FT WEEKEND MAGAZINE: HAILE GEBRSELASSIE INTERVIEW

I have got into the habit of feeling obligated to buy the Financial Times Weekend paper every week. I have in fact been buying this paper for quite a long time on and off because it makes me feel clever – even if it’s just the proud walk with the paper under my arm, from the newsagent to my home that is the most impressive bit of all. Nothing much happens with the all that information after that. It sits resplendent in my kitchen looking at me, untouched, fat and pink, making me feel guilty and unknowledgeable. But have you tried reading it? It’s virtually impossible. I need time and space and COMPLETE SILENCE – nobody is allowed to talk to me because otherwise I have to go back to the beginning virtually straight away because the articles make no sense otherwise.

There is no doubt that this recent obligation to buy it has much to do with the death of my father. We used to compare notes. Or at least I’d ring him on Saturday afternoons and ask him several questions about what I’d read – I was probably just trying to impress him – I doubt it ever worked. I am really missing him at the moment, almost more than before and it makes me feel closer to him but even more sad as I wade through clever articles that I have to have quiet conversations with him about in my head.

There was an article this week on the new Chief Executive of HSBC – Stuart Gulliver – he would have been very interested in that having spent much of his life in Hong Kong.

There was a question and answer page in the magazine which incensed me – questions were posed to the Ethiopian long-distance runner Haile Gebrselassie who has set 27 would records and won 2 Olympic gold medals. He was asked a number of questions – the same questions that presumably get asked to all their guests but frankly they were not remotely appropriate. They should have been changed. I would much rather see questions that relate to the person – not to how different people answer the same question.

He was asked the following questions:

How physically fit are you?
Duh

Public School or state school?
To which he replied that he didn’t get further than primary school because 100 children had to share 4 books

Do you have more than one home?

Do you believe in assisted suicide?
What sort of question is that to ask him?? He replied “We don’t really have this in Africa – many people wouldn’t choose to die but they do anyway because of illness, Aids, sanitation issues and lack of food and water”).

I am frankly completely stunned by the lack of sensitivity that question shows to him and his country. Unacceptable I think and I think my father might have agreed with me.