THEO PANAYIDES meets a film maker and novelist who appears fascinated by serial killers but who says they are merely metaphors

Every year, the inmates of La Santé – one of France’s most notorious prisons – award a prize for the best crime novel of the year (the rather mischievous point, I suppose, is that they know good crime writing when they see it). A few years ago they chose Je ne vous aime pas (‘I Don’t Like You’), the debut novel by Eric Cherrière – and were quite surprised when Eric, now 41, turned up in person to receive his award. “When they saw me, [they said] ‘But you look like a child!’,” he recalls with a chuckle. “And then they said: ‘When we saw what you write, it’s not us who should be in prison, it’s you!’.”

Eric’s first novel is about a serial killer. So is his second novel, Mademoiselle Chance. So is his film debut Cruel, which unspools behind us – part of the Cyprus Film Days festival – as we talk in the lobby of the Zena Palace in Nicosia. Like the hero of Je ne vous aime pas, Pierre Tardieu in Cruel (played by Jean-Jacques Lelté) kills people more or less at random, and not only does he kill them but he likes to toy with them first, keeping them prisoner in the cellar where his grandpa once hid Jews during the war and noting down details of their final hours in an exercise book.

So when did Eric first become fascinated by serial killers?

He shakes his head: “For me, it’s a concept,” he replies. “It’s not real”. He’s tall and thin, rather geeky-looking; his face is pleasant, even boyish. His hair is floppy and he’ll sometimes pause to brush hair out of his eyes as he talks, like an adolescent. “My serial killers in Cruel and my two novels don’t exist in reality. In reality, serial killers kill for psychosexual reasons, because their fantasmes [i.e. fantasies] involve sex and death. My serial killers kill for existential reasons. They kill because they are human, and they don’t know how to live.”

Cruel plays with that concept a little, subtly misdirecting the audience in a nod towards the kind of film it pointedly isn’t. Pierre’s first victim (that we see) is a young woman, and he appears to have sex on his mind as they talk in the cellar: “Could you find me attractive?” he asks. (“Yes,” sobs the desperate woman, willing to make any sacrifice.) But in fact sex has nothing to do with it: Pierre’s next victim is a man, and in any case he’s later involved in a ‘normal’ relationship with a woman who knows nothing of his murderous tendencies. His problem is something much deeper than sexual dysfunction: it is, as Eric says, “existential”.

The killer is merely a metaphor. “I never considered my serial killers as serial killers. I considered them as human, like you and me”. Pierre’s violence stems from the loss of childhood, the alienation of daily life, the burden of existence itself. “How do we react to the frustration of life?” asks Eric rhetorically, warming to his theme. “How do we react to the anguish of Time passing – Time is passing, we are going to die, how do we react? I think we react by violence. Of course we don’t kill people, but by a form of violence”. Making his protagonist a killer is a reflection of a general malaise, an amplification of the violence that exists inside all of us. It’s the same idea as a scientist, investigating Nature with his – and Eric makes a gesture that looks like a microscope or a magnifying glass, his words having failed him. He sighs unhappily: “It’s difficult for me to speak in English”.

I think I understand what you’re saying, I assure him.

“You understand between the lines,” he replies, with a rueful laugh.

I’d actually offered to do the interview in my miserable French, but he prefers to practise his English. It’s easy to see why: Cruel is a hit, having opened in Busan (the biggest festival in Asia) and travelled all over the world; he’s only here for a couple of days, then travels to Rome for another screening. Festivals have interpreters, of course, but being able to discuss the film fluently in English will surely make a good impression – and Eric must be keen to do all he can for Cruel, given how hard it was to make it.

How hard was it? For the answer, one only has to look at the brevity of its opening credits. Most European films open with a list of funding bodies and production companies, but Cruel only has a single production credit: “De Pure Fiction présente”. De Pure Fiction is the company he formed with his wife in the middle of shooting – and let me tell you, he laughs, “creating a company with your wife in the middle of shooting your first movie is the worst thing you can do in your life! Your life is a nightmare when you do that! But my wife hasn’t divorced, it’s all right,” he adds with a flourish of gallows humour. At first the idea was to make the film guerrilla-style, more or less without money – but the project grew, people had to be paid, so Eric and his wife sold their apartment, got a little cash from the regional government in exchange for shooting locally, and formed the company to help with financing. “Cruel is a movie that has been produced completely out of the system in France,” he explains emphatically. “Because it’s very, very, very low-budget” – around €200,000 – “and we don’t do movies with that kind of budget in France”.

His wife Isabel was vital to the project; she too is a writer (of novels), but also has a knack for convincing people “to continue” when they’re thinking of quitting. There’s a home-made quality to Cruel. The child in the childhood sequence that opens and closes the movie is Eric and Isabel’s own son (he looks about four years old). Pierre’s flat is Eric’s grandmother’s flat, “when I was a child I slept in the same bed” as the killer. The shirt he’s wearing now, he says, pointing to his shirt, was worn by Pierre in the film; “The way the killer meets his wife is the way I met my wife, in a librairie [bookshop]”. It’s more than just low-budget penny-pinching, it’s a hidden authorial signature: “For me, it was important to have that kind of truth. I’m the only one who knows it, this truth, but when you are desperate” – when things are going badly, when the film doesn’t work in the editing room – “it gives you something strong. ‘I continue, I continue, this is what I want to do’.”

Did he ever have moments when he thought he’d made a mistake in starting the project, though?

“I think you always have the doubt,” he replies. “And you always say to yourself: ‘I make a mistake, I make a mistake, I make a mistake. It’s a disaster. No, it’s not possible’.” He shrugs eloquently: “And then I am here in Cyprus – wow! You know, you meet people … After this I go to Roma, to festival of Roma. You meet people who say ‘The movie’s interesting. It’s interesting’. So, OK, you have to continue. Being there is wonderful when you have passed many problems, disasters”.

One might almost say that Eric himself is an existential hero, like his killer. One might say that making Cruel was his own “form of violence” – but against what, exactly? Maybe the frustration of having wanted to direct a film for the past 15 years, making TV documentaries for a living while meeting with producers; that’s why he finally turned to novels, he explains, so he could get something done without having to share his vision with a litany of backers. And of course there’s Toulouse, the town where he lives. “Toulouse is a small town, after all,” says Pierre in the movie (speaking, one presumes, for his creator). “We always see the same faces, the same people. We watch each other growing old, and don’t even say hello”. Toulouse is also in the provinces, a long way from Paris. “I’m not in le réseau,” admits Eric, “I’m not in the network. It’s very difficult. But I’m not stupid. I have friends, I have connections”.

The success of Cruel has brought new connections; the film has already been sold in Turkey, Mexico and much of Asia. One still has to wonder, though: Where does it come from, this darkness? It’s all very well to say ‘Oh, the killing is just a metaphor’ – but Cruel is aptly named (it’s a ruthless little film), and let’s not forget that debut novel which even hardened criminals found a bit disturbing. (His books are a lot more explicit, says Eric; he doesn’t show violence in films, “I don’t know how”.) What’s he like as a person? Why do all these visions of sick, sadistic bogeymen dance in his head?

I don’t know; nor does he, probably. What was he like as a child, or a teenager? “Shy and completely extroverted,” he replies cryptically. “I was melancholic, and very happy”. He’s not being coy, he really has two sides. His parents divorced when he was young and he grew up in two environments, in the city with his father and in the country with his mother; the latter seems to have been the more pleasing, and even now he has “a great passion for Nature” (Cruel has some beautiful shots of rippling ponds and dappled light amid the horrors). He’s a film buff, the kind of boy who must’ve buried himself in movies; his all-time Top 10 is heavy on action and Westerns, and a line from The Wild Bunch – “In our hearts we all want to be children again, even the worst of us” – was a big inspiration in writing his killers. One might call him a solitary type in a sociable profession. “When you make a movie, you are alone,” he says simply. “But you can’t be alone. You have to find people.”

Eric Cherrière works hard; that’s what happens when two writers get married. “Long hours to write, write, write, and rewrite and rewrite,” he sighs. “And talk with my wife, she reads what I write and we talk, we talk, we talk”. Sometimes he’ll seek seclusion in his house in the country: “I work for 10 days, I see nobody. I don’t see my wife and my kid. I’m in another place. I just watch Nature and the land, I just see the clouds and the trees”. And then? Does he start to miss people after 10 days? Oh no, he replies – but then it’s Isabel’s turn to write “and to be out of the world”, so presumably they switch places! He spent today in Limassol, he tells me, as a guest of the festival: “I [spent] four hours just watching the sea – and four hours writing, writing, writing.”

His next book will be dark and violent – but his next film will be more of an adventure yarn, not so disturbing. I suppose it’s just as well; there’s enough real-life violence in the world without adding to it in movies. When you watch real beheadings on the internet, how can fiction be deemed overly-violent? “I don’t know how to dialogue with that kind of images,” he muses, speaking of militant Islam’s various atrocities – a curious admission from a man who creates monsters for a living, but of course the work is different. In the end, I suspect he tends to look inwards, loving nothing better than to lose himself in the calming beauty of Nature and the voluptuous embrace of Cinema. “Do you think you can change the world?” I ask. “No,” he replies instantly.

No?

“No. I can just make movies which are like me, and the way I see the world,” replies Eric, with one of those pleasant smiles which must’ve nonplussed the incarcerated readers at La Santé. “And you write articles, as you see the world. And that’s all – and it’s very little. But it’s big, in a way”. I suppose it is.

ERIC CHERRIERE’S TOP 10 MOVIES
1. The Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah, 1969)
2. The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1947)
3. The Blade (Tsui Hark, 1995)
4. The Whip and the Body (Mario Bava, 1963)
5. Explorers (Joe Dante, 1985)
6. Youth of the Beast (Seijun Suzuki, 1963)
7. Heaven’s Gate (Michael Cimino, 1980)
8. One-Armed Swordsman (Chang Cheh, 1967)
9. A Fistful of Dynamite (Sergio Leone, 1971)
10. Graveyard of Honour (Kinji Fukasaku, 1975)

The nerds have inherited the earth. THEO PANAYIDES meets one who is keen to see children encouraged to think differently

The first time I glimpse Mark Tuttle, he’s talking to three younger men in the offices of IdeaCy in Nicosia. He’s standing up, the three are sitting down. They seem, like Mark himself, to be American. I assume they’re entrepreneurs (IdeaCy is an “incubator” and “accelerator” for new ideas, providing office space and mentoring for teams pitching possible start-ups) – maybe even part of the three-day Startup Live Cyprus event, which ends today. Mark is speaking of the war in the former Yugoslavia, and the Serbian army in particular; I don’t catch the context, but he seems to know what he’s talking about. Mark Tuttle knows a lot of things, indeed knowledge – more than any particular trait – is a big part of what he brings to the table. ‘What’s your specific area of specialisation?’ I ask. He smiles: “I’m a generalist”.

Time is short; he has a flight to catch. It’s nearly 2.30, and a taxi’s picking him up from his hotel at three o’clock. Yet he can’t stop talking, like a gourmand reaching greedily for one last morsel even as the tray’s being taken away. We talk about all kinds of things. “I’m not a hacker, but I had to study hacking,” he confides at one point (his main business these days is Cryptografx, a company specialising in online security). “I had a company in India for two years,” he muses a little later. “Another business of mine was sound-on-sound recording, so I built a series of recording studios and ran them as businesses,” he says, thinking back to his 20s. He’s a musician and a photographer. He talks of Gabor Maté, a Hungarian-born doctor who’s made extensive studies of drug addiction and ADHD. He talks of Democracy Now, a news programme he watches religiously – one of the few media outlets that continues to cover topics (Julian Assange, for instance) which our leaders would prefer to be quietly forgotten.

Mark has blond hair and blue-green eyes; he looks younger than his 51 years, which he puts down to good DNA on his mother’s side. He’s been a design engineer for both medical and mechanical companies; he’s designed parts for the F-22 stealth fighter and the General Motors EV1, the world’s first mass-produced electric car (it was made in the 90s then discontinued, due to pressure from the car-making industry). He lives a peculiarly 21st-century lifestyle, the kind made possible by Skype. His home is a small Austrian village near the border with Slovakia, but his business is in California and he spends between one and three hours every day Skyping with the West Coast (he also fields a daily onslaught of 300-400 emails). His life is “time-shifted,” he explains, so he goes to bed around 5am – nine hours ahead of his associates in San Francisco – and wakes up around midday.

How did he even end up in Austria? He got married, he says with a shrug, to a “complicated” Austrian girl he met in California. “She was gorgeous and exotic, and I didn’t know much about women so I was like ‘OK, this is a good one’!”. He laughs, with no trace of bitterness; his face is rather baggy, giving him a look of relaxed anticipation. “It ended up that she wasn’t the right mentality for me. She didn’t understand me, what I was doing and why I did things. She just liked the money”. I’m a bit startled that Mark’s being so honest about his ex-wife (I didn’t even have to ask), but it seems to be part of his temperament: he won’t apply a filter, even when it comes to his own life. A little later, he talks about his sons, aged 15 and 14: “The 15-year-old boy is like me. So he doesn’t do well in school, he’s really smart, he’s awkward. And the 14-year-old is just like my wife – he’s like, Mr. Social!”. He pauses then adds a caveat, as if remembering that it is, after all, his own kid he’s talking about: “He’s intelligent, also – but he understands communication so well.”

Mark, too, is all about communication these days – but he wasn’t always. What was he like as a teenager? “I was a nerd,” he replies firmly. “I was very introverted in those days. Now I’m, like, an extrovert, but I went through a long process to teach myself how to communicate with other people”. He may even have a touch of “high-functioning autism”, he reckons – an innate awkwardness that left him slightly alienated in the world of high school. He didn’t go to parties, “didn’t go to the prom, never went to dances. I hung out in the Chess Club at lunch. All those people were foreign to me, all the rest of the people”. Chess Club people were fine: they were fellow nerds, they were “awkward people”. Oddly – or not so oddly – his technology provider at Cryptografx is one of his old Chess Club buddies, a brilliant computer scientist who could play three or four games of chess blindfolded simultaneously back in the day, and is now at the cutting-edge of secure authentication for online accounts.

That’s the point, of course: the nerds have inherited the earth, that slight quirky stiffness which made them better with machines and systems than fellow classmates turning out to be just the ticket in a world run by computers. “I had to learn how people work, so I could understand them,” explains Mark, listing the study of human nature as his main interest. “I learn all the time. One of my main interests is learning” – though one senses that he learns with a semi-conscious agenda, so he can teach what he learns. He’s taught English at a Montessori school, and Business Administration at a private university. Above all, in recent years he’s turned to mentoring, sharing his knowledge to advise and inspire entrepreneurs with ideas for start-ups.

What counts as a start-up? The working definition is “a company that’s doing something new that doesn’t have a predictable or measurable outcome from traditional business”. It’s not how big (or small) you are that determines a start-up, it’s how original or revolutionary your idea is. But why should a former electronics whiz-kid and design engineer be so keen to transform the world of business? The answer lies mostly with the missing piece in Mark’s personal jigsaw – his late father, who passed away from brain cancer about 15 years ago but was also his mentor as a child, sparking his curiosity and helping the rather nerdy boy to engage with the world.

“My dad was a serial entrepreneur before it was fashionable,” recalls Mark. He was always getting new ideas, then trying to make them work with no money. One of his brainwaves was a big success (he invented double-sided magnetic material, and made signs for military clients to put on their filing cabinets), allowing him to make a living just from that, but meanwhile he also made his son an accomplice and hands-on sidekick. At six, Mark was working for his father, taking devices apart on Saturday mornings – Dad had a company selling military-surplus electronics from the Vietnam war – and sorting the screws. At 16, he was working for himself, founding the Best Bike Rack Company which ordered bicycle racks from a manufacturer in LA and sold them to apartment blocks housing university students. “I ran that for three or four years,” he recalls, “while I was in and out of college”.

He finally dropped out of college, probably for the same reasons why he’d always done badly in school (“It wasn’t so interesting”) – but the point was never sterile knowledge, the kind one regurgitates to earn a degree, but curiosity, the thirst for knowledge. He and his dad “used to play a game,” he recalls: after church on Sundays they’d drop off his mum and sister at home and drive around suburban Santa Barbara looking for garage sales, a random person’s clutter laid out in their front yard. “Then we’d look at stuff, and I had to ask ‘What’s that? What’s that? What’s that?’ – and my goal was to learn what everything was, so I didn’t have to ask my dad anymore”.

It’s the same curiosity that drives the start-up community – what he calls “the oddballs, those who think differently” – and the same curiosity that drives Mark himself, whether talking of new ideas or staying up all night in his Austrian village, reading about the world. There’s actually a certain despair behind his relaxed bonhomie, his ongoing study of human nature having revealed that people aren’t always very smart. “In America, we call the people that don’t really pay attention to things ‘sheeple’,” he says. “And America’s full of sheeple”.

Everything’s too easy these days, he sighs: everyone is pampered, over-fed and consumer-minded: “We buy products now that last for three years, then we throw them away and buy a new one”. In return for material comforts, people have become passive and conformist, easily managed by the political system. “There’s a lot of people that their parents didn’t bring them up to think – and schools aren’t teaching them to think. They’re teaching them how to be compliant, how to learn something to get a job, so you’ll make money and not make a revolution, not complain too much, get married, have two children, pay your taxes,” he declares hotly. “I think one of the features of most educational institutions is to reduce divergent thinking and creativity”. He cites a study in the UK which tested kids for divergent thinking (“thinking about things differently”). In kindergarten, it found the vast majority of children capable of “genius-level divergent thinking”; by the time they’d graduated from high school, it was down to about 5 per cent.

Is that so surprising, though? Surely kids realise early on that a certain way of thinking will bring them more rewards and an easier life?

“An easier life?” he repeats acerbically. “Oh, is that the goal? An easier life?”

Well, doesn’t everyone want an easier life?

“Maybe. Or an interesting life. What’s interesting? If sitting at home and watching your big screen in your nice house, and driving your Jeep, and going on holiday for two weeks every year – if that’s all your curiosity needs to be fulfilled, great, that’s easy.”

He’s being sarcastic – but in fact Jeeps and big-screen TVs would indeed satisfy a large segment of the population. In a way, Mark Tuttle still hangs out at a metaphorical Chess Club like he did in his high-school days, subtly alienated from most of his fellow humans even if he’s grown much better at communicating with them. His life, after all, is unusual, swinging between two extremes, either super-sociable – immersed in crowds of smart young people from Kosovo to Sweden to Albania, and now Cyprus – or snug in his custom-made bubble, the soundproof office in his Austrian basement (there’s even a piano, in case he feels like playing) and the nightly Skype-commute across the Atlantic. Even now, however, he’s not too keen on going out socially (unless it’s to accompany his girlfriend, a local politician, to some village function). “Well, it’s kind of boring,” he opines when I ask about meeting people just for fun, without any angle. “I’m not really going to gain anything personally by going out”.

Mark will always be a bit of a nerd, I suspect – but that, plus his father’s early mentoring, may be the secret of his success. “I just don’t take easy ways out on things,” he says at one point – and he’s talking about keeping fit (he always climbs stairs instead of using the lift) but he might be talking of his reflexive non-conformism, his zest for the new and original. It’s important to try and think differently, he says – and even more important to share that message with younger people.

Kids no longer have role models, laments Mark Tuttle. Both parents work, the extended family is a thing of the past; they no longer have “uncle Tom, who has a great farm, or uncle Bob, who works on cars”, relatives who’ll invest in a child and answer his questions. “All those role models are gone – so who are the role models? Who’s on MTV, who’s on YouTube. Justin Bye-ber, Bee-ber, whatever his name is”. He shakes his head sadly: “If you don’t have a good mentor, how’s a kid going to reach beyond eating and drinking, and getting a girl in a fast car?”. Then – talking of fast cars, and the very fast taxi he’ll have to locate so as not to miss his flight – he zips out quickly, still talking.

Being a tall woman can be a challenge but it is important to face life’s challenges one TEDx speaker tells THEO PANAYIDES

Christina Smith leans across her desk at the British High Commission, the better to emphasise her point: “It’s not about the heels,” she says firmly. The heels, you might say, are a symbol – and in fact she said so last month, at the TEDx Nicosia Women event where she gave a talk entitled ‘The Challenge of a Woman’. Christina leans back, her point made. The wall behind her is bare, except for two things: a jokey sign reading ‘Keep Calm, We Still Have Oil’ and a photo of Arsenal players Dennis Bergkamp and Thierry Henry, autographed by the players themselves.

She’s 45, with a patient expression; she talks slowly, punctuating her sentences with many a “yeah” and “actually”. I can’t see the high three-inch heels (she’s sitting down) but I assume she’s wearing them (she always does). I do note her fingernails, painted in a quirky way that initially seems random but clearly isn’t, each finger lavished with a different combination of glitter and polish (the ring finger on each hand has no glitter at all). “I do something different every time,” says Christina airily, casting a quick glance at the nails. “My husband goes ‘Don’t have anything odd’, so I always come up with something odd!”.

Her husband Ian is English (she’s London Cypriot), and somewhat older; he’s been awarded an OBE for his work in securing the human rights of people in police custody – which explains indirectly how they met, not because Christina was in custody but because she’s been dealing with the police all her professional life, before her current job as Vice Consul at the High Commission. She worked for local authorities in Barnet and Camden, then moved north and rose to become Director of the Greater Manchester Police Authority, a watchdog overseeing the work of the police – which is where the heels come in, because one day she was walking down a corridor with a senior police officer, on their way to a meeting. “He was making comments about my height,” she recalls, “and queried why I wore heels. So my response to him – because a lot of the TEDx talk was about women having the courage to respond, and not feel threatened or demeaned in some way – my response was: ‘Only a small man would comment about the size of my heels’.”

At this point, one should probably pause to acknowledge that Christina’s experience (the “challenge” she mentioned in her talk) was by no means the worst possible case of sexism in the workplace. She was never denied her rights, or fell victim to overt discrimination like women in many poorer countries. Even by First World standards, she was never harassed to the point of having to file a complaint; she’s never taken anyone to court. Indeed, it’s entirely possible that a man in the same job would’ve faced the same amount of tension (albeit expressed in different ways): the police were understandably wary of having their work scrutinised and inspected by an outsider. “I think, though, the fact that I was young and dominant – and tall! –”

Dominant in terms of how she did her job?

“Dominant in terms of personality,” she replies, with a sly laugh. “That, I think, was what was a challenge to them. Their kind of perception of me was” – her face crumples into an impression of a nervous and unhappy copper – “‘Oh my gosh, yeah, there’s Christina again, she’s going to say something…’”

Sometimes, as with that senior officer in the corridor, it may have been a case of professional tension getting channelled into inappropriate remarks. (He, by the way, was only about five foot three – her “small man” retort was intended to sting – and “never made personal comments ever again”.) Other times, however, her experience might’ve been the experience of any woman in a managerial position – like the time when she was giving a training session on diversity to a roomful of cops, all men.

“So the first three police officers arrive,” recalls Christina. “They come up the stairs, walk towards me and say: ‘Can I ask you where the toilet is, and can you make me a coffee?’. And I said: ‘My coffee-making skills are really good, and I can direct you to the toilet, but actually I’m the Director!’.” The assumption, she notes with a sigh, was that “as the only woman in the room, I must be there to make their coffee for them … For me, it’s a perception thing. I don’t want people to look at me and think ‘She’s just a woman’.” That’s why “the being tall thing is important,” she adds – and that’s why she now wears heels all the time, deliberately.

Why?

“OK, I like wearing heels – but also, since the altercation with the short police officer, I thought ‘Actually, if that’s going to irritate you, I’ll just do it all the time!’. So I’ve got used to wearing the heels, and now actually I wear them with pride – because actually, when I was young, I used to be bullied at school for being tall. I went to a girls’ school, and the small girls would permanently laugh at me because I was tall”. Christina reached her full adult height (about five foot eleven) at the age of 12, and endured many a playground taunt of ‘Jolly Green Giant’; her height was a source of shame and unhappiness then – “but now, actually, I’m very proud of the fact. I’m proud that I’m tall, I’m proud that I can wear the heels and walk around and people are like ‘Oh gosh, you’re tall’. Great! I know I’m tall, that’s fine!”.

Oddly enough, I didn’t notice. Driving up to the High Commission, I was too unnerved by the tight security – my car inching forward at a snail’s pace through the double gates – to notice anything unusual about Christina when she came out to meet me. After the interview, however, walking back to the car, I did discern (now that the subject had been raised) that she is indeed quite tall – and maybe that’s the point, that experience is all about self-image. Once you’re conscious of something, once you’ve learned to view yourself in a certain way, social interaction gets reflected through the prism of that image. It’s not about being tall, it’s about being perceived as tall. Like she said, it’s not about the heels; it’s about what the heels represent – the knowledge that people must be staring at the tall woman who chose to wear heels instead of flats, and getting to a point where you just don’t care.

