So you were not an attentive student, is that right?
Pardon?
You were not attentive in school.
That was my little joke, Malak.
You know, Tim, it takes luck. It takes one person to see what's there.
If a door cracks open and you think it's the one you want to go through, push politely.
Absolutely.
I wish I was D.H. Lawrence, but I'm not.
It's a formula. This is great. I hadn't thought about this stuff for decades.
That's the point of the show. You have to go back. Thank you.
You don't need to lie down afterwards.
Yeah, exactly. This episode is brought to you by EFG Hermes One,
your one app for investing in more than 35 stock markets worldwide.
Hi, everyone. I'm Malak Fouad, the host of What I Did Next, coming to you from A&T Media.
This month, I've had the pleasure of bringing to you Tim Marshall,
who is a best-selling author of books on geography and how they intersect with
geopolitics and with current affairs and why it's an area that is so underrated.
We are all so concerned for what's happening around us, and we're all looking
for answers to really fundamental questions.
Who we are, why is this happening to us, why does it keep happening to us,
and what is it about our region that attracts all these problems and this chaos?
Tim's books really help us put this in perspective,
understanding key questions from the point of view of geography and how each
country inherently has advantages and disadvantages, both in terms of history and geography.
So I want to just pull up here.
two of your books, which I adored.
Thank you.
Right here. I attended, you gave us a talk in London in October for Intelligence
Squared, and I just absolutely loved it.
And I found it, first of all, it was a packed hall, which is kudos.
You obviously have, you're a magnet.
And I found it really interesting that your audience was made up of every demographic.
You had every age group, but you had a lot of students, which I thought was
fascinating and I thought that was brilliant.
You know, we worry that the new generation is complacent or not interested and you proved it wrong.
I mean, you had an all, the majority of the questions that you took that night
were from students and they came up with really interesting questions.
So I felt quite hopeful leaving your talk, you know?
Good. And, I mean, they have proved that they are not many of them, not that.
You know, I think younger people were the ones that probably drove the rise of podcasts.
Yes. And also proving they're not three-minute attention span people necessarily.
You know, people said that long format was dead and podcasts have proved it wrong.
As for the demographic, I think, to praise myself, forgive me,
I do try and make things accessible.
How refreshing i.
Do try and make things accessible and therefore uh it's accessible to you know
everyone but also the subject matter of course uh it doesn't matter if you're
18 or 80 you know it affects us and it's of interest
Absolutely one thing i noticed which which um which
i do um now that i've got this
sort of uh podcast profile i guess
which is you and i met before your talk and
we had a coffee and we chatted like two
normal human beings and i paid for your coffee yes
i bought you a coffee yeah yeah um so the the funny thing about that is so we
had this really nice chat and we you know kind of broke the ice a little bit
and then when i went into this to the hall and then you came on to sit onto
the stage you had a stage persona,
So, you changed. I did? Yes.
So, you suddenly, you switched, a switch went off, and you became Tim Marshall,
author, best-selling author, presentation to get through, you know, et cetera, et cetera.
And I found it really, I started laughing, actually. I thought it was really cute.
Well, I mean, that is the real me as well. Yeah. I behave differently when I
go and see my football team, Leeds United, than I do when I go and see my mum.
Because she would be so astonished at the team that goes to see Leeds United.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Of course. So, you know, yes, it's an act in a sense,
but I think a lot of us are acting nearly all the time.
I don't mean that negatively.
You step out the front door and you put on a different kind of persona, right?
But the other thing that you just maybe think of is it's also because I spent
so long in television, television news.
And I used to say to some younger reporters, be aware you're acting.
You don't have to ham it up.
Yeah.
But be aware, you know, this is not normal. You know, you don't go downstairs
every morning and say, this morning I'm going to have cornflakes.
You know, you don't. But when you're on the telly, you have to project.
so i think there's probably a bit of that
As well i found it i found it funny um and and and entertaining i mean you were
extremely entertaining on that stage terribly.
Bad jokes but
Everyone laughed so you know we all went along with it yeah shakespeare.
Went into a bar right into a pub and the landlord said i've told you you're barred
Which is an English language thing because he was known as the bard. Yeah. That sort of joke.
