Nursing is not war yet they risked it all for one per cent
THE PRESENTER, 52, ON SPRINGTIME ON HER FARM, WORKING WITH HUSBAND LUDO DURING COVID AND GOING OOH Là Là – AU NATUREL!
Graham and Stephen don’t understand why the one per cent pay rise for the NHS is an insult (MetroTalk, Thu), so I’ll try to help them.
Imagine a 75-year-old man who is the husband of an NHS care worker (as in those we all clapped for). The ward where his wife was working gets overwhelmed with the coronavirus and the 15 or so staff all catch it one after the other.
At first there was no testing and limited PPE, and it wasn’t realised staff would be catching the virus from other infected, often asymptomatic, colleagues as well as infected patients.
So the man’s wife brought the virus home, as did many other NHS employees. Sleeping and eating separately didn’t work and the 75-yearold husband got mild symptoms, but it could well have turned out otherwise.
Graham makes a comparison between nurses and soldiers, saying the latter don’t ask for more money when they go to war, so why should nurses when they’re just ‘doing their job’?
Nurses are paid to care for the sick, not to risk their lives to do so.
We know perfectly well that many NHS employees died or suffered longterm effects from coronavirus, and also that they gave the disease to their nearest and dearest with unfortunate results.
And yes, that 75-year-old husband is me. Sometimes you have to live something to know about it.
Col Blake, Ealing
Prime Minister Boris Johnson regards public life as a debating society. He will say absolutely anything for an apparent advantage in the moment, having either no memory or no shame.
Why doesn’t he now ‘level up’ with underpaid NHS staff by drawing on his famous £350million-a-week post-Brexit
dividend? Because, as is so often the case with Boris, his empty rhetoric is ‘full of sound and fury. Signifying nothing’.
Philip, Manchester
I totally disagree with both Graham and Stephen over their attitude to the one per cent NHS pay rise.
Yes, we have all had a horrendous year but not as much as the overworked NHS staff.
They are exhausted and worn out. As such, they deserve far more than the insulting one per cent being offered to them.
I would agree with them taking strike action as this is the only way the government will take them seriously.
Adrian Appley, Bromley
Graham compared nurses with soldiers. He probably forgot that their roles lie on completely opposite ends of the spectrum – nurses save lives, whereas soldiers take lives.
What are you filming?
Another series of Escape To The Farm, which is going to come out after my Coastal Britain series. We’re also filming another series of A Country Life For Half The Price. The first series went out at the start of lockdown one and had resonance because lifestyle choices were questioned. For series two we’ve seen the pandemic have a galvanising effect and a change to living. People are selling properties to buy one larger one and live together.
And you have your farm…
Yes, it’s a very busy time of year because we’re lambing. Our lovely pig, Dahlia, has just had her first litter. We’ve got another two sows that are due to farrow and our goats are due to kid. No one’s told Mother Nature about the pandemic so we just carry on. I probably take the crown for the least glamorous woman on the telly but I’m going to win a double least glamorous crown because I’ve had no sleep at all.
When did you film Coastal Britain? It looks idyllic.
We first talked about doing it in April last year and, logistically, it was too difficult so we filmed it in July and early August. It was super quick, it was just the three of us and we lived in self-catered accommodation. I’d get up at 6am and make everyone breakfast and a packed lunch, we’d leave at 7am and would film for 12 to 14 hours. We’d all come back, share the cooking, collapse and then do it all over again, whereas normally you can stay in a hotel and find somewhere for lunch.
Everyone’s walking and will be holidaying in Britain…
Travelling is part and parcel of my career. I’ve been to every continent and 170-odd countries but I’m embarrassed to admit that there are bits of this country I’ve never been. The Exmoor coast is just over two hours’ drive from where I live in South Wales. I’ve been to Antarctica but never there and it’s jaw-droppingly beautiful.
Was this an idea you came up with because you weren’t allowed to travel?
