​​CRAIG

Hello, and welcome to Desperately Seeking Wisdom with me, Craig Oliver. This is a podcast for anyone who wants to lead a wiser, more fulfilled life, but is tired of all the snake oil and dubious life hacks that are out there. I talk to some well-known people and some experts about what life has taught them; and they share the wisdom they gained, particularly during the tougher times. Our guest today is John Simpson, who is nothing short of a BBC legend and, at 78, is still an active reporter, racing around the world and covering the war in Ukraine.

JOHN

People would say ‘you're an adrenaline junkie’, which really pisses me off, no end, because I don't go to places because they're dangerous. I want to be in places where important things are happening.

CRAIG

I first met John when I became editor of the Ten O'Clock News in 2006. He'd already clocked up 40 years at the BBC, always at the heart of the action. I'm fascinated by what still motivates him to continue reporting from the most dangerous parts of the world, when so many of his colleagues have long since retired.

There’s huge amounts to talk to you about John, but I wanted to start by zipping back to your childhood. And there was a moment where your parents separated. And people I think, perhaps think slightly unusually you chose to go with your father. Do you remember why you made that decision or what it was like there?

JOHN

I sat there and I looked at the two of them. I was six years old. And my mother was walking out on my father, who was a very difficult man. And my father, I think said, ‘well, what does the boy think’? And so they both looked at me. And I thought - my mother was a war widow, and her first husband was killed at Alamein, I think, and she had two children by that husband. And my father didn't have any. And I thought, well, you know, that seems to have been unfair on my father, I thought to, you know, to leave him so [unintelligible] ‘I think I better stay with daddy’. And a look passed across his face - of course, I'm probably just making this up, but, you know, it really did clip his wings, poor old chap, to have a young kid around. But what can you do if somebody, if your kid says he wants to be with you? You can't then say well, I've, you know, I've got lots of girlfriends and I.... So I grew up in a flat with lots of sort of girls coming in, toing and froing rather glamorous, lots of them, some of them pretending to be really motherly and others not wanting to have anything to do with me whatsoever. And it was a bit of an education, really.

CRAIG

Did you see your mother much after that?

JOHN

No, I… this is the thing, I think it's really still affecta me all these.. and she’s been dead for 40 years or something. But no, I still feel really, really bad. That moment of my deciding not to go with her was so difficult that I could never really easily face her.

CRAIG

She found it crushing

JOHN

Oh, yes, absolutely. Well, it would I mean, oh God, I feel so bad. You know, having sort of walked away from her, really. Yeah…. So very full of, life full of guilt. And I mean, I saw her a lot over the years. It wasn't that, but we could never really talk about that awful moment.

CRAIG

And when you’re a kid, you know, the world is what the world is. You just take it for what it is. But looking back now, do you think, ‘God that was really strange’?

JOHN

Yeah, well, it was, and I mean, we're talking, this was 1950 or something - ‘51 actually, because my father and I had just come back that day from seeing the festival of Britain. And you know, men didn't bring up children on their own, really at all. There were lots of war widows bringing up kids on their own but not, no men. So I used to kind of invent a mother for my, when I was at school, you know, my mother will say this, my mother… Well, you know, and.. even though no mother existed.

CRAIG

Because you felt you had to show people that you were normal?

JOHN

Yeah, exactly that, exactly that; you know, somebody who lived with his dad was very weird indeed. And there is enough weirdness about our lives anyway without adding to it.

CRAIG

And you started by saying that your father was a difficult man. And how did that manifest itself in terms of dealing with you? You talked about the girlfriends, but other sides of it?

JOHN

Well, he was wonderful in many ways. Yeah, an absolutely stunningly good father in some ways. And in others, he really, really was difficult. I mean, he’d go off in bad, terrible moods for days on end, and I wouldn't know how to get him out of it. But at the same time, he was hugely sort of exciting to be with really, so that, of all things, he was a genealogist, he was sort of local historian and genealogist at a time when nobody had any interest in that kind of stuff. So he scraped a living. And he was very clever about buying properties cheap and doing them up and then selling them. So that was what he kind of mostly lived on. He was wonderful in many, many, many ways. And he loved film as one of his big things. And when I was a little bit older, maybe 12, or something, on a Friday evening, I'd get away from school, and he and I would come up to the centre of town, and we'd go to what was then called the National Film Theatre - I think it's called the BFI now - but they would have films. And we had a rule that we weren't to look at what the film of the evening was. So sometimes we'd get, you know, German films about steelmaking. But at other times, we'd get the most sensationally marvellous, you know, French comedies, it might be a Marx Brothers evening. And that was a very bonding experience, and hugely educational, it was great fun to be with him. He could be immensely mentally difficult, but he could also be very, very rewarding. I miss him terribly every day.

