Reader's Digest UK Mar 2016

Contents

MARCH 2016

features

14 I t’s a mann’s world

Self-proclaimed “big-boned gentleman” Olly Mann on why he’s had enough of gyms

e ntertainment

22 “ Yo U ’VE G o t to E arn r E s PEC t ”

Celebrity chef James Martin explains why he’ll always care more about food than fame

30 “ I r E m E mb E r”: r obson G r EEn

The TV star on fishing, family and dealing with Simon Cowell

Health

38 FIGHtInG lUnG C anCE r

How earlier detection and new treatments are bringing hope to thousands of patients

Inspir e

56 l E nd I n G a H E l PI n G

H and

The couple who opened their hearts and doors to bullied kids

64 b E s t o F br I t I s H: mar KE t towns

The sought-after settlements you should be visiting

76 t H E boY C a ll E d a nton

A documentary about one child’s autism changed this filmmaker’s life

86 “wE wE rE lU CKY to GEt oU t alIVE”

Rory Young is hunting down poachers—and training others to do the same

98 tHE maKInG oF a JIHadIst

What drove a young man to commit brutal acts of murder, and what does it teach us?

two C ontroVE r s I al s U bJE C t s dominate our March issue. Firstly, with the terrorist attacks in Paris last November still fresh in everyone’s minds, our report on p98 into the background of Omar El-Hussein— the man behind the fatal shootings in Copenhagen in 2015—is an attempt to discover why extremism is on the rise in Europe. Secondly, our feature on wildlife poaching in Africa on p86 suggests that this subject is too often ignored by the world at large.

But it’s not all hard-hitting stuff. This month’s celebrity interviews— chef James Martin on p22 and TV star Robson Green on p30—reveal two men totally in love with what they do. And there’s a heartwarming look at Northleigh House School on p56, set up by an elderly couple to help out bullied or troubled children.

Finally, thank you to everyone who sent in 100-word-stories! We received thousands of entries, so we now face the daunting (but pleasurable) task of going through them…

tom Browne

theeditor@readersdigest.co.uk

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Eye catching.

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edItOr-IN-ChIef Tom Browne

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“Human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights.” hillary Clinton

March 8 is International Women’s Day. Celebrate with our feature “Hillary Clinton: The Most Powerful woman in the USA” at readersdigest. co.uk/books

Congratulations to Amanda Jacobs from Devon, who won a 4K Panasonic Smart tv in our online competition. More competitions can be found at readers digest.co.uk/fungames/competitions

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Over to You

We pay £50 for Letter of the Month and £30 for all others

✯ letter of the month...

Olly Mann’s column “Life Will Never Be The Same

Again” struck a chord with me, and I could totally identify with him as he got to grips with impending fatherhood. My days of being a whizz-kid are well and truly over—now I’m a full-time dad with no clue as to how to be a good father. But I know I want to try my darnedest.

For instance, one day I was rushing to work on the motorway…and the next I found myself keeping to the speed limit, using my indicators and letting other cars go before me. Kids change you for the better. They make you realise that life isn’t all about you, and you shouldn’t take chances because you want to be there as long as you can.

SCOTT JOSEPH, London

world problems

I’d be delighted if someone like Alastair Fothergill got the chance to put the world to rights as in “If I Ruled the World”. He’d like to stop global warming, abolish food waste, set aside at least ten per cent of each country’s land surface for national parks, not allow birds to become extinct...if only governments

were as keen as Alastair is to help the environment.

It seems we have lost sight of the fact that our own well-being is dependent on a prospering natural world. Ultimately, the environment’s health is directly related to the health —and the ultimate survival—of all species, including our own.

JANA AITCH, Merseyside

snACKI n G h ACK

Susannah Hickling’s “7 Surprising Secrets Of Slim People” was most interesting—any tips to help keep my weight down are a must-read. I took careful note of her helpful suggestions and can see they really do make a lot of sense.

My own tip to stop the evening munchies is to clean your teeth after dinner and only drink water after that. The thought of having to clean and floss my teeth again if I have more food always puts me off snacking!

GILLy HOLLANDS, Hertfordshire

bA rm Y A bo U t boo K s Reading “Best of British: Bookshops” made me think of my own favourite: The Speaking Tree in Glastonbury. It’s a treasure trove of books covering many varieties of spirituality. The shop makes use of every available space—it even has shelves as you go up the stairs—and staff are helpful and knowledgeable. There are seats upstairs if you want to look more closely at a book before making a decision, so several hours pass easily once you’re in there!

For me, it’s an essential part of a trip to Glastonbury.

CATHy BLyTHE, Cornwall

A l I fe f U lf I lled

I enjoyed reading Ranulph Fiennes’ “I Remember”. What a man, and what an interesting life he’s led for 71 years!

He’s chosen to live his life in a somewhat crazy but also magnificent way. The spirit of his endeavours is what gives our species some hope of maybe being more than just a passing infestation in Earth’s evolutionary history. He’s my hero— an inspiration to everyone.

ryAN rOSWELL, Norfolk

h A pp Y ded ICAt I on

I was interested to read Amanda Riley-Jones’s article “Why You’re (Probably) Happier Now”. Many of us can relate to the “U-shaped curve of happiness” and the challenges we face when we grow up and have to fend for ourselves.

It’s not necessarily easy to have a positive frame of mind. You have to practise it as you would a musical instrument or any skill. Hopefully by doing it repeatedly it will affect those around you.

It comes with relief that our later years can become some of our happier ones—but it’s also worth putting in the effort now!

KEvIN BrIGGS, Shetland

Chosen Ones STEPHEN

SLATER

A thousand years ago, in helping him defeat the Tragens and assume the throne, Dracell gave an elite group of mercenaries called the Chosen Ones a great honour: he made them the guardians of his life and his lineage.

Peace reigned throughout the empire for generations… until a Tragen spy penetrated the imperial palace and conceived a son with the wife of present emperor Frances II, a descendent of the Dracell bloodline.

The son was named Clasus.

When Clasus becomes aware of his true father’s identity, he kills the emperor and sets the Tragen army to purge the Chosen Ones to extinction...

...DIFFERENTLY

A visit to the Mendenhall caves in Alaska is guaranteed to be an icecool experience. This spectacular world of ice is found beneath a roughly 13-mile-long glacier. Those who wish to see this natural wonder with their own eyes need to be fit, as even experienced mountain climbers need up to eight hours for the tour.

And be careful, the danger isn’t just limited to the hike itself— in 2014, one of the most popular caverns suffered a massive cave-in.

Olly Mann has successfully avoided physical exertion—but, unfortunately, at a rather high cost

Why I’ve Had Enough Of Gyms

Olly Mann is a writer, LBC presenter and serial podcaster, with shows including Answer Me This!, The Media Podcast and The Modern Mann

MY GYM MEMBERSHIP IS ABOUT TO EXPIRE. I know this because I’ve circled the date in my diary as if it has great significance, like a high holy day or The X Factor final. In one sense it does—it’s my last opportunity to pump iron before having to commit to a further contract. But really it’s just one more day, in a series of 365, on which I will, almost certainly, fail to go to the gym.

I don’t like gyms. I don’t like the torturous machines, the swaggering personal trainers, the pervasive aroma of chlorinated sweat. I don’t like the distant thud of dance music emanating out of nearby spin classes, as if from an interrogation suite just out of eyeshot. I don’t like the banks of TVs showing “sports news”, as if that’s even a thing. I don’t like the small talk in the changing rooms, and I don’t like to socialise while I’m dripping with fluid. Of any kind.

So it’s hardly surprising that I’ve not made the most of my membership, nor that I’m now choosing to let it lapse. In fact, one might reasonably ask why I joined in the first place.

THERE WERE A TRIO OF CONTRIBUTORY FACTORS. Initially, the cunning marketing—the gym had recently opened in my area and their “free day” leaflet had aroused both my curiosity and my nose for a bargain. I’d anticipated they’d give it the hard sell; but how hard could it be, I’d thought to myself, to resist enrolling in a club I already knew I almost

certainly wouldn’t use? I’m Mr bloody self-control: I didn’t even buy an Apple Watch!

The second factor in my conversion was Emma, the “membership coordinator” (translation: cold-hearted

money-milking assassin) tasked with showing me around. She had shockingly strong patter: if I joined TODAY I could claim One Month Free! If I set my “goals” with the onsite physio I’d see the benefits within

WEEKS! And she was ruthless at establishing rapport: only days later did I realise it was uncharacteristic for a 21-year-old with a sportsscience diploma to be so fascinated by podcasting.

The third and final reason I found myself handing over my direct-debit details was the most compelling: they had free towels. I’m always a sucker for a free towel. In any hotel room that I hire, all that Please-Considerthe- Environment malarkey can go jump: sorry, Mr Hilton, but by dawn every single one of your available linens will be soiled with my moisture, even the flannel. Occasionally, when I’ve got through six towels in an evening just getting in and out of the bath, I feel ever so slightly guilty. But the next night there they are again, all clean and ironed and folded, and you best believe I’m at it again. Recklessness with towels is the only thing that makes me feel alive.

one to mop my brow), or even four (er… hair towel, face towel, upper- and lower-body towel?) was a huge selling point. A club with towels on tap: show me the dotted line. Towelstowelstowels.

AS IT TURNED OUT, the allure of a free towel isn’t enough—on either a cold winter’s morning or a sunny summer afternoon—to get me up and out of the house, into the car, to drive for 15 minutes to go and get changed just so I can have a swim, all so I can abuse a free towel. Apparently some other motivational pull (presumably a desire actually to spend some time in a gym) is required.

Sorry, Mr Hilton, but by dawn every single one of your available linens will be soiled with my moisture, even the flannel

So in the 12 long months that have passed since Emma flashed her teeth and towels at me, I’ve attended this gym (wait for it) seven times. Seven. And each time, I’ve used only the pool. Because, as I believe I’ve mentioned, I don’t like gyms.

So the fact that this gym not only provided free towels, but also that the staff seemed indifferent to whether I took two (I’m a bigboned gentleman, after all) or even three (I suppose I might require

I’ve done the maths and the sums are horrendous. The membership was £58 per month (a discounted rate, because I’d fraudulently claimed to work for a company with whom they had a corporate account—oh, how I laughed!), totalling an eye-watering

annual fee of £696 (roughly the cost of an all-inclusive week in Cuba). So each swim cost me…deep breath…£99.42.

I can’t think of any other thing I do that costs nearly £100 a pop. My weekly shop is at Lidl. I buy clothes in the sales. Occasionally I’ll go to a good restaurant and spend, say, £60. Sometimes, when the trains are knackered, I’ll splash out and get a

minicab from the centre of town back home. That, too, is about 60 quid. Yet, for the money I’ve been spending on a facility I had no real intention of using, I could have done both these things for five days running, and still have money left over to get seven new towels at home.

Still, I’ll attend the gym one final time. There’s a free-day promotion next month.

FORGOTTEN TREASURES

Ever left something in a hotel room? You’d have thought the following items—found at Travelodges across the country—would have been missed:

1. A pair of prosthetic legs, along with alternative shoes (Sunderland).

2. A five-foot-high wedding cake, encrusted with Swarovski crystals (Essex).

3. A miniature Shetland pony by the name of Pudding (Ayrshire).

4. A collection of lightsabers, in assorted colours (Birmingham).

5. A pre-nuptial agreement (Cardiff).

6. A replica of the Duchess of Cambridge’s wedding dress (Chester).

7. A set of manuals on how to fly a plane (West Sussex).

8. A vintage Lionel train set, valued at around £1,200 (Birmingham).

9. A secret pasta recipe, which had been successfully passed down five generations without ever being leaked. Well, until now (London).

10. A house made of bread. Dimensions were unspecified (Middlesborough).

11. A wedding proposal, written in poetic form (Harrogate).

12. A mother-in-law named June. She was later reclaimed (Lancashire).

SOURCE: MENTALFLOSS.COM

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“You’ve Got To Earn Respect”

He’s one of the most recognisable chefs in the country, but this Yorkshire lad will always care more for food than fame

BY FIONA HICKS

JAMES MARTIN IS IN A CURIOUS POSITION.

As a veteran of Ready Steady Cook and current host of Saturday Kitchen—the longest-running Saturdaymorning show in TV history—the 43-year-old is, by all accounts, one of the most successful TV chefs of this century. And yet he never aimed to be on the small screen, let alone stick around for two decades.

PHOTOS: © PETER CASSIDY

“I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t passionate about cooking,” says James Martin

“I’d never imagined doing this for a living,” he says in dulcet Yorkshire tones. “When you’re 16 and training in college, or 18 and getting your a*** kicked in London 24/7, TV was never on the horizon, was it? Your dream was to be a head chef.”

In fact, working in a kitchen has always been Martin’s ambition. “I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t passionate about cooking,” he says. “I used to help out at restaurants at the ages of eight and ten, and by the time I was 12 I had my own little business that catered for parties and weddings with my mum.”

He cooked for his first wedding at the tender age of 13, and the experience “put me off weddings for the rest of my life. You’re trying to please everybody, and then the photographer takes two and a half hours so everything’s overcooking. I’ll never cater for weddings again. That’s the golden rule.”

Martin, of course, was destined for much greater things than local celebrations. Continuing his prodigal trajectory, his won “Student of the Year” three years in a row at Scarborough Technical College. Graduating on a Friday, he’d moved to London by the Sunday to throw himself into the culinary capital. One of his first jobs was at Antony Worral Thompson’s restaurant, and he was subsequently snapped up by Marco Pierre White.

“It was all I ever wanted to do,” he

explains, “and it’s still all I ever want to do.” But that’s not to say it was easy. He worked incredibly long hours for very little pay—a state of affairs that didn’t dent his passion one iota. “It’s the best job in the world. The hours are irrelevant—they come with the job. If you don’t like the hours, don’t be a chef.”

He was surrounded by exquisite food all day, and yet his mother still had to make sure he was being fed. “She used to send me dinner vouchers for Marks & Spencer to get food because I had no money. I was heavily in debt—but not because I spent anything. I remember Michael Jackson brought out an album and it took me six weeks to save up a tenner to buy it. That’s how little money I was on back then.”

HIS LIFE CHANGED WHEN, at 22, he was headhunted for the position of head chef at the newly opened Hotel du Vin in Winchester. “We had an eight-month waiting list for tables—it went nuts. Because of that, famous people used to come down for a meal and you got spotted. But it’s not like I went looking for it, and I still don’t to this day.”

So followed his stint on Ready Steady Cook, followed by ten years (and counting) hosting the everpopular Saturday Kitchen. The luxuries afforded by a successful TV career have certainly changed his lifestyle, but his work ethic is as strong

Being a chef, says James, is “the best job in the world. The hours are irrelevant”

as ever. He describes the previous Saturday, where he got up at 4am to film Saturday Kitchen, then hopped on a train to Manchester to visit his eponymous restaurant. “I worked the entire night service and finished at about a quarter to one.” For those counting, that’s a 21-hour day. Where does his drive come from?

“I was a farmer’s kid,” he shrugs. “You get nowt for nowt in life— you’ve got to work for everything. What better existence can you have than waking up in the morning and enjoying your job as much as you did when you were 18? I think 95 per cent of the population would probably not do their job again.

I wouldn’t change a single thing because I don’t want for any more.”

One of this recent projects is Sweet, a sumptuously shot cookery book that’s a follow-up to his popular 2007 tome Desserts. The recipes, although deceptively simple, have quite a cheffy presentation—twisted willow appears majestically on top of a chocolate dacqouise, for example. It’s a deliberate decision for Martin, who was a pastry chef for 25 years.

“Pastry is a dying art,” he laments. “People say it’s primeval, and that chefs want to be in the kitchen with the fire. But it’s nothing to do with that, I don’t think. It’s the hours —pastry chefs have to work much longer. There just isn’t the talent out there now.”

Martin himself is never far from a kitchen, but having done his time in

the capital, he now happily resides in the Hampshire countryside. “I’ve got no interest in living in London,” he says emphatically. “I’ve got my car collection, I’ve got my dogs, I’ve got green grass and I’ve got trees. In London nobody knows each other; I live in a village, and if the house alarm goes off, there’ll be people round in two minutes.”

Lest it sound idyllic, Martin points out that his beautiful home and his success have come at the expense of other areas of his life. “The sacrifices you make are huge. All your mates are married and have children. It was quite funny—my friends came over to my house last week, and we were walking through my garages when one of them said, ‘So this is what you could have had if you didn’t have kids.’ ”

He suddenly laughs to himself. “One old chef once told me you get two things in life for free: parking tickets and syphilis…you’ve got to earn respect, and that means more to me than anything.”

Does he not want that sort of family life? He pauses for just a second. “No. I’ve not got that and that’s fine. It’s a lifestyle choice. The sacrifices you make doing your job are colossal, but the rewards are huge. And I don’t mean financial, it’s in here and here,” he adds pointing to his head and his heart. “That’s what matters.”

He has no time for complainers, either. “Being a chef isn’t hard work —it’s not coal mining, is it? You’ve got the luxury of food, you’ve got camaraderie and you’ve got warmth.”

MARTIN IS CERTAINLY HELD in high esteem by his peers. Many of his former bosses—Pierre Kauffman, for example—have supported him on Saturday Kitchen, he’s one of only four chefs outside the Roux family to judge the Roux Scholarship each year, and in 2013 he won “The Chef’s Chef of the Year” from the Chef’s Guild.

“It’s the Oscar of the catering industry,” he says, trying (but failing) to hide his smile. “I’m more happy about what chefs think of me. There’s

no b****** with them—if you produce c***, they don’t want to know you.”

It’s this conditioning that shapes to his own no-nonsense attitude towards the fickle entertainment industry. He says, controversially, that, “There are chefs on TV that are brilliant cooks. But there are also chefs who shouldn’t be on TV. I’ve been doing this for a long time, so I’ve seen people come and go—and I’m sure I’ll see others come and go.”

Although he’s beamed into millions of living rooms every Saturday morning, he has no patience for those who court fame. He avoids all red-carpet events (“I go round the back. I don’t need to pose with everybody”) and maintains an entirely pragmatic approach to being a celebrity.

He admits that his biggest regret is writing an autobiography. It was released in 2008 and serialised in the Mail on Sunday, attracting a lot of attention because of the details of his former relationship with Bond producer Barbara Broccoli, among other tales.

“It was a big mistake. I stupidly didn’t listen to people, but I won’t be doing that again. I know now that you don’t sell your story. My industry is based on what I do, not who I am.”

People get deluded with stardom. They think it’s all about them, but it’s nothing about them

WITH AN ENVIABLE TV CAREER, cookery books, restaurant and myriad businesses in his “empire”, what else does he want to do?

“I try to tell people who are new to it what it really is. People get deluded with stardom. They think it’s all about them, but it’s nothing about them.”

It’s hard to believe that Martin was ever in danger of believing his own hype, but he does concede that there was a risk of it when he was younger. “The minute you think you’re bigger than something, someone needs to kick you in the balls. My mum’s the perfect person for that. She’ll tell me exactly what I need to hear.”

