S17, Ep3 Alex Crawford: the legendary war correspondent on staying alive, motherhood and the resilience of hope

28:35I think I said, let me just check. And this is like after 3 million rejections. And then when I got down in front of him, I seemed to answer every single question wrongly. He must have just thought, you know what, just give this one a break or something. I still don't know why. Then when I was applying to leave that job and go on when I was a senior, again, I couldn't get anywhere. So is this the Wokingham Times? Yeah, that was the Wokingham Times. The editor was Adam McKinley. And, you know, I had no idea what he saw in this gangly, inexperienced young girl who didn't know anything and sort of came out of the lose regularly with her zip down at the back and forgot things like her notepad and pen, which was the only thing you actually had in those days.

29:21So I don't really know what he saw, but I'm so glad he gave me the break. And did you enjoy it when you were doing it? At first I didn't. It's a bit like every job I've done because I felt inadequate and that everyone else was much more senior, which they were, and knew much more, which they did. But those starting moments are really, really, really important. I felt I had such a struggle. I try and help the young ones that reach out to me because I think no one helped me really, apart from my editor who gave me the first job. And then when I entered that newspaper, I realized I was in a group that it was very small and they wanted everyone to succeed.

30:01And those lessons are just really important lessons, really important lessons. Alex Crawford, do you have imposter syndrome? Um, possibly, I think, because I still question myself and my instincts, even though I know my instincts are really good. I'm a great believer in instinct, and that's kind of how I've always operated. But if you've got the slightest bit of doubt, it's hard to convince someone else on just the basis of an instinct. Yes. I go on instinct. I thrive on instinct. I've learned to trust myself with my instinct. because you never quite know when you've responded to an instinct and it's gone right, but it's because of the instinct or because of something else.

30:47And you'll never know when you decide not to do a job, which I have done just based on instinct. Sometimes I find that I'm also a big believer in instinct, but sometimes I find it can be difficult to tune into and to separate what my instinct is and what my anxiety is. Yeah, I think that can be confusing for some, but I always go on my instinct. Do you have a way of tapping into it or it just is there? Well, my instinct, no, it's just there. It's not like a supernatural thing. I think obviously it's got stronger and more developed based on what I've done and the experiences I've had. But even right at the start, if it didn't feel right, I did certain things or I got out or I reacted in a certain way.

31:28I mean, there was one time in Afghanistan, and again, you won't know if this would have turned into anything really bad, but it was the first time. I'd gone generally everywhere on my own because they didn't want men and they didn't want a cameraman. And this was the first time I'd taken a cameraman. So we'd gone with my Afghan interpreter. We went to interview the Taliban. When we got there, they took us into a room and it was a completely windowless room and it had their flag set up at their end. And they led us in and there was a camera in front of the flag. Oh my God. Yeah. And they shut the door and locked the door.

32:06And my Afghan colleagues started praying straight away. And they left us in there for what seemed like a long time. And we were all sort of thinking, okay, what? This was during the international occupation of Afghanistan. Anyway, they came in wearing balaclavas and holding guns. And they sat down in front of us. and I mean I think it was fairly obvious thought that this isn't going well the meeting was meant to be them giving an insight into their bombs and what they were doing and showing how they could operate in the center of Kabul and all of this sort of thing and this didn't smell very good at all and so he sat down the main guy but they were all wearing balaclavas and stuff which actually was quite unusual and I just didn't even wait for them to talk I just started laying into how dare you treat us like this you know would you treat your mother like this would you treat your sister like this we trusted you you said you were going to do this that and the other and my afghan interpreter was like what okay and then he started i said just tell them what i'm saying doesn't it and so he started saying and and they just started shifting around uncomfortably and then next minute we were out wow and i was saying how dare you've let us down you've wasted our time you're meant to be showing us this that and the other and you've you've wasted our time and they kind of like shuffled around and said uh okay we'll try and organize it some other time and took us out and that was it that's so clever of you and I I didn't feel clever it felt like I was just oh my god right this is a chance and I've just got to take it do you feel that appeal to so So that thing that you said, would you treat your own mother like this?

33:53Is that a necessary? Yeah, because I want to make them think of me as a human and preferably as something they know, not this crazy foreigner who's coming. I think being a woman definitely helped in those circumstances. It helped a lot. Is it true that you were told time and time again to give up trying from your close friends to try and get a foreign posting? I was like, because most of the time you'd expect your close friends to be... Every time I was absolutely devastated when I got turned down. I mean, I got turned down a spectacular number of times at Sky when I was trying to be a foreign correspondent.

