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- [00:01]
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- [01:09]
Hanif Qureshi
Hi, come in. Welcome to Fashion Neurosis. Hanif Qureshi.
- [01:19]
Thanks, pa. It's a great pleasure. I've been looking forward to this, doing this with you. I'm so envious of all the other people you've been invited to have on. So I'm glad finally I'm here.
- [01:31]
Me too. Can you tell me what clothes you're wearing and why you chose these particular ones?
- [01:38]
Today I'm going to look down and see what I am wearing. I think I've got a blue sweater on, but I didn't choose my clothes. I don't really choose my clothes anymore. I've got two carers in the morning, one who lives in and another one, usually a stranger who pops in at 8 o'clock in the morning and they get me dressed. When I was younger and before my accident, I went to a lot of trouble, some trouble at least the with what I wore. And I, I, I thought about it and changed my clothes during the day. Since my accident and since my body became so injured and different, I've kind of given up thinking about really what, what I wear or what I look like. Because when I see myself, I'm so appalled and ashamed that I, I have to look away. So I'm not really aware of what I'm wearing. But Isabella chooses my clothes and I try and wear plain stuff because I don't want to be looked at anymore, to be honest, to tell you the truth.
- [02:52]
I mean, you don't look like you haven't taken trouble. So Isabella's doing a good job. I Feel like you're looking like you normally do. You know, you look like you care about how you're out and about. And I wondered if there's anything that you do like to wear that you feel represents you as you've always been.
- [03:19]
I don't think about that anymore, really, because I don't care about it and I don't want to be looked at, I don't want to be seen because when I see photographs of myself, I see myself in a. In a wheelchair. The worst thing is being in Tesco's, tell you the truth. They've got these huge screens. Tesco's is one of my favorite places, but they've got these huge screens and when you're going up the aisle, you see yourself in your wheelchair like a little beetle progressing up the. Up, up the aisle. And of course, when you're in Tesco's and you're looking around, you can only see you're sort of dog's eye level of everything. And you see yourself in a wheelchair going up the aisle. It's a horrible thing to have to see. Yeah, but I can, I've still got my brain and my mind and I can think and write and do that is useful. That keeps me going because you're one.
- [04:24]
Of our greatest contemporary British writers and you're a novelist, a playwright, you've written screenplays, including the Oscar nominated My Beautiful Laundrette, which is one of my favorite films. In December 2022, you fainted and woke up on the floor in a pool of blood, paralyzed from the neck downwards. And almost immediately you started writing and dictated to your partner, Isabella. And writing, you've said, has kept you connected to wanting to stay alive.
- [05:05]
Is that, yeah, it's really important to me to write, to do stuff. Every day I get up, when I finally get my clothes on, I, I like to go to work and I like to work on my blog, which I do every day with my now I do it with Carlos, my second eldest son. He comes to the house every day at 10 o'clock and we write the, the blog. And if we're not doing the blog, I do the, the film. We're doing a movie of Shattered or I do something else. It's really important to me to, you know, not to abandon the idea of myself as an artist, as a writer, which is what I am. And I need to remain otherwise, you know, I'm just a broken body. I mean, most people who have had spinal cord injuries, they've fallen over or fallen out of bed or Dived into an empty swimming pool or whatever and ruined their bodies. They can't go back to work, most of them.
- [06:11]
Yeah.
- [06:12]
If you're a truck driver, you can't go back to work, etc. But I can work. I need to work for my dignity, for my sense of myself and not being a useless person, that I. That I've got some dignity, which is my contribution, which is. Or I can earn a living and support Isabella and just do something useful in the world. It's really became much more important to me after the accident.
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Yeah.
- [06:42]
When I was in the Jambali hospital after the accident, few days after the accident, really, Isabella would sit at the end of the bed and she would type the blogs into her phone and then we would start putting them on substack and people would start reading them. And it went round and it got bigger and bigger very quickly. And that was very gratifying because you're, you know, you're lying alone in a hospital bed, you've had this devastating accident, you're completely traumatized, you think you're going to die, but at the same time you can communicate with a big audience.
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Yeah.
- [07:20]
At the same time, I designed for myself a new way of writing, which was the blog, which I'd never written a blog before. It's a kind of the mixture between a sort of mission statement and a diary. And so I just wrote down any that was happening to me. Memories, things about my dad and my mom, things, things about being in Bromley in the 60s and what was happening to me that day, what was happening to my body, what was happening with the physios, with the nurses and so on. So it was like discovering a new form of writing, even as I was on the edge of death. And it's incredible to be creative at a time like that. But then you think, if I can't be creative now, when am I going to be creative? You know, you can't wait for ideal conditions.
- [08:12]
Yeah. I mean, your writing just seems better than ever. I've been reading the blog ever since you started and I've read your book and. Have you ever written with someone else before? Because I watched a little clip of you and Carlo and him arguing about a word and why you should use another one. And it was so exhilarating, it was great.
