Читать книгу If I Could Tell You Just One Thing... - Richard Reed - Страница 7

IN THE BUBBLE WITH PRESIDENT CLINTON

HIS STAFFERS CALL IT BEING in ‘The Bubble’, the experience of travelling in President Clinton’s entourage. You ride in the President’s plane, drive in his armed convoy, sit at his table. You don’t so much as move, you glide. There’s no queuing for passport control, no checking in, no checking out – it all just happens behind the scenes. You go wherever and whenever Mr President goes.

I got to ride in The Bubble on a Clinton Foundation trip round Africa. It was a gruelling schedule: eight African countries in eight days. Every day the same: wake up in a new country, get in the convoy, drive hours down dusty tracks and potholed paths into the middle of nowhere, visit a project – an HIV testing clinic, a malaria treatment facility, a woman’s empowerment group – then back in the jeeps and on to the next project, at least four times a day.

At each visit, the President was an unstoppable force: straight out of the 4x4, hug the local community nurses, talk with the dignitaries, dance with the local tribal performers, pose for the photos, do the speech, present the gong, stop and chat with the locals, play with the kids, notice the quiet one at the back, make a point of talking to them, give them a hug, coax out that smile. At every event. In the searing heat and dust, all day, for eight days straight. I’ve not seen anything like it. I don’t think anyone has.

He reflected for a while when I asked my question about advice for life in a rare moment between stops. But the President’s answer made sense of what we were seeing:

‘I’ve come to believe that one of the most important things is to see people. The person who opens the door for you, the person who pours your coffee. Acknowledge them. Show them respect. The traditional greeting of the Zulu people of South Africa is “Sawubona”. It means “I see you”. I try and do that.’

Never has a person practised more what they preach.

The craziest bit, back at the hotel, after twelve hours in the field, tired, dusty, depleted, when us mere mortals would be up in our rooms ordering room service and hiding, President Clinton is down in the dining room talking to the waiters, joking with the other guests, making an American couple’s honeymoon, accepting an invitation to join a family’s table, sitting with Mum, Dad and two saucer-eyed children. He doesn’t stop. He knows what it means to people to meet a President, or more specifically to meet him. And everyone is made welcome. Everyone is made to feel important. Everyone is seen.

‘ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT THINGS IS TO SEE PEOPLE. THE PERSON WHO OPENS THE DOOR FOR YOU, THE PERSON WHO POURS YOUR COFFEE. ACKNOWLEDGE THEM. SHOW THEM RESPECT.’

– Bill Clinton

MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ IS PRESENT

I’M IN DOWNTOWN NEW YORK looking for soup. Specifically chicken noodle soup with prawns, or, I am now wondering, did she say without prawns? I arranged this lunchtime meeting with Marina Abramović, the Serbian-born, internationally revered performance artist, a month ago and we agreed I would bring her favourite soup. I just can’t remember what it is.

To avoid a potential faux pas, I get both. So when I arrive in the Greenwich studio where Marina works, the first order of business is to decide who gets which soup. Personal preferences are to be discarded; she insists on tossing a coin. Fate shall decide.

The fact that I worried she may be upset about which soup she gets both shows my hopeless Britishness and ignores the fact that this is an artist who has flagellated, cut and burnt her naked body for her art in public on many occasions. She is probably not the type to get worried about soup.

In fact, she is a woman who fits no type at all. She is gloriously, gorgeously unique and manages simultaneously to be sincere, saucy (she likes telling dirty Serbian jokes*), free-living, disciplined, reckless and loving, and is about the most interesting and alive human being I have ever met.

In her performance art over the years she has pushed herself to the point where she has lost consciousness, gained scars, spilt blood and risked her life. One of her earlier works, Rhythm 0, involved her lying on a table while people were given access to seventy-two different objects – scissors, a feather, a scalpel, honey, a whip, etc. – and told to use them on her as they saw fit. By the end she’d been stripped naked, had her neck cut, thorns pressed into her stomach and a gun put to her head.

She has recently hit seventy and is more in demand than ever before. MOMA’s 2010 retrospective of her work, ‘The Artist Is Present’, super-charged her international profile. As part of this exhibition, she sat immobile and silent in a chair for over seven hundred hours while thousands of visitors queued, some overnight, to sit opposite her. Marina would hold eye contact with each person, fully present in the moment, reacting to them only if they cried, by her crying too.

She explains that being present, gaining consciousness, is a big theme in her work. She sees cultivating inner-awareness as the best way to disentangle ourselves from the artificial structures of society, so we don’t feel disempowered or helpless. ‘With many people, there is a sense the world is falling apart and it creates a feeling of just giving up. And that inertia is the real danger to society. People have to realise we can create change by changing ourselves.’

This heightened consciousness can only come if we stop thinking and achieve a state of mental emptiness; only then can we receive what Marina calls ‘liquid knowledge – the knowledge that is universal and belongs to everyone’. The mission to help people attain it explains her more recent work, in which she invites her audience to count grains of rice or water droplets, to open the same door over and over again, to ‘create distractions to stop distraction, and rediscover the present so they can then rediscover themselves’.

Given the originality and uncompromising nature of her work, the risks she has taken and the sacrifices she has made, it is unsurprising that her main piece of advice is a rallying cry to commit deeply to whatever it is you feel that you must do.

‘Today 100 per cent is not enough. Give 100 per cent, and then go over this border into what is more than you can do. You have to take the unknown journey to where nobody has ever been, because that is how civilisation moves forwards. 100 per cent is not enough. 150 per cent is just good enough.’

I hugely respect the advice, but I reply that most people may not be prepared to put themselves in harm’s way and in real pain for their passions as she has done. But for this too she has advice. ‘Yes, the pain can be terrible,’ she replies, ‘but if you say to yourself “So what? So Pain, what can you do?” and if you accept pain and are no longer afraid of it, you will cross the gate into the non-pain state.’

Advice I choose to accept rather than put to the test.

* ‘How do Montenegro men masturbate? They put it in the earth and wait for an earthquake’ (Apparently a favourite Serbian joke about how lazy Montenegrin men are. With apologies to all our male Montenegrin readers. Source: Abramović, M.).

‘TODAY 100 PER CENT IS NOT ENOUGH. GIVE 100 PER CENT, AND THEN GO OVER THIS BORDER INTO WHAT IS MORE THAN YOU CAN DO. YOU HAVE TO TAKE THE UNKNOWN JOURNEY TO WHERE NOBODY HAS EVER BEEN, BECAUSE THAT IS HOW CIVILISATION MOVES FORWARDS. 100 PER CENT IS NOT ENOUGH. 150 PER CENT IS JUST GOOD ENOUGH.’

– Marina Abramović

TERRY WAITE, A PATIENT MAN

I’VE JUST HEARD WHAT MUST be one of the most understated sentences a human being could utter. I’m having lunch with Terry Waite in his local cathedral town of Bury St Edmunds. He is telling me about his experience of being held hostage for five years in Lebanon in the late 1980s, after having gone there as the Church of England’s envoy to negotiate the release of existing prisoners. He describes his four years of solitary confinement in a tiny, windowless cell, chained to a wall. He recounts the beatings and mock executions he suffered. He explains how he had to put on a blindfold if a guard came into the cell, so he didn’t see a human face for four years, and how they refused him a pen, paper and books and any communication with the outside world, including his family. He reflects back on it all and says, ‘Yes, it was a bit isolating.’

Terry Waite is the human manifestation of what it means to be humble, to serve and to sacrifice. He put himself in harm’s way in the hope that he could help others. And twenty-five years later he is still working tirelessly to help people who have had family members taken hostage, which says it all.

The craziest thing is that he claims he was mainly doing it for himself. I tell him I know the concept that no charitable gesture is selfless, but this is pushing it. He insists, saying his career has been about achieving reconciliations and that following that path has helped him reconcile the different sides of his own self.

