A class of their own ... the Zoo Weekly spread. Via Crikey

You’ve made the difficult choice to flee your homeland. Perhaps your ancestors backed the wrong horse in a centuries-old religious split, or the blood-curdling whir of hovering death-robots was getting you down. Maybe you wanted to avoid selling your children to a criminal gang threatening to destroy your only source of food or water.

But do you look hot in a bikini?

Think hard about that last one. If you answered in the affirmative, Australia’s premier humanist periodical, Zoo Weekly magazine, may have thrown you a lifeline.

In its July 16 issue, Zoo launched a competition to find ‘Australia’s Hottest Asylum Seeker’, housed in a crass breakout in the corner of a spread full of bikini-clad women on yachts titled ‘Sexiest Boat People’. The offending paragraph is indistinguishable from satire:

Independent news site Crikey picked up on the competition and a petition for an apology soon followed, something Zoo finally offered on Sunday.

The Racket tried the Zoo offices Friday, mainly to find out if the competition had yielded any entrants, but was met with an uptight, “We’re on deadline”. Zoo Weekly Australia founder Paul Merrill, though, told us to look on the bright side.

“After weeks on a dilapidated boat, there are worse things than being offered a photo shoot,” he said.

Ex-Chat editor Merrill left Zoo last year to work on a book, titled A Polar Bear Ate My Head: Misadventures in Magazines. His LinkedIn profile boasts:

I’ve run competitions to find Australia’s Randiest Nanna, Hottest Horse Dentist and Ugliest Baby, and offered prizes of a boob job, lesbian wedding, divorce, voluntary euthanasia for a loved one and time machine (a clock).

Merrill also claims to have published the only known topless shot of Dame Judi Dench, and to have recreated Osama Bin Laden’s killing with ‘hot babes’. He framed Zoo’s asylum seeker search in a political context.

“Given that we have a leader of the [Australian federal] opposition demonising all asylum seekers as potential terrorists and invaders, I think Zoo is to be applauded for finding a lighter side to the debate,” Merrill told The Racket.

He may have a point — Zoo’s profound study in tastelessness is far from the worst thing Australians have done to boat-borne asylum seekers in recent years. The island nation is not known for compassion when persecuted people undertake gruelling boat journeys to reach it. This is a perfect storm of historical irony and collective amnesia, given the country was built by ‘boat people’ who came from Britain only two centuries ago.

While the majority of Australian asylum seekers are from China and come by plane, a small but growing number come on boats, often from Indonesia. Many of those on the boats have fled overland from Iraq or Afghanistan.

You may have risked death several times, before cramming onto an unseaworthy vessel headed to Australia to seek refugee status (your right under international law). But once you board that boat, things get political — you are ‘boat people’. You are defined not by your claim to refugee status, or the distance you’ve traveled, but by the mode of transport in which you undertake the final leg of your journey.

The number of incoming ‘boat people’ has spiked in the past few years, averaging 5500 per year since 2010, up from 160 in 2008. Is the spike a response to global trends – i.e. the further destabilisation of countries like Afghanistan, Iraq and Sri Lanka – or to Australia being a ‘soft touch’? The nation’s politicians ponder the question endlessly.

For perspective, Australia accepts around 200,000 new permanent residents a year, and tolerates 50,000 visa over-stayers, many of whom are from Blighty.

Tragically, some boats sink, and can take hundreds of lives with them when they do. Since the turn of the century more than 1500 Australia-bound boat people have died at sea.

As a means of discouraging would-be boat people, successive Australian governments have elected to make life as difficult as possible for them after they arrive. Both major parties agree they should be ‘processed’ in privately-run offshore prisons (run, in fact, by Serco, which has come under criticism in the UK this month for failing to meet legal requirements on staffing levels and training in an out-of-hours GP service it runs for the NHS in Cornwall). But they can’t agree on where to put them.

Most Australian refugee policies feature the worrying syntactic construct: ‘The X Solution’. There was the ‘The Pacific Solution’, which involved detaining people on islands dotted around Australia, sometimes for years on end.

The Labor opposition spent years hounding the conservative government for their ‘inhumane’ policy of offshore processing. Now in power, Labor is trying to have them processed in Malaysia (‘The Malaysia Solution’) for reasons best surmised as “it’s not exactly what the conservatives did”. Malaysia is not a party to the 1951 Refugee Convention, one of the sticking points that has prevented the minority government from getting its policy up.

Australia ... land of heteronormative opportunity

This month, conservative opposition leader Tony Abbott – a man who is essentially a box of slogans with a pair of ears stapled to it – repeated calls for the country to revisit the ’Turn Back the Boats’ rhetoric of the previous conservative government. Under the policy, asylum boats were turned back to Indonesia by a blockade of Australian naval ships.

Abbott was asked on radio if this was the Christian thing to do (the vocal Catholic has been christened the ‘mad monk’, and once told a magazine the virginity of his three daughters was a ‘gift’). He replied that it was “[not] a very Christian thing to come in by the back door rather than the front door”, forgetting perhaps that many boat people are in fact Muslim, that many of their doors have been shot to pieces by coalition forces, and that Australia is an island, not a house.

A retired admiral who led the defence force under Howard criticised Abbott’s suggestion that boats should be turned back around, all but questioning its legality, and telling the ABC it would “drive people to very desperate measures”. Abbott responded, rather ominously, that the admiral “understands that the armed forces are under the direction of the government of the day”.

Ninety per cent of boat people that arrive in Australia are eventually found to be genuine refugees under international law.

There are currently no statistics on how many have bikini bodies.

Pitbull, AKA Mr. Worldwide, a husky-voiced rapper from Florida, will almost certainly be sent packing to Kodiak, Alaska come Sunday, as a result of a botched social media marketing campaign.

In an arrangement with Walmart and Sheets Brand energy strip, Pitbull, a short, powerful-looking man with a pugnacious face and sloping shoulders, agreed to perform at any US location with a Walmart which gets the most votes in a Facebook contest.

Hugely popular, with his trademark handsfree mic and chunky shades which make him look like the hair-trigger security detail at an Atlantic City casino, Pitbull guests on songs by the likes of Shakira and J-Lo. The rapper also shills for brands to a degree many find irksome, including writers Jon Hendren and David Thorpe.

So in response to this latest marketing campaign, Hendren (@fart) and Thorpe (@arr) started a Twitter campaign for people to vote for the most remote Walmart location in America – Kodiak island. More than 70,000 people have done so. When the competition closes on 15th July, Pitbull will likely have heard the collective call – get the hell out of here.

Downtown Kodiak

As Elba was for Napolean, so may Kodiak be a private little hell for Pitbull during the few hours he is there; a picturesque exile of the soul away from both the Miami streets and the corporate sponsors that raised him.

Nevertheless, for those still on the fence over whether or not to piss off a hard-working Floridian, consider the following:

1/ Pitbull must have a hide like a rhino. His enthusiasm for corporate sponsorship borders on the macabre. Touting product for the likes of Kodak and Budweiser, he has pimped himself out of his own free will too many times to feel any shame over this. As for his sponsors, Walmart and Sheets presumably couldn’t be happier. Every time someone ‘likes’ the idea of sending Pitbull to Kodiak, they see a photo of the rapper, gumming for the camera with an energy strip. If this exercise is a little more humiliating for the ‘talent’ than planned, well they can probably live with that.

Plus, Mr. Worldwide reportedly has a financial stake in Sheets and therefore in his own degradation.

2/ This is the kind of lyricist we’re talking about here:

‘Cause I can spit it spit it
However you want it want it
My peoples is with it with it
We about that money money
And I do anything that I have to do to get that money meng
Miami, Money is a major issue meng
They, They don’t understand

Racket writer Mark O’Connell recently argued in favour of the Ancient Greek practice of casting out annoying public figures, in a process which involved anonymously carving their names into pieces of broken pottery, called ostraka. Mark put Michelle Bachmann, Simon Cowell and Bono on his ostraka. Granted, there a lot of people who ought to join the rapper out there in Kodiak. In fact, some of them are a lot worse…

Here’s where to vote (Kodiak Walmart is zip code 99615):
http://www.facebook.com/pitbull/app_216359575057664

UPDATE: It’s official, he’s going. Dalee.

Ostraka ... Simon Cowells of Ancient Greece

The ancient Greeks hit on some very clever and durable ideas in their time. Democracy was a particularly good one. Euclidian geometry has also come in handy, as, to a lesser extent, has philosophy. It’s probably reasonable enough to say that they invented Western civilization. Some of their innovations, however, never really made it past the death of Alexander the Great. One of these is the tradition known as ostracism. The term itself, of course, is one we still use today, but we use it only in a more or less metaphorical sense. When we say that someone has been ostracized, we are saying that what has happened to them is a little like what used to happen in ancient Greece.

Ostracism was a formal practice in Athenian democracy whereby any citizen could be exiled for a period of ten years. Every spring, people would gather to vote on whether one particularly troublesome or unpleasant public figure should be given their marching orders. The procedure took its name from the Greek word ostrakon, which referred to a broken bit of pottery. These shards of ceramic would be handed out to everyone present at the vote, and each person would scratch into their ostrakon the name of whatever citizen they wanted banished. The shards would then be collected and sorted into piles for each name; whoever had the largest pile would be given ten days to get their affairs in order, pack their bags and make themselves scarce for a decade, with their property held safely for them until they returned.

A quorum of 6,000 votes was needed for an ostracism to be effective; a significant number of people had to find a guy objectionable, in other words, before he was exiled (you couldn’t just campaign to have someone osctracized for, say, skipping the queue at the legume stand down the Agora). Ostracisms therefore tended to be political in nature, in that those who got exiled were usually powerful figures felt by their rivals to present too large a threat, or who were considered liable to become tyrants.

In a way, the idea has survived in an attenuated form in the guise of reality TV, where a nation (or the part of it that cares about Big Brother) gets to choose which of a number of excessively tanned and hair-gelled extroverts to banish from a house, and, at least notionally, from its screens. But it could also work on a broader societal level. Not for criminals, whom you obviously want to lock up and keep society safe from, but just for people who are getting on everyone’s wick, or are somehow damaging to society in a way that isn’t technically illegal. There might, that is, be something to be said for holding a vote every spring on which of a selection of public figures – your Donald Trumps, your Jeremy Clarksons, your Michelle Bachmanns, your Bonos – would be exiled for the next ten years. It would be like collectively saying, “look, you’re more than welcome to keep doing what you’re doing, but you just can’t do it in our line of sight. Now make yourself scarce until July 2022 at the earliest.” There’s something attractive about the idea of this collective power; of sentencing people not to death or imprisonment, but to essentially just clearing off out of it for a bit. It would probably be a logistical, legal and political nightmare – not to mention a human rights farrago waiting to happen – but it’s nice to daydream about anyway.

It was a warm, pleasant evening when I checked myself into the mad house. The irony of my situation wasn’t lost on me. Everything was back to front. As a psychology PhD, I fully expected to see the inside of such an institution in a professional capacity. But I now sat on the other side of the clinical transaction: a patient, tremulous and anxious, in the small admissions room of a large, gloomy psychiatric hospital.

