Three weeks after the killing, I got a letter from British Airways saying, Dear Mr. Harding, we regret to inform you that the plane you were travelling on was contaminated with radioactive poison. If you have any concerns, ring NHS Direct. So I called NHS Direct, and of course you’re in this awful phone hell queue. I eventually hung up, realizing there wasn’t a big plane in option.

Hello, I’m Laura Shavin, and this is The Offcuts Drawer, the show that looks inside a writer’s bottom drawer to find the bits of work they never finished, had rejected, or couldn’t quite find a home for. We bring them to life, hear the stories behind them, and learn how these random pieces of creativity pave the way to subsequent success. My guest this week is British journalist Luke Harding. After graduating from Oxford University, where he edited the student newspaper, The Cherwell, Luke went on to work at the Evening Argus and the Daily Mail before joining The Guardian in 1996, where he continues to work today. He has lived in and reported from Delhi, Berlin, and Moscow, and has covered wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya. In 2014, he was the recipient of the James Cameron Prize for his work on Russia, Ukraine, WikiLeaks, and Edward Snowden, and two of his books on these subjects have been turned into films, The Fifth Estate, starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Julian Assange, and Snowden with Joseph Gordon-Levitt, which was directed by Oliver Stone. More recently, Luke’s book about Alexander Litvinenko, a very expensive poison, was dramatised by playwright Lucy Preble and performed at the Old Vic Theatre, where it won this year’s Best New Play at the Critics Circle Awards. And then there’s his latest book, Shadow State, Murder, Mayhem and Russia’s Remaking of the West, which is currently residing well-thumbed on my bedside table. Luke Harding, welcome to The Offcuts Drawer.

Thank you, Laura. Great to be with you.

It’s a pretty exciting time to be a foreign correspondent, isn’t it? Was it always this exciting, or has the advent of social media and constant news meant that we now have more detailed access to it?

I think it’s always been pretty exciting. It’s something I long wanted to do. It seemed more fun than sitting at a desk in London. Funny enough, I was rewatching last night the famous Princess Diana Panorama interview, which took me back. I spent a year for The Guardian after her death in 1997, basically following Prince Charles around the world on his jet and his various state trips to places like South Africa and Sri Lanka and Nepal, seeing foreign correspondents literally wearing cream-colored linen suits in faraway places. And I thought, this is what I want to do.

So you wanted to be a foreign correspondent from the very beginning or just once you were following Charles around?

Well, I’d always had a kind of strong drive towards foreign countries. I guess I consider myself an internationalist. I went to an international sixth form college in Wales, studied the International Baccalaureate, spent a year out in India. So yeah, there was a kind of restlessness. I mean, the Germans, they have a great way of conceptualising it because there’s Heimweh, which everyone understands, which is, I guess you can translate as homesickness, the desire to be rooted in one place back with your family and so on. But there’s an antonym to that. The Germans also have a concept called Fernweh, which is the desire to be far away from everyday normality. And throughout my life, throughout my career, I’ve felt Fernweh really, really strongly. And it’s shaped my professional life and it’s shaped my personal life too with my wife Phoebe and our kids. We’ve spent many years living abroad in various countries, learning languages, having experiences and so on. And so I don’t know if that makes me a rootless cosmopolitan, Laura or not, but maybe I am a rootless cosmopolitan at heart.

Well, let’s get started with your first offcut. Can you tell us what it’s called, what genre it was written for and when it was written?

Yes. Well, this is an extract from a notebook I kept when I was in Masuri Sharif in northern Afghanistan in November of 2001, covering what at the time looked like the end of the Taliban.

They arrived in darkness, then sat until dawn in the desert. The Taliban’s elite foreign fighters were supposed to fight until the death, but early yesterday morning they packed into five open trucks and three pickups and headed east out of Kunduz in a swirl of choking dust. At 3 a.m. they arrived unannounced on the outskirts of Mazar-e-Sharif, Afghanistan’s northern city. They waited. As we set off from Mazar early yesterday, we had no idea they were there. The road out of the city seemed unusually frantic. We passed a checkpoint manned by opposition fighters and dozens of jeeps packed with soldiers. We kept going. And then, 200 yards ahead of us in the desert were hundreds of soldiers in black turbans, sitting placidly among the dunes in neatly spaced groups. Some of them were asleep in black tents. A few were dozing. Others stretched in the morning sunshine. Taliban! my driver shouted. He spun the car around. We paused a moment. The local opposition commander, Gulam Saki, came to talk to us. There are 400 of them. Only 30 of them are Afghan. The rest are foreigners, he said. Some of them are Pakistanis and Chechens. They came overnight from Kunduz. They still have their weapons. They have agreed to surrender. Are there any Arabs among them, I asked? We don’t know, he said. Probably. The Taliban commander, who had been negotiating with his opposite number, the modalities of surrender, tapped on our window. He was dressed in a green turban and a blanket. And his dark eyes seemed streaked with coal. He says it is time to leave, Gullamsaki said. When Mullah Mohammed Omar founded the Taliban seven years ago with only 30 fighters, he could have anticipated neither his movement’s extraordinary success, nor the bleak and rapid manner of its undoing. The Taliban are no longer a pan-Afghan force, merely a small provincial army presiding over a rapidly shrinking southern empire. The utopian experiment that was the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan ended yesterday in a wilderness of shimmering desert and telegraph poles.

So you were watching the Taliban surrender. When you went over there, did you know that was what was going to be happening?

No, Laura, I didn’t. I mean, it’s actually the whole episode is quite poignant for me. I mean, just to explain, I was the Guardian’s South Asia bureau chief, so I pitched up in Delhi with my family in 2000, and had been to Afghanistan a couple of times during a period when it had really fallen off the map. Nobody was going there. Nobody was interested. The Taliban were in control. They were running Kabul. Paradoxically, it was relatively safe and secure, and I traveled all around the country writing about culture, writing about education, and so on. And then, of course, after 9-11, Afghanistan became the epicenter of world events, and there was a US-led invasion. And I, like all journalists, spent quite a long time in Pakistan trying to get in, and eventually then drove up through the Khyber Pass up to Kabul. And I kept going. I was told to go to the north and ended up walking through the Salang Tunnel, which is the sort of mountainous tunnel that had been blown up with my flat jacket, managing to pick up a vehicle at the other side, then going up to Mazar. And this particular moment was important. I mean, it was both the end of the Taliban, but also, I’ve done a lot of war and kind of death reporting, if you like, in my career. But what happened subsequently, your extract stops, but the Taliban surrendered, were kept in this sort of Beaujolais-style castle. And after a day or two, they broke out. They broke out. Some of them had actually hidden grenades. They managed to see some weapons. They had a firefight. They killed a CIA officer. The SAS were involved. I, meanwhile, was at the front line. At one point, I was reported dead because I hadn’t been seen. And Newsweek reported that I had been killed. And I went and reported on this kind of gruesome siege. And after about three, four days, the Taliban finally surrendered. And I remember going into the courtyard and counting about 150 bodies of dead Taliban soldiers. I mean, some survived. Some were dying in front of me of hypothermia. They were a mixture. They were the kind of Taliban’s international brigade. And it was strange and it was savage. And it took place against this astonishing Afghan landscape, which is a mixture of kind of desert and high mountain, beautiful sort of turquoise, jade-coloured rivers. And in the midst of this war, this kind of astonishing war where at the time there seemed to be only one outcome, which is the US, the UK would prevail. But of course, what we now know is that the Taliban, my obituary of them, if you like, was premature. And they came creeping back and they now control much of the country. And just the last thing to say is that when I was there, I went back a couple of times after that trip, I sort of had this fantasy that I’d come back with my kids as teenagers, you know, sort of 10, 15 years later, and we would travel around as hippies used to do. Because Kabul used to be on the hippie trail. You go to Afghanistan from Iran en route to India, take drugs and enjoy the good times. And of course, that never happened. And when I got back to Delhi after this experience in Mazar and in Afghanistan, being not dead, I think I probably was suffering from post-traumatic something or other. I mean, war does strange things to you. I mean, first and foremost, it’s terrible for the people, for the civilians who are in it. But as a sort of war journalist, it makes you experience life in quite a hyper way. And coming off that ride, it’s like an adrenaline ride or a sort of drug trip. You do feel kind of quite strange. And it took me a few months, I think, looking back to get back to normal.

So did that put you off going back into something as dangerous as that, back into the middle of things?

Well, actually, I did. I mean, I did a lot of war. I mean, I did all of George W. Bush’s wars in the noughties. So having done Afghanistan and survived and written some dispatches from there, I then did, you know, Baghdad. I was in Iraq until it got too dangerous. And one of my colleagues was kidnapped. And then I stopped going. But I was rotating in and out of Iraq and then subsequently brought on the war in Georgia in 2008, Libya in 2011, then Ukraine most recently in 2014. So, I mean.

So the shock didn’t last that long.

Well, it’s not that. The strange thing is war in a way is, I mean, this sounds perverse, but perhaps enjoyable is the wrong word. But if you’re a writer, if you’re a reporter, it’s very compelling because it’s actually quite easy to report about war. I mean, you don’t need to kind of phone a press officer. You just describe what you see. And the front lines change all the time. So every day you have to kind of drive out, see what’s going on, talk to people, return back and then file your dispatch. And what I tried to do always was not to write about myself, but to write about civilians, innocents caught up in this and the kind of pity of their situation. And am I done with it? I probably am done with it. But if I were asked to do it again, I would probably agree.

OK, time for another offcut. Tell us about this one, please.

Well, this is a clip of a novel or a piece of autofiction I was writing when I was in India during my year out in May, June, April, May 1987.