CRAIG

The thing that's interesting in talking to a lot of people is that you're aware that there's almost like little time bombs that are planted in people's lives. And the thing about your mother, I was reading around it, and you saying, quite late on in life, that you felt that you wanted to get in touch with that side of family, because you hadn't done? So this is like, you know, decades later.

JOHN

I don't know why, at that particular time, I suppose it was around the time of my mother's death. And afterwards, and I, you know, I just felt that some part of me wasn't there, wasn't functioning right. But inevitably, I mean, my life has been a move away really, from family and roots and everything. And so it didn't really lead anywhere -

CRAIG

Did you manage to make the contact?

JOHN

Yeah, with some of them. It was rather painful, actually, in many ways, because my mother's side of the family were very kind of glamorous, or had been. The first man to fly in Britain was an American showman called Colonel Cody - Samuel Franklin Cody, wonderful, absolutely marvellous man, a cowboy in the in the Wild West who came to Britain, bringing horses with him and then, used to do kind of travelling circuses and everything. Found my great-grandmother, ran off with her even though she had a marriage and three kids and the kids came with it. And they, all the kids were in the circus together. I mean, crazy, crazy stuff, and wonderful sort of shows of horsemanship and shooting abilities. And they all did these things, but Colonel Cody then turned to flying, which was the sort of big thing, and he was the first man to fly in Britain in 1908. And on the anniversary, the 100th anniversary, I went there, and my great aunt was there. And she looked at me and she said, ‘oh, I always understood’. She was terribly old, she must have been about 100 I think, 98 or something, she said, ‘I always understood that you hated our side of the family. And I just, I didn't know what to say. I mean, it wasn’t, it was never true.

CRAIG

Did you feel the pain?

JOHN

Oh, tremendous pain. Yeah. And that was 90- that was 2008 I mean, we're not talking about when I was a six-year-old kid, you know, we're talking about when I was in my late 50s.

CRAIG

And do you feel now a peace with all of that?

JOHN

No, I don't feel entirely at peace because I don't think I behaved, I did the right thing. I think I was too idle and lazy to make the contact. I'm actually still, I think that weird childhood of mine made me very kind of shy.

CRAIG

And it's interesting. I mean, listening to you, I mean, you're being quite harsh on a six-year-old boy who's got a lot of tumult in his life. And that, you know, it's not your fault. You know, like any six-year-old is, like, gonna struggle with something?

JOHN

No, but there's a difference, isn't there, between blame and guilt? I mean, I don't feel any blame attaches to a six-year-old, who's given this sort of lifetime choice, even though you know, I don't think there was any malice in it. But there is guilt not having done, you know, what you might think of as the right thing by the fact that-

CRAIG

There’s guilt, and I suppose it's also an important part of you that was, you know, cut off, wasn't it, and it's not your fault, or whatever but inside you, a part of your development is closeness to certain figures. And if that's not there, it's incredibly difficult.

JOHN

Very, very difficult. And, you know, quite difficult not to have a mother. I mean, I don’t want to sound like, sort ofi, you know, Peter Pan or something. But it's important for one's growth as a human being to have a father and a mother, and to have just a father, even though a very, a very loving, weird, but loving father, that, you know, does have an effect.

CRAIG

And I talked to so many people and a lot of the issues and complexities and difficulties they find, it's because the traditional mother-father relationship wasn't there. And it causes a lot of reverberations, it has a huge impact.

JOHN

Yes, I mean, in my case, it made me absolutely determined to give my children as much love and affection as I could possibly do. I mean, that didn't stop me from leaving my first wife with my two daughters, but my relationship with my daughters is really, really good and - going to have dinner with one of them tonight. So we've kept really close. So my son has been even more, I think, of a beneficiary of the whole thing, because-

CRAIG

From your second marriage?

JOHN

From my second marriage, I was 61, when the boy was born, so not exactly in the first flush of youth-

CRAIG

So he’s 17-18 now?

JOHN

He is 16, a lovely kid, but I was absolutely determined that he wasn't going to pay a price for my life.