“There’s no hunger for me any more other than food,” he states. “I’ve got everything I could possibly dream of in life. What more can you do than have a home, have security and, for me especially, earn enough money to look after my mother?

“I don’t need to do the latest TV show. Maybe in a few years time I won’t be doing it any more. But I can look back and say I gave it my best shot. And I’ll tell you where you’ll find me—in my restaurant.”

James Martin’s latest book Sweet (published by Quadrille) is out now.

102 Years Old

And Still Writing Stories

BORN JULY 30, 1913, FRANK BISBY became LifeBook’s oldest author at 102 years young. Roy Moëd, LifeBook’s founder, met with Frank and his companion of more than 40 years, Eithne Noakes. Roy instantly became enthralled by Frank’s dry

sense of humour, enthusiasm, drive, wit and amazingly alert mind. Frank told Roy countless fascinating stories, relating his memories and maunderings, not to mention demonstrating the mathematical puzzle he designed, which he calls The Bisbionacci Jigsaw Illusion.

LifeBook is so much more than words and has two objectives for each author:

1) The creation of a priceless family legacy to be enjoyed both by current generations and those yet to come.

2) The fun of working on a fascinating project to capture and re-live sad and joyous memories, all of which are recorded for posterity in the author’s very own LifeBook.

Frank’s grandparents produced 14 children and a generation of more than 30 Bisby cousins, of whom Frank has been the sole survivor for more than ten years

Working with authors all over the world, LifeBook has been instrumental in helping authors remember life events and details they didn’t even know they’d forgotten. These precious memories are then shared with family and friends in the pages of a beautiful, stitched, linen-bound book.

Frank recounts his very first memory: a recollection dating from when he was just five years old, some 98 years ago! As sponsors of the 100-Word-Story competition, LifeBook asked Frank to write his own short story in exactly 100 words.

100-WORD TRUE STORY FROM 1918

Neither wind nor horse being available, father gave two elder brothers the task of “man-hauling” barge. Mother, wanting me, aged five, out of her way, suggested I pretend to help them, placed ahead with line attached to theirs. Dull work, I swivelled, walking backwards and chivvied brothers for needing my assistance. Tom thereon jerked me headfirst into canal and hauled me out, spouting water and vowing vengeance, for my mother to strip and re-clothe. However, the only dry pants she had available were my sisters BLOOMERS, which infuriated me much more, according to legend, than the ducking in the canal.

To start your very own family story and bring to life all those priceless memories for future generations to enjoy, let LifeBook’s interviewers and writers help you make it happen. Just call us now on 0800 999 2280 or email us at digest@lifebookuk.com

Frank with a birthday card from the Queen

Robson Green, 51, is one of TV’s best-known and popular actors, with a career that’s spanned nearly 30 years. When he’s not fishing or with his son, he can be found filming the new series of Grantchester.

“I Remember” Robson Green

…THE

SHOULDERS ON MY DAD. He was a miner and that job crafts a certain type of hard, powerful man. His very appearance demanded respect and, boy, did he get it. He was never physical with my sisters and brother and me, but I was fearful of him and he got into a few fights outside home. When I was nine, a young man tried to rearrange my face with his foot. When my dad saw what had happened, he went over to his house and rearranged the father’s face and stuffed him in the dustbin.

…THE

dancer, a real natty dresser and a brilliant singer. He was the warm-up act for a lot of the great acts that came to the north-east clubs. He’d always end with “Blueberry Hill” and bring the house down.

But he had another side to him: he was a national champion ballroom

SENSE OF COMMUNITY IN DUDLEY, Northumberland, where we grew up. It was self-policing— if anyone misbehaved, all the other person had to say was, “If you do that again I’ll tell your dad.” Everyone looked out for each other and knew where other people’s kids were.

Northumberland is a beautiful

Robson with his mum and brother David; (below) kitted out for his school football team

county; I still live there and have never been comfortable in cities. I find all that concrete too grim.

…WATCHING BEDKNOBS AND BROOMSTICKS

. For two hours in the cinema in 1971, I was transported away from life in a small village, away from any notion that in the future I’d be working down a mine, and instead

travelled with Angela Lansbury to magical places. I knew then that I wanted to be part of a world where storytelling could change the way you perceived life.

I also loved watching television. My parents worked really hard, my dad during the nights while mum was a shopkeeper and a cleaner, and they reaped the rewards by buying one of the first colour TVs our village had ever seen.

…BEING

TOLD,

“YOU’LL NEVER BE AN ACTOR, you’re a fool and you’ll always be one.” So said one

of the masters at school, but it was the

PHOTOS COURTESY OF ROBSON GREEN

Robson in a school play; (below right) abandoning the shipyard for his first professional production The Long Line, much to his father’s consternation

women teachers who inspired me. My drama teacher Mrs Wheeler said, “You have the ingredients for being a very fine actor.” I bumped into her a couple of years ago. She gave me a big hug and said, “I’m so happy for you, Robson, you handsome man.” She was gorgeous, that Mrs Wheeler.

…I WAS

IN

A

BAND

AND WE WERE

REALLY GREAT. Well, we thought so. We called ourselves Solid State, but my Dad called us What a State!

My party piece was wearing a pair of green cut-off shorts. One leg had a big capital “S” on it. The other leg had “olid” on top and “tate” underneath. So when I put my legs together it said the band’s name. Genius! We emulated bands such as Kiss, so we wore lots of make-up. But in the end you can’t touch Elvis, who was my dad’s favourite singer.

…LEAVING

SCHOOL AT 16

AND

GOING TO WORK AT THE SWAN HUNTER SHIPYARD. I couldn’t believe how many people worked there—tens of thousands. Three times a week after work I’d go to Backworth Drama Centre. After I’d been at Swan Hunter some four years, Max Roberts, the resident director at Backworth, offered me a lead role in the play The Long Line—a proper, professional job.

When I told my parents there was utter confusion. My dad said, “What do you mean you’re going to be an actor? That’s a hobby, not a job.” He was in a panic about how he was going to tell his mates—he had the false perception that being an actor meant I must have liked other fellas…I said, “The only person who will suffer if I fail is myself,” and off I went. Inside I knew I’d survive.

And I’ll never forget my mum and dad at the opening night of The Long Line. I watched as my dad refused the

complimentary tickets and paid for them with his hard-earned money.

…SIMON COWELL PESTERING

MY MOTHER. When I was in Soldier Soldier, Jerome Flynn and I sang “Unchained Melody” in a wedding scene. That was in 1993. No one had heard of Simon Cowell back then— certainly not my mother, who kept getting calls from him asking me to ring to talk about recording a single. This went on for about a year until I said, “If you ring my mother one

Robson and Jerome [Flynn] sold millions of records during their heyday in the mid-1990s

more time you’ll be talking to my lawyers, not me.” But Simon taught me that money corrupts the bestlaid plans. He offered Jerome and me a life-changing amount and we recorded the song in 1995. It sold some two million copies and was

I’m sure Bon Jovi thought they’d all taken something hallucinogenic, looking at us and wondering, Who ARE those two nuggets on stage? But Elton John invited us to an Oscar party, and Jerome and I have fond memories of those crazy years.

Simon Cowell taught me that money corrupts the best-laid plans. He offered me a life-changing amount

number one for seven weeks. Then we recorded two albums—it was an amazing time.

…DAVID BOWIE, TINA TURNER, ELTON JOHN, MICHAEL JACKSON AND BON JOVI in the Top of the Pops studio watching Jerome and me sing “I Believe” (also number one in 1995).

…USING THAT MONEY WISELY.

I set up Coastal Productions and when we made Wire in the Blood (which ran from 2002 to 2008), my production company employed some 165 people and I was so proud. I remember thinking, This isn’t about me any more, it’s about investing in others. We were turning over millions for the local economy in the north-east, and the youth theatre we set up taught many young people their jobs—about half of them are now working full-time in the entertainment industry. To have helped them feels just great.

Robson with his son Taylor (now 16) and ex-wife Vanya Seager

…THE IMAGE OF TAYLOR BEING HELD IN HIS MOTHER’S ARMS after he was born. Everything made sense to me that day. Mother and son were both beautiful, an utter miracle. Taylor’s still doing miraculous things 16 years later.

Robson is known for his fishing exploits, calling it “my therapy”

…CATCHING MY FIRST FISH. I’ve made a lot of fishing programmes over the last few years and had so much fun doing so. But I’ll never

forget the beautiful morning my uncle took me to the River Coquet when I was seven. We left home at 4.30am and spotted a barn owl, two mating hedgehogs, otters, kingfishers—it was idyllic. My uncle put a little fly on my line, made from hair from a hare’s ear, and taught me to flick it out on the river. Although I had no rhythm, I got a bite and that all-consuming feeling went through my body—the gasp of surprise, the

thrill! My uncle was so happy and said, “That’s a big fish, Robson! People dream of catching a fish that big.” It was a four-pound brown trout and is—to this day—the best fish I’ve ever caught.

…THINKING I WAS GOING TO DIE. We were filming on an 82-foot trawler in the Brooks Peninsula in Canada for Extreme Fishing with Robson Green when the storm we hit turned into a Force 10 hurricane. Now, I’m not a religious man, but for 36 hours I talked to The Almighty and begged him to get us home safely. I thought I’d never see Taylor again. I was so sick it felt like I’d brought up every organ of my body. It was a living hell; nothing will ever come close to that horrendous experience. Some of the crew who worked on that boat have never stepped back on board.

…FEELING RATHER CLOSE TO DENNIS QUAID. The space suit I wore in Rocket Man was the exact

Robson “bonded immediately” with Grantchester co-star James Norton

…NEVER TAKING ANYTHING FOR GRANTED. My first trip abroad was during Soldier Soldier when we flew to Hong Kong. We all went out in a sampan round the harbour and then stayed in a lovely hotel—and I was being paid to do it! More recently,

I talked to The Almighty and begged him to get us home safely—I thought I’d never see my son again

same one Dennis wore in The Right Stuff, which is not only one of the most iconic films ever made but also one of my favourites. I’m a space nut.

I knew I was definitely the luckiest individual alive when I went to Kenya for four days of safari, then fishing. Life doesn’t get any better.

…BEATING MICHELLE YEOH IN AN UNARMED FIGHT. Michelle [star of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon] is a serious martial-arts expert, but in the script for Strike Back I got to win—so she didn’t have a choice. That was an exciting show, especially the part where I got to save the world from an imminent attack from a rogue faction of North Korean terrorists, obviously.

...LAUGHING A LOT. I laugh all the time with James Norton when filming Grantchester. We bonded immediately and we’re so relaxed in each other’s company that I think it must be quite

annoying for the crew. Sometimes when I do my lines he looks at me questioningly as if to say, “You’re actually going to commit that to camera?” and that’s it—we’ve got tears running down our faces. James had a great audition. When they asked him, “What can you bring to the character of this charismatic member of the clergy?” he replied, “I’ve got a first-class degree in theology from Cambridge.” As told to Caroline Hutton

The new series of Grantchester is showing on ITV this month and will run for six weekly episodes.

A PERFECTLY REASONABLE NOTE

Their housemates may not be amused, but at least these memos make funny reading for the rest of us:

“Dear Gary, i have been feeling really dirty lately. Please do me. Love, Dishes.”

“Do NOT sleep in my bed. I will be able to tell, and I will be [angry]. I respect your stuff, so please respect mine. And if you think this note is weird, I think it’s even weirder that you’re in here to begin with.”

“Thanks for adding that saliva flavour to my doughnut. I really needed it.”

“Dearest Housemates, I put my name on things in the fridge in the hope that no one else will eat/drink them. So, if you thought the lemonade tasted like cat’s wee, you’d be right. I’m sure you won’t make the same mistake again.”

“Dishes are like boyfriends. Your roommate shouldn’t be doing yours!”

SOURCE: SMOSH.COM

Earlier detection and new treatments bring hope to thousands

Fighting Lung Cancer

BY ANITA BARTHOLOMEW

When Ann Long, from Liverpool, started smoking at about 17, she never imagined that she was putting herself in danger.

In the years after cigarettes first became popular, tobacco companies campaigned furiously to cast doubt on findings about a lung cancer-smoking link. And it worked. By the time the evidence

was so overwhelming that all doubt was gone, the seeds of cancer had been planted in millions of lungs— dormant, sometimes, for decades, but almost always deadly.

In 1976 Ann, by then a mother of six mostly school-aged children, lost her husband George, a heavy smoker, to lung cancer. And although she smoked far less and gave up entirely before 1993, Ann herself got the terrifying diagnosis late in 2003.

Today, dread haunts the minds of many women, smokers as well as ex-smokers: Will I get it too?

LUNG CANCER ACCOUNTS FOR

about 20 per cent of all cancer deaths in Europe. In the UK and Poland, where women started smoking earlier than in most other EU countries, it might soon overtake breast cancer as the leading cause of cancer mortality in women.

Although smoking is behind the vast majority of lung malignancies— 90 per cent in men and 80 per cent in women—exposure to certain substances, including asbestos, radon and diesel fumes, can also increase risk, as can genetic mutations. Genes are often to blame when the illness strikes younger people, says Dr Rafael Rosell of the Catalan Institute of Oncology, Barcelona. And genes help determine which treatments work best for each individual.

It’s detecting cancer early, before it’s had a chance to spread, that gives

individuals the best chance of longterm survival. In recent years, in many countries, there’s been a push to screen for early signs with annual low-dose CT scans for those at increased risk. A large study in 2011 found that early detection via such screenings resulted in a 20-per-cent reduction in lung-cancer deaths, thanks to quick treatment.

Screening is important because often, at the early stage, people will have no symptoms at. Others might have vague symptoms such as a cough, shortness of breath or weight loss that can easily be dismissed. It’s usually only after cancer has spread that troubling symptoms manifest, such as chest pain, coughing up blood, finger “clubbing” (when the tips of the fingers enlarge and the nails bulge) and wheezing.

It was a vague symptom—one she could easily have ignored— while brushing her teeth that sent Ann Long to the doctor.

“As I was rinsing my mouth out, I saw a little spot and it looked a bit like an amoeba,” recalls Ann. She noticed that this “spot” had a tiny red speck at its centre. She’d recently developed a slight cough, but otherwise she felt as fit as ever. Nevertheless, she made an appointment with her GP, who sent her for an X-ray, followed by a CT scan and a bronchoscopy (an ultrasound-guided procedure to see lesions in the lung and lymph nodes).

About a week before Christmas,

she got the bad news. And she thought back to how devastating losing her husband George had been for her family. She remembers, “How was I going to tell my kids?”

ON JANUARY 3, 2004, Ann had half her left lung removed and has been cancer-free since. Surgery is often a good option for people whose cancers are detected early (Stage I or II—see box overleaf), as Ann’s was. And a

of therapies because people may respond quite strikingly.”

Standard chemotherapy drugs and radiation can slow a tumour’s growth, shrink tumours and kill cancer cells. These therapies are often used after surgery to mop up any malignancy that might have been missed and are also typically the first-line treatments used for more advanced tumours when surgery isn’t feasible.

It’s been found that precision or

PRECISION OR PERSONALISED CHEMOTHERAPY CAN HELP IN MORE ADVANCED TUMOURS

newer, less-invasive type of operation, video-assisted thoracic surgery, lets surgeons remove diseased tissue with a much smaller incision, reducing trauma and recovery time.

However, if the cancer is metastatic, meaning it’s spread to other parts of the body, surgery might not always be the best therapy. But there are numerous treatments today that can prolong life even in people with more advanced cancers.

“We’ve changed quite a lot in how we think about lung cancer,” says Dr Mina Gaga, medical director of the Athens Chest Hospital, Greece.

“When people have a good health status then it’s worth trying all types

personalised chemotherapy can help. Just like normal cells, cancer cells need “growth factors”—hormones, proteins and other substances that occur naturally in all of our bodies— in order to thrive. “We do a genetic analysis of tumour tissues,” says Dr Eric Haura, a physician-scientist at the Moffitt Cancer Centre, Florida. If this shows that a cancer is being fuelled by particular growth factors, targeted drugs can block the cancer cell from accessing its “fuel” source. This sometimes “results in dramatic responses”, says Dr Haura. He points out though that these drugs aren’t cures, as cancers eventually develop resistance to these and other drugs.

New drugs, tailored to the mutating cancer, can in some cases replace the ones it’s developed resistance to. These are designed to behave like a super-charged version of your body’s own immune defences. The two most used are bevacizumab or cetuximab. Each blocks cancer cells from growing by denying access to the growth factors they need.

Current immune therapies only benefit about 20 to 30 per cent of lung-cancer patients. But when they do work, the results can be amazing. “In some cases, most of the tumour goes away,” says Dr Haura. And the effects can sometimes last for years.

One of the most promising findings in the history of lung cancer is a new vaccine called CimaVax, developed in Cuba and soon to be tested on patients in the US and later in Europe. CimaVax produces an antibody that latches onto EGF, a naturally occurring growth factor. It nabs these molecules and whisks them off to the liver, where they’re eliminated before cancer cells can use them.

Without EGF, “the cancers starve and essentially stop growing”, says Dr Kelvin Lee, the chairman of immunology at Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, New York. In tests of CimaVax on people with aggressive late-stage cancers, for those who responded to the vaccine, the average survival time was 18 months, versus only six for those who didn’t get the vaccine or didn’t respond.

“The other amazing thing,” says Dr Lee, “is that at five years after they start the therapy, about 20 per cent of the patients who got the vaccine are still alive.” CimaVax also has virtually no toxicity, he says. “It’s just a shot in your arm once a month.

“We think the most exciting piece of this is in prevention of lung cancer. The idea, at least initially, would be

THE STAGES OF LUNG CANCER

STAGE I

Early, isolated in the lung where it originated, has not spread.

STAGE II

Has spread but not extensively, usually to nearby lymph nodes and possibly to membranes between the lungs or surrounding the heart.

STAGE III

Cancer that has advanced further, and has now spread to lymph nodes on the same side of the chest as the affected lung, as well as other parts of the body.

STAGE IV

May have spread to both lungs, into the chest and throughout the body, possibly affecting bones and organs such as the brain or liver.

AT LAST! Special Pensioners’ Hearing Aid

A new hearing aid offer has been introduced for pensioners. The hearing aid is low cost, simple to operate and brings improved hearing to thousands!

This high-quality hearing system is equipped with proven technology that gives you crisp and clear sound —the effect is immediate. No fuss, no bother. It’s astonishing just how easily conversations, television and radio can be heard with such a small device.

To learn for yourself about this remarkable device for clearer hearing, simply telephone 0800 740 8680 and quote RDAV5000.

This device has given improved hearing for thousands. It’s suitable for a wide range of hearing loss, from mild to profound.

For all the information you need about hearing loss, hearing aids and hearing health, head over to readersdigest.co.uk/hearing

FEATURES OF THE SPECIAL PENSIONERS’ HEARING AID:

• Adaptive Feedback Cancellation: This feature suppresses any whistling noises commonly associated with bigger, older hearing aids from years ago.

