MEMOIR

THE GOD OF NO GOOD 

by Sita Walker (Ultimo Press £16.99, 320pp)

Sita Walker’s heartfelt memoir opens in a café in Brisbane, Australia, over a vanilla custard slice.

Walker had just taken a bite when her husband, Borhan, announced he no longer wanted to be married. She had icing sugar on her face and assumed it was a joke — but he was perfectly serious. There had been no fighting, no arguments — but he wanted out.

Walker had form when it came to break-ups, having already ‘left God’. Raised in the Baha’i Faith (which believes in the unity and equality of humanity, and in one God), she married at 20, had sex for the first time on her wedding night, and didn’t touched a drop of alcohol (‘not even in a plum pudding’) until she was 28.

Unlike her husband, who ‘left God like Noel Gallagher left Oasis’, Walker’s faith gradually ebbed away into a state of doubt. She maintained a facade with her family — not swearing, smoking or drinking when she was with them, making excuses not to participate in Faith activities. She stepped away so stealthily no one suspected she’d left her religion.

Aged 35, unmoored by the end of not one relationship but two, Walker packed up her three children and moved to a rental: adrift in a ‘sea of unbelieving’.

But this is not, she says, a book about divorce or God. (Not entirely, anyway.) ‘Like everything else, this is about love.’

Lost and bewildered Walker may be when we first meet her, but she comes from a family with an extraordinary capacity for love. Her memoir reads like a novel — a sprawling, intimate, intergenerational family saga. And what a family. Warm, wise and anchored by not one but five strong women: Walker’s grandmother, Dolly; her mother, Fari; and her remarkable aunties, Mehri, Irie and Mona, who dispense love, well-intentioned advice, and chai in equal measure.

It is a family of cousins who feel like siblings, full of whispered intimacies and unspoken, affectionate shorthand.

Walker’s own story is a springboard into the family’s past as she skates elegantly between generations and around the globe. She takes us from Tehran in 1946, where widowed Dolly cleans, sews and scrimps to keep her five children to India in 1952, where a terrified Fari cowers in a mulberry tree, chanting a magic prayer against a black panther. In 1966, Dolly and her daughters flee heartbreak, in search of a new life in Australia where, in 1980s Toowoomba, four-year-old Sita — her parents’ fourth child, her father’s ‘precious treasure’ — eats chapatis and begs Dolly to sing You Are My Sunshine yet again.

Intertwined throughout is the ending of Walker’s marriage. After Borhan’s declaration over that vanilla slice, they drift towards a civilised separation until, in 2015, they mark their divorce by taking hallucinogenic drugs together in the forest.

A novel approach which certainly promises more excitement than arguing in a lawyer’s office.

This, Borhan tells her, will allow them to subconsciously uncouple.

In her drug-induced state Walker sees her family’s souls as elements. And, suddenly, she understands: she is fire and so is he. Together they are ‘too much fire’. Little wonder their relationship is a ‘ravaged’ landscape.

The matriarchs gather her to their collective bosom. Her students — she is clearly an excellent and loved English teacher — notice that she is different and shyly offer their sympathy.

And then there is a new love affair — with Anthony, a kind, interesting, charming actor, who kisses ‘like Joseph Fiennes in Shakespeare In Love’. (This quality is accorded the reverence it warrants.)

Walker has an eagle ear for dialogue, an eye for absurdity, and is drolly self-deprecating. She tells us that this is ‘no post-divorce Eat, Pray, Love’. But on a more modest scale, it is — as told by Nora Ephron. Food is offered as comfort incarnate, there is faith and there is an abundance of love.

Walker realises she must listen to the women who raised her for the fate of her soul. In the words of redoubtable Aunty Mona, take the fear from her heart and fill it with love. For that, and only that, is the answer.

Scientists have unearthed a brand new dinosaur, named after Janus, the two-faced Roman god of change, for its skill at surviving in a chaotic and rapidly evolving phase of North America’s prehistory. 

The creature’s most interesting feature, according to researchers, is an unusually powerful jaw, developed to make use of the dense new growths of vegetation.

Global temperatures were so high during this mid-Cretaceous period, roughly 99 million years ago, that rainforests rose up out of Earth’s poles.

Rising sea levels crowded dinosaurs into heated competition for food and territory. And it was under these conditions that this newly discovered species in North America, Iani smithi, fought it out with feathered tyrannosaurs and early duckbills that were coming in from Asia.

Paleontologists with North Carolina State University unearthed the nearly complete skeleton of a young, juvenile specimen of Iani smithi in Utah’s Cedar Mountain Formation, the famous dinosaur graveyard.

The unusually strong jaws of the plant-eating Iani smithi were packed with gigantic spatulate or ‘shovel-like’ teeth, the scientists found, with each tooth bearing up to 12 ‘secondary ridges.’

