Lynda's letter

I’ve decided to write Izzy a letter. 

I suspect it will be too long and rambling. I am pretty sure it will make her cry, though that isn’t my intention. I also hope she won’t read it for many years. There are things I want to say to Izzy that I can’t tell a 5-year-old. Things I won’t be able to say to her face, because I won’t be here. 

Being an older parent – no, a very old parent – I know that even if I live to be as old as my mother, who’s nearly 94, I’m unlikely to see Izzy into marriage, children, and total independence. So I’m going to write her a letter, and tell her what I know about life. Before it’s too late.

RIP Mr Etch-A-Sketch

Boots the new puppy has now added chairs to his diet. The one I’m sitting on has scores of little teeth marks down the leg. 

Jo says it improves them because they now look old and worn. She says everything looks better with a little wear and tear, including me.

Unlawfully Killed

We all know clairvoyance is just a magic act, a branch of showbusiness – how could there be such a thing as psychic power? 


18 years ago I was at a dinner party in London when I noticed the lady opposite staring at me a little too intensely. When she caught my eye, she leaned forward and whispered, “You’re going to marry an American”.  Such impertinence, and totally inappropriate, because, having recently divorced my first wife, I was rather publicly in love with an English television presenter, who was sitting next to me at the dinner. 


“And you will have six children,” she went on. This was too much. No way would there be any more children: three was quite enough. I told this story at my wedding at Jo’s parents’ home in Laguna Beach. Baby Izzy was there with my four other children. Everyone laughed, especially at the prospect of my American wife bringing me yet another child. 


But what I didn’t reveal was the rest of what the clairvoyant said that night. It’s been parked at the back of my mind all these years, but was chillingly recalled last week by the coroner’s verdict on the bizarre death of MI6 employee Gareth Williams. 


After dinner, the clairvoyant took me aside. She had something very important to tell me. “Your friend didn’t die the way they say, you know. They said it was sexual and perverted, but one day the truth will emerge.” 

Stephen Milligan MP

I knew immediately she was talking about one of my closest friends.  A respected member of the community, we’d been on holidays together and spent long evenings arguing about politics in his little house in Chiswick. He’d been engaged to a delightful journalist called Julie. He’d been foreign editor at the Sunday Times, a senior BBC journalist, then finally an MP. One day his body was discovered in scandalous circumstances. He name was Stephen Milligan. 


All this I knew, but didn’t breathe a word to the clairvoyant. “There’s a dark, evil force,” she went on. “ and a faraway country. Oman. He went to Oman, or somewhere near there, Yemen maybe, and when he was there he found something out. So they killed him. One day it will all come out and your friend’s honour will be restored.” 


Then she mentioned a name – a famous name. Apparently there was a connection to spying. He had been involved in my friend’s death. It was all weird and nonsensical. 


The police hadn’t investigated Stephen’s death beyond confirming the ghastly details: he was found on his kitchen table, a black plastic bag over his head, a cord round his neck, naked but for a woman’s stockings and suspenders, a small piece of satsuma in his mouth. They called it auto-erotic asphyxiation. In one mad moment, the life and reputation of a brilliant, witty, utterly moral friend, journalist, politician and godfather of my eldest son, had been completely destroyed. 


Cross dressing, auto-erotic asphyxiation: sounds familiar? Stephen Milligan’s inquest may have ruled out foul play, not so Gareth Williams’ coroner this week. 

Williams couldn’t possibly have put himself into the red bag in the bath and there were no fingerprints. Why did MI6 wait a whole week to report him missing, by which time any small scratches on the body would have gone? The verdict: he was “probably killed unlawfully”. 


According to last week’s Independent on Sunday, there have been 17 mysterious deaths linked to the defence or intelligence services over the past 50 years, a third featuring bizarre sexual practices or asphyxia. Men like Stephen Drinkwater, the GCHQ clerk, found choked with a plastic bag over his head; journalist Jonathan Moyle, hanged inside a tiny wardrobe while working on a story about a dodgy arms deal; ex-MI6 agent and writer James Rusbridger, discoverd in a gas mask surrounded by bondage pictures; and Stephen Milligan MP.  