He is also quick to point out that many people have to endure far more than he did. He talks of people held captive in their own body, when disease or accident have taken away their ability to move. And he knows only too well of the many hostages who don’t get to come home at all.

Both Terry’s words and actions advocate the profound importance of having empathy: it is a fundamental tenet of his approach to life. He recounts meeting with the British mother of a man who was beheaded by terrorists in Iraq, who even in her terrible grief said that she knew her suffering was no different to that of a mother in Iraq who has lost her son through warfare or insurgency. ‘In that simple statement she summed up with tremendous courage something we should never forget: we are all members of the same human family. We all have fears, and hopes and aspirations. We all have our vulnerabilities, so we should be very careful before we attribute negative stereotypes to other people.’

Terry’s empathy helped him stick to the three rules he set himself when he realised that he’d been taken hostage: no regrets, no self-pity and no sentimentality. He also stuck to his principle of non-violence, a philosophy tested to the extreme when one day he found a gun in the toilet left accidentally by his guard. (Terry said ‘I think you’ve forgotten something’ and handed it back to him.)

So, how does one cope with four years of entirely unjust and unrelenting solitary confinement?

‘I did my best to structure each day. I would allocate a period of time to doing my exercises, then I would write for an hour or two in my head, then do mental arithmetic. And I spent a lot of time dreaming up poetry too. And then it would be time for some more exercises. And so on.’

I tell him it seems it would be impossibly hard to fill all those lonely hours. In another world-class example of being understated, Terry just nods and responds, ‘You know, the whole experience wouldn’t have been so bad if they’d just let me have some books.’

He claims there have been unintended benefits of the ordeal. It gave him the confidence to leave his salaried job afterwards and live a freer life. So one related piece of wisdom he is keen to pass on is that every disaster, or seeming disaster, in life can usually be turned around and something creative can emerge from it. ‘That is not to say such suffering is not difficult and damn hard, but it doesn’t need be totally destructive. It’s the way you approach it, and the way you approach life after.’

So, given that, what is his best advice for how to approach life?

‘It’s the same lesson I learnt in that cell. What you have to do is live for the day, you have to say, now is life, this very moment. It’s not tomorrow, it’s not yesterday, it’s now, so you have to live it as fully as you can. Invest in every day.’

After speaking to Terry, I will.

ABSOLUTELY LUMLEY

I’M AT AN AWARDS DO and the god of seating plans has smiled benevolently upon me. I’m sat next to Joanna Lumley, one of the UK’s most loved actresses, and also one of the country’s most prolific and effective activists. To talk to, she is as one would expect. Warm, inclusive, crush-inducing. But with these soft-edged charms come inspiring, hard-edged principles: a sense of civic duty, of justice, of doing the right thing. She is a heady combination of warm heart and iron will. Which explains that while her TV and film work would be a career to be proud of in itself, it is her commitments and contributions off screen that are the most remarkable.

Take the new Garden Bridge across the Thames in London. An idea soon to become reality, providing the most beautiful addition to the city this century. Everyone in London knows about it and everybody loves it. Just like Joanna Lumley. But what is less known is that it was entirely her idea, a concept she dreamt up and then agitated to make happen, bending the will of those who naively told her at first it couldn’t be done.

Or look at the issue of Nepalese Gurkha veterans (who served in the British armed forces before 1997), who have been historically denied the right to settle in the UK after fighting for the country – a morally bankrupt decision and one that needed reversing. It was an unfashionable and unfabulous fight, but one that Joanna Lumley took on unreservedly, using her charm, celebrity, conviction and sheer dogged resilience until the victory was achieved and those rights installed.

In short, she is no ordinary woman.

And when I give a short speech later at the awards do and say I’ve been sitting next to Joanna Lumley, the audience erupt into applause: everyone in the room loves her.

There was therefore a synchronicity to the advice she gave me.

‘The secret, darling, is to love everyone you meet. From the moment you meet them. Give everyone the benefit of the doubt. Start from a position that they are lovely and that you will love them. Most people will respond to that and be lovely and love you back and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, and you can then achieve the most wonderful things.’

Then she leant forward and whispered in my ear.

‘But get rid of any of the bastards that let you down.’

As I said: warm heart, iron will.

‘THE SECRET, DARLING, IS TO LOVE EVERYONE YOU MEET. FROM THE MOMENT YOU MEET THEM. GIVE EVERYONE THE BENEFIT OF THE DOUBT.’

– Joanna Lumley

THE ELOQUENT MR FRY

THE PREVIOUS TIME I SPOKE with Stephen Fry he was a robot. The setting was a tech conference, and he attended via an iPad attached to a cyborg-on-wheels, controlled remotely from a joystick and camera in his bedroom. This time, we’re chatting in person over afternoon tea, sipping from bone china cups in a cosy members’ club in London. The different interactions capture two sides of a fascinating man: on the one hand, a self-confessed techno-geek with an interest in the latest gadgets, and on the other a graceful British gentleman with a love of classic traditions and culture.

As you would imagine, meeting his real, rather than virtual, self is the richer of the two encounters. In person you experience his warmth and thoughtfulness, and a wonderful sense of complicity from the stories and confessions he weaves into the conversation. He’s an easy man to spend time with.

Modestly, he says advice is something he is wary of giving, but he does have a few thoughts he’d be happy to share. I am expecting something literary or spiritual, but surprisingly his first thought is a broadsiding of life-coaching. ‘One piece of advice I want to give is avoid all life-coach lessons; they are snake oil, without exception, and the art of stating the so-fucking-obvious it makes your nose bleed.’

I was not, it has to be said, expecting that.

When I query why, he expands further. One reason is ‘their obsession with goal-setting. Because if I meet my goals, what then? Is that it, is my life over? I met my goal, do I just set another one? What’s the meaning of the first goal if the second one has to be set? Or if I don’t meet it, am I a failure?’

As he talks, I subtly turn over the page in the notebook that lists my goals for the day.

Unsurprisingly, Stephen does not have a life coach. But he does have Noël Coward. And a quotation from him, which Stephen has above his desk, guides his approach to life: Work is more fun than fun.

‘If you can make that true of your work, you will have a wonderful life. I know how lucky I am to have found that, and how unlucky so many are to have not found that. People talk about work–life balance. But the idea of balancing one against the other makes no sense. My work isn’t against my life – work is my life.’

Of course, just loving your work is not enough; if you want to get anywhere, you have to be prepared to work really hard at it too. ‘Everyone I know who is successful works, and works hard. Really hard. Maybe that should be my advice: work your bloody bollocks off.’

But the strongest recommendation Stephen has is to avoid the trap of thinking it is somehow easier for other people.

‘It is never right to look at someone successful and think “That person’s got money, that person’s got looks, that person’s good at cricket … so it’s easier for them.” Chances are, 90 per cent of the time you’re wrong. But even if it is somehow true, thinking that is a very self-destructive thing. It leads only to resentment, which is corrosive and destroys everything but itself.’

Stephen believes it is better to try and put yourself in their shoes. Imagine what life is like for them.

‘It is the secret of art, and it is the secret of life: the more time you spend imagining what it’s like to be someone else, the more you develop empathy for others, the easier it is to know yourself and to be yourself.’

Which is the best thing for us all to be.

‘Work your bloody bollocks off.’

– STEPHEN FRY

THE EROTIC INTELLIGENCE OF ESTHER PEREL

THIS IS PERHAPS THE ULTIMATE sign of the times: I am at an international tech conference, featuring literally thousands of founders of cutting-edge internet companies, but the talk everyone wants to hear is Esther Perel’s, the world’s most renowned relationship therapist and advisor-in-chief on handling intimacy in the modern age.

