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07.08.21 MAGAZINE OF THE YEAR

TESTING! TESTING!

LOW LIBIDO? HIGH BLOOD PRESSURE? PREMATURE AGEING? Can DIY medical kits transform Britain’s health?

PLUS

Prince Charles and me.

By Harry Enfield

07.08.21 10

29

36

COVER PHOTOGRAPH BY DAN KENNEDY

FOLDING BEACH CHAIRS

OLIVER BONAS, £98 An adjustable reclining bamboo rattan lounger (oliverbonas.com)

EMU, £209 A modern twist on the folding chair from a chic Italian design house (madeindesign.co.uk)

ZARA, £45.99 A classic webbed metal chair. Comes in two retro colour combos (zara.com)

VIDAXL, £45.99 FOR 2 Simple, cheap, lightweight and come in a range of bright colours (manomano.co.uk)

BUSINESS AND PLEASURE CO, £230 Folds up to be worn as a backpack (bearandbear.com)

CHOSEN BY MONIQUE RIVALLAND

COVER: CHARLIE GOWANS-EGLINTON WEARS DRESS, THEREFORMATION.COM; SHOES, MALONESOULIERS.COM. HARRY WALLOP WEARS T-SHIRT, SUNSPEL.COM; CHINOS, REISS.COM; TRAINERS, VEJA-STORE.COM. HAIR AND MAKE-UP: JULIA WREN AT CAROL HAYES MANAGEMENT USING CLARINS AND T3 HAIR TOOLS. THIS PAGE: OLIVER ROSSER, LUKE ALBERT, OLE MARTIN HALVORSEN

5 Caitlin Moran My husband’s tatty T-shirt has come between us.

7 What I’ve learnt Jessica Ennis-Hill on Olympic highs and lows.

9 Spinal column: Melanie Reid Pity the survey-taker who calls me.

10 Playing Prince Charles Harry Enfield on transferring his TV sitcom The Windsors to stage – at very short notice. 16 Cover story The self-diagnosis revolution The market for home health tests is booming. Harry Wallop and Charlie Gowans-Eglinton send off their samples. 24 The TikTok takeover In just three years, the teen video-sharing app has become a global brand. Now adults love it too. 29 Eat! Easy vegan recipes. 36 My hijab, my choice Rawdah Mohamed – from Somali refugee to Vogue editor.

42 One billion doses and counting AstraZeneca’s Per Alfredsson tells Tom Whipple how the Oxford jab became a global life-saver. 46 Coco Fennell Meet the fashion designer sister of Oscar-winner Emerald. 49 Shop! The dresses to buy now. 50 Pout!

The 20 best sunscreens. 52 Eating out Child-friendly restaurants (for when the babysitter’s busy). 58 Beta male: Robert Crampton I’ve gone stealth with my burner phone. Giles Coren is away

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 Is my marriage on the rocks?

Pete’s T-shirt is saying: ‘I’m in early talks with a divorce lawyer’

ROBERT WILSON

I

t’s an orange T-shirt. Or, at least, it was. As it’s now over 17 years old, it’s more of… I want to say “a troubled apricot”. In 2021, the shape is no longer “a T-shirt”. It’s warped from so many washes that it’s stretched to mid-thigh length – so it looks, disconcertingly, like the tunic worn by the Seventies cartoon character Bod. The hem at the bottom dangles like a mad, tattered crinoline. There are also seven tiny holes around the nipple area. As if a gang of hungry breastfeeding moths have been at work, munching away at the tit zone.

This is my husband’s favourite T-shirt. He wears it at the gym. “I run faster in it,” he says, looking at it lovingly. “As soon as I put it on, I know it’s going to be a good day. I’ve run all my best times in it. I don’t know why.”

“Is it because ‘terrible social shame’ makes you run faster?” I ask.

“No!” he replies, ignoring me. “I figured it’s the ventilation – from all the holes! I’ve got a through-breeze! All the air is keeping me cool.”

“Love, it’s literally a rag,” I say. “I’ve genuinely cleaned the windows with better items.”

“It’s the gym!” he says. “Everyone wears a scruffy T-shirt at the gym. That’s gymwear!”

“No,” I say. “ ‘Gymwear’ is a very lovely selection, full of options, in eg John Lewis. We could go there! Get you a nice new top that provides ‘ventilation’ via exciting wicking fabrics – which would still keep you cool and cover your man-nipples from view.”

“A waste of money,” Pete says, dismissively.

“This T-shirt does the job! Has done since 2003!”

“The only ‘job’ that T-shirt does is provide moths with glory holes,” I reply.

“What’s a glory hole?” Pete asks.

“Google it. On your way to John Lewis.

Here is money. Please buy a new top.”

“It’s just a top,” Pete says, genuinely confused. “Why do you care?”

Why do I care? I don’t want to be horribly reductive about gender roles – but I suspect every woman reading this has a husband who has an item of clothing like this. Something so battered that it passed “comfortably wellworn” a full decade ago and now reads, simply, “I live under a piece of corrugated iron, and catch pigeons to eat, as snacks.”

I don’t mean this as a slur to the homeless, many of whom are very well dressed compared with my husband. I am describing the life, style and wardrobe of the ogre Shrek.

It’s only a matter of time before a single woman at the gym offers to sew up his nipple holes

Why do I care? I care because, despite all my feminisms – and I think I score around 8.7 ovaries on the Feminism-O-Meter – I know that a married man regularly dressing as one of the Background Orphans from Oliver! conveys a certain vibe. To wit: that there is no one at home who loves him enough to emotionally manipulate him into buying a new, better top. A married man dressed in rags suggests his wife has given up on him; that she doesn’t care enough to nag him into adhering to society’s crazy rules, like “wearing a top in better nick than the loincloth of Lindow Man”.

I know, as a fact, that there will be other wives at the gym who will have concluded our marriage is on the rocks. That I am “allowing” Pete to go out in public looking like this by way of sending a message to other women: “This man has been rejected by his partner. Observe how quickly he has declined without my care and attention. Point at him and whisper to your husbands, ‘And that’s your future if you dick me around: Les Misérables realness.’ ” All clothing is a communication. Pete’s T-shirt is saying: “I am in preliminary talks with a divorce lawyer.”

“I feel like you are at great risk from a kind, unmarried woman saying, ‘Are you going through a bad time right now?’ ” I explain.

“Or even offering to sew up your nipple holes, which will basically be her way of saying, ‘Once you get the decree nisi through, call me.

You just need a good woman, to care for you’.”

“I’m sorry,” Pete says, regretfully. “I do hear you. But I can’t be swayed by society’s petty clothing prejudices. Don’t feel you’re responsible for me. I’m 52! I am going to keep that T-shirt.”

And the matter is closed, firmly, down.

Two days later, however, we come in halfway through an episode of Celebrity Antiques Hunt, where it’s obvious, to me, that one of the celebrities is Ruth Madoc, star of Hi-de-Hi!.

“Coh! That’s never Madoc!” he insists. “It’s obviously Rhodes. Zandra Rhodes.”

And then, unexpectedly: “Bet the T-shirt on it?” – just as Su Pollard screams, “LOOK AT THIS WHOPPING GREAT DINOSAUR EGG, RUTH MADOC!” I smile at him fondly – he has deliberately thrown the bet, so neither of us would have to feel we’d “lost” on the T-shirt issue. This is a good marriage! Look how careful we are of each other’s feelings! I feel great contentment and joy. Not least because I’d already put the T-shirt in the bin. n The Times Magazine 5

What I’ve learnt Jessica Ennis-Hill

ADIDAS/GETTY IMAGES

Olympic gold-winning heptathlete Jessica Ennis-Hill, 35, started competing at the age of nine and was the face of London 2012. She is covering Tokyo 2020 for BBC Sport. She lives in her native Sheffield with her husband, Andy, and their children, Reggie, seven, and Liv, three.

Resilience was one of the keys to my success in athletics.

Being able to focus and turn setbacks around can be very difficult – I could have gone round in circles thinking what I should have done differently. I turned them into learning experiences and moved on.

I’m like Monica in Friends – I’m too organised and structured.

Focusing on goals and achievements in sports is great, but when you take that into your personal life, it can be hard just to enjoy the moment. I’m always thinking ahead and planning rather than going with the flow.

Life became blurred during Covid. Home schooling and keeping the kids entertained while trying not to be overwhelmed was very difficult. But it forced my husband and me to slow down and make the best of family time.

People have become more conscious of the impact of their actions on others. There are so many amazing movements, like Black Lives Matter, which are bringing injustices and inequality to the forefront of our minds.

It’s important for people to have a deeper understanding of the issues behind the headlines so that progress can be made. Asking uncomfortable questions is vital. Lewis Hamilton has been great at galvanising people and using his sport as a platform to drive change.

Parenting isn’t about smothering kids or giving them endless toys and gadgets. It’s about getting them to be open to new things and teaching them good habits, like getting out and eating right.

I didn’t have pushy parents. They always supported me and drove me all over the country for meets, but they never forced me to do anything I didn’t want to.

As an athlete you have to be selfish to focus on your performance, but that can make relationships challenging.

I’ve just celebrated my eighth wedding anniversary, though, so we must be doing something right.

Don’t get too caught up in what everyone else is doing.

Focus on you and controlling what you’re capable of. In sport, it’s very easy to worry about what your rivals are doing, but you can’t control any of that. In the real world, there’s a lot of noise too, including from social media. Try to tune that out and focus on what’s important to you.

My career was almost over before it started. I had to miss the 2008 Beijing Olympics because of three stress fractures in my right foot. It was a devastating blow, but it gave me motivation to come back even stronger.

The transition from a sports career to normal life can be very hard. It depends a lot on your reasons for retiring, whether it’s injury, illness, age or personal reasons. For me, it wasn’t a hard decision. After I had my son in 2014, I said I was going to do two more years and make it to Rio. I’d achieved everything I’d wanted to and I was ready to move on and start the next phase of my life. n

‘You have to be selfish to be an athlete. It makes relationships challenging’

Jessica Ennis-Hill is the face of Berry Gardens’ berries range INTERVIEW Sarah Ewing PORTRAIT Ben Duffy

The Times Magazine 7

SPINAL COLUMN MELANIE REID

I answer a survey about my health.

Turns out I don’t tick any of the boxes

MURDO MACLEOD

S

ome people’s postcode wins them the lottery. Mine gets me randomly targeted to do a survey for the Office for National Statistics. I agreed to do it. Facts are precious and ONS data informs every bit of policy shaping our lives, to infinity and beyond.

My survey is the labour force one, providing official measures of employment and unemployment. Next time job figures make the news, one of them’s me. Maybe. During four long phone interviews, often unintentionally hilarious, I have baffled unfortunate staff and frozen their computers. So many questions are genuinely unboxtickable. So many answers unsayable. Such as: Q: Before we begin, are you driving or doing anything that requires your full attention?

A: I’m driving my mobility scooter up a track.

I’ll ring off if I encounter a bear.

Q: How is your general health?

A: Not being funny, but is my starting base a tetraplegic who’s not dead yet or a fit person with a useless body?

Q: Do you have any long-term physical conditions expected to last 12 months or more?

A: 12 months? You kidding? Your insensitivity appals me. I demand compensation.

Q: Did you receive our £25 e-voucher gift card that entitles you to buy things from many famous retailers?

A: Yes, but because I’m actually a flustered old klutz I failed in my attempts to log on to the platform to choose one. So I threw it in the bin.

Q: Do your health conditions reduce your ability to carry out day-to-day activities?

A: My knitting is seriously impaired. Bizarrely, however, I can still do what other fit people can’t, like clean the loo.

Q: Overall, how satisfied are you with your life nowadays (scale of 1-10)?

A: A philosophical conundrum. I’m alive.

That’s either a 1. Or a 10. It varies.

Q: To what extent do you feel that things you do are worthwhile?

A: Carrying on working means I can treat the men in my life in the manner to which they’re accustomed. Ask them.

Q: Overall, did you feel happy yesterday?

Answer yes or no.

A: At 14.00, I experienced fleeting bliss as I ate a Double Decker and watched some Olympics. Is that a yes?

Q: On a scale of 0 to 10, how anxious did you feel yesterday?

A: 04.15, rigid with impending doom. 14.00, eating Double Decker.

Q: How much overtime do you work?

A: Haven’t a scooby. Journalism doesn’t work like that. Unfathomable amounts, since everything about me is snail-paced: twofingered typing, rural broadband, brain.

Q: What hours do you work?

A: About 10-12 hours a day, multiple split shifts, usually finishing at midnight. Normal people would take a third of the time.

Q: What is your main health problem?

A: Good question. There’s a super league.

Q: Is it a) hands and arms, b) legs and feet, c) neck and back, d) difficulty seeing,

e) hearing, f) speech impediment, g) skin conditions, h) breathing problems, i) heart, blood pressure, circulation, j) diabetes, k) depression, l) learning difficulties, m) mental illness, phobia, n) progressive illness, o) other.

A: I don’t have diabetes or learning difficulties.

Or a speech impediment.

Q: Is your illness progressive?

A: Not in the way you think it is. Er, can’t you just write “spinal paralysis” in a box?

Q: I’ll try. No. Computer insists you answer all the other questions first. Do you have epilepsy or stomach, liver, kidney or digestive problems?

A: FFS. Q: Are you physically disfigured?

A: Another cerebral question. And wholly subjective. Haven’t you heard of identity politics, where everyone’s body is considered beautiful?

We did our best. It was amusing. But here, if the ONS would like some advice from the dark side, are the proper questions to ask disabled people about work (though I see the organisation’s officially dropping the “d” word): how severely crocked are you? What wouldn’t you give for a job? How totally lucky does it feel, having one? Does work help you cope?

Are you grateful you’re not dead? Does paying tax make you feel less guilty for the hundreds of thousands of NHS budget you’ve gobbled up? Are surveys like this a mordant delight?

Score all 1-10. n @Mel_ReidTimes Melanie Reid is tetraplegic after breaking her neck and back in a riding accident in April 2010 The Times Magazine 9

Prince Charles and me One’s show must go on!

How Harry Enfield put the Firm on the stage

Harry Enfield, 60. Portrait

by Mark Harrison. Opposite: as the Prince of Wales in The Windsors: Endgame, photographed by Oliver Rosser

The legendary comedian is starring in a West End show based on the hilarious Channel 4 series The Windsors. But with Covid delays, the sudden death of one of the writers and a (very) short schedule, things didn’t always go to plan…

Harry caption words ere in this space on the page where

OLIVER ROSSER, CH4/PLANET PHOTOS

I

n 2019, while filming series three of Channel 4’s hit comedy The Windsors, the show’s writers, Bert Tyler-Moore and George Jeffrie, tell me they’ve been approached to write a Windsors theatre show. I think this a terrific idea. The Windsors is the funniest sitcom I’ve worked on. Dubbed by one paper “The Crown’s brattish little cousin”, it’s irreverent, silly and often satirical.

(Wills to Charles: “Father, do you not think sometimes that we’re an irrelevance?” Charles: “Well someone’s paying me 19 million quid a year to do something!”)

If you’ve not seen The Windsors, Channel 4’s website gives an accurate flavour in its episode summaries: “Ep 3 – Charles vows to prove he’s not a crank and Kate is replaced by a robot.”

“Ep 5 – Kate worries that she’s boring. Anne has a crush on David Beckham. Meghan has had enough.” This particular episode was made two years ago, before anyone knew Meghan had had enough.

By early last year Bert and George have written our show: The Windsors: Endgame.

It begins with the Queen abdicating and a fight for succession between Wills and Charles. Charles, under the guidance of his wicked Queen Camilla, “takes back control” as absolute monarch and returns Britain to feudal times without pesticides or roads, but with serf flogging and drownings in mud. Wills and Kate fight for a return to a constitutional monarchy – and for this they need the help of Harry and Meghan who must leave their beloved chickens and return to Britain for a right royal showdown.