Honestly, I think— But it gets the room going, really, you know.
People realize then they're not necessarily going to be brought to tears with
arcane, complicated geopolitics.
Yeah. So I want to go back, Tim, before we get into your new career and your new stardom.
You left school at 16.
What did you leave school with your GCSEs only?
I was invited to leave.
Oh, you were invited to leave?
Yeah.
Okay. And so you were not an attentive student, is that right?
Pardon?
You were not attentive in school.
That was my little joke, Malak.
I'm going to have to get on the Tim Marshall wavelength to get through the interview.
No, I wasn't. I was thoroughly, thoroughly bored.
Didn't know what was going on most of the time. I got into a lot of trouble in and out of school.
They stuck me in what was called the remedial class. And this was for people
with mostly learning difficulties.
And yeah, I had learning difficulties, not because I wasn't capable,
just because I wasn't trying.
Do you think that today you would have been diagnosed with ADHD,
one of those attentive disorders?
I think it's not impossible. I think there's far too much diagnosis of that.
No, I... Well, yeah, it's possible.
But I think it's more that, I'm not blaming the teachers in the school.
I mean, it was a bog standard state school, comprehensive school,
35 to a class, lots of disruption of which I then was drawn into and participated in.
I think if I had gone to a different type of school with better discipline,
I might have been disciplined.
But you would go home and read avidly, right?
So you were not encouraged at school, but you still went home and you realized
that you still had a thirst for knowledge, basically, and you were almost self-taught in a way.
Voracious reader um and also i mean it's it's funny i was this um dichotomy if you like in that
i went to the football i got into bits and bobs of trouble uh same at school
big in a fashion and music you know i wasn't a nerd in that sense but i was i was a nerd
simultaneously in that you know at 12 years old i'd be watching documentaries
about international affairs.
I remember even at nine years old being fascinated by Martin Luther King's funeral
and realizing this is some sort of a momentous event. This is a nine-year-old
kid in Leeds in Yorkshire.
But I could just, oh, what is this? And then there are the books.
So yeah, I was this sort of caught between two worlds, but there was only whatever
one world in which anything was possible, and it certainly wasn't the world
of academia and journalism and news.
And what was that world? What were the expectations for you at the time?
Zero.
Um, yeah, I'm not trying to paint a hard luck story. Yeah, yeah.
You know, most, my brother went on to be a refrigeration engineer,
uh, and then a minicab driver, now he's a chauffeur.
Um, most of the lads, half the lads went into the, uh, wood factory,
which was opposite the school.
Um, some went on to the sixth form, uh, you know, I mean, it wasn't a disaster as a school. Yeah.
But, no, I mean, so I became a painter and decorator.
Yeah. That was my first job on leaving school.
And how did you make your way from that? And you were also a petrol pump, petrol attendant.
Yeah, yeah, I did a bit of that.
You had a brief span in the RAF.
Four years.
Four years. How did you make your way to broadcast journalism?
I mean, that's a stretch. Where did that come from?
It was a bit of blagging. Sorry for non-native English.
Blagging is the way into a lot of these jobs, right?
Chancing, you know, a bit of a chancer. I think the Air Force played quite a
role in that that gave me discipline. That gave me structure.
Why did you join the Air Force, Tim? What was it about that that attracted you?
Not very much. I was unemployed.
I see. Okay.
Well, all right, that's a little bit disingenuous. I went down the Navy and
I said, you know, what jobs can I do?
And was it my eyesight? There was some problem. And they said you could be a warehouse man on shore.
What's the point of joining the Navy to be a warehouse man?
So I went to the Army and they were very keen to tell me that I'd very soon
be in Belfast in Northern Ireland during the Troubles.
Not very appealing.
Well, I mean, later on, I wouldn't say I was attracted to war, but, you know...
I did cover a lot of wars and combat, and there is something compelling and horrible about it.
And then I went down to the Air Force, and they said to me, you can be a telegraphist. What's that?
And radio operator. And I'd seen enough World War II films, you know, Morse code.
Yeah, cracking the Enigma code.
So I went into the Air Force, did four years. So that gave me this sort of structure
and discipline that you actually have to do stuff and teamwork.