Esther is ready to speak, but the organisers won’t let her. We’re in the main auditorium and there are 500 more people than there are seats. Founders are sat on the steps, stood at the back, crammed into the doorways. However, the fire regulations won’t allow for such numbers, so an announcement is made: until the extra 500 people leave, Esther can’t start. But no one is prepared to miss out and a stand-off ensues. It’s resolved only by Esther promising to repeat the talk later for the people who can’t stay. In fact, such is the demand that over the weekend she ends up giving four talks. In comparison, the founder of Uber gives just one.

I catch up with Esther later, in her current hometown of New York. I ask her why she thinks so many people were keen to get her advice on sex and relationships. She explains, ‘We have gone, at this point, into a digitalised way of life, a generation that has been clicking away forever, in environments that are sensorially deprived. And it creates a corrective need, for human contact, for face-to-face relationships, but after the digital world we can often struggle with the imperfect nature of real people.’

The fact that people immersed in the online world sometimes need help with handling real life is not something she judges or condemns, but it is something she occasionally worries about. ‘There can be something beautiful about the immediacy of connection that the digital world allows, but on the other hand dating apps where we swipe left or right can leave people feeling disposable, commodified even, and that commodification is hurtful and degrading.’

Esther first received international acclaim for her insights into relationships when she published her book Mating in Captivity, an exploration of ‘erotic intelligence’ and how to keep sex alive in long-term relationships. Esther brought into the open the underlying contradictions in coupling-up: the fact that we crave both freedom and security, the predictability love needs yet the novelty desire longs for. It gave some straight-talking solutions and has been credited with saving countless relationships ever since.

Beyond the actual content of her work, the most fascinating thing is why Esther was drawn to studying people and relationships in the first place. ‘My interest in people, in humanity, in the way people live, whether they create a life of meaning or not, it goes back to my two parents, who are Holocaust survivors. They both spent four years plus in concentration camps and came out with nothing. All they had was themselves, their sense of decency and their relationship. That is what endured. And my dad said that was all that mattered.’

And her father’s wisdom echoes in the advice Esther gives, which is among the best and most profound I’ve heard:

‘The quality of your life ultimately depends on the quality of your relationships. Not on your achievements, not on how smart you are, not on how rich you are, but on the quality of your relationships, which are basically a reflection of your sense of decency, your ability to think of others, your generosity. Ultimately at the end of your life, if people commend you, they will say what a wonderful human being you were, and when they talk about the human being that you were, it won’t be the fact that you had a big bank account, it really won’t. It will be about how you treated the people around you and how you made them feel.’

‘THE QUALITY OF YOUR LIFE ULTIMATELY DEPENDS ON THE QUALITY OF YOUR RELATIONSHIPS. NOT ON YOUR ACHIEVEMENTS, NOT ON HOW SMART YOU ARE, NOT ON HOW RICH YOU ARE, BUT ON THE QUALITY OF YOUR RELATIONSHIPS, WHICH ARE BASICALLY A REFLECTION OF YOUR SENSE OF DECENCY, YOUR ABILITY TO THINK OF OTHERS, YOUR GENEROSITY.’

– Esther Perel

INSIDE HESTON BLUMENTHAL

IT’S NOT GOING WELL. THE score is 10–1, match-point to Heston Blumenthal. The Michelin three-starred chef and owner of the best restaurant in the world (as voted for by the best chefs in the world) turns out to also be a fiend at table tennis. In my defence, before the match started he plied me with strange-coloured cocktails and confessed to having table-tennis lessons up to three times a week. At least the humiliation is swift: his final serve goes the way we both know it’s going to, and I retire to the bench and to the solace of my next cocktail.

The experience of going to see Heston at home is the British middle-class equivalent of visiting Hunter S. Thompson: liquor is drunk, cigars are smoked, deep chats are had, and while no guns get fired, he does have his table-tennis serving machine, a device that shoots out one hundred balls a minute. We turn it on and it causes a hailstorm of the little blighters pinging off every wall and surface in his table tennis-dedicated basement.

I’ve known Heston for a while now. His brain is like that ping-pong machine, capable of throwing out a hundred ideas a minute. His curiosity, creativity and appetite for learning are greater than in anyone I know. The first time we met was at a company meeting, where I watched him get 300 people to each eat an apple holding their noses, to demonstrate how flavour is what we smell, not what we taste. He is a man who lives and, literally, breathes sensory experiences. And to illustrate the point, we’re now back in his kitchen and he’s teaching me how to smoke a cigar so you can appreciate all the different flavours. It involves repeatedly pulling a lit cigar from his lips with a pronounced ‘schmack’ sound; the trick apparently is to ‘keep the smoke out of your mouth, don’t let it get past your teeth’.

Food doesn’t just play a central role in Heston’s life, he sees it as a way of explaining all of human existence; food has shaped not just what we do and who we are, but also what we are.

‘We evolved because of eating and the things around eating … when we discovered fire we moved away from eating only raw starches, our lower digestion started to shrink, our neck and therefore our larynx lengthened, which allowed us over time to start to vocalise. And that ability to communicate meant we could start to spread ideas, build up our imaginations and from that everything became possible.’

Connecting food to human imagination is his signature dish. He’s brought more original ideas into the kitchen than anyone else. He first got major attention in the culinary world when his restaurant, The Fat Duck, put crab ice cream on the menu – a dish that now seems almost ordinary in the food fantasy world he’s since created of edible pubs, food you can listen to and chocolates that float in mid-air.

He says his interest in the world of food went from zero to one hundred in a lunchtime: as a teenager, his dad got a bonus from work and to celebrate he took the family to a Michelin three-starred restaurant in France. The combination of not just the food and the tastes but the sensory overload of the smell of lavender from the restaurant garden, the feel of linen on the table, the crunch of gravel underfoot, the sounds of crickets and clinking glasses: ‘It felt like I’d gone down this rabbit hole into wonderland and I found something that fascinated me and I knew right then I wanted to be a chef.’

His imagination and curiosity were kick-started by studying ice cream. He found a recipe from 1870 for Parmesan ice cream. ‘I thought, “That’s bizarre!” and then I started questioning why was it bizarre, who says ice cream has to be sweet? And once I started questioning that, I began questioning everything. I found that thread and just kept on pulling.’

It means that while your average chef is checking out other restaurants and menus for inspiration, Heston will be investigating the worlds of biology, chemistry, history and geography. He has teamed up with professors in macrobiotics, psychologists and molecular scientists. As an example of how deep he can go in these lines of enquiry, this year the Royal Society of Chemists is publishing a list of 175 of the most influential scientists and chemists on the planet, alive or dead. Einstein’s on it, so is Heston.

He leads me over to a coat of arms he created, now framed on the kitchen wall. He says it took him seven years to design, as he wanted to capture everything he stood for. There is a twig of lavender to reflect smell and the trip to that first restaurant, a pair of hands to reflect the craft of his work, a Tudor Rose for the historical element of his cooking, a magnifying glass for the importance of investigation and enquiry, and an apple to reflect Newton’s discovery and non-linear thinking. Most telling of all is his motto, just two words, inscribed in italic font, which explain his approach and his creativity and what he puts forward as his best piece of advice for life:

‘Question everything.’

And to me he expands:

‘The opposite of question everything is question nothing. And if you don’t question things, there’s no knowledge, no learning, no creativity, no freedom of choice, no imagination. So I always ask why. And why not. I ask question, question, question, question. And then I listen. And that’s how I discover something new.’

He then concludes by asking me a question. It’s the one I am most dreading: ‘Fancy another game of table tennis?’

‘QUESTION EVERYTHING … IF YOU DON’T QUESTION THINGS, THERE’S NO KNOWLEDGE, NO LEARNING, NO CREATIVITY, NO FREEDOM OF CHOICE, NO IMAGINATION.’

– Heston Blumenthal

THE TWO VOICES OF ANNIE LENNOX

ANNIE LENNOX HAS TWO VOICES. The first is the one that has sold over eighty million albums, winning her five Grammys, an Academy Award and more Brit Awards than any other female artist. Her second voice is the one she lends to women’s rights and the issue of HIV/AIDS in Africa. And it’s this campaigning voice that takes centre stage these days.

