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29.05.21

M AGA ZINE OF THE Y EA R

‘I FELT SO LOW AND HOPELESS. I’M NOT BETTER YET’ Stephen Mangan on grief, lockdown and losing friends

CLIVE MYRIE IN AMERICA Racism, George Floyd and me

Normal service has resumed!

Giles Coren is back in the Ivy PLU S

EAT!

The only 10 spaghetti recipes you’ll ever need

29.05.21 18

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5 Caitlin Moran My six-point plan for parents. 7 What I’ve learnt Actress Isabelle Huppert on sending herself up in Call My Agent!.

9 Spinal column: Melanie Reid Dave’s eye operation was a success.

If only there were one for spines. 10 Cover story Stephen Mangan The actor on personal tragedy and his new project with his sister.

18 Do you need spiritual coaching? Jo Bowlby is the shaman to the A-list – and business is booming. 24 The legacy of George Floyd Clive Myrie visits America’s most violent city a year after the killing that traumatised the nation. 30 A doctor writes What made Tom Templeton give up a glamorous career and retrain as a medic in the NHS? 35 Eat! The only 10 spaghetti recipes you’ll need.

48 ‘My dad didn’t think I’d make it as an actor’ Of Jared Harris’s many plaudits, none beats winning over his hellraising father, Richard. 56 Home! A six-storey London townhouse complete with swimming pool. 65 Beauty Lesley Thomas on hangover cures – for your face. 67 Men’s style Jeremy Langmead likes the new-look casual suit. 68 Giles Coren reviews The Ivy, London. 74 Beta male: Robert Crampton I’m channelling the spirit of a warlord.

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CHOSEN BY MONIQUE RIVALLAND

COVER: TOM JACKSON. THIS PAGE: MARK HARRISON, MICHAEL B THOMAS

FIVE STYLISH DECKCHAIRS

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 How to survive school – as a parent My six top tips. Pay attention. I’ll be testing you later

ROBERT WILSON

M

y youngest daughter had her final day at school last week. She now joins my eldest as an adult worker bee in the buzzing hive of capitalism. No longer gathering the sweet nectar of knowledge, but pumping out the honey of earnings from wherever it is bees pump out honey from.

Who knows where bees pump out honey from? It wasn’t on the kids’ GCSE revision sheet, so I know nothing about it. For the past five years, if it’s not been a GCSE or A-level topic, I haven’t cared about it. Could my kid get a “9” in bees? No, so bees are dead to me.

And here’s the thing about your kids going to school that every parent learns: your children’s school years are a rolling, arduous series of exams and tests for you too. In many ways, their school years are your school years.

You’re in it together. However, also like exams, there is always someone – in this case, me – willing to “tutor” you through them. On this occasion, for the mere purchase price of The Times, I have done your homework for you.

1. All children act like it’s the end of the world when they start at nursery. They will cry and cling to your legs, and you will be convinced you can see the emotional damage happening in front of you. You’re right – your emotional damage. You still have PTSD from that day.

They, of course, can’t remember a thing.

The same thing happens when they start infants, junior, secondary school and uni; on sports day; when they get their first bad test result; when they “only” get cast as a sheep in the Nativity; and all through their exams. You are still, even now, 30 years on, reeling from their sadness. Your kids, on the other hand?

Can’t remember a thing. It is a recurring motif.

2. The school run, aka the daily domestic decathlon. Before you do your first school run, you fondly imagine a daily relaxed walk/drive where you “catch up” with your child and make precious golden school run memories.

By day three, you will be leaving the house ten minutes late, urging your children to eat their breakfast, clean their teeth and put on their tights while running and then throwing them through the school gates, like a javelin, so they’re technically on school premises by 8.59am. By 9.01am, you will either technically have won a gold medal or be begging to

By day three you will always be late, throwing your kids through the front gates like a javelin

retire from parenting with a torn hamstring.

3. Your kids will never remember Book Character Day until 8.47pm the night before.

Never. Book Character Day is where you realise why JK Rowling is the literary behemoth she is. Put your specs on Callum, hand him a chopstick/wand, scribble a scar on his forehead with a Sharpie, and hey presto!

4. Teachers. The most important life lesson you can give? Telling your kids not to be a dick to their teachers. Be polite. Don’t disrupt lessons. Let them do their job. After all, you know how hard it is to do your job with your kid around. Your kid’s teacher is in that hell daily. You gotta help out a brother/sister.

On the other hand, some teachers are just awful or incompetent or mean, and it’s important your child knows they can come home and bitch about them while you say comforting, catty things such as, “Mr Eastern’s tie really seems to enjoy having egg all over it,” or, “It’s true – Mrs Bejam is a cow bag.”

5. If you have a daughter/daughters, keep a friendship Rolodex/spreadsheet. Teenage girls’ friendship groups are as vast and complex as the cast list of Game of Thrones – and just as bloody and violent. One day Daisy is their “absolute spirit animal”; the next, a “total bitch, who needs to die”. In the absence of a Rolodex, keep all your inquiries as to friends incredibly vague: “How’s… all the people?”

6. Exam flashcards. While your children are between 15 and 18, you will find brightly coloured squares of card with “Eukaryotic” and “Saar was a province formed from parts of Prussia and the Rhenish Palatinate” everywhere. As exam time approaches, these cards will be stained with both food and your child’s hot, sad tears.

My tip? Go through these flashcards while you walk in the park. Your kid needs the fresh air and exercise. Screaming, “I HATE EUKARYOTICS,” in a public place is emotionally cleansing and if things about the League of Nations get very fraught, you can say, “Look! A duck!” It still works.

Subsidiary tip: it is traditional for teenagers to set fire to their flashcards on the last day of exams. Warning from a pro: don’t let them do this a) with a friend who has very flammable, dry hair (2017), or b) in the bathroom, next to your lockdown stockpile of toilet paper (last week). You don’t want their “last day of school” to be their “first day in A&E”. If nothing else, you deserve a day off now. n The Times Magazine 5

What I’ve learnt Isabelle Huppert

EYEVINE

Award-winning French actress Isabelle Huppert, 68, has starred in more than 100 films. She satirised herself in Netflix’s Call My Agent! and now stars as the lead character in the Cannes-nominated family drama Frankie. She lives in Paris with her film director husband, Ronald Chammah, with whom she has a daughter, the actress Lolita Chammah, and two sons.

I wish I were a muse. Once I have worked with one director, I don’t understand why he doesn’t make all his movies with me. Going with another actress? Oh, I hate that. It’s the worst betrayal for me. Claude Chabrol and the other French directors with whom I did five movies – that should be the norm.

England is an island, so don’t make it even more of an island. That’s all I have to say about Brexit.

I spent almost a year in London in 1995 and loved it. My favourite series is The Crown. But the London Tube? I hate it. Oh my God, it’s like being in a coffin, because you are between two walls. I’m claustrophobic, so it’s impossible for me.

I wouldn’t define myself as a workaholic. Just as someone who has the great, great privilege to be passionate about what I do.

Not everybody can say the same.

So why not enjoy it as much as you can? I did many, many films.

My character in Call My Agent! is an extension of a perception that people have about me working a lot. It’s me, but it’s not me. It’s a game. I contributed a lot to the writing because Marc Fitoussi [the director] is a very good friend and has a great sense of humour, especially when the character is so greedy about having more lines.

I like French rap. I am not a great connoisseur of it, but the language is really interesting in rap music.

When you are performing in a foreign language, you are a slightly different person. I have acted four times in English on stage and my attitude is not quite the same as it is in French. You’re a little bit different, especially

‘Once I’ve worked with a director, I don’t understand why they don’t want to make all their movies with me’

INTERVIEW Georgina Roberts PORTRAIT Ed Alcock

when you have to play English and French in the same film.

Speaking Arabic in my last film was more of a challenge because it was very difficult to learn.

I really don’t know why people think I’m scary. This image of being cold and aloof, that makes my close friends laugh. Because I’m the contrary of an intimidating person.

I can cry in one second. Theatre is more emotional than cinema.

It’s a great sensation, being so emotional. It’s like a huge mountain you have to climb, but on top of it the view is beautiful.

I have a little space in my life where I am confident, and that’s acting. It’s not difficult for me to laugh; it’s not difficult to cry.

I don’t know if you can do acting if you think it’s difficult.

All I can teach my daughter is to have broad shoulders. It was wonderful to perform with Lolita

in the movie Copacabana, but we did have a hard time at the beginning because we were laughing. It took us some time to be back on track and really take it seriously.

Ageing has bothered me since I was one month old. But I don’t think you learn things from life. You learn at school, but you don’t learn after. You just live. n Frankie is in cinemas from May 28 The Times Magazine 7

SPINAL COLUMN MELANIE REID

‘My husband’s operation has given him his life back. Deep down I confess to a tweak of envy’

MURDO MACLEOD

‘E

ureka!” My husband is fully 30 metres away, dancing a jig in the afternoon sunshine and punching the air. I’ve not seen him move like that in years.

I’m his examiner, hovering at the front of the car, checking he’s read out the number plate correctly, that his new eyes, cataracts removed, are more than good enough to drive again. And he’s passed the test.

We try it three more times, on other cars, at longer distances. He’s right every time.

Ecstatically grateful, Dave rejoined normal life last week. He’s not just happy to get away from isolation at home, where Nurse Ratched on wheels has been torturing him every three hours with eye drops, but he can now drive himself and recognise whom he’s talking to.

This is a man reborn. Dave “I can see clearly now” has got his mojo back. His sense of humour and bounce have returned. With divine serendipity, the culmination of his eye operations has coincided with the reopening of the local pub and he can get back together with his mates.

That first evening, he says he got a hero’s welcome and didn’t have to buy himself a drink – although nothing new there, as those who know him too well will testify. He sat in the beer garden beaming like a Cheshire cat, moaning happily about the new brand of beer (which he didn’t have to pay for), waving at

strangers as they passed and generally bursting with goodwill for all humankind.

My break for freedom was in a different direction: I put on earrings and a new jumper and drove two hours for a rendezvous with girlfriends. A glorious escape from male grumpiness and 19th-century women’s work, nursing and cooking. A chance to eat salad made by someone else and discuss unashamedly girlie things, like how overhyped the novel Normal People is (I read fiction in the slow lane, three years late) and how Lily James reminds us of those ghastly, boy-magnet females who haunted our growing up, and how lockdown has turned our husbands into couch potatoes.

Freedom began to hurt my ears after a while, doubly so. I’d forgotten how noisy real life is, but also because my pierced lobes had put themselves out to grass over the past year and soon became hot and sore at the invasion of earrings. Artifice, you demand a high price.

When I got back I discovered a fresh hazard: Dave can see stuff he hasn’t noticed for years. Everywhere, details are emerging for him out of the fog. “That’s disgusting,” he says abruptly as he helps me out of the car. “What is?” “The passenger footwell.” “It’s mostly your rubbish,” I tell him. Defensively.

In pretty short succession he informs me that someone’s cracked the casing of the mirror on his car (it’s undoubtedly been that way for ages); the kitchen needs to be painted; and did I know there was a windmill on the

horizon? His fresh world view is by no means all negative: he’s started being nice to the dog and took him for a walk through the woods on a path that he’s rejected for months as too rough to walk on. He’s even keen to start golf again, which he gave up because – he now admits – he couldn’t see the ball any more.

I am superthrilled for him, so pleased he a) decided to get the ops done, and b) was lucky enough to be able do it privately and not wait a year for the NHS, unable to drive.

My evenings lecturing him about the lack of pockets in a shroud have borne fruit. It’s wondrous to hear him say he’d have paid the money twice over for the result. He’s a new man and I’m so glad.

Deep down, and I’m ashamed to admit this, I also confess to a tweak of envy. A fleeting meanness of spirit: it’s all right for him.

I can’t repress the brief, wistful fantasy of an operation to fix everything for me too. When you break your spine, you do your best to bury any thought of renaissance. But you never quite manage to smooth out the knowledge you’re unfixable, damaged beyond repair.

No one, though, could begrudge Dave his joy. “Now I can work the microwave! And tell when the dishwasher’s dirty! And find the on/off button on the remote control.” Truly, there is a God. n @Mel_ReidTimes Melanie Reid is tetraplegic after breaking her neck and back in a riding accident in April 2010

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‘Even now, 30 years after her death, my mum would only be 75.

The tragedy becomes deeper the older you get’ The actor Stephen Mangan describes the trauma of losing both his parents, followed by the death of his best friend Paul Ritter, the star of Friday Night Dinner, last month. Grief has left him reeling, he tells Louise Carpenter PHOTOGRAPH Tom Jackson

Stephen Mangan, 53

STYLING: SIDONIE WILSON. GROOMING: KRISTOPHER SMITH AT DAVID ARTISTS USING HAIR BY SAM MCKNIGHT AND THE ORDINARY. STEPHEN MANGAN WEARS JACKET AND TROUSERS, GABRIELAHEARST.COM; T-SHIRT, SUNSPEL AT MRPORTER.COM; TRAINERS, SAUCONY.COM. THIS PAGE: BBC, COURTESY STEPHEN MANGAN, GETTY IMAGES

S

tephen Mangan has always thought of himself as an optimist, despite having a strong streak of Irish melancholy. But recently, the 53-year-old actor, writer and regular Have I Got News For You presenter says, “I went into a bit of a hole. I just felt really low, hopeless and defeated. I really started to struggle and I am still trying to claw my way back. I’m not feeling better yet, and I don’t know why.”

It began with the second lockdown, he says, when hope slowly began to drain away.

“For the first time in my life, I was really struggling to feel like I could cope with it.

It wasn’t through lack of work. I was busier than I’ve ever been. It was more that the sunny, optimistic part of me was hard to access. I’ve found it really hard to shake off profound sadness.”

At the beginning of last year, the set of a film he was shooting in Haifa, Israel, was closed down suddenly. But there were at least two scripts he was writing; there was the running of the production company he set up five years ago with his wife, Louise Delamere; and the completion of his first children’s book, Escape the Rooms. He collaborated on it with his beloved sister, Anita, an illustrator.

But, he says, “It is one and a half years of the claustrophobia of life, not having those evenings where you see your friends, homeschooling, not having the outlet of the outside world. It was accumulative. I don’t know how to describe it. It’s just debilitating.”

Mangan has a face that lends itself both to melancholy and to comedy, so in the past 25 years since he graduated from Rada (having first studied law at Cambridge) he has become known for straight and comic acting: Green Wing, his breakout TV show; Episodes (with Tamsin Greig and Matt LeBlanc); Hang Ups, adapted from Lisa Kudrow’s US hit Web Therapy; all preceded by a lot of poorly paid classical theatre in the early years. Most recently there has been his role as a barrister in the BBC hit The Split, Abi Morgan’s drama centring on a family of female divorce lawyers, which is about to begin filming its third season.

Today he looks not sad exactly, more emotionally tired. The children’s book, with its underlying theme of bereavement, means a lot to him because he got to work with Anita. Mangan and his two sisters, born in successive years, lost their mother when they were young (more of which to come).

Mangan’s middle son, Frank, 11, has read the book four times. The central character, Jack, is named after his five-year-old son.

Mangan’s eyes are large and brown, his face long and chiselled, topped with his trademark dark mop of curls. Over the years he has

12 The Times Magazine

made jokes about his appearance, about not having a face for television, about looking like Shrek’s donkey, and even today he says to me, “I didn’t trust television [at first] to give me a chance.” He gestures to a bite on his cheek and says a bit forlornly, “I think I’ve been bitten by a radioactive spider. I don’t know how [the make-up artist] is going to deal with this.”

But actually, whatever he says, he is goodlooking. I imagine he was a bit of a catch at university, a mixture of funny man/performer and soul-searcher. He is also part workingclass boy, the son of an Irish builder, the first of his family to go to university, and yet part prep school/scholarship boy.