Unfortunately, after about two years, I really figured I want out of this,
but I signed up for nine years, fixed, couldn't get out.
Wow.
Yeah. Well, when you're 18, I joined at 17. And when you're on your 18th birthday,
you have to decide three, six or nine. And so I thought, well, hang on a minute.
You said that, and now it's this. So I tried to get out and they wouldn't let me.
So I embarked on a two-year career of growing the hell as long as I could get
away with not shining my shoes.
Career of mischief to get out.
Basically, I was back at school again.
Exactly. You regressed.
And they eventually said, oh, go on, get out.
I think the end point came when the warrant officer came in on the night shift
and I was standing on a table declaiming from Karl Marx or a communist man just
for a laugh you know I wasn't a communist but it didn't go down very well in the Cold War you
Were an agitator yeah.
Well I mean I wasn't I was just having a laugh you were having fun I think that
was the tipping point so anyway
This is great. I hadn't thought about this stuff for decades.
That's the point of the show. You have to go back. Thank you.
You don't need to lie down afterwards.
Yeah, exactly.
On the way out of the Air Force, you had to do this career review or whatever.
And there was this wife, a woman, a female officer.
She said, what do you want to do? I said, I want to go to university.
Because I had spent that four years reading.
And also, don't forget that new wave and punk music was happening at the time.
So we're talking about the early 70s by then.
Yeah, late 70s. And they were referencing a lot of politics.
If you listen to a British band called The Clash, they were referencing the
Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua, or The Jam were referencing George Orwell, etc., etc.
And if a teacher references that, I'd have fallen asleep, but oh, these cool guys.
And so that got me into exploring and I thought, oh, I quite fancy going to
uni, but I didn't have any qualifications.
You need A-levels and I didn't even have O-levels, the one below,
but I took a night school course.
So she just wouldn't give me any help at all. She said, no, you can do this,
you can do that, refrigeration, painting, decorating, radio operator in civilian life.
I said, I don't want that, I want this. And she said, well, no.
It's not your path. I did a night school course, got an A, and on the basis
of one O level, at A, they let me in to college on a mature student.
And in those days, you didn't have to pay, which was great. And then I was down in London.
Again, I was unemployed. And I was doing another night school course in something,
which again was free in those days.
And doing the same course was the news desk secretary at LBC IRN told her of my ambitions.
I didn't know what a curriculum vitae was, because I didn't speak Latin.
Didn't know what a CV was, but she said, get yourself a CV.
And there was a department that required for three days work.
They required a sort of T-boy researcher, news information it was called.
And bless her, this woman called Vivian Fowle, wonderful woman.
After journalism, she went into charity work.
and only because that nice woman gave her the cv she said oh well take a look
at him and she clearly bless her saw something and the three days turned into 30 years yeah
You know you know tim it takes luck it takes one person to see what's there
and um and you know you just you you make the most of that that first entry
don't you that's what it did that's what it is.
If a door cracks open and you think it's the one you want to go through, push, politely.
Absolutely. Yeah. So, I know you from your years at Sky, foreign correspondent,
then you became diplomatic editor, but you were there for all in all about 30 years, weren't you?
Yeah, I am actually 87.
You obviously started young.
No, I mean, it's the thing, I started late. I didn't get a full-time job.
I didn't get a full-time staff job until I was in my early 30s,
but I didn't get into journalism until my mid-20s, which is quite late.
Then a documentary series when the BBC were looking for an unknown to do some
undercover work on a five-part series about racism.
So I left the freelance job to freelance with them for a year.
Quite successful. A bit of sort of, oh, you've done something now.
And then I, this is going back to being a chancer or a blagger,
if you like. I still had contact with LBC radio, and they didn't have a Paris correspondent.
I remember the editor saying to me, we get these people, they go across,
they disappear down the metro, we never hear from them again. I won't do that.
I'm going to go to Paris.
I'll be your Paris correspondent. I'm not going to disappear down the metro.
And they looked at it and said, well, I haven't got anyone there.
I mean, freelance, you know, not staff. And they said, do you speak French?
And I said, do you think I'd be so
stupid as to go to France and be a correspondent if I don't speak French?