The hospital was the archetypal big house on the hill, the sort of looming grey institution that comes to colour people’s idea of an entire town. I grew up at a school just 20 miles away, and I remember how we’d use the town’s name in our playground taunts. Simply accusing someone of coming from the town was an effective takedown. Say the word by itself, at just the right moment, making sure to draw out the syllables in a nasal exaggeration of the regional accent, and you could make a class of silent ten-year-olds dissolve into a sniggering free-for-all. These were the associations I carried with me. Despite all those years of study, after all those dinner conversations where I railed against the stigma associated with mental illness, much of what I thought of in the weeks after my admission had its roots in those childhood impressions. I was in the mad house. Inside me, a ten-year-old boy felt very frightened and very ashamed.

My memories of the weeks leading up to my admission are cloudy and grey. I spent a long time unravelling in slow motion, which gave great concern to those who cared for me, but I couldn’t do much about it. I knew I was falling apart, but I felt like a spectator on the side-lines of my own crack up. The phrase “all over the shop” would loop in my mind like a little mantra. I’d whisper it to myself during desperate, booze-fogged moments behind the drawn curtains of the little flat I shared with a man I didn’t know. “All over the shop,” I’d whisper. “I’m all over the shop. All. Over. The. Shop. I’m all over the shop.” The mechanics of mental illness are looping.

The simplest tasks became feats of endurance. I would lie on my floor, avoiding my bed because I associated it with insomnia, and try to convince myself that a shower was worth the effort, a battle that could last hours. Curling in the fetal position became my trademark activity – narrowly ahead of walking around the kitchen in circles – and there were days I did more of this than anything else. I cried much of the time too. At first at stuff that was outright sad, but soon the things that made me cry became more oblique. I managed to find sadness everywhere, by projecting tragedy onto the most innocuous objects. An incomplete list of the things that made me cry during that murky period includes the following: an episode of Home and Away, a burnt dinner, a hole in a sock, a far-off car radio playing pop on a sunny Sunday, and my own face in the bathroom mirror, haggard and bleeding from a shaky shave.

I was drinking, and the booze was tangled up with my depression in a pattern familiar to any problem drinker. I was drinking to fend off depression while at the same time it was making me depressed. Thinking back now, what I most remember about the weeks immediately prior to my admission was the constant hot vapour of booze in my nostrils, a literal cloud I carried with me everywhere. I was slowly poisoning myself. After months of deterioration, my mental health finally unspooled entirely. At my wits’ end, rudderless and exhausted, I found myself late one night in a bright room, relating the grim details to a succession of clinicians while my mother listened in tears.

A few hours later I was drifting in and out of sleep on the hospital’s most secure ward, the section where, for our safety, windows opened only an inch before they hit bars. The bathrooms had no locks and the shower activated from a hole in the ceiling, rather than from a nozzle, which might support a noose. At that particular moment, with all the obvious means to harm myself removed, my situation seemed to me the better end point to a process that had only one other possible ending. In that regard I was safe. This was the consolation I clung to during moments when the shame of my situation rose up to claim me for its cold depths.

A Franz Xaver Messerschmidt bust. Illustration by Colm Mac Athlaoich

—

On my first morning on the ward, I was awoken from a broken sleep of noisy, hurtling dreams by a rhythmic slosh. The curtain rail around my bed enclosed the ward’s communal sink, and stood in front of it was a man who could only be described as sparkly. He was wearing a sequined pink tube top, wrap-around sunglasses and was in his fifties. He was manually washing a pair of ragged old Y fronts in some soapy water. “Ah, the new man. You don’t mind if I do this?” His voice was oddly metallic and ran a little too slow. I thought of a musical toy with knackered batteries. Not that I knew it then, but I’d soon come to recognise that voice in its many variations. It was the voice of anti-psychotic medication, drugs that seem to inhabit a person’s entire being, altering how they talk and how they move (the movement is sometimes referred to as the ‘Risperidol shuffle’). How disturbing it must be for those people’s loved ones to see them so altered, to see their essences flattened in order to manage that vast and still unknown illness we call schizophrenia.

The underwear washer, who had introduced himself as Ger, made himself comfortable by sitting at the foot of my bed, making uncomfortable contact between his backside and my big toe (I quickly discovered that boundaries of personal space simply do not apply in psychiatric hospital). And then he cracked the first terrible joke of my stay. “You only need to know one thing about this place”, he said, leaning in even closer. “The patients are the least mad people here.” This turned out to be the tip of a groaning iceberg of ward humour.

Ger’s teenage girl dress-sense aside, the most striking impression of my first few days on the ward was of the smell of tobacco smoke. I was one of eight men there, and the only one who didn’t smoke. Traumatised as a child by the sight of a cigarette butt floating in a cold cup of tea, I still have a pathetic revulsion to the smell. I found myself battling disgust a lot during those first few days, not least when Ger leaned in, as he was wont to do, all close-up yellow whiskers and orange fingers. I quickly found out that the solitary outdoor place to which I had access, a fairly grim caged area near the television room, was used as a smoking area by the other patients. Patients would crowd into it around the clock, because smoking is a serious and sustained business in psychiatric hospitals.

There is a theory that schizophrenics use nicotine to self-medicate. The drug apparently alleviates the disorder’s associated psychoses and improves short term memory. Schizophrenics tend to smoke in a certain way too, in violent rapid sucks that can incinerate a half a cigarette in one go. Their faces are shaped by smoking – pinched, hollow, and capable of crumpling around a cigarette in the most remarkable contortions. I remember, when I was a teenager, getting the bus home from a shopping centre one evening, when a lanky man with rolling eyes marched up the aisle, sat beside me, and immediately lit a cigarette. By the time the bus driver had stopped the bus to reprimand the smoker, the cigarette was as good as gone. Inhaled. I can still see a length of ash as long as the cigarette itself falling from the orange tip as the man whispered nonsense around it in a papery voice.

Each night, about ten minutes after the lights on the ward were dimmed, the smell of smoke would drift faintly up the floor. I wondered why the nurses seemed to ignore it. But then I thought of the humanity of it, and I understood. It was around this time of the night, too, that I engaged in my own little attempt at self-therapy. I’d sneak my contraband mobile phone out, and slyly log on to Twitter beneath the sheets.

Before my admission to the hospital, I had worked hard, even throughout the most chaotic phase of my breakdown, to maintain an outward appearance of normalcy. I carried this delusion with me well into the early part of my stay on the ward. Somehow, I had reached the conclusion that maintaining an ordinary-looking Twitter feed would be a key survival strategy while in hospital. It was only after I had updated my status with a wise crack about the nightly news that I could fall asleep, consoled by the knowledge that my acquaintances probably pictured me on a couch at home, sprawled in front of the news with a laptop, instead of curled beneath starchy sheets in a psychiatric institution.

I spent my first full day in hospital pacing the ward, slick and jittery from alcohol withdrawal, in search of any sort of material that could stimulate me or distract me from my anxieties. The auguries weren’t good. There were no newspapers. There was a television room, but I found it to be the saddest place on the ward, as patients with catatonia tended to spend their time there (i.e. were ‘placed’ there), rigid and vacant, providing an ironic commentary on the daytime rubbish that streamed from the TV screen. There was also a ‘games room’, which I explored with a rising sense of dismay. There was a white board on the wall to keep scores for the games that were surely there, but which I struggled to find. Someone had scribbled a quote from Jonathan Swift, who had donated towards the building of Ireland’s first psychiatric hospital, on the board: “He gave what little wealth he had/ to build a house for fools and mad/ and proved by one satiric touch/ no nation needed it so much.” Below this, there was an A4 page tacked over a cupboard. “Bored?” it proclaimed in comic sans font, “Then why not try something from the games cupboard?” I opened the cupboard. It contained a monopoly board missing half of its pieces and all of its paper money, a solitary table tennis bat with a peeling rubber front, a crumpled table tennis ball, and a giant clot of cobwebs.

Then I discovered the hospital’s small library. From then on, when I wasn’t quixotically maintaining an illusion about my life via Twitter, I occupied myself with reading.

I read voraciously, reclaiming a rush of escapism that I had lost somewhere along the way in my reading life. I would read in bed for hours after the nurses put the lights out, making use of a small rectangle of light that came through the ward’s upper window and fell serendipitously across my bed alone. I was astounded by how much you can read in a day if you put a bit of effort into it. At my peak, I was getting through about 400 pages a day, managing Philip Norman’s biography of John Lennon (the sort of book a child might stand on to reach high up objects) in two days flat. Once I had spent a few days like this, alone and reading, the chaos of my life began to recede like a slow tide. I raced through a series of books in a fantasy saga called The Sword of Truth. I became so hooked on these utterly formulaic novels, that I legged it to Waterstones the day I left hospital so I could buy the next one.

A Franz Xaver Messerschmidt bust. Illustration by Colm Mac Athlaoich

One of the few treatments available to us was called peer group. Peer group took place every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon in a small room that smelled of art materials and chlorine. The purpose of peer group was to share anxieties or talk about your treatment progress with your peers. I could see how this worked conceptually, but my abiding memory of it is of one of the most painful communication breakdowns I ever hope to witness.

A tearful man was telling his story about a marriage breakdown, alienation from friends and family, and a suicide attempt. Meanwhile a woman sitting opposite would regularly interrupt to proclaim that Barack Obama was to blame, not just for this man’s problems, but for all the ills of the world. (She could be heard around the hospital, throughout my stay, returning again and again to this core guiding principle, often to the accompaniment of Bob Dylan’s ‘Maggie’s Farm’ as sung by another patient, every hour on the hour.)

In spite of my attempts to mediate between the poor man and the Obamaphobe, the three of us appeared locked in the sort of hopelessly doomed personality clash you’ll find in Samuel Beckett’s bleakest plays. And all the while, the staff member in charge appeared to want to take the Barack Obama thread as seriously as the man’s nervous breakdown. Perhaps there were times when peer group wasn’t a frustrating tangle of people with clearly incompatible treatment needs, but I never got to experience them.

I got to sit down with the psychiatrist carrying my caseload on three occasions, adding to a grand accumulated total of 45 minutes over the course of a month. He was a beleaguered yet friendly-looking man with huge sacks under his eyes which reminded me of the composer Philip Glass, and he was as helpful as he could possibly be within the short periods he had to advise me. He recommended cognitive behaviour therapy as the most suitable treatment intervention for my depression. “Oh good. I could do that”, I said. “when or where do I go to receive it?” “Well that’s the thing. It is not available here. We have one clinical psychologist providing therapy for all the hospitals in the northeast region, and there is a six to eight week waiting list”. This psychologist was a mythical creature, as far as I could see, a shadowy promise of treatments that people clearly required but would not receive.

The psychologist’s cap stayed on my head throughout my time on the ward, and I’d wonder such things as whether the environment – a small ward, barred up windows, very little stimulatory activities, zero fresh air – was appropriate for good mental health. I’d often consider the more obviously ill men in my ward and wonder too if some of their problems weren’t brought about by over-prescribed medication.

