with opportunities and drive the economy. Bogota is a frenetic and sprawling city, but Colombian Journeys helped me carve out an itinerary. I was staying at the Hotel Coco, with a fab rooftop restaurant for breakfast, offering views of the undulating mountains and colourful districts. A half day Egipto Neighbourhood Experience organised by Colombian Journeys got me even closer to the country’s terrible, bloody history: men formerly tied up with gangs sold us carvings; women the clothes they tailor in a newly-built factory paid for by tourism. One man had been in prison for something awful but seemed incredibly proud of the ornaments he was flogging us, evidenced by the wide smile on his face. Here, you really can get closer to Colombia than ever before.
In search of untouched culinary gems in the lesser-visited regions of this strange and beautiful country,
by LUKE ABRAHAMSWhen you think of Vietnamese food, chances are you’d be hard pressed to name anything more than a bowl of pho or a bánh mì baguette. It’s okay, don’t be too hard on yourself: London, as richly flavourful and cosmopolitan as it is, only offers a mere smidge of the flavours Vietnam has to offer. I first realise this in Hanoi, capital of this welcoming socialist republic. I am sitting in Café Giang in the city’s Old Town, a small hole-in-the-wall coffee shop that serves one of Hanoi’s finest inventions: egg coffee.
The thick and creamy espresso-sized cup of java was the brainchild of Nguyen Van Giang, created in response to milk shortages during the first Indochina war in 1946. It’s since become a nationally acclaimed staple, mostly made of egg yolks, sugar, condensed milk and exceptionally strong robusta coffee. Despite its mind-altering strength, a third generation Giang tells me the stuff is also good for me; apparently a morning cup of egg coffee can help stabilise blood sugar, increase metabolism and even boost your mood. I’m sold, wired and ready to cancel my Pret subscription.
Heck, even Michelin finally got the memo about Vietnamese food after releasing its first foodie guides to Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh last summer. Aside from its newfound Michelin buzz, a dazzlingly good exchange rate and the sheer variety of cuisine is attracting travellers to this culinary
hinterland. Sipping another cup of yolks, I look to the streets around me, and this complex country’s food makes a little more sense. Scooters scramble for right of way amid the explosive thunder of blaring horns, and all around there are the complex architectural layers of French, Chinese and Japanese colonisation. Remnants of this cultural mishmash still prevail, especially in the food, and the result is some of the best and most innovative fusion cuisine in the world. Endless cookery classes and food-themed walking tours make it easier to discover the country’s culinary heritage, but it’s the local street food scene where my love affair with Vietnamese food is forged.
Found on practically every street corner of the Old Town and French quarter, I try canh chua, a refreshing sweet and sour soup made with fish, pineapple, tomatoes, and vegetables including okra and elephant ear; ban xeo, a delectable crispy fried crepe stuffed with pork and shrimp; banh bao, large steamed buns stuffed with minced meat, quail eggs, Chinese sausage and veg; banh trang tron, one of the most popular street food snacks made from shredded rice paper, chilli powder, dried shrimp, and fried shallots; and for desert, a mouthful of mung bean cake, mixed together with ground mung beans, sugar and grapefruit flower essential oils… all washed down with green tea, naturally. All of the above, and more, cost less than £25.
Then there’s the bánh mì. What you get in the UK is nothing in comparison to the vast variety of baguettes you get
here. The bread is softer. The pâté richer. The fillings grander. And depending on which part of town you are in, the garnishes even more fiery. I find the Elite Banh on an unassuming street corner just by the city’s famed St Joseph’s Cathedral. The line for the small cart is mammoth, with a mix of locals and western folk like me. A product of French colonial rule during the Nguen dynasty, my baguette is filled with layers of pork, pâté, cucumber, fresh chilli and carrots. The defining difference from what we get back home? It’s unusually toasted. I ask the owner why and he says: “Because we like it like that. Everyone has their own version and this is how we eat it at home. If you don’t like it, go somewhere else.”