Paleontologists believe that Iani very much needed every extra ridge in its bite to hack through the tough plant material overcrowding the lush, hyper-tropical environs of mid-Cretaceous North America. 

A rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide during the mid-Cretaceous, as the team notes in their peer-reviewed report on Iani smithi for the journal PLoS ONE, led not only to warmer climates and rising seas, but a flowering of new forms of plant life.

The researchers say this changing greenery choked out the normal food sources for many other plant-eating dinosaur species, who were less adaptive than the shape-shifting Janus-like Iani. 

‘We knew something like it lived in this ecosystem because isolated teeth had been collected here and there, but we weren’t expecting to stumble upon such a beautiful skeleton,’ said the study’s co-author, paleontologist Lindsay Zanno, an associate research professor at North Carolina State University.

‘Having a nearly complete skull was invaluable for piecing the story together,’ according to Zanno, who also serves as head of paleontology at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences.

Armed with detailed scans of the new species’ well-preserved skeleton and some complicated statistical analysis, Zanno and her team came to the surprising conclusion that Iani smithi shared common traits with a lineage of dinosaurs rarely, if ever seen in North America. 

‘We recovered Iani as an early rhabdodontomorph,’ Zanno said, ‘a lineage of ornithopods known almost exclusively from Europe.’ 

‘Recently, paleontologists proposed that another North American dinosaur, Tenontosaurus – which was as common as cattle in the Early Cretaceous – belongs to this group,’ she added, ‘as well as some Australian critters.’ 

‘If Iani holds up as a rhabdodontomorph,’ according to Zanno, ‘it raises a lot of cool questions.’

Zanno and her coauthors speculate that Iani may represent the last gasp of its kind in on the North American continent before a migration of duckbilled dinosaurs from Asia out-competed them in the ecosystem.

‘Iani was alive during this transition – so this dinosaur really does symbolize a changing planet,’ Zanno said in a University press release. ‘I think we can all relate to that.’

British paddleboarder Scott Seddon was filmed laughing and joking with a close friend as he emerged from the sea – just minutes before he was struck by lightning and killed.

The keen sportsman, 26, died shortly after emerging from the water during what appeared to be clear weather over the Greek island of Rhodes.

The video shows Scott looking athletic and clearly very happy – and gives no hint that he was in any apparent danger with an earlier storm seeming to have passed.

It was released to MailOnline by his devastated family who want it made public to show that Scott had left the sea when the incident happened and was not acting in any way recklessly.

Scott’s heartbroken mother said he had been having ‘the time of his life’ before his tragic death in the freak accident on Monday afternoon, when, she said, ‘God just decided to take him’.

Initial reports from Greece had suggested that Scott died while out to sea during an electrical storm at Agia Agathi as his close friend Anna Vidamour, 24, begged him to come in.

But Scott’s mother and father, who were in the ambulance as paramedics tried to save his life, said an earlier storm seemed to have passed and sunlight was breaking through the clouds.

They pointed out that the video shows there was no hint of an imminent lightning strike as he returned to the beach on Monday afternoon. 

His family insist experienced boarder Scott knew the dangers of the sea or weather in Greece where they used to live for years before coming home to Liverpool.

His father Stephen, 68, said: ‘We have lived in Greece for the last 30 years.

‘He knows the water and respects the water. He wasn’t some silly tourist who get on a board to go somewhere dangerous.

‘He was laughing coming out of the water. They put the canoes on the shore and they were standing on the stand and they hugged.

‘He was not in danger and was not dragged out of the water.’

Scott, who lived with his sister Layla and father Steve in a large bungalow in Liverpool, was described by close friends as a ‘lovely guy’ and ‘really popular’.

The avid sportsman, who had trained to be a civil engineer and worked in the building trade, spoke Greek and was a regular visitor to the family’s holiday home. 

‘He wasn’t a tourist and he knew and respected the water,’ his dad said.

‘The locals loved him and he went to school there.

‘We are devastated. We will never get over losing him.’

Anna, 24, from Belfast, who was close to Scott but not dating him – he was soon to go on another trip to visit his girlfriend – had taken the video just five minutes before he was struck.

Scott’s mother Jackie, 56, told MailOnline: ‘They got out of the water and they were so happy that they had come out of the water.

‘They were having a laugh and he asked his friend to take the video as there was no danger.

‘They put the board down and the lighting struck him on the back of the neck.

‘Scott did not have any metal on him – just two little earrings.

‘It looked like the storm had gone, the danger was finished.

‘It was just a freak accident.

‘He wasn’t on the board and it was not anywhere near him.

‘When Scott fell, he fell into the water. He was too heavy for Anna to lift so a Brazilian man came to help.’

She added: ‘My son went out having the time of his life, and God just decided to take him.

‘Lightning struck him in an instant. It was a terrible, sad thing that happened.