But Covid happens and everything gets put on hold. Then, last September, George dies suddenly at the age of 56. It’s a tragedy for Bert, who has written with George for three decades. And to a lesser extent, for me. I’ve worked on and off with Bert and George for 20 years, and have spent some of the happiest moments of my professional life writing with them and giggling like an idiot. On a personal level, George was one of the nicest blokes I’ve ever met. It is a desperately sad time.

But the show must go on, and in July this year the Prince of Wales Theatre becomes available from August until October. It is such short notice that only a few cast members from the TV show are available. The rest of the family must be recast in two weeks.

And so we end up in a Shoreditch rehearsal room for our first read-through. Our director, Michael Fentiman, who is also new, has been poached from his show Amelie the week before, and exudes a chirpy confidence. This skilfully masks his lack of time to prepare.

The read-through goes well, but the new cast are apprehensive. Are they expected to play their parts as they were performed on TV? Or can they do their own thing, be different to television but right for the play? I can see

With Tracy-Ann Oberman, who plays the Duchess of Cornwall on stage

With Kathryn Drysdale and Richard Goulding in The Windsors

The read-through runs long.

Nearly every play is too long. No one ever says, ‘Well, that was too short’ as we read that many of the new eyes are on Michael, who is laughing, but also thinking hard about how to stage what he’s hearing.

They are also glancing at Bert, to see his reaction to their readings.

I realise I have to be George. Having spent two decades with Bert and George in writers’ rooms and rehearsals, I knew how they worked together. They were like a mother and father to their jokes. George, the mother, found the birth of a joke painful, but from then on he thought the sun shone out of his joke’s arse.

Bert, the father, found the birth fairly fuss-free, but always seemed to worry that his joke might be a bit of a disappointment, or could do better in life. So in read-throughs George roared with

unconditional laughter each time he heard one of his own jokes; Bert sat nervously, his frown relaxing slightly if a joke landed the way he hoped, but his brain simultaneously buzzing with thoughts on how to improve it.

During the read-through I deliver my Prince Charles in a pretty slap-dash manner.

I’m not thinking about it yet. I’m letting myself enjoy every silly joke and every new performance, as George would have done.

It’s a cracking script, involving love, live sex, torture, songs, a sword fight to the death and up-to-the-minute satirical heavy petting: “Do you mind if I Matt Hancock your buttocks?”

At the end of the read-through, three things are obvious. The new cast members are nervous. There is room for improvement in the script. It’s going to work.

I’ve only ever done two plays. But I like the theatre and go a lot. For every play that disappoints, is up its own arse, is preaching to the converted, there is another that makes you laugh properly (London Assurance), makes you think properly (This House), or makes you laugh and think properly (Ink).

The read-through runs at 1 hour 40 minutes – so with songs and laughs it will be about 2 hours. Michael, Bert and I agree this is too long. This is a rare thing in the theatre. Nearly every play is too long. Why? When did we ever leave a theatre with the audience muttering, “Well, that was too short”? Because in the theatre directors have no time limit, they tend to treat the script as a sacred text. “Let us work on the text,” they say – not meaning chop out the flab, but examine the marvellousness of it all, and look for hidden depths and subtle nuances in the boring flab. And because most theatres are too hot, hidden depths and subtle nuances are often lost on snoring audiences.

The Times Magazine 13

GROOMING: KATRIN REES AT CAROL HAYES MANAGEMENT USING TOM FORD

My two plays were both too long. The first, Once in a Lifetime at the Young Vic, was an 80-year-old comedy from an age when humour was gentler and people had a longer attention span. The director, Richard Jones, had to go to the estate of the long-deceased writers each time he wanted to snip the text, and was more often than not rebuffed. I didn’t arrive on stage until 30 minutes into the play. This first halfhour was laden with plot and almost jokefree, so that by the time I arrived much of the audience was asleep. I was directed to storm on stage shouting and yelling (I was the boss of a movie studio) and make for a chair right at the front, in which I was to sit and continue to bellow instructions to my on-stage underlings until the audience woke up. One matinee I found myself yelling at an old lady whose head was slumped in her lap. Her chest was heaving so she wasn’t dead. I can still see the eyes of her mortified companion as I barked away in vain.

Bert and I come from television, where there is no wriggle room if your 30-minute show is running at 34 minutes. You have to be ruthless.

Michael agrees that it should be 90 minutes max. It should crack along and leave the audience feeling happy and blissfully awake.

So Bert starts cutting flab and adding jokes.

It’s obvious to the new cast members that the TV show is a blessing and a curse. They are acutely aware that they want to be as good as their TV counterparts, and feel that burden.

“The history of past generations bear like a nightmare on the brains of the living,” wrote that well-known luvvie Karl Marx.

I discuss these worries first with Tracy-Ann Oberman, who has replaced Haydn Gwynne as Camilla. Tracy-Ann and I are near neighbours, so I give her a lift in most days on my moped.

On these journeys we discuss our roles. Should she mimic Haydn’s Cruella de Vil? As we wobble towards Shoreditch at 20mph I yell over my shoulder that this is a show that could run in London, Manchester and Edinburgh simultaneously. Everyone knows the royal family and loads of actors could play them and make the show a success. Because it’s funny. And each cast would play their characters differently. Tracy-Ann’s Camilla will be to Haydn’s Camilla what Heath Ledger’s Joker was to Jack Nicholson’s. I’m not sure if Tracy-Ann can hear my persuasive jabber because she goes quiet, and when we arrive in Shoreditch asks what I was saying about Hampstead Heath. But my ponderings on her Camilla come to pass: Tracy-Ann’s Camilla is not Cruella – she’s a fun-lovin’ sadist, full of joyous hatred and mischief.

The rest of the new cast gradually lose their anxieties and start to grow into their parts.

Ciarán Owens, our new Wills, transforms into Wills the Matinee Idol, full of swashbuckling sincerity and righteousness. Kara Tointon becomes his beautiful Kate, a woman who 14 The Times Magazine

truly believes in her noble role, but betrays her gypsy roots and resorts to bare-knuckle fighting when crossed. Crystal Condie becomes our Meghan – strong, dedicated to her life of vapid podcasts very much in control of Tom Durant-Pritchard’s hilarious, hapless Harry.

My former common-law stepdaughter (life’s complex) and friend Lily Allen is rehearsing her first play, 2.22 (at the Noel Coward), in the next-door rehearsal space. We have lunch in what is her first week, and she’s terrified.

I empathise – I was in her position five years ago. It doesn’t matter how many times you’ve played the Hammersmith Apollo or the Pyramid Stage, being in a play with experienced theatre actors confirms you’re a fraud. How the hell do they learn all those lines? I tell her to put herself completely at the disposal of Matthew Dunster, her director.

There are five very funny songs in The Windsors: Endgame. Singing and dancing is not my forte. I can scrape by with the singing, but the big end dance piece is a problem. I’m positioned behind Kara, who won Strictly,

Kara, who won Strictly, is patient with me, but it feels like a movement class in an old people’s home and our young understudies, all of whom are trained dancers. Three weeks into rehearsals, the cast dances in unison, except for Prince Charles, who flails like an octopus caught in a fishing net. Kara and the understudies are patient with me, making me feel like I’m in an old people’s home and these lovely young people have come to give me a music and movement class.

Tom, who joined The Windsors as Prince Harry two years ago, finally told me today that I’d seen him in Alan Bennett’s Habeas Corpus when he was at Marlborough College.

My goddaughter Charlie was in the play, as was Jack Whitehall, both of whom I remembered but not Tom. He was suitably gracious – why would I remember a boy in a school play from 16 years ago? But because I’d remembered Jack Whitehall it stuck with me and I felt bad about it. Until this afternoon, when I was telling Tracy-Ann about the last play I did at Hampstead Theatre a couple of years ago. As I described the plot she began to frown: “I think I might have seen that – but I don’t remember you in it.” The further I got into the play’s storyline, the more emphatic Tracy-Ann became. She definitely had seen it and she definitely didn’t remember me.

Tracy-Ann and I have to go on ITV’s This Morning to promote the show. Everyone’s a bit Covid jumpy, but we’re all double jabbed and tested twice weekly and we know the audience will be too. ITV’s Covid supremo has declared Tracy-Ann must not arrive on the back of my moped, in the fresh air, with our faces covered in helmets, but for Covid safety’s sake, must travel in a car with closed windows driven by a total stranger. She’s brilliantly accomplished, describing The Windsors as “The Crown based on fact”. In this and other interviews I’m asked what I think of the real Prince Charles.

I reply (truthfully) that I’d sooner he was absolute monarch than Boris Johnson PM. We seem to do a good job and tickets start to fly.

At 60, I’m at least a decade older than the others. I’m also overweight – or as the butcher I go to in Cornwall said when I appeared after a year stuck in London, “Blimey, Harry – someone’s scoffed his way through lockdown.” Luckily, last week my moped was stolen by a “rogue” (this is what the police actually called him). So now I’m on my dad’s old pushbike, without Tracy-Ann but with a slightly leaner frame.

Three weeks in and Lily and I find time to grab another bite, and she’s a different person.

She’s enjoying herself. On the Saturday I bump into Matthew Dunster in the street, and he tells me, “Each week with Lily is worth a year at drama school.” I call Lil that evening to tell her. Secondhand praise always feels more valuable than that from the horse’s mouth.

Today is the birthday of Eliza Butterworth, who plays one of Fergie’s daughters. I was once driving my six-year-old daughter and her friend to school when the friend piped up, “Grandpa’s coming to stay tonight. He’s very old.”

“How old?” I ask.

“Eighty.”

“Guess how old I am.”

“Eighty?”

Many years have passed since then, and now I am 60, I’ve reached the age where the problem this little girl had is reversed. Anyone under 35 looks indeterminably young. After we sing Happy Birthday I guess her age.

“Twenty-one?” She chuckles and I can’t read her chuckle-tone. Panic rises: “Is she 20? Or worse, 19?” That she won’t tell me her real age surely confirms my faux pas. So I have to ask her directly. She’s 29. I’m relieved. No big deal, just confirmation of the increasing speed at which I hurtle towards the grave.

It was George’s birthday today too. He would have been 57. He would have loved what we’ve done with his words. n Harry Enfield stars in The Windsors: Endgame at the Prince of Wales Theatre, London W1 (thewindsorsendgame.com)

DO TRY THIS AT HOME THE DIY HEALTH TEST BOOM

From left: Harry Wallop, 46, and Charlie GowansEglinton, 33, photographed

by Dan Kennedy. Styling by Hannah Skelley

Want to know your cholesterol score, fertility levels or biological age, all without seeing a doctor? A £4 billion industry is here to tell you. Harry Wallop and Charlie Gowans-Eglinton try out the new home kits. Are they worth the money?

JOHN NGUYEN/JNVISUALS

T

he scene at the breakfast table resembles a middle-class crack den. In front of me are multiple discarded medical lancets, a bowl of hot water and bloodied swabs. I am searching for a fresh piece of skin on my finger to pierce so that I can let the blood run, drop by drop, into a small vial. After 25 minutes and four fingers, I still have not filled up the vial to the requisite 0.5ml. This doesn’t sound much, I realise. Not enough to coat the bottom of an egg cup. I am – as per the instructions – massaging my hand every four seconds and pleading for another globule to form. I start doing star jumps, one of the suggested tips “to get your blood flowing”.

My wife looks at me witheringly across from her marmalade on toast. “When you’ve quite finished your midlife crisis, you need to do the school run.”

“But unless I fill this vial, I won’t know my testosterone level,” I plead.

“Well, if you were a real man, you’d be able to fill it,” she says.

Welcome to the world of at-home medical testing. An industry that some conservative estimates put at £4.4 billion and growing fast, thanks to the increasing obsession with what is now called our “wellness”. Almost any condition – diabetes, gout, low blood sugar, high cholesterol, an overactive thyroid, an underactive sex life – can now be tested from the comfort of your kitchen table. Fill a vial with blood, spit into a tube, swab your cheek, breathe into a plastic pebble and find out what’s wrong with you. Or, crucially, what might become wrong with you at some point in the future because of your DNA. What was once the preserve of health nuts is on its way to becoming a mainstream lifestyle choice. After a year when many of us shoved a cotton bud up our nostrils on a regular basis, it no longer seems quite so strange to be swabbing spit and squeezing blood into a tiny tube.

“To steal a phrase, a crisis is a terrible thing to waste,” says Hamish Grierson, 36, the co-founder and chief executive of Thriva, whose blood tests are marketed with the phrase, “Take control of your health.”

Grierson started Thriva six years ago but has seen sales jump over the past year, helping make his company worth £100 million at the last count according to its own estimates. “We are very fortunate that health is on the agenda in a way that it wasn’t before.”

Thriva’s tests run from a very basic £21 cholesterol check to a more complex £64 omega-3 and 6 test, which will help determine whether you are at risk of heart disease.

“We will look back in five years and say it was absolutely insane that we knew so little about our health,” says Grierson, who with his

18 The Times Magazine

Diabetes, gout, thyroid, low blood sugar – you can find out about them all from your kitchen table

Thriva’s Eliot Brooks, Hamish Grierson and Tom Livesey

tortoiseshell glasses and light stubble looks like a typical tech entrepreneur. He smatters our chat from his home in Bath with phrases such as “the company is attacking the vision and the mission”.

Self-diagnostics is not a new idea. Home pregnancy tests were launched in the late Seventies and diabetics have been testing their blood glucose levels since the Eighties.

Then along came “wearables” – devices that could measure how much exercise you were getting, your heart rate or even oxygen levels. “But what seemed a massive gap was clinically accurate and clinically evidenced insight as to what’s really happening inside your body,” says Grierson.

I used to work for a company whose perks included an annual in-depth medical checkup.

This ended when I went freelance five years ago. In that half decade I’ve gone from being in my early forties and feeling pretty good about myself to being 46. I am suddenly in the 46-55 age category, closer to death than birth.

Bad hangovers now last a week; I say “oof” when I get out of a chair. My accountant asked me recently if I’d thought about inheritance tax planning.

This sense of my impending decrepitude, plus some curiosity, made me sign up for tests offered by seven different companies.

In all I send off for DNA analyses, blood tests for testosterone, liver function, sexual

health, vitamin levels, food intolerance, a personal digestive tracker, a sleep tracker and a test for my true biological age.

All arrive in slick packaging. Most have instruction leaflets with funky graphics talking me through how to collect blood or saliva. You then post them back in pre-paid envelopes. Thriva’s box comes with cartoon plasters and jauntily suggests, “When you’re finished, share your finger selfie and tag @thriva on Facebook.”

My fingers are too bloodied for that. Days later, it still hurts to type. Gallingly, I soon receive an email from Rightangled, one of the companies, saying, “Quantity not sufficient to complete all assays.” The next day, Thriva emails me to say its lab couldn’t process all my results, explaining that my blood cells had burst: “This can happen if you squeeze too hard and too close to where you pricked it.”

I want to cry. All that blood, toil and sweat and all those star jumps for nothing. Both offer to send free replacements; I agree to start again.

Grierson insists just 7 per cent of tests fail like mine. He says that soon people will be able to stick a patch on their arm that will harmlessly collect blood directly into a vial, without the need for a syringe or jumping.

Rightangled, which advertises on billboards on the London Underground, admits the failure rate for blood tests is higher at 20 per cent. “Not everyone has the same blood flow,” says Abdullah Sabyah, 29, the co-founder and chief executive.

Sabyah, a Saudi who has lived in the UK for ten years, is convinced that the days of queueing up at a doctor’s surgery are over.

Rightangled doesn’t just do blood diagnostics. It offers a range of checks including DNA tests to help you “achieve peak fitness” and analyse your risk of heart disease.

Isn’t this sort of DNA testing – analysing your predisposition for diabetes, Alzheimer’s or even certain cancers – preying on people’s anxieties?