Days ebbed and flowed around the dispensation of medicine. There was a brief window of time every evening when certain patients’ eyes sharpened and their tongues seemed to deflate. This window was quickly shut by a trip to the medicine dispensary. A tell-tale amphibious film went up over their eyes again shortly before bedtime. Of course, many of these people needed drugs for their respective illnesses, but one or two incidents made me wonder, such as the night an elderly man got caught short on his way to the ward toilet. He ended up sitting on the floor in his own excrement, sobbing in a tiny voice with a look of vulnerability so unusual to his typically taciturn countenance that I could only look at him for a brief moment. The first nurse to tend to him offered him something to calm him down. I couldn’t help but wonder if kindly and carefully deployed words alone might have been just as effective. I found out the next day that it wasn’t the first time this happened to him; it was a unfortunate side-effect of his medicine, treated by more medicine.

My own treatment consisted primarily of running through anti-depressants in the hope of finding a combination that worked, which in practice meant experiencing a chain of physical side effects that included bloating, nausea and due to the vagaries of serotonin uptake, a confounding inability to pee. My secondary treatment related to alcohol. I met a lady, a nurse with addiction counselling qualifications, who ran me through counselling options and the groups I could access once I left. Her main advice was “don’t pick up that first drink”, and you know, it’s hard to fault that advice. An entire culture of sobriety treatment is built upon that foundation. More to the point, she was a wonderfully sympathetic woman to chat to, and my half hour of face-to-face time with her – an eternity in that place – was perhaps the best therapy I received on the ward.

I am not exactly sure what it is, even now, but I got something from my stay in the big house on the hill, something that I would probably not have gotten elsewhere. I remember sitting up in my bed with a book one night, reading in my precious rectangle of light, moving my toes against the crisp sheets, and feeling so secure in my surrender to the help of others, and so very far away from the trembling mess who admitted himself only a couple of weeks earlier, that I whispered as much to myself. “Thanks,” I said.

Simon Moore ambles up to the police officers to tell them he is about to commit an offence.

“I just want to let you know that I have an ASBO, and I am going to be breaking it,” he informs the two men in a strikingly cordial tone. They look on, bemused, as he outlines the conditions of his Anti Social Behaviour Order.

Simon is a professional activist. Goldsmiths University-educated, the boyish-looking 29 year old has the hint of a mockney accent and hair bleached blond from years living outdoors. He has been called England’s politest ASBO recipient, and his story has recieved national media attention in Britain. He also the subject of a so-called Olympics ASBO, which effectively bans him from large parts of southern England.

He tells the police that he believes in a transparent approach in his dealings with law enforcement, and that he respectfully disagrees with the ban. The officers nod thoughtfully, and each takes out a small black notepad to jot down notes.

The policemen are guarding the campus of Royal Holloway University, just outside London. Simon is interested in this site because it lies next to an unspoilt patch of woodland where his friends are camping while looking for a place to start an ecovillage. But the campus will be home to the Olympic Rowing and Canoeing Villages for the duration of the Games, and if Simon goes within 100 metres of the college he risks arrest.

Simon politely stifles a yawn. He looks exhausted. After a night in jail in Staines and an afternoon representing himself at the Guildford Magistrates’ Court, he sits in a Pret a Manger with his friends planning the next court case: his ASBO hearing in London. Challenging the order – and a potential arrest – is all part of Simon’s plan to prove a point about political expression and personal freedom in the UK. He wants his day in court.

The 2012 Olympic Games are Europe’s largest construction project ... They have affected vast swathes of East London

Later, while his friends discuss train schedules back home to London, Simon turns to me and begins to think aloud: “What to do? I don’t want to stop just because I’ve been arrested.”

He decides he’d like a lift straight back to the woodland next to Royal Holloway. Once again, at the entrance to the woods, he lays out his case to the officers. He is still wearing his prison-issue navy tracksuit bottoms and cheap black plimsolls. He waves goodbye to me, and wanders back into the woods. Later that night he is arrested again.

—

London 2012 is Europe’s largest construction project. It will permanently alter vast swathes of East London, and, perhaps inevitably, the attendant changes have upset some. The Olympic bid was always focused on regeneration – building is centred on Newham, one of Britain’s poorest boroughs. But though billions in public money has been poured into the project over the past 18 months, the borough has little to show for it. A recent report from London School of Economics suggested that East London was in fact financially worse-off than it had been before planning for the Games began.

A huge number of people have been evicted to make room for the behemoth project. Four hundred and thirty residents from the demolished Clay’s Lane housing co-operative, businesses and council tenants from the Carpenter’s Road Estate, riverboat owners, the traveller community, and allotment holders from the Manor Gardening Society. Publicly opposing the initiative has proven risky, with reporters and photographers challenged by private security guards fearful of a terrorist attack. Activists are viewed as a potential threat to the smooth running of the Games.

Enter Simon Moore. In reality, Simon claims to have no interest in disrupting the Games. And he doesn’t live in East London. He grew up in the west of the city and now describes himself as being of no fixed abode.

Simon became involved in activism when he learned about the use of cluster munitions in the 2006 Lebanon War. Gradually, he spent more time with peace campaigners in Parliament Square, and within two years he had quit his office job, moved out of his parents’ home and taken up residence in various squats around London. He no longer felt comfortable paying taxes to a government he increasingly opposed. By 2009 he was living in Kew Bridge Ecovillage, on a patch of derelict land overlooking the River Thames. Later he moved on to Democracy Village, where he joined a group of peace activists camped in front of the Houses of Parliament.

Simon Moore, activist ... Moore stands outside Westminster Magistrates’ Court after his Anti-Social Behaviour Order (ASBO) hearing

Earlier this year, while Simon was living in Finsbury Square as part of Occupy London, he heard about a group of locals protesting the construction of a temporary Olympic basketball training court at Leyton Marshes – part of London’s so-called ‘green lung’, beloved of dog walkers. They needed support, and Simon happily stepped up. As a professional protester, he does not have bills to pay or a job to hold down. He is accustomed to hardship and well-versed in the tactics of playing cat and mouse with the authorities. When the Games are over, he will move on. That utility makes him a valuable asset to any cause.

“We couldn’t be there twenty-four seven because we have families and jobs, and have lives to lead,” one of the group told me. “So that’s when [Simon and his friends] were invited to come and camp here.”

None of the Games organising groups or law enforcement officials I spoke to would comment on the basketball court, or on Simon’s role in the protests.

But in a statement, the Olympics Delivery Authority (ODA) said the vast majority of the Marsh was to be unaffected by the court, that the site was decided only after ruling out a number of alternatives, and that it was to be temporary: “[After the Games] the site will be restored to its former state, with £65,000 funding to help the landowner to improve the area, including [through] increased seating, new paths and gates, and enhanced wildlife habitats.” Yet the construction of this temporary structure has made activists out of people who have not been involved in protests before: teachers, council workers, artists, and even grandmothers.

“A few of the locals said we’d love it if you come and camp here,” Simon explains. “We were greeted the next morning with bowls of porridge and hot tea from the locals. Four of us decided to stay there permanently. The camp grew and we received huge support. Every day we were given bread, porridge, lentils, rice, money, you name it.”

The group camped on the marsh and prevented access to the basketball site for two weeks. Then bailiffs were called in, backed up by the police. In the final standoff, Simon and four others sat in front of a lorry and, after a warning from police, were arrested.

After three days in Thamesmead prison, a detective presented Simon with an application for an ASBO stipulating that he could not go within 100 metres of any Olympic venue, or of any road being used for the procession of the Olympic torch. Furthermore, he could not take part in anything that would disrupt the official Games activities, and could not intentionally obstruct the passage of any Olympic participant.

Reg Hawkins, allotment holder ... Hawkins is a member of the Manor Garden Society, which was relocated to Waltham Forest at a cost of £1.8 million

A few days after his arrest at Royal Holloway, Simon is due at Westminster Magistrates’ Court to hear whether his ASBO will be granted in full. At issue is whether his protests constitute “anti-social behaviour”.

Simon is very late. Channel 4 News is here, as are Scotland Yard. The prosecuting barrister, along with a group of supporters from Save Leyton Marsh, have all been here for more than an hour. At the judge’s request, a phone call is made to Simon’s mother. Any moment now, we are told.

When the defendant does eventually saunter in, still wearing his prison-issue tracksuit bottoms, he is greeted by a flurry of handshakes and hugs. Simon’s supporters and friends are pleased to see him, but so are the police, some of whom are waiting to be called as witnesses in the case. The man from Channel 4 asks where Simon’s lawyer is, and Simon explains that he will be representing himself in a little speech in the foyer of the sleek magistrates’ court.

“I want to say certain things that don’t relate to a legal defence,” he explains. “When lawyers are arguing law, sometimes the meaning is lost.”

Simon’s supporters are a disparate group of locals from Leyton who have brought along banners and placards to hold up within the court. They want to use Simon’s hearing to promote their cause. Peter Taheri, the prosecuting barrister for the London Met, takes Simon aside to offer some relevant case notes, smoothing his Brylcreemed hair as he talks. Taheri acts for a number of police forces, and is clearly well-versed in the techniques of ASBO hearings.

Caroline Day with ‘Nelson’ ... Day is a member of Save the Marshes, a group opposed to the basketball training courts (background) on the Leyton Marsh site (foreground)

Each courtroom usually hears around five cases every morning. But courtroom six has been blocked out for the day for Simon’s hearing, a sign of the case’s importance. It will set a precedent, whatever the outcome.

District Judge Quentin Purdy comes across as a patient man, with a friendly voice that cuts through the pomposity of the courtroom. Simon takes his seat in the dock, but the judge immediately suggests he settle himself down at a nearby table so he can spread out all of his documents. Civility is once again the order of the day. Taheri, the Met lawyer, begins by acknowledging Simon’s unusual situation.

“Mr Moore is intelligent, eloquent, polite, charming and charismatic,” the lawyer gushes. “He knows exactly what he is doing and why, and he has strong opinions about politics, about the law.”

The crux of Taheri’s argument is how the words “harassment, alarm and distress” – the behaviour that warrants an ASBO – are defined. The granting of this ASBO will come down to the shades of meaning of the word “harassment”.

Taheri’s opening argument is met with exasperated sighs, angry gasps and relieved laughs from supporters in the public gallery.

At one point, a policeman and the defendant grin at each other across the court, Tom to Jerry, the chase momentarily suspended in the courtroom. Suddenly it all begins to feel like a real courtroom drama.

Police Constable Osman from the Public Order Department of Scotland Yard, a witness, describes how Simon once scaled a building, calling him “brave”. Simon modestly deflects the compliment: that’s not him any longer. Simon has multiple criminal convictions – including breaking and entering into a Ministry of Defence building. These protests are always peaceful; even his language is carefully controlled. But words are slippery entities. On rebuttal, Simon challenges a policeman in an impossibly well-mannered version of the core scene from A Few Good Men.

“What is your job?”

“To uphold the law. Specifically, to deal with groups of protesters.”

“What do you believe the purpose of these laws is?”

“To ensure the harmony of the country.”

“No further questions.”

