Have you ever liked a villain more than the hero? Who and why?
In the Discworld, the incredible series by Terry Pratchett, the city of Ankh Morporkh is ruled over by the scheming and authoritarian Lord Vetinari. He thinks nothing of having problems eliminated by the Guild of Assassins and will ensure that he has leverage over everyone in the city. He is amoral and self serving but he is also one of the most relatable characters in the books. I always love the stories which he controls from the background. For example, Making Money sees him controlling the central bank by employing Moist von Lipwig as the manager because he has allowed him to literally cheat death at the gallows and knows that Lipwig can be put back there if he so chooses. This kind of control exercised by anyone else other than Vetinari would be frightening but with the urbane, cultured and occasionally amused Lord Protector it is merely business. I think that is a large part of the appeal of Discworld. The heroes are never fully heroic and the villains are rarely as bad as they seem.
I was wondering which category to put Death into, because he is one of the most complex and compelling literary creations of the past century of writing in any genre. He is a skeleton with a scythe and a horse and is utterly implacable. If your time is up it is up and there is no room for appeal. Pratchett has given him one of the most fascinating hinterlands of any fictional character. We watch his growth over five books as he becomes more sympathetic and more like the human beings he oversees. His approach is to lead them across the threshold into death with respect and kindness and there is an odd beauty in some of his scenes. In The Hogfather, his most riotous adventure, he deliberately interferes with humanity by taking on the role of the midwinter gift bringer to keep belief alive as that belief is crucial to the survival of the Discworld. Death is a hero dressed in villains clothing and a true highpoint of 20th Century writing. If nothing else, you need to read his view on belief at the end of The Hogfather which is angry and absolutely right.
For the record, Pratchett only wrote one set of villains with no redeeming characteristics, The Auditors. They are a race of detached managers who hate anything that interferes with what they see as the right way of doing things. As we all know, management types are soulless and have no redeeming characteristics in our world so why should they have redeeming characteristics in the Discworld?!
What’s the longest book you’ve ever read?
The short answer to this question would be Middlemarch by George Elliot which comes in at around 850 pages. Despite that length it never seemed like an effort. What about the long answer? The long answer would be A Horseman Riding By trilogy by R.F. Delderfield which is well over 1000 pages in total.
I love reading sagas when I really care about the characters. I want to see them develop slowly, subtly and completely. I want to feel like I know these people and that I can share in their triumphs and tragedies. An individual book of just 150 pages can have a huge impact as A Christmas Carol proves, but if you can dive into lives over a period of many years it gives you a rich texture the shorter books cannot match.
Don’t be afraid to start long books. If you don’t like them don’t finish them. There’s nothing wrong with abandoning a book. I did it twice to Lord of the Rings after I realised it just wasn’t gripping me. Give them a go and if you like them you will find a cast of characters that become incredibly real to you.
What’s the best advice you’d give to someone younger than you?
We are in a situation where the debate around AI has become polarised and where it’s been demonised by people in education and beyond. Well, it’s here, it’s not going anywhere, and indeed it will just carry on getting more advanced, so younger people need to work out how to use it properly.
What do I mean by properly? Well, to an education professional it means to use AI to help you and scaffold your learning but to do the hard work of thinking and writing yourself. Use it to brainstorm ideas on ChatGPT, use it to ask questions of the articles that may or may not be useful to you on ChatPDF. Learning how to craft effective prompts is central to using AI and it’s a skill that must be taught in schools from the early stages. I am still learning how to craft prompts myself, and will continue to learn as I get more experience with AI. Younger people should never stop learning about AI and, indeed, any other aspects of life and education that they are inspired by.
AI is not the enemy, well apart from environmentally, and we need to be as focused and logical as possible when looking at the power it possesses and we know it will continue to become intertwined with our lives in ways we can’t yet imagine. As young people step into that new reality they need to have the attitude of open minded experimentation in order to make the most of it. We have spent too long misunderstanding King Canute. He never tried to command the waves, he showed his courtiers that he couldn’t. AI is a tide we must work with not against.
What’s one thing that would instantly improve your city?
When I go to London for a concert the one thing guaranteed to mess things up is the transport network. In the last year I have had to leave concerts early to ensure that I could get home and, in one case, ended up with an expensive Uber ride back home. Southeastern trains and TFL who run the tubes seem designed to make your night out as difficult as possible by basically closing the network by midnight.
In July I went to see My Chemical Romance at Wembley Stadium. The concert was amazing but the trip back turned into a real pain. First of all, it took us an hour to get from the Stadium to the tube station which was incredibly crowded with people but not with trains! The stupidity of running a large scale people moving operation with limited trains and the decision to stop the first train at Baker Street would almost guarantee that anyone trying to get back to the Medway Towns or Canterbury, two major population centres had no chance. The last train from both St Pancras Station and Victoria Station left at the same time, 11.40.
With most major concerts ending at about 10.30 these days it is just baffling that no one in either Southeastern or TFL has the foresight to think, ‘We need to put on an extra service tonight’. Mind you, they also run short trains on days when there are huge concerts or large crowds going to football matches! As with so many other organisations it is pathetic managers whose only interest is in how much they will get paid not doing any work to justify that pay. When we have been in Sydney for the New Year’s Eve fireworks their trains and buses have continued until 4am. That is a proper transport system for a city famous for nightlife, not the poor excuse of a system we have in London. Come on London, sort it out!
What’s the longest trip you’ve ever taken?
As a child I was taught about lots of different places, people and times in geography and history. It gave me, and many others, a vision of travel as an opportunity to explore and learn about new cultures and to see new places. That vision has never left me, despite the modern reality of travel as stressful, crowded and fractious where people travel to new places to drink copious amounts of alcohol and seemingly avoid learning anything at all!
My Dad was in the Diplomatic Wireless Service and before I was 5 we had lived in India, Pakistan and Singapore. I had racked up thousands of miles of flying in my first three years. When we left Singapore we took a boat to Australia called the Centaur, where we disembarked at Perth and then a boat back from Sydney, Australia to the UK via the Pacific Islands, the Panama Canal, Mexico and the US. That was definitely the longest journey I ever took by water. I have vague memories of the trip, with the Panama Canal and the Pacific Islands chief among them. I also remember Acapulco where a band played La Cucuracha. That tune stuck in my head and when we learnt that song in one of the Singing Together terms I recognised it immediately. I can’t remember if I told other children that I remembered it, because I learnt very early on that they thought you were either lying or showing off when you said things like that.
Since those days I have travelled to the US twice, lived in Japan, Hong Kong and Saudi Arabia and returned to Australia three times, twice for long enough to feel like a local and to do a Masters degree. In all, I have been round the planet three or four times and I hope that my travels are not yet finished.
