The summer that changed me

{"text":[[{"start":0.5,"text":"Tim Harford"}],[{"start":1,"text":"UNDERCOVER ECONOMIST"}],[{"start":null,"text":"

"}],[{"start":6.68,"text":"Sometimes everything happens in a rush. In May 2003 I was growing tired of a corporate job in London, and so was my girlfriend, who worked in the same department. By September, she was pregnant and both of us had quit and moved to Washington DC."}],[{"start":21.52,"text":"In between? Marriage, a coast-to-coast walking honeymoon, and even a summer job. I spent June, July and August writing editorials at the Financial Times under the auspices of the new Peter Martin fellowship, set up in memory of the great FT business commentator. Summer fruits do not always endure, but the baby, the marriage and even that internship continue to shape me."}],[{"start":22.02,"text":"Rebecca Watson"}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":44.92,"text":"FT writer and novelist"}],[{"start":47.68,"text":"This isn’t a tale of an exhilarating romance or a profound encounter with a dolphin. I wasn’t even on holiday — although I had recently touched down from one, and was making my way home. It was the summer of 2015. As I was rushing to board the Tube, I slipped and fell in the gap between the carriage and the platform. I was 20 and my arm, instinctively thrown through the closing doors, saved my life."}],[{"start":72.02,"text":"I’ve written elsewhere about the shockwave of this incident but it also had a different, less expected impact. The experience was a sartorial lesson: since then, I wouldn’t be seen dead in plimsolls. (It’s hard not to hear the near literalness of that expression.) I was a student, wearing my friend’s cast-offs. Shoes then were the afterthought component of an outfit."}],[{"start":93.28,"text":"That summer taught me their importance. Ideally, that they have grip, and do not send you sliding at speed into a gaping, perilous space. But safety concerns spun into surprise that I had ever not cared. Shoes, much like a good pair of glasses, can elevate an outfit. I never wore those plimsolls again. Respect your feet, watch your step."}],[{"start":93.78,"text":"Martin Wolf"}],[{"start":94.28,"text":"Chief economics commentator"}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":117.36,"text":"My choice of life-changing summer is that of 1946. I was born in August of that year. It is impossible, after all, to think of any event that meets this criterion better than one’s birth. It is more than life-changing: it is its beginning."}],[{"start":130.76,"text":"Moreover, 1946 was rather special: it was the first full year after the end of the second world war. I was one of the first postwar “baby boomers”, a generation that has had a profound influence upon the western world."}],[{"start":144.48,"text":"Yet even more interesting than the subsequent history of my own generation were the choices made by our parents. They were then young people, mostly in their twenties and thirties, who had been through a devastating war. In the UK alone, some 450,000 had died. Worldwide, the estimated total death toll was an almost inconceivable 87mn."}],[{"start":166.92,"text":"What did young people do after these horrors? They chose life: 955,266 children (19.5 children per 1,000 inhabitants) were born in the UK in 1946. This was the second-highest ratio in all the years between 1945 and 1970, and only just behind the 20.7 in 1947."}],[{"start":190.12,"text":"My parents chose life, too, despite knowing that almost all members of their wider families had been murdered in the Holocaust. They chose life, despite having been forced into exile during the war."}],[{"start":202,"text":"So many men and women in my parents’ generation chose life, because they trusted in a better future. They were right to do so: their children have lived in a golden age of peace and plenty. My life began with optimism. We need such optimism again."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":202.5,"text":"Jay Rayner"}],[{"start":203,"text":"Restaurant critic"}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":219.88,"text":"At a distance of four decades, it’s tricky to identify the exact moment of revelation. It may have been while trundling by train through the brown toasted scrubland of southern Italy en route to the ferry to Greece. Or perhaps it was while bobbing across the Aegean Sea. Or maybe it was on one of those blissfully air-conditioned buses that snake along Turkey’s coast, the journey broken only by the driver squirting your hands with lemon-scented eau de cologne during rest stops. But whatever the exact occasion, somewhere during that hot travelling summer of 1985 I made an important discovery: I liked my own company."}],[{"start":255.32,"text":"Sure, I loved meeting people. But there was also the self-contained bliss of being alone: of the simplicity of me and my thoughts, augmented only by a good book."}],[{"start":264.84,"text":"I hadn’t set out to find myself like this. The plan had instead been to travel with someone else, as I had done the year before. But my closest friend wasn’t available and, I soon realised, neither was anyone else. Instead, declining to be sad, I bought an Interrail pass, planned a route, hoicked my overstuffed backpack high on my shoulders and set off for Dover, hoping for adventures. I found a few of those that summer, along with a lesson that has stayed with me for life."}],[{"start":265.34,"text":"Henry Mance"}],[{"start":265.84,"text":"UK news editor"}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":297.8,"text":"It was the summer of 2005, and I was fielding on the boundary in a low-level cricket match. A high ball headed towards me. I misjudged it. My thumb fractured like a Jacob’s cracker. The English summer was sending me a hint: it was time to head elsewhere."}],[{"start":313.52,"text":"A few weeks later, I went to do university fieldwork in Colombia. Two tips about Colombia: never spell it with a “u”, and never make a joke about cocaine. Because the country is a million more interesting things."}],[{"start":326.84,"text":"After that summer, I went back to live in Colombia for three years. Does living abroad change your life? Or does it begin another life, unconstrained by previous loyalties and expectations? I made friends, plans and mistakes. I felt my path splitting into two, rather more neatly than my thumb had."}],[{"start":345.92,"text":"I was too British to live in Bogotá for ever. But these days, when I reluctantly return to the cricket pitch, I can remember the person I was there — and be grateful that life hasn’t been entirely linear."}],[{"start":346.42,"text":"Alice Fishburn"}],[{"start":357.64,"text":"Opinion and analysis editor"}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":360.72,"text":"2003. New York City. Twenty-one years old. I am a camp counsellor in Manhattan to a gang of five-year-olds by day, sofa-surfing and partying my way from the Upper West Side to SoHo and back again by night."}],[{"start":373.54,"text":"It is two months of discovery. Discovering that American parents tip big. That you can never go wrong with a dance routine to “Under the Sea” when confronted with a bored kindergarten class. That a scarf can be repurposed as club wear in an emergency. That you’re only 21 and on the edge of love once. That an English accent in the US is never a bad thing. That true family will allow you to catch up on a year’s worth of sleep in one weekend, put you back on the bus and not hold it against you."}],[{"start":402.16,"text":"Summer storms in totally inappropriate footwear. A regular pay cheque. Art museums. 50 Cent. Cabs up the West Side Highway at 2am. Kind friends. Even kinder parents of friends. The security of knowing you get to go back to university at summer’s end and leave that looming adult world for just a little bit longer. The excitement of knowing it’s out there waiting for you."}],[{"start":402.66,"text":"Bryce Elder"}],[{"start":403.16,"text":"City editor, Alphaville"}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":427.88,"text":"The Yugoslav state lasted slightly longer than my parents’ marriage, which was not to my benefit. Rising tensions between separatist factions culminated in a package holiday to the Makarska Riviera. My father, always alive to a bargain, saw the impending collapse of Yugotours as an opportunity. My mother, for reasons we didn’t acknowledge, stayed at home."}],[{"start":449.2,"text":"For me, it was a new type of holiday. It was an introduction to breakfast buffets of rubber cheese and UHT milk. I’d not previously guessed that people would fly to places that are a bus excursion away from anything worth seeing. I’d never thought to spend whole fortnights by the pool — although, in my case, not in the pool. I’d grown my hair long to look like Iron Maiden, which instead made me look like a girl; some bigger kids pointed and laughed the first time I took off my T-shirt, so that was the end of that."}],[{"start":477.6,"text":"Seeing my dad flirt with waitresses was another new experience. He was crap at it, I understood later, but not at the time. Having previously been unaware of his style, it was easy to imagine it being cramped by having as wingman a gawky misgendered kid in a Number of the Beast shirt."}],[{"start":493.6,"text":"How exactly that summer changed me is hard to know. The kind of psychiatrist who can untangle all the threads is one I could never afford. So, rather than scrutinise the damage, I fall back on the knowledge that nothing at home will be fixed by going away, and that no package holiday can ever be cheap enough."