How to Fail

‘… the time my friend Simon and I lost the final of the over-40s doubles and had to be content with the runner-up glassware.

‘At cricket, I remember once getting out when I had made 98 and chipped a return catch to the bowler …

‘One of my books was shortlisted for the Bancarella, a big prize in Italy, but did not win (the prize to the brother-in-law of the chairman of judges).

‘And of course there was an embarrassing setback when my famous soufflé à la nage d’homard rose a mere 288mm instead of the desiderated 290.’

He was joking, of course, and when I did interview him for the podcast he spoke eloquently about his periods of depression and feeling as if he didn’t fit in at school. The point he had been trying to make was a serious one, however: it was that failure was all a matter of how you looked at it. On coming second in the Italian literary prize, for instance, he said: ‘Is that a failure? I mean, I wouldn’t have thought so, I thought it was rather a success to be going to Milan to be celebrated in a country not your own for a book with no Italian connection.’

The author James Frey had a similar take, despite the fact that he was publicly outed for fabricating parts of his 2003 debut, A Million Little Pieces. The book, which had originally been marketed as a memoir, did not suffer from his notoriety and became a global bestseller.

‘I don’t look at things that other people might consider failures as failures, it’s just a process, right?’ he said. ‘And you can either handle it or you can’t. If you can’t, get out. But I don’t look at all the books that I tried to write before A Million Little Pieces that I threw away that were no good, as failures, I just look at them as part of the process.’

To this day, Frey said, his mantra is: ‘Fail fast. Fail often.’ It’s a mantra that holds great weight in the (male-dominated) entrepreneurial world too, where risks have to be taken in order to think differently. In this sphere, failure is not only accepted but sometimes even celebrated. There are certain venture capitalists who won’t even think of parting with their cash unless an entrepreneur has failed with a start-up company at least once – the idea being that the entrepreneur will have learned from that failure, will have got all the mistakes out of their system, and will therefore present a sounder investment. Thomas Edison, after all, went through thousands of prototypes before perfecting his light bulb. Bill Gates’ first company was a failure. Over his career in major-league baseball, Babe Ruth set a new record for striking out 1,330 times but also set the record for home runs, hitting 714.

When asked about his batting technique, Babe Ruth replied: ‘I swing as hard as I can … I swing big, with everything I’ve got. I hit big or I miss big. I like to live as big as I can.’

What Babe Ruth was essentially saying was this: that in order to succeed on a grand scale, you have to be willing to fail on an equally grand scale too. Often the former relies on the latter, which is why failure can be integral to success, not just on the baseball field, but in life too.

What does it mean to fail? I think all it means is that we’re living life to its fullest. We’re experiencing it in several dimensions, rather than simply contenting ourselves with the flatness of a single, consistent emotion.

We are living in technicolour, not black and white.

We are learning as we go.

And for all the challenges that come our way, I can’t help but continue to think: it really is an incredible ride.

How to Fail at Fitting In

When I was four, my family moved to Northern Ireland. It was 1982 and the height of the Troubles. Bombs routinely exploded in shopping centres and hotel lobbies. On the school run, my mother would be stopped at checkpoints manned by soldiers in camouflage with machine guns strapped around their chests. At night, the television news would dub over the Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams’s voice, which always seemed bizarre to me, even as a child.

When I did hear his voice, several years later, it was something of a disappointment. I’d built him up in my head to sound like a less friendly Darth Vader. As it was, he had the air of a geography teacher unable to keep control of the troublemakers at the back of the class.

I, meanwhile, spoke with a precise, received pronunciation English accent and stood out from the first day of school. I had been born in Epsom, in the comparative safety of suburban Surrey. Every year, the Derby took place on the Downs next to our house and my mother would have a picnic to which she would invite a large number of family friends. I once saw the legendary jockey Lester Piggott fall off his horse and watched him being stretchered off, his face as white as plaster. I was struck by how small he was, even though I was pretty small myself back then.