- [08:36]
It's a brand new thing for me. Bella, it never occurred to me that you could write with anyone else before. I mean, me and Carlo, we write the sentences together and then we argue about everything, the paragraphs and so on. But these are very Productive conversations. Yeah, they're really good conflicts we have.
- [08:57]
They're so. It was so interesting listening to that and it was clear what you were both going for and driving at and how.
- [09:06]
Yeah.
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Everything that you both said to each other was making. Improving it. And as a reader, it's so immediate, the experience, and it's so enjoyable and so revelatory. It's, well, fantastic.
- [09:24]
He's really tough. Yeah, he does what is horrible, actually, what he does. He does something called pushback, what I'd never previously come in contact with, which means he argues about everything and he says, oh, dad, dad, this is so disappointing. You've said this before, you know, I can't. I don't want to hear another word about Bromley in the 1960s, stuff like that. So it makes me do new stuff all the time and it's really hard work. But we have long conversations, conversations which we would never have had in normal circumstances, about everything.
- [10:01]
Yeah.
- [10:02]
Sex, about immigration, about politics, about Tesco, about trivial stuff and. And big stuff. But it means that I can write stuff that I haven't written before. And I really like the idea of it being quite random, what we're going to write. I mean, I might write about a trip to the shops or I might write a political piece about me becoming a fascist, for instance. Yes, I wrote recently, I read that. So it's a great new form that I discovered after having my accident.
- [10:35]
Yeah, it's very exacting. It's amazing to find a new way of writing at a certain point in your life when you're so established and people love your work and look forward to what you're doing. And it's like you've got this sudden new dimension, this edge that goes along with having been in the worst accident. You know, you could never want this to happen.
- [11:06]
Well, you could say that trauma, or what happened to me has created an opportunity for me to do something new. I wouldn't have done this if I hadn't got smashed my head in on Isabella's floor in Rome.
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Yeah.
- [11:26]
But it creates an opportunity for you to do something new. I mean, I regret what happened. I wish it hadn't happened, but it, It. It's given me a new lo of life with the writing and the opportunity to write with Carla or to write with Isabella and to write stuff that I wouldn't have said previously. So it's a. It's a. It's. It's a late stage flow, flowering, you might say, that's come out of this terrible occurrence. But also. Yeah, I mean, the terrible occurrences is where we're all going and the kindness of strangers, of the carers and the nurses and the doctors, we're all going there. So I feel I'm writing about a common experience, one that most people have had in their families. I. You know, most of us have had accidents in our families and people have died or where you're going yourself as well.
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Yeah.
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And how you'll cope with your own deterioration and your own eventual death.
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Can I ask you about clothes and whether there was a piece of clothing you were obsessed with as a child that you felt that would somehow change your life?
- [12:41]
Oh, yeah. Have other people have that?
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Yeah.
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I was very excited when I was. I was. I used to do my paper round in Bromley, get up at 6:30, go to the shop and hold these. This big bag of papers around the streets. I got very excited because I used to read all the papers and I used to like reading newspapers and still do. Anyway, one of the reasons I was doing this paper round was to buy clothes. And what I really wanted was to buy a pair of Levi jeans. £4 I think they were at the time. And I was saving up to get these Levi jeans. And I was very excited when I got my Levi jeans because the boy that I was in love with, guy called David Goatley, who I. I still in contact with today, in fact, he told me that I should wear Levi's jeans. And so I got these Levi jeans and then I got. I was a hippie. Everyone in the school was in a gang, so you were either a mod, a rocker, a skinhead or a hippie. And I was a hippie and I wore jeans. I wear a purple shirt and my dad got me some kind of Indian waistcoat with, you know, kind of glitter things on it. I was very proud of this girl. And I'd walk around Bromley High street, which is what you had to do.
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Yeah.
- [14:17]
Walk around Romney High street on Saturday afternoon in your clubber. And so I saved up to get this clobber. And then after that we. We used to take the train up to the King's Road.
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Oh, God.
- [14:32]
And we'd walk up down the King's Road and King's Road on the Saturdays. You probably remember it.
- [14:37]
Yeah.
- [14:37]
Great incredible parade of people in their best clothes and there were these incredible boutiques in the King's Road. I remember thinking, this is it, this is London. This is where I want to be, you know, it's fantastic parade of incredible people wearing beautiful clothes.
- [14:56]
Yeah. I used to get the bus up there because I lived in Sussex and I'd get the bus, the number 11 bus, to visit my friend who lived in Poulton Square at the end, near World's End. But I became obsessed with what the bus conductors were wearing. And these gray suits with a pale blue shirt. This is what I remember, whether it was actually. And a tie. And that was the sort of first bit of evolution of kind of my. My look, I think I. I love. I love that journey down the King's Road and. Yeah, but you. Did you really start your career, your writing career in the 70s as a pornography writer?
