Podcasts

In a recent job interview I spoke almost exclusively about podcasts. The interview was not for a job that had anything to do with podcasts. And strangely enough, they did offer me the job.

It seems the podcast is having a real moment. Actually, this moment has lasted a fair while. In an age where virtual reality games are being developed and there's the option to watch films and TV on the go, we still go back to audible stories - it's one of the oldest mediums and, I think, one of the best. Plus, you can listen to them whilst doing whatever it is you're needing to get on with. Bored on a treadmill? There's a podcast for that....Unrelenting commute? Why not listen to this....Too easily distracted by TV but hate silence? Stick this on in the background...

Plus, they're free. At least all of the podcasts featured in this post are, so there'll be no complaints from me.

First up, we have something that I'm borderline obsessed with. Stuff You Should Know podcast is really, really good. It's interesting, the hosts are friendly and relaxed, it's structured enough to actually be informative (go on, ask me anything about nuclear winters or sarcopenia, I've got that locked down) but not too formal, so you don't feel like it's a lecture. It's really just a chat about stuff you should know. Seriously, I have a lot of love for this podcast. Bonus: there's such a huge back catalogue you can listen to them all the time and not have to wait for the next episode. Although I am rapidly making my way through so should maybe slow down....

Well known in podcast land, it's Dear Sugar Radio, and it's a classic. Responding to listeners letters, this agony-aunt style podcast is helpful, calming, and super interesting. I love that the hosts (Cheryl Strayed and Steve Almond) incorporate their own experiences when giving advice and aren't afraid to say what they really think - even if that's an initial judgemental reaction or an unpopular opinion. Plus, their voices are just so soothing.

This was a recommendation from the person who interviewed me, and I'm glad they recommended it. It shows that everyone has a story. Featuring true stories, retold by those who experienced them - such a simple premise but it works so well. A great one for variety, there's bound to be several stories that will have you thinking about them for days, and it feels really personal - which I love. 

Just the one series? Seriously? Well okay, I guess I'll make do with re-listening to the five episodes until I can mouth along to them (and honestly, I'm not that far off.) This is just so good. I love Lena anyway, and I love the people she features (there's a great interview with her mum, Zadie Smith pops in for a chat, and so many other inspirational women). The episodes cover topics - love & sex, friendship, the big picture - and lengthy chats are followed by sketches, quick fire interviews, or monologues. It's like this podcast knows me, which is probably a very weird thing to write, but you know when you think 'oh my god I think about that all the time I had no idea other people did too' - yeah, that'll happen a lot with this one. Now just to wait for the next series....(please).

I read the book. I loved the book. I downloaded the podcast. Similar to dear sugar, Elizabeth Gilbert responds to listeners creative fears or problems and then gets a friend to offer their opinion as well. If you don't like metaphors, magic, and phrases like 'creative bonding with another soul' then steer clear, but if you do then this is right up your street. It's cathartic to know people struggle creatively in the same way you do, and it's nice to hear reassurance. One thing I really love about this is how fun Elizabeth makes creative pursuits - she has a wonderful 'just do it, maybe it's rubbish, maybe it will never make you a living, maybe it's pointless, but just do it...be creative' kind of attitude that I'm definitely trying to channel. 

There you go, five recommendations to get you started - lovely series' filled with lovely people and highly useful when blocking out the sounds and annoyances of an 8:15 London commute. 

Today I swam 800 meters

Today I swam 800 meters. I didn’t do it particularly fast, or particularly well. It’s not an exceptional feat, but it was something that I did today. And it was my body that allowed me to do it. My body that I’ve spent years hating and wanting to change. The body that I’ve looked at and wished I could just grab fat and it would dissolve, the body that makes me change my mind at the last minute because the dress I wanted to wear is just a bit too tight and I don’t quite have the figure.

What else did my body do today? It allowed me to walk to where I needed to go. It allowed me to laugh, to store and recall memories. It balanced hormones, digested food, absorbed nutrients….a whole host of functions that just happen. I mean, that’s pretty great.

Now, I know I’m no exception when it comes to opinions regarding body image – there’s a whole wealth of literature out there that describes hundreds of thousands of people who experience less than favourable relationships with their bodies. Similarly, there’s a wide variety of theories about why this is, which most of us will be able to recognize and understand, the media, the pressure to reach perfection, social media…. It’s not something I talk to about friends very often, apart from the occasional ‘I need to go on a diet’ or ‘lets start yoga before our holiday’, but I do remember one evening at university surrounded by some of my closest friends in a sort of sofa den we had made (yes, we made a den, yes, we were 21 years old, and it was great). We each said one thing about our bodies that we really did not like. Now, I’m not going to list what these wonderful people take issue with on their own person, but I sat there listening to all of these insecurities I had never considered they had. I was surrounded by friends whose bodies I envied – they were so strong, they inhabited themselves so well and so fully, they were so lean, or flexible, their bodies taken them to so many places - withstanding heartbreak, grief, and stress.

