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24.07.21 10

Kelly Slater wearing his sustainable clothing brand, Outerknown

5 Caitlin Moran Going out is the new staying in, just as it used to be. 6 What I’ve learnt No one needs a Ferrari after 50, says the Who’s Roger Daltrey. 9 Spinal column: Melanie Reid My husband’s tech-phobic; I despair. 10 King of the waves On the water with Kelly Slater, the world’s greatest surfer. 18 Cover story Sex education Can an app improve your love life? Jane Mulkerrins meets the entrepreneur who’s betting that hers can. 26 Jason Miller The Trump man who wants The Donald back on social media. Plus, what happened to the president’s team after the White House. 35 Eat! special Imagine you’re on a Greek island. Plus, six delicious summer soups.

46 Age of anxiety In the wake of Covid, could we be facing a pandemic of panic attacks? 54 Pout! Nadine Baggott’s 20 best beauty bargains. 58 Home! A restored Greek island hideaway. Plus, page 65, modern Mediterranean style. 68 Giles Coren reviews Camden Beer Hall et al. 74 Beta male: Ben Machell Stockton-on-Tees beats the Cotswolds every time.

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COVER: DAN KENNEDY. THIS PAGE: RYAN T FOLE/OUTERKNOWN

FIVE BITS OF WATERPROOF KIT

EDITOR NICOLA JEAL DEPUTY EDITOR LOUISE FRANCE ART DIRECTOR CHRIS HITCHCOCK ASSOCIATE EDITOR JANE MULKERRINS ASSISTANT EDITOR TONY TURNBULL FEATURES EDITOR MONIQUE RIVALLAND CHIEF SUB-EDITOR AMANDA LINFOOT DEPUTY ART DIRECTOR JO PLENT DEPUTY CHIEF SUB-EDITOR CHRIS RILEY PICTURE EDITOR ANNA BASSETT DEPUTY PICTURE EDITOR LUCY DALEY CONTRIBUTING EDITOR BRIDGET HARRISON EDITORIAL ASSISTANT GEORGINA ROBERTS

The Times Magazine 3

CAITLIN MORAN

I’m on tour and feel alive again

Audiences order ‘pints of wine’. That’s 16 months on Zoom for you

ROBERT WILSON

I

’ve just finished the live tour for the paperback edition of my book*, and, due to the weird and shifting parameters of the lockdown, the shows were often the first live event in each city or town since March 2020.

It felt a bit “moment in time-y” – to be criss-crossing the country, by train, and watching the live sector slowly come back to life. Like observing one of those frogs that can go into an unconscious state when frozen solid, then spring back into life when it defrosts.

The “frozen in time” element was more apparent in some places than others. At the Festival Theatre in Edinburgh, the women related how, earlier in the day, they’d opened a door, only to be surprised by a room filled with glitter. They were bemused. “We were racking our brains, trying to work out why – then remembered the last show we did here, March 2020, was a kids’ show. Loads of glitter.”

Presumably, they’d intended to sweep it up the next day, but then Boris made his televised announcement and everything shut down overnight. Since then, a room full of glitter has just sat there, empty. Waiting for a time when we have kids’ shows, and glitter, again. Waiting for the doors to open.

Opening doors and seeing what’s inside: during the pandemic, I realised how much a city is like an advent calendar – a joy behind each door you open. A sense of being stuck in time when they remain firmly shut.

I stood in the foyer of St George’s Hall, Bradford, on a Sunday afternoon – doors flung open for the first time in 20 months – and watched the people walking past do a double-take. “It’s back!” “The lights are on!”

“The bar is open!”

I guess it’s the urban equivalent of spring – this late-summer opening is city-spring. The bands are returning, like swallows! The festivals are blossoming again! The nights grow longer – because you can stay out and dance!

But it’s a rusty, tentative start. The stage door at the Newcastle Opera House had grown stiff, and difficult, after a year and a half of being locked. “I’ve forgotten how to open it!” the stage manager shouted, through the door, as I stood outside, in the rain.

Inside, the smell was of mildew and damp: these big old buildings need the body heat of people inside them; they’re big brick hearts that need people flowing in and out of them, like blood.

In Basingstoke, by way of contrast, the

There’s a kind of intense eye contact I will always associate with summer 2021 – joyous, shiny, but not too far from tears

constant click, click, click from the handsanitiser pumps, all down the corridors, filled the air with the sharp, semi-alcoholic smell of disinfectant – like a secular thurible.

Hands clean and slightly raw, “proper” shoes on for the first time in a year and a half, nice frocks, a slightly dazed look in the eye – as if being in a roomful of people again is quite a psychedelic affair, after 472 days at home, on Zoom. The spirit has been willing – the bar staff at every venue reported that “a pint of wine” was a popular option – but we were all a little… overwhelmed to be in rooms full of people again. There’s a particular kind of intense eye contact I will always associate with summer 2021 – joyous, shiny, but also not too far from tears, telegraphing desperately over the top of a mask. When you say, “Hi! How you been?”, people reply, “Not too bad, you know…” and we all know it’s still too soon to give the proper reply to that question. We don’t yet understand how we’ve been.

Apparently, it takes roughly five years before you can begin properly to understand, contextualise and move on from seismic life events. No one is even trying to do that yet.

For now, we just want to enjoy doing this old new thing: going out. Being together. Laughing, and hearing laughing – rather than just typing “LOL” into a screen that’s been hot in your hand, all day, and then going to bed alone.

In London, at the Royal Festival Hall, I got a text: there was an audience member who was both amazing and very, very ill. Each-dayfeeling-like-a-million-dollar-bonus ill. Could I give her a shout-out? “I think she’s owed more than a shout-out,” I replied.

I told the audience about the amazing woman and the existential million dollars – and then tried, as hard as I could, to sing the opening lines of All You Need Is Love. I’d figured it’s the modern hymn everyone knows the chorus to – and you need a modern hymn when simply saying something is pathetically, insultingly inadequate – but before I reached, “Nothing you can say/ But you can learn how to play the game,” the whole hall took it up, full-lunged, the air ignited, and there it was: 700 people, all two seats apart, disinfected and masked and battered, but turned into one thing once again. A crowd. A choir.

When the doors open again, it’s not rooms you find behind them, but people. n * More Than A Woman (£7.99, Ebury). It went in at No 1 on the Sunday Times bestseller chart – so thank you if you bought it!

The Times Magazine 5

What I’ve learnt Singer Roger Daltrey CBE, 77, is a founding member of the Who, who met at Acton County Grammar School and have sold more than 100 million albums worldwide. He lives in Sussex with his second wife, Heather, the mother of three of his eight children, and still regularly tours – in part to raise money for the Teenage Cancer Trust.

We always had music in the house. It felt like every house had a piano and someone who could knock out a song. People would sing everywhere: inside pubs and outside, and on building sites.

We have lost that now. I miss it.

Life wasn’t terrible after the Second World War. We had hardship, but it was good for us. We didn’t eat too much, so we weren’t obese. And everything we wanted we had to create. It wasn’t a throwaway society; you had to make things for yourself.

After the age of 50 you don’t need things like Ferraris. If I was to splurge now, I’d take some friends and family on a tour of Italy.

I believe in being strict with kids. In our house, everyone took turns at washing up and no one could duck it. There were tantrums, but you had to teach ’em. We don’t live in a world where some mythical creature will wipe your bum.

One of the toughest things to try to do is give advice to addicts.

Tough love is the only thing that works, but that’s often tougher on you.

I often hit out at people because I came from a rough neighbourhood. And that’s what boys did. You fought.

I only learnt to control my temper when the band threw me out – so I had to.

In the early days there were lots of parties, booze and relationships. We had no money, so we were sharing rooms and it was chaos. When we got arrested [in 1973 in Montreal, for wrecking a room], I’d been ordered to go to bed by the doctor, so I didn’t do the smashing up.

Some of those rooms did need a bit of redecorating.

Young people should stop listening to such loud music. They don’t need to. If your ears are ringing, you’ll pay. Pete [Townshend] and I both have to wear hearing aids and it’s no fun taking them out; without them, life’s a mumble.

INTERVIEW Lisa Grainger

6 The Times Magazine

I wouldn’t have been a good father when I was on the road. There’s no point in wishing that I could have. I couldn’t. When three daughters arrived on my doorstep [unexpectedly in the Nineties, the products of relationships with women in the Sixties], I accepted them and I love them very much. I am very lucky.

I would have preferred some reforms to Europe, rather than leaving.

Although I was never a huge fan. I could see what they were creating and that was a federal state without asking us.

Teenagers in hospital have totally different needs – psychologically and physically – from small children and adults. The drug companies don’t care about their needs though, because they make far more money from older people with cancer.

There is far too much overanalysis going on. The whole world is becoming neurotic. There are real things to worry about.

I don’t actually like my voice. But I know when I am getting the feeling right. I love voices like Joan Armatrading, Smokey Robinson, Howlin’ Wolf, Robert Plant, Paul Weller. And Van Morrison – his voice is the same as it always was.

I roll with things. What’s the point of worrying? An Austrian physio I had in the Eighties would say, “What are you holding on to pain for? When you let go, it will be all right.” That’s how I approach everything now.

There’s nothing wrong with being the best plumber in Sussex.

I didn’t finish school, and it didn’t matter, because I wasn’t academic.

I appreciate people protesting about climate change, but a pink boat in the middle of Oxford Circus isn’t going to solve anything. It seems that there are people creating new markets to make money, but nothing is being done to solve the CO2 problems.

Playing with a rock band is like sitting on a stool and trying to maintain balance after four drinks. Whereas playing with an orchestra is like being on a big old comfy sofa that you relax into. It is not easier. Just a different feel. n Champagne Cuvée Roger Daltrey, made to raise money for Teenage Cancer Trust, is available from eminent-life.com

SHUTTERSTOCK, GETTY IMAGES

Roger Daltrey

‘Pete Townshend and I both wear hearing aids now.

Without them life’s a mumble’

Roger Daltrey in 1968 and, opposite, in 2019

SPINAL COLUMN MELANIE REID

‘Teaching my husband how to unlock his new car is driving me round the bend’

MURDO MACLEOD

D

o not be surprised if, shortly, you read a news snippet in The Times to the effect that a certain columnist has been remanded in custody after a senseless assault on her loyal and devoted husband.

As she was wheeled away to the police van, she was overheard wailing, “Put the key fob in your pocket and grip the door handle. That’s all there is to it.”

My husband has just got a new car and I am living on the edge of reason. Teaching him how to lock and unlock the doors, or open the tailgate, without provoking a cacophony of bings, bongs, alarms, flashing lights and profanity, is taking its toll.

Mornings see me perched at the top of the steps above where he parks it, instruction manual on my lap. The manual has 500 pages, of which 50 are devoted to keys and doors.

Sub-headings: remote keyless access entry function. Warning chimes indicator. Disabling unlocking with the door-locking switch (Australia models). Aaaargh. I sizzle with frustration at my inability simply to get in the damn vehicle and intuit the solution.

I like cars. I was good at them.

Me: “You don’t need to press any buttons on the fob.”

Dave: “Janice said I did. The middle button, she said.” (It’s confusing. We have two friends, called Janice and Janis. Both have this make of car, but a different model from him.)

Me: “Which Janice? The one whose husband can’t work the key fob either?”

Him: “Yes.” Me: “But your car’s got double locking, it’s a luxury version – and that means you just hold the door handle and the lights flash and it’s open. Trust me. Just do it.”

Him: “Well, explain why, when I lock it, it’s never locked. It just opens again.”

Me: “That’s because the fob’s in your pocket when you test it to see if it’s locked. So it opens again.” I’m now putting my hands over my head and starting to rock to and fro, moaning.

Him (all expletives deleted): “While Richard Branson’s soaring into space, I’m trying to unlock my car so I can go and buy my newspapers. Plainly I’m an idiot. But why have they turned cars into computer games?

What’s wrong with a simple lock and unlock?

Why has car design been handed to spotty adolescents who want to recreate PlayStations?

I’m sure someday I’ll be found in the remotest part of the country unable to get out of my car for help. I’ll just wither away in the driving seat playing with the buttons, getting nowhere.”

Our low point came the night before I write this, when in the dusk he couldn’t differentiate the buttons on the fob. First he set off the burglar alarm. Then when he got home he left the lights on. And no, I don’t know how this was even possible. Nor does the instruction manual.

We went through a similar process with the last car, a fabulous German thing. It was, unbeknown to me because the seats were too

high for me to reach, basically a mobile computer. Dougie gave him lessons and made crib sheets – but he hated it and moaned for four years, so it’s gone back. The new car’s Japanese, and he really loves how it drives, the simplicity of the controls, the cream leather inside and the fact the outside is exactly the same colour as a copper beech tree. He just needs to be able to get into it.

We’ve been here before in other ways.

Notably after he bought a Chinese lawnmower called a Weibang, with a totally opaque instruction booklet that I had to interpret. He soon got the hang of it. Dave’s simply allergic to buttons. He has no patience and starts pressing them wildly, randomly. He’s been like this with electronics and machinery as long as I’ve known him. Shamelessly, he mocks engineers as bores, all gunge, gaskets and sprockets.

So I sing the timeless lament of the exiled petrolhead, the fixer, the pit crew. I married a man with zero interest in cars as long as they work, are nice and big, and have some status.

He doesn’t care about tyres, servicing, even knowing how to open the bonnet to top up the washers. That was my job. Now I just gnaw my fillings with frustration.

Him: “It won’t stop beeping.”

Me (demented, expletive deleted): “It’s not in Park.” n @Mel_ReidTimes Melanie Reid is tetraplegic after breaking her neck and back in a riding accident in April 2010 The Times Magazine 9

ON A ROLL: MEET THE WORLD’S GREATEST SURFER For 30 years, one man has dominated surfing – no other athlete comes close to matching his record.

Kelly Slater is the sport’s global star and still its poster boy at 49. Helena de Bertodano meets the king of the board at his Surf Ranch in California

Kelly Slater photographed by Patrick Hoelck and, opposite, surfing at Teahupoo, Tahiti

At the Billabong Pipe Masters in Oahu, 2019

Practising at Oahu’s North Shore, 2020

IT’S BEEN SAID THAT KELLY SLATER IS TO SURFING WHAT FRANK SINATRA WAS TO CROONING

PREVIOUS SPREAD: TIM McKENNA, CPLA/HEADPRESS/EYEVINE. THIS SPREAD: GETTY IMAGES

‘L

et’s go catch a couple of waves,” says Kelly Slater, 11 times world champion surfer, standing in front of me wearing only a pair of turquoise swimming trunks, surfboards tucked under each arm.

For a terrifying moment I think he is asking me to surf too. I may have lived in California for nearly a decade but my surfing skills are minimal. Slater, on the other hand, is known in the surf world as the Goat, the Greatest of All Time. With his 11 world titles and 55 career victories, he is both the youngest and oldest world champion in history.

No other athlete comes close to matching Slater’s sporting prowess for such an extended period of time. Not Michael Jordan, not Pelé, not even Muhammad Ali. As GQ magazine put it in 2014, “To find the proper analogy you need to look outside sport: Slater is to surfing what Sinatra was to crooning.” Seven years later Slater, 49, is still competing at championship level – he is even first reserve for the Olympics, which includes surfing this year for the first time, having missed out by a hair’s breadth in the selection process. The two US surfers who were chosen – John John Florence and Kolohe Andino – are both more than two decades younger than him. Slater may yet compete because both Florence and Andino are recovering from injuries.

But he is almost as well known off the surfboard. Named one of People’s magazine “50 most beautiful” in 1991, he has modelled for Versace, starred in Baywatch and dated Pamela Anderson (long after they first met on Baywatch). He has his own eco clothing brand, Outerknown, and is passionate about helping the environment.

“Jump on the ski,” Slater urges (to my relief he is not expecting me to surf). “Just take your

At Rip Curl Pro Portugal, 2019

sandals off. You shouldn’t get wet.” Seconds later we are roaring off on a jet ski with Connor O’Leary, a 27-year-old Australian pro.