34:35And, you know, I got turned down so many times, it was almost embarrassing going for the interview, or at least that's what my friends thought. Every time I got turned down, they kept saying, one of my closest friends said, do you not think maybe they're trying to tell you something you know maybe they maybe they just don't want you to be foreign correspondent yeah maybe no no I'm sure they do this is just a test it was quite difficult to keep going but I think this whole sort of burning sense of injustice really came in because each time I thought I should have got it there was about there was it only one time.

35:15The very first one, I thought, I'm not sure I'm ready for this job. But after that, I thought, you know what? I can do this job. What the fuck? You know, I think it was about the third time they took me to one side and I was just shaking my head and they said, why are you so surprised? And I said, I don't know what I've got to do to convince you guys I can do this job. I mean, what do you want me to do? And then I started launched into a rant about how much energy I had than all those single white guys out there. And I think, oh my God, it must have been their worst nightmare. Do you think they were underestimating you as a woman?

35:50I think they were generally underestimating me full stop. I don't know whether it's because I was a woman, but that might have played into it. Also that by that stage I had four children. I mean, I was just back from maternity leave. I think she was like just over a year old. I mean, I regularly went for the jobs, but I'm sure that must have played into the thinking as well I mean it to be fair it probably would play into mine as well if I was now employing someone who who had more children but maybe I hope I'd think differently I don't know I mean I think it's a shame that I came to it so late because I feel like it's it's a job that does require quite a lot of energy and useful sort of enthusiasm and that's what you know I was saying to you before I still feel and think and act like I'm 23.

36:40But maybe that's trying to convince myself it works. How old are you? 60. Wow. You look amazing. Not that that's relevant. But honestly, I would never. You're 60. I had no idea. The thing is, I constantly think that there's been some sort of mistake and I'm not really that age. Because as I say, I have an emotional maturity of mostly younger than my own children. I don't feel that age and I actually like when I was in Ukraine and talking to invariably much older people who were left behind in these nearly taken over just about to be encircled towns and I was talking to my colleagues saying oh my god that woman's let's go and talk to this old woman and then I'd say at the end of it so how old are you and they'd say something like 59 or 58 or 60 and I'd come away saying Jesus that poor old lady hang on I'm the same age and yeah and they'd laugh and I don't feel old I don't feel old I don't think old I feel like I've spent my life having to cope with various things I'm sure other women are going through as well I mean like when you're young they don't treat you seriously because you're young you're a woman or a girl you know they think you're about to get married or have children and you struggle to be taken seriously by anyone because you invariably don't know as much as as all and then you go through the baby stage possibly and they're even if you're not having children they think you are about to have children or you are having children and you're written off for that and then immediately after that you're thrown aside because you're old and it's like what the hell when do we get a break in all of this yes when do we when do we yeah and it's it feels and now I feel like I'm constantly being written off because of the age thing and I find that really really weird really strange well there's constant references to age I think one of the papers even did I wouldn't have taken part in this but I slightly found out halfway through the interview It was a piece on how there were so many older female correspondents covering Ukraine or something.

38:59And it's like, what? You're not doing that for John Simpson, are you? And there were questions. Yeah, I know. It's like I went to see, because I'd rarely come to London very much now, and I saw a David Hockney exhibition. He went through the ages, and he is my inspiration. I'm going to be the female journalistic equivalent of him. He's 84. He's now doing his paintings on iPads and using GoPros. And it's just like he's developed. He's the same artist, 84, still got this incredible youthful energy and taking on all these innovative ways of doing his craft. And that's how I want to be. Ditto. I think the secret is being engaged with the world and with the new things rather than dismissing them as something you don't understand.

39:52And for what it's worth, you don't seem your age at all. And I don't think of you in that way whatsoever. Thank you. So no more writing off. I think there are some women who do categorize other women. Yes. But it's mostly men. It's definitely men. Yeah. They want to deny us our power. Yeah. They do, unfortunately. And the thing is, if you say things like that, they get a bit twitchy because you get moved into a sort of, oh, ranting, feminist ranting. And I sort of think, hang on, no, there comes a time when you have to actually say what's what. And I'm getting really pissed off with being constantly written off or constantly categorized or constantly boxed.

