The Sunday Times Magazine • 17through the albums,” he recalls. “I got out of
my car once and this bloke stands on my
foot. I look up and he says, ‘Sorry, man.’ It
was Johnny Depp.”
The only time that Myrie has ever been
star-struck, though, was meeting Nelson
Mandela at a press conference in London
shortly after he had been released from
prison in 1990. “I just went very quiet,” he
says, making a gaping fish mouth.
It has been a career with more grit than
glamour. Reporting on famine in Yemen
and the Rohingya refugee crisis in
Bangladesh; being shot at by the Taliban in
Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein’s forces
in Iraq. His correspondent stories are better
suited to stiff whiskies, but we’re on the
sparkling water. For example, there was
the time at a Kabul café in 1996, when the
Taliban had just taken over. “In Ramadan
you get tetchy because you haven’t eaten
much, and this Taliban fighter came in and
wanted something to eat but they’d run
out of food,” he says. “He just took out his
Kalashnikov and said, ‘I’m going to blow
this place apart.’ I hid behind this pillar and
remember crouching down. They managed
to produce two eggs and fried them for him
there and then.”
There was his reporting on the ethnic
conflict between the Dayaks and the
Madurese, “the literal headhunters of
Borneo”, in 2001. Myrie and the BBC team
steered clear of wearing anything red, the
traditional colour of the Dayaks, to avoid
upsetting their enemy. “We’ve driven into
this town and there, in the main streets,
are headless bodies. It’s the most bizarre,bloody battle for independence in 1999
he remembers a heavily pregnant woman
whose husband and children had been
killed and whose village had been burnt
down. She was weeping and aimlessly
wandering the streets. “You wondered,
‘What’s the future going to be like for
that [unborn] child?’ She’s got absolutely
nothing,” Myrie says. “And this family
from a neighbouring village took her in,
and that generosity was something very,
very moving when they were worrying
about their own safety and futures too.”
There was also the time, while embedded
with the Royal Marines in Iraq in 2003,
that he had to write a goodbye letter to his
wife in case he didn’t return home: “I think
there were lots of words relating to what
a wonderful life I’ve had with you, and we
will meet again in another place.”
What does Catherine, an antiques
restorer, make of her husband flying into
such hairy situations? “If I don’t call she’s
not going to be thinking, ‘Oh my God,
something’s gone wrong.’ She’s very
sanguine about it,” he says, before adding
that his Ukraine assignment rattled her.
“Catherine would be getting calls from
her extended family, from my family, with
everybody going, ‘Oh God, we’re really
worried. Is he going to be OK?’ And that’s
what freaked her out.”
The couple met in 1992 at a launch party
for a book about Swiss cheese. “And I’m not
a big cheese man,” quips Myrie, who has
said before that he felt “love at first sight”.
They married in 1998 in a Covent Garden
church and, approaching their silverMyrie and his wife, Catherine, on their wedding day in London, 1998bizarre situation,” he recalls. “We’d got to
that point and I realised I had one of those
little red Kabbalah things on my wrist.”
Madonna had popularised Kabbalah; was
the bracelet a relic of his starry LA days?
“Yeah, probably,” Myrie says, rolling his
eyes. “Talking about it now, it seems silly
that you might get your head hacked off just
because you’re wearing the colour red, but
at the time I was absolutely bricking it.
Sweating and sweating. I was genuinely
scared, more so than lots of other situations
that I’ve been in, which is curious.”
Inevitably he has witnessed the best and
worst of humanity. During East Timor’sThey decided
not to have
children.
“I knew I
wanted to
travel. It is
something
that we don’t
regret”