of the country. four boys from a youth football team have already been retrieved from the cave. a further nine people are still inside. here in the uk, the minister for exiting the european union — david davis and his number two, steve baker have quit. it comes only a few days after the government agreed a deal on future relations between britain and the eu. and this crisis injapan has been described as unprecedented. rescue workers there continue to search for people trapped after several days of heavy rain and landslides that have killed eighty people. millions of people have been moved from their homes. stay with us. we will have more on oui’ stay with us. we will have more on our breaking news from both thailand and the uk. more from me later, but first, hard

to talk. welcome to a special addition of hardtalk from the hay literary festival in wales. today i am joined by an audience to meet a specialist in death. for many of us, the ha rd est in death. for many of us, the hardest subject of all to think and talk about yet for sue black it is the very business of her life. she isa the very business of her life. she is a professor of frome tic anthropology whose ability to read the clues and stories in human remains has made her a world—renowned investigator. so what do she see when she looks death in the face? sue black, a very warm welcome to hardtalk. how is it that

you have found yourself engaging with death in a way that so few of us can with death in a way that so few of us can imagine? for many of us it is something we shy away from, something we shy away from, something we shy away from, something we find it difficult. and yet you confronted head—on. why do you think that is? because i don't confront it. it is not an adversary. it is somebody who walks with you your entire life. my grandmother came from a tiny village on the west coast called glenelg and she had, as the west coast, one of those people who believed in second site and the world beyond. for her, death was a lwa ys world beyond. for her, death was always her companion, someone she would talk with, someone she felt she knew. she passed that on to me asa she knew. she passed that on to me as a child. she would talk to me, as as a child. she would talk to me, as a child, about herfriend death. my maiden name was gunn and my name is

susan margaret so i became known as fm gunn, susan margaret so i became known as f m gunn, submarine —— submachine gun. so the physical reality of flash was with you from an early age? then there was a time in your girl who when you volunteer to work as which is assistant. i did not volunteer. my father was a presbyterian scot and he asked me what i would do for a job when i was a 12—year—old. he wanted to know what i was going to do now. he expected me to have a job because he expected me to have a job because he expected me to pay half my income to my motherfor my expected me to pay half my income to my mother for my board and lodging. that was my responsibility as a child. i hope my children here that. my child. i hope my children here that. my friend, susan, got me a job in a shop selling carrots and i hated it. soi shop selling carrots and i hated it. so i went across the yard into the butcher shop and loved it. absolutely loved it. you have

written an extraordinary book about your life and career and you say that you were up to your elbows in muscle, bone, blood and viscera. you clearly, in a way, relished that. muscle, bone, blood and viscera. you clearly, in a way, relished thatlj clearly, in a way, relished that.|j love clearly, in a way, relished that.” love lucy give you go into a butcher shop, it is a wonderfully clean and precise place to a butcher knows exactly where to place his blade to cut out a piece of me. the is precision and art to it and and then he lays it out as something almost poetic. i knew that i was not going to be squeamish about things because it is always cold and a butcher shop and we used to look forward to the bands coming up from the abattoir, particularly on the days when little was being delivered because the liver was always warm and your hands will always hold so you could warm your hands and use the cow blood to get your roadgoing. if you are going to do that, then you will never ever

be squeamish. i think we were all the getting a picture that you were quite an unusual girl. my friends all had jobs in pharmacies and clothes shop ‘s and things like that. you took your interest further and in your academic life you found yourself dissecting human bodies and that was a part of your training as a forensic anthropologist. you have written interestingly about that and i would like to tease it out with you. you said that eventually anatomy imprints itself on your soul and when you have gone through this period of learning, of dissecting bodies and learning about the bone struck, the nervous system, everything, taking it apart and feeling it, you say that you eventually consider yourself for ever a member of a privileged elite. what do you mean by that? everybody interacts with the people around them on an external surface of it