‘I texted him not to walk back and told him a storm was coming, so he was aware.’

Jackie and Stephen had come to pick him up to take him home but then saw an ambulance.

Fighting back tears, his mother said: ‘As we got closer to the ambulance, I saw my son’s foot.

‘I saw Anna and she said: “He’s been hit”.

‘I was thinking he had been hit by a car or boat. Stephen was on the floor in the ambulance crying: “It’s my son”.’

The family in the ambulance and Stephen helped give CPR to his son – whom the family nicknamed Elvis – before they got to hospital.

Speaking in the family’s large bungalow, Jackie said: ‘They worked on him for an hour.

‘They gave him adrenaline. I begged them: “Please give him one more”.

‘So they gave him one more. They tried and they weren’t going to give up.

‘But he had gone. I asked the doctor if they had found water in his lungs because I didn’t know he’d been struck by lightning.’

She added: ‘Scott was fearless. He was one of a kind, he was flamboyant. A beautiful blond boy.

‘He would catch octopus and give it to the locals.’

His sister Layla, 24, said: ‘By the time they came out of the water it was sunny.

‘When they were on their boards, they saw a bit of lightning but by the time they got in, it was in the distance, it had already passed.

‘There was no crazy water or lightning. The danger had gone.’

His sister added: ‘I am just numb over losing him.

‘It doesn’t feel real. Everyone adored him.’

The couple also released new pictures of Scott and his sister as children in tribute.

Scott was planning to go surfing with his girlfriend as well as running the bulls in Spain.

Liverpool football supporters have drowned out God Save the King on the day of the Coronation with a huge chorus of boos.

The national anthem was played ahead of the Premier League fixture between Liverpool and Brentford at Anfield on Saturday afternoon to mark the crowning of King Charles III and the Queen Consort.

But supporters inside the stadium did not respect the anthem as the two teams lined up around the centre circle.

The jeering started immediately after the PA announcer confirmed that the national anthem would be played moments before kick-off. 

As the players uncomfortably moved toward the centre-circle where they gathered shoulder to shoulder, huge chants of ‘Liverpool, Liverpool’ took over from the boos.

Boos were then heard almost entirely around the ground, with the anthem only faintly heard, as Reds skipper Jordan  Henderson appeared to sing along with the anthem from the touchline as a substitute.

Meanwhile, the Reds players from multiple nationalities decided to keep silent as they observed protocol, with chants of ‘Liverpool’ soon taking over once more. 

As soon as the anthem finished, the traditional song played at Anfield before kick-off, ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’, was blasted around the stadium.

May supporters brought banners to air their grievances, saying ‘not my king’ while others featured a banner of legendary former player and manager Kenny Dalglish – referring to his traditional nickname of ‘King Kenny’.

Liverpool only reluctantly played it ahead of the televised fixture after the Premier League ‘strongly suggested’ clubs hosting fixtures this weekend mark the Coronation.

Their fans have booed the anthem in recent years and some chanted ‘you can stick your coronation up your a**e’ at last week’s match against Fulham.

The club were aware that to not play God Save the King would subject them to a nationwide backlash, so announced on Friday they would acquiesce to the league’s suggestion, which wasn’t mandatory.

Liverpool supporters did respect a minute of silence for Queen Elizabeth II following her death last September.

But the national anthem had been jeered by some of their fans prior to last season’s FA Cup final at Wembley.

Privately, there was anger at Liverpool at being put in this position by the Premier League.

Liverpool had been planning to use the Brentford game as an opportunity to celebrate the start of Eurovision week in the city and showcase the event.

They were also going to tie in their Foundation Day, marking 20 years of its charitable work in the city.

But their fans’ actions and the wider backlash to it will now dominate the agenda.

Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp said on Friday he agreed with the club’s decision to play the anthem.

Asked about the coronation in the first question of the press conference, he responded: ‘The club’s position is my position. That is clear. 

‘Besides that, this is definitely a subject which I cannot really have a proper opinion about. I am from Germany, we don’t have a king or a queen, I am 55-years-old and I have no experience of that. 

‘Watching from the outside, it is a nice thing to watch when all the weddings are massive things in Germany but no one really knows what it is like. It is like watching a movie. We don’t feel that. 

‘That is it pretty much. I am pretty sure a lot of people in this country will enjoy the coronation, some will not be interested and some will not like it. That is it and that is over the whole country. That is all I can say about it. The club’s position is my position.’

Anfield stadium DJ George Sephton, 77, tweeted he would ‘happily’ play the national anthem before deleting the post.

In reply to a message suggesting Sephton plays ‘God Save the Queen’ by punk band Sex Pistols instead, he wrote: ‘I will happily playing the National Anthem. It’s coronation Day.’ 

In response, Liverpool fans told him it would ‘be the worst received song you’ll ever play’. 

More to follow…