A short ride downtown to Bún cha Huong Liên, which I’m told serves the finest bowls of the popular grilled pork noodle dish. It’s a local gaff, first made famous by former US President Barack Obama who once dined here with the late American chef Anthony Bourdain during a state visit in 2016. Since Obama’s visit, the restaurant has literally preserved the table they sat at, commemorating their meal as the “Obama combo”.
I am served a broth of small patties of seasoned pork and slices of pork belly, both grilled over charcoal and marinated in a bowl of nuoc cham–based sauce. The secret ingredient? I have no idea. The waitress says it’s so secret she’d rather die than tell me. Whatever it is, it’s fermented over 25 years and it makes all the difference.
Familial generational secrets hold the key to some of Vietnam’s most delicious bites. Down in the city of Ninh Binh, I find the cuisine gets way more local, and way more country. A short two hour or so drive south of Hanoi, the landscape morphs from chaotic city streets to giant, moss flecked limestone mountains that rise up from the lotus flower-flecked paddies.
It’s what the locals dub ‘Ha Long Bay on land.’ Very few western tourists go here, and while it’s all beautiful, the most raw and authentic part of this Avatar-esque landscape is the nature reserve, Van Long. Less polished than the more touristy area of Trangh An, it is where most of the locals call home.
I join Marie for a typical lunch. Set on the Red River Delta that snakes just outside her home, we feast on a medley of bites served on banana leaves. There’s banh cuon, delicate rice noodle
rolls loaded with minced beef, mushrooms and topped with shallots; seared chicken garnished with fresh chillies handpicked from her garden, nut-mixed vermichilli stir fry noodles made fresh by her friend in the hills; and cha gio, fried spring rolls loaded with freshly cooked ground pork. Everything, and she means quite literally everything, should be dipped in homemade fish and chili sauce, as per “the Ninh Binh way.” Driving, full and a little weary, I stop off at a roadside cart selling the area’s most famed delicacy: roasted mountain goat. The beast, like a pig on a spit roast, is cooked whole, face and hooves charred. Some even have their eyes still intact. You can either buy it as is or select cuts to take a home to pop in a broth or curry.
My next stop is Hoi An. Once a key exchange post on the spice route linking the Orient to the occident, this ancient Central Vietnamese city has always been a melting pot of cuisines. To make the area’s signature chewy noodle dish, cao lau, locals use water straight from the archaic Ba Le well, a chasm of pure brown H2O just off the coast of the city. Topped with sliced pork, crunchy rice crackers, aromatic spices, and a handful of fresh coriander and lettuce, it’s an incredible assortment of flavours and textures. Thanh Cao Lau Restaurant in the New Town serves the OG. It’s really a local street food joint, so expect no trimmings and service without the BS. You see everything cooked from the comfort of your own stool. Magic.
By the time I arrive on the coast, the foodie offering gets wildly spiritual. At Amanoi, perched just outside the small fishing village of Vin Hy near the town of
Cam Ranh, I discover the cuisine of the Cham people. The journey starts at dusk with a brisk walk to a hidden spot within the hotel’s nature reserve. Before we feast, we are blessed in an ancient Vietnamese tongue by a Cham Master who utters various mantras to rid our spirits of any black magic and bring us good fortune. Once cleansed, we eat. Everything has been foraged within a few miles of the hotel. I try papaya salad with marinated octopus, tamarind broth with chicken, chargrilled beef topped with herbs, stir fried prawns with chili salt, braised fish fillet with turmeric and pumpkin custard for dessert. It’s a banquet that’s been 800 years in the making when the first Cham dynasty crossed into Vietnam from their native India.