• Adaptive Noise Reduction: This feature is designed to manage out background noise so you hear speech more clearly.

• Lifestyle Profile: A personalisation option that takes into account your individual lifestyle and allows the hearing aids to be customised to you.

to vaccinate people that don’t have lung cancer but we know are at high risk to get it.”

Dr Lee will be testing CimaVax on people with lung cancer in clinical trials in the US, once the US Food and Drug Administration gives the goahead to proceed, sometime this year.

YOU CAN IMPROVE YOUR ODDS

of not getting lung cancer right now. If you smoke, stop. Within ten years of giving up smoking the risk of dying from lung cancer drops by half. But it won’t drop to the levels of someone who’s never smoked. Dr Haura says: “We think that cancer is a process that began many decades before, where cells and their DNA were damaged.” As we age, our immune systems, which might protect us against the consequences of such damage for all those decades, eventually become less robust. Nonetheless, people with lung cancer who stop smoking live about 50 per cent longer than those

who continue to smoke. And the sooner you get diagnosed and treated, the better your odds.

Ann Long is a testament to all of the above. Now aged 80, more than 20 years after she stopped smoking and more than ten after the surgery to remove half her lung, she leads an active life, travels widely, exercises more than some people half her age and has a positive attitude.

But what saved her might have been her willingness to face her worst fears and go straight to the doctor. “I know from talking to people, they’re so terrified they might have cancer, they don’t go.”

When Ann thinks back to losing her husband in 1976 to the same disease, she remembers that doctors could offer him nothing other than painkillers. Medicine has progressed exponentially since then.

“I just realise how fortunate I am,” says Ann, “to be living at the time that I am.”

UNDER PRESSURE

Thinking on the spot doesn’t always go well, as demonstrated by the question-and-answer round in the Miss Universe pageant:

Question: “If you could be either water or fire, which would you be and why?”

Miss Serbia: “Well, I’m a human being and I don’t know how it is to be fire or water, and from that reason I really don’t have answer on this question because I’m a human being, I’m a girl who has an emotion, and fire and water don’t.”

SOURCE: TIMESOFINDIA.COM

Keeping Your Kidneys Healthy

BY SUSANNAH HICKLING

Susannah is twice winner of the Guild of Health Writers Best Consumer Magazine Health Feature

CHRONIC KIDNEY DISEASE (CKD) affects one in ten people and a staggering one in two of those over 75. Never heard of it? You’re not alone. It’s surprisingly little-known and many people aren’t aware they’ve got it (symptoms include swollen ankles, tiredness and feeling out of breath, as well as blood in your urine), but it can increase your risk of heart attack and stroke. The good news is that you can cut your chances of developing it.

1 KEEP YOUR PEE PALE. Your urine should be the colour of straw. This is achieved by drinking plenty of water throughout the day. This in turn will help keep your kidneys functioning properly.

2 KNOW YOUR BLOOD PRESSURE—AND TREAT IT IF IT’S HIGH. Having high blood pressure puts extra strain on your kidneys, so keep yours as low as possible. Not had a check recently? Get blood pressure tested at your doctor’s surgery or invest in your own monitor, and take medication to lower it if necessary.

3 STAY SLIM. Making sure you remain a healthy weight will cut your blood pressure—and, by extension, your chances of ending up with CKD.

4

DON’T SMOKE. They’re not just cancer-sticks; cigarettes can increase your risk of heart disease and make any mild kidney problems worse.

5 GO EASY ON THE ALCOHOL.

Stick to those recommended limits—three to four units for men, two to three for women—to keep hypertension and CKD at bay.

6 AVOID COMMON PAINKILLERS. Long-term use and overuse of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs such as aspirin and ibuprofen can up your risk of kidney disease.

7 TAKE EXERCISE. Again, staying fit will help keep your blood pressure down and your kidneys healthy. You should be looking at 150 minutes a week of moderate exercise such as fast walking or cycling.

SWAP AND DROP

Too much salt can lead to high blood pressure, plus increased risk of osteoporosis and stomach cancer. Try these snack swaps to cut down on salt.

SWAP THIS… …FOR THIS

CANNED SOUP

While it may be handy to have in the larder, tinned soup is often packed with salt.

SALTY SNACKS

From peanuts to crisps, salty snacks do more than make you thirsty—they add to higher salt levels in your diet..

COLD MEATS

Pre-packaged processed cold cuts are often laden with sodium.

HOME-MADE SOUP

Control the salt by making your own stocks and soups. Cook in batches, then portion and freeze. It’s easy, economical and tastes better too.

POPCORN

Unsalted and freshly popped popcorn is a satisfyingly crunchy snack. Toss with black pepper for flavour.

FRESH MEATS AND POULTRY Cook and keep sliced roast beef, chicken and pork in the fridge for up to three days.

Your Heart Matters

Take great care of this vital organ

The heart is our hardest working organ – beating 2.5 billion times in an average lifetime. As the body’s fuel pump, its basic job is to maintain the flow of energy-bearing blood to all our organs. Yet how often do we give it a second thought?

So it’s certainly worth paying some extra attention to your heart’s wellbeing, especially as you get older: every beat counts.

LOOK AFTER YOUR HEART

There are plenty of simple ways to help protect cardiac health. You may think of taking a nutritional supplement such as Vitabiotics Cardioace Max, for example, scientifically developed to help safeguard your diet to support all-round health, and packed with specific nutrients to support heart health.

HEART-HEALTHY TIPS

Stay active. Regular exercise can cut heart disease risk. Choose an activity you enjoy, whether it’s walking, cycling or zumba… that way you’ll stick with it.

Eat for your heart. Go for a healthy diet, with lots of fruit and vegetables filled with protective nutrients. Spinach, carrots and broccoli contain beta carotene; avocados are rich in vitamin E. Eat fibre from various sources, such as wholemeal bread, bran, oats, potatoes with skins on.

Eat oily fish weekly. Cut down on sugar, saturated fat, salt and processed foods.

Add a supplement. Vitabiotics Cardioace Max is an advanced dual capsule formula containing vitamin B12 and folic acid which contribute to normal red blood cell formation, and thiamine (vitamin B1) which contributes to normal heart function. Additional ingredients include over 0.8g of plant sterols* which contribute to maintenance of normal blood cholesterol levels. It also contains a premium quality Red Krill Oil capsule providing a superior source of easily absorbed omega-3 fatty acids. With Cardioace Max, there is no need to take an additional multivitamin.

Vitabiotics Cardioace Max RRP £29.85 for 84 capsules (one month’s supply). Available from Boots, Superdrug, Holland & Barrett, supermarkets, pharmacies www.cardioace.com and online at www.vitabiotics.com

*A beneficial effect is obtained with a daily intake of at least 0.8g of plant sterols.

MEN’S HEALTH: THE HONEST TOOTH

A recent survey of 1,000 people by private dentists Carisbrook Dental in Manchester reveals the full horror of men’s neglect of their gnashers—only 16 per cent have an annual dental check-up (compared with 52 per cent of women) and only a third manage an appointment every two years.

Beyond the risk of ending up toothless, bad teeth and gum disease can have serious consequences for your health, as the inflammation and bacteria from your mouth can trigger or exacerbate conditions elsewhere in the body. Here are some of them—and If this lot doesn’t get you chaps hot-footing it to the dentist, we don’t know what will:

• Diabetes

• Heart attack

• Stroke

• Rheumatoid arthritis

Two Yoga Moves To Do Tonight

Research shows that humans have evolved to need less sleep than animals—try these poses to maximise the quality of your shorter shut-eye.

1Windscreen wiper twist (2

minutes)

Lie on your back with knees bent and feet flat on the floor. Place your arms out to the sides, palms upwards. Slowly drop both knees to the right side, rolling your head to face the left. Hold for two breaths, then repeat on the opposite side.

• Dementia

• Chest infections, including pneumonia

2 Savasana (2 minutes)

Perform this final resting pose in bed so you can drift off to sleep afterwards. Lie in a comfortable position with legs and arms extended, and simply focus on your breathing.

“I Had A Cochlear Implant”

Margaret Messham (right) says: In 2013, when I was 72, I had a severe bout of labyrinthitis, an inner-ear infection. I lost my balance and could hardly stand up. When I went to bed, I had a terrible noise in my ears. When I woke up in the morning, I couldn’t hear anything.

The hearing aids I’d worn since suffering earlier bouts of labyrinthitis in my 60s now no longer helped me. I felt isolated as I couldn’t communicate with anybody.

My audiologist referred me to the John Radcliffe Hospital implant centre in Oxford, where I was considered suitable for a cochlear implant in my left ear. I was a bit frightened at first as I mistakenly thought the operation would be near my brain. But my surgeon reassured me that hundreds of cochlear implants are done every

year and it’s a safe procedure. They place an internal implant just under the skin behind the ear, which sends electrical signals directly to the hearing nerve. I had the operation in September 2014 and my implant was switched on four weeks later.

It was like a miracle. Although the sounds are quite robotic at first, you get used to it quite quickly. It’s given me back my confidence—I can now hear what people are saying to me. ■ For more information, visit iwanttohear.com

FOOD FACT

Eating plenty of fibre can help guard against heart disease, cancer and digestive problems. But if you opt to eat more, make sure you drink more water too. Why? It’ll help the fibre pass through your digestive system without getting stuck. Up your fibre intake slowly to avoid bloating, gas and constipation.

PHOTO

Getting On The Sympathy Ladder

BY MAX PEMBERTON

Max is a hospital doctor, author and newspaper columnist

IT’S BEEN SAID BY PSYCHOLOGISTS that one of the most stressful experiences in life is moving house. The ordeal isn’t helped by estate agents who know how ignorant you are and that, chances are, you’ve no idea whether or not “up-andcoming area” actually just means the vice squad have raided the crack-house next door.

While property hunting recently, I found myself being shown around a flat—wildly out of my price range—by Paul. “What do you do, then?” he asked, after assuring me that I’d get used to the sound of the juggernauts passing directly below the bedroom window.

“Oh, I’m a doctor,” I replied, wondering how I was going to leave before having to face the humiliation that I’d wasted his time and it was too expensive. There was a silence. He sat down on the sofa with his head in his hands.

“You all right?” I asked, guessing that he too had become claustrophobic at the sight of the bathroom.

“I got diagnosed with multiple sclerosis last week,” he said quietly, and then began to cry. I didn’t know what to do.

IT’S A JOKE THAT AT PARTIES

doctors are always collared for their opinions on some rash or lump, and inevitably the advice is to go to a GP and to pass the canapés. But that wasn’t going to wash here. This was serious. I sat down next to him, looking around for some tissues. It felt bizarre to be consoling a man who wasn’t my patient, who in fact I’d only met ten

BY JOSIE PORTILLO

minutes ago—and all this going on while sitting on someone else’s sofa in someone else’s home.

“I don’t know what to do. I won’t be able to keep this job up for much longer, my wife’s not well and how are we going to pay the mortgage? What are the kids going to do?” he asked, looking directly at me while tears streamed down his face.

I didn’t know what to say. MS is a horrid disease. It has a variable course, with some people rapidly incapacitated while others remain symptom-free for years with only the occasional flare-up.

But this was of little consolation to him. He explained that he didn’t want to tell his wife how scared he was. He’d make excuses not to go out so she wouldn’t see how bad his walking

was. He’d drop and break things and hide the evidence. There was nothing I could do, but I guessed that he just wanted to talk. After half an hour, we left. I didn’t buy the property.

A few days later I found my dream flat and began the process of buying it. I forgot about Paul and my vague promise to send him details of the MS society until weeks later, when I remembered and sent him an email. It was sent back. I called his office. He’d left his job a month ago. They couldn’t tell me any more.

I thought of him on the day of the move and stopped myself fretting about the removals men being late, the telephone not being connected and the kettle being lost. There are, I reminded myself, more stressful things in life than moving house.

MEDICAL MYTHS—BUSTED!

You Can’t Get Pregnant When You’re On The Pill

WHERE DID THE MYTH COME FROM?

There’s no doubt the invention of the oral contraceptive pill revolutionised women’s lives and enabled them to be in control of their fertility. But many people wrongly assume that it’s 100 per cent effective. In fact, during one year, between five and eight women out of 100 taking the pill will fall pregnant (yet this rises to nearly 20 per cent for women who only use condoms).

WHAT’S THE TRUTH?

No contraception can guarantee against pregnancy. The main reason the pill fails is because people don’t take it regularly—even missing one dose significantly increases the risk of falling pregnant. It must also be taken at the same time each day to ensure a steady level of hormone in the blood. There’s some evidence that one antibiotic—rifampicin, used to treat TB—may affect the pill, so if you’re talking both you should discuss your options with your GP.

SO, WHAT’S THE ANSWER?

A woman on the pill must endeavour to take it at the same time every day as prescribed. Missing doses is the primary reason why the pill isn’t 100-per-cent effective. If doses are missed, then don’t assume you’re covered by just starting to take them again. Keep taking the pill but speak to your GP or health advisor and, until you do this, use an alternative form of contraception.

Lending A HandHelping

BY JOY PERSAUD

After reading the story of a tragic teen suicide, one elderly couple opened their hearts— and their doors

FLICKING THROUGH THE PAPER

ONE MORNING, Fred and Viv Morgan came across an article about a bullied schoolgirl who’d jumped from a bridge in Cornwall. The 15-year-old was holding her childhood rag doll and a mobile when she was found.

Instead of turning the page and carrying on with the busy work of running their B&B in Warwick, the couple began to look into how they could turn their home into a place to save young lives.

“I thought it was shocking—she’d done that to escape the fear of these people that were getting at her,” says Viv. “And I thought, We must be able to do something about that.”

“When kids come here, they’re extremely apprehensive and anxious,” comments Viv. “Even when they gain confidence, they’re immediately back in a state of anxiety if anything new happens. A lot of them have been bullied. Quite often, children who are being bullied don’t tell anyone, not even their parents. Either it’s ‘their fault’ because they’re silly, or if they tell anyone their dad will come to the school or their mum will make a fuss, and they don’t want that.”

QUITE OFTEN, CHILDREN WHO ARE BEING BULLIED DON’T TELL ANYONE, NOT EVEN THEIR PARENTS

Viv, 72, and Fred, 95, sought advice from people they knew in the education sector and embarked on setting up Northleigh House School.

Viv recalls, “I went in to Fred and said, ‘Do you really think this is a good idea?’ He was reading the paper. The paper came down and he said, ‘We’re not quitters, are we?’, and the paper went up again.”

Since 2012, 34 children have passed through Northleigh’s welcoming doors. They’ve got chickens that hop through the cat flap and sit by the log fire to warm up, alongside pupils enjoying a cup of tea while they work.

ANN HARKIN’S DAUGHTER RUTH

was one of Northleigh’s very first pupils. Ann recounts how from the age of around six, her daughter, the second of four children, began to express distress at school. She found the classrooms overwhelming and tried to escape. When a private psychologist failed to see beyond Ruth’s conduct, she was labelled “naughty” and was soon a target for bullies.

“Once a teacher begins to discipline you more, or is focused on your behaviour more, then all the children start to focus on you too,” explains Ann. “So this compounded over the years and she was quite easy prey for bullies. Many times I’d bring her to school and she would lie in the gutter screaming. School was a very

alien place to be and that led into the self-injury behaviour that eventually led to her overdose. She was 13 or 14, and it was a very serious overdose. She ended up in an acute hospital for 12 weeks.”

Viv Morgan with Northleigh’s headteacher Jill Cornfield

Following her hospital stay, Ruth was interviewed by a panel for a place at an adolescent treatment unit.

“I’ll never forget how eloquently she put her case,” says Ann. “She said to them that she felt she’d been born at the wrong time and she didn’t want to continue and just wanted to die— so please let her.”

Ruth was granted a place for eight weeks, during which she received a diagnosis of high-functioning

Asperger’s syndrome. Finally she had an explanation for the way she behaved and learned. This led to enrolment at Northleigh.

“I think I slept for the first six months,” Ruth recollects. “There was a bed upstairs at the school, so I slept there because I couldn’t concentrate. I was so overwhelmed by going back to school. When I first met everybody, I wasn’t sure because I’d tried things before that hadn’t worked. [But] when I walked into the school I remember thinking it was very different.

“All the children are lovely and they try really hard to make you feel better. A couple of times I went into school crying as I was so sad. They’d

all sit around me and distract me and think of things to do. Some of these children were 13 or 14, and when I started I was 15, 16. It was amazing how much it helped.

“The staff are very much like my mum and I found them quite easy to get attached to— I saw the same qualities my mum had. It was like they’d adapt their support for every child. They were like my mum for me, but they’d be like someone else’s mum for someone else.”

HEADTEACHER JILL CORNFIELD

says Northleigh’s teachers are excellent subject specialists with compassion, intuition, personal strength and autonomy. She explains that the school caters for up to 20 students at a time. Some features from Viv and Fred’s B&B days, such as carpets and curtains, have been retained to create a nonthreatening environment.

“Schools do their best to enable students to achieve their potential,” says Jill. “But the sheer size of the schools, the volume of students, the bells every hour and the uniforms become terribly daunting for many

young people. Some schools truly are ‘listening schools’ and work hard to cater for all of their students’ needs. Sadly, there are other schools that don’t. Students, such as many of ours, have fallen by the wayside due to the lack of understanding needed to enable them to continue. A number of students have described Northleigh as their dream school.”

Jill Cornfield with Ruth Harkin on the day she left Northleigh last summer. “It was lovely and I miss it so much”

Pupils are taught in small groups or on a one-to-one basis depending on the subject and their ability. Each has a personally negotiated timetable

give up their home to help young people is an incredible gesture, and reflects their progressive and proactive outlook on life.”

STUDENTS, SUCH AS MANY OF OURS, HAVE FALLEN BY THE WAYSIDE DUE TO A LACK OF UNDERSTANDING

and as much consideration is paid to their social and emotional needs as it is to academia.

Jill adds, “Viv and Fred are the most amazing role models. I think that to

Viv and Fred Morgan previously ran their home Northleigh House as a B&B

Viv and Fred were given a Pride of Britain award last year—and were subsequently inundated with extra applications and admissions queries.

“The experiences that applicants were recounting, nationwide, were heartbreaking and we’re still working through replies,” Jill says. “These emails from parents, students and family members highlighted just how vital it is for more schools such as Northleigh to be established—and how many young people are suffering, with no hope of moving forward to achieve their true potential and economic independence.”

ALTHOUGH IT’S HELPED MANY CHILDREN since 2012, Viv is concerned that Northleigh may not be financially sustainable. They save every penny they can, reusing everything and relying on voluntary help to keep going.

“I’d like to make sure that it can go on and on. I’d also like to see more places like it open, so that other children in this desperate state can have a chance,” she says. “It’s cheaper financially too. That is, a bit of money and they’re on their way— productive members of society paying their taxes.”

As well as the wider benefits of a school such as Northleigh, the impact on families such as the Harkins can’t be underestimated.

