Lives Less Ordinary

Encounters: loss

2011-12-12T10:46:00.007Z

The cheese straws I manufactured yesterday morning in catering quantities – for a Christmas soiree – were a little saltier than they should have been. I was listening to journalist Eve Pollard on Radio 4's Desert Island Discs, and moved to tears more than once.

Her parents fled Vienna in the 1930s, but her grandparents died in a concentration camp. Her mother could never speak about them. When the war was over, she had the chance to visit Vienna, but couldn't do it. Jews' houses were routinely looted when they were deported, and she told her daughter she couldn't bear to see another woman wearing her jewellery. It was a small personal detail – a story I'd never heard before – that revealed so much about the lives of ordinary people at the time.

Pollard dedicated one of her songs, the beautiful aria "O mio babbino caro" ("Oh my beloved Father") by Puccini, to her mother, who would listen to it quietly, lost in memories of her Dad.

Like I said, salty cheese straws.

Swingers

2011-11-16T16:28:00.012Z

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.

Photographer Terry O'Neill, who I interviewed for last Saturday's magazine, was bang slap in the right place at the right time. An eastender like Caine and Bailey, he stumbled into photography by accident. He was picked up in the early 60s by the Daily Sketch, which was after a young snapper to dispatch to the darker corners of London in search of those making the capital swing. The next oldest photographer on Fleet Street was 31 – a dinosaur.

He photographed the Beatles, the Stones (below), the lot – his informal, on the hoof style suiting these equally establishment-upsetting upstarts. "We were all just kids – none of us knew we were going to be famous." Yeah, yeah, Terry, save it.

Today, O'Neill is a short, sweet, twinkly-eyed man who still can't believe his luck, talks merrily about the past, and says there's no-one interesting left to photograph. I beg to differ. But I did enjoy visiting him in his tiny basement studio in Mayfair, filled with boxes, files, drawers and cigarette smoke. I inhaled it along with his stories, pretending I was right back there with him.

Grumpy old man

2011-10-14T15:07:00.019+01:00

I've never been a particular fan of Terence Conran. His well-fed, cigar-smoking (five a day, apparently), bon viveur persona – not to mention his ubiquity – hasn't ever sat too comfortably with me.

But I might have to revise my opinion. Meeting him a few days ago at a dinner for his 80th birthday, I got a fascinating glimpse into his personal world, and a new-found appreciation for what he's done for British lifestyle.

He set up a furniture, ceramics and textile workshop in the East End of London in the late 40s, and worked on the Festival of Britain exhibition in 1951. But his first big public venture was The Soup Kitchen in 1953, a little restaurant just off The Strand. Inspired by trips to France, he served unimaginably exotic wares to a British public still on rations: espresso, French bread and cheese, and soup. Served in mugs! Inside were cane chairs and a quarry-tiled floor.

Conran founded Habitat in 1964 and revolutionised our homes. It sold colourful, exotic furniture and homewares – duvets, woks and Japanese paper lanterns – to that hip young generation, a world away from their parents' heavy, pre-war furniture hand-me-downs. The rest – design shops, divorces, a restaurant empire and designer offspring – is history.

At dinner, he was surrounded by women who had clearly been extremely beautiful in the 60s and still had that decade's tousled, blonde hair and smoky eyes; and dapper, old-school gents, in whom you could still detect a touch of the East End barrow boy.

I sat next to one, Roger Mavity, chief executive of Conran's holding company – unconventional, twinkly-eyed and with a cracking humour. He refused to take the quiz that had been laid on for us seriously, unlike the rest of the room – "It's a bit of a conversation killer, isn't it?" – and regaled me with stories. I was utterly charmed.

Conran, like many of his generation, hates waste of any kind. He works hard, is famously tight-fisted, and loathes mobile phones and bullshitters (notably Tony Blair and George Bush). In a speech at the end of the night, he might have said a few humble thank yous and raised his glass. Instead, he lambasted the Government, said that now he was 80 he better work harder as there was no time to waste, and made a slightly off-colour joke about cutting staff numbers, before someone relieved him of the microphone. And I admired him all the more for it.

"Mummy, they're going in again!"

2011-09-20T13:14:00.018+01:00

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?

He was one of two guides leading a swimming and camping trip we went on last weekend. Our other guide was Olly (below, in blue), who has been a beach lifeguard in Cornwall, a surf bum everywhere from Bali to Costa Rica, and is now a PE teacher in Cumbria.

The weather was shocking, but the scenery heartstopping.

Murie used to be a mining engineer, but decided nine years ago to turn his hobby – open water swimming – into a job. The result is Swimtrek, a company that runs outdoor swimming trips all over the world, from Turkey to Mexico (I went with them to Greece last year – weirdly warmer than northern England – and never laughed so much).

While the rest of us squeezed into our wetsuits and shrieked as we entered the 12 degree water, Murie stripped down to his shorts as if it were the Mediterranean in August. It's really not: at 12 degrees, the cold hits your face between your eyes, your lips turn numb and your hands, by the time you climb out, are incapable of movement until you've grafted them to a mug of tea.

Australian by birth, Murie has swum Hellespont in Turkey, the Channel, the River Volta in Ghana and the Gibraltar Straits. He goes on half a dozen Swimtrek trips a year, and spends the rest of his time scouting for new locations. He swam alongside me twice, shouting encouragement and giving me technique tips.

But what I admired most about him is his modesty. When introducing himself, he didn't tell us it was his company. He got up before breakfast to manufacture sandwiches with excellent humour. And he cracked jokes all weekend.

On our final swim – the length of Lake Buttermere (above) – a small girl shouted: "Look Mummy, they're going in again!" Yes, I couldn't believe we were either. But I'm still glowing.

Encounters: parallel parking

2011-09-20T13:05:00.007+01:00

I've been spreading a little kindness around the world lately, for a feature: showering colleagues with compliments, helping lost tourists and chatting to neighbours like I was born to it. Random acts like this, not surprisingly, strengthen our connections with people and make us happier.

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.

Steppe On

2011-08-16T14:27:00.017+01:00

Remember Rob Lilwall? He is one of my favourite Less Ordinary Lives, a young man who jacked it all in to cycle 30,000 miles from Siberia back home to England (he went the long way round).

Well, he's off again – this time to walk a mere 3,500 km from Ulan Bator in Mongolia to Hong Kong, where he now lives. The trek will take him and his companion through the Gobi desert, along the Great Wall, down the gorges of the Yellow River and across the mountains of central China. He leaves in November.

Part of the joy of Lilwall's original expedition was his amateur under-preparedness – £10 Royal Mail waterproofs, a pup tent and no fixed route – and an absence of the trappings of modern-day expeditions: camera crew, sponsorship and a book deal.

This trip is slightly different. He is hoping to raise money for children's charity, Viva, for which he and his wife have set up the Hong Kong fundraising office. National Geographic is making a documentary of his journey (his companion is a young cameraman, Leon McCarron). Even Bear Grylls, who I dismissed in my original post, has provided a quote for the pair's trip website (you can follow their progress here).

Does it matter? You can only cash-in your life savings and take three years off to cycle the world once, as Lilwall did. And anyone who has managed to combine being an "adventurer" with running an outpost for a children's charity has to be deeply admired.

For now, Lilwall is getting fit, planning his route and improving his Mandarin. Sadly, those £10 over-trousers probably won't make the kit list.

Big Hack

2011-07-23T19:15:00.023+01:00

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.

Last year, I attended a talk Davies gave with The Guardian’s other super sleuth, David Leigh. The two could not be more different. Leigh cuts a scruffy geography teacher figure. He stood at the podium and spoke quietly and humbly about his work, his methods, the stories he is most proud of.

Davies, in black jeans, leather jacket and a headset, paced the stage like a tiger, regaling the packed hall with tales. To his credit, he tried to convey the unglamorous side of his business – the endless chipping away at a story, the lonely days away from home, the slow pace of events. But his energy made it sound impossibly exciting. After the talk, in the bar, he was surrounded by female admirers.

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.

Rainforestman

2011-06-16T21:38:00.006+01:00

Dr John Hemming – explorer, writer, gentleman – seems a little out of place in 2011. His world is one of Amazon expeditions, museums and relics; Oxford college days and received pronunciation.

Ancient artefacts line the walls of his elegant Kensington townhouse: pots and figurines that look very breakable. Most are from Peru, he says, some thousands of years old, bought at auction in London. I'm here to interview him for Friends of the Earth's 40th anniversary, which it celebrates this year. Hemming is a supporter of the charity and my first subject – one down, 39 to go.

He first visited the Amazon in 1961, aged 25, with friends Kit Lambert and Richard Mason. They had set out to survey the Iriri, then believed to be the world's longest unexplored river. "The Brazilian government authorised us to name places, so we named all the landmarks after our Brazilian girlfriends," he says.

The young trio – plus three Brazilian government surveyors and five local woodsmen – spent four months mapping, cutting trails into the unknown, discovering the river and building dugout canoes when disaster struck. Mason was ambushed by a long range hunting party of, at that time, uncontacted Panará tribesmen ('uncontacted' refers to tribes who have had no peaceful contact with mainstream society).

When Hemming and Lambert found his body, left on their trail, it was surrounded by 40 arrows and 17 clubs, his head smashed by the latter. Two arrows sit in a basket in Hemming's downstairs loo – with long bamboo stems and pointed tips, they are not much shorter than me.

"It was incredibly bad luck, they were the most belligerent tribe in Brazil," he says. "They had the same word for stranger and enemy – anyone who wasn't one of them. Richard was the first to walk into the ambush – it could have been any one of us." The tribe was contacted 12 years later.

The photograph above was taken a few days after first contact was made with another tribe, the Asurini. It took three years of work and several tough expeditions, he says, undertaken by Brazil's National Indian Foundation. "Meeting these indigenous people was the greatest day of my life," he says. "And she even invited me to sit in her hammock with her."