Simon has brought along a well-thumbed copy of Tim Jewell’s book Forgiving Justice, and during a courtroom break it is passed amongst the group of police, the judge and the barrister.

Mambo, riverboat owner … Deemed a security risk, all riverboats in the area are being relocated for the duration of Games

Judge Purdy allows Simon the opportunity to make a statement, which he reads from a heavily marked-up print out. His essay ranges from an assessment of the Olympics as a culture of greed, through to an attack on the whole concept of ASBOs, and the legal framework in general. At one point he even suggests the judge resign his post.

“I think it is clear to see from the delivery of London 2012 that these Games are not simply about sport and amusement,” says Simon. “They involve the channelling of very large amounts of public funds into the hands of private corporations whose primary aim is to make as much profit from their services as possible.”

Taheri makes a closing argument which rests on the idea that harassment can be defined as annoyance. Simon counters: “When you begin to suggest that irritating people should be against the law, that’s very dangerous. We all irritate each other every day.”

Judge Purdy decides to take a few days to deliberate.

—

On Monday morning we are all back for the judgement. Simon is late again. He arrives smelling of hay after a night sleeping on a pile of straw in Runnymede.

Lest we were in any doubt, Judge Purdy begins by joining the ranks of law enforcers praising Simon’s character. “You are intelligent and sincere… polite and engaging,” he says.

Nevertheless, he grants the ASBO. Simon has behaved anti-socially, and is likely to do so again.

As we flood out of the courtroom Taheri pulls Simon aside, shaking him by the hand: “Mr Moore, I wish you all the best.”

Detective Sergeant Hearing adds: “You represented yourself very well. I’m sure we’ll meet again.”

Simon laughs. “Well, que sera, sera.”

Brian Whelan, journalist activist ... Whelan broke the story that missiles had been installed on the top of his apartment block in Bow Quarter. He has since been evicted from the block

It’s 9pm on a Tuesday night a few days later, and Simon is wearing a smart blue shirt as he talks to a packed town hall in Walthamstow. A poster on the wall reads: “Like Simon, we refuse to fear doing what is right and just in the face of repression. We stand together against this injustice and speak as one. Simon is one of us and we are all Simon Moore!”

He tells the crowd how he will continue to breach his ASBO and challenge every law he believes to be unjust. In response, almost every person in the room holds up a piece of paper with the words “I am Simon Moore” written on it. Sitting back down, he looks rather overwhelmed.

A child and dog on Leyton Marsh

Drinking orange squash in the pub afterwards, Simon describes the coming weeks in the lead up to the Games as a Rubicon – a point of no return. The event may only last one month, but there are all sorts of measures of control that may become permanent, he says.

“I feel like showing it for what it is,” he says. “It’s coercive, and designed to intimidate.”

Simon has no fear of prison. Improbably enough, he claims to enjoy it.

“From my experience it’s always been quite peaceful and a chance to rest, to be honest. I felt free in prison – I’d chosen to be there.” I find it difficult to square this with my understanding of prison, but it is all he will say on the subject.

“I don’t seek fame or celebrity, but I see that there’s a need for a figurehead and I’m happy for my name to be used. I don’t think it’s about me as an individual though, just my name.”

With that, Simon unties the piece of string attaching his bicycle to a nearby lamp post, and cycles off into the cool night air.

“If I went back, I would get picked up at the airport and go straight to prison,” says Arbabi with a sigh. He last set foot in Iran in 1985, as a 12 year old. “I’m on the top list of the government’s most hated and wanted people, for sure.”

Parazit, which translates as “static”, is funded by US public broadcaster Voice of America, and each episode comprises roughly 30 minutes of Hosseini and Arbabi creatively trashing the Iranian government. There are interviews – Hilary Clinton was a guest – and sketches featuring Arbabi, who also executive produces the show, as comic side-kick to Hosseini, who usually hosts. A few episodes are available with English subtitles, though Arbabi has at least temporarily abandoned this idea since he can’t find anyone to accurately relay the nuances of the humour from the Persian.

With its DIY graphics and low-rent sets, Parazit is carried by the energy of its presenters, who glug coffee, climbs on desks, and wave their fingers at the monitor as they rail at Ahmadinejad and his goons.

Parazit is beamed into Iran via satellite, which is regularly disrupted by government censors (hence “static”), and it is distributed via social media sites, also tightly controlled and periodically banned. Reporters Without Borders gives Iran’s pervasive censorship laws the worst ranking level on their five-point scale. But such is the clamour for the bluster-puncturing satire of Parazit that the show was viewed 30 million times in a single month last year, on Facebook alone.

The frenetic energy spills off-screen: Arbabi is taking advantage of a brief hiatus from Parazit (it is scheduled to return in August) to launch an internet art project and a sister TV programme, called OnTen, an Onion-style fake news show which parodies Iran’s state TV news network, Al-Alam.

Arbabi and Hosseini were both working for VOA when they dreamed up, over drinks, the idea for a Persian-language show that would focus on the crazier exploits of the Iranian government.

The expatriates felt they owed something to the young people that make up the majority of Iran’s population (more than half of Iran is under the age of 30) ruled over by a few old men.

Ali Larijani, former Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council and current chairman of the Parliament of Iran, gets the Parazit treatment

At that time, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was lurching ever rightward as he geared up for re-election, and Ayatollah Khamenei was parading around in cloaks made from the hair of specially-bred camels. Arbabi and Hosseini saw rich pickings for satire. The show trundled along as a ten-minute segment for months before exploding in popularity as the 2009 election protests erupted.

When Arbabi and Hosseini appeared as guests on The Daily Show two years later, host Jon Stewart praised Arbabi’s flourescent green trousers: “These are the pants of someone who has assimilated.” Indeed, Arbabi owes a lot to America. His family fled Iran in 1986, at the height of its war with Iraq, in order for Arbabi to avoid conscription (at the time, says Arbabi, the military was taking boys as young as 13). Armed with green cards, his family came to the US and, after finishing school, Arbabi worked as a cook at a Hooters restaurant before, at 19, scoring an internship at a public radio station. Since 2003 he has picked up his cheque from the US Government, via Voice of America. Hosseini worked as a petrol station attendant in Oregon before joining VOA.

Indeed, some claim the pair are too beholden to their adoptive home country. Though it claims editorial independence, Voice of America is often dismissed as an instrument of US foreign policy, even propaganda. Parazit takes flak from the likes of Iranian-American commentator Nima Shirazi, who argues that the hosts are, however unintentionally, mouthpieces for the US. In a discussion of Parazit on Al-Jazeera, Shirazi accused its creators of focusing on Iran while ignoring US-led injustice.

Arbabi, who worked as a foreign journalist before joining VOA as a video producer, says that while it may be legitimate to raise the issue of Parazit’s funding, in practice VOA’s backing does nothing to diminish what they do.

“We’re using the funding to point out some major flaws in the Iranian government,” he says. “We’re talking about a government that still executes children. We’re totally doing the right thing.”

There are plenty of other shows that criticise the US government, he says, and while he has his own problems with it, that’s not what the Iranian people care about.

“I have my personal views, and I have my professional choice as well to decide what it is I want to do with this little brain,” he says.

Saman Arbabi and Kambiz Hosseini on the set of Parazit

When it relaunches, Parazit will face even tighter controls. Ayatollah Khamenei recently earmarked US $1 billion for a new internet censorship body, winningly named the Supreme Council of Virtual Space. Hosseini once said that Khamenei and Ahmadinejad should be on the VOA payroll for all the satire-ready material they offer up each week. But Arbabi says people will continue to get the show using proxy servers and even passing it around on flash drives. Plus he knows he can count on government lackeys as regular viewers, not least the state media. Iran’s leading national television station, Keyhan, runs regular attack pieces on the show, and until recently, state TV ran a sort of anti-Parazit, complete with footage from Arbabi’s show and regular denunciations of Arbabi and Hosseini as American spies.

But Arbabi remains professionally and spiritually devoted to Iran.

“I can’t ever go back unless something completely changes,” he says. “But I get the opportunity that kids don’t have in Iran to speak as loud as I can, and point my finger in their faces, and call them out on their lies.

“We’ve got our audience, and they look up to us. They expect to get something every week,” he says.

Arbabi says that broadcasting the show from the sanctuary of Washington DC, and returning to their nice apartments, is of no great risk compared with protesting in the streets of Tehran. But he does concede there is more at stake than with a standard satire show.

“The major difference is we’re dealing with a very oppressive government and a sponsor of terror… So we have a very bad audience as well,” he says.

Death threats have become a regular event for both presenters, Arbabi says. Within Iran, police would surely have a field day with a couple of expats who devote their entire weekly show to mocking Iranian heads of state. But to Arbabi, Iran’s alleged involvement in a plot to assassinate a Saudi diplomat on US soil last October showed just how far its government is willing to go to exact revenge upon its enemies. (Two Iranian nationals have been charged in the US with planning to blow up Saudi diplomat Adel al-Jubeir in a crowded Washington restaurant, and then bombing the Saudi Arabian and Israeli embassies for good measure. The Iranian government denies any involvement.)

“The threat is very real,” Arbabi concedes. “But I can’t think about that a lot. Maybe it’s my stupidity, but I just don’t really care.”

Arbabi, who describes himself as a lifelong class clown, has this breezy approach to many things, but his emotions betray him when talk turns to the prospect of returning to Iran.

“Oh I would love to go back,” he says. “Absolutely I would love to. Sometimes I dream about it. I would love to go, and hopefully one day I will.”

The following is a transcript of the talk delivered by Irish authorpreneur Larry Ryan at a recent TED event in Edinburgh.

Hey there TEDsters. Let me tell you a story.

When I was nine years old my best friend was Kenneth Kenny. He and I were inseparable. Then one day Kenny had to leave town.

You see Kenny Kenny’s father had lost his job. So Kenny and the Kennys had to immigrate to Australia. It was the late 80s in Ireland; this stuff happened. Sad story. Friendships split. Families displaced.

Four years later, though, the Irish economy started to take off, Kenny returned and we resumed our friendship.

The K Man hadn’t done much except go away for a long time, but now he was a star around school. He was exotic, he had caché.

This being the early 90s, the UK’s obsession with Australian soap operas was in full swing. We had a rather iconoclastic music teacher in the school, and that year he staged an epic comic opera homage called the G’Day Cycle. Naturally, Kenny was a shoo-in for the lead.

People, here’s what I’m getting at: what Kenny found out, and I eventually learned. I’m talking about exile. Walk with me…

What people don’t realise is that just getting the hell out of wherever you are can be the best career move a person can make.

Don’t take it from me: ask Jesus Christ. JC went to the desert for a stretch and has been dining out on that shit ever since.

Take a look at some famed Irish writers. Joyce, Beckett… They fled a downtrodden and stagnant Ireland. Here’s someone who didn’t: Paudie Fitzmaurice. He stayed at home writing limericks. Heard of him? Didn’t think so.

Imagine you’re an artist from a repressive regime. Take your plays and your poems and your doodles and go pick up tenure at a US university. You’ll be a campus hero! Students gazing up adoringly at your sad, “thousand-yard refugee stare” during your occasional lectures.