Being a woman – especially a woman in a male-dominated world like the police – is a similar problem (Christina’s talk was called ‘The Challenge of a Woman’, but it might’ve been called ‘The Challenge of Being a Woman’). It’s something one is conscious of, like being tall or wearing heels, a part of oneself that’s never quite forgotten when dealing with others, and explodes into focus when a chauvinist cop asks you to make his coffee. Being a woman comes with caveats, and implied preconceptions. “I’ve always been outgoing. I’ve always been confident,” she tells me. “But, as a Greek Cypriot-origin person from the UK, I was always told it was good for young women to be good young women, and not really speak their mind so much.”

Hers is a classic London-Cypriot background: dad owned a café, having emigrated from Cyprus in the 50s (“Sometimes I imagine my mum and dad are still in 50s Cyprus!”). Christina’s the middle child, and the older of two girls; her folks were strict, and she still lived at home when she went to university. “We were taught that we had to study hard, do the right thing, get a degree, get a good job, that kind of philosophy”. She was raised not to challenge her parents, unlike the way she raises her own kids (she and Ian have a boy and girl, now 14 and 10) – yet her work has been based on challenge, whether challenging police misconduct or challenging those who couldn’t see past her gender.

The example she gave in her talk was of one occasion when the Greater Manchester Police Authority investigated how the police dealt with prostitutes – only to be told that two officers were “using their services in the back of a police van”. A report was made, and the two men ended up in jail for dereliction of duty – and of course there were cops who resented this meddling woman, and tried to scare her into backing off. “So that was a real challenging time: to be faced with phone calls from police officers who would ring and put the phone down, and you would know that it was their colleagues, and that’s quite intimidating. If you’re not strong, it can be intimidating.

“So, for me, the purpose of that TEDx talk was not to tell them about ‘Look at all the things I’ve done’, that was not the purpose. The purpose was ‘What have I learned from all these experiences that I’ve had in the UK?’. And I’ve learned that actually there are times when not saying what you think, and not challenging, means that people get away with behaviours that are inappropriate”. It helps that she’s naturally confident, admits Christina – “but if you feel passionate about something, if you feel strongly about something, my message was ‘You know what? Don’t be afraid to’” – she hesitates, trying to put it as broadly as possible – “‘to do those things that make you feel better about a situation’. You know? Don’t sit back and let life happen to you”.

We’re interrupted by a phone call. A young teenage girl has come to Cyprus from England, on a vague promise of work; she arrived late last night and now finds herself alone in a mountain village, feeling very lost and scared and homesick; her worried parents in the UK called the High Commission – so Christina sets about organising transport to find the girl and take her to the airport, part of her duties as Vice Consul. It’s a reminder that she challenged the status quo – her own status quo – in a subtler way as well, by walking away from her top job in Manchester, packing up the family and moving to the village of Skarinou (her parents’ village) and a mostly administrative job at the High Commission.

After her talk, she admits, many people wondered ‘Why did you leave that job?’ – “and I said ‘You only have so many fights in you’. You only have so much that you can give before you say ‘Actually, some things are a little bit more important’.” She had two kids, and barely saw them; she left home at 7am and came back at 8 in the evening, often including weekends. She could’ve kept working – could’ve sat back and let life happen to her – but she chose to make a change. Maybe that’s also part of being a woman, muses Christina, “wanting to nurture your children is partly in your brain all the time. All the time you’re doing your job you’re also thinking, trying to make arrangements for where the children are, how will they get from A to B, does the baby need picking up…” She still gets up very early – she leaves Skarinou at 6.20, to beat the traffic – but is generally home by 4pm, leaving time for “normal family things”.

Christina Smith seems like a fun person – she even paints her nails in quirky ways! – yet she’s worked in the grim world of law enforcement, and never shied away from a challenge. Some might say she even challenges clichéd ideas of femininity itself. Her big passion, after all, is the traditionally male enclave of football – that Arsenal photo on the wall is no accident – and in fact she worked for nine years as a “loggist” in the Arsenal control room, driving down from Manchester on weekends to “go and watch my football team”. And of course she’s very tall, for a woman – though in fact lots of women are tall, and they all flocked around her after that TEDx talk. We’ve never had the courage to speak our mind or wear heels, sighed these young women, telling her how much her account had inspired them. One of them specifically said “I’m going out tomorrow to buy myself a pair of heels!”, relates Christina with a satisfied chuckle. It’s not about the heels, though.

Famous caricaturist Hanoch Piven tells THEO PANAYIDES if you are always looking for the right answer you might miss all of the others

You look like an old Israeli singer, says Hanoch Piven, getting up to greet me in the lobby of the Classic Hotel in Nicosia. It’s not something you hear every day, and in fact, having Googled the singer in question – a venerable fellow named Ehud Banai – I think it’s more a case of wearing a similar hat than having a similar face; still, it’s easy to see why he might say it. When you’re a famous illustrator and caricaturist, like Hanoch, I presume you run every face through a checklist of other faces, as a kind of professional instinct. It’s like a tailor mentally calculating waist size when introduced to a new person.

Hanoch is famous, all right; his work has appeared in most of the world’s big magazines, starting back in pre-internet days when magazines ruled the world. Nor did it take him long to become famous. “The day after I finished school I got a commission from Newsweek magazine, to do a cover,” he tells me. The school in question was the School of Visual Arts in New York, the time was 1992 when he was 29 years old (he’s now 52), and the open-sesame was a combination of being prodigiously talented and knowing the right people (the daughter of one of his teachers was an art director in the Newsweek cover department). “In the first months [after graduation] I got a call from Rolling Stone, from Newsweek, from the New Yorker, from Entertainment Weekly, from New York magazine. In the next year I did work for TIME. I mean, I had the big magazines immediately.”

Barack Obama

All these prestigious outlets were asking for caricatures – but not just any caricatures. Hanoch’s particular niche is “playing with objects,” as he puts it, crafting portraits out of a collage of everyday materials. Back in the 90s, he ‘drew’ Bill Clinton with a face of soft pink marshmallows; two decades and two US Presidents later, he assembled Barack Obama for Esquire’s February 2009 cover using chewing gum for his teeth, tiny US flags for his eyes and an Aladdin’s lamp (presumably a reference to the endless promise he represented) for his nose. His Bob Dylan had a harmonica for a mouth and a pointy light-bulb for a nose; the outrageous young Madonna of the early 90s was nothing but a black bra and a pair of handcuffs, arranged to suggest her eyes and mouth. Ross Perot had chattering dentures for eyes; Barbara Bush, like Clinton, had marshmallows for her teeth and pearl necklace. “My marshmallow period,” notes Hanoch wryly.

It’s a joke, but a joke with a slight edge – because artistic ‘periods’ are the hallmark of serious artists, and Hanoch is at pains to point out that he doesn’t view himself that way. “I come from the tradition of caricature and illustration,” he says, sipping water in the lobby of the Classic. His main inspiration as a kid was Mad magazine. “I don’t come from ‘wanting to be an artist’, I’m like ksh-ksh-ksh-ksh” – he mimes himself putting together an illustration at top speed, trying to meet some impossible deadline. “I don’t do it like that,” he concedes, “but this is the picture I have in my head of my original profession”.

Note the word ‘original’ – because things have changed, and in fact our time in the Classic Hotel is fast running out. In a few minutes he’ll be getting up and I’ll be accompanying him across old Nicosia to the Bank of Cyprus Cultural Foundation, for a rather unusual workshop on ‘Playful Creativity’ – one of two events he’s hosting here, the other being a lecture called ‘What can a banana teach us about creativity?’. As those titles indicate, Hanoch Piven’s focus has shifted in recent years, from magazine illustrations to a more educational emphasis on how his particular style can be used to inspire creativity in non-artists. “People told me that,” he explains. “Educators, art therapists, consultants told me: ‘What you’re doing, it can be applied’.” Just as ‘playing with objects’ came to him by accident – he was drawing Saddam Hussein and decided to make the dictator’s moustache out of matches left lying around the house by Hanoch’s heavy-smoking girlfriend – so the hope is that being surrounded by random, everyday materials can stimulate people who wouldn’t know what to draw if faced with a blank sheet of paper.

I don’t ask what made him change direction, but a few explanations come to mind. One is simply that, as he says, experts pointed out the pedagogical benefits of instructing others in his experience. Another, I suspect, is that work has decreased as stories have shifted online, making magazine covers superfluous (though he mentions at least one new commission by a well-known publication) – and another reason may also be Hanoch himself, a man who’s never been entirely comfortable as part of a group. “I feel like I’m always a foreigner, wherever I am”.

He was born in Uruguay and only moved to Israel at the age of 11, part of the returning Jewish diaspora. He suffered the fate of every newcomer, that distinctive feeling of being “a bit on the sides,” not quite in the mainstream of society. As a teen, he longed to belong – like every teen – but didn’t have much to offer except an ability to draw “funny pictures”, which at least was something. “Because, you know, I was a short guy. I wasn’t popular – I was a foreigner, I was short…” Hanoch shrugs ruefully. “It’s not a surprise that many comedians are short, it’s not a surprise. Because they need to be loud – they need to find a voice, to be heard! I always like the last scene of Shrek, [where] they’re all dancing and singing and you see the Donkey in the back – and he cannot see, so he keeps jumping, so he can see something. And this is a good definition of my life back then. That you try to jump to be seen, you know?”

Was he happy, at least? “No, I wasn’t happy. I was frustrated.” His only real plan was to go to art school, but he was rejected; he studied Computing as a fallback choice, but there must’ve been a few gloomy years before he finally made it to New York in his mid-20s – though “what I developed was resilience,” he says firmly. “An ability to – to – to grind my teeth and keep going. You know? And this is a very good thing that I learned in Israel, and it’s definitely a very Israeli quality, I have to say. It’s something that growing up there gives you”.

It’s also a key to his creative process – because his art is “playful,” he admits, “and it’s not based on great technique… It’s based on great ideas, and sometimes they come and sometimes they don’t”. Two things help them come: first, creating a “playful space” with lots of objects that can trigger ideas – and second, having resilience. The trick, he asserts, is to keep going: “If you keep going, something will happen. If not A, then B. If not B, then C… Good ideas come because of bad ideas.”

It’s a line I recall later on, about an hour later at the Bank of Cyprus Cultural Foundation as Hanoch introduces the workshop to a motley bunch of around 20 people. Behind us are tables, arranged in a semi-circle and piled high with … objects. There are paper clips, confetti, kernels of corn, plastic lizards, bottle tops, faded pairs of spectacles, old CDs, paper flowers, coloured bits of cardboard – all kinds of junk, only it isn’t junk, it’s potential ideas. “Collage is a metaphor for our life,” Hanoch is saying. “Our identity is composed of many things”. Seeing him in public reinforces the impression I formed at the Classic – a small, lively, rather gnome-like man with a mop of long hair and the mien of an enthusiastic teacher. Stand up while you’re working, he urges participants, it’ll give you energy. Try different things, he instructs them, keep going. Resilience again.

I recall another line, what he said earlier about not viewing himself as an artist – and it occurs to me that he’s had quite a fraught relationship with the world of Art, a subject he broached in a TEDx talk a couple of years ago (it’s available, along with much of his work, on his website, pivenworld.com). That art-school rejection must’ve hurt, then he fell into “periods of deep self-doubt” while in New York, before he discovered his voice; he mentions a Chekhov story about a couple of wannabe artists – and “I was aware of that in my 20s, that maybe I’m just fantasising, maybe I’m a wannabe”. Even after he’d become successful, he may well have felt like a foreigner again – a foreigner in the world of artists and consummate draughtsmen, being just a guy who slapped slices of bologna sausage and bottles of booze together to create a likeness of Boris Yeltsin. That, I suspect, is why he relishes these workshops, and the whole educational aspect – a way to establish his art as the people’s art, and a way for the short guy to be seen without having to jump.

Hanoch Piven probably comes across as more easy-going than he really is. ‘How much do you work?’ I ask, and he makes a gesture as if to say ‘How long is a piece of string?’. Everything is work; after all, he’s always on the lookout for ideas. He went to Sardinia last year on a family holiday (they live in Barcelona; his studio is in Israel), and did his best to disconnect – but only for a week, “two weeks is too much”. He does workshops and collage illustrations and also writes children’s books, with titles like My Dog Is As Smelly As Dirty Socks. When he isn’t working, or thinking about work, he likes to run, another way of building resilience. Then we have his politics, which are “Left-leaning” and apparently quite active: while in Cyprus, he’s also taking part in a week-long seminar organised by the ‘Seeds of Peace’ NGO – and he’s also done political cartoons for liberal Israeli paper Haaretz in the past, but now finds that “pointless”. He prefers education, he says, helping people to think for themselves.

One might say he’s Israeli but not quite of Israel, just as he creates Art without quite being an artist; “To be a foreigner,” as he puts it, “has certain advantages”. He laments the “politics of fear” keeping Netanyahu in power (there’s a “liberal population” in Israel, he says sadly, “who feel like they’ve lost the war”) – and his own particular artform is perhaps the opposite of that, a playfulness that goes hand in hand with fearlessness. The trick, after all, is that you have to be open to everything. You never know what you’re going to end up using – whether it’s going to be matches or marshmallows, light-bulbs or slices of sausage. Here’s the opposite of what I do, Hanoch tells the students at his workshop – and puts up a slide showing a page from an IKEA catalogue!

“If you are constantly looking for the right answer,” he points out earlier, in the lobby of the Classic Hotel, “then you are missing all the other answers”. I stay at the workshop for a while, watching random people – a bohemian-looking girl, a mother with two children – rummaging through piles of random stuff, looking for a combination that’ll speak to them. I recall something else Hanoch mentioned, about our life being itself a collage, a collection of random things, like the details and memories that comprise his own life: random fragments of Uruguay, Israel, New York, Sardinia, even the lobby of the Classic Hotel – and even, in a tiny way, my own face, twinned with the face of Ehud Banai.

The man who helped spearhead café culture in Cyprus is back near his old stomping ground but it has been an incredible journey he tells THEO PANAYIDES

If a Triad member in Hong Kong had been a better shot, Sean O’Neill wouldn’t be sitting in front of me now. (“It’s a misconception that people know how to fire a gun,” says the man himself with disarming – no pun intended – casualness.) If he hadn’t instinctively grabbed hold of a little boy who was running into the street outside a favela (slum) in Brazil, saving his life, Sean wouldn’t be welcoming diners to 48 Bistro, the new restaurant he runs on Makarios Avenue in Nicosia. Instead he’d still be in Brazil, probably face-down in a ditch, and a name on an Interpol list of the permanently missing.

For a restaurateur, he’s led quite a life. He’s sandy-haired and very trim, as befits a man who goes to the gym three times a week. “Between 30 and 50, I gained maybe two kilos,” he tells me – and he is indeed 50, having marked his half-century in April. (Is he where a 50-year-old should be in life? “It depends on the 50-year-old,” he replies airily, “and where he wants to be.”) He tends to smile more than laugh – but when he does laugh the eyes disappear, and the lips pull back to reveal very white teeth. He says he’s the listening type, his girlfriend being the one who likes to talk (“She’s brilliant!” he adds hastily) – but has no problem turning raconteur for an hour and a half, his Brazilian adventure bearing all the hallmarks of a party-piece he’s told before loads of times. But we’ll get to that later.

We meet in his flat, at 3pm – that being almost the only hour when a man in his position is free: he started work at 8 this morning, will go back around 6, and plans to stay at the Bistro till it shuts at 1am. This is fairly typical. “I work about 300 hours a month,” calculates Sean, and it’s been his life for as long as he can remember. One of his most vivid childhood memories is from a day just before he turned 14, as he sat in the kitchen peeling potatoes with his mother. “You know your 14th birthday’s coming up?” said his mum. I know, he replied, expecting a question about what he wanted for his birthday – and was staggered when she asked: “You don’t think it’s time you found a job?”. “Two weeks later I started work,” recalls Sean – three nights a week clearing tables in a bar, then weekends at the fruit market from 4am to midday at 50p an hour. “And I’ve never stopped.”

Work has always defined him. Sports were also important, in his youth: he played schoolboy football for Liverpool, and made the semi-finals of the ABA Under-16 schoolboy boxing championship. Sport was how he channelled his rage and aggression, growing up “in a three-bedroom council house in Liverpool with 11 children”. Five of the kids were his siblings, the rest his cousins, adopted after the death of their mother. Dad was an illiterate labourer who’d come over from Ireland to work on the roads; Mum had a job in a launderette, and could read and write – though the first time Sean read a book was when he did his ‘O’ Levels; before that, “the only thing in the house was the Daily Mirror, and it was usually the horse racing page”.

Of those 11 kids, he’s the only one who went to university (three years at Stirling, doing Politics and Economics). Indeed, it’s worth noting the human cost of growing up in such a rough environment: his eldest sister died last month, one of his brothers is in rehab for cocaine addiction; of the five adopted cousins – all of them younger than Sean – three have also died, all three having killed themselves after a lifetime of drink and drug problems. The family lived on a cul-de-sac, with all the kids playing outside in the street; from his gang of friends at the time, maybe three (including Sean himself) managed to escape and succeed. Twice that number ended up in prison.

Was it at least a happy home, despite all the hardship?

“It was tough at times, because my father drank. A lot. And – it was a hard upbringing.”

What happened when he drank?

“I mean, he was very violent,” replies Sean softly. “Very violent. But at that time, it was par for the course. I mean, most of my friends suffered the same. It wasn’t something you complained about”. Sean bore the brunt of his father’s wrath: “I was, I suppose, the strongest one in the family. And it was impossible to break me”. He recalls being knocked down at 15, then taunting his dad for more. “He hit me again. ‘Now hit me again!’ I wouldn’t bow to him.”

What does a boy like that do – a boy so determined, physically strong, streetwise and stubborn – when he grows into manhood? Becoming a narcotics cop in Hong Kong, which he did for three years after college, is an obvious answer; that’s where he won commendations for drug arrests – and also, of course, where that Triad member shot at him from across the street, and fortunately missed. Becoming a manager of trendy cafés catering to the rich and fashion-conscious is a less obvious answer – but that’s what he’s done for most of his professional life, in London from 2000-08 where he co-owned three café restaurants (the flagship being perhaps the Knightsbridge Café) and before that, from 1994 to 2000, in Cyprus where he ran the legendary Le Café in Nicosia, just down the road from his current venture.

Strange but true: Sean O’Neill, the hard-headed, hard-working Liverpool-Irish lad from a dirt-poor background, has spent the past 20 years hobnobbing with Cypriot yuppies and Saudi sheikhs with more money than sense. Customers in Knightsbridge (predominantly Arabs) would often book a table for a whole month, he recalls, paying £3,000 in advance; their table would be free from 6-9 every night – but they wouldn’t even bother turning up most nights, because they’d booked tables at a dozen other places and only decided where to go at the last minute. Customers in Nicosia were a bit more frugal – yet to sit at Le Café in the late 90s was to be at the centre of everything, surrounded by the people who mattered. More than any other place, it kick-started café culture, combining excellent service (his staff were “like soldiers”, and better-paid than most soldiers) with a cool, casual vibe.

Sean, too, prospered; that goes without saying. For one thing, 1999 was the year of the stock market in Cyprus – and, as manager of Le Café, he was surely well-placed to receive advice on when to invest and (more importantly) when to pull out before the bubble burst. (“I was fortunate,” he says modestly.) Later, in Knightsbridge, working with a world-champion pastry chef named Rik de Baere, he was sending cakes to Saudi Arabia on a regular basis, flunkeys filling taxis with cakes and flying them off on private jets to the Royal family. Did Sean himself succumb to the high life? “I think the most stupid thing I’ve ever done,” he replies with a wry grin, “I once mail-ordered a Porsche Cayenne TechArt Turbo, fully customised. I mean, fully loaded – 543 bhp, V8 engine. It was a monster!”. The car cost £150,000, and took six months to manufacture. He’d just been divorced, in 2005, and “you go through a phase where you lose yourself, you do stupid things. I guess that was the most stupid.”

Maybe so. Yet the most striking thing about his apartment now is how bare it is. There are no paintings on the walls, no real décor – just a small pile of books in a corner, including Alex Ferguson’s autobiography and Robert Ludlum’s Bourne trilogy. After Brazil, he “made it simple,” he says. “With all that happened to me there, when I came back I realised that the simple things in life are the best. Freedom, the ability to speak and do as you like without fear of someone coming to kill you, or take it from you. It’s silly things now that make me happy. And I’m actually a really content guy now.”

Ah, Brazil. Where to begin? He has a son there, Mateus, who’ll be three in August; Mateus’ mother is a beachwear model. (Sean has two kids here as well, 14-year-old Alex and 12-year-old Anna; they live with his ex-wife Christina.) He started buying property in the mid-00s, flats by the ocean in a place called Fortaleza, in the north-east – and moved there himself in 2011, initially for a six-month extended holiday (his plan was to buy more property, then sell everything before the World Cup). While in Fortaleza, he started getting business ideas – a man so active could hardly sit around all day – first for a children’s entertainment park then, while waiting for the licences, for a failing, 240-seater restaurant in the city centre which he took over, refurbished and promptly turned into a roaring success.

“I had two contracts,” he recalls. One was with the landlord who’d rented him the property. The other was with a sergeant in the militia police, to whom he was paying protection money. Fortaleza, like most of Brazil, is incredibly violent: “I’ve seen many people killed in Brazil,” says Sean. “Walking along the road, banditos just take out their gun, shoot them in the head and take their money. There and then, in front of me… I’ve seen an off-duty policeman be approached by a bandito who has a gun, to rob him in the street, and he pretends – I was standing there watching! – to take out his wallet, took out a gun, shot him twice in the head”. Nonetheless, it was still a shock when the aforementioned sergeant came up to Sean in the restaurant one day, offered him 80,000 Reals – the place was worth half a million – and said “I’m buying the restaurant off you”.

Sean replied that it wasn’t for sale. “Three days later I’m in the restaurant. Lunchtime again, full of people. He comes, in his uniform, with two other uniformed men, puts a gun to the back of my head and he whispers in my ear: ‘Gringo, I will shoot you in the head and bury you in Beira Mar’. Beira Mar was the local beach. I turned around: ‘Go f*** yourself. I’m not selling it’. Now, that was a big mistake – but I guess it’s the Gaelic, Irish temper: ‘I won’t be bullied’. Which, again, was going back to being a child,” growing up tough and standing up to his father. “I refused to be bullied”.

The favela room which was locked at night

The sergeant left again – but Sean found himself in serious trouble. A few days later, he was informed that the cop had taken out a contract on his life. He was now a marked man, and unless he left Brazil (which, for business reasons, he was loath to do) would surely find himself dead. He decided to disappear, and went into hiding in the favelas. An old man rented him a room: four by three metres, stiflingly hot, full of mosquitos. Sean wondered why the mattress was up on a stone platform – but no longer wondered when he heard scratching at night and saw a water rat, big as a cat, inches from his face, trying to climb up the platform.

One day, he heard voices outside – and saw the sergeant talking to the old man in the courtyard. The offensive gringo had been tracked down. “I froze,” he tells me. “I thought OK, any minute now he’s going to come through the door and shoot me. There’s no way out – there are two doors, and he’s in front of them. OK, I’m dead”. Sean squatted down, his back to the door, and resigned himself to his fate – but, when someone entered, it was the old man: he’d lied to the sergeant, and told him there was no gringo here. But why? It turned out his unlikely benefactor was the grandfather of that little boy – remember the boy? – whom Sean had saved from running out into the street, weeks before, outside that same favela! “And I thought: there is a God!”.

The rest of the story isn’t so inspirational. The bad guys won: Sean was forced to seek terms with a senior cop, and agreed to sell up and leave in exchange for his life. Yet something seems to have changed in Sean O’Neill as a result of this adventure. His life, as he says, is very simple now: his flat is 10 minutes from the Bistro, about the same from the gym, about the same from Christina and the kids. His world has shrunk to the dimensions of this safe little diamond – yet, inside, he’s bursting with purpose. After having grown rich and lazy for a while, in his 40s, “I have that raw energy back to achieve again”.

Sean is a positive person. Every period of his life – Hong Kong, Nicosia, London, even Fortaleza – seems to have been “an amazing experience”. He’s full of praise for his various collaborators. Erika Vasiliou, who founded Le Café, was “an incredible marketeer”. Athos Papaellinas, his partner in London, taught him more about business than he learned in his MBA. He’s also a meticulous person – the kind who remembers every date, every number. I can see why he relishes going to work, the planning, the nuts and bolts, the feel of a job well done. “For me, work comes naturally. I can understand it, and I’m comfortable with it. I’m not so comfortable with personal relationships – because they can be complicated, and you have to speak to your emotions and get involved”.