you interact with somebody‘s basal body, their hands from the outside. we are given a rare, rear opportunity to interact with people on the inside well is on the outside. and when you make that first cut into human skin with a scalpel it is an incredible rubicon. you can never scalpel it is an incredible rubicon. you can never ci’oss scalpel it is an incredible rubicon. you can never cross of scalpel it is an incredible rubicon. you can never cross of the game, the first time you make that can't. did you find that difficult?” first time you make that can't. did you find that difficult? i was terrified. i can remember my hands doing this and it is no accident that when you dissect you start on the chest because you don't know how deep to cut and there is a big bone there so you cannot make too many mistakes. i realised by the time i had made the first part... i had not caught my breath at all. i was so scared i would do something wrong and sirens would sound and someone would call me a fraud and pull me out. and nothing happened. but what an amazing world when you can peel away the skin and you can see what is underneath and each one of those

cells and tissue work together, pretty well in harmony every single day of our lives, to keep us alive. it is nothing short of a miracle. let's get to what it means to be a forensic anthropologist. it seems to me that something really interestingly different about what you do from the pathologist who, we know, they look at the dead body and tries to figure out how it died, the process of death and what led to it. you are not so much about what led to the death, you are about the identity of the person who is now dead and you are using the remains, the corpse, to work backward and former picture of the identity of that person. how important is it to you to see it as something in a positive sense? it is positive. what we have to do is we have to try and realign the dead body with the identity that person had while they we re identity that person had while they were alive. if you can imagine a

police investigation where you have a body and you do not know who that person nears, then you do not know which family to go and talk to, which family to go and talk to, which friend, how to piece together the information that has led to that death. most of us will die in a hospital or a hospice, in death. most of us will die in a hospital ora hospice, in our car, oi’ hospital ora hospice, in our car, or we will carry something about tells us who we are. but when you are found without that information it is important. we cannot investigate a murder until we know who you are. is that you can't investigate a murder and earlier i called to an investigator. despite your science training and your skills in anatomy and forensics, do you see yourself it hard to be an investigator? only in terms of the evidence in front of us. we do not investigate the crime. that is the responsibility of the police. we will interrogate and investigate the evidence placed before us and the evidence placed before us and the evidence may be the human body. if you have somebody where body parts

are found because of dismemberment, we will identify which is which body part, do they belong to the same person? then we have to identify what implemented may have been used to cut that body into pieces. was the body on its back or on its front when the limb was removed? was that a knife, a sore? these questions that lead you through the investigate if processed. when it comes to the corpse, —— court, we do not investigate there. that is the job of the lawyer. we do not find somebody guilty, that is the job of the jury. everyone in somebody guilty, that is the job of thejury. everyone in the process somebody guilty, that is the job of the jury. everyone in the process as an role to play and we just work with the evidence. it is a question of looking for the tiniest clues that sometimes. if we go into some of the, to an outsider, extraordinarily difficult cases you have had to deal with. 1999 for example a new being called in to go to kosovo to help with the investigation into alleged war crimes and you found yourself in a

village where, allegedly, well, the evidence pointed to, a0 people including children had been gunned down and massacred in one particular place and by the time you got there, what was left? they had been taken to an outhouse and they had been separated into two rooms and the gunmen had stood at the door of each room and had spread the room with kalashnikov fire and their accomplices out the window had thrown in straw and petrol and they torched the building. so when we arrived there, probably about six or seven months later, what you had in the two rooms are co— mingled remains. very badly decomposed because you had 28, 30 degrees heat. you had partially burnt remains, more less covered by the tiles fallen from the roof and the wild roaming packs of dogs view this as a food source so the bodies will have

been partly pulled apart and separated by the dogs as well. so thatis separated by the dogs as well. so that is what you find. a boiling mass of maggots, partly buried, partly burnt and partly dispersed by animals. where you able to use your skills in identifying those individuals? some. what you have... we had this myth that dna solves everything. it often does not. you need a sample with which to compare that dna. we generally given to these individuals. what we would do is we were in these white teletubby suits that make you look a lot fatter than even i am and you have like plastic wellington boots on and you have a face mask and double layer globs in 28 degrees heat and you will go through the four 8a until you find the first bit of body and you start to create an individual. generally by this point, most of the soft tissue has gone so

