SHOP! AUTUMN FASHION SPECIAL 2 2 . 9 0 . 0 1 STOPS THE SUPER LEAGUE STARTS A UNIVERSITY HAS MORE CLOUT THAN A POLITICIAN IS THERE NO STOPPING GARY NEVILLE? 10.09.22 Shop! HIGH STREET FASHION GUIDE 63 7 Caitlin Moran How to steer your children through a financial crisis. 9 Spinal column: Melanie Reid My first time on a beach for 14 years. 12 My hair dilemma Harry Wallop, bald on top, tries out a £1,000 designer toupee. 20 Cover story Gary Neville The former footballer gets started on politics, train strikes, Manchester United’s owners… 28 Why I’m single at 44 Jane Mulkerrins has never felt the need to settle down. Could America’s latest dating guru change her mind? 38 The Indian who survived Colditz Ben Macintyre tells the amazing story of Birendranath Mazumdar, a doctor in the British Army who fled Nazi captivity. 43 Eat! Rukmini Iyer’s quick Indian meals. 56 The Harry who styles Harry Styles The Norwich boy redefining modern masculinity. 63 Shop! special Elizabeth Hurley kicks off our 11-page autumn high street fashion guide. 74 Pout! Nadine Baggott’s 20 best new budget beauty buys. 78 Eating in Nadiya Hussain Raspberry pastry cake slices. 80 Giles Coren reviews Roti King, London NW1. 86 Beta male: Ben Machell How to complain (politely). FAB FIVE: COMPOSTABLE COFFEE PODS NELL ON ND C A N. THIS PAGE: ZOE MC TenR OpAodRs .G FIoLLu,r £di3ff.e9r5ent ForFtIyR pEoHdEsA. RNTo,t e£s1 o9f. 9d5ark Fifteen pNodOsR. LBOle, n£d9 based on Ten pods iHnA aL Ob,o x£.1 T0en luxury Fifty poRdAsV. GE,o £ fo15r .s5ig0nature, N BY MONIQUE RIVALL RT WILSO inat ednesciatife os ptoti ocnh o(roosea rfgriolml.c,o pmlu)s ocrahnogcoe l(aftiere, hcheaerrrtcyo, fcfaene.dcioemd ) Niotsr wsmegoioatnh ncoesffse (en –o rklon.ocwo.nu kfo)r bclehnodoss ew firtho mta (shtianlgo .ncooftfeese t)o Italian(r, aCvoelcoomffbeeia.cno o.urk I)ndian CHOSE BE O OVER: R EDITORD NEPICUOTYL AA RJTE ADLIR DEECPTUORTY J OED PILTEORN TL ODEUPISUET YF RCAHINECF ES UABR-TE DDIIRTEOCRT COHR RCISH RRIISL EHYIT PCICHTCUORCE KE DAISTSOORC AIANTNEA E DBIATOSRS EJTATN ED EMPUUTLYK EPRICRTIUNRSE A ESDSIITSOTRA NLUT CEYDI TDOARL ETOY NCYO NTTURRIBNUBTUINLGL EFDEIATTOURR EBSR IEDDGITEOTR HMAORNRIIQSUOEN REIDVIATOLLRAIANLD A SCSHIISETFA SNUTB G-EEDOIRTOGRIN AAM RAONBDEAR LTISNFOOT C The Times Magazine 3 CAITLIN MORAN Don’t tell millennials that life was hard when you were young. You have no idea W ell, it looks like how superb your parents were in shielding we’re going to be you from the adult reality they were living in. short of a lot of From your memories of that time, it’s things this winter: clear you were eight or nine or twelve – my food, heat, fuel, age – and you weren’t the one stacking the red trains, takeaways bills on the dresser or begging your sister-in- open more than law for a tenner for the rent. You weren’t the three days a week. one lying in bed miserably wondering how Hope. you’d got to middle age and were unable But there’s one thing we won’t be short reliably to feed your children; becoming of – indeed, stocks are already very high. This clinically depressed and anxious; nursing a rare glut? People of roughly my age using the stomach ulcer. I know you think your stories forthcoming Winter of Misery to talk about of ice on the inside of the windows make you how tough their childhoods were in a voice sound tough and from “the school of hard of semi-aroused wonder. knocks” but, to me, all I can hear is how spoilt “When I was a kid, you’d regularly wake up you were. Your parents indulged you – let you to find ice on the inside of the window,” these have a childhood where you only remember people say. “And the milk! The milk on the the huge snowmen you made or listening to doorstep – frozen solid! Blue tits pecking at it the Top Ten rundown on the radio. Bryan like ice cream. Magic! Ferry! Sparks! – because they were of a “No radiators back then – we’d have generation that would never have let their one three-bar fire on in the front room children know how miserable it was to be a and everyone would huddle around after a powerless adult in a failing economy, where, bath. There was a brilliant community spirit no matter how hard you worked, your family around that tiny heat source. You won’t find were dragged backwards. anything like it today. My whole childhood Let’s be honest: no one of my age actually was spent being cold and hungry and not has any memories of how great they were going anywhere – unless it was to press my at coping with deprivation, because they face against the glass of the chip shop, like the never had the responsibility of coping with Little Match Girl, hoping for free scraps from deprivation. Instead, they just have memories the sympathetic owner – and it never did me of being a child – which always seem exciting any harm at all.” and magical. Notably, you never see any Indeed, from the way people often go on social-media posts from the people who to be poetic about these things – “Ice on the were adults at the time. Seventy-year-olds inside of a window is quite beautiful. All the aren’t tweeting, “I loved my children waking patterns – like Bruges lace. Nature’s beautiful, up to see ice on the inside of our house meltable, hypothermic lace!” – it seems they – it was the childhood I had planned for have grown oddly nostalgic about it all. And them. If I’d had the option to heat the house, it certainly seems to have made them feel I wouldn’t have. I enjoyed the ice keeping great about themselves now: they have known them busy while I scrubbed the mildew deprivation and it has, as they repeatedly off the bathroom wall, then got ready From the way people