40:37I'm not just banging on for older women because I as I said it happened to me when I was younger and when I was in the middle of child rearing it was being seen as a child breeder type thing so I'm pretty sure that's happening all the time exactly you're totally right and I'd actually never thought about it in that articulate a way that literally every phase we're at there's a reason to dismiss us yeah yeah I'm excited for this new iteration of Alex Crawford your second failure is getting taken hostage in Afghanistan. What year was this and what happened? I think it was 2006. We had gone and managed to get through a very strong Pakistani contact and in with what was then described as a terror group, very closely aligned or working with the Taliban.

41:27I'd done several already with various arms of the Taliban. And the big discussion was them running training camps in parts of the Afghanistan countryside. So I wanted to show that. So I wanted to stay there for a few nights. That was probably mistake number one, because you should probably should not stay in a place too long. And I stayed there with my team, which was just a cameraman and an Afghan colleague. That night was a bit crazy because we were in this room packed full of gunmen, and they were all taking pictures of me on the mobile phone. And it was literally like being stripped by a mobile phone.

42:11So they were giggling and sort of filming me like this. And the commander was just watching it and giggling and then finally said, stop, stop. So they stopped. And it felt quite edgy, but I was in constant contact with my Pakistani contact. After we'd been and seen all of this for a couple of days, the commander said, you've been spotted. I think you should go and the trip was slightly cut short because we were meant to stay a bit longer and actually at that stage I should have been much more alert to the danger than I actually was I was more annoyed that the trip was being cut short because we were getting really good access and seeing them doing their training but I contacted my colleagues two other colleagues who were in Kabul waiting for us to come out and I said the trip's been cut short there's a suggestion that something might happen on the way out.

43:05But I honestly didn't really take it seriously, and that was probably a big mistake. I should have raised the alarm big time. Instead, I just casually mentioned it to my colleagues who'd stayed in Kabul and were just there to just check that everything went all right, but no real concern. So we left early the next morning, and they took us to the edge of their territory. And after that, they sort of waved and said goodbye. and that was it. I then send a message to my colleagues, everything's fine, see, everything's fine. We'll see you in 20 minutes in the original meeting point. And then as we drove down, I saw these people who I recognized as intelligence people.

43:49And I remembered ringing my Pakistan contact saying, are these your guys? Because they seem to be in a car in front and what's going on? And he replied straightway saying, nothing to do with us. And again, I didn't do anything, I didn't react. I told my cameraman colleague to hide the thing, but we'd done that anyway. So I had various cards in my bra and things. I said, film out the window so if someone stops us. We'd already prearranged this, but we weren't expecting to be stopped. Then we get into town and again, 10 minutes along, because it all happened very quickly. The explanation takes much longer than what was actually how long it took at the time.

44:27We get into town and suddenly cars come out. One's jammed in front of us, one jumps behind. There's lots of armed guys, but they're not Taliban. It's in the middle of a town. The doors are flung open and guns are pointed in. The guy just looks at me and he's expecting me to be there. And he says, give me your phone. And I was like, OK. He said, and the other one. OK. And I said, what's happening? He said, get out the car, come in with us. So we left the car, got into this other car with them. And they drive off and they take us to this big building. And I'm thinking, what is this? And we get into the building and when we're in the building, we get taken to a room.

45:12They hand us our phones. The first thing they do is talk to my colleague, cameraman, and the Afghan interpreter is having an absolute meltdown at this point. He's talking to my colleague, asking him to open his phone. he hands mine to me to open it and as I open it I quickly send a message to Neville saying taken by intelligence and he says open it show me what you've got on your phone my colleague had pictures still pictures of us with this terror group so he's trying to find what's going on and I'm saying straight away because I thought I didn't know who this guy was had no idea who he was but we were in an office and I said straight away that we were British journalists that my office was waiting for us.

45:58Could I ring my office? And he said, no, no, it's okay. We'll ring them. What number is it? And I gave the number. We showed our credentials. He was going on about how we were operating illegally and what were we doing. And we shouldn't be taking pictures of terror groups like the Taliban or consorting with any of them, blah, blah, blah. And he wanted to have all our pictures. And I was wondering, I didn't really know what was going on, but again, it didn't feel right because I thought if he is who he is, my office would have been notified because they were waiting 20 minutes down the road. So I went to the loo.

46:31As I went to the loo, I had to go through an office and I could see he was the head of the Afghan intelligence, which there were always lots of reports about how compromised they were and how corrupt they were and how they were double dealing. So they'd be working with the international troops, but they would be also keeping a hand in with the Taliban guys. I thought, if I leave them behind, I'm going to lose all the pictures that we've done. If I keep them with me and it gets really bad... It's the cards of the photo cards. Yeah, of all the pictures that we've done over the last three days, which was really unprecedented sort of access to how they were operating and laying IEDs and building bombs and doing training camps and basically just running amok in the countryside.