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":494.1,"text":"Jemima Kelly"}],[{"start":494.6,"text":"Columnist"}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":513.72,"text":"I had just turned 16. My brother was about to join my sister at Cambridge and my eldest sister was just starting life as a doctor. But I wasn’t going to do things the same way as the rest of them. I, the youngest, the dissenter, was going to be a pop star."}],[{"start":528.32,"text":"My mother hugely disapproved but my father felt he should support my dreams. So he allowed me and the two school friends I had started singing with to have his house for a week."}],[{"start":537.56,"text":"We treated it as a kind of boot camp. We practised harmonies, did hundreds of sit-ups a day for the sake of our crop-top-and-low-rise-jean combos, and studied videos of Destiny’s Child and Britney Spears."}],[{"start":548.92,"text":"Urban Clique became the name of our girl band, inspired by the most urban of sources, my father’s Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, formed in the most urban of places, the upmarket seaside town of Aldeburgh, Suffolk (if you are doubting my own credentials I was, for all intents and purposes, Posh Clique)."}],[{"start":565.64,"text":"We bought fish and chips and sat by the beach writing our first song together. “Baby I’m sitting here and I’m thinking of you / You’re driving me crazy boy what’s a girl to do?” went the opening lines. It was a legit banger that would see us sitting, trembling, opposite an A&R executive at Polydor Records the following year."}],[{"start":583,"text":"I would stay at school until 18 but not go back into formal education for another six years as I tried to make it in the music industry, earning money by working in bars, shops and a boutique bowling alley, and partying pretty hard in Camden and east London. I never did quite make it. But it made me who I am."}],[{"start":583.5,"text":"Robert Shrimsley"}],[{"start":600.04,"text":"UK chief political commentator"}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":602.68,"text":"Summer has served me poorly for life-changing events. This is probably lucky, since Speedos were never my go-to look. All the big defining moments in my life, meeting my wife, becoming a parent, losing my father, all came in winter or late autumn. But one lasting summer change came in my late twenties. I had moved jobs and suddenly liked the idea of two weeks without any employer having a call on my time."}],[{"start":627.32,"text":"My bank balance swiftly downgraded it to one week. But I booked a small B&B in Lynmouth on the Exmoor coast, took a stack of books and spent most days walking (or driving) to a beauty spot to sit in the sunshine and read. (There was one walk on a boiling day, flies buzzing around my head, where I learnt the great lesson that before you rejoice at walking down a hill you should be sure there is not another to come.)"}],[{"start":651.24,"text":"My main destination was a National Trust property called Watersmeet, where I sat under a tree reading novels. But I also travelled and fell in love with the Devon coast. My wife joined me at the weekend and Devon became a happy place, where we’d holiday year after year, slowly dragging more of our family along. Not a very exciting tale, but come back in winter, have I got some stories for you."}],[{"start":651.74,"text":"Jo Ellison"}],[{"start":652.24,"text":"HTSI editor"}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":678.22,"text":"August 1997. I had graduated from Edinburgh University, against the backdrop of a New Labour government (that I hadn’t actually voted for) and a terrible nagging dread about my future prospects. A final summer working the box office at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, offered a tantalising delay before the inevitable slide back to London and postgraduate unemployment."}],[{"start":697.7,"text":"The 21-year-old actor Cillian Murphy was seducing the whole of Scotland with his debut role in Disco Pigs, an explosive two-hander about first love performed in an extraordinary pidgin language. I fell in love with the writing, and its writer, to whom I would present comp tickets while flirting beneath my newly shorn Gwyneth Paltrow-tribute haircut."}],[{"start":717.86,"text":"We finally snogged on the last day of the festival, at the after-party, only to be interrupted by the news that Princess Diana had been killed in a car accident. He then vanished."