Slater quickly peels off with a board and expertly navigates a monstrous wave, gliding straight up its face before executing several perfect turns, including a 360-degree aerial, then tucking down for the long barrel ahead.

For a few seconds he is invisible, the water arcing in a spray of diamonds over his body.

He shoots out at the end of the tube and dives into the water. The jet ski wheels round to pick him up and he hauls himself onto it, then sits back to back with me, soaking my T-shirt, which is a relief as it is 42C out here today.

We are at the Surf Ranch in Lemoore, a 2,000ft-long basin in central California, which produces the best mechanical wave in the world. The brainchild of Slater himself, it opened six years ago and is reshaping the surfing world with its revolutionary wave technology. The best surfers from all over the globe have gathered here this week for a pro

contest, part of the 2021 Championship Tour, and Slater is back in the game after recovering from a back injury.

I had arrived at the ranch the previous day for this interview but Slater had not shown up – which, I quickly gather, is par for the course. No one knows when or if he is arriving, although there are clues. He has swapped most of his practice waves with individual surfers. “This is classic Kelly,” says Erik Logan, CEO of the World Surf League, with affectionate frustration. “He’s made it so f***ing complicated, nobody knows when he’s surfing. Somehow he’s figured out a way to win the day already.”

“It’s like wrangling a cat,” says Will Dove, who oversees Slater’s schedule at the ranch.

Meanwhile Colin Carlos, his manager back in Los Angeles, is on the phone optimistically rescheduling me for a breakfast interview with Slater the following morning. Everyone at the Surf Ranch finds this hilarious. “It’s not going to happen,” they tell me. “Kelly is not a morning person.”

My best bet, I am told, is to hang out late at the ranch. He has an Airstream trailer on the property, where he sleeps when he is here.

But by 10.30pm there is still no sign of Slater and the three last surfers have finished their night waves. They offer me a lift back to my motel. Australian surfer Morgan Cibilic, aged 21 and currently ranked fourth in the world, is in the front. “You can interview me instead if you want,” he suggests. OK, I say. How does he rate his chances against Slater this weekend? “Kelly’s pretty good out there; he did build it,” replies Cibilic doubtfully. Liam O’Brien, 22, an Australian wildcard, chimes in: “Morgan will beat Kelly. No doubt.”

Just after 8am the next day, I am back at the ranch, ready for my breakfast interview.

It goes without saying that Slater has not The Times Magazine 13

DAVE MORGAN/ALPHA, GETTY IMAGES

arrived. I eat breakfast alone: a very nice lemon blueberry cake. So there is that. Logan, the CEO, passes my table. No, he sighs, no news: “It’s Kelly’s world. We just live in it.”

I wander around the basin to his Airstream, just in case he has managed to sneak in quietly. But no. I take a photo of the Airstream for the hell of it. This reminds me of the time I resorted to taking a photo of George Best’s wine glass; he had also bailed on an interview at the last minute. Are all great sporting heroes as unreliable as this?

But there is still hope. Slater has a practice wave scheduled at 10.08am and shortly before there is a flurry of activity. Someone has “eyes on the Goat”. The news spreads fast and the energy of the ranch subtly shifts. Now the real competition can begin.

Driving a huge black SUV full of surfboards, Slater pulls up near the water and gets out barefoot, an apple core tumbling to the ground and his tiny dog, Action, scampering behind him. “He forgot his shoes,” explains Kalani Miller, his girlfriend, who has done most of the driving from their home four hours away in San Clemente. Slater, it transpires, has only just flown in from Hawaii.

He has barely slept but exudes energy.

He races to the boardroom (not that sort of boardroom), camera crews trailing him. As he waxes his board he banters with the other surfers, donning a Father Christmas hat that someone has left in his locker and updating everyone on conditions in Hawaii. “Sixteen foot waves. I may pop back over next week.”

Slater’s schedule is dictated by waves. If he wakes up and hears the waves are good in Mexico or Bali, he’s off. “He flies by the seat of his pants,” says Miller. “I always have my bags packed just in case. The number of flights that we miss, change, book on the way to the airport, I couldn’t even tell you.”

Slater tells me about the time he pulled up to the kerb at Los Angeles airport 17 minutes before a flight to Chile. “Luckily the flight manager was a surfing fan.” Miller keeps the show on the road – just. “She’s really organised.

She makes lists every day of what we have to do. I’m like, ‘Stop bothering me with lists!’ ” The last year, of course, has been trickier for travel with pandemic and quarantine rules.

Nevertheless Slater has managed to spend most of that time between Bali, Australia, where he has a house on the Gold Coast, and Hawaii, where he also has a house.

We’re out on the water now and I’m trying to interview Slater on the back of the jet ski.

Is it easier to surf here than in the open sea?

“Surprisingly, no,” shouts Slater above the roar of the engine. “It has anomalies. There are currents in here. And you rarely ride a wave this long in the ocean.”

And then he’s off, paddling out to the next wave; it starts well but he falls in the barrel

HIS FATHER DRANK HEAVILY. ‘SURFING WAS A SAFE PLACE. I FITTED INTO THE OCEAN. NOTHING ELSE MATTERED’

Top: with Pamela Anderson in Australia, 1998.

Above: with his girlfriend, Kalani Miller

and admonishes himself. “I was a little lazy on it. I’m so mentally and physically exhausted that I couldn’t really picture what I needed to do to get in the right place.”

By his fourth wave he is back on form.

Everyone has come out to watch. As he climbs off the jet ski the camera crews swarm him, peppering him with questions about the Olympics. “If the Olympics were to run today, I’m in. But I’m third man so I’m waiting in the wings…”

Back at his Airstream he is still fizzing with energy and picks up a BB air pistol, asking me if I have ever used one. “No,” I say, sensing that I’m not going to get out of this one. A few seconds later we are at the water’s edge and he is teaching me how to load the gun. “There’s no one around so you won’t shoot anyone,” he says reassuringly. “Cock it all the way. Do it forcefully. Jam that thing.

And turn your body a little more to the side, almost like you’re surfing.” He directs me to aim at a buoy on the water and

miraculously the BB lands nearby. “Oh my gosh,” he exclaims. “Did you see it? It was so close.” Now he’s really enthused: “It’s superfun.

I’m always here at night by myself so I’ll just shoot at stuff. This brings up my childhood: we had BB guns and we’d try to shoot the minnows along the side of the river.”

Slater’s childhood was not easy. Born in Cocoa Beach, Florida, he was the middle of three sons. His father, who owned a bait shop, drank heavily, leading to raging arguments with his mother, who was always trying to throw him out. “I remember one night when I was about eight and she was yelling, ‘Get out of here,’ and she was dead serious. I saw it in her face. I begged her not to make him leave. To me, that was like the end of life. I think she just tolerated another few years because of me.”

Naturally an extrovert, Slater says his character altered as the situation at home became worse. “I was very outgoing. At school, I would show off and I was loud. And then there was a change in me. I realised it was real serious at home and I became insecure. I was terrified my mom was going to abandon us.

I got separation anxiety really bad and she couldn’t be out of my sight. She used to say [she would leave] too.”

Fortunately by then he had discovered a passion for surfing: it was the one place where he felt in control. “Surfing gave me a safe place. I felt like I fitted into the ocean and the energy. Nothing else really mattered.”

By the age of 11, he was already winning competitions. The home situation had become so bad that his father had finally left. “And things were better immediately between them.

Literally the next day I remember him coming over with flowers for her.”

Those early wins were better than any of the world titles that came later. “The best win emotionally was when I was 12 years old.

I won the superheat, beating the juniors and the seniors. And I won a trip to Hawaii. I cried for an hour in the bath because I was so happy.” He has tears in his eyes now.

“I get emotional talking about it. That trip changed my life. I made all my friends and won the US amateur title.” The trip only included the plane ticket, so he slept on the floor of someone’s house for $1.25 a night. “And I now have a house on the beach in Pipeline [a famous surf reef break in Hawaii]. It’s absurd.”

Gradually he began to win more money and was able to help his mother. “At 13 I won two pro contests and I made a few thousand bucks each one. We weren’t homeless but my mom was struggling every month. I didn’t have a silver spoon. And so for me to make $2,000 at a surf contest was like: I’m rich now.

It was fantasy stuff.”

It spurred him on to greater heights. “I’ve been very goal-oriented and disciplined my whole life since I was a kid. I started The Times Magazine 15

RYAN T FOLE/OUTERKNOWN

Wearing his sustainable clothing brand, Outerknown

realising, ‘I can do something great with my life – if I don’t f*** it up.’”

At 20 he won his first world title. He ruled the waves between 1993-1998, winning five straight titles. “I probably sounded really brash to the seasoned competitors because I didn’t think the level was very good.” In 1999 he attempted to retire but found himself unable to resist the urge of competing against a new generation of surfers, topped by Hawaii’s Andy Irons, and he rejoined the tour full time in 2002. Irons beat him for three years, with Slater reclaiming the title in 2005. “If you’re going to go through more than a single generation in any sport, you’re going to have to reinvent yourself,” he says today. He won his 11th world title in 2011 at the age of 39. And he’s still going strong, the standard rising to meet him.

“I’m really happy with the level now. There are guys out there who blow my mind.”

“The sport would not be where it is today without Kelly Slater,” says Logan. “He is the most important person in the history of pro surfing. His ability to lock on and compete is unlike anything that has ever been seen.

He was so singularly focused on winning.

And still is by the way.”

He was miserable doing Baywatch in the Nineties, feeling he had been pushed into it by his mother and his manager. “I didn’t love it.

And I hate doing things I don’t love. I was so uncomfortable. The storylines were so silly.”

He also found the ensuing level of fame uncomfortable. “I’ll meet people sometimes who can be crying, and it’s so weird to me.

I’m not always totally courteous and gracious.

Sometimes I’m just a human in a bad mood…

But there are many people a lot more famous and I’ve seen what they deal with. It puts mine in perspective. And I set out to have this life. I am living the life I wanted to live as a kid. I love it.”

More than 20 years after they split, many fans still want to talk to him about Pamela Anderson. “I understand why it’s interesting for people, but it honestly seems like another lifetime or almost like someone else lived it.”

He does say, however, that he was surprised at the way his relationship with Anderson ended.

“It was kind of embarrassing or maybe just strange, because I was dating her when she got married. I heard about it on the news and I was like, ‘Wait, what just happened?’ Ha ha.”

Scarred by his parents’ relationship, he is wary of marriage himself. “I know so many people who get married and then straight away get divorced. Maybe it’s just fear, an idea stuck in my mind for some dumb reason.”

His relationship with Kalani Miller, 33, is the happiest – and longest – he has ever experienced. “Kalani’s a lot younger than I am.

We started dating when she was 20 and I was in my thirties. But I was way less mature than her. Kalani has her shit together.

‘LET’S GO CATCH A COUPLE OF WAVES,’ SLATER SAYS. I’M SCARED. MY SURFING SKILLS ARE MINIMAL “She is definitely a fighter. And she has a good family. That really attracted me: it was just calm in their house. They might fight but they work it out. They’re talking that same day.

Whereas I’ve had fights with my family and not talked to them for six months or two years.”

For many years he did not get on with his older brother, Sean. “I thought he was an asshole. He thought I was an asshole. It got to a point where I didn’t know if we were going to have a relationship in the future. Now I kind of agree I was probably an asshole too.

You just mature.”

Slater has a daughter, Taylor, now 25, from a relationship in his twenties. “We’re close now. When she was a teenager she got angry.

Now she’s asking the questions and ready to hear the answers. It’s become a very transparent and open conversation between us.” Recently she became engaged. “I was talking to her fiancé and channelling that competitive thing in me. [I told him,] ‘I’m going to be a really good f***ing dad from now on.’ ” There is an honesty and vulnerability to Slater that makes him very engaging. He’s an emotional man and is close to tears several times while we talk. He has lost many close friends in recent years, several to suicide, and is not afraid to contemplate his own mortality.

“I would never want to sound like a dark person, but none of us is getting out alive and I think we all need to be comfortable with death. And it’s almost like the goal of life is to live a great life so that when you’re gone, it was all done as good as could be.”

He worries about the environment. “I go surfing in Bali and it’s heartbreaking to see

how polluted it is. There’s so much garbage in the water and it’s sinking down and fish are eating it. For a few years now I’ve been thinking that we can never turn back the clock. Then recently I had a conversation with these schoolchildren and they were so motivated to find solutions. They’re connecting the dots. They gave me hope.”

As well as his clothing brand, Outerknown, which only uses recycled materials, he is trying to make a recyclable surfboard.

“Because no one’s done that yet.”

Although Slater has a reputation for being ruthless, he says that much of this is myth. “Everyone thinks I play mind games on tour. But if they have that in their head, I don’t have to do anything; they’re already losing the game.”

Nevertheless I get a glimpse of Slater’s competitive side when I recount my car journey with Morgan Cibilic and co the previous evening. I tell him that Cibilic’s friends reckon he is going to beat Slater this weekend. Slater is riled. “I’m planning on smoking him,” he says tersely, and two days later he does just that. Cibilic is out while Slater goes through to the semi-finals. Slater finishes the competition in fifth place out of 36. Cibilic comes in ninth.

Mid-afternoon, I tell Slater I have to leave to catch my plane. “What time is your flight?” he asks. I tell him 5.10. It is now 3.20 and the airport is nearly an hour’s drive away. “You’ve got another 30 minutes here,” says Slater firmly. I can’t believe I’m taking flight advice from you, I tell him. Slater shrugs. “If you get there early you just wait in line; if you get there late you just run on.”

He’s right of course, although I only just make it. When I speak to him again three weeks later, he is adjusting to the realisation that the Olympics is probably off the table. “It hit me today and I haven’t processed it yet. A few weeks ago I got pretty excited and started practising and thinking about what equipment I was going to use. Then just a couple of days ago I found out John [John Florence] was surfing again and is really motivated.”

He is sad but philosophical. “In the prime of my career I would have been torn apart, but John earned his spot. I had the chance and I didn’t make it happen. The number of times in my life things have gone my way is remarkable. The number of times the right wave popped up for me at the right time and I won a world title. That’s just the way competition is. You can’t cry about it.”

Anyway, it’s a long way from over for Slater. “I have friends who are still surfing in their nineties. You constantly have to have the belief that maybe your best days are still ahead of you.” n outerknown.com The Times Magazine 17

YES! YES! YES!

SHE’S GOT AN APP FOR THAT Serial entrepreneur Chloe Macintosh, 46, believes her new app can help everyone have a better love life – not just more mindful, but mind-blowing too.

The co-founder of online furniture retailer Made tells Jane Mulkerrins what prompted her to enter the sextech world PORTRAITS Dan Kennedy STYLING Prue White

RII SCHROER/EYEVINE

W

hen Chloe Macintosh was pregnant with her first son, Felix, she was, she says, succinctly, “very horny”.

“Because I was having a boy, there was an increase in testosterone in my system [hence the horniness] and, as quite a slim person, I started getting curves for the first time – I felt transformed,” she recalls.

“I tried to research what was happening to me and my body, and to find out how I should have sex differently now that I was pregnant, but I very quickly realised that, apart from porn, there was just nothing out there. There were no brands that were a destination for sex, love and intimacy.”

Born and raised in Paris (the Scottish surname comes courtesy of her ex-husband), Macintosh was, at the time, an architect at Foster + Partners in London. She considered perhaps changing career, trying to start something to deal with this dearth of real sex education and information. But it was 2005, several years before Gwyneth Paltrow would launch Goop, where she would pedal jade eggs and vagina candles, and take the hitherto fringe idea of “sexual wellness” mainstream.

Macintosh did change direction a few years later, disrupting the luxury furniture market in 2010 as co-founder of made.com, which redefined home furnishings, offering chic, cutting-edge yet affordable furniture from independent designers around the world via ecommerce, then becoming chief creative officer for members’ club Soho House in 2015. And now, after selling us elegant sofas and aspirational lifestyles, she has finally returned to the research she started 16 years ago, raising more than £4 million of investment to launch Kama (yes, as in Sutra), a sex education and training app with hours of tutorial content to help users upskill, explore and become better lovers.

This is not pornography or titillation – Macintosh has a serious mission. According to the 46-year-old sextech entrepreneur, most of us are reaching just 5 per cent of our sexual potential. “But because no one is having the sex they deserve, they don’t even know what they’re missing,” she says.

Technology has not helped. Instead of bringing us more connection, it has left us feeling more disconnected than ever – from ourselves as well as each other – swiping and comparing, feeling inadequate and (among young men in particular) turning increasingly to porn, which, says Macintosh, now accounts for 30 per cent of all internet traffic and “builds more anxiety and self-esteem issues”.

We are, she believes, suffering a sex recession. “People are choosing not to engage with sex because of the amount of stress and

In her London home

‘AS NO ONE IS HAVING THE SEX THEY DESERVE, THEY DON’T EVEN KNOW WHAT THEY’RE MISSING’ anxiety that it brings,” she says. She believes anything up to 50 per cent of men under 30 suffer from some form of anxiety. “This then turns into premature ejaculation or erectile dysfunction – a condition that was previously only associated with older people.”

Kama, she believes, is a digital solution to a digitally enhanced problem. “Technology is the biggest magic we have.”

The app, launched a little over three months ago, offers in-depth, technical sex education and advice, in video and aural form, delivered by (a fully clothed) Macintosh and a team of experts, including Aaron Michael, the in-house psychosomatic sex coach, a laid-back American with truly incredible arms. It is free, explicit – in both senses of the word – and covers topics such as how to give (and receive) oral sex and guides to “penetration skills”.

And there’s a definite spiritual, New Age-y bent too – alongside all the detailed instruction, there are also “sound baths” and meditations, and sections on “Using your voice to unlock pleasure” and “Body love and acceptance”, plus a “Pelvic floor gym”.

There are some major restrictions to the content – social media rules forbid showing genitals – but instead of the traditional stand-in props (generally fruit)

Macintosh has anatomically correct ones, including a model of a truncated, legless female torso, on which she demonstrates sexual techniques.

Even with such restrictions, Macintosh is the first to acknowledge how dramatically the landscape has changed since she first began contemplating Kama. Only three years ago did sexual wellness became a “category” for venture capitalists to invest in. “With Goop, Gwyneth Paltrow opened the door to a lot of possibilities – before, you would have been laughed at if you came up with an idea like this,” she says.

It’s a warm Friday afternoon when I arrive at Macintosh’s southwest London home, as impressive a property as one would expect from a former architect: two four-storey terraced houses knocked together to create a cavernous space of exposed brick walls, floating staircases and houseplants worthy of the greenhouses at Kew. Glass bifold doors stretch the width of the combined houses and lead out to the garden.

Macintosh greets me at the front door, barefoot, in leggings and a T-shirt. “I was a lazy dresser before, but now it’s disastrous,” she says. It is far from disastrous: Macintosh has that make-up-free, nonchalant glamour that only Parisiennes can properly pull off.

The Times Magazine 21

COURTESY OF KAMA

A Kama tutorial about enhancing pleasure via breathing

She fetches water from the vast kitchen island while exhorting her mission, which is not modest. “I truly believe that, when we reframe sexuality, we reframe our understanding of ourselves.” She says the fastest-rising area of concern in medicine is mental health: “Many of the mental health issues that people have are because they don’t have a good relationship with themselves.”

Apparently, we’re not even masturbating properly. “In masturbation, we find our patterns that mean we can have an orgasm in ten minutes and we think that’s the ritual.

But actually, we should never do the same thing – if we vary things, the brain remains plastic and discovers more pleasure.”

However, one of the other major barriers to reaching our pleasure potential, believes Macintosh, is our tendency to focus on the brain instead of the body.

“We overintellectualise everything, so we are completely disconnected. Even someone like me. I thought I was in my body, because I love dancing. I realised that I used my mind to convince myself that I was having a physical experience. I looked at the likes of [meditation apps] Headspace and Calm and thought, we need a version of those that engages with the body,” she says.

Macintosh recommends making selfpleasure a “practice”, just like yoga or meditation. “We should take time and schedule it and put a focus on it,” she says.

Not necessarily daily. “The most important thing is to set people for success and every time you tell them to do something every day, suddenly they fail,” she shrugs. She recommends starting with an hour, once a week. Her own practice consists of, “Maybe ten minutes of getting in touch with my body, ten minutes of voicing – the most impactful thing you can bring to your masturbation practice is voicing; if you use particular tones you can actually increase and localise arousal – and then I start interacting with the genitals.”

Macintosh spent much of the pandemic building the app with a remote team of developers. Her plan was never to appear in the videos herself.

“I don’t think I’m the best person for it at all, but we got locked in this house, with no crew, and I had to turn my house into a studio and do everything from a phone.”

I would argue that she’s the ideal presenter for the content – beautiful, sincere, frank and she delivers detailed, explicit direction in a French accent.

She spent six months beta-testing with focus groups on Zoom who were frequently “having their first G-spot orgasms and screaming”, and launched the first iteration of Kama in December 2020.

But what it covered, she quickly realised,

was pitched a little too high. “My content team are really nerdy, and we focused a lot on mindfulness and psychosexual practices…

But it was too advanced.

“So we did a huge round of SEO [search engine optimisation] research, and looked at what people were actually looking for, and that was Sex 101. They were looking for how to put a condom on – the basics.

“I’m a brand person, and I could see the opportunity,” she says. “But then I realised, ‘It

was, she says, a lot of financial insecurity. “I could feel the anxiety of not having enough money and I associated that very much with the creative industries. I thought if you’re creative you can’t make money from what you love, so that’s why I ended up going into architecture. I was scared to go in another, less defined creative direction, whereas with architecture, you become an architect [and] there’s a job.” She trained at the Beaux-Arts de Paris and, at 26, became the youngest associate at Foster + Partners.

At 35, she teamed up with Brent Hoberman of last.minute.com to launch made.com, creating an online platform that streamlined the supply chain and reduced prices, offering some items at 70 per cent below the high street.

She doesn’t pretend it was plain sailing – “As a female founder in an industry that is still male-dominated, my board at Made was me and ten men” – and admits the pressures of her business did not help her marriage. “I was under a huge amount of stress; I wasn’t very present. I had nothing left because building Made took so much out of me.”

Then, in 2015, there was, she says, “a big collapse of everything”. She walked away from

‘I NEVER HAD A ONE-NIGHT STAND, NEVER DID ANYTHING CRAZY. AFTER MY DIVORCE, I JUST WENT FOR IT’ won’t work yet. People have to relearn. They still need more content.’ ” While Macintosh can’t reveal how many people have downloaded the app so far, she will say that the greatest number are in the US, followed by the UK then France, are split 60:40 female/male, and that the greatest concentration of users are aged 18 to 35.

The most popular courses include “5 skills for better sex”, “A guide to massaging the vulva” and “Masturbation meditations”.

Macintosh is keen to tailor to the content to her audience, so the app crowdsources users to ask what areas of sex and sexuality they want covered next. “Anal sex is the No 1 topic of interest for people, because there is so little information on it and there’s so much curiosity,” she says. “People are missing out on the biggest orgasm of their life.”

Macintosh grew up in a one-bedroom apartment in the Marais district of Paris, with her sister and a single mother, who was an artist, taught poetry and sold antiques. There

Made and from her marriage to investment banker Alastair Macintosh.

“I fitted very much into his life. He was very supportive of me starting Made and supported me with the kids,” she says. “But the kind of man I had been looking for was based around what I thought I was missing: a sense of safety, because I didn’t have that much when I grew up, and a very sound relationship to money and ethics, because, again, I had a father who wasn’t great with that – he lied a lot.

“My parents never spoke to each other after they separated, when I was one, so there was a lack of maturity around parenting that meant that I had to grow up really quickly,” she continues. “I wasn’t really expressing myself. I was being what other people wanted me to be – I believed that in order to be accepted, you had to do that rather than be yourself – so I was not connected to myself or to my marriage.”

Now, she says, “I adore my ex-husband.

He’s my best friend. We agreed that the

The Times Magazine 23

HAIR AND MAKE-UP: JULIA WREN AT CAROL HAYES MANAGEMENT USING CLARINS AND T3 HAIR TOOLS

SHE PREDICTS ‘A SUMMER OF LOVE – A SUMMER OF SEX’ only promise we should make each other is to be friends for the rest of our life, because that’s really what matters. And because my parents didn’t talk to each other, I was determined to have a very good relationship with him, so I invested a lot in it and he did too.” Alastair lives a few streets away.

After leaving Made, she joined the Soho House group, which she left in the summer of 2019 to raise money for and focus on Kama.

A curious mix of hard science, business savvy and a less tangible but obviously deep spirituality, Macintosh talks about tantra, trauma and healing in the same breath as neuroplasticity and seed rounds.

Was she always spiritual? “Not at all. I grew up with a Catholic background, but my mum was a rebel and decided she didn’t want any of it, so there was no belief centre.”

In the wake of her separation, she “randomly” took herself to a holistic wellness centre in Alicante, Spain, where she learnt to meditate for the first time. “My spirituality came out of adversity, and I came out of this retreat having the key to myself,” she says.

Shortly afterwards, she also made a new friend who encouraged her to become more experimental and stop playing it so safe.

“I started to investigate things which, for me, had never been permitted. I was such a good girl. I never had a one-night stand. I never did anything crazy. Then suddenly I was single, and my kids were only with me half the time, so I just went for it,” she laughs. “It’s not that I became very promiscuous, but I definitely went and explored. I call it my ‘yes year’. You’d come to me and offer me something and I’d say yes – to everything. I went on a boat with 3,000 people to party for a week. I went to Burning Man with nothing in the car – not even a tent. I did a plant ceremony.”

Over the past six years, her approach to relationships has also, she says, “changed completely”. “Now, I’m looking for people who are going to help me grow spiritually, who want to make sexuality a big part of their self-development, because, honestly, the extent by which sexuality can transform our experience of life is beyond what anyone imagines,” she says.

To that end, she is currently on three dating apps: the mainstream Hinge; Raya, an invitation-only app for the wealthy and/or famous; and Feeld, for people interested in polyamory, swinging and kink – and is, she says, “being very upfront with what I’m looking for. I say I’m looking for a sexual partner. I’m looking for someone who’s open to exploring in a mindful way.

I want to see how people react to something very direct.

“People need to be honest about what they want,” she believes. “If you’re not going to discuss what you want, the likelihood of getting it is really unlikely.”

And what reactions has she been getting so far to her direct approach, I ask. She’s only just set it up, she says, so it’s too soon to really tell. “Also, I’m 46. It’s not an easy age to be on a dating app. People filter by age,” she shrugs.

“I’m getting closer to 50 and I feel so alive and young in myself and I find there’s a big disconnect with the way age is represented,” she continues. “I want to become an ambassador for changing that, for transforming how age is seen in society. I think you can stay young and active and you still discover a lot about yourself. For me, ageing is an ascending opportunity – wisdom and reflections and letting go of all the external signs of beauty.”

Age can also be irrelevant when it comes to sex, Macintosh believes. “Because for procreation our prime is in our twenties, we think that for sexual experience and satisfaction, it’s in our twenties too. But actually, the generation that’s most satisfied with sex are in their fifties.”

Her aspirations for Kama include content for all ages, including her sons’ teenage peers.

“One of the biggest gifts of lockdown for me was that my sons came home from boarding school and were living here – as well as with their dad, ten minutes away.”

She was, at the time, filming the video content, with “dildos and sex books everywhere”, which Elliot, her younger son, understandably found uncomfortable at first. “It’s a lot of very explicit information for a 14-year-old,” she laughs. Meanwhile, 16-year-old Felix “realised quite early on, after spending time with one of our sex coaches, that this was a real opportunity”.

Once lockdown restrictions were lifted, Macintosh gathered together some of Felix’s friends – in small, single-sex groups – for classes. “After half an hour’s conversation, they would say to me, ‘We’ve been having sex education at school for three years, and this is the most we’ve ever learnt.’ ” This doesn’t surprise Macintosh. “Sex education in schools is all about what not to do, how not to get pregnant. Nobody teaches the simple things we are teaching on the app, like how to prepare the body, how to breathe, where your nerves are located.”

Instead of turning to porn, or the problematic sexualisation of their own peers that has led to the Everyone’s Invited antirape culture movement, “They should learn

about being mindful, about mutual respect and pleasure. They should learn about intimacy.”

But the nature of Kama’s content presents challenges, especially in an era of scrutiny over what young people are viewing and disseminating. “Because it’s sex, people don’t share as much, so that’s something we need to work on – more content that is shareable,” she nods.

And, since there are strict limits on how explicit app-based content can be, she’s working on web-based content too: “Explicit education videos, behind a paywall. And I’m working on creating the best sex newsletter you’ve ever received, with incredible research and knowledge.”

So far, Macintosh has not monetised Kama. “I wanted to wait at least a year before monetising. I raised extra money, because I knew it would take time to do my product market fit, and really align with where people are at, and what they want, and what they’re able to take in.”

Soon, though, she has plans to introduce more intense, taught, paid-for courses.

“If people want their first orgasm, or their erections aren’t the way they used to be, we can put them on a three-day, week-long or three-week programme.” She wants to provide access to sexual wellness retreats and therapies unavailable or inaccessible elsewhere. “There is a big opportunity to create a pleasure brand that would become the destination on the web for content and experiences,” she enthuses.

The Zoom events she organised as part of Kama’s testing and development were testament to that, proving a huge hit. “But everyone’s a bit zoomed out now,” she notes.

One of the most popular was a 90-minute guided live masturbation meditation, with hundreds of people taking part together online. “One of the things so many people told me was not about the sexual part of it, but that it was the first time in so long that they had spent an hour and a half with themselves.

“If we don’t spend an hour a day in our bodies, what are we doing here?” she asks.

“Because all of this [she motions to her exquisite surroundings] is never going to be truly satisfying.”

In this post-pandemic moment, after 18 months of turbulence but also reflection, “We have many great opportunities now to re-enter the world from a slightly different position and to think about what we really want it to be.

“That, for me, is the positive of coming out of this now,” she says. “It’s going to be a summer of love – and a summer of sex.” n The Times Magazine 25

From top: Jason Miller and other Trump advisers with the president-elect, December 2016; Miller in the Capitol on day one of Trump’s second impeachment trial; in the Oval Office

GET ME JASON THE TRUMP ADVISER WHO CAN UNLEASH THE REAL DONALD (and his 90 million followers) With the former president banned by the tech giants, the first new social network to sign him up can make a fortune – and give Trump a platform to rally his supporters.

Enter Jason Miller, a White House insider with an even more colourful past than his controversial old boss. Will Pavia meets him

Jason Miller, 46, photographed by Stephen Voss in the Trump International Hotel Washington DC earlier this month

PREVIOUS SPREAD: AP/ANDREW HARNIK, CHIP SOMODEVILLA/GETTY IMAGES, COURTESY JASON MILLER. THIS SPREAD: JOSHUA ROBERTS-POOL/GETTY IMAGES, JUSTIN T GELLERSON/THE NEW YORK TIMES/EYEVINE, GETTY IMAGES

T

he first thing you notice about Jason Miller is that there’s a lot of him. I’m sitting in a rather small restaurant booth when he arrives and from this low perspective he seems a colossus, tall and heavily built, dressed in a dark suit, his blue tie swinging out from his tremendous chest as he whirls around, looking for me. For a moment I wonder if he’ll actually be able to get into the booth, but he removes his jacket, lowers himself and slides in, hot from a hurried walk across midtown Manhattan.