Annie remembers the moment when her singing voice changed pitch from artistry to activism. It was after taking part in a concert to launch 46664, Nelson Mandela’s HIV/AIDS foundation in South Africa, a country with the highest rate of HIV infection in the world. She witnessed Mandela describe the HIV pandemic as ‘a silent genocide, carrying the face of women’. He explained that one in three pregnant women were HIV positive in South Africa and AIDS was (and still is) a leading cause of death for women of reproductive age globally. Then, on a visit to a township hospital, she saw the impact of AIDS for herself, in clinics, rape crisis centres, orphanages and people’s homes. It was a dark epiphany for Annie. From then on, she shaped her life around responding to the tragedy.

The result has been over a decade of tireless work on tackling the issue – work that has, according to Archbishop Desmond Tutu, ‘contributed significantly to turning the pandemic around in our country’. In 2007 she founded a campaign called SING to raise global awareness and prompt action, helping to ensure that HIV positive women and children have access to the treatment and care they need. Annie has travelled across the globe giving fundraising performances, presentations, speeches and interviews on radio, television and in the printed press, at conferences, rallies and in government buildings, speaking truth to power at every given opportunity. She also became the founder of The Circle, an organisation which aims to inspire and connect women in order to harness their skills, creativity and influence, and to transform the challenges and injustices faced by the most disempowered girls and women in the world.

Those dusty plains of Sub-Saharan Africa are a long way from the working-class tenement block in Aberdeen where she was raised. Coming from a poor but musical family, she studied the piano and flute at school, which led her to be offered a place at the Royal Academy of Music in London at the age of seventeen. ‘It became my passport out of there.’

Tough years followed, however. ‘I had very little money and didn’t really know anyone. I lived in a variety of different bedsits, doing whatever I could to make ends meet, but even though my chances seemed bleak I didn’t want to go back to Scotland and feel as if I’d failed.’

One constant through it all was singing. ‘I would sing and sing and sing, walking down the street, in the shower, all the time, just by myself, and by the time three years at the Royal Academy had come to an end I knew I wanted to be a singer/songwriter, so I started to write songs on an old Victorian harmonium. I’d been writing poems since I was twelve and I had a lot to say.’

But for all the hard work, practice and passion, one factor for success was still missing: serendipity. That came thanks to Camden Market, where Annie sold second-hand clothes, sharing a stall with a friend. It was there that she got to know a guy selling records who told her, ‘You should meet my mate, Dave.’ According to Annie there was a creative connection with Dave Stewart from the beginning and within a few years they were dominating the charts on both sides of the Atlantic as Eurythmics.

Her life story is of a woman following her passions, wherever they may take her, from the tenements of Aberdeen to the townships of Africa, via the Grammys in America, and her advice fits that story perfectly.

‘There will be “Ah ha!” moments in life when a light might go on, when you think to yourself, “I MUST do that” – whatever it is. It’s not because someone says you should do it, but it’s because you feel absolutely compelled to and there would be something wrong with the world if you didn’t. If you find that light – acknowledge it. Find other people who share that passion. Cultivate it. Find that deeper purpose in your life.’

As voices go, it’s a good one to listen to.

ON HOLIDAY WITH SIMON COWELL

I’M SAT DEEP IN THE stalls of the London Palladium theatre, watching four glamorously dressed people on stage argue with each other. Above them hangs a huge backlit Union Jack resplendent with the words ‘Britain’s Got Talent’. And beneath it sits the man who has most definitively proved that assertion to be true: Simon Cowell.

After the judges finish play-fighting and filming wraps for the day, I’m brought backstage to meet the main man. He’s sat in the centre of the room, surrounded by a bustle of black-clad assistants, cameramen and producers: the calm eye in the middle of his own media storm.

I know his reputation for cutting to the chase, to put it politely. I also know from his media director that he’s twelve hours into a twenty-hour day, so I am a little apprehensive, expecting a terse, short conversation. But the exact opposite ensues and, embarrassingly for a forty-three-year-old straight man such as myself, over the hour we spend talking I fall hopelessly and completely in love with Simon Cowell.

It starts with Simon sitting me down and making sure I am comfortable. He then offers me a cup of his homemade fresh ginger tea, but it turns out to be so fiery I start to cough and my eyes water uncontrollably. Simon is concerned and makes sure I am OK. Then, once he is happy I’ve recovered, spends the next ten minutes enquiring about me, my business, my story. He speaks softly, probes gently, listens intently. He invests more time just asking about me than the time we’ve been allocated to talk.

Eventually he allows me to move the topic of the conversation from me to him. His manner is so warm and kind and charming, and his voice so soothing, I totally relax. A lovely feeling washes over me, like being on a sunny holiday. He uses my name a lot and drops in the odd compliment. I get the impression he really likes me. I start to think we might become good friends. Maybe we’ll even go on holiday together.

I catch myself. This is ridiculous. I’m a grown man behaving like a teenager. I need to concentrate. I push my man crush and daydreams to one side and tune back in to what he’s saying. He’s certainly someone worth listening to: a rich and fertile source of practical wisdom and insight, anecdotes and stories. I say his team strike me as exceptional in their commitment and professionalism, and he explains how he learnt to get the best from people. ‘Well, Richard, my dad told me there’s an invisible sign on everyone’s head which says make me feel important. Remember that and you’ll be fine.’

He’s charmingly, self-deprecatingly candid about where his ideas come from, which makes me like him even more. ‘So, Richard, I’m in my kitchen one night, cooking dinner and watching some boring programme, saying to myself, “I’d rather watch a dancing dog than this,” and then a few seconds later I think, “Actually, I really would rather be watching a dancing dog than this.” And that’s where the idea for BGT came from.’

I can see his assistants hovering, but I don’t want my time in the sun to end, so I play for time and keep on asking questions. Given his dominance in the music industry, what’s his advice for aspiring artists trying to make it? ‘More than anything else, you’ve got to have a great song. Do small gigs. Listen to the crowd’s reaction, find out what works.’ And how does one cope with all the inevitable rejections? ‘Listen to the feedback, you may learn from it. But if the people saying “No” are more stupid than you, don’t get discouraged.’ What if someone finds themself auditioning or pitching to Simon Cowell? ‘If you get a “Yes”, then shut up. There are times I’ve said yes and the artist starts with “I knew it, we’re going to do amazing things together” and the more they talk the more I’m thinking, “I’m really going off you”. The better ones just say “Good, call my lawyer” and leave. That confidence has me reaching for my lawyer within ten seconds.’

I would keep going all night if I could, but I know that sadly all holidays come to an end. And with local versions of his shows running in more than 180 countries, Simon has a long night ahead of him, with many questions to be answered, many auditions to watch, many people to make feel important.

So I finish by asking for his number-one piece of advice.

‘My best advice is listen, listen rather than talk. I was never bright in school, but I was a very good listener, and I still am. I have a better life because of it. When I meet people, I’m curious about their story, about how they did what they did. Along the way you meet people smarter than you and they teach you what you don’t already know. So I listen to them, take away my little titbits, and off I go …’

And with that, a final wave and a ‘lots of love’, he’s whisked off by his ever-faithful team. Unfortunately my holiday romance with the talented Mr Cowell is over. I wonder if he’ll write.

‘IF YOU GET A “YES”, THEN SHUT UP. THERE ARE TIMES I’VE SAID YES AND THE ARTIST STARTS WITH “I KNEW IT, WE’RE GOING TO DO AMAZING THINGS TOGETHER” AND THE MORE THEY TALK THE MORE I’M THINKING, “I’M REALLY GOING OFF YOU”.’