you are looking at bone and identifying that it is a male, what age, what potential hide, is there anything about them in terms of their dentition or disease or a broken bone that they have had that might help their family identify them. are they still wearing some clothing? is there something in the pocket? you have described this as one of the greatest experiences of your life doing this and i am struggling to relate to that because it just sounds like struggling to relate to that because itjust sounds like a vision of hell to me. i can see why it would be a vision of hell and certainly i have never done anything on that sort of scale before. most of the work that i have done within the uk has been on single burials or a single murder. so the scale of it was an enormous education for me. but also knowing that this was going to an international criminal court meant that even in the most adverse of circumstances we still had to be able to work to the standards were

a lwa ys able to work to the standards were always expected both so the challenge was to make sure that our standards did not slip. do you see it as an act of humanity? in the end we are talking about human beings who have, in the case of kosovo but in other crime scenes that you have worked on, human beings who have suffered from the most terrible crimes. from evil, if we can put way. do you see yourself as restoring something? we have to be careful. when you are out there is a scientist you are expected to be objective. it is not yourjob to be emotional about it, it is not your job to be involved. you have built it is not your responsibility. you have a job to do. anger? you cannot. it is not your place. this is about justice and justice will determine who is guilty he was innocent. my job is not tojudge who is guilty he was innocent. my job is not to judge anybody, who is guilty he was innocent. my job is not tojudge anybody, myjob is to gather evidence, analyse

evidence, present evidence and let someone else decide on guilt. if you allow yourself to become emotionally involved in these situations, you become a less effective objective scientist and you may well be called to court and you have to stand there with all clear conscience saying i believe this is my opinion not i desperately want to get him put away for the rest of his life. that is not ourjob. you need to fight again to. if that is the new unique to fight against it. going back to my point about humanity, has a coloured your view of what we human beings are your view of what we human beings a re really your view of what we human beings are really like and what we are really ca pa ble of? are really like and what we are really capable of? i think we have a lwa ys really capable of? i think we have always known what the human is capable of what i find is that in these horrendous circumstances and they really are truly awful, there is always wonderful humanity. so you might have a widow who has lost her husband, her children, her entire family. and when you come along to resume the grave, she is still there

with you offering a cup of tea. her way of expressing her thanks for what you are doing. i have never found a horrendous situation in the world that has an absence of some humanity somewhere. and that is what you need to look for. that is what really reassures us of what humans are genuinely capable of. and you cannot concentrate on the negative. i wonder if you have ever been just overwhelmed by the scale of something that you have had to face and thinking, of the tsunami, for example that many of us remember how awful it was to hear that news at the end of 200a, that this tsunami had destroyed so many coastal areas in asia, from sri lanka, thailand, indonesia, catching holidaymakers and local people and hundreds of thousands of people died. you are called, i think you decided to send just off even before you were called, you went to thailand to help

the big identification effort. it was so overwhelming. it was. the country was not ready for it, and it was no disrespect to them at all that they couldn't cope with the enormity of the scale of the death. and what people were doing was they were collecting bodies and they were putting them on the back of flatbed trucks, and they we re the back of flatbed trucks, and they were driving them into the cities and leaving these bodies at the temples. and of course, the temples we re temples. and of course, the temples were the right place for this at all, so all they could do was lay the bodies out in rows. and so in searing heat you would have these bodies that in front of you were rows upon rows, just decomposing in the heat, as you almost watch them, bloating to the point that the skin would break. and we had, as you can imagine, just flies everywhere, make it everywhere, rats everywhere. it was really... if there was a hell on earth, it was those early days in thailand in particular —— maggots everywhere. and it is nobody‘s

fault, they simply weren't expecting that kind and magnitude of an incident. let me change tack a little bit and talk to you about crime. and here we are at a festival devoted to literature, and crime fiction is a huge thing, and i know you have become friends with a fellow scot, val mcdermott, who is a great crime writer but she writes a lot in great detail about violent crime, and you have, i believe, offered her some advice. and i wonder whether sometimes you fear that you run the risk of feeding a somewhat voyeuristic tendency in us, to wa nt somewhat voyeuristic tendency in us, to want to know about how to dismember a body, what happens to a body as it sort of erodes the time —— val mcdermid. we are sort of intrigue, we are repelled, but are you feeding of voyeurism in all of us? it is definitely there. there is no doubt that we all like a good murder mystery, because we feel co mforta ble, murder mystery, because we feel comfortable, we feel secure, because it is remote. so we like to be slightly scared by crime. and if