Many doctors think so. Margaret McCartney is a GP and author of The Patient Paradox. “I’d pay not to have my DNA screened,” she says. “If it says you’ve got a slightly higher risk of getting dementia, you’ve got a slightly lower risk of getting cardiovascular disease – does that mean you should eat a load of junk food but do memory tests every week?”

Sabyah is aware of the criticisms. “We’re not here to target the worried well,” he says.

“There is a huge market these days where you just basically feed on people’s fear. We are all about giving people certainty.” On his boxes, along with quotes from Erasmus – “Prevention is better than cure” – is the slogan “Be Certain”.

Blood tests are pretty black and white. Do

HARRY’S TESTS

‘A sense of my impending decrepitude made me sign up for these tests’ Type Biological age Provider GlycanAge (“Take control of your ageing”).

Cost £276.

Method Pinprick blood test – four drops onto blotting paper.

Results “Your GlycanAge is 32. Your biological age is EXCELLENT, and you are 14 years younger than your chronological age!

Congratulations!”

Type Food intolerance Provider Yorktest.

Cost £149 (reduced from £199).

Method Pinprick blood test – saturate a thin cotton “wand” with blood.

Results “You have a high reactivity (a score of 20-100 is high reactivity) to: Wheat – 42 Gluten – 29.”

Type Fitness DNA test Provider Rightangled – “Our Fitness DNA test will direct

you in the right way, looking at the way your body metabolises nutrients and how it responds to types of exercise.”

Cost £129.

Method Cheek swab.

Results “Diet and nutrition – all clear, except vitamin D: decreased. Body and weight management – five areas of concern: proinsulin to insulin conversion: impaired; fasting blood glucose: increased; feeling full: slightly impaired; food pleasure response: decreased; snacking behaviour: increased.

Insulin secretion: impaired.

Insulin sensitivity: decreased.

Exercise response – all clear, except Achilles tendinopathy: increased.”

Type Testosterone test Provider Medichecks (“Know yourself inside out”).

Cost £28 (reduced from £35).

Method Pinprick – fill vial with blood.

you have high cholesterol or low vitamin D levels? Analysing your blood will give you a decent picture.

But interpreting your DNA is a different matter. Can a company really be certain about my risk of developing diabetes by looking at a sample of my DNA? Sabyah, wearing a white T-shirt showing off his buffed body, has a breezy confidence about him. “You can be 100 per cent certain with DNA, of course,” he says.

Most geneticists are dubious. Giles Yeo is a Cambridge University scientist who studies the genetics of obesity and is the author of Why Calories Don’t Count. “My fear is that these companies are trying to get the technology to do something it is not designed to do yet, which is to make predictions,” he says.

He explains that there are about 20,000 genes in the body. Some human traits are “monogenic”, as in a variation in a single gene can determine whether you are lactose intolerant or if you will develop cystic fibrosis.

But most conditions are polygenic – they rely on a combination of genes. “Body weight is polygenic – more than 1,000 genes influence our body weight. Any one given change is next to meaningless without everything else in context,” says Yeo. I put this to Sabyah, who agrees. “You can

Results “20.9nmol/L – inside normal range.”

Type Prostate health, sexual health, immunity health Provider Rightangled.

Cost £223.

Method Pinprick – fill vials with blood.

Results “No areas of concern, except red cell distribution width: increased; mean corpuscular haemogloblin concentration: decreased; mean corpuscular haemoglobin: increased; mean corpuscular volume: increased.

These are markers ‘indicative of anaemia’.”

Type Personalised blood test (including vitamin deficiency) Provider Thriva (“Take health into your own hands”).

Cost £65.

Method Pinprick – fill vial with blood.

Results “All results normal.”

be certain, but to an extent. The extent is governed by your lifestyle.”

“Be Certain To an Extent” is not such a snappy slogan, however.

Sabyah says most people still want to know if they are slightly more or slightly less likely to develop certain conditions. If you are concerned, you can always sign up for his blood tests to get a fuller picture. “You’re born with a baseline. If you don’t know what your baseline is, you cannot be strict enough with your lifestyle.”

His father died at 55 from a heart attack.

“When I did the [heart DNA] test, I found that I would be at high risk of heart disease as well,” he says, and decided to give up smoking.

Despite all the caveats, I was still intrigued to find what all my results would show.

Some were satisfyingly immediate. Something called Food Marble involved me blowing into a device the size of a small matchbox;

After a year of sticking cotton buds up our nostrils, home tests no longer seem strange

Type Sleep diagnosis Provider Sunrise (“Why wait to start taking care of your sleep?”).

Cost £89 (down from £119).

Method Sensor that sticks to your chin during the night; results on an app.

Results “Overall, you spent 84 per cent of your time in bed actually sleeping but we noticed that you had trouble sleeping.

This could be caused by irregular and inadequate sleep schedules and explain your excessive daytime sleepiness.”

Type Digestion Provider Food Marble (“The world’s first personal digestive tracker”).

Cost £149.

Method Handheld breath tester; results on an app.

Results “No issues with fructose, lactose, sorbitol or insulin.”

my score showed up in real time on an app.

Designed for those with digestion issues and suspected irritable bowel syndrome, it measures the hydrogen in your stomach and how well you are digesting various foods, allowing you to correlate any bloating with particular foods. The app alerts me to record every meal and “log my poop”. Is it a mushy stool or like a sausage, smooth and soft?

With Sunrise – “Sleep diagnosis, reinvented” – I had to stick a soft magnet to my chin, a bit like a blister pad that you insert into the heel of new shoes. As I hopped into bed my wife declared, “You look like an idiot.”

The diagnosis downloaded onto the app the next morning gave a detailed description of my night, my head position, my respiratory effort, “corresponding to the percentage of sleep time with breathing difficulties”.

The blood and DNA results took between three days and three weeks to arrive. My food allergy result suggests I am intolerant to wheat and gluten, which I find odd because I love bread and pasta and have never noticed any adverse effects. I choose to ignore this.

My testosterone level, measured by two different companies, came out within the expected range – despite my advancing years. So too my thyroid, prostate, liver and sexual health – even though I’ve been The Times Magazine 19

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

wearing a weird sticker on my chin in bed.

My DNA test from Rightangled did flag, however, that I am at serious risk of developing type 2 diabetes because I carry some genes responsible for impairing my proinsulin to insulin conversion rate, as well as genes that raise my risk of hyperglycaemia.

Worse, I carry two copies of the FTO gene, which makes you crave calorific foods. This makes me 50 per cent more likely to become obese according to Yeo, a leading expert on this particular gene.

This alarms me. Because once I start on a tub of ice cream, I can’t stop. Late at night I sometimes spoon Nutella straight into my mouth from the jar. Sure I go to the gym, but is there a fat diabetic bursting to get out?

Yeo reassures me. “The far easier way to ascertain if you are at risk from type 2 diabetes is to ask if your parents are type 2 diabetic. Are they severely obese?” I tell him they are quite trim and are not diabetic.

“It’s not predictive, but it’s going to be more predictive than a genetic test. Because it’s real world data – it’s your socioeconomic class, your lifestyle, your education. I bet you have hummus and carrots in the fridge.” I do. “This tells me you are not at risk.” I don’t tell him about the Nutella.

Then comes my biological age result. This is calculated by a company called GlycanAge and measures glycans, tiny sugar molecules that correlate to inflammation in the body.

Again it involves a blood test, but luckily just four drops onto a piece of blotting paper.

The company claims this is “the most accurate test of bio-age and wellness available”. The email arrives: “Your GlycanAge is 32. Your biological age is EXCELLENT. You are 14 years younger than your chronological age! Congratulations!” I feel unbelievably smug and virile and run to show my wife.

“I’m never going to hear the end of this,” she says.

A criticism of all these companies is that they will actually add to the burden of the NHS, leading to patients pestering their GPs with results they do not know how to evaluate; or worse, being given false reassurance or unnecessary distress.

For me, most of the information I receive is fairly clear. And many of the companies – as part of their business model – encourage you to sign up to health plans or consult with one of the (private) doctors on their roster.

In the case of GlycanAge, as part of the hefty £276 price tag I am hooked up with a GP turned nutritionist who discusses my result in some detail. She tells me that my score is “fantastic” but then starts discussing my alcohol intake (too high), night-time snacking and the fact that when I go to the gym I mostly sit on the bench tweeting rather than lifting weights.

My bio-age is 14 years younger than my actual age. I feel unbelievably smug and virile “Some people might approach that score and see if they can get it down any further,” she says. One 67-year-old man has achieved a biological age of 32. Later, she emails me suggestions of meal plans and exercises.

It is this level of personalisation that most of the companies are aiming for.

Rightangled wants to use machine learning to crunch your survey results and your blood tests; Sabyah claims chatbots will then be able to offer advice “which is personalised to each user, based on their results and their environmental factors”.

When every single aspect of your health can be measured, you will always find something you fall short of in some way. Even though my results came out pretty well, I will still catastrophise my diabetes DNA score.

I didn’t sign up for the Alzheimer’s test because there’s a history of it in my family; I just don’t want to know.

Professor Daniel Davis is an immunologist and author of The Secret Body. Like Yeo, he is sceptical that our complex immune system can be simplified to a few traffic light scores.

But he doesn’t dismiss these companies’ ambitions. “This is the direction of travel.

And in the end, these sorts of data will be clearer, more reliable and more precise.

Not tomorrow, but at some time in the future.

And then we will each need to make very personal decisions about what we want to know about ourselves and how we act on the information.”

Me? I’ll start by putting away the Nutella jar.

‘I AM MOST NERVOUS ABOUT THE FERTILITY TEST’

Charlie Gowans-Eglinton

I

sailed through my twenties convinced of my immortality. I was blasé about long overdue smear tests and breast checks, smoked at parties and ate a lot of supermarket ravioli.

In January 2018, a few weeks before I turned 30, my sister was diagnosed with breast cancer aged 32. In 2019 it was my father’s prostate cancer, then my mother’s breast cancer. That Christmas, all three of them cancer free, the four of us toasted the new year ahead: 2020, the year of good health, no hospitals. Sorry if we jinxed it for everyone.

I’m still an optimist but a thrice-burnt one, so while I do not imagine that every twinge is a terminal illness, I now know the importance of early diagnosis and prompt treatment; I will always nag my GP to do further tests just in case. Or I did until the pandemic, when we stopped going to the GP for anything less than life-threatening.

I was lucky enough not to need emergency medical help from the NHS; I am ticking along with a “healthy” BMI. But after what’s now pushing two years without seeing my doctor, I want a health MOT and reassurance that the wheels aren’t about to fall off.

And, first things first, reassurance that

I didn’t spend my last year of fertility stuck indoors alone (not shagging anyone, in case you missed the inference). At the start of the pandemic I was 31. I’m now 33 and a half.

My two best friends both had babies during lockdown. I am single and I want children – eventually. But while “eventually” used to feel far off, it’s now tailgating me in the rearview mirror – not helped by the government’s obsession with “households” during the pandemic, which isolated single people like me. Spending lockdowns alone, I was envious of those cooing over newborns… occasionally.

Lack of a boyfriend aside, I don’t think I’m even close to wanting a baby yet, but unfortunately that’s not the main factor that women need to consider.

The test I was most interested in – and nervous about – was Hertility’s hormone and fertility test. I wanted a definitive answer, a hard timeline to work to, the exact number of years and months that I could wait – or to be told categorically that I must freeze my eggs right now. Obviously it doesn’t work like that. All my answers were in the “normal” range for someone my age, so there was nothing I needed to do – any red flags and the doctor reviewing the results would have suggested a consultation or that The Times Magazine 21

CHARLIE WEARS DRESS, THEREFORMATION.COM; SHOES, MALONESOULIERS.COM. HARRY WEARS T-SHIRT, SUNSPEL.COM; CHINOS, REISS.COM; TRAINERS, VEJA-STORE.COM

CHARLIE’S TESTS I take them to my GP. I added the virtual consultation because I wanted advice and to make sure that I really understood the results, some of which were towards the lower end of the normal bracket, which worried me.

For half an hour I had a video call with fertility specialist Dr Michele Robinson, who’s been with the company since it launched last year. Research into that mid-thirties fertility cliff that I’ve read so much about means that my egg reserve and quality of eggs will start to decline more rapidly at 35 or 36. Egg freezing is an option that many women are choosing, although it’s an expensive process. I don’t have plans to do anything about my results now, except perhaps to retest annually and then make a decision when my results force one, or when I turn 36 or have enough money to comfortably freeze my eggs “just in case” – whichever comes first. I’m reassured at least that there are no obvious problems.

Medichecks’ female hormone blood test was more of an all-rounder, testing nine markers from the proteins in my blood to my thyroid, with results given in a traffic-light system of green (inside normal range), amber (borderline) or red (outside normal range).

My results were all green, showing “healthy hormone levels and a balanced thyroid” according to the doctor’s overview, which was incredibly brief. But I suppose brief is bestcase scenario – these markers can point towards liver or kidney disease or an under or overactive thyroid, so any ambers or reds would have meant much more information for me to digest.

Yorktest’s food and environmental allergy test looked at 23 of the former and 19 of the latter, giving them a score between 0-6, with 5-6 being high reaction. I didn’t get any high scores, and the medium 3-4 on just four things: cat dander (I already knew about that one, because cats can sense it and try to sit on me accordingly) and soy each got 4; at 3 were apples (I often eat apples. Should I stop?) and “common ragweed”, which I had to google – apparently it’s a hay fever culprit, although I’ve never suffered much. I won’t be avoiding things that I had a small reaction to because they included delicious foods like crab, shrimp, hazelnut and peanut, all of which I’ve eaten for decades without noticing a reaction.

LetsGetChecked’s cortisol test put me well within the healthy range, so any fatigue is probably down to the fact that I don’t go to bed early enough; Sunrise’s sleep tracker clocked 5 hours and 35 minutes of sleep, but then it was one of the hottest nights of the year. Those results were delivered via a very slick app but there were reams of information to get through; if you have real problems sleeping, then measurements of apnoea, teeth grinding and how long you spend in light,

‘After what’s now pushing two years without seeing my doctor, I want a health MOT’ Type Hormone and fertility testing Provider Hertility.

Cost £149 + £90 for virtual follow-up with a doctor.

Method Finger prick – fill vial with blood on day 3 of menstrual cycle.

Results All normal – “Within range for someone of your age and biometrics.”

Type Food and environmental allergy Provider Yorktest.

Cost £199 reduced to £139.

Method Finger prick – fill vial with blood.

Results Medium reaction (3 or 4 on a 0-6 scale) to soy (4), cat dander (4), apple (3), common ragweed (3).

Type Cortisol Provider LetsGetChecked.

Cost £59.

Method Finger prick – fill vial with blood.

Results Normal.

Type Heart check Provider LetsGetChecked.

Cost £49.

Method Finger prick – fill vial with blood.

Results All normal except low high-density lipoprotein level.

Type Female hormone blood test Provider Medichecks.

Cost £79.

Method Finger prick – fill vial with blood.

Results All normal – “healthy hormone levels and a balanced thyroid”.

The founders of Hertility, from left: Dr Helen O’Neill, Dr Natalie Getreu and Deirdre O’Neill

deep and REM sleep could help you to discover the issue.

My only red flag – technically an amber flag – came in LetsGetChecked’s heart test.

Of the five biomarkers tested, I dropped fractionally below the normal range for high-density lipoprotein (HDL), the “good” cholesterol that tackles the “bad” kind.

Boosting my HDL level means no smoking, more exercise and more “good fats” in my diet.

I stopped smoking when I was 25; this has definitely been a more sedentary year than most; and given my flat’s proximity to French cheese emporium La Fromagerie, I thought too many “bad fats” would be the problem rather than not enough “good”. Possibly trying to diet off 2020’s brie by avoiding fats altogether wasn’t the best idea.