I toast out my culinary odyssey of Vietnam down in Ho Chi Minh City with Original Vespa tours. Sped around the city gorging on oc (snails), bánh canh cua (crab tapioca noodles) and a bowl of pho for good luck, I finally admit that after 10 days of feasting I’m a little full. While Vietnam’s cerulean seas and breathtaking vistas will always draw the crowds, it’s the food that gives the country its soul. Each region has its own specialties rooted in the legends of tribal communities and forged through decades of invasions. Wherever you go, you’ll always encounter something wildly different, and that’s the allure.
l Original Travel offers a ten-night trip to Vietnam. Prices start at £5,095pp based on a two-person trip, including direct Vietnam Airlines flights, all transfers, tours and hotel accommodation, with a two-night stay at Amanoi
The Forbidden Pink Rolls-Royce Black Badge Ghost has ‘something of the night’ about it.
ADAM HAY-NICHOLLS takes it for a spin through Provence
Ordinarily, the discovery of a massive spider upon arriving at one’s hotel might be cause for complaint; a definite markdown on Tripadvisor. At Provence’s serene Villa La Coste, however, it’s one of many highlights. I’ve arrived behind the wheel of a RollsRoyce Black Badge Ghost, steering through the hotel’s concrete Tadao Ando-designed gates, before being confronted by a vast Louise Bourgeois arachnid crouching in a
mirrored lake.
This place is the South of France’s hottest holiday destination for A-list art lovers, but thus far reports have been discrete. Billionaire property developer and hotelier Paddy McKillen bought the 17th century 600-acre Chateau La Coste in 2003, developed a sculpture park as well as the biodynamic winery, and added the Villa La Coste – his 28-bedroom hotel – in 2017. Belfast-born McKillen, 69, is close friends with Bono, a regular visitor, and as well as gifting some of his own daubings for
the cocktail bar’s walls, the U2 frontman has dragged along the likes of Sasha Baron Cohen and Isla Fisher, Chris Rock, Matthew McConaughey and Metallica’s Lars Ulrich to savour the painterly landscape, quaff the Chateau La Coste’s eponymous rosé and enjoy the £1,200-a-night pool suites.
Bono isn’t the only rock star on permanent display here. There are also sketches in the stairway by Bob Dylan, and hidden in the pine trees above the property are happy-looking bronze foxes sculpted by REM singer Michael Stipe. Yoko Ono has
planted an almond tree on which visitors are encouraged to hang notes detailing their prayers.
The surroundings are a culture-meetsnature theme park. There are sculptures by such heavyweights as Alexander Calder, Tracey Emin, Richard Serra, Hiroshi Sugimoto and Ai Weiwei, and some serious outbuildings: an art centre and a chapel by Tadao Ando, a gallery by Richard Rodgers, a music pavilion by Frank Gehry, an auditorium by Oscar Niemeyer (his final project), and the winery by Jean Nouvel,
which looks like a spaceship has landed in Cezanne country. Where else, privatelyowned, has this amount of 21st century starchitecture on show?
Breakfast is spent staring less at croissants and other guests, more at Picasso, Damien Hirst and the Le Corbusier tapestry. Bag re-packed, I wander to the waiting Rolls. It’s in contrast to the unostentatious property’s zen minimalism and fifty shades of pale: a huge, beefy lux-o-barge painted ‘Forbidden Pink’, a hue usually more at home in a sex shop. This is how Rolls’ press department
– and some of its more outré clients – like to spec their Black Badge cars. It’s certainly eye-catching. And the craftsmanship, whether inside, outside or unseen, is a true work of art. The materials, surfaces, lines and attention to detail would earn nods of approval from any artists in residence.
Like former Tory leader Michael Howard, there’s something of the night about this car. A Black Badge machine sees the grille and Spirit of Ecstasy sprayed black, and it sits on large, brawny carbon-fibre rims. I burble out of the cypress tree-lined driveway and hit the Luberon’s wintery roads. Even behind the wheel it feels edgier than a ‘standard’ Ghost, due to its slightly firmer ride, more urgent throttle and discernible growl. It’s designed for a younger demographic: filthy rich under 40s who identify as disrupters.