Which is a question, not a lie.
And rhetorical, I presume. Yeah.
Because once I got past Bonjour, I was struggling.
But packed everything up in an old car, went across, got a flat.
Bought a very old-fashioned one of these.
Learned how to unscrew a phone and stick some crocodile clips on it to have
a better quality. Made it up as I went along.
And I didn't disappear down the metro except in the mornings.
And I used to come back, because this is pre-internet, pre-mobiles,
and they'd say, oh, I've been ringing you, where have you been?
Oh, I had a meeting with President Meater on or whatever.
whereas in fact i'd been at my intensive french language course i
Was going to say you were you were at the cafe having a croissant and a.
Coffee yeah oh yeah pretending to read le monde yeah exactly and um off the
back of that sky asked me in their first year which was 89 sky news
to file occasionally from paris and then in 1990 they said can you come back
and be a reporter for us and i said yes which was difficult because the last
story i covered in farence was the cambodian peace talks and to go from that
to then being the most junior of the junior
reporters uh covering as we say in english dogs up cats up trees dogs up trees
would be news cats up trees cats
Up trees is pretty common yeah but why did you do that then tim what was the
what was your rationale what did you see in sky that you wanted to be part of maybe.
I could see that it was something new.
It wasn't establishment. I mean, they'd have buried me at the BBC if I'd ever gone there properly.
They'd have buried me. Um...
The Australians were front and center in setting it up and running it.
And they have pluses and minuses. But one of the pluses is that can-do attitude,
that, well, give it a try, let's do it.
Whereas the BBC at the time, I don't know now, was, let's have a meeting about
this, and then we'll put it on the agenda to make it the third item on the agenda next week.
You had that newcomer versus establishment philosophy, didn't you?
yeah and it probably suited your your your abilities and your character and all of that i'm afraid.
So and again i didn't really you know i didn't i didn't know that
i'm not sure how much i know about myself especially at that time i'm not particularly
reflective um i yeah i think it's instinctive i think i instinctively knew i could do something here
Most of our decisions i think are instinctive and we don't stop and think in
a 360 way when we're making those decisions at least i was like you i didn't
do that i would just jump into things and say yeah that sounds like fun i'll do it.
Yeah that's me
Yeah and then it's only later that you start thinking oh actually that was a
really good decision and it led me to or bad and it led me to meeting so-and-so
that led me to the next job and so on.
Sliding doors. But I take your word you're like that, and I suspect I'm like
that, but there are quite a lot of people that really do think it through chess,
if you like, this will lead to that, this will lead to that.
I mean, was it either Boris Johnson, the former prime minister,
or it was Michael Heseltine, One of the two, I forget, when they were at Oxford
or Cambridge, probably Oxford.
They were both at Oxford.
I think. Generally wrote down on the back of an envelope, you know,
I'm going to do this, this, this, this, this.
And at the top of the list is prime minister. You know, there are people like that.
Both of them, it sounds in character for each of them. So it could have been
either one of them. Yeah.
And also, you know, let's say you're in the military and you're in the army.
You know, to rise through to major general, you have to have some combat experience.
It doesn't have to be that much.
You then can go into like management. you can go into logistics you know there's
all these steps you have to take whereas nah i i'm just
Yeah you know but one.
Thing after another
No i agree with you but i think your age group my age group even um we had more
of a path to success that was clearly defined if we chose to do it or things
were very clearly demarcated in certain careers today i think yes i look at my
children, I've got two children, 20 and 18,
their world is, there's no blueprint for anything anymore.
It's just, you almost make it up as you go along.
You're right. Because I used to say to younger people, and I don't as much anymore,
be very careful when you make your decision because you're going down this road
and there's not going to be very many branches off if you find you don't like this road.
Whereas now, I think there's still some truth in that. But I do think it's easier
to, you know, even make a U-turn or just come across.
And media is a good example, you know, with its multimedia. Whereas before, you print radio or TV.
I also think that there's no road now. There's just no road.
And fewer jobs for life. Exactly. Fewer, more, what do you call it,
portfolio careers, etc.
I mean, it's liberating in one sense, but it's also unsettling and unsafe.
You know, jobs are far less safe.