The tests themselves were painless, although a fair amount of fist pumping and arm waving and seven finger pricks were required on the morning I drew three vials of blood for three separate tests at once. My fertility test had to be taken on a specific day in my menstrual cycle, which also happened to be a day I needed to be at the office early, so I gave a colleague a shock when they

walked into the fashion cupboard when I was squeezing my blood into a vial.

Getting results by email or on an app can be strange because there’s no one to ask questions of immediately. But that happens in the NHS too – when I had in-person genetic testing for the BRCA mutation responsible for my sister and dad’s cancers, my results came by post.

If there’s something particular you’re worrying about, these new home tests will either offer some peace of mind or turn your possible problem into an actual one that you can do something about.

My own results didn’t tell me that my ovaries were absolutely chock-a-block with zippy, perky little eggs and that I had at least five years left before I had to worry about babies, which would then practically dance out of the womb – this is what I was hoping for, if I’m completely honest. But I do have one thing to be proactive about: taking a few more Pilates classes and eating a few more good fats. Everyone has a go at millennials for wasting our money on boutique gyms and avocados, but in my case they’re just what the postal doctor ordered. n The Times Magazine 23

THREE YEARS. THREE BILLION DOWNLOADS. HOW TIKTOK TOOK OVER

(First the kids, then the grown-ups)

The happiness coach

Styling by Hannah Skelley.

TikTok creators, left to right, Dr Julie Smith, 37, Poppy O’Toole, 27, and Abby Roberts, 19. Inset: Mick Fleetwood with his take on a viral TikTok of a skateboarder lip-synching to Fleetwood Mac’s Dreams; Sir Elton John doing a comedy NHS advert on TikTok

It really didn’t seem much at first – teens making up dance routines to hit songs in 60-second clips shot in their bedrooms. But it just kept getting bigger and bigger…

So how did TikTok become the dominant social media platform on the planet in record time?

Julia Llewellyn Smith reports PORTRAITS Tom Jackson

The viral chef

The beauty guru

PREVIOUS SPREAD: @MICKFLEETWOOD, @ELTONJOHN. THIS SPREAD: @NATHANEVANSS, @JACKBLACK, @THEROCK, @POPPYCOOKS, @DRJULIESMITH

I

t is a rainy summer morning in London but in my head I’m a competitor at the Tokyo Olympics, watching footage on my phone of 7ft-tall Argentine basketball player Francisco Caffaro trying to squeeze into a Japanese shower cubicle. I swipe onto a video of gold medallist Tom Daley, not diving but wobbling his head in time to Olivia Rodrigo’s Deja Vu. Onwards and US volleyball player Erik Shoji is talking me through his teriyaki and rice-ball dinner in the Olympic Village.

It’s just another few seconds on the Chinese-owned micro-video app TikTok, where at any one time 75 million different videos are jostling for attention and which in the space of just three years has come from nowhere to become a – if not the – driving force in western culture.

Right now, millions are enjoying the Olympics through the prism of its (mainly) 60-second videos, with silly snippets giving a face to sports and competitors that often previously languished in obscurity. Who, after all, honestly previously cared about the US women’s rugby or its team member Ilona Maher before she gained 300,000 TikTok followers with such videos as her paean to the “tall foreign demigod lookin athletes”?

Last month, an estimated 1.9 billion people watched TikTok’s quaver logo repeatedly flashing around the Euro 2020 pitches as one of the tournament’s official sponsors. Millions of fans flipped between watching matches to TikToks of the players performing dance routines or sharing footballing tips.

It’s a huge leap for the social-media platform, which initially many dismissed as “just for kids”. Since it became available internationally in August 2018, TikTok has been downloaded 3 billion times and is used by an estimated 1.1 billion people daily in more than 150 countries – especially impressive when you realise those countries don’t include China (which has a Chinese version of the app called Douyin, owned by the same company, ByteDance) and India, where Narendra Modi’s government banned it, accusing the Chinese of illegally accessing data.

“Our goal is just to be omnipresent as a brand. We want to become the most relatable brand on the internet,” James Rothwell, TikTok’s head of marketing for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, tells me.

Many of our institutions such as the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 have been “advised” by TikTok on how best to launch their accounts, as have brands such as Stella McCartney and Birds Eye. Its recent collaboration with Ed Sheeran attracted more than 5 million views, the largest audience for a live streamed concert to date. From being the place where teenyboppers performed dance routines 26 The Times Magazine

IN THE FIRST HALF OF 2021, NEARLY 383 MILLION PEOPLE INSTALLED IT FOR THE FIRST TIME it’s now being used as a recruiting tool in the US, where brands such as the fast-food chain Chipotle are using its spin-off, TikTok Resumes, to ask potential staff to upload their video CVs. To show it means business, TikTok has bagged two prominent new London addresses for its UK and European headquarters, one above the new Crossrail station in Farringdon and one over two floors at Soho House’s new Soho Works space in the Strand.

After all, its ever growing numbers are enough to make the likes of YouTube and Google quake. (TikTok is the only major social-media app that didn’t originate in California.) In the first half of this year, TikTok was the most downloaded and highest-grossing non-game app, beating Snapchat, Facebook and Instagram, with nearly 383 million people installing it for the first time. Typically, users open the app eight times a day, spending a daily average of 52 minutes on the platform (for younger people aged 4-15, it’s 80 minutes).

Those younger people (even if the app is officially for 13+ only) were – at least at the start – TikTok’s bread and butter. TikTok was born after ByteDance’s owner, 38-year-old Zhang Yiming, who has an estimated net worth of $44.5 billion, bought the lip-synching app Musical.ly for a rumoured $1 billion in 2017, merging it with the unknown TikTok. ByteDance has been named as the world’s most valuable start-up, worth £58 billion.

Musical.ly’s followers – reportedly 200 million of them – were largely children, who used it to make videos of themselves singing and dancing along to pop songs.

At first, this was TikTok’s USP. But quickly other types of videos started crowding onto the platform. Musicians found the app an ideal vehicle for new material. Comedians started using it for sketches. People flocked there to share household and beauty “hacks” such as applying foundation with a moisturiser and to lecture on anything from the semiotics of Black Lives Matter to living in a convent (#nunsoftiktok has been viewed 7 million times).

For many, TikTok rapidly gained the edge over “old-school” platforms such as Instagram or YouTube because its videos were simple to film (the app provides all necessary editing software) and snappier in feel. The “feed”

aspect means anything that bores you can be instantly scrolled past.

Most of all, people were drawn to TikTok by its light-heartedness. According to Nico Cary, the chief operating officer of Influentially, an agency that manages socialmedia stars, its core appeal lay in being for everybody, not just the rich, famous and gorgeous. “You’re never going to get your superwealthy woman on TikTok; they’ve never cared for it. TikTok’s a much more playful, positive and unfiltered place than other social media, and because it’s so normal it gives anyone an opportunity to express themselves, not just the One Per Cent.”

“Creators” (TikTok reprimands me when I call them TikTokkers) also loved the fact that on TikTok fame could – with luck – be found virtually instantly, rather than through stolidly building up followers and likes as on the other platforms. The difference lies in its “For You” algorithm, which analyses users’ behaviour (what they search for, how long they spend watching each video and so on) and then serves them bespoke content.

“You don’t have to be Ant and Dec [with 3 million followers]. You can come in with zero, but if your content is good the algorithm will recognise that and show it to more people,” says James Stafford, TikTok’s head of partnerships and community for Europe and the UK. Unsurprisingly, 50 per cent of TikTok’s users are under the age of 34, with 32.5 per cent aged between 10 and 19 and 41 per cent between 16 and 24. But now, boomers and Gen-Xers, who took years to realise the potential of the likes of YouTube, have started piling in. A video of Arnold Schwarzenegger on a bike dressed as a cowboy and chasing his mini pony went viral during lockdown; Sir Elton John was one of the earliest adopters to use the platform to reboot his classics – his Step into Christmas video was viewed nearly 500,000 times; while Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber’s a regular with 261,000 followers and is especially fond of using the “duet” feature, which allows him to split the screen and play the piano alongside another act.

The influx of affluent, middle-aged users is great news for TikTok’s advertising revenue, which funds the app, with a rumoured charge of £1.5 million to take over its front page for a day. Luxury brands such as Balenciaga and Prada have jumped on board, while TikTok’s latest brand partnership is with the decidedly upmarket Aston Martin Formula One team.

Whatever its demographics, if a craze has swept my household – and the world – this past year, it is more than likely to have been born on TikTok. My 16-year-old daughter, who spends hours daily scrolling the app has, in the past year, surprised me with sudden, urgent demands for, among others, pleated

From top: Nathan Evans sings with Ed Sheeran; Jack Black does the TikTok WAP challenge and Dwayne Johnson the tequila shot one; Poppy O’Toole, left, and Dr Julie Smith

TYPICALLY, USERS OPEN THE APP EIGHT TIMES A DAY, SPENDING A TOTAL OF 52 MINUTES ON IT

white miniskirts in response to the #tenniscore trend, where TikTokkers began wearing garments that wouldn’t have looked out of place on Virginia Wade, leading to searches for tennis skirts tripling on the shopping platform Lyst, where searches for silk polo shirts also rose by 21 per cent.

In the past few months I’ve been ordered to buy Little Moons mochi balls (sales rose 700 per cent after TikTokkers began posting videos of them going into Tesco in search of the ice cream), probiotics (a “creator” swore by them for perfect skin) and Madeline Miller’s 2011 novel The Song of Achilles, about the Trojan War – this prompted by a viral where a weeping creator filmed herself rocking back and forth while clutching the novel, which resulted in the book recently reaching No 3 on the New York Times bestseller list.

We’ve also been subjected to endless playing on a loop of Fleetwood Mac’s 1977 hit Dreams, which recently re-entered the charts after it featured in a viral video that also involved Ocean Spray cranberry juice (sales of which rocketed too).

Whenever I ask my daughter if she’s concerned about Beijing potentially invading her data privacy, not to mention controlling her customised For You feed, I’m told I’m “racist” and “xenophobic”. I’m also told that these were the concerns of Gen-Z archnemesis Donald Trump, whose threat earlier this year to “ban” TikTok, by insisting its US arm was sold to a US company such as Microsoft, was simply a spiteful reaction to last summer’s activism: teenagers, rallying on TikTok, sabotaged a Trump rally in Oklahoma by registering for seats then not showing up.

With its global headquarters in Singapore, TikTok denies in the strongest possible terms that it would share data with Beijing. But a recent survey showed one third of Brits had concerns about the issue (although often not strong enough concerns to stop them downloading the app). Behemoths such as Amazon and Wells Fargo bank banned it from corporate devices (Amazon later relented).

The Democratic and Republican national committees both told staffers not to install the app on phones. As the tech writer Casey Newton puts it, there’s “no evidence TikTok is doing anything extraordinarily shady with our data, and no evidence it could stop the Chinese government from forcing it to at any point”.

Despite the app’s prevailing air of daftness, there have also been numerous reports of the company’s “toxic”, Chinese-influenced work culture in the US and Europe. “High control from base in China regarding working hours,

culture and (lack of) flexibility,” says one review on the website Glassdoor. “The atmosphere and culture is fake as, once you are in; it like little china [sic] everything is controlled,” reads another. (In fairness, other reviews say things such as “lovely culture and co-workers”.) Recently, CNBC reported on six Brits who’d either backed out of interviews, turned down job offers or left the company after learning that TikTok has a “996” culture – associated with some Chinese companies that demand working hours of 9am to 9pm six days a week. Not expecting a completely frank answer, I ask Paul Hourican, head of music operations UK, how it’s been for him.

“There’s definitely not a culture in the UK or Europe where people work on Saturday, which is pretty standard in China,” he says.

“We do normal working, plus the hour or two we all have to do, like yourself I’m sure, at the end of the day. But it’s a good atmosphere to work in. In Europe there’s a real sense of a shared mission. There’s a lot of work, but for a lot of people it’s a chance to do some of the best work of their careers, so everyone’s supercommitted and superpassionate.”

Do they take direct instruction from the Chinese? “We make all the decisions here around what’s best for the UK, what’s best for various markets across Europe. There’s the autonomy that you would just expect from a company focused on Europe.”

Like all the TikTok employees I meet – some on Zoom, some at its #ForYou event at a hipster brewery in Shoreditch, a bit like a belated Christmas party for staff who up until now have mainly only met on Zoom – Hourican is youngish, with a background working for other big tech firms. He’s also – and I don’t think it’s an act – hugely enthused about his work, which, after all, offers huge opportunities for creative, ambitious types.

Music is at the heart of TikTok, since most clips use a soundtrack from its vast database.

More and more big-name artists are using the platform to go viral, by releasing songs where people can copy the choreography – in the first lockdown, Canadian rapper Drake had us all dancing to his “right foot up/ left foot slide” Toosie Slide. But the app’s not only boosting established names; it’s launched dozens of careers, making it the contemporary equivalent of Motown or – more crudely – Stock, Aitken and Waterman, with executives constantly scanning feeds to spot the next big thing. “TikTok’s only as good as its creators, so it’s 100 per cent in our interests to nurture them,” says Stafford.

That’s what happened to 26-year-old Nathan Evans, who at Christmas was working as a postman in Airdrie, outside Glasgow.

At first he’d uploaded the music he made at Continues on page 35 The Times Magazine 27

T OU P LL EE PU D K AN

Eat! REALLY EASY VEGAN DISHES (FOR BEGINNERS)

Forget odd ingredients – vegan cook Katy Beskow uses strictly simple everyday food

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PHOTOGRAPHS Luke Albert

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ou don’t need to tell Katy Beskow how much easier it is to be a vegan nowadays.

When she gave up meat and dairy in 2006 it was a struggle to find decent ingredients, let alone inspiring recipes, and she spent ages carefully reading the small print on the backs of packets. It made for laborious shopping and even more laborious cooking and eating.

Fast forward to the present and supermarket shelves are full of ingredients that wear their vegan labels with pride, from smoked tofu to vegan “cheese”. You still have to get in the kitchen and cook them, though. “You can’t just rely on vegan convenience food,” Beskow says.

“It’s only by cooking from scratch that you can create balanced meals and gain the confidence to experiment with new ingredients.” She hopes these quick and easy recipes will give vegans and those who just want to ease off on meat the head start that she wished she’d been given 15 years ago. Tony Turnbull

1. CAULIFLOWER KORMA Serves 4; suitable for freezing This recipe is a regular in my kitchen – I love whipping up this creamy curry once a week.

I tend to have the basic ingredients in the store cupboard and cauliflower is the perfect korma companion, ready to soak up all those lovely flavours of spices, coconut yoghurt and coriander. Serve with pilau rice.

30 The Times Magazine

• 1 tbsp sunflower oil • 1 onion, finely diced • 1 large cauliflower, broken into florets • 1 garlic clove, crushed • 1 tsp ground turmeric • 1 tsp ground cumin • 1 rounded tbsp mild dairy-free curry paste • 1 x 400ml tin full-fat coconut milk • 1 x 400g tin green lentils, rinsed • A small handful of sultanas • Juice of 1 unwaxed lemon • A generous pinch of sea salt • 2 rounded tbsp coconut yoghurt • A small handful of coriander, roughly torn 1. Heat the oil in a large pan, add the onion and cauliflower and cook over a medium-high heat for 3-4 minutes, stirring frequently to avoid sticking. Stir in the garlic, turmeric, cumin and curry paste and cook for a further minute.

2. Pour in the coconut milk and green lentils, then loosely place a lid over the pan. Cook for 20 minutes, stirring occasionally.

3. Remove from the heat and stir through the sultanas. Squeeze in the lemon juice and season to taste with sea salt. Stir through the coconut yoghurt and scatter over the coriander before serving.

Easy tip Sultanas give a pop of sweetness, but if you prefer you can add a generous tablespoon of mango chutney.

2. SOY, LIME AND PEANUT STIR-FRY Serves 2 generously This is one of my go-to recipes when I need something quick and tasty. There’s no need for a separate sauce as the chilli flakes, soy sauce and lime deliver on flavour. Serve with rice.