people are going to be scared by crime, i would people are going to be scared by crime, iwould rather they people are going to be scared by crime, i would rather they be scared by true crime than by axel absolute and otherfictional by true crime than by axel absolute and other fictional crime that makes things totally unbelievable. so in your view it is important, if you are talking about how our body is to be dismembered, you think it is important to get the detail right of how difficult it is. absolutely, because so few people will become a dismember, ever. the chances that what i am doing is educating them will is extremely slim. but those people who read forensic novels are probably more forensically aware that any part of the public has ever been before. and they can quickly smell out something that doesn't sound right. so what i have is a huge amount of respect for the crime writers who actually go away and research what is it really like, so that what they are doing is they are respecting their readers, to say this is reality. i have notjust made this up, this is actually how it would be. and i have respect for that. you have written a book which

is full of extraordinary stories, and you describe so many countless experiences you have had with death. but what you don't do, and i don't know whether you feel like doing it now, is share your own feelings about what happens after death. if, when you have looked at all of these dead bodies, it makes you more or less convinced that there is nothing else, or whether you believe, less convinced that there is nothing else, orwhetheryou believe, having seen so much death, there is an afterlife ? seen so much death, there is an afterlife? i have no idea. but when i get there, i suspect i won't come back to tell you. and so, as far as i'm aware, no one has ever genuinely come back. now, i know that we have people who die in the operating theatre and are brought back by medical life, but there comes a point beyond which you don't come back. we don't have zombies. i have spent my entire life with the dead, andi spent my entire life with the dead, and i have never seen a ghost in my life. you have never been spooked by... no, the living spook me. the

living are weird. the dead don't move. when you put them down, they stay there, and they don't get up and try and eat you. but you are being so coldly rational about it. what it is rational! so i had a lovely conversation before we came in here with patsy, and she told me, what we are worried about, what happened before we were born? well, why should we look at the other end either. somebody switched on a light to give us life and someone will switch it off at the end of the day, but why should we worry. well, let's not get into why should we worry, but i just not get into why should we worry, but ijust don't know whether it's possible for you to apply the same rationality and logic, for example, do your own loved ones. because we have all, in this room, experienced, operable the most of us, if not all of us, experienced the death within our own families. and ijust wonder whether, when you experience death within your own family, and i know you have lost both of you paris, whether your feelings upon viewing their dead bodies has been different

from the feelings you took with you to kosovo or two thailand or to those major police investigation is you have worked on? my parents, bless them, gave me the opportunity to find out if i could answer that question. and so my mother died healthy to death within six weeks, and my father took a long time to die because of alzheimer's. and what was hard was their dying. their death wasn't hard. and then being dead wasn't hard. it was watching what they went through in the dying process. so, whether that was painful, whether it was protracted, whether there was —— they were somewhere that they never wanted to be. but when death came the both of them, it was an absolute and after release, for them and everybody. and being dead, they were a lot smaller than they were in life. they looked very small, very shrunken, but they we re very small, very shrunken, but they were gone, and there was something... but is that a metaphorical thing, as well? do you

feel... again, it is digging deep into difficult things, but when you saw your shrunken, dead father, did you feel that his soul... my father had gone. at that point, my father had gone. at that point, my father had gone. at that point, my father had gone. do you believe in the sole? that is, i guess, what i am getting at. i don't know, because something happen in something changed. i was there, i something happen in something changed. iwas there, i held his hand when he took his last breath in life, and i felt hand when he took his last breath in life, and ifelt there hand when he took his last breath in life, and i felt there was hand when he took his last breath in life, and ifelt there was nothing more that i could do for him as a daughter than that. it was the most privileged place i could ever have been and it was such a gentle process for him that he decided he had had enough. he stopped drinking, he stopped beating, it turned his face to the wall and he decided he was going to die. and when he took that last breath, and the rattle that last breath, and the rattle that you hear when they talk about the death rattle is pretty much the fluid that goes into the lungs, that comes out with the last rest, then i knew he had gone. and i had no trouble leaving my father's body, but i would never have left my father while he was still alive. and