Today was stool analysis. Across the street in the laboratory, a room containing one microscope, a flat tube and a visual display promoting healthy childcare, ramen was to spend the day examining shit. Most of the shit in Kandari was produced by the menfolk of the village on the side of the road. Ramen samples had been wrapped in tea leaves. One of the children had recently been adopted by a large worm and his stomach was swollen like a tire. It was ramen’s job to check that none of the other villagers would go the same way. Through the microscope, air bubbles and algae competed for scrutiny. Some worm eggs showed up in his samples. Ramen marked his observations in a notebook. Later that evening, after rice cakes and coconut stew, ramen took a stroll. Kandari’s main importance was as a chai stop for the buses heading further up the mountains. Men would climb out of the bus into the foreground of the hotel to urinate on the fence round the back and to buy chai. Ramen watched the hotel owner pour the liquid from a dented metal container into a collection of glasses. And then he saw a whaling family group, newly arrived. Inside the clinic, an emaciated peasant was stretched out on the table. The laboratory staff were holding him down. One of them inserted a plastic funnel into his mouth and poured in water. The man had swallowed pesticide. The room smelt of excrement. Ramen watched through the doorway with a crowd from the village. They had come from the chai stall to watch. Under a single electric bulb, a health worker danced around the trembling man checking his pupils. By 9pm, the clinic smelled so badly that the peasant’s new wife, an anemic girl of 17, was carried out by her relatives. Shortly afterwards, the shuddering stopped and the man died. Ramen had never seen death before. He ran out into the street and vomited in the tea bushes. Afterwards, he felt ashamed.

So this was written as fiction. Was this something you observed for yourself when you were in India? Or was this purely a figment of your imagination?

No, no, this happened for real. So I went to India after sixth form and spent about five months in Tamil Nadu near Kodi Kanal, helping out in this kind of medical centre. I think probably I was pretty useless at everything, including stool analysis. That really wasn’t my forte. But yeah, and this was just one of those sort of sad things that happened. But it was the first time, I mean, having just talked about seeing a lot of dead bodies in Afghanistan, it was the first time I had seen someone die at age 18. And it sort of stuck with me. So the incident was there. But also, I mean, I don’t think it’s a great piece of work. And the novel really spluttered out after about 10,000 words. I didn’t complete it. But I guess at that point, I was sort of experimenting with creative writing. I was trying to figure out what genre to write in, actually. And whether you make stuff out completely, whether you lightly fictionalise, what licence you can take with events around you and with reality. And what’s interesting was I did find my genre. And in the end, my genre was nonfiction rather than fiction. And by nonfiction, particularly kind of what you might call, I guess, novelised nonfiction, which is not to say that it’s not true. I mean, everything I write is true. The quotes, the sources, whether it’s Edward Snowden or Putin’s Russia or whatever, it’s all true. But you take novel style techniques to make sure that the reader is engaged and that you’re kind of entertaining and vivid. And I guess I’m sort of playing with detail there. But gosh, would I write another novel? I don’t think I would, actually. And actually, Laura, why write fiction when our reality at the moment is so twisted and strange and surreal? I mean, you know, an orange property developer becomes president of the United States and is currently refusing to leave the Oval Office and pretending goodbye Lenin style that he won. So I think the best stories are true. And that was something that I would later conclude for myself.

Right, let’s have another offcut now. What’s this one?

Oh, well, OK, I’m slightly ashamed of this one. This is from May 1988 from the Oxford student newspaper, the Charwell, where for that term I was John Evelyn, which is the paper’s gossip columnist writing gossip across the university.

Headline. Grass but no oats. Michael Gove’s post-presidential career seems to be going rather limp. As Evelyn was reminded from an intimate source, old stallions don’t die, they just lose their sex appeal. This probably explains Gove’s current macho behavior in his attempt to win back the love of union groupie Marion Gilchrist. Gilchrist packed in poor Gove just as his term as president ended and is now hotly debated by stripling Duncan Penny. Penny, who was recently voted in Corpus as JCR Penis, is another one of those eager union whippets who just happened to get in grunting Gove’s way. At a showdown on Friday night, Gove’s jealousy got the better of him and he scrambled egg all over Penis’s hair. Penis managed to respond by reaching for his fridge and splattering the Honorable Gentleman with a tomato. In a fit of Hulk-Man rage, Gove broke into Penis’s room at two in the morning and firehosed his sleeping body. Unfortunately, Gove somehow was unable to hit the mark and Penny wasn’t aroused. Mr Gove was last seen by Evelyn on Sunday night, car-hopping in Oriole Square. This week, John Evelyn brings you one of the most poncified, absurd anachronisms it has ever been my desire to avoid. Raymond Edwards. Monday Club hack and Bloodsports propagandist. Raymond can often be seen in his bowtie and tails, strolling very straight back through the Union as if he’s got a poker up his arse. The bar staff there hate him so much they spike his drinks. Our hero’s first move when he came to Oxford was to join the Monday Club. But he submitted an article for the Club newspaper which was so far right, even for that society, that it had to be censored by the Club’s president Giles Dixon. Unperturbed, Edwards quickly wangled for himself a post on the Monday Club committee as Beagling Rep, a spurious sinecure invented this term. Poor Raymond has two chips on his shoulder. First, that his name is Ray Edwards, instead of something much grander. The second, that he comes from some gnome hamlet near Blackpool of which nobody’s ever heard. To countenance this, Raymond claims that his father is commander of the Ninth Dragoon Guards, but no one’s ever heard of them either. In fact, Raymond’s connections to aristocracy are so good, he got taken in by an ex-comprehensive school kid who pretended to be Lord Ashcombe one night. Happy Raymond, his moustache quivering, took Lord Ashcombe back to Oriole and offered him his bed for the night. Never mind, Raymond. Find another fox out there and take a hatchet to its ear.

I’m shaking my head in shame and mortification. I mean, it’s truly embarrassing. I mean, I’ve got to sort of mere culper a bit. I mean, bear in mind, I was young. We all make mistakes when we’re young. And I mean, the prose is abysmal and there’s a lot there to rue. And if anyone is listening who appears, I’d like to apologize for my early student self. Having said all that, the sort of serious point is that, so I was at Oxford reading English at University College between 1987 and 1990. And as a sort of student journalist, I mean, I moved on from gossip and did more serious stuff later on. I came across all the people who are currently in the government. Another pushy fresher, and we didn’t hear that extract, was someone called Jacob Rees-Mogg. I wrote about Jacob Rees-Mogg because he turned up at Trinity College in a Bentley with his nanny wearing a three-piece suit, and his nanny unloaded his luggage out of the back for him. And Gove I met, I was in my first year, Gove was in his third year, was president or president-elect of the Oxford Union, the Student Debating Society, which is a kind of right-wing finishing school. The same kind of Gove you see on your TV screen now, bumptious with a sort of faux politesse, where he’s super polite, but actually it’s a form of high-level sneering, I think, really. And, you know, I saw Gove, Boris Johnson had just left. I didn’t overlap with Johnson, but he was, there was a sort of sulfurous, sort of shiny whiff of Johnson was still there. Other people like Ed Vasey, who was culture minister, I wrote about him in Evelyn and so on. And the serious point, Laura, is that I thought these people had such extreme views. They’re all arch-thatcherites. There was a sort of pantomimic quality about them. They were caricatures. I mean, okay, I treat them in Evelyn as caricatures, but they were quite ridiculous and sort of puffed up with their self-importance. This is sort of age 19, 20, 21. And I confidently assumed that they were going nowhere and that a more talented, more serious, cleverer generation would come along and at some point sort of take power. And how wrong was I? How wrong was I? These people are running government. And they’re not as bright as they think they are, unfortunately. And most of them come from very, very privileged backgrounds. And the years haven’t sort of softened their other extreme views to my mind. I don’t know if all your listeners will agree.

But do you know what’s happened to Raymond Edwards? Do we know about him?

I’m afraid Raymond Edwards has disappeared. I know what happened to him. But Michael Gove, I think, still wants to be prime minister. And I fear that you can’t write go off actually as I mean, how long will Boris Johnson last? We don’t know. But Rishi Sunak is the obvious successor. But I think Gove is better or worse is still in the mix.

Sorry to interrupt, but if you’re enjoying the show, please do subscribe to The Offcuts Drawer, give us a five-star rating, leave a review, tell your friends about it. All that stuff’s really important for a podcast like this. And visit offcutsdrawer.com for more details about the writers and actors, and to find out about future live shows. Thanks for your support. Now back to the interview. Presumably, you wrote about the other students who became Tory MPs as well, but you only sent me those two bits.

So I wrote about, I mean, David Cameron, funny enough, I think I did have that with David Cameron for one year, but he was not a sort of, he was not a university personality in the same way that Boris Johnson clearly was and Michael Gove was, and so on. But it was a strange time. Up until I went to Oxford, I didn’t really know what conservatives were. And I remember gatecrashing for a laugh with a sort of some fresher, who I scarcely knew, a kind of conservative party, sort of freshers drinks, wearing a Mao cap. It’s the kind of daft thing you do when you’re 19. And to my horror, to discover that it was full. It was absolutely heaving with people who already at a very young age had their eye on politics and had their eye on a career, and were also very keen to make money. I mean, this is the late Thatcher era where greed was good. And many of them did become extremely rich. And I just, to me, it just seemed crazy. It seemed that journalism was everything, and I loved doing student journalism because it was full of other people who wrote, who were bright. But you could be scruffy, and it was very informal. And actually, a lot of people who were on Chowell with me had really starry journalistic careers. Jonathan Friedland was there. Ian Katz, who runs Channel 4, was there. Simon Cooper, who’s a brilliant columnist for the FT, was there. And there were other people as well whom I didn’t know and have come across subsequently, like Carl Cadwallader, my colleague on The Observer, Harry Kunzrew, who’s a fantastic novelist. And also someone called Louis Theroux. I don’t know what happened to him, but he may have done something.