In Ireland, there were no picnics and no family friends. It was an isolating experience for all of us, but particularly for my mother who did not have a job through which she could meet new people. My father had moved us for his work, and was taking up a new position as a consultant surgeon at Altnagelvin Hospital in Derry. It was a place where he would treat a lot of knee-cappings.

I was aware of the civil unrest, and accepted it in that way that one does as a child. It simply became a way of life. The monsters under my bed were replaced by visions of balaclava-clad terrorists and I got used to the checkout ladies in the supermarket asking us suspiciously if we were ‘on holiday’ when we did the weekly shop. I hadn’t realised then that what we were actually being asked was whether we were there in connection with the British Army, but I do recall being scared that we’d be bombed by the IRA, to which my mother replied sensibly that my father ‘treats people from both sides’. That was true: he ministered to both Loyalists and Republicans. When a shattering bomb went off in Omagh in 1998, he rushed to help. My father went on to operate in many war zones with the charity Médecins Sans Frontières, including Chechnya, Sierra Leone and Afghanistan. When, years later, I asked him which place had affected him most, he said Omagh and recounted in detail the scenes of carnage that he had witnessed.

There were moments of absurdity amidst it all. For the first year or so, my family and I lived up the road from a village called Muff. I did not think to question this extraordinary name until many decades later when my friend Cormac howled with laughter when I mentioned it.

‘Muff?’ he guffawed. ‘You might as well have lived somewhere called Vagina.’

The village was a few minutes’ drive away from our house in the north of Ireland, and yet it was across the border in County Donegal, which was part of the south. My mother used to drive me and my sister to Muff for our Irish dancing lessons (all part of an effort to help us belong) and it baffled me that an entirely different country existed down the road from us. It seemed so arbitrary and, of course, it was. I couldn’t fathom, aged four, that it was all because of this map-drawn border that people were killing each other.

The Irish dancing wasn’t the only way our family tried to fit in. When we moved from near Muff deeper into the countryside around Claudy, my father bought a donkey, a red-and-blue-painted cart and four sheep to keep in the raised hillock at the back of our house which we called, without my knowing why, ‘The Rath’.

The donkey, Bessie, soon spawned a foal, christened with dazzling imagination Little Bess. We were better at naming the sheep, who we called things like Lamborghini and Lambada. Each summer, my parents would heroically attempt to shear the sheep by hand using what looked to me like a huge pair of scissors. My sister and I were required to act as sheepdogs in order to round up the bleating animals, and we had varying degrees of success.

For breeding season, rams would be borrowed from local farmers to impregnate our ladies. One of them dropped dead while on the job. We notified the farmer and then my father dug a pit to bury the ram. The ram was heavy and the only way my father could manoeuvre it into place was on its back, with its legs facing up to the sky. Mysteriously, when it came to replacing the earth, there was no longer enough of it to cover the ram in the pit, and his legs stuck out of the ground. For months, those legs poked out of the grass like spooky totem poles and I learned to avoid that particular area.

Periodically, the lambs too would disappear and I never thought to question these sudden absences. It was only some time later that I put two and two together and realised that every time a lamb was removed from The Rath, more bags of meat would appear in the freezer.

‘Is … this … Lambkin?’ I would stutter at the Sunday lunch table, looking at a roast joint served up with potatoes and a jar of mint sauce.

After a while, my parents started giving the sheep numbers so that I became less emotionally attached to them. I’m not sure it worked. To this day, I far prefer roast chicken.

Since this was the pre-internet, pre-Netflix era, when we weren’t herding sheep, my sister and I had to make our own entertainment. My idea of a good time was disappearing into the vast network of rhododendron bushes in our garden to read a Nancy Drew mystery or playing by the River Faughan which ran parallel to our house and which when uttered in a Northern Irish accent, sounded like an expletive. I papered the attic with cut-out magazine pages because I’d read somewhere that Anne Frank had done the same thing while hiding from the Nazis. I was oddly obsessed with the Second World War. Possibly, now that I think about it, it’s because I was living in a place shaped by political conflict.