It all reads like a spy thriller, I know. And yet you don’t need to be psychic to know that one day the true story behind all these cases will emerge. But I am quite sure my friend will be vindicated. Because a clairvoyant told me.

Ding-Dong! The Witch Is Dead

Holed up in the only brick house in town, the three little pigs could hear the wolf furiously huffing and puffing outside.

“Why is he still trying to kill us? Doesn’t he realise he’ll never blow it down?” squeaked the first little pig, still smarting from the loss of his nice straw bungalow.

“That wolf’s insane. He’s ruined our lives and deserves to die”, snarled the second little pig, clutching tightly the few remaining sticks from his own wrecked home.

Just then they heard the sound of growling on the roof. “Oh no, he’s coming down the chimney”, shrieked the first little pig: “Quick, open the cooking pot”. “Wait, we mustn’t kill him,” said the third little pig. “We need to call the RSPCA.”

“Don’t be an idiot”, said his brothers, “he’ll destroy everything. He’ll howl for his hateful wolf family and they’ll come for revenge”. And with that, they took the lid off and the wolf fell into the boiling cauldron.

Just then the phone rang. It was the United Nations. “We hear you’ve caught the big bad wolf. We’d like you to hand him over to the ICC so that he can be brought to justice. He’s a prisoner of war, after all.”

“Go away,” said the first little pig. “We’re having wolf stew for lunch.”

“I’ll handle this”, said the third little pig, picking up the phone, “It’s OK”, he said politely. “I swear by the hair on my chinny-chin-chin he was definitely caught in the crossfire.”

“Yes, he’s in the fire and very cross indeed”, chorused his brothers as they stirred the pot.

When you’re two-and-a-half, morality ought to be straightforward. After the hunter cuts open the wolf to rescue Little Red Riding Hood and her granny, I’m sure I never asked my Mum if they stitched the animal back up. Likewise I never questioned the fate of his pig-hunting cousin. But Izzy caught me out on the day they killed Gaddafi.  I was reading her the Three Little Pigs at bedtime when she suddenly said: “Is the wolf still inside the cooking pot?” Then somehow in my head the stories got intertwined.

I could have answered, “I’m sure the wolf police came and got him out and took him to that animal reserve in Scotland where they’re trying to rehabilitate them back to the wild”, but she would only have snorted, “You’re silly, Daddy”. Instead I told the truth: “He was a very nasty, evil wolf, and deserved to die.” That seemed to satisfy her, though I’ve probably scarred her for life.

Just as the Munchkins sang “Ding-Dong! The Witch is Dead” at the demise of the Wicked Witch of the East, thereby validating the concept of a just execution for future generations of children, so the death of Muammar Gaddafi had the entire Libyan population celebrating, and probably most of the Western world too. Does it really matter whether the perpetrator was a miracle called Dorothy from a star named Kansas, a tornado that dropped a house on him, or an over-exuberant 20-year-old rebel who pulled a gun and shot him in the head? The Munchkins are saved and the world is a better place: until the Witch’s even more evil sister comes for revenge, that is.

In fact, the circumstances surrounding Gaddafi’s death ought to matter to us: we are, after all, supposed to be more civilized than pigs and more intelligent than Munchkins, but Gaddafi was so incontrovertibly evil that even the soggiest liberal finds it hard to care about international justice at this time. There are so many more important issues facing Libya right now.

This is a country without identity: it has no institutions, no infrastructure, no concept of democratic process, its wealth has been squandered, its human rights denied for the last forty years. Is it any surprise that the rights of the wolf that destroyed their homeland have been overlooked? Already, the factional rivalries he encouraged are threatening to strangle this new nation at its birth. Let’s hope they can be reconciled.

Libya’s witch may be dead: but there are many more villains huffing and puffing outside its newly painted front door.

Till Death Do Us Part

You have to feel sorry for 60-year-old New Yorker Robert Fitzpatrick. After blowing his entire life savings on posters predicting the end of the world last night, he woke up this morning to find he was still amongst the heathen.

It must have been a bitter blow for him and thousands of American believers who’d been convinced by the California preacher Harold Camping that it was “Rapture Day”, when they’d all be transported up to heaven as huge earthquakes destroyed the rest of us left down here on Earth.

Robert had spent $140,000 putting up thousands of posters around the New York subway and bus system. I assume all believing bus drivers had considerately taken the day off work: after all, if any of them had been raptured off a moving vehicle, it would have caused no end of traffic chaos down Broadway.

Camping had worked out the date using a series of complex calculations based on the anniversary of Noah’s flood (7,000 years ago on Saturday) and various biblical passages. As a result, thousands of Americans sold their homes and valuables and quit their jobs, all clearly surplus to requirements in the afterlife, and handed over their money to Camping’s church. It’s reported that he raised tens of millions from believers over the last few months.

They weren’t put off by the fact that he got it completely wrong last time: he originally said that the Rapture would happen in September 1994. In fact, apart from the 5,000th performance of Cats on Broadway, there wasn’t a lot of seismic activity anywhere that month and, denied his Journey To The Heaviside Layer, the discredited minister went off to lick his paws and invent a new date.

This latest prediction has resulted in a roaring trade for poster manufacturers, end-of-the-world party organisers and also for a company in New Hampshire called External Earthbound Pets. For just $135, paid in advance, they agreed to collect and care for any furry friend left behind after its owner had been raptured away. No Armageddon, no refund.

The fact that Harold Camping’s absurd prediction gained such traction is a tribute to the extraordinary gullibility of the human mind. Is there nothing that people won’t believe, given a bit of hype? From fad diets to reality television, from conspiracy theories about Bin Laden to the journalism in the Daily Mail: people believe all sorts of nonsense as fact. It’s just as well – without fantasy, wouldn’t life be intolerably dull?

At precisely 6pm last night, just as the world wasn’t ending, Jo and I were at a wedding reception drinking a toast to the bride and groom. As they began their new life together, Jo and I were thinking about that daunting phrase “till death do us part”.

We agreed that, when you love someone so much that you can’t imagine life without them, the best way to go is probably to share some God-invoked end-of-the-world scenario. The mere thought of separation is more than either of us could bear, so it would be good to know we were victims in the same Armageddon. We’d have loads to gossip about as the conflagration hit: it’s always exciting to be a witness at a breaking news story.

But then we realised we’d have a problem: how to ensure we’d be together after the big event. You see, Jo is Jewish and I’m Church of England. As we can’t both be right, there’s a real risk that one of us ends up alone on the wrong side of the fence, looking after the pet-minding. Unless, that is, we’re both on the wrong side and we should have turned Buddhist. Still, as the Grateful Dead song goes: “I may be going to hell in a bucket, babe, at least I’m enjoyin’ the ride”.

RIP King of Pop

OK, I admit it. I never met Michael Jackson. I don’t think I know anyone who’s ever met Michael Jackson. This appears to put me in a minority.

All weekend anybody who had ever been on the same planet as the infamous singer has been pontificating on “the Michael I knew”. From spoonbenders to bodyguards, nannies to speechwriters (“Well, I’m not actually his speechwriter”, said one interviewee on Radio Four, “but I did help him write one in 2001”): everyone has been wheeled out for a quote.

All the comments, articles and interviews from these “close friends” comprise a very confusing jigsaw. Try and put the pieces together, you’d suspect none of them knew him at all: was he genius or monster, abused or abuser, addict or prude, billionaire or bankrupt, loner or partygoer, creepy or friendly, genuine or plastic, homosexual or husband, black or white? It’s as if scores of different Michael Jacksons have emerged from the woodwork over the last three days: the public can now pick and mix their own version from the various options on offer.

