The BBC's Lyse Doucet has revealed a key decision which became a turning point in her life, during an interview on GH's My Life in a Biscuit Tin podcast. The chief international correspondent spoke about her early career days and explained how she began with a four-month volunteer placement in an Ivory Coast village after university.
‘I wanted to become a journalist and so I got a volunteer placement with Canadian Crossroads International,’ Lyse said during the podcast. The night before she was due to leave, however, Lyse wrestled with the decision to stay longer or to go home to Canada.
‘I paced the floor all night because I had no money, I had no experience, I had no job. Should I go back to Canada?’ she said. ‘But I realised that this is my chance. I had left Canada. There was a chance to make it as a journalist.’
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The unexpected catalyst for Lyse’s decision to stay was a piece of bright pink fabric made in Bolivia, gifted to her by her sister Andrea. ‘There was something in looking at the bright pink – I often [now] think of it as the bright pink decision – and I thought, you have to stay. You have to go with the bright pink,’ she revealed.
As she made that decision, Lyse said she was also reminded of a passage from a favourite Seamus Heaney poem, which her sister had also given to her: ‘The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life.’
‘In other words, we worry about little things but it’s the big decisions that we make – whether we choose to be timorous or whether we are bold – that will have been our life. I’ve tried to be guided by that,’ she said.
During the podcast, Lyse also discussed her first book, The Finest Hotel In Kabul: A People’s History Of Afghanistan. ‘People would say, ‘Oh, Lyse, why don’t you write a book?’ And I’d say this, ‘I can’t even finish emails, how can I finish a book?’
However, she said she felt the world was at a point where ‘news avoidance’ was becoming an issue because people – including sometimes herself – can think, ‘the news is so negative, it sort of makes me depressed, it’s so glum,’ making it harder to engage with. Through her book, Lyse hoped to find a new way into the stories we hear about on the news.
‘Whenever I would travel to a new part of the world, I would read novels because I felt that was the best way to get under the skin of a country,’ she explained. ‘I wanted to find a way to be able to tell a story about Afghanistan which explores the spaces in between the images that we often see on our TV screen or hear about or read about.’
Lyse’s book centres around a hotel in Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul, and spans five decades. ‘In the 60s and 70s, Afghanistan was regarded as the Paris of Central Asia. The Intercontinental Kabul had escargot and cocktails on the on the roof. They had bikinis by the swimming pool,’ she said. ‘I use it as a prism to tell the lives of people who have worked at the hotel, some of them for nearly 50 years, from 1969 to present day. And so, by using some of the conventions of a novel, I try to tell a story of a people.’
You can listen to My Life In A Biscuit Tin series 2, sponsored by DFS, including the full episode with Lyse Doucet, on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also watch the full interview on the Good Housekeeping YouTube channel. Lyse’s book, The Finest Hotel In Kabul: A People’s History Of Afghanistan (Hutchinson Heinemann), is out now.
