In praise of immediacy
Plans for this newsletter (and my best work from 2023)
Hello and happy new year! Many months after pretty much every other freelance journalist in the UK realised Twitter was on a downward spiral and set up a Substack, I have followed suit. (I have form on this - I distinctly remember insisting to my school friends that the iPod would never catch on.) This is a quick post to introduce myself and explain what this newsletter will be about.
If you’re reading this first post, you probably already know me or my work - but to recap: I’m a freelance journalist who writes regularly for the Guardian’s Long Read section. I usually write long-form reported features which take months to come to fruition. This is a space where I am hoping to share some shorter pieces of original writing; a behind-the-scenes view of my reporting, incuding discussion of the kinds of challenges that I am constantly grappling with (eg how to deal with unreliable memories, or managing relationships with sources); interesting snippets or things cut from published work (you would not believe how much extra I end up writing for pretty much everything I do); and probably some chat about the business and logistics of freelance journalism. You'll find links to my work, as well as recommendations of what I've been reading and listening to. My aim is to post every fortnight - and never more than once a week (I respect your inbox, and frankly am not disciplined enough).
Since we’re only a few days into 2024, here’s a round up of some of the things I was most proud of last year:
In January, I wrote a story for the Guardian’s Saturday magazine about the brutal murder of Zara Aleena, and her family's struggle to find meaning. Zara was a bright law graduate in her 30s who was attacked by a stranger as she walked home from a night out. I think this was probably one of the hardest things I’ve ever written, not least because I started speaking to her family just two weeks after the murder, and their trauma and grief was so raw. In the end, I was proud of it, primarily because Zara's family felt it gave a sense of the person she was and not just what was done to her. (I also wrote a short opinion piece about the failures of the probation service in relation to the case).
I was priveleged to profile the documentary-maker Norma Percy for Prospect magazine. Percy’s landmark series chronicle the great political transitions and conflicts of our times - from Israel and Palestine, to Northern Ireland, from the fall of the Soviet Union to the rise of Putin. Her distinctive technique is to allow powerbrokers all sides to tell the story in their own words. If you’ve never watched any Percy films, start with this selection on BBC iPlayer. (Endgame in Ireland was one of my favourites.)
For the Guardian’s Saturday magazine, I wrote about the 18-year-old mystery of a woman who jumped to her death from a west London office block, and the volunteer sleuths trying to identify her. It’s bleak to think of someone dying apparently without being missed, but I ended up finding this story strangely hopeful because of the people looking for her. (As a side note, while I was researching, I revisited the 2011 documentary Dreams of a Life, which pieces together the story of a woman whose remains went undiscovered in her flat for two years. It’s an extraordinary look at the ways in which people can fall through the cracks, and is available to watch online here.)
My piece about extreme hoarding was the third most read Guardian Long Read story this year! This was reflected in the volume of emails I got about it - hoarding is a problem that affects so many people. As I wrote in the piece, it’s statistically one of the world’s most prevalent mental health conditions - roughly on par with depression. Until I worked on this piece, I hadn’t really understood that it’s also a huge public policy issue.
I was pleased to contribute to the Guardian's Cotton Capital project (it’s a brilliant initiative, and well worth looking at all the pieces they published if you haven’t already). My story, which was published in the Long Read section, examined the backlash against academic researchers looking at legacies of enslavement. I focused on the particular conflict at Gonville and Caius, a Cambridge college, though this backlash goes much wider. While I was working on this, I thought of it as "the anatomy of a culture war”, and found it very satisfying to think about what’s beneath the increasingly dramatic rhetoric around British history we see in the news.
In my final piece of the year for the Guardian Long Read, I delved into the wild story of Sheffield City Council trying to fell 17,500 trees - and the city-consuming battle that ensued. Featuring allegations of poisoned tea, a dawn tree-felling raid, and security guards authoritised to use force - this has to be read to be believed.
To conclude with something completely different, in December I hosted two episodes of the BBC Radio 4 series One to One, in which a broadcaster/journalist has conversations with experts. The brief I was given was to pick a topic that I am genuinely curious about. I went with something I spend a lot of time thinking about: parenting in the age of social media, and the impact of being constantly bombarded with advice whenever you open Instagram. I spoke to science writer Lucy Jones (incidentally, her book Matrescence was one of the best things I read last year), and to Helen Oliver, a school counsellor who had her kids before social media advice was so prevalent.
That feels like a good place to end this list. I loved recording these One to One episodes - not least because it was such a change of pace to my usual work to simply sit down and have a conversation and be done. That’s what I want to do with this newsletter; a bit more immediacy and brevity.
Thank you so much for reading! I’ll be back in a couple of weeks with something that looks a little more broadly. In the meantime, please share with anyone who might be interested. Until next time.