The Times Companion to 2017

by Ian Brunskill

  A lot of people, when they write to me — and I’m sure the many thousands more who contact Marr — say the same thing: “You’re inspirational.” From that, with sincere gratitude, I take the compliment. But I think they’re wrong. Courage can be dumb. Faith is like fake news: it’s dangerous. I could well be a rotten inspiration for newly disabled people, who would be better off accepting their fate and just enjoying what they have. My body would certainly be a lot kinder to inhabit if I had killed off the ghost of Melanie Past.

  That way, I’d stop seeing the bloody woman wherever I go.

  Melanie Reid is tetraplegic after breaking her neck and back in a riding accident in April 2010

  SPRING

  SCRAPS, STORMS AND TRENCH HAND—ALL IN A 23FT BOAT

  Damian Whitworth

  MARCH 2 2017

  IN 1789 A ROYAL NAVY SHIP was sailing from Tahiti to the West Indies when members of the recalcitrant crew seized control of the vessel from her commander, Lieutenant William Bligh. In an episode that would become known as the mutiny on the Bounty, Bligh and a group of loyal sailors were forced into a 23ft launch and cast adrift in the vastness of the South Pacific with five days’ worth of food and water. Their epic 4,000-mile, seven-week journey to safety in Timor is regarded as one of the great maritime survival stories.

  In 2016 nine men, all strangers, set out in a replica boat to re-create that voyage. Their captain was Anthony Middleton, a former special forces soldier who puts recruits through their paces in the series SAS: Who Dares Wins. Some of the men were experienced sailors, but the others, including a handy man, a junior doctor, a brand ambassador and at least one colossal pain in the arse, were hardly seasoned survivalists.

  Five days into the expedition they hit a big storm while sailing, at night through an area littered with reefs. In the first episode of Mutiny, the Channel 4 series about the voyage, embedded camera operators capture the reactions of men who signed up for what sounded like a jolly adventure and are now confronting the reality of life-threatening conditions.

  “I am hanging on for dear life,” says one terrified man as wave after huge wave crashes over the tiny boat. “F***ing scary,” says another as he huddles with a haunted look at the bottom of the boat, holding the hand of a crewmate.

  Mutiny takes reality TV into uncharted waters and makes The Island with Bear Grylls look like a Scout camp. “Oh beyond, beyond Bear Grylls,” says Middleton. “And I am a big fan of Bear Grylls. This is set apart from any reality TV; nothing like it out there.”

  It is hard to overstate how miserable the experience looks. Nine men are crammed into a small, open sailing boat, navigating, 18th-century style, with map, compass and sextant, eating 18th-century rations (ship’s biscuit and dried beef ) and enjoying 18th-century privacy and toilet facilities (they squat over the side of the boat).

  A tarpaulin proves ineffective in lashing rain and their clothing, although modern, is mostly wool and cotton in an attempt to be more authentic. “Horrendous,” says Middleton. “Like cardboard.” The crew are seen quickly becoming soaked to the skin and they stay that way. After a few days one man has such a bad case of trench hand, or frostbite, that he cannot hold a rope or an oar.

  “People need to see the real suffering, the real pain, the real hardship: the storms and the rotting of the flesh,” says Middleton. But we will also see “the real joys. It was an amazing opportunity to sail the same waters as Bligh. You will definitely get an idea of what Bligh and his men went through.”

  One of Bligh’s men was stoned to death by hostile natives and others died soon after the voyage ended. The modern crew set out to island-hop like Bligh from Tonga, to Fiji, Vanuatu and islands off Australia before reaching Timor. As a concession to modern health and safety they wore life jackets and a safety boat tracked them from a few miles away.

  “If somebody got attacked by a shark, obviously we had the means to call in the safety boat, but I made it clear from the very beginning that I would make that final decision and didn’t want any of them to think they had that option,” says Middleton. “I know how far people can push themselves. People will question when it gets to episode five whether we did go over the line.”

