The Secret People 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿

1774: they blew tobacco smoke up drowning victims' backsides to revive them, and the kits hung along the Thames like lifebuoys. 1863: they sold cocaine wine as a daily tonic, and a pope pinned a gold medal on it. 1898: they sold heroin as a cough medicine, and spooned it into coughing children. 1918: they sold radium water as a health drink, and the millionaire who drank 1,400 bottles was buried in a lead-lined coffin with most of his jaw gone. 1921: they put lead in petrol, and Britain kept it in the pumps until 2000. 1930s: they X-rayed children's feet in shoe shops, and kids queued to watch their toes wiggle on the screen. 1940s: they rubbed mercury teething powder into babies' gums, and about 1 in 500 of those babies was poisoned. 1946: they sold cigarettes on the line that more doctors smoked their brand, and put a man in a white coat on the advert. 1949: they gave the lobotomy a Nobel Prize, and doctors went in through the eye socket with an ice pick. 1952: they sold a cigarette filter made of asbestos as the greatest health protection in smoking history, and smokers drew it into their lungs with every puff. 1957: they sold thalidomide to pregnant women for morning sickness, and around 10,000 babies were born with missing or shortened limbs. 1960s: they sold margarine as the heart-healthy fat, and spread trans fat on a generation's toast. 1996: they sold OxyContin as barely addictive, and started an overdose epidemic. 1999: they sold Vioxx for sore joints, and pulled it five years later after tens of thousands of heart attacks. 2026: they're selling seed oil as the heart-healthy fat, and it's in almost every packet in your kitchen. Every one of these came with an expert's blessing and the same total certainty. The people telling you which fat to fear today sit in the same chairs as the ones who put radium in the water and a doctor on the cigarette packet, and they're every bit as sure. "The experts recommend it" has the longest body count in medicine.

The clocks went back on Sunday night and not one animal on this account has been informed. Hector was at the field gate on Monday at the hour he has presented himself at since the day he came off the lorry, the hour the farmer once looked up and has never told anybody. By the kitchen clock he was an hour early. He stood square in the dark, ears forward, waiting for the day to be explained to him, and the farmer, who had been handed an extra hour by the government and had planned to spend it asleep, spent it at the window instead. Nelson came out of the shelter when the light came, as he has every morning of his life, and found the hay hung an hour late by his reckoning. He ate it with the expression of an animal who has noticed, and has decided not to raise it, yet. In Wester Ross, Isla was at the byre door at the time Angus has fed her for four years, which is to say the time the sky said, and Angus was in the house in his socks being told by the radio that it was earlier than it was. She stood there in the drizzle. She has stood through a blizzard. A clock was never going to shift her. In Yorkshire the man opened the pop-hole at seven by the kitchen, and the sun had been up the better part of an hour, and four hens came out of that coop like a dropped tray. Beatrice first. She looked at him on the way past in a manner he has described, to nobody, as pointed. In Monmouthshire Marged issued Grunt Three, which is the one that means she is awake and this is your notification, at precisely the usual time. The farmer's wife, for whom the usual time was now an hour earlier, has lodged an objection with the only authority available, which is the pig, who has not acknowledged it. Gerald was in the south corner at first light. First light did not move. A cow, a hen, a horse, a pig and a donkey keep time by the sky, the same as they kept it before there was a clock in the country, and on Sunday night the entire nation moved its watches to catch up with them for the winter and called it the clocks going back. Nothing in those fields went back. They were already there.

In November 1941 the richest man in America drove his twenty-three-year-old daughter to a hospital in Washington without telling her mother, had two surgeons drill holes in her skull and cut into the front of her brain while she sang God Bless America to them, and when the singing stopped she had a mental age of two and the family did not speak her name for twenty years. Rosemary Kennedy was the third child and the first girl, and she was slow. A nurse at the birth had held Rose Kennedy's legs together for two hours while they waited for the doctor, and the baby had been starved of air. She learned to read and write, but late, and in a family where the boys were being bred for the presidency and the girls for the right marriage, she was the one who could not keep up, the one who had to be coached and watched and given the simpler part in the photograph. She was also, by every account, the prettiest of them, and when the family went to London in 1938 she was presented at court in a white dress and curtsied to the King without a mistake. Then she was twenty-one, and the trouble started. Moods. Rages. Slipping out of the convent school at night and coming back in the morning and not saying where. The nuns said she might be meeting men. For Joseph Kennedy, who was managing his sons towards the White House and could not have a daughter who might get pregnant or get talked about, that was the end of it. He had read about a new operation. Walter Freeman had promised the newspapers it calmed the agitated, and Joe Kennedy had never in his life been told that a thing he could pay for would not work. Rosemary was given a mild sedative and kept awake. Freeman and his surgeon, James Watts, opened the skull on both sides and Watts pushed a blade into the frontal lobes and swept, while Freeman asked her to recite the Lord's Prayer and sing, and count backwards, so they would know how far to go. They went until she was incoherent. Then they stopped. She came out of it unable to walk or speak. Years of therapy got her a few words and a limp. Joe moved her to a private hospital in New York and then to a convent school in Wisconsin, told the family she was teaching the retarded in the Midwest, and never went to see her. Rose, her mother, was not told what had been done until long after, and did not visit for twenty years. The brothers and sisters, including the one who became President, were told she was away. When Joe had his stroke in 1961 and could no longer manage the story, Eunice went to Wisconsin and found a woman of forty-three who did not know her, and came home and started the Special Olympics. Rosemary lived to eighty-six, in the convent, and died in 2005 with her surviving sisters at the bed. The brother who became President had signed the first federal mental health law in 1963, and the family has said she was the reason. Freeman kept operating for another twenty-six years. His notes on Rosemary have never been released. That is what the expert's confidence looks like when it meets a powerful man with an inconvenient child. The science was published. The father was certain. The daughter sang to the surgeon until she could not. Every institution that has ever decided it knows what is wrong with you and how to tidy it has the same two ingredients in the room, and the person on the table is still the only one who pays.

Seed oils were sold as paint for a century before they were sold as food, and they do in you what they do on a window frame. Linseed oil hardens on a fence post in a few days. Chemists call it a drying oil. Soybean oil hardens too. So does sunflower, so does safflower. They were sold to the paint trade before they were sold to the kitchen. Linoleum was invented in 1860 and it is named after linseed oil, because that is what it is, oxidised and pressed into a floor. The oil does not dry by evaporating. It dries by oxygen attacking the double bonds in its fats and welding them into a hard skin. The oil in your chip pan and the oil in your body carry the same double bonds, so the same attack runs there, with aldehydes thrown off as it goes. A painter calls that curing. A biochemist calls it lipid peroxidation. A doctor calls it inflammation and prescribes something for it. Once the oil is in your fat, it stays about two years, drying from the inside, every time it meets oxygen or sunlight. Butter never dried a fence post. Tallow never varnished a boat. Saturated fat has no double bond for oxygen to attack, which is why it sits in the pan for a week and why it sat in your great-grandmother's cells for a lifetime. A fat that sets hard in the air was never a candidate for the inside of an artery. The flooring industry understood the chemistry in 1860. The heart charity recommended it in April.