Nowadays, the thinking on uncontacted tribes is somewhat different. According to charity Survival International (of which Hemming is a founder), tribes must be left alone, and effort put into protecting them. Minimal contact, such as this extraordinary, moving video, is sometimes necessary to check whether tribes have moved elsewhere, whether their lands are being invaded, and to draw attention to their existence.

In the 50 years since his first trip, Hemming has travelled the entire Amazon region, documenting it in several books, including The Conquest of the Incas and, most recently, Tree of Rivers: The Story of the Amazon. He has visited and lived with over 40 tribes, four of them at the time of first contact.

He now enjoys the comfortable existence of a retired explorer – "I am too old for really tough exploring" – but is still active in south America. He is off next week to Brazil for a conference of Amazonian anthroplogists, and is chairman of a new charity there that is creating a research station in an undisturbed tropical rainforest.

His passion for the welfare of the Amazon rainforest remains undimmed. "It gives the world three things," he says. "It absorbs our carbon. It provides rain for much of Brazil and Argentina, even parts of the Caribbean. And it has the richest biodiversity on earth. We still haven’t documented everything. Protecting it is actually protecting humanity."

The wisdom of Michelle O

2011-05-26T17:22:00.003+01:00

Dressed in a white tunic, black pants and a major gold belt – together with her black eye-liner, looking just a little bit 60s – Michelle Obama offered some career and relationship wisdom to a group of schoolgirls from inner city London (just up the road from here) who were visiting Oxford University. Who wouldn't want this wonderful woman on speed dial for all of life's crises?

“People sometimes questioned whether someone with my background could succeed at an elite university. And when I was accepted at one of those universities, I had all kinds of worries and fears and doubts. I worried that I wouldn’t be as well prepared as students who had come from more privileged families; I worried that I wouldn’t fit it somewhere so different from where I’d grown up.

"But after a few months, in college away from home on my own I realised that I was just as capable, and I just as much to offer [as] any of my classmates. I realised that if I worked hard enough I could do just as well as anyone else. I realised that success is not about the background you’re from, it’s about the confidence that you have, and the effort you’re willing to invest. You just have to work hard, that’s it. You have to push yourself. That’s the only thing. This doesn’t come easy.”

And on her husband, she said:

“I knew he was a special person. And it had nothing to do with his education, it had nothing to do with his potential. There are a lot of women who [to tick] the boxes – did he go to the right school? What is his income? It was none of that. It was how he felt about his mother. The love that he felt for his mother. His relationship to women. His work ethic.

"We worked together in a firm. He did his work, and he was good. And he was smart. And I liked that. And he was low key, and he wasn’t impressed with himself. And he was funny. And we joked a lot. And he loved his little sister.

"And he was a community organiser. I really respected that. Here we are in a big law firm, right, and everybody was pushing to make money. He was one of the smartest students at Harvard Law School, one of the smartest associates in our firm. He had the chance to clerk for the Supreme Court. And I thought – well, you’re definitely gonna do that, right? Only a few people have the chance to do that.

"And he was like, nah, not really. I think I can do more work working with folks in churches. And I was like, whoa, that’s different. And he meant it. It wasn’t a line, he wasn’t trying to impress me. It was those kind of values that made me think, you don’t meet people like that often. And when you couple that with talent and, he’s cute... You know, I always thought he would ... be useful [she laughs].

"But I had no idea he would be President. I didn’t think he was going to be President until the night we were standing on the stage and he actually won, you know. I was like, God, whoa, you won.

"The lesson for women is reach for partners that make you better. Trust your instincts. Good relationships feel good. They feel right. They aren’t painful. Do not bring people into your life who weigh you down.”

Himalayan porters

2011-05-12T16:03:00.000+01:00

One of the more unsettling sights you see while trekking in Nepal's Khumbu Valley is the steady stream of porters carrying extraordinary loads on their backs. There are no roads, and no transport other than yak – small planes land at airstrips lower down the valley, but higher up, they're strictly for emergencies only. So these human white vans keep the trekking lodges, the local markets and the wealthy teams at Base Camp supplied with food, drink, construction materials and other essentials.

The porters – small, wiry and weathered – have straps across their heads to take some of the weight off their backs, and small wooden walking sticks that double as bottom rests. Bent almost double, they trudge past, one tiny step at a time.

We saw mountains of toilet roll, sheets of plywood, crates of beer, roll matting, plastic basins, lemon drink, kerosene, enormous wooden planks as large as a crucifix, plumbing pipes 12 feet long and, once, a generator. Most wear flimsy plimsolls or sandals. One person had bare feet. The terrain is rough, the altitude punishing, and the mountainsides steep.

But the larger the loads, the better the pay. So it makes sense to carry as much as you can, goes the logic.

Some loads are more lucrative than others. These blue plastic barrels are toilets headed for Base Camp. Lined with a plastic bag, topped with a Western seat and placed inside a tarpaulin, they make for a surprisingly pleasant loo-going experience, considering.

A porter carrying a full barrel of poo will earn 150 rupees (about £1.20) per kg. At 60kg per barrel, that's 9,000 rupees – a good wage in Nepal. Any porter lucky enough to get the gig overseeing the transportation of an entire Everest expedition's excrement for three months can earn $2,500.

Struggling with my own meagre backpack, these porters seemed superhuman – and medieval. But they brought the Everest experience into sharp relief. For every rugged, moneyed mountain climber seeking glory on the summit, there's a porter who has to has to carry their shit back down the mountain. And there's very little glamour in that.

Monks

2011-05-11T17:32:00.000+01:00

These Buddhist monks live in a monastery in Tengboche, Nepal – a tiny settlement on top of a ridge with breathtaking views of Everest and Ama Dablam (the large lump in the background, below). Even they appreciate the outlook: I spotted one peering up the valley through his binoculars, although he could have been birdwatching.

The monastery, or gompa, is richly decorated. Tourists are allowed inside the main hall, or lha-khang, twice a day to watch the monks chanting. Silk banners hang from the ceiling, the walls are ornate and colourful, and a large, bright Buddha oversees proceedings.

Early morning and evening the monks, who have dedicated their lives to the monastery, take roost like chickens on two sets of benches, facing one another. Some are little more than teenagers. They wrap themselves in fleece-lined capes to keep warm and start to chant.

The sound is a low drone with mumbled articulations, that lasts around five minutes before coming to an abrupt halt. This is followed by tea sipping, poured from a flask by a monk, slurping, yawning, ear-picking and glancing around the room at the tourists. Then the chanting begins again.

Tengboche was one of my favourite places in the Himalayas, perhaps because it's reached from either side by a very steep climb. Or perhaps because of its very good bakery. But perhaps it was the monks, who showed me the true meaning of dedication.

Sonam Sherpa

2011-05-11T13:35:00.010+01:00

Lhakpa Sonam Sherpa lives in Namche Bazaar, a small, horseshoe-shaped town perched on a mountain high up in Nepal's Khumbu Valley, where the air is thin. Crows caw-caw loudly, yaks stroll through the streets, and the chink-chink-chink of hammer on stone is a constant soundtrack.

Namche is a popular stop-off for trekkers to acclimatise before pushing up the valley to Everest Base Camp, and beyond. We spent three days there breathing the sharp air and eating apple pie.

Unfortunately, I didn't take a digital picture of Namche, but this is the view up the valley from a short, steep path above town. That's the peak of Everest (behind a cloud).

Sonam is a historian of Sherpa culture and an excellent photographer. He is slight, with expressive eyes and a high-pitched, schoolboy giggle. With his wife, he runs a lodge for trekkers with two rudimentary museums attached: one documenting Sherpa culture, the other a history of climbing Mt Everest.

This is him as a beautiful 16-year-old boy.

And this is his matinee idol-handsome father, Sonam Girmi Sherpa, who undertook 37 expeditions to Everest during his lifetime.

When he was 19, Sonam junior contracted meningitis while making his way on foot, and by truck, to Kathmandu to embark on an engineering course at university. He woke up in hospital, deaf. He was sent to the best ear specialists in the US and London, but no-one could do anything for him.

The event changed the course of his life. He decided he had to do something his disability would allow. And he felt a deep desire to document the fast-changing lifestyle of his people, the Sherpa (the name given to people who live in this region of Nepal).

Communicating with a profoundly deaf man whose first language isn't English – although it is very good – is a challenge. But we managed through lip-reading (him), hand gestures (me) and scribbling on a pad (both of us).

"Where did you take this photo?" I asked. "OFF TRACK. ALMOST NO TOURIST" was the written reply, delivered with a wide smile and a twinkle in his eye.

"Million dollar Mickey Mouse music"

2011-02-07T14:10:00.004Z

A year or so after I left university, I briefly joined a short-lived film music orchestra. John Barry, along with the other John (Williams), was our God. I sat in front of the brass section and opposite the violins, both of whom had all the fun.

But despite the dull cello parts, I’ve never had so much fun playing in an orchestra. I had shivers in every rehearsal, such was the emotional intensity of the music.

Barry, who died last week, was the master of ear-splitting, striptease brass and soaring violins. He used both copiously in his 11 James Bond soundtracks. He was also a paid-up member of the impossibly glamorous 60s set, marrying Jane Birkin in 1965 (pictured above, tooling around in his E-Type Jaguar). “I was besotted,” she said in 2008.

His razzle-dazzle 007 theme tunes mirrored perfectly the films’ outlandish plots and characters, most notably Goldfinger and Diamonds Are Forever. But many featured lush, elegant melodies, such as From Russia With Love, Moonraker and the gorgeous, cascading You Only Live Twice. Barry was a great experimenter, too: his sinister soundtrack for The Ipcress File featured a cimbalom, with its haunting, metallic jangle.