“Nothing I can say can express what an amazing couple Fred and Viv are,” says Ann. “In all seriousness, my daughter is alive today because of them. The opportunity they gave

her to be herself, through giving her a safe environment and her confidence back in learning...that’s a gift that not many people can give and they’ve done that.”

Ruth echoes this: “I never imagined that this would happen—passing all my exams and going on to do my A levels. These are things I’d dreamed about for years and now it’s actually happening. It’s amazing.”

A MODERN CONUNDRUM

Transport for London offers a “Thought Of The Day” at various tube stations in the city—but they’re not always philosophical: “How long after walking into someone’s house is it acceptable to ask for their WiFi password?”

SOURCE: FACEBOOK.COM

Viv and Fred. “I’d like to see more places open”

Market

Historic, pretty and great for a spot of shopping, there’s every reason to visit these sought-after settlements

BY FIONA HICKS

Sherborne DORSET

This medieval town was formerly known as the Kingdom of the West Saxons. Not only are King Alfred’s elder brothers both buried in the abbey, the riverside location has attracted many notable figures over the centuries. Sir Walter Raleigh, for example, took a shine to the place and built the Elizabethan mansion now known as Sherborne Castle.

There’s also Sherborne School (founded in the abbey in 1550) to attract those seeking a top-class education, and plenty else besides for non-school-age visitors.

“The town offers an unbeatable combination of beauty, heritage, culture, an interesting high street and delicious food and drink,” says Sherborne’s Janet Schofield. The Green Restaurant is especially popular—and will refuel you nicely after a day of exploring.

■ Visit visit-dorset.com for details

Helston CORNWALL

The Cornish coast is a classic destination for a home-turf getaway, and Helston is the perfect place to provide a bit of good ol’ English fun. Among many other historic buildings, it’s home to the Blue Anchor. Originally a rest house for monks, this was converted into a

© DAVID HASTILOW

Helston residents take part in the annual Flora Day parade

tavern in the 15th century and remains a private brewery to this day. It’s certainly worth trying the local brew Spingo but—be warned— it’s strong stuff.

Each May, Helston also plays host to a raucous celebration on Flora Day. “Make sure you catch the Furry Dance, which is the star element,” says Visit Cornwall’s Julia Hughes.

“See locals dressed in their finery weave their way through the lively town and join the celebrations that last from dawn till dusk.” It’s a day of dancing, re-enactments of St George slaying the dragon and consistently sterling performances from Helston Town Band. Be sure to pack your Elizabethan costume…

■ Visit visitcornwall.co.uk for details

Ludlow SHROPSHIRE

This town is a bit of a record-breaker in its surrounding locale. It is, in no particular order: the largest town in south Shropshire (population is around 11,000); the site of the largest parish church in the county (the splendid St Laurence’s); and home to more than 500 listed buildings (boasting all kinds of architecture). You can see why poet laureate Sir John Betjeman dubbed it “probably the loveliest town in England”.

The lovingly tendered Millennium Green is the perfect spot for a springtime chill-out, with many a person enjoying a languorous picnic or simply watching the ducks. Best of all, however, is the annual Ludlow Food & Drink Festival, which takes place every September. With more than 150 stalls offering generous tasters, make sure you go on an empty stomach.

■ Visit ludlow.org.uk for details

Kirkby Lonsdale CUMBRIA

Kirkby Lonsdale has held a market charter since 1227—and trade is still going strong. Thursday is now market day, and visitors and locals alike swarm to snap up the various offerings. The regular market on the elegant Georgian square is a destination for those seeking local produce, plants and pretty trinkets, while the Country Market held simultaneously in nearby Lunesdale Hall is a treasure trove of homemade cakes and other treats. There’s

also a popular and friendly farmers’ market once a month.

It’s worth wandering down the charmingly titled Salt Pie Lane, home-baked good in hand, followed by the ancient Devil’s Bridge. Meander through the churchyard and you can spy the exact view of the Rive Lune that inspired art critic John Ruskin to exclaim, “I do not know in all my own country, still less in France or Italy, a place more naturally divine.”

■ Visit kirkbylonsdale.co.uk for details

Holt NORFOLK

This town has been around since at least 1086, but it’s emerged from its historical hardships like a phoenix from the flames. Almost literally, in fact—in 1708, a vicious fire destroyed almost all the medieval town in three hours. Various accounts describe how the flames didn’t even leave the butchers enough time to retrieve their meat from the market stalls.

The nation rallied round, however, and donations enabled the town to be rebuilt in the wake of the fire. There’s an abundance of Georgian architecture to behold, and the whole town has a wonderfully convivial vibe. Enjoy the cafe culture in the summer, lose yourself in the galleries when it’s colder—and don’t leave without snapping up some edible treats from Bakers & Larners. (“It’s the Harrods of Norfolk,” says Visit Norfolk’s Pete Waters.)

■ Visit visitnorfolk.co.uk for details

Marlborough WILTSHIRE

Marlborough holds the rather spurious but brilliant claim of having the second-widest high street in the country (after Stockon-on-Tees). This is the perfect setting for the vibrant market—on Wednesdays and Saturdays—featuring good old fruit and veg, locally produced meat and an especially good cheese stall.

Non-market days are a treat too. An afternoon can easily be whiled away by leafing through tomes in the ancient White Horse Bookshop, perusing the knick-knacks in The Merchant’s House and eating creamy cakes in Polly’s Tea Rooms. Kath Pinchen, a resident for 57 years, says, “The high street is always busy and friendly. There’s a good selection of shops and lots of alleyways leading to old town cottages.”

If you can bear to leave, nearby Savernake Forest is a wonderful setting for a leafy walk.

■ Visit marlboroughwiltshire.co.uk for details

Sandwich KENT

This quaintly named town is one of the smallest on our list (population around 5,000), but its reputation is far-reaching. Once one of the Cinque Ports—a collection of five coastal towns historically used for trade and military purposes—it’s now two miles from the sea but its medieval centre is beautifully preserved. Incidentally, TV aficionados may recognise the scenery, as it’s also home to cheery couple Steph and Dom from Channel 4’s Gogglebox .

The best way to enjoy Sandwich is simply to amble around. History buffs will delight in the White Mill Rural Heritage Centre, naturelovers will relish Sandwich Bay Bird Observatory and more casual tourists can’t fail to enjoy one of the many listed public houses— and funnily enough, The Market Inn is a particular favourite.

Of course, the other reason

Sandwich is on the holidaymaking map is its two world-class golf courses, Royal St George’s and Prince’s. What more could you want than a quick putt before the pub?

■ Visit visitsandwich.co.uk for details

Do you know any other market towns worth visiting? Email readersletters@ readersdigest.co.uk and let us know

How Online Dating Has Changed British Culture

DEVELOPMENTS IN TECHNOLOGY

are shaping our day-to-day lives and that includes our dating rituals. But is this really such a bad thing?

You might view online dating like a scene from Logan’s Run: watching Michael York’s character beam in potential dates and swipe the proverbial left until the right woman shimmers into view. Certainly, for techno-cynics and cyber-phobes alike, the recent swell in online dating may leave you feeling more isolated than before, bewilderingly clicking into a dystopian near-future.

But it’s not all shallow swipes and fast holograms. In Britain, one in five relationships begin on the internet as nine million of us attempt to find love online per day. And according to recent studies they're more successful than those that start out in a more traditional sense.

Research carried out by psychologists at Chicago University found that just over a third of couples who married between

2005–2012 met via the internet and had a 25 per cent higher success rate than those who met face to face.

This could be due to the specific nature of searching for love online as we hone our requirements and match with those of a similar agenda.

The pros seem to outweigh any cons when looking at cultural changes directly related to online

dating. We have the choice to be more sexually open and break societal norms in choosing a partner, searching a more diverse cross-section of society.

Psychology lecturer Dr Jeff Gavin has researched the social science behind dating sites, disproving theories that online communication hinders our rapport. Instead, “we ask more questions and give more intimate answers, than when communicating face-to-face”.

It’s certainly worth exploring, if not just out of curiosity. Reader's Digest has its own user-friendly dating website with a simple fourstep registration. Visit readers digestdating.co.uk

1. Create a profile for free

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You can receive a rather attractive 20% discount should you decide to upgrade. Quote SPRING20. Get clicking!

Dave Myers and Si King, known as The Hairy Bikers, are TV stars and the best-selling authors of several cookbooks. They’ve travelled the world on their motorbikes, enjoying life and food to the fullest.

If I Ruled the World The Hairy Bikers

Dave: I’d do away with self-service tills at supermarkets. Mainly because I can’t work them. It irritates me beyond belief—I’ve even just dumped my shopping and walked out before now because I’ve got so frustrated. Going shopping should be a pleasure, but it’s become so sanitised. When I grew up, the corner shop was a lovely place where the shopkeeper knew everyone and would keep an eye on the older people—and there was always time for a little chat.

Si: I’d invest heavily in our local high streets. I’d like to see them become the heart of the community again, full of independent familyowned businesses where the butcher, baker, hardware store and chemists became thriving enterprises valued by local people. I’d make it law that there could only be one large out-of-town supermarket within a 50-mile radius of another.

Dave: I’d put more resources into health and education. If you’ve got a society that’s well-educated and healthy, then absolutely everything else follows—and my job would be an easier one.

Si: I’d like to see a world that had clean water and shelter for all. These are basic human rights that have been at the top of the UN agenda for years but are still unavailable to far too many people.

Dave: I’d ban cigarettes. A hundred years from now we’ll look back on smoking as a ridiculous, antiquated habit—like smoking opium. We’ll say, “Why did people do something so terrible to their health?”

Si: I’d dismantle the establishment. The leaders that silently run our lives need to know that we’re not sheep; we’re human beings who deserve clear, open discussions about what’s happening in our beloved country.

Dave: There’d be no mobile phones in restaurants. Breaking bread around a table with your family or friends is such a lovely thing, but you can’t celebrate the food or the moment when phones distract you. It just seems so rude. And obviously no phones at mealtimes at home either—though my teenage stepchildren always try to hide them on their laps.

Si: Shops would be closed on a Sunday. When I was a kid it was a given that I’d be around at home, that we’d get together with other members of the family, have a special lunch and talk properly. Sunday lunch was the social glue for society and we’re fast losing it.

Dave: I’d ban chunky chips. You know the ones that are halfway to a roast potato but usually cold and hard in the middle? They’re just wrong. I like French fries, made by soaking the potatoes in water to get rid of the starch then twice-cooked to give them a crispy outside and soft, hot inside. This is more my own personal chip fascism—less for the common good than for my own pleasure.

Si: Everybody would learn to ride a motorbike before a car. Riding a motorbike ensures your road skills are far superior to a regular car driver—you’re more engaged and know what to look out for, mainly white vans, BMW and Audi drivers! It’s also a really good laugh. So on your bike until you have your first child. Then you can get in a car. Dave and I don’t follow that rule, but we’re all for do as we say, not as we do. Ours is a benevolent dictatorship. As told to Caroline Hutton

The Hairy Bikers: Blood, Sweat And Tyres by Si King and Dave Myers (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £20) is out now.

When I first started a documentary about autism, I never thought that it would transform my life

C Boyalled Anton The

BY LYUBOV ARKUS AS TOLD TO LISA FITTERMAN

IN APRIL 2008, while researching film projects for a director friend, I came across an essay a boy with autism had written when he was 14. “People”, it was called. “People sit, die, take off their socks,” I read. “Cheerful, serious, normal, smashing, mischievous, red-haired, deep.” And further on: “People endure, people don’t endure...at the end, people are finite. People fly.”

Really? I thought. Did an autistic boy really write this? This was the cycle of a human life, perfectly distilled. I knew next to nothing

Within a couple of months, I’d found Anton’s mother. Rinata Kharitonova lived in a rundown flat in St Petersburg. Anton, now 19, was doing a stint in a psychiatric hospital.

It was June 8, 2008. I sat in my car outside the hospital, waiting for Anton and his mum. I knew he didn’t write any more. I had no expectations.

He was all angles when he walked out the hospital’s doors. I felt sorry for him. He scared me too, because I knew he tended to bolt and bite himself. But there was something else —he had presence. He got into the car

AT THE HOSPITAL, ANTON WAS LIKE A VEGETABLE. AT HOME, WITH HIS MOTHER, HE WAS BRIGHT

about autism, but as a film-magazine editor I’d worked with texts all my life, and this one was beautiful.

I thought there was potential for a documentary. The director agreed. “Find the boy!” he said.

His name was Anton Kharitonov. At that time in my life, some days were good and some not so good. My marriage had ended and my daughter had moved to Moscow for her PhD. I went through the motions because that was what adults did. I had no inkling that a boy with autism was about to take me on a journey that would prove transformative for me—and pioneering for Russia.

as if he owned it, silent and with unfocused eyes that seemed to look right through you, quickly judging if you were worthy of his company.

Over the next couple of years, I would learn that staff in psychiatric hospitals could be cruel. They considered autistic patients less than human because they were incapable of adhering to the niceties of everyday life—of saying “please”, “thank you” and “have a good day”. And I’d learn that Russia has few programmes for autistic people and no overriding organisation to ensure that everything works smoothly. So things don’t.

I arranged for Anton to go to Camp

“At Camp Onega, I wanted Anton to stay with me, not run off,” says Lyubov. “But for a while he remained remote and didn’t trust my offer of friendship”

Onega—a summer camp for kids with problems. Located at Onega Lake, some 270 miles from St Petersburg, it was one of the few places in the country that offered a haven for these kids and a break for their parents. Anton’s visit was from June to August 2008. The funding for Anton’s stay was dependent on our filming while he was there. A cameraman, Alisher Khamidkhodzhaev, came with me.

At the time, we weren’t making a film about Anton. We were speaking to parents of kids at the camp about their challenges and fears. I tried to make contact with Anton over the few weeks we stayed there, however, through two things I love to do: cooking and hugging. I just wanted Anton to stay with me, not run off.

One day at the camp, we were standing on the bank of the river when he hugged me for the first time. He’d approach, scurry away, then approach again. Finally, after what seemed like forever, he stayed with his arms around me. Before that moment, it was as if he was on the fringes, not quite real. From then on, he was always there.

When the camp ended, I took Anton home to his mother. Rinata had cared for Anton as a single parent ever since he was 14, when his father left. Like any parent in Russia with an autistic child, she was scared of what the future held.

I told Rinata, “I’ll keep in touch.” That was it. Or so I thought. Before I could leave, Rinata told me that she’d

been diagnosed with an aggressive blood cancer and she’d undergone some treatments. I didn’t question why she told me. This wasn’t about her. It was about Anton.

A few months later, Alisher and I visited Anton to see how he and his mum were doing. It was like he was a different boy. At the hospital, where I’d first met him, he was treated with such powerful psychotropic drugs, he was turned into a vegetable. Now, out of the hospital and living with his mother, he talked and looked bright, alert and sunny. He smiled! Alisher and I looked at each other and shouted, “We have our film!”

So it began—a film about Anton’s transformation. At least, that’s what I thought at the time.

During filming, there were lots of issues to deal with. There was Rinata’s illness and hopes raised and then dashed by the failure of two bonemarrow transplants. As she underwent treatment, Anton was in and out of the psychiatric hospital. I remember one visit when we sat in a sterile room, talking quietly and eating food I’d made. Then it was time for Alisher and me to go. Without saying a word, Anton stood up and started to bang his head against the wall. BAM. BAM. Blood streamed down his face.

In that moment, looking at the despair on Anton’s face, I recognised myself. Before, I thought he was a sick kid. What I recognised was an emotional exuberance in him that

I had myself. Like Anton, I was over the top. If I loved someone, I loved them completely. If I was upset, I let it show. People said, “Moderate yourself.” Or, “Don’t cry.” Or, “Don’t love. Hold yourself back.” And, unlike Anton, I’d learned to edit emotions as if they were a film. But lately, I was waking up in the morning with one terrifying thought: “Who am I?”

Anton helped me to answer this. We both had a need. He was the only person in my life who let me love without any holding back and who loved me the same way. I was three when my father died of a brain tumour, but I remember him very well. All his family was lost during Stalin’s purges. I was the only blood relation he had. He always kept me on his lap, safe and protected. And I wanted to be loved the way my dad had loved me.

ONE DAY RAN INTO ANOTHER.

I kept helping Anton and he kept helping me. In February 2009, we’d collected money to enable us to send Anton to Camphill Svetlana, some 90 miles from St Petersburg. It’s the only place in Russia where individuals with special needs can live together, with volunteers, and are not treated as patients.

But not long after he got there, I was called and they asked me to come because he was acting out. Of course he was! His volunteer friend had left the camp and he felt desolate, and his

“Finally, Anton let down his guard,” says Lyubov. “He lets me love him without any holding back”

mother was dying. But I didn’t go. I had too much on my plate. My mother, who has Alzheimer’s, was living with me and Rinata had moved in as she waited to die. That autumn, I had to take Anton from Camphill because he didn’t fit in there and kept running away. Then I had to put him back into hospital where it was rough for him. I told Alisher, “You must film my betrayal of him.” I wanted people to understand this wasn’t a film about autism so much as it was about being human.

The hospital was an hour away from St Petersburg by car. Anton was sobbing and biting his wrists, which were covered in blood. Finally, I pulled the car over to the side of the

road. We got out and I took him by his shoulders.

“Anton, have pity on me,” I pleaded. “If you’re like this, they’ll take you to isolation. You must be normal. I promise I’ll do my best to get you out.”

All of a sudden, he stopped crying and put his hand out. “Anton is right here,” he said. And he smiled. He was saying yes, he understood. When we arrived, he allowed himself to be escorted to the ward and then lay obediently on his narrow bed. I started crying. “I’ll come back,” I promised him.

The day I was able to take Anton from the hospital was bittersweet. We’d worked hard to make sure he was named on the title to his mother’s flat—no easy feat in Russia where you’re not allowed to own property if you’re mentally ill. I set him up with carers at the flat. During the day, he’d come to the magazine office where I’d arrange his schedule—swimming lessons and therapy workshops. But throughout this was a growing worry: what was going to happen when Rinata died? There were no services for young adults like him.

I decided to look for his father. About four months before Rinata’s death, I found him. He was a trolley driver and had started a new family. He was reluctant to get involved at

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first, but I showed him footage we’d shot of Anton smiling and talking. He changed his mind and I started to bring Anton round so they’d get to know each other again. I wanted to show him what I’d learned: as long as you open yourself up, there are connections, not differences, between people. Not long after, in August 2011, Rinata died.

The film Anton’s Right Here was released in October 2012 and shown at film festivals in Russia where it received prizes at several major Russian film festivals, as well as in Tunis and throughout Eastern Europe. The main prize it received was at the 69th Venice Film Festival in September 2012. After the film was shown by the First TV Channel, Russia’s main TV channel, letters flowed in. Autistic individuals and their families needed help. That’s when the idea of a foundation began

to take shape in my mind. It would be a place for them to go, a resource.

