Lives Less Ordinary
A blog of extraordinary, everyday people
Monday, 12 December 2011
Encounters: loss
Wednesday, 16 November 2011
Swingers
Envy, I suspect, lies behind my irritation at those 60s icons – David Bailey, Michael Caine, Terence Stamp, Twiggy, any Beatle or Stone you care to name – who are forever saying how exciting it was, how young they were, how they didn't have a clue what they were doing, they just made it up as they went along – how, at any moment, it could disappear in a puff of marijuana smoke. It all sounds so much fun. 
Friday, 14 October 2011
Grumpy old man

Tuesday, 20 September 2011
"Mummy, they're going in again!"
This is Simon Murie. He's standing on a grassy hummock on the shore of Buttermere in the Lake District, doing I forget what with a banana. A joke involving cold water and male shrinkage? Demonstrating front crawl with soft fruit?
Encounters: parallel parking
More interesting is news that happiness is contagious. Research from the US suggests three degrees of separation of positivity: our good mood affects not just us, but our friends, their friends and even their friends.
I was reminded of this a few days ago. I was trying to parallel park in front of a cafe filled with onlookers, and after ten minutes of getting no closer to the kerb gave up in a huff, leaving the car a foot from the pavement.
A man leapt up. "You're not gonna leave it like that are you, love?" he said. I nodded. "Give me the keys." As I handed them over (while simultaneously undoing decades of feminist progress) it occurred to me he might just drive off, but of course he didn't. It was a random act of kindness that forced me to trust him, and made me smile for the next two hours. I wonder if my own meagre acts, in a causal, butterfly-flapping-its-wings way, somehow prompted it. I like to think they did.
Tuesday, 16 August 2011
Steppe On


Saturday, 23 July 2011
Big Hack
Barely a day passes these days without Nick Davies’s picture byline on the front of The Guardian. He is the investigative journalist behind the story of the moment: phone hacking, Murdoch and the News of the World.
Davies is journalist as rock star – handsome, charming, and confident bordering on arrogant. He has been called "courageous", "heroic" and "the British Bernstein and Woodward to Murdoch's Nixon" (he was apparently inspired into his line of work by the Watergate scandal, filmed as All The President's Men with Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford). Oh, and "pompous", according to Private Eye editor, Ian Hislop.

The masterclass was off the record. But it's not too controversial to say Davies talked about his early days as a reporter in South Devon, recently graduated from Oxford. A seasoned photographer accompanied him on his first “doorstepping” – visiting a young widow to talk to her about her husband’s death at work in suspicious circumstances.
“What are you going to say?” asked the old-time hack. “I’ll tell her I’m investigating her husband’s death,” replied Davies, brimming with confidence. “She’ll shut the door in your face," the old hack said. "Tell her you're writing an appreciation of her husband, and she'll invite you in for tea." It was Davies's first lesson in the art of investigation.
How does he decide what stories to investigate? Anything that makes you think, hang on, something doesn't add up here, he told us.
Phone tapping at NoW is just the first in a long line of impressive scoops. He uncovered the story on nurse Beverly Allitt, has investigated education, drug policy and penal reform. And he spotted the potential in Wikileaks before anyone else. Unsurprisingly, he has a book deal from the Murdoch story, it was reported yesterday.
Guardian editor, Alan Rusbridger, says Davies never gives up. "Although he's in his mid to late 50s now, he's still got an amazing appetite for standing on doorsteps, for getting out and meeting people, and spending long evenings in seedy bars or whatever it takes to get the story," he told Radio 4 last week.
"He is a troublemaker, and quite often when he comes into the office, your heart sinks because you know there's going to be trouble. That happened when he came in and said, 'I've just met Julian Assange and he's got the biggest cache of secrets the world has ever seen.' Part of you thinks, that's fantastic, and part of you thinks, oh God, how are we going to deal with that one?"
Daily Telegraph political journalist Peter Oborne has said: "He's uncomfortable to be with, there's no ease when you're with him, you make a joke and he tends not to get it. But I have no doubt that he's the greatest living British journalist."
In a way, Davies is why almost anyone becomes a journalist: he uncovers the truth, and his stories change things. Right now, the press, police and politicians are changing how they do business with each other. I can't say many of my stories have achieved that.