In spite of his success – including five Oscars – he called his work “million dollar Mickey Mouse music”.

Barry had his faults. He dodged the tax man and was banned from the UK for a spell. And he had a penchant for girls considerably younger than himself (Birkin was 19 to his 32 when they married), illustrated in this story told by his friend, Glenys Roberts.

“John ... liked his women young,” writes Roberts. “I was on the same transatlantic flight as one of his girlfriends when she altered her date of birth on her passport with a bottle of duty-free vodka (which dissolves ink) and a fountain pen. You could do that before the days of barcodes and biometric passports. She thought that, given his track record, she would be more suitable for him if she was ten years younger.” Ah, the 60s.

Encounters: surf crowd

2011-01-20T18:02:00.007Z

The people at my surf camp on Costa Rica´s Pacific Coast are a mix of mahogany-skinned experts, regulars slowly remembering the moves, and learners falling off their boards a lot (guess where I am). They say things I could never pull off, like "let´s hope it cleans up later" and "it´s like a washing machine out there today".

There´s Billy from California, who´s been partying too much: "I haven´t seen him carrying a surfboard much lately," someone said, concernedly. There´s Bob, who rigged up a contraption back home in land-locked Idaho to help him get his paddling arms into shape. It involved bottles of water and a pully. And there´s Jennifer, my roommate, a smart New Yorker studying for a PhD who surfs at home - in Queens.

But best of all, there´s Dusty. A silver-haired grandfather in his 60s, he surfed for 20 years in southern California in the 1950s and 60s on longboards, when you learned by clambering first to your knees, then your feet. He chuckles at the memory.

Married for 33 years and living hundreds of miles from the sea, he takes a surf trip three or four times a year, usually to Baja. What´s the attraction? "It clears you head. I´ve got a lot of demons in here," he smiles. His four grandchildren are impressed. "They think it´s pretty cool their Grandpa surfs."

He didn´t surf this morning. He walked to the sea with his board, and came back shaking his head. "Terrible. Messy as anything. It´ll clean up later."

Encounters: Francisco

2011-01-17T18:33:00.006Z

Francisco is tanned, has lots of freckles and when we meet, in a swimming pool, he shows me his his party trick: blowing a thin spout of water high into the air through a gap in his front teeth. He is nine years old.

He lives in Mal Pais, a "legendary" surf town on Costa Rica´s Pacific coast. He goes to school here. His parents are American, but he says he is Costa Rican, and he´s fluent in English and Spanish. He is talkative but seems a bit lonely.

The ocean is dotted with surfers from sunrise onwards, bobbing in the water and riding the messy waves. His mother works at a surf camp. He is surrounded by dudes day and night - they muss his hair, play around with him and throw him into the pool.

"Your surfing must be pretty good," I say. "I don´t surf," he replies matter-of-factly. Now, living in Mal Pais and not surfing is like living in the Alps and never skiing. I ask him why, but in reply, he shrugs and dives to the bottom of the pool. But I already know: it is Francisco´s nine-year-old way of asserting his independence, of wanting to be different from every other person in this town. I inwardly salute his confidence, and kick off for the other side of the pool.

Trapped

2010-12-15T16:39:00.004Z

There is extraordinary – and there is Aron Ralston (above), who cut off his own arm, trapped under a boulder, to save his life. His story, filmed as 127 Hours by Danny Boyle, might surprise you.

Ralston is honest enough to admit the downside of the fact that this supposedly life-changing experience did not actually change his life as perhaps it should, writes my colleague Patrick Barkham in today's Guardian.

"What did I do? In the years following my amputation I thought, I won't let it change me, I just want to be the guy I was before and prove that I am still this hard hero. It's almost pathetic to the extent that what I really needed was a humbling and what happened? I just got reinforced – I'm a fucking badass, I just got out ofthat. Nothing's gonna stop me!" He lowers his voice. "But I was ultimately humbled actually through a relationship – a girl who broke up with me.".

In the first guest blog on Lives Less Ordinary, read his incredible story here.

Out of the shadows

2010-12-04T22:04:00.011Z

Thet Sambath has been looking for the truth for ten years. That’s how long it’s taken him to track down some of the men and women involved in Cambodia’s savage Khmer Rouge regime. His father, brother and mother were murdered during that reign of terror, but Sambath isn’t after revenge – he wants his countrymen to hear their stories.

If anyone can persuade ageing party cadres and henchmen with blood on their hands to open up, it’s Sambath. A senior reporter on the Phnom Penh Post, he asks extraordinarily uncomfortable questions with charm, humility, smiling eyes and a gentle voice.

A British filmmaker, Rob Lemkin, has captured Sambath’s mammoth quest and turned it into a film, Enemies of the People. It has been nominated for an Oscar.

Every weekend Sambath kisses his young family goodbye and heads into the country, video recorder in hand, to dig up the unbearable past. His wife, wringing out washing, is non-plussed: “I wonder why he is so different from other people,” she smiles. “He’s always off in the forest.” She seems unaware that he has sacrificed ten years of his life to discover, for the first time in Cambodian history, what actually went on between 1975-79. She just misses her husband.

Sambath started at the top. Nuon Chea (below) was Brother Number Two to Pol Pot – and is now an 84-year-old with bad teeth and a certain grace. It took three years of regular interviews before Nuon Chea admitted knowledge of any killing, something Pol Pot never did.

But it’s a pair of illiterate farmers, Mr Khoun and Mr Suon, who provide hard facts, in all their terrifying detail. “You must talk to uneducated country people to get the truth,” says Sambath. “It’s hard for foreigners and journalists, but easy for me because I am a country person too.”

Between them they were responsible for killing hundreds, probably thousands, of Cambodians. They slit their throats and, when their hands started to ache, stabbed them in the neck and flung the bodies into ditches. Sambath, armed with a plastic knife, smilingly asks one of the men to show him how he did it, as casually as if he was asking for a demonstration on the best way to slice an onion.

Later, they confess to eating human gall bladders. But they are remorseful, and eager to tell their story. One of the men has a look so haunted he appears possessed (pictured, below). A Buddhist like most Cambodians, he isn’t expecting to come back as anything much in the next life. “I feel desolate,” he says.

Meanwhile, Sambath has decided that, after ten years, he’s finally ready to tell Nuon Chea that his own family was butchered in the 70s. He hadn’t wanted to tell him before in case Nuon Chea thought he was out to avenge them. He does so softly, off camera, while we watch the man’s reaction. “What is your response to my family’s story?” asks Sambath, quietly. It’s unbearably moving.

Nuon Chea was arrested in September 2007, and will stand trial next spring. “I feel very sad,” says Sambath. “We worked together for ten years.”

It is entirely to Sambath’s credit that you feel no hatred towards these men, only sorrow. Perhaps we see them through his forgiving, generous eyes. "These people have sacrificed a lot to tell the truth," he says. "In daring to confess, they have done good – perhaps the only good thing left."

I went to Cambodia earlier this year. Its people were warm, friendly but, behind the smiles, sad. Perhaps with these stories the country can start to come to terms with his heartbreaking past. If it does, one extraordinary man can take a lot of credit.

Boyo's Own adventure

2010-11-30T09:06:00.007Z

He may be a Hollywood actor, starring in a glossy TV drama with a constellation of stars, but Matthew Rhys is just an ordinary Welsh lad, worrying about the rugby. Although he loves Los Angeles, it's no Cardiff, he says, and certainly doesn't invite impromptu pints in the pub. "It's so vast, we're dotted all over. So you either drive and don't drink, or you stay the night at whoever's nearest to the pub we're going to," he says. It is a problem.

Rhys is polite, sincere, funny and easy to talk to. He's obviously interested in other people – I realise with horror when I play back my tape that I have spent nearly half the time wittering on about my job, my flat, my degree, my travels. His answers to my questions are lengthy and intelligent and thoughtful, but I get the impression he's just as happy quizzing me than talking about himself.

Rhys has played Kevin Walker in Brothers & Sisters for five years. That's a long spell in a profession where insecurity is a given. "It's like having a weird office job," he says. "I go to the same place every day, I park in the same spot, I turn up in shorts and flip flops and then put on a suit." His character – who happens to be gay, rather than being "a gay character" – is rarely without a shirt and tie.

Does he enjoy the routine? "It's nice to have security, but part of me misses the variety that comes with not knowing what you're going to do next." The cast (Sally Field, Rob Lowe, Calista Flockhart and Rachel Griffiths among them) are great mates – he was recently best man at his co-star Dave Annable's wedding.

Rhys's latest role is less stellar: he is bringing to wider attention, with first a documentary and now a travelogue, the extraordinary heroics of a small group of Welshmen in Patagonia, Argentina. Almost 125 years ago to the day, a party of 29 men left the safety of a small Welsh colony, established 20 years earlier, in search of more fertile land – and with it, survival – in the Andes. Their gruelling 700km journey, on horseback, took them five-and-a-half weeks.

To commemorate the 125th anniversary of the trip, descendants of the original men decided to recreate the entire journey. And Rhys persuaded them to let him come along.

"In my ignorance or arrogance, I underestimated the physical challenge of it," he says. "I didn't realise we would be in the saddle so long, and by the third day, I wasn't sure if I was up to it."

Part of the attraction was to document some real Welsh heroes "who make you feel good about being Welsh", he says. "I was a big cowboy fan when I was growing up. Wales doesn't have those kinds of heroes, so I wanted to get their story out."

He came across it when he stumbled on the diary of John Murray Thomas, one of the group's leaders. “He was a great adventurer. What they did was the equivalent of space travel, unknown and incredibly dangerous. We’re [the Welsh] not really known for our pioneer spirit, but here was someone who very much was.”