And if you’re lucky enough to be there when a bloody civil war breaks out back home, you’ll be the go-to guy, picking up pay-cheques all over town: debates, TV, radio, newspapers.

I still see some sceptical faces out there. Ok, let me throw some names at you.

Marco Rubio.

(click – picture of Marco Rubio appears on screen behind me on stage)

There’s his picture. Family exiled from Cuba, Republicans need that Hispanic vote, yada yada yada, he’s the VP.

(click – replaced by a picture of Earl Sweatshirt)

That’s Earl Sweatshirt. Your up-and-coming rap entertainer, guy’s a child. Mum sends him to Samoan reform school. Boom: he’s bigger than the Beatles.

(click – replaced by a picture of Pervez Musharraf)

That’s Pervez Musharraf.

When people ask me what my dream job is I answer quickly: deposed quasi-dictator in exile. That’s the good life.

Our boy Musharraf was hustled out of Pakistan in 2008. I’m going to read briefly from an article about his new life in London:

“He lives well, dining at the Dorchester hotel, playing golf and hosting musical evenings at home. A recent YouTube video revealed him to be an accomplished Urdu singer. He regularly plays bridge with his confidante, Brigadier Niaz Ahmed, a retired arms dealer.”

Nice, right? Pakistan is calling for Interpol to arrest him over the death of Benazir Bhutto. Meanwhile he’s at the Aspen Ideas Festival, casually suggesting he might go back home and retake power when he’s a good and ready. But as he said at the shindig after comparing his form during the 2001 military coup to that of Abraham Lincoln: “I’m quite comfortable out living in London and Dubai and being called up by lecture circuits around the world.

Aspen, here’s what you could have won: Colonel Gaddafi, you fools! Assad, take note.

This need not just apply to your strongman boss. Let’s say you’re a lowly minister in some vicious dictatorship. I’m not judging – who knows what any of us would do faced with chewy circumstances like that. But now the people are rising up, the centre cannot hold. What do you do, oh Minister for the Interior? That’s rhetorical. You defect to Cyprus.

Now protestors you’ve watched being killed will treat you like a revolutionary hero. The international community – which previously considered you a scumbag – will praise your bravery. You can play the talk show circuit for a while and see how the civil war pans out. When a new government forms you might even get asked to take up your old gig – or get a sweet ambassadorship somewhere sunny.

Now the sad-sack-mongers will say that any sort of banishment is a terrible thing. A sorry tale of defeat and loss. But I don’t see it that way. I think it’s a great way to acquire a USP.

So I urge you, now. Get the hell out of dodge. Make like my boy Kenny Kenny and leave. It’ll be the best business decision you’ll make.

I’m going to do something crazy here – forget Malcolm Gladwell on “What sandwiches can teach us about North Korean Economic Policy” in the main hall at 7:15pm (light refreshments included). I want you all to do something bold. Walk away from me. Now! Get out of here. Run. Leave. By the time I’m finished dancing I want to be looking at an empty auditorium.

Ryan breaks into a dance routine. As the sequence concludes he holds his hands-free microphone triumphantly above his head. 

* Author’s note: Reading my talk back, I found that it fell rather short of the suggested 18 minute time frame, so I have bulked up the talk by concluding with a dance sequence. I will also perform the dance part of my talk separately at the spin-off fringe event TEDdancin’ at the Traverse theatre**.

** Editor’s note: there does not appear to have been a TEDdancin’ event. A spokesman for TED said, “Ted Danson? What the hell are you talking about?”

I slide the Hezbollah card into my wallet, between the business cards that I haven’t cleared out since leaving my banking job earlier in the year: ‘True Capital’, ‘Monumental Capital’, ‘Trust Capital’ and now, lodged uncomfortably between them, a Hezbollah Press Relations accreditation. At least it’s a card, I think. Coming to Qana empty-handed is not wise, as I have already learned to my cost.

The small town in the south of Lebanon is believed by some to be the site of Cana of Galilee from the Christian New Testament – the place where Jesus performed the first of his miracles, at a wedding, by turning water into wine. But events of a tragic rather than miraculous nature have marred the town’s recent history: Qana has suffered Israeli bombardment twice in the past 20 years. Today, paranoia and tragedy hang in the air.

—

I first visited Qana a week earlier, and had found myself standing beside the stone containers that supposedly held the miracle wine, wishing my devotions weren’t being disturbed by a local man circling the pit in which I stood and talking animatedly into his mobile phone. As far as I could make out, he was getting instructions on what to do with the lone, British, black-trenchcoat wearing visitor that he’d found walking through his town. He hung up and gestured me into his car. We drove to a shop, and an equally glum-looking man ­– introduced as a “camera expert” – climbed into the back.

“Where are we going?” I asked, adding that I wanted to see the rock carvings that I’d read about.

“We will take you there,” the driver replied. “We just need to ask you a few questions.”

We drove to the upper ridge of a hillside on the edge of town, which I recognised as the place where sculptures dating to the first century AD had been hewn into the rock face. There were no other tourists in sight. The driver rummaged through my bag and notebooks while his companion worked his way through my holiday snaps. He was particularly interested in a photograph of a table tennis ball dispenser I had taken the previous week. “It fires table tennis balls, not bullets!’ I explained, but the exaggerated forehand I mimed did little to soften his expression.

Things didn’t look great. I had in my possession a black bag full of notebooks and maps, no passport, and no credible account of what I was actually doing in Lebanon. I wasn’t happy in finance, I tried to explain, and I had come out to Lebanon to try new things. I was genuinely fascinated by these rock carvings. But they stared at me blankly, with less sympathy for the story of losing one’s professional direction than the average audience in a city wine bar.

I told them I lived in Beirut.

“Where in Beirut?”

“In East Beirut, Ashrafieh.”

“Where in Ashrafieh?”

And on and on until they arrived at the exact alleyway, floor and door number of my newly-rented flat. Great. I couldn’t wait to get home and tell my unsuspecting girlfriend about the new friends I’d made that day. They might even pay us a surprise visit, maybe even at night…

In light of this, I hit upon a plan to kill all the birds unpleasantly circling above my head with one stone. I would return to the town, only this time with a specific and officially-validated purpose. I would go as a journalist interested in holy sites. This, I thought to myself, would achieve two things: put my newfound friends at ease, and conveniently relieve me of my rather acute professional identity anxiety.

Sporting tortoiseshell glasses and a tweed blazer I pitched up to my interview at the Hezbollah press relations office. Though confused by my lack of a publication history, the stern-looking man responsible granted me permission to return to Qana and conduct my research. The condition: that I be accompanied at all times by a driver and a local Hezbollah representative, who would monitor my every move. It was going to be a fun trip.

—

Qana sits in the rolling hills of the south of Lebanon, inland from the ancient port of Tyre and 12km north of the Israeli border. My driver is a man named Hassan. We travel south from Beirut along the coastal plateau between sea and mountain, to the rhythm of the car stereo and the classic drum-backed Shia shout-out “Ali! Ali! Ali”. The port of Tyre was once one of the most important maritime hubs in the world. In the first millennium BC, trading routes stretched from here all over Europe, and as far as Vietnam. Tyre lent its name to Tyrian purple – the famous purple dye extracted from sea snails found in the area – which was exported around the world alongside wheat flour, dates, timber, fine glass and pottery.

Along with economic prosperity, the region was also defined by inclusiveness. The cosmopolitan Greek and later Roman settlements in the area included populations of Galilean Jews, Syrians, nomad Arabs, ethnic Mesopotamians and indigenous Phoenicians.

I couldn’t wait to get home and tell my unsuspecting girlfriend about the new friends I’d made that day. They might even pay us a surprise visit, maybe even at night.

Today, the main road flanking Tyre hits a dead end at the Israeli border. Where once stood a mercantile capital, there is today only a quaint fishing harbour surrounded by empty restaurants and cafes. The ethnic diversity that characterised the Tyre of old has been replaced by a predominantly Shia Muslim population, and the area receives only a trickle of tourists each summer.

As we begin to head inland from Tyre towards Qana, the lush orange groves and banana plantations that hug the coastline give way to an undulating, rocky and sparsely vegetated terrain. It all feels unmistakably biblical and I begin to imagine the passing hamlets as part of an ancient landscape once roamed by tribes of Canaanites, Amorites, Samaritans and Hebrews. Nowadays, it is telegraph poles emblazoned with the Hezbollah flag and leader Hassan Nasrallah that flash past the car window. The cemetery on the right of the main ascent into Qana is lined with images that strike a similar note – gun-bearing local martyrs’ staring into middle distance awash in Hezbollah’s characteristic lime green and yellow.

As we drive into Qana, I stop briefly beside a rock-cut Cenotaph dedicated to King Hiram, a man considered the greatest of the Kings of Tyre during the city-state’s golden age. Hiram was arguably the region’s greatest ever diplomat. He famously maintained peaceful relations with both King David and King Solomon. He had gifted the Jewish people the cedar wood and architects to help build the first temple of Jerusalem and had received, in return, olive oil, wheat and 20 towns in Upper Galilee (including, it is believed by some, Qana).

Was Jesus really here? Is this hilltop town in South Lebanon the very place that he chose to begin his ministry?

The gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke all have Jesus wandering along the Phoenician coastline through Tyre, and as far as north as Sidon. But the debate over where the “Wedding at Cana” took place is as polarising as that over which group of people first mashed chickpeas to make hummus. For many, the real miracle site lies within modern-day Israel, in the village of Kefr Kenna.

Ameen Houssein, a local Shia Muslim and self-appointed miracle site expert, is among those advocating Qana’s place in biblical history. He accompanies me around the town along with my Hezbollah monitor and driver. It gives me a pleasant feeling that they all refer to me as an English sahafi (journalist), and I find myself taking to the role with increasing enthusiasm.

Thinking I’ve hit upon a cracker of a question, I ask: “What do you think about the fact that Jesus, a prophet within the Muslim faith, chose to convert water into wine? Doesn’t this entitle Muslims to the odd tipple?”

“Non-alcoholic wine, Edward,” he responds solemnly. “It was a special kind of wine that Jesus made. Wine without alcohol. Alcohol is haram – forbidden.”

—

The four of us make a motley crew, and the humour in a pilgrim needing so much supervision to help reach his destination is not lost on me. Holy sites are supposed to be a conduit to the divine; this one just leads to more politics. Jews, Muslims and Christians can all claim an intimate connection to Qana. The irony is that because of this, Qana remains a place from which each of the Abrahamic faiths is exiled. Even for the Shia inhabitants of the town itself, control of physical access the site does not guarantee them spiritual possession.

As we explore the array of 2000-year-old rock carvings that cover the hill to the west of the town, the whole group seems gripped by Ameen’s commentary. “Here”, he says, pointing to another weather-beaten carving. “You can see Mary’s cousin. And this is, of course, Jesus’ uncle. Jesus used to come and sit and rest here with his disciples.” There is lots of local colour about what Jesus did in his time here – proximity to the holy lands would seem to spell an increased sense of poetic licence. The locals of Tyre will tell you with a mix of pride and embarrassment that Jesus’ donkey was stolen while he preached to the people there.