For the most part, the terrorist attacks happened outside my immediate world. My primary school was a nice place, with good teachers and children who seemed to accept me as I was. The Troubles impinged on our consciousness in a way that was simultaneously familiar and abstract. Everyone seemed inured. In the 70s, when bombs and booby-traps and gun battles were an almost daily occurrence in parts of the Province, local doctors took to prescribing ‘nerve tablets’ and tranquilliser use was higher here than anywhere else in the UK. According to Patrick Radden Keefe’s book, Say Nothing, ‘Doctors found, paradoxically, that the people most prone to this type of anxiety were not the active combatants, who were out on the street and had a sense of agency, but the women and children stuck sheltering behind closed doors.’

By the time I arrived, this traumatised numbness had evolved into a culture of silence. Words were used sparingly and often carried symbolic, historic importance. The closest city to where we lived was referred to as Londonderry on the road signs, but to use its full name in conversation was to make a political statement that you were pro-British. You had to refer to it as Derry or risk the consequences. No one told me this directly but I absorbed the knowledge without it having to be said.

Sometimes the silence was particularly acute. When the shopkeeper father of a boy in the class below me was machine-gunned to death for selling his goods to the British Army, I can’t remember any of us even mentioning it. I was aware of my parents speaking to each other in hushed, serious tones and I became used to listening for what wasn’t being said as much as I listened for what was. Mostly I just got on with it and tried not to think too much of the things that scared me.

But when I went to secondary school in Belfast, I became more aware of my difference. I was a weekly boarder there and one weekend, as I walked to the coach stop to catch the bus home, my route took me through the aftermath of a bomb attack the previous night. I passed the hulk of a blasted car, the metal warped beyond recognition. Every single window of the Europa Hotel had been blasted out. A confetti scattering of glass crunched under my feet.

In those days, to speak with an English accent was, in certain quarters, to be marked out as the hated occupier. I was aware of this, and tried not to talk too much when meeting new people or when I found myself in unfamiliar locations. But at school, I had to talk. At school, there was nowhere to hide.

I had no notion of my own alien nerdishness until, shatteringly, at the beginning of my second year in secondary school, I was told a boy in my year didn’t fancy me ‘because she’s English’. He wasn’t even a particularly attractive specimen. I didn’t fancy him because he had a ruddy complexion and always smelled vaguely of uncooked sausages.

Still, his rejection cut me to the core. Overnight, I started seeing myself through other people’s eyes: my fluorescent orange rucksack which I wore on both shoulders was not the last word in style; corduroy trousers had never been cool; my accent was so noticeably foreign as to be actively off-putting to boys who smelled of sausage-meat; my hair was flat rather than curly like Charlene’s in Neighbours and I didn’t own crimpers and my mother wouldn’t let me get a perm. In fact, my mother still cut my hair, which wasn’t exactly helpful either.

To add insult to injury, I had also been put up a year, which meant I was the youngest in my class by a considerable margin. But worst of all – I was English.

I began to notice that the girls I thought of as my friends were talking about me rather than with me. They would make plans that didn’t involve me to go to nightclubs with fake laminated IDs. I would hear them in groups laughing loudly and when I approached, the laughter would mysteriously stop like wind dropping from a sail but because I was so accustomed to the constant shifting tension between said and unsaid, I didn’t think to question it. I simply accepted it. I became used to not belonging.

It all came to a head in the week we had our school photographs taken – those embarrassingly awkward portraits that are all blazers, uneasy forced smiles and wary adolescent eyes.

My photograph was a particularly good example. I had wonky teeth, ears that stuck out through the limp shoulder-length hair that my mother still cut. I was grinning dementedly at the camera, sitting with one shoulder angled towards the lens as the photographer had demanded. My blazer sleeves were too long for me and hung over my hands because my mother, as well as believing I should always have short hair, also believed there was no point in investing in a uniform that actually fitted when one could purchase clothes with substantial growing room.