A decade ago, if you’d visited the home of a Rolls-Royce owner and asked the way to the loo, they’d have told you “down the hall, left at the Monet”, recalling the floorplan of Jeffrey Archer’s penthouse. But now, at least as far as the Black Badge gang goes, it’s more likely that the owner’s art collection comes in the form of NFTs – or at least they did during that brief moment of madness when the art, tech and financial worlds collided up their own backsides. They reject suits for streetwear and use blockchain not banks. With the Black Badge Ghost, however, you can see where the money’s gone. How much does it cost? Rolls-Royce won’t even tell you – not until it’s been fully spec’d up anyway. There is no starting price. That’s how bespoke it is.
Black Badging extends not only to the four-door Ghost, but the Wraith coupé, Dawn convertible and Cullinan SUV, and was triggered by a trip to Los Angeles, taken by Torsten Müller-Ötvös, Rolls’ recently retired CEO. He emerged from Beverly Hills’
SLS Hotel one evening to find a chap pulling up in a Phantom Drophead which had been independently pimped and “murdered-out”. Introducing himself, Müller-Ötvös said to the driver “I like it, but why have you done this?” The man – a plastic surgeon – told him he’d wanted a car that gave him an alter-ego. The meeting inspired a more assertive direction for product styling. TMÖ had to lobby Rolls’ owner BMW, which after considerable resistance finally backed down and allowed the Spirit of Ecstasy to go dark – both literally and metaphorically. Black Badge now represents 30 percent of all Rolls-Royce sales, and takes inspiration from the fact their customers all carry a black Am-Ex Centurion card. Black means luxurious, exclusive, mysterious and minted.
Buyers can define their own custom hue, or select from 44,000 (that’s not a typo) prét-à-porter colours. Most simply opt for the signature black. Just as catholic priests (in Father Ted’s telling, anyway) wear the blackest socks, Rolls boasts the industry’s darkest black. The paint weighs 45kg alone. The whole car, unladen with Kardashians and Krug, is a whisker under 2.5 tonnes.
The Ghost’s twin-turbocharged 6.75-litre V12 is sufficient in anyone’s book, but this one generates an extra 28bhp – a total output of 591 thoroughbreds. When it comes to performance, the engineers had an interesting challenge; to create a driving personality that matches the Black Badge’s visual intent without compromising that famed magic carpet ride. The Ghost’s allaluminium spaceframe architecture is a superb starting point, both stiff in body and flexible in adaptability. This car has fourwheel-steer as well as all-wheel-drive. It also
boasts the Rolls-patented Planar suspension system which irons out the dips and bumps. These systems, all on the regular Ghost, have been reengineered for Black Badge, including fitting more voluminous air springs to alleviate body roll under more assertive cornering. Between that and the satellite-aided transmission, this limousine takes roundabouts like a Lotus.
My destination is lunch at the Gatsbyesque Les Roches Blanches in Cassis, which is empty of tourists in winter but still invites sunshine and warmth. This hotel was a favourite of Winston Churchill, who loved to paint here.
The dining room’s sumptuous Art Deco interior is like that of a 1920s ocean liner. Lobster is devoured, generously lubricated by fizz, with a sybaritic view of the Cap Canaille. After lunch, a chauffeur is summoned and I return to Marseille airport in the back of the Rolls, this time. The rear of a Black Badge Ghost is a most cossetting place to sit and savour the warm buzz from a wine pairing and stare up at the Starlight Headliner – hundreds of skilfully-woven fibre-optic LEDs representing the night sky, including shooting stars. Kitsch, maybe, but atmospheric (and a five-figure accessory, FYI). There are seatback TVs, and crystal flutes included in the champagne fridge behind the arm rest.
The ambiance treads a fine line between red carpet glitz and luxuriant substance. Rolls’ aesthetes have, I’m told, turned to haute couture for inspiration, in particular the work of Kei Ninomiya, Rick Owens, Yohji Yamamoto and John Varvatos. In terms of peers, Rolls has also compared its work to pioneering sailing yachts Maltese Falcon, Black Pearl and Philippe Starck’s Sailing Yacht A.