– Simon Cowell

SHAMI CHAKRABARTI: ALL TOGETHER NOW

I AM HAVING COFFEE WITH ‘THE most dangerous woman in Britain’, according to The Sun newspaper. Shami Chakrabarti, former director of Liberty (the human rights lobbying organisation), was given that illustrious title after 9/11 due to her high-profile work in defending civil liberties, or, as The Sun saw it, cosying up to terrorists and criminals.

It was a title Shami was happy to accept. ‘It was like an honour, better than a CBE from the Queen.’ In a brilliant twist of fate, a few years later Shami found herself helping the journalist who had written the piece. He had been sacked from a radio show for describing a Tory councillor as a ‘Nazi’ for preventing smokers from being foster parents and his defence was his right to freedom of speech under the Human Rights Act, an act he had so wilfully attacked in the past. But as a protector of everyone’s human rights, Shami was there to support him too. It was a situation that illustrated a contradiction that Shami knows only too well. ‘We all like having our own human rights, it’s just other people’s we have a problem with.’

Unfortunately for Shami, being branded ‘dangerous’ was the least she had to deal with in her job: constant racist, misogynistic and personal slurs also came with the territory. But she’s not complaining: ‘Elsewhere in the world human rights campaigners get physically attacked or worse, so if I have to deal with someone saying nasty things about me in the newspaper or social media then bring it on.’

The reason why she experienced so much hate was partly the context she was working within. Shami’s time at Liberty was shaped by the 9/11 terror attacks and the world’s response to them. ‘I started at Liberty on the tenth of September. On that first day, I was told to blue-sky think about what our priorities could be. Then the next day happened, so no more blue skies.’ Her role required her to defend very publicly the basic principles of human rights when the world suddenly wanted to ignore them. ‘The country did really bad things, not just for human rights, but for our own security: extraordinary renditions, indefinite detention without trial. So I had to say things nobody else wanted to say, and a lot of people didn’t want to hear them.’ The scorn of members of the Establishment and the Fourth Estate followed.

She never shirked once, no matter how unpopular her campaigning made her. If anything, she relished the fight, taking on the government over proposed new laws and holding the system to account. I ask her where she gets the resilience to face such strong headwinds and stand up to power. Shami herself attributes it to several things, but none less than her parents. ‘I am the daughter of migrants. They’d both been to university in India before moving to England and they raised me to believe I could do anything. I was educated at the local comprehensive and I knew Eton boys were privileged and different, but I never believed they were better than me.’

She has a personal motto that encapsulates this thinking: ‘Anyone’s equal, no one’s superior.’ It’s a principle that guides her approach to life as well as work. ‘It’s a pretty good way to rub along with other people in the world.’

The goal of achieving a society where everyone is equal, according to Shami, is still far away. She despairs at how refugees are talked about increasingly with disdain. ‘“Refugee” to me is one of the most noble words on the planet. When I grew up in the 1970s we loved refugees because they were Russians who wanted to escape the terrible Soviet bloc for our better way of life. But now we cast refugees as “others”, as “less than”, as a problem.’ And worse than that, she sees women’s place in the world as the biggest inequality going. ‘The older I get and the more I see, I think gender injustice is the greatest human rights abuse on the planet. It’s literally like an apartheid, except this isn’t one country, this is global and millennial and it’s insane.’

She has a one-word answer for tackling such issues of inequality and defending our basic rights, and that is solidarity.

‘Powerful elites in the world always succeed by divide and rule, using tools like fear and racism. But solidarity, the basic human connection we can all have with one another, is stronger. It is the magic weapon to achieve change. If we remember that your human rights are the same as my human rights, even if we don’t look the same, and if we support one another we all benefit, we all become stronger. Ultimately, we are each other’s security.’

THE REAL ARI EMANUEL

IT’S OSCAR WEEK AND ARI Emanuel, Hollywood super-agent and inspiration for Entourage’s Ari Gold, is a busy man. He’s so busy even his assistant has an assistant, and she’s worked marvels, getting me time with the most powerful man in Hollywood at Hollywood’s busiest time of year. But there isn’t a second to lose.

I’m grabbed from reception and walked quickly, almost at jogging pace, to his office. A meeting is just ending and this is our shot. Two people are still being shown out as I am shown in – we briefly get stuck in the doorway. Inside, Ari is stood at his chest-high desk, a desk that is placed over a treadmill so he can work out while he’s working. He looks up and over at me, then to his assistant, and asks, quite reasonably, all things considered, ‘So, who the hell is this guy?’ And so my conversation with Ari begins.

If that makes him sound rude, then it’s misleading. Focused, for sure. Direct, definitely. But not rude. It’s just that ‘it’s a shitty week for me, what with it being the Oscars, and EVERYONE is in town, there is a LOT going on’. He talks in lean, rapid-fire bursts, all protein, no sugar. A dark-matter magnetism radiates from him; he’s unquestionably the centre of gravity in the room. He had me at ‘So’.

Ari wants to know why I want him in this book. I explain it’s about people at the top of their game, and that he’s the most powerful and successful agent in the world. He listens to my answer, reflects for a nanosecond and says, ‘That’s true. I am.’ And then, a beat later, follows up with, ‘Well, it doesn’t pay for me to be humble, not in this industry.’

So what does pay in this industry? What is the secret for getting to the top?

‘I’ve thought about this, and my advice for success comes down to three things: be curious, show up, stay in touch. You have to keep reading, listening, talking, thinking, finding out how people think, what they do. And chase down anything that seems interesting.’

He recounts an article he read ten years ago about a new technology that to him sounded intriguing and to us is now known as virtual reality. So he got on the phone to the person in the piece, invited him for lunch and asked him questions. Ari kept in touch with the guy, sent him the odd email, the occasional article. The same guy called him one Friday night saying that he was off to see some whizz kid he was excited about and asked whether Ari wanted to come along. ‘It’s 10 p.m. on a Friday night. I’m in bed. It’s been a shitty week, pounding away trying to make this place work. But I think, right, fuck it. I get out of bed, put my trousers back on and drive an hour to meet this kid. Best thing I ever did. I loved him, decided to back him, and his company has been a huge success.’

I say it’s easier to be curious, to show up, to stay in touch when you are already successful, when your name opens doors, so I’m keen to understand how he first got going, before his name meant anything. ‘Basically I started out by calling the big guys in the agency world back then. I was a nobody, a pimple on their ass, but I just kept calling them and doorstepping them until eventually they gave me an in.’

I say that it takes a thick skin to keep going in a situation like that. He concedes that’s the case and, surprisingly, says that the extreme dyslexia he suffered from as a kid helped him.

‘When you’re dyslexic you constantly fail, nothing comes easy, so you lose the fear of failing, you get used to being embarrassed. So with cold calling, who gives a shit? They say no, big deal, you just keep calling them till they say yes.’

Furthermore, he says being dyslexic teaches you other things too. It gives you better emotional intelligence: ‘You might not be able to read books but you get great at reading people.’ And it teaches you how to put a team together, ‘because you can’t do everything when you’re dyslexic, you need people to help’. And ironically in an industry typically about ‘me’, Ari’s reputation is for being about the ‘we’. The loyalty of his staff seems absolute, as is his to them. As an illustration, one of his colleagues was telling me how, during the terrorist attacks in Paris earlier in the year, as soon as Ari heard the news he got straight on a plane and was there within twenty-four hours, making sure his French team were OK.

Curiosity. Not giving in. Team. All things instrumental to his success.

And it is one of his loyal team members that now gives me the nod. My time is up. As I’m shown out, I take a look back. The last thing I see is Ari going back to his desk, getting back on that treadmill. And thanks to the time he’s given me, now busier than ever.

‘I’VE THOUGHT ABOUT THIS, AND MY ADVICE FOR SUCCESS COMES DOWN TO THREE THINGS: BE CURIOUS, SHOW UP, STAY IN TOUCH. YOU HAVE TO KEEP READING, LISTENING, TALKING, THINKING, FINDING OUT HOW PEOPLE THINK, WHAT THEY DO. AND CHASE DOWN ANYTHING THAT SEEMS INTERESTING.’