CRAIG

And it's interesting saying that as well because, is it a danger also that you almost end up overcompensating in terms of like pouring love, it, I mean, a child can never have too much love, but the need to sort of show them sometimes can be a complicated thing.

JOHN

Yes, that is true. But you know, life has changed a bit, I find it to my surprise, so that for instance, I rather like walking the dog in the morning, and my kid is within walking distance with school, easy walking distance. So I tend to sort of, you know, start off the day's activities with a walk with Rafe, my son, and the dog. And, you know, there'll be a gangs of kids hanging around the entrance to the school. And I'm always amazed how he, you know, put his arm around me and say, ‘I love you, dad’. I mean, I would rather have been burned at the stake than say that to my father.

CRAIG

Did your dad tell you that he loved you?

JOHN

Oh, yes, loads! Oh, yeah, no shortage of that. He was a very, could be a very loving man that, he was just, you know, just had a bad temper, really. But I've been determined never to take out anything on my son, even when I, you know, got lots of worries and everything, I tried to put them aside.

CRAIG

Let's flip forward to when you joined the BBC. And I was re-reading your book recently, there’s a section in it where you describe this kind of very cold, strange world where men in cardigans are sitting there drinking tea and making decisions which, knowing you and given what we're about to start talking about, must have been just complete anathema to you.

JOHN

Well, I was too young and ignorant to make any great judgments. All I knew was that most of them didn't like me because I came from university. And the BBC got it into its head wrongly, in fact, that I'd got a double first at Cambridge. Actually, I got a really kind of middling, boring degree but it wasn't anything I said, I didn't lie about it. One of my tutors wrote a letter in which he said I was, he confidently expected I'd get a really good first. But of course I didn't. But they got into their heads I was sort of a Wunderkind who was in their midst. And of course all the old 40-year-old, 50-year-olds looked really askance at me. And they were right to because I had no ideas of my own.

CRAIG

Were you pushy?

JOHN

No, not at all! No, no, no. I mean, I always knew what I wanted to do. And I didn't give up wanting to do it. But I can't tell you how irritating it was on a daily basis to have your colleagues coming over and telling you why a degree at Cambridge was just the worst possible thing for a journalist to have, and how quite a lot of my older colleagues who didn't approve of, you know, flash Harrys turning up from university thinking they could run the universe. Actually, I may have been a flash, I'm not sure I was, but I certainly had no notion of how to run the universe, no idea about it. But I think, looking back on it, and there's no one really, really sadly, now that I could check this out with, nobody left alive, but I think they always thought that I was going to have a fairly stellar career. Nobody actually got round to telling me.

CRAIG

You have had a stellar career. And I think that you could go back over the last 50 years and pretty much anything of substance in history, you've had a front row seat to. And I've said this to you before, is that, the reason that you were in these places is because actually, you can be quite sharp-elbowed, and you felt that you should be there, and that you wanted to be there. Is that fair?

JOHN

Oh, yeah, no, I think it's entirely fair. But it never came easy. I mean, nothing in my entire existence at the BBC, except possibly that moment of joining was easy. It's always been hard, really, really difficult to go to the places that I wanted to, that I knew, well, the BBC should be present at, and preferably me. There were always obstacles, major obstacles put in the way once, or no, more than once, I just had to pay my way to-

CRAIG

You just turned up?

JOHN

I just turned up to Iran, in the Iran-Iraq War, it was a particularly key, absolute key moment. I knew we should be there. And you know, I was told no, no, you know, there's no, nobody's going and you can't go and all that. So I bought a plane ticket. When Ayatollah Khomeini flew from Paris back to Iran, to kick off the revolution in 1979, I was ordered by the foreign editor of the day not to travel on the plane - and I did.

CRAIG

This is the big question, it's like, why? I mean, so most people were in the face of their boss telling them, ‘you're not to do this’. And I suppose I don't want to be too Freudian about it, but what is the reason why, why were you so driven? What is driving you?

JOHN

I just want to see things for myself, I don’t want to read about it in the Times or The Daily Telegraph afterwards, I don't want to, I want to see what's really going on, make my own mind up about it. The one thing that the decades of doing all this have taught me is, I know when something is going to happen. I want to be there when it happens.

CRAIG

And when you’re there, the places that you're choosing to go to or where you report from tend to be places in severe crisis, you know, there's a war or a famine or a revolution or whatever is going on. And they are - they feel particularly dangerous, that kind of thing. Is there anything in that, the fact that it is that kind of real frontier kind of stuff?