Post-50 he is in good shape, physically at least, long and thin as a result of running 30 kilometres a week, which has helped to some extent with the low mood. He likens it to meditation. There has also been a bit of “jumping around to Joe Wicks”.

“They say lockdown made you a hunk, chunk or drunk. I definitely went the chunk and drunk route for a while, but now I’m totally hunking it out,” he says ironically.

He reads voraciously and religiously.

“Forty-five minutes before bed. I don’t know where I would be without reading.”

He is ploughing on through his feelings of depression, he says, learning his lines for June’s The Split, recording his children’s book on audio (with comic voices), and with the writing of a script, optioned from a true story.

But the fog has not lifted. “Not yet. I don’t know why.”

Do you think you might be depressed?

“Maybe,” he says. “I’m hesitant to say that.”

Might you need to take action? UK statistics point to the fact men are notoriously bad at asking for help. Antidepressants might help, perhaps.

“I don’t know. I assume it will pass. I don’t think I’m alone. I couldn’t be more fortunate.

I have a loving family, a happy marriage, three lovely kids. No one [in my life] has died from Covid. None of us have been ill. I’ve got amazing career opportunities. I’m about to film another series of a great drama. I have a play I’m attached to. It’s all great, but…”

He pauses. “And also I know people who have really suffered from depression and it’s not something I would lightly claim that I’m suffering with, but I’ve found it really tough and really hard to shake off profound sadness. My whole career I’ve been constantly meeting people, with the stimulation that brings. And I think not seeing friends, not being able to connect, not seeing my family, my sisters, my cousins, not being able to go to Ireland for the longest time ever, all those things… During the first lockdown, the weather was great and everyone was determined to do the right thing, but we’ve all

Stephen Mangan with Nicola Walker in The Split

Anita and Stephen Mangan in 2003

‘I was busier than I’ve ever been but the optimistic, sunny part of me was hard to access’ been worn down by it. I feel worn down by it.

“I haven’t taken [antidepressants]. I don’t know why I haven’t. I don’t know the answer to that. I could quite easily say, ‘Yes, I would take them,’ but I haven’t, so… I feel perhaps it is as much a symptom of what we are all going through rather than something in me that has taken a turn that is not pleasant.”

He pauses again.

“I don’t want to cause a fuss, is what I am saying. I know this interview is about me, but I don’t want to cause a fuss.” He laughs at himself.

On April 5 this year, the actor Paul Ritter died, aged 54, of a brain tumour. He was best

With his wife, the actress Louise Delamere

Mangan with Paul Ritter in London, 2008

known for his character of Martin in the iconic sitcom Friday Night Dinner. He was also one of Mangan’s best friends from his days as a student at Cambridge. They had similar backgrounds. “We instantly became really good friends. We would sit in my room and talk about the impossible dream of being paid to be an actor.”

In 2005 Mangan, as he was becoming known in Green Wing (set in a hospital), watched his father die from a brain tumour, not long after having complained of a headache during a meal with Mangan. Paul Ritter died in the same way.

“I lost my friend,” Mangan says. Despite his honesty about his feelings, I sense talking about Ritter is difficult. “What was so hard about seeing Paul get ill was that it was so much like when my father got ill.” Neither man was quite himself as the tumours marched on.

Then came the death of Helen McCrory.

That announcement came just 11 days after Paul Ritter’s death and was made by her husband, the actor Damian Lewis. She too was young, had two children like Ritter and was a phenomenal actor in the prime of her career.

Barely anybody knew she was ill, although Mangan knew something. “Helen and Damian are both good friends of mine,” he says. “I saw Helen in January. I knew she was ill, but she didn’t want to talk about it.” Mangan is respectfully quiet about this loss.

How could he not be affected by such early deaths of his close friends, in addition to the loss of both his parents? His mother was 45; he was 22. “Even now, 30 years after her death, my mum would only be 75. The tragedy of it becomes deeper and deeper as you get older. Because the older I get, the more I see what she has missed out on and the harder it is to take.

“It is hard. You lose your mother when you are 22, but you don’t know what she is going to miss out on, what we are going to miss out on by not having her around, because you haven’t lived life yet.”

This brings us on to the underlying theme of Escape the Rooms. On the surface it is a rip-roaring adventure of two children who have to solve puzzles to move through a series of chambers towards escape. The children gradually realise they are connected by their own bereavements.

Mangan had not intended to write about childhood bereavement at all: “But obviously it is something that is very much resonant in my psyche.” He wrote it on trains and on the set of season one of The Split. The theme of loss emerged as if from nowhere but was, of course, from every part of him.

More than the loss of his father, it is Mangan’s lasting grief over the sudden death of his mother that informs the book, in which Jack too is struggling to make sense of life alone with his father. “We had to rebalance ourselves as a family when Mum died.”

Mangan is extremely close to his two sisters. The strength of the family got him through (all the more painful that he was cut off from them by Covid). His father was a lot more emotional than the father he created in his book.

It is the mention of Anita that makes him light up. “Adults can be in grief for years and feel that tug of emotion almost constantly,” he says, “whereas with children it is like spin cycles. It’s like they can jump into puddles and feel devastated and then be fine. That’s the way they handle it.”

It was Mangan who was dining with his mother, Mary, when she first experienced pain. (This would be horribly repeated with his father’s first headache.) Mangan had not long graduated from Cambridge, where he had chosen to read law because it would lead to a “proper” job. Mary left the table suddenly. He found her doubled up in the living room.

“They thought it was a twisted gut. The operation was supposed to take 40 minutes.

Four hours later she was still in there. Then

the surgeon came out and I remember him standing against a wall unable to look us in the eye. She had severe bowel cancer. She died six months later.”

When Mangan was losing his father, he had just met his wife-to-be. “It was a real baptism by fire, there is no question about it, but our relationship survived. It would have been really easy for me to say, ‘I can’t handle all this,’ but I didn’t want to.”

His TV career was growing by then too.

However, he was in a different place when his mother died. He was insecure about the future and had just split up from a long-term university girlfriend. His mother’s death shaped his whole emotional life, he says, “in ways I am still trying to unpick and come to terms with”.

“I remember the night she died being vastly more concerned with… just having these great conversations with my girlfriend as a sort of avoidance, as a way of putting my feelings into that.” (They dated on and off for 11 years.)

Practically, he explains, “It changed the course of my life when my mum died.”

He jettisoned law for good and decided to pursue acting – “I’d done 21 plays in 3 years at university” – by auditioning and earning a place at Rada. He was acutely aware then, as he is now, of how a life can be cut short. “I am aware that time is running out in my life and I am impatient.”

Also, he says, “Part of the attraction of acting for me has been a way to explore all those things about being human, that emotional thing, in a way that I probably don’t do. I probably learnt to be a bit more private at boarding school.”

Mangan was always the family’s golden boy, just because he was a boy. He was offered the best food – “Feed the men” was his grandmother’s mantra. He recalls being passed the smoked salmon while his sisters were told, “What you don’t know, you won’t miss.”

At the dinner table he was allowed to sit next to his father, reading a book on the bench, while his two sisters were crammed in opposite alongside their mother. It is not that the girls were loved less; more that importance was placed on his role as the male with all the traditional working-class notions of him being the potential provider. “My parents were very smart, but left school at 14. It was drummed into me, ‘Education is key. You have this chance that we never did.’ ” Aged seven he was sent to a prep school in Potters Bar, a huge success. From there he wanted to follow his friends to Haileybury, a boarding school. He gained a scholarship and pushed to go. It was a move entirely at odds with the ethos of his close and large workingclass Irish family. His leaving the house was mourned by his parents, who wanted all their children living together at the family home

The Times Magazine 13

in Ponders End in north London. “Family was very important,” he says.

“My sisters were doing stuff together,” he remembers while he was away at boarding school, “and then when I did come back the special treatment continued and there was even more the sense of the prodigal son returning. I didn’t talk about it [with my sisters] at the time, because I didn’t have that perspective on it then.”

Added to this, he was badly bullied for the first two years. “I was really miserable, hated it. And then you stop being the little one in the class. I was small until I was 15. I was in a band and doing plays… But I regret having gone there, to be honest. It’s a good school.

I got to Cambridge; I can’t complain.

“But the way things turned out with my family, you don’t realise how little you are at home as a family unit and how quickly that time goes… And I didn’t know my mum was going to die that young.”

Mangan is visibly upset when he says this.

“But you are talking about looking back with perfect hindsight at what I would have done differently. I regret how upset my parents were for me to go to boarding school, especially my mum. But I wasn’t from one of those families where they say, ‘This is the way we’ve done everything for years.’ We were respectful of experts.”

It is heartbreaking for all concerned to think of Mangan’s mother waving him goodbye to live elsewhere in the interests of his education, only to die less than ten years later having never really properly lived with her boy again.

The loss forged his acting career, however.

“I grew my hair long [at Rada]. I sort of hid from the world, really. Drama school was a refuge. I had made really great friends. Your friends are your family before you’ve started your own family, and that was that period of my life. And that is what got me through.

“My dad was morose and grieving for two years. His heart was broken, completely broken, and he couldn’t see a way forward. He moved round the corner from me, and we also shared a flat together for six months.

“I think what we could give each other as a family was to be together and acknowledge what we were going through. We were good at it and very emotional about it. For six or seven years after my mum died, every New Year’s Eve you’d find us all at these big [family] parties, and Dad and the three of us would be in floods of tears in the corner.”

His own family now sit at the centre of his life. “The boys are without doubt the shining glory of my life, my whole world.”

Mangan’s wife and eldest sons are all brunette. Of the youngest, Jack, Mangan says, “I see so much of my mum in him, in a way that is really lovely and heartbreaking too.

14 The Times Magazine

He’s a redhead like her. He has freckles and this sort of sunny personality. Mum was such a laugher, just a total joy, really loving and warm, and Jack is so affectionate. He gets cuddled by the entire family – by his brothers, by us. He is like this little gorgeous love cushion. But it does look like we’ve kidnapped him when all us brunettes walk down the street with him.”

Mangan has a show running on Radio 4 called The Confessional. It is, in his words, designed to dig out of its celebrity guests the things they are ashamed of rather than the glossy elements of their lives they generally want to promote.

Mangan knows about confession. He grew up a Roman Catholic, was an altar boy and went to a convent until the age of seven. He no longer considers himself Catholic but he appreciates the dynamics of confession, which is to say not having to look at somebody while

‘I am sure I have jeopardised my career by ignoring influential people. It’s perverse’ speaking (like how driving or walking can be particularly helpful when talking to teens).

During the first half of our conversation, Mangan spends a lot of time looking away.

In the pilot, the actor David Tennant admitted to him that he had made up a personal assistant with her own email address so that “she” could turn things down without him looking bad.

So, how about Mangan? He looks like a rabbit in headlights. I can’t believe he hasn’t got something lined up to tell me. I mean, come on. Surely he knew it was going to be in the top ten questions? His floundering around is rather endearing.

“I haven’t prepared for this at all,” he replies. “Where I sympathise with my guests is that they have to give me something revealing enough, but not so revealing that it is kind of embarrassing for us all.

“I’m trying to think of something… I want to give you something that is personal and genuine, but I don’t want to give you one of those false answers, like, ‘My worst habit is that I care too much or work too hard.’ ” Mangan is smart.

On this matter of “confession” he doesn’t really deliver, but I don’t think it’s because he is proud. As if to prove that point, he says his lack of ability to network has been at various times painfully embarrassing and unhelpful.

“Why am I more chatty and friendly to caterers and drivers and the people making sure the trailers are hooked up to electricity than I am with executive producers? It’s perverse. I’m sure I have jeopardised my career by doing the opposite of going up to the influential people. Because I don’t know how to handle it, I ignore them. I find it really hard talking to anybody who might help [with my career].”

Once, with iron will, he forced himself to overcome his nerves and approach Robert De Niro. When he held out his hand by way of introduction, instead of saying, “I’m Stephen Mangan,” he said, “I’m Robert De Niro,” to which the real De Niro said, “No, I’m Robert De Niro.” Mangan slunk off, mortified.

“Another time, when I was in LA for work, there were a few comics I’d been half talking to on Twitter. I went to a club where they were doing a gig and sat down at a table next to them for an hour. I then just got up and went home. I was just shy, I think.”

He remembers interrupting a row in a service station between some baristas to ask them for a coffee. As the woman made it, he saw in the mirror that she had spat in his drink. When he challenged her, hardly able to believe what he had seen, she said, “What if I did?”

“It was so confrontational and brazen,” he says. “It totally knocked me for six.”

And? “It was very unlike me to have said anything in the first place. I sort of went at that point.”

He has never been able to bring himself to move to Los Angeles, perhaps because of this character.

“It feels like there are forces at work in America that are hidden and mysterious, and therefore it feels like being in a horror movie.

You know there is something going on that is bigger than you and could crush and kill you – and you back away.”

And also, he admits, he can’t bear the idea of sitting around in LA not working while waiting to land a big part.

“I like to be busy. I like to be doing stuff.

There isn’t enough time to do all the things I want to do. I am working harder than I have ever worked in order to try to give things a go.”

One of the main messages of Escape the Rooms is “a room at a time”. When we meet, restrictions are easing. The UK is slowly returning to some semblance of normality.

I really hope Stephen Mangan does too because, as he says, “I’m an optimist. I believe that everything will always work out fine.” n Stephen Mangan’s Escape the Rooms, illustrated by Anita Mangan, is published

by Scholastic on June 10 (£6.99)

THE A-LIST SHAMAN WHY THE WORLD’S ELITE PAY TO LIE DOWN WITH THIS WOMAN Can inhaling the waft of burning herbs while listening to the sound of a gourd rattle really be worth £250 an hour?

Jo Bowlby’s clients – from pop stars to corporate titans – think so. Our writer Julia Llewellyn Smith goes along for some ‘energy work’ PORTRAITS Mark Harrison

Jo Bowlby, 54, at home in London, with writer Julia Llewellyn Smith

I

am lying on a blanket on a bed holding a chunk of petrified wood on my stomach, inhaling the scent of burning herbs. My shaman (words I’d never thought I’d write), Jo Bowlby, who trained with an Amazonian medicine man, is shaking a gourd rattle above me while I am imagining lying on a Caribbean beach, hearing the beat of waves on the shore.

I’m meant to be in the moment, but my mind wanders, wondering if I’ll ever see the Caribbean again, and then to that morning’s conversation with my 16-year-old daughter when I told her I was paying another visit to my shaman.

“Mum, you’re so weird! And it’s not ‘shayman’, it’s ‘shah-man’.”

“She calls herself a shay-man and she should know, she’s been doing it for 15 years.”

“It’s ‘shah-man’.”

After six months nearly entirely locked down alone with two teenagers (my husband’s working away), in these circumstances I’d normally yell something unenlightened like, “Shut up, you annoying know-it-all!”

But now I recall what Bowlby has taught me. I stare through the window at a tree.

I strain to hear birdsong; my nostrils pick up the scent of Dettol in the sink; I taste the remnants of my coffee on my tongue.

I reach in my pocket and stroke the smooth labradorite stone Bowlby gave me – which

There are high ceilings and dark-wood floors and though there’s all the usual folksy stuff dotted around – Peruvian blankets, stones, crystals – there are also silver-framed photos of an obviously upper-middle-class family.

I ask where she got the two life-size puma statues in her living room – surely, the rainforest? “Harrods,” she whispers, giggling.

“Actually, my mother spotted them in Harrods and went to the place they were made and bought them wholesale.”

Shamans first came from the Tungus tribes in Siberia about 2,000 years ago – the word itself means “spiritual healer” or “one who sees in the dark”. Across the world, from Japan to South America to Finland, forms of their lore were practised by wise men and women who – as Bowlby puts it – “were the bonesetters, the ones who worked out how to keep the fire alight, the psychologists of their day”.

