So we dropped the boys off at a week-long summer camp last weekend. After a fraught few months during which Ethan had major school exams, grew 6 inches, sprouted hair in places I had hoped never to know about, deepened his voice by an octave, and learned the surprising art of communicating entirely by grunting - well, a week at camp seemed like an excellent idea.

Since the only thing that our eldest child professed to be interested in was computer games, we scoured the whole of England for a camp that taught programming and found one (and only one). Well, I practically ran to put down the payment.

We asked our younger son Luca, still a tender young thing, if he’d like to join in, and he chewed ruminatively on a carrot and thought, yes, he would. Regarding the carrot, this was back when they only snacked on what we told them was delicious. But I digress.

We arrived at the camp at last (it had taken us a while to pack enough wet wipes, facial scrub and other things we considered to be absolute boy essentials), and Luca’s face fell.

Gangs of 13 year olds, looking like extras from a British suburban remake of West Side Story, stood about in hoodies, scratching their arms, and wondering how to connect with each other in the absence of cell phones.

We left Ethan evaluating the other teenage boys and headed off to settle Luca in his cabin.

Well, I don’t know about you, but the word ‘cabin’ brings to my mind some kind of mythic, romantic Americana, a pine-scented haven of peace with a roaring fireplace and cosy blankets.

I know camps are not meant to emulate the Four Seasons, but the sight of all the bunk beds, thin mattresses and single, sad toilet only reminded me of The Shawshank Redemption; but instead of Morgan Freeman’s reassuring presence, there were only a bunch of camp counsellors - preternaturally perky youths who looked about 14 years old, and who promised me they’d take care of our shy 9 year old.

Luca held himself together but couldn’t make eye contact as he was marched away to play football.

I kept a stiff upper lip all the way home, then burst into floods of tears.

Hanan eyed me from over her glasses and her Macbook, for she had already worked out that a week at camp meant 80 hours of spreadsheet work for her and she wasn’t planning on wasting a minute.

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Having successfully derailed Hanan’s spreadsheet and left her lying awake worrying about the boys, I fell asleep.

Calling the boys at camp was strictly prohibited and, being British, I could not break a rule without weeks of angst, so I did the next best thing and begged Hanan to break it.

‘Give me the number,’ she said nonchalantly, unfazed by fake laws laid down by 16 year old camp employees.

Within two hours they had called us back with Ethan and Luca ready to talk to us. I took the phone, trembling, and asked my offspring if they were OK. In my mind, they were both wearing orange jumpsuits, Ethan’s hint of a 13 year old mustache was already a long, tangled beard, and Luca was weeping from loneliness.

‘Can you not call me again?’ was Ethan’s opening salvo. ‘I’m missing dinner, and it’s really good.’

I was taken aback, but recovered in time to get in another question, but by now, Luca had taken over the phone.

Nice.

As soon as we hung up, I realised that instead of snivelling and working on spreadsheets, we really ought to be hanging out at the movies.

Insight. It’s a beautiful thing, especially when your children give it to you.

May we all learn to loosen our grip just enough to let the people we love surprise us — and may they occasionally remember to call before telling us never to call again.

Shamim

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One of the stranger things about being a novelist is this constant, low-grade stress us authors carry with us, about our imaginary friends and whether they should take that job, tell their partner the truth, say that thing that will split open their heart; and if they will, should it be on page 43 or in the last chapter?

I get that this is all faintly ridiculous. I create these characters, decide at which point in their lives to drop in and mould their inner voices into strings of words. I get to decide whether they are good at lying, bad with money, whether the words ‘I’m sorry’ get stuck in their chest when it would solve everything to just say it. This mighty feeling of being the all-knowing, all-powerful creator does not last for very long. If you are doing this right, these characters stop feeling like characters and start to become people who now are able surprise you, and sometimes appall you, with what they are going to do.

So, what does it take to do this for a living? I get asked a lot. I answer, usually, in practicalities. Read, keep a routine for writing, walk, think, watch. But in a world where AI is creeping up on our creativity, partly numbing it, partly trying to replace it, I think what really matters is why we write and why it matters. Why do I love doing the laundry and paying bills, presenting as a functioning human, while my psyche, like someone dying of thirst, is drinking in the sensory elements of a parallel world that exists for no one else but me?

This is, to be sure, highly irritating for Hanan who, much as she appreciates my books once they’re done, is less enamoured of the writing process when she is asking me to sign off on her colour-coded spreadsheet, and I am bleating about not being sure when this plot line is going to work, because, you know, the characters are still finding their way…

Do you become this kind of person once you start writing, or do you write because your mind already lives in two places, and always has? For me, it was the latter.

When I first began writing in earnest, I was still living with my parents and working during the day in my father’s office because I had announced ‘I’m going to be a writer’ and he replied ‘That’s great! Be at your desk at 8.30am on Monday.’

The desk job over there made no big impression on me, but it did involve an inbox that was an actual (grey) plastic tray on my desk, lots of numbers, hole punchers, staplers (this was a long time ago), and wall-to-wall, durable beige carpet. Aching beauty, emotional drama, and existential angst were not to be found in the stationery cupboard. Well, maybe the angst was, as I stood there wondering at how many types of envelope existed. There were also spreadsheets. These were reassuring things, with formulae and colours and a placid, stolid knowledge that if column H adds up today, it will still add up tomorrow. I felt suffocated.

What I remember is the contrast; spending the day at a blond wood desk covered in paper and then the almost physical need, once home, to truly live, amongst the words which told the real story of life, at least to me. Everything that had been accumulating somewhere in my head while I was filling cells and checking boxes would come flooding out each evening: fragments of dialogue, emotional moments, pieces of lives.

The Routine That Will Finally Turn You Into a Proper Writer

Writers love to talk about routines. I’ve done it myself, a lot, and not always only when asked, sadly for the person sitting next to me at dinner. Why? Because writing is a calling but also a career; if you are lucky. It is magical and inspired, but also just needs to be actually written down, thousands and thousands of words. If you don’t make time to do that, your novel will always be a short story that was hoping to grow up one day.

Also, the discipline matters because writing is so horribly unreliable and terrifying and the fear of sitting down and realising you have forgotten English, is a real, real fear. So, I get up early (maybe), walk, avoid doom-scrolling, drink coffee and eat something (possibly) healthy, and without ever looking that morning’s planned work fully in the eye, I sidle up to my desk, casually, trying not to seem like I even care, and start tapping away. On a great day, maybe I write two thousand immaculate words and, why not, read a little Proust, at which point it is somehow only 11.15 in the morning, and I am free to spend the rest of the day floating around in love with life and creativity.

The other 95% of the time, I just show up, and force myself to write new sentences, even they feel like stilted lines I already wrote once, when I was five.

There are things that help. You begin to understand when your own mind is awake, available, connected to something a little bigger than you, so things can flow. Music can open a yearning that reminds you how the character should’ve felt twenty pages ago. Getting up and walking helps too. Get out, away, don’t think about your writing, don’t expect anything from your subconscious, and then it will often arrive – the solution you’ve been needing for the past three months.

Usually, at these moments, I have no phone because I impetuously left the house without it. No voice note capability, nothing to jot down this ephemeral piece of genius, and even worse, I can feel it evaporating like rain hitting a hot metal roof, just like that last brilliant idea I had in a dream that one time…

There is a solution; I repeat it to myself all the way home, and the pedestrians who would normally smile when they meet my eyes, cross the street instead.

Ideas like this also happen in the shower, because the imagination totally understands there is nowhere reasonable to take notes while you have shampoo in your hair and it loves watching you scrawl illegible shorthand in the steam on the shower door.

The actual point is that writing may happen at your desk, but usually, what happens at the desk is the translating of ideas into readable text.

The actual writing mostly happens when it looks to Hanan as if I am doing nothing at all. I can’t tell you how much that drives her nuts.

Imaginary Work Versus Actual Deliverables

Hanan believes in stories; she has seen the blank pages slowly fill, and she respects creativity, though I believe she respects it more in our writer friends than in me, perhaps because only with me does she have the weird, daily grind of this kind of conversation:

Shamim gets up from her computer and offers to make tea.

In my mind, I am questing through a landscape that is still creating itself, throwing up more questions than answers, listening for instinct, and I know, somehow, things will start to take shape at some point. Hanan would like to know if this fluidity will be 5000 words by Friday, and if I was aware that I’ve exceeded the blue cells she had allocated to this chapter on her spreadsheet.

I exaggerate (but not much). Also, she has a point. But I do too.

To write fiction, your imaginary world has to feel utterly real. It can live next to the existing world, the one everyone says is real. The one with the taxes, the dentist, the dodgy Eid Mubarak graphics on WhatsApp. But even in the airport check-in queue, in your head, a marriage can suddenly end, or an antidote be discovered.

If you’re an airline person asking me if I’m carrying flammable liquids and a machine gun in my suitcase and I nod distractedly; trust me, it’s just that someone suddenly died in Chapter Ten.

Protecting Something That Isn’t There Yet

This, more than the meditation, and the music, and the hours at the desk, is what I truly believe a writer has to learn to protect:

You have to protect the recesses of your imagination where the lives and worlds that don’t yet exist for anyone else are forming.

They matter more than invoices, that password you can’t remember, the online shopping return that’s been sitting in your hallway for three weeks, and voicemail.

Nobody else is going to protect that pretend life for you, mostly because they don’t know it exists and no-one is going to tell you they are worried about the woman you’ve had sitting in a café for the past week, while the school holidays have happened.

Only you can do that.

So keep going, keep coming back to the pages, after the kids, the job, the groceries; if you keep coming back, your imaginary friends will always know where to find you. And, you know, Hanan is, annoyingly, still right. You have to write the damn thing.

With several imaginary people, one terrifyingly real deadline, and a long shower that I will always insist counts as work,

Shamim

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And some things have not changed at all.

Hanan, for example, is still extremely good at getting me to do things I would much rather complain about doing.

I spent the morning trying not to whine that she was nagging me to finish an interview. I didn’t succeed, but my wife has an uncanny ability to tune out the sound of my complaining. She simply continued to ask me if I’d finished the work at regular intervals until I realised it would be better for my own sanity to just do it.

It is this exact technique which makes her such an effective mother, not to mention film producer, and since I see from the romantic comments on Facebook that some of you are longing for your own Hanan, I suggested to her (after the 12th time she nagged me) that we should list her on www.enlightenment productions.com as a ‘Special Offer’ alongside ‘The World Unseen’ and ‘I Can’t Think Straight’ DVD and soundtrack packages.

And since there have always been people who seem to long for their own Hanan, I suggested that perhaps I should put her up for sale.

One careful, lady owner.

Excellent condition.

Highly efficient.

Will organise your life whether you want her to or not.

Hanan suggested that instead of complaining to her, I should complain to my fans. So here I am.

I don’t mean a word of it, obviously. I am also very aware that there has long been a queue of women waiting for her, and the majority are younger, thinner and often considerably more French than me.

So I watch my back. Or, at least, Hanan’s front.

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Later that day, we were at a birthday party, and I found myself sitting with a group of women discussing clothes, shoes and — my personal specialist subject — make-up.

While I received a lesson in what exactly one is supposed to do with an anti-ageing bronzer (Polish the silverware? Roast it for dinner?), I heard gasps of astonishment from the mothers clustered around Hanan.

One may have hit the floor in a dead faint.

I assumed Hanan had started explaining one of the more intimate scenes from I Can’t Think Straight again, but no. The conversation had simply turned to age, and nobody could believe hers.

I can tell you now, it isn’t bronzer or foundation that makes her look the way she does.

I don’t think it is even having such a low-maintenance wife.

It’s the genes.

Which is why I’m not giving her up that easily.

She may nag me. She may organise me. She may ask me whether I have finished something several times before breakfast.

But she is also the apple of my eye.

The rose upon my lips.

And I’ll go no lower anatomically.

For now.

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I love a good Buy Now button, when I’m sure about what I want. It’s not unlike Donald Trump - loud, often orange, and extremely hard to miss. Also, like Trump, it keeps no promises. There’s no guarantee that the thing you’re about to buy will be good for you, or work, or that it will even look remotely like the beautifully lit photo that got your finger to hover over it. But it’s incredibly persuasive at 10.48 p.m. when you need a birthday present for someone you love whose birthday was yesterday. Sure - you could take till midnight to research who actually owns the company, examine its supply chain, find an indie alternative, compare delivery costs and set up yet another account with a password requiring that needs fourteen digits and the name of your oldest niece. Or you could just press that glowing, neon button. The item may even hit your doorstep before you actually wake up and wonder if you even ordered it.

It’s the mental equivalent of one of those moving walkways at the airport. You just have to step onto it and hold still long enough for it to take you right to where somebody else has decided you should go. Terribly convenient. And what’s wrong with that, I hear you cry? What idiot has time to search out the inconvenient?

I don’t either. But you have to admit, convenience is turning out to me quite the compromise. Mega corporations have spent untold billions on consultants, marketers, and UX experts to erase the tiniest pauses between impulse and purchase. They remember my card details, can mysteriously predict what I want even though I swear I never even mentioned to Hanan that I secretly wanted a grater that could thinly shave the parmesan cheese I eat once a month. Then there’s the horrific flashing message that threatens that 834 people are also looking at the same thing (and there are only 12 of these graters left!), and finally, that free delivery that shows you an animated van inching, reassuringly, towards your house.

Meanwhile, the independent shop’s website looks like it was thrown together by the owner’s nephew who might not have been quite the tech genius he seemed when he was playing Fortnite for weeks at a time. You may have to email someone at a hotmail address. They email back the next day. It’s all very 2003.

So why bother? Glad you asked. I’ve noticed that convenience is training us out of agency. Waiting an extra delivery day feels unreasonable. Walking to a smaller shop feels like a time suck. Paying a little more for something made by a person earning a decent wage feels like a compromise somewhere else in our personal finances. So we trudge back to what we know, buying from the same brands, owned by the same groups of corporations – because the money behind all this shopping variety we seem to have often flows up to the same few conglomerates.

The cheapest option is usually cheap because someone else already paid.

Boycotting interrupts that journey. Because the money you spend doesn’t stop at the store. It flows up to shareholders and to the massive private equity companies (State Street, Vanguard, Black Rock) that own those large chains of shops and, actually, half the stock market. Eventually maybe it goes into AI weapons research, or to profit the illegal settlement where Coca-Cola is bottling its regional stock, or a lobbying budget aimed squarely at you. Or it could be because the plastic bottle of chemicals (hello again Coke!) that took a second to open takes four hundred years to leave the planet, taking much of your gut biome with it (no, I can’t medically prove it, and you know they’re not paying for that research, but you know it’s true).