• 1 tbsp sunflower oil • 10 Tenderstem broccoli florets • 1 large carrot, peeled and finely chopped • 1 red pepper, deseeded and thinly sliced • ½ tsp dried chilli flakes • 4 cavolo nero leaves, torn, stems removed • 8 sugar snap peas, halved diagonally • 2 tbsp light soy sauce • Juice of half an unwaxed lime • 2 spring onions, finely chopped • A small handful of coriander, roughly torn • 2 tbsp salted peanuts, roughly chopped 1. Heat the oil in a wok over a high heat.

Throw in the broccoli, carrot, pepper and chilli flakes and stir-fry for 2-3 minutes. Add the cavolo nero and sugar snap peas and stir-fry for a further minute.

2. Stir in the soy sauce and cook for 2 minutes, stirring constantly until it reduces.

3. Remove from the heat and squeeze through the lime juice. Scatter with spring onions, coriander and chopped salted peanuts.

Easy tip These vegetables all cook quickly, making

this stir-fry ready in under 15 minutes. Other quick-cook vegetables include green beans, cauliflower florets, mushrooms and asparagus.

3. EASIEST EVER DAL Serves 4; suitable for freezing Over the years I’ve simplified my favourite dal recipe (due to being too lazy to wait for it to cook). This is ready in 30 minutes.

• 300g dried red lentils • 2 tbsp medium dairy-free curry paste • A pinch of ground turmeric • A pinch of ground cumin • A pinch of dried chilli flakes • 1 litre hot vegetable stock • 1 x 400ml tin full-fat coconut milk • Zest and juice of 1 unwaxed lime • A generous pinch of sea salt • 2 tbsp coconut yoghurt 1. Add the lentils to a large pan along with the curry paste, turmeric, cumin, chilli flakes and vegetable stock. Bring to the boil over a high heat, then simmer for 20 minutes, stirring frequently.

2. Pour in the coconut milk and cook for a further 5-6 minutes, stirring constantly, until the lentils break down and become creamy.

3. Remove from the heat and stir through the lime zest and juice. Season to taste with sea salt, then stir through the coconut yoghurt.

Easy tip Use this as a basic recipe. You can add carrot and coriander, caramelised onions or spinach.

Serve with Bombay potatoes (see overleaf).

4. SPANISH CHICKPEA AND OLIVE STEW Serves 4; suitable for freezing Chickpeas, olives and peppers are simmered in a smoky, herby sauce and topped with crunchy toasted almonds. Toasting the almonds in a dry pan takes just a couple of minutes, but it’s well worth it for the extra layer of flavour it brings.

• 1 tbsp sunflower oil • 1 onion, diced • 1 yellow pepper, deseeded and thinly sliced • 1 garlic clove, crushed • 1 tsp smoked paprika • 1 tsp dried thyme • 1 x 400g tin chopped tomatoes • 1 x 400g tin chickpeas, drained and rinsed • A handful of pitted black olives • A generous pinch each of sea salt and black pepper • A generous handful of flat-leaf parsley, finely chopped • 2 rounded tbsp flaked almonds 1. Heat the oil in a large pan or heatproof casserole dish, add the onion and pepper and

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cook over a medium-high heat for 3-4 minutes until they begin to soften. Add the garlic, smoked paprika and thyme and cook for a further minute.

2. Pour in the chopped tomatoes and chickpeas, then simmer over a medium heat for 20 minutes, stirring occasionally.

3. Stir in the olives and cook for a further 2 minutes, then remove from the heat. Season to taste with salt and pepper, then stir through the parsley.

4. Toast the flaked almonds in a dry frying pan until lightly golden and fragrant. Scatter over the stew just before serving.

Easy tip If you have any leftovers, stir in hot vegetable stock, then blitz in a blender or food processor for a tasty soup.

5. CREAMY COCONUT NOODLES Serves 2 Creamy and rich with a hint of Thai spices, these simple noodles make the perfect lunch.

They are easily transported and reheated in a glass jar (reheat without the metal lid) or plastic container for your very own instant noodle pot.

• 1 x 400ml tin full-fat coconut milk • 1 tbsp vegan Thai red curry paste • 1 carrot, peeled and grated • 300g ready-to-wok egg-free noodles • 4 sugar snap peas, sliced lengthways The Times Magazine 31

Eat! EASY VEGAN

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Eat! EASY VEGAN

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• A few drops of light soy sauce • A generous handful of coriander, roughly torn • Unwaxed lime wedges, to serve 1. Heat the coconut milk in a large pan until simmering, then stir in the curry paste and grated carrot.

2. Carefully separate the noodles, then add to the pan. Simmer for 10-15 minutes until softened and the coconut broth has thickened.

3. Add the sugar snap peas and soy sauce and cook for a further 2-3 minutes until the sugar snaps are al dente.

4. Remove from the heat and scatter with coriander and lime wedges just before serving.

Easy tip Ready-to-wok noodles are found in most supermarkets. Unlike the chilled version they are often egg-free, but check the label before buying.

6. SATAY SALAD Serves 1 generously The creamy peanut sauce is addictive. Don’t forgo the final topping of spring onions, coriander and crushed peanuts, which lifts this salad to another level.

• 1 tbsp smooth peanut butter • 1 tbsp light soy sauce • A pinch of dried chilli flakes • A generous handful of watercress • 1 carrot, peeled and sliced into ribbons using a vegetable peeler 32 The Times Magazine

• A handful of sugar snap peas, sliced diagonally • Juice of half an unwaxed lime • 1 spring onion, finely sliced • A small handful of coriander, roughly chopped • 1 tbsp roasted and salted peanuts, roughly chopped 1. Mix together the peanut butter and soy sauce with 3 tbsp boiling water to create a creamy sauce. Stir in the chilli flakes and set aside.

2. Toss together the watercress, carrot and sugar snap peas, then stir through the lime juice. Arrange on a serving plate, then drizzle over the satay sauce.

3. Sprinkle over the spring onion, coriander and peanuts and serve fresh.

Tip Due to the varying oil content in each brand of peanut butter, you may need to add a little extra boiling water, as it thickens as it cools.

BOMBAY NEW POTATOES Serves 4 (see picture 3) These potatoes are fantastic with my easy dal (page 31) but also chilled with a green salad.

• 500g new potatoes • 3 tbsp sunflower oil • 1 tsp mustard seeds • 1 tsp fennel seeds • 1 tsp ground turmeric • ½ tsp mild chilli powder • ½ tsp paprika

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• A handful of cherry tomatoes • 1 red chilli, deseeded and thinly sliced • A handful of coriander, roughly torn • A pinch of sea salt 1. Bring a large pan of water to the boil over a medium-high heat, then tip in the new potatoes. Boil for 20 minutes until tender.

2. Drain and rinse with cold water until the potatoes are cool enough to cut in half.

Ensure all the water is drained away.

3. Return the pan to the heat and spoon in the sunflower oil. Sprinkle in the mustard seeds and fennel seeds and cook for 2 minutes until they start to brown.

4. Stir in the turmeric, chilli powder, paprika and cherry tomatoes and cook for 4-5 minutes, stirring frequently to coat the potatoes in the spice mix and avoid sticking.

5. Remove from the heat and scatter over the red chilli and coriander. Season with sea salt.

BLOODY MARY Serves 2 Pour 100ml vodka and 500ml chilled tomato juice into a jug, stir in a few drops of Tabasco and (vegan) Worcestershire sauce and sea salt.

Mix. Add celery sticks to serve. n

Extracted from Easy Vegan Bible by Katy Beskow, published by Quadrille (£22)

@ABBYROBERTS. HAIR AND MAKE-UP: BRITTA DICKE AT CAROL HAYES MANAGEMENT USING LEONOR GREYL AND LAURA MERCIER

TikTok Continued from page 27

home to YouTube. But his nephew, nine, and niece, seven (who – as an executive on our Zoom clarifies – shouldn’t have actually been on the 13+ app), kept nagging him to join TikTok. “I said, ‘No way. TikTok is for kids,’ but they said, ‘Uncle Nathan, trust us.’ ” So Evans trusted them and saw his videos instantly gain far more attention than on other social media. He’d been on the app for about a year when, on December 27, he uploaded his version of the 19th-century whaling sea shanty Wellerman. Within a couple of days it had attracted hundreds of thousands of views.

Queen’s Brian May and Andrew Lloyd Webber “duetted” it on guitar and piano respectively.

Today, the #SeaShanty has been viewed 5.9 billion times on TikTok, Evans has 1.3 million followers and his version’s been viewed half a billion times.

“Things went crazy,” says Evans. “I was walking about posting letters in the snow when my phone rang and it was Polydor Records.’ ” Within a fortnight he had a threealbum deal and had quit his job. By March, Evans had topped the UK charts. His new single is out shortly.

Music’s far from the only field where stars are born overnight. (Unlike YouTube, creators don’t earn royalties for their videos but depend on it leading to other opportunities.)

Abby Roberts, 19, from Leeds, has 16.5 million followers on the app. When I speak to her on Zoom, three minders hover in the background.

Her elaborate and often highly lockdownappropriate creations (think transforming herself into Tiger King’s Joe Exotic) have been “liked’” 1.3 billion times and led to her working on campaigns with Anastasia Beverly Hills and L’Oréal and being a guest judge on BBC 3’s beauty competition series Glow Up. She intends to move permanently to Los Angeles to pursue – among other things – her flourishing music career.

“My ultimate goal is to have my own make-up brand,” she tells me in her hybrid northern/transatlantic accent – few of her legions of US fans realise she’s British.

Chirpily, she tells me how her followers soared almost immediately she joined TikTok in 2019. “It was the third video I posted on there.

The next day I was off school sick and saw I’d had 100,000 views. I went back to sleep and the next time I looked I was hitting one million.”

Both in hoodies and with nose rings, nice-looking but not intimidatingly so and endearingly upbeat, Roberts and Evans come across as ideal “creators” in a world where authenticity is key. Relatability’s also what made Poppy O’Toole, 27, who turned to

An Abby Roberts make-up transformation

TikTok after being made redundant from her job as a junior sous chef during the first lockdown. “I’d always wanted to do some social media thing, but I was working 70-hour weeks, so there was no time.” In November her video on how to make the perfect roast potato went viral. Today she has 1.4 million followers and a cookbook due out in September. “No one minds when my Brummie accent occasionally comes out. I recently pronounced something wrong in a video and on some of the other platforms it was like I’d done something terrible, but on TikTok it was like, ‘Oh, actually, this is how we say it,’ and I was like, ‘Great!’ ” Increasingly people are using the app to educate as well as entertain. Clinical psychologist Dr Julie Smith, 37 and a mother of three, runs a private practice in Hampshire.

She joined TikTok in late 2019 and thinks she was the “first therapist on there”. Today, her

‘MY THIRD VIDEO HAD GOT 100,000 VIEWS SO I WENT TO SLEEP. WHEN I LOOKED AGAIN, IT WAS 1 MILLION’ 60-second videos on subjects such as anxiety or “three signs of depression no one tells you about” have been watched 31.5 million times, leading (there’s a theme here) to another book deal. Some carped that TikTok’s one-minute limit (they’ve recently raised the time limit to three minutes, but few are yet exploiting this) was too short properly to tackle such serious subjects. “You can’t give all the information in 60 seconds but you can give a bite. Learning one small piece of information that you can then retain is better than a half-hour video you don’t think of again. But the feedback has been fantastic,” Smith says.

But if it’s all so fabulous then why did my 14-year-old – whose friends, she says gloomily, are “all addicted” – last year delete the app? A keen cook, she’d been following accounts such as #WhatIeatinday. But her For You was soon full of emaciated girls showing off plates of three lettuce leaves and a carrot, or a viral craze in which girls were displaying how tiny their waists were by tying their headphone cables twice around them. Meanwhile, a friend who’d suffered from a lockdown eating disorder found her For You page full of

#thinspo accounts from people promoting anorexia and bulimia. My daughter decided she was better off not knowing.

Compared with some social media platforms, which have allowed such “pro-ana” content to sit around for months, TikTok’s trying hard to tackle these issues. When I search for #thinspo I’m sent straight to a page for an eating disorders helpline. But even as a digital dinosaur, I’m instantly able to subvert this and find page after page of ultra-skinny girls celebrating their weight loss (the headphones challenge is still out there, even if many such videos are scorned with #bullshit).

“We do not allow content that would either promote or glorify or even normalise eating disorders or eating habits that will lead to harmful behaviours,” says Alexandra Evans, TikTok’s head of child safety, Europe.

“TikToks are very short, so we already have built that diversity into the platform for business reasons instead of safety reasons and we give people quite a lot of agency about what they’re seeing.”

Evans points out there’s a “not interested” button you can click to remove any dodgy content, but how many teenagers are sensible enough to do this? Anyway, very often this isn’t about teenagers. TikTok’s 13+ rating means children shouldn’t be able to download it – but that’s only if parents have put filters on their phones. TikTok also has a “detection strategy” in place to bust those who’ve lied about their age when registering; during the first three months of the year it removed 7.3 million underage users.

But many young children will remain there with parents delighted by their electronic babysitter – not great when content such as a live streamed suicide (which many reposted after it appeared last year) occasionally busts through the barriers.

Others worry that, like other social media, TikTok is an ideal vehicle for fake news.

Memes supporting, for example, the Nazis, the IRA and the antivax movement have all at various times been posted and held some sway. In TikTok’s defence, however, most are quickly removed. More troubling were previous complaints that #protest throws up demonstrations from around the world, but almost none from Hong Kong. Yet when I check, there’s plenty of footage of tear-gassed protesters being led away by police.

Still, these are problems for all social media firms, not just TikTok. Meanwhile, my 16-year-old has just texted demanding I go to Marks & Spencer to pick up cocktail sausages and tzatziki for dinner, inspired by a TikTok video headlined, “When it’s picky bits for dinner but you’re painfully middle class.”

No matter how thorny the underlying issues, for now this app looks set to control my life – until the next one comes along. n The Times Magazine 35

The Vogue editor who grew up in a refugee camp

With her ten Somali brothers and sisters, Rawdah Mohamed spent her childhood in a Kenyan tented camp.

Now she is editor of a new Vogue magazine. The 29-year-old tells Julia Llewellyn Smith her extraordinary story

PORTRAITS Ole Martin Halvorsen Rawdah Mohamed wears jacket, trousers and shoes, Gucci. Left: blouse and trousers, Zimmermann; shoes, Attico. Styled by Alice Wang

PREVIOUS SPREAD: MAKE-UP: HINA SULEMAN. PRODUCTION: AMAR FAIZ/ID.STUDIO. POST-PRODUCTION: KIFFA. THIS PAGE: RAWDIS/INSTAGRAM, GETTY IMAGES

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s a child in a refugee camp, Rawdah Mohamed was allowed to buy one dress a year, for the festival of Eid. “I was obsessed by that dress. I would go around the tents and show it off,” she says. “When there was a wedding, I’d sneak into the tent to watch the colourful gowns the ladies were wearing. Fashion’s always helped me out of bad situations I’ve been in.”

Her family gained asylum in Norway when she was eight, where her passion for clothes continued. But she knew her chances of working in the fashion industry were almost nil.

“I come from a refugee background, so my family pushed me to have an academic career that would lead to a stable job. Then, on top of that, I’m a woman, I’m black, I’m wearing the hijab and my last name is Mohamed. So, a job in fashion? Forget it,” she says.

Certainly, until very recently, fashion has had a poor record for diversity. Magazines, in particular, were renowned for a particular type of editor: white, middle-aged and with a cultivated chilly aura – think US Vogue’s Anna Wintour’s sunglasses or German Vogue’s Christiane Arp with her platinum bun – that fed into a narrative of them being untouchable, the ultimate arbiters of taste.