As a 21st-century urban incarnation, Bowlby, 54, is smiling, dressed in a baggy shirt and trousers. True, her jewellery’s vaguely hippy, but no more so than that of any other woman who’s visited a market in Ibiza. Without the fact she’s sitting cross-legged in her chair, I’d have no clue she is any more spiritual than my many yoga-head friends. “I don’t want people to think here’s a Londoner like one of those people who come back from the Amazon wearing ponchos, pretending they’re South American. I think it’s really naff.”

SHE LOOKS JUST LIKE WHAT SHE IS – A FINANCIER’S DAUGHTER FROM BERKSHIRE apparently can help me reconnect with my imagination. It’s the five senses meditation, which she’s told me will “bring me out of my body for just long enough that it’s impossible to go back to the same place you left off”.

I tune in to my daughter again, who says Google supports her pronunciation. “All right, darling,” I say, the exercise having made me feel 99 per cent more tolerant than I would normally. “All I’m saying is it’s not how Jo says it and she trained with the Q’ero tribe in the Andes.” Instantly, my daughter jabs Jo Bowlby into Google Images. “She doesn’t look like a shah-man,” she pronounces.

What does a shay-man look like?

“Like, Native American?”

Indeed, Bowlby does not look like the shamans we find on Google. The woman who allegedly – she won’t reveal names – is guru to CEOs, actors, pop stars and bankers, who fly in from all over the world to see her, doesn’t wear robes or elaborate headgear.

Nor is her face painted all the colours of the rainbow, nor – most pertinently – does she live in the rainforest but in a rather splendid flat overlooking Battersea Park, London, instead.

In fact, Bowlby looks exactly like what she is, which is a financier’s daughter born in Berkshire, who, from the age of ten, boarded at ultra-pukka Heathfield School, whose old girls include Susannah Constantine – “She was a few years above me. I had dinner with her at Trinny’s [Woodall] the other night” – Isabella Blow, Tamara Mellon and Daphne Guinness.

She loved riding, skiing and tennis.

“But apart from sport I really found school quite difficult,” she says. “I didn’t really like authority. When they said, ‘You’ve got to do something,’ I was like, ‘OK, fine. But why?’

I was always smoking – from the age of about ten, that was the way you rebelled.”

What terrified her was living the sort of life her Sloaney counterparts were bred for. “I really was concerned I was just going to be trapped.

I had this panic you leave school and then that there was some production line and that was life. I wanted to explore. I was curious.”

After school, her friends went to university but Bowlby worked for an estate agent, then for rocker Adam Faith, who’d set up a business helping showbiz stars invest their riches. “So at the age of 19, I was having lunch at San

THE FIVE SENSES MEDITATION This is an easy but effective way to break toxic thought patterns or to shut up the voices in your head. It doesn’t matter where you are; it can be done in bed, on the bus or during a meeting. The theory is that by going through the five senses – vision, hearing, smell, taste and touch – you escape your negative thoughts and come back into your body for just long enough that it is impossible to return to the exact place you left off, thus breaking the cycle.

X First, look around and in your head name

anything you can see: a chair, a window, a red car… Five or six things you can see right now.

X Then notice what the furthest sound is that you can hear. It may be traffic, the sound of an aeroplane or somebody’s voice.

X Next, notice what the nearest sound is that you can hear. This could be a bird outside your window or, if you are very quiet, you may be able to hear a sound in your ears or your own breath.

X Then notice what you can smell. If you can’t smell anything, smell the back of your hand or your sleeve.

X Now notice what you can taste in your mouth.

X Finally, notice how your body feels in the seat, the bed or wherever you are.

This whole exercise needn’t take more than 30 seconds, but you can string it out for as long as you want. Once finished, feel free to go back to whatever it was you were thinking, if you can. The thought pattern will not have the same hold on you the second time around. Coming out of our heads and back into our body is an effective way of creating some distance between our self and any negative self-talk. n From A Book for Life: 10 Steps to Spiritual Wisdom, A Clear Mind and Lasting Happiness by Jo Bowlby, published by Yellow Kite on June 24 (£16.99)

The Times Magazine 21

HAIR AND MAKE-UP: DANI GUINSBERG AT CAROL HAYES MANAGEMENT USING GO2BE HAIR CARE AND NARS. ADDITIONAL HAIR STYLING: TOM GREENHOUSE

Lorenzo with Eric Clapton, dinner at Harry’s Bar with [industrialist] James Hanson, every single top person in showbiz and captains of industry. My best friend’s father named me ‘the capitalist’.”

There was no sudden disenchantment with this world – Bowlby moved on to work in publishing, perfectly happy, but was still convinced there was more to life than the everyday. “I took up karate, I studied yoga, but I could never quite find what I was looking for.”

She was in her early thirties when she went to a talk by Cuban psychologist and medical anthropologist Alberto Villoldo, who has spent years working with the medicine men of the Amazon. “I immediately liked him because he didn’t have a beard to his knees.” Bowlby studied for four years with Villoldo, first in the US, then – at his suggestion – in Peru, receiving her final rites on a mountain called Pachatusan in 2006.

What she learnt – and has continued to learn by spending time with Buddhist monks and Indian yogis – was how profoundly human psychology is connected to nature and how lost we can feel if the link is broken.

It may sound like total gobbledygook, but many of these spiritual practices – chanting, for example – have been scientifically proven to be beneficial to our wellbeing, helping us release oxytocin. “I’ve seen physicists explain string theory in exactly the same way the medicine man explained his philosophy to me.”

Now Bowlby’s written A Book for Life: 10 Steps to Spiritual Wisdom, a Clear Mind and Lasting Happiness – which, in pleasingly straightforward terms, lays out these teachings. As soon as she returned from Peru, she started sharing what she’d learnt with friends. “I hadn’t been thinking of becoming a shaman, but then it just turned into this thing.

I thought, ‘This is what I want to do.’ ” Bowlby charges around £300 for an initial 90-minute session, £250 thereafter, with most clients having 10 sessions, although several have her on retainer. She doesn’t advertise – there’s no need. “It’s always been word of mouth,” she says. “Last week I had someone who flew in from Portugal. He arrived in his suit and I thought, ‘This will be interesting.’

But he just loved it. What I do resonates.”

While recently she hasn’t been able to do much “energy work” (the exercise we did on the bed where the primal sounds and smells are meant to bring clients respite from a hypervigilant state of fight or flight), the pandemic hasn’t stopped her from “spiritual coaching” remotely. “I’ve just skyped someone in Beirut and whatsapped someone in LA. Every week is a global adventure.”

She’s also been leading free guided meditations on Facebook with her old – and well-connected – buddy Trinny Woodall. “I’ve known Trinny since I was 17.”

22 The Times Magazine

The pertinent question is, why is Bowlby so busy? Are these high-powered people so gullible they think clutching a stone and listening to a rattle can change their lives?

Yet as soon as she opens her door, I can see why. Bowlby is charismatic, fun and wise.

Forget the feathers and embroidered blankets, I’d guess most of her clients come because they can moan about problems at work and home to a sympathetic ear. But as she makes clear, she’s not a shrink. “People who see me don’t feel their lives are falling apart. Instead, they come to be the person they want to be, so they have an advantage when things go wrong. I’ve got clients in New York who are running vast funds and big global companies and want to have a better understanding of why they’re feeling a particular way.”

What are their anxieties? “Sometimes they can be thinking, ‘I’m stepping into a new role. I’m not good enough.’ Or often it can be, ‘What’s it all for?’ You’re at the top of your game, you own endless companies and you still feel empty inside. We’re told that if you

most talked-about vehicle for this is ayahuasca, a plant-based drug that contains DMT (dimethyltryptamine), which induces ideally perception-expanding hallucinations. In the UK, it’s classified as Class A and is illegal.

Following her South American experiences, Bowlby’s an ayahuasca fan, although the first time she took it she was “terrified”.

“But it did change something. When I came out of it I thought, ‘OK, I have now seen the layers of life.’ ” Still, she warns, around a dozen tourists are thought to have died after taking it. “It’s certainly not something you take every weekend. That horrifies me. But now ahayausca is a billion-pound spiritual tourism industry. It’s just gone through the roof. And the Peruvians aren’t idiots, so everyone’s now a shaman.

“The guy I did it with it was very selective – it was with his vines, he made it, he prayed over it. It wasn’t, ‘Oh let’s just meet 80 people and lie down,’ which is what you get now. It’s fine if everything goes well, but if someone has a problem or gets stuck in a journey, you

SHE DOESN’T ADVERTISE – THERE’S NO NEED. ‘IT’S ALL BEEN WORD OF MOUTH’ get your Ferrari, you’ll be sorted. But once you get your Ferrari, you’re still thinking, ‘Why do I feel so lost? I have everything around me and I’m still not happy.’ ” As Bowlby talks, I keep thinking of Prince Harry, venting about his toxic upbringing.

Bowlby won’t comment on his situation, but she says it’s not always the best idea to keep harking back to an unhappy childhood.

“If something has happened to you as a child, therapy is fantastic. But you need to allow yourself the freedom to say, ‘I am more than my story.’ These are things that happen to us but they don’t define us.”

You can definitely imagine Harry – and his mother before him – having a shaman on the payroll. In Los Angeles, shamanism is huge – Americans spend $1.7 billion a year on “spiritual services” with, predictably, Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop at the vanguard, plugging her “light in shining armour” Shaman Durek, whose girlfriend is Princess Märtha Louise of Norway. There are financial shamans who advise on business, fashion shamans who scrub bad energy from your wardrobe, even shamanic hairstylists who perform a “ritual combing practice”.

Pre-Covid, boutique hotels had begun offering shamanic healing sessions, with a menu of singing bowl meditations and cacaodrinking ceremonies.

“Right now, shamans are very trendy,” Bowlby admits, somewhat ruefully. “There’s a desire to see more than the everyday life.” The

need someone who can help them out of it.”

She occasionally takes clients to Peru to guide them through the experience. “Because even if you can see this other world, the real point is how are you going to integrate it into your everyday life?”

So instead of entering into altered states, Bowlby and I discuss my current gripes and she gives me some smart insights into them, as well as some techniques. There’s the five senses exercise I use later with my daughter, then she tells me to imagine I’m an eagle (the ideal shamanic state of consciousness moves between that state, a serpent’s – pragmatic, urgent – a jaguar’s – intellectual – and a hummingbird’s – soulful). “The eagle’s in a place of stillness, up in the sky, where you can just say, ‘OK.’ ” This may well sound like utter nonsense.

You certainly would never have persuaded me to fork out £300 on this. All I can say is, after first seeing Bowlby, I felt blissfully relaxed.

I don’t think she could cure cancer (and she certainly wouldn’t make such a claim), but if time with her makes you feel so positive, then that’s better than spending thousands on drugs, alcohol or gambling – remedies her clients may have tried to numb their anxieties.

I feel so blissed out, I almost forget to ask the most pressing question. “ ‘Shay-man’ or ‘shah-man’?”

“Oh, you can say either,” Bowlby smiles beatifically. “It really doesn’t matter. As we say, ‘There’s no shame in shay-man.’ ” n

N O G IN K A H S D A E H ‘I DID A LOT OF ’ R E G N A F O T O L A ests THIS TRIP. I FELT e Black Lives Matter prot

George Floyd and th of h at de e th e nc si ar ye America to find out to It is a s rn tu re ie yr M e liv C . the world or who carries a pistol st pa made headlines around e th , op st t rs Fi s. th past 12 mon what has changed in the

The BBC’s Clive Myrie photographed in St Louis earlier this month by Michael B Thomas.

Left, from top: a demonstration in St Louis in the wake of George Floyd’s death last May; a memorial in George Floyd Square, Minneapolis, last month

PREVIOUS SPREAD: MICHAEL B THOMAS/GETTY IMAGES, YASIN OZTURK/ ANADOLU AGENCY/GETTY IMAGES. THIS PAGE: AP, MICHAEL B THOMAS

T

he Rev Darryl Gray is slight of build, in his mid-sixties now, thinning grey hair crowning a gentle, kindly face. An AfricanAmerican, his skin is light brown and he has a wispy grey beard.

But don’t be fooled by the outward frailty. When he speaks, it’s a powerful sound – a deep richness underpins every word, every syllable. And you listen.

“I might wear a collar, but I’m not a fool,” he tells volunteers at his church at the intersection of Garrison and Greer Avenues in St Louis County, Missouri, one of the most violent areas of America. One of the volunteers suggests he needs to be careful as they go door to door popping little plastic bags containing five white washable masks through the letterboxes of people’s homes, along with a slip of paper reading, “With love from the Greater Fairfax Baptist Church.” As we all know, coronavirus likes nothing better than attacking poor people, especially, it seems, poor black people.

“I told you, I’m good. I carry mine,” he says to the volunteer worried about his safety.

I’m not exactly sure what he means, but I have a feeling. And then, as I sit down to interview him by the altar in the church, yellowing white plaster peeling off several cracked walls with a bright morning light flooding in through large, truly beautiful stained-glass windows, he unzips his black fleece to reveal a holster on his belt, with a 9mm Glock pistol sitting snugly inside.

I am surprised to see the weapon – a little incongruous, I think, for a man of God. Then I remember old black and white cowboy films from my childhood and there is always a preacher with a gun in the badlands way out west. Gray is a preacher in the modern-day badlands of the city of St Louis.

“It’s not uncommon,” he tells me matter-of-factly, “especially for deacons in big inner-city churches, to carry guns.

These are the times that we live in, but for me to feel that, even with my collar on, I have to be armed, is pretty depressing.

But I’m a realist. The belief that God will do everything for us and we have to do nothing for ourselves? That’s not faith, that’s superstition, and that can get you killed.”

Gray preaches on a Sunday and takes Bible class on a Wednesday. His church was built in 1883. A brass plaque glints in the sunlight, declaring it to be a listed property in the National Register of Historic Places. It sits in a leafy neighbourhood that was once very well-to-do, but certainly isn’t now. The parish is chock full of handsome, big-boned Victorian houses, all stuccoed porticoes and porches, the kind that line the moneyed streets of Notting Hill or Kensington. But in this

26 The Times Magazine

St Louis Baptist minister the Rev Darryl Gray

THE PREACHER UNZIPS HIS FLEECE TO REVEAL A 9MM GLOCK. ‘THESE ARE THE TIMES WE LIVE IN,’ HE SAYS St Louis neighbourhood, they’re worth a pittance. Many are falling down, crumbling and vacant.

It’s such a waste, I always tell myself, shaking my head whenever I visit similar inner-city areas in Baltimore or Chicago, Milwaukee, Detroit or Boston. Districts abandoned in the recessions of the Seventies and Eighties, as businesses went bust and factories moved out, forcing the more affluent, mainly white residents to up sticks and head for the suburbs. Left behind were the urban poor, mainly African-Americans. There’s no river or mountain range that divides the city of St Louis, but there is Delmar Boulevard.

North of the road are the poor, black areas, and south are the rich white ones. Exactly the same housing stock forests both, but the south has beautiful and well-maintained homes, closer to Notting Hill prices.

I do a lot of head-shaking on this trip, and I feel a lot of anger too. The main highways that ferry commuters from the suburbs to their good jobs in the downtown metropolitan area of St Louis elegantly skirt the poor neighbourhoods, arcing around the deprivation and twisting away from the lost inner cities full of lost souls. But it’s not only the office workers who can avoid the unpalatable. Guess where the stadium of the St Louis Cardinals baseball team is situated.

And the ice hockey stadium of the St Louis Blues, as well as the Major League Soccer stadium of St Louis FC currently under construction. Yes, a hop, skip and a jump away from the shiny office blocks at the end of the winding freeway. Downtown then, a one-stop

shop for work and play that doesn’t involve having to clap eyes on poor people.