He has a broad, slightly flat face, small dark eyes and a trimmed beard. He looks like Henry VIII, minus the ginger hair and the rubies, and he has been living a large and eventful life these past five years.

Since 2016 he’s been an adviser to Donald Trump, which must take it out of you, and a PR man and CNN pundit. He’s had two extramarital affairs, the second of which resulted in a son whose mother regularly assails him on Twitter. He was involved in a bitter custody dispute with her and in a splashy defamation lawsuit, in which he had to give a deposition acknowledging having sex with escorts and visiting massage parlours for more than a back rub.

Rehired by President Trump last year, he became one of the last of the president’s men still standing in the aftermath of the January 6 insurrection. It was Miller in fact who got Trump to agree to a statement acknowledging that there would be an “orderly transition”.

You might even say that he saved the republic.

He stayed on as Trump’s man until June; then, not three weeks ago, he emerged as the chief executive of a new social media platform that is supposed to liberate humanity from cancel culture and the death grip of the “social media monopolies” that banished his former boss.

It’s taken its toll, all this activity. “I saw a picture of me from four years ago. I’m like, ‘Oh man, I got old quick.’ ” He smiles broadly.

He seems a rather sunny fellow; not the sort to waste time in melancholy remembrances of things past.

His new project is called Gettr, a platform that looks a lot like Twitter except that instead of a blue bird, there’s a red torch flame. Its launch was marred, initially, by a hacking attack and by reports that the platform was full of anime porn, but Miller remains bullish.

“We’re at 1.4 million users right now,” he says.

“Fastest platform ever to [get to] one million and we did it in three days.”

When I first saw it, I assumed that this was the platform Trump himself had been threatening to launch, but its origins appear to be more complicated, connected to a flamboyant property magnate named Guo Wengui, who fled China and launched an

Miller during the second impeachment trial, February 10

THE CAPITOL STORMING? ‘I DO NOT BELIEVE THAT TRUMP WAS INCITING ANY ASPECT OF VIOLENCE’

Appearing on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, 2019

online media network called GTV with Trump’s old strategist Steve Bannon, attacking the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and trafficking in wild conspiracy theories.

Gettr was part of this: a Chinese-language social media network, created about a year ago according to Politico. In late June, Guo, who sometimes goes by the name Miles, posted a video on GTV informing his followers that the “Gettr platform is adjusting” and everyone would need to re-register their accounts on the site.

Miller says Guo is “not directly involved.

He doesn’t have any financial stake in the operation. His family foundation, which is actually based in the UK, is one part of a group of investors that put the money in early on. He’s very much anti-CCP, bring democracy

and freedom around the world. So we’re kind of kindred spirits in that aspect.”

This does explain the bewildering mixture of commentary on Gettr. “TRUMP WON. THERE IS NO 2020 OR 2024. FIX 2020,” someone called Juddy TrumpBabe said beneath a post by the conservative website Newsmax, when I went poking around on there. Beneath it was a lengthier post (you get up to 777 characters) that seemed to have been written through an online translation programme. It began: “Dear American people, the current government of Biden has planning compromise with America’s enemy, that’s CCP. It’ll danger for America.”

According to Miller, “People were being de-platformed and realising that the tech giants, so to speak, had [decided] to ally themselves with the more left-of-centre folks, who want to silence people all over.”

People are being silenced for their political beliefs, he says. “Not because they made a threat online, not because they hurled some sort of epithet, but their political position did not align with the owners of that company, say Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, that type of thing. That is where I think this has gone entirely too far.”

Are there any examples of that?

“Oh, there are thousands.”

It’s a rallying cry among American conservatives, though there doesn’t appear to be any evidence for it. A study in February, by the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights, found that the platforms tended to amplify rather than silence rightwing voices. But Miller says he recently did his own survey. “I believe it was 20 per cent of Trump voters knew someone who had been de-platformed because of their beliefs.”

I suppose they might all know Trump, who was banned from Twitter after the company concluded that his tweets around January 6 and in the days after had the potential to incite violence. If Trump had been on Gettr, would he have faced any penalties?

“I do not believe that President Trump was inciting any aspect of violence on that day,” he says. “I don’t think he did anything that was wrong or sanctionable… and certainly not [something] that would be a permanent lifetime ban. I’ll give you an example. Look, I wrote the statement for President Trump. The one that formally said that Biden now has the electoral votes; he’s the president. We’re going to have an orderly transition and move on. I wrote that with the president and the first lady. And Dan Scavino [Trump’s social media man] ended up putting that out at something like 4am on the morning of the 7th. Dan had to do it from his personal Twitter account, broken into two parts, because the president of the United States couldn’t even put out a statement. So

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GETTY IMAGES

think about that… In my opinion that was a critical statement. It was saying, ‘Hey, a new guy is coming in here in two weeks, and we’re going to co-operate.’ And he couldn’t even put that type of statement out because he’d been kicked off all the platforms.”

Of course, he still had the White House press office. And the platforms would presumably argue that Trump showed no sign of making such a statement for hours after his supporters had staged a violent insurrection.

(He actually denounced Vice-President Mike Pence on Twitter, even as rioters were hunting for him in the Capitol building.) He didn’t acknowledge his defeat, I say. He still doesn’t.

“But I guess...” Miller begins, and then stops. He wants to go back to the principles of the thing, rather than arguing about one troublesome case. “Look, now that I’m in this, I realise that you can’t give sometimes the general broad answer,” he says. “My job isn’t to try to play nanny… But I do not believe President Trump should have been suspended on that day. It was a real travesty.”

Before January 6, Trump’s family and aides had apparently been suggesting that he join the conservative social media network Parler, co-founded by the right-wing political donor Rebekah Mercer. In his new book, Landslide, Michael Wolff writes that they had “floated a proposition that Trump, after he left office, would become an active member of Parler, moving much of his social media activity there from Twitter. In return Trump would receive 40 per cent of Parler’s gross revenues and the service would ban anyone who spoke negatively about him. Parler was balking only at this last condition.” Wolff says the deal was “offered by the family as a carrot to entice the president out of the White House… Trump could do what he loved to do most and potentially make a fortune off it.”

I ask Miller if he’d consider a similar deal to get Trump on Gettr. “He’s going to have some offers that are in front of him, on different things. I’ll keep our negotiations between me and him, so I don’t get myself in any trouble here. But I’ve made a very strong effort to try to get him on the platform.”

Miller went to the golf club in New Jersey that serves as Trump’s summer residence bearing a smartphone loaded with Trump’s old tweets as they would appear on the Gettr app.

“Just as an example we put them on there, just to show him,” he says. The sight appears to have transported Trump back to the time when he would send out his morning blasts.

“He loved it,” Miller says. “He was kind of holding the phone in his hand and he was like, ‘I haven’t done this in a while.’ ” He thinks Trump is waiting to see how Gettr does. “I know he also has several offers that are in front of him, as far as different platforms and some different deals,” he says.

WHAT HAPPENED TO TEAM TRUMP? LIFE AFTER THE DONALD They were indispensable. Until they weren’t. Stuart Heritage picks up the trail Steve Bannon Chief strategist Lasted 210 days Although initially seen as the man behind Trump’s curtain – he co-wrote the “American carnage” inauguration speech and invented the Muslim travel ban – Bannon has seen his stock fall precipitously in recent years.

Disavowed by Trump after calling his daughter Ivanka “dumb as a brick” in a book, since leaving the White House Bannon rejoined then left Breitbart News, and was arrested for fraud (after conducting a crowdfunding campaign ostensibly to raise money for a US-Mexico border wall). He is currently free, thanks to Trump’s last-minute pardon, and now hosts a podcast. After calling on it for the decapitation of Dr Anthony Fauci and FBI director Christopher Wray, Bannon was permanently suspended from Twitter.

Rudy Giuliani Lawyer 1,035 days Remember the desperation, so tangible that it caused rivulets of hair dye to trickle down his head, when he tried to overturn the election? Well, Rudy Giuliani is now paying for his warped loyalty. His reputation is in shreds since the Borat movie caught him in a compromising position with a young woman in a hotel room, his licence to practise law has been suspended in New York and Washington and, according to quotes in Michael Wolff’s latest book, he’s demonstrated focus issues, memory problems and simple logic failures – Trump aides alleged the issues could be attributed to drunkenness or senility.

Kellyanne Conway Senior counsellor 1,319 days One of Trump’s most ferocious defenders – it was Conway who coined the phrase “alternative facts” – she could always be counted on to rationalise any claim, no matter how potty, whenever the time came.

However, her time with Trump ended not because of a political scandal, but because her own family turned against her. Her husband, George, was so appalled by Trump that he co-founded an organisation that campaigned against his re-election, and her daughter, Claudia, earned fame on TikTok by posting

videos claiming that her mother had been physically, mentally and emotionally abusive towards her. Things have improved since; Kellyanne is now campaigning for a wouldbe senator in Ohio, and Claudia was recently in American Idol.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders Press secretary 705 days Whisper it, but Sarah Huckabee Sanders might just be the only figure to escape Trump’s orbit with any kind of career.

As press secretary, she was seen as a comparatively safe pair of hands following the departure of the flailing inanity of Sean Spicer, although this might be down to her tendency to go more than a month without conducting any press briefings. Since leaving the post in 2019, Sanders has started to actively pursue a run for governor of Arkansas in next year’s election, a role her father fulfilled for a decade. The family connection makes her the hot favourite, but her ambitions do not end there. This month New York magazine noted her willingness to wade into issues outside her gubernatorial purview, and posited that it’s only a matter of time before she runs for higher office. Do not be surprised to see her picked as Trump’s vice-president when he inevitably campaigns for re-election 18 months from now.

Sean Spicer Press secretary 182 days Spicer never had an easy ride with the press. His college’s student newspaper once referred to him as “Sean Sphincter” and, as Trump’s first press secretary, he was forced to lie angrily about a number of issues to a band of increasingly outraged reporters. As such, the last thing you’d expect Spicer to do post-Trump is to join the media. However, along with writing a book and making a widely derided appearance on Dancing with the Stars (he came sixth), that’s exactly what he did. Spicer & Co airs every weekday on the tinpot conservative news channel Newsmax. In January, the channel withdrew Spicer’s application to join the White House Correspondents’ Association.

Anthony Scaramucci Communications director 11 days A perfectly functioning microcosm of everyone who crosses Trump’s path, Scaramucci burnt brightly and then faded away in less than a fortnight. Scaramucci came in hot after calling congressmen

The Times Magazine 31

GETTY IMAGES

“I told him that I have his handle, @real DonaldTrump, in a big, beautiful safe in the corner of my office… Just waiting. ‘As soon as you sign up and open the safe, I can give it to you, sir.’ ” Why, I ask, is it in a safe? Exactly what is in the safe? The phone?

Miller says this is a metaphor. “I don’t have a safe in my office. What would I need a safe for?”

It sounds like an episode of The Apprentice.

“Yeah, no, it’s just to relate to him that no one’s going to touch @realDonaldTrump. It’s there. It’s put aside. It’s just waiting for you.”

Miller grew up in the liberal city of Seattle, where his father was a welder and his mother worked as a bookkeeper and a receptionist.

It’s “a beautiful place, not my cup of tea politically”, he says. “I always wanted to zig when everyone else was zagging.”

He recalls going off to a George Bush Sr rally in 1991, around the age of 15, walking through town bearing a Bush sign. “A man grabbed my Bush sign and he ripped it in half and handed it back,” Miller says. “He goes, ‘Hey kid, you might not be so lucky with the next guy that comes up to you.’ ” He found some fellow Republicans via his high school football team, he says. Talking politics with a team-mate, “His dad said, ‘Oh, my brother is the county Republican chairman… You’ve met him at a couple of the barbecues.” The chairman introduced Miller to someone who worked for the Republican senator Slade Gorton. Miller subsequently interned for the senator and then got hired. He met his wife, Kelly, on a California congressional campaign in 2000. They now have a daughter who is 12 and another aged 4 and his wife has abandoned politics for online marketing. “She’s like, ‘You people are crazy, who do this.’ ” But Miller was drawn to the campaigns, doing crisis communications and making adverts. He was good in a crisis. “It’s always easier when it’s someone else’s crisis,” he says, cautiously.

I was thinking actually of Mark Sanford, the South Carolina governor who had an affair with a woman in Buenos Aires while telling his staff that he was hiking the Appalachian Trail. Miller pulls out his phone and shows me the advert he composed for Sanford’s comeback campaign for Congress in 2013. “I’ve experienced how none of us go though life without mistakes,” Sanford says, staring into the camera. “But in their wake we can learn a lot about grace, a God of second chances, and be the better for it.”

Sanford was resurrected. In 2016, Miller went to work for Ted Cruz as his communications adviser, where he engaged in gleeful Twitter attacks on “#SleazyDonald” Trump. Then he was asked to join team Continues on page 45

“f***ing jackasses” in an interview a few months earlier. His appointment caused Sean Spicer and chief of staff Reince Priebus to resign, and his own pregnant wife to file for divorce. Just 11 days later he was sacked, and has since built his career around stinging anti-Trump sentiment. Scaramucci has called Trump “racist” and “nonsensical” and launched a Super PAC – political action committee – to help prevent Trump’s re-election. In 2019 he appeared on America’s Celebrity Big Brother, along with Joey Lawrence from Blossom and Lindsay Lohan’s mother.

Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner Advisers 1,393 and 1,461 days respectively Of all the figures discussed here, Jared and Ivanka are likely to find it hardest to move on. Through the Trump presidency they were blighted by scandals about nepotism, conflict of interest and their level of security clearance, and there had been whispers that one or both of them would eventually run for office themselves. However, it now seems like they are both going hell for leather to distance themselves from Trump.

They rarely visit Mar-a-Lago, it has been reported, and they recently jetted off to Aspen rather than join everyone at the Conservative Political Action Conference.

Additionally, Trump’s niece Mary has gone on record as saying that, if the time comes, Ivanka might sell her father out to the police if it kept her out of prison. Watch this space..

Michael Cohen Attorney 12 years If you were ever to make a film about Donald Trump, Michael Cohen would be the obvious lead character. As Trump’s attorney he was effectively a fixer, claiming, “If somebody does something Mr Trump doesn’t like, I do everything in my power to resolve it to Mr Trump’s benefit. If you do something wrong, I’m going to come at you, grab you by the neck and I’m not going to let you go until I’m finished.” Although his tasks were myriad, the most well-known ones involved paying off Playboy models and porn stars who had slept with Trump. In 2018, Cohen surrendered to the FBI and pleaded guilty to eight criminal charges, including five charges of tax evasion. Sentenced to three years in prison, he claimed that Trump was the man who “led me to choose a path of darkness over light”.

Last year he published a memoir, Disloyal, in which he calls Trump “a cheat, a mobster, a liar, a fraud, a bully, a racist,

a predator, a con man”. Cohen also has a podcast, naturally.

Hope Hicks Director of strategic communication 235 days Dubbed “Untouchable” by Politico due to the relative safety of her job in a tumultuous administration, Hicks has been in the Trump orbit since 2012, when she did PR for Ivanka’s fashion line. After resigning in 2018 following a brief stint as communications director, she re-entered the White House as Trump’s counsellor in 2020, and was apparently responsible for his catastrophic decision to break up a peaceful protest in the wake of the George Floyd murder and hold up a Bible outside a church. In the interim, she served as Fox Corporation’s chief communications officer.

Mike Pompeo Secretary of state 1,000 days Roundly described as the most loyal of Trump loyalists – following the attack on the Capitol, he claimed that Trump should win the Nobel peace prize – Pompeo was first made director of the CIA, then was rewarded with one of the biggest jobs in the cabinet in 2018. Three international relations scholars have all called Pompeo the worst secretary of state in the history of America.

Since leaving his post, Pompeo has done his best to remain in the public eye, wading into culture war arguments with such relentless frequency that a run for office in 2024 seems almost certain. In his free time, he likes to tweet excitedly whenever his name is an answer in quiz shows.