  I meet Middleton, 36, in a pub in Wapping, east London, where Bligh lived. Today Middleton has the neatly trimmed beard of a Hollywood pirate, but by the end of the voyage he looked “like Tom Hanks in Cast Away”. He has lavish tattoos and the biceps you’d expect of a former marine who led teams of 40 men on the ground in Afghanistan with the Special Boat Service.

  You’d bet on him to island-hop his way across the Pacific, but what about the rest of them? “I wanted to see if the modern-day man could stand up to such hardships. I genuinely believed as a leader, as a captain, that I could take any man on the street and get them through this voyage and complete one of the hardest maritime survival feats known to man.”

  He was not without doubts though. “I thought to myself: can the modern-day man do this? People feel encaged in this health-and-safety world where you can’t climb a ladder without wearing safety boots. I think people want to test themselves both physically and psychologically. They want to see where their limits lie. These men obviously volunteered to do this because they wanted to push themselves.”

  And were they up to it? “All of them made the mistake of thinking that it was just going to be a sailing journey. The moment I stepped off that safety boat into the 23ft open boat I was in survival mode. I didn’t think of it as an adventure. I thought of it straightaway as survival. And they didn’t.”

  He won’t say how many of the men, if any, completed the voyage, but “it certainly presented its challenges and after a couple of weeks I was thinking: ‘What have I got myself into?’”

  At sea the men had to sleep sitting or curled on the deck and become accustomed to consuming little more than 400 calories a day of ship’s biscuit and dried beef and less than a litre of water each. When they anchored at islands they went ashore to hunt and forage. Middleton put on 10kg in preparation and lost 21kg during the voyage.

  Two of the group were experienced sailors but were used to having GPS, weather reports that could warn them of storms and a cabin to dry off in. “They may be hardened sailors but I guarantee you they have never been exposed to anything like that in their lives.”

  Physical hardship was not, though, the biggest challenge for Middleton or the crew. “I am used to my body feeling pain, to being sleep-deprived. I am used to being malnourished, I know what dehydration feels like. It was the psychological side that really pushed me as a leader and that came from the longevity of the voyage. Constantly my main priority was the welfare of the men and making sure they were psychologically OK, that they weren’t sinking into depression. People got extremely low. People lost their minds on that boat,” he says and gives a grim little laugh.

  Was he among them? “I had bad days. I couldn’t afford to lose my mind. If I was a crew member I could have, but they were looking to me to lead. If you see a weakness, see your leader crumble, then I guarantee that will have a knock-on effect and before you know it the whole team will be down.”

  There were good moments too, including watching a pod of dolphins following the boat and returning triumphant from successful hunting trips. “People went from extreme depression and hypothermia to next day the sun coming up and they are just in a completely different space.”

  His greatest fear? “Losing the command and control of the men, losing their respect.” Was there a mutiny? “Not in episode one,” he says, knowing that’s all I’ve seen. Did anyone come to blows then? “Not to blows. I wouldn’t allow physical violence.”

  Chris, a self-styled “adventurer” from Liverpool, has clearly been chosen by the production company to drive everybody else crazy and create conflict. He has been to prison for an undisclosed offence and says he has turned his life round. He dreams of sailing round the world. The problem on this voyage is that he refuses to do what is asked of him, whether it is an
instruction from Middleton to collect firewood or a plea from his crewmates not to risk his life and the expedition by diving off perilous rocks. “If you say to me, ‘Don’t do it, stop it’, I’m gonna fockin’ do it,” he says with the grinning pride and logic of a particularly infuriating teenager.

  Of course, he cuts his leg jumping off the rocks, gets an infection and has other members of the group screaming at him within the first two days of what could be a two-month trip. “When you chuck people in at the deep end they either tread water or they drown,” says Middleton. “Chris started drowning straightaway. I found out very quickly that he wasn’t a team player and also that he had a problem with discipline and authority. I had to focus a lot of time on Chris. It was like looking after a child.”

  Middleton has had his own experience of prison. On an alcohol-fuelled night a few months after leaving the Special Boat Service in 2012 he assaulted two police officers. He served four months of a 14-month sentence.

  He emerged with a plan and the determination to plot a career in television. “When I came out of prison I made a conscious decision. If I can train my mind to be an elite military man I can train my mind to be an elite civilian.