Talking to potential sponsors to raise money for the foundation is the toughest thing I’ve ever done. When I tell them that, “This boy used to bang his head against the wall and now he doesn’t,” they don’t see that as a result. You can give drugs or wheelchairs to other sick kids but the only thing that works for autistic kids is genuine human contact.

The foundation, called Anton’s Right Here, officially opened in December 2013. It’s Russia’s firstever centre for adults with autism, located in a warren of rooms in a prewar building in St Petersburg. The bright reception area has benches, posters, a jar for donations. There are about 75 young people and adults— I call them all “kids”— there right now with autism and other psychiatric disorders. It’s not quiet but it’s not

The foundation is a place of happiness for all the “kids”, including Anton (centre)

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loud either. When I arrive the “kids” swarm me, cadging hugs and kisses. I’m in my element.

I have two important tasks: to raise funds for the centre and to attract the right people to it—people who are prepared to devote themselves to the kids. Those with autism need a respite, a place to learn and socialise. I have to find one million Russian rubles (£10,000) a year just to keep the centre going! But I can’t give up on Anton and the others—they don’t give up on me.

When we started to film, Anton was 19. He’s now 28. He couldn’t live with his father at first as he lived in communal housing with several families, and his father and new wife shared just one room. The Foundation team purchased the family a house in the countryside near St Petersburg, where Anton now lives. This means he doesn’t have to go back to the psychiatric hospital.

I’m still very much a part of his

life. In the summer of 2014, I rented a dacha close to St Petersburg and we lived there with a tutor so Anton could refresh and work on his speech and motor skills. I got bikes and we went cycling in the countryside.

This past year, the Foundation held their second festival to raise funds for the organisation. It was attended by over 2,000 people and raised around half a million rubles (almost £5,000), an important sum for the Foundation. There was also a kiosk where crafts made by those attending the organisation were for sale, and some of the students put on a musical. The festival was covered by national TV. It was a big success. Anton wasn’t present, as he doesn’t feel at ease in big crowds.

With their unedited emotions, the kids remind me every day of what it’s like to be really, unreservedly loved and to love back in return. When people tell me I’m a hero, I say, “No, I’m not. I’m just human.”

WE DO APOLOGISE (BADLY)

A local newspaper printed the following notice:

“CONGRATULATIONS George Brownridge, for pleasing 15 women for an entire day. We were all exhausted and very satisfied and look forward to next year. We all thank you!”

...and were forced to run this the next day:

“OUR SINCERE APOLOGY to George Brownridge and staff. Our intentions were to thank him for a generous holiday shopping trip he arranged...Any inappropriate innuendos were unintentional and we take full responsibility.”

SOURCE: HUFFINGTONPOST.COM

“We Were

Lucky Alive” To Get Out

With wildlife poaching rife across Africa, we meet the man who’s risking life and limb to defeat the criminals

By crispin andrews

“The authorities in a country have to want to deal with poaching,” says trainer Rory Young:

“One Of Our guys g Ot glass in the eye and ended up in hospital for five days. Our vehicle was smashed to bits. But, to be honest, we were lucky to get out alive.”

So recalls Rory Young, a man who trains officers working for African authorities—rangers, wardens, policemen, even soldiers—to find and catch wildlife poachers. He usually takes his charges into areas where they operate, such as the bush, the plains, forests and mountainous areas. This is dangerous enough, but sometimes his teams have to go into the towns and villages where the criminals actually live.

In March last year, Rory and a group of seven rangers went to a village in Malawi to arrest two suspected poachers. “I can’t say which village because there are ongoing operations we don’t want to jeopardise,” says Rory. “But it was in a populated area, bordering one of the national parks.”

A few days earlier, five police officers had been to the same area to arrest a murder suspect. All of them ended up in hospital, two in intensive care. The police had subsequently declared the place a no-go zone—but nobody had bothered to tell Rory and his team.

Rory’s arrests passed off without incident. But as the suspects were led to the rangers’ vehicle, a cry went out. Within seconds, scores of people were mobilising to deal with the perceived threat to their home. “The cry was relayed by mobile phone and shouting, and everyone who heard did the same.”

The mob couldn’t be persuaded to back down and there were too

many to fight off. “Most of them didn’t know why they were attacking us; they were just following the guy next door,” says Rory. “It’s their defence mechanism, probably thousands of years old—you’re an outsider on their territory and the group will protect itself if it feels under attack.”

Rory and his team made it to the vehicle, but that was just the start of it. One of the suspected poachers had got away during the chaos, but the rangers still had the other. There was a six-mile drive out of the village, along an uneven road illuminated only by moonlight. Plenty of time for the locals to get their man back.

“Hundreds of them lined the roadside, on and off, for what seemed like miles,” recalls Rory. “We were later told that more than a thousand people were out that night.”

Trenches were dug across the road. When the vehicle slowed down, locals attacked with rocks, spears and machetes. “It was so dark you couldn’t see much. It was only when

we saw that the maize stalks had been flattened up ahead that we knew trouble was imminent.”

Rory and his team in The Omay, Zimbabwe, a wildlife area belonging to the rural community

Rory and the rangers took it in turns to sit on the vehicle’s roof, with others running alongside or behind, to ward attackers off.

“When the attacks were too bad on one side, we’d run around the other side of the vehicle or jump in. A large rock hit the car near the door, next to my head. If that had hit me, it would have been fatal.”

b O rn in zambia, Rory, 44, has been training anti-poaching forces for five years. In the 1990s, he qualified as a tracker in Zimbabwe, where he grew up. He subsequently ran a game

sanctuary, then managed forests and sustainable forestry operations in Zambia and Zimbabwe. Then, about ten years ago, a new poaching crisis hit Africa.

Wild-animal parts have always been coveted, particularly in China and the Far East. It’s believed that rhino horn can cure everything from impotence to cancer. Rory has even heard of people snorting the stuff at parties. Traditional Eastern medicine also values pangolins, mountain gorillas and lions, the latter a substitute for the dwindling tiger population. Ivory, meanwhile, is associated with opulence all over the world.

Recent economic growth in east Asia has meant more disposable

income and an increase in the blackmarket price. Criminal syndicates have capitalised. Many impoverished Africans have joined or set up their own gangs. Others, poor and starving, kill animals illegally for food.

The conservation group Tusk estimates that 30,000 elephants are killed by poachers every year—one every 15 minutes. Ivory goes for £700 a pound on the black market, while rhino horn can fetch up to £20,000 a pound, according to the African Wildlife Foundation. To the criminals, it’s more valuable than gold. In South Africa, where 80 per cent of the rhino population live, a rhino is killed by poachers every three days.

In 2011, as the crisis escalated, Rory started training Zimbabwean rangers in his spare time. He quickly realised

Teaching local safari guides at Bumi Hills Safari Lodge, Zimbabwe; (below) Rory on patrol in the Vwaza Marsh Wildlife Reserve, Malawi

that these people didn’t have the tracking or bush skills needed to stop the poachers.

“If they’d been trained at all, it was by local and foreign military people, and then just in military tactics,” says Rory. “But applying such a doctrine doesn’t work in the bush—you don’t have the communications, the structure and the logistical support.”

He adds: “These guys were walking around the bush in patrols, trying

to bump into poachers. But the areas they cover are so vast, you just can’t do that.”

rOry realised that something more was needed. Rangers, he felt, needed to learn how to live and survive in the bush, to use it to their advantage. With Yakov Alekseyev, a former federal agent in the United States Office of Special Investigations, Rory devised what he calls a holistic anti-poaching doctrine. He’s since used it to train anti-poaching forces in 12 African countries.

Rory runs the training, helps devise and implement local plans, and is sometimes involved in helping to catch the criminals. In 2014, he set up a non-profit organisation, Chengeta Wildlife, to help fund training and support other conservation ventures across Africa. Rory claims that all donations go towards supporting work in the field.

and his team were attacked, there was elephant and rhino poaching going on, alongside meat poaching— both commercial and subsistence. To deal with the organised crime, Rory taught park rangers how to use undercover officers, informants and reconnaissance teams.

Tusk esTimaTes

“You build up a picture of how the gang is operating: when and where, who they’re working with, where they’re getting their ammunition and weapons,” he points out. “Then you start making arrests, which generates further information. Then you start rounding up the network.”

ThaT 30,000 elephanTs are killed by poachers every year— one every 15 minuTes

“When we go into an area, we try to initiate and then manage a behaviour change,” he says. “You can’t stop poaching by arrests, drones in the air, advertising or educating the youth. It’s a combination of all these factors that creates a change in attitude.”

In the Malawi village where Rory

He adds, however, that none of this works with someone who’s desperately hungry— a man running into the park, laying out a snare, catching an animal and running out again: “Throwing him in jail is probably going to make his day, as he’ll get a hot meal.” Also, shooting poachers on sight, a common practice in parts of Africa, is futile. (“A dead poacher can’t provide information.”)

In Malawi, Rory’s team convinced local leaders to help. Religious leaders preached that slaughtering wild animals for food wasn’t halal and went against the teachings of Islam. Tribal chiefs started ordering their own arrests, afraid that state

authorities would stop bringing food relief, books and other resources into these villages if the attacks on rangers and police continued.

“The authorities in a country have to want to deal with poaching,” says Rory. “Not necessarily from the goodness of their hearts—a country might just be reliant on foreign exchange or tourism and need to maintain their global image.”

in s O me c O un tries, however, the authorities are part of the problem. In 2014, Young was invited back to Zimbabwe by a local authority to train some of their police officers. But before he could start, he was ordered to report to the President’s Office.

There, he was told by the Central Intelligence Organisation (CIO) bosses that he wouldn’t be permitted to carry out the training.

“First they accused me of coming to Zimbabwe to train rebels. When I told them I was training their own police officers, they said I didn’t have the necessary permissions.”

But when Rory showed them the proofs, they got really angry. “They said, if you train anyone, or if you go into any area and are seen training anyone, we’ll find a reason to arrest you and throw away the key.”

Soon after this, five elephants were shot in the area, and there have been almost daily reports of elephants being killed ever since. This January,

An elephant muscles in on Rory and his son in Imire game park, Zimbabwe

a CIO officer was jailed for being part of a poaching gang.

“They’re involved, and everybody knows it,” concludes Rory. “Poachers need corrupt officials to move their goods. Corrupt officials need cash to maintain their position.”

Rory soon realised that he’d have to leave Zimbabwe for good. “The CIO were visiting anyone who knew me, asking where I was, telling them they were going to arrest me because I was training rebels. You have to take a threat like that seriously.”

He moved with his family to the Netherlands, where his wife Marjet has relations. He’s since trained anti-poaching forces in Guinea and Malawi, but he hasn’t been back to Zimbabwe. Not even when his father died last year did he feel it was safe.

alth O u gh his w O rk is important, Rory believes everyone should do their bit to stop poaching, “whether it’s putting some coins in a tin, writing

an article, training someone or just spreading the word”. He’d also like to see all governments do more. “China has given Zimbabwe £1.4m to stop poaching, but it won’t do anything about the illegal trade in its own country. The US is the second-largest importer of illegal ivory in the world. Europe does nothing much.”

He’s particularly angry that richer countries expect less-developed ones to handle the problem. “Poaching is a result of so many other evils—poverty, corruption, bad government, conflict, religious hatred. To fight it, African authorities need equipment, weapons and training. Sometimes the people I train don’t even have boots.”

But none of this has deterred Rory. “Yes, my work carries some risks and I get a lot of headaches,” he admits. “But at least I can sleep at night.”

to learn more about the work of chengeta wildlife, and to make a donation, go to chengetawildlife.org

w H at ’ s in a title ?

“real-life” magazines love an attention-grabbing headline, but they can sometimes go a bit too far:

“Meal Deal! I SWAPPED a bowl of pasta for a BABY”

“My DeAD boyfriend phoned me from beyond the grave”

“HORROR PRANK. Whoopee cushion killed grandma”

“My best mate’s a PotAto”

“TRAPPED in a fridge—but ketchup kept me sane”

sOurce: BuZZFeed.cOM

By C at H y ada MS

My Great Escape: Big Apple To Boat

Lorraine and her family (below right) enjoyed a magical voyage to Bermuda

Lorraine Carter from Greater Manchester finds her own Bermuda Triangle on a cruise from New York

Cathy has danced in Rio, been microlighting in South Africa and hiked the mountains of Oman

In my famIly, it’s become a tradition that momentous occasions are celebrated in New York. So where else would we fly to for my husband Bob’s 60th birthday? The surprise was that, on reaching New York, our daughter Hayley would join us. But little did Bob know that Hayley and I had booked us all on a birthday cruise to Bermuda…

The secret was out when we landed in New York. After a couple of nights in our favourite city (and some to-die-for Mexican food at 62nd Street’s Rosa Mexicano), a car arrived to take us to the docks. Aboard the ship, we had two adjoining cabins with a balcony each. I’d booked the birthdaycelebration package online, which meant our cabin was decorated beautifully and the birthday cake they provided was almost too pretty to eat.

We spent our five-day adventure playing table tennis on deck, swimming in the pool and dancing to live music at Dizzy’s Jazz Club. The drinks package we ordered was definitely worth it—we were allowed six alcoholic drinks per day (which we didn’t always manage, hic!) and unlimited soft drinks. We enjoyed getting dressed up for dinner too.

After a day and a half cruising, we docked in Bermuda. We took a bus to the pink sands of Horseshoe Bay, then a ferry to the capital, Hamilton, to visit the town’s famous Marks & Spencer (it had to be done!). We also enjoyed the famous Bermudian cocktail, Dark and Stormy, on Front Street, which overlooks the amazing Hamilton harbour.

Our return voyage was equally magical though: the seas were calm and our own Bermuda triangle of the three of us was just perfect.

■ CruISe COntrOl

A five-day Bermuda cruise on Royal Caribbean’s Anthem of the Seas starts from £1,438 for two people (0844 493 4005; royalcaribbean.co.uk).

Postcard From ...Tenerife

WhIle TenerIfe Is beT Ter knoWn

as a beachside destination, it packs an adventurous punch too. This month marks the island’s second annual walking festival—a four-day event taking place across Tenerife.

There will be 15 different trails, varying in length and difficulty, across some of the island’s most diverse terrain. Make sure you take the time to explore the spectacular Unesco-listed Teide National Park, which sports orange earth and Mars-like volcanic surroundings.

■ WalKInG On MarS(ISH)

For more information on the walking festival and Tenerife in general, visit webtenerife.co.uk

Tell us about your favourite holiday (send a photo too) and if we include it on this page we’ll pay you £50. Go to readersdigest.co.uk/contact-us

Things To Do This Month

Havana in two minutes

■ Do: o l D T oW n h avana Now relations have warmed between Cuba and the US, it’s time to explore one of Latin America’s most quixotic capitals: Havana. Its old colonial centre, including the wide Piazza Vieja, is a good place to start (020 8747 8315; journeylatinamerica. co.uk).

■ sTay: hoTel saraTo ga Set in a wonderful neo-classical building, this classic Havana hotel might feel like the 1950s heyday—but it’s brought up to the present with a sleek rooftop pool and panoramic city views (+53 7 8681000; hotelsaratoga.com).

■ see: hemIngWay TraIl Is there a better excuse for an afternoon drinking mojitos than on Ernest Hemingway’s trail? Check out La Bodeguita, where the infamous author regularly propped up the bar.

sH ort/ lon g H aul: wildlife H olidays

s horT : s c otland Wildlife is right here on our doorstep—specifically, a noisy cacophony of puffins and Arctic terns in the wild Scottish isles, best seen up close from a kayak. Explore offers an 11-day trip from £3,850pp (01252 756447; explore.co.uk).

l ong: british Columbia, Canada Experience grizzly bears and orcas at scarily short distances in the wilderness of British Columbia with a brand-new tour running this year. Wildlife Worldwide offers a 12-night trip from £7,495pp (01962 302 086; wildlifeworldwide.com).

travel app

Of tHe MOntH

liveTrekker, free, ios, android. livetrekker.com.“Not all those who wander are lost,” said J R R Tolkien. Habitual wanderers will love LiveTrekker, which tracks the routes you take, enabling you to collate them in a single map.

Why would a young man in one of the happiest countries on earth commit a brutal act of terrorism?

The Making of a JihadisT

By William Wheeler

Left: Omar El-Hussein in the photo he posted to his Facebook page

at a B out 3.30pm on February 14 last year, Omar ElHussein cut down a back street in Østerbro, a quiet neighbourhood near the centre of Copenhagen, and steadily approached the Krudttønden cultural centre.

A panel discussion inside featured Lars Vilks, a Swedish cartoonist who’d been living under police protection since 2007, when he published cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad with the body of a dog. Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, now the self-proclaimed caliph of the Islamic State, had announced a bounty of at least £70,000 on Vilks’s head. A heavy security detail —two Swedish bodyguards, two uniformed cops and three agents from Denmark’s security and intelligence service (PET)—scanned the guests as they arrived.

Standing about six feet from the centre’s glass facade, 22-year-old El-Hussein withdrew an M95 assault rifle from a bag and opened fire. Several agents managed to return fire, but there’s no evidence that they hit El-Hussein. Finn Nørgaard, a 55-yearold filmmaker, was killed and four security agents were injured.

El-Hussein got away and eventually made his way to Mjølnerparken, the low-income housing project where he’d been born. At 4.15pm, according to the Danish newspaper Politiken, ElHussein entered a nearby apartment

and changed his clothes to disguise his appearance. After that, Danish news reports state that at 10pm ElHussein spent 30 minutes at a local internet cafe.

El-Hussein surfaced at 12.41am outside Copenhagen’s Great Synagogue, where a Bat Mitzvah party was under way. Two policemen, their machine guns hanging loosely by their straps, stood guard outside. As El-Hussein stumbled towards the men, pretending to be drunk, a 37-year-old security volunteer named Dan Uzan joined them in front of the building. El-Hussein produced two handguns and fired at least six rounds at the guards, killing Uzan and wounding both officers. One of the policemen was able to return fire—a single shot, which missed.

El-Hussein managed to get away again. When police caught sight of him in Mjølnerparken on a live surveillance feed at about 5am, they scrambled to the scene. After they reportedly called out to him to surrender, El-Hussein opened fire and was gunned down.

El-Hussein’s attack came just weeks after the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris, and the parallels between the two incidents seem clear. Like the shooters in Paris, El-Hussein was a troubled young man. But he was also something more: a Muslim in a formerly ethnically homogeneous European nation that’s now decidedly less so, and struggling with it.

in the 1960s, Denmark experienced its first major wave of non-European immigration, as guest workers from Turkey, Pakistan and Morocco came to fill manufacturing jobs. Many were slotted into social housing. A decade later immigration controls were ratcheted down and family reunification became the main channel for nonEuropean immigration.

When it was built in 1987, Mjølnerparken boasted some 600 fairly sizeable one- to threebedroom apartments, centrally located near Nørrebro railway station. But it quickly became a hub for immigrant families, and those with the resources to move soon took flight.

journalist for Berlingske, a top Danish newspaper, I retraced the path of ElHussein’s escape. We passed the modest four-storey brick building where El-Hussein’s mother and brother live— no one answered the doorbell—and proceeded down a main thoroughfare lined with housing projects.