– Ari Emanuel

MARTHA LANE FOX, FAIRY GODMOTHER 2.0

I’M IN THE OFFICES OF a hip London digital agency to meet Baroness Martha Lane Fox, the First Lady of the internet. The company is full of people with ironic T-shirts, directional haircuts and piercings that allow you to see through their earlobes. Martha’s sitting in the communal coffee bar, looking gloriously countercultural by being dressed in a smart, powder-blue trouser suit. As someone who knows more about digital than all the trendies in London put together, she doesn’t need to wear the ripped T-shirt and body piercings to prove it.

As we chat generally, I discover my favourite remarkable fact about Martha. It is not that she was the co-founder of lastminute.com, the dot-com-era-defining start-up that sold for half a unicorn. Nor that she was the youngest female appointee to the House of Lords, impressive though that is. And it is neither the car accident that nearly killed her and resulted in two years confined to a hospital bed as they rebuilt her shattered body, nor that she now runs Doteveryone, her charity focused on making the UK the most digitally advanced nation in the world. Remarkable though these things may be, the nugget that best gives you a sense of the woman is her number of godchildren: she has nineteen. That’s two more than Princess Di.

When you meet her, it’s not difficult to see why. She is alive with a sense of possibility, potential and optimism. ‘I love building things, I love ideas and I love that you can always empower people and improve systems and make things better.’ And her guiding philosophy? ‘Without sounding too kooky about it, you feel much better as a person if you default to generosity as opposed to being mean-spirited.’ What lucky godchildren.

Ironically, she herself has not always been on the receiving end of people’s better natures. When her friend and co-founder Brent Hoberman floated lastminute.com and the share price crashed, she received more than 2,000 pieces of hate mail, ‘including death threats and people calling me every name from B to C’, as well as business journalists writing in the press that they wished they could shoot her, or that she ‘should be put in a burka and told to stay in my box’. Not much generosity of spirit there. And, tellingly, all that vitriol was focused on her, not her male co-founder.

The lastminute.com story is a time capsule that reflects the internet of the late 1990s. They were ahead of their time, launching in an era before Google even existed. Their original name was LastMinuteNetwork.com but they thought it would be cooler if they dropped that third word. They struggled to raise funds because venture capitalists said people wouldn’t buy things over the internet as no one would put their credit card details into a website. It seems laughably naive now, but Martha says it was a different internet back then. ‘It was so new and exciting, a real sense the whole world was going to change, we didn’t foresee that these huge monopolies like Amazon, Google and Facebook would just go boom and lock down the internet.’

Her belief in the fundamental power of the internet to help people change things is the driving force behind her organisation Doteveryone, which has the mission to democratise access to and understanding of the internet for, literally, everyone. She is mobilising the government, businesses, schools and communities to ensure everyone has the skills to get online and in a non-curated way: ‘No disrespect to Facebook, but the internet is not just Facebook. If you know how to really use the internet, you have access to every opinion, piece of information and tool out there. It can help us all change things.’

It is this spirit of wanting to improve herself and others, and of seeing the endless possibilities in the world, both online and off, that drives her and it is reflected in the advice she passes on:

‘Be bold. If you’re bold you might right royally screw up, but you can also achieve much more, so be bold. You’ve only got your own reputation to lose and that’s not important. It’s much better to strive for something that seems impossible, that’s quite nuts on some level. So be bold, whatever it is. Even if you work on a customer help desk somewhere, ask yourself how can I be bold? Find those small moments of boldness because they are everywhere.’

‘BE BOLD. IF YOU’RE BOLD YOU MIGHT RIGHT ROYALLY SCREW UP, BUT YOU CAN ALSO ACHIEVE MUCH MORE, SO BE BOLD. YOU’VE ONLY GOT YOUR OWN REPUTATION TO LOSE AND THAT’S NOT IMPORTANT. IT’S MUCH BETTER TO STRIVE FOR SOMETHING THAT SEEMS IMPOSSIBLE, THAT’S QUITE NUTS ON SOME LEVEL. SO BE BOLD, WHATEVER IT IS. EVEN IF YOU WORK ON A CUSTOMER HELP DESK SOMEWHERE, ASK YOURSELF HOW CAN I BE BOLD? FIND THOSE SMALL MOMENTS OF BOLDNESS BECAUSE THEY ARE EVERYWHERE.’

– Baroness Martha Lane Fox

HARRY BELAFONTE, KINGSMAN

I’M TALKING US POLITICS WITH Harry Belafonte, the eighty-nine-year-old Grammy award-winning singer, titan of the American Civil Rights Movement, and confidant of Martin Luther King. It’s a big conversation. He is a man of extraordinary eloquence, intellect and life force, the latter being fuelled by the twin engines of his anger at social injustice and his enduring love of the better side of his country.

We talk about the Republican primaries, which are raging around us while we’re in New York. Donald Trump is given short shrift – ‘a character clearly smitten with ignorance and arrogance, one doesn’t need to linger too long on him’ – but he says what is worth greater consideration is the amount of people responding positively to Trump’s messages of hatred, which reveals to Harry the extent to which the American Dream has been corrupted.

Conversely, Harry sees Barack Obama as one of the most intellectually gifted people ever to occupy the office but believes he’s endured eight years of the worst animosity of any president in history – a fact that Harry puts down to ‘one thing and one thing only. Because he’s a man of colour.’

These two phenomena – Trump’s popularity and Obama’s received animosity – support his assertion that racism and inequality are alive and rampant in modern-day America and the wider world. And Harry shows no sign of resting while that is still the case. His work extends from fighting AIDS in Africa and serving on the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation to educating American students on the importance of non-violent protest.

Harry Belafonte wasn’t born into the worlds of social activism or stardom. Raised in Harlem to working-class parents, his path to a life in the spotlight was precipitated while working as a janitor’s assistant in New York. A tenant of his building, short on cash, tipped him with two tickets to the American Negro Theater. Watching the play ignited within Harry a love of the art form and he decided at that moment to become an actor. He signed up for acting lessons and, to pay for them, started singing at night in a New York jazz club. But unexpected success there gave him the opportunity to launch a pop career, popularising Caribbean music through his ‘Banana Boat Song (Day-O)’, releasing many successful albums of different musical styles and then forging an equally successful film career. All in all, not a bad outcome from a couple of free tickets.

Like many remarkable people he claims his life has been shaped by such moments of happenstance, those chance events none of us have control over. He advises making the most of them. ‘The greatest force in my life has been coincidence, and having an openness to receiving whatever the people I met offered and wanted. Due to this my life opened up into a whole set of challenges and joys that I would not have had otherwise.’ He summarises this into one of his main philosophies for living: ‘It pays to always answer the knock at the door.’

With his subsequent fame came considerably more of those knocks, including one that turned out to be the most significant of all. From a young pastor by the name of Martin Luther King, asking for Harry’s help at one of his events. And at that first meeting ‘Dr King called me to help him with his mission, and there I was caught up in a social movement that changed the American political landscape and the global family.’ He became Dr King’s mentor and provider, supporting Dr King’s family, bailing him out when he got arrested, financing the Freedom Rides, and organising the March on Washington, and he has been carrying the torch for the Civil Rights Movement and other social injustices ever since. ‘Those guys left me with my hands full.’

So, given all that he has stood for, fought for, and seen his friends die for, it makes sense that his greatest piece of advice is this:

‘Discover the joy of embracing diversity. When people become more open to the strange, to the unusual, to the radical, to the “other”, we become more nourished as a species. Currently our ability to do that is being manipulated, diversity is being looked upon as a source of evil rather than as a source of joy and development. We must recapture the profound benefits of seeing the joy in our collective diversity, not the fear.’

The most important advice I ever heard.