- [15:43]
Because I started writing porn around. It was really around after I left university. I left Kings, where I read philosophy. But it was Year of Punk, was the year of the Sex Pistols and the Clash. I think it was 76 or 77. I can't remember. We'd left university and we were living in squats and there's cold water flats and stuff around West Kensington. And everybody was hustling, you know, working as hookers, stealing. London was really rough in those days. And I used to write for magazines that had, you know, naked girls and. But in those days, they used to have writing in the magazines as well. Unusual that people would actually want to read pornography. It's completely absurd now. And I used to write stories for them, but I'd also write serious stuff, like about the Marquis de Sade. I remember writing a long thing about Aubrey Beardsley, who I used to love. So I started to make a living doing the. Doing this stuff. It was a good introduction, but it's a stupid form, porn, because there's nothing you can do with it, really. That's interesting. So then I stopped that and then I started to write, like, early drafts of the Buddha of Suburbia, I guess.
- [17:15]
Right.
- [17:15]
Which was a novel I've been trying to write for years, but I couldn't. What have we, 76. I started writing it really, the end of. The end of the 80s, and I.
- [17:27]
Wrote it properly because you mentioned. And I think this was much later. But you. You knew JG Ballard would. He writes very well about sex. And I'm just reading Crash at the moment, so.
- [17:41]
Oh, yeah, that's a great book. I didn't know him at all, but I've just written a blog about Shepherd's Bush and the Gold Hall Road and so on, where I spend every day now roaming around in my wheelchair. But I remember I used to see JG Bella walking around Shepherd's Bush, and it used to freak me out completely. I think there's the world's greatest writers. He's walking down my road and apparently he had a. A girlfriend or a lover who lived above McDonald's on Shepherd's Bush Green. This was according to legend. So I was very impressed by that and. And love. Still love his work.
- [18:21]
Yes. I've never read anything to. I've seen films, but I've. I saw Crash and I. And then I started reading it now and it's. I. I wish I'd read it years ago because it's so interesting and. But you were at school in Bromley with Billy Idol and he gave you your first tab of acid and you said that he made you throw the watch that your dad had bought for you, age 16, out of the window on the train, saying, time doesn't matter.
- [18:55]
Yeah, I think he got that. Bill Broad was his name then. He used to wear little round glasses and a duffel coat. God, I think he got that from Easy Rider, actually. But Bromley was the most incredibly boring place and hell on earth on Sunday afternoons in the rain. But actually it was really creative as well. I mean, a lot of the kids that I knew form bands. A lot of punk came out of Bromley.
- [19:25]
Yeah, the Bromley Contingent. That was a big punk thing.
- [19:29]
Yeah. I was at school with the Romney contingent. I knew all those boys. I'm still in touch with some of them. And then we came to London and started hanging around Vivian Westwood's shop, which was then called Sex at the End of the King. King's Road. And all the pubs and bars around there were full of punks on Fridays and Saturdays. And so although Romney was really dull, there was a lot of opportunity to be creative. And the Bromley Contingent, I mean, those kids went into fashion. They worked for Vivian Westwood Photography. They were in bands. It was a very creative time. Despite the fact it was so deathly dull in Romney. It was quite close to London. So you come up to London, go up the Kings Road, buy clothes and get involved in. In what was happening really at the end of the 60s and then into punk in the mid-70s.
- [20:24]
I wonder why it produced so many creative people. Cause it really did like all. I mean, obviously David Bowie as well and you and my friend Susie Cave. And there's just a lot of very groundbreaking people that came from Bromley. And I remember seeing Billy Idol in there used to be this punk club called the Vortex. Did you ever go then?
- [20:49]
No.
- [20:49]
He was so good looking that everyone slightly looked down on him. Cause he was just like. He looked like a film star. He was. It was just absurd how good looking he Was so everyone was a bit snoot, sort of contemptuous.
- [21:03]
Yeah, well, it was a very creative time because of what happened earlier, which was then called the 60s, you know, and this explosion of talent and creativity in the 60s. But it really began to expand by the 70s. Everyone was doing it, everyone was dressing up, you know, David Bowie had been to the school that I went to and he obviously, 10 years, he was 10 years older than us, but he had been a huge influence. Everybody thought, if he can be in a band, he can do it. He's so unique and interesting. We can start dressing up and doing stuff, you know.
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Yeah.
- [21:41]
And in those days, certainly in, in, in, in and around London, there was much more social mobility than there is now. You really felt that, you know, you could join a band or become a photographer or get into fashion and you could leave Bromley behind and become a new person.
- [22:00]
Yeah.
- [22:00]
And reinvent yourself and then get involved in the creative industries. There's much more flux socially than the probably is now. I mean, I was a, you know, a mixed race kid from the suburbs and I thought it. I can be a writer. Yeah, I can be a great writer. Even though there have been never been any writers like, like me before in the, in, in the uk, in Britain. I thought, I can have a go at that. I can do that. I didn't. It didn't seem to me to be insurmountable that I could do that. I could do that, you know, because.
- [22:37]
Bowie wrote this, the soundtrack for your first novel, Buddha of Suburbia.