JOHN

No, and I mean, you put it very nicely and impossible to take exception to the way you said that. A lot of people would say, ‘you're an adrenaline junkie’, which really pisses me off, no end, because I don't go to places because they're dangerous, but I want to be in places where important things are happening. Now, I mean, 1989 was a particularly kind of an important year for me, because so much happened. And I was fortunate enough to be at it. Tiananmen Square, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the revolution in what was then Czechoslovakia, the revolution in Romania. And before all of that happened, the withdrawal of the Russians from Afghanistan. Now, none of that, well, I suppose the revolution in Romania was quite dangerous actually, it was dangerous, a lot of journalists got killed. But that was the only one of those major events which I found to be really dangerous. It is true, I did nearly get killed at Tiananmen Square, but the massacre came at the end of a month of demonstrations by the students, which brought China to a crashing halt. I'd never seen anything like that before. So it wasn't, it wasn't the danger that drew me, it was the importance of the history, oh it sounds so pompous doesn’t it? But the historical significance of it.

CRAIG

I don't, I don't think it's pompous at all. And I totally get it. I suppose - this is a podcast about wisdom and what people have learned from their experiences. And I think you have been all over the world seeing some of the history that's happening, you've had a front row seat, you will have seen a lot of pain and suffering and anger and humanity at its best and its worst and all of those things. And I just wonder, it's such a big question, but if we could try and paint it out in very broad brushstrokes, looking back, what do you feel you've seen and learned? And what do you want to tell people having seen that level of history and human activity?

JOHN

Can I kind of bat the question back a little bit to my teenage years, 16-17, the age that my son is now, I suppose some one of my teachers said, read George Orwell, you know, it's important. And I read 1984. And I was absolutely horrified at the thought that what George Orwell sees is what he knew to be the case in Stalin's Russia that the state took the facts of whatever it might be, and twisted them and changed the archives so you would never find the real truth. And that that was more painful and worrying to me as a 16 or 17-year-old than anything else could be. And it was at that stage, I decided that I wanted to be a witness of things, I wanted to know what the real truth was, so that nobody could con me or anybody else into thinking that it was different. And that is the root and branch, I think still all these years later, 60 years later, for wanting to do these things. I want to know what really is going on and tell other people about them. And I don't want a government or political party or a grouping of any kind to tell me - and that's the purpose. And I don't want anybody to stop me doing it.

CRAIG

Was it Oscar Wilde who said, you know, the truth is never clean and never simple sort of thing. He just basically said, his point was that lots of people say this is the truth. But the reality is, it's always complex, muddy, messy, difficult. And I worked in television news for a long time. And the great thing about it is you can take people right there and you can show them, but it's also very short, it's very broad brushstrokes, nuance tends to get thrown out.

JOHN

Yes, I mean, welcome to my world, you know, trying to explain the complexities of things. I mean, when I think back for instance, to the Bosnian war, it's the only war I've ever been at, is one of the very few I can think of where there were three distinct sides, the Bosnian Serbs were attacking the Bosnian Muslims and the Bosnian Croatians were attacking the Muslim government as well. And they're all independent of one another and all fighting one another. And this was hugely difficult to explain to anybody, but American networks just cut the Gordian knot. And a friend of mine who worked for NBC showed me one morning the message that he got from New York, which said, the American people don't want to hear any more about three sides in the war. So I don't, we don't want to hear any reference to the Croatians in this. This is a war between the Serbs and the Muslims. So nothing is really as simple as television news or newspaper news makes out. Is just really important that if you're simplifying things, you've got to get the simplification as accurate as you possibly can.

CRAIG

So I’ve known a lot of foreign correspondents in my time, and a lot of them follow a trajectory of, you know, broken marriages, that they get into their sort of like 40s or 50s and so, actually, I've had one too hairy decision too many, it's time just to cut it out. You haven't done that. And as part of the preparation for this as well, I went and looked back at your report of when there was friendly fire when you were hit in Iraq, and you follow the conwoy, I think, and then the Americans hit, you know, their own side effectively. And the chaos and confusion, there's blood on the lens, you can see that you're very badly shaken and actually injured. You try and rescue or save somebody who's part of your team who dies. I wonder when you're going through that, do you ever look back and go, was that worth it?

