10 • The Sunday Times Magazine
he first person to be interviewed by the
broadcaster Kirsty Young for Desert Island
Discs, back in 2006, was the illustrator
Quentin Blake and the last, in 2018, was the
neurosurgeon Henry Marsh. Sandwiched
between those two men were hundreds
of illustrious castaways and for many of
them it was as if they were stepping into
the confessional box rather than a studio.
Instantly recognisable for her sultry
Scottish brogue, Young became adept at
coaxing revelations out of her guests.
Morrissey told her he believed suicide to be
honourable; Yoko Ono disclosed that she
and John Lennon had considered aborting
their son Sean; and David Walliams talked
about why it would be easier if he were gay.
Today it is Young, 53, who is opening up
for the first time about the debilitating
illness that forced her off the airwaves in
- That summer she revealed that she
was suffering from a form of fibromyalgia,
a chronic condition that causes widespread
pain, and would be taking a break from the
programme. In July 2019, after an 11-month
absence, she said she was stepping down
permanently. At the time she said she was
“well on the way to feeling much better”
and that the enforced absence had “altered
my perspective on what I should do next
and so I’ve decided it’s time to pursue new
challenges”. Then she disappeared. She has
been gone for almost four years but next
week she returns to the BBC to anchor
the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee.
When we meet on a sunny day in north
London, it is almost surreal to hear her
distinctive voice up close and personal.
She looks fresh-faced and bright-eyed —
you would never guess the battle she has
been waging. For the past few years Young
has been dealing with “severe, relentless
and sometimes debilitating pain. I’ve got
rheumatoid arthritis with secondary
fibromyalgia,” she says quietly, before
taking me back to that summer in 2017
when her life started to unspool. “I had
extreme joint pain,” she says. “I’d wake up
and I’d feel like I’d got glass in my joints.”
The pain got so bad it disrupted her sleep.
“In the morning, I felt like somebody had
come in with a baseball bat and given me a
‘doing’, as we say in Glasgow, in the night.”
She was also experiencing extreme
physical tiredness. “I couldn’t walk up the
stairs without stopping in the middle. It’s
not like tiredness if you’ve had a big walk or
done some gardening. It’s like somebody
had drugged me, like you’d taken a sleeping
tablet at the wrong time in the day and you
were completely losing it.”
Her husband, Nick Jones, the 58-year-old
founder of Soho House private members’
clubs, knew the full extent of her pain but
she tried to hide it from her two step-
children, Natasha, 29, and Oliver, 27, and
her two daughters with Jones, Freya, 21,
and Iona, 16. She didn’t want to worry them
because “they were busy with their lives”.
“I just thought, soldier on. You don’t
want to admit defeat, do you? I was
shovelling down the painkillers.” A holiday
in the Maldives in February 2018 forced
her to act. “I remember I picked up a bottle
of water and it was too heavy for me,” she
says. “I dropped it and it smashed to the
ground. The kids laughed but I could feel
tears in my eyes. I felt pathetic that I
couldn’t even lift a bottle of water. I just
felt totally physically incapable.”
Over the following months she
embarked on a frustrating search for adiagnosis. She went down “lots of blind
alleys” and was prescribed medication
including steroids. “The rheumatoid
arthritis is more straightforward but my
fibromyalgia was muddying the waters.
I had the wrong medics and the wrong
medication and they were treating things
that weren’t there.” Meanwhile her
day-to-day life became ever more curtailed.
“Driving starts to become difficult,
cooking at home, all those things you do.”
This is the first time Young has talked
about any of this publicly. The turning
point came in August 2018, when she met
“an absolutely brilliant physician”. He
carried out numerous tests and gave her
the diagnosis that had eluded all the others.
Rheumatoid arthritis is an autoimmune
disorder where the immune system
attacks the lining of the joints. About 1 per
cent of the UK population has it. “The pain
centre in your brain is right next to the
sleep centre,” she says, “and when your
sleep centre is thrown off [as it was by
rheumatoid arthritis], your pain centre
can go into a spiral.”
This kicked off her secondary condition,
fibromyalgia, a disorder that causes the pain
threshold to malfunction. It is thought that
one in 20 people in the UK are affected by it
to some degree. “With fibromyalgia, if you
do that” — she lightly touches the side of
the sofa with her forearm — “it would bring
tears to your eyes, you feel pain in a way that
is just so heightened. Your whole physical
sense is distorted — your world starts to
move in front of you in odd ways. They talk
about ‘fibro fog’ ... a woolliness between
you and reality, and I think that is because
you’re dealing with pain all the time.”
On the day of her diagnosis, Young’s
physician said: “There’s light at the end of
the tunnel, but it’s a long tunnel. I can’t cure
you, but I can treat you. It’s a managed
condition.” But there was a catch. “Are you
able to scale your work back for a while,
work part-time?” he asked. “I said, ‘I’m not.
With my job you’re either in or you’re out.’”
He told her: “I can treat you with all the
medications but if you don’t have deep restFrom left: with Desert Island Discs castaways David Beckham, 2017, Nicola Sturgeon, 2015, and George Michael, 2007