It was as I was walking down the busy school corridor on my way to Double History with Mrs O’Hare that I saw it. The most popular girl in my year – let’s call her Siobhan – was in fits of giggles. She was looking at a piece of paper in her hand and then passing it around a group of willing acolytes, each of whom in turn glanced at it and then laughed riotously. Siobhan said something in a low whisper, cupping her hand against her mouth. More giggling. Then she saw me staring at her and caught my eye.

‘We were just looking at your photo,’ she sniggered. ‘You look …’ Snigger. ‘Really.’ Snigger. ‘Pretty.’

There was an outburst of laughter. Even I knew I didn’t look pretty. My eyes prickled with tears. Hold them back, I told myself, pretend you don’t care. But of course I did care. I cared terribly. As a twelve-year-old, my need to camouflage myself by belonging was at its most pressing. I didn’t want to stand out. I wasn’t sure enough of myself yet to risk forming a new teenage identity of my own and until I figured that out, I simply wanted to be one of them.

That was the moment it dawned on me: I was the school joke. I didn’t fit in and I never had. I was the weird, ugly English girl with bad clothes. I felt stupid, as if I’d perpetrated this big lie on my own unconscious. I’d been fooling myself up to that point that I was like all the other normal kids. I had stupidly thought that the qualities my parents and sister valued – a sense of humour, strong opinions, a slightly eccentric love of The Archers – would transfer seamlessly into a different environment. But teenagers are unforgiving of difference. Plus, there’s a thin line between strong opinions and shameless precocity, isn’t there? I was probably unbearable.

It’s so interesting what your mind chooses to fix on. Lots of other things happened during that period that were probably, in their own way, far more upsetting. My mother recently told me that I had once kneeled down in the middle of the road, arms held aloft like a wailing penitent, crying and begging her not to take me to school. I had completely forgotten this, but when she spoke about it, glimmers of memory came back to me and I remembered the sensation of gravelly tarmac against my knees.

Yet it was Siobhan’s reaction to my photograph that stuck with me and although it would have been, in any other context, a passing, thoughtless comment, it became in my mind’s eye definitive proof that I was not good enough. Worse, I knew that the source of my difference and my shame was my real self; the self I had been brought up to believe would be accepted on its own merits. My parents encouraged my enthusiasms and my individuality. At school, I learned too late that my strength of character was perceived as oddness and from that moment on, my sense of self started to disintegrate.

I wanted to change and to blend in, and yet I had no idea how to pretend to be someone else. In fact, there seemed to me to be something fundamentally dishonest about even attempting it. I was living in a society where there were so many different versions of the truth and where danger lay in the silent, shifting gaps between these truths, that at the same time as wanting to fit in, I also had an innate desire to hold on to the one thing I knew was me: my voice. I was a conflicted, unhappy mess.

I started to talk less at school. I stopped putting my hand up to answer questions. If no one heard my Englishness, I thought, then maybe they’d un-see my difference. During the days, I kept myself to myself and trudged long corridors with lever-arch files clasped to my chest, hunched inwards. I sat at the back of the classroom, defacing my books with Tipp-Ex, fighting my natural inclination to work hard because I knew now this marked me out as weird. I started cheating in tests, sneaking in scraps of paper with the answers on them and propping them up inside my pencil case. I did the bare minimum.

It was a big school and during the days, I was able to lose myself quite effectively amid the blue-and-grey-uniformed mass. At nights in the shared dormitories of the girls’ boarding house, I took down the posters I’d Blu Tacked of fluffy seals (too babyish) and striking Calvin Klein adverts (if they had a woman in them, I was called ‘gay’ by the other girls) and replaced them with black-and-white male Levi’s models and pop stars. At weekends, I wasn’t allowed to leave until Saturday morning, when I got the coach back home. The journey took ninety minutes. When my mother picked me up from the stop, my shoulders would drop with relief that I could be myself again.