Yeah, I’ve never heard of him. Okay, time for another Offcut now. Tell us about this one.

Yeah, well, so one thing you have to do sometimes is write obituaries for people who are still alive. And this is an obituary I wrote a couple of years back for The Guardian for Alexander Medvedev, the now former Prime Minister of Russia.

Medvedev first met Putin in 1990. Putin was head of the Committee for Foreign Relations and Medvedev worked as its adviser. The committee met a couple of times a week in the Smolny Institute, a neoclassical building which Lenin used as his HQ during the 1917 October Revolution. The two men became friends. In 1991, Sobchak was elected mayor and the city reverted to its pre-Bolshevik name, St. Petersburg. Putin, eight years older and with a Soviet worldview, was the dominant figure of the two, a dynamic that would persist. Medvedev served as Putin’s personal lawyer, and when Putin became Russia’s prime minister in 1999, he took key St. Petersburg allies to Moscow with him, including Medvedev, who got a job in the presidential administration. Medvedev was undoubtedly talented, but it was his loyalty that most counted to Putin. Despite his lack of experience, Putin selected Medvedev to run his 2000 presidential campaign. When ailing Boris Yeltsin had anointed Putin as his successor and as Russia’s acting president in the dying hours of 1999, there was little doubt that Putin would win the election. But Medvedev ran the campaign well, showing a capacity for hard work and technical detail. According to the political analyst Liliya Shevsova, Medvedev could be petty, jealous and sometimes unscrupulous, useful qualities in the Kremlin jungle. As Medvedev prospered, he acquired business interests. In 1994, he became a director of the board for a subsidiary of Ilyin Pulp, Russia’s leading paper manufacturer. In 2000, he became chairman of the board of directors of Gazprom. His role appeared to be political oversight rather than management. There have been long-standing allegations of Putin’s personal corruption. Fewer rumours attached themselves to Medvedev, but he was a key player in a system dubbed Kremlin, Inc.

Did you ever meet him, Medvedev?

I didn’t. I didn’t personally meet him. I sat a couple of times in a room with Putin just across the table. I never shook Putin’s hand. You would get summoned from time to time to his dacha residence in northwest Moscow, and you’d invariably have to wait about seven hours until he deigned to show up. But this was one of the central questions that I had to answer when I was the Guardian’s Moscow correspondent. That was between 2007 and 2011, which was the nature of the relationship between Medvedev and Putin. Putin became president in 2000 after taking over from Boris Yeltsin. Then he did this kind of castling maneuver where he became prime minister. Medvedev took over and did a stint as president. People were curious to know as to whether Medvedev was a real substantive figure or whether he was, as the Americans put it, an elite diplomatic cable, which I wrote about, whether he was Robin to Putin’s Batman. And the brief answer was that he was Robin. And any differences were stylistic rather than substantial. But yeah, I mean, I have to say my stint in Russia, I mean, I’d done Delhi before, I’d done Berlin before and then moved to Moscow.

Was this your choice moving to Russia or was this where you were sent?

It wasn’t really my choice. It was, I remember, in the summer of 2006 when I was in Berlin and the World Cup was going on. And my then boss came out and said to me rather delphically, we think you need a bigger canvas. And what that really meant was, I think, no one has applied for the Moscow job with sending you to Russia. It’s a pretty tough gig, right? I mean, the weather obviously is, it’s rather cold. But also politically, it was extremely chilly as well. And I’ve written, I think, four books about Russia now. The one I wrote immediately after this period was Mafia State. But then subsequently, I wrote A Very Expensive Poison, which you mentioned about the murder of Alexander Litvinenko, a story that dominated my time there. He was poisoned with a radioactive cup of tea just before I arrived. And I actually flew on one of the planes used to transport radioactive polonium to London by the two assassins. And even three weeks after the killing, I got a letter from British Airways saying, Dear Mr. Harding, we regret to inform you that the plane you were traveling on was contaminated with radioactive poison. If you have any concerns, ring NHS Direct. So I called NHS Direct and of course, you’re in this awful phone hell queue. Eventually, I hung up realizing there wasn’t going to be a polonium option. But essentially what happened was that I tried to write about the Levonenko case, I tried to answer the question about how much money Putin has, answer he’s the richest guy in the world. And I wrote other kinds of stories which displeased the Russian embassy in London and the Russian government. And my reward was, I had a series of, basically was harassed by the FSB, the KGB successor agency which Putin used to run. And we had break-ins at our apartment, demonstrative ones, we were bugged, we were surveilled. I had guys following me around the icy streets of Moscow from time to time and all of our phone calls were listened to. And that was made very obvious. You’d make a joke about Putin and the lion would just go, like this. And then so you make another joke about Putin and on one occasion, Laura, that the KGB left a sex manual by the side of the marital bed when we’d been away on a holiday in Berlin, came back to discover a book on relationships. And they’d bookmarked it to a page on orgasms, how you have a better orgasm. And I was sort of sitting there on the bed reading this. First of all, I had to explain to my wife that it wasn’t my book.

Was it in English or Russian?

It was in Russian. Still got it. I would wave it around, but it’s a podcast, so I can’t. And it was kind of clear what the message was. The message was we were watching you. The British Embassy had told us that there was probably video surveillance in our bedroom. So we were watched having sex for three and a half years. And eventually I was deported, kicked out in February 2011. But the reason I sort of say all this is two reasons. One, it gave me an insight into sort of thuggish, really Soviet KGB mentality of the people in power in Russia still. They’re still there. And two, when it came to Donald Trump and allegations which kind of burst four years ago into the public domain that he had been secretly filmed in a five-star hotel in Moscow cavorting with two prostitutes. It was clear to me that of course they would have a Trump film because that’s what the FSB do. KGB did it as well. They spy, entrap, hound, try and blackmail, compromise foreign guests, particularly Americans and Brits. And so it was a really kind of dark period. I mean, I loved Russia. I still love Russia. I learned Russian, the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life. I had a Russian lesson two days ago via Skype. But it really sort of shaped my professional destiny and my career as a writer. Not because I’m an obsessive, but just because Russia plays an outside role in world affairs and co-contributed to Donald Trump’s victory in 2016.

We’ll be talking more about that with a later clip, but let’s move on now and have one more off-cut. What’s this one?

Well, we’re going backwards again. This is from 1987, summer of 1987. It’s a piece I wrote for a travel writing competition in the independent newspaper, which was new at that point before going up to Oxford.

Even for Canton, 90 fen an hour for hire seemed expensive. The boyish glee of the old man who ran the stall overflowed as he straightened up a bike. I did not have long. The light was fading and the city could soon be reduced to a perspective of ideograms. The Pearl River cut a huge path to the right of where I pedalled, home to a muddle of tugs and black marketeers. I suffered inevitable ambush from a cry of, Change money! and swerved into a bizarre thickening of peasants and neglected bicycles. It appeared that Ching Ping Market had thrived for centuries without discovery. I pushed inside a crowded, split-roofed passageway defined by whitewashed walls and wooden trestles. Nonchalant cellars in flimsy western shirts and slacks squatted nearby and watched over the procession of city-dweller and peasant diffusing through the complex. Some aimlessly absorbed the atmosphere like myself. Others had something more definite in mind. A middle-aged woman topped with straw hat thrust her hands into a basket and withdrew four unhappy frogs. The quartet was strung together and carried off, patterning the air with an elegant geometry of leg kicks. Yet the true tenants of the Xiping market were not really human, more a reflection of the earthy creativity of the Chinese mind. Everything and more was there. Angular roots like purple truncheons, beans, rice, branches of white flesh, liqi, fish drawn and quartered, bodies laid out for purchase next to smiling heads, eels losing faith with their upper halves on the street floor, turtles, some old, some flat-backed and struggling, others sedentary, all resigned to their ineluctable soup bowl fate, goldfish chased by boys with nets, dried brown forms of squid hung up like martyred prophets, slated, crumpled and humiliated, terrapin housed in blue plastic bowls, wild umbrella forms of fungi, broilers hung lamenting between wooden bars, cats, they’re not as pets, blue-necked singing birds, shark fins dried and set up like trophies, and a solitary, somewhat melancholy, fat-winged owl in a cage. It was a feast, albeit briefly encountered.

So you were in China when you wrote this. This was the same year when you wrote the piece in India, is that right?

Yeah, I was doing my sort of classic middle class kind of round-the-world thing, and so after four and a half months in India, I moved on to Hong Kong where I stayed with friends, and then went into sort of mainland China. And one of the reasons I included this clip was, we don’t know precisely where the coronavirus came from, but the strong suspicion is it came from one of these wet markets where you’ve got lots of live animals, and you’ve got lots of people all kind of packed together in a rather kind of steamy environment. And so I sort of thought of this. And also, I guess the other thing about this piece is that it’s, by the way, it’s not a great piece of writing. I mean, it’s slightly too elevated and pretentious. I mean, that’s something as a kind of writer you have to dial down. I mean, the longer you do it, the more you realise that the answer is very often a sort of simplicity. And if you can choose between being elaborate and sherry and being clean, it’s always better to choose sort of clean. So I write somewhat differently now, but I guess I was ambitious. I mean, I sort of set this off with the independent in the full expectation that I would win this competition. Of course, I didn’t. And in fact, it was a kind of early life lesson because having got my first from Oxford, I’d edited Charwell and I sort of thought that all these doors would be open to me. And actually, aged sort of 22, I had a kind of massive pile of rejection letters from a whole number of people, including the BBC, applied for their training scheme, didn’t get it, applied for it. Everyone wanted to work on The Independent at that time because it did photographs so beautifully and so well. And they had an internship which all the student journalists I knew applied for, and none of us got it. And I subsequently discovered the editor’s niece got it. But I guess the moral is that for anyone, whatever stage they’re at, whether they’re kind of a young person setting out or whether they’re, you know, in their 50s trying to get their first novel published, that perseverance is important and also being quite robust. I mean, if it doesn’t work out, that doesn’t mean you’re no good, you can’t write. It just means you need to kind of keep trying or put one project to one side and try another one. And I think eventually with some good fortune, you’ll get there.