- [22:42]
He wrote the. The music for the TV version, the BBC version. Yeah, of the Buddha Suburbia. That was Roger Michelle with brilliant Naveen Andrews playing me. Bo was very keen to do it. He asked me if he could do it.
- [22:58]
Wow. How did that happen?
- [23:01]
He said to me, he said, I thought you'd never ask. I said, ask what? That I can do the music for the Buddha of Suburbia. I said, I didn't think you'd want to do it. He said, I've never done it before. He said he was going to do the music for the man who Fell To Earth, but he was too tired at the end to do it, so he, he offered to do it and he was very keen to do it and he worked really hard on it, actually, and his album the Buddha Suburb is a really good album, one of his best albums. I. I actually think he made an album at the end of all the bits of music that he had composed for the soundtrack.
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God, yeah. Amazing. I must get that.
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Yeah, yeah. It's Fantastic record.
- [23:45]
Because I remember once you saying that you'd written a song for him, but he's.
- [23:50]
I wrote. He asked me to write the lyrics for. There's a song on the album called the Buddha Suburbia. And I said, how do you want to do this? He said, well, I do the cut ups. So he said, write all the words down. So I went home, went through the Buddha of Suburbia and wrote all the. Wrote phrases and words and bits of dialogue and all the stuff. Then I took it back to him and he got his scissors out and he did the cutting up. God. And then he wrote the song around the. The. The words that I presented to him and he. He got this cut up method from Burroughs and Brian. Yeah. Which was that you cut up and move it around and you create sentences. It's very effective way of creating new sentences, new ideas.
- [24:39]
Is that why the songs, they have this kind of unexpected. Well, they're just so brilliant, the unexpected phrases or things people are doing.
- [24:52]
Yeah. You can create new ideas and new stuff out of the random mixture of different words that you then, you know, move around and cut up and put and align together. I used to do it with Kia, my son. We used to write poems like that. It's really effective, actually.
- [25:11]
I must try. Such a good idea.
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Yeah.
- [25:16]
And growing up you received a lot of. You've written about receiving a lot of racist abuse, being of Pakistani origin. And I wondered if you dressed to be anonymous or to attract attention as a way of dealing with it and maintaining your identity.
- [25:33]
Well, in Bromley at that time, at the end of the 60s, 70s, it was quite violent. There were a lot of Skinners around and I knew all the Skinners. I've been to school with them. I knew their families and so on. And I was a hippie. So you're in double trouble. Not only were you a packy, but you're a hippie as well. You know, we had long hair and. And wore, you know, loom pants and all that stuff. So you're in double danger of being chased around. It was quite hair raising. I mean, it really was. It was quite rough down in Bromley, particularly in the 70s when the end, the National Front were down there, you know, and the BMP were marching around all the time. Gangs of skinheads and so on. But I knew a lot of those boys, as I said in my Beautiful Laundrette, you know, he's in love with a Skinner played by Daniel Day Lewis. And it kind of represents a good friend of mine I was at school with who later on, became a skinhead and, you know, wore a Ben Sherman and Levi's and the big boots and, you know, the Crom B and all that stuff. And about how, you know, we were really close friends, we were really close to each other, and how awkward it was when he became a skinhead and discovered that I was, in fact, you know, a pucky. And that was the basis of that movie, really.
- [27:07]
It was so romantic how you showed the change, you know, it just. I. It's just so brilliantly done. I love it. It's incredibly moving and convincing, you know.
- [27:22]
Well, I wrote it originally as just a friendship. I remember I was in Pakistan. I was writing it. It was about two mates, one who's a Pakistani, one who's a skinhead, and they were running a laundrette, et cetera. But when I made it romantic when. When they had a kiss, it really. The film really kicked off. It really came alive in some way.
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And the dancing, so magical and poetic.
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Incredible. Yeah. That was Stephen Fraser's idea. Beautiful.
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That's so good.
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Yeah.
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You've written about gay and bisexual characters at a time when it was taboo. But there's a lack of shame in your writing. And I wondered how you'd manage to avoid this cursed condition.
- [28:12]
Well. Well, when I wrote My Beautiful Laundrot, which was around, I was going to say, the early to mid-80s, there was a lot of gay going on in London at that time. You'll remember it, particularly what Derek Jarman was doing. And also then there were the Merchant Ivory films quite soon after that, which was posh gay bumming.
- [28:38]
Yes.
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But I wanted to do the, you know, a bit of rough gay bumming and the big gay sweatshop. They've been a lot. Simon Calla and what they were doing. So there's a lot of gay stuff going on all the time in. In. In London. And when we were punks, we used to go to all the gay clubs. I used to remember the Sombrero.
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Yeah.
- [29:00]
And Ken High Street. We used to go there.
- [29:02]
Yeah.