Whatever the precise facts surrounding the rock carvings, they leave a powerful impression. One feels oneself amongst the vestiges of an early Christianity that moved through a region not by organised church or institution, but by foot, hand, eyes and mouth – and spent much of that time running or hiding.

At Qana's miracle site ... Photo by Edward Hallett

Later, Ameen perches himself on the edge of a broken stone cistern and smokes a cigarette. As he does so, he tells us how the miracle site was discovered. In 1967, a local man named Amer Moussa met a monk from a local Lebanese monastery while travelling in Senegal. Having won his trust, the monk shared documents that showed him where the site was located in Qana. The man came back and began to dig, and eventually discovered stone pots several feet underground. What the town needs now, Ameen says, is funding to conduct extensive archaeological research into the site.

Modern day Qana is home to a small Christian community, and I secure an interview with the local priest. I ask whether he believes that these are the pots in which Jesus turned water into wine. He does. He says the key biblical and historic texts make it clear that the site of the miracle was in the upper region of Galilee, in which Qana sits. He says that within this area, the town is the only one appropriately named, with proven origins dating back to the time of Christ. “You must also remember that there were no borders in the time of Christ,” he adds. “Jews and Phoenicians mixed freely with each other in this region. Mary and Jesus came here to the wedding of their cousin who lived in Qana.”

This is not a scenario one can imagine taking place today. The thought of a Jewish contingent attending a wedding in the town is inconceivable, positioned as it is at the meeting point between several strategically important roads connecting Southern Lebanon. Qana is also perceived as a seat of Hezbollah-led resistance or aggression towards IsraeI. The most recent exchanges between the two peoples have been not wedding gifts, but bombs and mortar shells. The Israeli shelling of a UN compound just outside Qana in 1996 killed more than 100 local inhabitants and injured 116, as well as four UN workers. More recently in 2006, an air strike on a three-storey building in Qana killed 28 civilians, including 16 children.

Later I meet Khodor, who lost his entire family in the 1996 shelling. He regards me with scepticism, and tells my guides that the British government was complicit in the Israeli occupation of South Lebanon. It is the most fraudulent I’ve felt all day. I nervously stretch out my phone (with its newly-downloaded recording app) and ask him whether his community – and he in particular – view the presence of outsiders like me as an unwelcome intrusion into the life of his town.

He glances contemptuously down at my mobile phone and responds with his own question: How have I been treated since arriving here? He gestures towards my entourage. I tell him that my welcome has been mixed; that alongside the hospitality apparent in Ameen’s freely shared expertise, I have also provoked a good deal of suspicion since my arrival in Qana. This, he responds, is because I could be a Mossad agent.

Ameen leaps to my defence. “He is a journalist, Khodor! He has come to see our sacred site. He is a doctor of philosophy!” I nod and smile sheepishly.

Khodor stands in front of the town’s memorial to the dead of 1996 and 2006. Among the photographs are larger-than-life-size images of the wife and five children that he lost in the first attack. His face, set upon a slight and stooping body, movingly blends peace and steely resolve, as do his words.

“I cried to God for my children and wife, and he took pity on me,” he says. “God gave me my wife and my children, and God took them away. They are with God now.” Then, shifting to a more militant tone, he continues, “My children and my wife were martyrs in a holy war. This is Karbala. We believe in this.”

—

I go to meet one more person in Qana: Moussa Tiba, a local artist whose brightly-painted house sits with marvellous incongruity amid the pallid grey concrete of its neighbours. Does he think Jesus came here? He says he doesn’t know. “Some historians say so, some say that he didn’t. I get up in the morning and I paint. I don’t know what happened all that time ago. And I believe that all places are holy places. Qana, Beirut, London, Chartres.”

But there is such a thing as sacred, holy ground, isn’t there? The idea of a locality made holy through the presence of the divine is as old as the Canaanite land we are both standing on. Tiba gestures towards the sculpture he made after the 1996 shelling of Qana. At its centre is an olive tree made of marble, under which are scattered dozens of white cubes.

“This is a mother.” He points at the tree. “Proud as a mother and sad as a mother. The squares scattered below her are children – the houses and families who were massacred in 1996. Qana – it’s a village. Full stop. We should love this village. We should work in this village, and we should continue to live in this village, whether it is important historically, or today, or neither.”

Tiba turns to me. I stand among his sculptures and paintings, still nervously clutching my mobile phone/recorder. “But what are you doing here, Edward?” he asks in the most friendly tone I’ve yet encountered in this damaged and jittery town.  “Are you looking for Jesus Christmas?”

1.

On a drizzly late September night, about twenty people are seated in a circle in a small bookshop in Notting Hill. A dapper young man named Alex has just stood in front of the group and animatedly delivered a long, banal anecdote from his childhood about hijacking a home movie of his older brother playing violin for their parents. His story, punctuated with grandiose physical gestures and culminating in an overwrought violin-playing mime, is one of the last in a succession of similar efforts from the assembled group, as part of a workshop entitled “The Art of Rhetoric”. Giles Abbot, one of the workshop’s two teachers, is praising Alex’s story and delivery when one of the other attendees, a Romanian woman named Madalina, leaps out of her seat and begins shouting at Giles: “This is complete bullshit! How can you tell him he’s an engaging speaker when he’s terrible? I’m sorry but this is absolute bullshit, this whole thing.” She whips her coat off the back of her chair, very nearly lashing her neighbour in the face with it, and charges for the door, which she slams so hard behind her that the shop’s front windows rattle momentarily in the bemused silence.

We watch her stride off down the street, before turning abruptly around and heading back towards us once more. Perhaps she has forgotten something. But no: she is not yet finished. She stands outside the bookshop and shouts at Giles from the street, her voice only slightly muffled by the glass panes of the door. “That boy is going to go out into the world thinking he’s great! And he’s not great! He’s completely shit!” She swivels around and strides off again in the direction of the nearest tube station. Alex, to his credit, seems to take no special umbrage at having his oration badmouthed in such loud and unambiguous terms. Clearly, he sets no particular store by his talk-smarts.

The other workshop attendees are in a collective state of bewilderment after Madalina’s dramatic defection; the mood in the room seems suspended between amusement and shock. Giles and his partner Leon Conrad, however, are refusing to acknowledge that anything especially significant has happened. Leon turns his attention to the issue of Alex’s violin-miming, the inaccuracy of which seems a particular preoccupation for him. He demonstrates the correct approach to pretending to play a violin, seated with stiff-backed composure on his stool, left wrist perfectly straight, fingers gliding fleetly up and down the neck of his imaginary instrument. The fluent wrist movement and rigid elbow of his bowing arm is of near professional standard. He is like some absurd hybrid of Jascha Heifetz and Marcel Marceau. But he is having trouble passing on these techniques to his student. Some minutes have been spent in this endeavour before Leon abandons it abrubtly.

“Park it,” he says, a note of flinty exasperation seeping into his delivery. “Park it, and we’ll come back to it. We’re obviously not going to get it perfect tonight.”

Leon Conrad. Photo by Sam Irons

I exchange a glance with my neighbour, an affable, sharp-suited gentleman named Andrew, and gesture towards the empty seat left by Madalina. He leans in close to me and says, “that’s going to be an interesting conversation when I get home tonight.” Madalina, I am surprised to learn, is his fiancée, and only came along in the first place because he didn’t want to attend the workshop on his own. I am taken aback at his equable reaction to her public tantrum, and by his showing no interest in going after her. He may have just recently demonstrated himself a jittery public speaker, but the guy is clearly not lacking in nerve when it comes to the private realm. Andrew seems, on a one-to-one level, a confident and thoroughly likable fellow, but he’s here because he has problems with how he comes across in public situations. (Earlier on, he had told his own story to the group, an anecdote about being in Paris in 1997 and passing the scene of Princess Diana’s death without realizing it. This was a passably good story, but one Andrew was obviously very nervous in telling; his voice faltered badly at times, and he clearly struggled with the slightly absurd rhetorical affectations—making theatrical hand gestures, eyeballing members of one’s audience for uncomfortable stretches of time—insisted upon by Giles and Leon. Madalina was discernibly unimpressed, and was not shy about laying forth her objections.) Others have come from various walks of life for various other reasons. There’s an Italian historian named Alessandro who seems to be thoroughly enjoying the evening. There are a couple of drama students, too, and some business types, all looking to up their levels of magnetism and their mastery of an audience.

I, on the other hand, am here because I am interested in the topic of charisma, and in the people who deal in it and study it. Specifically, I want to know whether it can be taught, whether it is something that can be isolated and cultivated. I want to find out whether it is a skill—like juggling or yodeling or pretending to play the violin—that can be learned from an “expert”, practiced and perfected. Giles and Leon run a slightly left-of-centre communications consultancy in London called The Academy of Oratory, whose stated brief is to “help people to communicate at their best in any situation” and to “help aspiring leaders to be authoritative, motivational, influential speakers.” They are also professional raconteurs, part of a circuit of storytellers who travel around spinning yarns at festivals and other public engagements. (Giles is a full time storyteller, while Leon still has a day job he’s been planning to extricate himself from for a while. He designs Powerpoint and Keynote presentations for business talks.)

I’ve come to their workshop because I want to see whether they are capable of helping people become more magnetic, more forceful and persuasive in their speech. (Although I may not be as aggressively skeptical as the recently decamped Madalina, I am certainly habouring doubts of my own.) Even in casual conversation, they both speak with a theatrical magniloquence, making alarming use of a miscellany of hand gestures, dramatic pauses and unnervingly sustained eye contact. Leon in particular seems not to blink at all when in conversation. With its emphasis on enunciation and staginess, his manner is that of an unnerving children’s television presenter. Giles, who is legally blind and has intermittent trouble negotiating the furniture in the room, is nonetheless capable of his own disconcerting feats of eye contact.

One of the workshop exercises involves pairing people off and having them stare openly at each other until one of the parties raises his or her hand to request a ceasefire. I’ve been paired with Andrew, who proves a worthy adversary, but ultimately no match for my ability to withstand and inflict eye contact of grueling duration and intensity (a surprise even to myself). Andrew’s obvious discomfort with my staring reminds me of something I once read about the connection between the social taboo against sustained eye contact and the threat of predation in nature. The philosopher Mary Midgeley, in her book Beast and Man, writes that “to stare steadily while you approach someone, or to stand still staring after he has seen you, is as direct a threat as can be made,” and that this “may well have something to do with the fact that predators naturally stare fixedly at prospective prey before jumping on it. And they are of course regarding it as an object, not as a possible friend—which is just the effect a direct stare conveys to a human being.” The exercise perhaps has a valid enough point—a sort of inoculation against our natural wariness and squeamishness when it comes to eyeballing and being eyeballed—but it seems to me that Giles and Leon may have underestimated the creepy intimacy of direct and sustained staring. You cannot, surely, charm a person while making them uncomfortable.

Giles Abbot. Photo by Sam Irons

2.