47:16it went on for quite a while we were there for eight hours I think it was and I kept on asking and saying I'm meant to be meeting the British ambassador my colleagues and all this time nothing was happening and I thought this definitely isn't right because if they were genuine we'd have been out by now you know because we were genuine journalists and we hadn't been doing anything wrong anyway so then he says okay we're going to move you now we're going to drive you to Kabul and I again thought this isn't right because we don't need a lift to Kabul. Why is he taking us all the way to Kabul? During the course of the questioning, a couple of people came in the room and one of them was a woman who was giving us tea and I remember her looking at me strangely and thinking, I wonder who she is, but I looked at her directly as well and I noticed her looking at me really intently.

48:09Someone comes in, whispers in his ear and he leaves the room and we don't hear anything. We're wondering what's going on. And then my colleague looked out of the window and he said, there are American military vehicles coming outside. I looked out and there was a whole string of them thinking, what the hell? And next minute the door bursts open and there's this huge, big American Marine standing there saying, Alex, Skylot, come with me. And we were sort of, what the hell? and we were bundled into the APC and driven to the American base, which was very close, where they gave us a debrief. And then it all sort of came out that my colleagues, Neville and Stuart, Neville had got my message and tried to ring back and rang all our phones and none of it went through.

48:58So then immediately started the search, going house to house around the area where we were meant to be meeting. Because he knew we had already communicated. He knew we couldn't be far. Then they went to the American base, the nearest American base, and said two British journalists have... And I look back and I think, if they hadn't been there, I don't know what would have happened. The Americans told me what they thought would happen. They said that this guy had been under their investigation for quite a long time. They thought he was selling anyone that he could get, usually foreign journalists, to Taliban groups, because at that stage they were being held for a while and various countries would pay ransoms.

49:36Britain was not paying a ransom, but there were Italians and French who were he'd got two people working inside who verified they rang up asked two British journalists have gone missing in the area do you know anything about them and they'd rung up twice and each time they said no no not at all so then they turned up having been got these insiders giving them yes there's a woman and a man who look like foreigners and they were in the office. They turned up. They then asked to speak to him directly. And that's when he'd left our room. The American soldiers by this stage who had all their guns out and everything said, we think there are two British journalists in here somehow in this building.

50:16And he again said, no, there's no British journalists. I promise you, we've got no British journalists here. And apparently the American guy told us that he then cocked his gun and said, I'm going to search every single room in this building until I find them. We can either do this the easy way or the hard way. And the guy then just led him to the room. Do you think it was the tea lady then? Yeah, she definitely ID'd us and passed it on. And so you could have been held hostage for years and years and years. Yeah, that's what it looked like. And so the reason that you have chosen this particular episode, I imagine, for this podcast is that it highlights when you need to make the call.

50:57I think it highlights how you can contribute to the mistakes, perhaps by not responding quickly enough or not realizing the danger. Even when we were being interrogated, it's done in a way where they try to keep you calm so that you don't think that things have gone wrong. And that's when your instincts should be screaming at you. And actually they were by that point. But I thought my mistake was they should have screamed a lot earlier. I should have laid plans to make sure that there was a gap between being dropped off and being picked up by my colleagues. And that was the big gap. In retrospect, I don't think I'd make that mistake again.

51:43I'd be much more alert, much more alert to possible things going wrong. I can put up with a certain amount of things going wrong, and that's fine, because I think you need to expect certain things to possibly go wrong. You've got to think of absolutely everything that could go wrong and try and narrow that down and shut it off and cut it off. That was the most extreme, at that time, the most extreme example of mistakes I made. But I think it laid the foundation for other things not to go quite so badly as wrong as they could do. You acquired the necessary data. I think so. But how difficult as well when someone is deliberately trying to keep you calm.

52:23You're almost being gaslit about the entire situation. It's just so confusing. Yeah, and even when I came out, I think my editors, my colleagues, and everyone found it hard to believe that I'd just spent three or four days with the outlaws and been taken by the people that they were working with. It was a very difficult thing. I remember talking to my editor at the time and saying, hang on, are you saying Afghan intelligence took you? I was saying, yeah, these are the guys they're working with. When you get taken back by the American soldiers, what do you do that night with your colleagues? Like, is there a celebration?