But I only had one night of grace, because we were required to be back early on Sunday evening for a chapel service. My mother would give me dinner, making my favourite things, and I’d have a lump in my throat as I ate and I would try not to cry. I dreaded returning to school and my way of coping was to seek comfort in the rare pockets of the familiar. I brought food from home. I read books, and cherished the ability to lose myself in a different world. When I cried, I did so in private, behind a locked lavatory door. And as time went on, I did make a couple of friends who were, like me, social outcasts.

My grades spiralled downwards. I failed exams, once getting 47 per cent in a Chemistry exam – a shame so acute it haunts me still, three decades later. I developed two distinct personalities: a home self and a school self, and I went to great pains to ensure that the two never coincided. I never invited anyone back to mine at the weekends. I didn’t tell my parents a lot of what was going on because I wasn’t sure I fully had a grip on it myself. I just knew I was unhappy.

It was to set in motion a coping mechanism that would last into my adult life, and cause me a great deal of heartache. It was an internal dislocation, which meant I could distance myself from the pain of my sadness and put it to one side, like a washed-up dish left to dry in its own time, while I continued to exist and function seemingly effectively. But the detachment from my own hurt meant I gradually lost touch with what I was actually feeling, which meant that this became difficult to express. I, who had so many words, could not find the right ones when it came to myself. At the same time, I was desperate to please others in the hope that, by doing so, I would finally be granted the secret access code to belonging. So I shaded my character according to the company I found myself in. I would pretend to like pop stars and clothes and television programmes I didn’t much care for, all the while clinging on to my English accent like a life raft that could still carry my disparate selves back to the actual me. I felt fury and guilt at what I conceived of as deception, and I turned these emotions inward and worried, all the time, about the myriad things I was doing wrong.

Eventually it got to the stage where I point-blank refused to go back to school. My mother pleaded with me to finish the term, but I couldn’t. I had reached the point where I had no emotional energy left, and in the end my parents agreed to take me out halfway through my third year. During the time that followed, I got a scholarship to a boarding school in England where no one thought my accent was exceptional. That September, I went back into the year I was meant to be in. The school was single-sex rather than co-ed, which I found less intimidating.

I had also learned some valuable lessons about how to be popular from my earlier experiences. I knew to stand back a bit and take stock. To be cautious about revealing myself too quickly for who I really was. I needed to suss out the other girls first and assess the group dynamic before making my move.

So it was that, aged thirteen, I approached my first day as a new girl with Machiavellian intent. My strategy was simple: I would identify the most popular girl in my year and I would befriend her. I would observe the way she dressed and spoke and what she did with her hair. Then I would copy it. This I did. It worked like a dream.

It was, in some respects, relatively straightforward and a matter of acquiring and doing the right sort of things. I bought River Island black hipster trousers. I said I fancied Robbie Williams from Take That. I drank Cinzano straight from the bottle on a park bench because you had to get drunk to be cool. I had a boyfriend in my final year and went to the Algarve with a group of friends to celebrate the end of our A levels. It was the first time I’d ever stayed up to watch the sun rise. On the surface, at least, I appeared to belong. I was one of the cool ones.

After my earlier failures, I was indubitably better at playing the game. I got good grades and made real friends. The teachers liked me. Still, I didn’t much like school. I always felt resentful that I wasn’t in control of my own life. I wanted, more than anything, to be an adult and in charge of my own existence. I was impatient to get on with things, to have a job, to live in my own flat and pay my own rent. In fact, I couldn’t wait to leave.

I had a growth spurt at the age of fourteen and people frequently told me I seemed older than I was. It caused some confusion when I visited my sister at university. When we went out for a black-tie dinner with some of her male postgraduate friends, I was keenly aware that I didn’t want to embarrass her. I wore a black dress, with white buttons all the way down the front (River Island again. I really did love that shop). Halfway through the Chinese meal, I was told that one of the men had taken a shine to me. He tried to strike up conversation across the table. I politely asked what degree he was taking and after a few moments of chit-chat he said: