Life Without Limits, A (7 page)

At least now I understand the problem. Learning to see my body less as an object to be manipulated and more as an integral part of me was a crucial step. And in even more simplistic terms, I saw all of a sudden the damage I was doing to it by not eating properly. I am not sure you are ever cured of the illness that is an eating disorder but the key for me was to have developed a healthier perspective about my body. Whereas I used to see it as no more than contours of skin and colour, now I see it as a holistic system that I respect and love for what it enables me to do.

Uneasily, I started eating more healthily. From the end of term in June until I handed in my thesis (‘The Changing Form of the Indonesian State’) at the end of September, I moved into digs with a guy called Rich, another great friend. He was a vegetarian and superb in the kitchen, and his cooking helped me back onto a more even keel.

One thing I didn’t let up on, though, was my work. I think Rich, who was also completing a master’s, raised an eyebrow over how hard – and late into the night – I was working and how stressed it made me. But that was an example of energy directed towards a positive goal, and I graduated with a distinction. Naomi was awarded a distinction as well. I don’t know which of us got the higher mark. It didn’t seem to matter so much any more, and that in itself was a sign of progress.

4

Development

It is interesting for me to look back through the diaries I kept during my travels. In June 1999 I was bemoaning my tendency to ‘always try to please people’; five months later, as the millennium approached, I was renewing my lifelong vow to ‘make people happy’. They may sound contradictory statements of intent, but I don’t think pleasing people and making them happy are quite the same thing, even if they are two sides of the same coin. The first is akin to the impulse to worry about what other people think of you; the second is more about the desire to give to other people.

I would say my life has been dominated by two dynamics: an obsessive lust for control and self-improvement on the one hand, and concern about people and their situations on the other. From the latter has grown, perhaps fuelled by the former, my passion for development. I call it development these days, because that is the name they give it in politics and in higher education, but really it is just the desire to help people and to try to make the world a better place. It played a big part in my life when I was growing up.

It was the era of Band Aid and Live Aid. The footage from Africa reduced me to tears, and I remember vowing to do something to help. I was an avid fan of
Blue Peter
, and one episode in 1986 made a particular impression on me. It concerned the famine in Ethiopia and the cataracts that were rendering so many of the Ethiopians blind. I went through to the kitchen and asked Mum if we could arrange a bring-and-buy sale in the village. I wrote a letter to
Blue Peter
, explaining how distraught I was and how much I wanted to help. They sent posters and an information pack, and we set about planning and promoting the event. It was a success, and we raised £173, which wasn’t bad in the mid-1980s. I was overjoyed to be awarded my first Blue Peter badge. Still got it. Still got them all (I didn’t stop there).

The television reports gave me my first inkling of a world beyond my own, a world that wasn’t fair or equal, a world of poverty, war, disease and famine. But I also realised that this state of affairs wasn’t necessarily a given, and that we have it in our power to make a difference, to make the world a better place for all. We have that choice. One thing’s for sure, though – if we do nothing, it
will
be a given.

Buoyed by the success of the bring-and-buy sale, I set up further projects to raise money. I organised a litter-pick in the village (I hated litter). Then I wrote a version of
Aladdin
for the stage, which was put on at the primary school, complete with costumes and songs.

As I went through my teens and early adulthood, other pre-occupations took over, such as studying and socialising, but that passion for helping others has never left me. It was a big reason for spending those two summers of my university years in Boston, teaching children to swim. They ranged in age from three to ten, and seeing them grow in confidence and enthusiasm was so uplifting.

I remember one boy called Welcome Bender. He was four years old and didn’t really interact with the other kids, although he was exceptionally bright. He was borderline genius when it came to discussing the solar system. He was also afraid of the water. But in time I gained his trust, he slowly grew in confidence and finally he learned to swim.

His is the case that sticks in my mind most poignantly, because of his fear of the water and the catharsis of his eventual victory over it, but this sort of journey was repeated over and over again in all the children on that camp. Watching them discover something of themselves brought home to me what a wonderful tool sport is in the making of people.

To oversee that process and help it along, meanwhile, reminded me of the joy of making a difference to other people’s lives. It was an incredibly rewarding experience. When you receive letters and artwork from these kids and from their parents thanking you for helping them, it is pretty special. Still got them all.

However much your youth may be characterised by these passions and urges, they tend to burst out of you in a blur of unfocused activity. If they are to shape your life as an adult, they need time to come together and settle into something more coherent. That process happened for me during my travels.

Africa is where it started, encouraged by Jude and her unique perspective. To see how poor the locals were in economic terms, yet how rich in culture and emotion, made a deep impression on me.

As did the history. I was blown away, for example, by the rock art in the Rhodes Matopos National Park in Zimbabwe, painted by bushmen tens of thousands of years ago with hematite and animal bile. I was in tears as I listened to our guide recount how the bushmen’s way of life has become eroded by the advance of modern ‘civilisation’, even more than their art has been. I felt an emotional connection with the natural world, and an anger rose deep inside me at the destruction of an entire way of life, precious in ways ‘civilisation’ could never conceive.

Early on in our journey through Africa, I got into the habit of giving out pens to the locals, before realising that this in no way benefits them in a long-term, sustainable way. It’s not as if pens are growing on the trees out there. They will run out sooner or later. Handing them round willy-nilly would just breed dependency, even greed. Then I saw a child in Zanzibar wearing a McKids t-shirt from McDonald’s. It started me thinking about the concept of ‘development’ and the underlying causes of poverty, including the West’s role in perpetuating it. ‘We give presents to the locals,’ I wrote in my diary, ‘perhaps as a means of alleviating our own guilt and making ourselves feel better, when really it does nothing to help people help themselves. In the longer term it actually has a negative impact on their development.’

It was the six months travelling through Asia, though, that had the biggest effect on me. By then I had decided to take the MA in development studies. To go from arriving at that decision to arriving in Indonesia so soon afterwards was a powerful progression. I immediately fell in love with the country – the lush green scenery, the terraced paddy fields, the ornate temples, the arts and crafts, the local food stalls, the volcanic peaks and shimmering turquoise lakes, the offerings of banana-leaf bowls everywhere I turned, filled with incense and flowers. I was seduced. My love affair with Indonesia was intense, and introduced me to the unfamiliar and the terrifying.

We visited the island of Siberut, off the west coast of Java, where we walked for hours to visit villages virtually untouched by Western civilisation, surrounded by the dense, vivid green jungle, where handmade wooden canoes are the only means of transport. We stayed in their ‘longhouses’ on stilts. The locals wore loincloths made of bark, and their bodies were covered in tattoos, rendered with a mixture of ash and sugar-cane juice hammered into the skin with a fine nail. On one hike through the jungle my walking boots broke and I had to spend the day walking barefoot through thick mud, rivers and foliage that seemed to consist primarily of sharp things. This is what the locals have to endure every day.

It was easy to feel completely immersed in another way of life, except, of course, that you were not and never could be. I suffered from the classic traveller’s dilemma. It made me ask questions of the voyeuristic, selfish and contrived nature of travelling, as practised by Westerners. I felt very uncomfortable about what I was doing, but equally, how could I turn down the opportunity to visit these societies?

Another salutary experience came during a forty-hour bus ride with my Danish friend Pernille through Sulawesi, a large island to the north of Indonesia, more populous than Siberut but still largely untouched by tourism. Our journey to the north of the island coincided with an outbreak of violence in and around the town of Poso, a flare-up of the ongoing troubles between Christians and Muslims. Buildings were being burned, people murdered, and pro-tagonists on both sides patrolled the area with guns and machetes. The streets were full of cars, as people tried to escape the violence. There were roadblocks every couple of hundred yards. We were travelling on a local bus, which was hijacked by Muslim fighters. They climbed aboard wearing masks like ninjas, their mouths set in grim, determined lines as they waved their machetes and ordered the driver to take them across town. They walked through the bus looking for Indonesian Christians, coming so close to me that I’m sure they must have heard the blood pounding in my ears.

After they had been driven where they wanted to go, they left the bus without touching us. The relief was, of course, overwhelming, but it came with more guilt – guilt that we were only passing through, that we had escaped because we were Western tourists. Who knows what would have happened to us if we hadn’t been?

Elsewhere on my travels through Asia, Burma was under military dictatorship, and in Laos I saw first-hand the toll that the production and smoking of opium had taken on the local population, particularly among the men. None of it did anything to dampen the sense in me of a troubled, unfair world, or the desire to try to do something about it, however small. When I returned to the UK and went up to Manchester, I hoped my MA could be the start of my own contribution, but I also wanted some hands-on experience.

I signed up as a volunteer at the Salford Cathedral Homeless Centre. It was a drop-in centre rather than a residential one, but I went there twice a week. I served the homeless food, played cards and pool with them and simply listened to what they had to say. It was a real eye-opener. It’s all too easy to see a homeless person on the street almost as a non-person. It doesn’t really occur to you that they have a life and a family and have often been in so-called ‘normal’ jobs. But at some point, or points, along the way they have encountered adversity and have been unable to cope. A lot of them were ex-Forces. They had become institutionalised, and had left the system without any support.

Some of the things I saw were awful. Their shoes, for example, were almost welded to their feet so that you couldn’t get them off. The socks had become a part of their feet, too, the skin growing into the fabric.

But, generally, I was struck by the generosity, openness and good humour of the people I met there. Some were happier to talk about their issues and where they had come from than others, but whenever you went there in a bad mood, or in my case with the tribulations of an eating disorder, it was all put into perspective. Your own problems paled into insignificance. I got so much from the experience. It was so gratifying and fulfilling, and it reconfirmed that I had made the right move by pursuing my MA in development. Even if I was concerned more with the international angle, I could see that the same principles applied closer to home.

When my MA was finished, they offered me a paid position at the centre. I decided not to take it, because I wanted to head back south. But my lifelong passion for development (I had a name for it now!) was stronger than ever, and I had some qualifications and experience to back it up. Now I needed to embark on a career.

5

Summits and Volcanoes

On Christmas Day 2001 I went out for a run. Training on Christmas Day is a landmark for any athlete. Considering I wasn’t even an athlete to any serious degree at that point, I had to accept that running was now another addiction to add to my list.

I have trained every Christmas Day since then. But when I pounded the streets in 2001 on so holy a day, I did so with a particular goal in mind. I had entered the 2002 London Marathon.

It was my friend Amy who inspired me to do it. She had grown up with a heart defect and had never been a runner, and yet in 2001 she completed the race. I took the decision to enter while I was still in Manchester. I approached a charity, Hope for Children, who agreed to let me run under their banner if I raised £600. Then, when I moved to London that winter, I threw myself into the most unstructured yet obsessive training regime.

I simply ran. Once or twice a day, up and down the Thames path for an hour, the same route, rain or shine. I was living with Tim and Easy in Putney – or rather sleeping on some cushions on their floor – and was on an internship with Card Aid (i.e. selling Christmas cards). All of it was fun, like being back at uni. None of it really encouraged the sort of training values that a credible athlete might adopt. I was eating properly by now. Not necessarily a balanced diet, but it was a lot healthier, as was my perspective on it. That might have been because I justified it with all the running I was doing.