I first started to think about the nature of charisma, after interviewing the late Christopher Hitchens four years ago for a magazine. At the time, he was at the very apex of his fame, riding high on the crest of a publicity wave for his book God is Not Great, which had just reached the top of the New York Times Bestseller list. I was already an admirer of his work—in particular his suavely pugnacious performances on American current affairs shows—and I was also probably somewhat in thrall to the legends that surrounded his hard drinking lifestyle and the various and colourful political feuds he had been involved in (contra Chomsky, Galloway, Said, Vidal, and so on). But even so, I was not prepared for how impressed I was by his presence. His fame, of course, would have had something to do with it, as well as his famous eloquence —his much-vaunted ability to speak in perfectly constructed paragraphs; his capacity to chat, as it were, in prose—but it wasn’t just these things. I had met famous people before, and been more or less unimpressed. (I worked in a fancy hotel one summer while in college, for instance, and had the pleasure of bringing a tray of sandwiches and a pot of tea to Tiger Woods in his suite, which I served to him as he sprawled in his underwear on a sofa watching a recording of himself playing golf. As famous as he was, he was not even slightly charismatic, and I don’t think having trousers on would have made him much more so.) Hitchens, though, had the distinctive quality of what I can only attempt to describe as enhanced thereness. He seemed to inhabit the space he occupied in a more potent and thorough way than anyone else possibly could have.

From the moment he opened the door to his hotel room, he was establishing himself as a person who didn’t have a great deal of time for the punctilio of social convention. He warmly greeted me and then immediately excused himself to go to the toilet. He did not, however, close the door to the toilet behind him. Instead, he continued chatting, the urbanely stentorian rumble of his voice amplified so that it could be heard above the sound of his own late-morning urination. He was enthusing about the Irish novelist Colm Tóibín, who was due to swing by after the interview to drive him out to a party at the home of Paul McGuinness, U2’s manager. He also mentioned that Bono, his “new best friend”, was going to be there, and I remember being impressed by the way in which he could superimpose a shade of subtle self-mockery onto this crass namedropping, all while shouting at me from the next room over the sound of his own piss hitting the bowl. The whole thing should have been a case study in vulgarity, but somehow wound up seeming obscurely sophisticated. I thought that perhaps this was what people were referring to when they talked about self-possession. Hitchens gave the impression of possessing himself in a way that I had not encountered before. He was, it seemed clear, a deeply charismatic man.

It was a little early in the day for me—not yet even noon—but when he announced that it was high time to break out the booze and offered me a little something from his mini-bar, I threw caution to the wind and told him I could probably handle a dry white wine. People often say of very charismatic people that they would follow them out of the trenches and into battle. I might not have followed him into battle, but there was no question in my mind about whether I would follow him into late-morning drinking. No question at all.

3.

Charisma is a mysterious thing. The language we use to speak about it is often characterized by a kind of in-built evasiveness. When we talk about “the X factor”, or about “that certain something”, or about “je ne sais quois”, we are in fact acknowledging, that we don’t quite know what it is we are talking about. Language itself seems to throw up its hands in resignation when it comes to this particular subject. Conversations on the topic tend to begin and end with an acknowledgement that a small number of people have it, and that pretty much everyone else doesn’t. Indeed the origins of the word point towards its essential unknowability, its strange mystique. It was initially an ecclesiastical Latin term derived from the Greek word kharisma, from kharis, meaning “favour” or “grace.” Its classical usage was exclusively religious, referring to a spiritual gift, and it retains something of that numinous quality even today. A charismatic person can seem more present, more there, than anyone else in a room, and that presence can have odd and unaccountable effects on people. The late Steve Jobs, for instance, was by all accounts a legendarily charismatic man when he needed to be; the phrase “Reality Distortion Field” was coined by Budd Tribble, one of his colleagues at Apple, to describe the way in which his magnetism acted on those working around him, persuading them to attempt and achieve things they would otherwise have thought impossible.

The earliest use of the term “charisma” is in the epistles of St Paul, where he uses it to mean “the gift of God’s grace.” The epistles themselves were written for a specific and circumscribed demographic: the nascent Christian communities that had started to appear in gentile areas such as Rome, Corinth and Colossus in the decades after Christ’s death. Here he describes the “charismata”, the various forms and manifestations of this divine spiritual gift.

 I might not have followed him into battle, but there was no question in my mind about whether I would follow him into late-morning drinking. No question at all.

Only very recently has the term taken on a secular meaning. We owe our contemporary understanding of charisma to the German sociologist and economist Max Weber. In his book The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, Weber offers the following definition: “Charisma is a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities. These are such as are not accessible to the ordinary person, but are regarded as of divine origin or as exemplary, and on the basis of them the individual concerned is treated as a leader.” Weber would presumably have dismissed the idea of charisma training with a hearty Teutonic chuckle.

When I meet Giles and Leon for a drink after the workshop, they are adamant that charisma can be taught, however inconclusive the events of the last few hours may have proven. Giles settles into his seat and takes a small sip of his pint. I ask him how he would define it.

“Charisma,” he says, lightly rolling the “r”, “is a quality ascribed to some people. What do I believe it to be?” Here he breathes in deeply through his nose, something I’ve noticed he does in order to muster his oratorical forces and signal that he is about to say something noteworthy. “I think it’s related to presence. Presence with self. Presence with what it is you are talking about. And also presence with the person you are talking to.”

I suggest to Giles that charisma might actually have more to do with visual signals than with the kinds of oratorical techniques he and Leon teach. I mention the famous “glove scene” in On The Waterfront, in which the young Marlon Brando plays with a white glove dropped by the beautiful young woman with whom he is walking. Brando says very little in the scene, and in fact doesn’t do a whole lot either, apart from toying with the girl’s glove and finally putting it on his hand, but it is nonetheless impossible to take your eyes off him, despite the simultaneous presence in the frame of Eva Marie Saint’s beautiful face.

Giles’ attitude to charisma is less whimsical: he cares about the things that can be taught.

“I can’t make people beautiful, but I can improve the sound of peoples’ voices and, more importantly, the way people use their voices. Can we teach talent? No. Can we improve skill? Yes. Can charisma be improved by skill-based learning?” Here he pauses at dramatic length before answering his question in a near-whisper: “Yes.”

Charisma class. Illustration by Marian Scott

4.

The idea that charisma can be taught—that low-impact schlubs like you and I might be able to learn some of the “techniques” that make the likes of Bill Clinton and Steve Jobs such magnetic personalities—seems counterintuitive. Nevertheless, the field of charisma training is continually growing, and growing more lucrative. One of its major players is Owen Fitzpatrick, an Irish practitioner of Neuro-linguistic Programming (a controversial form of personal development-oriented psychotherapy often used to treat phobias and mild addictions). If Giles and Leon have set out their stall at the artsier fringe of the charisma market, Owen is very much at the business end. His company, Owen Fitzpatrick International Life, runs a successful semi-regular course known as the “Charisma Bootcamp.” This is a four-day event in which attendees are taught the principles of what Fitzpatrick calls “Charismatic Communication.” Guest speakers include a voice coach; a “self-made multimillionaire and management guru”; a magician and mind-reader; a man who calls himself “The Pitch Doctor”; a stylist and fashion television show presenter; and a mid-range Irish stand-up comedian named Karl Spain. According to the promotional materials from the course website:

You’ll find yourself understanding how to look as good as you can and speak as well as you can to make the best possible impression. As you enjoy learning about leadership, you’ll begin to understand how to become a more inspiring communicator with a more success-based attitude. From captivating people with stories and having them crack up with laughter, you’ll learn how to move people. You’ll learn how to command a room and speak powerfully in public.

Owen agrees to meet me for coffee at one of Dublin’s fancier hotels to discuss his own personal perspectives on charisma. He arrives dead on time, casually dressed in jeans and an open-necked shirt, looking nothing like the kind of cornily handsome, sandblasted lunkhead I had lazily imagined. He has a geek-made-good look to him, like an older and more dapper Mark Zuckerberg.

Can we teach talent? No. Can we improve skill? Yes. Can charisma be improved by skill-based learning?” Here he pauses at dramatic length before answering his question in a near-whisper: “Yes.”

“When I was 14 or 15,” he says, “ I was very depressed. I went through a tough time in school. I was bullied quite a lot. Not physically so much as emotionally. I was in a mixed school and stuff, and I wasn’t very popular—I wasn’t one of these people that everyone looked up to, or related to. I was on my own a lot of the time. I actually got to the point where I was suicidal for a couple of years. So it was pretty bad.”

He tells me all this, unprompted, within seconds of sitting down, delivering it almost in the style of a sales pitch. It has undoubtedly become part of a personal mythology, a narrative of how he got to Charismaville and, more importantly, how he can help others get there too. What he is keen to stress is the way in which he went about using NLP to change the personality that seemed to be at the root of his unhappiness and unpopularity. NLP is premised to a large degree on the idea that, through making certain behavioural adaptations, we can change aspects of ourselves that might seem fundamental.

“I just kind of got through all that myself,” he says. “I didn’t reach out for help or anything.” He started to learn about NLP, developing an interest in psychology and becoming, at 17, one of Europe’s youngest ever qualified hypnotists.

“One of the things I wanted to do was not just become happier myself, but also become more popular. I wanted to become someone that people actually listened to, or liked. I wanted to be someone who made some sort of impact, who was of interest to people. And the term that kept recurring for me, over and over again, was ‘charisma.’”

While he was at university and studying NLP, he started developing an interest in how to become more charismatic.

“I said, look, if I can make this much progress on my own, then I can make more progress. I’d seen comedians become more funny over time. Children who were very shy could develop more confidence. And sometimes, with that, came charisma. So I became fascinated with the question of how you become a more charismatic person. What is charisma? What’s it all about?”

Owen’s personal definition of charisma is that it is an impression you create in the mind of another person, which seems an uncontroversial enough interpretation, and perhaps even a banal one. “Sometimes it isn’t you that creates it,” he says. “It’s an impression of you being engaging, of you sometimes being funny, sometimes being passionate, intriguing, mysterious. But it’s something that they get inside their head that is constructed in their head.” It’s not necessarily about confidence, he insists, although people often conflate the two qualities. It’s possible (although rare) to be charismatic without giving an impression of unusual confidence. “The important thing is to create an impression of being warm and engaging, or to create a powerful energy.”

I tell him that he seems to sees it as a kind of performance. He pauses for a moment. “I think it’s true in many cases. But from my point of view, it only works long-term if it’s done internally. It’s like the inner game and the outer game. The outer game is how you position yourself to other people, but that doesn’t always sit if you’re not feeling it yourself. Because you can tell by talking to me whether or not I really like myself. We have that instinct.”

I’m not sure that I do have that instinct, personally. Owen could secretly loathe himself and I might not suspect it. He could be planning on standing up from the table after our conversation and going straight to the bathrooms on the other side of the foyer to weep lavishly in a corner stall, and I wouldn’t have any instinctive sense that that might be on the agenda.

“The vast majority of people have the ability to be able to read a bullshitter,” he says. “You are evaluating me at a subconscious level, figuring out whether I’m putting it on. It’s about the way you stand, the way you talk, the way you sit.”