He seems pretty good at them, though, I point out, thinking of the various girlfriends he’s mentioned and the kids on two continents. Maybe it’s because he’s so “ruggedly handsome,” quips Sean – and laughs so hard that he actually claps his hands, and rocks in his chair.He stops, turning serious: “For me,” he says earnestly, “my happiness comes from seeing other people enjoy the things I’ve created”. Then goes off to do exactly that, at the Bistro.

Successful rapper A.M. Sniper is an island boy at heart. THEO PANAYIDES meets a man whose musical talent was developed on the streets of Ayia Napa

I’m thinking of the traffic, mostly, the infamous Sunday-evening summer traffic from Ayia Napa to Nicosia, inching ever closer as the minutes tick by and A.M. Sniper still hasn’t turned up to our interview. There’s a café called Ravioli’s opposite Grecian Park, Sniper (né Anthony Melas) had said on the phone – but Ravioli’s isn’t a café, it’s a sleek Italian restaurant serving lobster-tail pasta at €40 (for two, admittedly). I look around, starting to feel out of sorts. What exactly do I know about ‘grime’ music, anyway? On a TV screen behind me, Novak Djokovic and Roger Federer are gearing up for the Wimbledon final under grey London skies, a far cry from the gentle mid-afternoon sunlight washing the scene around me.

Traffic, Wimbledon, the precise status of Ravioli’s… All is forgotten two seconds after Sniper sits down, flanked by a personal assistant, muttering vaguely about “bike issues” to excuse the delay, and fixes me with his narrow, unblinking green eyes. Bushy beard, backwards baseball cap, grey Adidas T-shirt, two rings on his fingers and an unmistakable aura – whether it’s power or confidence, or just engagement – emanating from his wiry frame. The eyes are shrewd, challenging without being hostile. The danger in trying to wrest answers from a celebrity – even a mini-celebrity – is always that they might be bored or distracted, but Sniper is totally focused. He’s facing the TV but doesn’t glance once at the screen in 90 minutes, not even when some perfect forehand or audacious lob gets the Wimbledon crowd in an uproar.

Is he a celebrity, even a mini-celebrity? “I toured with Christina Aguilera around Europe. I opened for Eminem at Wembley,” he reports. He’s sold five million records, whether on his own or in various collaborations. “When I go [walking] in Ayia Napa, I need security. People want to take pictures”. Those trying to mob him aren’t locals (though everyone knows the Melas family in Ayia Napa) but British tourists, Sniper being a leading light of grime – a jangly, propulsive type of hip-hop – that’s become “the new, let’s say, punk rock music of England”. As a performer, he’s had success in the UK Urban charts and even hit the Pop charts (peaking at No. 3) with last year’s less-edgy single ‘Bus Pass’. He does sell-out shows every week at the Kandi Beach Party, and played to 3,000 people just a couple of days before our interview. Meanwhile, as a promoter, he’s a big part of the reason why Chris Brown – R&B star, controversial former boyfriend of Rihanna, banned from performing in the UK for well-publicised reasons – will be playing in Napa, with Sniper himself as the opening act, on July 28.

There’s another fact that adds to his mystique: he does almost no interviews (which perhaps explains why he’s so invested in this one). Why does he shun the media? Wouldn’t it be good for his career to talk to the press? The eyes gaze at me levelly.

“Why is it good for my career?”

Well, you know, exposure and so forth. Surely the media are part of the system?

“Not anymore,” he shrugs. “Maybe 20 years ago.” What’s the circulation of the Mail? he asks pointedly: “How many people will read this interview?”. I give a number, and he nods thoughtfully. “If we filmed this,” he points out, “and I put it on my YouTube channel…” I know what he means: his videos get hundreds of thousands of views, mostly from the same devoted fan-base who buy online tickets to the shows and chat with Sniper on Snapchat and Facebook.

The eyes soften, as if worried that I might feel disrespected. “I’m not being – wrong here,” he says, conciliatory, “but I grew up with the media game. You have to remember I was signed to Sony from the age of 15. By the age of 17, I was a multi-platinum-selling artist”. Sniper was part of So Solid Crew, one of the biggest hip-hop groups of the early 00s. “So I’ve experienced the media more than probably any human being has ever done – I mean, in terms of Cypriots. In terms of someone who has relations to Cyprus, the only people who’ve experienced media more than me are probably George Michael and Peter Andre. No-one else.”

The waitress arrives to take our order. He orders a carpaccio and a Sprite with a slice of lemon, no ice. Is that his breakfast? More of a mid-morning snack, he smiles: “I had breakfast around 3 o’clock”. Ironically, given the ‘AM’ in his name, Sniper isn’t really a morning person: shows and nightlife keep him up till the wee hours. He’s been doing this job – or variations on it – since he was eight years old (he’s now 28) and moved to Cyprus from South London. His dad, George Melas, previously played for Ipswich Town in the top flight of English football, and used his footballer’s earnings to invest “in a small fishing village called Ayia Napa”. Anthony’s uncles had already moved here, opening the legendary Black & White nightclub (playing R&B, then as now) in 1985. Is that where he started DJing at 13? I ask, trying to recall my pre-interview research.

“Eight, actually.”

Eight years old? What kind of DJing can an eight-year-old do?

“Very good, if you’re me!” he replies. He laughs then repeats it, as if charmed by the thought: “Very good, if you’re me.”

Clearly, he doesn’t lack self-confidence. He never did, even as an eight-year-old – and seems to have been an unusually strong-minded boy. The family started Radio Napa around the same time (they also own the Waterpark and the new Circus Square development, among other ventures) and Anthony had his own show by the age of nine, playing music and adding a little patriotic message to “explain to tourists that Cyprus is under invasion”. It must’ve been quite funny, a squeaky nine-year-old voice punctuating the music with a short reminder of the Cyprus problem. Magazines dubbed him our “youngest ambassador”, and he also composed a Cypriot version of ‘Wind of Change’ by the Scorpions – his first visit to a recording studio, a milieu that instantly fascinated him: “At that moment, I knew that’s what I wanted to do”.

By the age of 12, having practised on the equipment at Black & White, he was doing proper DJ sets and hanging out with people twice his age. “I was wild when I was young,” he recalls. “I’d get up to all sorts of stuff”. He also discovered girls – and that was the biggest drive of all, he admits with a chuckle.

Has he learned how to handle that side of things better, at 28?

He looks at me, eyes twinkling merrily. “Well, I’m not a virgin, so I know my way around!” he replies, and bursts out laughing. “I think I’m responsible for a lot of returning female tourism to Cyprus. I should get an award,” he riffs. “’Cos I’m on the front line, fighting to bring the girls back!” He laughs again, pleased with the way this is going, then turns to Louis – his friend and PA – and holds up his hand for a high-five: “Yeah!”.

There’s a lot of A.M. Sniper in those last few paragraphs. The laddish side, of course, the macho swagger many would associate (rightly or wrongly) with hip-hop culture – but also the patriotism, the love of Cyprus, above all the fact that he’s always been a doer, always fiercely independent, even as a child.

First, the swagger: “There’s no-one like A.M. Sniper in the whole Mediterranean,” he declares at one point. “And there will never be. There will never be another Bob Marley”. Hip-hop is a narcissistic culture: more than in any other musical genre, rappers tend to sing about themselves (the Rolling Stones have been making music for five decades without the words ‘Mick Jagger’ ever appearing in their lyrics). It’s also – a related point – a music of the streets, linked to forging an identity in a tough, unforgiving environment. Being ‘edgy’ is part of a rapper’s persona. “To do the business that we do,” explains Sniper, “we have to be a bit – it’s part of our culture to be a bit arrogant and cocky. Because it’s our music, it’s full of attitude, and without the attitude the music is just going to be flat. It’s like eating food without the seasoning”.

So Solid Crew crossed the line, at least in the eyes of the tabloids; several members were accused of gun crime, and the group’s founder Megaman was charged with murder (he was later acquitted). It was totally unfair, says Sniper, because the Crew were made out to be friends – and all tarred with the same brush – when in fact they were independent rappers coming together on the same project: he didn’t even know half those people. (This may be what soured him on the media, at least the British media.) In fact, and despite the swagger, “I’m a very responsible individual,” he insists, between bites of carpaccio. “I can make a song and influence people to go and do some very crazy shit – but I’ll never do it. And I know I have that power, [but] with power you’ve got responsibility… Just because I make hip-hop music, it doesn’t mean I want to see everyone walk around Cyprus with a champagne bottle in their hand and a spliff in the other hand, and just get high. If you listen to my music, that’s not what I reflect”.

Instead he tends to gripe about Kids Today, like a man twice his age: “Everything that defines a Cypriot – honour, loyalty, trust, hospitality – it’s all dissolving,” he asserts glumly, adding that Cypriot youngsters (and Cypriots more generally) seem to have lost their identity. “It’s like people don’t take pride in themselves. They can’t believe that a Cypriot can go in the Olympics and win. They can’t believe that one of the best rappers in the world can be from Cyprus”.

How Cypriot does he actually feel?

“Very. I’m very Cypriot. I’m actually more Cypriot than people understand”. Yes, he speaks English, makes hip-hop and hangs out with folks like Memphis Bleek, one of Jay-Z’s right-hand rappers – but he also has friends who’ll “call me and say ‘Yo, I’m gonna put the souvla on, come over, let’s play some tavli’”, and he recently freaked out Memphis Bleek by taking him to a fish restaurant and eating the fish-heads, cheeks, brains and all, like a proper Cypriot. (Bleek was even shocked that the prawns came with the heads still on; apparently, they clean them in America.) “I’m an island man! I admit that, and I say it. I’m not a city boy, I’m not a modernised – y’know, everything chic and all that. I’m an island boy.”

Meaning what? Hard to say, exactly, but note that Bob Marley was also an island boy – and, though the comparison can’t be stretched too far, there are similarities. Marley was devout, and so is Sniper. “Of course,” he replies when I ask if he believes in God, and adds that he doesn’t really ‘get’ atheism: “I mean, I’m sitting right now and I’m looking at so much life in front of me. I’m looking at those trees moving, and something’s causing that, y’know? I’m feeling this beautiful breeze, and I’m feeling good, something’s causing that. I know that’s not some atheist blowing down my face, d’you know what I mean?”.

Most importantly, however, an island man is something of an island himself. Marley went his own way, and so does Sniper; indeed, his whole career has been built on going his own way – doing it himself, bypassing the media and music industry and the rest of those meddlers. He promotes his own shows, sells his own tickets; he now has an album – a “mixtape” called ‘Sniper Skills’ – and of course you can download it on his website, snipermusic.com.

One could call A.M. Sniper a product of a new age – an age when music flows directly from the artist to the fans, lubricated by social media – but in fact I suspect he’d have been just as successful in the old system. Some people have an aura about them, and he’s one of those people; he probably had the same air of power when he was just a kid named Anthony Melas, or a teenage boy obsessed with girls and getting high – though he’s grateful for those wild teenage years, because now “I’m not starving for anything… I know myself. Because I’ve lived with myself”. That’s the point, at the end of the day: to be who you are. “When you’re yourself you learn about things, and become more of a genuine character to yourself,” reckons Sniper. “Whether you’re good or bad, that’s irrelevant. Just be yourself”. Then we shake hands, and I plunge into the Sunday-evening traffic to Nicosia.

Irene Charalambidou has been in the public eye for almost 30 years. THEO PANAYIDES meets a strong woman determined to use her position in politics to create change

 

There’s one thing Irene Charalambidou won’t talk about, namely the recent fracas with another MP that made – and continues to make – headlines, and may lead to sexual assault charges being filed. (The case is currently before the Attorney-General, which is why she won’t talk about it.) There’s no point in recounting the sordid details, since almost all readers will already know them – just as they’ll know much of the back-story of the erstwhile TV presenter turned AKEL MP. “My life is an open book,” says the woman herself in her Nicosia home. “Since the age of 23, my life has been accessible through the mass media, through my own journalistic work, through television. I’ve never hidden anything.”

Is that true? Maybe – though she also, as befits a fellow journalist, has a keen understanding of the difference between ‘on’ and ‘off’ the record, asking me to silence my tape recorder before sharing some potentially controversial tidbit. Irene has a right to be cautious; it’s well-known that threats have been made, and that she and her family have been under police protection. “The system in Cyprus – the establishment – is very powerful,” she says. “From the moment you decide to clash with the establishment, obviously you’re going to find yourself exposed – in the sense of being in danger”. Scratch a recent scandal, and you’re likely to find her involvement. She was among the first to cry corruption against Deputy Attorney-General Rikkos Erotokritou, clashing repeatedly on TV talk-shows – but has also lent her weight to politically risky Causes like the hunting of ambelopoulia (she’s against) and LGBT rights (pro).

It wasn’t always thus – or maybe it was, and we just didn’t realise it. In 1987, aged 23 (she’s now 51), she auditioned for a job as a news anchor at CyBC, having studied Journalism in Athens after a degree in Psychology. She didn’t get a job reading the News, but instead was offered (and accepted) the chance to present Efcharisto Savatovrado, a light-entertainment programme – which was ironic because Efcharisto Savatovrado (literally, ‘Pleasant Saturday Night’) ended up getting even higher audience figures than the News, with peak ratings of around 85 per cent. Such a number would be almost impossible today – and in fact, even if it were possible, could only be a reference to audience share, i.e. 85 per cent of those watching TV, whereas in late-80s Cyprus there were no other options, only CyBC. 85 per cent meant 85 per cent of all households, so eight out of 10 Cypriots were watching Irene on a Saturday night, the other two being presumably in bed with a good book.

Watching clips on YouTube three decades later, you can see the appeal. She was young and fresh, yet also poised and confident. She wasn’t a bimbo; she didn’t seem about to dissolve into giggles – but she didn’t have the stiffness and formality that often afflicted local TV presenters in those days, either. She was girl-next-door-ish, natural, sensible. What was she like, as a 20-something? “I would say that, until the age of 35, I felt that all you had to do was decide to fight for something, and you could achieve it,” she replies. The confidence, if nothing else, came easily.

What happened at 35? That’s a reference to her mother’s diagnosis with a brain tumour (her mother passed away two years later), the first time in her life – says Irene – when she was faced with something “unmanageable”, something she couldn’t defeat however hard she fought against it. She’s had other misfortunes in her 51 years, including a bout with breast cancer in 2011 – during the time when she was campaigning to become MP – and she’s changed, inevitably. Confidence has hardened into something more implacable, an assertiveness that surely comes in handy when she’s striving to make herself heard against male politicians who may resent her for being (a) a woman and (b) a TV personality.

We sit in her air-conditioned study, the shelves lined with books (they include Glafcos Clerides’ memoirs and the biography of Nicos Kazantzakis by his wife, aptly titled O Asymvivastos or ‘The One Who Wouldn’t Compromise’), and she sits very straight in her chair, bedecked in makeup and a stern expression. Her voice is resonant, commanding attention, often rising to make a point; the face doesn’t really change very much – most of the movement comes in the hands, used for emphasis. She joins thumb and forefinger and sweeps them up and down as she talks, like an orchestra conductor beating time; she taps one palm rhythmically with the side of the other. Once or twice she soars in rhetorical flourishes – as when recalling the birth of her son – and I swear I see tears pricking at the corners of her eyes. She seems fierce and passionate.

There’s undoubtedly a hectoring side to her personality, something of the schoolmarm. Irene has two sons, Christos and Theodosis, 17 and 14 respectively (their portraits, drawn as young children, hang prominently just inside the entrance to the house), and she calls them down to introduce themselves, along with husband Andros and Boubou, the excitable family dog. “Can you tell me what you two have in common?” she asks Theodosis quite sternly, indicating me, and the boy looks blank – so she gives him a brief maternal lecture on the prefix ‘Theo’, which begins both my name (Theodoros) and his. Many 14-year-olds might squirm with embarrassment to be lectured like that in front of a stranger – but the boy takes it in his stride, being presumably used to it.

What’s she like as a mum? “I’m not the kind of mother who cooks,” she replies straight away. “My [older] son is rather indignant with me, because he doesn’t think I take care of his needs”. (Christos works out, and demands a special diet – but Irene doesn’t believe in preparing different dishes for different family members.) She may not be a “traditional mother” like her own mum, she says, but her sons know she’ll stand by them when it matters. “I like to think I’ve passed on some messages to my children. That they have to fight for their dignity, that they must be honest – above all with themselves – and I’ve taught them to respect other people. Respect their classmates, their teachers, everybody”.

Don’t kids tend to rebel against strong-minded parents like her?

“If they’d been daughters, maybe – but my sons…” She smiles affectionately, weighing the thought in her mind: “Maybe they feel repressed – OK, they do feel repressed, because they’re teenagers, they have certain needs. But they’ve understood that their mother does a certain job – pardon me, that she has a certain vocation – and they also have to do their bit”.

That job, or vocation, is everything. What’s her lifestyle like? I ask, and she chuckles wryly. “Let me tell you something,” says Irene: “My life is work, work, work! Ask my husband – call my husband right now, and he’ll tell you that this woman has become alienated from her own family” due to her workload. It pre-dates politics, in fact it has nothing to do with politics: when she presented Sizitame from 2005-11 – a hard-hitting talk show that became the top-rated programme in its time-slot – the show was on Monday so her weekends were usually wiped out, kids or no kids.

“I take things very personally,” she explains. “I’m devoted 100 per cent to what I do, I’ll never think ‘oh, I’m on holiday now’. Do you know how many holidays I’ve ruined for them?” she adds, pointing vaguely in the direction of her family. “How many holidays I’ve broken off because there was something I had to do – and my husband was annoyed, and my children were upset? And I’m sorry for that – but you see, in this job you have to react at the right moment, otherwise…” she claps her hands to indicate the uselessness of responding to news when it’s no longer news. They do plan to go on holiday again this summer, she adds mischievously – but only with a clear warning “for Mother to behave herself, and think of the needs of the family”.

Her vocation, it bears repeating, isn’t politics, it’s journalism. “I’m not a career politician,” she insists more than once. “I don’t want to be a career politician. I used to be a journalist, I have a certain mentality: I’ve learned to investigate things, to find evidence and bring it to light. Now I’m in politics, so I have the opportunity to go one step further – not just to publicise and let people know, but also to do what’s necessary to bring about change. That’s my ambition”. Her secret weapon, she explains – the reason why she feels free to muck-rake, and most MPs don’t – is that she’s not carrying “weights”, meaning the kind of favours and mutual back-scratching which are endemic in Cyprus. “Even a free night’s stay, which you might be offered in a hotel, creates obligations… I don’t owe anything to anybody – I mean, on a transactional level”. It’s odd, in a way, since she had a life (and a famous life) before politics, the kind of life where accepting freebies has no obvious drawbacks – but I guess she’s always been like this, eager to fight her own battles, wary of being tied down.

How far can she go? It’s a fair question. A journalist is a nuisance, but an MP seeking to expose other politicians is a real threat – because, like she says, she has the power to effect real change. “The system is exceptionally strong, and can crush anyone,” she warns, adding that she couldn’t do what she does without the support of AKEL. She was never known as a Party member, but saw the light during the six seasons of Sizitame when she learned about “the marginalisation of Leftists” in recent Cyprus history and felt increasingly outraged by “the propaganda on which we were raised at school”. She sounds like a true believer, and the feeling is presumably mutual: any MP with Irene’s unique combination of celebrity status and attack-dog instincts would be an asset to any party.

Does she ever go looking for trouble? Of course not, she replies: “What rational person would want to annoy people on purpose, or provoke people? They’d have to be foolish”. Actually, there are other possibilities: someone might want to dig up dirt or champion unpopular Causes because of the publicity it brings (though god knows Irene is famous enough already), or just to be a gadfly, a provocateur, to rock the boat. There’s also the question of party politics – and it goes without saying that Irene’s investigative journalism is aimed squarely at the government, with AKEL now in opposition. Then again, maybe one should simply take her at her word: “If you feel passionately about something, if you support it, if you think it’s right, if you have an opinion about it – then, if you remain silent because you’re afraid of the reaction [you’ll provoke] from the many, you’re unworthy of your situation and you ought to stay home, not be in public life”.

Maybe her life really is an “open book”, as she says. Maybe what you see is what you get – a woman who’s firm, single-minded, quite controlling, dramatic in her passions, burning with a strong “sense of justice”. She talks of a calm, happy childhood (her parents were very young when she was born – her mum was 20, her dad 22 – and must’ve had a young person’s energy) and I get a sense of a clear trajectory, a girl full of self-belief maturing into a woman who knows her own mind. ‘Do you ever wish you could be that girl on Efcharisto Savatovrado again?’ I wonder – and Irene Charalambidou bucks like a startled mare:

“Don’t even think about it! You didn’t even ask me that question, I didn’t hear it!”

Why not? Wasn’t it a quieter life, at least?

“I don’t want to go back,” she says simply. “I’ve been through a lot in my life – I’ve lived, I’ve strived, I’ve worked very, very hard. I’ve developed as a person, I’ve worked for it and tired myself out doing it. Therefore, I have no desire to go back”. Never mind a quiet life, “now is when I feel my life has substance,” she says, and the eyes flash dramatically. Holidays? Don’t talk to me about holidays.

THEO PANAYIDES meets a former drug addict who is now working to help others overcome their addiction. It has been far from plain sailing

If Marios Kittiras had to pick a single day as the most important day of his life, I suspect he might go for the day in 1999 when the police stormed his home in a dawn raid. He had 15 grams of opium in the house, the raw material for cocaine and heroin (it looked like a wad of chewing gum; he kept it stuck to the underside of his bedside table), and he impulsively swallowed the whole thing when he heard them coming. The cops found cash and stolen jewellery, so they took him down to the station (Paphos Gate police station in Nicosia) for further questioning. In the car, with the opium kicking in, he began to grow restless – then, in the station, he suddenly made a run for it and jumped out the back window, falling from a height of about 12 metres. He broke his back, his hip, an arm and a leg.

Looking at him now, you’d never think him capable of such wild adventures. Marios is short, suntanned, laid-back, with gentle eyes and an easy smile. Even if you knew that he used to be a criminal (which is by no means apparent), you might guess at some low-level fraud or common hustle. Maybe he dealt in fake watches, or sold used cars as new. In fact, Marios Kittiras was hooked on heroin more or less continuously for 26 years, between the ages of 13 and 39 (he’s now 51), robbing and stealing to finance his daily fix. He stole mostly cash and jewellery, though “I’d sometimes find myself running in the street clutching videos and TVs and so on”, running to his motorbike to make off with the loot. Where did he steal from? Houses?

“Houses, shops, businesses, flats…”

Was he armed? Did he have a gun, or a knife?

He smiles, slightly shamefaced: “Not every time”.

Did he ever threaten people with a gun or knife?

“Lots of times.”

And how does he feel now, looking back on it all?

A long pause. “How do I feel?” he repeats. “OK, on the one hand I often say ‘Look at all the stupid things I did, all the bad things I did’ – but I also put it down to the sickness I had. I did it because of the sickness.”

So when he was doing those things, he’d think ‘I know this is wrong, but I have no choice’?

“I have no choice,” he repeats, nodding vehemently. “I have no choice. I mean, [the heroin] was the only thing I…” he breaks off, thinking how best to put it. “When I woke up I had to have it on the bedside table next to me,” he explains. “I had to have it in my hands. To go to sleep, I had to know it was there, to get up I had to have it”. Half an hour after getting up – half an hour maximum – he needed his fix. Otherwise he’d do anything to get it.

That’s the point, of course. I wrote that Marios used to be a criminal, and that’s how the law would view him – but it’s surely more accurate to say that he used to be sick, in the grip of addiction, which is why that day in 1999 was so significant. He spent four weeks in hospital after his fall from the window, totally incapacitated – but that month was also his first drug-free month in many years, allowing him to enter the newly-formed “therapeutic community” of Ayia Skepi. He’d actually wanted to seek help for a while – two years earlier he’d met his girlfriend Elena, who became his wife in 2000 – but could never stay clean long enough, three weeks’ abstinence being a precondition for entering rehab. Heroin had become his crutch; he’d been injecting every day for two decades.

The farm at Ayia Skepi

How did it start? Who’s to blame for Marios’ predicament? Marios himself, some would say. Society, say others. “It was the circumstances,” he insists. “Because, you know, I got on a ship. I was in my village, everything was fine. Then I got on a ship…” The ship took 10-year-old Marios to Greece – part of a government initiative to help Cypriot refugees from large families in the wake of the Turkish invasion. He has five brothers and sisters, all of them violently uprooted from their village of Trachoni, near Kythrea – so the government put him on a ship, actually to the Peloponnese where Cypriot kids were taken in by local families and allowed to do a year’s schooling while our education system struggled to cope with the influx of refugee schoolchildren.