There are crummy small businesses too. I really want to grab a hose and spray my smug window cleaner sometimes. But it’s the overall shift in the tide of spending that does make a difference, though. Are we moving a little more money towards people and businesses we want to sustain, and a little less towards those whose conduct we would rather not reward?

For me, especially when I don’t have the time to think about it, the quickest route to making fast, painless decisions is to internalise three basic rules – imperfect, but not unenjoyable:

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I was born in London to South African Indian parents who left in the early 1960s because of apartheid. In practice, I think they got tired of not being able to sit on certain benches, go to certain cinemas and beaches, of using back entrances because the front door was ‘Whites Only’ and of having to move home when their areas were no longer open to them to live in as people of colour. They missed home, even in this form. They still spoke the state-mandated language of Afrikaans at home as my sister and I grew up, and longed for the Mediterranean fruit, the apricot jam, the dried beef biltong.

All of this is to say that South Africa was a force in my life, a shadow of loss and disgust at its horrific apartheid laws, long before it ever touched me as a snatch of school history lesson. My very first novel, The World Unseen, reimagined my grandmother’s life in her small hamlet outside Pretoria, alone in a vast landscape and a small shop, with a husband, several children and no idea she might choose her destiny. Of course, thank you fiction; in my version, her destiny was helped along by a feisty young woman she meets along the way…

Years later, we held charity premieres of two of our films, including The World Unseen, in aid of the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund.

So Mandela Day means something to me, even though it passed two weeks ago, while I was busy on set, shooting something, or perhaps while I had no idea it was even 2026, never mind July. But that’s another story.

Sixty-seven minutes is an awkward block of time.

It spills over the calendar block of an hour. It’s too long for a tea break, but not long enough to justify taking the afternoon off. Yet, every 18 July, the UN and the Nelson Mandela Foundation ask us to take at least 67 minutes from our busy lives to help others. And the number isn’t scientific or anything more than a bit random; it’s one minute for each of the 67 years Mandela gave to public service.

So it is kind of random, as a number, if we’re honest. Still, why not do it? Why not find a nice image of Madiba against a setting sun, with maybe a dove in the background somewhere and a gold font quotation, that evokes the family Whatsapp group Eid Mubarak graphics. Something we can share and post because, you know, justice is good. And seeing Mandela passing through my social feeds like this reminds me, at least, to be less grouchy in zoom meetings.

Mandela, After the Edit

I make movies, I love editing and trust me, I fully get the lure of the edit. So many things you couldn’t control in the script or the shoot can be removed or finessed into perfection.

What’s not so great is when the same thing happens to our history. Nelson Mandela is held up as proof that patience and dignity will eventually triumph. But it’s also true that Mandela was banned, arrested and prosecuted for organising against the state. In 1962 he was sentenced to five years for incitement and for leaving the country illegally. In June 1964, at the end of the Rivonia Trial, he and seven co-defendants were convicted of sabotage and sentenced to life.

The South Africa I Inherited

Apartheid was cruel. It still is, in places like Palestine, where Israel implements it with separate roads, different coloured license plates for non-Jews, military law for Palestinians living in Palestine (welcome to being held without charge indefinitely!) and civil law for Israelis, checkpoints for Palestinians, none for Israelis. The list goes on. Like Israel, South Africa had identity documents and clerks/police/soldiers who went home for dinner after a day spent ensuring other people’s humiliation.

Which is why Mandela mattered so very, very much. But apartheid was not defeated by a single man with exceptional moral qualities. It was worn down by movements, organisers, lawyers, workers, students, families, prisoners, and vast numbers of people whose resistance was never recorded at all. And by those from outside who embraced the power of boycotting.

But it all sounds terribly tiring, doesn’t it?

A quotation is more doable. A quotation doesn’t care what your ISA or IRA is invested in, and it doesn’t ask you to stop getting your overly large Starbucks or to stop drinking the chemicalised water that is Coke, because they operate out of illegally built settlements in East Jerusalem. It doesn’t require another password, or to give up that juicy Booking.com discount.

You post it, agree with yourself, and get on with your day.

I have done it. But it doesn’t take 67 minutes.

Too Small for Grandstanding

So back to the question of this hour and a bit. It’s not enough, is it?

You can’t spend an hour and seven minutes at a food bank and come out thinking ‘That’s world hunger solved!’ You can’t even do a film screening, dammit, unless it’s the version that Hanan always wanted, because she got tired of watching it 300 times during post production.

But 67 minutes is long enough to interrupt us and the monotony of our routines. We all wake up, scroll, answer an email, sit in traffic, work, shop, cook, watch, sleep. The world stays a mess, but the routine, the prescribed stuff you have to get done, carries you through the worst of it, day in and day out.

Sixty-seven minutes drops a little teaspoon into the machinery and makes it shudder. Maybe the machine will mangle it and carry on – but one day, maybe, the machine will break.

What Fits Into 67 Minutes

1. Write to your MP. Not that magnificent letter you composed in your head while washing your hair, in which you teared up before reducing Parliament to silence. The real letter, with one specific request that this idiot public servant could do if he chose to. That’s the hour. The seven minutes could go on finding their email.

2. Ask a local aid group, food bank or charity campaign what would actually help. Many of them will welcome the question.

3. Help a neighbour fill in a form, collect a prescription, shift something heavy, or do some shopping for them while they’re laid up or busy with the kids.

4. Read something for an hour. Not sixty minutes scrolling through IG or YouTube but a book or article that tells you something you didn’t know but always meant to ask. Why is South Africa free of legal apartheid but still a world of townships versus massive wealth? Or read Palestine Revealed, my wife’s book which makes that history readable, clear and a page-turner.

5. Find a better news service. CBS and CNN now sit under David Ellison’s Paramount, waved through by Trump’s Justice Department. Larry Ellison is the world’s biggest private doner to the IDF, who the UN have confirmed use rape and torture on Palestinians, and who continue a genocide, killing every day during a ‘ceasefire’. Lachlan Murdoch holds Fox News and the Wall Street Journal outright, his trust locked in until 2050. Three of the four biggest US newsrooms answer to men with high-stakes businesses entangled with the political administration they are supposed to cover.

6. Set up a standing order. A modest one. Especially a modest one, if that’s what makes it survivable. We all subscribe to a bunch of things that profit our tech bro overlords. See if you can help with a couple of dollars a month to something that matters to you.

7. Pick one thing you buy repeatedly and find out who profits. Then change it where you realistically can. Do you need Spotify when there are other streaming services with the same choice who pay artists better and whose founder is not funding AI weapons? Consumer choice will not topple an economic system overnight but it’s already making change —corporations do not spend billions on advertising because our choices are irrelevant.

Most useful work is uncinematic, and resistant to good lighting. It looks like emails, standing orders, spreadsheets, lifts to hospital, and setting out endless plastic chairs.

It took me a while to figure out that Mandela Day is not an invitation to cast myself as the man himself.

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When the Timer Stops

And when that hour is over, well - perhaps the letter to your MP becomes another letter. Perhaps the hour becomes a weekly thing. Perhaps getting drawn in by a history not written by the colonisers changes how you read the present. Perhaps, after 67 minutes of looking at something, you don’t want to go back to not seeing it.

So: choose one thing. Give it 67 actual minutes — not twelve minutes of activity and fifty-five spent finding the right photograph (and, trust me, I’ve been there).

And tell me in the comments, if you’d like, not for the applause emoji, though I do know how to throw those around now. But in case someone else can borrow it, adapt it, or take it somewhere you couldn’t. Small acts do not stay small even if they start that way.

With 67 minutes, an inconvenient number of browser tabs, and no dove flying over a sunrise,

Shamim

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When the invitation arrived by WhatsApp, I said yes before I’d thought about it properly, which is how quite a few things in my life happen, and honestly, I’d decided years ago that this was probably not a bad recipe for life. Just say ‘Yes!’ to things that sound delightful. This invite was from Sarah Rench of Represent AI and Nikki Chubb of Mint - a Q&A with me, followed by a book-signing at the Century Club in Soho, in aid of the fabulous charity, Switchboard.

‘Lovely,’ I said. ‘How kind.’

‘Well, you are a bit of a legend for queer women,’ someone said.

I panicked. Legend? ‘Legend’ is what people say when they’ve run out of tenses. I started to worry that it was related, in my case, to ‘pioneer and still going’, and that what it really meant was: ‘we all love your films but we saw them a very long time ago.’

I began to fret in a way that made Hanan look up not even once from her spreadsheet; slowly shrinking into the small, cold worry that I would walk into a beautiful room in Soho and find eleven people in it, three of whom were related to me.

‘Everyone loves our films,’ Hanan said. ‘It’ll be packed.’

I was not to be so easily consoled. ‘The people who were born when I Can’t Think Straight and The World Unseen came out are 18 years old now,’ I said. ‘They’re all watching micro-dramas on their phones, or scrolling TikTok or worrying about climate crises. No-one will come. I’ll cancel…’

I looked over my wife’s shoulder to where she was turning every other cell of her Excel sheet a pale blue. The sheet was called ‘Shamim’s writing projects’. There were ten of these projects, and all the due dates were for August. This August. She sat back and regarded her work with a sigh of satisfaction. ‘Sorry, what was that?’ she asked.

I opened my mouth to complain, but the event hosts texted me at that very moment. The evening was sold out.

The room was elegant, London, beautiful; low light, high ceilings, smiling, happy faces. It filled up with a couple of friends but mainly with a great many women who have been part of this story for far longer than I had given them credit for. Hanan came, of course, and Luca, our youngest.

A lot of the audience had last seen Luca at the very end of I Can’t Think Straight, when he was around three years old, appearing in the final sequence, small, cute and completely oblivious to the fact that he was helping close out a love story.

And he was there now; a fully grown man with a philosophy, biceps and beard, who came to hear his mother talk about her career. I didn’t plan for that to be the emotional centre of my evening but in many ways, it was. It was as if the happy ending never stopped when the credits rolled. It kept going, got taller and got a (wonderful) girlfriend.

During the Q&A, hosted by Melanie Rickey, I talked with the audience about the work and what’s changed since 2008 and what maybe hasn’t. How it felt to make our movies; romantic films full of hope at a time when these were rare commodities in our lives and our industry. We also talked about AI; not whether it is here or any good, but about what happens when an artist doesn’t need to create. Do we ever not need to create? What do we lose if we lose our solitary struggle with words on a page, the echo of characters’ speech in our heads, the stress of being stuck before awaking at 4 a.m. with the thrill of a solution. Or years of apprenticeship, the terrible first drafts, the slow accumulation of craft that comes from doing the work endlessly, year in, year out, until you know in your bones the beautiful truth that you are a writer or director or musician. Does AI, which has learned (stolen?) everything any of us has written, published, thought, posted, created - have the right to exist when it exists on the back of our output. Why should all of us not own it, if it should continue?

It felt like a wide-ranging conversation and at first I wondered whether AI and my movies had anything at all to do with each other, but by the end I realised that perhaps they did.

Twenty years ago the question was whether our stories would be told at all — and if they were, whether we’d be permitted to end them well. Now the question is who, or what, will tell them. The anxiety we felt back then has shape-shifted, but the stakes lying beneath it haven’t really changed.

The stakes are about authorship, about who holds the pen and who decides how it finishes.

The signings afterwards went on longer than anyone had scheduled for, which is the best kind of logistical failure, I feel.

And what kept replaying in my mind late that night when I was too keyed-up to sleep, wasn’t the sold-out room, but instead what people said at the book-signing table, over and over, in so many poetic and blunt and heartfelt ways. It wasn’t just that they’d enjoyed our films; it was that these films had let them believe something.

I guess sometimes I forget what our shelves looked like then. If you were a queer woman in a film, particularly a woman of colour, the outcome was often reliable and often depressing: sometimes you died, often you were left, or you went back to a husband, or you paid in some other bizarre way. The story existed, but mostly as a warning.

Desire was the setup but the payoff was, too often, punishment.

We wrote a happy ending instead between two people who intuited from the start that they were meant to be, but needed to take the film to get there. It was the film I wanted to watch but over the last two decades (and one evening in Soho) I have found, or remembered, that for a lot of people it served as evidence - that you could come out and the world would not collapse. That your family could struggle with it, but the struggle was their burden and perhaps not even yours at all.

So - a huge thank you to the wonderful, wonderful people who spent days and days organising this evening so that I could fret that nobody would come, and then swan in and tell my story. But the evening was made by the amazing audience, filled with women who had been carrying their own stories and who took the time to share them, even briefly with me.

The glow stayed with me all the way until the next morning when I clicked open Hanan’s blue spreadsheet. Then, reader, I wept.

With love, gratitude, and ten rapidly approaching August deadlines,

Shamim

No-one loves a fountain pen like I do, and I still cling on to my DVD and Blu-ray collection, but I like to think I’m pretty decent with technology.

I use my laptop every day, a lot. I can create a look book, upload files, set up a Zoom in three different time zones, and easily move things from one cloud storage folder to another cloud folder so fast that I can never find them again.

I have made feature films, too, so I understand digital capture (while politely hiding my yawning from the tech genius explaining it to me); I get that sensor size, as well as emotion, influences my lens choice; I have sat in sound mixes and said things like “that footstep needs more reverb,” without feeling like a complete fraud, though possibly sounding like a smart-ass.

So, my relationship with microphones is not fear-based, nor did a relationship even much exist before a recent podcast we recorded. I don’t think about my mic that much. It just does what it does.

Then came this podcast.

Hanan, of course, was ready. She had read the research, compiled endless notes, and offered questions that roamed around before segueing with impressive elegance into empire, memory, and all the ways that powerful people arrange the past so they come out looking civilised. All of this kind of input is her part of the bargain.

My part as co-host, as you may have gathered from an earlier Substack, is to do the tech support, and I was also ready. At least, I had checked the link. Also, the recording software and yes, even the microphone, several hours before, which is the kind of impressively forward-thinking behaviour that the universe should, in my opinion, be amply rewarding.

But no. Seven minutes before the guest joined, I sounded like I was broadcasting from inside a tube in a water park.

The Mic of Betrayal

The microphone was connected, according to my laptop; also according to the podcast platform. A happy little green light shone from said microphone. And yet the sound coming through sounded like the final, gurgled words of a woman trapped in a fish bowl.

“Say something,” Hanan said.

“I am saying something.”

“You sound terrible. Why?”

“I don’t know,” I responded through gritted teeth.

Hanan sniffed, and looked at her phone. ‘He says he’s joining now.’

Early!! Why would our guest join early? I felt a jolt of panic and all I could remember was my mother telling me it was polite to show up for dinner at someone’s house ten minutes late. Never, ever, early.

Spurred by Hanan’s appalled expression and the opening of her sentence which was: ‘I thought you said you checked…’ I desperately clicked (again) all the audio settings.