No, this was an idea to show we have some really beautiful places right on our doorstep. When I was growing up in the ’70s and ’80s most families didn’t go abroad. There weren’t the cheap flights or package holidays. But in recent years there have been some
The Exmoor coast is just over two hours from where I live and it’s jawdroppingly beautiful
fundamental changes: the weather isn’t always awful here, and now there’s a wonderful range of places people can stay and amazing restaurants and cafés to enjoy. There are compelling reasons to holiday in the UK, not least the environmental one.
The first series of Escape To The Farm was very popular...
It was surprising how popular it was. I think it’s because it’s real life and nothing is made up. It’s our farm – me and farmer Tim, and incredible producers and craftspeople who we’ve worked with since we bought the farm ten years ago. And it was timely. People are thinking more about the provenance of their food since lockdown and they want to support local businesses. It encapsulated a groundswell of people trying to make jam or grow vegetables. It’s a very gentle programme in a beautiful place with inspiring people, lovely animals and nice food that’s really easy to cook… because I’m cooking it!
Has Covid affected what you and husband Ludo Graham had planned?
We’ve been incredibly lucky. We’ve not only had work but also been able to work together. Some bright spark said, ‘Your husband’s won a Bafta as a director and you can only infect each other so he can shoot you!’ And we’re quite a useful partnership, as it turns out! He’s a series producer, director and cameraman for Escape To The Farm. We were quite nervous about it but we both slotted into work mode instantly.
Have you been in touch with any of your telly mates over lockdown?
Ben Fogle and I are great mates and in the tiny gap we were all allowed to see each other, he and his family came down and stayed here, which was just lovely. He has a lovely home in the Chilterns and it did make me laugh because he’s about as un-green fingered as you could be but he and his kids were growing veg last year. He kept sending me – hugely proud, as he should be – photos of his sweetcorn, and I was slightly jealous.
Are you itching to get back on a plane?
I’m not – and I can’t quite believe I’m saying that. We have a 4x6-metre, completely off-grid cabin in the woods on a lake in the middle of a deeply unfashionable bit of France, which I love. We drive there and try to go for a month so we’d love to do that this year if we can. We go feral. I don’t wear any clothes, we cook on fires, we swim in the lake and it’s absolute heaven.
Kate Humble’s Coastal Britain airs Fridays at 8pm on Channel 5. Escape To The Farm returns soon to Channel 5
SYRIA’S civil war is ten years old today, , with more than 500,000 people dead and 13million displaced.
On March 15, 2011, six teenagers were e arrested and tortured for spraying ‘the e people want the downfall of the regime’ e’ on a school wall in the city of Dera’a.
It marked the start of a brutal crackdown by president Bashar alAssad that in turn prompted the bitter years of fighting and a mass exodus.
Aid workers helping 5.6million exiled Syrians in Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey and Iraq see no end to the torment. They say the global crisis of Covid, which has s infected 16,328 Syrians and killed 1,090 0 according to disputed official figures, ranks low on refugees’ list of concerns.
Charles Lawley, in Lebanon with the charity Syria Relief, said: ‘Many hospitals have been targeted by air strikes, just as so many more people need hospital beds.
‘Hope is such a rare commodity here, the pandemic seems such a small concern for many when judging the scale of risks. One man told me, “What do I think about Covid? I wish I had it and it would end this suffering”.’
Among the victims is Hanaa, nine, left paralysed when her home in eastern Aleppo was bombed three years ago. She relies on help from Unicef community teams. Hanaa said she was ‘scared to go outside’ after the blast, adding: ‘I feared people would point at me and ridicule me because I could not walk.’
Her mother Fatima has sold her wedding ring to help pay for treatment, saying: ‘I will do everything I can to help my daughter stand up again.’
Meanwhile, a widowed mother-of-six told how she was driven to thoughts of setting fire to her family’s tent and ending their lives. Her children include a 13-year-old daughter who has been working since the age of six to help support the family.
Also desperate is Susan Ahmed Al-Hasan, who walked across mountains with her children after their Aleppo home was bombed in air strikes and her husband died. The widow, who receives monthly sponsorship from Syria Relief, said: ‘The area was like a ghost town – it was so scary, terrifying.’