‘DISCOVER THE JOY OF EMBRACING DIVERSITY. WHEN PEOPLE BECOME MORE OPEN TO THE STRANGE, TO THE UNUSUAL, TO THE RADICAL, TO THE “OTHER”, WE BECOME MORE NOURISHED AS A SPECIES. CURRENTLY OUR ABILITY TO DO THAT IS BEING MANIPULATED, DIVERSITY IS BEING LOOKED UPON AS A SOURCE OF EVIL RATHER THAN AS A SOURCE OF JOY AND DEVELOPMENT. WE MUST RECAPTURE THE PROFOUND BENEFITS OF SEEING THE JOY IN OUR COLLECTIVE DIVERSITY, NOT THE FEAR.’

– Harry Belafonte

SANDI TOKSVIG, SERIOUSLY FUNNY

THERE’S A RAINBOW FLAG KNOTTED around the large brass door handle of the Soho-based club I’m about to enter – a show of solidarity for the victims of the Orlando massacre at a gay nightclub just twelve hours before. It’s a terrible event that has horrified everyone and has a deep, personal relevance to Sandi Toksvig, the much-loved writer, actress, producer and comedian. She came out as the first openly gay woman in UK public life in the 1990s and was subject to extreme homophobia. ‘I had death threats and stalkers and people sectioned. But you don’t have to be in the public eye to be afraid. Blind hatred is scary for anybody.’

In her case, the biggest outpouring of vitriol was reserved for the fact that (thanks to a sperm-donating friend) Sandi and her partner were mothers to three children. The Daily Mail ran the headline ‘If God Meant Lesbians to Have Children He Would Have Made It Possible’. Members of the religious right wrote and said they were going to kill her on God’s behalf. ‘Because apparently God was busy and needed them to help pick up the slack.’ Fortunately, she says, things are much better these days: ‘People are very nice to me, I get hugged in the street a lot. I don’t know why. I think it’s because I’m small.’

This is part of what makes Sandi unique: she can be simultaneously funny and extremely serious. She loves comedy – ‘it’s a nice thing, people can forget about their mortgage and marital troubles and come and laugh’ – but she is driven by a more serious motivation than just providing entertainment: ‘I have no drive for fame, no drive for money, I couldn’t give a damn about either of those things, I’m not in the least bit religious, but I do have a drive to make a difference. I’m only here this one time and I intend to make it count.’

Her most recent manifestation of this credo was co-founding the newest political party in the UK, the Women’s Equality Party, an organisation with the specific aim of bringing gender equality to education, employment, social welfare, culture and every other aspect of society. Sandi says it started as an idea on stage at a women’s rights festival, but once they’d thought up the concept she couldn’t leave it alone. ‘You have to get off your arse and do something, don’t you? I will not go to my grave thinking I didn’t try.’

There’s no fear of that. The party already has more than 20,000 members, has fielded two candidates in the recent London mayor campaign and will be putting forward representatives at the next general election.

It leads me to a more pragmatic question: given all the presenting, writing and acting jobs she already has, how does she balance it all? Her answer is equally pragmatic: ‘I work very hard and I get up very early. People say how do you get everything done? The answer is you just have to spend lots of hours.’

And this appetite for work relates to her most valuable piece of advice:

‘Just work hard and be passionate. If I’ve taught my kids one thing, it’s to be passionate. I’m passionate about food, my friends, my wife, passionate about our house, our dog. I’m passionate. I get up and I’m passionate – my father believed in it and that’s the one thing he taught me, that life is amazing and it’s full of people you haven’t met yet, music you haven’t heard, books you haven’t read. And if you start each day looking for something to be passionate about, mostly you won’t be disappointed because every day you’ll find something that’ll make you say, look at that, that’s so cool.’

On that manifesto for life, we want Sandi Toksvig for prime minister.

‘Get off your arse and do something.’

– SANDI TOKSVIG

THE LESSER SPOTTED SIR DAVID ATTENBOROUGH

ALL I CAN HEAR ARE the sounds of nature. The air is filled with mysterious chirpings and squawks, exotic whistles, tocks and clicks. In quick succession, a Ghanaian Giant Squeaker Frog, a Madagascan Side-Necked Turtle and a Pakistani Snow Leopard dart past in front of me. Then a Papua New Guinea warrior in tribal headdress appears. Our eyes meet. He gives me a friendly smile and comes towards me, extending his hand in a traditional greeting. And I think, not bad for a Tuesday evening in West London.

Admittedly the sounds are recorded and the animals are on film, but the warrior is very much real and enjoying both his first trip to London and his first-ever gin and tonic. We’re at the Whitley Awards for Nature, an Oscar-lite awards ceremony for rising stars in the world of conservation. The venue is the Royal Geographical Society, an appropriate choice given the far-flung origins of tonight’s nominees, each of which has dedicated their life to defending their threatened native species. The Ghanaian chap protecting the Giant Squeaker Frogs has even learnt to mimic their mating call and does so loudly when collecting his prize. It makes for a memorable acceptance speech.

While the evening is shaped around celebrating these conservationists and their projects, the biggest draw of the night is guest of honour and the world’s most revered naturalist Sir David Attenborough. He’s dressed on-brand in a crumpled cream linen suit, looking for all the world like someone who has just come back from exotic travels, which of course he has. He’s at the event to support the conservationists and wants no limelight for himself. Like his documentary subjects, he seems more comfortable hiding in the long grass and remains in the audience, avoiding the stage.

To talk to him one-on-one, he is the charismatic yet humble man you would imagine him to be. He says he gives time to these awards every year, including narrating each of the conservation project’s films, because ‘local people with local knowledge and a vested interest’ do the best conservation work and ‘it’s more important than ever to support those who protect the planet’. It’s lost on no one that the room is full of people inspired to do just that because of the films Sir David has made. The effect is global: President Obama credits Sir David with awakening his fascination in the natural world as a boy and asked Sir David to the White House to pick his brains on conservation and fulfil a childhood ambition of getting to hang out with Nature’s commander-in-chief.

According to Sir David, the growing encroachment by man on our natural habitat and the ever-increasing demands we place on the environment has got progressively worse over his sixty years of film-making. And he’s clear-sighted about the fundamental driver of the issue: ‘there’s no major problem facing our planet that would not be easier to solve with fewer people’.

He also underlines the importance of appreciating what is around us: not just our natural history, although that is of course of fundamental importance, but also our art, other people too. He recommends what he calls an ‘explorer’s mentality’, delighting in and savouring all the riches of life as we journey through it. And while doing so heeds ‘it’s a good idea to create more than you consume’.

There’s also a boyish mischievousness about him. When I ask for his best piece of advice, he feigns ignorance and says he’s never been able to think of anything clever to say his whole life, and then winks. When I push a second time for his most valuable advice, he continues in the vein of what he has been saying about appreciating the miracle of what life on earth has to offer, and it fits exactly with the endless fascination he exhibits in every second of his films:

‘I have never met a child that is not fascinated by our natural world, the animal kingdom and the wonders within it. It is only as we get older that we sometimes lose that sense of wonderment. But I think we would all be better off if we kept it. So my advice is to never lose that, do what you can to always keep that sense of magic with our natural world alive.’

And no one does that better than Sir David.

‘I HAVE NEVER MET A CHILD THAT IS NOT FASCINATED BY OUR NATURAL WORLD, THE ANIMAL KINGDOM AND THE WONDERS WITHIN IT. IT IS ONLY AS WE GET OLDER THAT WE SOMETIMES LOSE THAT SENSE OF WONDERMENT. BUT I THINK WE WOULD ALL BE BETTER OFF IF WE KEPT IT. SO MY ADVICE IS TO NEVER LOSE THAT, DO WHAT YOU CAN TO ALWAYS KEEP THAT SENSE OF MAGIC WITH OUR NATURAL WORLD ALIVE.’