Rhys found extreme contentment on the month-long ride. "It was an immediately gratifying, real experience," he says. "You're not pretending to be anyone else."

Patagonia is the subject of his next film, out in March, in which he plays an Argentinean of Welsh descent.

He is drawn to stories like this. A few years ago he made a documentary about another extraordinary character, Griffith Jenkins Griffith, a Welsh-born industrialist who donated parks and public spaces to Los Angeles, but become better known for shooting his wife and spending two years in prison.

As well as promoting charismatic Welshmen, it seems the attraction of telling these stories is having a bit more creative control. "If you break up the elements of film acting, your input and satisfaction can be weak," he says. "You're reciting someone else's words, under someone else's vision, wearing clothes someone else has told you to wear. And the director and editor get to decide how it all turns out.

"I've started directing a bit on the show" – he has three episodes under his belt – "and I find it really gratifying. Everyone asks you how you'd like something shot, and you think, wow – I have an opinion on how this looks, what happens, the tone."

Rhys is about to reprieve, briefly, his role as Benjamin in The Graduate (he starred opposite Kathleen Turner on stage in London), this time for radio in LA. "I miss the theatre enormously. The Graduate feels like a lifetime ago but it was one of my best jobs. Everything clicked. The cast got on, we had a great social life with it, and it was great to make people laugh every night.

"It's weird how your perspective changes. At the start of your career you think, I just want to do cutting edge work that makes people think. Now, I would do a blockbuster in a heartbeat." What changes? "Just the awareness of what we do," he says. "Don't get me wrong, I take it very seriously and work very hard. But at the end of the day, we're entertainers."

Crossing the Plain, published by Gomer Press, is out now.

Black and white photographs: Matthew Rhys

Circulation

2010-08-25T10:12:00.004+01:00

Rui, our regular swimming coach, is a dark-haired, sun-kissed, Portuguese janota who looks too warm-blooded and Mediterranean to enjoy the chilly, 15 degree waters of Parliament Hill lido on a Wednesday morning.

So I usually get a sympathetic response when, as one of the few people swimming without a wetsuit, I climb out after 40 minutes to defrost in the showers.

But today, Rui wasn't there. Instead we had a tough-looking drill master with a crew cut, barking instructions like an East End Sergeant Major.

"You're cold?!" he said, as I got out early. It was as if it was the oddest, most unlikely thing I could have said.

"I think it's time I got a wetsuit," I replied. "Never use one," he said. "And I swim all year round. Just swim harder."

He smiled, and I realised that underneath the crew cut, he was a softy. And perhaps, secretly, a little bit impressed that among our group of wetsuit-clad, big-shouldered men, I was the only one braving the cold.

Midsummer Madness

2010-06-06T18:54:00.001+01:00

The last time I met a group of strangers in a layby it was 1989, the second Summer of Love. Under-age and under dressed, we were trying to find a field with a rave in it.

Over 20 years on, I'm doing something a little more age-appropriate but just as fun: meeting outdoor swimmers, pulling on a swimsuit and jumping in a river.

After making friends in a heartbeat – standing semi-naked by the side of a B-road does accelerate the bonding process – we pick our way across a field. We're quite a sight: barefoot, red hats, wet suits and goggles.

Chat is excited but a little nervous. How long will the swim take? How cold will the water be? Will the current help us? What happens if we want to get out early? We pass a group of picnickers, flushed pink from the sun and the empty bottles of wine littering their rug. They wave and shout words of encouragement.

Soon we're at the riverbank. Here in Oxfordshire, we are around 40 miles from the source of London's great river. The water is brown-green, clean and sleepily slow-moving, the bank lined with lush shrubbery.

I hop down and into the shallows, surprised to feel sand between my toes. The water is colder than I expected but as soon as I dive under and stretch out, my shivers pass and it cools me down. I am at the front (it won't last), cleaving through the water at a gentle pace. No-one is racing: strokes are languid as we drink in the surroundings. It's exceptionally peaceful, just the lapping of the water, murmuring chat and the occasional whoop behind us as someone enters the water.

Reeds and leaves become entangled in my fingers. Ducklings wobble past. And every five minutes a large boat looms into view. It makes me feel very small bobbing at water level as they cruise past.

After a kilometre or so, I'm starting to chill. Most people are in sturdy wetsuits but my new-found friend and I are in skimpy swimsuits (it was only a last minute change of heart that made me leave my bikini at home). So we get out at a stretch of sand and walk back to the parked cars. Our goose bumps are soon warmed by the afternoon sun.

We catch a lift to the end of the swim, at the village of Shillingford a mile away, and await the swimmers (pictured, above – that's me by the barge wrapped in a woolly grey cardigan).

Soon, red hats appear around a bend in the river. They reach the bank and clamber out into awaiting towels, beaming with the joy of exertion, relief and pride. I haven't enjoyed a Saturday afternoon this much in years.

Storm in a treehouse

2010-05-27T14:27:00.002+01:00

Koh Rong is a tiny island off Cambodia's south coast – 15km of pristine jungle and pale sand so soft it feels like icing sugar between your toes.

A few hundred people live here, their corrugated huts lining the beach on the island's eastern edge. Their children attend a local school. They fish. And they provide food and drink for the small groups of scuba divers who explore Koh Rong's emerald waters.

Until recently, few tourists visited this beach. But in the past couple of months, a handful of wood and thatch bungalows have appeared among the trees. And if you keep walking, round a tiny headland, you reach few more, including a magnificent treehouse, two storeys high with vertiginous steps, waves lapping at its feet and heart-stopping views out to sea.

This is where we spent the night.

The treehouse was built by Nuch Ros, a beautiful, bubbly girl from Sihanoukville across the water, and her Turkish husband, Bora Ozturk (she fed us hot sour soup to revive me after the bumpy crossing). It has a large bed with a mosquito net, open sides to catch the breeze, even a shower. We threw down our packs and dozed to escape the searing midday sun.

A word on that: it is a hardier traveller than I, I have discovered, who braves Cambodia on the cusp of the rainy season. Most days it reaches 40 degrees, and it is so humid that I swear I sweat even in the shower. I am always, always hot. A fan is a must, air-conditioning preferable, otherwise sleep (in the loosest sense) involves lying in one position long enough for the sheet to soak, before rolling onto a drier patch and repeating.

The rains are on their way, though. Most evenings, thunder rumbles like timpani and lightening forks through the clouds, sometimes followed by a short downpour that cools the air momentarily.

But that night in the treehouse, there is no relief. We are sweating and fanless (the generator is turned off at 9pm). We watch three storms over the mainland, praying for them to reach us, but instead, the air is as thick as noodle soup and the surf beneath us turns listlessly. Sleep is impossible.

Suddenly, a light breeze blows across me. It is almost imperceptible, but I sit up nonetheless to feel its effect on my body. It slowly picks up, and soon my wet skin is drying, the mosquito net is billowing gently and the mercury is falling. I am pathetically grateful.

It doesn't take long to stiffen and minutes later, an empty water bottle blows off the window ledge and lands with a clatter on the floor. Suddenly, lightening fills the entire room, thunder rumbles angrily and the rain comes down.

We're now wide awake. The mosquito net has come loose completely, but I tuck it back under the mattress. It's a pointless exercise as it is whipping around us like a main sail in a gale. A towel and a bikini, tied securely to the balcony, are whisked away into the night. Rain is slicing through the open windows, and the sea is roaring beneath us. Thunder claps deafeningly directly above our heads.

I point out that the treehouse, barely two months old, hasn't yet weathered a rainy season. And suddenly we are laughing uncontrollably, tears streaming down our faces, hysterical with relief, excitement and fear that our treehouse is going to collapse into a heap of sticks.

The storm continues at this intensity for over half an hour. We've stopped laughing, we're cold and wet and we just want it to end. Finally, after a few false alarms, the wind subsides, the mosquito net hangs loose again and I fall into a deep, cool, exhausted sleep.

Living off the land

2010-04-20T17:49:00.000+01:00

The tribal people of the world don’t have much of a voice. But journalist Joanna Eede has been collecting their extraordinary stories. She has spoken to Bushmen in Botswana, Amazonian Yanomami and Canadian Innu, among others, about their lives, homes and beliefs.

“This is our land. Do only people live here? No, there are also monkeys, even bears. The land is for everyone, men, animals and plants. The land is full of the spirits of our forefathers, it is a reciprocal relationship. The land is for our men of today and for our children.” So say the Asháninka tribe in Peru, echoing the beliefs of tribes the world over.

These people inhabit some of the most remote corners of the earth: tundra, sea-ice, mountains, deserts and prairies. They have done for thousands of years. “The affinity with their homelands is reflected in the names tribal peoples call themselves,” says Eede. “They are the savannah people, the people of the headwaters, the people from the wild pig place.”

“We did not think of the great open plains, the beautiful rolling hills, the winding streams with tangled growth, as ‘wild’,” says Luther Standing Bear, an Oglala Lakota Sioux. “Only to the white man was nature a ‘wilderness’ and only to him was it ‘infested’ with ‘wild’ animals and ‘savage’ people. To us it was tame.”

Each tribal society is unique. But most share the belief that man and nature should live together – and that a long-term attitude to the caretaking of the planet is vital. “The Iroquois of North America always consider seven generations ahead in their decision making,” says Eede.

We can learn from these wise people, who tread lightly and lovingly on the planet. "Only we, the indigenous people, know how to protect the forest," says Davi Kopenawa, from the ancient Yanomami tribe in the Brazilian rainforest. "Give us back our lands before the forest dies. It is dangerous to abuse nature. The sky is full of smoke because the napë, the non-Indians, are logging and burning our rainforest. The rains come late, the sun behaves in a strange way. The lungs of the sky are polluted. The world is ill."