His Greek foster parents were unfailingly kind, he recalls, and of course the year abroad was an act of charity – but, coming on top of the invasion, it seems to have been traumatic for the young boy. He was homesick, and cried for his mother. Plonked at the back of the class during morning prayers (even then, he was physically small), he broke away and ran off, fleeing as fast as his legs could carry him. Back in Cyprus at the end of the school year, he rejoined his family, who’d settled in Ypsonas – but in fact they were far from settled. Relationships had been frayed by the war and its aftermath, and his father in particular had begun neglecting his family. Looking back, 41 years after the invasion, Marios can be seen as one of its indirect victims.

They moved back to Greece, this time en masse, where his dad all but disappeared, losing himself in drink and women. Marios was in Athens, 12 years old and increasingly unmoored. When did he get into drugs? “About then,” he replies.

There was a square near their flat, where he hung out with older kids. Sniffing petrol spiralled into weed, then heroin – an empowering experience, at least initially. “You’d feel that strong intensity that grabbed you all of a sudden, quickly, unexpectedly – your body seemed to stretch, you got wilder, you’d start throwing up, you couldn’t sit still. I was constantly full of energy, really active, 24/7. I couldn’t sleep, I was full of energy. Anything I tried to eat, I threw it up. Anything I tried to drink, I threw it up”. He didn’t care; he felt stronger, invincible. Heroin was once used by soldiers in war, he explains, so they could march for hours at a time without getting hungry or thirsty. The effects last longer than for other drugs – between six and 12 hours – but of course you crave it every day. At first, he’d inject randomly into his flesh; later, as the habit started eating up more cash, he learned how to point the needle at a vein, to save money.

Some may wonder why no-one intervened (after all, he was barely in his teens), but it wasn’t so simple. Stuck with five kids and an absent husband, Marios’ mother was in no shape to rein in her son – “I put my mum through a lot,” he admits – nor could she easily challenge his lies about going to school, having never finished school herself. Eventually he stopped pretending, and stopped coming home; he worked as a motorbike mechanic for a little cash – and of course he’d steal. “I’d do anything, sure. To get my fix, I’d do anything.”

Like what?

His smile is incongruously pleasant: “The people I hung out with in Athens, they’d say there are two things you don’t do in life: don’t be a homo, and don’t be a snitch. Everything else is okay. So yeah, I did a lot of things”. The worst, he recalls, the smile fading quickly, was a hit-and-run accident, running over a pedestrian with his bike while high on drugs – but in fact, as the months stretched into years, there were lots of bad moments. The energy fades, he explains: “You start to weaken. You start to crumble. Your whole body seems to shrink”. You turn into the popular image of the hollow-eyed junkie, “where you just stay there and don’t move, you’re lost in nowhere-ness. You’re nowhere. You belong nowhere”.

And you want to quit?

“You want to quit, you want your salvation. Every user wants that. But you can’t do it on your own.”

Even with help, it isn’t easy. Marios is full of praise for Ayia Skepi (where he now works as a counsellor) and Tina Pavlou, who runs the place – and of course he’s devoted to Elena, his wife, who stuck by him even when he lost all their money on a would-be romantic trip to Athens, and left her alone while he went on a two-day drug binge. (“She stayed. Good for her. She was really patient with me, and I owe everything to Elena.”) Even after they’d been married, however, even after they’d had two kids – a daughter and a son, now 15 and 14 – even after he’d been getting treatment at Ayia Skepi for two years, Marios still backslided, going back to the drugs for a year in the early 00s.

He got cocky, he recalls, and may also have been spooked by the new responsibilities of fatherhood – so he started drinking, going out for a drink, then another. Glasses turned to bottles, then “one day I thought, ‘Why bother with bottles?’. [So] I went straight to heroin. Same as before, didn’t think of wife or kids or anything. The dope. Not Ayia Skepi or anything. Just the dope, the dope got the better of me”. He started stealing again, breaking into shops in broad daylight; an arrest warrant was issued, not his first by any means – he’d previously been tried in Greece and sentenced to eight years in absentia, which was why he’d smuggled himself back to Cyprus – but this time he was tired, “I’d had enough”; besides, he was nearly 40. He turned the page, and has been clean since 2003. Since backsliding, however, he’s learned an important truth about drug addicts: “The addiction is never going to leave us. We’ll take it with us to the grave. All we can do is try not to wake it up”.

‘Why him?’ one may wonder. Why was Marios seduced by heroin, when others in the same position weren’t? Was he angry as a younger man? Not really, he shrugs. What was he like? “Same as now. I’m a good guy, I’m the quiet type.” Trying to decode what makes an addict is foolish and presumptuous – but one thing can perhaps be mentioned, namely his tendency to flee. That leap from the window at Paphos Gate wasn’t the first time he’d tried to bolt from a police station, he says – and of course there’s also the image of 10-year-old Marios running away from morning assembly, futilely trying to escape back to Cyprus. There’s an overlap, I assume, between drug users and congenital escapists.

The price is high, in any case. Marios Kittiras’ most conspicuous feature is his smile – he smiles easily, charmingly – but the smile is deceptive. 20 years of drugs leave a mark, he says, and opens his mouth to reveal that he has no teeth: no bottom teeth at all, and the top teeth (the straight white teeth that appear when he smiles) are false, the real ones having been rotted by heroin. He also tends to forget, especially names – but the scars on his arms have healed now and indeed he looks perfectly normal, a middle-aged man with an easy smile and a silver beard. The real scars are inside, but even they are slowly healing.

“I mustn’t forget who I was,” he tells me – and he doesn’t forget, sharing his story with his kids (it frightened them at first, but they get it now) and the younger addicts he tries to counsel at Ayia Skepi. The drug problem is real: when he came back to Cyprus in the late 80s, you could count heroin users on the fingers of one hand, he says – but now there are many more users and more drugs, and “new kinds of drugs which aren’t pure”. Even marijuana now gets processed and augmented so it messes with your mind, he asserts with the air of an expert. The problem is real – but it can be overcome, and Marios Kittiras is living proof.

He has faults, he admits: “I’m stubborn, I’m selfish”. He’s lived most of his life on the fringes, on the streets, in decay and degradation. But he’s come a long way. “I have to remember who I was, and who I am now. And I’m happy about who I am now. I feel, I understand, I’m aware of things. I get hurt, I laugh… I’m real now”. There’s no better drug.

George Danos worked with Richard Branson in his previous incarnation as a successful dot-com pioneer. Now he’s returned to his childhood passion – Space – and is determined Cyprus can contribute to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. By Theo Panayides

Meeting George Danos – president of the Cyprus Space Exploration Organisation (CSEO), among other achievements – comes with a number of surprises. First of all, the building where he lives (a squat block of flats in a Nicosia suburb; he’s on the ground floor) is called the George K. Danos Building, making you wonder if the rest of his life is similarly self-referential. Second, hanging prominently on display on the walls of his home – next to the European Space Agency fridge magnets, and the stack of VHS tapes of The X-Files – is an impressive array of religious icons. And third, his flat seems devoted – incongruously for such a sober-looking, almost-45-year-old man – to the glories of champagne. I can see three or four empty bottles, used as decoration; another one (he tells me) has pride of place in the kitchen, unopened and signed by Richard Branson.

Let’s explain the easiest one first. The ‘George K. Danos’ whom the block of flats is named after isn’t George himself but his grandfather, a high-ranking policeman in colonial times who was prominent enough to be granted a state funeral. His grandpa was much-beloved, says George with feeling. “He helped a lot of people,” he affirms, adding: “I have a part of him in me. I’m like that too” – a line that goes some way to explaining the existence of the CSEO, a labour of love which he co-founded in 2012. And what of the champagne? It’s his favourite drink, explains George – but maybe it’s also symbolic, a reminder of the heady days of the dot-com boom (or dot-com bubble) which he experienced first-hand as co-founder and CTO of Virgin Biznet, one of Branson’s most lucrative ventures.

“It was an absolutely amazing time,” he recalls of those years (roughly 1997-2001) when he and other young internet mavens settled the wild frontier of online business, burning the candle at both ends and reaping disproportionate rewards. “Everybody who worked with me, and is still in the UK, says those times will never come back. It was crazy times, the dot-com era. Crazy times”. The hours were long, the parties mad, the perks significant (among other things, he arranged for two months’ holiday to come to Cyprus every summer); George was a frequent visitor to the House of Lords, meeting individual Lords to advise on joint projects they were doing with Virgin. Maybe that’s why he left the UK, he muses – he went travelling, then to Ireland, then back to Cyprus in 2005 – because “the dot-com times had actually gone, and then everybody was so sober. And so, like, blue-chip behaviour”.

Yet he seems so meticulous, I point out. Did he really have a problem with ‘blue-chip’, by-the-book behaviour?

He pauses, as people do when about to summarise themselves. “I’m very formal, OK?” he concedes. “I behave, in most aspects of my life – even with friends – in a formal way, and sometimes they say ‘George, loosen up, relax’. But at the same time, I’m a party animal. The parties that I gave were notorious in London. If Richard Branson’s parties were notorious, my parties were notorious too!”

I wasn’t there (alas) for those parties, but I’d be surprised if they ended with George getting falling-down drunk and embarrassing himself. He’s just too controlled. He lives in his current abode with two cats, Lily and Mariwa – and he’s shocked when I ask whether ‘Mariwa’ is short for ‘marijuana’: “No, no, definitely not! I never [even] smoked tobacco. I’ve never smoked anything, or done anything”. (The name actually comes from the way she miaows.) One imagines him gliding noiselessly through his Bayswater home, glass of champagne in his hand, being the solicitous host and making sure his guests were enjoying all the things he’d prepared for them. There might be 100 guests, often including celebrities; once, at a Guy Fawkes party, the neighbours complained about the noise from his fireworks display – so he invited the neighbours in too.

He is indeed meticulous; he does indeed like to prepare things, whether it’s a big party or just our interview which he treats like a presentation, bringing out props at appropriate moments. “I’ll get to that, I’m going to go chronologically,” he says at one point, when I ask a premature question. “I still have them stored in my archive,” he notes later, speaking of the UK press clippings marking the launch of Virgin Biznet. That, too, was about being meticulous, less a radically new idea than an idea whose time had come: for the first time, an off-the-shelf package was created offering a complete service to companies that wanted to get on the internet (“Remember, that was the time when, if you saw a URL on a billboard, it was like ‘That is so cool’. We were counting them on the highway, from London to Heathrow!”). George, working as a relatively lowly IT manager at Virgin, conceived of a package that would do absolutely everything for business clients, from listing their website to promoting their wares and communicating with customers – and the whole thing was “boxed like a fast-food product that you take and it’s got everything, your chips, your Coke and your burger”. Richard Branson gave him £10 million to bring the idea to fruition, then made many times that amount after Biznet was launched – and made even more by selling it on just before the dot-com bubble burst. George, as co-founder and CTO, got “a lump sum”, leaving him both very rich and barely past his 30th birthday.

That, you might say, was the first act in George Danos’ life – and it’s already possible to note the various strands that combine in his personality. On the one hand, he is – to put it bluntly – a geek, an IT person, with glimpses of the almost pedantic exactitude that defines the breed. He also seems to gravitate to structure, and indeed authority. (Family background may be relevant: his grandfather, as already mentioned, was a senior cop; his father and both younger brothers are lawyers.) In high school, he recalls proudly, he used to invite the headmaster to events organised by the Science Society, of which he was president; in the army, he did something similar with the top brass. On the wall of his flat is a framed letter from the former King of Greece, thanking George for his wishes on the occasion of the wedding of the King’s son – and he’s no monarchist, explains George hastily, that was just a one-off, then again he did frame the letter and put it on his wall.

Anarchy isn’t part of his makeup; I suspect he finds nothing very attractive in the notion of total freedom – his belief in authority finding its highest expression, of course, in his strong belief in God (hence the religious icons). But he’s also an explorer, a curious mind, always looking for more: “I’ve always been a character that wanted to break frontiers,” as he puts it – and he also, unlike the stereotypical geek, seems to be a sociable, outgoing person, able to charm and persuade when necessary. This is why, for the past two years, George has been the public face of CSEO, appearing on TV, talking to schoolkids, and taking endless meetings with space agencies and government officials.

CSEO is his baby, the second act in his life – not just a project but an act of giving back, like his benefactor granddad. There are five goals listed in the organisation’s charter, he explains, “but the main goal was to make Cyprus proud. The main goal was to utilise the talents of this country, so they’re not wasted, and to make all of us proud.”

Space has been his passion since childhood; he got his first telescope while still in kindergarten. In Britain, he was president of the Imperial College chapter of SEDS (Students for the Exploration and Development of Space), on the Board of Directors of parent body UKSEDS and also on friendly terms with legendary TV astronomer Patrick Moore, even being featured once on his show The Sky at Night. That was when he was at Virgin and very involved with SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence; “I had a massive network at Virgin that was crunching bytes,” doing their bit in sifting through billions of signals from outer space in search of those that may come from aliens. Fast-forward to 2012, and a space conference in Limassol which George attended (he’d been back for seven years, running a successful IT company called ArtFX) – and suddenly, seeing the potential in a roomful of Cypriot space scientists, he decided to go all-out, using all his connections, “all my strength and all my passion” to create CSEO and “place Cyprus on the space-industry map”.

The goal was noble, and perhaps utopian. Cyprus, a tiny island with no high-tech scientific credentials or tradition, involved in space exploration? “You have no idea how many people laughed at us,” he recalls. “People felt that Cyprus is incompetent,” unable to do simple things properly (Mari was frequently cited), let alone venture into outer space. Yet, three years later, two local projects – Mars Sense and Arachnobeea – have successfully competed at the highest levels of space research, the former named among the four best projects worldwide at last year’s NASA SpaceOps (“like the Oscars” of space exploration, he explains), the latter winning this year’s NASA Space Apps Challenge in the ‘Best Mission Concept’ category.

What does that mean? Maybe nothing, in terms of actual investment – but the CSEO has changed the “climate”, as George puts it. It’s a bit like when he got the headmaster to lend his weight to the Science Society: in appealing to authority (NASA being the highest authority), he’s made Cyprus credible. Neither Mars Sense nor Arachnobeea was George’s own idea, of course – but the CSEO played a big part in the “media blitz” that promoted the former, and surely encouraged the latter just by making space research so visible and viable. For the past two years he’s organised event after event, gone from school to school, invited luminaries like Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Volkov, signed Memorandums of Understanding with assorted foreign space agencies, drawn up a “full business case” and presented it to government ministers in order to make Cyprus a full member of the European Space Agency (members have to contribute financially, which is why there’s resistance). “At the beginning they were very sceptical towards us,” he says of the government. “But, bit by bit, they saw that we’re bringing results”.

It’s come at a cost, and indeed the cost is visible: George has vitiligo, a skin condition that causes his skin to fade, leaving white blotches – and the blotches on his face have grown bigger in the past year, because vitiligo is made worse by stress. Yet surely he must feel that it’s been worth it – because there’s another aspect to George Danos, one that hasn’t really been mentioned so far. He’s not just an IT guy, or an entrepreneur, or a media personality or a party animal: he’s a man who’s always gazed at the stars, and wondered who’s out there.

“I wanted to discover something different. It was maybe a soul quest or something,” is how he describes his year of travelling (China, Brazil, etc) after he left Virgin – and the stars fill a similar role in his life, a quest simultaneously to the furthest reaches of the universe and the innermost parts of his soul. Does he think SETI is useful? Is it plausible to think there may be contact with extraterrestrials in our lifetime?

“I surely hope so.”

But is it plausible?

“It is plausible, yes.” There are so many stars, 500 billion galaxies, each one with trillions of stars: “In Carl Sagan’s words, it would be an absolute waste of space if there is no life”. Yet it’s also true that we’ve only been listening for the past 100 years or so – “a quick blip” in the lifetime of the universe. There’s no reason to believe we’ll receive a signal now, out of all the possible millennia when aliens might choose (or have chosen) to contact us.

It’s a long-shot – but then everything in space exploration is a long-shot; the universe is just too vast, too unimaginable. Even God is a long-shot, objectively speaking. “There are probably levels we can’t fully comprehend,” he tells me; we’re like an ant walking on the earth – not even conscious of the human beings around it, let alone able to know what they’re thinking. In the end, “I use this as my compass,” says George, pointing to his heart – which is also a way of saying that it doesn’t really matter if exploring space, or listening for aliens, is useful or useless: we have to do it.

“Why did we build the CERN facility? Why did we go to the Moon? Why do we do the things we do as humanity? Because we always explore.” George Danos looks at me, moon-faced and utterly determined. “Why do we explore? Human mind. Human spirit. That’s why we explore.

“And we will never cease to. Because we’re humans.”

One leading documentary maker was in Cyprus recently at the showing of one of her films. THEO PANAYIDES meets a woman scarred by a troubled childhood

One of the advantages of living in a wired world is that I already know a lot about Kim Longinotto even before I find myself sitting opposite her in the bar of the Curium Palace in Limassol, a few hours before she’s due to present her latest film at the Lemesos International Documentary Festival.

I know, for instance – because she’s mentioned it in other interviews – about the all-girl boarding school where she spent seven unhappy years, from eight to 15 (she’s now 63), and where, after having got lost on a class trip, she was ostracised by the bullying headmistress and none of the other girls were allowed to talk to her, an internal exile that lasted (incredibly) for two years. I know that she slept rough in her teens, after leaving home, and found her vocation as a filmmaker quite late, going to the National Film and Television School at a time in her 20s when she seemed to have no obvious options (“Film-making saved my life” is the title of a 2010 profile in The Guardian). And of course I know – or know of – her films, a 30-year body of work, mostly made for Channel Four in the UK, that’s propelled her to the front rank of non-fiction filmmakers.

They’re strictly speaking ‘fly on the wall’ films, in the sense of being observational – but Kim hates that term, her aim being not just to observe but also to empower. Her subjects are quite often women in extremis, and the idea – though she almost never interviews her subjects directly – is that the presence of the camera allows these women to tell their stories. (“I’m not making films about issues,” she insists. “I’m telling stories.”) Thus, for instance, Shinjuku Boys (1995) is about Japanese women who’ve chosen to live as men; The Day I Will Never Forget (2002) focuses on female genital mutilation in Kenya; Rough Aunties (2008) are a group of women working with abused and forgotten children in Durban, South Africa; and her latest, Dreamcatcher, tells the story of Brenda Myers-Powell, a former prostitute and drug addict in Chicago who now runs the Dreamcatcher Foundation, trying to help young women at risk.

All this I know, or could’ve found out. What I don’t know is Kim herself, whose personal style – at least in interview mode – is remarkably warm and intimate. “Have you? You’re very cultured, it’s lovely,” she coos, when she asks if I’ve heard of Cartier-Bresson – she’s talking about the “state of grace” one needs to inhabit while shooting a movie – and I admit that I have. “That’s a nice little camera,” she exclaims when I bring out my camera to snap a picture. “You look quite Iranian. You look so Iranian, it’s a really nice look,” she tells me later (she made a film there, Divorce Iranian Style in 1998). She has a slow, dreamy way of speaking, and a tendency to go off on tangents; her eyes are very green, and very interested. She seems almost painfully attuned to the other person, aware of the risks in making assumptions. At one point she shows me the uncomfortable way Japanese women are traditionally required to sit – then immediately backtracks, lest she sound too absolute: “I don’t know, you’d probably find it comfortable. I don’t know if you would…”

Part of it, no doubt, is simple politeness. Part of it is surely a side effect of making documentaries – because Kim’s greatest talent may be the ability to make people feel relaxed and unthreatened, so they either ignore the camera or open up in its presence. (She notes, more than once, how frustrating it feels that I’m the one asking the questions, instead of her.) But part of it is also deceptive – I hesitate to say ‘passive-aggressive’, which sounds very calculating – because she’s actually much more of an activist than her gentle veneer would suggest, as you’d expect of someone who makes films about the vulnerable and disadvantaged. There’s a fiery anger behind the conciliatory courtesy.

Thus, for instance, on the subject of child abuse (a recurring subject in her films), when I opine that society has many more safeguards today than it did in the bad old days: “That was so sweet that you said that. You obviously don’t abuse children, because if you did you’d know that you can get away with it. It’s no different now”. (Clearly, ‘sweet’ in this case is a synonym for ‘hopelessly naïve’.) Or, for instance, on the local businessman who sits at a nearby table halfway through our interview, and starts talking facts and figures in a piercing, metallic bark: Kim shifts in her chair, her sensitive antennae clearly ruffled by the man’s grating voice – partly, I suspect, on my account, afraid that he’ll drown out the tape recorder – then she sweetly observes: “Cypriot people have very loud voices. Which I love! It’s like Iran.”

Why not say what she means? This is where we head into armchair-psychology mode – a flaw she scrupulously avoids in her own work – but there does seem to be a bit of insecurity in Kim Longinotto, reflected perhaps in her honeyed exterior. She tells me a story which may be revealing. She was recently on the Tube with a friend, and realised that she didn’t know the way to their destination – so she took out her phone and pretended she was topping up her card online, a meaningless gesture but a way of making herself feel more knowledgeable and competent in front of her friend. (The friend didn’t care either way, of course – and, when Kim later broke down and admitted what she’d done, couldn’t stop laughing.) “A lot of the time, I feel quite useless,” she admits candidly. “I do feel useless.”

She never felt loved when she was growing up. It’s worth pointing out and indeed underlining, both because the child is mother to the woman and because she herself is quite forthright about her early life. Boarding school was traumatic, of course, in fact her very first film was a damning exposé of her old school, which closed down a year later. (Was that because of the film? “I hope it was.”) But school wasn’t really that bad, she demurs – “I was just often lonely and sad, it wasn’t like I was in pain or anything” – at least compared to her home life. Both her parents are dead now, but she hadn’t had a relationship with them for years: “When they died, I just thought ‘Oh, they died’. You know? It was like that.”

She wasn’t abused, just unloved. Her abiding memory of childhood is a kind of numb confusion (the feeling Terry Pratchett once described as “being in a film where you’ve missed the beginning”). “I think it’s a sort of secret that people don’t want to admit, that a lot of people don’t want kids. My mum always used to say to us really openly: ‘I never wanted to have children’.” Her old headmistress called her a “class traitor” after watching her vilification of the school – her parents also hated that film and never, to the best of Kim’s knowledge, watched any of her other films – and that was the class she belonged to, “the class I was brought up in, which I’m not part of now”, the class of cold unhappy self-loathing snobs who aspired to the aristocracy and sent their kids away as soon as possible. (One of her cousins was packed off to school at two years old!) Her dad was the son of a diplomat, with a sleek-but-hollow façade and a cruel family. Kim tells the story of the “piccaninny”, a little black boy hired to be her dad’s companion when the family were posted in South Africa – at least till he got too attached, so they drove the African boy away and left him in the bush. “I think my father had a horrible father.” He was also angry, constantly and scarily angry.

“I think particularly men,” she begins – then pauses, backtracking again: “You don’t feel at all angry, but a lot of men just take being angry for granted. I know my father did… And a lot of people I know had very angry fathers”. For her, the effects of this prickly upbringing were twofold. First and foremost, it left her unable to love; that’s why she’s happy now, “happier now than I’ve ever been” – because she can finally live with a partner without being assailed by the thought that his love is a red flag, a sign that there must be something wrong with him. “Because, if nobody has loved you when you’re growing up,” she explains, “then if someone says they love you, you don’t trust it really. I used to go out with one person after another, that’s what I used to do for ages – and I’d think I was bored, but it’s mainly just being frightened of it. There’s a lot of people like me.”

The other legacy of her angry parent is that “the men I’ve always been in relationships with are not harsh men. I’ve never been drawn to dangerous, violent men… I go out with people who read poetry to me!”. The one exception is the father of her son, whom she met at college: “He was the university drug dealer, and he had a motorbike, and he was 15 years older, and everybody wanted to go out with him – so I thought ‘Wow’. Stupid, isn’t it? And I was 18. But I’ve never made that mistake again”. The mistake was compounded when she gave her son Moby up to be raised by his dad (“I didn’t think he would mind”) – a bad misjudgment, since the man turned out to be violent and the boy had a horrible childhood. Fortunately, Moby’s now grown up – and he and his mother are good friends, unlike Kim and her own parents.