Sound advice. Well, we’ve now come to your final offcut. Tell us about this one.

Well, this is a piece I wrote recently in October of 2020 commissioned by the Guardian of Foreign Desk about Donald Trump after he got COVID and we thought he might die. I mean, now that seems unlikely. He hasn’t died. He’s still very much with us. But quite often in journalism land, you have to write pieces in case something happens and it doesn’t happen. I mean, I also read a piece about Joe Biden becoming president, which has been published, but this one hasn’t and wasn’t.

Well, let’s hear it now.

Hold for Trump death or defeat. For the next almost two years, the workings of Mueller’s team stayed secret. The prosecutor was simultaneously Washington’s most present personality, endlessly discussed, and a ghost. From time to time, his office issued indictments. These were against 26 Russians, including GRU hackers, and Americans, Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, Attorney Michael Cohen, and others. Mueller’s report, delivered in spring 2019, was a disappointment, at least to liberal Americans who hoped it might sweep Trump from power. It identified numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump campaign, but didn’t find a criminal-level conspiracy. The most significant backchannel to Moscow involved Manafort, and his one-time Russian aide Konstantin Kilimnik. In a series of clandestine meetings, Manafort gave Kilimnik internal polling data, including in the Rust Belt states, which proved crucial to Trump’s 2016 victory. The two men behaved like spies. They used burner phones, encrypted chats, and a secret email account, with messages shared in drafts. Mueller identified Kilimnik as a career Russian intelligence officer. His employer was the GRU. What Kilimnik did with the information he got from Manafort is unknown. He refused to cooperate with the FBI and is in Moscow. Mueller’s report had many shortcomings, an excess of legal caution, and a failure to meet face-to-face with Trump. Its biggest, arguably, was a lack of Russian witnesses. In August, the Senate Intelligence Committee published its own report. It said Manafort’s willingness to pass confidential material to Kilimnik was a grave counterintelligence threat. And it gave some credence to the Steele Moscow allegations, noting that an FSB officer was stationed at the Ritz-Carlton hotel and had a live video feed, including from guests’ bedrooms. In the end, Russia didn’t interfere in the 2020 election in the same sweeping and systematic way as in 2016. Probably it didn’t need to. The Kremlin’s goals of exacerbating political chaos in America and deepening civil strife had already been achieved. Rightly or not, Moscow viewed Trump as the perfect candidate to destroy US democracy, with his victory Russia’s own.

You are an expert, really, on the Trump-Putin connection. That’s sort of your specialty, isn’t it? What did Russia want from Trump, and did they get it, do you think?

Yeah, it’s a good question. I’ve written two books on Trump and Putin. One was Collusion, which came out in 2017, and it was the first book on this theme. There have subsequently been very many others. And also, I went back to this in Shadow State, my new one, essentially for two reasons. One, Sergei Skripal got poisoned in Salisbury in the spring of 2018, which was another astonishing misdeed by the Kremlin. But two, Trump and Putin met, you’ll remember Laura, in Helsinki, their famous summit there where Trump is asked point blank whether he believes the Russians hacked the election to help him win. And he says, no, I believe my good friend Vladimir. And it was just a jaw-dropping moment where even people who were pro-Trump thought this was sort of treasonous behaviour. I mean, I’ve looked at this. I mean, I’ve had an awful lot of kind of abuse and trolling from Kremlin bots, from Trump fanatics and so on, who say, look, it’s all a nonsense. There’s nothing to see here. But actually, that’s just not true. Trump has been going to Moscow since the mid-1980s. He was there first in 1987. It’s clear for anyone who knows Soviet espionage, KGB, that there’s a kind of huge file on Donald Trump. And one of the things I dug out, which I write about in my books, is there’s a sort of secret KGB questionnaire, which was leaked by a defector about what the Russians are looking for in a potential Western asset. And you get on the list and it’s things like narcissism, unfaithfulness, greed, poor analytical capabilities. Donald Trump is off the scale. I mean, he’s a kind of dream asset, really. And I’m not suggesting that when he’s logged away in the White House that he puts on a kind of olive green Soviet uniform and prances around in front of a mirror. No. But the point is, he’s so immoral, he’s so kind of me-centered. He is so flawed that he’s a kind of mark. He’s easy to manipulate. And I think what Putin has been doing with Trump throughout this period and their summits and in their private phone calls, we don’t know quite what’s being said, is planting ideas in his head. I think Trump is eminently suggestible. And what Putin, Putin is a kind of Lord of Chaos, he’s the sort of near least in chief. What he’s got from Trump is, you know, Putin hasn’t created divisions in America, they already existed, or indeed in our country, in the UK. But he’s pouring paraffin on the fire. And what we know is there was a kind of huge operation, espionage operation involving Russians pretending to be Americans sitting in a troll factory in St. Petersburg involving career spies and involving this, an actual spy at the heart of the Trump campaign, Russian spy who was getting confidential polling data and passing it back. And so Trump is, the election of Trump, rightly or wrongly, is seen in Moscow as the greatest espionage success in the entirety of KGB and post KGB history. I mean, you know, Moscow can’t believe it. And you might argue that he’s a homegrown monster. I mean, I think that’s right. And a lot of Americans, quite sincerely, clever Americans voted for him last month. But Russia has and does play the spoiler role in the world, where it tries to sort of drag down and corrode Western democracies and back extremist candidates. And Trump is their greatest success. And if somehow he can stay in power despite losing the election, they’ll be even more rejoicing in Moscow. Shampanskoi, champagne clinked, and so on. And part of me thinks, and you heard it here first, Laura, that if it all goes wrong for Donald Trump, if his legal cases pile up and he faces the prospect of jail time, I can see a world where actually he flees the country, where he leaves America, and one place he might end up is Russia.

You think so?

It’s Russia. It’s the one place from where he’s never going to be extradited, where he can just rant and tweet and be a kind of angry, brooding guy in exile, complaining for all eternity about how the election was fraudulently stolen from him, and that actually he’s a winner, not a loser. I mean, it’s a sort of dark fantasy. Almost certainly it won’t happen, but the 21st century has been so strange, as we were talking about earlier. It’s been so wacko that I wouldn’t entirely rule it out.

Well, you heard it here first. Who knows? Listen to this in another two years, five years, seven months’ time, we might be going, look, Luke said that would happen. Right, we’ve come to the end of the show. I’ve got one more question for you. Are there any offcuts you still got that you haven’t shared with us today?

There are more offcuts, yeah, which I haven’t shared. There’s a kind of idea. There’s an idea which I think will never happen and so maybe I could talk about that, which is that I, when I was in Russia, I always wondered about the ghosts, the spies who broke into our apartment. Obviously, we were never there when they did it and there was a wonderful book written by Timothy Gartenash called The File where after the fall of the Berlin Wall, he goes and tracks down the starzy guys who had spied on him when he was a student in East Berlin in the 1980s and discovers to his great delight that they had given him the code name Romeo. In some fantastic sort of post-Putin future, maybe when I’m on my Zimmer frame kind of hobbling along, I just would love to meet the people who basically handed me and followed me around. I mean, I created a lot of work for, I was treated like James Bond. They thought I was some kind of literary MI6 super operative writing this stuff, my books and my articles on the command of Her Majesty’s government. I mean, this was ludicrous. I mean, I took my kids to school on the tram. I didn’t have an Aston Martin. I mean, you know, anyone with an internet connection could read what I was doing. But I’m just curious as to whether these people were sort of true believers in the Putin project or whether they were cynics just doing it to make a living with the women telephone operators who would sit with headphones like we’re sitting now listening to my every phone call about high politics.

But the sex book, though.

Yeah. Who picked the sex book? Where did they get it from? Why did they bookmark it to the orgasm page on 187th? What was the message they were sending, Nora? Was it…

I wouldn’t like to hazard a guess, Luke.

Well, a frequency issue, conventionality, I just, I don’t know, I mean…

You could just ask your wife, obviously. She might give you an easier answer.

You know, I just wanted to kind of pull the veil a bit further on that dark world. And who knows? No regime is immortal, no leader lives forever. I mean, there will be a time when Trump is gone, where Boris Johnson is gone, where even Vladimir Putin wants the out-style is done and is gone, and maybe in that space, one could do something and one could write something.

Well, Luke Harding, it’s been absolutely fantastic talking to you. Very, very educational and entertaining. Thank you so much for sharing the contents of your Offcuts Drawer with us.

Thank you, Laura. A pleasure. Go Offcuts Drawer. Great podcast. Love it. Thank you.

The Offcuts Drawer was devised and presented by me, Laura Shavin, with special thanks to this week’s guest, Luke Harding. The Offcuts were performed by Christopher Kent, Lynsey Murrell and Nigel Pilkington, and the music was by me. For more details about this episode, visit offcutsdrawer.com, and please do subscribe, rate and review us. Thanks for listening.

Hello, I’m Laura Shavin, and this is The Offcuts Drawer. Welcome to The Offcuts Drawer, the show that looks inside a writer’s bottom drawer to find the bits of work they never finished, had rejected, or couldn’t quite find a home for. We bring them to life, hear the stories behind them, and learn how these random pieces of creativity paved the way to subsequent success. My guest this week is the multi-award-winning writer, journalist and broadcaster Jay Rayner. Although he’s written columns and features on subjects across all aspects of modern life, he is probably best known for his pieces about food and drink, having been The Observer’s restaurant critic for the past 20 years. On the airwaves, he’s been the host of Radio 4’s Kitchen Cabinet since 2012, and on television, his numerous appearances include being a judge in multiple series of Masterchef, being the resident food expert on BBC’s The One Show, and in the US, he was a part of the expert panel on Top Chef Masters for Bravo. As a writer of books, he’s published four novels and seven works of non-fiction, and his latest work, My Last Supper, has just come out in paperback. His book, A Greedy Man in a Hungry World About the Challenges of Food Security in the 21st Century, became a one-man show which toured Britain for 18 months and resulted in him giving evidence to the House of Commons Select Committee on Food, the Environment and Rural Affairs. Add to that his many live shows playing jazz piano with the Jay Rayner Quartet. And you have a man who may possibly have been subject to puns on the phrase, if music be the food of love, one too many times. Jay Rayner, welcome to The Offcuts Drawer.

Lovely to be here. I’m slightly exhausted by listening to that account of me.

Well, you shouldn’t be so damn productive. That’s your own fault. Has anybody actually used that phrase, if music be the food of love?

I suspect they have. I mean, it’s my own fault because when we started gigging as the Jay Rayner quartet, one of the selling points was that, you know, people know me through food. So we’d do a whole bunch of songs that are food related. So the original show was called A Night Of Food And Agony. It might still be called that actually. And so if there are any puns like that to be made, you know, I’m entirely responsible for them.

Well, let’s start with the basics. What do you need to have around you when you write?

Well, the bluntest answer to that is is because I have been a print journalist, you’ve allude to the fact that I’ve written on almost everything. People know me as a writer who writes restaurant reviews and writes about food, but I have covered literally everything apart from sport. And even then I once wrote about the All-Amateur Natural Bodybuilding Championships. And one of the, I’m gonna say it’s a skill, one of the skills of the inveterate print journalist is I can write anywhere. And I have done. If you give me a device, I can sit there and write. And in fact, on occasion back in the old days when I was a hardcore news journalist, I could actually dictate it off the top of my head. I didn’t do that very often. It wasn’t great. So in reality, I can write anywhere, but I’m talking to you today from my desk, which is the front upstairs room of the house in Brixton that I’ve lived in for over 20 years. It has a large desk. It has all the stuff. I mean, it’s just, you know, it’s just a bleeding office. What can I tell you?

Okay, let’s kick off with your first offcut. Can you tell us what it’s called, what genre it was written for and when it was written?

This is an outtake from my latest book, My Last Supper, which is a piece of nonfiction about my pursuit of my last meal on earth. And it was first published last year in 2019.

I have seen only three dead bodies in my life, which strikes me as remarkable for a 50 something man. Everybody who has ever lived has also died or will do so. It is to paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, the only certainty in life along with taxes. And you can dodge the latter with the help of a devious accountant. Nobody can help you dodge death, not even a devious doctor. And yet just three, two of whom belong to my parents. Death is the part of life we hide from. The other body belonged to a middle-aged man with a luxurious mustache. He was staying at the same hotel as my family in Southern Portugal in the late seventies. He was a weak swimmer. After a good lunch, he went in the water, got out of his depth, panicked and had a heart attack. By the time I saw him, his body was out of the pool and was being worked on by two men pumping his chest. I would have been 11 or 12, old enough to recognise the futility of what was going on down there. I remember looking down from one of the balconies that ringed the pool as a hot afternoon gave way to the long shadows of early evening and being struck by how different he didn’t look. Take away the men trying to restart his heart and he was just a chap, asleep poolside. The fact that this was the body of a dead man was more a concept than anything tangible. With my mother, it was obvious. Claire had taken her time about dying. It was an emergency operation on her bowel that had put her in hospital and from which she never recovered, slipping between intensive care, isolation rooms and for a short period, her bedroom at home. One day to cheer her up, I called up Scots in Mayfair, one of London’s great seafood restaurants and a place she loved. Scots did not do takeaways, but I asked if they might make an exception, both for me and, more importantly, my old mum. The life of a restaurant critic is, of course, one long line of perks. There surely had to be another. So it proved. They put freshly cooked blinis, a tiny glass bowl of chopped shallots and another of crumbled egg yolk onto a Scots branded plate and then added to the side a small tin of caviar. The whole plate was wrapped up in cling film to keep everything in place for the journey to North London.

Well, this book’s already published. So what happened to this section? Why didn’t it make the final cut?

I don’t think it made the final cut because it was just a bit gloomy, actually. I think I felt it was performative in me going on about death. No, obviously both my parents have died. And at times I have written pieces for The Observer, the newspaper for which I write, on both of them. A long piece for my mother because Claire Rayner was well known and a prominent figure. And they got me to write sort of 3,000 words when she died. And I wrote a smaller piece on my father around food. And people always congratulate you when you write movingly about the death of a parent. And my view is that if you cannot write well about that subject, you have no business being a writer because the material is so strong, frankly. That sounds kind of cynical and all of that. And I think after writing this passage, I looked at and felt I’d done it to death, literally, figuratively enough already with the dead parents. The death of my mother appeared in a previous book. It was just too much. I mean, listening to it, I have to say, nice piece of writing. The prose is all there. It’s almost, dare I say, it’s involving. But just because something sounds nice doesn’t mean it has a place in the narrative. And so it needed to be cut.

But the book itself is called My Last Supper. The implication of the title is it’s about death. So if it doesn’t involve the death of your parents, Keith, tell us what it does involve.

Yeah, well, it doesn’t involve the death of me either. So the opening, it makes the point, you’ve mentioned that I do live shows and the first one, A Greedy Man In A Hungry World, led to others, one around terrible restaurant experiences called My Dining Hell, and another one called The Ten Food Commandments, which I play a kind of culinary Moses. And I’d always have a question and answer session. And so, always, literally, I mean, well, I’d go 95% of the time. When we get to the question and answer, someone put their hand up and say, imagine you’re on death row, what would your last meal be? And I became intrigued by the question because I thought I’d always say, if I was on death row, I’d have lost my appetite. And that actually, that’s not what you’re being asked. What you’re being asked is if you were to prepare a meal that was the sum of all your parts, that represented you and all your appetites and your urges and your passions, what would you have? And that I thought was very interesting. So it is memoir. It’s about looking at those foods that talk to me through memoir. And obviously at the end of it, I’m still alive. Death is around it slightly, particularly in the intro, when I talk about all those various proper candidates for one who are the people least suited to eating it. But actually, I have to say, I was doing this show, the show that’s around this one, My Last Supper, right up to the point of lockdown. And the idea of doing a show about last meals on earth in the teeth of a murderous pandemic, it’s not really a brilliant sales job, is it? I’ve already done it at a drive-in. So yeah, it’s actually, I hope, an uplifting journey through life and food and memory and emotion and family and all of that stuff. Which again, is probably another reason why I decided to cut this, just didn’t think it needed to be there.

Now you’ve covered all sorts of different subjects in your journalistic career. Why or how did you end up specializing in food and drink?

Why did I accept the job of going out to restaurants on somebody else’s expenses and…

Oh, it was offered to you. You didn’t…

I mean, that’s the honest answer. So I went out to lunch with the editor of The Observer Magazine in 1999. And she said that the then restaurant critic, Kate Flett, was moving on to be the TV critic, which meant they had a vacancy. And literally in that instance, say, well, that’s a job you can’t apply for, but I’d like to do it. I had this vision. Could you imagine one of those in the old days media ads would turn up in The Guardian on Mondays and wanted restaurant critic? Could you imagine the pile of applications? You wouldn’t actually, you know, you wouldn’t ask for applications. I just put my hand up and said, I’d like to do it. You’ve known me a long time, Laura. I’ve always been a chunky chap. I like my lunch. I like my dinner. I’m part of a noisy Northwest London Jewish family communicated through food. I spent my own money in restaurants. And I thought, here’s something I could write about. I didn’t anticipate just what a good fit it would be or what a lucky time it would be to go into the job because it was the beginning of a major restaurant boom. But I also found in the subject so much more than just aesthetics. It’s not about how things taste. It’s about emotions and who we are. And the brilliant thing about a good restaurant is it stops the world and places you somewhere else. So yeah, and that was it. I didn’t intend to go on for 20 years. Various times I said, I should quit and get back to serious journalism, but well, that hasn’t happened.

It is serious journalism, isn’t it?

Well, actually, in my case, I shouldn’t be so disposed of myself because I still remain a reporter. And certainly through lockdown, I was doing an awful lot of proper old-fashioned reporting. I’ve been on that paper, The Observer, for 24 years, and they have long memories, and they know that they can send me out with a notebook and tell me to go and do some news stories. So I have been doing a lot of stuff around coronavirus and its impact on various elements of society. So yeah, you’re right. I’m still doing serious journalism, and then I’m writing restaurant reviews, which I hope are entertaining.

Well, the lack of mortgage, presumably, is a good indication that it is.

Oh no, my parents died, left me a legacy. Let’s not pretend.

You know that’s how it happens.

Check my privilege. I just have, I’ve got loads of it.

Okay, time for another offcut now. Tell us about this one.

This is a clip from Bluff, an unfinished novel I was working on around 1998.