But the past few years have seen many changes. UK Vogue’s Alexandra Shulman was replaced by a younger, black, gay man, Edward Enninful, while in the US, Samira Nasr became the first black editor of Harper’s Bazaar. Several other key posts (increasingly of digital titles) have been taken by young people from ethnic minorities, and the ethos now being pushed is nonhierarchical and all about approachability.

So now, Mohamed, 29, who until recently was working as a behavioural analyst with people with conditions such as autism, has the job of her dreams as editor of the new Vogue Scandinavia, launching this month, making her the first hijab-wearing person of colour at a western fashion magazine.

Before her appointment was announced, Mohamed had already made headlines, after the French government revealed in April it was considering banning the hijab for women under 18. Mohamed’s response was an Instagram selfie with “Hands off my hijab” written on her upheld palm. It went viral.

“The hijab ban is hateful rhetoric coming from the highest level of government,” she wrote.

Mohamed posted because she was exasperated by the justification that the hijab demeans women. Her argument is that it can be a symbol of expression not oppression. “No one’s ever asked if I want to wear the hijab; they always assume that I’m forced to do it. So many other people were speaking for me, but I’ve been silenced for so many years. You feel

Her viral Instagram self ie

, 2019 At the byTiMo show at Paris Fashion Week

HER INSTAGRAM SELFIE WITH ‘HANDS OFF MY HIJAB’ WRITTEN ON HER HAND WENT VIRAL like you’re screaming at deaf ears,” she says.

“No one’s listening.

“I’ve always been expected to be submissive to oppression, whether it was coming from my community, where there are all these rules of how Muslim women are supposed to be, or from the public. When you’re brought up in that environment, you just really get fed up. But now, with social media, I can speak to those who are willing to listen.”

Many assumed it was this stance that brought Mohamed to the attention of Vogue Scandinavia, but in fact, she’s been in the job since October. Her outspokenness (and charm) no doubt made her an attractive hire, but she was chosen primarily for her styling talents, which she’d been displaying for around five years on Instagram, where she has 141,000 followers, enchanted by her imaginative use of vintage or high street items, crazy patterns, cool sunglasses and hijabs.

At 2019 Paris Fashion Week, she wore a medieval chainmail headdress over her hijab. Young Muslim women (she also has a strong following in devout US Christian communities) loved how she expressed an individuality, while staying true to her faith’s demands for modesty.

“There’s this notion that when you come to the mosque, you shouldn’t obsess about how you look,” she says. “But I believe God loves beauty. If I want to wear a colourful skirt then I should be able to do so. Why should I wear just black just because everyone else does?”

Mohamed’s talking to me from her home outside Oslo. She’s wearing a white shirt and a black hijab. Friendly and frank, it’s immediately obvious she fits none of the boxes in which some would like to place her.

Extremely devout, she’s also liberal – a single mother (“Unfortunately, there’s still a stigma about that in the Somali community”) who is vocal about supporting, for example, trans Muslims. “My community does not accept them and it’s so disheartening. We should be a safe space for everyone because we know what it’s like to be excluded.”

One of 11 siblings (two adopted), Mohamed and her family were forced to flee the Somali civil war. She spent her early years in a camp in Kenya, living in a one-room tent with an outside toilet and cooking over an open fire.

“It was the only world I knew. My parents used to tell me how life was when there was peace: my father would go to work – he had an office job – my aunts would go to university.

I couldn’t imagine what it was like to be free.”

Still, she was happy. “It’s funny, the things that are traumatising to the adults but which I have fond memories of. When I share them with my mother, I can see in her face that she feels very differently about them to me. We’d have to stand for six hours in queues for food and sometimes you would still come home empty-handed, but I would fight with my siblings to stand in those queues. When we did get something the cans had no logos, so you never knew what you had. I found this really exciting. I’d hang over my father, saying, ‘What is it? Did I get something good like beans? Or did I get nasty tomato paste?’ ” When she was eight, her family moved to Norway. “My parents told me, ‘We’re going to go to a place where we don’t have to worry about food and you can go to proper school.’ ” Encountering the outside world for the first time, Mohamed was most excited by the variety of outfits she saw. “I remember at the airport my mum telling me to hurry up because I kept stopping. I was so mesmerised by everything. I wanted to look at these weirdlooking people and what they were wearing.

And escalators – I didn’t trust them!”

On arrival, they were placed in an asylum camp in a town of only 2,000 people, many The Times Magazine 39

GETTY IMAGES

of whom resented refugees. At school, many children had never seen a black person before.

“When I washed my hands, everyone gathered to see if my colour was coming off.

“I had this little dream that everything in Norway was going to be perfect and then it really wasn’t,” Mohamed continues. “In the refugee camp the thing that was scary was the men with guns, but you learnt how to manoeuvre around these dangerous people.

When they came into your house you just prayed they wouldn’t take your mum or dad.

You didn’t look at them; you tried to be invisible. But in Norway the people that were harming us were our neighbours, and it was much more scary because they were not in uniform, so you didn’t know what to look out for. I didn’t understand why Mum was forcing us to stay in the place where we felt so lonely.”

Suffering from post-traumatic stress, she developed “huge anxieties” and insomnia that led to her being prescribed sleeping pills.

Desperate to return to Africa, she frequently tried to run away. Immigration officials questioned her, away from her family, to ascertain if their story was genuine. “I’d say, ‘Why do you worry about the things that happened to me in my own country when you can’t even help me with what’s happening to me today? I’m still scared.’ ” Mohamed wore the hijab every now and then, as she pleased. But now she decided to wear it daily to school, as a riposte to authority figures telling her how oppressive it was. “It was the first time I’d heard this, [that] it was a cultural indoctrination. The teachers were asking if my mother had forced me to do it, saying, ‘In Norway, women are free. You can wear whatever you want.’ It felt like everyone was telling me how bad I had it in life. I wasn’t allowed to be proud of where I came from or even tell happy stories about it, and I thought my hijab looked good.”

But at school, the garment sparked “constant bullying. At first it was verbal abuse, then it got violent – they would take the hijab off in class. A teacher confiscated the hijab because he said it was disturbing the class, so I started bringing a spare.”

A meeting was called between Mohamed’s mother and six teachers, where it was agreed she could wear the hijab on the school bus but not in lessons. “So the next day I just didn’t go to school.” Her mother begged her to abandon the hijab for a quiet life. “It was one of the first big arguments I ever had with her. I said, ‘I can take it if the outside world doesn’t like me, but I need you to like me.’ So then she was on my side and told the school, ‘You just have to accept however she wants to come.’”

The situation grew worse. “There were posters in the local coffee shop saying refugees are not allowed and they drew me with, like, a monkey holding a banana.” Things finally

Somalis in Mandera refugee camp in northern Kenya

‘THE MANAGER SAID SHE COULDN’T HIRE A SOMALI GIRL, BECAUSE THAT WOULD SCARE THE CUSTOMERS’ eased after the family was allowed to leave the camp and live with Mohamed’s grandmother, who was already settled in Oslo. With time, she says, the hijab “just became part of my identity. It was who I was.”

As a teenager, Mohamed’s fascination with clothes grew and when she was 16 she sent her CV to all the boutiques in the local mall.

“But as soon as they saw me, the manager said she couldn’t hire a Somali girl, because that would scare the customers. So I stopped being interested in fashion.”

Mohamed decided to work in mental health. At 23, she gave birth to her daughter, but split up with the Norwegian father a few months later. (Her child, she says, will be under no obligation to wear a hijab.)

At home in the evenings with her baby, Mohamed started posting on Instagram her “eastern-western” outfits. As her following grew, she began to be asked to collaborate with brands and attend events. In 2019, she was signed by a model agency, with her healthcare employer granting her a flexible contract so she could combine the two careers.

Since then she’s modelled for the likes of MaxMara and Cartier, yet the transition wasn’t seamless. When she first attended Paris Fashion Week in 2019, Mohamed was upset by the big deal that security guards made of scrutinising her invitations to shows. “They didn’t believe someone in a hijab could have access to these events. Often, I’d have to call someone already inside to let me in.”

She’s been treated with contempt by PRs and casting directors. Some of the worst labels are those with a huge Arab and African client base (the Muslim fashion market is set to be worth £260 billion by 2023). “It’s so bizarre.”

The industry’s snootiness compared very

unfavourably with her healthcare background.

“It will for ever be shocking to me, the things these [fashion] people get away with.”

When Vogue Scandinavia approached Mohamed, she was interviewed by execs from New York-based publisher Condé Nast and the Swedish company Four North, which had licensed the title. “There’s a lot of tokenism in fashion – you’re hired because you tick, say, the Asian box. But one of the things that made me comfortable in this interview process was they knew how I styled and what fashion meant to me and the things that I tried to express through my clothing. It wasn’t just like, ‘Oh yay, she’s hijabi and black!’ It was one of the first times I felt I wasn’t there just for decoration, but for what I had to say.”

Generally, she’s wary that people will now treat her with too much reverence. “I don’t like it when people have too much power.

I’m supposed to break the barriers of what a person in a high position should act like.

Career-wise, it’s huge that I’m a fashion editor, but when I go on a shoot now it changes the whole dynamic. So if people don’t know I’m an editor, I like to keep it that way. Fashion is such an elitist industry and when you have this position everyone starts behaving differently.

If I make a mistake, people are not going to correct me, because everyone is so scared.”

It seems a bold move to be launching a new Vogue, even one that will only appear in print six times a year, when magazine-land is in terminal crisis – with legends such as Vogue Paris, Vogue España, Vogue Italia and German Vogue all now being run from a central London hub. But this Vogue is editorially independent from Condé Nast, and there’s no question that Scandi style has long been crying out for a showcase. “But what most people have seen so far is just one aspect of our style,” Mohamed says. “I’m hoping people will see all those stories coming out about our many cultures and not just the version of Scandinavia that French men like.”

What do French men like? “They believe good fashion comes from the Italians or French and what they like from us is very minimalist.

But Scandinavians have all these other patterns – we can be extremely colourful.”

Even today, Mohamed says, “The industry gatekeepers still don’t like me, because I talk too much. I haven’t learnt to sugarcoat things.

It’s fine; we get by.” If she has wobbles, she remembers the autistic patients she still works with voluntarily in her spare time. “People are always trying to force them to fit into our society, but they are so honest and authentic.

In fashion you can’t even say you love something because you’re so afraid of being judged. We have a long way to go.”

Mohamed smiles. “But I was silenced when I was eight years old. It’s not going to happen again.” n The Times Magazine 41

THE

VAX MAN One billion doses. An unprecedented scientific feat.

Fifteen months ago the Oxford jab’s Professor Sarah Gilbert (below) asked AstraZeneca to embark on the most ambitious vaccine manufacturing programme in history. Step forward, Per Alfredsson. Luckily, he’s a very calm Swede. Interview by Tom Whipple

PORTRAITS Tom Jackson, Evan Pantiel

Per Alfredsson, 51, at the AstraZeneca facility in Gärtuna, Sweden. Opposite: Professor Sarah Gilbert, 59

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GETTY IMAGES

n May 2020, a group of scientists at Oxford University loaded three 30ml and five 6ml tubes into a small polystyrene box, and carefully packed them in dry ice.

This box was then given to a courier who specialised in temperature-controlled shipping, and driven to Heathrow. There was no unusual security for this – no outriders, no armed guards. Yet it was almost certainly the most important package on the move in the world at the time.

From Heathrow, the eight tubes, which contained billions of viral particles, the result of months of work by a team led by a scientist called Professor Sarah Gilbert, were flown to Washington Dulles airport in the USA. From Dulles airport, they began the final leg of their journey, to Gaithersburg, Maryland, just across the border from Washington. There, Per Alfredsson was waiting to receive them.

At that point, Oxford University’s role in making their vaccine had ended, and Alfredsson’s had begun. The Oxford scientists had made enough doses of vaccine to carry out the early trials, and to prove it could – in theory – be mass-produced. Now he had to make enough to vaccinate half the world.

Sometimes, the bottleneck occurs in actual bottle necks.

For a while, rubber stoppers were Per Alfredsson’s nemesis. The AstraZeneca vicepresident had everything else he needed, but if he couldn’t find more stoppers to put in vials, he realised, his whole operation was in jeopardy.

It was a few months after that delivery and he was in charge of the most ambitious vaccine manufacturing operation in the history of his company and – at least until that year – in the history of the world.

It involved a product that used the latest genetic technology, that had the backing of the world’s leading governments, and that was gearing towards a production line that could turn out 80 doses a second from 25-plus factories in more than 15 countries.

Yet the entire operation was threatened because he and his small team couldn’t source little bits of rubber.

That was just that week. Other weeks it was the plastic containers they used as bioreactors, or the little clips they needed to hold tubing together. Filters were a particular problem too. Everyone wanted them. They are needed for all sorts of chemical processes – including the kind of chemical processes suddenly crucial in a pandemic. “You can just imagine the surge in demand.”

We know about the scientists who tweaked the vaccine vectors and used fiendishly clever research to design a vaccine in record time.

A vaccine in a laboratory is useless, though.

Manufacturing fast and at scale requires its own kind of cleverness – and provides

44 The Times Magazine

challenges that can seem, in their own way, equally insurmountable.

Alfredsson, though, surmounted. So it was that, ultimately, the vaccines kept on coming.

It was never guaranteed that they would.

At the end of last month, the billionth stopper was put on the billionth vial, and a company that had previously been a very minor player in vaccines took a big step towards fulfilling its stated mission: to provide a vaccine for the world.

Sixteen months ago, when the OxfordAstraZeneca vaccine was still just the Oxford vaccine, the only doses produced had been made ad hoc. Dr Catherine Green, who helped run the university’s manufacturing, described their operation as a bit like a small restaurant. “We were essentially a family-run pizzeria, doing everything ourselves,” she says.

They made nice pizza; people appreciated their pizza. But to make a difference they needed to partner with their own Pizza Express.

They needed a pharmaceutical company.

At around that time – the time that half the world was in lockdown – Per Alfredsson was standing in a car park in Maryland when his phone rang.

It was his boss. “He said, ‘We are looking at this vaccine from Oxford University that we are thinking about partnering with... Could you have a look at it, what do you think?’ ” Blond, tall and perfectly bilingual, Alfredsson, 51, exudes the sort of effortless Scandinavian competence you would want in a moody detective investigating Arctic Circle murders or, say, in the manager of a vaccine logistics operation.

“My role is a bit like a football coach,” is how Alfredsson puts it. “We have a fantastic team of people. They’re really, really good at what they’re doing. I’m not an expert at all.

My role is really to make sure that everyone can do their best.”

In that phone call, he was being asked to take part in his own World Cup final. Did he think they could do it?

Making a vaccine is not like making cans of Coke. You can’t just take, for example, your Fanta processing plant, switch the ingredients and get going. Different vaccines have very different requirements and the process has lots of stages, each of which can go wrong.

At points in this process, such as when you are coaxing cells and trying to, in Alfredsson’s words, make them “happy”, it is closer to animal husbandry than manufacturing.

He went through what would be required.

AstraZeneca isn’t big on vaccines, but there are other drugs it makes that have similarities in terms of manufacturing to the one Oxford was producing. “I was looking at it and thinking, ‘Can we scale the process? What do we need to do in this process? Do we have

the materials and equipment we need? Is it feasible to get hold of enough capacity? How strange is this process really? How strange are the things that we need?’ ” He said yes.

Ten days after the phone call, the company had signed with Oxford. “From there on, we have never stopped.”

“I was number two, three – maybe four – on the programme. It took us just two months to get to at least 700. It was very much begging, stealing, borrowing people.”

It wasn’t hard though.

“It was so great to see everyone rallying to this cause. I’ve never worked in an environment where if you ask for something people say, ‘Of course. And, by the way, I have someone else that could help you too.’ ” The Oxford vaccine is what is known as an adenoviral vectored vaccine. Vaccines work by presenting your body’s immune system with something that looks like a pathogen or part of a pathogen, but which isn’t. The first smallpox vaccine, for instance, was cowpox – a related virus, relatively benign. Cowpox had enough similarities to smallpox that, if you learnt to fight it off, then afterwards you were protected from both.