  “I found myself in a shameful situation and I didn’t belong there. One minute I am an elite special forces operator, team leader, the next minute I am in a prison cell sitting next to robbers and murderers. It was a massive wake-up call for me.”

  Tracing Bligh’s route was in some ways tougher than fighting in Afghanistan. “This challenge was longer and, to be honest with you, this challenge psychologically has been the hardest test as a leader. Not the biggest test psychologically and physically combined. That would be in the special forces: you are being shot at for two or three hours, the rev count is in the red all the time. Here, it’s the longevity: two to two-and-a-half months at sea. Making sure I got these guys home safely was such an immense stress that I was just engulfed psychologically with their feelings, their mental state, their physical state. I was torn from pillar to post.”

  Middleton has four children with his wife, Emilie, and a son by a previous relationship. Emilie is used to him being away, but in the military he was in contact regularly by email and phone. “This was the longest time I have been without talking to my wife at all. I was more emotionally connected on this journey than I was in Afghanistan because I had time to think about my wife and family and I could let some emotion show because I wasn’t going out fighting wars.”

  He returned on the due date for his fourth child with Emilie, and their son was born a few days later. They named him Bligh. “It seemed very fitting. To me it was such an amazing journey. I loved doing it. I’d do it again tomorrow, but that’s just me.”

  WE ALL NEED TO LEARN HOW TO TALK ABOUT DEATH

  Alice Thomson

  MARCH 8 2017

  I HAD FORGOTTEN his pink denim suit and floral kipper ties, but as we sat in Mortlake crematorium in west London it all came back. My godfather, Willie Goodhart, was an inspirational barrister and founder member of the SDP who wrote the party manifesto. He was deeply self-effacing about his intellect but proud of his flamboyant wardrobe. Our families had been bound together for more than a century and I suddenly remembered his love of singing Mud, Mud, Glorious Mud as he sat on an orange corduroy beanbag; being given my first diet bitter lemon by his wife, Celia, in her kaftan; and his smiling up at me in the Lords when he was the Liberal Democrat shadow lord chancellor and I was this paper’s junior political correspondent.

  His humanist funeral on a freezing January day, with a blessing by Rabbi Julia Neuberger, was extraordinarily joyful. At the end everyone sang Happy Birthday to his 13-year-old granddaughter.

  Death embarrasses us too often now in Britain. We have lessons on sex education, careers advice and pre-natal classes. We swap tips on how to extend our lives but we rarely mention the end except when we discuss social care failures, inheritance tax or the morals around assisted suicide. “Fathers are expected to be present at the birth, but no one told me about the importance of being there at my father’s death and I missed it,” one friend explained.

  When I interviewed Samantha Cameron recently she talked powerfully about the death of her son Ivan and how it overshadows everything else in her life. Many successful people I’ve interviewed seem to lose parents at an early age yet they almost all prefer not to dwell on it, acknowledging briefly perhaps that it may have acted as a spur to fulfil their lives. Studies have shown that children who lose parents, and adults who are orphaned young, often develop an instinctive drive to survive and thrive. But it is very rare for people to talk frankly about bereavement. A new book by the psychotherapist Julia Samuel, Grief Works, aims to change this using her case histories to illustrate the overwhelming pain of losing a parent, partner, sibling, friend or child. Just reading one of the case studies about Mimi, whose son Aiden was stillborn, is devastating: “Her eyes were dark pools of sadness with no life,” she writes.

  We need to understand how we can help. People often worry that they will be tactless so they become paralysed with fear. Meanwhile, those suffering find that death has irrevocably changed their lives.

  Ms Samuel explains that sharing pain is the only way to make a difference yet most of us aren’t sufficiently aware of the impact a traumatic bereavement has, the ripples it leaves or how long they persist. Nor do we understand how to explain death to a grieving child. It’s 50 years since CS Lewis wrote A Grief Observed and Elisabeth Kübler-Ross explained the five stages of grief in On Death and Dying yet we appear less able now to confront mortality.