You can walk for miles in some of these rundown neighbourhoods all over America and you’ll be hard-pressed to find a school or a bank or a cop on the beat. Instead, there are pawn shops engaged in usury, liquor and convenience stores, and cheque-cashing dives that charge extortionate levels of commission.

It’s always the poor who pay more. And, yes, in such neighbourhoods a tiny minority do turn to illegality and drug-taking to get by, to survive another day. There’s nothing else. The waste of human talent is a stain that shames a supposedly God-fearing country like America, and that’s why visiting such neighbourhoods with their teeming millions of supposedly lost causes, always causes me to shake my head and well up with anger.

In St Louis, along certain streets where crime is plentiful and hope is in short supply, the police fear to tread. And if they do go in, it’s mob-handed, like an invading army doing battle. Gray says he’s no fool, which is why he carries a 9mm Glock; well, neither are the police. But he argues forcefully that officers

Myrie and Jason Armstrong, chief of police in Ferguson, St Louis County

adhere to a strict set of rules, laid down by the Department of Justice, governing how it conducts its business. It was the killing that prompted Gray to move from Atlanta, Georgia, to St Louis, to be part of the new front that had now been opened up in the battle for civil rights.

The current Ferguson police chief, Jason Armstrong, has been in the job for two years, trying to maintain a steady course on the road to the force’s redemption after Brown’s death. The four gold stars that stud the collar of his crisp white shirt on both sides, in a neat descending line down to the tips, are buffed and sparkling, as is the rather large gold badge pinned to his chest that declares his rank. His black trousers are pressed with a firm crease; shiny black patent dress shoes adorn his feet. A black tie swings from side to side when he walks. An African-American, he seems however to carry all that formality lightly on a 6ft 4in frame.

Possessed of a deep Southern drawl, his last gig was running a police department down in Georgia.

“Klaus, how’s it goin’, man?” he says genially to an officer who walks by.

“Good, sir. How are you?”

“I’m doin’ awright, man. I’d rather be home in bed.” He’s forgotten perhaps that he is wearing a microphone for our imminent interview, but it is good of him to meet us early on a Sunday morning.

“We’re doing what we can,” he says. “I cannot guarantee or promise you there won’t be another police shooting, of course not. But what I can promise and guarantee is that we

‘I CAN’T GUARANTEE THERE WON’T BE ANOTHER POLICE SHOOTING. BUT I CAN PROMISE WE’LL HANDLE IT RIGHT’ do have to take some responsibility for the lack of trust between them and the public they’re supposed to serve.

“They’re gonna come in heavy, they’re gonna come in fast, and they get out fast,” he says. “The police have openly told us that when they go into black communities, they overpolice out of fear. You will often see four patrol cars respond to one tiny incident. We’re dealing with police officers who overprotect white people and overpolice black people.”

In this atmosphere there’s little trust between the police and the policed. In St Louis County is the municipality of Ferguson, the scene of weeks of demonstrations and rioting in 2014 after an African-American teenager, Michael Brown, was shot six times and killed by a white police officer.

The death led to the resignation of the police chief, and to this day the force must

are going to handle that problem the right way, that there will be accountability. Only time can build trust, but we’re getting there.”

But what about the fabled “thin blue line”, that unbreakable bond between cops?

It used to mean your buddy had your back in a dangerous situation, but maybe also that he or she had your back if you did something stupid or wrong or even illegal. In other words, they’d lie to cover for you.

“We have new disciplinary procedures,” says Armstrong. “Our Duty to Report policy means that if an officer sees a colleague engaged in activity that would discredit the force, then they’re duty-bound to report what happened, and failing to do so could result in penalties similar to those imposed for committing the offence itself.”

It is a long road to the atonement past police injustices require. Armstrong tells

me there hasn’t been a single police shooting in Ferguson since Brown died. No officer has had to discharge their weapon. The chief was taking part in a fun run on the day I arrived in St Louis, jogging alongside local people.

A different kind of community policing on a sunny Saturday afternoon. No big deal, no great fanfare, but the visible manifestation of a sense of community the Ferguson Police Department is trying to foster.

Then the chief has a query. “I’ve been googling you,” he says. “So what’s it like being a black man in England?” “Ha!” I reply rather defensively, flicking quickly in my mind through what kind of things he may have found online referring to me and racism.

I recount to him the one time a viewer sent me a card in the post with a gorilla on the front, and I tell him about another person who said in an email that the British public don’t want to see people like me on TV. I also tell him about the man who issued death threats, and who was eventually sent to prison for, among other things, sending malicious communications. I add that while I have never been stopped by the police in Britain, too many young black men are stopped and searched in the UK. I’ve been lucky. “You have been lucky,” he says. ‘The one time I went to London, I hired a car, got lost and ended up driving on the wrong side of the road and I got a ticket! But it had nothing to do with me being black.”

On my visit to St Louis, I make a point of asking everyone I interview where they were when they saw the video of George Floyd begging for his life. Some recall straight away; others have to think for a moment. It is a bit like recalling where you were when Neil Armstrong first walked on the moon, or on 9-11, or when Barack Obama won the presidency.

Defining moments in world history.

Along with the death of Osama bin Laden, George Floyd’s passing was one of the most high-profile killings of the 21st century.

Gray was at home watching CNN; Armstrong was at work watching on his mobile phone.

I was in an office at the BBC when the video surfaced, and patrolwoman Brittany Richardson of the Ferguson Police Department was at home with her wife and two children.

She’s about to go out on patrol when I join her. Stocky, she’s bulked out by a thick bulletproof vest underneath her regulation blue police shirt. A small diamond stud in each earlobe. On a thick black belt hangs a pair of silver handcuffs. Her right hip has a pistol with the handle pointing behind her.

Her left hip has the yellow marked grip of a Taser, with the handle pointing forwards.

The weapons are positioned like this to avoid confusion when an officer has to make a split-second decision which one to choose.

The Times Magazine 27

YASIN OZTURK/ANADOLU AGENCY/GETTY IMAGES, COURT TV/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

“There were so many videos of police engaged in the wrong kinds of interactions with people,” Richardson says, “but this was heartbreaking. We’re not all like that; the majority of us are not like that. But we’re not seen as individuals – if one cop does something like this, we’re seen as all the same. I was watching on my phone and I just kept thinking, ‘Why is he on him? There’s no need for this.’

There was no need for that amount of force at that moment. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Watching the reaction of my wife, who was with me, she was saying the same thing the rest of the world was saying: why? Just why?”

Out on patrol with Richardson, we head for the area where Brown was shot and killed. We drive up to a little memorial plaque, embedded in the pavement, surrounded by a half a dozen or so bouquets of flowers wilting in the sun.

The inscription reads: “I would like the memory of Michael Brown to be a happy one. He left an afterglow of smiles when life was done. He leaves an echo whispering softly down the ways, of happy and loving times and bright and sunny days.”

I notice Richardson is staring off into the middle distance behind the wheel of her patrol car when I return from reading the plaque.

I know exactly what she’s thinking. She’d told me earlier that every day before going to work she prays that she’ll return home safely to her family that night. She told me she prays outside the room of her children, that they’ll be safe, and to make sure they know they’re loved.

Brown was just 18 when he died. She prays every day she’ll see her children celebrate many birthdays long after they come of age.

Fly north from St Louis for about an hour and a half and you’ll reach Minneapolis in Minnesota. It’s where George Floyd died a year ago, the scene of the horror film that was watched the world over. Many Minneapolis neighbourhoods boast the same historic Victorian architecture you can see in St Louis.

Some of it is similarly dilapidated with rundown streets mainly populated by the white working class and African-Americans.

Areas where the police fear to tread.

There was a trial that lasted just over four weeks, but none us have any idea what was really going on in Derek Chauvin’s head when he knelt on George Floyd’s neck for more than nine long, agonising minutes. Chauvin refused to take the stand. That horrible day one year ago in Minneapolis brought into sharp focus the divided worlds that mark America. Between white and black, the suburbs and the inner city, poverty and wealth, power and weakness.

They’re dangerous divides exacerbated by decades of indifference from politicians and business, the media and the law. The tragedy is that it’s always the symptoms of these divides that hold society’s attention, not

Flowers outside the Cup Foods store where Floyd was killed

‘WATCHING THE GEORGE FLOYD FOOTAGE I JUST KEPT THINKING, “WHY IS HE ON HIM? THERE’S NO NEED” ’

Derek Chauvin listening to the verdict in his trial, April 20

the deep underlying and structural causes. So excuses are made, police forces are militarised, the poor and the powerless are scapegoated, the jails are made bigger.

Studies show that income inequality is one of the most important factors that drives murder rates. When inequality is high and large numbers of men lose their status, matters of respect and disrespect loom disproportionately. Powerlessness and a lack of self-worth drive homicides. So it’s no surprise then that income inequality in the US is the highest of all the G7 nations, according to the OECD. The income gap between whites and African-Americans has widened in the past decade and the wealth gap between America’s richest and poorer families has more than doubled from 1989 to 2016.

Then, of course, there’s the fetishisation of the gun, the obsession with firearms. There were 14,400 gun-related homicides in 2019.

Killings involving a gun accounted for nearly three quarters of all homicides in the US that year, a larger proportion of deaths than in

Canada, Australia, the UK and many other countries. It’s estimated there are 390 million guns in civilian hands in America, in a population of 328 million. It’s a madness visible in every mass shooting and police overreaction to a motorist stopped for a minor traffic violation who makes the mistake of reaching for something in the glovebox.

Having lived in the US for several years as the BBC’s Los Angeles and then Washington correspondent, many has been the time I’ve shaken my head in disbelief, reporting on the country’s inability to kick its gun habit.

Are the divides now too cavernous to bridge? Perhaps. One thing that binds us all is our humanity, and yet it’s surprising how often that simple fact is forgotten. Did Derek Chauvin have at the forefront of his mind the idea that George Floyd was a fellow traveller on this earth, to be treated with the same respect he himself would have wanted to enjoy? Clearly not. But why not? As bystanders pleaded with him to take his knee off George Floyd’s neck because they were distressed a fellow human being was dying, where was Derek Chauvin’s humanity?

We may never know.

For Gray, acknowledging we’re all human beings is truly the beginning of the road to redemption for America’s police forces, but also for those who come into contact with officers. They need to see human beings and not just police uniforms.

Our interview in the Greater Fairfax Baptist Church is drawing to a close. The sun is beginning to retreat, and my jet lag is taking hold. Then Gray elaborates on some of his feelings while watching the final day of the trial of Derek Chauvin. The Covid mask hid the full reaction of the defendant to the three guilty verdicts, but Gray saw something more profound and elemental in his eyes.

Do you pray for the police, I ask.

“Every day. We cannot become what we despise. If we despise hatred, let us not become it. If we despise bigotry, let us not become bigots. If we despise prejudice, let us not become prejudiced. And so when I saw the verdicts, and I saw the look on Chauvin’s face, I saw a human being caught in the glare. And I thought about him and his family. We have to do this, because we cannot become what we despise. Are we angry? Yes. Are we frustrated? Yes. Are we tired? Yes. But we cannot become what we despise because it’s hope that moves us forward, hope that there’s going to be a better day, that we can bridge this gap between the police and the black community. If there is no hope, there is nothing.” n Clive Myrie is a BBC News presenter and correspondent

The Times Magazine 29

I GAVE UP MY GLAMOROUS LIFE FOR A JOB ON THE NHS FRONT LINE Tom Templeton had the career he’d always wanted, interviewing celebrities. Then he swapped it for years at medical school as a mature student, exhausting shifts and stress, all while bringing up a family. What made him do it?

PORTRAIT Richard Pohle

Tom Templeton, 43, photographed in his GP surgery in Oxford

I

was one of a group of medical students standing around a man’s naked body. Shortly after death the man had been taken to a large Victorian room with blacked-out windows and embalmed.

As per his wishes, he now spent his nights in a drawer in the anatomy department of the medical school and was brought out daily so we could learn our trade by cutting him open.

RICHARD POHLE

The acrid smell of the embalming fluid filled the department, and the sight of a fellow student, Laura, slicing the scalpel through the waxy magnolia skin of his lower abdomen made me flinch. The man’s face had the slightly aghast look the dead tend to adopt, as I would soon realise. As Laura’s blade revealed the bobbly layer of vivid yellow fat and the glistening purple layers of muscle below and delved into the man’s innards, I regulated my breathing and thought about my baby son in an effort to take my mind off the grisly spectacle.

I was 30. In the early hours of the morning, while Laura and many of the other medical students had been out clubbing in the Ministry of Sound, I had been driving Oscar through north London in a vain attempt to get him to sleep. Later on I had fallen asleep standing up, jack-knifed over the wooden bars of the cot, feet on the floor, head on his mattress, little finger acting as a surrogate nipple. Calmed by the thought of this child whom I loved, I realised our anatomy professor was folding back the flap of flesh Laura had been cutting and we could see a clump of a new type of tissue, dark brown, less coherent in its spread than the layers we’d seen so far.

“Now, Laura, what’s this, do you think?” the professor asked.

“Is it cancer?” Laura said.

With a flourish the professor uncovered a card that carried sparse biographical information about our corpse.

“Metastatic testicular cancer,” he said, gravely. “Very unlucky. He was only 42 when he died.”

We stood quietly. I looked at Laura, scalpel in hand. She was 18 years old. I was closer in age to this embalmed corpse than to her. The youngest I could conceivably be by the time I qualified as a specialist doctor would be the age at which this man was embalmed. Oscar would be 12 years old. Was this remotely sensible? I looked back at the dead man’s yellowed face, mouth slightly ajar, and wondered how it must have been, after the diagnosis, at the end.

I’d never been interested in studying medicine.

But as a university student my local temping agency sent me to work as a ward clerk in St Thomas’ Hospital, on the banks of the River

32 The Times Magazine

With his dog, Jumble, in his garden in Oxfordshire

Thames opposite the Houses of Parliament.

After work I would visit my best friend, Louis, in a psychiatric hospital further down river, while he told me of the madness of the other patients and implored me not to leave him there to be tortured and killed.

The ward-clerk job was a way to help fund my time at university studying English literature. I was interested in the life of the mind, of the imagination, not the nuts and bolts under the human hood. But I do remember being absorbed by the patients, in particular Jack, a man with a missing leg.

Jack had walked into the Admiral Duncan, a pub in Soho, to order a drink and had his leg blown off by an explosive device packed with 500 nails.

Five years later, I found myself walking through the office turnstiles into a job on a national Sunday newspaper. It felt like something out of a film to be sitting at a desk with just a phone and word processor as my tools, interviewing writers, pop stars and politicians.

But sometimes I found my thoughts turning to Jack and his stump and wondered how he was doing. One lunchtime I glanced down a side street to see a parked ambulance and a middle-aged man on a pavement being given CPR, his lifeless body jerking with the paramedic’s thrusts. I walked on, feeling useless.

One day at the pub, a friend of mine told me about how she was training to be a doctor.

“Why don’t you do it?” I took that question home and couldn’t come up with any reasons

beyond a thousand practical ones. My partner, Siobhan, was supportive even though we were on the cusp of getting married and trying to have children and did not have much money.

Two months after Oscar was born, I’d walked into medical school for the first time.

Medical school opens up an ocean of human knowledge – statistics, anatomy, biochemistry, sociology, psychology – but it also holds up a high-focus mirror onto your own physical fragility. From the molecules to the cells to the tissues, the organs and bones and muscles and nerves and hormones that in their intricately calibrated circus keep us growing and breathing and exercising and eating and pissing and shitting throughout our lifespans, you learn about how the human body operates normally. Then you learn about the interaction of this human body with the environment around them: heat, cold, famine, fire, water, dog bite, rattlesnake venom, sugar, smoke, alcohol, bacteria, fungi, viruses.