No one fully understands El-Hussein’s motives and he acted alone, the young men insisted

Its transformation coincided with a new immigration trend, beginning in the 1980s, in which family reunification would be overshadowed by the arrival of refugees from war-ravaged Muslim countries such as Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Somalia and Bosnia.

El-Hussein was a member of a gang called the Brothas. Outside the group’s clubhouse, located in the basement of one of the buildings in Mjølnerparken’s housing block, we met two of his friends: a thin 19-yearold named Abdurramadan, who had a short beard of wispy scruff, and Ahmed, a slightly cherubic 20-year-old who requested that I not use his real name.

No one fully understands El-Hussein’s motives and he acted alone, the young men insisted. Yet his horrific actions were almost inevitable, they said, a consequence of a society that views Muslims as second-class citizens.

In a historically homogeneous country uncomfortable with public displays of religion, it was also the start of a continuing debate—many Danish Muslims would call it an anti-Muslim discourse—about the place of religion in Danish society.

Together with Jens Beck Nielsen, a

“He was a good man,” Ahmed said of El-Hussein.

“But when people put pressure on us...then you explode,” Abdurramadan continued. He explained the implicit racism in Danish society—the way the police treat Muslims and politicians talk about them, the way cartoonists

lampoon their prophet and call it freedom of speech, and how the military joins US-backed combat operations across the Muslim world. “The government is against us,” he said. “Straight up: those who depict our prophet, we’ll blow them up.”

Søren Rosenberg, a former policeman in Mjølnerparken who’s now a social worker there, said the young men’s heated rhetoric shouldn’t be taken strictly at face value. Their bluster disguised an element of shock. “I’m sure they fully understand what he [ElHussein] did,” Rosenberg said.

Social workers who counselled El-Hussein’s gang associates and childhood friends had told me that members of El-Hussein’s circle admit that there’d always been an extremism to his political views, maybe even some underlying mental instability. But in front of two journalists, they seemed eager to portray their friend in a less hostile light.

“He’s completely normal, just like the rest of us,” Abdurramadan said.

el-hussein Was Born in Mjølnerparken to parents of Palestinian ancestry. When he was 14, his mother took him to Jordan for three years— a break from the path of juvenile delinquency he’d started down. When El-Hussein returned to Denmark in 2009, he talked of staying straight and threw himself into Thai kickboxing. Before long, however, he was arrested for burglary. Convictions for theft and

possession of knives followed. Over the next few years, he bounced between prison and various institutions.

Lotte Akiko Nielsen, a teacher who tutored El-Hussein in 2012, confirmed his friends’ sense of a young man trying to get his life together. He was polite, she said. It was clear that for him, respect was paramount.

But El-Hussein also “turned his anger inward”, Nielsen said. When conversation turned to the IsraeliPalestinian dispute, for example, ElHussein grew “pretty dark”.

One time she asked why, since he seemed happy when he talked about his time in Jordan, he’d returned to Denmark. He told her he was born and raised here. It’s where his friends are. “He considered himself Danish,” she said. Nonetheless, she had the sense that “circumstances made it hard for him to live here”.

In early 2013, El-Hussein was arrested for stabbing a stranger on a train. In court he described being high and feeling paranoid. A court psychiatrist, however, ruled out the need for any further mental-health assessment. Two years later, El-Hussein would emerge from prison a changed man. Outwardly, he was exceedingly happy to see his old friends. He visited a job centre for help finding work and a place to live. But he was also quieter, more distant.

In retrospect, Ahmed believes that his friend left prison with a plan. “He knew he was going to die,” he said.

Before the attack, the country’s security apparatus was focused on the threat that Danish citizens radicalised in Syria would return to wage attacks at home. PET estimates that at least 115 Danes have joined the fight in Syria since the start of the civil war there in 2011, making Denmark, on a per-capita basis, one of Europe’s largest exporters of foreign combatants to the conflict (second only to Belgium). Anja DalgaardNielsen, former PET executive director, who’s now a director at the Royal Danish Defence College, traces the roots of the problem to a highly mobilised and radical community that formed around the 2005 publication of Muhammad cartoons in the Danish daily newspaper Jyllands-Posten.

things that taint your brand. But I think we have a real challenge in the sense that ISIS more or less has branded itself by doing crazy things.”

Gang members make for attractive recruits. They already have access to weapons

The pace of radicalisation and the pool of potential recruits have increased dramatically with the rise of ISIS. In the past, extremists didn’t want to work too closely with criminal groups that had no pretence of justifying ideology.

“Old Al Qaeda, I think, wasn’t particularly interested in highly criminal individuals,” said Dalgaard-Nielsen. “Or, for that matter, in people who suffered from mental illnesses—they’re unpredictable and they might do crazy

In recent years, a new threat profile has emerged, said Dalgaard-Nielsen: the “petty criminal” for whom ideology is often nothing more than a thin cover. Magnus Ranstorp, who leads the foreign fighters working group of the EU’s Radicalisation Awareness Network, has noticed that many European radicals today tend to be poor, poorly educated and have long criminal records. “Many are just really losers of society who don’t have a lot of religious context and experience in being able to question this issue,” Ranstorp said.

Gang members are attractive recruits. They already have access to weapons and experience using them, meaning their natural barriers to using violence have been lowered—a critical threshold along the path to radicalisation. Said Dalgaard-Nielsen, “When people selfrecruit out of these environments, the process can move very fast.”

According to a Reuters report, an unpublished official investigation found that El-Hussein had grown increasingly religious over his final six months in prison. In September, he started to talk

of heading to fight in Syria. Prison officials added his name to a list of inmates at risk of radicalisation that it flagged to PET. The intelligence service, however, was never alerted when El-Hussein was released.

Nine minutes before his first attack, El-Hussein pledged his loyalty to ISIS.

t he a l Qaeda narrative that the West is at war with Islam—once a peripheral, extremist view—has now become mainstream for young Muslims raised amid the discourse of the war on terror, Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo.

“This generational battle means the problem is much larger than a small nucleus of extremists,” Ranstorp said. “It’s also about inclusion, about feeling part of the same society.”

turn out to have good lives,” said Aydin Soei, a sociologist who met ElHussein in 2011 while researching the gangs of Mjølnerparken.

Many gang members in Copenhagen don’t recognise their privilege, however. “Part of their identity is that they’re living in the same reality as the oppressed black man in the American ghettos,” Soei said. And this belief feeds a narrative of victimisation that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy for those who never leave their insular communities.

They agreed that, if the status quo persists, the next generation will be all the more violent

Part of what makes finding solutions so difficult is that, arguably, life in Denmark is good for immigrants in communities such as Mjølnerparken. Overall, Denmark ranks among the happiest nations in the world, and citizens benefit from free health care, free university education and other state-sponsored benefits. “If you look at the stats, most young people from these areas and with the same family background as El-Hussein actually

That’s not to say that racism isn’t an issue in Denmark. There’s no doubt that landing a job interview is harder with a Muslim-sounding name on your CV. War correspondent Nagieb Khaja, whose parents came to Denmark from Afghanistan, said that as a young man he felt discrimination most profoundly at the night clubs, where he often couldn’t make it past the bouncer at the door. Gangs, however, offered power and prestige. “When I went out with the gangsters, we were treated like kings,” he said. Today, he said, kids from these communities are increasingly becoming Islamists—in the postSeptember 11 world, the most provocative way to reject the society from which one feels alienated.

The public response to the shooting hasn’t helped alleviate that sense of antagonism. The anti-immigrant Danish People’s Party finished second in last June’s elections, and a new centre-right government announced it would cut immigrants’ benefits and strengthen border controls.

El-Hussein’s milieu is a subculture that defines itself in opposition. “They have an enormous hatred towards society, and the hatred also has to do with the identity of being a religious minority,” said Soei.

That doesn’t mean that places such as Mjølnerparken are hotbeds of potential terrorists. Not all disaffected young men gun down innocent people. In the aftermath of the attack, a spokesman for the Brothas publicly disavowed El-Hussein’s actions.

Still, the parallels between the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris and ElHussein’s, between the profiles of the attackers and so many of the gang members Soei has interviewed over the years, are striking.

“If I were a lawmaker, a politician in another European country with the same problems as we have in

Denmark and in Paris, I would be concerned,” Soei said. “The feeling of not belonging, the feeling of society being against you, of you being against society...isn’t a Danish problem or a French problem. It’s a common European problem.”

Several weeks after my initial visit to Mjølnerparken, I sat down again with Ahmed and Abdurramadan, along with two of their friends, Abdi and Salahedin. They supported the principle of an Islamic caliphate. Yet they were also bothered by the atrocities committed by ISIS—namely killing children and beheading hostages. That wasn’t their conception of Islam. Not that they were devout, learned Muslims. “I’m not practising so much,” Salahedin admitted.

What they agreed on was that, if the status quo persists, the next generation will be all the more violent. “He [El-Hussein] felt like the world looked down on Muslims. And they kinda do,” said Abdi. “If you keep telling that guy, ‘You a terrorist, you a terrorist,’ —on the television, everywhere you look—at the end, he’s gonna think, ‘I’m a terrorist.’ ”

u n f -atom- aB le

Did you know there are more atoms in glass of water than glasses of water in all the oceans in the world? What’s more, if you removed the space from all the atoms that make up YOU, you’d be smaller than a grain of salt.

sources: BBc.co.uk

© 2015 BY THE NEW REPUBLIC (AUGUST 2, 2015), NEWREPUBLIC.COM

Saving Cash Only Takes Seconds

The clocks go forward this month, giving us a little more daylight. You’ll lose an hour—but you could gain pennies

Andy Webb is a money expert at the Money Advice Service. Visit money adviceservice. org.uk for details

You’ll need some willpower, but not buying a hot drink on the way to work or when you’re out shopping saves both time and money. Cutting out £3 per coffee every day would B

LESS TIME TO MANAGE YOUR MONEY? Here are eight really easy ways to save and get on top of your finances. Even better, they won’t take more than a couple of minutes each.

1. Check your bank balance

If your balance is low then you’ll save by not spending the money in the first place—and avoid overdraft charges. If you do this on an app or by getting a mini statement when you next take out cash, it’ll take you less than 60 seconds.

2. Turn down the heating

If you’ve been using your heating, turn your thermostat down by one degree. Just doing that will save you ten per cent of your annual energy bills.

3. Freeze your leftovers

The average household throws away £470 worth of food each year. It’ll take you under a minute to put the leftovers into a Tupperware box and whack it in the freezer. Check the dates of fresh food too, so you use it before it goes off.

4. Say no to a cup of coffee

save you £1,095 in a year. OK, maybe it’s easier to cut out one every other day—but that’s still a great saving.

5. Open the post

It’s easy to put that bill or bank statement aside for “later”. But does later ever come? Open it up when you get it and take a minute to check it’s correct. Ensuring errors are fixed might take more time, but if you don’t look for them it’s easy to lose some of your hard-earned cash.

6. Only buy things you actually need

You’re standing there in the shop looking at something you don’t really need. But it’s in the sale! Just look at how cheap it is. How can you say no?

Well, if you don’t need it, ask yourself if you’re really going to use it. If the answer is probably not, you’ve just saved yourself even more money by not buying it.

7. Don’t get hungry

If you’re at the supermarket when you’re hungry, you’ll be more likely to buy goods you don’t actually want or need. So grab a snack before leaving home!

8. Switch to own brands

Can you really taste the difference between own-brand products and branded products? Is your salonbrand shampoo really worth the extra money? Switch things up and you may be surprised.

Make A Will For Nothing

If you aren’t married or in a civil partnership, you run the risk of adding to your partner’s and other dependents’ heartache should you die without a will in place.

Whereas married couples and civil partners have more protection under the law—ensuring they and their dependents will receive what’s due to them—unmarried couples don’t, meaning loved ones won’t automatically inherit. This can create difficult situations, especially if there are children or others who depend on you financially.

A will, however, lets you share out your estate as you wish, and to whom you wish. It can also help you reduce the amount of inheritance tax that’s payable on any property and money you leave behind.

Fortunately, March is “Free Wills Month”, where any individual or couple over 55 can make or update a will for nothing.

Head over to Freewillsmonth.org. uk and you’ll be able to search for participating solicitors near you. From March 1 you’ll be able to book an appointment on a first come, first served basis.

Only “simple” wills are free, but

that should be enough for most people. If your solicitor thinks it’ll cost any more, they’ll let you know and you can choose to pay the extra.

You can also write your own will, of course, which will cost about £10 for the stationary. This can be risky, but if you want your affairs sorted in a very simple manner, it might be a suitable option.

A Spring Clean Can Boost Your Finances

March 19 is the official first day of spring, and traditionally a time to give the home a thorough tidy. If you generally use this as an opportunity to clear your cupboards and throw out things…STOP!

It might seem like junk to you, but there could be someone out there who sees it differently. Even broken items can be in demand as people look for spare parts. So rather than binning anything you no longer want, have a look to see if you think you can sell it and generate some handy extra cash.

There’s generally a place for anything you want to sell. Boot fairs, small adverts and auctions are worth considering, but selling online is often the best way to find buyers, as

you’ve a far larger pool of people who might be interested.

FOUR ONlINE SEllING TIpS

1. You can often check what similar items have sold for, which should give you an idea if it’s worth selling or not. If you think it could be a collectable, it might be better seeking a valuation from a specialist.

2. To help make a sale, make sure you describe the item accurately and include any brand names in the title.

3. Take good-quality photos that show the features and condition of what you’re selling.

4. Work out what the postage will cost and include it in your listing. It’s also worth knowing if there are any extra fees you’ll be charged.

Retirement Isn’t All Plain Sailing

WE ALL HOPE TO ENJOY SOME OF THE FINER THINGS IN LIFE in our retirement. Time with our grandchildren, travelling the world or improving a golf handicap—the things working life doesn’t allow us to do as much as we’d like.

Of course, retirement doesn’t always work out as planned. The very nature of that phase in our lives is that most of us will be in our later years—and we could be faced with challenges to our health and threats to our wealth that mean we don’t enjoy it quite as much as we’d hoped. Planning your legal affairs with Reader’s Digest Legal could help you focus on the things you really want to be doing.

It’s cheaper to live on a cruise ship than in a care home…

We could probably all think of better ways to spend £800 a week (the average cost of a week in care), but the reality is that if your health suffers in retirement and you need to go into care, you may have to pay these fees yourself from income, savings and

even the capital tied up in your home in some circumstances. An estimated 45,000 homes are sold each year to fund care-home fees. It’s possible to plan ahead and protect your home and savings in some circumstances, but it’s crucial to act early, not when the issue presents itself.

Choose who makes financial decisions if you can’t…

The odds are in favour of most of us living longer than our parents. With

this increased life expectancy comes a greater chance of us suffering illnesses that leave us unable to manage our own affairs. We don’t always get advance notice of a life-changing illness or accident, so those who think they’ll consider planning for

such eventualities when their health starts to deteriorate risk leaving a difficult situation for their loved ones. Arranging lasting power of attorney is something that every adult with assets and people who depend on them should consider.

WHAT NEXT? Take the first step and request your free information pack by calling Reader’s Digest Legal on 0800 031 9516 and quoting reference RDL10.

Easy-to-prepare meals and accompanying drinks

Harissa Lamb Leg Steaks

By Rachel walke R

Rachel is a food writer and blogs at thefoodieat.org

Tamarind and Tahini, chia seeds and coconut oil—there’s no denying the amount of “world ingredients” that have crept onto supermarket shelves in recent years. If you’re going to try any, then make it harissa. The Moroccan red-pepper paste is laced with paprika and chilli flakes, and often contains a blend of cumin and coriander. It works especially well with lamb leg steaks, which is rather handy at this time of year—as it makes for a quick, cheap and impressive alternative to the classic Easter feast.

Serves 4

• 4tsps harissa paste

• 2tsps honey

• 4 boneless lamb leg steaks

For the tabbouleh

• 100g bulgur wheat

• 200ml boiling water

• 100g fresh parsley, picked and sliced finely

• 30g fresh mint, picked and sliced finely

• 1 red onion, diced

• 2 salad tomatoes, diced

• 2 spring onions, sliced

• 1 lemon, zested and juiced

• 4tbsps good olive oil

• Salt and pepper, to season

For the minted yogurt topping

• 4tbsps plain yogurt

• 2tbsps (leftover) mint

leaves, picked and sliced

• Pepper, to season

Optional serve: hummus, baba ganoush, green beans (tossed in 1tbsp olive oil and zest of ½ orange)

1. Mix the harissa and honey in a baking dish, and then rub mixture into the lamb steaks. Cover with cling film and leave, refrigerated, for ten minutes or as long as overnight.

2. Rinse the bulgur wheat and cook in water according to pack instructions.

3. Meanwhile, prepare the rest of the tabbouleh. Take some time to thoroughly wash the herbs, spin them dry, pick the leaves from the stem and then slice. Set aside 2tbsps of the fresh mint leaves and tip the rest into a mixing bowl.

4. Add the diced red onion, tomatoes, sliced spring onions, lemon juice and zest and olive oil to the mixing bowl. Fluff up the cooked bulgur wheat with

a fork and stir it in with the herbs and vegetables. Taste and season.

5. Mix the yogurt with the remaining 2tbsps of fresh mint and season with freshly ground black pepper.

6. Cook the lamb steaks quickly at a high temperature. Bring a griddle pan up to a high heat and then cook the steaks for 3–5 minutes on each side (dependent on thickness and also how well-done you like them).

7. Remove them from the pan and let them rest on a chopping board for a further 2 minutes, then slice into strips. Divide the tabbouleh between four plates. Arrange the sliced lamb steak on it and then top with a tablespoon of the minted yogurt.

Wines From Lebanon

archaeologists have found grape pips that are evidence of winemaking in Lebanon, dating back to 8000 BC. Despite being so well-established, Lebanese wine has, for millennia, flown beneath the radar. That is until two decades ago, when a new generation of winemakers revived old vineyards and wineries, and started pushing it onto a global stage.

Lots of the country’s vines are located in the Beqaa Valley, 20 miles east of Beirut, where the high altitude, plentiful rainfall and hot sun make a perfect growing climate. The area is particularly well-known for producing full-bodied red wines, which pair perfectly with strong lamb

flavours—particularly a dish which is laced with a harissa spice blend, which runs through a lot of Middle Eastern dishes.

Out of the nine million bottles of wine produced each year, only a small amount make it out of the country and onto supermarket shelves—but it’s a start. Here are three bottles that are all a fine introduction.

Rachel Recommends…

■ Chateau Ksara Clos St Alphonse, marks & spencer, £10, smooth, easy drinking with juicy redcurrant notes— a great place to start with lebanese wines.

■ Domaine des Tourelles Red, nd John, £8.95, rich with cherry notes and a hint of spiciness, from one of the longest-established wineries in the beqaa Valley.