Michael Flynn National security adviser 22 days Remember when I said you’d make a film about Michael Cohen? Forget that, because Michael Flynn’s story is so much weirder.

Having previously registered with the US government as a foreign agent, due to his work with the Turkish government, he was forced out of his White House job after less than a month due to revelations that he had meddled with the 2016 election result by conducting under-the-table conversations with Russia. He pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI, then withdrew the plea, before being pardoned by Trump.

Last year he posted a video where he quoted slogans popularised by conspiracy theorists QAnon and was this month pictured grinning in front of an enormous and genuinely bizarre whiteboard flowchart entitled “Path to Trump”, which links hundreds of names, from Bobby Kennedy Sr and the actor Kevin Sorbo to Jesus Christ, to the former president. n The Times Magazine 33

Eat! c GREETINGS FROM IKARIA (MEOW! IT’S ALL GREEK TO ME)

Fried fish, page 42

Recipes from the healthiest place in the Med. Plus: summer soups

Eat! GREEK

The village of Armenistis

A

s Aegean islands go, Ikaria is particularly lovely – a mountainous, largely unspoilt jewel. But that’s not why Australian cook Meni Valle wanted to write a book about its food. Ikaria, you see, is famous as one of the world’s five “blue zones”, where people live far longer than average. One in three Ikarians make it into their nineties.

The islanders’ light, delicious recipes are integral to that longevity, says Valle. Lunch is the main meal of the day. The whole family gather to dig into platters of tabbouleh, salads, tzatziki and eggs, with grilled seafood or fish.

Dessert is likely to be fruit-based, even if it’s in cake form. The island’s not short of vineyards – Ikaria is the birthplace of Dionysus, god of wine, after all – and a glass of chilled white adds to the relaxed vibe. Clearly, a little of what you fancy does indeed do you good.

1. OMELETTE WITH SPRING ONIONS Serves 2 Spring onions have a sweeter flavour than regular onions and, together with the herbs, make for an excellent omelette.

36 The Times Magazine

• 6 spring onions • 60ml olive oil • 6 eggs • Salt and pepper • 60ml milk • 1 tbsp each chopped mint and parsley, plus extra to garnish 1. Wash the spring onions well, discarding the dark green ends. Slice thinly.

2. Heat the olive oil in a frying pan over a medium heat. Add the spring onions and sauté until they soften.

3. Crack the eggs into a bowl, season with salt and pepper and add the milk and the herbs.

Whisk well and pour over the spring onions.

Using a spatula, push the sides towards the middle, creating space for some of the liquid to fill and cook by tilting the pan.

4. Cook for a further 2 minutes. When it looks almost done, fold over and slide onto a plate. The omelette will continue cooking on the plate and should still be a little soft in the centre. Sprinkle with the reserved herbs to serve.

Continues on page 41

1

THE MIN I PULLO U T

SUMMER SOUPS Liquid lunch? Six quick recipes to whizz up by Henrietta Clancy

1 2

PHOTOGRAPHS Romas Foord

ARIA N V E G ET

V E GA N

All recipes serve 2

• ½ tbsp turmeric • ¼ tsp fine salt

VEGETABLE STOCK

For the cauliflower rice tarka • ½ tbsp coconut oil or groundnut oil • 1 shallot, finely sliced • 1 tsp mustard seeds • 1 tsp cumin seeds • 200g cauliflower florets, pulsed in a blender to resemble rice • 1 tsp onion seeds • A handful of coriander leaves, plus extra • Salt and black pepper • 2 tbsp pomegranate seeds

Makes 1 litre • 1kg chopped vegetables: leeks, carrots, celery and any other vegetable relevant to the soup in question • Tarragon, bay, thyme, parsley, lemon peel, garlic, according to taste Chop the vegetables into 2cm pieces. Place in a large saucepan with the aromatics and cover with 1.5 litres cold water. Bring to the boil then continue to boil rapidly for 30 minutes. Strain.

1. DAL WITH CAULIFLOWER RICE This very simple dish is delicious – and the cauliflower tarka is the party on top.

For the dal • 200g yellow split peas, rinsed • 1 green bird’s eye chilli, seeds removed and finely chopped • 3 garlic cloves, sliced • 3cm root ginger, sliced in matchsticks

38 The Times Magazine

1. Cover the rinsed split peas with 1.5 litres water. Bring to the boil, skim, then add the chilli, garlic, ginger and turmeric and simmer for 2 hours. Every 20 minutes or so use a small whisk to beat the lentils into submission, and add a little water if necessary. When you’re ready to serve them, add the salt and loosen them with a little boiling water.

2. When the dal is ready, heat the oil for the tarka in a large frying pan over a medium to high heat. Fry the shallot until it starts to brown, then add the mustard and cumin seeds and stir until the mustard seeds begin to pop. Toss in the cauliflower and stir for about

1 minute. Turn off the heat and add the onion seeds, coriander, salt and pepper.

3. Divide the dal between two bowls. Heap the tarka generously on top and finish with pomegranate seeds and extra coriander leaves.

2. RISI E BISI WITH TARRAGON OIL This traditional Venetian dish falls somewhere between a risotto and a soup. My version is firmly in the soup category. It’s delicious made with a good chicken stock (not for veggies obviously), but it’s also quite forgiving so an instant stock will be fine.

• 2 tsp olive oil, plus extra for drizzling • 1 tsp butter • 1 onion, finely chopped • 1 celery stick, finely chopped • 100g risotto rice • 1 garlic clove, chopped • 700ml stock • 200g frozen peas • 2 tbsp grated parmesan • Salt and black pepper • A handful of pea shoots 1. Melt the oil and butter in a pan and cook the onion and celery over a low heat for

SUMMER SOUPS 3 4

V E GA N about 10 minutes. Add the rice and garlic and stir to coat with the vegetables and oil, then pour in the stock and bring to the boil.

Reduce to a simmer and cook for 15 minutes.

Add the frozen peas, bring back to the boil and simmer for another 5 minutes. Stir in half the parmesan and check the seasoning.

2. Serve the soup with a drizzle of oil and top with the pea shoots and remaining 1 tbsp parmesan.

3. MAPLE CAULIFLOWER WITH CHICORY AND HAZELNUTS A generous pile of bitter leaves is a welcome foil to the caramelised cauliflower in this recipe and has the added benefit of making your soup look rather dramatic. If anything is going to convert a cauliflower hater, it’s this velvety concoction.

For the soup • 600g cauliflower florets • 1 tbsp maple syrup • 1 tbsp olive oil • Salt and black pepper • 1 onion, finely chopped • 1 garlic clove, chopped • 400ml vegetable stock

V E GA N To serve • 1 red chicory • A handful of flat-leaf parsley • A dash of red wine vinegar • A dash of olive oil • 40g hazelnuts, dry roasted in a pan and smashed with the back of a knife 1. Preheat the oven to 200C (220C non-fan) and line a large tray with baking paper. Break up the cauliflower until you have very small florets. Cut up any large stalks – you want to make sure that everything cooks evenly. Mix the maple syrup and ½ tbsp olive oil in the bottom of a large bowl, add the cauliflower and toss until covered.

2. Season well with salt and black pepper and tip into the prepared baking tray (or two trays if necessary – you want the cauliflower to be well spread out). Roast in the oven for 20-25 minutes, or until the edges are blackened and the stalks have softened.

3. While the cauliflower is in the oven, heat the remaining ½ tbsp oil in a saucepan and sweat the onion over a very low heat until soft and translucent. Add the garlic and cook for a further 2 minutes before adding the stock. Tip in most of the cooked cauliflower, reserving 2 heaped tbsp for garnishing. Pour

everything into a blender and blitz until very smooth, then season with salt and pepper and return it to the pan. Cook a little longer if you’d like it thicker, or add a little water if you’d prefer it thinner.

4. To serve, finely shred the red chicory and chop the parsley, then mix them together with the red wine vinegar and olive oil.

Season well and pile onto the soup along with the extra maple-roasted florets and the smashed hazelnuts.

4. MANGO, AVOCADO AND LIME Avocados have a talent for making everything they’re whizzed up with turn to velvet, but they also carry the risk of making things a little too rich. Lime comes to the rescue here.

• 2 large avocados (400g flesh) • 2 large mangos (600g flesh) • 6 tbsp lime juice (from 2-4 limes), plus zest to serve • 2 jalapeño peppers, a little reserved for the garnish • 2 spring onions • Half a small garlic clove or a pinch of garlic powder • Salt and black pepper

The Times Magazine 39

SUMMER SOUPS 5 6

ARIA N V E G ET

5. SALMON, EDAMAME AND WASABI

straight away, then add the sliced salmon just before serving so that it’s still a little raw.

4. Sprinkle with toasted sesame seeds and serve with a little extra wasabi on the side for the brave.

This soup takes 10 minutes to make.

6. CARROT, CARDAMOM AND ORANGE

• 600ml fish stock • 2 tsp fish sauce • 2 tsp soy sauce • 1 tsp honey • 1 tsp white miso paste • 150g udon noodles, to serve • 200g frozen edamame beans • 1½ tsp wasabi paste • 2 salmon fillets, thinly sliced • 1 tsp sesame seeds, toasted in a dry pan

This is refreshing served chilled.

Blend everything and season to taste. Add water to obtain desired consistency. Top with lime zest and some chopped jalapeño pepper.

1. Place the stock, fish sauce, soy sauce, honey and miso paste in a saucepan, whisk to combine and bring to the boil. Reduce the heat and simmer gently for 10 minutes.

2. Cook the udon noodles according to the packet instructions, drain and rinse them thoroughly under cold water. Divide the noodles between two bowls.

3. Add the edamame to the soup and cook for 2 minutes before adding the wasabi – taste and add an extra ½ tsp if you would like more heat. Pour the hot liquid on top of the noodles

40 The Times Magazine

• ¼ tsp ground cardamom (see method, no 1) • 800g carrots, cut into small batons or 1cm rounds • 1 tbsp olive oil • 2 tsp honey • Zest and juice of half an orange • ¼ tsp cumin • Salt and pepper • 1 onion, finely sliced • 1 garlic clove, finely chopped • 700ml vegetable stock For the topping • 2 tbsp natural yoghurt • 4 pitted dates, finely chopped • Zest and juice of half an orange • 1 red bird’s eye chilli, seeds removed and finely chopped • A handful of mint, shredded • ½ tsp coriander seeds, crushed with the back of a knife

• ½ tsp cumin seeds • 1 tsp honey 1. Preheat the oven to 180C (200C non-fan).

To prepare the cardamom, crush about 10 pods using a pestle and mortar or with the back of a heavy knife. Remove the pods and further crush the seeds. Measure ¼ tsp (you may need to crush more).

2. Toss the carrots in ½ tbsp oil and the honey, orange zest and juice, cumin and salt and pepper. Spread them out on a large baking tray so they have plenty of space. Cook them for 40 minutes, by which point the carrots should be tender and blackening at the edges.

3. Heat the remaining ½ tbsp oil in a saucepan and cook the onion gently for 10 minutes. Add the garlic and cook for a further 2 minutes. Stir in the cooked carrots, then add the stock and bring to the boil. Simmer for 10 minutes, then blend. Add a little water if the soup is too thick.

4. Top each bowl of soup with yoghurt, then mix together the remaining ingredients and scatter on top. n

Extracted from Just Soup

by Henrietta Clancy (£8.99, Short Books)

Eat! Greek Continued from page 36

Eat! GREEK

PHOTOGRAPHS Lean Timms

2 2. YOGHURT WITH HONEY AND TAHINI Serves 1 This is a supersimple breakfast or snack.

• 2 dollops of Greek yoghurt • 1 tbsp tahini • 1 tbsp honey • 1 tbsp crushed walnuts (optional) Place a dollop or two of yoghurt into a bowl and drizzle over some tahini and honey. I love it topped with some crushed walnuts.

3. SPRING GREENS WITH POTATOES Serves 2 This rustic dish is not only simple but also nutritious. Served with olives, cheese and bread, it can make an easy lunch or dinner. If you can’t find spring greens you can use kale, Swiss chard, spinach or cabbage instead.

• 60ml olive oil • 1 red onion, diced • 500g spring greens, chopped • 3 large potatoes, peeled and cut into large chunks • Salt and pepper • 2 tbsp wild oregano, chopped • 2 large tomatoes, grated (optional)

3

1. In a large saucepan, warm the olive oil over a medium heat. Add the onion and sauté until soft. Add the greens and lower the heat. Cook, stirring, until they have wilted.

2. Add the potatoes. Season with salt and pepper, then stir in the oregano.

3. Pour in 250ml water (if you are adding grated tomatoes, only use 125ml). Add the grated tomatoes, if using.

4. Simmer, stirring occasionally, for about 20-30 minutes until the vegetables are cooked through and there is very little water left.

Serve warm.

4. ORANGE PIE WITH FILO AND SYRUP Serves 8-10 (overleaf) Serve the pie with a dollop of Greek yoghurt or ice cream in summer.

• Melted clarified butter, for brushing • 400g ready-made filo pastry • Greek yoghurt, to serve • A drizzle of honey, to serve For the filling • 4 eggs

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Eat! GREEK

4

• 100g caster sugar • 200ml vegetable oil • 3 tbsp grated orange zest • 2 tsp vanilla extract • 2 tbsp baking powder • 285g Greek yoghurt For the syrup • 345g caster sugar • 250ml orange juice • 3 tbsp grated orange zest • 1 cinnamon stick • 3 cloves 1. Preheat the oven to 180C (200C non-fan).

Brush some melted clarified butter onto a 35cm round baking tray or a 25cm x 35cm rectangular baking tray.

2. Fold or crumple each filo sheet using your hands and place on the tray. If you are using a round tray, work your way from the centre until all the dish is covered. If you are using a rectangular tray then concertina-fold and place each sheet side by side until the tray is lined.

3. Place in the oven and bake for 6-8 minutes, until the filo feels crispy to the touch. Keep the oven on.

4. For the filling, beat the eggs in a large bowl with the sugar, oil, orange zest and vanilla using an electric mixer until light and fluffy.

42 The Times Magazine

Add the baking powder and the yoghurt and stir gently until everything is combined.

5. Ladle the filling mixture evenly over the filo pastry and set aside for 4 minutes for the mixture to find its way through the folds of pastry, then bake for about 25-30 minutes until golden.

6. While the pastry is baking, make the syrup.

Put the sugar, orange juice, zest, cinnamon stick, cloves and 250ml water into a saucepan and bring to the boil, then reduce to a low heat and simmer for 5 minutes.

7. When the pie is baked, remove from the oven and ladle the hot syrup over the warm pie and allow to sit until all the syrup has been absorbed. Serve cool with a dollop of yoghurt drizzled with honey.

5. FRIED FISH Serves 2 (page 35) One of my favourite things to eat in Greece, especially when I’m so close to the sea, is fish with a side of wild greens. You can also prepare this fish even more simply by dusting it in a little flour, only once, then pan frying.

It’s lovely either way.

• 4 small fish (such as sea bream or red mullet), cleaned

• Flour, for coating • Olive oil, for frying • Lemon, to serve • Salt and pepper 1. Wash the fish and dry well using some kitchen roll. Have two bowls ready, one with the flour and the other filled with water.

2. Fill a deep frying pan with olive oil to a depth of about 2cm and place over a medium heat. To check that the oil is hot enough, drop in a little flour; if it immediately starts to bubble, the oil is ready.

3. Take one fish and coat with the flour, then dip into the water quickly and again into the flour, shaking off any excess. You can also simply coat the fish once in the flour if you prefer.

4. Place the fish in the hot oil and fry on both sides until golden and crispy. Do not overcrowd the frying pan as the oil will cool and the fish will braise instead of fry.

Drain the fried fish on kitchen roll. Drizzle with fresh lemon, salt and pepper. Serve hot.