- [29:03]
Louisa's club, which was a. Louisa's was great lesbian club. So the gay scene and the punk scene were quite adjacent to one another, so it wasn't such a big step to write a gay relationship. But in My Beautiful Laundrette. But as you say, it hadn't really been done in the cinema. It would have been quite difficult to do in America, for instance. No studio would have ever made a film about a gay skinhead, for instance. But you could do it in those days. You could do it on Channel four because Channel four was new and it just started. And you could do innovative and weird on Channel 4 because nobody ever watched Channel 4.
- [29:44]
Yeah, they were fantastic. They.
- [29:47]
It was a very good period in British cinema.
- [29:50]
Yeah.
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Because Channel 4 invested a lot of money in films that Derek Jarman made, Neil Jordan made, Stephen Freeze obviously made several films for them. Ken Loach of course. Etc. It was a very lively period in British cinema, actually funded by television.
- [30:06]
Yeah, it was wonderful. And who did you look up to, style wise, at that time in the.
- [30:13]
In the, in the 70s? Yeah, well, you know, it was a big dressing up period, you know, because after punk, everyone got bored with wearing safety pins and black, black leather. Everybody started dressing up and, and it was the club we used to go to called the Blitz, which was in Hobon, which was a big dressing up place where Boy George ran the cloak room. But I really stopped dressing up then. I wasn't going to wear all that gear.
- [30:45]
Yeah. New romantic stuff.
- [30:47]
Yeah, yeah. I was not going to wear that stuff and I wasn't going to walk around, you know, full face makeup and all of that because, you know, I was becoming a serious writer then. Writers don't need to wear makeup because nobody ever, nobody ever sees a writer. You sit, you know, your desk in your pants.
- [31:07]
Yeah.
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And that's your, your, your job. So by then I started to lose interest in, in clothes and then it was the 80s, which was really good fun, you know, and Soho started lots of more restaurants and Soho clubs and soho. There's a lot of television money, advertising money. So the who changed really between the end of the 70s and, and the 80s, but by the 80s I'd really kind of lost interest in, in what I was wearing. Was much more interested in, in other people and being with creative people and starting to become a serious writer. That was much more important to me then than, you know, parading around in gear.
- [31:56]
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- [32:56]
Hanif Qureshi
And if you fancy someone and you don't like something they're wearing, does it kill your attraction to them?
- [33:03]
That's a very interesting question because obviously because you, as you suggest, you're looking at people all the time, you are looking at them. What you're looking at is their face, their gestures, their eyes, their mouth and so on. But you're looking at their clothes. And every day every single person in the world chooses their clothes, don't they?
- [33:26]
Yeah.
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And make a choice. They're going to be looked at and they must think, what are people going to think when they, when they look at me? So, yeah, you would choose a person, a lover, a friend. I mean, if they wore hideous clothes, would you, would you dislike them? But you don't, do you?
- [33:49]
Some people, I think, are more allergic to certain things than others. But it's such an interesting thing how, even if it does put you off, whether you decide to override that or not.
- [34:02]
With my girlfriends, whoever they were over the years, I wouldn't want them to look a mess. I want them to look what I would think of as being good, that they would care for how they looked, would think about it. That would be important, I guess for a man. I don't know whether it matters so much for a woman, whether she would care what you wore or what you looked at. But I think for a man it would be quite important that the woman had thought about how she looked.
- [34:34]
I think for a woman it's important, but not for that reason. It's more like having a kind of almost physical response of withdrawing or embarrassment. I suppose in the end it's always dependent on the person because someone you like can wear these terrible things, even really quite sort of violently off putting. And you just think, oh, oh, well, you know, and if you don't like them, you just think, I must never see that person again.
- [35:10]
I guess in the 1950s, everybody wore the, the same thing. All the, all the mothers on my street where my, where we lived in Bromley, they would all wear the same clothes. They'd usually wear a penny as well. I remember my mom always wore A penny.
- [35:26]
Yeah.
- [35:26]
But by the 60s, clothes were cheap then by the 60s, and by the 60s, people used to choose their clothes and throw them away. I mean, in the 50s, you wore the same pair of trousers for 10 years and you'd mend stuff. You'd even mend your socks, you know, I remember Mum sewing up your socks and stuff. So we lived. We were really at the beginning of a kind of the consumerist age when it came to clothes, of just buying stuff cheaply and chucking it away and then buying something the week after and the week after that. But that was a totally new thing. You know, my grandparents would wear the same shoes and get them mended and mended and mended for. For 25 years, you know, the same pair of boots. So it was a new era for us. And Bowie was a great example of that, you know, that he would change his look all the time. And you think, I can change my look, I can go to a shop and come out looking completely different, become somebody else. But I don't think that had ever really happened before for. For ordinary people in British fashion. I hadn't thought about that. But the idea that you could transform yourself and become somebody else for other people, it's quite a new thing.
- [36:34]
Yeah. It's really interesting thinking a bit like that.
- [36:38]
Yeah.