And then, perhaps most importantly, you learn about the interaction of this human body with other human bodies. The familial, social and cultural interactions, which can be life-enhancing and prolonging or depleting and foreshortening: love, friendship, peace, anger, stress, sex, violence.

And all this knowledge was directly relevant to us, the very bodies that were sitting there in the massive lecture theatre ten times a week, looking through microscopes at slides of cells, dissecting in the anatomy room, looking at the jars of old foetuses and diseased body parts in the specimen library. The sheer improbable complexity of it all made me feel vulnerable for myself and my children. After a while I began to believe that I had liver disease, then vascular disease, then generalised anxiety disorder and then testicular cancer. Then a lecturing psychiatrist mentioned medical student syndrome, where trainee doctors suffer a series of ungrounded fears about their own health. I laughed in relief.

The camaraderie was what made and makes medicine great. Years of tests, exams, scrutiny and confrontation with disease and mortality made me grateful for my fellow travellers. It was refreshing being around people a decade younger. We headed onto the wards to start applying our knowledge to real people.

We buzzed around the hospitals of London like flies on a battlefield. We learnt how to take blood, to cannulate, to read an ECG or chest x-ray, to relocate a dislocated shoulder, to break the news to someone that they have an incurable condition that will shortly kill them, to look at the back of the eye and interpret what we saw, to listen to lung and heart sounds and interpret what we heard.

Now the science and the personal motivations faded and the real focus of

medicine swam into view: the patients. Real, live, suffering people. They would graciously let us practise our skills on them in exchange for the human contact of us perching on the edge of their hospital beds and listening to their stories. The realisation of how many sick and incapacitated the city held was sometimes overwhelming, and the journalist, or human being, in me realised that everything important in life was happening right here in vivid colour.

I headed to the obstetric departments to watch mothers give birth to babies; to the A&E department where the city’s daily damaged and smashed flooded in to get stitched, staunched and resuscitated; to the cancer wards to meet those hovering under a potential death sentence. Along the way, amid the accrual of medical knowledge I encountered memorable stories. The man with a progressive neurological disorder who had been working with banned chemical substances for MI6; a woman who had become psychotic after failing to rescue her son from kidnapping; a young man who somehow survived a brutal stabbing and its bizarre consequences for him.

On one cardiology ward I met two patients chatting about rock music, one homeless after returning from fighting in Iraq, still struggling with the guilt of what he had done there; one whom I recognised as a politician who had boosted that same war. And then, racing to sit in on a clinic one day, I found myself on the staircase leading up to the ward in which I had sat and talked with Jack well over a decade before. It had been turned into a dialysis ward. So much had happened in the intervening years that I could hardly remember what my life had been like back then. I rang my old friend, Louis. He was not doing well. Circumstance and his illness were hemming him in to an unbearable extent.

I wondered if I’d made a mistake on many occasions. Some of the doctors were haughty, depressed or downright unpleasant. The workload was stressful, with constant exams and practical tests to weed out the unworthy, and the reward just the prospect of more of the same. To have young children and to be studying was alienating. I lost or reduced contact with many important people in my life.

The financial squeeze was awful. I made bad decisions about my family and my life. Being around ill people could be distressing, watching their suffering or bearing the brunt of their unhappiness and sometimes even violence.

Sometimes I wondered what I was achieving. Standing in the resus room of A&E in a busy London hospital, I watched as a woman who had thrown herself onto the tracks of the local station and been hit by a train was brought in. Met by a welcoming committee of consultant anaesthetists,

cardiothoracic surgeons, A&E doctors.

Hundreds of years of medical experience worked on her but could only keep her alive for about 12 hours. What she had really needed, I thought, while watching their frantic efforts, was the emotional or financial or psychiatric support to prevent her from wanting to jump in the first place.

A few weeks later, when one of my medical student colleagues jumped onto the tracks of the same station to be worked on by the same team before being declared dead, I wondered where we had all been in helping that person not want to jump.

Death seemed to be carrying off friends on a regular basis, leaving bereaved parents, bereaved children – a chasm of devastation in its wake. Some tiny hidden foolish fantasy that

People would congratulate me on my worthy career change – without seeing the hidden cost at home being medical would somehow protect me, my family and our friends from our share of suffering and pain evaporated.

The reward for the endless hoop-jumping and hard work was to become a junior doctor.

I remember leaving Siobhan and our now three children at breakfast, jumping onto a bike and cycling across London, jumping onto a train, an hour later getting off and cycling through a provincial town to the base of a hospital tower block where I would lock up the bike, run to the lifts and put on my shirt to join the early morning ward round of a geriatric medicine job. Then followed a day of frantic medicine and snatched texts from Siobhan before the whole commute was repeated and I was home, exhausted and strung out.

When I had to do a series of “long days” or nights, I would pay to stay in a hospital accommodation room, have cereal for dinner, sleep, have cereal for breakfast, then head back into the hospital. At home my wife was bringing up the children entirely on her own, making excuses for my absence and trying to balance our nonexistent budget. People would endlessly congratulate me on the worthiness of my career change, not seeing the hidden cost at home. The children were always overjoyed to see me due to my rarity value.

Siobhan somehow tolerated what our life had become. My family’s love, and the feeling that the frenetic, stressful, exhausting work was worthwhile, kept me going.

Perhaps the patients filled the emotional void left by my absent family and friends.

I certainly felt a kinship to them, whether in geriatrics or paediatrics, general practice or intensive care: the demented man who believed that he was still running a successful bakery and bossed around us ward staff, his bakery workers, mercilessly; the critically ill boy with Down’s syndrome who had rescued his parents’ marriage; the young man who left my care feeling healed by my words but, due to a miswritten phone number, was unaware he probably carried a brain tumour. I was learning a huge amount from these patients, not just about the practice of medicine but about life and human existence.

Resources were tight, and that winter it became clear to me for the first time how stretched the hospitals were. The wards were always full, however rapidly and riskily we discharged the patients. Being a doctor sometimes felt like being a bouncer in a white coat, turning patients away from A&E for a three-week wait to see their GP. No chance of a hospital bed to detox from alcohol, despite a knackered immune system that left their feet coated in an inch-thick layer of fungus.

Discharging risky psychiatric patients to the time-stretched community team. Then as a GP trying to help people as they waited for specialist care. Nine months to wait for the procedure to diagnose their abdominal pain and nausea. One-year wait for an operation on arthritic hips that made every step an agony (despite popping opiates eight times a day). Patients flashed past us like the people on the down escalator in the Tube at the end of the day. Thirty-plus on the ward; ten to twenty on every A&E shift; twenty to thirty every day in general practice.

At about this time Louis began to get very unwell again. On the train home from work we would sometimes have agonising conversations, the signal cutting in and out, as his mental health deteriorated. I felt powerless in the face of his problems and the resources being offered to him. After all those years at medical school I didn’t have a magic doctor’s card to help him. Instead I had depleted reserves of time, money and energy.

One day I got a call from a strange number and when the voice introduced himself as Louis’ younger brother, I felt my stomach churn.

“There’s been an accident,” he said. “Louis has fallen under a Tube train.”

Not an accident, I thought to myself as I ran to the hospital he mentioned, mind whirling with all the things I should have done, all the time I’d spent on other things, other people, myself, instead of my friend.

I’m not the only doctor to feel they have neglected their nearest and dearest because of the demands of strangers. I watched as Continues on page 45

The Times Magazine 33

THE ONLY 10 SPAGHETTI RECIPES YOU’LL EVER NEED

ON THE TABLE IN 10-20 MINUTES

T OU P LL EE PU D K AN

Eat!

READY IN 10 MINUTES

2

RECIPES Finn Lagun, Roberta d’Elia PHOTOGRAPHS Tim Atkins

T

rue to our notion that all Italians are schooled in pasta-making from an early age, Roberta d’Elia learnt to make orecchiette as a six-year-old girl at her nonna’s side on the family farm in Puglia.

Finn Lagun, on the other hand, was brought up in Newcastle upon Tyne so had to wait rather longer for his first lesson. “Like most Brits, I had grown up on dishes from the pseudoItalian repertoire, notably spaghetti bolognese,” he recalls. All that changed when he cofounded Pasta Evangelists, the fresh pasta company, and now his eyes are opened to the beautiful simplicity of a bowl of pasta properly made. With head chef d’Elia by his side, he shares some of his favourites. Tony Turnbull

1. SPAGHETTI ALLA CARBONARA Serves 4 For the people of Lazio, and especially the capital, Rome, two rules should be observed with this dish. First, the addition of cream is aberrant. Second, the pork component should be guanciale, a cut from a pig’s cheek. In the Roman view, lardons or smoked bacon are not to be substituted. In respect of tradition, we therefore give you the version you’d find in the Italian capital.

The trick we employ here – using a little of

the starchy water the pasta cooks in to thicken the sauce – is common in Italy. At first it might feel odd to add water to thicken a sauce but, as the water evaporates, the remaining starches help the ingredients to adhere.

• Salt and black pepper, to taste • 500g spaghetti • 150g guanciale (if you really can’t find it, opt for cubed pancetta) • 5 medium egg yolks • 50g pecorino, grated, plus extra to serve 1 Bring a pot of generously salted water to the boil. Cook the pasta until al dente, following the packet instructions.

2 While the pasta cooks, prepare the sauce.

Remove and discard the tough rind of the guanciale, then cut the meat into cubes. Place the cubes in a cold, dry frying pan over a low heat and cook for 5-6 minutes until crisp and browned, then remove from the heat.

3 While the guanciale cooks, place the egg yolks in a bowl (saving the whites for an omelette). Add the pecorino, salt and pepper and beat with a fork until combined.

4 Once the pasta is al dente, reserve a cup of the cooking water, then drain the pasta and add it to the pan with the guanciale. Return the pan to a low heat and sauté the pasta for a few minutes, adding a splash of the cooking water.

5 Remove the pan from the heat and add the egg yolk mixture. Toss the pasta in the sauce continuously, adding more cooking water if necessary. You should be left with a glossy sauce that completely coats the spaghetti.

6 Serve immediately with freshly grated pecorino and black pepper to taste.

2. SPAGHETTI AL LIMONE Serves 4 The Amalfi Coast is known for its eponymous lemons, which are distinguished by their large size and sweet, perfumed flavour. When we visit we eat pasta al limone: a simple, fragrant sauce. This is our version, best enjoyed with a glass of chilled white wine.

• Salt and black pepper • 500g spaghetti • 2 tbsp olive oil • 20g unsalted butter • 1 garlic clove, peeled and lightly crushed • 400ml single cream • Juice and grated zest of 2 unwaxed lemons • Parmesan, or vegetarian alternative, to serve 1 Bring a pot of generously salted water to the boil. Cook the pasta until al dente, following the packet instructions.

The Times Magazine 37

Eat! SPAGHETTI

1

3

VEGGIE IN 10 MINUTES

4

VEG AN

2 While the pasta cooks, prepare the sauce.

Place the oil and butter in a large pan over a medium heat. When the butter has melted, add the garlic and fry gently for around 2 minutes until golden. Once the oil mixture is fragrant, take the pan off the heat and discard the garlic clove. Slowly add the cream and stir to combine. Return the pan to a low heat and stir gently until the sauce begins to bubble.

3 Remove from the heat again, then add the lemon juice and zest, salt and pepper to taste.

4 Once the pasta is al dente, reserve a cup of the cooking water, then drain the pasta and add it to the sauce. Stir over a low heat to combine, adding a splash of cooking water if necessary, to obtain a glossy sauce that coats the pasta.

5 Serve immediately with freshly grated parmesan to taste.

3. COURGETTE CARBONARA Serves 4 For those who have taken up vegetarianism the passing of carbonara from one’s life can cause gastronomic grief. Fortunately, this version promises to restore the joy of even the most maudlin new vegetarian. As courgettes have a fantastic ability to absorb salt, they can, if fried punctiliously and not to the point of mushiness, emulate salty morsels of guanciale while bringing a light freshness in their own right.

38 The Times Magazine

• Salt and black pepper, to taste • 500g spaghetti • 2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil • 1 garlic clove, peeled and lightly crushed • 2 large courgettes (around 300g), diced • 5 medium egg yolks • 50g pecorino, or vegetarian alternative, grated • 15g fresh parsley, finely chopped

the pasta. If the mixture becomes dry, add a splash of the cooking water and toss vigorously to combine.

6 Plate and serve immediately, topped with freshly ground black pepper to taste.

1 Bring a pot of generously salted water to the boil. Cook the pasta until al dente, following the packet instructions.

2 While the pasta cooks, prepare the sauce.

Heat the oil in a pan over a medium heat.

Add the garlic and sauté for 2 minutes until fragrant, then remove from the pan and discard. Add the courgettes to the pan, season with salt and pepper and cook for about 5 minutes, stirring occasionally.

3 Meanwhile, place the egg yolks in a bowl and whisk gently. Add the pecorino and a dash of salt and pepper and continue whisking until smooth.

4 Once the pasta is al dente, reserve a cup of the cooking water, then drain the pasta and add it to the pan with the courgettes.

Stir to combine and cook for 1 minute over a high heat. Add the parsley, then turn off the heat.

5 Slowly add the egg mixture, stirring quickly with a wooden spoon to distribute throughout

We call this dish “wanderer’s spaghetti” as it was created by traders who wandered Sicily’s countryside, stopping in towns to sell goods.

4. WANDERER’S SPAGHETTI Serves 4

• Salt • 500g spaghetti • 4 tbsp extra virgin olive oil • 1 garlic clove, peeled and lightly crushed • Half a fresh red chilli, finely diced (optional) • 70g sun-dried tomatoes, chopped • 25g capers, washed and roughly chopped • 15-20g fresh parsley, finely chopped • 80g toasted breadcrumbs, to serve 1 Bring a pot of generously salted water to the boil. Cook the pasta until al dente, following the packet instructions.

2 While the pasta cooks, prepare the sauce.

Place the olive oil, garlic, chilli (if using) and tomatoes in a large frying pan over a medium heat. Fry for a couple of minutes, then add the capers. Remove and discard the garlic clove.

3 Once the pasta is al dente, reserve a cup of the cooking water, then drain the pasta and add it to the pan with the sauce. Toss to combine, adding a splash of the cooking water.

Continue mixing until the sauce coats the pasta, then stir in the parsley.

4 Plate and serve immediately, topped with the toasted breadcrumbs.

5. SPAGHETTI ALLA MARINARA Serves 4 A recipe really wouldn’t be Italian if its origins weren’t in some way contentious. Theories explaining the origins of the salsa marinara abound. Some claim this sauce – which in its simplest form is only tomatoes, oregano and garlic – was created by cooks on board ships returning from the New World (marino is Italian for sailor). Others insist that it was created by the sailors’ wives when their husbands returned from their voyages.

• 6 tbsp extra virgin olive oil • 1 garlic clove, peeled and sliced • 4-5 anchovies, rinsed and roughly chopped • 300g tomato passata • Dried oregano, to taste • 750g spaghetti • 15g fresh parsley, finely chopped • Pecorino, grated, to serve

SEAFOOD IN 10 MINUTES

1 Heat the oil in a frying pan and fry the garlic for 2 minutes until golden. Add the anchovies and fry for another couple of minutes.

2 Add the passata and simmer for about 15 minutes, then add oregano to taste. Simmer gently for 10 minutes, then turn off the heat.

3 Meanwhile, bring a pot of generously salted water to the boil. Cook the pasta until al dente, following the packet instructions.

4 Once the pasta is done, reserve a cup of the cooking water, then drain the pasta and add it to the sauce. Toss to coat the spaghetti and continue cooking for about 2 more minutes.

If the sauce is too dry, add a splash of the cooking water. Stir through the parsley.

5 Serve immediately with freshly grated pecorino to taste.

6. SPAGHETTI ALLA VENETA Serves 6 This recipe is inspired by Venice’s spaghetti alla busara, a dish with tomatoes and scampi.