  The ancient Egyptians planned their exit from childhood. The Victorians grieved properly, holding wakes and wearing mourning with glass lockets representing tears so people could empathise. They felt closer to death. One of my great-great-grandmothers lost eight of her siblings before she was 23. But clinging to elaborate public mourning practices during the First World War was impossible, and people were expected to pack up their troubles in their old kit bag. Death during the past century was moved discreetly from the home to the hospital and sanitised, so that grief is often now treated with antidepressants.

  Ms Samuel shows that we need more emotional help but there could also be better practical advice. Four fifths of people say they never discuss their own death, half of couples have no idea of their partner’s end-of-life wishes and more than two thirds of adults haven’t written a will, according to the National Council for Palliative Care and the Dying Matters campaign. Even a quarter of GPs admit that they avoid discussing death with their patients.

  This means that already-fragile families are often left reeling by the administration a death incurs. It’s as hard to organise a funeral as a wedding and although for some it can provide a distraction, it can become a terrifying ordeal. Only 25 per cent of bereaved people across Britain feel supported after a death, while 32 per cent don’t feel that their employer treated them compassionately. Willie Goodhart’s eldest daughter, Frances, a clinical psychologist, said that the undertakers were her unsung heroes. “They were supportive, sympathetic and respectful, and they have to do this every day,” she explained.

  Cash-strapped councils, however, increasingly take advantage of families’ vulnerability to hike up the prices. The cost of a burial has doubled in the past five years in some areas and now averages £4,136. Even if there is a will, a third of families end up arguing over a dead member’s estate. Others have found that it is simple things that floor them, such as not being able to access the deceased’s computer.

  There is an art to death. If possible, the dying should make plans, write and discuss their wills, suggest funeral ideas, explain whether they want to be buried or cremated and leave their passwords. Employers should be sympathetic, as should companies dealing with delayed payments when bank accounts are frozen.

  The younger generation is also providing a way forward. Their tributes on Facebook show that sharing grief is one of the best ways to help one another. As
WB Yeats wrote, “Let’s talk and grieve, For that’s the sweetest music for sad souls.”

  WHAT’S A NICE ASIAN BOY DOING IN A PLACE LIKE THIS?

  Sathnam Sanghera

  MARCH 18 2017

  IN NEUROLOGY, MEDICAL professionals sometimes talk about the “clasp-knife response”, a term that describes how, during an examination, certain joints will not budge at all but then suddenly give way. Some writers have, in turn, used the phrase to describe patterns of emotional response to serious medical diagnoses, although, at risk of trivialising its use, I can’t help but feel that it also encapsulates my feelings about learning to ski at the age of 40.

  One minute I am, in a state of cheerful cluelessness, rather looking forward to the whole thing; the next I am dreading it more than an avalanche. Though to describe myself as clueless would be to understate things. Growing up in Wolverhampton, and knowing no one who skied, my references come almost entirely from the ZX Spectrum game Horace Goes Skiing and TV chat show interviews with Eddie “the Eagle” Edwards. I know so little about winter sports that when I am sent to the World Economic Conference in Davos as a news reporter in my twenties, I go in my office brogues, somehow not realising that there will be snow in a ski resort, and spend all my time falling over. The first time I try on my borrowed ski clothes (thank you, Mountain Warehouse), I put everything on at once, more than five layers, not realising that each set of thermals is for a different day.

  What am I thinking? Not much. If I imagine anything at all, it is sporting a nice anorak in a snowy scene reminiscent of the video for Wham’s Last Christmas. But then I can’t help but notice that the ski jacket features “technology that makes you searchable in the event of an avalanche”, which is not as reassuring as the manufacturer seems to think it is. When I ask for beginners’ advice on Facebook, the responses, while encompassing the random (“Never eat the yellow snow”) and the racial (“You are evolutionarily designed for the Punjab plains: it’s hot, dry and flat. Skiing is not”), mainly dwell on pain and injury. As a result I google so much safety advice that algorithms begin emailing me articles about celebrity ski deaths (Michael Kennedy, aged 39, in Aspen, Colorado; Sonny Bono, aged 62, Heavenly, Nevada; Natasha Richardson, aged 45, Mont Tremblant, Quebec).