- [36:39]
I remember hearing about you and Stephen meeting up every Friday since you'd made My Beautiful Laundrette, and having. I heard that you had a salon and that you met and talked about ideas, and I thought, oh, my God, I've got to go. And then I heard about where it was and I appeared. And you and Stephen had just had this amazing conversation. You were talking about what was going on inside the mind of David Blunkett's dog, his guide dog. And I wrote some. I interviewed you both for something I was doing for another magazine. It was just so inventive and exciting and I wondered, how did you meet Stephen Frears?
- [37:29]
Well, I met him because I went around his house. I found out where he lived on Talbot Road in those days. I got his address and so I went around there and I gave him the script of My Beautiful Launderette. So he rang me up and told me to come round and I went round. And then later, when we were working together, I used to see my analyst every Friday at 10:00. So I used to meet Stephen every Friday at 9:00, just off the Portobello Road. And we used to sit together and gossip and have coffee, and then we'd see other Friends walking up and down the Portobello Road. So we then started what you call this salon, which is basically just a bunch of mates having breakfast together. And it's. This was, this has carried on for 20 years or 25 years. There's usually about, you know, seven, eight, nine people, 10 people. And some people come regularly, some people come every few months. People get really pissed off with each other because there are a lot of arguments and lots, yeah, lots of disputes, particularly among the women they, they, they take against each other. Or someone ring me up and say, I can't stand it, if so and so is there, I'm not coming back. They can off. Yeah, and there are a lot of big disputes, particularly about Israel and Gaza and so on, and people try and ban each other from coming and so on. I said, you can't bang someone from coming into a cafe and sitting down and having a cup of coffee and so on. So it does get a bit hair raising at times. But other times it's really peaceful and everybody sits down, they gossip for an hour, they have coffee, they eat a croissant, they talk. It's really fun and beautiful and people become quite devoted to each other. They're used to seeing each other every Friday morning for 25 years. You see the same people, bits of conversation and people drop out, new people come along. It's a really beautiful thing, but it happens spontaneously. We never try to set it up or organize it. People just, just, just come and you realize you've been sitting with these people for 20 years and you know them so well after such a long time, you should come back. But it was great when you used.
- [39:48]
To come back in the day. I know I work so hard, it's hard to get there. But yeah, I will come back. I'll go when you go next if you do.
- [39:59]
Yeah, it's difficult for me because they don't. I don't get up till it takes two hours for me and the carers to get me dressed and get me ready to get up. So I can't get there at 9 o'clock in the morning. But we could start doing it a bit later.
- [40:17]
Yeah, let's do that. Because we both go to the same analyst too and you've been going for longer than me and I remember you saying once, he's hot and he is. And I know you speak on the phone now, but I wondered, did you ever think about what you were going to wear when you went to see him? Because when I first started seeing him, I used to spend ages Composing my outfit, even my underwear, preparing myself.
- [40:52]
For.
- [40:52]
This visit, this precious visit.
- [40:55]
Well, I'm quite shocked to hear that, Bella. And I'm sure analysts might also be shocked to hear that you're thinking about your pants when you go down to, to, to. Well, you're undressing, really, in terms of your unconscious. You're, you are naked. You're showing him everything that, that you are. So I can see that what you wear could be a metaphor, but I lie on the couch. I don't, I don't look at him. I don't even remember what he looks like, to be honest. I just go in, or used to before my accident, lie down on the couch, start chattering on about whatever is on my mind, my dreams and beefs with people, etc. Etc. I don't think what I'm gonna wear when I go to Buy Analyst, but I, I think about what I'm gonna say and what I want to talk about. And I have to say, talking to my analysts on the phone on Mondays, which is what I do now once a week, I find it really creative. I don't know if you do very, I find it very creative in terms of what I'm writing, you know, and I, I, I don't know what I'm going to do next week in terms of my blog, but when I have a conversation with him, I often get ideas about what I will then write about the next week or the week after terms of the blog. So just hearing his voice and talking to him on the phone and during the silences that there are in analysis, as, you know, I find that really creative. And I, he's always helped me with my writing. And I know he's got a lot of writers as, as, as, as, as patients, you know, he's, he's known as the, the, the writing whisperer, you know, because it really helps us. Yeah. With our creativity.
- [42:47]
Yeah.
- [42:47]
You can think during a, a session without him and I, I find that very, really helpful, actually.
- [42:55]
Yeah.
- [42:55]
A kind of collaboration that I have with him. I know other writers feel the same.
- [43:01]
He's brilliant at that because I remember the first, when I first went to see him and I. Part of my motivation, it was about two or three years before my dad died. And I said, I don't want to fall apart when he dies. Cause I'm so attached to him. And he's such a big prism for how I think about life and feel about life. And I remember what I was wearing as well. I was wearing this Tom Ford like a Cowhide coat, chocolate brown.
- [43:35]
Oh, yeah.
- [43:36]
And I remember. Or I sort of made some sort of apology about my coat. And he went, I think it's fantastic. Great, I'm in. And I also remember that he. I said, I. I feel like I have some sort of fear of failure. And he said, I actually think you have fear of success. And anyway, that was about 14 or 15 years ago now. But, yeah, he helps me. I don't know. He's so intelligent. I feel as though he makes me more intelligent and have more confidence in my ideas.