It’s said to take its name from the Venetian word busièra, or “liar”, perhaps in reference to the way the tomatoes conceal the seafood.

• 15g fresh parsley, finely chopped • 3 tbsp breadcrumbs • 6 tbsp extra virgin olive oil • 2 garlic cloves, peeled

6

• 16 large raw king prawns, peeled, deveined and washed • 150-200ml white wine • 1 tsp sweet paprika • Salt and black pepper, to taste • 500g spaghetti 1 Combine the parsley and breadcrumbs in a bowl.

2 Heat the olive oil in a large nonstick pan over a medium heat, add the garlic cloves and cook for 2 minutes, letting them brown slightly and become fragrant, then remove and discard the garlic.

3 Add the prawns to the pan, arranging them in a single layer, and cook for a couple of minutes before adding the white wine.

Carefully flip each prawn and continue to cook. Season with the paprika and salt and remove from the heat.

4 Sprinkle the parsley and breadcrumb mixture over the contents of the pan.

5 Bring a pot of generously salted water to the boil. Cook the pasta until al dente, following the packet instructions.

6 Once the pasta is al dente, drain the pasta and add it to the prawns, tossing to coat. Sauté for a couple of minutes, then plate and serve at once, topped with ground black pepper.

The Times Magazine 39

Eat! SPAGHETTI

5

7. WILD GARLIC PESTO Serves 4 Wild garlic is all around us, abundantly, all year. Only its white flowers are ephemeral, appearing for a period in spring. You can buy wild garlic flowers online and at farmers’ markets between April and June. Much more rewarding, though, is to forage your own.

You can find information online about where your nearest wild garlic plants are. We’ve found it growing in a cemetery.

• 150g wild garlic leaves, washed • 50g blanched almonds • 30g parmesan, or vegetarian alternative, grated, plus extra to serve • 30g pecorino, or vegetarian alternative, grated • 10g pine nuts • 3 tbsp extra virgin olive oil • Salt • 3 tbsp lemon juice • 500g spaghetti 1 Place the wild garlic, almonds, parmesan, pecorino, pine nuts, olive oil and salt into a food processor and blitz until a creamy yet slightly chunky sauce is formed.

2 Transfer to a bowl and gradually add the lemon juice, stirring to combine.

READY IN 20 MINUTES

3 Bring a pot of generously salted water to the boil. Cook the pasta until al dente, following the packet instructions.

4 Once the pasta is done, reserve a cup of the cooking water, then drain the pasta and return it to the pot with the pesto. Toss until coated, adding a little cooking water to loosen, if necessary.

5 Plate and serve immediately with freshly grated parmesan to taste.

8. BLACK OLIVE PESTO Serves 6 Many people say they prefer green olives, yet they love this recipe when they taste it. The darkness of the pesto lacks beauty, but stay with us. The Taggiasche olives we use here are the same olives used in Liguria (home of pesto) to produce Ligurian extra virgin olive oil. In turn, this oil – at least within the region – is used to make the famous basil pesto. The Taggiasche variety of olive also has a less acidic, sweeter character than other black olives. Give it a go – you might just be converted to the dark side.

• 10g fresh basil leaves, roughly torn • 120g blanched almonds • 70g Taggiasche olives, pitted and roughly chopped

8

• 5 tbsp extra virgin olive oil, plus extra to serve • 40g pecorino, or vegetarian alternative, grated, plus extra to serve • Salt • 750g spaghetti 1 Put the basil and almonds in a food processor and give them a quick blitz. Add the olives and blitz until a rough texture is achieved.

2 Add half the olive oil to the food processor with the pecorino and blitz again.

3 Finally, drizzle in the remaining 2½ tbsp oil and blitz until you reach the desired consistency. You may require slightly more oil. Avoid overblending, however, because a rustic texture is preferred.

4 Bring a pot of generously salted water to the boil. Cook the pasta until al dente, following the packet instructions.

5 Once the pasta is done, reserve a cup of the cooking water, then drain the pasta and return it to the pan. Stir through the pesto, adding a splash of the reserved cooking water, if necessary, to ensure the pesto completely coats the pasta.

6 Plate and serve immediately with a drizzle of olive oil and freshly grated pecorino to taste.

The Times Magazine 41

Eat! SPAGHETTI

7

Eat! SPAGHETTI

9

READY IN 20 MINUTES

9. SPAGHETTI CACIO E PEPE Serves 4

and toss until well combined. If necessary, add more cooking water until you obtain a creamy consistency.

6 Plate and serve immediately.

Cacio e pepe, literally “cheese and pepper”, is one of those sauces that feels both basic and decadent, the climax of just three ingredients: freshly ground black pepper, an almost unseemly volume of pecorino and, of course, pasta.

10. SPAGHETTI WITH CRAB, LEMON AND CHILLI Serves 6

• Salt • 500g spaghetti • 1-2 tsp black peppercorns • 280g pecorino, or vegetarian alternative, grated 1 Bring a pot of generously salted water to the boil. Cook the pasta until al dente, following the packet instructions.

2 While the pasta cooks, prepare the sauce.

With a pestle and mortar, lightly crush the peppercorns.

3 In a bowl, mix the pecorino with a splash of the starchy pasta cooking water until creamy.

4 Add the peppercorns to a pan over a low heat and gently toast for 1 minute. Then add a ladleful of the pasta water.

5 Once the pasta is al dente, reserve another cup of the cooking water, then drain the pasta and add it to the pan containing the pepper.

Turn off the heat, add the cheese mixture

42 The Times Magazine

We are firm believers that crab (granchio in Italian) is best served simply. This isn’t because we are lazy (although we have our moments), but because the delicate flavour of crab lends itself to uncomplicated preparation.

Seaside eateries across Italy seem to share this view, serving crab simply with lemon and perhaps red chilli. So this recipe makes us think of summer holidays spent along the Italian coastline.

• 5 tbsp extra virgin olive oil • 1 garlic clove, minced • 1 fresh red chilli, seeds removed and finely chopped • 350g white crabmeat • 100ml white wine • 15g fresh parsley, finely chopped • Salt and black pepper, to taste • 750g spaghetti • Grated zest of 1 unwaxed lemon

10

1 Heat the oil in a frying pan and cook the garlic and chilli over a low heat for 2 minutes until fragrant.

2 Add the crabmeat and raise the heat slightly.

Then add the wine and continue cooking for 3-4 minutes. If the sauce is too dry, add a little water. Stir through the chopped parsley.

3 Meanwhile, bring a pot of generously salted water to the boil. Cook the pasta until al dente, following the packet instructions.

4 Once the pasta is done, reserve a cup of the cooking water, then drain the pasta and add it to the pan with the crab. Toss to coat, then continue cooking on a low to medium heat, adding a little of the cooking water at a time until everything is nicely combined and glossy.

5 Add the lemon zest and toss to combine.

Season with salt and pepper and serve. n

© Pasta Evangelists Ltd 2021. Extracted from Perfect Pasta at Home by Finn Lagun and Roberta d’Elia, published by Seven Dials on June 10 (£20)

Tom Templeton Continued from page 33

colleagues’ relationships and family lives collapsed under the weight of the stress, the workload or the guilt as patients suffered or died not because of some minor error on their part but because of a system stretched like bubblegum. People left for Australia, for hedge funds, for the dole queue.

I went into general practice. How could I choose between working with the brain, the heart, the musculoskeletal system, between treating the old and the young? Also, which other profession allows you to build longlasting relationships with such a variety of people? Nor could I imagine spending many more nights walking around a hospital with that dull chemical exhaustion washing through me, waiting for the crash bleep to go off, then returning to see my children at breakfast and collapsing into fevered dreams.

I was seeing 30-40 patients a day, feeling incredibly lucky. Dealing with every part of the body and the people and lives attached to it. I no longer think it’s possible to reroute the flood of someone else’s life. I think the most we can do is provide stepping stones for people when they’re navigating the fastestflowing or deepest bits of their own rivers.

I can listen and help as best I can.

In the past year health and human vulnerability have become front and centre

The wards were full. Being a doctor sometimes felt like being a bouncer in a white coat, turning patients away of everybody’s daily routine. The streets emptied for a protein and nucleic acid particle 100 nanometres across. Everyone went to medical school. R-numbers and spike proteins became common parlance. Many people felt physically vulnerable for the first time in their lives. The front pages of every newspaper covered Covid and little else.

The things that impressed me so much at medical school have all been on public display from the very NHS that was already creaking at the seams. Applying and extrapolating current knowledge to a new scenario, treating and studying disease simultaneously, carefully balancing ethical harms, the sensible navigation through risk and uncertainty, the commitment, hard work and bravery of the workers. The reason the medical response to Covid has been by and large so successful, from the improvements in critical care to the projections regarding lockdowns to the production of vaccines, is

because the work is rooted firmly in verified or verifiable knowledge.

The way we operate as GPs has been transformed. I am working primarily with a telephone and a computer, just like when I was a journalist. A wise doctor once told me, “Keep the patients you are worried about close to you,” but this has not always been possible during the pandemic and some of the consequences have been catastrophic. More than 100,000 extra deaths in one year, the missed and late diagnoses, the suffering, loneliness, hopelessness, financial ruination and family stress behind closed doors. I know enough about life to see that the ramifications will stretch deep into the future.

Somehow Louis survived his collision with the Tube train and now says he feels better than ever before. He gave his blessing for me to tell his story. He has always been proud of me for becoming a doctor. A few years back I told him about an elderly patient who had spent his entire life in love with four women, all of whom existed only in his head. Louis was silent for a while.

“That’s crazy,” he said. “Poor man. You should write that down.” n Tom Templeton’s book, 34 Patients, is published

by Michael Joseph (£20)

YOUR SHOWS WERE THE BEST IN LOCKDOWN ‘WHAT GOOD TASTE YOU HAVE!’

Jared Harris, 59

IS GETTING MARRIED A LOT A HARRIS FAMILY TRAIT? ‘THAT’S SO UNFAIR!’

His hellraiser actor father, Richard Harris, wanted his son to be a lawyer. It didn’t happen. Now Jared Harris is the standout star of some of the best TV dramas, from Mad Men and The Crown to Chernobyl and The Terror.

Polly Vernon meets him PORTRAITS Corey Nickols

I

PREVIOUS SPREAD: CONTOUR BY GETTY IMAGES. THIS SPREAD: GETTY IMAGES, EVERETT COLLECTION INC/ALAMY, NETFLIX/AP, HBO/ALAMY, BBC

‘

remember, we were driving in the car,” the actor Jared Harris – of Mad Men, The Crown, Chernobyl, The Terror, Carnival Row and, God, really anything remotely worth watching on TV lately – is telling me. “I was talking about acting and he suddenly goes…”

Harris expands visibly on the Zoom link before me, upwards and outwards, puffing his chest, broadening his shoulders, sitting taller and straighter, bigger and grander. This is in imitation of the relevant “he”, his father, the renowned actor and hellraiser Richard Harris, a man as vivid and dominant and demanding of attention as his son is discreet, subtle, watchful and contained. “ ‘Acting?’ ” Harris’s voice – more usually quietly, mellifluously posh and British – is suddenly vast, thespian, booming. “ ‘Acting is…’ ” He pauses for effect. I lean in closer towards my laptop: what? “ ‘It’s very simple, Jared. It’s very simple…’ ” Jared-Harris-as-Richard-Harris pauses again.

I realise I’m holding my breath. “ ‘Acting is… Acting…’ ” Yes? “ ‘Is…’ ” Yes? “ ‘Acting is… to act!’ ” Oh. “And I went, ‘No! Goddamn you!’ It was like the scene out of The Karate Kid. He Mr Miyagi-ed me.”

The miracle of this conversation is not the masterful, melodramatic opaqueness of Richard Harris (who died in 2002, partway through his stint as Albus Dumbledore in the Harry Potter films), however – but rather that it happened at all. Richard Harris had not wanted his middle son to follow him into the profession, had decided he was quite unsuited to it. “Because I was painfully shy. He always thought that my younger brother [Jamie] would be a wonderful actor, and he is a wonderful actor, but he has that huge gregarious personality, similar to my dad’s, where he walks into a room and he announces his entrance in some way or other. I kind of like to slip into a room and then see what’s happening and what people are doing, and, on some level, be invisible, observe.”

His father had him down from a very young age for the law or teaching, or something equally low-key and useful, but Harris – who left boarding school, then Britain, to study at Duke University in North Carolina in his early twenties – found himself drawn to acting, precisely because he was so painfully shy.

“It was directly attacking something I hated about myself,” he says. As it turned out, he was good at it. He performed in plays at Duke, he wrote and directed a “really pretentious movie” about subliminal advertising, then began the process of convincing his family

50 The Times Magazine

Jared Harris on father Richard’s lap, with brothers Damian and Jamie and mother Elizabeth Rees-Williams, Christmas 1964

‘I was painfully shy. My father always thought that my younger brother, Jamie, would be a wonderful actor’ it was wrong about his professional destiny.

“My mother [the actress Elizabeth ReesWilliams] had come to see me in a play at Duke – Equus – and she was really surprised that I pulled it off. She told my father, ‘You should go down and see him.’ He went, ‘No, it’ll be really embarrassing.’ ‘He’s really good.

He does a good job.’ ‘You’re just saying that because you’re his mother. I’m not going down there.’ ” Eventually, reluctantly, Harris senior went to see his son perform and, “I remember very clearly, I can still hear it, that laugh that I got from him in the first five minutes of the play.

I heard him laugh very clearly; very, very clearly. I knew what his laugh was like.”

And how did that feel?

“So happy and excited! And then, you just want to get another one. I wanted to get another laugh and another laugh. Then, after it was over, I went out to meet him and he had just this look of surprise on his face, and joy and happiness. He went, ‘God, you’ve got it. You’ve f***ing got it. You’ve got it!’ ” Hasn’t he, though? I have to admit that, in advance of researching Jared Harris for this interview, I didn’t know he was Richard Harris’s son. I just thought he was that extraordinary actor whose name on the credits of any TV show is a solid indicator it’ll be a

class affair, whose choice in projects is deeply tasteful, whose rare, transforming talent lifts every scene in which he features by – oh, let’s say 30 per cent minimum, shall we? The actor who played the Soviet-era scientist Valery Legasov so beautifully in HBO’s Chernobyl, he not only won a Bafta for it, he was said to have significantly ruffled Vladimir Putin’s feathers.

In lockdown, during my nightly, sometimes desperate trawls through TV schedules and streaming services for something good (something to relieve the tedium, the anxiety, to offer escape, anything at all), I developed a habit of rationing shows in which Harris appears, so as to not use them up too quickly.

Yours were the best shows I watched through lockdown, I tell him.

“What good taste you have.”

For what it’s worth, I’d say you’re one of the best actors of your generation.

“Thank you.”

Can you accept that?

“Oh, you think you’re going to suck every time you say yes to something. That you’re going to fail. You go on set and hope that the thing that has to happen when they say, ‘Action!’ is going to happen again this time, you know?”

We are zooming so that Harris might perform promotional duties on his newest project, a BritBox psychological thriller

Jared Harris with Jon Hamm and John Slattery in Mad Men, 2012. Right: alongside Claire Foy in The Crown, 2016

Harris’s Bafta-winning performance as Valery Legasov in 2019’s Chernobyl. Right: in the BBC’s The Terror

called The Beast Must Die, in which he stars with The Good Fight’s Cush Jumbo. Harris – whose choice in roles has always jolted from goody to baddie to not-surey, from the noble leader of a 19th-century naval expedition (The Terror; BBC iPlayer) to an intense, swaggering leader of interstellar freedom fighters (The Expanse; Amazon Prime) – plays the villain of this piece, George Rattery, a charming, bullying tyrant, and the person most likely responsible for the unexplained death of Jumbo’s young son – although I don’t yet know for sure, because I’ve seen only the first two episodes.