■ Chateau Ksara Reserve du Couvent 2012, oddbins, £11.50, an award-winning, full-bodied red wine, which stands up well to a rich and flavoursome lamb dish.

Pudding of the Month

Bun And Butter Pudding

Current-studded hot cross buns are perfect for this twist on a British classic.

• 6 hot cross buns, halved

• 20g butter, room temperature

• 250ml milk

• 150ml cream

• 2 eggs

• 2tbsps sugar

1. Pre-heat the oven to 170C.

2. Butter the hot cross buns and then arrange them in a greased ovenproof dish, buttered side up.

3. Gently heat the milk and cream. In a separate bowl, whisk together the eggs and sugar.

4. Pour the warm milk and cream over the eggs and sugar, whisking constantly, then pour the custard mixture over the buns.

5. Cook for 30 minutes, or until the custard is set and the top has turned golden. Serve straight away with cream or custard.

Good and Simple, hemsle y & hemsle y, Ebury Press, £17. The second cookbook from the popular sisters.

BUdGeT

morrisons medium sheep Easter egg, £3. Cheap, cheerful—and utterly delicious.

Blow oUT

Bettys large milk

chocolate spring flowers egg, £49.95. A beautiful handmade creation.

By Lynda C L ark

Lynda Clark is a homes, property and interiors expert, and is editor of First Time Buyer magazine

Spring Is In The Air

IT’S T he perfec T TIM e T O refre S h YOU r

IN T er IO r S. Think of a relaxed Mediterranean colour palette with shades of teal, turquoise and burnt orange complemented by zesty sunflower yellow. You don’t have to redecorate completely—instead, you can achieve a spring-like look by adding accessories such as cushions, rugs and wall art. Bedrooms in particular should be kept simple and relaxing, so stick to a few coordinated colours to create a calm and restful living and sleeping space.

Multi aperture frame, £45; aqua Brooklyn bed set, £50; throw, £80; Bailey cushions, £10; bow-tie cushion, £25; crew cushion, £15; Giraffe ornament, £18; teal irregular vase, £15; globe, £21, Nord double bedframe, £1,100; Nord bedside cabinet, £600.

■ All available at Debenhams (debenhams.com)

Get The Look

Reinvigorate your interior décor with a pop of this season’s favourite shades.

■ Betsy chair, £349, Very, very.co.uk

■ conran wall print, £99, Marks & Spencer, marksandspencer.com

■ Mala table lamp, £60, BHS, bhs.co.uk

■ Butterfly by Matthew Williamson cuban striped cushion, £24, Debenhams, debenhams.com

how does your Garden Grow?

Forty years after producing its first catalogue, Chiltern Seeds still offers some of the most exciting items in the UK. This year’s selection is on point: Geum “Queen of Orange” has bright blooms, Nigella Bucharica “Blue Stars” is wonderfully ornate, while the flowers of Gaillardia Pulchella “Blood Red” are an almost luminous shade of red.

■ Visit chilternseeds.co.uk

retro makes a return with these bold and inspirational pieces reTro reVIVaL

Orla Kiely plant pot, £21.95, cuckooland.com

Albany Symmetry wallpaper, £28 a roll, wallpaperdirect.com

Vintage apple cushion, £14.95, dotcomgiftshop. com

Some of the weird and wonderful products launched at the 49th Consumer Electronics Show

The (Very Cool) Hot List

BY OLLY MANN

Olly is a technology expert, LBC presenter and Answer Me

This! podcaster

SAMSUNG FAMILY HUB REFRIGERATOR

A few minutes rearranging the fruit shelf was as much entertainment as I’d ever expected from my refrigerator. No more. Family Hub has a 21.5-inch, full-HD screen on the door. So you could watch Star Wars on it. But, more usefully, it syncs with your smartphone, so you can share notes, photos and recipes on it, thereby digitising all those magnetic tchotchkes currently adorning your fridge. The really innovative bit? The three cameras lurking inside: when out shopping, just consult your app for a live image of what you have in stock.

LG SMART SECURITY SOLUTION

The market for web-connected home-security cameras is becoming increasingly crowded. For my money, nobody has yet beaten Google’s Nest for ease of set-up, but LG’s new home hub offers many more features.

As well as taping in 1080p digital zoom, its environmental sensors monitor temperature and humidity (useful, for example, in a nursery) and— if it detects smoke— there’s a built-in 100-decibel siren to alert the neighbours.

FISHER-PRICE THINK AND LEARN CODE-A-PILLAR

To stand a chance of a career in ICT, schoolchildren must learn how artificial intelligence works—hence coding has become part of the curriculum. But how to kick off their education at home, long before teacher explains what algorithms are? This cute motorised caterpillar, designed for ages 3–8, is a novel solution: it behaves differently depending on which order its segments are put together, thus mimicking the command structure of a computer programme. Expect Mark Zuckerberg to buy one for his daughter imminently.

VIRTUAL REALITY HEADSETS

Come summer, you and I will finally be able to get our hands on a VR machine. The three big contenders are HTC’s Vive, which includes a front-facing camera to interact with the outside world, Facebook’s Oculus Rift, which has been hyped harder than the return of the Messiah, and Sony’s Playstation VR, which, though lower-spec, is compatible with PS consoles rather than requiring an expensive gaming PC. Sony will sell more units—but it’s the £499 Oculus everyone wants to try.

EHANG 184 AAV

AAV? A new acronym for me too: it stands for “Autonomous Aerial Vehicle” (a self-driving helicopter). Since the media go doolally for all things drone, this has enthusiastically been billed as “the world’s first passenger drone”. Yep, a drone you can climb into. Auto-pilot aviation is hardly new, of course, and the regulatory ramifications of this product are endless, but it’s only a matter of time before Uber offers this service in Silicon Valley— for the publicity alone.

By Geor G ina yates

Georgina is a fashion and beauty editor for numerous travel titles and a blogger at withgeorgia.com

Pièce De Résistance

From a picturesque studio in Cornwall, textile designer Claire Armitage creates her exquisite silk scarves and accessories. Inspired by poetry and the natural world in equal measure, her handcrafted pieces teeter on the edge between stand-alone works of art and haute couture.

After completing a degree in textile design at Goldsmiths University, Claire enjoyed an exciting career as a freelance costume designer for film and site-specific projects. Says Claire, “One of the most interesting and creatively challenging projects I worked on was to design intricate, large-scale sculptural costumes based on flowers to represent the gardens

Country Amble

■ Keep the chill out with a puffa coat adorned with faux-fur (£98; lauraashley.com).

■ Pair this jersey dress with thermal leggings and boots (£98; jigsaw.co.uk).

■ Stay dry with bright, cropped wellies (£29.95; whitestuff.com).

of Cornwall in the Lord Mayor’s Show in London.”

But the desire to develop her own ideas grew. “Working as a costume designer was great, but I was always working to someone else’s brief. I wanted to be more in control of my work and to find a creative outlet for the ideas that were brimming out of my sketchbooks.”

Armitage Design was born. “All of my prints begin as drawings,” Claire explains. “My work has evolved and I now develop my drawings using computer-aided design, before digitally printing the final image onto silk.”

Fresh kicks

Last year on the BBC series Dragons’ Den, actress and entrepreneur Charlotte King pitched “ShoeLicks”, a unique idea to revamp a pair of tired heels with interchangeable solestickers. It’s been over 20 years since Christian Louboutin’s redlacquer soles became a source of shoe envy, but with Charlotte’s invention you can achieve a similar designer look.

■ Visit armitage design.co.uk for more details

Simply place the sticker to the bottom of each shoe and cut to fit. ShoeLicks are designed to stay put for up to eight wears and, since they’re waterproof, they can fully withstand the British weather.

■ Visit shoe licks.com for details

Pure And Simple

“While wandering through the dramatic Scottish landscape, I love to observe and absorb my surroundings, finding inspiration in everything from historic artefacts to cubist rock formations,” says Edinburgh-based jewellery designer Jenny Laidlaw. Indeed, her simple yet striking work is characterised by geometric designs, lines and minimalist shapes—much like the clusters of jagged rocks that pepper rural Scotland.

“My style has been slowly evolving for years,” Jenny explains. “The natural forms and intricate patterns that were so prominent in my previous collections have

given way to a more minimalist style.”

Soon after completing her MA in silver-smithing at Edinburgh College of Art, her unique approach has earned her a considerable reputation: just last year, Jenny was asked to exhibit at the prestigious Goldsmiths Fair in London—a leading annual contemporary jewellery event.

“Being selected for Goldsmiths Fair was one of last year’s highlights,” says Jenny. “The standard of craftsmanship and quality of design was so high. I have to admit that I was slightly in awe of the other jewellers and silversmiths I was exhibiting alongside!”

■ Visit jennylaidlaw.com for details

sleep BeautiFully

The benefits of a good night’s sleep can be seen in the skin, so why not help the rejuvenating process with a quality night cream? Origin’s plantscription youth-renewing night cream (£48; origins.co.uk) is a non-greasy formula that’s earned a reputation for its miraculous results. After using it for a month, I can attest that it’s extremely effective in firming the skin.

Cartilage damaged by arthritis

In 1980, in Heraklion, a beautiful village in Crete, the biggest discovery for those suffering from arthritis was made. For your information: in Crete, snails are the national dish and are in almost every meal. In Crete, arthritis is almost unheard of, 78% less than in other European countries.

In 1980, scientists were able to prove that snails have a unique protein (that is found abundantly in these animals) that allows them to regenerate, rebuild and heal damage to their shells or cuts I-N-S-T-A-N-T-L-Y!

That is why the inhabitants of Crete don’t suffer from arthritis! By eating snails regularly they have this immense privilege. We bring to you the first cure made with Snail Elixir. For the first time, you can now benefit from this arthritis healer “The Snail Elixir Miracle”

Just 24 hours after starting your treatment you will feel an improvement in your arthritic joints. If you suffer from arthritis, don’t waste a second and try this miraculous product.

It’s new, it’s Certified and the results are guaranteed. “100% satisfaction or get your money back, for 30 days”.

DON’T MISS OUT ON IT!

Testimonial

BEFOREAFTER

Just 15 minutes are enough for deep action to start

Your joint pains will stop thanks to strong and natural anti-inflammatory power

Your cartilage will be cleaned and cleared of stagnant dead cells.

Your cartilage will be intensively rehydrated. Your joints will regain their flexibility, mobility and shape.

Your cartilage will heal and be nourished in depth. Tissue regeneration accelerates naturally.

Your natural antioxidant functions will be boosted and create a highly protective barrier against free radicals. Snails

When you buy the radical or intensive course

TO ORDER BY PHONE: Call 0871 784 8781 OFFER CODE: VUK137 OR ORDER ONLINE AT: www.wellformuk.co.uk/VUK137

My nephew had noticed that all his small aches and pains had healed quickly since he worked collecting snails for a pharmaceutical company. Last winter, he encouraged me to try this extraordinary elixir for my back and knee pain.

I was really sceptical at the start. But I must admit that ever since my first treatment, I haven’t experienced any pain. Now I can go back for my long hikes and go on excursions with my wife without even feeling any inconvenience.

Thanks! John P. -69 years old – Paris

Normal cartilage that has healed and regenerated perfectly

Thousands sold in France!

Relieves joint pains

Cleans the cartilage

Regenerates & nourishes the cartilage

100% natural Scientifically proven results

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Repairing Action:

Allantoin heals and eliminates dead cells.

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Glycolic acid nourishes and hydrates the cartilage. Collagen and Elastin ensure the joints remain flexible.

Antioxidant Action:

Vitamins A, C and E release their anti-radical actives. They have a Protective and anti-inflammatory power.

Spring is in the air, but this poignant debut and hard-to-resist sequel will keep you curled up inside

March Fiction

Anatomy of a Soldier

by Harry Parker (Faber, £14.99)

James writes and presents the BBC Radio 4 literary quiz The Write Stuff

The main character in Harry Parker’s first novel is a British soldier who loses his legs when he stands on Improvised Explosive Device (IED). The fact that the same thing happened to Parker himself perhaps gives Anatomy of a Soldier an extra emotional punch, but this is still an astonishingly accomplished and powerful book in its own right.

It’s also a rather unusual one—because each of the 45 chapters is narrated by a different inanimate object that’s part of Tom’s story: among them, his tourniquet, one of his artificial legs and even the IED itself. Lest you think this sounds over-clever, the contrast between blameless objects and the uses to which they’re put in war only adds to the poignancy. The novel builds into a fully-rounded and overwhelmingly vivid picture of every aspect of Tom’s experience: from being a soldier in a country that he doesn’t really understand to being stared at by children in shops (“Mummy, that man’s a robot. Look”). Highly recommended.

NAME THE AUTHoR

(Answer on p128)

Can you guess the writer from these clues (and, of course, the fewer you need the better)?

1. He was knighted in 2009 for services to literature.

2. The final book in his most famous series was The Shepherd’s Crown

3. He died in March last year.

Nice Work (If You Can Get It)

by Celia Imrie (Bloomsbury, £12.99)

You can’t help feeling that Celia Imrie’s lateblossoming career in fiction owes quite a lot to the success of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, in which she played one of the adventurous oldies. There’s the same central theme of sixtysomethings refusing to fade away quietly, the same good-natured tone—and now the same willingness to serve up a sequel.

So it is that after last year’s bestselling Not Quite Nice, Theresa Simmonds and her expat chums are back, still living in the South of France, but this time with their hearts set on opening a restaurant.

Admittedly, this seems an ambitious plan given that for most of the book, they don’t really know what they’re doing. Nonetheless (and I don’t think a spoiler alert is needed here), they win through in the end, thanks to a mixture of neversay-die pluckiness and sheer charm.

And in fact, pretty much the same applies to the novel itself: although Imrie often seems out of her depth (the minor characters are cartoonish, for example, and parts of the plot madly implausible), she goes about her work with such infectious relish that the cheerfully frothy result is hard to resist.

My Life in Houses by Margaret Forster (Vintage, £8.99). Beginning in a Carlisle council estate, Forster considers all the places she’s lived—and the meaning of home.

Time of Death by Mark billingham (sphere, £7.99). In the latest in the series, Tom Thorne investigates an abduction in the village where his girlfriend grew up.

The Book of the People: How to Read the Bible by A N Wilson (Atlantic, £9.99). Fascinating reflections, based on a lifetime of fluctuating religious belief, from an always hugely readable writer—and old friend of Reader’s Digest .

Men in White Suits: Liverpool FC in the 1990s by simon Hughes (corgi, £9.99).

Liverpool’s decline from their glory days, told with the aid of the players who witnessed it.

The Santangelos by Jackie collins (simon & schuster, £7.99). Collins’s last book before her death last year. As action-packed and blockbusting as ever.

A mother celebrates her daughter’s talent and individuality— and the extraordinary friend who encourages her RD’s REcoMMENDED READ

Touching From A Distance

Within a year of her daughter’s birth in 2009, Arabella CarterJohnson already suspected that something was wrong. Even by babies’ standards, Iris Grace was a frighteningly bad sleeper. She also appeared unmistakably distant.

Arabella was told it was far too soon to worry—but Iris increasingly found the presence of other children distressing and, after saying “dada” at eight months, stopped talking.

Finally, aged two, she was diagnosed as autistic by a doctor who offered Arabella the less-thanhelpful advice that, “There are an abundance of therapies you can try, but very few work.”

In fact, by a lengthy process of trial

Iris Grace by Arabella CarterJohnson is published by Michael Joseph at £18.99.

and error, Arabella found activities that obviously do help her daughter, including music and riding on the back of her dad’s bike. Above all, Iris suddenly demonstrated a remarkable talent for art: producing large multilayered Impressionist-style paintings that take her several days and that once led to the Leicester Mercury headline, “Top artist aged 3.”

But this beautifully illustrated book (as well as Iris’s paintings, we get Arabella’s terrific photos) is much too honest to be a simple record of triumph over adversity. Iris has made progress, but by no means steadily, with promising developments often followed by periods of regression. As Arabella says, “She will always be on the spectrum...she slides along that spectrum from moment to moment.”

Meanwhile, one particularly extraordinary source of help has been a cat called Thula. She seems to understand exactly what Iris needs at any given time, sits riveted when Iris paints (see photo over the page)—and has helped her accept such previously meltdown-inducing activities as having a bath, getting a haircut and going to sleep.

And, as this extract shows, Thula had this ability from early on. The scene is set in Iris’s bedroom, where a seriously sleep-deprived Arabella is near breaking point…

‘‘

As Iris’s frustrations mounted she started to cry, and her sobs filled the quiet room. I felt so hopeless as I held her close. Nothing seemed to comfort her apart from the book and I longed for some help, but she pushed away all who tried apart from me. The pressure of that was becoming too hard to bear. The highs and lows over the previous four years had been exhilarating but exhausting. Our minds were constantly trying to

keep up and understand her world as she was learning to be in ours.

Downstairs, the credits at the end of the film were rolling and the fire in the wood-burning stove was almost out.

‘What is it, Thula?’

My husband P-J looked at our new kitten who had suddenly got up off his lap. Her eyes focused towards the door and she had one foot raised, perfectly poised in the air. She was alert: something had grabbed her attention—cries that were undetectable to his ears were like sirens to hers. Then her legs were moving fast. Scooting round the corner, she flew up the stairs into

Iris and Thula, her furry friend; (right) two of her paintings

Iris’s bedroom and jumped on to the bed. She curled up next to Iris, ignored the crying and started grooming herself, licking her paws and rubbing them over her ears.

Almost immediately, Iris’s mood changed. She giggled at Thula’s huge ears as they were folded down forward and then pinged back. The long tufts of black fur at the tips were backlit by the hallway, and her outline was adorable, with large ears set upon her tiny head. Fine longer hairs along her silhouette glowed in the darkness. The whiskers were next, and it was a performance like nothing I have seen before, combining comedy with beauty. Iris relaxed and put down her book. Seizing the opportunity, I slipped out of the room and waited at the bottom of the stairs, listening for the inevitable crying that would take me back to her side. There was silence: no bounces, no pages being turned, and no hums or cries.

I waited till suspense got the better of me, then tiptoed to the door of her room and peeked in. Iris had fallen asleep with her kitten by her side and they were turned towards each other. Iris’s hand rested on Thula’s shoulders and I could hear a gentle

AND THE NAME oF THE AUTHoR is… Sir Terry Pratchett. His Discworld series has sold over 70m copies in 37 languages.

Although still a tiny kitten and a new member of our family, Thula was already watching out for Iris, her faithful companion

purr. Their bodies mirrored one another with Thula’s paws up against Iris’s arm. Although still a tiny kitten and a new member of our family, Thula was already watching out for Iris, her faithful companion. She was a friend to me too, stepping in and helping when I needed it the most. I didn’t even need to ask, she knew instinctively what to do and how to help. This magical kitten was changing our lives and this was just the beginning.

Books THAT CHANGED MY LIFE

Tracy Chevalier is the author of historical novels, including the international best-seller Girl with a Pearl Earring, which was made into an Oscar-nominated film. Her latest book At the Edge of the Orchard is out this month.