As a last-ditch Hail Mary, I unplugged the microphone and plugged it back in, because this somehow still remains the key ritual of modern civilisation, and definitely remains the cornerstone of my tech support skills.

Still nothing.

The guest popped up in the virtual waiting room smiling and nodding, while I was still wrestling my input source to the ground. I clicked to another menu. My headphones stopped working. I clicked back. Now I could hear myself half a second after speaking.

It makes you question not only your audio setup, but your entire personality and possibly the meaning of the space/time continuum.

Meanwhile, Hanan’s sound was perfect, clear, serious. While exchanging pleasantries with our esteemed guest, she side-eyed me from her box on my screen with concern and a touch of disappointment. I think I may also have discerned a moment where she wondered whether, thirty years ago, she had mistakenly chosen the defective model as a life partner.

It sucks to be defeated by something that worked an hour earlier, so I kept at it while muttering excuses that sounded sad even to me.

Then, suddenly, miraculously, the sound corrected itself.

‘Shamim’s great with technology,’ Hanan reassured our guest, beaming. Shamim didn’t have a damn clue what had made the difference, but I nodded sagely, surreptitiously blotted a sheen of stress sweat from my face, and we began.

The Camera Lied

Sadly, there was more.

You may have ascertained that, in general, glamour is not my vibe. I also think it’s probably unlikely that anyone is tuning into a conversation about dispossession, archives, Palestine and moral responsibility because they are concerned about my cheekbone definition. Still, one hopes to look more or less alive.

But while Hanan looked fine, her background crisp, her video feed sharp. I looked like some 1980s security footage from a bank in a small, provincial town. Hanan couldn’t help but mention it, even in front of our guest.

I tried to laugh it off (‘I look better in soft focus!’). I tried to sell it as an artistic choice (‘cinematic blur, so filmic!’) Hanan wasn’t buying it, but I suddenly remembered that our podcast software taped everything in crystal clear brilliance no matter what crummy Wi-Fi speed you had, so we soldiered on.

Our guest had lots to say and much of it about whose perspective gets archived as history, and whose is erased. It was poetic and revealing about how official documents that we consider to be the truth are often written by powerful bodies who are serving interests that are not ours. The result? True archive and memory is carried in camps, on farmland, in recipes, oral stories, keys, songs, and silences.

It made me forget, for a while, to check the red recording light every few seconds. It made me forget that I still looked like I was wearing nylon tights over my head.

What took over was grace, and honesty, and the pleasure of real conversation about real things. It made all the tech headaches seem petty and also so worthwhile. That this brilliance had been preserved, on video, for posterity.

Or so I thought.

Gone but Not Forgotten

If there’s one sentence no-one ever wants to hear, it’s ‘I can’t find the recording.’ Well, also maybe ‘we need to talk’ and ‘I don’t think it’s contagious’. But I digress. After we were done, and Hanan and I had agreed that this was one of the all-time great podcasts, I checked the folder where the recording should be. Reader, it was empty. I checked my downloads, for what reason, I don’t know, but it felt better than lying down and weeping. Nothing. I checked the cloud, and the library files on my computer, and the guest’s name, the episode title and ‘podcast recording’ in every misspelled permutation.

Desperate, I started to scroll through YouTube videos of other people who had lost recordings on this very software and found them again. They were all liars.

“It must be somewhere,” Hanan said, tossing her curls. ‘Ask the AI’

‘Ask the AI’ has recently become a sort of weird watchword from Hanan that she throws at anything that feels beyond her, but mostly me.

‘How,’ I demanded of my wife, ‘is ‘the AI’ going to help this situation? It is not our friend, Hanan. It’s not smart, it’s some kind of data scraping large language learning model that has no idea where the podcast is, and you know what, we should want to keep it that way. Imagine if that thing just crawled over my entire hard drive and sent it to Palantir, Mossad, the CIA and MI5. They’ll come get us for thinking about expressing sympathy for children bombed by white phosphorus.’

I finished my rant, sniffed self-righteously and stared at her, waiting.

‘Did you say something?’ Hanan asked, removing an AirPod. ‘I was listening to a voice note from cousin Muna.’

Eventually, of course, I found it. Everyone sounded and looked good.

We had made a podcast.

The Bit Nobody Sees

Most finished things are held together by a ton of work that we never get to see. Preparation, panic, persistence, exhaustion and the willingness to keep going anyway.

But (you knew the lesson was coming!) here is what I learned from the panic. We’d done an entire podcast about being erased, about voices not heard or silenced or disappeared when the political or other systems around it are hostile, or when they just don’t care. After which, I spent the evening discovering, in a tiny way, exactly how that loss and erasure might feel. The difference, of course, is that my voice, our podcast, came back. I got a file in an unnamed cloud and, thanks to a Reddit thread, a happy ending. The people we had been talking about did not. There is no restore or back up option for a demolished village, only a key kept in a drawer, and the names of those taken, missing, or lost in grief passed down at kitchen tables in places that will never feel like home.

So we keep fighting the cables and mics; because behind every preserved voice is some technically-challenged storyteller with a million tabs open and a stressed out gaze — and that, it turns out, is actually okay.

With love, dodgy cables, dodgier files, and the quiet resolve to press ‘Record’ again,

Shamim

Stories have always been my way of making sense of the world.

They’ve allowed me to explore love, identity, belonging and the connections that bring us together, even when our lives may look very different. One of the greatest joys of making films has been meeting people whose own stories have found a place alongside mine. Every conversation reminds me that stories don’t truly belong to the person who creates them—they grow through the people who connect with them.

I’m really looking forward to spending an evening with you in London, thanks to Mint and RepresentAI, who have invited me to be part of the Mint Cultural Series.

We’ll spend the evening in conversation, looking back at the journey behind films including I Can’t Think Straight, The World Unseen and Polarized. I’ll be sharing exclusive film previews and talking about the inspiration behind the stories, the creative process and some of the people who have shaped the work along the way.

There will also be time for an audience Q&A. I always enjoy hearing how these stories have connected with people, so I’m looking forward to the conversation very much.

Whether we’ve met before, you’ve followed my work for years, or you’re simply curious about the stories behind the films, I’d love to share the evening with you.

An Audience with Shamim Sarif

📅Tuesday, 21 July 2026 (6.30pm–10pm)

📍The Century Club 61–63 Shaftesbury Avenue London W1D 6LQ

After the conversation, we’ll have drinks and the chance to continue talking together in a more informal setting.

Reserve your place

🎟️Book your ticket on Eventbrite

I’m also delighted that the evening proudly supports Switchboard, the UK’s LGBTQIA+ helpline, whose work continues to make a meaningful difference to so many people.

Hosted by Mint and RepresentAI, the event will bring together film lovers, creatives, professionals and members of the LGBTQ+ community for an evening of storytelling, conversation and connection.

Since 2006, Mint has been creating LGBTQ+ events and experiences centred on culture, community and bringing people together.

I hope you’ll be able to join us. It would be a real pleasure to spend the evening with you.

With stories, connection and love,
Shamim Sarif

Breakfast has always been one of my three favourite meals. It’s the most manageable too. Toast, eggs, coffee; perhaps a mushroom or two. It is not lunch with its potential meal-deal hell and other assorted sandwich-related disappointments. It’s also not dinner, with expectations, candles, guests, and Hanan asking whether I realised the napkins are creased, which I had not, because I am a person trying to survive in this insane world, not a forensic linens expert.

My beliefs about breakfast being simple and quiet and relaxed were exploded not long ago, when Hanan and I walked into a Palestinian restaurant in London, Ontario, one weekend morning. I was there for work, which meant we had recently landed in a hotel room. This meant no kitchen, too many bags, too few chargers, and killer jet lag. We missed being at home.

‘Let’s go get breakfast,’ I suggested, and we walked out onto the street outside the hotel and looked for somewhere to eat, each of us in our own particular ways. For me, that meant staring at my phone and scrolling like a demon, trying to evade the rubbish restaurant chains that Google was serving up and evaluating whether the self-consciously homey option was pseudo or worth a try. For Hanan, it meant striding onto the pavement and accosting two women who happened to be passing by.

‘Are you Palestinian?’ she demanded, in Arabic.

I died on the spot. This was Canada, and I was fresh off my film crew sub-courses about Respect in the Workplace, which had taught me in agonizing detail, with many, many, animated powerpoint slides, that making an assumption about anyone’s ethnic background could be construed as a micro-aggression at best.

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However, within moments of Hanan’s summary halting of these strangers (during which time I barely managed to dismiss one Tim Horton’s on my phone stream) names had been exchanged, families identified, and the best breakfast place in the city had been insisted upon. We went there and walking in was the exact same phenomenon, except now with a staff of four. The waitresses greeted Hanan the way you greet a cousin you haven’t seen since 2005 but who you really loved back then. There was hand-clasping, someone may have wept, and we had not yet even looked at a menu. It turned out we didn’t need one.

The Breakfast that Refused to be Efficient

The dishes began to arrive, alighting on the table like a flock of birds.

First one, then three, then six, then two of the waitresses pushed up another table to join our existing one, so we wouldn’t starve. There was labneh, thick and cool, with olive oil pooled on top. Za’atar, olives (two kinds), hummus, a platter of ful medammes, warm and earthy. Then fresh, hot falafel, accompanied by tahini sauce, ripe tomatoes and crisp cucumbers. Pickles. Herbs. Hot puffy bread, and omelettes.

Extra stuff flowed over because our waitress wanted to know what we thought. Hanan would taste, swallow and, on one occasion, send back some chicken livers which, though pleasingly tart thanks to pomegranate molasses, were slightly chewy. I was mortified, but the waitress was not. This was correct. This was how she knew Hanan was to be trusted. She offered another dish instead and poured mint tea with a temporary air of penance. In the meantime, I tried endless little bowls of things that demanded to be scooped, dipped, dragged through oil. I ate a few bites, haplessly and happily, till I noticed Hanan looking at me sadly.

‘What?’ I mumbled, through a mouthful of something divine.

Hanan tore a piece of bread and built a bite herself — labneh, za’atar, oil, in the right order and amounts, in moments — then handed it back as if giving me one more chance to be worthy of this feast of a breakfast. Naturally, it was perfect.

The first was proof that breakfast did not have to be a rushed bowl of sad cereal or, even worse, a pop tart, bolted down while standing before hurtling into the day to prove one’s economic usefulness. We’ve all been suckered into that belief over years of capitalism that ensure very few of us anymore can take our time over this sacred meal on any day of the week.

This breakfast, in contrast, had absolutely no interest in being efficient, or solitary, for that matter. We could not eat it well without reaching, passing, asking, offering, correcting, and smiling. It needed our attention, our appetite, though, notably, not our greed. There is something about sharing all these plates that keeps your awareness on those you are eating with, and making sure they have all the elements they need.

And the second proof was that a strange little hierarchy I have carried, and that so many of us have carried, was fully challenged; the idea that somehow, food from Palestine or anywhere non-Western is not quite as sophisticated. We’re all learning better, but I grew up with that lie – that eating Indian food at home was great, but not gourmet. Colonisation did not just take land, resources, names, and lives; it also took confidence, and sometimes, pride. It taught entire peoples to see themselves through the eyes of those who had arrived to diminish them. It created categories and told us those categories were natural.

It is an old trick, and incredibly useful one if your actual project involves theft.

We’ve seen it in occupied Palestine, where the people are told, daily and often at gunpoint, that they are lesser — while their hummus, their falafel, their za’atar, their salty Nabulsi cheeses, their hand-rolled maftoul, and smoky freekeh grains are quietly stripped of their owners, issued new papers, and sold back to the world as Israeli cuisine, and God help us, lifestyle, even. The dispossession comes with its own recipe card.

Shades of India, where the British turned up appalled that anyone would eat with their fingers, stayed two hundred years, and left having decided that Chicken Tikka Masala — a recipe essentially invented to reassure a nervous English palate — was their national dish. They could not deal with the people, but they sure took the food home.

So, that morning, looking at the table, the old hierarchy seemed not just cruel, but ridiculous.

The food was seasonal, varied, and healthy and had the added benefit of having no Gwyneth-style influencer gushing that it was also gut-friendly or plant-forward. There were beans, herbs, vegetables, olive oil, bread, fermented dairy, sesame, spices, pickles — everything the contemporary West keeps rediscovering at great expense, often after separating it from the people who knew it in the first place.

The ful had depth and intense savour, the labneh had coolness and tang. The olive oil just blossomed the flavour of everything it touched, including the za’atar which tasted like memory ground into fragrant herbs and seed. The pickles cut through richness, and all in all, not one single dish was trying to be the star. The pleasure is in combination, in the bite Hanan built for me, in the knowledge that the grassy oil needs the bread which needs the herbs.

It’s culture.

Not culture displayed behind glass in the British Museum (though there is some of that to be rescued, no doubt) but as the daily life of a people rooted in a place, a way of eating, living, thinking, talking together. Do I romanticise this too much? Of course I do! I love romance and also I am a novelist and food obsessed and can write florid prose at the drop of a hat.

But I will say it; no culture is perfect and no past was pure, and yes, I enjoy many, many things about modern Western life. I like central heating, and the idea of the NHS, and heated car seats in the winter, and I’m all over appropriating cacao from wherever it actually came from in an attempt to boost my antioxidants or whatever.

This is not an argument that says Western is bad and everything once colonised (or still colonised!) is good; it’s just a request for us to think about how we decided what counts and what doesn’t, to consider the constant biases still fed to us by mainstream media.

Because the knowledge in that breakfast was not abstract. It has been tested by land, weather, migration, poverty, celebration, grief, harvest, exile, return, the hands of women and men feeding families, by market stalls, and abundance and also lack and making do with what might be left after a bad harvest or an unneeded war.

Palestinian life is so relentlessly argued over, denied, appropriated, fragmented, and renamed. A dish is never only a dish when the land that grew it is contested by people who would rather Palestinians did not exist, or could be removed. Olive trees are not just trees when they have been uprooted as policy. Seeds are not just seeds when return itself has been made political. Bread is not just bread when the people who make it are being told, in every possible way, that their belonging is negotiable.

Perhaps, at that point, breakfast becomes evidence; that a people have lived in relation to land, and cultivated, tended, preserved, seasoned, shared, remembered. To me, it is screaming evidence that civilisation was not something any of us ever lacked, but rather was being used as an excuse to take from them.

I realise this is a lot to extract from hummus before noon.

But maybe that is only because we have been taught to underestimate the intelligence of ordinary things; like food, the dishes that hold it, and the seeds, songs, recipes that lead to it. These are all small, repeatable acts through which a community and an entire people remain themselves when larger forces are trying to unmake them.

I wonder if empires prefer monuments because monuments can be looked up at, captured, renamed, roped off, and photographed. Food is much more troublesome. It keeps moving, changing, evolving. It also physically moves - travelling in suitcases, spice jars, handwriting, muscle memory.

As a child, we would trek to the homes of innumerable aunties who had smuggled real apricot jam, biltong and Peppermint Crisp chocolate bars into the UK from South Africa – giving my parents a longed-for taste of the home they lost because their skin colour was wrong.

The Palestinian breakfast also says ‘don’t eat alone’. And don’t eat on the run. ‘Sit. Eat.’ ‘Tear the bread’. ‘Pass that.’ ‘No, not that way. Try this. Have more, habibti…’

That is what made the breakfast feel quietly radical; because it revealed how narrow my own assumptions could be. How easily I still think of progress as speed, and convenience and personal choice. A single plate placed in front of a single person, with no obligation to anyone else beyond paying a surprisingly modest bill. And yet the best bite I had that morning was not the one I made for myself. It was the one Hanan made for me.

By the end, the table was wrecked in the best possible way. Olive stones. A last piece of torn bread hanging hopefully out of its basket. A streak of hummus where someone (me) had made one last hopeful pass.

‘Shukran,’ Hanan said to the waitress. ‘Thank you’.

‘Sharraftoona. You honour us,’ she replied, in Arabic.

I actually got teary.

It’s not that a Palestinian breakfast is better than eggs on toast, though, to be honest, it makes a pretty devastating case; or that one culture should replace another at the top of some imaginary ladder. The ladder is the issue; the old habit of looking at the world’s cultures and asking which ones are advanced enough to be taken seriously, when the better question is: what forms of intelligence have we been trained not to recognise?

When we left the restaurant, I had olive oil on my sleeve and sesame seeds clinging to my top. This happens to me more often than I would like, though less often than Hanan would claim. Outside, London, Ontario, carried on being itself — cars, shops, malls, that unreal feeling of a place you are passing through for work. But I felt different than when I had walked in. Fed, yes. But also corrected.

The world had told one story for a very long time. Then breakfast told another.

Shamim

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Just think about a book as an object. I did this not long ago, as Hanan and I packed (and repacked) our suitcases, moving from one film set to another film set in another country, and figuring out how to travel lighter. Losing a book felt a smart move. This particular one was heavier than Hanan’s loose leaf tea which travels in its own little tins, and the portable speaker which lets us play, in any hotel room in any country, the exact same six songs. The book, by contrast, had no constituency; Hanan, for sure, was not lobbying for the wad of paper, a brick with obvious weight. But I couldn’t ditch it. I had started to read it, and was already embedded in a place I’d never been before; a place I already enjoyed revisiting in my mind.

Books are like that. They sometimes force their way into our suitcases and shelves and our hearts - and then, if we’re really lucky, they keep unpacking themselves inside us for years, like the ghost of a scent that wafts past every now and then. They do their deepest work when we are young, perhaps. Before I had travelled, or loved, or lost, or struggled to write, or sat in a foreign room feeling the spare loneliness of being far from home, I had understood at least some of the complex facets of all of these human experiences just from reading. A novel does not compete with what we term ‘reality’ or ‘experience’ — it is the experience, its own imprint on our psyches and emotions and imaginations.

I don’t care what VR enthusiasts say; for me, reading is the true technology we have for genuinely inhabiting another life. Not observing it from outside but wearing the skin, tasting the food, starting to think and react and feel and love like someone we could never have known or even met in real life.

Which may be why the reality of a book can feel more authentic than the thing we are taught to call reality. The world comes at us through our senses, secondhand and unshaped — but a novel is built inside us, assembled from our own memory and imagination; that landscape on the page is literally made of us. It’s deeply intimate. It’s an immersion, a secret life you have just between you, your imagination, and the story.

I’m aware, looking at this upcoming list, that it reads to me now like a colonial inheritance — the classic English-lit canon I was raised on; the bookshelf of empire. That the canon could move me so completely doesn’t mean the canon was complete — and later my world cracked open to writers who unpacked the colonial experience itself, who wrote the lives that this list today leaves out, for another Substack. For now, here are the books that hit me early:

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Hanan was busy pitting olives, not the kind of work you can look away from; still, somehow, with her usual preternatural radar, she managed to spot this offending spoon, in my hand, from way across the kitchen.

‘No, Shamim.’

I froze, hand hovering over her homemade qalayat bandora tomato sauce that was, I swear, calling to me in a voice that would make Karen Carpenter sound like a hoarse bulldog.

‘What?’ I asked.
‘Not that spoon.’

I looked down at it, uncertain. “Why not this spoon?”

Hanan sniffed, and my heart sank. That sniff is never empty, I don’t care if it’s in a kitchen or a notes meeting, or over a shawarma takeaway. It is a sniff full of evidence. In this case, it contained the spoon, its history, the sauce, the integrity of the meal, every previous transgression I’d ever made, culinary or not, and, no exaggeration, the collapse of civilisation itself. I waited, tensely, without moving.

“That spoon is for serving,” she said, at last.
“I am serving.”
“You are tasting.”

Fine, she was right, but really? I was just trying to help (yes, by tasting) but here we were. Not just making dinner, but navigating a legal system with herbs.

When Hanan discovered the kitchen, she discovered that she actually adores cooking if the kitchen rules are followed. There are not just rules, mind you. There are sub-rules, also precedents, and none of these feel remotely intuitive to me.

There are pans with their own hierarchy, and fridge shelves that seem ordinary until you put one thing back in the wrong position and discover they have more protected status than UNESCO world heritage sites. There are teaspoons specifically for putting cacao into the base of an espresso cup (‘it’s not me being difficult,’ Hanan explains, her eyes aglow. ‘It’s all about the cacao/coffee ratio.’) There are chopping boards for onions and another for other vegetables lest they become tainted by residual onion taste. There are cloths for counters, cloths for hands, cloths for dishes, cloths for drying rinsed coriander, and cloths whose purpose remains, to me, classified.

I did learn the purpose of one of these classified cloths, once…

And I don’t want to experience that again. It was pale blue, folded into a precise square. I had just washed my hands. The cloth was there, waiting. What followed was not anger; I could have navigated anger. This was that quiet bit in The Sound of Music right before the Nazi boyfriend blows the whistle. Hanan looked at the cloth, then looked at me, then at the cloth again, as if hoping it might somehow give a different account of events. ‘That,’ she said, with quiet disappointment, ‘is the cloth for the saucers.’ Saucers? I’d last noticed a saucer when I was six, and my mother poured hot tea into it for me to drink (Indian friends, you know what I’m saying). But I sensed it was best to not engage about on this point. I poured a glass of wine instead, because those glasses were mine, they were for wine, and even without their own cloths, I loved them.

Weirdly, I never really thought of my wife as a cook, not in the early years. A gourmand, yes; someone who can sniff out the age of the parmesan grated over her pasta, or the fact that this particular hummus was made (the travesty!) with tinned chickpeas. A guardian of family recipes, most definitely. But not someone who thrives surrounded by potato peelings or a sink blocked with coffee grounds.

That has changed, as our relationship has progressed. Hanan is now home in the kitchen – any kitchen, actually, which is a good thing because we spend most of our year travelling around the world for work. She has a routine in these new kitchens, whether they are a decent size or just a sad cupboard and hotplate in a suite hotel.

She unpacks her mise-en-place. Tiny jars of sea salt, Turkish spice, Palestinian Za’taar and Sumac, and has me order sesame seeds (two colours), soy sauce and a good olive oil. Even if we’re forced to order in, due to lack of prep space, what gets delivered is merely the canvas upon which she bestows the genius of her flair for flavouring.

Watching her improve on a shop-bought rotisserie chicken is like watching the ruler of a small, edible nation-state. She is a kind and merciful tyrant, but she knows where the weak links are, and usually I am the main one.

‘Can you squeeze some lemon on this?’ she’ll ask.

‘Of course,’ I’ll say, cutting the lemon with alacrity.

She looks at me. ‘Oh, you cut it like that? Did you roll it first?’

This, too, is marriage.

To be clear, even out of the kitchen, I am more than competent. I have systems for my work; I have standards. I can sense an actor losing focus from another room. When directing, I have everything in the right pockets of my bag, and my script is marked up using blue font for cinematography, purple for actor notes etc. Yet, in my opinion, only Hanan’s need for order is domestic totalitarianism.

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If I move a scene in a script because the emotional truth of the character is not yet ready to absorb the previous beat, that is craft. If Hanan moves my hand three inches to the left because I am dripping lemon juice too close to the salad, that is control.

The infuriating part is that she is always right. The egg pan is better for eggs. The tomatoes do need to be perfectly ripe and to simmer for exactly the right number of hours to melt into the garlicky base. The herbs do need to be properly dried or the tabbouleh becomes ‘a joke’. Toasted pine nuts are not toasted when I brown them, only when she does.

And the food is spectacular.

I mean, close-your-eyes-and-moan level spectacular. And that’s just the dodgy, pre-cut mushrooms we got from the nearest supermarket in a small town four hours north of Toronto. Food that, in the past, made our dinner guests say they couldn’t possibly have more while holding out their plates. Which is good, because in our house, “I couldn’t possibly”, even if it’s just me and Hanan eating, is not a refusal. It is just the first round of negotiations. If a Palestinian woman hears you say you are full, she understands this to mean you are at least three spoonfuls away from nirvana and must be helped.

Yes, I can make jokes about the cloth hierarchy and the spoon laws and Hanan hearing me from another room when I have opened the oven “just to check,” releasing heat she had personally accounted for. But I know what I’m really watching.

I’m watching care take physical form. I’m watching labour I benefit from while pretending to be oppressed by it. I love the meal, I love Hanan’s beautifully appointed table. I love the flickering warmth of candlelight on people eating and laughing and reaching across each other, and I adore the shared food helping them becoming less guarded, more themselves.

I love leftovers packed into containers before anyone has asked, because friendship, in Hanan’s language, comes with good quality Tupperware.

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I want love to be spontaneous, flattering, cinematic, and effortless. Hanan understands that love is often logistical. She remembers who eats what, who tolerates tabbouleh only finely chopped, which son needs feeding rather than questioning, which dish carries memory, which needs (still) more lemon.

But also, I have come to understand, somewhere between the spoon and the saucer cloth, that the rules were never really about the spoon. Our kids are grown, we travel endlessly for work, so we don’t have a home now, so much as a year of other people’s kitchens, in other people’s towns — and what Hanan carries with her in those proliferating tiny jars, is home. Salt, Za’atar, Sumac. She reassembles it wherever we land, after I unplug the regulation 1990s coffee-maker and throw it in the back of the wardrobe. The boards and the cloths and the olive oil are not tyranny. They are the framework of a woman who knows what makes a home, who values the tastes and resilience of her Palestinian origins, and who has decided that we are worth the trouble.

The thing about food, especially Palestinian food in this moment, is that it carries history with it. Olive oil is not just golden liquid, it is the drizzle that makes a dish come alive. Rice is not just rice when women have carried recipes across borders, wars, displacements, and kitchens that were never supposed to replace the home that were taken from them. The kitchen becomes an archive where memory remains in the most stubborn way possible: by being eaten.

‘We are here,’ it says. ‘Eat. Have more.’

So I have stopped fighting it. Mostly. I rinse the rice until the water runs clear. I dry the leaves until they are actually dry. I roll the lemon before I cut it. I tell myself this is compromise, when it is actually the humbling business of being loved by someone with standards, which turns out to be the same thing as being loved perhaps more passionately than I deserve.

I’ll keep complaining, obviously. I have a brand to maintain.

But I’ll also keep returning to the kitchen. To hover and taste and be corrected. To be handed the right spoon with the air of someone granting me parole. To watch flat leaf parsley become tabbouleh, onions become sweetness, chickpeas become comfort, and for all of us, briefly, become the kind of people who sit at a table long enough to remember what truly matters – family, community, and hope.

With a clean spoon, a humbled ego, and only mild fear,
Shamim

If you don’t know that I co-host a podcast (The Enlightenment Podcast, since you ask), let me set the scene. Hanan and I are two women who have, between us, made films, run companies, raised extremely intelligent (read ‘incorrigible’) boys, and held opinions firm enough to get us removed from several WhatsApp groups. Yet, somehow, nine minutes before a podcast guest is due to pop onto our screens, we are fully defeated by the recording software. You know what? I lie - it’s just me that’s defeated, crushed, personally mocked by the software.

Behind the Scenes

Hanan’s work on the podcast takes days longer than mine. She researches, reads, creates the questions and co-presents. My job is mostly just to produce the podcast on the day, and just to clarify: ‘produce’ is a fancy word for being the IT department, and let’s just say the IT department is having a rough morning. On this occasion, we’re travelling, and the only fibre in our accommodations appear to be in the Weetabix and not the wifi cable. To add to my stress, Descript is convinced our guest is in the waiting room but it’s also telling me the waiting room is empty. My mic won’t turn on. As I watch the seconds tick down till we are due to start, I lose any ability to be rational and just start clicking things. I have never known what these things do, but maybe it’s time to find out. Somewhere, in another browser tab, Descript is transcribing my panicked muttering, including cursing in all the languages I know, with total accuracy and zero mercy.

Meanwhile, in another room, Hanan has discovered that she hates her background. She always hates her background.

‘Does this plant look like its dying?’ she wants to know. ‘No, I AM DYING,’ I want to say, but I run in and shove the plant into a corner. Hanan regards her screen again. ‘Maybe now this wall just looks depressing?’

She’s not wrong. The wall is now empty and grey and makes her look like she’s recording a proof-of-life video from a dodgy basement somewhere. I drag a floor lamp in behind her. ‘Better?’ I ask, suppressing my hysteria. No. We move it back.

‘Better?’ I ask again, but I no longer know what ‘better’ even means. By the time our esteemed guest’s face actually appears on screen — calm, composed, ready — I have sweated cleanly through my shirt and aged at least a year, and truly, I can’t afford to shave off a year at a time, not at this age. Hanan glances at me, red-cheeked, face scrunched in mental anguish, and asks if, next time, I could make a tad more effort in my personal appearance. You know, since I’m presenting this thing with her? I nod, helpless.

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There’s a bit of chit chat, before we start taping, during which I get back on my game. And then the guest starts speaking. The Enlightenment Podcast gives time to Palestinians and those working with and supporting Palestinians – accomplished writers, artists, doctors, aid providers, historians, activists, lawyers, who often get just a soundbite on mainstream media, and even then, they’re sometimes forced to confront people from ‘the other side’ who shout them down.

Not on our podcast. Stories, for us, are everything, and those who are doing extraordinary things usually have quite the life history to share. They start to answer Hanan’s incisive, gentle question. We start to hear about where they are from, what they’ve seen, the life events that shaped them. One of them has faced down armed, aggressive soldiers more times than they would have wanted. Another has been jailed for the crime of reporting accurately. Another has held dying babies in Gaza, not because they were mortally wounded, but because the formula he brought in his suitcases was confiscated by IDF soldiers at the border. And there I am, freshly traumatised by Descript, thinking ‘Could I have done that?’

Our podcast with Ahed Tamimi finished me off. If you don’t know the name, you know the photograph: a slight teenage girl with a curly ponytail and a face full of fury, fist raised at an Israeli soldier in full armour and a machine gun who dared threaten her family. Ahed looks fierce, and the soldier looks, frankly, unsure of how this is going to go.

She became a global symbol of Palestinian resistance before she was old enough to drive, essentially by refusing to be pushed into fear. In my mid-teens, I also raised an arm, but in a classroom, and only halfway and then, the instant the (admittedly scary) teacher looked up, I converted it smoothly into scratching my head. Same arm. Wildly different stakes. Even now, I have to pluck up the grit to confront an arsey waiter about bringing me the thing I actually ordered.

I always listen carefully as we tape this podcast, immersing in our guests’ fascinating worlds (and yes, obsessively checking the red dot is flashing or whatever); but sometimes I also quietly audition myself for their roles, and face the fact that I’d never get the part. It took me some time to get over this knowledge, but then I figured out that maybe I shouldn’t be trying to audition at all.

You see, I’d been picturing bravery as a scene. I’m a filmmaker and also, Hollywood colonised my youth; of course, I imagined it as a scene. Beautifully-lit, by the way, maybe even a touch of flaring sunset in the corner of the shot, achingly-scored, a real ‘moment’ — the soldiers taunting, the line you refuse to cross, the slow push-in on the defiant eyes. It’s all thrillingly dramatic. The problem with imagining courage as a series of filmic shots, though, is that you can end up spending your whole life waiting in your trailer, for someone to knock and ask you to be in a scene that, really, you never, ever, want to actually appear in. Nobody has taken my home, food, water. Nobody’s asking me to amputate a limb without anaesthesia. The fiercest terror I face on an average weekday is a spider in the bath and, trust me, I whinge like a brat till Hanan can catch it and throw it outside.

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But this is what the guests kept telling me, in different ways and about various catastrophes: there is no ‘scene’. Ahed didn’t stand there weighing her options like an actor nuancing a performance. By the time the soldiers were in front of her, the decision had already been made — months earlier, and a thousand times over, on every ordinary day she refused to pretend the thing in front of her wasn’t happening. The ‘moment’ I kept fixating on was just the part that got filmed. The tip of an iceberg with a whole sea of valour underneath, larger and more hidden, formed and hardened by constant, relentless apartheid and attempted degradations, day after day after day.

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Dr Ghassan Abu Sittah and Dr Nick Maynard are surgeons who keep heading back into Gaza to operate, again and again, to put people back together under bombardment with whatever is left in the room, in whatever is left of the buildings. And it’s not much as over 90% of the aid trucks agreed under the ‘ceasefire’ have not been let in.

On another plane entirely, Vivien Sansour saves seeds. Which sounds like a dream, until you understand that this is a woman moving heaven and (literal) earth to bet on a harvest she may never see; preserving the ancient, heirloom varieties of a homeland that is being stolen from under her, precisely because Israel is doing everything it can to take them, or erase them and often replace them, with European plants as well as poisoning wells and burning olive groves. Two of these heroes run toward the catastrophe; the other diligently preserves life in its smallest form as a gesture of care and resilience. All are people who’d decided, long before any camera turned up, long before we interviewed them, which way they were going to face.

I am not about to face down a soldier (yet, and I hope ever). But brave people all over the U.K. have faced down the Met Police and gotten arrested simply for peacefully protesting a genocide. So, the stakes seem higher than ever in our relatively privileged parts of the world. The lines of ‘democracy’ are blurring before I eyes, and free speech seems to be fine if you’re trashing immigrants but not if you’re standing up for Palestine. Maybe this is the one-step removed, retail version of bravery but it matters. It also stops letting you off the hook, because without all of us adding something – even one, small, bit to this process, to this protest - the system will do what it always does and chew up and spit out millions who, like us, deserve a peaceful life

It felt, for a while, as if the podcast was the easy, less feisty option; handing a microphone to people who’d actually risked something while I fiddled with the sodding software from the safety of my own house. But it at least gives these people a voice in a world where mainstream news gives the platform to those who checked their morals at Jeffrey Epstein’s door decades ago. The podcast is a refusal to look away, scheduled weekly, presented (sometimes) in a damp shirt.

And if you yourself haven’t got a podcast to perspire through, take heart: the possibilities for jumping into connection with the world, for starting to create it as it should be, are everywhere, and mostly free. It’s the thing you finally say to the relative who has once more complained about ‘immigrants’ over the roast chicken, instead of stress-eating another potato. It’s the three irritating minutes it takes to make yet another shopping account and invent yet another password you’ll forget by Thursday, so that your tea, or your sofa, comes from someone — anyone — not ultimately owned by Amazon and BlackRock and the handful of funds that would quite like the world kept exactly as profitable and miserable as it currently is. None of it is heroic. It just takes a tad more time and energy.

The default is frictionless on purpose. They want it that way. They want you unable to take a moment to reject the default. Don’t accept.

So for me and (I hope) for you - no soldiers, no scene. Just sometimes, other than a podcast, and social media, and donating to those doing incredible work in the field, there’s a keffiyeh, which I wear on set.

It is, I promise you, the least dramatic object on a film set filled with costume, lights and props. But when I walk onto the floor wearing it, I can feel the room quietly sort itself into those who hold your eye, a few who give the small nod, and a few who develop an intense new interest in the gaffer tape. Once in a while, sadly, one who is thinking ‘I’m not hiring her again’. It costs me almost nothing. Almost. Turns out that this “almost” is the whole of it — the difference between a Coca-Cola or a Starbucks I can refuse, and a scarf I keep wearing into the room, in front of people who’d just rather I didn’t, as we turn the cameras onto other people. Not brave, by any stretch of the imagination. Just facing the right way, and standing tall.

Shamim

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Here’s how most people think writing for film and television works: you sit somewhere peaceful and beautiful — a cabin in the hills, a Parisian café, a sun-drenched terrace with a view of some European citadel — and you dash off something brilliant (ideally with a fountain pen). Then you send it straight to an executive at a studio or a streamer who reads it, weeps gently, smiles in all the right places and calls to offer you tens of millions of dollars to make it exactly as you wrote it. In this idealised version, I say something humble, they tell me how unique my voice is, and after the mutual love-fest is over, we go off and make the show.

This has never happened to anyone, ever, including whoever is currently winning all the Emmys. It has certainly never happened to me, and I’ve been doing this long enough that if it were going to happen, the universe has had plenty of opportunity.

What actually happens is this. You write something. It goes to a producer, who doesn’t ever read it, or reads it and doesn’t want it, or (best case scenario) likes it but has thoughts. Then it goes to the wider production company, or mini studio, who have different thoughts. Then we all work on the pitch or the pilot script a lot more. Then the story gets pitched to a streamer or a network, where it’s heard and/or read by development executives, who have a whole new set of ideas, many of which contradict the producer’s thoughts, and some of which you’re fairly sure contradict each other.

But first, in case you are not familiar with the industry term ‘development hell’, let me explain what ‘development’ actually means. It doesn’t mean writing. Writing is the part you did, ages before, when you were still (relatively) young and full of promise. Development is the part where everybody else gets involved, and for some weird reason, it lasts eons longer than actually creating characters, scenarios, plot and dialogue from scratch. It’s the process by which a script and/or pitch for a series is read, discussed, questioned, reconsidered, restructured, and thoroughly taken apart like a pocket watch, by people who are confident they can put it back together. By the end, though, several of the parts will be left on the table and nobody will be quite sure if the watch will ever keep time in the same way.

But I digress. Before the Notes Call, I make tea, put a decent tee shirt over my pyjama bottoms, open my document, and sit down with a notebook and pen, embracing a quiet optimism. And why not? I know I wrote this beautiful piece of work, and more than that, I know it’s unimpeachably good, if not the best thing that has ever been written for the screen, and definitely better than ninety per cent of the crowd-pleasing claptrap this very company financed last year. Also, four busy executives have carved an hour out of their day for this call. People don’t block out time in their calendars to destroy you. That’s not how meetings work, at least outside the Oval Office. I join the Zoom, arrange my face into an expression of calm, creative openness, and briefly catch sight of myself next to my profile photo, which was taken eight years and a whole different face ago, but which I keep because, apparently, my latent vanity has no expiry date.

The call always begins warmly. “We loved it,” they say, and I thank them heartily, and for a brief, irrational moment I allow myself to believe this will be the entire exchange — a mutual appreciation of the work, followed by a return to our respective days as emotionally stable adults. They say it again, “We loved it!” and this time there’s a ‘but...’ at the end. This ‘but’ slips out gently, dressed as curiosity.

"What if it was mostly a romance?" Translation: everyone wants yearning since Heated Rivalry, and yes, your show is about a war crimes tribunal but hey, genocidists probably need love more than most people!

“Could the lead be more relatable to our core demographic?” This is code for ‘younger’, which is code for ‘cheaper’, which is code for someone with a TikTok following and an agent who’s not as tough to negotiate with.

This is where my non-existent acting skills get dusted off and dragged, squinting, into the sunlight. ‘Good note!’ I squeak, or if it’s really egregious: ‘That’s so interesting!’

But there is a version of the call that is less salesy and more about considered argument — professional, thoughtful, engaged, precise — where I defend what needs defending, and listen carefully to what is being said. Because sometimes (annoyingly often) most executives and producers are actually brilliant at cutting through the noise that’s holding the work back. Some notes I challenge immediately because they strike at the core of what the work is trying to do. Others, I let pass. Maybe not because I agree at that moment, but because I’m not yet sure whether I’m riled up for the right reasons. Sometimes I’m protecting the work and other times, I’m protecting my first instinct, and it takes a bucketful of experience and maturity to tell the two apart in real time.

And then, if I’m lucky, there are notes that make me feel slightly ill. Not because they’re wrong, but because they’re right, and I knew it all along and never dealt with it. Deep in the subconscious part of my mind, the part that woke me up about this very character at 4 a.m. in a cold sweat, but that I chose to ignore anyway. I knew that character’s inner journey was held together with some smart-ass dialogue, a punchy description of their attitude, and not much else. Or I knew the third act dramatic moment wasn’t quite character-grounded but hey, it was so clever, no-one would care...but someone noticed. And now I’m sitting there with my calm, open Zoom face, nodding thoughtfully, while my internal monologue is primarily the phrase “shit, shit, shit” on a loop.

By the end of it, we have, collectively, a set of notes. Some I have agreed with. A few I have gently resisted. Some I have placed in a folder called “To revisit when less convinced I’m right.” We thank each other. We agree it’s been a useful conversation. I say I’ll take some time to process and come back with thoughts. I hang up.

Hanan is usually on these calls as a producer, mostly listening and taking notes. She heads to the bathroom right after, right when I need her, but I don’t let that stop me. I burst in as she’s still washing her hands.

“Can you believe what they just said?” I begin, not even drawing breath before walking her through the call she just attended, in forensic detail, including the parts where I was particularly clever, persuasive and, most importantly, utterly correct. In this new version of events, already notably embellished from the reality of five minutes ago, I have navigated a series of well-intentioned but misguided notes with intelligence and restraint. I am an artist forced to contend with a bunch of suits, but hey, I dealt with it, and came out the other side with my integrity, and the conviction that art can win, and I am, actually, modestly, a genius. Somewhere in the background of my recounting, a lone violin plays.

Hanan listens, intently, until I stop rambling, and self-congratulating, and actually ask her what she thinks. “I agree with the notes,” she states.

This is a hundred times worse than the actual notes. Yet Hanan nods, smiles, and starts listening to a new three-hour voice note from cousin Muna. Just like that.

If the notes were entirely wrong, we would be comrades-in-arms right now; we would dismiss them, politely but firmly, and carry on. But they are not entirely wrong. They are right in ways that are deeply painful and irritatingly inconvenient, and usually exactly in the places you were hoping might go unnoticed.

‘I’m not seeing it,’ I squeak.

‘I’ll help you,’ she replies. ‘I’ll re-read.’

The red pen comes out and hope withers. Hanan does not circle everything; she circles just enough. The line that doesn’t land. The scene that goes on a page too long. The point where the character does what I need them to do rather than what they would actually do. It is precise, economical and quite devastating.

Sometimes I see it immediately and I’m embarrassed that it took someone else to pinpoint the problem. Other times, I dig in for a short but self-satisfied period of resistance. A phase in which I consider abandoning the project entirely, or at the very least refusing to engage with the notes on principle. But eventually (that is, by the next day) I read the notes again, and they feel different, unsullied by my own old perceptions. Excitement to get back to work starts to set in.

Because the Notes Call exist to make the work better, to get a script or an idea to the level where, yes, it sells; but also that after it’s undergone production - the budget cuts, the different directors, the compromises on locations, cast and schedules – the core of the story is still enough for audiences to care enough to finish the series and talk about it.

And here’s the part that never makes it onto the misty-eyed list of reasons to become a writer: the work was never mine alone, and it was never meant to be. It’s not a novel, it’s a screenplay. By the time it reaches a screen, I sometimes couldn’t tell you which of the good moments were mine and which were dragged out of me by people I was certain were wrong — including Hanan and her terrifying red pen. Somewhere in that gauntlet, if I’m lucky and not too proud, the watch gets put back together. Not identically. A few weird springs and screws are still on the table. But it keeps time now.

So no, it isn’t the fountain pen and the weeping executive and the tens of millions. It’s tea, pyjama bottoms, a face I no longer technically have, and the slow, humbling, occasionally thrilling business of being told — gently, repeatedly, correctly — that I can do better. And then, irritatingly, doing it.

May we all survive the notes, forgive the red pen, and find the version of the work that was waiting underneath,

Shamim

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“I’ve always known why,” she says. “But I was hoping the reason I thought was the reason, wasn’t really the reason. I was hoping things would change.”

The Conveyor Belt Has Good Lighting

It’s not the process of coming out that I want to stay with, but that last line. Layla isn’t stupid or deluded. She knows things won’t change. She’s known since she was probably fourteen and has constant, inconvenient yearnings for people who were, sadly for her mother, not suitable boys but unsuitable girls. What she’s really saying is: I was hoping that if I just kept going through the motions long enough, the motions would start to feel real. That if I dated enough men and sat through enough dinners where their mothers regarded me with approval, that eventually, the performance would stop being a performance and just become my life.

Which is, arguably, the entire premise of conformity.

It’s a soft, gentle kind of pressure. Usually, no-one forces you to do anything. It’s just that the alternative is so exhausting, awkward, embarrassing and full of weird and difficult conversations at family gatherings, that you start to think: maybe it’s easier to just marry the guy. He’s funny. He has great hair. He has a chain of hotels. We would always have mini-soaps on hand. It could be a beautiful wedding, and a nicer house. Maybe I can decorate my way out of this.

The terrible sneakiness about this kind of conformity is that it’s not frightening, it’s seductive. It doesn’t appear with the dark, crushing look of oppression, it presents itself like…belonging. Here’s a path, it says, and everyone you love is already on it, and they saved you a place, and there’s cake. You can even choose which kind of cake. All you have to do is want what you’re supposed to want. And, by the way, this is not just about being queer. This conveyor belt of opportunity and expectation travels you through a similar array of preferred options for what subjects you choose to study at school, how you dress and do your nails, what you decide to do for work, who you vote for, and (crucially, often) how you think.

Leyla was hoping things would change because the alternative, which plays out during that coming out scene, is that she has to change things herself, by uttering words (out loud!) that will probably mean a whole infrastructure of approval and ease and belonging will collapse around her.

Most people, faced with that calculation, in whatever area of life, will, understandably, choose the cake.

You Yield in Small, Sensible Increments

Sexuality happens, still, to be one of the more dramatic arenas in which conformity does what it does, but the idea is the same in so many places. The closet just happens to have a very clear door. Because most of us are performing something. The thirteen-year-old who likes the music she actually likes until she gets to school, at which point she likes the music everyone else likes, because the unforgettable social cost of having unusual taste at thirteen is being laughed at. The employee who has opinions about a genocide but whose employer has sent a email reminding everyone that the company would prefer if staff kept ‘divisive topics’ off their public profiles.

None of these appears fully catastrophic. But conformity just needs to be easier than the alternative, and it almost always is. You don’t sell your soul in one go; you lease it out in small, sensible increments, and each one feels so minor that it would be ridiculous to even call it a compromise. You just laughed when everyone else laughed, even though something made you squirm. You just nodded when you could have spoken. You yield, sometimes, to an atmospheric pressure that makes certain shapes easier to hold than others.

It barely seems to matter, except that, eventually, we contort ourselves; so gradually that by the time we’ve fully folded into the expected shape, we can’t remember what our original shape was. And then, one day, we wake up and wonder if we ever even had one.

The Conformity With a Dental Plan

And then there’s the conformity that pays us. Which is the hardest kind to resist, because it comes with a salary and a dental plan, and we live in a culture where it’s hard to find shelter without the former or enjoy a toffee without the latter.

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Apart from feeding, sheltering and clothing my boys since they were born, teaching them stuff was a core tenet of parenthood, and if I’m honest, it appealed deeply to the part of me which knows that I know everything and really likes to be listened to.

However, I have been reflecting recently, (reflecting while Hanan thinks I’m ‘writing’) on what my sons have taught me — mostly that I was wrong, in general, about a great many things, with remarkable confidence, and for far longer than I care to admit. Some of these include my taste in music which, to be fair, may have peaked in 1998 and has been slowly composting ever since. Or the difference between a ‘vibe’ and an ‘aesthetic’ (apparently enormous) and that no, the algorithm is not, in fact, watching me personally, according to Ethan — although I completely disagree about this, based on the way Instagram serves me ads for every ailment I even think about.

Anyway, I digress. There is a particular kind of disorientation that comes with realising your children — now adults — have definitely become more competent than you in specific areas of life. Not always in the reassuring, traditional ones that allow you to retain a sense of hierarchy (like cooking a meal or locating a passport under pressure), but in the ones that now seem to govern everything: technology, obviously; philosophy, inexplicably; and emojis, which I had assumed were just decorative punctuation before I became aware that an eggplant is not just an aubergine, and that they are a fully operational language with rules, subtext, and the terrifying ability to completely undermine your credibility when deployed incorrectly.

This is the part nobody really mentions — not the big, obvious milestones of parenting that we are all prepared for (at least, in theory), but this more subtle shift, where the transfer of expertise happens not with ceremony or announcement but through a series of small corrections that accumulate over time until you realise, somewhat belatedly, that the balance has tilted. ‘That’s not how that works,’ they snort. Or ‘No-one uses that anymore.’ Or, worst of all: ‘Mum, you don’t get it.’

There is, within me, a deeply embedded belief that I am the one who knows things, a belief reinforced over years of being the adult in the room, the decision-maker, the person people turn to when something needs to be figured out, and someone who has read books non-stop since I was five. This belief in my own brilliance does not go quietly into the dark night; it argues, presents evidence, references past successes and moments of clarity, it insists — quite reasonably, I think — that experience should count for something.

Still, the balance has shifted. Maybe not in life experience and those parts. But on all the rest. So, Happy Mother’s Day, and here are some of the key lessons I’ve learned from my boys:

That the entire 1990s mindset I was sold — work harder, faster, longer, multi-task your way to productivity, sleep when you’re dead — was not, as advertised, a path to fulfilment. It was a business model. And I was both the customer and the product. That ‘busy’ is not, as I had assumed, an achievement. It is the symptom of a system that requires my exhaustion to function and has very cleverly trained me to be proud of it. That a drive for power or rank or status, examined closely in a quiet room with no notifications, often turns out to be fear wearing better shoes. That the question ‘How do I fit more into the day’ is not really worth asking, but the question ‘Who, exactly, benefits from me believing my worth is measured in output,’ is worth excavating, and the answer is rarely ‘me’. That mindful presence — the actual, unscheduled, unmonetised kind, not the sort you book into a Calendly slot between calls — is something my sons appear to understand instinctively, and something I have to relearn like a foreign language I once spoke fluently as a very small child.

Related to Lesson One is the truth that a job is a job, not always a calling, not your family, and definitely not your self — a lesson my youngest learned faster than I did, after a ten-week internship at Goldman Sachs which left him looking like a man who had glimpsed the machine, understood, aghast, exactly what it ran on, and quietly resolved never to be the fuel. He came home thinner, paler, and considerably wiser, having discovered in two and a half months what took my generation about thirty years to admit out loud: that ‘we’re like a family here’ is a red flag, not a perk. That loyalty to an employer is generally a one-way street that can easily end in a redundancy email sent at 4pm on a Friday. That ‘I quit’ is, in fact, a complete sentence, and not — as I was raised to believe — a moral failing requiring three letters of apology and sleepless nights. And that nobody is coming to give you a gold watch at the end of any of it, and the gold watch, on close inspection, was never all that great anyway and definitely not needed.

Just for fun, they’ve also exposed that the entire architecture of digital communication has rules I did not know existed, that get updated somewhere I can’t seem to access; rules that I, apparently, break constantly. Rules include: you do not, under any circumstances, answer a phone call. You text back asking what they want, and if they wanted to talk talk, they should have warned you in writing first. Voice notes are acceptable but only under thirty seconds, and never, ever from a parent — a rule which has, sadly, not yet reached Hanan’s Palestinian relatives, whose fifteen-minute kanafe-soaked epics continue to arrive in our inboxes like beautifully wrapped time bombs. That “k” is hostile, “kk” is fine, “okay” is just old school and worse than both, and a full stop at the end of a sentence could be construed as an act of war. That the read receipt is a moral choice, not a setting. And that every app icon has, overnight, migrated to a different folder, and I will never find Settings again without one of my sons, sighing audibly, reaching across the table to do it for me.

I sent them a thumbs-up once — a perfectly reasonable gesture, I thought, positive, efficient, universally understood — only to be informed, within seconds, that it felt cold and dismissive. Well. I don’t know about you but my mother’s generation spent valuable time on non-verbal communication, especially passive aggression, using the subtlest of eyebrow raises, face twitches, barely audible sighs, and light shoulder shrugs.

How could this emoji of a cartoon thumb do all that?

“Look it up,” I was told.

I sent back a thumbs up. 👍🏾

Overall, as much as I’m on top of my game at writing, directing, and finding the best food in any place I land, I also, with the kids, find myself in the unfamiliar position of being the one catching up. Alongside the mild humiliation, the occasional resistance, the ongoing corrections — there is something else happening; the gradual shift from being the source of knowledge to being in proximity to it, from explaining to listening, from instructing to being instructed, and discovering, unexpectedly, with relief, even, that this is not entirely a loss.

‘I don’t have to know everything,’ is a sentence I would not have written twenty years ago and yet here we are. There are moments now (certainly not enough of them, if you ask Hanan) where I don’t step in, where I let the silence sit, where I listen rather than respond, and in those moments there is a different kind of awareness, one that has less to do with being right and more to do with recognising that the world our boys are navigating is not the one I learned to understand.

They are still learning, obviously, in ways that are occasionally spectacular, and there are decisions I watch with the kind of internal reaction that can only be described as a full-body ‘No!’, but I am learning, slowly and not always successfully, that not every instinct to intervene needs to be acted upon, that there is value in letting things unfold, that understanding reached independently carries a weight that instruction rarely does.

I still use the thumbs-up emoji, though. Of course, Hanan uses Palestine emojis of various kinds, though we know she does that even for the unsuspecting guy who’s just giving her a delivery time.

But not for the boys. For them, we use a heart, which I suspect is also wrong in ways I’ll soon figure out, but which at least tells them the truth – that I adore them.

With evolving language, questionable emojis, and two teachers of varying patience,

Shamim

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There are rules to a dinner party, especially in Britain. Arrive with wine (in a bottle, not a box). Do not ask what anyone earns. Do not ask what anyone voted. Do, definitely, always, discuss the weather — the unseasonable warmth of it, the worrying lack of rain, the fact that the magnolias are out a full three weeks early, which someone will mention with the appalled air of a man reporting a crime.

But the first rule of a dinner party is that nothing of consequence is to be discussed, lest it upset the general relief everyone feels at being in a convivial setting eating food they haven’t had to cook. The second rule is that if something of consequence is, by accident, raised, it ought to be defused within ninety seconds — ideally by someone asking whether the cheese is from that place in Borough Market, or about whether that new kitchen counter is quartz or granite.

I have given a ton of dinner parties (mostly as a reluctant and slightly antagonistic sous-host foil to Hanan’s effusive hospitality), and I’ve attended many too. I know that these rules will likely get broken before the miso-glazed whatever gets cleared. Starters are usually too early; everyone is still being charming. Dessert is too late, everyone is too full to fight. Someone mentions Trump. Someone shakes their head about Gaza. Someone has thoughts about Epstein, or Iran, or the Iran Lego videos. And the second the breach happens — the moment politics or religion or some combustible compound of the two parachutes in — the characters emerge. They have been at the table all evening. You just couldn’t see them yet.

I should say upfront that I am one of these characters. But we’ll get to me.

The Devil’s Advocate

Does not, they will have you know, actually believe the thing they are about to say. They are merely advancing it, for the purposes of discussion, because someone has to. Even worse, they would like credit for this — for the rigour of it, the intellectual courage — before they have said anything at all.

Then they say the thing.

The thing is usually that Israel has a right to defend itself, or that we don’t really know what happened on Epstein’s island, or that Trump, say what you like about him, has a point about something. The Devil’s Advocate is not committed to any of these positions. They are committed to the posture of being the only person in the room brave enough to raise them.

If challenged, they will retreat, wounded, to the phrase I’m just posing questions with an air that suggests that you, by contrast, are lacking all nuance. Yet the Devil’s Advocate never devils-advocates against power. You will not find them at dinner gamely trying on the position that Palestinians have a right to resist occupation, or that perhaps the billionaires did know. The devil, it turns out, only strolls down one side of the street – usually the one with the lobbyists, the think tanks, and some dodgy Nigel Farage videos. He or she also has an unbreakable Daily Mail habit and believes that mainstream media is mostly balanced.

The Both-Sideser is a sub-genre of the Devil’s Advocate. In a kind of unlikely moral levitation, they survey the conflicts of the world and observe that really, when you think about it, there is fault on both sides. No-one truly knows what happened on Epstein’s island. Trump, whatever we think of him, is smart enough to have gotten himself in charge. And the IDF – well it’s not everyone in the IDF behaving like war criminals. It is all, they suggest with a small, sad shake of the head, very complicated.

You know what though? We do know what happened on the island because victims have told us, not to mention that yes, Trump is in charge, put there not by his smarts but by those who have the evidence from that island and have their hands well and truly wherever they need to be to use him as a glove puppet. And actually, yes, the entire IDF is in an illegal occupation, never mind the level of depraved, institutionalised violence they perpetrate with absolute impunity.

But the whole function of the Both-Sideser at a dinner party is not to illuminate or opinionate. They are there to make sure that whatever moral point has been raised is safely reduced to a matter of taste, about which reasonable people might, after all, simply disagree.

The Phone-Checker

The Phone-Checker decides, within eight minutes of sitting down, that the evening is beneath them. There is a small internal retreat, a muttering about the merger they’re working on, and then the hand strays, elegantly, to the pocket to retrieve their phone.

From here on, they are conducting a parallel life under the table, or pacing around in the entrance hall. Replying to a work email they could have answered yesterday but are answering now, with deeply visible concentration, so we all understand how in demand they are, but for all we know, watching a reel of a dog on a paddleboard.

The Devil’s Advocate is at least engaged. The Both-Sideser is at least making a show of thinking. The Phone-Checker has opted out of the species.

The Partner Who Kicks Under the Table

The Partner Who Kicks is not, technically, a guest in their own right. They are a managing editor. They have spent fifteen years refining a single signal, transmitted via the shin, which means stop talking now.

The kick comes in grades. There is the gentle warning kick, deployed when their partner has begun a sentence with “the thing about not speaking up is...” There is the firmer kick, for when the sentence has reached a verb. And there is the final kick, which is not a kick so much as a sustained pressure, applied with the full weight of a marriage, which means if you finish this sentence we are not speaking in the car.

They love their partner. This is important to understand. The kicking is not contempt. The kicking is love, expressed through the medium of soft tissue damage. They are trying to save them. From the table, from themselves, from the Uber ride home in which it will be explained, at length, that nobody wanted to hear about what OpenAI is doing to the labour market.

The Host Who Panics

The Host Who Panics is not a personality, it is a survival response.

The Host Who Panics is not on anyone’s side. They are on the side of the evening continuing. Sudan could be pored over, the fentanyl crisis could be dissected, the Lego videos of the Iran strikes could be re-lived, but the Host Who Panics would be rushing to the fridge to bring out the tiramisu. Because maybe, just maybe, the tiramisu could save this evening? That tiramisu, deployed now, at just the right moment, in massive portions, could carry us through to coffee and carriages.

The Host Who Panics has spent four days on this dinner. They have ordered a truffled brie from somewhere posh, and they have shined glasses. They have worried about the seating, and vacuumed the coat closet. They did not do all of this so that someone could start weeping about a ceasefire between the main and the pudding. The Host Who Panics would like everyone to know that they do care, deeply, about the world. They just care, rather more, about the tiramisu.

And then, YOU

You arrived, as you always do, having promised yourself you would behave.

You had the conversation with yourself in the mirror. You had the conversation with Hanan in the car. You agreed, you agreed out loud, that tonight you would not be the one.

Then someone said the thing about Gaza being complicated, and here we are.

You are not, to be clear, the Devil’s Advocate. You believe what you are saying. You are not the Both-Sideser. You have, demonstrably, one side. You are not the Phone-Checker, because you have not looked at your phone once, which is part of the problem. You are the fourth figure. The one, the other three characters exist, in part, to manage. The one the kick is for.

You tell yourself you are being honest. That silence, at a certain point, is its own position. That if nobody says the thing, the thing goes on being unsaid, and unsaid things become, eventually, the way of the world. All of which is true. It is also true that you are now explaining, with some heat, to a woman you have just met, and who already regrets having laid eyes on you, that she is swallowing every mainstream myth about Iran like she was born yesterday.

In the Uber home, you brace for it. But Hanan turns to you and says she was proud of you. She says someone had to say it. She puts her hand on yours. And then, because she is Hanan, and because she is always, infuriatingly, more accurate than you, she mentions, lightly, almost in passing, that when you mentioned the Jewish population in Iran, you said 8,000 and it is closer to 10,000, and there is a seat in parliament reserved for Jews in Iran. Just, you know. For next time.

You lie awake at 2am fact-checking on your phone. She was right. She is always right. The woman at dinner is, statistically, also asleep, and has not given you a second thought. You turn over, and count the days to next Saturday’s dinner…

Until the next dinner, where we’ll attempt the impossible: a conversation without controversy, and manage not to ruin the tiramisu in the process,

Shamim

I am at a black tie premiere for one of my films. Or it might be a fundraiser dinner. In any event, it is an evening of impossible sophistication, where the lighting is extremely forgiving (while also making it impossible for me to read the menu, and I am inevitably starving having burned a thousand calories wrestling my body shaper tights into submission). Everyone (else) is holding their champagne with casual ease, and laughing, and taking photos. These evenings have sometimes, sadly, blurred in my memory after long enough time has passed; although what does stay sharp is those heels making me want to propose marriage to the nearest chair. I’ve never worn them again, by the way.

Someone will come up to you — always during the standing bit, never when you’ve finally secured a seat — and they will say: ‘That was so moving. Really. I had no idea.’ And they mean it. Their eyes are bright and they’ve forgotten they’re holding a drink and for a moment neither of you is at this event. You’re just two people standing inside something true. And I want to tell you — that moment is worth all of it. Every long year in development. Every pitch that went nowhere. Every time someone in a boardroom said ‘love the story, could we change the gender/sexuality/colour of the leads.’ For this blissful moment after a screening, someone just felt the thing you made, and it changed something in them, even slightly, even just for a moment. Right there, in the room, it makes me want to cry, which would be ill-advised because this mascara was not cheap, and I have no idea how to reapply it. But it is the most beautiful thing to experience.

They go home. We go home. The feeling fades. By the end of Monday, it’s gone entirely, replaced by the school run, an exploding inbox, and a vague intention to think more about the film, the message, the ideas.

I don’t say that with judgment, just recognition, mostly. Because the question they didn’t ask — ‘what do I do now?’ — is the same question I spent years not asking myself.

I used to think making the work ‘was’ the work. That if the film was good enough, sharp enough, honest enough - the job was done. Art itself would fly in on a winged chariot and do the heavy lifting. I could throw off the terrible shoes, put on the joggers, and feel good about myself.

Yet, it doesn’t quite work like that. I wish it did.

I first felt that question as a knot in my stomach standing in an ornate, high-ceilinged room after a film festival premiere of The World Unseen. The film is set during apartheid in South Africa. A system built on division, control, and silence; a system my parents were born into and grew up swallowing, degrading their own humanity in the process. People clapped after the film. Some of them cried. Several said “it’s so powerful.” And I remember going home with Hanan, and her saying, ‘Yes, it was wonderful, and it is not enough.’

We’d just screened a film about systemic injustice and then we stood amongst canapés. If we didn’t ask the question — if we didn’t ask “what now?” — then who exactly was going to?

So we used our next screening to raise funds for the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund. Not because we were saints. Though getting decked out in black tie attire did feel like a kind of hair-shirt penance. But because we’d made a film about injustice and the NMCF puts money into education and healthcare for children — real, specific, practical things that don’t look as good on a poster but can actually change someone’s life experience.

And that approach stuck. Once you do it, you can’t go back to not doing it. Hanan, to be fair, may have told me this years earlier, repeatedly, but I was busy being an artiste who thought the work spoke for itself. The work does not always speak for itself. The work sometimes needs a bank transfer and a follow-up email.

For ‘Polarized’, we partnered with the Galilee Foundation. The film opens a conversation about division, identity, belonging by wrapping these ideas into a small-town love story between two young women — and the Foundation turns that conversation into scholarships for young Palestinians, and in a way that gives them the space to be proud of their culture and community, even as it is deliberately erased around them.

A percentage of sales from ‘The Athena Protocol’ and ‘The Shadow Mission’, my spy thriller book series went to Headwaters Relief, who run rescue and relief operations in crisis zones around the world. I write fictional women who do much the same thing in fabulous outfits. Headwaters does it for real, without the wardrobe budget or the soundtrack.

Each time, the question “what now?” Got us to a great place meeting incredible people doing far more tangible on-the-ground work than we could ever do. There are other questions, of course, like ‘how can we raise awareness?’ But in my limited experience, that’s a phrase that only ever results in a yet another panel discussion.

I’m aware that I started out making a point and end up digressing so far that I’m now just delivering a keynote that nobody requested.

Because Hanan’s book, ‘Palestine Revealed’, is the first thing I’ve seen that doesn’t just ask the question. It ‘answers’ it before you’ve even finished reading, and in fact, at the point you buy it.

The book is meticulously researched, rigorously argued, and forensically honest about how the story of Palestine has been buried, rewritten, and erased. It is the kind of book that makes the discomfort clearer even as it’s tricking you into thinking it’s a rollicking page turner.

And one hundred per cent of the author profit, every cent of profit goes to ten brilliant charities supporting Palestinians in education, healthcare, and humanitarian relief.

The upside of this is that you don’t have to ask “what now?” The “what now” is already built into the thing itself. The question and the answer arrive together, in the same cover. Hanan solved the problem I’ve been circling for twenty years, and she’s done it so elegantly that I’m almost annoyed I didn’t think of it first. Almost. Mostly, I’m just proud.

At the launch event alone — which I also had to get dressed up for, though thankfully nobody mentioned the word ‘dress’ — we raised exactly £4,111 for the Galilee Foundation, enough to sponsor two students for the year.

Look. I know art won’t save us. I’ve been making art for twenty-five years and the world currently has a president who has run a genocide, launched a needless war during peace negotiations, is running out of countries to bomb, posted himself as Jesus on Easter Sunday, picked a fight with the Pope for being anti-war, and when confronted about the Jesus photo said ‘I thought it was me as a doctor.’ I cannot satirise this. Banksy cannot satirise this. Art has met its match.

The question isn’t whether art matters. Of course it matters. The question is the one nobody asks at the party, the one you take home with you, the one that’s still there on Wednesday morning when the feeling should have faded but hasn’t:

If you’re inspired, consider supporting this effort. Buy the book, share it with others, or take direct action to help make a difference.

Shamim

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I don’t mean to do it. I want to be clear about that upfront, because I think it’s important — socially, possibly legally, and in terms of my continued ability to get invited to things — that everyone understands: I do not set out to ruin rooms. Rooms sometimes combust. I just happen to be in them at the time.

It can happen anywhere. A dinner party, of course, is the classic venue, the spiritual home of the unsolicited monologue after a glass of wine or three.

Someone says something careless. A half-sentence about “both sides” or “it’s complicated” or “I just don’t really know what I can do.” And I feel it. A heat. A rising. A tightening in the chest that has nothing to do with the questionable shrimp-and-limp-lettuce starter and everything to do with the fact that I’m shaping up to make Mark Ruffalo’s transformation into the Hulk look like a man changing into a cardigan.

Sadly, it’s not just dinners. I travel a lot for my directing work, so most of my time is spent with revolving batches of time-poor, over-stressed film professionals. Last year, in pre-production, our costume designer showed me a mood board. Gorgeous references, very chic. She pointed to one swatch and said, “I’m thinking a Middle Eastern palette for the second act.” And I said, “Oh I love that idea. By, the way, I’ve started using West Asia to refer to the region - because of colonial tropes that led to the use of Middle East, and while we’re discussing it,’ I barrelled on, conveniently ignoring that this ‘discussion’ was only going one way (from me to her, and I’m the director so she basically had to listen) ‘do you know what’s actually happening in the area right now?”

Reader, she had come to discuss linen. She left with a geopolitical education and a deeply haunted expression.

Just yesterday, the transport coordinator made the mistake of complaining about rocketing fuel prices within earshot. And I thought — oh, you poor, unsuspecting man. I almost felt sorry for him, but letting it go was not an option… ‘I get it,’ I said (trimming rapport-building to three words) before pulling up a chair he had not offered me. ‘Let’s start with the petrodollar.’

He looked at his clipboard. He looked at the door. He looked back at his clipboard. But it was too late. I was busy drawing an annotated diagram (‘Reasons for, and consequences of, the attack on Iran’) on his movement order.

The Ethical Dilemma of Silence

Hanan can see it coming before I can. Over the years, she has developed an early warning system — a finely tuned radar that picks up the precise moment I shift from ‘socially acceptable human’ to ‘one-woman tribunal at The Hague’. There’s a look she gives me; not angry…more, resigned. The look of someone watching a weather event they know they cannot stop. The look of a woman who came to set to discuss the next scene and is now watching her partner explain the Balfour Declaration to a man holding a walkie-talkie.

“Shamim.”

“I’m just saying—”

The Consequences of Caring

She shakes her head and she’s right. I’m never ‘just saying’. I haven’t ‘just said’ anything since approximately 2023. Everything now comes with context, and the context comes with history, and the history comes with a reading list, and before anyone has finished their main course — or their mood board, or their fuel requisition form — I have mentioned four U.N. resolutions and followed up with links to The Enlightenment Podcast.

The worst part is: I’m not wrong.

That’s the dilemma, isn’t it? The hideous, inconvenient truth of caring about things in a world that would really prefer you didn’t — at least not out loud, and definitely not at Sonali’s or Sarah’s birthday dinner.

The things truly worth caring about don’t arrive at convenient moments. They don’t wait for you to finish your starter or for your streaming series to reach a natural pause. And then, they sit in your chest, and when someone offers you an opening — even an accidental one — everything you’ve been carrying comes barrelling through it like the Israeli army over a neighbouring country’s border.

I have, at various points, delivered impassioned speeches about the following in contexts where they were not, strictly speaking, invited (because someone made the mistake of making eye contact, even briefly):

The colonial underpinnings of the modern state system. (At a barbecue.)

Media framing of occupation. (At a school parents’ evening. To a confused maths teacher.)

The ethics of complicity through silence. (To a plumber, who had come to fix a tap and made the mistake of asking how my day was going.)

The plumber, to his credit, did stay for eleven minutes. Though, in hindsight, I see that he may have simply been trapped behind the boiler.

You get seated strategically at dinner parties. Always next to someone who either already agrees with you (containment) or someone the host has decided deserves to be challenged (deployment). Occasionally you catch the host’s eye across the table and realise you have been ‘weaponised’ as the evening’s entertainment.

Hanan handles all of this differently. She operates in an entirely different, definitely more elevated, genre.

She has more right to the anger than I do. Immeasurably more. This is not, for her, something she read about and got passionate over. It’s not an intellectual position she arrived at through books and documentaries and late-night rabbit holes. It’s her family. Her history. Her Nakba-survivor mother, her grandmother’s house that got stolen and given to settler-colonisers without payment, redress or an invitation to, oh, stay in their own home in their own land, maybe? If anyone has earned the right to the impassioned monologue, to the table-thumping, to the moment where you look someone dead in the eye and say ‘How dare you?’ — it’s her.

And yet.

She doesn’t. Where I explode and burn like a rampant forest fire, she gets precise. Where I escalate, she narrows. She will listen to someone say something breathtakingly ignorant and instead of combusting — which is my move (actually, my whole brand these days) — she will pause, and then she will ask a question. A calm, specific, unanswerable question. The kind that doesn’t raise the temperature in the room but does something worse: it removes every exit.

I’ve watched her do it. It’s extraordinary, admirable and slightly terrifying. When I get angry, people get defensive — and defensiveness is an escape hatch. It lets them stop listening to what you’re saying and start reacting to how you’re saying it. They reclassify you, not wrongly. You’re no longer someone with a point; you’re someone with a ‘tone.’ And once you’re the person with a tone, they’re off the hook. They can dismiss you as emotional, or aggressive, or — that word, that careful, calculated word — ‘difficult.’ Your anger, however righteous, has just handed them permission to stop thinking.

I asked her once how she does it.

‘I pick my moments,’ she said.

‘I pick my moments too,’ I said.

She looked at me for a long time.

‘Shamim. You pick every moment.’

The thing is, I used to be better at this. Or worse at it, depending on your perspective. There was a time — in my twenties, my thirties — when I could let things go. When I could hear something I disagreed with and file it away under ‘not worth the fight’ though often it was ‘I don’t want anyone to not like me.’

I could get through a conversation that made my skin crawl and get in the car afterwards and say to Hanan, ‘Can you believe what they said?” and she’d say, ‘Yes,’ and we’d drive home and feel superior, which is a fabulous tonic in it’s own right. Also easier. More socially hygienic.

There can be, sometimes, a seductiveness to it. Once you start saying the uncomfortable thing out loud, there’s a tiny, electric thrill — a feeling of clarity that is dangerously close to self-righteousness if you’re not careful. But generally, I’m a non-conflict kind of person. It doesn’t make me happy to suck the air out of a room, or to argue in general, ever.

The boys love a good argument. They belong in a high level Greek forum somewhere in the past. Ethan will engage with deeply, irritatingly, logical arguments, leaving me caught between admiration and infuriation. Luca will listen with an expression that suggests he is constructing a detailed internal case for why he should have been born into a less exhausting family before linking my blabbing outrage to a much higher level of philosophy.

I’ve noticed, though, that as they grew up, they were watching. Not just what we say, but when we say it. Whether we say it. Noticing that the argument is being had at all. And I think that’s the thing that matters. Not whether I delivered it elegantly (I didn’t), or at the right moment (I rarely do), or without alienating at least one person at the table (impossible, and anyway, they had it coming). But that they saw someone refuse to be comfortable.