“That’s more than I have,” Harris says.

Well, let me break it to you: you’re pretty unlikeable, I say.

“Yeah. There’s that cliché that you’re supposed to like, or love, every character you play, but are you? I mean, he’s a total, complete and utter narcissist.”

Base him on anyone in particular?

“What, throwing anyone under the bus?”

Oh, feel free to name names!

“Ha! There’s plenty of people one’s met.

And not necessarily in this business. Just in life. They always seem to get elected.”

Are narcissists fun to play?

“I wouldn’t say that. You want to have a shower every day after you come home. And when you play these sorts of characters, you’re

the butt of everybody’s joke on set. Everyone’s sticking pins in you, pulling you down. You’re the arsehole, your character’s the arsehole, so they let all that out, in between takes.”

What did they do to you? “People are rude.

They throw things at your portrait that hangs on the wall; if they could disfigure it with a marker pen, they would.”

Why couldn’t they? “Oh, they wouldn’t have been allowed. There was only one picture. But they would have, if they could.”

The Beast Must Die was shot on the Isle of Wight in the late summer and autumn of 2020, as the second wave of Covid-19 took hold of the country, which must have been daunting.

With his second wife, Emilia Fox, London, 2005

“We had all these new strictures: wearing masks; you had to have colour-coded bands.

All these methods of trying to figure out how to prevent the spread of it, if it found a way in,” Harris says. “That meant you didn’t get to know people the way you normally would, because you’d hang out with the crew, you’d hang out with the cast. You’d have dinners, get together in the local pub, organise fun things during the shoot – go-kart racing or whatever.

But none of that stuff happened. And you didn’t know what people looked like because they had masks. Obviously, they had to take their masks off to eat, and you’d see them without their mask on: they just didn’t look anything like themselves or how you’d imagined the lower part of their face looked.”

You wouldn’t know to watch the thing, which is a slick, smart, delicately unfurling sort of a proposition – and, inevitably, all the more powerful for the presence of Harris.

Jared Harris was born, 60 years ago this August (“Why are you counting? What’s wrong with you? I don’t understand this obsession people have with numbers and counting!” he says; he’s joking, sort of) in Hammersmith, west London, to Richard Harris and Elizabeth Rees-Williams. He was the middle of their three sons, who were packed off to boarding school – Ladycross in East Sussex – around the time their parents’ marriage ended, when Harris was seven.

Ladycross was followed by another boarding school, Downside, in Somerset. Both were grim, by all accounts: “Famous for discipline, cold showers every morning,” he has said in past interviews. “If one of the teachers didn’t like you, it could be hell.” Now, when I ask him if boarding school scarred him, he says, “I would not send my kids to boarding school at the age of seven, no way.”

Elizabeth Rees-Williams got married three times after divorcing Richard Harris: to the actor Rex Harrison, who, Harris says, didn’t have much time for children, then to Peter Aitken, then to his cousin Jonathan Aitken.

“I was recently talking to my mother’s husband who, as you know, spent some time as a guest of Her Majesty. He said that boarding school was a wonderful preparation for that.”

While it might have prepared Harris for a prison sentence, a single-sex boarding education rendered him useless with women.

“Completely useless. I had no idea what I was doing. I had no game whatsoever, never really ever acquired any at all, I would say. I had these foolish ideas that were all based on the stories and the films and the books that we read. I just didn’t know how formidable women were, and how they have totally different tools and weapons at their disposal that men don’t have. They can just flatten you in seconds.”

Women were, he admits, very much in the mix when he started toying with the idea of

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GETTY IMAGES

With his third wife, Allegra Riggio, in Los Angeles

acting, up there with a desire to win his father’s approval (“Obviously, we all want to impress our parents”) and the thrill of being part of a creative community. “It’s intense. You all have this common goal that you’re trying to achieve, the adrenaline rush is fantastic and…”

It gets you women?

“That was another positive, a big positive, yes: you can meet women. Yeah. I left that out, you’re quite right. Thanks. Fancy not letting me get away with that one.”

After Duke University, Harris stayed in the US; first in New York, latterly in Los Angeles (which is where he is now and where he spent most of the pandemic). He worked a lot for two decades: tiny roles in big projects or bigger roles in tiny projects. The website IMDB lists him as being gainfully, if quietly, employed from a minor role (“Geoff”) in the 1989 film adaptation of Martin Amis’s The Rachel Papers through the Nineties: Head Thug Pug in Tall Tale (1995), Older Will Robinson in Lost in Space (1998), among many other parts.

It wasn’t until 2008, when Harris was 47, that things kicked off for him in earnest. He was cast as Lane Pryce in Mad Men, that early indicator that classy, big-budget TV could be every bit as artful as cinema, set in a Sixties New York advertising agency. Harris’s Pryce – a repressed Englishman whose head is turned by New York’s burgeoning hedonism – was a perfect showcase for the subtle, unshowy potency of his style, a style he’d been told as a younger actor would never cut through.

“I do remember once, I went to audition for a movie Danny DeVito was directing. He was really lovely. He came and went [Harris turns in yet another entirely respectable impression here], ‘I’m so excited to meet you, kid. I’m really excited to meet you,’ he said.

‘You know, I literally had no idea – I didn’t know how tall you were gonna be; I didn’t know what you were gonna look like; I didn’t know what you were gonna sound like…’ [even though] he’d seen my showreel.

“He said, ‘It’s really fascinating,’ and I said, ‘Oh, thank you so much!’ He goes, ‘Yeah. Well listen, kid, good luck! You’re gonna need it.’

And I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He goes, ‘Really? You really need me to explain this to you?’ I said, ‘Yeah! I don’t understand.’ He said, ‘A successful actor is a recognisable actor.

You’re trying to start from scratch every single time, hoping that, eventually, it will catch up with you. Good luck, you’re gonna need it.’ ” So maybe it did just take 20-odd years for “it” to “catch up” with Harris; for him to become famous? “No. I don’t think I’m famous. It’s good of you to say, but I walk through airports and nobody bothers me.

I like that. I suppose, from my experience of watching people who were very famous, it’s a good tool to have within your business, but it’s a warped hall of mirrors in life.”

How much of a diva is he?

‘I should ask my wife that.

Hang on. Allegra? I’ve got a question for you…’

If not famous, Harris is now certainly very known – and extremely successful by any reasonable metric. It’s a rewriting, I tell him, of the standard story of middle age, more usually associated with gentle decline. Yet here he is, getting recognised and rewarded and applauded and cast in a way he never did in his youth. “Stop counting!” he says again, with a vast, gap-toothed smile. As low-key and unshowy and fundamentally shy as Harris insists he is, when he smiles, oh, you know about it.

I’d assumed he wouldn’t want to talk about his father much – that he’d be bored by it, want to look forward, rather than back. But actually, that’s what Harris likes talking about most, the point at which he ignites. He tells me their relationship deepened when Richard Harris realised his son could act. “He would re-enact performances for me. I saw Olivier’s death scene in Coriolanus as re-enacted by my dad, the moments in Titus Andronicus, Othello, Patrick McGoohan in Brand, Paul Scofield in Hamlet... Suddenly I wanted to figure out what he knew.”

Yet one could reasonably wonder how much of a role model his father was, given his badly behaved public reputation. “Dad knew what he was doing,” Harris has said in the past. “The box office would be going down on one of his films, so the producer would call and say, ‘Make headlines,’ and he’d go out there and he’d do it. The hellraising was part of an image that he cultivated, for sure.”

So how was he, as a father? As an example, an adviser? “I don’t know if he was brilliant on relationship advice. But he was great friends with both his ex-wives [after Rees-Williams, Richard Harris was married to the American actress and model Ann Turkel for eight years]

and he was determined not to consider the relationships as failures just because they were divorced. He was on very good terms with both of them throughout his life. He trusted my mother implicitly; she was the executor of his will. He owned his failure in the relationships completely. When you were going through problems, he would say, ‘Relationships are 50/50, and you are 100 per cent responsible for 50 per cent of the f***-up of this relationship.’ ” Harris has been married three times: first, from 1989 to 1990, to Jacqueline Goldenberg, then from 2005 to 2010 to Emilia Fox, the Silent Witness actress, daughter of Edward Fox and cousin of Laurence Fox; now, since 2013, to the broadcaster Allegra Riggio. He hasn’t spoken about the end of his marriage to Fox, although she has said, in a 2009 interview, “I had a miscarriage two years ago. We didn’t explore enough the impact that had on both of us and on our relationship.”

Is getting married a lot a Harris family trait?

“Oh, my God! That’s so unfair! That’s really unfair!” Harris says, smiling his enchanting gappy smile just in case I think he’s being serious (although again: I think he probably is, at least, a little). “I don’t think you can do better than quoting George Bernard Shaw: it’s the triumph of hope over experience.”

He has no children. “Some things happen and some things don’t,” he says. He seems a little sad. But he also says if Covid and lockdown taught Riggio and him anything, it’s that “we married the right people”.

When I ask Harris how much of a diva he believes himself to be, he says, “I should ask my wife that. Hang on. Allegra? Allegra, my love, I’ve got a question for you…”

He disappears, then reappears with a ridiculously beautiful woman, who peers around one edge of the laptop saying, “Oh my God, hello! I was just folding laundry. This is my folding-laundry outfit.”

Harris pulls her to him, kisses her forehead – an act, I think, in part for my benefit, in part a gesture of relief because he’s no longer alone with my interrogations, but mostly, because he really, really likes Riggio. I find I like her too, instantly, and him a little more again for how patently he adores his wife.

“How much of a diva is Jared?” Riggio says.

“Like, right now? Or in the morning, when he’s cooking, when he’s stubbed his toe, when he’s driving… Can we have some context?”

“I think you’re getting an idea of the answer,” Harris says.

“Diva is a word I’ve never associated with Jared, but now will always associate with him.

Thank you, Polly,” Riggio says.

You’re welcome, I say. We all hang up. n The Beast Must Die is streaming on BritBox

The Times Magazine 53

THREE UP, THREE DOWN Storeys, that is – when interior architect Brigitta Spinocchia Freund wanted to extend her London townhouse, she literally dug deep REPORT Carolyn Asome PHOTOGRAPHS Kate Martin

Home

The subterranean library, described as her ‘happy place’ by Brigitta Spinocchia Freund (right, top), who is also pictured by the glass lift that connects all six floors

Richard Wood chairs in the kitchen

F

rom the outside, Brigitta Spinocchia Freund’s three-storey townhouse looks like any other on her leafy road in west London. But step inside and you discover an incredible basement conversion going down not one, not two, but three floors, to a swimming pool. A circular see-through lift whizzes the interior architect, her investor husband, Michael, and their three children up and down the six floors.

Spinocchia Freund is known for creating highly idiosyncratic interiors, something that is very evident in her own home. Before starting her own business she was creative director of the property developers Candy & Candy. Twelve years ago she launched her own interiors practice, where she oversees everything from floor plans to the patterns on porcelain dinner services.

High above the swimming pool hangs an art installation by the Cuban collective Los Carpinteros, whereby an imaginary blast has ripped through walls and furniture, leaving broken sculptures, chairs and books suspended in the air. “It’s meant to feel as if a room has

58 The Times Magazine

exploded over the water,” explains Spinocchia Freund. “It’s a talking point.”

When Spinocchia Freund started her three-and-a-half-year renovation in 2013 she removed everything, including the central staircase. The result is a celebration of lateral living. A retractable glass roof and three separate light wells allow natural light to reach the basement floors, as does its split-level, open-plan layout, so that nowhere do you ever feel as if you are underground.

Despite the spaciousness – the house is 18,000sq feet – Spinocchia Freund has created areas that work for family time as much as entertaining. Her undisputed “happy place” is not the hammam, the spa room or Mondrianinspired playroom, but the mezzanine library area. This is where she helps her children with homework, puts on vinyl at the weekend or gathers her 20-strong design team to research from a huge collection of reference books.

“If there were a fire, it’s the books that I would save first,” she says, pointing to outof-print tomes by the iconic French designer Jean Royère. “I am obsessive… I notice when one goes missing.”

Next to this is a bar with nightclub seating – green velvet chairs with fringed edges and sumptuous zigzag-patterned textiles. The openplan kitchen on the next level up includes a Zaha Hadid Liquid Glacial table and colourful Richard Wood stools around a large island.

Evidence of family life includes the pillar-box red converted Stokke high chairs. “It’s where we hang out cooking and eating. It’s tidy now because the kids are at school but that India Mahdavi,” she says, pointing to a green velvet sofa by the Iranian-French designer, “gets its share of being jumped on.”

Spinocchia Freund is a fan of panelling, which she thinks makes the best blank canvas against which to show her contemporary art.

This includes Fredrikson Stallard’s Hurricane, a Vincenzo de Cotiis metal and marble side table, the Pierre Cardin desk bought as a gift for her husband, a Mitch Griffiths canvas and the fabric-covered chest of drawers by Christian Astuguevieille.

She is a also fan of lesser everyday finds and a queen of upcycling: glueing découpage chests of drawers and transforming vintage vases into lamp bases with her children.

Home

The main living room.

Below: the cloakroom with antique flamingoleg table and lights

The bar area with Mitch Griffiths canvas

The Times Magazine 59

Home

Sofa by India Mahdavi.

Below: the swimming pool with Los Carpinteros installation

She attributes her style to her parents, an Italian father who worked in construction and also imported Italian furniture, and a Greek mother who ran an antiques shop in Dorset. Although born in Dorset, she spent the first six years of her life in Istanbul and her earliest memories are of vintage stores, flea markets and souks.

“That’s definitely given me a lifelong thrill of the hunt. I enjoy finding pieces that can be reworked and upcycled. A Fifties drinks cabinet that needs a new interior, for instance.” She haunts online design sources like 1stDibs and auction sites.

When she embarks on a new project – her current ones include homes in Ibiza, Monaco and Los Angeles, as well as chalets in Gstaad and Courchevel – she says she can’t sleep as she walks around the “new” space in her head, trying to figure it all out.

No doubt converting her six-storey home also made for many a sleepless night – but the result is most definitely worth it. n spinocchiafreund.com

The Times Magazine 61

Beauty Lesley Thomas My favourite hangover cures – for the face The best ways to pep up dehydrated morning-after skin ritain opens up! Hangovers are back!

Even if you were not one of the ones ordering superstrength home-delivery cocktails during the lockdowns or discounted supermarket wine by the caseload, you may be taking on more alcohol now that our social lives are less restricted.

My units per week are definitely increasing.

I had almost forgotten about hangovers. A foggy Sunday morning feeling and the lowlevel headache don’t bother me too much. But jeez, the state of my face the day after. And the day after that too.

The No 1 deleterious effect of a boozy night (or afternoon – 5pm seems to be an acceptable time to open a bottle in 2021) is, of course, dehydration. Alcohol pretty much frogmarches all the water away from your face, leaving behind crêpey and thirsty-looking skin. A pint of water upon waking is helpful for your organs but won’t have the same effect for skin.

Of all the hydrating serums I’ve tried over the years there’s one I return to again and again: Estée Lauder’s Advanced Night Repair (£60; boots.com). It’s the trusted unguent that plumps up the skin and gives it instant and long-term bounce. It has rightly won endless awards and has been flying off the shelves for 39 years. This will be the first thing I apply in the morning – and if I’ve remembered to use it the night before, so much the better.

If you are not minded to spend this much on a serum, CeraVe’s Hyaluronic Acid Serum (£16.99; superdrug.com) is an excellent

TOM JACKSON

B

Lesley loves EDITOR’S PICK

instagram.com/lesleyjthomas

Face revivers

Lightweight all-day hydration

Estée Lauder Advanced Night Repair, £60 (boots.com)

Alcohol frogmarches all the water away from your face, leaving behind crêpey and thirsty-looking skin

cheaper option containing the essential tried-and-tested hydrating acid.