This week, indigenous people in Brazil are threatening violence after a successful tender for the rights to build a giant hydro-electric plant on their ancient land. "Indians will be forced to kill the white men again so they leave our lands alone," says Kayapó leader, Raoni Metuktire.

We can also learn from their philosophy on life, too. "The desire for possessions is destructive," says Davi Kopenawa. "Nothing that can be bought, or sold, has any real meaning. Possessions are looked upon as symbols of advanced humanity, yet they disappear with the wind. All they do is cloud the mind and pollute the soul."

What can we do? Tell their stories, the tribal people say. "You have seen with your eyes what is happening here," says a Bushman in Botswana. "Go and tell people what you have seen. What would make us happy is if we have the rights to stay on our land."

Last Sunday, a glamorous gathering of actors staged a one-off benefit in London, performing readings from Eede's book, We Are One, which was written for the charity Survival International to mark its 40th anniversary. Julie Christie and Gillian Anderson shared a stage with Derek Jacobi and Mackenzie Crook. Sadly, Colin Firth didn't make it...

Should we care that tribal people are being forced away from their land and livelihoods? "Yes, if we believe that taking other people's lands – and so destroying them – should not be tolerated," says Survival International director, Stephen Corry. "They teach us that price and value are not the same things, and that community can be more intelligent and humane than government."

Or, as Cecilia Mitchell, a Mohawk in the USA puts it: "Different people, different ideas and different beliefs make life so much more interesting.”

Photographs, from top: Mike Goldwater, Grenville Charles, Bruno Morandi

Encounters: ticket

2010-04-20T14:35:00.001+01:00

Settled by the train window, the sun streaming in, the elderly man reminded me of a character in a Graham Greene novel: smart hat, straight back, distinguished nose. He was heading, via London, for the coast. Where, I asked? "Brighton. Or Weston-super-Mare. I don't know yet," he said, with admirable free-spiritedness.

"I remember the golden age of steam," he said to no-one in particular. He tried to get a small boy interested in the semantics of the albatross insignia on his uniform, but all he wanted to do was spot Wembley Stadium.

I tried to buy a ticket but the inspector's machine was broken. The man flashed his free pass – "43 years on the railways got me this," he said. He offered to escort me to the ticket gate to back up my broken machine story. But when we pulled into the station, there was no barrier.

He looked concerned, and for a moment I thought he was going to march me to a ticket desk. But then he cracked a smile: "Good job his machine was broken, eh? And to think, I had to work for my free trip." And he shuffled off across the concourse.

Eruption in Iceland

2010-03-21T16:46:00.000Z

Icelanders rarely forget they live on a groaning, fiery land-mass astride two of the earth's giant plates, the Mid-Atlantic Ridge (pictured above, the plain caused by the plates pulling apart). But in case they do, a volcano erupts to remind them.

Last night's eruption happened not from a snow-capped crater but from a crack in the earth about 1.5km long, near the Eyjafallajoekull glacier. If it erupts again – and a relatively small eruption like this often precedes a bigger one – the glacier could melt, causing devastating floods. Worse, nearby is Katla, one of the country's largest, most dangerous volcanoes. When there is activity nearby, it often starts to move.

Even in a country used to volcanic activity, it's exciting. When they heard the news, young men left their Saturday night beers to jump into 4x4s and head off for a closer look. All the roads were blocked by police cordons.

How do Icelanders feel about their volcanoes? Greipur Gíslason, one of the organisers of Iceland's second design festival, HönnunarMars – the reason I am here – says volcanic eruptions, unless they are life-threatening, are reassuring. "It's really good," he said this morning, wearing the smile of a secretly proud father whose naughty child has just come top of the class. "It reminds us our little island is working properly."

"The earth has reminded us that its creation is still going on, and that we are not its creators," Iceland's president, Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson, told us today, as we sipped white wine at his home outside Reykjavik. "These ever-present, but unexpected events have a strong influence on the mindset of the country."

"We're excited," a young woman told me. "Katla has been sleeping for too long. Her last eruption was nearly 50 years ago so she is behind schedule." (Volcanoes, by the way, are gender neutral, but the most powerful have female names).

I experienced some of Iceland's awesome energy yesterday on a trip to see Geysir, the hot bubbling spring that erupts every 15 minutes or so (below).

It was awe-inspiring. But I fell in love with the tiny bubbling spring nearby...

I swam in an outdoor pool heated by geothermal energy. And I've showered every morning in piping hot water from the ground. On my flight from London, I sat beside a man who sits on the board of an Icelandic renewable energy company. The country produces more energy than it needs, he told me, but it doesn't know what to do with it. I hope they find a solution: if they do, Iceland will become very rich again.

Encounters: Swimmer

2010-03-14T17:06:00.001Z

In the last few years I've swum in an inky black lake in upstate New York (where I dared not put my feet down for fear of monsters); in a Scottish loch so cold I thought I would have a heart-attack (but didn't fear monsters – whoever heard of a monster in a Scottish loch?); and in too many bathtub-warm Indian seas to mention. It soothes, strengthens and regenerates.

But my most memorable outdoor swim was two springs ago. I extended a flying visit to Munich by one day and jumped on a train bound for Starnberger See – a glorious lake 40 minutes from the city. I found a patch of grass among the trees lining the shore, stepped gingerly down the slippery wooden steps into the water and kicked off.

In a heartbeat, the tension in my shoulders lifted and the heart-ache engulfing me at the time subsided. I felt nourished. "Swimmers often feel that in water they are truly 'in their element'," writes Kate Rew, author of Wild Swim, founder of the Outdoor Swimming Society and friend, "and in lakes this is somehow enhanced. They offer the chance for muscles to stretch out and glide for miles, but they also nurture a different kind of wellbeing – that of the heart, soul or psyche."

Back on the bank, as I lay there drying off, a woman in a tiny towel approached the steps. She let the towel fall away revealing a white bikini, dipped an elegant toe into the water and jumped in. She had the figure of a race horse – tall, lean and toned – and her skin was deeply etched in soft, honey-coloured wrinkles. It was the most wrinkled body I'd ever seen. She must have been at least 70.

Yet she looked remarkable. She seemed comfortable in her skin the way so many older women aren't. I bet she swam every day. "When I'm that age..." I promised myself. And I turned my face toward the sun.

Encounters: Pick-up

2010-03-07T18:06:00.000Z

I’d never been to the US before, so I’d never met anyone from Alabama – I don’t think they give them passports. “You girls ever been in a pick-up truck?” he asked. We giggled.

His name was Chip. I still don’t know whether that’s short for anything.

He took us fly fishing, me and Caroline, my oldest friend. I never really got the hang of it. Besides, I was too fascinated with Chip: he had everything a man needed for a day’s fishing: rod, bait, book, cool beers and a padded thermal sleeve to go round them. I've always envied that sort of simple self-sufficiency.

Caroline and I were visiting a friend on the coast in Maine. That night, with no catch, the four of us ate at Mable’s Lobster Claw. Talk turned to women. Apparently, the girls of Maine weren’t up to scratch. What about Internet dating, we suggested. “I’d be lettin’ maself down.”

A few days later, we drove round to say goodbye. The pick-up was outside, a pair of trousers draped over the back. It was dark, the deep black you get in the country, and the hiss of crickets filled the air. We banged on the veranda door, and eventually he appeared, a beer in his hand snug in the thermal sleeve. “I’m goin’ to Portland, gonna get me a girl,” he winked. “Ya’ll have a naace trip home.”

"Hugo Chavez thinks we're dating"

2010-02-25T16:52:00.001Z

Courtney Love, it must be said, isn’t the sort of guest who usually graces The Guardian’s morning conference. On the days there is an invited speaker, it’s usually director of policy at this, or deputy chair of the national association of that – not fast-living former strippers.

But she stalked into the packed room in six-inch scarlet and black heels, skinny as a model, squeezed herself between the bemused editor and deputy editor, and held the room in thrall.

I can't really tell you any more – everything she said was off the record, and I'm an honorable journalist. But we’re among friends, so I’ll try to give a flavour of how extraordinary she is. Bonkers is another word for it.

“I’m here to share my thoughts with you, high brow and low brow,” she announced, tongue in cheek. Nothing was censored – she used the f-word liberally, was wildly indiscreet, and made grand pronouncements: she knows, for example, with unwavering certainty, who the future president will be.

Her thoughts, how can I say this politely, meandered – when asked a question, she would veer off on a tangent so unrelated that not only she, but everyone else, had forgotten the question. It didn’t matter – the tangent was always more interesting.

She was genuinely funny. She noted that drugs may have once played a large part in her life – “but don’t tell anyone...” she said. When asked how she felt about ageing (she’s 45) she said: “I’m here, aren’t I? I think that’s pretty age appropriate.”

She’s an Anglophile: she loves Russell Brand and Noel Fielding – “comedians as rock stars” – and the hip taxidermist, Polly Morgan, and is obsessed with fashion. She talked Hollywood, foreign politics, split infinitives, feminism and – movingly – about how hard it is for her daughter to listen to her Dad’s music. I admired the way she was unintimidated by the crowd of opinionated journalists. She was a match for any one of them.

Most of all, she made me feel like I’ve lived a really, really boring life.

And the Venezuelen president? Apparently he may have taken a shine to her, she claims. That’s it – no more revelations from me. But get me drunk and I’ll tell you everything.

Encounters: Neck

2010-01-25T17:36:00.001Z

She was a smiley English girl, with a handsome, surfer-blond French boyfriend. We boarded the train together at Colombo, and they hauled their surf boards onto the luggage rack, where they threatened to fall off and concuss someone all the way to Hikkaduwa. We were packed in as tightly as jigsaw pieces. Only sweatier.