in that last breath, something changed, but my father ceased to be, and a body that was left was not my father. it was just the vessel that he occupied for his entire life. my father had gone, he had died. is there something beyond? i don't know until they get there. but he changed. do you fear your own death? not at all. i think it is the last great adventure. you are going to do it once lifetime, and if you are going a long journey, you will a lwa ys going a long journey, you will always prepare for that journey. going a long journey, you will always prepare for thatjourney. why do we not prepare for dying? and i think i want to experience every single moment of it. i want to know what it is like to die. because i can't remember being born, so i would really like to know, in those last stages, this is what it feels like, this is what it sounds like, this is what it tastes like. and then presumably i will remember none of it, because i willjust die. and will you give your body to science and dissection? absolutely, i would

bea and dissection? absolutely, i would be a hypocrite if i didn't. so i have an organ donor card that they can use my organs to keep other people alive for as long as they are of use to anybody. i suspect by the time of 65 they are so far done that nobody is going to want them anyway. soi nobody is going to want them anyway. so i feel in marguc weevil form to my anatomy department, and i will hand my body to them when i die so that students can dissect —— my bequeathal form. and that students can dissect —— my bequeathalform. and i want them that students can dissect —— my bequeathal form. and i want them to bequeathal form. and i want them to be able to gather together my bones, you have the boiled down to get rid of the fat in the muscle attached to it, and that i want them to re— strea m it, and that i want them to re— stream into an articulated skeletons that i can carry on living and teaching for the rest of my death. applause i've done a lot of interviews in my time, but! i've done a lot of interviews in my time, but i can't think of a more finite way of ending an interview, soi finite way of ending an interview, so i think we willjust say, sue black, it has been an enormous pleasure to have you on hardtalk.

thank you very much indeed. well, it's been another glorious weekend. if you do like your weather hot, dry and sunny, just some subtle changes in the weather, i think, as we head over the next few days. some more cloud and things will turn cooler, but here was the picture on a sunny afternoon in wiltshire, beautiful blue skies are not a cloud around. bit of fair weather cloud here and there are through the week, quickly things will turn cooler and cloudier but staying largely dry and temperatures picking up once again into the latter part the week, we start the new week with high pressure still in charge, a weak cold front heading south across the country introducing some slightly cooler conditions initially to the north and further south. so, on monday, it won't be quite

as warm as it has been across parts of scotla nd and northern ireland, northern and eastern england, with a shift in wind direction, more cloud than we have seen, and holding on to the warm and dry weather the much of the country. a bit of drizzle in the far north associated with a bit more cloud. you can see the red colours indicating that warmer weather across southern and western england and south wales, but north, not as warm. some places 5—10 degrees cooler than they have been. 16 in newcastle monday, contrast that with london at around 30 degrees or so, but that dry theme sticks across the board. and then, moving through monday evening, still a bit more cloud around the north and east and we'll start to draw in more of a northerly wind, as you can see the wind arrows around the east coast of england.

so a noticeable breeze into tuesday morning, and temperatures overnight not as hot and muggy as we have seen, but down towards southern and western parts, around 16 degrees. tuesday, quite breezy feel if you're exposed to the north sea wind around the east coast, breezy through the english channel too. but less windy further west, with spells of sunshine and a bit of cloud around but staying dry across the board once again. temperatures on the cooler side than what we've seen recently, so typically around i7—2a degrees or so. and then, as we move through tuesday to the middle of the week down to wednesday, high pressure stays with us. with that cold front to the south, we are in slightly cooler air mass, so i think through the middle of the week, a slightly cooler interlude but temperatures in the low to mid—20s and then towards the end of the week, it looks like those temperatures are going to pick up, turning hot and staying dry into next weekend. have a great week. i'm sophie long,

live outside the caves where rescue teams will shortly resume their operation to bring the remaining boys to safety. four out — nine more to go. divers get ready to start what they hope will be the last part of the cave rescue. they're racing to complete their mission before the forecast heavy rain brings more flooding underground i'm babita sharma in london. also in the programme: here in the uk, the brexit minister — david davis — sensationally quits the government. a british woman who'd been exposed to the nerve agent novichok has died. prime minister theresa may says she's appalled and shocked.