The face-quenching does not stop there.

After serum comes moisturiser. La RochePosay has some great choices, but the latest Hyalu B5 Aquagel SPF30 (£34.50; larocheposay.co.uk) has a light but hard-working gel formula. The SPF bonus is useful, should you feel the need to “walk it off” outside.

Then for the eyes. My favourite wakeywakey eye cream, Murad’s Vita-C Eyes Dark Circle Corrector (£56; cultbeauty.com), has all the proven ingredients for depuffing and smoothing, with the added benefit of lightreflecting minerals to subtly disguise shadows.

Still, you may feel you need a concealer.

The weight of a full-coverage formula on already fine skin will not help, so choose something lighter and moisturising and accept that the circles will look less prominent but not completely erased. Trinny London BFF Eye Serum-Concealer (£26; trinnylondon.com) is packed with cooling hydrators, brightening vitamin C and offers light-medium coverage.

I usually steer clear of a base after a big night. A foundation on a baggy, puffy face is not always cute. If you must, though, go for something lightweight. I’d say the best sheer base is MAC Studio Face and Body Foundation (£32; maccosmetics.co.uk). It blends easily with a moisturiser if you want something even lighter. n

CeraVe Hyaluronic Acid Serum, £16.99 (superdrug.com)

Blends well with moisturiser

MAC Studio Face and Body Foundation, £32 (maccosmetics.co.uk)

Contains brightening vitamin C

Trinny London BFF Eye Serum-Concealer, £26 (trinnylondon.com)

Combats puffy eyes

Instant skin refreshment

Murad Vita-C Eyes Dark Circle Corrector, £56 (cultbeauty.com)

La Roche-Posay Hyalu B5 Aquagel SPF30, £34.50 (laroche-posay.co.uk) The Times Magazine 65

Men’s Shop!

The formal suit has been given a good dressing down, says Jeremy Langmead

TOP 3 UNDER £150 Jacket, £275, trousers £125, reiss.com

L

ong before the pandemic hit and we swapped suits and offices for sweatpants and Zoom calls, the death knell was already ringing for traditional business attire. Back in 2016, JPMorgan Chase declared that suits were no longer essential; Goldman Sachs introduced a “flexible dress code”; and Silicon Valley CEOs wore T-shirts and jeans rather than tailoring and ties. The traditional business suit got relegated to court appearances and weddings.

It seemed odd that the main item in any man’s wardrobe was going to become obsolete.

But then our forebears back in the 17th century probably never imagined a future without pleated breeches and curled periwigs.

Now many designers have reinvented the work item for out-of-office use: cut in more comfortable, loose-fitting shapes and worn with trainers, polo necks and T-shirts. It’s all about the bar not the boardroom. n

My pick of stylish watches that will work on or off duty – and won’t break the bank.

1

2

3

1 £139, fossil.com. 2 £120, Swatch (shop.hodinkee.com).

3 £130, Timex (hsamuel.co.uk).

WHAT TO WEAR IN (AND OUT OF) BED Ideal for end of lockdown: the White Company’s pyjama shorts, £30, and T-shirts, £35, will see you from bedroom to coffee shop with no need to change (the whitecompany.com).

@jeremylangmead

HACKETT’S GOT IT COVERED

SIX OF THE BEST SUEDE JACKETS* If, like me, you worry that a denim or leather jacket makes you look like an ageing rock star (in my case more Ozzy Osbourne than Bruce Springsteen), then a suede one like these makes an easy alternative.

Blazer, £345

Shirt, £130

1

2

4

5

3

NEIL BEDFORD FOR MR PORTER

Shorts, £85

Blazer, £425

Chinos, £110

Hackett is one of those quintessentially British brands that effortlessly mixes tailored items with more relaxed pieces. The result always looks comfortable rather than contrived. hackett.com

6

1 £339, allsaints.com. 2 £250, arket.com. 3 £120, mango.com.

4 £250, Selected Homme ( johnlewis.com). 5 £60 (faux suede*), next.co.uk. 6 £375, Nudie Jeans (mrporter.com).

The Times Magazine 67

Eating out Giles Coren ‘For all my talk of the passing of the Ivy’s golden age, we immediately bumped into dear Rafe Spall. That, my friends, is proper Ivy’ The Ivy

TOM JACKSON

‘S

68 The Times Magazine

o this is a posh restaurant we’re going to, right?” said Kitty, buckling herself into the superswank Uber Exec Mercedes I had booked for our celebratory trip into town on May 17, 2021, the day of the Grand Reopening of Everything.

“Yes, very posh.”

“On a scale of one to ten, how posh?”

“Ooh, that’s tricky. Once upon a time, I’d have said it was a nine or even a ten. But these days it’s probably only an eight. Or a seven and a half.”

“What’s posh about it?”

“Well, it will be reasonably quiet. And it’s expensive. And the waiters will be in suits with bow ties and carrying big trays, and people will be eating lobster and drinking champagne.”

“Like in the Beano?”

“Exactly like in the Beano!”

“So why only seven and a half out of ten?”

“Well, it’s complicated. It used to be very, very difficult to get a table there and everyone inside was either very rich or very famous.

And it was very exclusive and was owned by these two wonderful guys called Jeremy and Chris and it was always in the newspapers.

But times change, and someone else bought it and a lot of the famous people started going to other restaurants instead. And this new owner, he wanted to make money out of what he’d bought, quite reasonably, so he made

copies of it and started opening them all over the place until there were lots and lots of them all over the country.”

“Like McDonald’s?”

“A bit like McDonald’s, yes.”

“Except with posh food instead of burgers.”

“Actually, they do have burgers. The burgers are very popular.”

“Oh. Well, I’ll have a burger then. Mum said I should try not to eat with my hands tonight, but she probably thought I’d be having spaghetti or something.”

“Great.”

“So, Dad?” “Yes?’ “What’s posh about eating a burger in a place there are lots of?”

Well, you try explaining the Ivy to a ten-year-old. I’d booked it because we were going to see The Mousetrap in the theatre across the road. And having walked in and out of the Ivy 20 or 30 times over the past 25 years and thought, “Oh, look, The Mousetrap. I must go and see that one day,” when the time finally came to go and see The Mousetrap, 69 years after it first opened, with a ten-year-old who would need feeding beforehand, the restaurant to do that in was obvious.

We were going to The Mousetrap, by the way, not just because we could (because we could have gone to any of the handful of plays in the West End that had decided to risk reopening on Day Zero with a skeleton, fully masked audience), but because it is now in the hands of a very old friend of mine, Adam Spiegel, who had invited us to his first night.

The Ivy 1-5 West Street, London WC2 (020 7836 4751; the-ivy.co.uk)

Adam – who has been a theatrical impresario since I met him at school at the age of eight, complete, even then, with the calling’s required pugnacious optimism, snazzy shoes, fluctuating finances and fingernails bitten to the quick – bought the production a couple of years ago, perceiving in it a slumbering giant on whose back a monumental hit might, with the right input of optimism, finance, snazzy shoes and nail-biting, reasonably be constructed. And then came Covid, and, after nearly 68 years of record-breakingly nonstop performance, the doors were shut.

“I was the first producer to close The Mousetrap,” Adam said sadly, from the stage, before curtain-up, clasping his little hands together in the spotlight and staring up into the gods.

“Then again,” he said, throwing his arms open and beaming, “I’m also the first producer to reopen The Mousetrap!” And everyone roared their approval, the lights dimmed and Kitty whispered, “I’m going to guess who did it in ten minutes!”

But first, dinner.

For all my musing on the passing of the Ivy’s golden age, we had a total Ivy moment the very second we walked through the door. For while Kitty was handing her coat to a waitress (I have no idea how she intuited that was the thing to do with one’s coat here – she is more of a floor-dropper), a tallish chap in a good suit and a well-cut mask said, “Hello,” to me and that he liked my columns (which people do do from time to time, while the ones who don’t like them

don’t say anything, leaving their grand silence to speak for their vast majority) and I said, “Thank you,” and then looked at him again and mentally edited out the mask and saw that he was Rafe Spall.

So I said, “Oh God, sorry, I love your stuff too!” And he said “That’s not what I meant!

You don’t have to say that!” and I said, “No, but I do!” and I turned to Kitty and said, “This guy is a famous actor!” And she said, “I thought you said famous actors didn’t come here any more – what’s he been in?” So Rafe Spall said, “Have you seen Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom?” And Kitty said, “No.” And Spall said, “Nor have I!” And that, my friends, is proper Ivy. Kitty and I took a seat at the central bar to wait for her uncle Xander and my friend Jamie and his son, Kit, who were all coming to the show. We ordered a vodka martini and a Coke (I’m off the booze for a bit) and I taught Kitty how to flip beer mats and explained about the good tables and the bad tables. (“So, Dad, you’re saying these draughty ones at the front are for out-of-towners and competition winners, and the big round ones in the middle are for guys in dinosaur movies?

That doesn’t seem fair.”) And then she laid down the three poshest things about the place, as far as she could see.

“One: they’re really pleased about it being old, and make sure you can see all the wood and marble and stuff. Two: the windows have little coloured diamondy parts and you can tell they’re really pleased with themselves about that too. And three, which is the main thing: there are no kids! Which is kind of great but

kind of worrying. Does it mean there isn’t a kids’ menu?”

I told her not to worry on that score. There is indeed a kids’ menu, I told her, but at the Ivy they just call it the menu.

From it, Kitty ordered a prawn cocktail (£13.75) that was absolutely as it should be, with neat little prawns and a Marie Rose sauce that erred on the pink side, with plenty of shredded Gem lettuce and slices of avocado; and a burger (£16.75), with everything except the fried runny egg because, she said, “It’s bound to go everywhere and I think Mum made me wear this stupid white cardigan specifically so she could check if I’d been eating nicely.”

The burger, said Kitty, was amazing.

Crunchy from the grill on the outside and superjuicy. She wolfed it down in seconds and, with her stomach suitable lined, was allowed half a glass of champagne (her genuine tipple since the age of two – I was kidding about the martini) and then chocolate ice cream. And then a lot of excitable banter with Kit about something on somebody’s dad’s phone, while we had plates of the cheese-topped shepherd’s pie (£19.75), still as good as ever, as rich and silly as Jeffrey Archer, its most famous consumer back in the glory days, with a very good £56 bordeaux supérieur, and a grilled whole lobster with wild garlic butter (£39.75), immaculately presented with many silver pots of fries.

The only flaw: in the long layoff, everyone had forgotten how to eat and be out in time for the theatre, so there was a lot of, “Oh shit, eat up! Eat up! Quick, the bill! The bill!” And then running out of the restaurant (“Should I say goodbye to the dinosaur guy?”), running back in for Kitty’s coat (“You go on, we’ll see you in there!”), then into the theatre, can’t load the digital ticket because there’s no phone reception…

Never mind, you’re up in the circle… Here are your seats, shuffle, shuffle, right, here we are. Sit down… “… first producer to reopen The Mousetrap!”

Clap, clap, clap. And then curtain up on Kitty’s first ever play. “It’s so beautiful,” she said, surveying the post-Edwardian magnificence of the place. “And they’re such good actors! I bet it’s him! No, wait, it’s her, she’s horrible! I’m so going to guess who did it before half-time.”

And I’m sure she would have. But when I turned to her again, ten minutes later, snuggled down in her seat in her fleecy parka, to see if she was any closer to identifying the villain, the only answer she could give me was a loud and very contented snore. n The Times Magazine 69

LIFESTYLE

LIFESTYLE

Beta male Robert Crampton

TOM JACKSON

‘I worry that Uhtred, warrior supreme, Lord of the North, is not entirely a good influence on me’

Leaving aside my wife, children, cats, Mustafa at the corner shop and, latterly, Sapan, my personal trainer, my closest companion this past year and a bit has probably been Uhtred of Bebbanburg, fearsomely violent 9th-century warlord.

I’ve also been in regular contact with the office and one or two pals, but only by phone, email or Zoom. There’s no getting around it, Uhtred is right up there as a lockdown buddy. Even though he is a (largely) fictional character who’s been dead for 1,100 years.

Very loyal guy, Uhtred. Very big on making and keeping oaths.

Except Uhtred is not dead. He’s very much alive in the (thus far) 13 books of the Last Kingdom saga by Bernard Cornwell, now televised and a lot like Game of Thrones without the supernatural stuff. Yep, the master of blood-soaked historical sagas, having given us Richard Sharpe/Sean Bean, Cornwell has done it again.

I have devoured all 13 books in lockdown, some more than once, not necessarily in the right order, which can get weird when one minute Uhtred’s an old fella shacked up with the fiery Italian Benedetta and the next day he’s in the prime of life married to Gisela and she’s banging out babies.

At whatever age, you can be sure Uhtred will still keep himself busy hacking his enemies to bits, though.

“How’s Uhtred getting on?” my son will ask whenever he sees me with a book.

“He’s in a right old pickle this time, Sam,” I’ll say, “and he’s only got 13 pages left to get out of it. But he will, never fear.”

Thing is, I worry that Uhtred, warrior supreme, Lord of the North, is not entirely a good influence on me. People moan about Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty and what message they send to youngsters. But what if you spend several hours a day tucked up with a bloke whose solution to more or less every problem is to stab it in the guts with his treasured sword, Serpent-Breath?

In later volumes, he even sleeps with Serpent-Breath in case he snuffs it in the night because, as we all know, you need to die holding your sword to gain entry to Valhalla, right? I don’t know what Benedetta makes of this peculiar threesome. My wife wouldn’t put up with it.

Yep, Uhtred and his pals give their swords silly names. (Their actual swords, not their penises, as some tragic blokes do. Uhtred is

way too cool to do that.) I have to say, I find this habit a bit cringey.

However, I caught myself looking at my penknife the other day and wondering what I might name it. Orange-Peeler? ItchScratcher? Toenail-Excavator? I’ve also taken to walking around the house in a blanket, by way of an imitation cloak. The fact it’s purple, velour and all soft and fluffy somewhat spoils the effect.

Similarly, “Ale for my men!” has rather more bite to it than, “Beck’s Blue! In a glass, please, if it’s not too much trouble?”

I recently gave a talk, via Zoom, to a group of students in Oxford about this column. I said, if it has any deeper purpose beyond entertainment, it is to satirise traditional notions of masculinity, the sort of beliefs and behaviour that hold men back and cause women so much trouble.

Laudable stuff, eh? And yet here I am, scrabbling around desperately to find even the smallest thing I might be able to boast about having in common with one of the most flagrantly macho creations of recent literature.

I do the same with Jack Reacher. And Jackson Lamb in the Mick Herron Slough House series. And Bernie Gunther in the Philip Kerr novels. I even did the same with the egregious Gene Hunt in Life on Mars.

What an utter hypocrite.

Uhtred is a notably tall man. I am 5ft 10in, just above average height. But, I tell myself, if I’d been 5ft 10in in AD900, that would have made me tall for that era. Uhtred is a pagan and, hey, who’s to say Thor doesn’t exist? His son is also called Uhtred and, when Nicola was pregnant with Sam, before he was Sam, we called him Baby Bob as a joke. Uhtred is a northerner and so am I. He also regularly sails to the Frisian Islands and, when I once did a DNA test for a feature at work, it turned out my ancestors probably came from the Low Countries. And you can’t get much lower than the Frisian Islands.

Uhtred drinks beer for breakfast. I did that once, on a skiing holiday in 1996. He eats a lot of bread and cheese and so do I. In fact, Uhtred pretty much eats only bread and cheese. I worry sometimes that he isn’t getting his five a day, just as I worry that sometimes, I’m not either. Except, I usually am.

Pathetically thin pickings, I realise. n robert.crampton@thetimes.co.uk

© 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.