}],[{"start":726.08,"text":"Three weeks, one theatre flyer, four letters, one public library, five phone directories, two public payphone calls and one garbled message left with my mother “from a strange chap with an Irish accent” later, we reconnected. (These were analogue days, children.) Disco Pigs is 30 years old this autumn. We’re still together."}],[{"start":726.58,"text":"Stephen Bush"}],[{"start":727.08,"text":"Columnist"}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":749.12,"text":"Recollections may vary when it comes to explaining why I spent two summers working in food and beverage at Legoland Windsor, the children’s theme park just outside London."}],[{"start":758.32,"text":"As I remember it, I decided that I wanted to earn my own money and gain more experience in the world of work before going to university. According to my mother, I was informed in no uncertain terms that my plan to spend the summer holiday loafing around and asking her for money was a non-starter, so I grudgingly applied for a job."}],[{"start":776.32,"text":"At the time, Legoland was a great employer — we had good overtime, free entry into essentially all the UK’s other theme parks — but not a provider of great food. A few years after I left, the Soil Association (a food and farming charity) described it as “Deep Fried Crap Land”. This is unfair in that quite a lot of it was boil-in-the-bag, blast-in-the-industrial-oven or reconstruct-from-an-offsite-kitchen crap when I was there."}],[{"start":801.9,"text":"Nonetheless, those summers did change me: they sharpened my time management, gave me a taste for financial freedom and taught me to always bring a packed lunch when visiting a theme park."}],[{"start":802.4,"text":"Horatia Harrod"}],[{"start":802.9,"text":"Arts editor"}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":813.44,"text":"As England exited this year’s World Cup, I was taken back to my own summer of footballing disappointment. In 1995, my passion was Queens Park Rangers FC, then a surprisingly great Premier League side whose talismanic striker was Les Ferdinand. I sat up in the Loft, a rare girl in the stronghold of QPR supporters, and watched “Sir Les” score goal after goal."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":834.64,"text":"It was almost an inevitability that when the season ended, he would be sold to a bigger club. Unless, perhaps, I could persuade him to stay? It was the first and last fan letter I ever wrote. And, astonishingly, he replied: a handwritten note on blue paper, gently equivocal about the chances of his moving on. A month later, in June, he left. I cried and realised I could never bind myself to a football team — or maybe this football team. I was 12 years old, and my tomboyhood was over."}],[{"start":835.14,"text":"Oliver Roeder"}],[{"start":866.02,"text":"Commissioning editor, FT Weekend Magazine"}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":870.18,"text":"I graduated from college in the early summer of 2006 and moved from the South Side of Chicago to the North Side, and into a one-room apartment by the lake. I lived a mile from Wrigley Field, the jewel-box baseball stadium and home of my beloved Chicago Cubs. I walked there whenever there was a game, dozens of times that summer."}],[{"start":889.48,"text":"Wrigley nestles into its neighbourhood so snugly that you can watch the games from the rooftops across the street. Outside the stadium, beyond left field, is leafy Waveland Avenue. It is 355ft from home plate to the brick outfield wall, and another 50ft over the bleachers to the street. Well-struck home runs would rain on to the city pavement."}],[{"start":910.44,"text":"And there each afternoon rose a lawn-chair encampment. Its residents wore mitts and caps and listened to the game on the radio. They were called the ballhawks, Moe, “Super” Dave, Ken, Rich and, for that summer, me."}],[{"start":924,"text":"The Cubs were the sunshine heroes of my youth, unreal, distant ideas, television characters on a stage of carpet grass. But there on the pavement their great works landed, manifest, dirt-rubbed and asphalt-scuffed. I caught four baseballs on Waveland Avenue that summer and felt the world shrink."}],[{"start":941.48,"text":"They’ve cantilevered more bleachers over that street now, and installed fencing, an enormous video screen and advertisements. Very few baseballs land there any more."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":951,"text":"Share your teenage epiphanies, sporting insights, life-altering encounters and near-death experiences in the comments below. We might run a selection of the best contributions on ft.com"}],[{"start":961.56,"text":"Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram, Bluesky and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning"}],[{"start":974.5,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1785565319_4599.mp3"}