Perfect with salad and chips if you like. n Extracted from Ikaria: Food and Life in the Blue Zone by Meni Valle (£22, Hardie Grant)

Jason Miller Continued from page 33

Trump. Arriving at Trump Tower and ascending to the 26th floor, he found Trump in his office, the doors flung open, all of his adult children and aides and advisers and various businesspeople in the room. “He’s like, ‘Hey, pull up a seat,’ ” Miller says. “And he says, ‘OK, tell me something negative about Ted Cruz.’

I’m like, ‘Well, you know… I usually, as a matter of policy, don’t say anything negative about someone I used to work for.’ ” Miller recalls Trump said, “Come on, just pretend like no one else is here.” He refused again. Trump “kind of puts down his hands. He goes, ‘All right, quit “blanking” around. If you want this job you need to tell me something negative about Ted Cruz.’ I said, ‘Mr Trump, I’m here to help you win the election, not to say something negative about a former boss.’

Immediately my armpits are soaked. I’m wondering, is a trapdoor going to open up?”

But Trump laughed and said this was actually the right answer and he was hired.

“We just got along well after that,” Miller says.

He would call Trump every morning at 6.30am after Trump had inhaled the newspapers and the television news, and they would talk, not with a bullet point list of plans, more, “What’s your sense, where do you think things are trending?” he says.

Miller’s oldest daughter has a birthday in October and had become used to asking, “Hey, do I get a real birthday this year, or is this like where we do part of it before the election and then part of it after?” he says.

But after her eighth birthday, he took her on Trump’s plane. He shows me a photograph of her with Trump, wearing red trainers that match her red Maga cap. “She asked him, ‘It’s your own plane and it’s got everything you could ever possibly want. Why don’t you put a hot tub in here?’ And he goes, ‘Because the take-offs and landings, you’d spill a lot of the water. And that’d be too messy to clean up.

Otherwise it would probably be a great idea.’ ” On December 22, 2016, as Trump prepared for the White House, Miller was named as his communications director. The announcement prompted an initially puzzling tweet from AJ Delgado, a fellow staffer on the Trump transition team. “Congratulations to the babydaddy on being named WH Comms Director!” she wrote. He was “the 2016 version of John Edwards”, she added, referring to the former presidential candidate who had an affair while his wife was dying of cancer.

Two days later Miller resigned, saying that after “spending this week with my family... it is clear they need to be my top priority now”.

Delgado revealed that she began dating Miller, aware he was married but believing that he was separated from his wife. Discovering she was pregnant, she told him one night when she could not sleep.

“Well, this is going to be extra awkward

for me to handle,” he replied, she said. “Because my wife is expecting.”

Their relationship soured after that. Miller was reconciled with his wife and went to work for a consultancy and then as a pundit for CNN; Delgado moved back in with her mother and, “Every time I would peek at Twitter, there would be comments calling me a homewrecker,” she said.

Miller gave his own account of it after suing a website called Splinter, which published claims Delgado made in court papers during their custody dispute. In the papers, Delgado said she had heard that Miller had impregnated a stripper and slipped the woman an abortion pill in her smoothie.

Miller’s legal team filed a declaration from the woman in question, who said it was not true and she had never met him.

Miller was questioned at length by a droll lawyer named Katherine Bolger. She made him talk about the strip clubs he had visited.

She asked if he had any other affairs. He told her he’d had sex with an escort in 2015 and

time thinking about it, I’ll probably start getting a little cranky. But I know that even though I didn’t win, I proved that I was right, that this whole thing was made up.”

Miller got back involved with Trump last year. The president called him. “He was asking a lot of things about my life and how my family’s doing,” he says. “Usually he doesn’t ask quite that much stuff.” Miller knew what was coming. The pandemic was wreaking havoc, soon protests erupted over the killing of George Floyd. “That was a tough stretch for the president,” Miller says. In June, Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, called saying, “We need you to saddle up again,” he says. “I usually run to the sound of the guns.”

The weekend before I meet Miller, Trump gave an interview praising the people who turned up to his rally on January 6, calling them “great people” and suggesting that there ought to be repercussions for the Capitol police officer who shot one of them as they stormed the building.

HE AND TRUMP LEFT WASHINGTON ON AIR FORCE ONE. THE PLANE WAS EMPTY. ‘IT WAS A BIT SURREAL’ again in 2017, paying about $300, and that he’d been to “Asian-themed” massage parlours.

At the time of his affair with Delgado, he did not think his marriage was going to last, Miller said. He had been away so long on the campaign trail. The affair was punctuated by rallies, by a presidential debate, by Trump’s election victory. Then they were in New York on the transition team and Delgado was pregnant and threatening to tell his pregnant wife. He discovered that Delgado had emailed his wife while riding in Trump’s motorcade.

“I’m not sure if I was in the same car with the president, but I think on the inside I was freaking out, but I was trying to play calm because I was still, like, on the clock, staffing the next president of the United States.”

You can imagine this would be stressful.

Then of course the whole thing became public knowledge. If it was me, I would have spent a while hiding under the bed covers.

“Nobody goes through life without making mistakes,” Miller tells me. “I just seem to have made mine in the most public way possible. I think my friends and my family know who I am… I’ve got a lot of people that rely on me.”

He shrugs. “Just got to keep charging ahead.”

I ask if he regrets bringing the lawsuit – a court eventually found that the website had the right to report on court documents and he was forced to pay $42,000 (£30,000) in costs.

“You can beat yourself up all day long,” he says. “It took a toll, and if I spend too much

“I think he’s reframing the debate, making the whole fight around January 6 more of a partisan battle, trying to call out some of the inconsistencies from the Democrat side or expose the fact that they’re pursuing a partisan agenda,” Miller says.

After January 6, did it feel like the end of days? The end of the road?

“I mean, for a couple of hours. And then again you got to pick yourself up and start going.” Miller says he went to work, getting a poll together showing that “the base was overwhelmingly with the president” which “basically held most of the Republicans tight” during his impeachment trial. He wanted to ensure that “there would still be viability for him to come back in the future”, he says.

Flying with Trump out of Washington DC on Air Force One, the plane was empty.

“Usually you have all kinds of allies or hangers-on,” he says. “CEOs or members of Congress.” This time it was just Melania and Barron and a few of his adult children, he says.

“It was a little bit surreal… And then we land down in Florida and literally from the airport all the way to Mar-a-Lago, there’s tens of thousands of people on the side of the street.

There wasn’t an open space for the entire drive… People with signs, people with banners, people with trucks, waving flags with families out there, strollers, people of all backgrounds, supportive handmade signs, waving and cheering. And you’re like, ‘OK. His political career is not over yet.’ ” n The Times Magazine 45

MAY 2021

‘I went out for the first time since lockdown.

Life felt good’

Melissa Hemsley photographed by Dan Kennedy for the Times Magazine in 2015

2 HOURS LATER

‘I was hot. I felt claustrophobic.

I thought I was having a heart attack’

‘I was terrified’

ANXIOUS NATION THE RISE OF POST-PANDEMIC PANIC Food writer Melissa Hemsley is among more than ten million adults in Britain who will have a panic attack at some point in their lives – and the return to ‘normality’ is only making it more likely, say experts. What’s going on? By JANE MULKERRINS

GETTY IMAGES, SHUTTERSTOCK

O

n a sunny Wednesday in May this year, Melissa Hemsley was shooting images for her next cookbook at a studio in Hackney, east London. “It was the first time I’d left home for a while in the pandemic,” she says. “I’d not been seeing friends or even family. I’d been really cautious.”

But the 35-year-old cook and author wasn’t feeling stressed about her outing. “I was feeling pretty good, actually.

I was excited about the progress we were making on this big project and it was a beautiful day. Life felt good.”

After a day of shooting, she walked to her acupuncturist appointment and then headed home, where she made dinner and settled down on the sofa with her boyfriend, Henry, and their dog, Nelly, to watch TV. Suddenly, she says, her stomach “felt a bit churny and I felt fidgety”. She asked Henry to change channels to The Repair Shop, a programme guaranteed to soothe if she felt jangly or worried. “But then I felt my heart pounding, racing – so hard it was as if there were almost two heartbeats. I was terrified.”

She recalled watching an episode of a television drama in which a character was having a panic attack but thought it was a heart attack. “All that was going through my head when I started feeling a pain in my chest.” She felt claustrophobic, with the urgent need to move around, and wondered if she should go out for a walk. “But it was getting dark and I didn’t want to be far from home.

It was like I needed distraction, but I also needed to focus. I thought I needed somehow to ground myself, but I just didn’t know what to do.” She remembered having heard advice to ground yourself by observing what you can see and touch, so she tried stroking Nelly. “But that wasn’t doing it.”

She marshalled her experience of meditation and tried focusing on her breath.

“But I felt hot and terrified, and was just wondering when it was going to end. There were all sorts of new sensations in my body and I wondered if it was getting worse. I felt as if nobody could help me.” She asked Henry to put Headspace on Netflix and find the episode about stress.

She estimates that the panic attack lasted several hours. “And then I just remember feeling shattered. But I was terrified of falling asleep and waking up unable to breathe.” Eventually she did go to bed and fell asleep. “When I woke up the next morning, I felt like a truck had run me over. I was really shaky, and terrified that it was going to happen again that day. I had this horrible fear that another one could strike at any time.”

In spite of her fears, she gathered

HELP! I’M HAVING A PANIC ATTACK WHAT ARE THE SYMPTOMS? It’s a feeling of sudden and intense anxiety.

Physical symptoms include shaking, feeling disorientated, nausea, rapid, irregular heartbeats, breathlessness, sweating and dizziness. The amygdala (the “fear centre” of the brain) becomes hyperactive, triggering the fight or flight response, which results in a release of adrenaline. The heart beats faster and blood flow increases. Often, breathing becomes laboured.

Most panic attacks last between 5 and 20 minutes, although for some people they can last more than an hour.

WHAT HELPS? One dose of Valium According to Peter Tyrer, emeritus professor of psychiatry at Imperial College London, panic attacks sometimes have a specific trigger, such as public speaking.

Before tackling an event or situation that is likely to bring on intense panic, Tyrer suggests taking 2mg or 5mg of Valium (diazepam) beforehand.

“Valium causes dependency if it is taken very regularly and suddenly stopped. My advice is just to take one tablet. It’s absorbed within 20 minutes.”

‘It has been easy to avoid things during lockdown, but avoidance makes panic disorders worse’

From left: Emma Raducanu, Ariana Grande, Amol Rajan and Emma Stone have all suffered from anxiety attacks

Shift your focus Dr Becky Spelman, a psychologist and clinical director of the Private Therapy Clinic, says it’s important to shift your focus. “When we’re very anxious, noticing all our symptoms makes them even worse because we worry about them more,” she says. “So instead you want to be thinking about what you can see, smell and hear. Ask yourself, what’s in my environment? That will help to redirect your focus.”

Cognitive behavioural therapy A type of talking therapy, CBT can help to combat the anxiety that causes a panic attack by challenging unhelpful ways of thinking. The aim is to shift from a negative, irrational mindset to a rational, coping one. Apps like the CBT Thought Diary can be used to record your anxious thoughts and then counter them.

Breathing techniques Try coping mechanisms such as the “4-7-8”. Close your mouth and inhale through your nose to a count of four.

Hold your breath for a count of seven. Exhale completely through your mouth, making a whoosh sound to a count of eight. Then inhale again and repeat the cycle three more times.

Avoid caffeine, alcohol and cigarettes The NHS suggests all three can make panic attacks worse. Elisabeth Perlman herself and went back to the studio for another day of shooting for the book. “When everyone asked if I’d had a nice evening, I was honest.

I said, ‘Not really. I had a panic attack.’ And nobody seemed shocked. We then had a really helpful chat about everybody’s mental health.”

If Hemsley’s story feels horribly relatable, you’re far from alone, particularly right now.

Academic estimates suggest almost 25 per cent of people will suffer a panic attack at some point in their lives. This summer, however, we are seeing a “surge” in the reporting and diagnosis of them, according to Dr Andrea Reinecke, a research fellow in psychiatry at the University of Oxford, who specialises in anxiety disorders and, specifically, panic disorder.

The dramatic increase in mental health issues during lockdown, including anxiety and depression, has been well documented.

But this spike, many experts believe, is related to post-pandemic reopening.

Perhaps counterintuitively, after a stressful and unpredictable 18 months of coronavirus and its accompanying restrictions, it is now the return of freedoms – a return to offices, pubs, restaurants and public transport – that is prompting a new pandemic: one of panic attacks.

“Many people who have previously suffered panic attacks and agoraphobia are now experiencing

The Times Magazine 49

them much more severely than we’ve seen before,” says Reinecke. Having spent the best part of 18 months sequestered at home, sufferers have not been forced to put themselves in stressful situations that could trigger an attack. “It has been easy to avoid things, but avoidance actually makes panic disorders worse.” In addition, she says, we are also witnessing a rise in panic attacks among people with no history of them.

Claire Eastham, an author and blogger who has written extensively on the subject, is seeing evidence of this increase too. “I’m getting a lot more messages on social media and via my blog from people who are struggling to re-enter the world and are dealing with panic attacks as a result.

“It’s a huge change,” she acknowledges.

“And the brain notoriously does not accept change well, or quickly. If you wanted to run a marathon, you wouldn’t just decide to run 26 miles – you’d build up to it through training,” she says. “But we’ve been at home for more than a year and now, suddenly, we’re expected to go back to the office, to restaurants, to pubs, to shops and cinemas and on the bus.

“Anxiety feeds on control,” she continues.

“If you can control the environment, then you can calculate the threat. Right now it feels like we can’t calculate or control any of it.” She finds that incredibly stressful herself. “I don’t like that I can’t guarantee that everyone in a room has washed their hands or that everyone on the train will have their mask on.”

Meanwhile, recent reports have presented evidence of a link between Covid itself and mental and neurological disorders among sufferers in its aftermath. A study by The Lancet published in April this year found that one in three people who were severely ill with coronavirus were subsequently diagnosed with a neurological or psychiatric condition within six months of infection, the most common being anxiety, reported by 17 per cent. The study also found that sufferers were 16 per cent more likely to develop a psychological or neurological disorder after Covid than after other respiratory infections, and 44 per cent more likely than people recovering from flu.

Looking back, Hemsley believes this wasn’t her first; that she’d probably suffered a panic attack during a talk she was delivering at a dinner in the summer of 2019.

“I’d written my speech and I had all my notes printed out. I was up third. And I remember saying to the person next to me, ‘Oh, I’m quite nervous,’ ” she recalls. “It was a very warm, welcoming space – women drinking wine, beautiful meal, lovely vibe.

And I remember getting up there, dry mouth – which isn’t unusual; I always get a dry mouth and feel nervous before events – but even with the words in front of me I couldn’t read them. Everything was swimming.” She

‘Patients with panic disorder are generally very strong, in highcalibre positions’ recalls little else about giving the speech but, “I remember a lot of people came up to me afterwards and said, ‘You were amazing to get through it. How do you feel? I can’t believe you got through that.’ So I walked away thinking, well, that was obviously a train wreck.

“I’m trying to work out if I had a panic attack during the talk,” she muses. “And the reason that I’m wondering is because I think if it was a true panic attack, I would have had to run out the door. But I do think I went through some sort of attack.”

Clinically, says Reinecke, a panic attack is “a situation where, without an apparent external reason, suddenly a person develops physical symptoms like a racing heart and breathlessness”. Then, having noticed their own racing heart, “gets this catastrophic interpretation that maybe something’s wrong with their heart, so gets anxious and their heart rate goes up even more”.

Under which definition, Hemsley’s experience at dinner certainly fits.

Recently, a string of celebrities have spoken about suffering panic attacks, including musicians Ariana Grande, John Mayer and Grimes and actresses Amanda Seyfried, Nicole Kidman and Emma Stone, who spent three years suffering attacks so severe that during filming she would spend most lunchbreaks with the on-set nurse, asking for reassurances that “no one was going to die”. Eighteen-yearold British tennis player Emma Raducanu’s breathing problems in the second set of her high-profile fourth-round match at Wimbledon had all the hallmarks of a panic attack.