Adenovirus vaccines are part of a new generation of “platform” technologies that are a bit different. Unlike cowpox, the adenovirus that gives the vaccine its name does not itself look anything at all like the coronavirus. It is as evolutionarily distant from it, in fact, as you are from a halibut.

Instead, it holds the genetic instructions to make something that does look like the coronavirus. When the vaccine is injected, the adenovirus does what viruses tend to do, and infects your cells. Once inside, it does what viruses tend not to do – it doesn’t replicate.

Rather than hijacking your own cells to copy itself, it has been genetically engineered to instruct the cells to make copies of the coronavirus spike protein, churning them out.

The principle is ingenious. So too, though, must be the manufacturing.

After signing, Oxford sent over everything AstraZeneca needed, in those eight tubes. It wasn’t much. “They were small bars, like small protein bars,” he says, holding up two fingers to demonstrate the size.

Some of the frozen bars were the “viral seed”, the adenovirus whose descendants would end up in their billions in each of the billion doses made so far. Some of them were a very specific line of cryogenically frozen cells.

A key problem facing Alfredsson was that he had to make trillions of copies of an adenovirus that had been specifically designed so that it would not make copies of itself.

The entire claim to safety for the vaccine was that the virus it used was “benign”, that

Emmanuel Macron, who questioned the jab’s effectiveness at the start of the year

between it and a pizza recipe is that this one is 1,000 pages long.

Alfredsson, as you might have guessed, is not originally from the USA. When we speak, he is in his home country of Sweden. He returned for the midnight sun of the midsummer festivities. He also returned to see his family.

They had moved with him to the USA, but when the pandemic began they left for the more laissez-faire coronavirus policies of Sweden, where his teenaged daughter could continue her schooling.

He is far from the only member of the AstraZeneca team to have made such sacrifices.

There have been hard moments. There have been fires, floods and national strikes.

There have been rubber stoppers.

Each time the supply chain was threatened, he and his team hit the phones – or, just as likely, Zoom. That was when something astonishing, for him at least, happened. “If you

‘I’VE NEVER SEEN IT IN THE INDUSTRY BEFORE. EVERYONE CAME TOGETHER TO DO THE RIGHT THING’ it had been deactivated in such a way that it could not reproduce. This meant there was no risk of it causing its own infection.

Now he had to reactivate it. How? This was where the cells came in. The virus had been genetically engineered no longer to have the tools required for replication. The cells in those frozen bars had been engineered to contain the missing tools. Together, they were a lock and a key. These were the only cells in the world in which it could infect and spread.

Alfredsson likes Green’s pizza analogy.

“It’s a very complex pizza with a lot of ingredients on.” He had a method from them for growing the human cells, infecting them, then harvesting the adenovirus. But it was too fiddly. “It was a small-scale, artisanal setting – and what we need to do is think, how can we do millions and billions of pizzas?

We needed to take it to an industrial scale.”

Yet while doing so, they also had to maintain the kind of flexibility that you don’t associate with industry. “This is a biologics process… We need to really treat the cells so they are happy, and make sure they are happy.” The happiness of cells is the reason that, still, there is huge variation in what some manufacturing plants can produce.

“It’s important to understand it’s not, ‘A + B always becomes C’.”

In the end, what he had was a recipe to tell each of the factories they were working with how to make the vaccine. The difference

look at our supply partners, they are normally competitors.” This year, they haven’t behaved like it. “We reached out to companies and they would say, ‘No, we can’t do it, but we know this company and I have contacts with this one.’ ” Alfredsson is senior vice-president of Global Biologics Operations at AstraZeneca, with 24 years’ experience in Big Pharma, but he had never experienced this. “I’ve never seen it in the industry before, everyone coming together. Everyone wants to do the right thing.”

The hardest moments, though, have been not acts of God but acts of governments – and journalists.

It has been when Emmanuel Macron, the French president, was saying it didn’t work; when the German press was claiming, incorrectly, the vaccine had minimal efficacy in older people; when the company itself, which was producing the vaccine at cost, was being criticised for its trials.

“From time to time, you know, you feel a bit sad. You know that everyone has done their part, that hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people are sacrificing their family lives and may not see their kids at all. And then you read things in the paper. It can be really, really tough for people.”

That was the bad. There has been more than enough good to counteract it. “It’s been everything from small, handwritten notes saying, ‘Thank you, thank you, for allowing me to meet my grandkids again.’ There was a really nice video from a trust in Africa,

where they were vaccinating with our doses and saying, ‘You’re helping us. Thank you.’ ” He saw the video of Gilbert, creator of the Oxford vaccine, getting a standing ovation at Wimbledon. “That was so good. I was so happy.”

For all his pride, the antibodies currently swilling round Alfredsson’s body are not branded Oxon. Because he lives and works in the USA, he received a different jab – Moderna. People sometimes ask him if he minds this, but he really doesn’t.

His is one story of many, in a pandemic that has seen the best of humanity. He is one of a team that manufactured the vaccine, itself part of an operation of scientists, trialists and regulators that has compressed ten years of development into one. And that’s just their vaccine.

There are other Per Alfredssons for Moderna and Pfizer. There are other Per Alfredssons too for Merck and the Pasteur Institute – although we don’t hear much about them these days.

It is difficult to remember now, but the success of the AstraZeneca vaccine was never assured. Throughout last summer and autumn, Alfredsson and his team did not allow themselves to think about what would happen had it failed.

“We needed to drive as hard as we could, because if it works, we just needed to have as much vaccine there as early as possible. There was no discussion about what we should do if it doesn’t work. It was like, ‘Go, go, go, go, go.’

Because the opposite would not have been the right thing to do.”

For other vaccines, that was also the case. That some of them, such as Merck and Pasteur’s, failed is not their fault; most do. The world needed many vaccines so that some could succeed, and it needed people going full tilt at manufacturing even when all they had was hope – and the knowledge, at the back of their mind, that they were one lottery ticket of many for the world.

So, in that sense, Alfredsson is lucky to still be taking calls from four continents and many more time zones, to still be working as hard as he has ever worked before. He is also, though, looking forward to a return to normality. That time is, he thinks, coming. Mind you, he has thought that for a while.

“I’m always an optimist. My wife tells me I say, ‘No, don’t worry. After summer everything will be back to normal.’ And then, after the summer, of course it is not back to normal.

I continue on that three to six-month cycle.

“I think it will be hard work. We have so much more to do, so many more countries to support. When I look back on this, I feel very proud of what we have achieved as a team. It is a once in a career thing to do. Hopefully...

I hope we don’t get another pandemic.” n The Times Magazine 45

THE OTHER FENNELL GIRL One sister, Emerald, is the writer, director, actress and Oscar winner. Her younger sibling, Coco, has her own cult fashion label, loved by the A-list. Is there no end to the family’s talents? Charlie Gowans-Eglinton finds out PORTRAIT Diana Gomez

Coco Fennell, 33, at home in London. Left: with her sister, Emerald, left, at the launch of one of their mother Louise’s novels

HAIR AND MAKE-UP: JO LORRIMER AT DAVID ARTISTS USING BOBBI BROWN AND BUMBLE AND BUMBLE. CLOTHES, COCO FENNELL. PREVIOUS SPREAD AND THIS PAGE: GETTY IMAGES

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n any other living room, Coco Fennell’s electric blue hair might stand out. But in her own, next to a 6ft red plastic rocket ship magazine rack that sits beside the navy velvet sofa, or under a pendant light stamped “Fish & Chips” that hangs in the kitchen, and paired with a pink gingham dress of her own design and cowboy boots, it seems perfectly natural. Fennell rents out her house for photoshoots, featuring the jukebox, arcade games, neon wall lights and wallpaper printed with strawberries.

But this is her home first and foremost, decorated by her and entirely to her taste: “I want my house to look like a diner-cum-rodeo.”

A few days after we meet she’ll be hosting a few friends for a dinner party to mark her 33rd birthday.

“They always say, ‘This is the best thing you’ve ever heated up,’ because I just get something from [frozen meal chain] Cook.”

Coco Fennell’s fashion brand (the dresses are her own designs) is in its tenth year. She started out with £1,000 and what she earned from working simultaneously as a graphic designer, growing the business into her fulltime job and a brand worn by Rihanna, Kylie Minogue, Liz Hurley and Holly Willoughby.

It’s a one-woman operation by choice; she does everything from design to packing orders.

The Fennells are an extremely successful – and stylish and well-connected – family. Coco’s parents are Theo, the jewellery designer, and author Louise, who it turns out is something of a style influence. “Back in the day, she would always have a beehive and big black sunglasses and gold jewellery. She looked like Patsy from Ab Fab.” Family friends include Sirs Elton John and Andrew Lloyd Webber.

And then there’s the older of the two Fennell sisters, the actor, director, writer and now Oscar winner Emerald Fennell, 35, who played Camilla in series three and four of The Crown on Netflix and Nurse Patsy in the BBC’s Call the Midwife.

She took over as head writer and showrunner on Killing Eve from Phoebe Waller-Bridge, a friend whom she met on the set of the film Albert Nobbs in 2011.

The Oscar was for best original screenplay for the 2020 film Promising Young Woman, a poster for which is hanging in Coco’s hallway.

Emerald was the first woman to win in that category since 2007, and was also the first British woman to be nominated for the best director Oscar – all the more staggering given it was her directorial debut.

Its star, Carey Mulligan, was nominated for best actress.

48 The Times Magazine

The sisters with Hugh Grant. Below: dresses from Coco’s collection, available at cocofennell.com

‘EMERALD WAS ACADEMIC AND I WAS MORE ARTY. BUT WE’RE VERY SIMILAR’ It won a slew of other awards earlier this year, among them a gong for Nancy Steiner at the Costume Designers Guild Awards, and two of those fashion moments are of Coco’s making: on screen, Carey Mulligan wears both a rose-print dress and an illustrated baseball shirt from her label. The designer and her mother wore duplicates of the shirt to watch the Oscars on TV (along with Theo and Coco’s boyfriend, the comedian John Robins).

“We stayed up until five in the morning watching it; not a party, but as much as one can have a party of four people. We did have a pretty nice dinner and we were like, ‘How the hell are we going to stay up?’

Had to mainline Haribo to keep us awake. And then it was just so exciting.”

Coco spent lockdowns 1 and 2 with her parents in the house that the Fennells rent long-term in Hampshire – “We’re like The Brady Bunch.”

She’s back in London now that she can work from the studio space that she shares with five photographers. Emerald visited from Los Angeles between lockdowns with her family. (She’s married to director Chris Vernon, and was seven months pregnant with her first child during Promising

Young Woman’s 23-day shoot, and expecting her second while accepting her Oscar in April.)

How is her sister coping with her new level of fame? “Her life is so normal that it’s not a thing. Nothing’s really changed. Everything’s as it was – apart from we’re incredibly proud.”

The Fennell sisters grew up in Chelsea, west London, “during the week”, spending the rest of the time at the house in the country.

Both attended boarding school: Emerald went to Marlborough in Wiltshire, whose alumni include Princess Eugenie and the Duchess of Cambridge, while Coco attended Bryanston in Dorset, one of the more bohemian public schools. “She was just more academic and I was more arty.” Bryanston’s former pupils include Lucian Freud, Sir Terence Conran and Cerys Matthews. In that sort of atmosphere, any Fennell rebelliousness was little more than what any other pupil got up to.

Emerald went from school to Oxford to study English, where she was spotted by an agent while performing in a play. Coco was never tempted to follow her into acting.

“We’re very close and very similar. But I would be so scared to do that. If someone told me to act, even now in front of you, I would start sobbing. It’s so cool, but not for me.”

But she did follow her sister to Oxford.

The town, not the university. “I wanted to be in a university town to have the experience, but I didn’t really know what I wanted to do, so I didn’t want to piss away three years.

And so I thought, ‘Oh, that looks fine!’ ” “That” was a six-month secretarial course.

“I was just so awful at it. So hungover all the time. After school I did a smorgasbord of courses that I was terrible at. I did a cooking course – it was very bad. I still can’t cook an omelette. I did the secretarial course, which I was also terrible at. And then I did a really amazing graphic design course, and that was when I started working and art-directing, and it was at that point, when I was 22, that I then started my brand.”

She isn’t the partygoer one might assume she would be, bearing in mind a 2012 “Queens of the Scene” profile in Tatler (which also covered Emerald’s 18th birthday). “I’m too shy.

I’ve never been very good at those fashion parties. And I don’t drink so I feel like there’s that part of it. It just makes me too anxious.”

Her brand’s tenth year comes after one where “I’ve sort of been on standby”. A homeware line might be in the works, and Coco’s definition of “on standby” is clearly different to most other people’s – she took a psychotherapy course last year and is weighing up a further qualification. The year before that, it was circus trapeze. Was she any good, I ask, noting the Big Top red and white stripes hung as a canopy over her dining table. “No, and it’s so sad,” she says, laughing. “Because all I have ever dreamt of is to be in the circus.” n

Shop!

20 DRESSES TO BUY NOW Puff sleeves, square necks and long, swishy skirts make for loose, relaxed style this summer

By Hannah Skelley

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6. £145, kitristudios.com. 7. £245, Rixo (net-a-porter.com). 8. £165, Kitri (flannels.com). 9. £89, neverfullydressed.co.uk. 10. £425, Sea (net-a-porter.com).

11. £595, the vampireswife.com. 12. £57, faithfullthebrand.com. 13. £60, oliverbonas.com. 14. £149, cocofennell.com.

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The Times Magazine 49

Pout! THE 20 BEST SUN CREAMS

Our beauty expert Nadine Baggott selects her favourite, lightest, easiest to use sun

THE MUST-HAVE SPF50 1 Garnier Ambre Solaire Super UV Anti-Dark Spots & Anti-Pollution Face Fluid SPF50 (£7; boots.com) Look no further than this renamed but still the same light fluid, launched last summer to much applause and with good reason. Sits well under make-up – simply wear it in place of your everyday moisturiser.

Ultra Violette Supreme Screen Hydrating 2Facial Skinscreen SPF50

ALESSANDRA FIORINI/THE LICENSING PROJECT

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here is so much brouhaha around SPFs – which factor to choose, which chemical to opt for (and yes, they are all chemicals; everything is made up of chemicals, even the air you breathe and food you eat) – that it can be easy to find sun protection confusing.

But the simple truth is that you need to protect your skin from the sun because not only is skin cancer on the increase but the sun ages your skin, causing wrinkles, lines, sagging and pigmentation. So let me do the hard work for you and choose the top 20 lightest, most pleasant to use SPFs. Now lie back and enjoy the sun – and don’t apply sun filter as a highlighter like Gwyneth Paltrow. Slather it on all over.

50 The Times Magazine

(£34; spacenk.com) This is the hottest SPF range to launch this year in the UK, and this is the dream: light, doesn’t pill under make-up and dries to a demi-matte non-greasy finish. Ultra Violette also has a mineral sunscreen that dries matte (£34) and an SPF30 (£32).

Saltee Daily Protection Formula 3SPF50 (£29; saltee.co.uk) Superlight, this has a primer-like feel to it and over a vitamin C serum is all you need for summer.

Partners will love it too.

La Roche-Posay Anthelios Age Correct 4SPF50 (£25; boots.com) This is a great option for anyone with sunspots/ age spots/liver spots – call them what you want, we know when we have them. It is loaded with hyaluronic acid to hydrate and vitamin B3, and, for good reasons, dermatologists love this brand.

Lancaster Sun Sensitive 5Oil-Free Fluid SPF50

Pro Protect Soft Focus Fixing 9SprayRevolution SPF30 (£8;

(£22; next.co.uk) I know what you’re thinking: oh, Lancaster, the brand famous for its low SPFs and celebration of tanning. Well, not any more, and this oil-free lotion is ideal for oily and breakout-prone skins.

revolutionbeauty.com) This is only 50ml, but that makes it perfect to pop in your pocket or bag. Don’t rely on any top-up SPF as your primary protection, but for on the run in the sun this is great.