It's just another way of being. And it hasn't yet shown its true colors yet.
I mean, it's still very much in the infancy of all this AI stuff and how do you juggle jobs.
There's still a lot that's unclear in my head. This episode is brought to you
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Let's go back to Sky, Tim.
So 30 years, that's a lifetime. You covered every hotspot, every war, every peace treaty.
You've been to every part of the globe.
Why did you stay there? I mean, what kept you doing this for 30 years?
It's a tough job that you were doing, you know.
Yeah.
What was it? Obviously, as you said earlier, there's a bit of adrenaline there with conflicts.
There's a whole bunch of stuff, I suspect.
Ambition, probably, to do stuff.
Yeah.
I've never had an ambition to...
To make your mark? To make your mark?
Probably, yeah. Yeah, probably.
But that's a good thing. You say it like you're embarrassed about it. It's a good thing.
Ego isn't necessarily a bad thing. Too much ego is. So, yeah, okay, there's that.
Testing yourself, which is, you know, mostly a male thing, but not entirely.
Sheer interest. Oh, my God, you know, to go to these places that you'd read
about. I mean, I've been to many, but there are some like Tashkent.
I've never been to Tashkent. I've never been to Timbuktu, these great romantic names.
They're romantic-sounding names, aren't they?
Yeah, I've been to the Euphrates Valley, and I've been to Al-Quds,
Jerusalem, etc., etc. Oh, Damascus, wow. Anyway.
Damascus is amazing, yeah.
Amazing. So there's that. There's the money, which wasn't bad.
Always always something that's going to keep everyone yeah of course it's important.
And also i enjoyed it you know i enjoyed the challenges i enjoyed writing writing
for television when it's done well is really really good uh forgive me there's
not that many people can do it especially now give
Me an example what does what does writing for television mean in the sense of a news bulletin for.
Example do not say what is in the pictures what's the point It
Seems really obvious, doesn't it? So you're describing the experiences of being
where you are, what's happening around the scenes.
No, I'm talking about writing with, or as we say, to picture.
So the worst ones will, as Prime Minister Starmer arrives in a black car outside Downing Street,
They will say, the prime minister arrived in Downing Street.
What's the point of saying that? The prime minister arrived in Downing Street. That's seven words.
And you've only got maybe 280 if you're lucky.
Why would you say seven words doing that?
You know, let's say someone opens the door for him.
You can say the prime minister is looking for a way out.
You know, if the story is, he's in a real problem. So that's writing with picture.
Yeah.
And hardly anyone does it anymore. Forgive me for praising yourself.
I was in Kosovo in Pristina.
You're allowed to do that on this show, by the way.
I was in Pristina when the Russians arrived. And that moment when they rolled
down Pristina's high street was when the tide began to come back in or out.
Yeah.
And I knew that because the Russians had made sure they got there before NATO.
Now, it didn't work out for them, but that's not the point.
The point is, my opening line was, forgive me, the Russians roll down Main Street
and back onto the world stage.
Because I knew that was the moment.
That was the hook.
Yeah. Now, that's writing to picture. So anyway, yeah, we did all that.
Really enjoyed. And that was a bit, possibly I enjoyed the most,
was using image and words and putting them together. Really enjoyed it.
You had a point where you were in Egypt covering the Arab Spring.
You had a good friend and cameraman who was shot at the time.
And it kind of made you take a step back and reassess a lot that was going on
and whether you really wanted to be doing this to continue with.
Yeah, Mickey was shot in Cairo, Mickey Dean.
um i'd been with him in exactly the
same spot two weeks earlier i mean i think this was probably already percolating
because i'd had a couple of narrow escapes down the years but it was after i
mean i did the fall of mubarak and and this was after um fall of mubarak this happened right um
and then from there i went on to and i'd already done afghanistan and iraq uh
but from there i went Syria.
and had two or three narrowish escapes.
And I think if it hadn't been for Mickey, I might have kept chancing it. Going, yeah.
It really had a profound effect on
me. Yeah. In fact, I've known about 12 colleagues that have been killed.
Mickey was a friend and two or three others I was friendly with.