In May this year, BBC presenter Amol Rajan confessed that he had a “full-on panic attack” the night before his first appearance at the helm of the prestigious Today programme on Radio 4. On Twitter, following his first (successful) shift, he posted of how he “worked myself up into a frenzy, catastrophising… had 3 massive rums and a bit else. Got 1hr kip. In at 3.45. Survived.

“In the depths of my self-inflicted horror,” he continued, he downloaded sleep apps, which only “intensified the doom spilling through my head”.

Two days later, when Rajan discussed the incident on air as well as his history of anxiety, the response was overwhelming.

For Hemsley, in the aftermath of her prolonged panic attack in May there was not only a fear of it happening again but a sense

of disappointment in herself too. “I felt like, oh, I’m not strong enough,” she says.

According to Reinecke, however, the opposite is more likely. “I’ve found that the patients I work with, patients with panic disorder, are generally very, very strong people,” she says. “They are usually in very high-calibre positions – police officers, university professors – are very high-functioning and are used to having a certain level of control. So experiencing panic attacks for them feels particularly bad because there is a sense of ‘it just can’t happen’ – it doesn’t fit in, because they have things to do.”

Claire Eastham can relate to that. The 34-year-old Manchester-based author was diagnosed with social anxiety a decade ago when she began suffering chronic panic attacks while “at the same time being obsessively ambitious”. She estimates she has suffered around 400 panic attacks to date.

The first one arrived when she was 25 and interviewing for a promotion at a high-profile publishing house, a moment she describes in her recent memoir, F***, I Think I’m Dying: How I Learned to Live with Panic. “The fear that started as a tingle mutates into a roar.

Then IT happens. A warm, not unpleasant tingling sensation flows through my body like an electric current. I feel it firing down my legs and to the very ends of my fingertips.

When it reaches my chest, everything erupts.

My heart isn’t just beating any more, it’s pounding, punching violently at my ribcage, demanding attention.

“My stomach gurgles and twists uncomfortably as sweat pours down my back,” she writes. “But most of all is the overwhelming feeling that something is very wrong. You’re dying. F***, you’re having a heart attack, or is this a stroke?

“When the second wave strikes, I feel detached from my body, suspended in a state of numb terror,” she continues. “This is it. This is the end. I don’t care about anything any more. All the work I’ve put into preparing for this meeting, my job, my career, money, future: it all seems insignificant next to a burning desire to get out of the room and run.”

Eastham did, in fact, run – after telling her interviewers that she had norovirus and had to leave “at once”.

“I ran out of the meeting room, screaming, and all the way down the street, convinced I was going to die,” she says today. “I thought they’d say, ‘It’s OK. We’ll get the white van and you’re going to be locked up for a bit.’

And I would have welcomed that. It [her attack] was so public. But the doctor I then saw said, ‘Sounds like a panic attack. That’s quite common.’ ” For Eastham, understanding the science of what was happening to and in her brain was enormously helpful. “I needed

The Times Magazine 51

to learn as much about it as I could, to figure out what this was and why it was happening to me, because the confusion and panic feed off each other,” she says.

The amygdala, part of the brain’s limbic system – the system that deals with emotion and memory – is a collection of cells at the base of the brain responsible for the “fight or flight” response that is triggered when we find ourselves in danger. “When you trip on the stairs and you grab something, you don’t even think about it – that’s the amygdala working,” says Eastham. “You’re experiencing all the symptoms you would be experiencing during a panic attack, but because there was a reason, you don’t really notice it.”

However, she says, when those symptoms occur when you’re in the supermarket or an office, “It’s overwhelmingly confusing and you think, ‘What’s going on?’ If it’s not an external threat, then it must be internal.” That prompts “this huge cycle of the rational brain trying to figure out what’s going on, and the amygdala just keeps sounding the alarm”.

Reinecke has found the most successful method of curing panic attacks is exposure therapy. Extreme though it may sound, her approach involves locking patients with panic disorders in a broom cupboard (with their consent) for an undisclosed period of time.

‘I finally figured it out: just wait. Everything’s going to end eventually.

It will pass’ In reality she only keeps them in there for 15 minutes, “But they don’t know that. They think I might keep them in there for the night.” It’s a one-time-only lockdown. “We know from our studies that once is enough to convince the brain that this heart attack – or the fainting, stroke or whatever it is they’re afraid of – is actually not going to happen,” she says. This treatment is, she recognises, “really hard to do. Because they give up all control. They can’t escape.”

But, she says, “We know from our research that there’s a limited amount of time that the body can be anxious for. At some point, anxiety will decrease naturally.” And, she says, “It builds a different association with the situation and the brain and body learn: actually, I have tried everything to have that heart attack and I still didn’t have it. So maybe I’m not going to.”

Reinecke makes clear, however, that this is not simply a case of locking people

in cupboards willy-nilly. “We’ve noticed that it does take a certain level of intelligence, because it’s really important to understand the concept,” she says. “And to be able to monitor yourself in the situation. Some people are just too anxious to really do it.”

After reading up on it, Eastham gave herself an at-home version of a more gradual exposure therapy, involving simulating interviews at home at her dining room table.

This is, she says, “the only way you can communicate to the amygdala because it’s primitive – you can’t reason with it”. She still suffers from panic attacks, although with far less frequency – once or twice a month – and far less intensely. “I call it my Richter scale; these days, they don’t usually get above a five out of ten. And because I know so much about them now, I can usually shut them down really quickly.”

She’s developed strategies for dealing with attacks when they do strike. She practises breathing techniques. “Moving around is really good too – go for a walk to help disperse some of that adrenaline.” She also had the word “wait” tattooed on her left wrist.

“Because I finally figured that out: just wait,” she says. “Everything’s going to end eventually. It will pass. You’re not going to have a panic attack for the rest of your life.” n

Pout! 20 BEST BEAUTY BARGAINS

Supermarket cleansers, a £12 hairdryer – Nadine Baggott chooses her top budget buys three other new scents at Zara

by Jo this summer – Rose Petal Drops, Amber & Fig Cashmere and Bergamot & Leather Spritz – and all are gorgeous.

BEST REUSABLE 2 THE MAKE-UP REMOVER PADS

I

t might be unfashionable to admit, but budget beauty has never been better. Just as there has been a revolution in high-street fashion, so there has been an equal movement within beauty, and an array of great-quality dupes and even purse-friendly original products have filtered down to the high street to save your skin, hair and nails and at the same time save you cash. Here are my top 20 options for summer.

HEIDIKLEIN.COM

1 THE ON-THE-GO POWER DRYER AF Pro styling hairdryer (£12; Primark, in store only) Small enough to pack away into a case or overnight staycation bag, powerful enough at 1800W to blast dry hair in minutes. It has two speed and three heat settings, a removable filter to clean and a cool shot. Just try keeping your teenager’s hands off it.

54 The Times Magazine

The Body Shop Clean Conscience Reusable Make-up Remover Pads (£10 for 7; thebodyshop.com) None of us should be using old-fashioned cotton wool pads any more when we can buy eco-friendly, washable and reusable soft, round cotton minicloths. These come in a wash bag and are even labelled with the seven days of the week in case you’re feeling grubby and are tempted to reuse.

SENSITIVE SKIN SAVIOUR 3 THE

Honest Beauty The Daily Calm Moisturizer (£35; cultbeauty.co.uk) I’ll be honest and say I generally dismiss celebrity beauty, but Jessica Alba has done a brilliant job of curating her range, and this wonderfully light lotion is ideal for summer-sensitised skin.

Loaded with humectants to lock water in your skin without feeling sticky, it is the ideal hot-weather make-up base and suitable for all skin types, tones and ages.

4 THE SUMMER SCENT

Zara No 03 Citrus Meze eau de parfum (£25.99; zara.com) You know Jo Malone formulates these, right?

I mean, the queen of citrussy, zesty scents has created the stand-out high-street scent for summer 2021. I defy you to look at the elegant flacon or sniff it out and tell me it isn’t worth four times the price. PS, there are

WATERPROOF 5 THE MAKE-UP REMOVER

PS Naturals Balms to Oil Cleanser (£3; primark.com) Many beauty aficionados say that this is a dupe for much pricier options and at just £3 it’s worth trying if you love a balm and rinse-off oil cleanser at night.

It is perfect for dry skin and anyone who likes a long-lasting foundation or lip colour. It even removes waterproof make-up with ease.

LIZARD LEGS SOLUTION 6 THE

CeraVe SA Smoothing Cream (£12; boots.com) CeraVe is well known for creating super-rich creams for dry skin, but this is a lighter texture and contains an exfoliating salicylic acid, which makes it perfect for summer lizard legs, dry elbows, knees, even sandal-dusty dry feet. Sleep in it overnight for a few nights and, voilà, smoother, softer skin.

THE IDEAL SOAP FOR 7SUMMER Kopari Super Suds Soap Bar (£9; koparibeauty.co.uk) Until recently soaps seemed so out of touch, but now we know they are kinder to the environment and require less packaging, everyone is looking for the perfect body bar – and this ticks a lot of boxes. It is loaded with coconut milk, so it cleanses and softens skin easily.

REFRESHING SUMMER CLEANSER 8 THE

Q+A Hyaluronic Acid Gel Cleanser (£7.50; sainsburys.co.uk) In summer I want a stick-it-in-the-shower, easy to use, refreshing wash-off cleansing gel and this works well without stripping your skin. It will remove SPF and summer sweat, but that hit of hyaluronic acid means that it respects your skin and leaves it comfortable, with no tightness or dryness.

THE SOFT-FOCUS 9MOISTURISER VEGAN BYBI Face Base (£16; bybi.com) If you’re looking for a vegan moisturiser and want a hydrating but soft-focus finish, then this is the one for you. It plumps lines but has a flattering, softly blurring finish so works well on older skins, even though this brand is targeting a younger demographic.

THIRSTY 10 THE SKIN QUENCHER

Beauty Pie Triple Hyaluronic Acid Deep Moisture Miracle Face Cream (£13.89 for members; beautypie.com) There’s no denying that Beauty Pie (the monthly subscription beauty club) is going from strength to strength with its products. This gel cream moisturiser sits perfectly with its bestselling Triple Hyaluronic Acid & Lipopeptide Serum (£16.96) and is great value for money if you’re a member. If you’re thinking of joining, then my advice is to share a membership with friends and family.

‘My favourite body lotion?

It costs £4.50 and you can find it in Tesco’

hint of summer gold shimmer and a matte brown dark enough to use as a liner too.

13 THE ONE-COAT MASCARA

Max Factor Divine Lashes Mascara (£11.99; boots.com) Why pay a fortune for mascara when the high-street options are so good? This chunky brush formula gives serious volume and length in a single coat, and it comes in a waterproof version if you suffer from lash to lid transfer and smudging in warmer weather.

14

THE BEST BUDGET SKIN PEEL

Me+ Polyglutamic Acid Booster (£8.99; superdrug.com) This new-generation resurfacing acid is really gentle but effective, great for SPFclogged skin and summer breakouts but also, when slept in overnight, will leave you with a gorgeous fresh summer glow.

15

THE FAKE IT MANICURE

Sally Hansen Insta Dri Nail Polish In a Blush (£4.99; boots.com) You know the moment you look down at your ravaged nails and need a quick fix? This is that – a creamy pink nude polish that dries fast and can be double layered in a flash.

16 THE SKINPLUMPING 11 SUN PROTECTION L’Oréal Paris Revitalift Filler SPF50 (£19.99; superdrug.com) This cult moisturiser now has added SPF50, which means if you apply enough of the stuff (that quarter-teaspoon rule for face, neck and ears) then you no longer need a dedicated SPF. It’s a gel cream that truly does plump fine lines and absorbs quickly with no white cast.

12 THE BUDGET SMOKY EYE

e.l.f. Bite Size Eyeshadows (£4; superdrug.com) You can’t beat a tonal eye quad for £1 a colour. e.l.f. (eyes, lips, face, in case you were thinking pixies and fairies) has seasonal colours and classics, but look at Cream & Sugar for the perfect brown smoky eye quad with a

THE LIGHTEST LOTION SPF

The Body Shop Skin Defence Multi-Protection Light Essence SPF50 (£22; thebodyshop.com) If you like your SPF dedicated and superlight, then this lotion is for you. Ideal for all the family, even men with facial hair, it’s a milky serum that offers a great level of protection. (The quarter-teaspoon rule still applies to get the full factor 50 protection for face, neck and ears, though.)

BEST BRONZER 17 THE

Zara Bronzing Powder (£14.99; zara.com) Why is this bronzing powder so good? Well, it comes in nine shades. It’s loosely packed so goes on and blends easily, but be sure to try to get into the store, not only to see the entire range of Zara make-up (created by Diane Kendal, who has worked on more Vogue covers than you can count), but to get your colour match.

BUDGET VITAMIN C SERUM 18 THE

Revolution Skincare 12.5% Vitamin C Super Serum (£15.99; superdrug.com) This is a great vitamin C serum, strong enough to protect against pollution and to brighten and tackle sunspots. Perfect yearround but essential in summer.

CONCEALER DUPE 19 THE

Collection Lasting Perfection Stretch Concealer (£3.99; boots.com) Dare I say Glossier dupe? Oh hell, yes, because that’s what this is; a doesn’t-sit-in-finelines under-eye concealer and primer for greasy, sweaty summer eyelids. It also has enough lightreflective particles to brighten under-eye dark circles.

20 SUPER-SOFTENING BODY LOTION

Dove Pro Age Body Lotion (£4.50, tesco.com) I know you’re thinking that this is for older skin, but that’s not strictly true of a lightweight lotion that contains lactic acid, which is ideal for dealing with ingrown hairs, marks left by insect bites, shaving nicks and uneven skin on legs and arms. n You can find Nadine @nadinebaggott on Instagram and YouTube where she answers all your beauty questions

The Times Magazine 55

Home!

THE SIMPLE LIFE GREEK ISLAND STYLE How one London couple turned a ruined cottage on Tinos into a stunning hideaway in the mountains REPORT Fiona McCarthy PHOTOGRAPHS Peter Marston

The plunge pool cut into the rock.

Right, from top: the terrace; Susan and Peter Marston

From top: the pergola in the garden; exterior of Xinara House

I

t isn’t often a delayed flight leads to buying a house, but this is exactly what happened to London-based creatives Peter and Susan Marston five years ago.

While stranded in Mykonos after a holiday around the Greek isles, the couple decided to hop on a ferry for Tinos, a small island in the Cyclades archipelago (renowned for being very foodie) only 20 minutes away. “We’d visited lots of Aegean islands before, but Tinos had always been missed,” says Peter. “What we found was beautiful landscapes, heavenly beaches and excellent tavernas. It was great.”

While exploring the island, someone showed them a centuries-old dilapidated house (once home of a Cyclades bishop, Ioannes Kollaros), and despite “the roof falling in, the windows and doors past using, and no paint on the walls”, recalls Peter, they were instantly charmed. The house’s high ceilings and original features – such as marble fanlights (created for ventilation) and decorative plasterwork (in the shape of upside-down pineapples, a symbol of plenty) – as well as several acres of gardens and

60 The Times Magazine

Home!

Clockwise from top: the garden; outside dining area; collection of religious votives found in cupboards and under the floor

The Times Magazine 61

The kitchen. Below: bedroom with 19th-century cast-iron bed and antique French tapestry

vineyard traversing the base of the honeyhued Exomvourgo Mountains, sealed the deal.

Their original idea of “doing up a modest little cottage, with a simple shower and rustic kitchen”, Peter says, gave way to “something much more ambitious”. It took a year to buy, navigating the demands of 17 owners, and then another two to rebuild what the couple now call Xinara House from scratch.

Drawing on former textile designer Susan’s flair for colour and texture and Peter’s architectural and design experience as one of the co-founders of the conservatory company Marston & Langinger (since sold to Alitex), the couple have fashioned an impressively sympathetic yet contemporary restoration of a traditional Greek house. “For more than 50 years, I’ve worked on a lot of old buildings,” including the Marstons’ own Victorian family home in Stockwell, south London, he says.

