Chas Newkey-Burden

There was some dramatic testimony during the first week of Russell Brand’s trial and we didn’t need to miss a moment of the action because there are five – five – podcasts reporting daily from the courtroom. Brand faces three charges of rape, three of sexual assault and one of indecent assault, all of which he denies.  On the BBC’s Russell Brand on Trial, Anoushka Mutanda-Dougherty gives a breathless daily commentary on the trial, which is expected to last eight weeks. Minnie Stephenson lends an authoritative, let’s-get-down-to-business vibe to Channel 4’s Four The Record: Russell Brand on Trial. Sky News have their own Russell Brand On Trial series, which finds room for details such as the ‘basic’ coffee in the courtroom canteen.

Like any freelance writer I’ve taken on some tough gigs. I wrote a book about Paris Hilton. I interviewed the hardman footballer Julian Dicks, surrounded by his panting English Bull Terriers. Even more dangerously, I’ve argued for veganism in the pages of The Spectator. But I recently got the most challenging commission of all: my Dad asked me to write a eulogy for my Mum, who has passed away.  Naturally, I was honoured. The speech gave shape to my grief and, when I delivered it at the funeral, I felt like I was speaking directly to her.

It was a few moments before the whistle blew on the opening match of the 2006 World Cup when a text message arrived from a colleague. ‘Well, here we go!’ it read. I rolled my eyes, slipped my phone back into my pocket, and left the message unanswered.  Why the grumpiness? Because the message came from a man who normally took no interest whatsoever in the game, except to occasionally mock people like me for being daft enough to enjoy a 'silly game with silly men kicking a ball around'. Yet here he was, transformed by the arrival of the World Cup into an enthusiastic student of… 'footie'.  He wasn't alone.

Sometime around the pandemic years, I began to notice that when friends called to catch up, alongside the customary news about careers, marriages, and offspring, they would update me on the fortunes of their favourite podcaster.  The trend reached a harrowing crescendo when an acquaintance of mine somehow became a devout listener to The Rest Is Politics and started keeping me informed about the latest exploits of his imagined companions, ‘Alastair’ and ‘Rory’. (Worst of all, his favourite of the two is Rory. I can think of only a handful of worse things to discover about a friend.

When I was in my teens and twenties, older people told me that they were exhausted just watching how I lived my life. I careered through my youth in a fog of football matches, protest marches, pubs, clubs and raves. I treated sleep as an inconvenience and I’d increasingly arrive home at daylight, not quite sure how the evening ended or where that bruise came from.  ‘Wait until you’re our age,’ oldies would say. ‘You’ll slow down too. Then it’ll be your turn to look at the young with bewilderment.’  Well, I did the slowing down part. After we were all locked down in 2020, I never fully unlocked again.

I’m one of those gobby vegans who will happily tell anyone why they should stop consuming animal products. But I can still admit what’s obviously true: most vegan cheese isn’t particularly good. I was once ardently devoted to cheese. In my vegetarian years, paneer, mozzarella and halloumi were less foods than companions. I loved how paneer would soak up the spice of a curry like a sponge. Mozzarella was like a spectacle of tensile, elastic theatre and halloumi provided evocative, salty squeaks. I also took delight in the standard toasted cheddar sandwich. Yes, I did get quite fat. But when I learned about what goes on at dairy farms, everything changed.

A farmer in Derbyshire is going to make his cows uglier to try to deter  modern agricultural impostors. These impostors are neither foxes nor badgers but social media influencers who keep showing up to film content with his animals.   They arrive in waves. On one occasion, dozens surrounded Alex Birch’s herd at the edge of a field. Another time, a yoga teacher unfurled her mat and filmed a class beside the cows, as though they were props in a bucolic stage set. Wearied by the intrusion, Birch now speaks of crossbreeding his Highland cows to make them ‘less photogenic’.

When I was a child, I always wanted to watch television during supper, but my dad wasn’t keen. He preferred family conversation and as we chatted over a meal he would try to gently steer us towards more pleasant subjects rather than the vulgar or provocative topics I tended to propose. ‘A meal is a sacred thing,’ he’d tell me.  I spent my secondary education at a bizarre school run by a quasi-Vedic cult, where table manners were also important. Before lunch, we chanted a Sanskrit mantra. The organic vegetarian food was to be offered, not grabbed. We sat upright, our backs as straight as any Himalayan yogi. We were told not to eat more than we needed. Naturally, I sneered at much of this as angrily as any teenage Clash fan would.

Over the past few months, I’ve been training for the London Marathon, so most weekends I’ve been out running more than 20 miles at a stretch. I carry the usual bits to make these long slogs vaguely civilised – energy gels, a water bottle, a couple of fruit pastilles. They help, of course. But there’s one thing I absolutely cannot do without: music.  Non-runners sometimes ask if I ever feel like giving up and trudging home. And honestly, the only times that’s happened is when my AirPods have died and the music – my invisible pacer, my emotional support DJ – has suddenly vanished mid-run.  This makes sense, according to Victoria Williamson, a researcher and lecturer in music psychology and the author of You Are the Music.