say, done them no harm at all. Indeed, it’s for a night shift.” made them the strong, self-righteous frequent- And the second thing? It’s those tweets wax poetic about poster they are on social media today. revelling in “snowflake” millennials and These millennials and Gen Zs don’t know Gen Z about to “learn a lesson” in “tough ice on the inside of a they’re born! It’ll do them good to finally times”. Key fact: they’re our children. If we experience adversity.” want this winter to “do them no harm”, they window, it seems they Well, there are two things I want to say to should be doing nothing more than building the “it didn’t do me any harm” people. The big snowmen, listening to pop tunes on the have grown nostalgic first? I want to congratulate your parents on radio and marvelling at window ice. We’re being absolutely excellent – because, even as the ones who are supposed to be coping with about deprivation ON you speak, I can see their hard work, which what’s coming next. If we’re good parents, S WIL you still seem unaware of, all these years later. we’ll be deprived, anxious and depressed – not RT All your memories of deprivation – which you them. So I guess we’re about to find out if it BE RO seem to find quite thrilling now – just tell me “does us any harm” after all. n The Times Magazine 7 SPINAL COLUMN MELANIE REID I thought I’d never be on a beach again – but I am spinning along the edge of the waves, and it’s sublime F or a long time, the beach has Sands, famous with film directors and posh over the tideline until the sand got wetter and been a real no-go area. I’ve students, there is a charity that provides beach firmer, and the jellyfish lay waiting to refloat. been to the seaside, of course, wheelchairs. And she was determined to get Here it was even easier to push and I started and watched the waves from me in one. to relax. safe ground. But the real The first time she suggested it I prayed That’s when I remembered how sublime hardcore, close-up, sand-in- she’d forget. There is always an element of it is, down at the sea’s edge, just you and the your-knickers experience was terror in the prospect of leaving your comfort waves and the horizon, where suddenly it something I thought would zone, your own chair. And leaving it for didn’t matter that I was leaving wide rolling never happen again. a publicly used chair, cushion and height ball marks on the sand instead of footprints. Beaches are built for feet: bare, wriggly, unknown, with all kinds of potential difficulties It wasn’t warm enough to dip my feet; besides, happy feet. In hot places, they’re for that built into the transfer, is a serious gulp. Failure taking my feet off the footplate would entail feeling of being blessed from the soles up. In lurks. What if I end up on the ground? The fire serious jeopardy. cooler places they’re for walking big distances, brigade, certainly, and maybe the RNLI, and But that didn’t matter either – the three of leaving footprints in newly washed sand, possibly a lame slot on Saving Lives at Sea. us spun along the edge of the waves at a good digging gritty patterns with your bare toes. S didn’t forget. Last week saw me at pace, then turned inland to the edge of the Beaches are for playing dare with the waves, St Andrews with her and another great friend, dunes, where S magicked up a tartan rug and for dodging jellyfish, for tasting wind and salt. between the beach and the fourth hole of the a flask of tea, and we sat like friends and Beaches are for movement. Old Course, eyeing up a chair floating atop families have sat fully clothed on east-coast They ain’t for wheelchairs. When you’re on giant grey plastic balls. A DeBug, it’s called, British beaches for hundreds of summers, wheels, any kind of shifting ground is hostile. one of three types of chair offered by the getting sand in our hair and our socks, and You exchange sand for a life of tarmac and Hamish Foundation on the app Scotland’s catching up on news. vinyl flooring, because that’s just the way it has Accessible Beaches. The chair was supposed to be back for 4pm to be. I was never the petite type a man could With an offshore breeze, a transfer board, a and we were hopelessly late, scurrying back scoop up romantically and carry into the sea bit of nerve and some skilled woman-handling like guilty children on a stolen pedalo, waiting for a spot of disabled paddle-boarding. Nor has from the two of them, I made it across the for a loudspeaker to call, “Come in No 4, Dave ever given off a surfer-dude vibe. The last giant ball-wheels into the dune chair. It had your time is up.” time we were at a beach together was Biarritz no engine and I could not propel it: I was now But nobody seemed to mind at all, and the 14 years ago, when the sand was too hot for his in S’s hands and the boardwalk beckoned. chair bounced back up onto the boardwalk. sensitive feet and he had to borrow my niece’s I fretted at what a weight I must be to push. Great girlfriends, heady sea air. And thankfully sequined flip-flops. “Let go,” I told myself sternly. “Just let go.” this time fewer ghosts from the past. n D ACLEO havTeh nee nveorr mmaelt rmulye so lodf mdiasateb lSe,d w lihfeo,’s h boeweenv er, theS b soaairdd ist awnads tehaes yb. uImt cpe rdtoawinnly o fnlotoa ttehde o svaenrd , @Mel_ReidTimes M O cooking up a plan to get me onto the beach where a little disabled boy was enjoying the Melanie Reid is tetraplegic after breaking her D UR for years. At St Andrews, on the stunning West freedom with another chair. She pushed me neck and back in a riding accident in April 2010 M The Times Magazine 9