“I love cleaning them up, removing all the old alterations, and bringing them back to a kind of perfect simplicity.”

The house is reached via steps up from the street onto a terrace, paved by the couple in the sea pebble mosaic style known locally

62 The Times Magazine

as votsaloto – which then takes you directly into a large double-height sala (living room).

From here, one way leads to the kitchen and the other to a TV room and two bedrooms, all of which open out onto the large terrace at the back, overlooking the gardens and mountain. The katoi (basement level), originally used for storing olive and lamp oil, flour, livestock and chickens, now reached by a sculptural staircase, has also been transformed into a series of vibrant bedrooms.

They have been replastered in the Greek style of asvesti (white lime plaster) to make it as light as possible. “Traditionally, these houses were very dark, to keep out the cold in winter and the sun in summer.” Wooden beams have been replaced, the garden’s ten terraces reconstructed, a plunge pool set into the rocks, and five more bathrooms added.

While Peter created the backdrop – “pale colours, natural materials such as timber, slate and island-quarried marble” – Susan has filled the spaces with artworks she has created, from paintings of sheep and Kandinsky-esque abstracts to handpainted shutters (typical of Cyclades houses) and quirky lamp bases with

Clockwise from top: the terrace; antique chargers artwork by Susan Marston; living room with Perspex coffee table full of objets; doors with marble fanlights

Home!

marbled paper shades, as well as textiles she has collected from Europe to Java.

A series of “subtly intervented” blue and white antique chargers, which Susan showed at last year’s Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, hang above one doorway while a Perspex box, filled with white objets, including a sun-bleached skin shed by an island snake and decorated ping pong balls, acts as a coffee table. In one alcove Susan has pooled together “curious bits of lace and tamata” (gold religious votive offerings) found in drawers, cupboards and even under the floors.

Perfect for large gatherings – especially when the couple’s four children, their partners and five grandchildren descend (it is also available to rent when the family is not there) – it is a place to cook, making the most of the local fish, honey and wine, and the fruit and vegetables grown in the garden, and to simply absorb the island’s rustic beauty. During the day, “You can sit out by the pergola with a pair of binoculars and watch the eagles fly around their nests on the mountain,” Peter says. “And at night, it is so pitch black you can perfectly see the Milky Way.” n The Times Magazine 63

Home!

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By Monique Rivalland

1. £195, nkuku.com. 2. £163.99, wayfair.co.uk. 3. £25, dunelm.com.

4. £489, cultfurniture.com.

5. £149, made.com.

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BRING THE MED HOME

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6. £24, laredoute.co.uk.

7. £8, maisonsdumonde.com.

8. Floor vase, £89.99, zara.com.

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9. £192, Seletti (amara.com).

10. Coconut palm tree, £285, sweetpeaandwillow.com. 11. Leather pouffe, £100, bohemiadesign.co.uk.

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16. Metal table and six chairs, £659.95, sklum.com.

17. Side plate, £14, anthropologie.com.

18. Dessert plate, £22, Skye McAlpine (anthropologie.com).

19. £611, Hay (skandium.com).

20. Fake cactus, £164, maisonsdumonde.com.

21. £74.95, sklum.com.

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12. Chair, £116.99 for two, wayfair.co.uk.

13. £39.99, wayfair.co.uk. 14. Silk cushion, £55, Les Ottomans (artemest.com). 15. Silk cushion, £86, Les Ottomans (amara.com).

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The Times Magazine 65

Eating out Giles Coren ‘With the restaurant writing, my best shot at longevity may well be to go “full Michael Winner”’ Camden Beer Hall et al

TOM JACKSON

T

68 The Times Magazine

he other week, in a review of Thomas by Tom Simmons in Cardiff, I wrote that the tea-brined fried chicken with lime mayo, coriander and sesame was “historic”, attracting a brief flurry of excitement below the line, as a number of you noted what you took to be an inadvertent tribute to the late Sunday Times restaurant critic Michael Winner.

But it absolutely wasn’t. Inadvertent, that is. It was among the most advertent tributes I have ever made. And, in fact, I make it quite often. Whenever a mouthful surpasses all superlatives, or I have already used all the other superlatives elsewhere, or I am a bit hungover or tired and cannot think of any other superlatives, I think, “Shall I just say it was ‘historic’?”

And then I think, “No, that’s Michael Winner’s word, and it tells you nothing, draws no pictures and tells no stories, because Michael was not a writer, he was just a (very knowing) caricature of an angry fat little Jewish man, brimming with absurd opinions and prejudices, and absolutely the last person to be looking to for creative inspiration, when one should be turning to Henry James, Samuel Beckett, F Scott Fitzgerald, Baudelaire…”

And then I think, who am I trying to kid?

Michael Winner was the greatest restaurant

critic who ever lived! The only one (apart from the guy in Ratatouille) ever to break out of the confines of these irrelevant, slobbery, sauce-bespattered back pages of the glossy magazines and resonate in the real world.

For 20 or 30 years, if you said the words “restaurant critic” to any half-read man and woman in the English-speaking world, Michael’s big, purple, currant-eyed, smiling face, with its curling white hair at the ears, like puffs of cloud encircling an evening sun, was the image that leapt into their mind.

He couldn’t write, he knew nothing about food (as he yodelled proudly, almost every week), he cared only about being fawned on by the restaurant manager from arrival to departure, he went to the same half a dozen places every time, and didn’t really like any of them apart from the Splendido in Portofino and Assaggi in Notting Hill, he was a hideous name-dropper (I don’t think he once sat down at a table without Shakira Caine or Roger Moore holding his chair for him), he told the same terrible Jewish jokes week after week after week… And yet you couldn’t not read him. He was unmissable – the highest paid columnist on Fleet Street and the man who made The Sunday Times, for a while, the greatest newspaper in the world.

So when I cave in and describe a dish I have enjoyed as “historic” (Michael reserved the term mainly for sugary puddings, as I recollect, but I don’t have a sweet tooth), I do it in full knowledge of whom I’m quoting and what he stood for. And I find myself doing it more and more these days, as it

Camden Beer Hall (left) 55-59 Wilkin Street Mews, London NW5 (020 7485 1671; camden townbrewery.com) Viet Grill 58 Kingsland Road, London E2 (020 7739 6686; vietgrill restaurant.co.uk) Defune 34 George Street, London W1 (020 7935 8311; defune.co.uk) Ino Gastrobar 4 Newburgh Street, London W1 (020 3701 6618; inogastrobar.com)

happens. Perhaps because in this dreary modern era for restaurant writing, when all the great exemplars are dead and the only really exciting work appears on heavily politicised, angry little websites whose fons et origo is a foul distaste for all the food writing that has gone before, my best shot at longevity – since my writing will never be a vector for exploration of the liminal spaces where intersectionality and bao buns express themselves in the white-hot smithy of perpetual revolution – may well be to go “full Winner”.

And so, henceforth, I propose to abandon even the pretence of seeking out exciting new independent restaurants in London and the regions, and stick to a handful of places near me that I already know and like, go there only with celebrities, big up new openings owned by my friends, rant about appalling service whenever I am not adequately kowtowed to, and do nothing in terms of describing the dishes, beyond announcing which are historic and which are not, as befits an angry old media whore with eight other jobs, for whom restaurant criticism is little more than a comedy side hustle.

To which end, let me implore you to visit the newly revamped and expanded Camden Beer Hall, home of the Camden Brewery, founded by my dear old friend Jasper Cuppaidge (lovely man, delightful wife), just down the road from his own (and, as it happens, my) gorgeous house in fashionable Kentish Town. He’s got my dear, dear pal Theo Randall from the InterContinental in

there doing the cooking now – the idea being to create a German beer hall with Italian food (quite bonkers, of course).

I was served (at the best table in the house, I might add) some quite historic giant pretzels [are pretzels Italian? Please check] as well as historic fritto misto (so crispy!), wonderful ravioli filled with some sort of Italian creamy stuff (cheese?), “loaded” focaccia as thick as my arm (Theo says it’s a more “interesting” version of pizza), and a brilliant steak cut into slices just like Luigi does at the Splendido.

Although Mr Randall didn’t fork it into my mouth himself, like Luigi does, so I’ve taken him off my Christmas card list. We drank little ice-cold glasses of wonderfully fresh Camden Hells lager with all these dishes and it was all quite, quite historic.

But I’ll tell you what wasn’t historic: supper at Viet Grill in Shoreditch. Actually, it was.

Historically BAD! Having pivoted to a delivery hub during lockdown, it has proved unable to pivot back into anything vaguely resembling a restaurant. One waiter serving a whole (empty!) room? Ridiculous! I was completely ignored, as were my famous friends, Jemima and Henry Dimbleby (son of David – wonderful man, lovely house, huge swimming pool).

It went on so long that I ended up ordering my dishes on Deliveroo because I thought it would be quicker. [Can this possibly be true?

– legal dept.] They made us a round of disgusting margaritas and only afterwards admitted they had no limes! What did they make them with, then? Shampoo?

Hydroxychloroquine? Appalling. Ought

to be closed down. (Henry and Jemima told me the food was historic – I know nothing about food! – but that’s hardly the point.)

To recover, I went to Defune in Marylebone on my own (my favourite person to be with) and had a simply historic meal at the sushi counter, as I always do, served (as I always am) by my dear friend Derek, the sushi master there. He isn’t actually called Derek.

I don’t know his name (it’ll be more Japanese than “Derek”, I suppose). But I’m too embarrassed to ask, now I’ve known him all these years. Calm down, dear, it’s only a name!

Anyway, according to my tape recorder, I had raw scallops (sounds awful but they were very nice, sweet as wine gums, which are the most historic sweets ever), fatty tuna, yellowtail and sweet shrimp – these were all sashimi, which apparently means sushi with no rice under it. Who knew? Then nigiri sushi with things like torch-blasted salmon and raw squid with a little bit of lemon squeezed over it and a historic inside out roll with shrimp tempura in it and a hand roll full of delicious stuff (Fish? Vegetables? What do I know?) and the whole thing was only £178 for one person with no booze. Historic value!

What do you mean, these aren’t newly opened restaurants? Calm down, dear, it’s just a review! I also went to a new modern Greek place called Ino, from the wonderful Andreas Labridis, whose first restaurant, Opso, I was horrible about many years ago – can’t remember why. No doubt Andreas failed to bow deeply enough when I walked in.

Anyway, this place is simply historic.

Catch of the day was grouper (no, not groupie, calm down, dear!) which they served first as carpaccio (more raw fish, I’ll live for ever!) but then offered in the form of its collar (fish have collars?), which had been blasted on a barbecue so the bones were black and crunchy and the fat was melting and they had scattered chopped onion and chilli and tomatoes over it (clever things) and it was, quite simply, historic. My dining companion, a Colombian lady called Lily, had paid for me in an auction (I went for millions by all accounts) for a charity called Lady Garden and she enjoyed the historic tarama with slow-cooked egg and bottarga, seftalies in caul fat with tzatziki, and ibérico pork secreto gyro nearly as much as she enjoyed my company, which was, needless to say, historic.

What was not historic, however, was the seating at the bar: too small, too cramped, too hot. Appalling. I noticed only when I was leaving that there was a spacious dining room downstairs. Someone should have told me! n The Times Magazine 69

LIFESTYLE

INTERIORS

INTERIORS

INTERIORS

Beta male Ben Machell

KATIE WILSON

‘Why do Cornwall when you can go to Swindon, Stockton or Swansea?

Bear with me…’

No summer holiday abroad for a second year running, but that’s fine. Deep down, perhaps I’m even a little relieved. The world is a big place. And the older I get, the bigger it seems to grow while, simultaneously, my comfort zone contracts by the day, like one of those animated maps of the Byzantine empire I like to watch on YouTube. At school, I had a mate whose grandmother would stubbornly take 20 litres of Leeds tap water on holiday to Spain.

We used to laugh about it. These days, I’d love to pick her brains about the logistics of it all.

Anyway, my family and I will holiday within these borders again this summer. We just need to pick a location, but we’re spoilt for choice.

While in global terms I am not a well-travelled man – I somehow ended up spending my gap year working for a railway supply company in Doncaster – when it comes to this country, I’ve been all over. And, in terms of holiday hotspots, there are hidden gems out there.

Cornwall? The Cotswolds? They’re for mugs.

You can do much better than that this summer if you’re prepared to think outside the box and just give some places a chance. For example…

Stockton-on-Tees. When I was young, my parents would often whisk us away on domestic city breaks, by which I mean they would find the cheapest possible places we could stay on full board, regardless of where it was. As a result we enjoyed some magical stays in Hull, Carlisle and – jewel of them all – Stockton-on-Tees. I really loved Stockton; very much Girona to Middlesbrough’s Barcelona. I remember one morning, as a treat, my dad took me to see the Tees Transporter Bridge. I was in awe. It was only years later, at university, that it dawned on me that this feat of Edwardian engineering was not the globally recognised landmark I’d assumed it was.

Everyone else was talking about somewhere called “Goa”. Quite simply, their loss.

Swindon. I went to see my football team play in Swindon ten years ago and, as I was trudging back to the station in the drizzly dark, a group of teenage boys emerged from an alley and asked if I wanted a fight. “Not really,” I said, turning to them. “All right then,” they shrugged. “No problem.” And they walked off.

Speaks very well of a place, manners like that.

Been meaning to return ever since.

Morecambe. A deeply erotic place, highly recommended for anyone looking for a spicy getaway. I don’t mind admitting that I’m speaking from personal experience. I once went to Morecambe to interview an indie

band I will not name and, in a seafront hotel afterwards, I was kept awake all night by one of its members and a young woman engaging in some of the loudest, most prolonged and guttural shagging I’ve ever heard. It sounded like the Spanish Inquisition were trying to extract confessions from them by any means necessary. Perhaps they had been invigorated by the crisp air rolling in off the Irish Sea, or enjoyed some libido-boosting local shellfish.

Maybe it was something to do with half a tonne of party drugs. Who can say?

Ballymena. Belfast is lovely but, when it comes to Northern Ireland, this is the place for me.

I visited on a school rugby tour and something about the combination of relentlessly pebbledashed architecture, nonstop rainfall and fried food really spoke to my natural temperament. The mother of the guy I was staying with had an accent that made Ian Paisley sound like Glinda the Good Witch in The Wizard of Oz. Which was cool.

Whitby. I love the Yorkshire coast but, more than anything, I love goths. And in Whitby you can’t move for them. Something, I seem to remember, to do with a literary connection to Dracula. Anyway, I can’t think of a group of people I’d rather spend a summer holiday around. For one thing there would never be any competition for sunloungers or, for that matter, sunshine in general. And for all their preoccupation with ghosts, graveyards, strong cider and their own beauteous undeath, they remain some of the politest, cheeriest people you’ll meet. No bother at all at the hotel bar or breakfast buffet.

Wales. Just… all of Wales. Cannot go wrong.

In the run-up to the 2012 Olympics I spent a week as a travelling reporter, following the progress of the Olympic torch through the Land of Dragons, and it was one of the best times of my life. Cardiff! Swansea! Fishguard!

Aberystwyth! Llandudno! Rhyl! Heady, heady places. Everywhere you went, cheering crowds, smiling faces and endless cans of lager, like a biblical plague of Carling sent by a giddy God. I’ve never actually been to carnival in New Orleans, but I can say with total confidence that this was a billion times better. Today, the rational part of my brain says that Wales cannot possibly be like that all the time. And yet, in my heart, I still believe it is. Perhaps I should go back and check. It’s better than staying at home all summer. n Robert Crampton returns next week

© Times Newspapers Ltd, 2021. Published and licensed by Times Newspapers Ltd, 1 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF (020 7782 5000). Printed by Prinovis UK Ltd, Liverpool. Not to be sold separately.