Because comfort is the real trap, isn’t it? Most people know. They’ve seen the images, read the headlines, scrolled past the footage. They know. They just also know that doing something with that knowledge is even more exhausting, and that it is infinitely easier to change the subject to house prices or whatever’s on Netflix this week and let the feeling pass.

And it does pass. That’s the insidious thing. It always passes. The discomfort dissolves back into routine, and routine is so warm and so familiar that you barely notice you’ve let something important slip away again.

That’s the hope, anyway. That being insufferable is not the end of the sentence. That it’s the start of a slower one — one that includes ‘but she made me think’ or ‘I looked it up afterwards’ or even just ‘I noticed something I hadn’t noticed before.’

I accept the trade. The awkward silences. The strategic seating. The look on Hanan’s face when I take a breath, and she knows I’m about to turn a casual comment about avocados into a lecture on resource extraction from the Global Majority.

“Shamim.”

“It’s relevant.”

“It’s a salad.”

Maybe. But nothing is ever just a salad anymore. And honestly? I don’t think it ever was.

With too many footnotes, not enough tact, and a partner who loves me despite the monologues,

Shamim

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I used to think getting older would feel like a kind of narrowing. Doors closing. Options shrinking. An irritating, unwanted retreat from relevance, accompanied by a growing interest in thread counts and a creeping terror that one day you’ll keel over in Waitrose and not be able to get up.

There are, of course, elements of this that are true. I do now have opinions about thread counts; opinions so passionate that Hanan will back away from me carefully just as I’m getting warmed up. I also recently bought a pair of trainers specifically because they were cushioned. Not stylish. Not cool. Cushioned. I stood in the shop and said the words “arch support” out loud, to another human being, and felt no shame. Just relief.

The thing that hit me like a hot flush is how fast it seems to happen. One minute you’re the same age as the actors you’re directing. The next, the entire cast of Finding Her Edge is calling you Shamom — and you answer to it, because, honestly, you have started telling them to sleep earlier and you also hand out healthier snacks on set.

But what nobody tells you — or perhaps not clearly enough — is that alongside the losses (which are real, and we don’t need to pretend our hard-won muscle tone doesn’t just get up and leave), there is a quiet, almost mischievous expansion happening at the same time.

It doesn't send a notification. There's no ping from your phone saying congratulations, you no longer care who’s watching you dance. You just notice, one unremarkable Thursday, that something heavy has gone.

Caring what people think.

Not all at once, obviously. This isn’t a cinematic transformation where you stride through life in slow motion, immune to judgement, hair blowing in a wind machine that follows you, just you, personally.

It’s more gradual than that. You care a little less. Then a little less again. Until one day you find yourself making a decision — what to wear, what to say, what to walk away from, who to walk away from — and realise you haven’t run it through the usual internal committee of imaginary critics. You know the one. Your mother. That girl from school who once said you were weird. All the people following you on socials that you’ll never meet anyway.

The committee, it turns out, has quietly disbanded. No farewell email, no final minutes, just gone.

There is a particular freedom in this that is hard to explain if you haven’t felt it yet. It’s not rebellion or defiance. It’s like setting something down and only then realising your shoulders were tense the entire time you were carrying it.

Alongside this comes a new, more thrillingly efficient relationship with the word “no”.

In my twenties, “no” was a complicated, multi-step process involving a sleepless night followed by justification, softening, over-explanation, and, ideally, an apology for having the hubris to even consider declining whatever was on offer.

I said ‘yes’ to a date with the most eligible Gujarati boy in a two hundred mile radius because he owned a chain of motels, his mother knew my mother, and as the latter reminded me ‘who wants to die alone?’ It was an effort to say no to something ‘useful’ at university - it took strength and stress to insist. ‘Can Virginia Woolf pay a mortgage?’ my mother wondered. ‘Can she even cook?’

Now, the ability to say no tends to arrive more quickly, with a lot less scaffolding around it.

“Would you like to—”

“No.”

A brief pause.

“Oh. Okay.”

And, excitingly, the world adjusts without incident. Entire evenings find their way back to you. Weekends you didn't know you'd lost. The freedom to sit in a restaurant alone without pretending to check your phone. The quiet thrill of going to bed at 9.30pm on New Year’s Eve.

It’s like there was a design flaw in earlier life that has now been quietly corrected.

Then there is the deeply underrated pleasure of being underestimated.

When you are younger, being taken seriously feels like oxygen. You want to be seen, recognised, understood in all your complexity. You want your ideas to land with weight. You want to enter a room and feel that you matter in it.

All of that still matters, it does. But something shifts.

Partly, it’s understanding that you do matter when you enter a room. If that truth eludes the other people in that room, that’s their problem and, frankly, their loss, not yours.

Also, when someone underestimates you, there is often a small, private moment of… delight. Like hacking the entire network while everyone’s still snootily wondering whether you even know how to turn on the Wi-Fi.

If it feels as if these exultant feelings just happen passively, let me confirm there have been years of learning, some of which, sometimes, culminate in me being better. With my boys, I've learned to do the hardest thing a mother can do: keep quiet and watch them make a choice I know in my bones is wrong and say nothing. Not the theatrical nothing where you're saying nothing so loudly they can hear it from another room. Actual nothing. Because they will work it out. And it will mean something because they worked it out. Not because I couldn't help myself at dinner.

I should say this last bit is aspirational. The reality is I still fall off this wagon with spectacular regularity. One of them will mention a financial decision or a relationship situation and I can feel it rising in me like a sneeze — the intervention, the wisdom, the ‘can I just say one thing’ which actually means, ‘sit back because here comes my full TED talk on the meaning of life - especially your life’. But hey. It happens less than it used to.

There is also, inevitably, the matter of the body.

I can’t tell you how rubbish it is to pull a muscle while you were, like, sleeping. Or to have to flick on your phone torch in every low-lit restaurant just to read the menu. Or hearing the soundtrack of your twenties (or worse, thirties) on a Classic Hits station. Or bending down to pick something up and wondering if there's anything else you could just get done while you're down there.

Meanwhile, every conversation with friends my own age now ends the same way. Not with gossip, or plans, but with a deeply competitive exchange of longevity protocols. Have you tried lion's mane? You need to lift heavy. Cold plunges. Magnesium before bed. Black pepper with your turmeric or don’t even bother. Someone will mention zone two cardio and the whole table leans in like we’re insider trading.

I can still remember names though. Just, usually at 4am, when it really doesn’t matter.

Ultimately, though, none of it matters. Because the thing nobody mentions about getting older in a world that is, by any reasonable measure, on fire: you stop pretending not to see it. The politeness burns off. The careful both-sidesing dies away. The energy you once spent making yourself palatable to people who didn’t share your values but did share your postcode is energy you need for something more useful — clarity about where you stand, and who you want to be standing next to.

You choose your people with more care. You choose your work with more care. You say the thing at the dinner party that younger you would have swallowed with the wine. And when someone tells you that’s brave, you think — no, it’s just clarity and freedom and understanding that being seen by the right people matters much, much more than being seen by everyone.

This is not the version of ageing that gets marketed to us.

There are no glossy campaigns for “slightly forgetting names but remembering who matters”, or “saying no without a paragraph”, or “the quiet joy of no longer performing for an audience you didn’t choose”.

But it exists. It’s real. And it’s surprisingly good.

With fewer explanations, lighter shoulders, and a very selective guest list,

Shamim

By the time I’ve brushed my teeth, there will be 36. By the time I’ve done the right thing and used my yoga mat for stretching, rather than for propping open a door — there will be 46. Only 18 of them will require a response — but you have to scan all of them to figure out which.

If I’m directing a series or a film, half these messages will be for work:

But - this is how our family communicates now, because we’re living all over the place and in different time zones. My parents had to wait six weeks for an airmail letter to find out if their relatives were even alive. I get irritated if a WhatsApp tick doesn’t turn blue within ten seconds. This, I fear, is not a sign of inner growth. But then, I also potentially know what my son had for breakfast, lunch, and dinner yesterday, which is more than I knew when he lived with us.

The Inner Circle

The Sarif-Kattan family WhatsApp group has four members. This is, sadly, too many for consensus on anything, starting with what to name the group. The group has also been privy to temporary notes saying ‘This person has left the group’ — a dramatic gesture akin to slamming a door when we were all at home — before they return, with no comment, 24 hours later.

Each of us occupies a distinct role, honed over years of digital cohabitation. Hanan sends admonitions to eat, to shave (not to me, to the boys, at least, mostly), and to shower. The day she discovered Palestinian-themed emojis and stickers was fun.

‘Handyman will be there at 5pm’ gets a ‘Free Palestine’ emoji. Why? I used to wonder; is Bert from FixRight of Palestinian origin? How does Hanan even know him?

Luca sends philosophy ‘insofar as we do, are we controlling life? Or do we leave life?’ These take me some time to ponder. What takes me even longer are the memes. Not middle-aged person memes with a clear arc and some text. These are memes from the deep internet, memes that live so far down a rabbithole of irony and self-referential smartness that I’m utterly lost. Once in a while, I’ll complain to Hanan, who also can’t understand these memes but who still looks at me the way she looks at her old milk frother - with a dawning dread that I am no longer the latest model and my functions are increasingly limited. ‘Just send him a heart,’ she suggests. ‘Or a watermelon sticker.’ Right. 🍉💗

Still, I’ll take philosophy and a deep engagement over Ethan’s passionate belief in minimum viable communication; compressed messages that make a haiku look like the complete works of Tolstoy.

Whatsapp and the Indian-descended Diaspora

Beyond the inner circle lies the wider family group. This group has its own physics, relationship to time, and unspoken rules. Here are three of the latter:

1. Nobody leaves. People have literally died and their numbers are still in the group — still technically capable of receiving that morning’s forwarded Eid Mubarak! New babies are announced in the group before the umbilical cord is cut. Wedding invitations, funerals, recipes for dhal, and endless birthday balloons scroll past, with no separation between the sacred and the mundane, because in an Indian family there isn’t one.

2. Forwarding crap graphics with trite sentiments is the best way to show love. A photograph of a flower — often a rose, sometimes a lotus, always looking like it was designed in PowerPoint in 2003 by someone who had just discovered the WordArt function and then felt, design-wise, that more is more. Overlaid in curly gold font: ‘Good Morning! May Allah bless you with health, prosperity, wisdom.’

I receive approximately eleven of these a week. I have never once responded to one, but a response is not needed. They keep coming, because that is the rule.

3. The health advice is relentless. If I followed all of it, I would be immortal and 90% root ginger by volume. I don’t want to get into it except to say that every ailment — headache, backache, existential dread — can apparently be cured by warm lemon water and a positive mindset. I have tried the lemon water. It doesn’t work for the existential dread.

Voice Notes

And then there’s Hanan’s personal web of Whatsapp groups – family, friends, networks that, to my introverted eye, proliferate terrifyingly fast.

Even worse, they are all dedicated to communicating in voice notes.

Voice notes are my private hell. I hate that people are usually thinking through what to say while they are leaving them leading to endless digression and painful pauses. But Hanan loves them. Her Palestinian family, to be fair, seems adept at them in a way that elevates voice notes into a performing art, or oral history.

A single voice note from one of Hanan’s relatives begins with a greeting so warm and elaborate it could open a state banquet. ‘Habibtiiiii...’ — the word stretched out like golden cheese in a warm kanafe dessert, loaded with syrup, love, and a very clear suggestion that you should sit down for this.

The declared subject of this voice note might be: ‘The plumber came.’

Over the course of fifteen minutes, the actual terrain covered will include: why the plumber was late, who recommended the plumber and who ever thought that person’s judgement was worth trusting; a tangent about the plumber’s mother in Bethlehem, the price of copper piping and a diversion that connects the copper price to that idiot Trump’s tariffs; a brief but vivid account of the Israeli checkpoint that delayed the plumber’s cousin who was bringing the parts; a diversion about how the tahini in last night’s hummus was just too much, just like in that wedding everyone remembers from 1994 (and by the way, they are getting divorced, can you imagine?), and then — circling back like a storytelling eagle spotting its prey — returning to the plumber, who it turns out did a reasonable job but overcharged, and here is what she intends to say to him about it, delivered now, in full, as a dress rehearsal, with both parts performed.

And why not? Life doesn’t stop because you’re recording. And recording doesn’t stop because you’re living. But a voice note is not a voice. It’s a voice disembodied, squeezed into a file, stripped of the room it was recorded in, the face that went with it, the hand that was gesturing while the mouth was talking. You get a rendering, not a presence.

Here’s the thing, though. Despite the fact I’m allergic to them, I do recognise that these voice notes are quite magnificent. I don’t mean that as a joke. I mean that as someone who works with narrative for a living and recognises mastery when she hears it.

In my happier moments I convince myself, it’s a form of storytelling that predates writing, let alone WhatsApp. These voice notes are the latest container for something ancient: the human need to tell someone everything, to be fully heard, to resist the compression that modern life demands of us. Everyone else is getting faster, shorter, more efficient. A Palestinian cousin on a voice note is saying: ‘No. I will take the time this deserves. You will listen. And by the end, you will know not just what happened with the plumber, but why it matters, and what it connects to, and what I was cooking while I told you, because that matters too.’

The Thread

Here’s what I think, after years of being in too many WhatsApp groups.

These apps were not built for love. They were built for data and engagement metrics and the pernicious harvesting of human connection so it can be sold back to us with better targeting. Nobody at Meta sat in a boardroom and said: ‘let’s build a platform where an eighty-three-year-old woman in Calgary can send a gold-font rose to her kin in London, Toronto, and Cape Town every morning for six years without ever receiving a reply.’ Nobody designed this so a family in Bethlehem could type ‘we are safe’ and have it arrive, instantly, in a kitchen in Europe. The technology doesn’t know.

But we filled it with knowing anyway. We took these small, bright, surveilled, imperfect rectangles of light created by increasingly fascist capitalist systems who worship the dollar more than they’ll ever appreciate an actual human - and we crammed them with recipes and blessings and blurry selfies and voice notes that could sustain a small theatre company and memes of confused animals and the question that carries the full weight of the world in it: ‘are you safe?’

We made them hold our families. Not completely, I’ll grant you. Not in the way that a room with a table and food and noise and arguments and everyone talking at once, physically together, can hold a family.

But enough. Just enough to keep the thread from breaking across London and Johannesburg and Bethlehem and New York and LA. It’s not enough, of course it isn’t. It’s also what we have right now. In our strange, disassociated, terrifying world.

My phone buzzes. Fourteen new messages. I put the kettle on. I sit down. I press play.

With love, unreliable Wi-Fi, and four hundred unread messages,

Shamim

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