But also, I know Mickey's widow and the effect it had on her.
and his children and uh you know i was aware that you know i i have my own responsibilities yeah and
You you probably felt you had the nine lives you know you don't want to push it yeah.
Yeah and i think you have to listen
I wanted to change tacks a little bit tim um and then we're going to end with
a really light fun lightning round just about your writing process um how do
you research your books how do you write do you have a system are you the type
that writes from 5 a.m until 12 uh i mean how do you do this.
Because you switched
Careers in effect didn't you you've changed careers.
Yeah yeah i'll tell you what i found hard to get used to given that
it's 20 to the hour we're finishing this piece editing it it's quarter to the
hour oh my god it's 10 minutes to the hour wow we make it with a minute to go
get it on there it's lead story to what do you mean you're publishing it next
year that was very hard yeah
Yeah yeah yeah.
Um so i wish i was uh dh lawrence or um
Hemingway but i'm not um it's a formula so the formula once you've got your
title that's a big start and then most important than anything structure
these are the things i want to write about let's say there's 15 of them
what order do i want to write them what order would they make sense
now i've got my chapters bang bang bang bang bang
great once i've got title and structure it's almost it's not the hardest thing
because the hardest thing is a year of bloody doing that typing away yeah but
without that i think you're all over the place and everything can be finessed
and moved around but once you've
got your structure and then let's say you're gonna write 80 000 words
all of them most of them your own and this
isn't plagiarism you then begin to
research and let's say you download 15 papers from russi the military think
tank here chatham house diplomatic think tank council of foreign relations uh
the egyptians report on the sinai whatever it is
and then newspaper articles and then history and then you do your interviews and I transcribe them.
I have now got a million words. I need 80,000.
That's the hardest part actually, isn't it? Yes. Narrowing it down.
Then I start going through them. That's actually quite easy.
I've got the delete button going, oh, hang on, this bit's important.
So now I've got 400,000 words.
Where do they go? Right, this whole block goes in that. So now I've got 10 folders open.
And are you doing this bit all alone, or are you working with an editor at this stage?
In the first instance, completely on my own. You're on your own, of course.
I've never, ever used researchers.
I mean, when I was at Sky, sometimes when I was presenting, one of the jobs,
and it's a good job, and I understand it for researchers, is they present you with an A4 on subject X.
i it's not i didn't trust them it's just that i always wanted
to go through the same research and pick out
what i think this is the important bit so
i always used to do my own if i'm researching i find a oh
moment if i oh that's
going in yeah for sure i mean it could be little things
forgive me but the uh when when i i mean it's obvious really but i hadn't thought
about it when i was doing my book about space the future of geography and when
i read that the astronauts had left all their human waste behind in little plastic
bags on the moon that's going in that's
Brilliant of course.
Because that's the sort
Of nugget the reader's going to remember.
Yeah so oh moments they go in um uh and then yeah then you better start writing your first word
once i've done a chapter it gets sent off to um a brilliant editor at elliott
and thompson books jenny uh who is
Takes out the worst of my jokes. And I do put jokes in serious books.
I like your jokes. I think they're sweet.
They usually also say something about...
Yeah, yeah.
But what she's brilliant at is saying, those two paragraphs there on page seven
fit much better on page 13.
I can't do that. I can't see it.
No. She sees it. But that's normal because you're in the weeds.
She's got the bird's eye view. Yeah. That's very normal.
And there's a little bit of back and forth, But I would say 10 times out of
10, she gets her, no, 9 times out of 10, she gets her way, because 9 times out of 10, she's right.
And what's next for you, Tim? What are you looking at next? What's the next project?
I couldn't possibly comment.
When are we going to have a follow-up then? Is it in a year so that we can talk about it?
I've spent a whole year now since I finished the 10th anniversary edition of
Business of Geography, yeah which took me more than a year to to write because it's a completely
you know bang up to date for the last decade i spent a whole year actually every day thinking
i want to write this and then in the afternoon thinking i don't want to write
another book and the next day in the morning think i don't want to write another
in the afternoon i need to write this it's
Niggling at you there's something niggling at you.
I'm still there but
I'm moving towards pretty soon, I think, sitting down and assembling a million words.