53:04That night I got drunk. I was about to say, I hope you got drunk. My colleague that I was with found it very, very, very, very hard. Very hard. He went the other way. and I think after that he found it very difficult to do any more hostile environments very very very talented cameraman very nice guy probably a lot more sensitive than I am possibly but I came out of that even when we were in the base in the U.S. base I was thinking that was a lucky escape and he was thinking, Jesus, we were nearly spending God knows how many years chained to a radiator or whatever. I think that is also a really valuable lesson.

53:52And I don't even know if you have control over it. I don't know because I'm sure given the option, everyone would want to think positively rather than the worst. And that tends to be my pattern of thinking is not, whoa that was so freaking close we could have x y z could have happened this is after something has happened it's much more whoa jeez that's another life that I've used up I tend to think of the worst before we go on it and then I try so like before we went into Ukraine I had I don't know what my my colleagues must have been thought who is this crazy but I sat my team down and said you know we don't have to go into Kyiv this is before when they thought it was going to be under siege, we're being asked if we want to go to Kiev.

54:37You need to know what could happen. We could be there for months. How are you going to feel if we get taken hostage? How are you going to feel if one of us gets shot? How are you going to feel if you see me being raped? How are you going to cope? How are you going to tell Richard if I die? Are you prepared for all of that? Because I wanted them to go in with their eyes wide open and I didn't want them to think that it was not going to be the very worst case scenario. And of course, none of that happened. But we went into it preparing for that with that mindset. With that degree of psychological preparation, have you ever had a moment where, as the saying goes, that your life has flashed before your eyes?

55:17Quite a lot of the time, it's so quick, you don't have time for that. Like when we got shelled in Syria, I was terrified and I was running and I knew we had to run. And somehow we had to have lots of strength to get out, get ahead of the shelling that was coming behind us because there was a drone that had spotted us and had already dropped a bomb that they thought was going to kill us. And it didn't. And under the cover of the clouds, the smoke that it created, we then ran and they then shelled some more. And we had to keep on running. that adrenaline just fueled my legs because you know normally it's really hard to be running with and a buyer on and a flak jacket and all of the things that we had but somehow we did it but other times when it's a bit slower like when I got my team got trapped inside a mosque when there was raging gunfire and tanks right outside on the other side of this wall there'd be boom And you thought we're going to die.

56:20And we had plenty of time to think that we were going to die. We couldn't think how we were going to get out. And everyone else was being injured and dying and mutilated. That's what it seemed like to us. So did my life flash in front of me? It didn't really flash in front of me, but I thought we're probably not going to get out of this. We're probably going to die. I think everyone in that moment thought that. It just seemed very, very bleak. I'm sure in those moments you think of your husband Richard and your four children which brings us on to your final failure and I'm extremely grateful that you've chosen to talk about this and it is in your words that you have failed as a mother many times yeah I think I definitely have I think I'm really really lucky to be a mother and to have my children and to have a family and they're incredibly valuable to me.

57:17I feel like they've been my safe foundations. There are lovely places that I like to go to, but it's my family I run back to. I mean, we have a very dysfunctional family because they've led very unpredictable, weird lives. Just their whole childhood has been very weird. It just hasn't been typical. And I felt guilty about that, dragging them from country to country and being away a lot of the time and constantly feeling like I wanted to be a good mother but I also wanted to be a really good journalist and I often felt I was failing at both I think if there were awards for motherhood I wouldn't be getting as many awards for motherhood because I felt like I've let them all down quite a lot of times and also that you know there's so many things I've missed and I remember at the time Richard saying you're going to really regret being away so much when they're so young and poo-pooing all of that and actually now I do regret it I do regret quite a lot I wish I had two lives that would be the solution so so many things I want to say so your children are now all in their 20s you've got three daughters and a son right but maybe you will have that experience of being around when children are younger as a grandmother.

58:37And maybe that could be the second iteration of your life. And actually, I'm a firm believer that we have all lived many lives. And I'm not a mother in this lifetime, although I have tried. And I think maybe I was a mother in the past. And it's okay. I know about your past struggles. And that makes me feel even more guilty. No, don't feel guilty. And can I also say how refreshing it is to hear someone talk about motherhood and their guilt around it prefacing it with I love being a mother how beautiful is this family who are my safe haven that's so wonderful to hear you acknowledge that and I never want other people to feel guilty for what they have simply because something that I've yearned for hasn't happened for me because I have lots of other things as well you know I and and it's my life's I'm not I'm not making I'm not I didn't intend to make you feel in any way, anything particularly.