Danny Sacks didn’t plan to be a hitman. As a child, before poker, long before handguns, he had imagined other lives. As the person on the television who told everybody the weather he’d chosen for the next day. Or the man outside their house with the broom and the trolley who kept the streets neat and tidy in autumn. He liked neat and tidy. None of his thoughts turned to killing. It was not what nice Jewish boys from the London suburbs did. It was not even what the nasty Jewish boys from the London suburbs did. They became accountants or quantity surveyors or if they had truly gone to the bad, Sheropodists, destined to measure out their lives in sliced verrucas and corns. Even they did not become murderers. When he was little, his mother also had dreams for her son. But they were fantasies based more on unrealized ambitions for herself than for him. She had wanted a life of Persian rugs, two inches thick, of wedgewood crockery and silver cutlery. Instead, she lived with carpet tiles and lino, willow pattern and stainless steel. She looked to her son to provide that which she had never obtained. Sylvia Sacks imagined newspaper announcements of her Daniel’s achievements, of his victories over death in the operating theatre. She imagined glowing descriptions of his supple cross-examinations in the High Court. Each would include the passing reference she craved. It was so vivid, she could even visualize the serif typography, the drop of the comma after her boy’s name and then her own immortalisation. Mr Daniel Sacks, son of Sylvia and Bernard Sacks of Kingsbury, triumphed yesterday. This was all she now wanted, to live her life as a subclause.

That’s a really lovely little piece that actually.

Isn’t it? So should we have a moment’s mourning while I explain what Bluff was?

I’m rather hoping there’s good news, but okay, tell us about the novel.

All right, so I need to go back here. I published my first novel, a novel called The Marble Kiss in 1994, when I was in my late 20s. And it was a somewhat complex art history romance thriller set in the present day in the 15th century, because that’s what you write when you’re 26. And it was nicely received, didn’t break any bestseller lists or anything. We’ve got shortlisted for a good award and all of that. I then had a problem with the second one, which we’ll come to. At which point an agent said to me, what do you really want to write about? And it was an interesting question, because I realized I’d written by that point, two novels that I’d never have gone into a shop and bought. And this dawning realization that I was writing stuff I myself wouldn’t buy was very, very important. And out of that came a novel called Day of Atonement, a big hulking lump of Judaica, which took my very secular family by surprise. It was the story of two chaps, Mal Jones and, oh, I forgot the name of my characters. Anyway, two chaps who meet down the side of what is quite clearly Stonegrove Synagogue in age where one, Rosh Hashanah, sneaked around the side for a fag. One has a machine for taking the fat off chicken soup. The other one has a business mind and they go into business. And it tells the story of their life from sort of the late 60s to the 90s. And it’s really, it’s the portrait of a friendship and it is really quite Jewish. And it worked very, very nicely. I’m very proud of that book because I wrote it when I was very young and it’s got a real emotional heart in it. And I needed to come up with a follow-up to that. And that follow-up was this book that we just heard a section from called Bluff. Now, Bluff was kind of a good idea and maybe a terrible one. I wrote 50,000 words of it and the truth is that no publisher wanted to publish it, which suggested it wasn’t necessarily as good an idea as I thought it was. But it was about a guy called Danny Sax who was terrible at poker, continued to play poker, but in another life was brilliant at bluffing because he was a hitman who never killed anyone. He managed to convince his victims to let him remove their identities from the world. It was a sort of caper really. And I liked the idea of a Jewish hitman with all his neuroses. I’d found that voice in Day of Atonement quite successfully and I liked it again for this. And at the heart of it was what happens to a fake hitman when someone is sent to kill him. It was kind of a romp. That was the idea. It was gonna be a romp. It was gonna be one eye on the gallery. It was a lot of comedy. And I think you can sense that in the passage you just heard. But as I say, no publisher wanted it. And this sort of gets to the meat of, I suppose what your podcast is, The Offcuts Drawer. How do we feel about that after the amount of work it takes? It takes a lot of work to write 50,000 words of a novel. And it was painful at the time. It is never anything but painful, but you kind of have to accept, I think, that if 15 publishers have passed, you’re not necessarily robbing the culture of something that needed to be there. And so, you know, it was hard, but I kind of accepted it. It’s certainly not one of those projects that I’ve gone back to over the years thinking, hmm, I really should revive that.

Well, very sanguine of you, I must admit.

Well, you know, I was thinking about this when you asked me if I’d do this. And the truth is, although I’m, you know, quite a neurotic in certain ways, I am quite sanguine about this stuff. You write and you write and you write, and writing doesn’t exist unless somebody’s read it. And you cannot protest that everybody’s missed the point if everybody’s saying no. And that’s not to say that maybe some people might have enjoyed bluff if it had ever been completed and read. But nobody has a right to be published. And I know this drives certain writers who are finding it tough to get published, absolutely not, but you don’t. You have to make an argument for yourself on the page, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph. And if a lot of publishers look at it and go, no, I mean, obviously there are all the stories of books that were turned down time and time again and then went on to be great classics. But in the main, I think you have to take it on the chin.

Okay, time for your next offcut. Can you tell us what this is, please?

Right, well, this is actually from a piece of journalism written in 2003. It’s from a newspaper feature that never got published about a drag queen called Lady Ding.

Lady Ding couldn’t be at the Welsh Lesbian and Gay Mardi Gras in Cardiff this year, but she still managed to stop the show. For 10 minutes on that last Saturday in August, the screen at the side of the stage was filled with video footage of her act. All gold and lacquered hair and massive shoulder pads and crooked grin. There was no audio, but they smothered the silence with Nobody Does It Like Me, sung by Martine McCutcheon. Lady Ding would have liked that, her friend said. When it came to singing, she would always find the wrong way to do it. That was part of the act, the forgotten words and the lousy voice and the scowl at the indignity of it all. When the video had finished and the music had faded, the crowd of 35,000 cheered. Gold balloons held by Ding’s family and friends in the crowd were released to float away on the afternoon breeze and Cardiff’s gay community said a last goodbye to one of the greatest drag queens the city had ever seen. Three weeks earlier, the body of Jason Massier, the man who created and performed Lady Ding, had been found floating in reeds at the edge of Panavane pond near his home village of Markham, high up in the valleys. He was 32 years old. The death of someone so young is always a tragedy, but anyone talking to Lady Ding’s fans over the past few weeks would have understood something deeper too. A sense of an opportunity that had been stolen from them, of the chance that they had lost to enjoy the success which should have been hers. She was one of the most talented drag queens I’ve ever seen, said Chris Marshall, who’s managed gay bars all over Britain and now runs Cardiff’s King’s Cross pub where she performed so often. Not just one of the most talented in Cardiff, but anywhere. Kerry Dupree, the Welsh drag queen who has already made it onto the national stage and knows what it takes to get there, agrees. Jason had created a real character. He’d thought about it. He wasn’t just a puff in a frock. There’s too much of that in drag today. Jason had something.

So who was this written for?

So this was written for The Observer and was a classic example of, if I made my name anywhere in journalism before writing restaurant reviews, of the sort of work I did, which was the long form feature where you take a small news story that you’ve found in the in briefs, perhaps in the Western Mail or whatever, in this case, a Cardiff newspaper, and you say, well, there’s something bigger in this. There’s a bigger story. So I spent maybe, I think, three days in Cardiff, on the ground to research this. And as it says, it’s the story of this chap who performed as a drag queen called Lady Ding, suffered from depression and killed himself. And it was clear that he was much more than just another drag queen on the scene because the whole of the Cardiff Lesbian Gay Pride stopped that year to celebrate him. And I went to Cardiff and I spoke to his friends and I went to the bars that he’d performed at. And I even went high up into the valleys where he’d been born. I had these fascinating conversations because I don’t know about you, but I, at that point, this is 2003, so we’re going back nearly 20 years. I’d assumed the valleys to be very conservative places. And there was this intriguing line where it said, nobody cares up here whether you’re gay or you’re straight. Life is on a knife edge. It’s a struggle and, you know, who you’re having sex with is of no interest to anybody at all. I thought it was absolutely fascinating. So it was about taking a small story and turning it, giving it its due, giving it its space to breathe. And I did a lot of these three to 5,000 word features where you’re trying to breathe real life into a story. And the reality is I included this because I would say 98% of my journalism, possibly more, gets into print. Not always the way. Back in my freelance career, when I was right at the beginning, I’d lose a few pieces along the way. I wouldn’t make it, it would be spiked. But this is one of the very rare, big features, for whatever reason, never made it into the features well of The Observer Magazine.

Do you know why?

Well, it’s a funny old thing, the features well. The editors of magazines are trying to create a gallery. Even now in the age of online, they have to think in terms of the object, the printed object in their hands, then whatever else happens, it goes online. And it’s always about getting the mix right. And I think week by week, this story never found its place in the well. And until eventually, after about nine months, we all had to put our hands up and go, well, it’s dead, isn’t it? Because, you know, journalism ages. They were apologetic, but not vastly apologetic because that is newspapers. There are times when things don’t make it into print. You go off, you write, and you get paid for it. And it doesn’t happen. But I think, weirdly, this one has always stung slightly more than some of the bigger projects that we’re talking about today.

As that article shows, you do cover a lot of subjects, and you’re writing about mental health issues. You got your nomination for a mental health media award. Was this sort of part of it, because the suicide element?

So with those awards, sometimes you have to look at an accident of how many pieces you happen to have written in any one year. And this really was about a person’s story rather than the mental health issues, although obviously they played a part. But I think in one particular year, I’d written about mental health issues inside Holloway prison. I’d written another piece about a change in government policy on access to medication and permissions and so forth. And that’s the way of being a, you know, a jobbing journalist. You can end up with little specialisms. And then suddenly you seem to be the guy who’s, you know, heading off to Whitemore prison to interview someone. So just happenstance. But no, with this one, I think it really was about a personality, about an individual and about a milieu, drag, you know, we’re all across drag now. Thanks to RuPaul and so forth. We think we know what that is. But back in 2003, it would have been very much more niche.