Was there any one thing that made you suddenly think you’d like to write a children’s book 13 years ago?
I was reading a lot of children’s books that I knew the story to but realised I’d never actually read. I bought an old edition of Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland. I was looking again at some of the Roald Dahl books and much as I knew the story of Peter Pan, I had never read the book. Then I thought, ‘This world is such a wonderful world, writing for kids, if you can just get it right. Have I got a story that would speak to children?’ And I had this idea about a boy dressing as a girl and going to school, an unusual theme at the time for a children’s book. That got me on my way.
And, as you say on
your BBC Maestro course, you don’t need qualifications to start…
No. Someone once said to me online, ‘You’re not qualified to be a children’s writer!’ But there are no qualifications. You can be JRR Tolkien, an Oxford don, or you can be a single mum like JK Rowling.
Do you impose a daily routine when writing?
You’ve got to regard it as a job if you want to get a large amount of writing done. Stephen King says he writes 2,000 words a day and then stops. If I write 1,000 words a day, I’m happy. A lot of people spend their life finishing a book that never gets finished. You have to think of it like schoolwork in that it has to be handed in at a certain time.
What biscuits do you have when you finish a chapter?
Jaffa Cakes. I don’t have to bite into them. They can just go in whole.
Has children’s literature changed since you started?
It’s exploded in the past ten years. The main person that’s changed things is JK Rowling. People just loved her story – the fact she was a single mum sat in a café and she comes up with one of the most famous book series of all time. I feel like, generally, children’s books have become a bit more grown-up. I see more daring styles too.
Mistakes, you’ve made a few?
When I started off I was very keen to set my books in the real world because the biggest thing at the time was and still is Harry Potter. So a lot of people were trying to come up with the next Harry Potter. I thought, ‘She’s done that brilliantly so don’t try to do that.’ I decided to have lots of references to real things. Unfortunately, those references can change rapidly. When I wrote The Boy In The Dress there was a reference to Trisha’s TV show that Matt Lucas and I loved. So Trisha Goddard is in the book but, obviously, if you are a ten-year-old now and reading it, that TV show’s not on any more so you won’t know what I’m talking about.
Is Simon Cowell mentioned in your stories?
I had a character based on him called Tyson Trowel. That was one of my World’s Worst Children, about a girl called Stacey Superstar who can’t sing. I had a lot of fun creating that but Simon thinks he should be picking up 50 per cent royalties!
Why do you think Gangsta Granny is your best selling book?
I think the title is really good, for a start. It’s an adventure story. It’s got comedy in it and it’s got some sad bits in it too.
What are you writing now?
The book I’m working on now is set on a deserted island. I’m always trying to do things a bit differently. Sometimes setting a book in the past is helpful. The last one was set in London during World War II. Awful Auntie was set in the 1930s. These things help me because they throw up new ideas for stories. Also, when you are writing a story, I don’t know if you want people to have things like mobile phones. There’s something about a child finding a map in an old treasure box buried in the woods rather than just
writing, ‘They googled it’.
Your online BBC Maestro course teaches adults how to write children’s books. What inspired you to do a free Mini Maestro version for children?
It felt like the right time because children have been in lockdown with no parties or after-school clubs. Right now people are more isolated than ever so what a wonderful chance for kids to get into really exploring their imagination.
There’s a prize draw with the Mini Maestro course. What do they win?
It’s difficult right now to actually meet up face to face so the prize for 20 winners aged 7-9 and 10-12 is an online one-to-one lesson for me to be a sort of tutor to kids and chat to them and help them shape their stories. Whatever they want to ask me is fine. The course is free so as long as you can get to a computer you can log on.
Do you think kids often come up with more original stories than adults?
Yeah, I think they do. Kids are used to thinking very expansively. They’ll travel back in time to the land of the dinosaurs. If they want to go to Mars in their story or in a submarine to the deepest part of the ocean and find a mythical beast, they can. They don’t have the barriers grown-ups have. When you’re a kid, you’re midway between the real world and the imaginary world, and I’ve never met a child without a brilliant imagination.