For a long time she felt guilty about her son, she says – but something changed last year, when she made Dreamcatcher. Brenda, the subject of the film, “was a prostitute from the age of about four” (“Four?” I repeat, goggle-eyed), pimped out to paedophiles by her own grandmother, became a “proper prostitute” at about 11 and had two kids, at 13 and 14, which she then abandoned, having succumbed to addiction. The film brings mother and children together, Brenda’s daughter telling her she forgives her – but what’s not in the film, because Kim dropped the camera to give her a hug, is Kim urging Brenda to “let the guilt go”, which is also (she says) when she realised that the same is true of herself and Moby. “It doesn’t help him when I ring him up and say ‘Moby I’m so sorry, I was so bad when you were a child’, and he goes ‘Kim, I got over it a long time ago, please don’t do that’. It’s a nuisance for him, he doesn’t want to hear it”. She smiles wryly: “This last film I made helped me with so many things. Because everything I did, Brenda did worse”.

Maybe that’s the key to Kim Longinotto, this osmosis between films and life: filmmaking didn’t just ‘save her life’, it defined it. Her camera never flinches. She’s filmed girls being cut during genital mutilation, and famously (in Rough Aunties) filmed the wrenching aftermath of a little boy drowning in the river (her sound recordist thought it was immoral to film such a moment, and never worked with her again). Yet she doesn’t sound like a documentary-maker talking about her subjects. “My friend was tortured in Syria,” she’ll say, or “My friend was locked up in a room from 12 years old”. The bonds she forges are real. The woman who grew up friendless now has friends all over the world; the woman who grew up unloved uses film as an act of love, to help pariahs like herself.

Not anymore, of course. Nowadays she’s far from a pariah, living in North London surrounded (I assume) by kindred spirits. You can glimpse the bien-pensant bubble when she talks about gay marriage – she’s a fierce enthusiast – and how it might also have an impact on the bad tradition of women taking their husband’s surname since, after all, gay men don’t change their surnames once they’re married. “But women still do,” she points out. “I think,” she adds uncertainly. “I don’t know any that do – but sometimes they do”.

She herself lives in unmarried bliss with “two lovely, lovely people”, both men – her partner Tony and also Colin, both a bit younger than herself. Tony works in theatre, Colin’s the co-founder of OR Books, a New York-based publisher dedicated to “progressive change” in culture and politics. “Colin is my best friend, and Tony’s best friend.” What does she do for fun? She loves swimming, cycling, sports in general, dancing and music. “What else? Just being with friends, being with Colin and Tony in the kitchen having a laugh. Smoking a spliff. I love drugs!” she says, her eyes twinkling, then laughs uproariously.

The troubled past surfaces occasionally; Kim Longinotto will never be anyone’s idea of a placid bourgeoise. She’s twice been the victim of rape – once at university, attacked by a gang of men while walking in the park with her boyfriend, once on a remote beach in Crete while on holiday – and startles me by saying that “twice in my whole life is not bad”, as if rape were a rite of passage. But how can I judge (even if I wanted to) when she’s seen so much, and been through so much – both in her own life and vicariously, on behalf of her various “friends”? She’s endured it; I just read about it on the internet.

An American archaeologist has spent over 40 years excavating at ancient Idalion, uncovering Cypriot treasures to the general indifference of actual Cypriots. THEO PANAYIDES meets a woman charged with energy for our past

It starts, as it must, at ancient Idalion, where Pamela Gaber races up a narrow, winding dirt track, raising clouds of dust, then gets out of the car and leads me to a large municipal water tank at the top of the hill. This used to be the western Acropolis of Idalion, a 207-hectare city which flourished on this site from about 2200BC to 450BC, when it was conquered by the Phoenicians – and from this vantage point you can see the whole place, stretching out to the far bank of the Yialias river.

“You see the little church on the hill there? Looks like a pimple?” says Pamela, pointing out a landmark as a prelude to describing what lies beneath it. Her patter is practised, and no wonder: she’s been doing this, on and off, for 43 years, leading or taking part in excavations here. The path to the ancient Acropolis is steep and rocky but she bounds along easily, reddish-brown hair flying in the wind; I can barely keep up, not to mention that she’s talking non-stop as she strides up the hill. At one point she does pause, to catch her breath – “I’m usually in shorts,” she explains apologetically – then bounds off again. Not bad for a woman of 67.

We start at Idalion, just to have a sense of what we’re talking about. We move on to the modern village of Dhali (more of a suburb nowadays) and sit down at a café opposite a pizza place on the main drag – special offer: XL pizza for €13.50! – which, with symbolic appropriateness, proves to be loud, tacky and generally unsuitable. In the end we get back in our cars and head on down the road to the village of Alambra, and the house she and her husband bought in 2005; the house is small, and the garden’s being choked by the neighbour’s out-of-control fig tree – but they restored it themselves, from a state of near-decrepitude, and besides there’s a middle-Bronze-Age town buried just behind it, where copper used to be processed before being transported to Idalion. The house is “my beloved haven,” says Pamela, surrounded by old photos, wood-carvings, reams of files, notes for unpublished articles, a grandfather clock and textiles she makes herself. “I’m a little crazy about it.”

She doesn’t live here all the year round; indeed, I’ve only just caught her before she sets off for the American half of her annual calendar. She teaches in the autumn, Theory and Method of Archaeology at Lycoming College in rural Pennsylvania – “by percentage, the largest undergraduate Archaeology programme in the country” – then comes back to Cyprus in February; then she works on articles for a few months then, every summer, the college supplies $12,000 for staff and students to carry out seven weeks of excavations at Idalion, led by the indefatigable Pamela. This, incidentally, is no paid vacation: they dig, in the hot summer sun, from six to 11 every morning, then wash pottery, have a light lunch, a siesta, then they’re back in the field from four to seven – then, after dinner, Pamela gives a twice-weekly lecture on Idalion to her dusty, bone-weary troops.

Excavations in Dhali

Does she still have the energy for such an exhausting schedule? “Apparently so,” she replies, laughing merrily. “I actually had both my knees replaced in December of 2013, and I always say ‘Now I’m bionic!’. But seriously, I lead this tour” – the excavations always kick off with a walking tour of the entire site – “and I always end up turning round and going [she claps her hands sharply] ‘Come on, chop-chop, keep up, what’s the matter with you kids!’.” She works out in the winter months, mostly stretching (“Old muscles tend to be brittle”), and she used to be a dancer in her youth, and she does love hiking and skiing – but mostly, I suspect, her energy during the dig is down to experience: she’s been digging since she was 19 years old.

Then again, it could be a family thing. After all, her paternal grandfather walked across Europe as a young man, trudging from a shtetl in Ukraine to the coast of Spain where he talked his way aboard a ship bound for America. Her family, working-class Jews from Chicago, are “a very odd family”, but a very industrious one. Pamela’s mum worked all through high school, surreptitiously doing her homework while serving customers at the glove counter of a big department store. Her dad, Martin Gaber, was an engineer who designed all the multi-circuit micro-switches in the Apollo space project and was also on the team, during WWII, that invented sonar for submarines (“When I was a kid, in high school, he was in the textbooks,” she recalls proudly). Gabers tend to study on a scholarship – or, like Pamela’s son Zeb, enter college as second-year students because they’ve already passed so many college courses while still in high school.

Zeb, now 25 and working in an “urban kibbutz” in Israel, is her son by her second husband; she also has two daughters, Jordana and Hannah, by her first husband. Photos of the kids come out in due course, one of Pamela’s most endearing traits being her Jewish-mother side; now and then, she sounds exactly like one of those middle-aged matriarchs from Woody Allen movies. “Whatever. He should make a lot of money,” she shrugs philosophically after a dig (no pun intended) at a colleague who’s a bit too fond of self-promotion; “What am I, chopped liver?” she demands, speaking of her – admittedly scandalous – difficulties in securing a residency permit after all these years in Cyprus. She’s actually great fun to talk to, one of those bubbly, indiscreet people who bang the table to make a point and crack themselves up in the middle of telling a story. Her voice is part of the drama, as when she talks about ancient Cypriot, a language we’re unable to decipher (Cypro-Minoan is the oldest legible writing system) – and the voice deepens, as if making some grave pronouncement: “It’s not. Greek. Sorry.”

There’s a serious point behind that, the politically-motivated tendency to define our ancient heritage as Greek rather than Cypriot – and indeed, the most depressing part of Pamela Gaber’s story is perhaps that an American should’ve spent her life uncovering Cypriot treasures to the general indifference of actual Cypriots (more on this later). Oddly enough, despite wanting to be an archaeologist since high school – her family claim she first expressed the desire at the age of seven – she never planned to come here, Mesopotamia (i.e. modern-day Iraq) being her preferred destination; but the plan met with obstacles. For one thing, the only place to study Mesopotamia in the US was Yale – but Yale, like other Ivy League schools, didn’t accept women in the mid-60s. She ended up studying in Israel, following a crash-course in Hebrew (she did receive a PhD from Harvard years later) – then decided to stay on, heeding the general advice that “little Jewish girls from the North Side of Chicago should not go work in Iraq”.

She approached one of the many digs taking place in Israel. “There was this guy called William Dever who was running the excavation.” Her voice drops to a conspiratorial whisper: “The man was CUTE! Had a great voice, too!”. She cracks up laughing, probably at my bewildered expression more than anything: “I’ve now been married to him for 26 years, so I can say all that – but at the time I was just an undergraduate, and I just went [gobsmacked expression] ‘Oh!’. I said, ‘I understand that you have an excavation’ and he said ‘But we only take graduate students’ – and I said ‘I learn fast’. For some reason, it cracked him up”. Like her grandfather and that ship to America, she’d just talked her way into a new life.

The personal stuff was complicated. Pamela was in love with Dever, but Dever was married and she wasn’t in the market to be anyone’s mistress; a few years later, pushing 30, she decided to marry her first husband – a longtime friend who knew all about her infatuation – and that marriage lasted 11 years after which, eventually, she ended up with the man she’d first encountered at that dig in Israel. (William Dever, now 81, also happens to be the world’s foremost Biblical archaeologist.) The professional stuff was simpler. Pamela soon became a “dig nut”, as she puts it, an exacting and meticulous digger – “I have a nose for the dirt. I’m a dirt archaeologist” – and, when the Israel job was over, she followed her new friends to Cyprus where she found herself “completely snowed. I liked the architecture, I liked the pottery. I liked everything about ancient Cypriot stuff”. She’s dug here every season since.

Ancient Idalion hasn’t changed much in those 43 years, its ruins buried snugly as they’ve been for millennia; modern Dhali is a different story. “It was – astounding to live through,” she says. “I mean, you don’t know what it was like in the 70s, it was really primitive. I mean, the women didn’t go outside by themselves. No unmarried girls ever went outside by themselves – period! There was only one telephone in the village, it was a payphone down in the centre. There were only two people who had televisions, and when it was football they’d put them out in the verandah, and everyone would come and stand in the street to watch”. She herself was a young American girl – a little hippie – in the midst of it all. People laughed and pointed when they saw her driving a Land-Rover; “I had a couple of taxi drivers try and put the moves on me” (one actually got in the back seat of the taxi with her, after she’d just flown in from the States; she was so jet-lagged she burst into tears). Yet there was something “delicious” about the culture too. As late as 1993, she recalls, a letter was delivered to her home that was addressed simply: ‘Pamela Gaber, Cyprus’. People knew each other.

Much of that has changed – for the better, when it comes to the women, though only “up to a point,” cautions Pamela, “because they became totally materialistic. Along with the men. I mean, everybody did”. She tells another story, of driving in Nicosia in the late 90s and an impatient male driver – a businessman, by the look of him – who started yelling at her. “Some people have important things to do, you shouldn’t be going so slowly!” yelled the man (she bangs on the table for emphasis). “I said, ‘You should call me Doctor when you speak to me’ – I was so pissed off! But that’s the kind of stuff you NEVER would’ve seen 20 years before.” It’s even more dispiriting in the light of ancient history – because that’s the beauty of our distant past, she says, that the people on this island were producing copper for 1,000 years (even now, the symbol for copper – Cu – stands for Cuprum, or Cyprus), selling it all over the ancient world, yet they didn’t go to war against each other, “didn’t have to fortify themselves against each other”; there was room for everyone.

The contours of today’s Cypriot culture matter in another way as well – which takes us back to the beginning, to that vantage point from the top of the hill in Idalion. I’m not really sure what I expected to see – but surely something more impressive (to a layman) than a series of shallow pits, so overgrown and weed-infested they’re barely visible. Even after all these years, they’ve only excavated about 2 per cent of the total city, says Pamela astonishingly – “Every inch of that area is covered with antiquities” – yet there are no firm plans to exhume the remaining 98 per cent, and what’s there is fenced off (to obstruct animals) but otherwise poorly preserved. It gets worse: half of the city gate was recently bulldozed to build a new sidewalk, the municipal feeling being that a few antiquities shouldn’t stand in the way of beautifying Dhali.

She doesn’t blame the Department of Antiquities, says Pamela: even in the good old days they naturally prioritised Chirokitia, a UNESCO World Heritage site – and now, with the crisis, they’re “a low man on the totem pole” when it comes to funding. But that can’t be the end of it – and she’s determined that it won’t be. Idalion (and Cyprus) is just too important. “Western culture is a blend of the classics and the ancient Near East, through the Bible,” says this ebullient archaeologist. “Where did they meet? Here! They all came for the copper. This is where they met. This is the crucible in which Western culture was formed.”

Wow. That’s a pretty big statement.

“Well, I have no doubt – and I make no apologies. And I think that’s why they invite me to the British Museum and Oxford.”

She has a plan, says Pamela Gaber. A replica of a typical house from the ancient city, so people can see what’s been uncovered. An archaeological park, like they have at other sites. She’ll be digging for a few more years, till she turns 70 – but the park is a long-term project, something she can nurture and develop, a handy précis of four decades excavating for the past in a country that hasn’t always appreciated her. It won’t take much – maybe €20,000. She’ll try to get an embassy involved. She’ll talk to local sponsors. She’ll try to find a grant in the US. “Somebody has to make noise,” says Pamela hotly. She seems like the right person.

The writer at the top of his genre on the Kindle chart lives and breathes comics although he came to them late in life. THEO PANAYIDES meets a man who thinks we should all give them a try

“Darling, your sword.” The couple seem to be in their 30s, though it’s hard to be sure since they’re in costume – presumably heading for the Cosplay (i.e. dressing-up) show, which begins in half an hour. His outfit has a touch of the pantomime dame, though of course it could never be anything so uncool. “I’m a neon cat,” seems to be the reply when I ask what he’s dressed as, and I’m too embarrassed to ask what that means; “It’s from the deepest, darkest corners of the internet,” explains his partner, noting my bewilderment. She, meanwhile, is in some kind of faux-mediaeval fantasy outfit, with tunic and sword. And yes, she’s just dropped her sword.

We’re in the parking lot opposite the Filoxenia Conference Centre in Nicosia, where the second annual Cyprus Comic Con is underway. The parking lot is a huge empty field, big enough for half a dozen houses – yet it’s utterly swarming with parked cars, visitors having spilled beyond the designated parking and left their cars on surrounding pavements and side-streets. It later emerges that 8,000 people attended (and that’s just those who bought tickets), vastly more than last year. “That always happens with Comic Cons,” shrugs Neil Gibson when I mention the scrum around us. They’ve become “a pop-culture event,” he adds as we make our way outside from his booth – actually named after T-Pub, the comic-book publishing company he runs in the UK, and stacked with copies of Twisted Dark, the comic-book series he writes himself – looking for a quiet place to talk.

Busy at the Comic Con

“First of all, shame on you for not reading comics!” he chides me a little later, when we finally find a shady bench outside the Centre. (I’ve already admitted that I’m no great fan of the medium.) Neil is 37, and mad about comics – not just writing them and reading them but (especially) talking about them. He gives lectures at schools and universities (he gave one this morning at Comic Con), lauding comics as a gateway to reading and a boon to learning in general; studies have shown that US students who read comics do better at written exams than those who don’t. “Don’t get me talking about comics. I’ll talk forever about them, I love them!”. He talks fluently, articulately – as you might expect from a former management consultant – and very fast. I’m worried we won’t have enough time (he has to get back to the booth soon), but I probably end up with more verbiage from our breathless half-hour than from interviews three times as long.

Neil is unusual, maybe even unique. After all, the standard rap against comics is that they’re a form of infantilisation, a medium for overgrown kids who need pictures to go with the words. Comic-book creators, it’s assumed, must still have a foot (albeit unconsciously) in childhood – yet Neil’s childhood was conspicuously comics-free. “I did actually read a bit of Spider-Man as a teenager, but I grew bored of it. I felt I grew out of comics”. Instead he did a Masters in Engineering, then an MBA at the London Business School, had a lucrative career as a management consultant – then one evening in 2011, alone on a job in Qatar, feeling bored in his air-conditioned hotel room, he decided to write a comic-book story. “I was never a creative type until four years ago. Twisted Dark, Vol. 1 was the first thing I ever wrote in my life. I –” he hesitates slightly – “just didn’t think I could do it. It never occurred to me.”

What kind of type was he, if not a creative? The answer seems to be a doer, a go-getter, a high achiever. “I want to try everything,” he says, talking fast as if trying to cram every possible word into a limited span. “I just think you’ve got one shot at life, try everything and find what you enjoy the most”. He’s a martial-arts aficionado, his favourite being hapkido (because it’s “no-energy”, he adds, ironically for such a high-energy person). “I have a lot of hobbies. I used to compete at ballroom dancing, I used to do debating, I played frisbee [he means the team sport known as ultimate frisbee] for Indonesia. I’ve done a lot of things”. He’s travelled to over 50 countries, and lived in five. He cooks every day, unless he’s too busy selling books or giving lectures. His personal hero is Richard Branson.

He’s also an entrepreneur, having personally shepherded that story he wrote in Qatar – along with other short stories – into comic-book form, watched Twisted Dark, Vol. 1 rise to the top of the UK Kindle chart, and founded T-Pub to publish his own and others’ work. (The company has 10 titles currently out, with more to come pending plans for expansion; you can read free comics on their website, http://www.tpub.co.uk/.) Having written the words, he turned to the internet, putting out feelers to illustrators all over the world (some of them he still hasn’t met in the flesh) – then, having crafted a comic, he went out and promoted it himself. “I actually cut my honeymoon short by two days, to go to my first-ever Comic Con,” he recalls. “The first print run was oversized, some of the art was terrible, some of the lettering was bad. I look back now, it’s cringe-worthy – but, on a side-note, those original copies now sell for £50 on Ebay.”

Needless to say, he didn’t go straight from shunning comics to actually creating them. The road-to-Damascus moment came in his mid-20s, when “someone gave me a good one – it was Watchmen by Alan Moore, and I couldn’t believe how much it made me think, and how great it was”. The man who thought he’d outgrown comics suddenly became an ardent fan – but after all, everyone who makes comics is a fan, and most of them have been fans since childhood. How did Neil manage to make a dent in the vast, amorphous comic-book community with his late-blooming creativity? “That’s a good question,” he admits, hesitating for once. “It’s actually kind of lucky, in a way, because a lot of comic-book creators are quite introverted, so when they go to conventions they’re quite shy about things. Whereas I’m – not so shy. So it’s easier to stand out.”

It’s an interesting point. I think back to the scrum inside the Conference Centre – Cosplay antics and a carnival atmosphere, certainly, an excitable announcer yelling “Keep having FUN!” and “Are you ENJOYING yourselves?”, but also a constant parade of lost-looking young people, the pale and the geeky. I have some trouble finding Neil, so the DJ pages him – and his booth is soon surrounded by a shuffling mass of curious youngsters, drawn by the commotion. “I just heard that Mel Gibson is here,” says one boy (joking? who knows?). A couple of Goth-looking teens peruse Neil’s comics. The boy has a diffident manner, delicate features, and wears a black ‘Misfits’ T-shirt; the girl has green hair and green lipstick. She’d like to be a comic-book artist, but doesn’t seem to have a portfolio or at least she hasn’t brought one.

These are his people – or are they? I’m struck by the thought that these teens probably wouldn’t have found much in common with Neil, had they met him when he was their age. He was born in Kuwait and grew up in Dhahran, the hub of the Saudi oil industry, an “ideal” expat childhood of tennis courts and swimming pools; his Northern Irish dad was the general manager for a Saudi family with many business interests, basically “the top guy running the company for them” (he also has a sister, now a “high-powered investment banker”). His background is high-flying and business-minded – and of course, as he says, he’s no introvert. I don’t know, of course, but I wonder: was he ever the type to wear a black ‘Misfits’ T-shirt?

There’s a larger point here – because Comic Cons themselves seem to be changing. They started as conventions for comics fans, and “you still get some hardcore people who say ‘That’s a stormtrooper, that’s not [from] a comic’, whatever” – but let’s be honest, there probably aren’t 8,000 comic-book fans in the whole of Cyprus, let alone assembled in one place on an August weekend. The crowd at the Conference Centre goes beyond comics to gamers, Game of Thrones fans and, above all, internet geeks (a Cosplayer who I thought was the Invisible Man turns out to be Slenderman, an internet ‘meme’), thousands of youngsters who essentially grew up online. This is not just a sub-culture, it’s mainstream youth culture – and well-organised entrepreneurs like Neil are able to take advantage in ways that eluded the previous generation of comic-book authors.

Does he ever feel resentment from other creators who are jealous of his rapid success? “Oh, god yeah!” he replies with surprising vehemence. “But I’m doing this because I have to make a profit,” he goes on. “I have to make money so I can employ people to do more, and make more and grow more. I have to do this. Whereas some of them are content not to make money, this is their hobby”. Neil Gibson doesn’t have his head in the clouds: he gave himself two years to succeed when he made the move from management consulting (fortunately, Twisted Dark hit No. 1 in less than a year), markets his work assiduously – after Cyprus, he’s heading straight to another Comic Con in Toronto – and has now sealed a deal for international distribution, meaning his comics can be sold in stores as well as websites and fan conventions. “I look at it from a logical outcome,” he says at one point, and later mentions that he doesn’t like illogical stories in comic books: “I don’t like it in stories when someone abandons the rules and just goes crazy, with no explanation for it”.

He’s the logical type. His work is quite extreme, with shocking plots and often a twist in the tail – yet Neil as a person seems fairly conservative. He doesn’t shirk from difficult subjects: one story is about modern-day slavery (that’s the one inspired by Indian workers in Qatar), another is about a woman whose obsession with losing weight leaves her grotesquely anorexic, yet another – in the latest volume of Twisted Dark, which I skim through at his booth – is about a gay man coming out. Yet he himself lives quietly in London with his wife and baby daughter, and mentions that he once walked away from a well-paid career in the drilling industry (this was before his MBA) because “everyone was on their third or fourth wife, [and] I didn’t want that future for myself”. He also surprises me by noting that he used to be quite religious in his teens, and even now – though he’s practically an atheist – “I genuinely believe that people who are religious tend to be better people and, crucially, happier. It’s like with marriage.”

Then again, religious feeling shouldn’t be a surprise when it comes to Neil Gibson. After all, his passion for comics comes very close to religious fervour – and having discovered them relatively late in life only makes him more passionate. It’s no secret that born-again Christians are more evangelical than those who were born into the faith.

“Some people are very snobbish about comic books – like I was – and think it’s just kids’ stuff,” he reports gravely – and recalls a “fancy party” in his management consultant days, and a doubtless very elegant woman who was shocked to hear that he loved anything so vulgar as comics. “I think I prefer normal books,” sniffed this snobbish woman – “and I went nuts,” recalls Neil. “How can you say that when you’ve never even read one? That’s like my grandmother, in her life she never ate Chinese food or Indian food, because it was made of cats and dogs and she had no interest in trying it. Now, I think that’s short-sighted – but she wouldn’t touch it.

“It’s the same for people who won’t try a comic. You’re being,” he splutters, too angry to get the word out, “bigoted! But you can’t tell people that because they get offended, you have to be gentle and try and convince them. But ultimately I think you’re just small-minded if you don’t try”. He sighs, thinking of all the petty and unreasonable people. Then I follow him back into Comic Con, through the merry crowd of Jokers and zombies and women with swords.

NEIL GIBSON’S TOP 10 COMICS

1. WATCHMEN
2. SAGA
3. SANDMAN
4. SWAMP THING (Alan Moore)
5. MAUS
6. Y: THE LAST MAN
7. THE ULTIMATES
8. INVINCIBLE
9. THE WALKING DEAD
10. FABLES

Freediving is not an extreme sport for the interactive athlete. THEO PANAYIDES finds its world champion is very composed and keen to stress the importance of relaxing

The place is an ordinary-looking block of flats, on a sleepy side street off the beach road. I’m a few minutes late, as I’ve taken advantage of the trip to Limassol to go for a dip in the sea – unprofessional, I know, but it seemed appropriate given who I’m interviewing. A middle-aged tenant holds the door open for me as she’s going out. I’m struck by the thought that she’s almost certainly unaware (unless perhaps she’s noticed the fins and other diving paraphernalia left out to dry in the third-floor corridor) that there’s a celebrity staying in her building for a few weeks – the only human being ever to dive to a depth of 100m with a single breath and completely unassisted, i.e. without using fins or diving weights or anything except his own body strength. William Trubridge performed the dive (one of his many world records) in the Bahamas in 2010; he held his breath for just over four minutes, around half of what he can do from a static position.