59:32I know people, I've had friends who've had difficulty and one of them wrote really movingly a book about it. And I just felt so bad for her because I remember her saying everywhere she looked, she could just see pregnant women. And I took it a bit for granted. You know, I feel bad about that, but sometimes I feel like I haven't been there for my kids when I should have been. You know, I remember even in the maternity hospital having to ask how to put a nappy on because I didn't know how to do it. I didn't think anything through with my life. I thought it'd be great to have children. I didn't think about the implications of how they might need me and how I should be there and how they still need you when they're in their 20s.

1:00:16They probably need me more now than they did when they were two, four, six and eight or whatever. I remember at the time we struggled to ever get them to school on time. I struggled to remember or to even know what classes they were in. I remember when we got one report from one school in one country that we'd been in because they did a report and those reports went on to the next school in the next country to say what we were like and the report about our parenting was that completely absent or something and it felt like F for fail. And I'm not saying that with any pride. I was like, oh, my God.

1:00:55What are they like now in terms of how you ask them? I mean, I'm immensely proud of them. Yeah. I think they all have issues. I think, as I said, we are a very dysfunctional family. They've been dragged around the world. They've watched their mother do these crazy things, which they're sort of half proud of. I think they're more proud of me now. In those days, when they were small, they just didn't like me being away. And they thought I was having lots of fun. I remember one of them saying, where do you go when you leave us? Do you go to the playground? Because I always seem so happy going. And that's that isn't that that's so.

1:01:34But you know what, Alex, this wouldn't even be a conversation if you were a father. How many fathers would sit in this chair and agonize and choose this as a failure? And we live in an imperfect world and not all fathers, not all men and not everyone will have that opinion. but you're carrying the weight of social conditioning and expectation too. I think that's absolutely 100 % right. But also I know, I feel that mothers are different to fathers, definitely. And it doesn't matter how you try and convince yourself you are the same or interchangeable or whatever. And you're just not, I don't think, you offer very different things as a mother.

1:02:19My own relationship with my parents was not at all like mine is with my children, but I had a much closer relationship with my mother than my father. But my kids have an entirely different relationship with me to the one I had with my mother. I mean, they talk to me about pretty much everything and they can't understand why I don't want to talk about absolutely everything because that's the way they are. As I say, I feel very lucky because I'm learning all the time from them. Yes. I hope they picked up a few things from me, but I'm pretty sure it's... I don't know. Maybe it's... One of the things that I can think of of the myriad of qualities that you embody is that you're not judgmental, that they clearly feel they can tell you anything because of the things that you've seen and witnessed and because you, in turn, have provided them with a safe harbour, emotionally speaking.

1:03:14I don't know, you see. I don't know whether it's because of that. There's probably a little bit of, well, maybe quite a lot of lingering resentment about me not being there enough, not giving them the safe harbour that they probably wanted and needed and demanded. I don't really know the answers. I just know, looking back, if I had the chance to redo things, I'd probably do a lot of things differently. When I'm talking to younger journalists now, the thing that I emphasize, I'm not sure they listen to me much because they think, well, you did it. But I say, don't miss out on your kids. Make sure that you spend time with them.

1:03:54When a fellow female colleague was away for months, weeks in Ukraine, she was there for weeks. And I sent her an email saying, you've been there too long. You need to get back to your family. And I remember one of my foreign editors telling me that when I was covering something in Sri Lanka a while ago, and I'd been there for a long time. And he also rang me up and said, you know what? You've been there long enough. Get back. And actually, you need people like that sometimes to tell you, especially when you're not realizing. Because every job you go into, I think a lot of the very focused journalists just get, they can't think of anything else.

1:04:32And I know I'm like that. And so you need someone to sort of say, you know what, time to go. Time to get a reality check and normality. Are you proud of your career? Am I proud? In some ways that sounds like it's over. And I feel I'm only just starting. I didn't mean it to imply that at all. No, I know you don't. I know you don't. I think I get some satisfaction in having proved a few people wrong along the way. I would be lying if I said otherwise. that has been very satisfying so you know every time I picked up an RTS I thought yeah that's for all those guys out there who thought I'd never do it Alex Crawford thank you so much for proving them all wrong and for continuing to do so and thank you for coming on how to fail oh thanks for to me.

1:05:33If you enjoyed this episode of How to Fail with Elizabeth Day, I would so appreciate it if you could rate, review and subscribe. Apparently, it helps other people know that we exist.