JOHN

Well, the ‘worth it?’ judgement is very, very hard to make, and I'm not sure how much point there is to it really, it happened. And as the bomb was coming down much though, I would have liked to have been somewhere else. You know, that's where I was, I mean, I think you just have to take the situation as you find it and, and keep on, you know, doing your best. I thought you were going to ask me why I carried on afterwards, why I didn't hang up my boots. Well, if I had been badly injured, and I couldn't have carried on, I would have had to have made my life as best I could. But since I was okay, apart from being made deaf, and I got various bits of shrapnel stuck in me and so on, but nothing life-changing. I just think I should carry on and do it.

CRAIG

But what's interesting as well is that there's a point at which you take off your body armour and there's a, it's sort of an inch piece of metal shrapnel, which basically would have severed your spine and probably killed you if you hadn't had an armour plating there. And I'm not, I'm not criticising you, but I'm just interested in the fact that I think a lot of people might have gone, ‘okay, I've done my bit, I've got people who love me, I'm tempting fate a bit too much here, nobody can criticise me for not having done all this stuff’. But yet you do carry on.

JOHN

Yeah, but you see that doesn't take account of that basic principle where I would have had to lead the rest of my life not seeing what was really going on.

CRAIG

And I totally get that. But what you're sort of saying is that, actually, you know, I could be killed. And therefore actually, I would rather take that accentuated risk than face a life where I'm not doing this kind of thing.

JOHN

Yeah, that's exactly right. If something bad did happen to me, well, you know, it's not, nobody else's life is going to come to an end as a result of that. And, you know, I mean, I think my son or my wife would be very affected by it. But -

CRAIG

No, but that actually happened before Rafe was born, but were you with Dee then, your wife?

JOHN

Yeah.

CRAIG

But so I mean, that would have had a massive effect on her life. Wouldn’t it?

JOHN

It did, but she's a journalist. She's a South African. She did some of the most awful, difficult reporting that you could do with people, you know, burned alive at demos and stuff like that. And she, she just, I mean, she knows the dangers and she understands it and actually, to some extent it was harder going off back to Iraq. Month after month, I kind of in those days, I was much more in charge of my own life and my own reporting. And so I decided that every six weeks, I'd go back to Iraq for a matter of 18 days. And that was quite a lot of trips. And it was really, really dangerous and difficult. And by that stage by 2006, my son was born. And by the time he was two or three, even though of course, we didn't tell him what was going on, he knew. And that poor little boy, he’d stand at the front door, as I was leaving with his arms across to try to stop me.

CRAIG

How did you feel?

JOHN

Oh, well, I mean, it's devastating. Devastating, I couldn't get it out of my mind, I still can't. But the thing is that there is a price to be paid for doing these things. And one of them is that emotional price - fine, I came back every time. So as a gamble, it worked. But it's clearly had an effect on him. And at the age of 16, when I go to places like Ukraine or Afghanistan now, I mean, I just came back from Ukraine just a couple of weeks, a few weeks ago, when I'm away in these dangerous places, one of his teachers told me the other day, there was, no, because he sort of sits looking out of the window a lot more, and he doesn't enter into the sort of discussions on, so -

CRAIG

I mean, you're obviously emotional about that -

JOHN

Well you couldn’t not be could you I mean, I, you know, and I feel really bad about doing that to my son, and it will, obviously have some sort of effect on him. But, you know, if I was a solicitor and going off to my day's work, that wouldn't have happened. But, you know, who knows what other influence would be on the kid.

CRAIG

I wanted to talk, this sort of taking you back a bit and the fact that you've aged and grown and learned early on, in your first memoir, you describe the young you and the impact that you've had on loved ones. So the generation before Rafe your son now, for example, and you say, ‘like a clumsy waiter, I've left behind me a trail of smashed relationships’. It feels quite a violent word. It's like you're choosing a word that is looking at those relationships and thinking, ‘God that had a real impact there’.

JOHN

You know, I feel very, very kind of responsible for wrecking my first marriage, and it was simply the job that did it. In those sort of awful conversations you have when you're breaking up with somebody, my wife said, I understand you really like your job and enjoy your job. But she said, can you imagine how painful it is for me? Only three days after you get back from something awful, you're starting to talk about leaving again. You know, I was too sort of a self-obsessed and too wrapped up in myself to understand the pain that that gave - I do understand it now. And I'm really sorry.

CRAIG

But what would you say to your younger self, because you're also talking about that you have this drive, the need to go and be there and to witness the truth and that kind of thing. That must have been, if anything, even stronger I suspect, in your younger self. What would you say to yourself at that time now?