This area holds a link with the earliest days of Rolls-Royce. While the company was founded in Derby in 1906, Henry Royce would do a lot of his design work here in the South of France. He wished to escape the tungsten skies of the Midlands in midwinter. In 1911, he bought a house on the coast at Rayol-Canadel-sur-Mer, between Marseille and Cannes, and spent every chilly season there for 20 years. There’s a blue plaque for him there listing his occupation, with typical Gallic understatement, as simply: ‘Mécanicien.’ Royce died in 1933 aged 70 at his other home in West Wittering, just ten miles from Rolls-Royce’s current headquarters at Goodwood.
From its very earliest days, Rolls-Royce has attracted creative minds, free spirits and iconoclasts – John Lennon, Elvis and Elton among them. It’s worth considering that the company’s founders – engineer Royce, and Charles Rolls, a millionaire playboy adrenalin junkie who died in a plane crash (the first Briton to do so) aged 32 – were the disrupters of their day, just like Picasso and Calder and other artists represented at the Chateau La Coste. Their backgrounds couldn’t have been more different (engineer Royce came from nothing, while aristo Rolls wore white tie spattered with oil, earning him the nickname ‘Dirty Rolls’), but they were both mightily ambitious and bonded over their love of technology and desire to shake things up. With the Black Badge Ghost, their visionary and subversive ways are being celebrated today.
Known for his buttery prose, ANNA MOLONEY finds the A Gentleman in Moscow author has led a life straight from one of his novels
The heroine of Amor Towles’s upcoming novella, Southern belle Evelyn Ross, keeps an important list: things to do before she skedaddles. Churros on the boardwalk, coffee at Chester’s, the Taj Mahal; one by one she dutifully ticks them off in an embrace of her new celebration for lists – which toasts a “thou shalt” rather than a “thou shalt not” sensibility.
As a child I kept a similar list, though I was not nearly as dutiful as Eve and only ever ticked off number one: to send a message in a bottle. Aged 10, I enlisted my father to drive me to Brighton Pier and there I sent it off into the English Channel with the boundless optimism of youth. Naturally, I never heard of it again.
Not so for Towles himself, however, whose life appears to have been blessed with such a sense of whimsy that one can imagine he may have been delivered by stork. And
indeed, young Towles, also aged 10, sent a message in a bottle out into the Atlantic Ocean – but to considerably more success. While he hoped it might have reached China, he instead received a letter from the offices of The New York Times, where then-managing editor Harrison Salisbury wrote to inform him he had found Towles’s dispatch – an extraordinary story that kicked off many years of correspondence between the two. It is also a story journalists now can’t stop bringing up, he tells me, but it’s one that so perfectly frames the world his novels sprang from that it’s impossible to resist.
“But I’ve never told an interviewer this story,” I’m grateful to hear, when I ask him what inspired that sense of joie de vivre in his life. He tells me another childhood tale, when he was “screwing around” in an old barn in his family home in New England and noticed a quirk in the floorboards. “I pulled them out. And it turned out that there was a room underneath this room!” And it was full of treasures, he tells me with childish delight, with him excavating toy fire engines from the 1930s along with an array of other long-forgotten trinkets. “It’s those kinds of experiences that reinforce your belief that everything is possible, if you just pull up the floorboards,” he says.
With that kind of attitude, it may be surprising to learn that Towles, despite always dreaming of being a writer, spent the first 20 years of his career as an investment banker, and a successful one. But, far from seeing this part of his life as discordant with his one as an artist, he tells me it helped him write with more freedom. “Everyone had basically forgotten it was a dream of mine, none of the writers in New York knew who I was, I was just a guy on Wall Street. I really didn’t have to write it for anybody but myself.” The money, he adds, also helped.
Thirteen years later and his career as a novelist has been so successful he’s been able to swap New York trading floors for Paramount film sets, with his second novel, A Gentleman in Moscow, just given the Hollywood treatment (though Towles admits filming took place in a rainy Manchester, far from the Beverly Hills Hotel where he resided to research his upcoming book).
Complete with stars Ewan McGregor and Mary Elizabeth Winstead, A Gentleman in Moscow follows the life of Count Rostov, an unrepentant but charming Russian aristocrat, who receives the rather cosy sentence of lifetime imprisonment in Moscow’s Metropole Hotel after the Bolshevik Revolution. It’s a story that begged for a TV adaptation, and fans of Towles will be doubly pleased after news last month that his third novel Lincoln Highway is now also set for the screen, led by The Bear creator Christopher Storer.
But for those who just want more of the smooth prose Towles is known for, his upcoming book Table for Two, half short stories and half novella, will be sure to delight. Eve in Hollywood picks up where Rules of Civility left off, while the New York stories are broken down into a series of six tales, starting in Soviet Russia and ending in contemporary Manhattan. While short stories can sometimes feel dissatisfying, Towles’s dry wit and twinkle-in-its-eye prose make these a pleasure to read.
l Table For Two is out on 16 May
When the Women’s Prize for Fiction, then known as the Orange Prize, was established in 1996, not everybody was happy. Journalist and novelist Auberon Waugh, the eldest son of Evelyn Waugh (who had never been given a step up in life) dubbed it the “Lemon Prize”; prominent literary critic A S Byatt, who refused to have her novels considered for the award, said it was sexist; and Germaine Greer, a major if controversial second wave feminist, scorned that it wouldn’t be too long before there was a prize for “writers with red hair”. Such special treatment for women, they finger-wagged, was patronising and unnecessary. And if recent hot-takes on the prize are anything to go by, there is a significant number who still believe the same thing.
“Well that’s a charming idea!” renowned historian, and chair of this year’s inaugural Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction, Suzannah Lipscomb tells me, when I put to her that some think there is no longer need for the prize. “Unfortunately it is not true.”
A look at the Booker Prize, which the Women’s Prize was specifically created in reaction to, gives an indication of the persisting problem. Its 1991 all-male shortlist was what inspired British novelist Kate Mosse to start the alternative prize, but the Booker’s 2023 list, which notably featured more Pauls than women, suggests its biases are yet to be fully overcome. And indeed, since 1996, 19 of the 28 Booker Prize winners have been written by men.
The creation of the Woman’s Prize for Non-Fiction, which will be awarded for the first time this summer, is similarly welcome as a step towards closing the “authority gap”, a term coined by Mary Ann Sieghart, whose 2021 book gave evidence to a long-suspected truth: men don’t like to read women. In fact, men are four times as likely to read books written by men as they are to read books by women.
How likely are they to read books recommended by women? Well, the Women’s Prize’s 2001 experiment, in which they set up a shadow judging panel of men to choose their own winner, gave a suggestion to the regard they held women’s opinions in. Paul Bailey, who chaired the shadow panel despite expressing his disregard for the whole prize, said the women chose “worthy books about issues which we found anathema” and went “soft when it came to the crunch”. The exercise was never again repeated. (Anna Moloney)
A recent exposé on the London Library, a private member’s literary establishment in St James’s Square, uncovered scandal. Incestuous members, fumbles between the bookshelves and bags of literary tension. The findings of the investigation, led by Gus Carter for The Fence, were unequivocal: the appeal of London’s poshest library has very little to do with books, and very much to do with sex.
But we should hardly be surprised; reading, if you didn’t know, is now officially hot
Vivienne Westwood once said the best accessory was a book, and the stylish took note. Fanned by Gen Z enthusiasm and solemnised by the participation of A-list celebrities, reading is now firmly the domain of the ‘it’ girl. Dua Lipa, Kaia Gerber and Kendall Jenner all host their own book clubs, while supermodel sisters Gigi and Bella Hadid have both been papped glamorously toting around their reads between fashion shows.