- [44:15]
That's great. That's the whole point of him existing, really, to make you feel like that. And I think he does that for anyone who comes into contact with. And I think there's a good reason that many of his patients, and of course, several of whom are our friends, many of his patients, they just keep on going. I think I'm the longest. I've been going for, I think about 31 years.
- [44:42]
Really?
- [44:43]
Yeah. God, I'm not even cured yet. I said to him the other day, and I fucking cured you. How long does it take for me to be cured? You seem to think that I wouldn't ever be cured. I don't want to be cured.
- [44:54]
No.
- [44:55]
Of loving him and going to him and finding him useful. Freud would have been appalled. Freud didn't think that you would go to an analyst for 31 years. You know, with Freud, you'd be in and out after six months, or maybe a year, or you go for a few months and then you go back later, three years later for a few months, so on. But it. You wouldn't go for 31 years. It would have been a madness to think about that because he would have thought. I'm sure Freud would have thought that would become like a kind of excessive dependence, you know, or a kind of addiction. I mean, what are you. What the fuck are you going to talk about for 31 years? But actually, I can tell you from experience there's plenty to say.
- [45:36]
Yeah, I'm glad he's not a Freudian in that sense. There's always something to say, and he seems to. It's that odd, that relationship of you're paying to see somebody. But I feel very loved by him and I love him.
- [45:53]
So, yeah, he's a very loving man.
- [45:58]
In your book Shattered, which was published last October, you end up analyzing the dreams of your psychiatrist. Can you describe what his dreams? I remember they were something to do with Trump.
- [46:13]
When I was in the rehab at the end in Stanmore, there was a psychiatrist There and I was really angry. He came to see me and I was really angry. I've been in hospital for nearly a year and I was in a bad way and I was very, very grumpy. Anyway, this psychiatrist came to see me. I thought I might as well meet him anyway, despite the fact I've spent much of my life in therapy. But of course, psychiatrists are not therapists. They don't really. Not really interested in listening to you. This psychiatrist, I, I really liked him. But he only had two. Basically had two drugs. You know, he either gives you antidepressants or if you're crazy, it gives you anti. Psychotics. God, otherwise there's nothing he, he can do with you. And he kept saying to me, you're clinically depressed, aren't you? I'd say you'd be clinically depressed if you were paralyzed, you know, and I lost the use of your arms and legs and we're basically a talking vegetable, which is what I've, I've become. He said, fair enough. All he wanted to do was to up my dose of antidepressants. So I said, listen, you can keep on coming to see me, but you know, we've got to have a proper conversation. Why don't you tell me your dreams? And then.
- [47:46]
So good.
- [47:47]
So he used to tell me his dreams. All of his, all of his dreams were about Donald Trump. And I said, you love Donald Trump, don't you? You love Donald Trump and you want to be Donald Trump. About. Millions of people want to be Donald Trump because he's a complete. He does whatever he wants, he says whatever he wants. And he's the best powerful person almost in the world. And so we started to have long conversations with the psychiatrist about how inhibited he was, how straight he was and how he hated it and wanted to be more Trump, like I. E. More. More crazy. And so we had these quite fun conversations in my room in, in, in the hospital. It passed, it passed the time. But it was a very odd situation where in fact I was treating him for depression rather than the other way around.
- [48:42]
So. Good.
- [48:43]
Yeah, that was the situation with me and the psychiatrist.
- [48:47]
It's just wonderful. I mean, the way you write about the situation you're in and you're never sentimental or self piteous and you're very matter of fact, even when you're describing how bad you feel and this part of yourself seems stronger than ever and you seem more loving than you I've ever known you to seem. And I wondered if it was harder to show love before the accident.
- [49:19]
Well, I was a much more private person before the accident. And I had friends and I saw friends and so on, but I wasn't so dependent on other people as I. As I am now, because I can't do anything now, really. I can't use my hand, so I can't. I can't, you know, fiddle around with the computer. I. I don't really listen to music. I've just got a lot of spare time, so. And I've made lots of new friends in the last few months with people who I knew vaguely before but become really close to, because I have much, much longer conversations with people for hours and hours now than I did before. When you'd meet someone, you know, in the apartment, have a beer, and that would be that. So my life has changed in terms of my relationships with other people, which are much more intense because I'm so needy now. You know, people would come to my hospital, mostly women, actually, and they would spend the day there and then bring me food, and then they'd read me the newspapers, and then they give me head massage. And their generosity and kindness was so impressive, but I was so needy, I needed it. I was desperate. Sitting in a fucking hospital room on your own for hours and hours alone, literally staring at the wall. It was the most horrific situation. The despair, the sense that your body was destroyed, that your life had been ruined. You know, you felt absolutely like. And so you really needed people to gather around you and show love, their love for you, really. And people were incredibly loving and still are towards me in a way that obviously you never saw before, didn't need before. So it's been a complete switch in that sense in terms of my relationships with other people.