– Sir David Attenborough

GETTING STOCIOUS WITH DAME JUDI DENCH

I’VE NEVER FELT WORSE ON a beautiful summer’s morning. It’s Friday, 24 June 2016, and the UK has just voted to come out of the EU. I stayed up all night watching the results with the campaign team I’ve been part of for the last six months, realising with a deepening sense of unease that the country has chosen to burn bridges and build walls instead.

Such thoughts are my mental backdrop as I drive to visit Dame Judi Dench at her home in deepest, greenest Surrey. On the way, I pass a multitude of red ‘Vote Leave’ posters, reminding me that at least half the people in the country will be waking up happy this morning. Dame Judi Dench is not one of them.

I find her in her garden. She’s dressed in white clothes and sunlight, sat by an old friend of a table in the middle of her lawn, safeguarded by reassuringly seasoned trees and the crumbly walls of her gorgeous house. She asks how I am. I bypass forty-three years of ingrained Britishness and reply honestly, explaining that I’m unbelievably depressed by what’s happened. ‘Me too,’ she replies. ‘There’s nothing else for it, I’m going to get stocious.’

‘Stocious?’ I ask, confused by the unfamiliar but respectable-sounding term. ‘Yes, stocious. It’s an old Irish word. My mother was from Dublin. It means being drunk, but even more so.’ I guess I was wrong about the respectable part.

We’ve not met before this encounter, but a shared sense of grief bonds us. We huddle together at the table, taking it in turns to bemoan the loss of identity and tolerance we feel the outcome represents. We’re as bad as each other, and wallow communally for a while before pulling ourselves back up into the light.

I end up spending three hours with Dame Judi. She is everything you would imagine her to be: thoughtful, candid, warm, funny, kind, the spirit of solace manifested as a person. Over the course of our conversation we graduate from sipping iced coffee to drinking champagne, but I leave neither stocious nor, thanks to Dame Judi, feeling the need any more to be so.

I do, however, leave intoxicated from the delicious cocktail of advice, anecdotes and affirmation she serves up. My favourite story is of the time eight years ago when she received a bad review from the theatre critic Charles Spencer. ‘He didn’t just criticise my performance, he also listed other things he thought I’d not done well. And that irritated me. So one night I woke up and thought, I’m going to write to him and get it off my chest. So I did. I wrote, “Dear Charles Spencer, I used to quite admire you, I now think you are a total shit,” and sent it off.’

Like all good stories, there’s a second half. Earlier this year, Dame Judi was at the Critics’ Circle Awards. ‘I felt a tap on my shoulder and a man said, “My name is Charles Spencer, I crave your forgiveness,” and I said, “Then you may kiss my boot.” And he did, he got down on the floor and kissed my boot. He then got up and exclaimed, “I’m so relieved.” But I said, “I haven’t said I forgive you,” and I walked away.’ Pause for dramatic effect. ‘I wrote to him the next day and said, of course, “I forgive you.” But it was very rectifying.’

Funnily enough, she never intended to be the subject of acting reviews. Her plan was to be a theatre designer and that’s what she studied, ‘but my older brother always wanted to be an actor and I caught it off him like measles’. And it was her other brother who introduced her to Shakespeare. ‘I was six years old and went to see him play Duncan in Macbeth, and he came on and said, “What bloody man is that?” And I thought this is it, he’s sworn and he’s allowed to stand up there and say it, so after that I used to say “What bloody man is that?” all the time, knowing I could get away with it.’

Her talk of Shakespeare leads to something remarkable happening, for me at least. Dame Judi puts her head back and launches into a heart-stopping recital of the Bard: ‘For once upon a raw and gusty day, the troubled Tiber chafing with her shores, Caesar said to me, “Darest thou, Cassius, now, leap with me into this …”’ She is momentarily transported to the shores of the Tiber, and she’s taken me with her. It occurs to me, I’m getting a private one-on-one performance of Shakespeare by Judi Dench while drinking her champagne. In your dreams, Charles Spencer.

She advises me on the importance of having passions. Hers is most definitely Shakespeare. And with the way she delivers it, virtually breathes it, if he were alive the feeling would be mutual. When she became an actor, Shakespeare was all she wanted to do. Her very first role was playing Ophelia at the Old Vic, which caused controversy, as it was unheard of for an unknown to bag a lead part on their first try. But she, of course, delivered and hasn’t stopped doing so since.

She surprises me, though, by saying that the nerves are greater now than back then. ‘The more you know, the more unsure you get. At first you don’t know the pitfalls. But if I didn’t have nerves I’d be worried, as they engender energy, they’re petrol.’

She says a theatre performance still leaves her feeling raw and exposed. ‘I am like that frog you’d see in biology class at school, split down the middle and pinned out, ready to be dissected. I just want someone to come in and give me a hug and be positive, but people knock on the door and come in and say things like, “We had the most terrible journey down from Gloucester.”’

It is a small example of her bigger point, that life is better if you stay positive.

‘If I was passing on anything, I would say, for goodness sake, look for the pluses in life. Being negative completely erodes everything. If something bad happens, I always say cancel and continue and get back on track. There’s no good being negative, I don’t believe in negativity.’

Then one beat later.

‘Except in regard to the referendum.’

I’ll drink to that.

‘LOOK FOR THE PLUSES IN LIFE. BEING NEGATIVE COMPLETELY ERODES EVERYTHING. IF SOMETHING BAD HAPPENS, I ALWAYS SAY CANCEL AND CONTINUE AND GET BACK ON TRACK.’

– Dame Judi Dench

SQUADDIE BANTER WITH CORPORAL ANDY REID

‘Are me family jewels still intact?’ That was Corporal Andy Reid’s first question when he regained consciousness after standing on a Taliban IED, which blew off both his legs and one arm, ten days before the end of his tour in Afghanistan as a British Army infantryman. Fortunately for Andy, his future wife Claire and now their son William, the answer was a resounding yes.

He tells me this when I meet him in his hometown. He has kindly collected me from the station, rolling by in his pimped-up 4x4 Jeep, with tinted windows, spoilers, the works. This is no typical disability vehicle, and Andy’s is no typical story.

Back in his kitchen, while he deftly one-handedly makes tea for us both, Andy recounts the time his parents first came to see him in hospital after he was evacuated from Afghanistan. Finding their son in bed, missing both legs and an arm, and with the remaining one in plaster, his dad, not knowing what else to do, patted Andy on the head. ‘I said, “I’m not a fucking dog, Dad,” and as soon as I said that we all started laughing and we knew then, it is going to be OK.’

To Andy, the jokes are ‘squaddie banter’, the humour that soldiers use to lighten the mood and bring a bit of normality to situations that are often anything but. ‘Four weeks after the accident, I went on a Remembrance Parade, and it was really cold, so I said to the boys, “It’s bloody freezing, I can hardly feel my toes.” It made everyone crack up and removed any awkwardness.’

The last thing Andy wants is people stepping on eggshells around him or feeling sorry for him. ‘I joined up and I accept responsibility for what’s happened to me, I knew the risks. That’s helped me move on a lot easier. You don’t move on very far by blaming someone else every time, it’s just going to make you depressed and angry and bitter.’ It’s a way of thinking that shows the resilience and determination that makes Andy such a role-model soldier.

Instead of being bitter, each year Andy celebrates the day of the explosion. He calls it Happy Being Alive Day. ‘When I woke up in hospital I realised I wasn’t a victim, I was a survivor. Six of the guys from my company all died from one IED. I got to leave hospital after two weeks and go home, they didn’t.’ He says he needs to honour those fellow soldiers who weren’t lucky enough to come back by living his life to the fullest rather than sitting around feeling sorry for himself.

One piece of advice he passes on to other people dealing with such a life-changing challenge is to remember that ‘the body will achieve what the mind believes’. On each Happy Being Alive Day he sets himself a goal to do something physically challenging to prove he can do it. With this attitude he has so far climbed Snowdon, run a 10k race, cycled most of Britain and skydived twice, all things people would assume were out of the picture but which Andy willed into reality.