101 Faces - 3

11 to 15 of 101 people I find interesting.

LAURA MARLING

As remarkable as the fact Debbie Harry became a pop icon in her mid 30s is the fact that Laura Marling has now released six albums of greater depth and wisdom than any other British songwriter of this era and she’s still not even 30. I think Marling remains underrated, an absolute one-off of accomplished songcraft it’s hard to categorise.

DAVID CAMPESE

From Campese I learnt to love the enemy, more so than from the great West Indies cricket team of 1984, who I didn’t really see as the enemy. But Campo, I did want him to lose and to fail, but I marvelled at him, and, at that age when I still played rugby rather well and could still have gone on to love it, I imitated him, or tried to – his hitch kick and his tiptoes, his one hand on the ball arrogance. He occupied the same space as Shane Warne – the one-off, the maddening, irritating, Aussie glorious sporting genius. Campese could have turned me into a rugby player, more so than the other rugby players I’ve loved who would follow. I was too far gone by then. I’m relieved he didn’t.

HARUKI MURAKAMI

For his mesmeric novels and also for his validating, revelatory book about running above all, which assured me I was on safe ground with his novels.

CASTER SEMENYA

There was some awfully shitty BBC piece about Semenya during the 2017 World Championships. It literally contained the line “Is she … actually a he?” I was surprised by the strength of my feeling. For sport, this is going to be an increasingly tricky issue, and I don’t know for sure how it should be handled, but I do know Semenya has been through great amounts of dehumanising bullshit, and just strides through it like an absolute star.

JUSTINE GREENING

Firstly, Justine Greening’s my favourite high-level Conservative politician, the kind of politician it’s important to acknowledge in order to hold on to your sanity and pretence at balance, that there can be someone who rises high in that party who seems sensible, reasoned, decent, highly competent. But what puts her here is that, ironically, her face was my first harbinger of doom. It was early on in 2005 election night and yes, of course Labour were going to win, but Justine Greening unexpectedly won Putney for the Tories and then, contrary to what I’d naively thought about the Conservatives pretty much fading to obscurity as a political force, I realised they were coming back. They came back, didn’t they?