Care should be taken not to slip into assumptions that are ultimately misogynistic, the (gasp!) beautiful-womenmight-have-brains-too mentality. When a 1955 photograph of bathing suit-clad Marilyn Monroe reading a worn copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses surfaced, for example, unfair accusations of posturing were abundant: a way to recast her ‘dumb blonde’ image, commentators suggested. But Monroe was genuinely a keen reader, with a personal library of over 400 books and, some suggest, more photos were taken of her reading than of her nude – an endorsement indeed of reading’s sex appeal.
But there is reason to have some healthy suspicion towards the fashionable’s embrace of the literary world, for it may not be so much reading that is in vogue, as it is the aesthetics of such. The gaining traction of ‘book stylists’, for example, often tasked with curating bookshelves not only by title but by design. Gwyneth Paltrow asked her literary curator for “light, inviting and easy to grab” books in her family room and a “palette of black, white and grey” in the dining room.
It is not only the words on the page that are being flouted, but the whole ‘literary look’. Slim, horn-rimmed glasses were ushered in as the new “geek-chic” must-have by Vogue in January and no mondaine has ever been papped proudly carrying round an Amazon Kindle. It is the worn paperback, undone hair and cool nonchalance which makes this look – the “oh, I didn’t see you there”. But you can be sure they were reading something chic. (Anna Moloney)
Ever tried writing a book? Don’t bother, it’s an endless cycle of self-doubt and recrimination. But do buy my new one
The best part of a book is right before you write the book, when you have that idea. An idea is a beautiful, powerful magnet: it lives inside of your brain and pulls little strands and threads and sub-ideas towards itself, out of the ether. You keep stopping abruptly in the middle of Liverpool Street station to write down a little thought. You feel magical, amazing. You glimmer with promise. What a masterpiece this will be! What a joy it will be to write!
THE WRITING
People say writing is editing, and it isn’t. People say writing is writing, and it isn’t. Writing is quite often just making sure all your pens are lined up even though you don’t write with a pen, you write with a laptop. Go away to the countryside for a week. Find the right coffee shop. Demand absolute silence. Go sober. Avoid work by ‘planning’ a ‘structure’. A book is only 80,000 words – 160 days work at a leisurely pace. Somehow the process takes two, agonising, years.
Once you have written a book, you need to let it sit for a while, like stew. It just has to be on your desktop for a bit. Occasionally, you will wander around outside, and think: if I get hit by a bus right now, they won’t be able to publish that book post-posthumously, because the password to my laptop is too strong. This worries you. The book has lived only in your head for 24 straight months (36 if you count the time since you had the idea). You’ve been talking about it in vague terms to everyone you know for the entirety of that time. They are bored of hearing about it and they haven’t even read it yet. All that work, for… You decide to be more careful about crossing busy roads.
THE WAITING FOR THE EDIT
Once you have written the book you
have to wait for an editor to read it, and tell you what’s wrong with it. This is a necessary process but you still feel incredibly wounded, like a teenager stomping upstairs. “This sentence doesn’t make sense” — shut up! Shut up! Yes it does! Shut up!
You read it back in the cold light of day and realise at least 20 percent of your sentences do not make sense. You have to send a really apologetic email.
THAT MOMENT WHEN THE BOOK EXISTS AND YOU HAVE SENT IT OUT AND PEOPLE ARE READING IT
We, all of us, feel great agonies over our lifetime. Huge griefs, humming anxieties, massive crippling worries about money, the future. You know that feeling, when your body reverberates with stress? That is what it feels like to send a book to a Times columnist you sort of know but don’t actually know, hoping they like it enough to say a nice quote about it. It is the longest month of your life.
You sit and think about every single one of the 80,000 words, deciding if any of them were right at all, and deciding that none of them were. Absolutely nobody e-mails you to tell you they are reviewing your book. Distantly, you wonder if ‘BookTok’ is going to be incredibly nice about it, incredibly mean about it, or, worst, ignore it entirely.
You stop abruptly in the middle of Liverpool Street station. It’s happened. A clunk of dread, like a radiator dropped into an empty skip. Please no. Please… no. Quietly, you open a new note on your phone. That’s the next three years ruined, then.
l Joel’s book, Four Stars, is out now