- [51:15]
In January, you wrote in your blog, to be motivated, there must be an imagining, a store of images that nurture our desire. And I wondered which of those desires motivated you to be so connected to life as it is now.
- [51:34]
That's a very good question. It's really the desire to keep living, you know, it's the will to life. You know, when I go to bed at the end of the day and I start to go to sleep, I want to go through in my mind what I've done during the day, who I've seen, who I've talked to, what I've done with them, what I've written, you know, what progress I've made. Because when you've been so close to death and when I had my accident was sitting upside my head in Isabella's apartment in Rome, and I thought this. I really thought, this is it. I'm going to die, mate. I'd lost contact with my body. There was blood on the floor around me, this increasing puddle of blood that was coming out of my forehead. And I thought, this is it. This is. And this is a terrible way to die. Falling flat on your face. You know, it's a bit embarrassing. I wanted to, you know, to be at least shot by terrorists or something a bit more exciting. I thought it was a bit wretched, but I thought there are still things I want to do, books I want to write, conversations I want to have that I'm still engaged in. So the will to live has. Hasn't left me. It's stronger in me now, I think.
- [53:07]
I mean, you've got this ability to make people feel filled with hope about their own lives through what you're doing with your life and this urgency and this incredible output. And the way you're writing is so brilliant and involving and engaging. And you have a lot of writer friends who visit you regularly. Zadie Smith and I think Salman Rushdie calls you most days. And do you find the effect that you're having on us? Your friend is flowing back to you and you're enjoying the feeling.
- [53:44]
I'm not. I'm not aware of what I can do for other people, but I'm certainly aware of how they can lift me up and how dependent you are on other people for inspiration. And you. I really need to plug into their energy because after what happened to me, it's so easy to fall into despair. It's so easy to give up, you know, And I don't want to give up. I'm not depressed. I said to. This psychiatrist, used to say to me all the time, oh, you're clinically depressed. I said, I'm not really. Actually, I'm depressed about what's happened to me. But in my spirit, I'm still going, you know, and I still have the desire to live, which is, as you read from that passage from. From Shatter, which is to do with an image of having good conversations or image of eating well or an image of enjoying a book or watching a movie. These things still fill me with pleasure and with desire. When I was really low, I would talk to my analyst, and he kept me going during that period as well. Even though I only spoke to him once a week or sometimes I speak to him for just 10 minutes at a time, he managed to keep me going without any factual stuff about, you know, a hope or encouragement or uplift.
- [55:07]
What kind of Things did he say? Because that's such an interesting point. It's, you know, without these cliches of hope and, you know, all the sort of platitudes. He never does that. And you don't do that either. And you give so much energetic force to your friends through what you do and how. How you write and how well you write and how. How kind of.
- [55:37]
I think it. Miller. I think it's to do with remaining curious about things, wanting to know things and wanting to see things and wanted to talk to people about things. Being fascinated by other people and still having a libido for life, you know, to know other people, to listen to them. I really look forward to visits from people who come around my house and we sit and we have tea and we talk, and I really look forward to hearing them and. And engage them with them. And people come around, they tell you such weird. I mean, mad, crazy stuff they tell you all the time. A woman came around my house the other day who I hadn't seen for about five years, and she was married to a Russian guy who tried to murder her. I said, how's the Russian guy? She said to me. He said, oh, he's in prison. He murdered both his parents. He slashed their throats. I said, oh, why did he slash the throat of his mother? And she said, because the mother left the window open. And I thought, that's a great story. I wouldn't have heard that normally.
- [56:47]
God.
- [56:48]
And so you hear some mad stuff out there, which I really love, because I can't go very far in the wheelchair. You know, I go up the Goldhawk Road, I go around the neighborhood and. And stuff, but I can't go very far. But I can go very far in terms of people's psyches, in terms of getting to know people.
- [57:08]
Oh, you're brilliant at it, Hanif. And thank you so much for being on Fashion Neurosis. It's just been a total joy to.
- [57:16]
Well, we haven't talked much about fashion, actually. I forgot. I thought you'd be asking me about my trousers.
- [57:22]
Well, I did, but we did talk about fashion, but a bit, yeah. In a way. It's like the whole thing about fashion is it's just the means to be the best of yourself, if you get it. If you can enjoy fashion and use it as a kind of. As a tool, really, you know, for anything, even writing. It's like I find if I'm writing, I mean, obviously I'm not a writer, but I don't want to be too comfortable or too much of a slob or the rest of my personality will start evaporating. So I have to have some tension. I saw an interview with you, and you were wearing a shirt, and it was a bit like a kind of pale shirt with stripes in it. Looked really good. And I thought, you know, when you described how you see yourself and the test goes screen and how you actually look is very different. And you look just 100 vitality, which is incredible.
- [58:24]
Well, thanks, Bella. That's cheer me up. I really enjoyed our conversation. I hope other people enjoy it as well.
- [58:38]
Sa.