The Little House in the Big Woods

BY LAURA INGALLS WILDER

This is the first in the Little House series. I read them when I was about seven and loved them all. Laura had plain mousy hair and was naughty and I really related to her. The mother in the book, Ma, is a central character—the glue that holds the family together. My mother was ill when I was growing up and died before I was eight. I think I was looking for that ideal of the perfect mother and close-knit family, and found much comfort in these books.

Charles II. She brings a modern, emotional feel to the period and opened my eyes to what historical novels can achieve. The key is finding universal truths that remain constant through time—and then playing them for all they’re worth.

The Vermeer Exhibition Catalogue FROM THE JOHANNES VERMEER EXHIBITION IN THE HAGUE, 1996

Restoration

BY ROSE TREMAIN

Rose did something extraordinary with this novel by making it feel utterly contemporary, though it’s set in 1660, the year of the restoration of the monarchy and the accession of

I’ve always loved Vermeer and try to see as many of his paintings as possible. So when this exhibition came to The Hague, my husband and I flew over. Back home with the catalogue, I was looking at “Girl with a Pearl Earring” and thinking, Why is she looking at the painter like that? and the idea for my book began to take shape. They didn’t know who the girl was and that felt like a gift to me—because it meant I could just make it up. As told to Caroline Hutton

You Couldn’t Make It Up

Win £50 for your true, funny stories! Go to readersdigest. co.uk/contact-us or facebook.com/readersdigestuk

mY DaUGHTeR’s TeaCHeR told me that, in an RE lesson, my daughter had been asked to draw on paper her perception of the “Flight into Egypt” with Mary, Joseph and baby Jesus.

There was a fourth person in my daughter’s drawing and her teacher was puzzled as to who it was. My daughter told her, “Pontius, the pilot!”

RHIanna YaRDLeY, Clwyd

I’D TaKen mY CHILDRen to visit their aunt in Guernsey, and we were to be joined by my other sister and her children. On the morning they arrived, my sister and I were excited. “The eagle has landed!” I said as their plane touched down.

I had a lot of explaining to do when I overheard my son telling his cousins, “When your plane got in, Mummy said, ‘The evils have landed.’ ”

aBIGaIL WaTKIns, Derbyshire

mY FOUR-YeaR-OLD answered the phone when I was in the bathroom. It was the rector ringing to confirm a

christening date. My son told him, “Mummy can’t come to the phone right now because she’s doing a number two.”

I still can’t look him straight in the face when I go to church!

HannaH BRYan, Liverpool

I Was UPseT and sent my boyfriend a text saying, “How could you cheat on me?” I got a text back immediately in reply from my dad. I texted back

Cartoon by Guto Dias

and said, “Sorry, Dad—that message was meant for Ben.”

Back came another text from Dad. “On a totally unrelated issue, have you seen my rifle anywhere?”

He’s always been a protective father!

sHeLaGH CLaRKsOn, Norfolk

FOR a BIRTHDaY TReaT, we took our four-year-old granddaughter to the local wildlife centre. At each cage or enclosure she would point at the occupant and proclaim in a very loud voice, “Birdy!”

girl and mentioned that he thought the headteacher wasn’t pleasant. She retorted huffily, asking if he knew who she was. He replied no, and she introduced herself as the headteacher’s daughter.

My son quickly asked her if she knew who he was.

“No,” she replied.

“Phew!” he said, relieved, and walked off.

This continued unabated until we reached the enclosure that contained ostriches. On coming face-to-face with one of them she looked surprised, but said nothing. Then suddenly, and in a very confident manner, she said, “Horse!”

mY HUsBanD Was FRaUGHT after a tough day at work, so I decided to take him and our three kids out for a meal to help him relax.

BRIan THaKe, Dorset

THe LOVeLIesT PResenT I ever received was a box from my son Cal, which appeared empty. I peered inside and, puzzled, asked him if he’d forgotten to put something in it.

He exclaimed, “But Mummy, it’s full of kisses I blew into it!”

I just had to hug him and say sorry. It made my day!

Vanessa smITH, Flintshire

mY TeenaGe sOn had had a bad day at school—he hadn’t done an assignment and had been spoken to by the headteacher.

The following Saturday there was a school disco. He was talking to a

He was still feeling irritable when we arrived at the restaurant, so when the waiter approached and asked, “Would sir like a table?”, he snapped, replying, “No thanks, we’ll eat off the floor...carpet for five, please.”

I don’t know who was more embarrassed—the waiter or me!

I TOOK mY DaUGHTeR eLLen (four years old), son Cai (three years old) and his friend to church one day. The boys were a little noisy and my daughter told them off, saying, “You can’t talk loudly in church.”

“Oh yes?” retorted her brother’s friend. “Who’s going to stop us?”

My daughter pointed to the two men at the back of the church by the door. “They will,” she said. “They’re hushers.”

seRen ROBeRTs, Flintshire

CORRIna WILLIams, Denbighshire

CaROLIne aLDen, Bristol

“I won £1,000 for 60p”

Alison O’Brien, 42, from Birkenhead tells us how she netted cash on Bingo

ONCE THE SHOPPING WAS DONE, I snuggled up in bed with my laptop and logged into Reader’s Digest Bingo, of which I’ve been a member for over four years!

I logged into my favourite bingo room, Emerald. The tickets are a bargain, starting from just 1p each. The lines are dabbed off automatically so you never miss a number.

But something was different this time. My Bingo game had carried on

while I was enjoying my cup of tea and I’d only gone and won the £1,000 jackpot!

I bought myself a new laptop and even took the family to Prenton Park to see my beloved Tranmere Rovers FC.

I just want to say a big thank you to Reader’s Digest Bingo for making it all possible!

*New customers only. Registration required. Minimum £10 deposit. You must be 18 or older. UK only. Offer ends 30 April 2016. You must enter the promo code RDBINGO on registration and accept the Welcome Bonus when you deposit £10 to receive the £25 bonus. 250% Welcome Bonus – max £100. Bonus must be wagered four times before withdrawals. Wager and cash-out requirement apply. See full T&Cs at readersdigestbingo.co.uk Play responsibly. For more information, visit gambleaware.co.uk

IT PAYS TO INCREASE YOUR

Word Power

Anyone who’s struggled through a game of Scrabble is constantly amazed by the number of obscure words in existence (“Qi” and “za,” anyone?). This month, all our words are derived from Merriam-Webster’s fourth edition of The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary, which added some 5,000 words to the game’s lexicon. Answers on the next page.

1. mores n—A: places for sailing boats to anchor. B: customs. C: camp-fire treats.

2. hinky adj— A: suspicious. B: high-strung. C: very wealthy.

3. jiggy adj—A: weak-kneed. B: devious. C: pleasurably excited.

4. haimish adj—A: homey. B: homely. C: harmful.

5. scrunchy n—A: folding chair. B: open-toed sandal. C: hair holder.

6. trog n A: hooligan. B: tree frog. C: ancient beverage.

7. bilby n—A: Australian folding case. B: small mammal. C: tall hedgerow.

8. delish adj—A: delirious. B: delicate. C: delicious.

9. cred n—A: credulity. B: credibility. C: credenza.

10. snarf v—A: to wrap around, as with a scarf. B: eat sparingly. C: eat greedily.

11. magalog n—A: magazinecatalogue hybrid. B: maths formula. C: high-speed train.

12. linguica n—A: type of bacteria. B: traditional Spanish dialect. C: type of sausage.

13. echt adj—A: genuine. B: artificial. C: superior.

14. doula n—A: fancy flannel. B: childbirth helper. C: part of the human brain.

15. barista n—A: coffee server. B: prison guard. C: bartender.

Answers

1. mores—[B] customs. “She lived in Paris for ten years, but she never got used to the French mores.”

2. hinky—[A] suspicious. “I’m telling the truth, so I don’t know why you’re acting so hinky.”

3. jiggy—[C] pleasurably excited. “When this song comes on the radio, I usually get a bit jiggy.”

4. haimish—[A] homey. “Their house has a nice haimish quality to it.”

5. scrunchy—[C] hair holder. “When cleaning up my daughter’s bedroom, I often find myself picking up one scrunchy after another.”

6. trog [A] hooligan. “Don’t act like such a trog when we have guests.”

7. bilby—[B] small mammal. “I understand that you want to get a pet, but I’m honestly not sure that a bilby is worth considering.”

8. delish—[C] delicious. “That meal was the most delish I’ve ever had.”

9. cred—[B] credibility. “It’s taken me a long

time to build up some cred with these people.”

10. snarf—[C] eat greedily. “I had to watch you snarf everything the waiter put in front of you.”

11. magalog—[A] magazinecatalogue hybrid. “Sometimes I’d rather flip through a magalog than actually go shopping.”

12. linguica—[C] type of sausage. “The key ingredient in a great stew is fresh linguica.”

13. echt—[A] genuine. “She has certain echt qualities that I value in a friend.”

14. doula—[B] childbirth helper. “For this baby, we decided to get as much help as possible—a doctor, a midwife and a doula.

WORD OF THE DAY*

DUDGEON:

a feeling of offence or deep resentment.

Alternative suggestions:

“How a dungeon master tells you about his dungeon with a heavy cold.”

“A not-so-smart pigeon.”

“A male sturgeon that can’t produce caviar.”

15. barista—[A] coffee server. “If you can’t tell a no-foam latte from a decaf, two-percent cappuccino, you’ll never be a successful barista.”

VOCABULARY RATINGS

9 & below: Bunker. 10–12: Fairway. 13–15: Hole-in-one.

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Challenge yourself by solving these puzzles and mind stretchers, then check your answers on page 139.

BrainTeasers

high Point

What’s the missing number?

Path Puzzle

Draw a path that goes from the opening at the top of the grid to the opening at the bottom. As the path winds from one cell to the next, it can move up, down, left or right, but not diagonally. It cannot pass through any cell more than once.

The numbers around the grid tell how many cells the path must pass through in the corresponding row or column. If a row or column has no number, then the path may pass through as many or as few cells as you like.

(Hig H Point) Marcel Danesi; (Pat H Puzzle)

Path Puzzle Redux

This time, there are more than two openings in the grid, but only two of them are part of the solution. It’s up to you to figure out which ones to use and which ones to ignore.

Roman Columns

What digits should replace the question marks on the grid?

Cubism

How many cubes are represented in this image?

* Entry is open only to residents of the UK, Channel Islands, Isle of Man and Republic of Ireland aged 18 or over. It is not open to employees of Vivat Direct Limited (t/a Reader’s Digest), its subsidiary companies and all other persons associated with the competition.

BrainTeasers: Answers

high Point

4. The number at the apex of each triangle, multiplied by the sum of the two numbers on either side of the base, produces the number in the triangle’s centre. For example, 2 x (8 + 3) = 22. (Or, if you prefer, 2 x 8 + 2 x 3 = 22.)

£50 PRize question

Roman Columns

7 and 4. Add 1 to each number in column I to generate column VI. Similarly, the numbers in column V are larger by one than those in column II, and the numbers in column IV are larger by one than those in column III.

Cubism 24.

801 623 712 534 267 178 ?

the first correct answer we pick on March 3 wins £50!* email excerpts @readersdigest.co.uk

answer published in the april issue answeR to FebRuaRy’s PRize question

blanket. the others begin with the first three letters of successive american presidents: carter, reagan, bush, clinton. the next word should, therefore, also start with bus for bush (george W) and not the first three letters of our former prime minister: blair. it’s also the word with the fewest vowels.

and the £50 goes to… Dawn Vanstone, Devon

Laugh!

Win £50 for every reader’s joke we publish! Go to readersdigest. co.uk/contact-us or facebook.com/readersdigestuk

MR JONES GOES TO HIS LOCAL BARBERS for a shave. While he’s being foamed, he mentions how difficult it is to shave fully around the cheeks.

“I have the solution,” the barber replies. “Place this small wooden ball between the cheeks and the gum to puff the skin out.”

The man has the closest shave he’s had for years. “But what if I swallow the ball?” he asks.

“Oh, just bring it back tomorrow. Everyone else does.”

JOSEPH STOKOE, Durham

TWO MEN, TOM AND FRANK, have loved cricket more than anything for their entire lives. One day, Tom says to Frank, “If you die before me, please promise you’ll come back and tell me if there’s cricket in Heaven.”

Frank agrees and makes Tom promise the same thing. About a week later, Tom dies.

One night, Frank wakes up to somebody calling his name. Scared, he asks, “Who’s there?”

Suddenly Tom appears and says, “Hi Frank. I’m speaking from Heaven. I’ve got some good news and some bad news. The good news first: there’s cricket in heaven!”

Frank gets very excited, but then he asks, “What’s the bad news?”

Tom looks at him grimly and says, “I looked at the line-up for tomorrow and you’re opening the batting.”

TWO CANNIBALS WERE EATING A CLOWN. One said to the other, “Does he taste funny to you?”

COMEDIAN TOMMY COOPER

ONE DAY, A FATHER FINISHES AT WORK

and on his way home he suddenly remembers that it’s his daughter’s birthday. He pulls over to a toy shop and asks the salesperson, “How much for one of those Barbies in the display window?”

The salesperson answers, “Which one do you mean, sir? We have: Work-Out Barbie for £19.95, Shopping Barbie for £19.95, Beach Barbie for

£19.95, Disco Barbie for £19.95, Ballerina Barbie for £19.95, Astronaut Barbie for £19.95 and Skater Barbie for £19.95. Oh, and Divorced Barbie for £265.95.”

The amazed father asks, “It’s what?! Why is the Divorced Barbie £265.95 and the others only £19.95?”

The exasperated salesperson rolls her eyes, sighs and answers, “Sir, Divorced Barbie comes with: Ken’s Car, Ken’s House, Ken’s Boat, Ken’s Furniture, Ken’s Computer and…one of Ken’s Friends.” SEEN AT REDDIT.COM

I GOT AN ODD-JOB MAN IN. He was useless. I gave him a list of eight things to do and he only did numbers one, three, five and seven.

COMEDIAN STEPHEN GRANT

A MAN GOES TO THE SURGERY. and is admitted into the doctor’s office. “Doctor, doctor,” he says. “I can’t stop singing ‘The Green Green Grass of Home’. ”

“That’s what we call the Tom Jones Syndrome,” says the doctor.

“Oh really? Is it a common thing?” asks the man.

“It’s not unusual,” says the doctor.

TIM BUCHANAN, Surrey

I ALWAYS LOOK FOR a woman who has a tattoo. I see a woman with a tattoo and I think, OK, here’s a gal who’s capable of making a decision she’ll regret in the future.

COMEDIAN RICHARD JENI

COVERING UP

A well-placed book, album or magazine can totally change your view (as seen on the internet)

TWO WOMEN CALLED AT MY DOOR and asked what bread I ate. When I said, “White,” they gave me a lecture on the benefits of brown bread for half an hour.

I think they were Hovis Witnesses.

STUART COLLINSON, Edinburgh

I WAS WATCHING THE LONDON

MARATHON and saw one runner dressed as a chicken and another runner dressed as an egg. I thought, This could be interesting.

COMEDIAN PADDY LENNOX

YOU’RE ON A HORSE, galloping at a constant speed. On your right side is a sharp drop off, and on your left side is an elephant travelling at the same speed as you. Directly in front of you is another galloping horse, but your

horse is unable to overtake it. Behind you is a lion running at the same speed as you and the horse in front of you. So what must you do to safely remove yourself from this highly dangerous situation?

Get off the merry-go-round!

SEEN AT LAUGHFACTORY.COM

WHAT HAPPENS to a frog’s car when it breaks down? It gets toad away.

SEEN ONLINE

YOU KNOW, when you’re a fat guy, you don’t need a reason to sweat. Guys come up to me and go, “Jeez, what have you been doing? Jumping rope in the attic or something?”

“Umm, no...I peeled an orange about an hour ago, why?

COMEDIAN KEVIN JAMES

OFFICE BANTER (OF A KIND)

These controversial quotes from Twitter feed @GSElevator are supposedly what’s heard in the lift at the offices of Goldman Sachs. Uncomfortable truths or corporate pig-headedness? We’ll let you decide…

“Teamwork is a group of people doing what I tell them to.”

“If you really want to get to know someone on a first date, just ask about their first pet or favourite teacher. Then read all their emails.”

“If you see me opening a car door for a girl, it’s either a new girlfriend or a new car.”

“Some people assume I’m quiet, boring or shy, without ever realising that I just don’t like them.”

“Let’s be honest. There’s no way your guess is as good as mine.”

Beat the Cartoonist!

Think of a witty caption for this cartoon—the three best suggestions, along with the cartoonist’s original, will be posted on our website in midMarch. If your entry gets the most votes, you’ll win £100 and a framed copy of the cartoon, with your caption.

Submit to captions@readersdigest.co.uk or online at readersdigest.co.uk/caption by March 11. We’ll announce the winner in our May issue.

January’s Winner

In modern electoral terms, 67 per cent of the vote would be considered a landslide to end all landslides. Well, that’s what reader John Samson secured for his caption, “That’ll stop him pocketing the cutlery”, leaving cartoonist Steve Jones’ original effort, “He was always destined for bigger things…” trailing in his wake. It’s barely a competition any more…

“What’s It All About?”

Legendary guitarist and songwriter

Brian May discusses music, his memories of David Bowie and why he’s aware of his own mortality.

IN THE APRIL ISSUE Plus

• Reconstructive Surgery for War Victims

• “I Remember”: Joan Bakewell

• Fixing Joint Pain

• Returning to Sarajevo

• Queen Elizabeth Turns 90

60 Second Stand-Up

We caught up with wry Canadian comic Craig Campbell

WHAT’S YOUR FAVOURITE OF YOUR OWN JOKES?

I tell a story about the Penticton Peachfest riot—probably the only one in Canada that had nothing to do with hockey.

HAVE YOU FOUND ANY PARTS OF THE COUNTRY TO BE FUNNIER THAN OTHERS?

Well, I think it’s pretty common that the more dire the place, the more robust their humour. So Scotland is always fun.

WHAT’S YOUR MOST MEMORABLE HECKLE EXPERIENCE?

Someone once called me a moose... well...something you’d have to blank out. Feel free to look it up. It’s now my nickname.

ANY FUNNY TALES ABOUT A TIME YOU BOMBED ON STAGE?

There’s nothing funny about bombing. It’s one of the most harrowing feelings of existence.

WHAT’S YOUR FAVOURITE ONE-LINER?

There’s no personality to a one-liner. I frequently take an hour to tell two main stories.

WHO’S YOUR COMEDY INSPIRATION?

My grandfather—he was the only one of my family that shot at Hitler. Now that I think back on it, he likely suffered from PTSD.

IF YOU WERE A FLY ON THE WALL, WHOSE WALL WOULD YOU BE ON?

Probably my own, so I could reconfirm what the hell is going on most of the time.

Craig is on tour across the UK with his stand-up show “Don’t Look Down” from March 3 until June 18. For details and to book tickets, visit craigcampbell.info