London’s last working windmill is grey and stout, sitting plumply in the middle of a quiet park in the shadows of Brixton prison. And it’s here that Emma Barnett suggested we meet, on her morning off from the Today programme, to introduce her latest project – a family business grounded in community and curiosity and a pathological inability to relax.
She organises plastic chairs beside the millstone while I scurry up the ladder – she has declined the brief tour, having been here before. The windmill features in one of a series of colouring books, Colour Your Streets, that she has recently published with her husband, Jeremy Weil. They began with drawings of landmarks in the London areas closest to where they live with their two small children, and have gradually expanded to include books that map the rest of the UK – and soon, hopefully, the world.
The University of Nottingham was one of the first places to stock the colouring books, which is apt. Barnett explains: “We met there and Jeremy proposed there. And I was very interested to hear that students really like colouring in.”
They’ve already made a book of Brooklyn landmarks, where Weil was born, and Manchester, where Barnett grew up, each book influenced by emails from strangers, advising on what to include.
“What was interesting about doing the Manchester book is that obviously I’ll know the landmarks but you’ll also see, for instance, the place where you had your first snog. I am always trying to find the main things in a city – and in life, I suppose – but also finding the road that’s not being walked down, and the question that’s not being asked.”
After a career in print journalism, Barnett moved to radio and television, winning renown not just for her interviews on Newsnight and Woman’s Hour (the Telegraph named her “the new Paxman”) but for her honesty around the pain and struggles of endometriosis, IVF and miscarriage.
In May, soon after returning from her second maternity leave, she took over as one of the presenters of the Today programme. Four shows in, an election was called. “A new baby, a new job, a new regime,” she grins.
She is still getting used to it. “The Today programme has got a very particular grammar. I’m just figuring it out at the moment – it’s a bit like being a mechanic: you have to get under the hood. Finding my identity on the programme is a work in progress but in many ways I already feel really at home.”
She counts off her formative moments in live radio. There was the time she asked a shadow minister about Labour’s Brexit position and “realised suddenly I was a political interviewer”.
Then there was “a moment with Emma Thompson recently where we talked about pubes, which will definitely live on, and then the times I’ve got people to trust me, like Kate Bush, who got on the phone and said, ‘Hi, it’s Kate’.
“And Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s first interview taught me an enormous amount about… what I do.”
What do you do? “Politics and geopolitics, mixed with humanity. With Nazanin, it was about what happened to a woman between two countries in the midst of what Iran is doing as a strategy, and I think that being able to hold those two thoughts at the same time is my hallmark.”
One of her favourite radio memories was when a woman called Chrissie called into her Radio 5 Live show to say she was locked in her kitchen. “There was, I think, a big political interview coming up but we had a bit of a gap, so I just went, ‘Can anyone help Chrissie?’” Barnett discovered the power of “community”.
“You find it with your locale [she nods to the pile of yellow colouring books beside us: Barnet, Brixton, Bath] but you find it with radio too – and we got her out! Something to do with a knife and an ice-cream tub.”
She learned that “it’s the smaller things in life that can bring some of the greatest, most unexpected joys”.
“Life’s pretty tough a lot of the time, so the silliness of life is quite important to maintain. With Today, you’re with people when they wake up, sometimes telling them things that are hard to hear. So I try not to take myself very seriously.”
The idea for the colouring books came last year when Barnett and Weil were taking shared parental leave, and their now six-year-old son asked a question about the clocktower in Brockwell Park. They printed a picture of it at home, he coloured it in, and (despite their many full-time jobs – Weil works in The Economist’s research division) they just… kept going.
“At school I had an embarrassing nickname – Commitment Carol – because I would always be joining clubs, trying to learn a new thing. It doesn’t mean I’m particularly good at them but I would just be interested, and want to fill my schedule.”
Her newsletter, aptly, is called Trying. And as well as writing this newsletter and continuing her activism around fertility treatment, her professional responsibilities include a column in the i newspaper, alongside her work on the Today programme, which requires waking up at 3am.
“Some people can really lean into nothingness, and I’m sure there’ll be a psychologist’s view of why I can’t. But in lockdown, I did find it really hard not having a palette to draw upon in daily life.”
It’s this rare energy that makes the addition of the colouring books to her roster somehow make sense. “I really like the way it fits into our lives. I think it’s genuinely creative, as opposed to a millstone around my neck.”
She pauses, to wince apologetically at the actual millstone a metre away. “It’s a family endeavour that’s come about relatively organically. It’s not, ‘we need to come up with a business’ – it was an experiment that was really lovely, and then the local shop bought them.”
Since then, a Kingston charity has been giving the books to children in hospital, and Barnett’s BBC colleague Jeremy Vine has featured them on his show after buying his local edition for a daughter who had just left home, not knowing Barnett was behind it. She messaged him after receiving a stack of new orders, saying: “Um, this is me!”
She finds she loves the rush that comes with sales. But that’s not surprising. “Being a journalist is very entrepreneurial,” she explains. “Making yourself relevant or finding the relevant story is part of that – getting somebody to do their first interview with you, for instance, is essentially about sales.” She says of these two jobs: “I think there’s quite a lot of symmetry for me.”
Making the colouring books “feeds that endless sort of curiosity in me, which I think is at the heart of good journalism”.
In February, Barnett will turn 40, and each year she likes to set herself a new challenge. One year it was to write her book, Period. Another year it was to start the newsletter. “Could I do something while struggling with IVF? Could I be honest about something going wrong, while it was still going wrong?”
This year it was the colouring books, and next year she wants to explore and interrogate her Jewish culture, and, in south London, “find different ways into community”.
Her 30s have been, she says with brief understatement, a “tricky decade. I got diagnosed with two diseases I didn’t know I had, and went through rounds of IVF. But there’s also been some good creativity and some incredible moments.
“I’ve had to sit with myself at times in ways that I did not expect. My matrescence was a whole other experience. So I think your identity is quite up for grabs in the next stage. And I’m really interested to see where we can take this and how it can be part of our lives.” Making colouring books with her family was never part of the plan, but she hopes they will bring, “A lot more fun in my 40s.” She grins. In fact, “a massive dollop of regular joy”.