It seems strange to find an extreme sportsman in such a non-extreme building, but in fact it’s no accident. William is here for the 2015 AIDA Depth World Championship (what you might call the World Cup of freediving) which is taking place in Limassol until next Sunday – and the Championship has a hotel where most of the athletes are staying, but he deliberately chose to stay here, in a quiet place by himself away from the action. Partly it’s so he can cook his own food, and make sure he’s eating right – “but also, to a certain extent, to kind of avoid that constant social interaction,” he adds with a touch of shamefacedness. “Which is nice, but sometimes you need to be able to escape”.

One can’t really picture him at a party, chattering away and surrounded by people. “Social situations can sometimes be taxing,” he admits, though “you learn to kind of find the balance”. He’s no hermit, by any means (he also teaches freediving at the Vertical Blue school in the Bahamas, not to mention media events and interviews like this one), but there’s a limit to his sociability. “Um… I do enjoy it,” he replies carefully, when I ask about parties and such, “but I think I’m probably introverted by nature”.

It’s entirely possible that freediving – which involves repeatedly plunging oneself into an underwater world of silence and solitude – attracts people with a natural tendency to detachment and reticence. At one point I ask about Natalia Molchanova, the world’s most famous female freediver, who died last month, at the age of 53, during a recreational dive off the coast of Ibiza – and William calls her “the queen of freediving”, speaking of the impact her death had on the relatively small community (“She was so much bigger than anyone else. Everyone looked up to her”), but he also describes her as “a shy and slightly reserved lady, although very intelligent and wise”. Shyness and reserve seem to come with the territory.

He himself is 35, but could pass for younger. He’s tall and very thin, his ears sticking out like a little boy’s. His skin seems tightly stretched around his body, though without any sense of cartoonishly bulging muscles; it’s just tight, like the skin of a fish. He’s extremely soft-spoken, punctuating his replies with frequent sips of water from a thermos (I don’t usually drink so much water, only “when I’m talking,” he explains mysteriously). He seems very serious – even his vocabulary’s serious, using words like ‘lucidity’ and ‘gregarious’ which you wouldn’t necessarily expect from an athlete – and somehow self-contained, as if in a bubble. Obviously I’m seeing him at his most focused, with the Championship just days away and his training now in “a tapered phase” – and he also mentions that he and his wife are “recently separated”, making me wonder if the seriousness is partly a newly-single man’s unconscious effort to become self-sufficient. Or maybe he was always self-sufficient.

Relaxing in Limassol

William grew up at sea, on a boat from England to New Zealand; that’s the kind of childhood that breeds self-sufficiency – though of course he had companions, namely his brother Sam and their parents. The parents (Dad is a designer and furniture maker, Mum an art and yoga teacher) didn’t like what Margaret Thatcher was doing to the country, he explains, so they sold up and left in 1982, when William was 20 months old; the plan was to sail to Australia, but “the plan kind of evolved”. They stopped in Tahiti, reached New Zealand in 1985, left again (for Vanuatu) in 1988 and lived on the boat for about eight years in total.

It was, in many ways, an idyllic childhood. They were lucky, he admits, in encountering no serious storms or serious illness. School was a combination of home-schooling and correspondence, allowing the kids to finish all their schoolwork before breakfast and “spend the rest of the day playing and exploring the islands”. They’d snorkel, or join their dad in spear-fishing. The sea was their element – “It was many different things: it was our means of locomotion, our school, our playground, our grocery store”. Living in an enclosed space like a boat taught them discipline too (“Temper tantrums just were not tolerated at all”), a trait that’s especially important in freediving. Socially, it’s true, they were rather isolated; they’d occasionally run into other families taking similar voyages, and play with their children, but they “definitely didn’t have as much of a social life” as most of their peers. Still, he doesn’t think it affected him.

Sam is now a theatre director in New Zealand, where the brothers grew up. He was always a bit more imaginative, muses William, “maybe I was a little more practical”. Isn’t there an element of recklessness in freediving, though? He hesitates, looking a little pained: “Um… That’s kind of a popular…”

Misconception?

“Misconception. A view from the outside… There’s a saying actually in scuba diving – how does it go? – ‘There are old scuba divers, and there are reckless scuba divers’. I think the same probably applies to freediving, although it’s not as dangerous as almost any other extreme sport.”

Isn’t it? The thought of plunging down into an endless blue abyss – and, even more, the thought of your lungs gasping for air halfway through, with the surface far out of reach – seems rather terrifying. Then again, no-one does 100m dives as a beginner. You learn “at a moderate and measured rate,” says William, only going deeper as you get more comfortable. What’s more, “running out of air isn’t a big problem. If you run out of air, you have what we call a blackout. So if you are by yourself, then obviously you drown – and that’s sad,” he adds perfunctorily. “But if you’re with a buddy, then all they have to do is to keep you above the surface of the water till you resume breathing”. He himself has had several blackouts – but they almost always happen near the end of the dive (sometimes even after surfacing), so it’s easy enough for a fellow diver to rescue him.

Isn’t the feeling horrible, though? Isn’t there panic, intense discomfort, a sense of choking?

He pauses, considering the question. “If a person who wasn’t a freediver were to try and hold their breath to the point of blackout, then they would get those kind of sensations, maybe,” he allows. “But in freediving training, you learn to develop tolerance to high carbon dioxide and be able to relax”.

Relax. That’s the magical word, it seems – and the key to his pre-dive process. “You want to be as relaxed as possible, to ensure that your muscles contain as much oxygen as possible,” he tells me. “You store oxygen not by breathing more, but by relaxing more. So relaxation is the key – and also slowing the mind down, because the mind consumes a lot of oxygen as well”. It’s not that he takes a massive breath before submerging for four minutes (though obviously you have to “fill your lungs”), it’s more about relaxing the body as much as possible and “being detached in the mind from what you’re about to do – and not getting sidetracked with thoughts, or allowing yourself to be swept away by trains of thought”. Detachment again.

You can see it in video footage of William’s amazing dives, the most amazing aspect being how serene they appear. My layman’s mind assumed that he swam as hard as he could to reach those depths – but of course that would only be a waste of oxygen. Instead he propels himself with simple, deliberate movements – a single firm push of the hands and kick of the feet – then drops his arms along his body and allows himself to glide through the water, totally motionless, before repeating the procedure. This, I assume, is what he means by discipline, a focus on the moment and a kind of Zen tranquillity; “It’s actually very easy to be in a meditative state underwater”.

The simplicity and serenity are deceptive: when he’s training (which is most of the year), William needs eight or nine hours sleep, maybe more, even though all he does during the day might be a single four-minute deep dive – “but those four minutes tire you out for 48 hours!”. We talk in the afternoon, after his morning’s training: “When I come back here,” he notes, pointing to the flat’s small kitchen, “I make a very nutritious and healthy smoothie, I take mostly vegan supplements, eat a lot of fruit and vegetables – and I need to do all that in order to recover, and prepare myself for the next dive”. Being a world-class freediver is incredibly hard on the body (unsurprisingly, he doesn’t smoke or drink, and does lots of yoga) – yet that other world, the world below the sea, is indeed serene. That’s not a delusion.

There’s nothing airy-fairy about William Trubridge. He’s essentially a scientist (he studied Genetics at university, and worked for a year as a geneticist before succumbing to the siren-call of the ocean); even his Twitter feed is scientific, sporting educational Tweets like ‘The earth’s hydrosphere weighs 275 times more than the atmosphere’. “I’m not a religious person by any means,” he insists – yet there’s something down there, in the vast silent underwater blueness where a diver is alone, and sees and hears almost nothing, and no longer feels the pull of gravity. “When you take all that material away, you’re left with a very bare state of consciousness… Spiritually I feel a strong connection with the sea, and with myself when I’m in the sea”.

What’s he connecting to? Himself? Or something else?

“It’s more just yourself, your own consciousness. I don’t feel, like, visited by some kind of greater force – but you do learn to relate, I guess, to the idea that our self isn’t just something that’s in our body, it’s all around us as well. When you’re underwater, you can have an expansive sense of your own self… The sensation of your body kind of drops away, and you’re left just with that pure state of consciousness.”

The sea is a pathway to a higher self. The sea is his friend, and always has been. He has no fear of the sea, says William. He’s spear-fished with sharks just behind him, and not been afraid. (Sharks very seldom attack humans.) The sea is vast, and Man is tiny – yet men (and women) continue to abuse the sea, and threaten to destroy it. The Mediterranean has been “annihilated” by over-fishing, he says, while his home in the Bahamas – he moved there to be near Dean’s Blue Hole, the abyss where he set his world record – has beaches where you can’t see the sand because of all the plastic that’s been washed ashore. He has a Foundation doing research on alternatives to plastic (that’s the scientist in him) as well as raising funds for the Maui’s Dolphin, an endangered species in New Zealand.

Mostly, however, he dives, bringing the detachment and reserve – the calmness, the coldness, the composure – that may be part of his personality to the world of extreme sports. “A huge part of freediving is to relax on the way down and detach your mind from what you’re doing,” he repeats. “To not think about how deep you are, how far away the surface is, how long you’ve been holding your breath, how difficult it will be to come back up – all those things”. I shake his hand, left with a feeling of not having got very far – a sense that what he does is both extremely simple (simpler than we think) and extremely mysterious – then take the very ordinary-looking lift down to the ground floor.

Elvis might be long gone, but it seems he never left the building; the man and his music are still very much on the cultural radar finds NAN MACKENZIE

When the King died at the age of 42 from a heart attack 1977 there were then 170 people professionally imitating Elvis. The estimated worldwide count now sits at around 250,000, making him the most imitated man in history.

These faux Kings come in all nationalities, shapes and sizes with a range of talents to match – there’s Chinese, African American, Mexican, a weird Welsh Druid, a Baptist minister, also a sky diving Elvis, and breaking the Blue Suede glass ceiling there are also gender bending ladies in form-fitting sequined Elvis costume. All are referred to as ETAs (Elvis Tribute acts).

And not least among these is the island’s very own Mario Kombou, who has been described as the best Elvis since Elvis.

Annually the ETA licensing business generates around $34 million with another $55million being added to the Elvis pot from use of his image, records and the 600,000 annual visitors who make the pilgrimage to visit Graceland. Elvis never sold off control of his hundreds of published songs and they continue to generate revenue for the estate, making Elvis Presley the second highest earning dead celebrity (Michael Jackson is no 1).

ETAs weren’t fully sanctioned until 2007 when Elvis Presley Enterprises, the business arm of the musician’s estate, held its first Elvis Week contest, called The Ultimate. The contest is considered to be the music equivalent of the Super-Bowl with performances from hundreds of ETAs all desperate to be ‘endorsed’ as an ‘Almost Elvis’.

There was a strong temptation to go into my kitchen and knock up a plate of peanut butter, crispy bacon, and banana fried sandwiches in readiness for the arrival of Mario, London-based English Cypriot who for the past 15 years has been channelling his version of Elvis Presley to sell out audiences in the UK, US and now Cyprus. Even minus the white form fitting jumpsuits he wears on stage, Mario still has a sheer physical presence; he is over six feet tall (1.82) with a powerful body that is thick set and muscled, while his lunchtime attire is a mercifully informal shorts, shirt and baseball cap, with not a sniff of a rhinestone about his presence.

A far cry from Elvis, of whom his mother was a fan, meaning the young Mario was brought up on his music. This was before, as a 17-year-old on his way to drama school, he started singing in a Greek restaurant to earn some cash. “I’d ‘do’ Dean Martin and Spandau Ballet then I saw someone ‘doing’ Elvis and that was it, I wanted to be an Elvis entertainer,” he says. “I really studied what I could, listened to all of the King’s recordings. I also liked that he had a good sense of humour, and sort of parodied himself a bit, but, the dedicated fan in me has to always admire his supreme talent, plus the enormous physical energy he displayed on stage”.

Mario Kombou without his Elvis attire (Photo by Brett Shaw)

His are hard shoes to fill though. “Everything really came from him, the bands that followed after him like the Beatles and the Stones, were all heavily influenced by his talent and versatility, his ability to move with ease from black gospel music, blues and ballads to all out rock. As far as singing is concerned Elvis had the power to express so much feeling with his voice, using it as a way of expressing the passion and understanding of the human condition, he also had an almost electrifying stage presence and held a huge rapport with his audiences,” says Mario.

And recapturing the King on stage means mesmerising an audience like he did and having as an elastic voice and body. But what are the key elements he brings to the stage? “You have to be able to perform, get the look right, the voice, and the stage presence, and for Elvis that’s an even tougher challenge because he is so identifiable in each of these areas. I go out there because I am a good singer, I can act, and also be a showman. Being an ETA allows me to earn my living. Elvis’ music has given me the opportunity and pleasure to be able to entertain others and thoroughly enjoy every single minute I am on stage singing his songs.”

Mario’s career path was given a huge boost after he received full endorsement from the Presley estate to perform as a professional ETA. He also gained extra cache after the late singer’s first cousin Donna Presley described his performance during one of his many visits to Graceland as ‘The best Elvis since Elvis’. This accolade also helped him beat off stiff competition from American performers to gain the starring role in the stage musical Jailhouse Rock. And come the end of October, Mario will once again return to touring the UK stage in the lead role of Vince Everett in musical The Elvis Years.

Mario returns regularly to Cyprus as he has an apartment in Larnaca and uses his break touring the UK to enjoy being with his extended Cyprus-based family giving a few concerts here as an ETA.

The accolades and roles do not come easy. “I have all my stage clothes made in America by a tailor Elvis used, the suits have to be really well made as they have to stand up to a lot of moving and shaking around and be as exact as possible to the originals, and yes I also have a pair of blue suede shoes! I have to keep a close eye on my weight as I play nightly six days a week the young Elvis so that, plus the sheer physicality of the performances means I have to be reasonably fit.” But getting into Elvis’ mindset apparently takes very little time. “It doesn’t take me longer than an hour, once I have the costume on, I then morph into the role easily, my job is to sort of suspend reality and become as close as is credible to the real thing and that’s the real challenge, it’s also the fun of it all.”

Elvis never performed in Europe so few people would have seen him live, only viewed him on TV but Mario says this does not mean his audience is dying out. Although the original Elvis fans must be pensioners now his concerts are far from a gathering of snow heads only. “I have audiences now who are teenagers, they will have come to appreciate the music through being introduced to it via their family and relatives, so we play nightly to a really mixed age group, the grandmother, mother and grandkids are all fans, that’s because this man’s music is still being discovered and loved by the next generation., Elvis has lasted and will continue to last long after I am dead and gone, so happily for me I can keep doing what I love and in turn keep alive the music of The King.”

It is a persona Mario is keen to stress is only for the stage. “I have known some guys unable to take off the persona when their show ends, but I have my hair back to normal, no sideburns, I go out with friends and family and there isn’t anything different about me. Only when I step on stage does the change occur and it ends when I step off and go to my dressing room”.

The physical image of Elvis has these days become completely separate from the music and people who have never heard a note of his music would recognise that someone in a jumpsuit, shades and sideburns was pretending to be Elvis. And even though it is decades since he died men like Mario continue to be out there keeping the image and the music alive, paying tribute to The King. “He left too early that’s for sure,” says Mario, “his fans were at that point sort of cusping on middle age and their hero died.” Instead they have to settle for the likes of Mario who continue to get all shook up honouring the spirit of one of music’s most influential performers.

Experience Mario Kombou’s Elvis tribute show on October 2 at Pissouri Amphitheatre. Tickets are €12.50 pre booked and €15 at the door. Also on October 3 at the Tala Amphitheatre. Shows start at 7:30pm, doors open at 7pm. For tickets and information contact 96 616256

As Europe continues to struggle to absorb all the migrants fleeing Syria and other areas of the Middle East, THEO PANAYIDES meets two of the men rescued last year from a boat sinking off the coast of Cyprus

We arrange to meet at McDonald’s, halfway down the Phinikoudes strip in Larnaca. No reason why, it’s just a convenient landmark – but with hindsight it’s also quite appropriate, being a perfect symbol of the all-powerful, hugely successful, somewhat faceless West that entices migrants, in their thousands and millions, to make the risky journey out of the chaos of Syria and towards an uncertain future.

Shadi Issa and Bashar Al-Masri are two such travellers, marking one year in Cyprus this month. They arrived in September 2014, rescued off the coast of Paphos from a small, unseaworthy fishing boat on which traffickers had crammed 345 refugees (the boat sank soon after its passengers had been rescued). They never intended to come to Cyprus – the boat was supposed to take them to Italy – and hesitated for a long time before applying for asylum, especially since our government initially promised them only “subsidiary protection”, a lesser status that wouldn’t have allowed them to bring their families. Bashar only applied a month ago, and is still waiting; Shadi applied four months ago, and got his “decision” – giving him official refugee status – the day before our interview.

Shadi Issa

Shadi is 33, thin and rather melancholy, with glasses and a stubbly beard; his smile, when it comes, is wry and crooked, a bittersweet smile. Bashar is older – nearly 47 – his skin darker, his beard neatly trimmed and flecked with grey. He laughs much more heartily, and talks much more freely, though Shadi seems to talk with more feeling. Of the two, Shadi is the one I could more easily imagine nursing a grudge, or keeping a secret, or writing a book of poetry; Bashar seems more open and naturally assertive, the kind of man who could break up a fight just by appealing to both sides to listen to reason. Shadi used to be a pharmacist in Syria, with his own pharmacy and a sideline as distributor for an Indian drug company; Bashar was a graphic designer.

Both used to live in Damascus – and not just Damascus but specifically Yarmouk Camp, “home to the largest Palestinian refugee community in Syria” according to Wikipedia. Both are Palestinians, which involves its own set of challenges. “We are refugees from 1948,” notes Shadi; “We don’t have country to come back [to]”. Palestinians in Syria, mourning their homeland for the past 60 years, had almost the same rights as natives – the exceptions being that they couldn’t vote or hold public office – but they didn’t have Syrian passports, only “travel documents” which are now almost useless. Of those 345 people on the boat last year, all the native Syrians are now in Turkey, which offers “many options” for ways into Europe – but Turkey doesn’t accept Palestinians (though they may in theory apply for a visa). Neither do Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt or Algeria. Shadi and Bashar are effectively in limbo, their only options being to sneak into Turkey via the occupied north or wait for developments here.

Things could be worse, of course; that goes without saying. Life at Kofinou reception centre (which has been their home for the past few months) is fairly pleasant, even with the camp population having almost doubled in recent weeks. “We are living like the Cypriots – or maybe better!” says Bashar, laughing heartily. “Cyprus did the best for us, we know that.” Even if Kofinou were a hellhole, however, it would still be preferable to the hellhole they’ve escaped from – a shattered Damascus where their wives and Bashar’s three younger children still live (his oldest son is with him in Cyprus). What do their families say? What’s the situation there?

“It’s – difficult,” replies Shadi.

How?

“They don’t have electricity. They don’t have money. The…” He hesitates, not sure what to call Assad’s forces in English.

“Regime, regime,” translates Bashar.

“The regime, they make a big control.”

No-one lives in Yarmouk anymore. The area was overrun by Islamic State in April, but was previously a battleground between the Free Syrian Army (the rebels, or “opposites” as Bashar calls them in his broken English) and the government, who bombed it from the air. Shadi’s wife now lives in a suburb of Damascus, and must cross three or four checkpoints – hence the “big control” – just to get into town. Meanwhile they only have power for five hours a day, at best, and the water only comes one day a week, for a couple of hours. If you’re lucky they’ll come at the same time, so you can turn on the pump and fill your water tank.

Yet life goes on, more or less. Bashar’s second son (who’s now 16) is trying to get into university, to delay doing military service. People go to school, go shopping – but of course they have to be careful. “Anyone who goes out in Damascus don’t know if he will come back,” notes Bashar. “Because, you know, any time [there could be] a car bomb, or something fall from the sky, you don’t know. But people are used to that. You can pass by a dead body, it’s very usual”. There used to be a street in Yarmouk where one end of the alley was full of shoppers and the other was completely deserted, due to crossfire between regime forces and “terrorists”.

When he says ‘terrorists’ does he mean al-Nusra, the Syrian arm of al-Qaeda?

“We don’t know who was shooting,” he replies with a laugh. “Sometimes it’s Nusra, sometimes the Islamic, uh, military. You know, they are – how you say? – breeding,” he adds with a touch of black humour. Meanwhile, from about 2012, bombs rained down on Yarmouk – every hour on the hour, you could literally set your watch by them. “They work with a good plan,” smiles Shadi, meaning the bombers. “You can see the watch – now it’s 11, they need five minutes. They change it every three or four days.”

“Regime change!” jokes Bashar.

Regime change, of course – the concerted effort to unseat President Assad – is part of the problem. Life was good before the war, they tell me – but didn’t it matter that the country was ruled by a dictator? “It was OK,” replies Bashar, “because, you know, the average people, what do they want? Like here in Cyprus – what do they want? Have to eat, and raise our kids, and have a job. We never cared who is the leader of the country. Because, you know, the politics is a big lie”.

What do they think will happen in Syria?

“I think…” begins Shadi, but isn’t sure of the word in English. He turns to Bashar, and I catch the word ‘destroy’ in his translation. “I think they want to destroy Syria,” says Bashar, taking over.

Who does?

“I think the Americans and Israel. I think they saw in Syria [that] she has a good power, she don’t have any loans, the economy was very good. And they want to destroy the infrastructure of Syria. Because all you see is destruction. From the two sides, regime and the opposites, all they do is destroying. Destroying the infrastructure and killing the people. Nobody wins.”

And what about Europe’s response to the migrant crisis? Could they do more?

“Yes. They can do many more things than they do now,” says Shadi. “They leave the people die at sea.”

Actually, no, they try to rescue them.

“I don’t believe them. They don’t try to do anything for these people… All the time they talk.”

“He means that they could do something better,” puts in Bashar.

“And they must stop the war in Syria,” adds Shadi earnestly. “It’s better than saving refugees. They can. If they want, they can. I ask myself every day the same question – why they do that? Why they need refugees, and at the same time they kill us in Syria? And in Palestine, and Yemen and everywhere? They can stop the war.”

Who can?

“America, Israel. And Europe. I think they can do it.”

Their own decision to join the flood of migrants didn’t come easily. Indeed, Shadi wouldn’t even leave Yarmouk, staying on for six months in his little pharmacy even after most inhabitants had fled the bombs. “I am Palestinian, OK?” he replies when I ask what possessed him. “I don’t have a land. Yarmouk Camp is my home. Out of Yarmouk Camp, I don’t have anything. OK? Yarmouk Camp to me is like Palestine – so I can’t leave it”. It was his profession that finally forced his hand – because the rebels needed pharmacists to help in field hospitals, and pressured Shadi to join their cause. He resisted as best he could, only for his shop to be looted and all his drugs stolen to treat their injured. “When this happened,” he recalls sadly, “I see we can’t live in Syria”.

The people-smugglers wanted $6,000 for a place on the boat – a big boat, the agent assured them, 90 metres long. Both men had some savings, and beyond that friends pitched in, wives sold their jewellery, anything to get one person out so he could apply for asylum and bring others legally. Small boats took the passengers out to sea at night. “You don’t see the boat until you be on it,” says Bashar – and of course when you did, it was too late.

The boat was less than a third of the advertised size; with 345 people on board, “you didn’t have place to put your foot”. It was old, probably bought from a scrapyard and re-painted; patches of grey hull were visible beneath the paintwork. On the fifth night at sea, the engine broke down. The waves were very high, and the boat – puttering along at low speed – was in imminent danger of capsizing. The vessel was being lifted up then crashing down, says Bashar; he was in the hold, “flying from the earth” each time a wave struck. Up on the deck, Shadi recalls the boat tilting so much he could literally put his hand in the sea. Waves were hitting, “the boat was cracking”. Were people screaming? “Everyone has his way of fear. Some crying, some praying”.

In the end, the men were lucky. Their crippled boat was spotted by a NATO plane, and a Cypriot cruise ship was dispatched to save the passengers before it disintegrated – which is more or less where I come in, surrounded by porky English tourists toting their Big Macs to the beach at Phinikoudes, talking to Shadi Issa and Bashar Al-Masri a year after their ordeal. It’s been a year of stasis and confusion, most of all about the future – even the far future, if and when the chaos in Syria abates. On the one hand, they both insist they’ll go home when the war ends; on the other, as Shadi notes sadly, “I think we don’t have Yarmouk Camp in the future. I think it will be in the ground.”