JOHN

Well, I often think it's much better if you're not if you're not married, you don't have those ties, if you're doing a job, a job like that, it’s much, much better for everybody else if you don't, if you don't have those commitments. I started off in a rather different way. Although in fact, I was covering the violence in Northern Ireland when I, my first job as a correspondent. But you know, we lived in Ireland, so I was just able, it was only a drive away, it didn't seem so dangerous. And we had a family, and I kind of assumed it would always, my life would be that as sort of foreign correspondent going to places, we went on to Brussels where there was no noticeable danger, except, you know, just overeating. But something happened while I was in Brussels and I got involved in covering the Angolan war. And I think the BBC thought that I should do a bit more of that kind of stuff. And although I was scared, I did also enjoy it.

CRAIG

And this sounds brutal, but I don't think it is, really, is that your advice to your previous, your wisdom to your previous self was almost ‘recognise who you are and what you want’?

JOHN

Yeah. And yeah, I didn't know - I mean, who knows at the age of 25, or even 30, who they really are. And I didn't realise at that stage that I was kind of married, not, I'm delighted to say, to the BBC, or even though I still work at the BBC, but married to the job of being a foreign correspondent.

CRAIG

Dee, your second wife, I remember her saying to me once that John wants to die with his boots on. And it's funny, I initially took that as meaning that you want to work till you can't possibly work anymore, and it's over. But there's another way of it almost like as well, like, you know, go out in a blaze of glory, because it's better than going down in f-

JOHN

No, I don't want to go out in any blaze of glory. I really don't. But what she meant, I think really, - well, I hope she meant - was he just wants to keep on working as long as he possibly can. I'm 78 now, I'm hoping to keep working into my 80s, as long as I'm not, you know, sitting in a corner of a studio with a drool running down my chin, I hope to be able to kind of keep on.

CRAIG

But it's interesting, isn't it? Because in America, there was a sort of tranche of correspondents who literally went on into their 90s, you know, like, the 60 minutes team. If you had the chance, would you do that?

JOHN

Oh, yes. But only if I was up to the job. I don't think there's anything more painful than realising that you're not physically up to it, but perhaps also not mentally up to it, that you can't understand what's going on? I mean, I'm thinking of, at the moment, quite a famous elder statesman, who actually isn't quite with the programme. And, you know, there's things that he forgets and leaves. I don't want that, that's one of the things I -

CRAIG

Are you thinking of the president?

JOHN

No, no, no, well, possibly actually, yes coming to think of it. But I wasn't I think if you… I mean, there's, I tend to define my future, more by negatives and by positives. But I don't want that I don't want to be a bloke who thinks he understands what's going on and doesn't and misleads other people in doing that, I don't want that. But the other thing I don't want to do when I first joined the Garrick Club - the one that still won't accept women members, much to the fury of many others - hen I first joined it, a lot of famous old journalists, I mean, wonderful old people, Robin Day from the BBC, a host of other people, they used to have a table in the corner of the of the dining room. And they'd always be talking, once or twice, I joined them. And their conversation was all about, you know, 1970s Britain. And I don't want that, I don't want to be the man that only can talk about the past.

CRAIG

So do you fear irrelevance?

JOHN

Yes. Yes. I think that probably is exactly what I do feel that people say, ‘oh, come on, Dad. You know, yeah, world's changed. And oh, come on.’ I don't want that.

CRAIG

What would you say to people who had the view, is like that, ultimately, we all become irrelevant. Ultimately, we, you know, we fade and we die. And, you know, that's just the reality of existence. And that may be embracing the slowing down and that you might find other things that you know, bring you joy and happiness.

JOHN

Well I jigsaw puzzle.

CRAIG

No, that you were telling me earlier that you're reading all of George Eliot, I can imagine that that would be an amazing-

JOHN

Yeah but I can do that on a plane. No, I mean, of course at some stage, you know, I’ll have to drop out. I don't mean to say that I do want to carry on until the day I die. That would probably be really quite embarrassing for all concerned, no. But I just want to keep on while I've got my mental health and physical health. I want to just keep on doing the job, and then the moment will come, and then I will, I mean, there's an awful lot of Anthony Trollope that I haven't read. And I'll enjoy it. But I, what I won't do is talk about the past. I don't want to see the eye-rolls around me. ‘Oh, God, there he goes, again. 90s, back in 1989’ and you know.