I felt for the poor obituary producers on the 24-hour news channels, desperately trying to sum up the man in just 45 seconds. In fact, you had to feel sorry for all conventional journalists on Thursday night. If the death of Jackson spelt the end of the 1980s (as one correspondent described it yesterday), the nature of his passing was pure 2009. How very typical of the man to be so of the moment that the news came not from any conventional source, but posted on the web. For nearly two hours the celebrity gossip site TMZ doggedly insisted he was dead, while the combined weight of all the news organisations hedged its bets by having him in a coma, or just “in a very bad way”. Millions were twittering RIPs long before the television stations confirmed it, despite all their news helicopters humming over the hospital.

It’s done wonders for his career, of course. Shares in the Jackson brand have soared, and millions of dollars worth of his debts will be paid off over the next few weeks as we rush to buy his albums. The suddenness of his passing, the continuing suspicion surrounding the drugs and the doctors, has probably achieved more record sales than any number of concerts arranged for his ill-conceived comeback.

In many ways, his death was the least unexpected of any personality. Hounded to death by debts, drugs and the vampire-like cravings of his hangers-on, his destruction was bound to happen sooner or later. It was the only conceivable release from his sad, unavoidable decline. Even in the unlikely event that the London concerts would have taken place, they would almost certainly have exposed an old, sick, spent, fallen idol. Now, by dying in such appropriately mysterious circumstances, he joins the mythical legends of his own fantasies: Elvis, Marilyn, Princess Diana, James Dean. It’s exactly what he would have wanted: pure, distilled publicity.

In life, the world wasn’t sure how to read him: paedophile or pitiful, fragile or failure; now, in death, words like icon and legend are being thrown around. For me, I just loved the music. But it’s a tabloid newspaper’s dream, one that they’ve been rehearsing for years, as the world’s obsession with popular trash culture has grown. Forget Jade Goody, Katie and Peter’s marriage: this story is the real deal. It’s going to run and run – no need for Max Clifford this time.

It’s as if Jackson, through the grave, has finally taken control of his own publicity machine. As each interview and counterclaim adds to the enigma, Jackson is writing his own legend. It’s his final masterpiece and we’re all obsessed with it.

The Finger of Fate

My heart goes out to those who loved the victims of flight AF 447. The passing of someone close is always painful; but sudden and unexplained death hits you with a blow so severe, the scars can last for years. Nothing demonstrates the fragility and transience of life more than the unexpected severance of the link between two close human beings. It’s so unfair: why now, and why us?

I was 20 when I received a note from the university porter asking me to call home. It was 9pm, just a few days before Christmas. My mother was calm on the phone. “I have some bad news. Your father…”, then the voice breaking into anguished fragments: “Bertie’s dead: Oh Tom, please come home.”

It was already snowing as I crank-started my 1955 Ford Popular. Only two of its three gears worked: it popped out of third when it went over a bump, giving the car a top speed of 28 miles per hour. There was no heater and just a single vacuum powered windscreen wiper that had wheezed its final wipe months before. The two little eyeball headlights mounted over the front wheels glowed in proportion to the speed of the car, and so made no impression on the freezing fog that enveloped us as we struggled over the moors. With one frozen hand stuck through the window to wipe ice from the windscreen, the other holding the gearstick in place, I gripped the steering wheel between my knees. It took five hours to make the 90 miles to Tynemouth.

I arrived at 3am. It was home, but somehow unfamiliar: my mother white with fatigue and tears, the door to the family bedroom firmly closed. I can still recall the next few days as images from a half-remembered film: my half-brother, 17 years my senior, arriving from London absolutely distraught; Mum bravely cooking Christmas lunch for us all as if nothing had happened – we ate, but tasted nothing; the black suits at the funeral, with me shaking hands and thanking but unable to cry, even when the earth began to cover the brass label on the coffin lid. The shock of sudden separation was such that I couldn’t mourn my father’s passing until 12 years later when I returned to North Shields cemetery and without a guide walked through the sea of thousands of similar headstones directly to his name. And there I finally dissolved with heaving sobs.