The near future is slightly more clear-cut, especially now that Shadi has refugee status: the plan is to try to reunite with his wife, learn the language (he’s already taking Greek lessons), hopefully find a job. “I can’t live without work,” he says with feeling; back in Damascus, before the war, he used to work 12 hours a day. Maybe it’s slightly easier for a Palestinian, a man who’s felt like a refugee all his life – though I still have to wonder, what keeps him going in the dire situations he’s endured in the past few years? What does he think about to give him courage when bombs are falling, or his country is imploding, or a boat seems about to capsize? He pauses, his thin face even more thoughtful than usual.

“The life,” he finally replies, trying to shape the thought in his broken English. “And my wife. And my mother. I must continue, because they need me. So I’ll try to continue, everything. It’s too difficult here. But you must try. That’s it.”

“We left our family, and they are waiting for us,” adds Bashar. “They are waiting for – for a Jesus!” For a miracle? “Yeah, yeah. Because I went to Europe, that everything will change”. I hope it does.

From stock broker to Pilates instructor to mature student at UCLan. THEO PANAYIDES meets a man who believes the less you are given the happier you become

There are aspects of Roger Brignell’s life which might strike an outsider as unusual. Some will find it unusual that he worked for many years as a stockbroker in the City of London, retired at 52 (he’s now “nearly 70”), then became a personal trainer and wrote a bestselling book on Pilates. Others may find it unusual that he was adopted, and grew up – without knowing it – in the family of a distant relative who he thought was his mother. And some will certainly find it unusual that he was married for 30 years, has two sons, but is now living with a man – a Cypriot named Yiannis who’s “half my age and twice my size” as he cheerfully puts it.

Roger himself, of course, doesn’t find any of this remotely unusual; it’s just who he is. The disjunction is partly inevitable, because Life always seems totally normal when you’re on the inside. It’s a bit like his childhood, when he didn’t see anything suspicious in the fact that his four ‘siblings’ were all six foot tall, with brown eyes and blond hair, whereas he was relatively small, with blue eyes and white hair; that was just how things were. Yet it’s not just blind acceptance that prompts him to play down the more unusual aspects of his life: he gives the impression of having thought a lot about these things, and discerned how they all fit together.

His sex life, for instance, is irrelevant: “I think sex is important, [but] I don’t think sexuality is – anything”. His professional life just happened, almost without his volition: “All these things happened to me by accident, I never chose them! I never had a Plan A, I never had a Plan B or any other. I just listened to what people said to me, and said yes or no”. And as for his extraordinary childhood, it was actually “a great lesson” – an enforced independence which outsiders might view as a hardship, but which actually taught him to stand on his own two feet.

Indeed, it wasn’t even that extraordinary. When he was born, at the tail-end of WWII, “soldiers were rife everywhere” and accidental babies were a common occurrence – though of course “in those days women couldn’t keep the babies they had, if they weren’t married”. Roger assumes that his real father was a soldier, though he never knew his identity; he only found out who his real mother was by accident, when he was visiting his grandma in hospital and Gran (presumably too sedated to think straight) said “‘Oh, here’s your mother’ – and when I looked around, it wasn’t my mother”. His mum was related to his foster-mum, as already mentioned, which was why she happened to be visiting at the same time.

Roger was about 18 when the truth came out, and the cuckoo-in-the-nest revelation explained a lot: why he didn’t look like his siblings, why his adoptive mother always seemed so resentful when he did much better at school than the other kids (“I can understand it in retrospect, at the time of course it felt very unfair and I felt I was being badly treated”), even why his ‘parents’ more or less gave up on him when he entered his teens, leaving him to his own devices. Yet, human behaviour being what it is, knowledge of the adoption didn’t really change his life. “I kind of suppressed it all,” he admits, and his birth mother – who had since married and had more children – was also disinclined to pursue it. Only years later did he even try to contact her, for the sake of his own sons – but she didn’t want to talk, and “essentially was cold and off-putting… Well, you can understand that,” he adds. “She’d come from a time when she was forced to do things, and the only way to manage that, I’m sure, in a psychological way, was to actually pretend it never happened.”

Repression, denial, the rejection of one’s own flesh and blood… For all of Roger’s sangfroid, sipping a beer on the seaside patio of Makou in Larnaca – a trim man with very blue eyes and a carefully-groomed white beard – there’s a lot of drama in his early life. It almost makes you wonder if that was why he did a degree in Maths and Psychology, to try and understand the perverse behaviour of his so-called loved ones – and he insists that wasn’t why, then again he’s currently studying Agriculture at UCLan Cyprus and explains his choice by saying that “Life sciences” fascinate him: “What makes animals, people, plants work. How do they work, and why do they work”. What makes a family keep up a pretence for decades, even with an obvious cuckoo in their midst. What makes a boy grow up solitary and mostly unloved, then look back in late middle age and tell an interviewer (i.e. myself) that he’s been “unbelievably lucky” in life.

The Maths and Psychology degree was in Manchester. Roger had a place at Cambridge, but Cambridge was where he’d grown up – a council estate on the outskirts of town – and going there would’ve meant living at home, an indication of how badly he wanted to escape. Getting a degree, on the other hand – any degree – was a big deal in those days. “There’s a huge difference from what life is like today. When I left university in 1967, I had 10 offers of jobs without going for a single interview! If you had a degree, you were very employable – and so people like [chemical company] ICI would write to you, because they’d got a list of all the people who’d got a degree, and say ‘If you want a job, you’ve got one’.” He worked for a while as a clinical psychologist, then ran into the father of an old schoolmate – “Life is full of serendipity” – who got him a job interview. “It was a firm of stockbrokers called Phillips & Drew, who eventually became UBS. And they offered me a job.”

By the time he got married, at 27, he was running a department; by the time he retired, he was set for life. Roger was happy as a stockbroker. He was good at numbers, and even better at talking to people – a fact that’s abundantly clear on the patio at Makou. “It sounds arrogant, but I do interview quite well. If you talk to me, I can talk back”. And he had another talent, a talent for “sniffing the air, getting a feel for what’s actually happening and moving in that direction. I mean, it paid huge dividends when I was a fund manager: I was very good at spotting trends”. Maybe that explains how he managed to segue so smoothly from the old Britain to the new, from a married-with-children stockbroker to a personal trainer and Pilates guru who’s fit, cosmopolitan and yes, bisexual.

“Actually, I take issue with the way the question’s phrased,” he says, when I ask at what point he found out he was gay. I’d assumed he’d always led a double life, maybe even that his 30-year marriage was a sham – but it wasn’t like that at all. “The sexual act is just an act,” he explains. “It’s just like having a meal, as far as I’m concerned. And if you meet somebody who fits you, then gender doesn’t come into it, it’s not an issue. At all! And if I get fed up with Yiannis – or we don’t stay together, or whatever – I might just as easily choose a woman”. That said, he doesn’t seem to have had any same-sex experiences till after his divorce, when he was living alone in Central London. “I’m a sexual being,” he shrugs, “and it’s much easier to get sex from men than it is to get it from women – in London, anyway. It’s just easier. I got hit on all the time, everywhere I went. And in the end, you think ‘Well, why not?’. You know, if you see someone you like, and you’re talking and everything seems to be fine, why wouldn’t you?”

So, does he not even accept ‘gay’ and ‘straight’ as categories? “I think there’s human and non-human,” he replies. “Though I think there are a lot of non-humans in our lives, they just look like us!” That’s a joke – or a half-joke – but the principle remains. “If you say ‘I’m human’ that hasn’t got any gender in it, it hasn’t got any ideology, it hasn’t got anything. It means I’m part of the species Homo Sapiens and I’m just trying to get by, like any other species.”

No gender, no ideology – “and no religion too,” as John Lennon might’ve added (religion is one of the systems people make up to protect themselves, says Roger). Maybe that’s the key to understanding Roger Brignell, the philosophy he espouses so fiercely – a kind of rigorous austerity which asserts that the less you’re given, the happier you’ll become. His childhood was a blessing, he believes, because he learned to look after himself. When it comes to his own sons, he recalls that he worked a 9-to-5 job when the older one was a baby, hence was always there to tuck him in, but was much more absent (having moved to a different job) with the younger one. Result? The older one felt “abandoned” whereas his younger brother learned to cope – and now, “although the older one is much more like me in temperament” they’re practically estranged, whereas he gets on better with his younger son.

Tender loving care as a recipe for disaster? That’s another part of Roger’s life which might strike an outsider as unusual – yet there’s no doubt he means it. Is it simply tough love? Is it his way of rationalising his early life, and turning it into an advantage? I suspect it’s just his personality – a tenacious, flinty personality that believes in taking responsibility for one’s life, and despises “sogginess”.

No, he wasn’t happy as a child – but, “as an individual, if you’re not happy it’s your fault. It’s not anybody else’s fault”. Roger would be mortified if he came across as a victim (“This is not looking for sympathy, OK?” he says by way of preface, when describing how poor his adoptive parents were) and is totally opposed to the “soft” thinking that’s infected public life, especially in Britain. “When I was young, I thought I was very liberal. Now I sometimes catch myself on the verge of fascism!” he admits with a wry laugh. It pains him that policy on Syrian refugees, for instance, “can be influenced by a picture of a dead child on a beach in Turkey, or wherever. Of course that’s very sad – everybody would admit that it’s very sad. But it’s not a reason for changing the way you think, or what you do… We can’t be the world’s social workers”. In a way, he’s a link between old and new Britain, illustrating how the latter’s trendy individualism and rejection of labels has its roots in the former’s emphasis on thrift and self-sufficiency. Neither of his sons (both work as artists) has ever asked him for a penny, says Roger proudly.

What if “sogginess” had been fashionable back in 1945, though? His real mum would’ve raised him, he’d have been loved. “I’d have been ruined, wouldn’t I?” he replies pointedly. “And I’m now going to be rude about Cyprus, [but] I would’ve been indulged in exactly the same way Cypriot children are indulged – and I think the way children are treated in Cyprus is ruination!” He’s lived here for almost three years (he moved to be close to Yiannis), and his lifestyle is enviable – tennis and gym every day, building a house on a hill overlooking Ayia Napa – yet he still can’t resist pointing out a few failings, from ugly buildings on the beach to 17-year-olds with their own cars (“Why does he have a car? Why do the parents pay for it?”). He is quite grumpy, in many ways. It’s amusing to learn that his older son – the one who’s very like him in temperament – hasn’t come to visit him in Cyprus because he “doesn’t like sunshine”.

There’s a lot more one could say about Roger Brignell. He has an MBA from Insead. He wrote his Pilates handbook in eight working days. The clients at his personal-trainer studio once included Madonna. Much of this is unusual, or impressive or remarkable – but, in the end, they’re just facts, things that happened in the course of his seven decades. Life per se, life as a collection of experiences, doesn’t define who he is, insists Roger – it merely defines his history. “I don’t think what I do, or what I say, or what I think, defines me at all. I think there’s something here, which is what defines me,” he adds, and points vaguely to his chest, “but it hasn’t got anything to do with external things at all”. He won’t call it a soul, but “a core, at least” – an essence, a Roger Brignell quality. Otherwise he’s part of the species Homo Sapiens, trying to get by like any other species.

Ecosystems under stress and helping communities that rely on them have taken one recent visitor to the island around much of the world. THEO PANAYIDES meets her

Ecosystem management isn’t a subject that leaps off the page; yet Gill Shepherd’s life has been rather fascinating. For the past 30-odd years this bespectacled, grandmotherly woman – she is indeed a grandmother, or at least a step-grandmother – has been roaming the mountains, mangrove swamps and (especially) forests of the developing world, getting in a long canoe with an outboard motor to reach places which are inaccessible by road, talking to nomads and village elders, trying to shame and browbeat intransigent governments – then heading back to her townhouse in Islington, where she’s lived since the 80s and is currently putting in a new bathroom.

And Cyprus? Where do we fit into all this? Well, it’s true our ecosystem could use a little management – but she’s actually here for another reason, a Memorial Lecture for Peter Loizos, her late husband and fellow anthropologist. Gill and I actually meet in the home of Nicos Philippou, an Associate Lecturer at the University of Nicosia who’s putting her up during her stay – and Peter Loizos, a London half-Cypriot who only discovered Cyprus in adulthood and became an authority on the subject, was immensely popular at the University, where he taught during the last decade of his life (he died in 2012) after retiring from the London School of Economics. He had a talent for encouragement, recalls his wife fondly – “he facilitated you going forward” – a skill he employed both as a teacher and in his personal life.

“I was lucky with Peter, because Peter always believed women should have a career,” she muses. “He made me aim higher than I would’ve done, probably”. They were married for 37 years, having met at the LSE where Loizos, six years her senior, was Gill’s tutor. His background was a bit more turbulent (his English mother and Cypriot father separated when he was two), hers was “very straight down the line”. Her mum had been a schoolteacher, dad was a civil servant; “Both my parents were quite shy, so I think we were brought up to be quiet”. Gill never went anywhere very exotic as a child – just a few family trips to France and Italy – but something gnawed at her regardless, a desire to discover new cultures and a dawning realisation that she probably wouldn’t be happy following in her mother’s footsteps as a teacher.

Anthropology was actually her second degree; she’d read English Literature at Oxford – but had also done something quite adventurous, going to Sudan for two years when she was 23 (she’s now 72) just because she wanted a change and didn’t want to start teaching in England right away. Travelling widely – she’d become fluent in Arabic before starting out – exploring the interior then trying to teach Shakespeare to young Muslim girls at a posh school in Khartoum, Gill was deeply smitten by the newness and strangeness of it all. Or, as she puts it in her nicely self-deprecating way: “I thought, ‘My goodness me, I’d rather be experiencing all of this with a bit more of a framework’.”

Cue the LSE, then a PhD studying the Muslim community of Mombasa in Kenya, then a second stint in Sudan working for Oxfam – this time with Peter and their kids, Daniel and Hannah. “You know, we did it as a job share – the two children were quite small, so we did two weeks on, two weeks off.” One spouse would go on a field trip while the other looked after the children, then they’d swap roles; “It was a very nice bit of work, very democratic between the two of us”. That was surely a key to their marriage, that the two were similar but different. On the one hand, Peter was a cultured, gentle soul, like her: “We were quite quiet when we were in London. We enjoyed reading books and discussing them together”. On the other he complemented her free-spirited side, staying home on his academic’s timetable to raise kids (with the help of a nanny) while she roamed the world; “My daughter has complained to me, and said ‘You weren’t around for me as much as you should’ve been’,” admits Gill, with a smile both amused and rueful.

The inhabitatants of Papua

It must’ve been a sight, this no-nonsense, very English lady trekking through jungles and forests. Indonesian Papua was perhaps the roughest: “I’ve worked in the highlands where these guys are more or less naked, wearing these sort of penis sheath things”. She wasn’t exactly an explorer – she always consulted on existing projects, liaising with staff who were already trusted by the villagers – but still inspired some puzzlement. “Why does your husband let you travel all by yourself to other places?” asked a bunch of old men in Nepal, parleying with the strange Western woman around the village campfire one night. “Well, he’s very happy that I can earn some money as well as him,” replied Gill. “But why does England let women have this kind of job?” they persisted, a question that has no easy answer except perhaps to give a potted history of women’s rights in Britain – which she did, much to the men’s bemusement.
What about the argument that what she does – telling people in poor countries how to manage their forests – is a form of benign colonialism, though?

“Yeah, yeah,” she replies briskly, with the air of having heard it all before. Gill is quite brisk in general, hence the air of no-nonsense Englishness. I suspect she’s not the type to give very effusive compliments – though equally not the type to lose her temper. “Oh no, I don’t think that’s me,” she replies when I ask if she might’ve become a militant activist, had she been born 50 years later. “I think I always do things the quiet way. Some people are good at shouting and stamping and so on – I’m not. I’m more inclined to persuade people by reasoned argument.”

What about the charge of benign colonialism, though?

“Obviously, at one level, it’s true,” she says candidly. “[However], at another level, local people will often say to you: ‘It’s easier for you to tell our government something than it is for us’. So they’re quite grateful to have a neutral third party, who doesn’t have a political interest in the situation”.

Her very first project – during her time in Sudan with her husband and children – is a great example of that. Gill explored the semi-arid “rain-fed areas” and met with nomads, who bred cattle and camels. The animals could only live on grass for about one month, then ate leaves off the trees for the remainder of the year. That had always been the nomads’ way of life, and they knew exactly what to do and where to go – but now the central government “were allowing the World Bank to come in and cut these trees down, to do some sort of rain-fed millet production”; they didn’t even realise they were destroying another economy in the process, and were quite surprised when Gill told them. It’s a common problem, national governments – whether through prejudice or simple ignorance – unaware of the way of life in rural areas; and these rural people, she says, “will never get a chance to explain what they’re doing at national level unless someone like me is in the middle, kind of facilitating.”

Has she ever been in physical danger? Not really, she says, trying to remember; maybe just once in Guatemala, when their guide unexpectedly got antsy and hustled them out of a hamburger place. “I said ‘What’s the matter?’ and he said ‘I suddenly saw there were four guys with guns in that place, and I thought any minute they’re going to do a raid, so we’d better get out as fast as we can’.” Generally, though, people are welcoming – maybe because they think she can help them, maybe because it’s just how they are. “People are the same all over the world,” says Gill, trying to glean a lesson from her travels. “I mean, you really have a strong sense that there’s a common humanity”.

That’s one lesson to be gleaned; but there’s another, less heartening one. “Money is the lever,” she admits. Money talks, all over the world. Sometimes money can be an incentive for good, as in Congo-Brazzaville where she helped a logging company work more sustainably so they could earn a quality-control stamp from the FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) – a European plan to label timber logged in a way that respects the local environment, for which European customers then pay a premium. More often, though, money is a force for evil, or at least venality and irresponsibility. Exhibit A is Indonesia, where acres of high-value timber lead to cronyism, illegal felling of forests, and corruption in general. “However much you try to do something good at the local level, if you can’t fix the political level, forget it,” admits Gill sadly. She’s tried the softly-softly approach, others have tried being confrontational, but it’s no use: “I think nothing works when you have a rich country like that”.

It doesn’t bode well for climate change, obviously our biggest environmental problem and the one where “big-scale government commitment” – usually against vested interests – is absolutely crucial. Villagers in Ghana a few months ago (Gill still travels, though not as much as she used to: this year she went to Ghana, Mexico and South Africa) told her they first noticed change in 1994: before that, Nature would give them signs about when to plant – “Certain birds started singing, certain insects hatched out, and we knew if we planted seeds then, the rain would come in about 10 or 12 days” – but for the past 20 years the signs have ceased to mean anything; “Now you just have to guess”. 20 years, she observes without rancour (not an activist, just an anthropologist), yet the West is still arguing about global warming. It’s unlikely the developing world will prove more efficient.

What will the world be like when her grandkids reach the age she is now? Hard to say, but the forthcoming “movement of peoples” is going to make today’s migrant crisis look like a stroll in the park – millions fleeing the lands where water has vanished – not to mention “water fights” which indeed have already started; Ethiopia and Kenya are currently at loggerheads over a proposed dam that’s going to stop a river flowing from the former to the latter. The next generation, or the one after that, will have hard decisions to make. As for Gill herself – well, she’s not quite hors de combat yet, but the years are inevitably catching up a little. “I’m at a stage of my life,” she says wryly, “when I feel I should be sorting out all the family photographs”.
Instead she keeps going (she’s even putting in a new bathroom), and her hobbies – in addition to pleasant pastimes like cooking and going to the theatre – include helping to run “a local community association that fights issues at the local level”. They argue with the local council, and Gill – being a writer – is often enlisted to write the “red-hot, five-page document” that sets out their arguments, drawing on a lifetime of reasoned argument against African bureaucrats and illegal loggers.

She seems like a strong person; there’s a touch of asperity in her manner – I get the sense that, if I were to ask a stupid question, she wouldn’t hesitate to let me know – though she also, like a lot of strong people, seems to dislike being hemmed in. It may be significant that she tried acting while at school and hated it (“The idea of having to get your words exactly right, so you can cue up the other person, is terrifying to me”); she needs freedom, even if it’s freedom to fail – and may have needed someone like Peter, who encouraged and enabled her. He died suddenly, of pancreatic cancer, and their kids had very different reactions to his death: Daniel moved back home, as if needing to be close to Gill – but Hannah quit her job and moved to Barcelona to teach English, as if unable to be physically in the same town as the memories of her father.

And Gill? She doesn’t say – but she surely consoled herself, in mourning the man of her life, with memories of her time in Mombasa, when death was enfolded in ritual. “If there was a death, everybody immediately knew what to do”. The bereaved family didn’t have to cook for 40 days; all meals were provided by the neighbours. Excerpts from the Koran were handed out and read aloud, the belief being that reading the Koran sped the soul on its journey. Different cultures work in different ways, all doing their best to make sense of the world – and Gill has experienced so many of them. A fascinating life, indeed.

THEO PANAYIDES meets a philosopher engaged in building robots who is convinced they will never outsmart us

There’s often a moment in American films when our heroes meet someone like Selmer Bringsjord (he is indeed American, despite the Norwegian name). He might be a small-town judge, or a sheriff. He’s deadpan, and rather doleful. He speaks slowly, in a deep bullhorn voice. He says ‘darn’ to express annoyance. The cinematic Selmer soothes our heroes’ fears, and talks some sense into them. In real life, however, Selmer isn’t a judge or a sheriff but something much less folksy – an academic researcher in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI), building robots for the relatively near future when machines will have penetrated deep (or even deeper) into everyday life.

How near is that future? “Two years ago, at a ski trip in Colorado, we had a very intellectually violent debate about the timeline,” he replies in his booming, deliberate voice. He himself believes that, when it comes to self-driving cars for instance, 50 years is a reasonable estimate; at that point, it’ll be “a complete done deal. Humans may enjoy driving, and driving fast, but the machines will be doing all of that”. Selmer may or may not be around to witness this (he’ll be 57 next month), but he’s fairly sure it’ll happen; the twist, however, is that – unlike most of the excitable folks who work in AI – he also thinks the human mind will forever be superior to machines and robots, however intelligent.

This is not always a popular view in his field. Futurologists love to talk – and not just hypothetically – about the so-called Singularity, a point in the future when computers or robots will be smart enough to build computers or robots even smarter than themselves, resulting (per Wikipedia) in “a runaway effect… creating intelligence far exceeding human intellectual capacity and control”. In short, many people are convinced that machines will eventually outsmart us, and presumably take over the world. Selmer, however, remains sceptical – though “that doesn’t mean that powerful autonomous machines can’t wreak havoc, and they will. They will, they will.”

The reason for that upcoming havoc is something called formal programme verification: this is essentially the process (a very technical, very expensive process) by which we check that a computer programme is behaving as intended – “and most countries, the US included, are spending next to nothing on it”. Hardly anyone knows how to do it, so we’re building these increasingly autonomous and powerful machines while shutting down the process of keeping an eye on them. (The problem is compounded by the fact that operating systems are privately owned by the likes of Microsoft and Google, so researchers who might want to work on the machines don’t have access to them.) Selmer is aware of this problem yet he’s also, among other things, Director of the Rensselaer AI & Reasoning Laboratory at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in upstate New York – and his work in the lab consists of trying to make precisely the kind of machines he’s talking about, the self-aware kind that may eventually ‘wreak havoc’.

Why does he do it? Practically speaking, I assume it’s because the robotics revolution is coming one way or the other (some would say it’s already here), so he might as well be part of it. Philosophically speaking, I assume it’s because he’s convinced (as already mentioned) that robots will never overtake us, though they might go rogue once in a while – and Philosophy, after all, is his turf, having been the subject of both his BA and PhD. When I ask whose theories of the future he finds most plausible, he mentions Leibniz, the 17th-century German philosopher.

It’s heartening to find a philosopher engaged in building robots – because AI brings with it dilemmas that can only be described as philosophical. Take the self-driving car, for instance. Selmer’s recent talk at TEDx Limassol (we meet at the Elias Beach Hotel, the day before the event) was entitled ‘Can Robots Be True Heroes?’, ‘heroes’ being this year’s TEDx theme – and his point was that, at the end of the day, “robots cannot be genuine heroes” because they don’t have emotions, and heroism consists of “rising above deep emotions that are militating against doing this”. The man who walks into a burning building to save a child is a hero, says Selmer, because every sinew in his body is shouting “No! No, you have a family, and you’ve got 20 years left of your life, and you’ve got great things to accomplish”. Robots have no such qualms, hence they can’t be true heroes.