Yeah, another million. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But that's how it is,
isn't it? You have an idea, you put it on the shelf, you take it back down, you try it out.
But why am I doing it?
I don't know. Why are you doing it?
I'm not wealthy. I've not got a yacht, but I don't really need the money.
I've got an awful lot to occupy. I go to every single League United game.
That's 40 games a season all over the country yeah yeah but um when you're
A curious person tim you're curious and intelligent it doesn't just switch off because you think.
I've got a sub stack i'm building i do some media work i do some talks in the
city of london you know i'm
So why put myself through it?
You like to write. A substack isn't the same.
Well, I dislike writing. But when I write a sentence, I think,
oh, that was good, which isn't very often.
It's kind of, yeah, I think, oh, that was good. Yeah.
It's tickling something in you, isn't it? Obviously. Yeah.
The Russians roll down Main Street and back onto the world stage.
You know, yeah, I want to write.
You're chasing more of those sentences, aren't you, Tim?
Well, I came up with one for the Sunday Times. I did a big page article for
them a couple of weeks ago, and it was about the raid in Venezuela.
And I deliberately got into the beginning of it, gunboat diplomacy,
how we used to act in the 19th, 18th century.
And I ended it with Delta Force diplomacy.
Nice. Which I'm very proud of.
Well, you should be. And it's almost as if you structured the whole article
just for that beginning and end, right?
Well, once I thought of Delta Force Diplomacy, it was only then I went back
and inserted gunboat diplomacy to make it sort of explicable.
Now, I copyright that. Okay, anyone listening, don't you be using it.
We'll use it at the top of this interview. We're going to end,
Tim, with a very quick lightning round. I don't want you to overthink it.
I just want you to say what comes to mind immediately.
What is your most used emoji?
I don't use emojis. At all? If I had to, the smiley one to say, I'm only joking.
If you had 25 hours in a day, how would you spend the extra hour?
Sleeping.
Actually, that's not true. Nah, sleeping. Sleeping.
Sleeping. Is there a country that you haven't visited you're dying to visit?
Yeah. It's a very long story. I won't tell it. I was on my way.
A colleague kiboshed it. North Korea.
That is interesting. Okay. If you were to choose another profession, what would you choose?
I am so lucky. I got to do what I wanted to do when I was a kid,
but never thought I would.
I think I could have made a reasonable teacher, but it never appealed.
I see that. I'm not on the radar.
This might reveal a lot about me. I quite fancied being an actor, but maybe I was.
Do you know what could tick each of those boxes is if you do a YouTube channel
and explain in a fun way your books?
I have actually thought of that. It's just too much work.
What's your favorite activity?
I was going to say watching football, but it's quite painful at times. Um...
Cooking.
Yeah? Would you like to cook?
I'm not particularly good, but I do a very good British Sunday roast chicken.
Sunday roast.
I'm working on my roast potatoes.
Good.
That's hard, actually. The whole alchemy for those. Yeah, cooking.
No, I mean, I only have one hobby, really, and it is football.
It's football. Like I said, I go home and away. I watch three or four games
a week. Yeah. I used to play quite badly.
So, football is an abiding passion through my life.
What's your least favorite activity?
Oh, God. Sorry, I know you said don't overthink it.
I don't mind driving. I don't mind DIY, although I'm rubbish at it.
Admin, taxes.
Yeah, I'm not very good at admin. Pretty soul-crushing, isn't it? I'm not very organized.
Okay. I do not enjoy it and put it off.
Last two. I'm going to read the beginning of a sentence and you just end it. I have a hard time.
Understanding. There is an instinctive understanding that can come easily,
but you better be right and to be confident. That's hard.
When you think about that, what do you mean by understanding?
Like, understanding what?
Human nature. Geopolitics.
Is there a god? To which the last one I think is probably, almost certainly.
Just don't know what she looks like.
See what I did there?
I did see that one. I like that.
There's one ray of light. Comes through a stained glass window, right?
There's seven colors on the other side. I don't care what color you like.
It's fine. I like this color. You like that color. It's good.
Nice. Last one. I get joy from?
Leeds United winning goals you won't believe it what we do when that winning goal goes
In you hug.
Strange men you've never met it's weird.