CRAIG

I do hope you keep continuing for many, many years. And I think that the BBC is a much better broadcaster for having you around.

JOHN

That’s a lovely thing yo say. I don't think is true -

CRAIG

It is true. But we're coming to the end of the interview, and you've been very generous with your time. But the one thing I always ask people at the end is, if there was one piece of wisdom that you’d pass on, what would it be? Can you think what yours is?

JOHN

Well, yes, mine is not, I mean, it's not wisdom, really. But it's never, never leave a story before it's dead. Never go off halfway through - I've done that myself. And I've seen other people do it. Just stay there. Keep on reporting until finally iit is time to leave. It's not a great piece of wisdom. It's not something people can take back to, and go ‘John Simpson says don't leave’, you know, but it is really important. There's a tendency always to sort of say, ‘okay, that's it. I'm sick of this. Let's get out of here.’

CRAIG

I mean, not everybody is John Simpson, who's covering great international events could.. does that apply to people's lives, to anyone?

JOHN

Oh I think it really does apply to everybody's life. Yes. I mean, just keep on, don't leave, don't give up. Just kind of stick with it. And it is the right thing to do. I think in almost every circumstance.

CRAIG

Am I reading too much into this, but are you sort of saying ‘don't give up on life’, basically?

JOHN

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, on anything, but life more than anything else.

CRAIG

It's interesting, isn't it? Because I think a lot of people do, don't they? So I was talking to Anthony Seldon, the historian the other day and he was saying that he's ageing and interested in looking into ageing. And he says a lot of the studies on it show that people come to a point where they almost reach a crossroads where they can decide to continue embracing life and enjoying it, or their worlds start shrinking, and they become narrow and bitter. And I think we know both kinds of people, but it's better to be first rather than the second, isn't it?

JOHN

Oh, far better, yes. I just rather dread the thought that I might kind of suddenly wake up as a you know, sort of asleep in a corner and realise that I've become that kind of narrow, bitter, bitter person still kind of fighting the battles of, you know, long ago, and constantly just talking about the circumstances of long ago, I don't want that.

CRAIG

It feels to me like, you're sort of saying that, we've been given this chance on this amazing planet, and we can embrace it and, you know, go and see and find out and experience as much as we can, or we can just be very narrow.

JOHN

So that's absolutely precisely what I do feel, I think you should always, always go and see for yourself. And although I was a bit spiteful about Robin Day, and the other old journalists, I remember, there was one lunchtime and I was there at their table. And there was a crash outside and a couple of cars bashed into one another and somebody was injured. And one of the old boys actually rang up his news desk. I mean, he had been the political editor or something incredibly grand. But he didn't feel so grand that he couldn't tip off the news desk that somebody's been killed in Garrick Street in London W1. I mean, I thought that old instinct was really quite impressive. And they hadn't given up being reporters, it was just at some stage the job had been taken away from him, and that's why I you know, fight like anything to sort of keep on going because I want to still feel a kind of sense of relevance and interest.

CRAIG

And that's a great point to end it on. So that was really good. Thank you very much. Thank you.

JOHN

I probably said all sorts of things I shouldn’t.

CRAIG

Thanks to John for talking so openly about his family and career. It’s extraordinary to hear someone with such an appetite for their work after a career of nearly 60 years. I hope he continues reporting for many more to come.

Next week's guest is the Reverend Richard Coles. At the heart of our conversation is the deep joy and turmoil brought into his life by his partner, David, then the terrible grief of losing him.

RICHARD COLES

Part of the reason why I loved him was because there was a bit of a Mr. Hyde in him sometimes, and when he was drunk - he drank, lots of people drink, self-medicate, I think, partly, it was to palliate the pain that he felt sometimes he could be a bit of a Hellraiser sometimes. And he was magnificent when he did that, although sometimes terrifying at the same time. And I think about it now, I think he would he lived parts of my life that I didn't live. There was a boldness, a bravery about it, but part of me wanted to actually give him a round of applause as well.

CRAIG

Richard has had an extraordinary life. He speaks openly about the grief of losing David, why he became a vicar, and an unlikely start as a pop star and gay rights campaigner at a time of discrimination and fear of violence. I promise it’s well worth a listen. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like and follow, or even write a review for Apple or Spotify. Desperately Seeking Wisdom is produced by Sarah Parker for Creators Inc. Goodbye for now.