We chatted excitedly about reaching Sri Lanka's south coast. But an hour or so later – hot, hungry, thirsty and facing backwards in my seat – I started to feel nauseous. So she lifted up my hair and blew on the back of my neck. It was such an unexpected, kind and intimate gesture from a stranger, and it worked: my queasiness disappeared a moment later. But I felt warm inside the rest of the way to Galle.

Encounters: Vivek the Saviour

2010-01-01T09:16:00.002Z

His smart navy suit stood him apart from the other staff at Chennai airport – and conferred, I hoped, some authority – so I raced over to him. Vivek, his badge said, and he was barely over 22.
"How can you have left your passport on the plane?" he asked, smiling, after I breathlessly told him what I'd done. I didn't know myself - tiredness, preoccupation, hurrying to make my connecting flight to Colombo, Sri Lanka.
Vivek picked up his phone and spoke to someone, unhurriedly. It seemed an inconclusive conversation. "Can I look on the plane? It's just out there, I just landed," I said.
He shook his head. It took me a second to realise he was doing an Indian head wobble, which can mean yes, no, maybe, whatever...
"We will get your passport back, no problem," he smiled. "What seat were you in? Do you have ID?"
I handed him my credit card. It's a measure of how much, from experience, I trust Indian people - or perhaps how desperate I was - that I did this without hesitation. "Wait here," he ordered.
Five minutes later he was back, strolling calmly towards me clutching my green travel folder. I tried to play it cool, but I was so relieved I wanted to cry. I gushed my gratitude and sprinted from the terminal.

The Accidental Explorer

2009-12-02T18:02:00.002Z

Rob Lilwall was teaching geography at a state school near Oxford when he decided to jack it in, take a one-way flight to the farthest reaches of Siberia and cycle back home to London on his mountain bike. No camera crew, sponsorship or book deal – just him, his Specialized Rockhopper, £8,000 life savings, an impressively flimsy tent and an adventurous spirit.

The obvious route would have been to cross Russia into eastern Europe and home. But part-way in, Lilwall decided to go via Australia. The detour doubled the length of his epic trip to three years and 30,000 miles.

He set out from Magadan, Russia, on a chilly September day in 2004 – accompanied on this first leg by his friend, Al Humphreys. “Everyone we met said, “Why have you come in September? In a month it will be winter,’” says Lilwall, 32. “They would warn us about wolves, bears, robbers, the biting cold: they all agreed we were going to die, they just couldn’t agree how.” Four days later, the snow arrived.

Temperatures reached -40 degrees. Lilwall’s water froze and his bike slipped and slid on the icy roads. His Royal Mail over-trousers – £10 from eBay – did little to keep out the chill. On the upside, frozen rivers were easy to cross and there weren’t any mosquitoes. “Cycling in winter fitted my plans, and it felt more epic,” he says. “But I was miserable – the coldest I’d ever been before was camping in Scotland.” But people offered them food and shelter, often several nights a week. “The more remote I was, the friendlier the people.”

After Siberia, he took a boat to Japan – “I was so happy to be alive” – then on to South Korea, China and Hong Kong. There, he waited three months for a passage to the Philippines with another Englishman, then picked his way down to Australia. It was there he nearly gave up. “I had malaria, I was homesick, exhausted, fed up and my money was running out,” he says. “But I thought, how would I feel if I went home early? That’s what kept me going.” That, and lecturing at schools about his trip to make ends meet.

In a world packed with professional adventurers, Lilwall cuts a charmingly innocent figure. He lacks the swagger and privilege of Bear Grylls, Ewan McGregor or Charley Boorman. He is slight, with a warm, sparky face and a cracking dead-pan wit.

He was ill-prepared for the trip. “I made up the route as I went along,” he says. “I didn’t know that part of the world, but I saw a string of islands from Japan to Australia so I thought it could be done.” He did no training, his kit was more suited to a festival than the world’s most hostile terrains, and he didn’t try to travel light, lugging War and Peace round Russia, never quite getting round to reading it.

Yet what he lacked in army-style preparation, you sense he made up for in personality, making friends easily and networking with aplomb. “I thought three months ahead – emailing anyone who might be able to help,” he says. His teaching must have given him confidence and a thick skin, and he seems relentlessly cheerful.

From Perth he took a freighter to Singapore, then cycled through Malaysia up to Vietnam, China again, and to Afghanistan via Tibet and Pakistan. By Turkmenistan, the mercury had hit +40 degrees, “easier than -40”.

Three friends joined him for the last leg through Europe. When he reached London, his new girlfriend Christine, whom he met in Hong Kong, was waiting for him. They married three months ago.

Then, a stroke of luck: a friend of Christine’s worked in publishing and suggested Lilwall send in a proposal. “Not feeling terribly confident, I did,” he says. It led to a book deal. Ten “emotionally consuming” months later it was finished, and published in September.

Lilwall filmed much of his trip, balancing his camera on a rock and cycling past cinematically, or trusting new-found friends with it. In one sequence, in Hanoi, he weaves elegantly through traffic to a stirring soundtrack: scruffy, serene, determined, a bit eccentric and unmistakably English. It’s very moving – one man and his bike against the world.

“Cycling Home From Siberia” is published by Hodder & Stoughton, price £12.99 (cyclinghomefromsiberia.com).

Queen of New York

2009-11-15T15:26:00.000Z

Give me a celebrity red-carpet event or a copy of Grazia, and I will happily judge A-listers without pausing for breath. It’s so much fun: Meryl, sweetie, what are you wearing? Jen, Jen, he’s a waste of space. Brad, seriously – be a man. Who doesn’t love a good bitch?

Of course I’m an amateur. New Yorker Abe Gurko is a pro – he has turned razor-sharp social observation into an art-form. In his blog I Mean What?!? – peppered with OMGs and oys – he skewers celebrities, details fashion disasters and humiliates Republicans (his current obsessions are Sarah Palin’s erstwhile son-in-law-to-be, Levi Johnston, underwear-as-outerwear, and his dog, Woodstock).

His day job in events production and public relations in the fashion, design and entertainment industries throws him into regular contact with the celebrity classes – he is currently working with Carrie Fisher on her one-woman show, Wishful Drinking – but more importantly, gives his blog more ammunition.

Gurko and I met in Reykjavik (pictured) – smuggling pastries from our hotel’s breakfast room under the nose of the watchful maitre d’ and into the minibus waiting outside in the snow, tooting its horn. He was lively, conspiratorial company.

We were attending Iceland’s first design and fashion festival. Gurko works with one of the country’s best-known fashion designers, Steinunn Sigurdardottir, launching her clothing in the US a few years back. The trip was every bit as fabulous, wierd and beautiful as you’d expect. I met creative people, coveted expensive knitwear, swam in hot springs, ate a lot of fish and partied in downtown Reykjavik – a street away from uptown Reykjavik (it’s a small place).

Gurko blogs every morning. “I’m up early anyway,” he says, “so I put on a pot of coffee, read the news online and decide who’s really annoying me that day. It’s usually people who think they’re all that – there’s such an arrogance that comes with celebrity. I am a bitchy queen, but I’m political too. And I’m honest about what I say, even if it alienates people.”

He is wasted in print. In person, Gurko is like Carrie Bradshaw's acerbic, Jewish, gay best friend: no surprise, then, that he’s developing an online fashion news show. Oh, and auditioning to be the best friend of a celebrity on her reality show. A real-life version of a fictional character on a TV show may become a real-life fake character on a reality show... Only in New York.

On Beauty

2009-10-06T12:29:00.003+01:00

I’ve never had lunch with a supermodel before, but if I’d ever given it a moment’s thought (ok, I admit I did, back in school), Helena Christensen would be top of my list. To my teenage self, she seemed the most intelligent, interesting and likeable one. I tried to copy her sexy-hippy look. I remember her tiny Copenhagen apartment photographed for British Vogue – an elegant hall table scattered with Polaroids from ‘her latest shoot’; a small, faded painting of an old Chinese lady; pots and pans suspended over a kitchen hob. One day, I told myself, I’m going have that life. I’m still working on it.

I met her yesterday at Shoreditch House: she is starring in a new campaign to make Habitat come across as warmer, friendlier and cosier. Why approach a supermodel, you might ask. But Christensen, with Danish ‘hygge’ oozing from every pore, seems a good fit (see Oliver Burkeman’s article on hygge).

She is, of course, beautiful – in a natural, non-freakish way. She is slim, not skinny. She had messy shoulder-length hair, grey painted nails, smudgy black eyeliner, and wore a short, slouchy black jersey dress and black patterned tights. She had a mid-Atlantic/Euro accent. She ate a hearty lunch, knocking back wine and dessert.

She is obsessed with vintage Danish design, and rips pages from interiors magazines: “I board planes with piles of them, ripping away. When I look through them again, months later, I often can’t remember why I tore a page out,” she says. “So I study it until I find the one small thing that made me keep it.” She is chatty, polite, funny, curious, open, intelligent, and cracked constant jokes with the half-dozen people there – the fact we weren't interviewing her no doubt made her more relaxed. She would be a great dinner party guest.

I realise none of this is extraordinary or, to many, interesting. Yet different rules seem to apply to the famous and the beautiful: don't we feel a thrill when we discover that someone like Christensen is, in fact, normal and nice – as if that alone is an achievement? For the rest of us, this is surely the minimum requirement, after which we usually have to do something.

But she does has an interesting, enviable life. She has just returned from Peru – she is half-Peruvian and speaks Spanish – where she was photographing evidence of climate change for an exhibition heading, via the UN Headquarters in New York, for Copenhagen in December. She was off to Paris after lunch, on Eurostar. She lives in New York, summers at her Danish beach house, raises her son.

Beauty, along with material wealth, is proven not to make us happy. My favourite positive psychologist (I know how that makes me sound), Sonia Lyubomirsky, says: “We simply don’t focus on our appearance when thinking about how happy we are. Good-looking people aren’t any happier. Becoming objectively more beautiful will not make most of you happier. Coming to believe you are beautiful is another story, and research suggests that this may be one of many happiness boosters.”

That is another story. But beauty has given Christensen the means to live a fabulous, glamorous and – apparently – happy life, so perhaps Lyubomirsky is wrong.

Christensen still has her tiny apartment in Copenhagen – in cobbled Christianshavn, round the corner from my brother-in-law. It says H Christensen on the front – in Denmark, by law, you must put your name on your door.

She hugged – or should that be hygged – me tight when I left: a proper squeeze, not an air-kiss. My teenage pronouncement turned out to be right, after all.

"I simply fell in love with that glorious food"

2009-09-16T13:48:00.002+01:00

I hadn't heard of Julia Child before I visited the US last month. Now, after a series of Julia-related incidences and coincidences, I feel I know this remarkable woman well.

First, I saw Julie & Julia. Next, while visiting the Smithsonian in Washington with my friend Ellen (we spent most of the time in the shop), I stumbled on Child's kitchen, which she donated to the museum in 2001. Then I found myself on Olive Avenue, a street in Georgetown, DC, lined with cute clapboard house where – I later discovered – Child used to live.

But best of all, I read her memoir, My Life In France, and discovered a spirited, curious, no-nonsense, sexual, determined woman: extremely tall, extremely loud and very, very funny.

Child was America's more fabulous answer to Elizabeth David. She bought French cooking to Americans – then just discovering the delights of meals-on-a-plate – in the form of her best-selling 1961 book, Mastering the Art of French Cooking. She went on to host, exuberantly, several series of cookery programmes. She died in 2004, two days before her 92nd birthday.

Her husband, Paul Child, was posted to France in 1948, and Julia fell instantly in love with the country, its people and, most of all, its food. She found everything "terribly exciting" in a Joyce Grenfell, hockey-sticks sort of way, and was unfazed and amused by most things life threw at her.

She started lessons at Cordon Bleu – and found her calling. She spent hours at home, experimenting. On mastering mayonnaise she wrote: "I thought it was utterly fascinating. By the end of my research, I believe, I had written more on the subject of mayonnaise than anyone in history. I made so much mayonnaise that Paul and I could hardly bear to eat it anymore, and I took to dumping my test batches down the toilet." She sent her tried-and-tested recipe to friends in the US. "All I received in response was a yawning silence. Hm! I was miffed, but not deterred. Onward I plunged," she wrote.

Above all, I loved Julia and Paul's relationship. They had enormous fun together. Everything and everyone had a nickname: their apartment on 81 Rue de l'Universite in Paris was christened 'Roo de Loo'. Their Buick station wagon was 'The Blue Flash' – mutating into a verb ("We Flashed into Rouen..."). They posed for silly photos on Valentine's Day (see below, in 1956). They were deeply in love, an apparent meeting of souls.

They met while working for the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA, during the Second World War, first in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), then China. He was 42, cultured, a "natty dresser" and dated lots of women. She was 32, inexperienced but game. They discovered a shared love of trying exotic food. "I was lucky to marry Paul," she wrote. "I hated being without my husband. Paul and I liked to travel at the same slow pace. He always knew so much about things, discovered hidden wonders, noticed ancient walls or indigenous smells, and I missed his warm presence. Once upon a time I had been content as a single woman, but now I couldn't stand it!"

It has been written that meeting Paul was the point in her life when Julia was found. "I was a late bloomer who was still growing up. I didn't get started on life until I was about thirty-two, which was good because I was old enough to appreciate it. I had it all ahead of me."

Photograph (top) by Arnold Newman, 1970.

Blood On The Tracks

2009-09-04T08:22:00.001+01:00

A freshly retired crime correspondent might be happy to hang up his mac and never darken the Old Bailey again. Not Duncan Campbell. “I get terrible withdrawals,” he says when he reads about cases such as the recent £40m jewellery robbery in Mayfair. “It was exciting, fascinating, another world. There was never a dull moment.”

He has an expert's eye: the Mayfair robbers, for example, enlisted a make-up artist from a salon in Covent Garden to alter their appearances. “That was a mistake,” he says, knowingly. “The inside man is always the weak link. They’re the ones that crack”.

But he also has a writer’s feel for crime’s black, often comical, turn of events. “There was the 1991 tale of the Suffolk barrister’s wife and her flying instructor lover who plotted to kill her husband by luring him naked into the living room and drowning him in the duck pond in a fake lawnmower accident. Whatever happened to them?”

Campbell, a law graduate, covered some of Britain’s biggest cases: James Bulger, Stephen Lawrence, Rosemary West. But he doesn’t fit the profile of a hard-bitten hack: he’s a self-confessed hippy, former commune-dweller, world traveller and culture fan – when we meet, he’s just back from a week at the Edinburgh Festival.

In this latter respect he’s no different, he says, from many criminals. “The crowd I got to know best were bright armed robbers who’d got degrees in prison. On the outside they were all ‘fucking this, fucking that’. But they were extremely well-read. One told me he was reading Virginia Woolf’s ‘To The Lighthouse’. When I mentioned this to another robber, he sucked his teeth: ‘It’s not her best.’

“The police were the same, listening to Bob Dylan, quoting Harold Pinter. You couldn’t put them in a novel, they’d be too florid. It was a great lesson in never to assume anything about anybody.”

Campbell’s first big case was the Torso Murder in 1977, which he covered for Time Out: back then it had a radical news section. The wrong people were convicted – Bob Maynard and Reg Dudley, victims of a witness who later admitted to Campbell he’d made up his evidence. They were eventually cleared but only after 20 years in jail. It was Campbell’s first proper brush with wrongful imprisonment, a cause he has a championed ever since.

He joined the Guardian in 1987, aged 42, after a couple of tries. His most memorable trial was Rose West – convicted in 1995 of 10 charges of murder of young women and girls. “What struck me most was how all that horror had taken place in such a small space,” he says of Cromwell Street. Reporting on the trial was like covering the end of a more innocent time, he says, and it marked a sea change in how seriously crimes against women were taken.

He stood in the dock himself in 1997, when the police sued the Guardian for libel over an article Campbell had written about police corruption. “I didn’t sleep the night before,” he says. Against the odds, the paper won. “We had a smart jury. But it made me more cautious about everything I wrote after that.” Operation Jackpot subsequently became one of the biggest inquiries into police corruption.

Seeking a change, Campbell headed to Los Angeles as the paper’s correspondent. “Someone once said LA is a a great place to live, but you wouldn’t want to visit. I agree – it has many layers, but you have to unpeel them slowly.” The job took him far afield: Colombia, Chile, Mexico, even Sydney.

Unlike many young thrusters, Campbell was 26 – almost certainly a ripe age in 1971 – when he realised he wanted to be a journalist. So he took himself, his long hair and his bell-bottoms off to India in search of adventure and stuff to write about.

He kept a journal from that long trip, which also took him east to Laos, Thailand, Singapore and Hong Kong. “I’m glad I did: you think you’ll remember things, but you don’t.” He discovered it when he came to write his debut novel, 2008’s thriller The Paradise Trail, set in a traveller’s hostel in Calcutta in 1971. It’s full of delicious period details: the books (Siddhartha), the music (Velvet Underground) and the late-night discussions over a smoke (how to change the world and what Bob Dylan lyrics really mean). “I loved writing it.”

His second novel, If It Bleeds, is a thriller about a British crime correspondent on a national newspaper (the title refers to the news editor’s axiom ‘If it bleeds, it leads’). “It’s a strange world, writing fiction. You end up giving away a bit of yourself,” he says.

“You were a bit of a hippy back then,” said Guardian editor, Alan Rusbridger at Campbell’s leaving party a few months ago. “Still am,” said Campbell proudly. Hippy ideals, crime writing and campaigning against injustice, it seems, do go hand in hand after all.

If It Bleeds and The Paradise Trail are published by Headline.

Photograph: Beth Evans (bethevans.com)

Pro Patria Mori

2009-09-03T17:01:00.000+01:00

“It’s ok, I didn’t know him real well. He was on my Dad’s side, I think.” The middle-aged lady, a little moist-eyed, her husband and young son had found Barry A Bidwell on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC. They’d been looking hard: it’s an extraordinary structure, a long, L-shaped walkway complete with 58,256 names of men who died or remain missing from that war.

I had memorial fatigue by the time I made a right by the Reflecting Pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial, after already visiting the World War II memorial, Washington Monument, Ulysses S Grant memorial, White House and US Capitol. I also had Memorial Back – it’s a bit like Tennis Elbow but lower down.

But with the Vietnam memorial, that vanished. It was unexpectedly moving. A young boy sat with his father looking up at it (pictured, above). “Some of these guys volunteered,” said the father in a southern baritone. “But a lot of them were drafted. Do you know what that means?" His son shook his head. "They took the ones who weren’t doing real well in school and made them sign up.” I think there was another lesson going on there, too.

The ranks of names – all but Barry A Bidwell anonymous and without any human context – reminded me of recent front pages back home of those killed in Afghanistan. How big will those memorials be?

As I left, another young boy asked his father, “Dad, was Vietnam the Second World War?” “No,” he replied wearily. “The Second World War was different. Vietnam was, well it was Vietnam.”

Happiness Gurus

2009-08-20T17:22:00.001+01:00

Are these young Indian boys happy? They certainly look it, posing for my friend Christian at Humayan's Tomb in Delhi last year.

In fact, after reading a stack of nine heavy books on the subject of happiness, and interviewing the academics who wrote them, I can say with a small degree of authority that these boys are probably happier than many Western people with more money, bigger houses and greater opportunities.

"It's hard for us to believe," says Sonja Lyubomirsky, University of California, "but it's not our job, marriage or looks that make us unhappy, it's our behaviour." All agree: it's how we think about, and react to, things that happen to us that determine our happiness. Even better, we get to choose how we think or react. I found this an uplifting concept. "There is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so", wrote Shakespeare in Hamlet. They all quote Shakespeare: he was the original positive psychologist.

One simple way to do this is to find the good in situations, says Barbara Fredrickson, University of North Carolina. "The bus to work, say: you could either count yourself lucky the route is long enough for you to read your book. Or you could worry if the car would have been quicker."

There are a few fundamental things we all need in order to be happy – or, as Lyubomirsky believes, things happy people naturally possess. One of the most important is to surround ourselves with people. "We need others to be happy," says Jonathan Haidt, University of Virginia. "We were made for love, friendship and family – so reduce your solitary activities." Another is to find a 'calling' – an interest or, ideally, job so absorbing you get lost in the flow of doing it. Importantly, it should be something you're good at.

All agree – and it's well-documented – that money and stuff don't make us happier. They may give us instant pleasure, but we quickly adapt to our new-found wealth/over-priced shampoo and return swiftly to our original level of happiness. Instead, says Haidt, "spend your money on 'experiences – a holiday, a great meal – rather than material objects. Work less, earn less, accumulate less," he says.

We should be braver, says Daniel Gilbert, Harvard University. "Studies show people regret not having done things more than things they did. Why? Because we can tell ourselves we learned something from the experience. Even more interesting, a real blow – a failed relationship, a lost job – trigger our psychological defences more than a small one. So we should "blunder forward", says Gilbert, "and choose action over inaction". As a serial blunderer myself, I love this idea.

Finally, it's the small things that count. "Savour life's joys – linger over a chocolate pastry rather than mindlessly consuming it," says Lyubomirksy. "Don't ruminate," says Fredrickson. "Endless mulling doesn't do any good." Be kind, write down your feelings if you're a bit sad, and be grateful. Do I feel happier after my summer reading list? You bet I do.

Photograph: Christian Schirmer

King of the World

2009-06-24T12:10:00.003+01:00

The one question I want to ask Bill Goodland (pictured in red at the top of the world's highest mountain) when we sit down for coffee is so obvious I can’t bring myself to do it. Luckily, I don’t have to. “Everyone’s been asking how it feels to reach the summit of Everest,” he says, which he did on May 19 this year. “Relief. It’s overwhelming: in that moment you’re excused from all the pressure you’ve put yourself under to reach the top. I'd told all my friends about my trip – so to know I wouldn’t have to be forever explaining why I didn’t quite make it was a huge relief.”

We’d been discussing his fellow climbers. Was there any awkwardness after he made it and some of them didn’t? “Yes. We tiptoed around each other for 24 hours, and many who hadn’t summited left early. It was a bittersweet experience.”

But social pressure and post-climb etiquette aside, how does it feel to stand on top of the world? “You get to sit down. You get to stop walking. It’s sort of that simple.”

Climbing Everest involves a lot of walking up and down the mountain to acclimatise to the altitude. You inch up, camp by camp, back and forth, until you adjust. Then, when you’re within sight of the summit at Camp Three, you head all the way back down, past Base Camp, to relax, build up your strength for the final climb and wait for good weather.

Goodland found this frustrating. “This way of climbing, the way [Edmund] Hillary did it, doesn’t suit most people. Altitude saps your strength, but acclimatisation makes the climb gradually easier. At some point, the two cross – ideally at the summit.

“For me, it happened about two weeks before that. The first time I reached Camp Three, I felt great and was ready to go on. The second time was worse, but that’s when I continued up to the top.” What would he do differently? “I’d start the climb later in the season. I’d be surprised if, in 20 years time, things aren’t done that way.”

Everest is well-chronicled: the cold, the wind, the frostbite – “That was one of my biggest fears, losing my nose or something.” What you don’t hear so much about is the boredom. Before the final push, the team holed up in a village called Pheriche, below Base Camp. “There is absolutely nothing to do apart from walk round the village one way, then the other way, then go and talk to the yaks," wrote Goodland in his excellent blog of the trip. “Luckily the next village along has a tiny internet cafe in a shed (from where I'm typing this), so my daily routine (after discussions with the yaks), includes a walk over the mountain for a couple of minutes online.”

The summit team was accompanied as far as Base Camp by a lively group of trekkers (I met them all in Snowdonia in February. We laughed a lot and they drank everyone else under the table.) “I was very sorry when they left,” he says. “They were a broader mix of people and ages, and more interesting than [us climbers]. We were quite similar: mid-life crisis single men who work in IT.”

What was the highlight of his trip? “The icefall was fun,” he says – great stacks of ice that shift around, pitted with crevasses. "You clamber over it, like a giant adventure playground." Wasn’t he scared? “You’d have to be jolly unlucky to be squashed by a falling piece of ice.”

But his favourite moment was on summit day, just before dawn. His group set off for the top in the dark. “When the sun rose, over Tibet, you could actually see the curvature of the earth. Sunrise also meant we were nearly there."

And his secret for climbing the world’s highest mountain? “Think only of the day ahead. You need a sort of Zen-like understanding of what the climb involves – and that even when you’re going down instead of up, it’s still part of the journey.”

Escape from east Germany

2009-06-17T10:26:00.001+01:00

Christiane and Ulf Beuck were young, in love, living behind the Berlin Wall under East Germany’s repressive regime and dreaming of escape. In June 1989, exactly 20 years ago, they took action. “We were never politically active,” says Christiane, who I interviewed while researching a piece on the Stasi, the East German secret police. “We were too scared of the reprisals. Besides, we didn’t think we could make a difference. But we did decide to escape. If that sounds contradictory, well, it was easier to try to flee the state than be political.”

She was 21, Ulf 22. They planned to escape into Austria – the west – via Hungary: the Austrian/Hungarian border was being dismantled, so they knew it was their only way out.

“We arrived at the border three days before our attempt, and walked up to the fence to check it out,” says Christiane. “Beyond were a wood and a steep hill, in Austria. The next morning, we chose a spot near a border guard tower – so we could keep an eye on it – and took cover, aiming to wait until it got dark. But at around 3pm a huge storm broke. ‘This is our chance,’ we thought. We assumed the guard would take shelter.”

Ulf cut through the fence with a pair of shears. “We crawled under and ran up the steep hill. After a short while, I noticed someone was behind us,” she says. “Then I heard shots – it was the guard. I didn’t know if he was aiming at us or just shooting in the air to scare us. Either way, from then on I felt crippled. Ulf was screaming at me to keep going, but I couldn’t put one foot in front of the other.”

“The guard caught up with us. We tried to reason with him, offered him money. But he couldn’t help, he said, otherwise – and he drew his finger across his throat. After a while another, tougher, guard joined him. He was pretty pissed off at having to climb the hill in the rain. He forced Ulf on to the ground with his hands behind his head, and held a gun at his neck. I saw stars, I screamed, I cried, ‘Don’t shoot!’ They put us in a jeep and took us to a nearby barracks. After our arrest we were sent back to East Germany, to a jail for political prisoners. Our trial was set for August 18, 1989 but it never took place: the political situation was changing, and East Germany was forced to release any political prisoners who’d been caught at the Hungarian border.”

“But we were still stuck in the east,” says Christiane. “So we lodged a request to move to the west. Two months later it was accepted, and a date set: November 10. The night before, the Berlin Wall came down, all the borders opened, so we passed through legally, along with everyone else. If we’d known that, we’d never have tried to escape. But if it wasn’t for people like us, the borders might never have opened. So, maybe, in our own tiny way, we contributed to that.”

Photograph: Michael Danner (michaeldanner.com)

Sisters

2009-06-04T13:35:00.002+01:00

Lady Macpherson, 78 (pictured, top), is sitting in the front room of her dainty London mews house having her hair cut. There is much giggling. Her identical twin sister, Anne Mallinson arrives a few minutes later. She lives around the corner, a few doors from Tony Blair, in a magnificent 1830s townhouse she “downsized” to when her brood flew the nest.

Anne bustles me downstairs to make coffee while her sister, Jean, gets a blow dry. “Now, tell me all about yourself,” she twinkles, even though I am here to interview her. We talk eyebrow threading, being a twin, children and my career. She’s warm, witty and conspiratorial.

Upstairs, the hairdresser leaves. “She was half an hour late,” Jean tuts in her Scottish lilt, before the poor girl is out of earshot. There is wet hair on the floor. “Have you been plucking birds?” asks Anne.

Jean and Anne were born in 1930 in Manchester, to liberal parents who were friends with the then Manchester Guardian founder CP Scott. They were evacuated during the war, first to Devon then to Canada. Jean, an ill, asthmatic child, married at 23 to Tommy, now Sir Tommy, Macpherson, a war hero. (He shuffles in later and shakes my hand – a good military grasp.) On her wedding day she was so frail, Anne had to stand in for her. Anne was married the following year. Unlike some identical twins, they married quite different men. Though they have the same initials: TSM.

These grand ladies live in a different London to me: one where the local parade of shops – upmarket florists, boutiques – feels like a village where everyone knows you. Where everyday London life – tubes, corner shops, buses – doesn't intrude.

Anne was the first female Lord Mayor of Westminster, and is still active with committees and charities. She gets tons of free tickets, which Jean steals. “I’m a sponger!” Jean ran the family estate in Scotland: her eldest son has now taken over.

They often get mistaken for each other. Once or twice a year they take part in twin research at King’s College – eye tests, blood tests, bone tests.

“We’re sometimes there all day – we once got a £2 sandwich voucher,” says Jean.

“But we got a parking fine the same day,” says Anne.

“We do memory tests, too,” she adds.

“I don’t remember those,” says Jean. And they throw back their heads and laugh.

Photographs: Mark Johnson (markjohnson.eu)