Next offcut, please. What’s this one?

This is the opening to The Memory Man, a completely finished and unpublished novel written in around 1995.

Here is a lad sitting in the long grass, arse damp, knees muddy. He tries to hold his breath, one hand squeezing his tummy as though grabbing the air in the palm of his hand to keep it there. He doesn’t want to make a noise, doesn’t want to frighten the animal any more than necessary. When he does breathe, he can hear a growling inside his nostrils, the cavities wet and stuffed up from the sobs of a few minutes before. Here then am I, nine years old, bottom lip bitten between teeth, the only witness to the killing of a friend. In the field, twenty feet in front of me, the animal lies flat, a gulping, snorting carcass in waiting, neck tensed, its spindle-thin legs splayed hard before it, the broken one at the back turned away, useless. Papa has the gun, the rifle butt wedged into his armpit like a crutch. He tries to position the end of the barrel just behind the animal’s eye. That’s where it has to be, he says, to be quick. He wants to do it with one bullet. Why pay for two when you can do it with one? Bullets cost money, he says. So do goats, I think, but I don’t say it out loud. He doesn’t want to know how much goats cost. A pistol would be better, something small and hand-sized instead of this tree-trunk lump of wood and metal which keeps slipping off her fur and bearing its steel snout in the earth. Each time he has to lift the barrel up and clean the mud out of the hole, sticking his little finger up there in the way he does when he’s digging around in his ears for wax. And when he does it, taking his hand off her shoulder to turn the weapon around in his hands, she flaps and twitches in the grass, like some big fat cod dumped on a quayside. I wanted to help hold her, just so she knew I was there, one hand on her side where you can feel the ribs and the deep thump of her heart. But Papa wouldn’t have it. I had to be back here, watching. Now the gun is clean again. He gets down on one knee, uses the other to guide the barrel into place, closes an eye as though taking aim, even though he can’t miss. I want to tell him that he’s hurting her by pushing the gun down so hard, but I know it’s just because he doesn’t want it to slip off again. And anyway, I don’t want to stop him. I just want him to do it now. And then there’s a bang, and some smoke, and Papa shouts shit and falls backwards and she twitches one last time, a puddle of thick black goo dribbles out of her head onto the grass. Beatrice is dead. I think about crying, but I don’t feel like it anymore.

Was this written before your first published novel?

No, that’s the hilarious thing. Most people’s unpublished novel is the first one they write. This is my second, which is quite funny. Well, at the time, I thought I had struck lucky in 92. 92 was a big year for me. I won Young Journalist of the Year in the British Press Awards, and publishers started showing interest in me. They said, do you want to write a novel? Because anybody who had a byline in a newspaper, they immediately thought you wanted to write a novel. At first, I’d said no. And then I came up with a couple of chapters, which became my first novel, The Marble Kiss, that art history romance thriller, and it was bought by Pam McMillan in a two book deal, get me, for a modest two book deal. And The Marble Kiss did, as I say, all right. It got some nice, appreciative reviews, it got shortlisted for an award, but it didn’t sell very many. But then I had to write the next one under the two book deal. And one summer, my wife and I, Pat and I had gone off, still without kids, we’d gone off to the south of France one summer and there was a traveling circus and it was clearly a family circus and, you know, the circus, it was tiny and the circus animals were goats. And they were much loved goats because clearly they were source of milk as well as performers. And the clown was the 10 year old kid who frankly looked a bit miserable to be doing this again. And I sat there watching this thinking, oh, there must be a novel in telling this story, you’re meant to be in the circus, you’re meant to be exciting, but actually you’re bored and you’re miserable and you don’t want to be here from the point of view of a 10 year old. Now, at that point, I then in, I don’t want to be down on myself as a young man, but it all got a bit baroque. So the story and actually, I have to say, I do think there is quality to this book, The Memory Man. It’s about a kid who is part of a circus traveling through Vichy, France during the Second World War, and something happens. He gets drawn in to resistance work and stuff to do with French Jews being rounded up and sent to concentration camps. Cut to the present day, it was a time slip, and there’s a very, very old man who’s being brought to trial as a Nazi war criminal in France, and he has gone and acquired for himself a lawyer, and the lawyer is actually the kid who was in the circus.

Is that the big reveal?

It’s sort of the big reveal, and he’s the child who ran away from the circus to be boring. He wanted to be a lawyer. He wanted to be dull, and he gets drawn back into the history of his childhood and the Holocaust in France. It’s not unambitious, and it’s about memory and memory acts and all of that. And what happened, I completed this book, and I’d been through many editors at Pan Macmillan. Eventually, the boss of Pan Macmillan would apologize to me for this. I went through five editors between signing that two book deal and then finally parting company with them. They said that they had decided to cancel something like 20 book contracts where the advances were 10 grand or less, which included mine. And so they canceled the contract. And I got paid my whacking four-figure sum. And then it went out. My then agent sent it around and nobody wanted to publish it. What can I tell you, Laura? Nobody wanted it. That was hard. That was very, very hard. But it was also the beginning of an understanding, as I say, it’s an interesting book. And every now and then I look at it and think maybe there’s a way to get this published. But at one point, I had an absolutely appalling idea. Should I confess my appalling idea?

Absolutely.

All right, because I didn’t do it. So it’s fine. But I had this idea. What would happen if I resubmitted this under the pseudonym, what should we call it, Danielle Schwartz or something, a young Jewish woman who is the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors and then see what would happen?

But surely, as a North London Jew, you must have some Holocaust survivor stuff in your past.

Oh, yeah, we’ve all got a bit of that, but I don’t think that’s how I was known. But anyway, there’s a whole book. And interestingly, my dear old ma, who wrote about 50 novels herself, always said that that was the one that she felt had got away. But I made it almost a point of principle. I am a grown up writer. I will let it go. And I did let it go.

Right. Well, we’re time for another Offcut now, what have we got?

Right. Now, this only sort of fits into the title Offcuts, if you’re being very pessimistic, but we’ll let it sit there. It’s from a theatre play, the first draft of which I wrote in 2010, the most recent draft I wrote in 2019. It’s called The Devil’s Interval.

My dad was the classic scholarship boy, first person from his lot to go to grammar school. So exams were a big thing. And if he passed them, it meant he was supposed to be there, became addicted, got him into some college to do business studies, all of that. Swear he became an accountant just because of all the exams there were.

Play quietly, love. Your dad’s studying.

He was always studying.

If you’ve got certificates, no one can ever argue.

Ferg begins to play a classical medley.

But dad, there’s got to be more to all this than just passing grade seven.

Of course, lad, plenty more.

It’s called grade eight.

At the back, a light piece of cocktail bar piano jazz starts up. Ferg stands to address the audience.

You remember I told Sam I’d never made it to grade eight. Funny story. A week before my grade eight exam, I hiked my guts out across Dartmoor as part of this Duke of Edinburgh gold award thing I was on. Right at the end, just as I was about to finish the job, I was given this signed chit to prove I’d done the task. Now, for my dad, pieces of paper were like pages from the holy bloody Bible. I had to take it back to show dad or he simply wouldn’t believe I’d done it. So I’m holding on to this piece of paper for dear life, stumbling down off the moor like I’m six pints down at closing time and that knackered. And I’m on this path by stream. Of course there’s a sudden gust of wind, isn’t there? And bang, the paper’s out of my hand. There it is in the stream. I dive at it like I’m rugby tackling the piece of paper because I have to show it to dad. Have to. Hit the deck with massive force. Throw my hand into the water to break my fall and I smash it against a rock so hard I know it’s broken. No question. Actually, it’s not a very funny story, is it?

He gets to his feet, walks to the piano and slams his fists against the keyboard, bringing the music to a halt.

My sodding old man!

Tell us the story of The Devil’s Interval from 2010 to today.

Right, so around 2009, 2010, I started doing an awful lot of TV work. Somewhere along the line, Laura, I gathered a bit of work and became, I don’t know, well known. I was bloody busy and I felt like I didn’t own myself anymore and I wanted something that was mine. I needed to write something that was mine. I have, as you mentioned, I play jazz piano and I have done for a very long time. And I’ve done a jazz piano night class at Goldsmiths a few years before, but I’ve been intrigued by the dynamic in the room. The way, you know, at night classes, people bring their stories in with them. And I saw a piece of theater in there. So that’s what The Devil’s Interval is. It’s a story of a jazz piano night class, five students, one teacher, three pianos. And the key is every single actor on that stage plays, which creates some issues, it has to be said, but that was the idea. And each of the students has a moment when they come forward and tells their story. Imagine it as a kind of jazz solo. There’s also an overarching narrative to this. I worked on it with a dear friend of mine, Joe Thompson, who’s another jazz pianist, a very, very fine jazz pianist. And it has gone through six drafts, which is not that unusual in theater, it has to be said. I mean, you know, you have a history in theater too, and you know that. The Devil’s Interval, by the way, is the sharpened fourth or the flattened fifth. The Roman Catholic Church regarded it as evil, and it’s one of the key tones in jazz, which is marvelous. And at various times, it has come very close to being produced. We had a slot at the Watford Palace, which is a great, you know, just outside London theater. And they were ready to produce it, but we needed extra money to be able to take it into town, and we needed the right cast to be able to take it into town. We’ve had some very good names attached to it over the years. Then another director came on, he was very keen, and he was gonna take it to another place and another director, and it’s, you know, it’s a classic story, and it was revived again, which is why I did the sixth draft in 2019. It’s gone through various versions, long, short, such is the way of things. I still think it’s a real goer. I mean, this is not, I think we know, this is not the moment in which to be trying to get pieces of theater on stage, but I wrote it because I wanted to sit in the theater and watch it. And the idea, the way the music plays, the way you actually watch the actors, the musicians compose in real time, that was the idea.