In contrast to Dad’s departure, Mum has been confidently predicting her own imminent demise for the last 20 years. Her first scheduled death was on February 16th 1995. We rang her the following morning to ask her how it went. She brushed it off as a miscalculation by a gypsy. Since then I can’t count the number of times I’ve had to go over to her house to be cheerfully shown where her will is kept, just in case. One year my children and I, together with my son’s embarrassed new girlfriend, were taken to Hampstead Heath, where Mum first courted my father, to help her choose the specific oak sapling under which her ashes were to be scattered. My youngest daughter looked up at her with a confused face. "Granny, how will your big body get under that little tree?"

12 years later Mum, at 88, is looking fitter and happier than ever. A gifted portrait painter, with a brain sharper than Jeremy Paxman’s, she undoubtedly will outlive all her subjects, and probably me too.

Mum, the great survivor, has often witnessed the arbitrary finger of Fate. Many of her friends perished in the London Blitz and elsewhere during the War. Watching the D-Day commemoration, I thought of the thousands selected to lose their lives, and of those who survived to tell their heroic tale. Gratitude for life is a hard thing to express. But living every day as if it’s your last is probably one way to say thank you.

Ski Stories

Every year around 40 people die from skiing accidents. The argument about whether or not helmets should be compulsory is largely irrelevant. At the speeds most recreational skiers zoom around, even a helmet can’t guarantee protection. Skiing is dangerous, and, to me, the most uncomfortable of sports. The news of Natasha Richardson’s tragic death has opened up wounds of personal grief, because I too lost someone very close, and I’ve always felt slightly responsible.

My best friend, best man at my first wedding and godfather to my son, was BBC Newsnight reporter Ian Smith. Tall, handsome, intelligent and incredibly athletic, Ian would turn heads wherever he went. He played tennis to county level and when we knocked a ball about on Saturday mornings he would return my weedy serves with smashes so violent the ball had to be prised from the netting. Ian was completely obsessive about hobbies – he did nothing by halves. When he took up cooking, he wasn’t interested in everyday food: he attempted the most sophisticated recipes and we all had to endure his experimental gourmet evenings. Then, one day in the early 80’s, I persuaded him to go skiing. It transformed his life and eventually killed him.

I myself would never have ventured on a ski slope had it not been for a beautiful woman. At the age of 29 I fell head over heels for a girl who lived in Brussels. Like most people on the continent who can pop up an Alp for the weekend, she was a stylish skier. One day she rang to say she had met a diamond dealer who had offered her the use of his chalet in Verbier. Sensing her excitement and panicking that she might go off with the dealer, I feigned enthusiasm and said I’d love to join her. “I never knew you skied”, she said. “I think skiing’s amazing” I replied, disguising the fact that I had never worn a ski boot in my life. But I did have a cunning plan.

We agreed our date in Verbier then I flew down a few days early and checked into the local ski school. Watching tiny children bombing down the mountain I thought, what’s the big fuss? Such a mistake: I never could understand why you should put all your weight on the downhill ski when every human instinct tells you to just sit down and enjoy the view. Nevertheless I plugged away and, by the time the girlfriend arrived, I could just about manage a shaky snowplough. The first morning she suggested a notorious black run. As we got out of the cable car I fell headfirst into a snowdrift. Through tears of laughter she said it was touching that I’d made the effort. A year later we were married.

I dutifully allowed skiing to share our life and, after listening to us droning on about the delights of gluhwein and mountain views (though secretly I hated the fact that I was always too cold or too hot, and invariably soaked through), Ian was eventually persuaded to join us. He was instantly hooked. Although nearly 40, he took to the sport like a 5 year old.

He became obsessed by powder snow and heli-skiing, and eventually quit his job to spend more time in the mountains. However his body didn’t have the suppleness of his ambition and he often had to be collected from Gatwick with sprained or broken limbs.

One day they brought him home in an air ambulance. He’d slipped over the edge of a glacier and hit his head. Ian never spoke or smiled again. The man who’d been one of the most promising television journalists of his generation spent the last five years of his life in a vegetative state in a home for the incurables. I have never skied since.