About that: there’s a discontinuity between what Owen is saying and the way in which he says it. I hadn’t been expecting the kind of skull-boring eye contact Leon unleashes on the casual chatter, but I had expected something above the standard level of gaze-holding. Owen barely makes any eye contact at all. As he talks, in fact, his eyes flit all over the busy lounge, and on more than one occasion, I watch his gaze follow an attractive woman striding from one end of the room to the other. His manner puts me in mind of a concierge circling a location with his pen on a complimentary hotel map. It seems to me that he is not fully present in the moment. I am not offended by this, though it seems odd in someone whose entire career is premised on the idea that he has privileged access to the “secrets of charisma.”

But perhaps this makes sense. Owen has told me, after all, that he is not a naturally charismatic person—that he taught himself how to be charismatic. I have seen video footage of him giving presentations on charisma. In these, he is highly animated, cracking jokes, a forceful and engaging personal presence. Obviously, he’s not “on” right now. I wonder whether any definition of charisma that allows it to be turned on and off at will is really a satisfactory definition. I consider telling him that I don’t personally find him especially charismatic—a nice guy, sure, just not an unusually magnetic personality—but I don’t want to be unnecessarily rude. Instead, I tell him that I’m a little skeptical about the possibility of charisma being cultivated in the average person. Does it happen, I ask, that a person comes in to one of his workshops and leaves, a few sessions and a presumably considerable cash sum later, a demonstrably more charismatic person? Does he really claim to be able to see a difference in his clients?

“I think I definitely can,” he says. “I’ve had emails from people, a couple of weeks after the course, and they’ve started up a conversation with someone on a train because they just felt okay about it. Or a girl went to do an interview and did a brilliant interview as a result. It’s about getting them to that point where they become more comfortable with who they are.”

But this is confidence he is talking about, surely, which is a quite different thing to charisma. Lots of people start conversations with strangers on trains, and far more are irritating or boring than are charismatic. Owen says, in the context of a discussion of the importance of how you present yourself, that “everything is marketing.” I can’t help thinking, I tell him, that if it can be taught, it’s not really charisma.

“Well, that’s a very predominant idea,” he says, “that charisma is something people either have or don’t have. And I fundamentally don’t believe that. Because when I was in school I was terrified the first time I did public speaking. I was a mess. And now I travel around the world teaching people to become better public speakers. I presented my own television show. And in order to go from where I was to where I am, I needed to have improved in a number of different areas. So I’ve definitely become far more charismatic as a result.”

5.

If charisma could be bottled, James “Baby Doll” Dixon would have done it long ago. “It would help tremendously in my field,” he tells me, “that’s for sure.” Dixon is a US talent agent whose clients are mainly comedians and television presenters; he represents, amongst others, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmell and Adam Corolla, and has been instrumental in their respective successes. Presumably, therefore, he knows a thing or two about charisma, and knows it when he sees it.

“Yeah, sure,” he says over the phone in a thick New York drawl, “it’s definitely something I look for in my line of work. It’s a huge factor. But there are people who say they can train people in charisma? Cos let me tell you, I know some people who could probably do with a few lessons.”

He insists, though, that he’s seen enough to know that it is definitely “an innate quality,” and that it can’t be manufactured. It’s one of the crucial things he looks for when deciding whether to represent a client, he says. “Generally you can tell right away when someone walks into a room, but that doesn’t always come across when you put a camera in front of them. There are a lot of times where a guy just doesn’t translate when the red light comes on, but there’s not a whole lot you can do about it.

Though we might imagine charisma to be the non-renewable resource by which the entire entertainment industry is fueled, it is, he tells me, by no means a given, even in the rarefied celebrity circles in which he moves professionally. I ask him who he has met who has most struck him as unusually charismatic. He pauses for a moment to consider, before apologizing for delivering what he sees as such a predictable answer: “George Clooney. I’ve met him a few times and that guy just, you know, walks into a room and lights up the place.”

That’s easy to believe, but with the likes of Clooney–even for someone who works with entertainers for a living–there is always going to be a certain amount of swooning. And that, I suggest, will inevitably exert a destabilizing pressure on any attempt to objectively measure the precise quality of their charisma.

Dixon chuckles. “That’s a fair point. I’m sure that’s got to be a factor, because he’s so famous. But the thing is, he just comes across as such a regular guy. Like an awesome regular guy that you could hang out with, even though he’s a giant movie star and so deeply talented. I’m sure there’s at least a little thread of, you know, ‘holy shit, it’s George Clooney.’ But I’ve met a lot of megastars over the years and, let me tell you, they don’t all have that quality.”

Tom Hanks, he mentions, is another person who possesses that extraordinary combination of celestial fame and regular-guy hangoutability. “Hanks is just incredibly likeable when you meet him. Totally a regular guy, but totally charismatic when he walks into a room, just in a really understated way. I know I’m mentioning gigantic stars here, and I’m sure, like you say, there are skewed perceptions when you meet a guy like Hanks. But my instinct? If he was a guy who just came into your office to have a meeting about your computer service in your business? You’d like him. You’d leave the meeting, and you’d go, wow, what a great guy that guy was! I just think that’s what it is, actually. Charisma is likability. A lot of it has to do with being self-deprecating. With having a sense of humour. All those qualities combined with intelligence.”

In James’s view, if there is such a thing as a secret formula for charisma, this is it. And it’s a formula that is, in his experience, common to a lot of the “super-successful” people in the entertainment world. “I always say the same thing,” he says, “which is that it’s not a mistake when these people get to that level. It doesn’t happen by accident. People say, ‘yeah, he got lucky.’ Well you know what? Maybe he got lucky for a film or whatever, and then you never hear from him again.” With the Hankses, the Clooneys and the Winfreys, he says, there’s no sense of arbitrariness to it when you meet them. You never think it could have been anyone. You meet these people, he says, and you think, “okay, I get it. I get why they are where they are. I get why they’re superstars. That can’t be manufactured, and can’t be learned.”

As with any conversation I’ve ever had about charisma, it doesn’t take very long for the name Bill Clinton to get mentioned. James has met him a number of times over the years and the man has, he assures me, “charisma coming out of his charisma.” His experience of Clinton is pretty much identical to anyone else who has met him. “He looks you straight in the eye, and you feel like you’re the only person in the room, like he’s focused on you solely. He’s great with names. He didn’t get to be president, a poor guy from Arkansas like that, without being charming as shit.”

When I talk to Linda Rice Johnson–who, as publisher of Ebony and Jet magazines is one of the most prominent African American women in American media–she doubles down on the Clinton charisma appraisal. He’s a family friend, and spoke at the funerals of both of her parents.

He didn’t get to be president, a poor guy from Arkansas like that, without being charming as shit.”

“Without a doubt, he is the most charismatic person I’ve ever met,” she says. “I’ve been with him on many occasions when he’s walked into a restaurant and people just drop their forks.”

She insists that this has less to do with his fame, and with his status as an ex-president, than I might think. “No. No, because I’ve seen other heads of state, and—believe me—it’s not the same. This is in the man’s DNA. And the reason I say this is because he came to our office when he was governor of Arkansas, and not even a very well-known governor of Arkansas. And he had it back then. He had it when he walked in the door.”

6.

As nebulous a topic as charisma is, as difficult as it is to talk about with any sort of objectivity or precision, it is–as both Linda Rice Johnson and James Dixon point out–something we tend to recognize instantaneously when we see it. There is a wide spectrum of opinion as to what the quality itself consists of, in other words, but a surprisingly high degree of unanimity when it comes to identifying those who are in possession of it. While writing this piece, I lost count of the number of people I asked for their ad hoc definitions of charisma—not just people I interviewed, but friends, acquaintances and family members. They all had their own idiosyncratic ways of defining the term, but almost all of them said that they believed it to be an innate quality. The only people I spoke to who claimed to believe that it could be cultivated were those who stood in some way to make a profit from that claim. There are countless books for sale on Amazon whose authors assert privileged access to the “secrets” of charisma. The tips they pass on to their readers tend to be a mixture, in varying proportions, of NLP techniques, self-help inspiration, heavily diluted psychology, and pure guff. It’s not surprising that people would want to claim to be able to teach charisma, and it’s less surprising still that people would want to be able to learn it. It is, after all, a form of power—the fuel on which so many successful politicians, entertainers and business people seem to run. We are all, to some degree or another, narcissists who crave the attention and approval of others, either as an end in itself, or as a means towards more material objectives (money, sex, influence, whatever). Charismatic people seem to attract these things with confounding ease—this is why we talk about “magnetic” personalities; they exert a powerful force of social gravity. It makes sense for us to want to attain this quality, and it makes sense for people to want us to believe that they can help us.

In the course of trawling the web for charisma traffickers and their titbits of advice, I came across one particularly striking video on the website of Forbes, the magazine aimed squarely at the aspiring billionaire demographic. In it, a beamingly glamourous older lady named “Carol Kinsey Goman, Ph.D” (“Business coach, Author, International Speaker”) gives a short, slick presentation–to a stock-music-catalogue background of light-to-medium funk–on “How to Fake Charisma.” The video is remarkable not so much for its content–which is mostly the usual stuff about warm smiles, expansive gestures and, above all else, keeping your shoulders well back at all times–as the way in which that content is presented. The fact that these tips are proffered as a means to faking charisma, as opposed to cultivating it or “mastering” is revealing. The behaviours she recommends are of much the same type as those recommended by Eoin, by Giles and Leon, and by pretty much everyone else who claims the ability to help people become more charismatic. But her frankness about the fact that these are only elements of a performance–her honesty about the fundamental dishonesty of the whole endeavour–puts the idea of charisma cultivation in perspective. More than this, the stiff staginess of her whole vibe in the video inadvertently reveals something crucial about charisma: not only can it not be faked, but attempting to fake it invariably leads to a terrible anti-charisma, the repellent flipside of charisma’s social magnet. Trying to act charismatic when you’re not can backfire in similarly drastic ways as trying to act young, or hip, or intellectual, or black, or tough, when you’re not.

That morning in Hitchens’s hotel room four years ago, when I assented to his offer of a drink from the mini-bar, he handed me a quarter bottle of Sauvignon Blanc and picked up the phone to put in an order for a Johnny Walker Black. After a couple of unsuccessful attempts to get room service on the other end of the line, he dialed zero, taking his business straight to reception.“Hello,” he said, not toning down the sauveness in the slightest even for this most mundane of exchanges. “It’s Hitchens here in room four-oh-nine. I can’t get room service to answer the phone. Could you intervene for me? It’s very easy. I just want them to pour a large Black Label Johnny Walker scotch. With no ice, please. And that’s all I want. If I can get a rush on that, I can’t tell you how grateful I would be. Thank you, happy Bloomsday.” Now that, I remember thinking, is how you put in a request for a goddamn beverage. He was ordering Scotch in the best possible way. But if I tried to order a drink in that tone, and in those words, I would, at best, look like an idiot or, at worst, get thrown out of whatever establishment I happened to attempt it in. That’s not to say that I haven’t, over the years, considered giving it a shot. But I know I’d never be able to pull it off, no matter how well I rehearsed it, and no matter how confident I felt in my performance. And that’s just my tough luck.