Maybe so. But what about the self-driving car that decides to sacrifice its own ‘body’ in order to prevent carnage? A child runs into the street, and the robot calculates that crashing the car – i.e. destroying itself – without injuring its owner/occupant will prevent loss of life. Isn’t self-sacrifice a kind of heroism? And, if robots can be heroes, how far will they go? “I think this is an enormous looming issue that no-one is really thinking about,” notes Selmer, looking even more doleful than usual. After all, “this kind of thinking is what machines do. This is what they’ve done in chess… If we don’t want the machines to do this, we will have to programme them somehow not to, because they’re going to see these things that we currently, for the most part, don’t see”.

Think about it. A child runs into the street, and the robot crashes (without injuring its occupant) to save the child’s life. But what if it has to choose between running over the child and crashing into another car? And what if there’s a whole bunch of children in the street, and it calculates that killing its occupant – by crashing into a wall, say – would still be a better option than ploughing into the kids? One assumes there’s some sort of Prime Directive to protect the car’s human owner, as in Isaac Asimov’s sci-fi novels – but an intelligent machine keeps learning and expanding, that’s the idea. Robots already use “naïve utilitarianism,” says Selmer; could they also learn “Kantian ethics”, the idea of basic rules (e.g. that human life is intrinsically valuable) that you never contravene? “This kind of dimension is really hard to figure out how to capture mechanically. I mean, I’m personally working on that, so I know it’s hard”.

Does he think his work with robots has given him a deeper understanding of what it means to be human?

He pauses, his deadpan expression giving no indication that he’s about to be funny. “Well, it would be hubristic for me to say yes. But I will say yes.”

Nothing like artificial intelligence, it seems, to make you appreciate real intelligence – and Selmer Bringsjord comes across that way on a personal level, as a man who appreciates the world and all who live in it. His small-town-judge demeanour is the opposite of arrogant; he’s very approachable, and spends a good 10 minutes after the interview asking for tips on what to see in Cyprus (he and his wife plan to come back soon, and explore more thoroughly). He seems, for want of a better word – or maybe there is no better word – very human.

For one thing, he appreciates travel, having given lectures and interviews in two dozen countries. For another, he appreciates family. He and his wife have been married since 1982, and have been a couple since Selmer was 15: “We were effectively childhood sweethearts”. (So these high-school relationships can work, I muse. “They can work,” he confirms, adding pointedly: “It takes a very understanding, patient woman for it to work”.) He’s also very close to his brother, and it’s long been a Thanksgiving tradition for the two Bringsjord families to go on a trip together – which suggests that he’s also close to his children, a son and daughter working for PWC and Macy’s, respectively.

Maybe he treasures family because he grew up without it, or at least without a part of it: his parents divorced when he was five, and his dad went back to Norway where he promptly dropped out of his son’s life (they only met once more, when Selmer was 16). He was raised by his mum, an entrepreneurial beautician who also dabbled in real-estate – and she always pegged him for a future academic, despite the non-academic family background (his absent father had worked as a builder). “She’d tease me about it. I remember when I was extremely young, she would say: ‘You’re basically not doing anything, it’s really hard to get you to do anything. You’re just sitting there reading!… The only thing you can be is a professor’.”

So he was always a bit of a dreamer?

“I certainly like to dream. I certainly like to read, and have always loved reading”. The internet is like crack cocaine for him; he can sit and read for hours, flitting from research papers to travel pieces. “I have to control myself, yes,” he says soberly. “I love reading about different places in the world and then travelling to them… I mean, to get online and say ‘oh, Cyprus. Darn, I’ve never been to Cyprus, this looks really interesting’, and I start to read about the history of Cyprus – it’s amazing!”. When he’s not reading, he’s writing – not just on robots but, for instance, a spy novel called Soft Wars (“What was the secret passed on from Russian top espionage master Andreev Kasakov to his even more ruthless son?” runs the Amazon synopsis) or a kind of philosophical tract called Abortion: A Dialogue, in which various characters debate the titular issue in a coffee house.

An academic who dabbles in spy novels, a robot-maker with no great faith in robots, an avid traveller who’s never lived outside the Hudson Valley (he was born in White Plains, New York, just a few miles from his current workplace). There are many facets to Selmer Bringsjord – and in fact his low-key style is also deceptive; he’s not just a reader and a dreamer, but also an athlete. He’s a serious skier, a “ski patroller”, and also plays golf and tennis. None of those are team sports, I note, and he shrugs thoughtfully: he does ski and golf with other people, he points out – “but I [also] have no problem enjoying solitude in those two sports, and really enjoying it a lot”. I suspect he may be one of those idealistic maverick types who love humanity but could probably live without actual humans.

Meanwhile, the robots are approaching – autonomous weapons getting ever closer to the battlefield (this is where formal programme verification might be useful), plus of course more benign applications. The Japanese have invested hugely in elder care, especially for patients with Alzheimer’s, and there’s also a huge growth market in education, robots as teaching assistants (maybe as “intelligent agents” rather than physical machines). Won’t people resent the incursion? Evidence shows that “most humans, including children, seem to have no problem developing an unusually strong bond with robots,” he replies. “The robot has to be respectful, courteous – maybe even seemingly loving. It can’t screw up all the time, people don’t have a lot of patience for machinery that screws up. But I think long-term there will be great acceptance.”

Robots can’t be heroes, though – and it’s unlikely they’ll ever be quirky and multi-faceted as Selmer is, and indeed as we all are. I don’t know if he’s right about the human mind, but certainly AI will have trouble replicating the human soul – the lattice of traits and contradictions that make each of us unique, the inner sense of what it’s like to be us. “The US is increasingly an AI economy. But the AI itself is not exactly deep”. You buy a book at Amazon and the online robots make recommendations, cross-referencing your tastes with millions of other readers’. “That is great, I love it, it pays the bills” for whoever designed it – but it’s not really deep thinking. Selmer points to my tape recorder: “You having to rationalise, systematise, take this information from the audio of what I said and produce a document makes [those robots] seem like absolute child’s play”. I feel better already.

More than a decade later and I still remember when I first saw Turkish Cypriot actress Oya Akin. It was in 2004. She was appearing in the play A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings, based on the Gabriel Garcia Marquez short story of the same title.

The experimental performance, produced by Kneehigh, a Cornwall-based international, site-specific theatre company, took place in Nicosia’s Buffer Zone, just opposite the Ledra Palace Hotel. Oya was one of a handful of Cypriot artists from both sides of the divide invited to participate.

A relative newcomer to the Cypriot theatre scene at the time, she played Dixa, a village laundry girl, a dark-haired beauty, full of life and joy. Her clear voice, her beaming smile, her pulsating stage presence made an immediate and lasting impression.

Eleven years on and as we talk over a glass of wine in one of the secret gardens of north Nicosia, the London-born Oya Akin still radiates the same joie de vivre. She remains as mesmerising and vibrant a presence off stage as on, living a life of multiple roles with the same energy and commitment that so marked that early performance. Yet, much has changed in her life.

Still an actress, with an impressive array of roles under her belt, Oya has taken on the additional challenge of becoming a theatre director. She teaches drama at one of the north’s leading private schools, is a theatre instructor in a bicommunal children’s project at the Home For Cooperation, serves as a voluntary teacher at the Arabahmet afternoon school for Turkish children, translates poetry and is a committed peace activist.

Somewhere along the way, she found time to get married and is the mother of two children. And she has learnt sign language. Sign language, a bit puzzling that someone so vocal would make such a choice. Noting my bewilderment, Oya nods her head enthusiastically.
“Yes, I always wanted to learn it. Once when I was at university in Istanbul, studying psychology, I watched a couple communicating in sign language. It was so poetic. They were talking and listening to each other with their whole bodies. This made me realise that having ears is not good enough to understand somebody,” she explains.

Still, I say, not everybody would commit themselves to learning something so difficult and at the same time perhaps not directly applicable, at least in our “hearing” world. So what is the key, the motivating force behind learning the “poetry of speaking with the whole body”?
For a moment, Oya pauses before revealing further reasons why becoming adept at sign language is so important for her. For the longest time, her dream had been to have her own artistic space where at least one room would be devoted to creating a sensory theatre for disabled children, a space that would provide stimulation for the various senses including smell, sound and touch.
“Some time ago I spent eight days at this residency programme in Munster (Germany) organised by the Goethe Institute,” she explains. “It was eight amazing days devoted to watching performances directed at children. And I met this one girl there who was running a theatre for blind kids. For me to observe how it happened was seriously mind blowing. So now I would love to have a place like this, where one room would be a sensory theatre, with sprinklers and moving boards and everything else.”

Also, a little hesitantly, the seemingly poised and outgoing actress admits to another reason for her fascination with sign language. “When I was a student I was quite shy. It was all about these feelings that I did not want to share with anybody because I believed that nobody would understand me,” she confides. “So I had this idea that if I learned sign language I could stop talking and communicate only with those people who would really want to hear me because they would make an effort to learn sign language as well.”

Oya laughs when I ask her if she would still call herself “shy” and admits that this is a phase of her life that is most likely behind her now. She insists, however, that there would not have been “Oya Akin an actress” were it not for her fear of speaking in public. It was to overcome this fear that she decided in 2000 to join a theatre workshop organised by the amateur Kyrenia Theatre Group (Gibetsu).
“I had this job that required me to speak out a lot and I had a mental block about doing so. I thought learning how to perform could help,” she says. And it did help. So much so, that soon after Oya was given her first big role, going on to join the group on a permanent basis. This also led later to a contract with the Turkish Cypriot State Theatre.

She makes no attempt to hide the nostalgic pang for what might have been in recalling how her time as a contracted player ended. “The State Theatre didn’t renew my contract in 2010, and Gibetsu expelled me in 2013 over an article I wrote in Yeniduzen about working on Katil (Killer),” she explains.

She shrugs her shoulders when I ask how come a newspaper article could make her persona non grata within the theatre group she had once considered to be her second family.

My own recall of the play – written by Elcin Efendiyev and directed by Mehriban Elekberzade, both from Azerbeijan – was that yes, it had been controversial. Not surprisingly, since it was one of the most provocative and interesting theatre productions ever staged in north Cyprus. Oya’s performance as a lonely teacher, abused psychologically and physically by her partner and former student, was widely acclaimed.

“I wrote that working with the director had been a great experience, a real eye-opener and that I had learned a lot from her,” says Akin. To put it mildly, Gibetsu didn’t see eye-to-eye with her views and Oya and they parted ways. It was a painful and hurtful experience.

“Doing Katil was a unique experience for me,” she continues. “The director’s style and approach was new for me, in some ways a revelation. For example, up to then, if there was any violence in a play we were working on we simulated it. But this director – she wanted it to be real! Perhaps not 100 per cent. But you could say she pulled no punches. After rehearsals, I was so bruised I began to feel like an abused women. I even started wearing long sleeves so my bruises don’t show. There was a power in this play and our performance that I had never previously felt during all my years of working at the theatre. I felt we really touched people with it. We could move them. We could make them cry.”

So does she miss this experience and even more the theatre itself? “Yes, I do miss theatre a bit but not any kind of theatre,” she acknowledges. “I have reached a point in my life and the life of Cyprus where I don’t believe that theatre and arts should be just about entertaining. I have started questioning who we are doing our theatre for. There is so much going on at present. The theatre should be about something that matters. That is why Katil was such a different experience for me because this is the kind of theatre that I want to do.”

Since the painful separation from Gibetsu, Oya has taken part in a number of bicommunal projects, most of them in a theatrical context. She participated in the research project Songs of My Neighbours, an EU-funded initiative to facilitate dialogue and social justice among communities living in conflict zones through the arts and theatre. As part of this project Oya took part in several interesting outdoor and indoor performances, including a spectacle entitled O Polis ji o Noufris shown at Nicosia’s Artos Foundation, that aimed to explore and re-energise common Greek and Turkish Cypriot folk tales.

This month alone, Oya participated in two performances, both based on the same principle of penetrating the wall of divide with a human voice. In Voicing the Line, Akin and Greek Cypriot artist Christina Georgiou walked in parallel to each other on opposite sides of the Green Line, calling out each other’s names as they attempted to measure the thickness of the wall keeping them apart. A video of it was recently exhibited as an installation at the Art Rooms Gallery in Kyrenia.

Two weeks ago, at the Nicosia Buffer Fringe, Oya and Greek Cypriot artist Marilea Kyriakou teamed up in Arabahmet’s Dervis Pasa Street to tackle similar issues of communication and miscommunication. Their performance piece entitled Mind the Gap was designed to show that artificially built walls can and should be challenged by individuals.

“The last two years, I have been constantly saying ‘yes’ to lots of projects. One reason I am doing this is because they are mostly bicommunal. Often they involve participation by Greek Cypriots who have little or no direct experience of meeting a Turkish Cypriot and I feel that it is my duty to open this door for them,” says the actress. In saying this she admits that she is partly influenced by the fact that having worked in a group, she misses the collaborative intensity of the period when a team assembles to research, rehearse and put a play into its final form.

She joined Poli Flourentzou to co-direct one of the street plays that were a feature of the Buffer Fringe. Entitled Nicosia, it was inspired by and based on two poems: one by late Greek Cypriot poet Niki Marangou, the other by Oya’s husband, leading Turkish Cypriot poet Gurgenc Korkmazel, who writes under the penname Gur Genc.

“We chose Niki because we were very close to her and losing her was terrible for us. We miss her a lot,” she explains. “We used a poem that she wrote to her mum, after she lost her. It is called I Didn’t Bring Her Flowers. We used it in three languages (Greek, Turkish and English). And then we took one of Gurgenc’s poems, Nicosia, also in three languages. There is this beautiful contrast between these two poems. Niki’s poem captures a daily routine of the Cypriot way of life. She is buying her groceries, and then she is baking. The poem is very soft and repetitive, and linked to her mum and how she repeats her mother’s movements during her daily work. Gurgenc’s poem contrasts with it strongly because he shows in it a different reality. He says that ‘although the others say they smell jasmine in the streets of Nicosia, I only smell the military sweat and blood’ so we tried to create with it the sense of something much darker and oppressive, and because of this, the way actors move while performing it is much more about control and the push for power.”

Amid all these ongoing projects (more are coming), holding down a regular teaching job and running a family, how does Oya manage to balance her life and commitments? Not too successfully, she admits ruefully. “Last year I had pneumonia and was sick for a very long time. This year I am trying to be more careful, eat more, sleep longer, take some vitamins but the truth is there are so many things that have to be done balancing is impossible.

“The good thing is that our children participate in many of the activities Gurgenc and I are involved in. We take them to all kinds of performances and demonstrations. We want them to be aware that we are living on an island that has problems and that even though we are trying to hopefully solve some of them before they will have to get involved, they might have to be part of the solution as well.”

For one wildlife conservationist months of boring work can be offset by half an hour of activity to burst apart a crime ring. THEO PANAYIDES meets her

Onkuri Majumdar sits in the Elias Beach Hotel in Limassol, poised, elegant. She poses for my improvised photo (our photographer couldn’t make it), and gently points out that it might be better to stand with the sun behind me. When she speaks, she punctuates her words with graceful hand movements and prim, almost embarrassed little chuckles – for instance when she talks about the reintroduction of predators in areas where they’d been hunted out (wolves in parts of North America, say). When they brought the wolves back into the ecosystem, explains Onkuri, “the prey population became healthier, because the weaker ones were” – embarrassed chuckle – “killed, basically”.

She’s not really embarrassed; it’s just that violent animal slaughter seems incongruous coming from the lips of this soft-spoken, 36-year-old Indian lady – and also, perhaps, that she works with animals (she’s a wildlife conservationist) but has no delusions about their, well, animal behaviour. Does she feel there’s a purity in animals, perhaps, an instinctiveness that human beings have lost, or never had? She shakes her head.

“No, I would say assigning qualities like purity or sweetness or innocence to animals is unrealistic. There’s a lot of savagery in the animal world – only you can’t call it savagery in the sense that humans are savage, because humans are capable of much more thinking. [But] it’s not like animals are these pure creatures who only kill when they need to. They can go on killing frenzies. Snow leopards, for example, go on killing frenzies and they just kill entire flocks of sheep, for no reason! … Lots of animals bully other animals terribly, just for fun”. Generally speaking, the more intelligent an animal, the more likely it is to be “naughty” – like for instance orcas (aka killer whales), who like ‘playing’ with seals even when the seals aren’t particularly enjoying the game. “They don’t want to eat it,” marvels Onkuri. “They just want to torture the animal, whack it around”.

Don’t expect wide-eyed sentimentality from this rather practical woman. Don’t expect much personal sharing, either. Almost all I get about her private life is that she’s married, to an American – they work for the same NGO, the Freeland Foundation – doesn’t have any children yet, and, since she travels a lot for work, tends to do “sedentary stuff” when she’s at home: “I knit a lot. I’m quite a big knitter”. She’s due to speak at TEDx Limassol the day after our interview – and TEDx tends to attract exhibitionists looking for the limelight, but that’s not the case here. For Onkuri, it’s obviously work, a chance to spread the gospel about what she does. Her speech isn’t going to be some cute-sounding, what-if-God-were-an-animal flight of fancy, but a simple overview of her work.

What exactly is her work? “I work in wildlife conservation, and specifically we work on wildlife law-enforcement support,” she explains, meaning that she mostly works with local cops in India and South-East Asia (she’s Managing Director of Freeland India, but divides her time between Delhi and Bangkok). “We bring government investigators together, we do our own investigations to support them, we go undercover to help gather evidence for police stings”. She plans to describe one particular investigation in her TEDx talk, a recent syndicate operating out of Laos: “They had tentacles everywhere,” she says – making me wonder, for one mad moment, if they were smuggling octopuses – “all the way to South Africa, and they were involved in poaching rhinos”. Onkuri and Freeland liaised with investigators for years, and finally secured the conviction of some key syndicate members – not “low-level transporters,” she notes, but the “big syndicate heads”, the ones who matter.

That’s a key point – because the trade in wild animals is extremely lucrative, attracting not just opportunistic local poachers but “dangerous characters” and very well-connected ones. When she goes undercover to gather evidence – quite a thrilling task, despite her low-key demeanour – it’s not necessarily evidence that’ll stand up in court. Sometimes the cops want an illicit video of the animal traders accepting cash, “so they can use that as leverage to get information about other members of the syndicate”. Sometimes they want “visual footage of where a person is hiding the animals” – so Onkuri and her team have to build a relationship, getting the poachers to trust them so they’ll take them to the animal enclosure. Does she go in disguise? I ask excitedly. “Not really. I just pretend to be a regular person,” she replies, the low-key demeanour returning.

In the end, if they’re lucky, there are raids and arrests – but the end doesn’t come until hours and hours of tedious analysis work, cross-checking phone numbers and perusing old files. Onkuri’s conversation is studded with exotic names like pangolins (a small scaly anteater, apparently) and slow lorises, but her life – unless she’s in the field, training local lawmen – is mostly spent in offices and meetings. What’s the most exciting part of the work? “I think it’s exciting when something just explodes into action,” she sighs. “Because most good investigations actually take months or years – it’s not like a movie where you get a clue and you follow it and immediately something happens. And most of it is boring, it’s just watching and waiting and watching and waiting, it’s boring for months and months and months. Until finally there’s half an hour of extreme excitement!”

In a sense, the animals are almost incidental; she could be doing much the same work about, say, human trafficking – and indeed, Freeland are now starting to investigate that as well (the two crimes often overlap, human victims used by traffickers to transport wildlife products). Yet animals have always been her life. “I always knew I would work with animals,” she affirms in her LinkedIn profile – and she always did, ever since she was a little girl in Lucknow, capital of Uttar Pradesh; it was just a question of discovering in what capacity. It’s strange, in a way, since she never had any pets (her mum is asthmatic) nor did she have much contact with animals in general. “There’s no logic behind it,” she admits. “It was just an innate interest, right from my childhood.”

Was she very solitary, perhaps? Was it a lonely childhood?

“No, I don’t think so,” she replies, looking puzzled.

I only mean because that’s the stereotype: the shy, sensitive girl who finds solace in animals.

“Yeah, I am not a very sensitive person!” replies Onkuri, the prim chuckle rising to a merry laugh.

Really? Not sensitive?

“I mean, I didn’t turn to animals because I was hurt by humans. Not like that, no. I just always liked animals, and my family were very supportive, and they’d buy me books and videos and things about animals”. (The family are typical of India’s social transformation in the space of a single generation: Onkuri’s mother was a housewife, but Onkuri is an NGO executive and her sister is a Web designer.) She does admit to being more of an introvert than an extrovert – hence perhaps all that knitting.

Does she ever feel like she prefers animals to people, though?

“Well” – the embarrassed chuckle again – “I would say that’s too general a question. Obviously, I like my family and friends more than any random animal!” She shrugs gracefully, indulging my question. “But I would say I’d much rather be in a natural place than going to a meeting and socialising with boring people.”

Maybe it’s just as well that she’s “not a very sensitive person” – or she’d never be able to stand the cruelty that’s endemic to the illegal trade in wild animals. Beasts may be captured or killed for trophies, for traditional medicine (as with rhino horn), for consumption, for ornaments and trinkets as in the ivory trade. Then there’s the trade in exotic pets, “which is one of the biggest and it threatens all the most endangered animals”. Irresponsible pet-owners in Europe, Japan and Russia will pay thousands of dollars for a big cat or a bird of prey, or indeed a slow loris.

A slow what?

More chuckling: “It’s a little – well, it looks like a teddy bear but it’s about that small,” says Onkuri, indicating with her hands. “And because they look cute, people want them as pets”. They do look insanely cute (do a Google search, if you haven’t already) – but slow lorises are also nocturnal, so being exposed to daylight in their new homes upends their whole metabolism, and they also have long, decidedly non-cute teeth which can bite and infect their new owners. “So the traders usually just pull the teeth out,” she explains flatly.

“So a lot of cruelty, a lot of mortality in the trade. A lot of mothers are killed, so the babies can be exported for the pet trade.”

The problem is huge, and has recently spiralled – fuelled by growing prosperity in Asia – after a period of relative calm in the 90s and early 00s. Some countries in Africa have lost 90 per cent of their elephants in the last five years, partly (says Onkuri) because millions of young Chinese men think that wearing ivory trinkets “makes them look cool”. The number of rhinos poached in South Africa soared from 15 in 2007 to 688 in 2012, mostly – according to an article in The Atlantic – because rhino horn has been touted in Vietnam as a cure for both cancer and hangovers (at one point, rhino horn was fetching up to $100,000 per kilo in that country). In the middle of it all are people like Onkuri, patiently tracking down crime syndicates and trying to build a culture “where people recognise that animals have a right to live. Not just because they can be useful to humans, but by themselves”.

What about more militant animal-rights activists? Does she ever sympathise with those who refuse to be patient, destroying fur farms and firebombing animal labs?
Her poise never falters. “More than emotional, I’m a very practical person. So I always go with what works. And militant approaches almost always do not work. So I think it’s a waste of passion. If you have that much passion, then direct that passion into something that will give you long-term results.”

Don’t the militant approaches sometimes work, though?

“Yes, sometimes they do,” she concedes, “but it requires continuous repeating of that same fiery action. If you really want long-term results, you’ve got to make the people in charge think it’s something they have to do. And institutionalise it – make people think that is the normal way to be. That it’s their job to look after the animals.”

What animal would Onkuri Majumdar be, if she were an animal? Unsurprisingly, she likes the smart ones: “Maybe a chimpanzee,” because they’re intelligent and develop complex social structures. Yet there’s also a larger question that goes beyond human intelligence, namely what would we lose – if anything – if we lost wild animals? Assuming that technology could repair the effects on the environment (a big ‘if’, admittedly), what would humans of the future have lost if they lived in a world where animals had become extinct? After all, the link is almost broken, at least for urbanites. Big-city kids learn about horses and cows in their kindergarten reading-books – but they never actually see these beasts, let alone lions and tigers.

Well, OK, admits Onkuri. “Of course they can survive without it” – but our lives are so much richer with the presence of wild things. It’s “a way of feeling connected to the world around you,” she asserts. “Not just with human society, but the larger context of the world that you inhabit”.

Yes, but that’s the point: animals are less and less a part of that world.

“I wouldn’t agree with that,” she says softly, with another of those prim, embarrassed chuckles. “I think at some point people will realise how much we need Nature, and we need to reconnect with Nature.”

Will they? Or is modern Man beyond redemption when it comes to the pangolin and the slow loris? And what of Onkuri herself? Does she ever get people questioning her work? Is she ever decried as a traitor to her species?

“I think the most negative reaction I’ve ever got is ‘Why don’t you work with children, or humans? Why animals?’,” she replies thoughtfully. “And I say ‘You can’t pick what moves you’. You know? It’s like saying, why do you love the colour red rather than the colour orange? You do. You just love it. You do what you want”. Ah, sweet mystery of animals.