TOP-UP OPTIONS

We sweat; we touch our faces; SPFs can wear off and wear out – so try these on-the-go top-up sun protection factors.

Brush On Block SPF30 (£40; 6brushonblocksunscreen.co.uk) This is a powder mineral sunscreen that knocks back sweat and adds SPF. The minerals are silvery so it’s not great for darker skin tones but it does come in a warmer shade for anyone with olive to mid-toned complexions.

Garnier Ambre Solaire Over Make-up 7Super UV Protection Mist SPF50 (£6; lookfantastic.com) You know that caught out over a long lunch, exercising in the park or taking the dog for a walk feeling? Then this light mist is small enough to carry with you and is the perfect top-up SPF. Coola Make-up Setting Spray Organic 8Sunscreen SPF30 (£30; spacenk.com) It’s a clever idea to add sun filters to foundation setting sprays because make-up slides in the heat, so why not kill two birds with one stone, or solve two problems in one spritz?

BEST SPF30 FORMULATIONS It’s much easier to find a pleasant SPF30 in a lotion, cream, even a mousse, and most certainly a physical/mineral formula for sensitive skins, than it is an SPF50. Apply enough of it and you will still protect your skin.

PS that’s a quarter of a teaspoon for your face, by the way.

La Roche-Posay Hyalu B5 10 Aquagel SPF30 (£34.50; boots.com) Take a cult hyaluronic acid serum, add SPF30 and, bingo, you have the bestselling SPF of summer 2021. A watery gel, this is ideal for anyone who truly hates SPF. Bliss Block Star Invisible Daily Sunscreen SPF30 11 (£19.99; boots.com) Welcome Bliss skincare back to the UK with this gorgeous matte-finish, soft-focus daily SPF lotion. Supersize it for the body and it truly would be all you need.

Evy Daily UV Face Mousse SPF30 12 (£25; evy.uk.com) Imagine a mousse that hydrates and protects your skin. This is the dream brand for anyone who dislikes lotions or creams.

FOR THE SUMMER protection – to wear under make-up and on the beach and intense treatments so it’s superlight and a dream to apply.

FOR THE BODY

The simple rule for your body is if you can spray it, it will be nicer to use, because the formula must be light enough to get through the pinprick nozzle. Here are the spray-and-go options.

‘This is a great cream for those of us with sun spots, age spots/liver spots – call them what you want, we know when we have them’

Eucerin Sensitive Protect Sun Spray 17 SPF50 (£16.99; boots.com) Eucerin makes great skincare and its suncare is ideal for the whole family: spray and rub in, and it dries in seconds with no stickiness.

Piz Buin Allergy Sun Sensitive Skin Spray 18 SPF50 (£8; boots.com) A good option for anyone who suffers from suninduced allergies like polymorphic light eruption (those itchy tiny bumps you can get from sun exposure).

There are body products and higher SPFs in the range too. You need more of it to compensate for the air in the formula (a golfballsized spray for face and neck), but it’s a sheer joy to apply and use.

Fenty Skin Hydra Vizor Invisible 13 Moisturizer SPF30 (£32, with refills for £28; boots.com) Who knew a pop star could come up with such great skincare?

Rihanna has worked her formulating chemists hard to create a light, refillable and gorgeous daily SPF that doesn’t leave a white ghosting cast. Trust me and try it.

BEST SENSITIVE SKIN OPTIONS If you’re sensitive to traditional sun filters, search out a mineral sunscreen. There are some great options, and if they are tinted it’s because the titanium and zinc dioxide used are silvery white.

Drunk Elephant Umbra Tinte Physical Daily 14 Defense (£29; spacenk.com) This is a gorgeous golden colour so can be used in place of make-up (if you apply enough, and that’s 2mg per sq cm of skin, so a quarter teaspoon for face, another for neck, etc).

Dr Dennis Gross Skincare All 15 Physical Lightweight Wrinkle Defense SPF30 (£46; cultbeauty.co.uk) Dr Gross is a US dermatologist and they like mineral SPFs because they suit all skins, even the most sensitive, and can even be used post-procedure.

This genuinely leaves no white ghosting on any skin tone.

Vichy Capital Soleil 19 Solar Protective Water SPF50 (£18.99; superdrug.com) This feels like a light, watery serum, hydrates skin and dries to a soft touch in seconds.

Garnier Ambre Solaire Kids Sensitive Anti20 Sand Spray SPF50 (£7;

Dermalogica Invisible Physical 16 Defense SPF30 (£49;

groceries.asda.com) If sand doesn’t stick to it then it’s guaranteed to be dry-touch. This spray is ideal for everyone and won’t break the budget. n

dermalogica.co.uk) Again, this was formulated to be used right after facials, peels

You can find @nadinebaggott on Instagram and YouTube where she answers your beauty questions The Times Magazine 51

Eating out

Where to take the kids (and keep Giles happy too) Posh pizzas, proper burgers, perfect chips. Esther Walker reveals the places all the Corens like to go. Not just her husband

TOM JACKSON

I

didn’t go to a restaurant other than McDonald’s until I was 14. My parents didn’t really see the point of restaurants even in their own lives, let alone mine.

Their attitude was, “Why on earth would you pay all that money when you can cook perfectly good food at home, and even eat in front of the telly if there’s a Second World War documentary on?”

My first trip to a proper restaurant was to Foxtrot Oscar in Chelsea in 1995, with some glamorous new friends who hadn’t quite cottoned on to how unglamorous I was yet.

I had no idea what was going on. I didn’t quite comb my hair with my fork, but it wasn’t far off. Is that my napkin or yours? How do I ask, without causing myself maximum embarrassment, if I have to pay for this bread?

Will I be expected to drink wine when I’d actually just like a lemonade?

By the time I met Giles, when I was 27, I still hadn’t really got the hang of it all. I wasn’t “into” food; my dinner when I was at home was often a microwaveable macaroni cheese from Marks & Spencer. My favourite restaurant was Strada, where I could have the bresaola, drink tap water and be out for £7.

And then suddenly restaurants were my entire life. Not only that, they were restaurants that I’d only read about in newspapers: Dishoom; Roka; Nobu; the Ivy; the Wolseley.

It took some getting used to. I ate and drank far too much, keen to fill my boots before Giles too realised how unglamorous I was.

I had just about got my head round napkins, fork tines and side plates when my children came along, and as well as teaching them to read and the fundamentals of cricket, Giles is keen that they have a gastronomic education as well.

But like most children, mine are suspicious of all food they haven’t seen 40 times before.

Getting something new into them feels like you’re cajoling them to try poison. The look on poor Giles’s face when Kitty, aged 2, rejected a har gau dumpling (the food of the gods as

52 The Times Magazine

far as he is concerned) would have been sad if I hadn’t been busy laughing at his hubris.

From then, the pattern was set. I am a superpractical Eeyore about taking the children to restaurants. “We’ve got one hour to get in and out,” I bark. “I’ve brought their iPads just in case.” I don’t ever really relax until their food has arrived, and even then a clock starts ticking in my head.

Giles is a delusional optimist, believing despite all experience informing him to the contrary that our children will try strangelooking things and make polite conversation.

Sometimes this combined attitude works out fine and sometimes there is a violent clash of expectations at which point we usually have to tip heavily and leave.

I do like children and I’m especially fond of mine, but quite often I think that everyone might be happier if they were eating a cheese toastie at home with a babysitter.

But when I absolutely must take my children to a restaurant, here are my favourites.

The School House Mothecombe, Devon (01752 830552; schoolhouse-devon.com) Top-notch spicy seafood, burgers and fabulous chips five minutes’ walk from the pictureperfect Mothecombe Beach. Very relaxed and plenty of running-about space in good weather, cosy nooks for when it’s raining.

The School House

Eric’s Fish and Chips

Kkini 131 Fortess Road, London NW5 (020 7485 0369; kkini-korean-restaurant.business.site) This Korean restaurant has introduced us all to “KFC” (Korean Fried Chicken), kimchi pancakes and galbitang. The spicy pork bao buns are excellent and every table has a hot plate for DIY barbecue. The staff are as unfazed by children as they are by everything else.

Soutine 60 St John’s Wood High Street, London NW8 (020 3926 8448; soutine.co.uk)

Roth Bar and Grill

cosy blankets and heaters and your children’s food orders will be put through first and at the speed of light.

Pizzatipi Cambrian Quay, Cardigan, West Wales (01239 612259; pizzatipi.co.uk) Ambitiously thin and crispy pizzas in an inside/outside dining space at a lovely riverside location. This place seems to have been designed with children in mind, with wide, gravelled boulevards separating dining areas.

Not a breakable item in sight.

Eric’s Fish and Chips Drove Orchards, Thornham, Norfolk (01485 525886; ericsfishandchips.com) The queues in summer are long but worth it for perfectly battered fish. An ideal pit-stop after a morning visit to the arcade at Wellsnext-the-Sea. Last time I went, there was even a little playground.

At the Chapel 28 High Street, Bruton, Somerset (01749 814070; atthechapel.co.uk) This just tips over into fine dining but, if you reckon your children can sit still for that bit longer, this is a wonderful space with a terrific, buzzy atmosphere. The pizzas and burgers are outstanding.

In fact, any of the Corbin & King group restaurants are surprisingly excellent for all but the most unmanageable children. The trick is to hit them up at an odd time. At brunch, for example, or 5pm. King and Corbin run such a tight ship that children are simply swept along in the whole clockwork efficiency of it.

Pizza East, various locations pizzaeast.com When our local branch of Pizza East shut two years ago, we all cried. We used to go every Friday evening and my children would scramble to sit at the counter to watch their pizzas being made. Our favourite waitress used to bring me a very cold glass of gavi without even being asked, which is certainly one way of coping with the under-tens.

The Red Lion and Sun 25 North Road, London N6 (020 8340 1780; theredlionandsun.com) This little gem tucked away in Highgate

outdid itself in lockdown, creating an enormous covered inside/outside eating area lit with heaters when it was chilly. There is an excellent children’s menu and everyone who works there is always extremely cheerful.

The Lamb Inn High Street, Shipton Under Wychwood, Oxfordshire (01993 832116; thelambshipton.com) Slightly older children will enjoy leaving the table and wandering up the lane next to this pub in order to check out the little babbling brook, which in spring and summer will have ducklings on it. As well as a children’s menu the kitchen is happy to edit any of the grownup dishes, within reason.

The Old Butchers 7 Park Street, Stow-on-the-Wold, Gloucestershire (01451 831700; theoldbutchers.squarespace.com) Any of the four tables outside this family-run Cotswolds restaurant is the best seat in the house when you’ve got children. There are

Roth Bar and Grill Durslade Farm, Dropping Lane, Bruton, Somerset (01749 814700; rothbarandgrill.co.uk) Weekend lunches here at this big, airy barn room are a proper family affair. There is enough of a boisterous scene to make parents feel like life is not over yet and plenty of choice for young palates.

Singapore Garden 83 Fairfax Road, London NW6 (020 7328 5314; singaporegarden.co.uk) When my family are happy, we all go to Singapore Garden; when we’re sad, we all go to Singapore Garden. Any dishes can be edited to suit, but even my fussy children have multiple favourites from this menu. My son once ate so much here that he was sick.

Five Guys, various locations fiveguys.co.uk I don’t know if it’s the bottomless monkey nuts, the bottomless drinks, the very potatoey chips or the supremely tasty burgers (frankly with or without the beef patty) that make us love Five Guys so much. It’s probably all four. n Giles Coren is away The Times Magazine 53

LIFESTYLE

LIFESTYLE

LIFESTYLE

LIFESTYLE

Beta male Robert Crampton

TOM JACKSON

‘Now I’ve got a burner phone, do I look like Jason Bourne?’

Keen fantasist as I am, I’ve always wanted a burner phone, and now I’ve got one.

Old-school Nokia, pay-as-you-go, doesn’t do much but handy for making calls that they – whoever “they” are – can’t trace back to you. It’s not quite the full go-bag in a Swiss safety deposit box (false passports, highdenomination banknotes in various currencies, handgun, spare ammo clip) but it’s a start.

Double-Oh Crampo!

“OK,” I said to my son Sam in the kitchen, “imagine we’re in Waterloo station and you’re my contact. I need to get in touch without any watching spooks or potential assassins clocking it. So, we’re going to walk towards each other.

You’re unaware of who I am.”

Long pause.

“Who are you then?”

“I’m Bourne, of course!”

“Fair enough,” said Sam, and did as I asked.

Drawing level, I attempted to slip the burner into Sam’s trousers. It snagged. I tried again. He kept walking. I chased after him, wrestling with the phone against the lining of Sam’s pocket. He speeded up. I let go of the phone, half in, half out. It clattered to the floor, battery, Sim card and handset scattering away under various white goods.

“Call me,” I muttered out of the side of my mouth, trying to keep the scenario alive, even though fair’s fair, my cover was by that point pretty much blown sky high.

“Smooth moves, Jason,” said Sam. I’ve never been any good at doing cool stuff, either long ago to impress girls or, latterly, my children. I can’t cycle no-handed for more than a couple of wobbly, heart-stopping seconds.

When I tried to open a beer bottle with a cigarette lighter, I gashed the webbing on my thumb. I can’t juggle, do card tricks, dance, sing, play guitar or wiggle my ears. When I once back-flicked a drawer shut with my foot, all élan, joie de vivre, je ne sais quoi and French words like that, I pulled my hamstring.

I can’t even whistle. This was a problem at school because back then it was commonly held that not being able to whistle meant you were homosexual. The good old days, eh?

Speaking of which, my sole fine motor skill is an ability to roll cigarettes efficiently and swiftly. The cachet in that, however, has steadily declined below zero to the point that in 2021 it now speaks ill of you.

The reason I’ve got a burner is not to stay one step ahead of the deep state but because my iPhone packed up. The battery had been

dodgy for ages. Then one day in France the screen froze and refused to come back to life.

Built-in obsolescence, eh? What a scandal! End of an era. New phone required. Back home, I got the burner (well, my wife found it at the back of a cupboard) to tide me over until a new one arrived. Happy days!

Except, not happy. Not happy at all.

Not because I’ve lost all my data. My contacts were backed up and I hardly took any photos. While modern phones reportedly have more computing power than that employed by Nasa to send men to the moon, I only ever made use of 1 per cent of what mine could reputedly do, in the same way we access a mere fraction of our brain’s capabilities. All I ever wanted my phone to do was make phone calls, send texts and count my steps.

Obviously, not being able to do the last one for over a week is killing me.

“Surely it’s a liberation,” said Nicola, “not having to remember to take your phone with you to the loo all the time?”

“No, it’s not a liberation. It’s devastating,” I replied. “My room to the loo, return trip, is 54 steps. They ain’t coming back, those 54 steps, or 0.05 per cent of a mile, given that a mile for me, taking into account variations in stride pattern – that is to say, and this is fascinating actually, I employ a significantly longer pace during a proper walk outdoors than I do when pottering about the house – requires on average 2,153 steps. Gone for ever!”

“But, Daddy,” Rachel said firmly yet gently, like a nurse explaining something to a much loved patient with advanced dementia, “you’re still doing the steps, whether you’re recording them or not.”

“Ah, but I’m not,” I wailed. “Without the means to log the distance, unnecessary journeys are instantly disincentivised. I don’t deliberately clear the kitchen table one plate at a time any more. I’ve lost the compulsion to pace pointlessly around the garden in the rain at three minutes to midnight because I know I’m in with a shout of getting to 12,000 for the day. I need targets! I need stats! I need external quantifiable validation!”

“Can’t you just guess?”

“Guess? Guess? No, I can’t just guess.

I need accuracy!”

“What you need,” said Nicola, “is to get that Fitbit I bought you three years ago working properly.” 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.