Sorry, they have to not only play the piano and act, but they have to compose.

Well, the idea was that as we get deeper into it, they would start properly improvising. We’d worked out a boot camp for them. Obviously every single one of the actors had to have a history with jazz, or at least piano. I mean, they didn’t have to be jazz pianists. They just had to play jazz pianists, but we reckoned between us, we could get them there. It’s a very ambitious piece, but not in terms of theater. I was very careful to make sure it was one set and the asset, three pianos, well, look after them and you can flog them off again. Afterwards, I had many conversations with producers over the years saying, and the great thing is, you can sell the pianos on. Early on, I was asked if I would sit on a panel at the National Theater to talk about Arnold Wesker’s The Kitchen. So you can imagine that, you know, Rayner, the restaurant critic, the observer, would have quite a good view on Wesker’s The Kitchen. And I agreed to do it. And they said, there’s a stipend, there’s a fee, 150 quid. I said, I’ll waive my fee, but I’ll trade you a moment sitting on a panel on stage for a coffee with Sebastian Born, the literary manager of the National Theater. And they agreed. So I took Bashbourne out, people probably don’t know the name, but he was in his time, the literary gatekeeper at the National. And I took him out for coffee and described this play. And actually, in a moment of, I think, great control, I didn’t do this until we were on the third draft. And I described what the idea was. And he said, so you think you’re writing this? And then I did the thing which must make any literary manager’s blood run cold. I went, no, here it is, and pushed the script across the table. Bash was very, very supportive. He said, it’s not right for the National, but I really think this has got something. And he put us in touch with Endless Producers. And so it goes. Over the years, it’s gone through lots of offices and never quite made it. And that’s why I say I might be cheating in putting it in The Offcuts Drawer because I’m not quite ready to say that that’s gone.

Well, at the moment it is an offcut, at the time of broadcast it will be an offcut, but who knows, maybe as a direct result of being on The Offcuts Drawer, it ceases to be one, which would be marvelous.

I can happily send it. I have it in PDF and Word format. And I think it would be a great night in theater. And that’s why I wrote it.

All right, then time for your final offcut now.

This is an outtake from my novel, The Apologist, brackets probably my most successful novel, which was published in 2004.

One night, desperate for someone, well, damn it, anyone to accept my apology, I returned alone to the bar where I had met Mandy and Tracy. I had it all worked out. I would identify the most attractive single woman in the room. I would approach her hesitantly, tell her she looked terribly familiar. Were you by any chance part of the French delegation at the African Union Congress in Kinshasa? You weren’t? Gosh, that’s weird. You really are the spitting image of a Parisian woman I met there. My prey, of course, would recognize me and be bowled over by my glossy pattern of celebrity and power. She would ask me to breathe hotly in her ear. Breathing hotly was my new party trick. With these introductions made, all I had to do was slip into bed with her and then treat her terribly badly the next morning. I had no doubt that my newfound sleekness and confidence would enable me to do this. What woman could resist such an approach with its heady mixture of African exotica and French sophistication? All of them, as it happened. The first one said, nice try kiddo, but you’re playing a little out of your league, don’t you think? The second one said, excuse me sir, but just my own reference, where exactly on my face is the word schmuck tattoo? Schmuck tattooed. Which was better than the response from the third woman. She didn’t say anything. She just laughed at me, grabbed her bag and her coat and ran from the bar, still hooting to herself as she clacked her way down the street on vertiginous heels.

Another lovely little piece there, really like that. Why was this not included in the book?

Because a little bit like the very first except we heard, it was over-egging the pudding. I’d already done this gag in a number of ways. So to explain, the apologist began, I was watching an episode of Friends, and it was the one where Monica admits that she’d once been fat, and Chandler admits that he once finished with a girl because she got fat, and Monica makes him go and apologize, and he apologized, and he comes back and he says, gee, if I’d known how good apologizing made me feel, I’d have started doing it years ago. And I turned to my long-suffering partner who was used to me saying this and said, there’s a novel in that, someone who apologizes because they like how it makes them feel. So the apologist is about a restaurant critic, yay, called Mark Bassett, who is renowned for his very negative reviews until one of the chefs he reviews apparently commits suicide as a result of the review. So he goes off and he apologizes to the widow, and it’s an all-around positive experience, and he feels brilliant about himself as a result of that apology. And he decides to apologize for everything he’s ever done wrong, just because he likes the emotional rollercoaster. So you get an insight into his life because he goes around apologizing to everybody, the kid he was horrible to when he was eight years old, the girlfriend he did wrong, all of that. And eventually a video of him apologizing to one particular friend goes viral and becomes so successful that he is appointed chief apologist to the United Nations to travel the world apologizing for the sins of colonialism, slavery. It invented this concept of penitential engagement, the whole academic discipline and captured a moment. And it is a broad political satire with a heart, dare I say it, and is without doubt the most successful book I’ve ever written. It was translated into over a dozen languages. At one point, Brad Pitt was going to produce the film version of it. I even sold a website for ridiculous sums of money. I mean, it was the whole roller coaster. The bit that we’ve just heard, he digs into his role as chief apologist to the United Nations and finds that it’s not quite emotionally satisfying enough apologizing in a political environment. So he needs to go back and create some crimes for which he can apologize on a personal level. And so he’s wandering around trying to trip people up and apologize to them.

I see, when I read that, when we heard that clip and he says, all I have to do is treat her abysmally the next morning. I think he obviously have missed a bit about that’s how you get a girl. You’ve got to be mean to her.

No, no, no, no. He just wanted something to apologize for. And because he’s now an international political celebrity, he’s getting some, he’s never to have any luck in bed, but now he’s sexy and fancy and everybody wants him. And so he thinks he’s really it. It is a classic first person narrator novel in that it’s all about the unreliable narrator who’s not quite clocking what’s going on around him. And this bit will have come out because it was over egging the pudding. And perhaps because it may have made you think just a little too poorly of Mark Bassett, the chief apologist of the United Nations.

And the character Mark Bassett, the restaurant critic.

Yeah, go on.

Is he you?

He was significantly me in certain ways. I mean, not because his personal story doesn’t have my parentage or whatever, but certain of my body issues and stuff from when I was a kid, I’d certainly mind my own life for that to create the bundle of insecurities. Yeah, I threw more of myself into that book than I did any other.

Right, final question. Are there any offcuts that you’ve still got that you haven’t shared with us today?

That is an interesting question. I don’t think there are. I mean, I have been… Some people might think that one and a half novels and a whole play that’s been through six drafts, the other bits are sort of smaller and tangential, is quite a lot to have in The Offcuts Drawer. In a writing career of over 30 years, I don’t think it is, actually. I think I’ve been either very fortunate or just blessed with huge unending reserves of talent. If you think of yourself. One or the other, one or the other. You know, I haven’t lost that much along the way. There’s quite a lot of studio-based TV proposals that have never seen the light of day. Probably at least a dozen of those, but we’ve all got those.

Yes, we have.

So I don’t think they really count. So I genuinely think I’m quite fortunate. That said, you know, there’s, what, 150, 200,000 words of unpublished stuff. But then to put that in context, I probably write anywhere between 100 and 200,000 words a year. So it’s livable.

And as for the Memory Man that we heard earlier, have you thought about repurposing it? Could you maybe turn it into a radio play or a film script?

I’ve occasionally toyed with that, but my appetite for going back to something that I wrote well over 20 years ago is limited, if I’m honest. I’d much rather just move on. I genuinely don’t think that I have deprived the culture of anything. Most books, however grand and great we think they are, move down the river, don’t they? They just pass us by and we read them and we enjoy them at the time, however successful they are. The Apologist has a life beyond itself. But for the most part, what we write is just part of the culture that passes by. So I don’t look at The Memory Man, I don’t look at Bluff and think, oh, that’s a waste. I think it’s more important just to keep going, moving forward.

I suppose you have got a sufficient body of work behind you to be able to go, look, I created all of this and that was shared with the public successfully. So maybe you don’t miss The Memory Man and Bluff that much.

No, I don’t.

If you’ve written one or two, you might go, oh, I’d like a bigger body for the amount of work I put in.

Yeah, I don’t think in those terms. I don’t think, oh, I’m, you know, one of the hilarious things is that Claire, my late mother, she published over a hundred books. And when you are faced by that body of work, don’t even think about competing. I was the one who was responsible for voxing them all up and putting them all into storage. I still have a copy of every single edition is in storage. And I remember voxing it all up and putting it in the lock up, the secure lock up, and stepping back from these big piles of cardboard boxes and thinking, and this is not to dismiss her body of work because Claire was, you know, very important work, but thinking, just remind yourself, this is how it ends with, you know, a dozen large cardboard boxes in a lock up. So we live our lives in the moment and it’s about enjoying the process of writing and being a writer rather than one eye on what you might not have completed.

And on that profound note, I think we’ll end it there. It’s been lovely to talk to you, Jay Rayner. Thank you for sharing the contents of your Offcuts Drawer with us.

It’s been an absolute pleasure.

Thank you. The Offcuts Drawer was devised and presented by me, Laura Shavin, with special thanks to this week’s guest, Jay Rayner. The Offcuts were performed by Keith Wickham, Christopher Kent, Toby Longworth and Rachel Atkins, and the music was by me. For more details about this episode, visit offcutsdrawer.com and please do subscribe, rate and review us. Thanks for listening.