I take issue with the ‘love your body’ rhetoric. It’s too forceful. I don’t need to love my body thank you very much, in fact, you’re probably the same industry that thrives on me wanting to change my body and causing this confusion so I’m not sure I should take your advice. Of course, if you do love your body then that’s great. Similarly, if you don’t like it, no worries – you don’t have to. You do not need to love your body to love yourself and to love others. Having said that, hating your body is fruitless. Look at what it does! Since when did bodies become more than something to transport and lift and hug with? They are primarily there for function, not aesthetic, and certainly not one, narrow aesthetic presented as the ideal. Naturally, there are varying levels of body image issues and I would never devalue the incredible pain and difficulty that such problems can cause. I just don’t think you have to love your body. I think a good starting point is to acknowledge your body – in all its gloriousness, in all its complex biological wonder, and yes – maybe your love of pastries shows, and maybe you’re struggling to put on weight, or maybe you’re arms aren’t as strong as you like, or your nose too long – but you have a nose, you had the amazing experience of eating those pastries, and these perceived ‘problems’ are just one part of such a huge and wonderful whole. They might not disappear and you might struggle to look at them with love, so just acknowledge them. Acknowledge your body, take pride in it’s abilities – however sparse you may think they are, see your body as part of you – not some casing that you want to escape from. The idea that you exercise or eat well in order to change your body comes from a place of hate; surely it would be better to do these things in order to feed and care for your body, coming from a place of gratitude?

I know it’s easy to write this and harder to practice it, often we have convinced ourselves into our failings over years and years so it’s probably not going to change quickly or easily.  Nevertheless, I’ve decided that it is okay that I don’t love my body, and maybe I never will, I would like very much to be stronger and leaner (admittedly for aesthetic as well as health reasons), and I am doing things to achieve this, but this is made so much easier by not waking up and thinking ‘oh god look at my thighs, I can’t wear that skirt it’s too short, I shouldn’t be allowed to wear jeans, look how much they spread when I sit down!’ Instead, I’m trying to think ‘okay, so there’s my thighs, not a huge fan of them, but there they are, and they get me from A to B, and they let me swim…”

A Week in Sunsets

Oh France. You beautiful thing.
The heat hits me first. That familiar smell of humidity, lavender, and fresh grass hugging the hills.

Nostalgia is a funny thing and, try as I might (and I don’t really try) I cannot wipe the rosy-tint from my memories of summers in the south of France. Riding bikes near a lake, devising imaginary games with my sister, the lightness of my body in the swimming pool, podding peas for dinner, listening to swing music as mum cooked inside the caravan, the thunder of rain on the tent during a storm making our sleeping bags all the more inviting. Skin bathed in sun, hair full of sea salt, smiles that have stretched from toothless to braced to adult – it’s all held here. I could talk forever about the wonderful memories I have created in this place. Driving with my family from Calais through the country, stopping at various campsites, visiting landscapes that look like they have been plucked straight from a Scandinavian fairy tale (and, yes, listening intently to Harry Potter on tape – the only way to spend a 7 hour long drive).

I could go on, but you get it, I love this place.

The lazy haze of sun filled days smudges the horizon. It’s so warm that you feel like doing anything other than laying around reading books or listening to blues is just unnatural. That's something I can hop right on board with.

Dotted with real life charming fairytale villages, hills lined with vineyards, and with sunsets so brilliant it looks as though the sky has caught fire, how can you not love this place? I mean just look at it.

Bookshelf: The Fly Trap

So it’s a few weeks after a break up and naturally I turn to books for help and guidance. It was an experience I had never been through before, and I felt like few of my family members or friends could relate - because in my solipsistic state I thought ‘surely no one had ever felt as heartbroken as this before’. I found myself at the doors of the four floor Watersones on Piccadilly – my happy place. (Well, one of many, I’m pretty greedy when it comes to happy places.)

Yes, I had cried on the tube there, but now I was armed with a list of the ‘Best Books for Breakups’ and a disregard for how little money I had in my bank.

Truth be told, I talked myself out of most of the books on the list – either they were too specific, too irrelevant to my particular situation, or just made me feel even more of a sad sack for thinking that purchasing ‘Why it hurts and how to heal: a perspective on single life’ would actually make me feel better. I’m a big believer in literature, I devoted three years of my undergraduate life to the thing, but I’m not sure that self-help literature is for me. I’ve never quite found the elusive self-help novel that isn’t cheesy, isn’t general, and makes me feel like I actually can go out into the world as the wholly imperfect individual I am and achieve my goal of (insert anything here – trust me, it will have been written about by someone.) Fiction, on the other hand, now that’s a horse of a different colour.

Fiction is, to me, like a small shed at the bottom of the garden, painted white with beautiful throws and patchwork blankets on armchairs and benches, fairy lights, and a warm cup of tea. It is my hammock, I can relax with fiction, it has offered me a space to recuperate, to escape, to rebuild…most things I need can be found in that moment of complete absorption in a book or poem – the moment where nothing but the overwhelming beauty of the language and the story exists. (Hello there pretentious literature student hiding away in my mind, nice of you to join us for this post).

Anyway, I walked away from the bookshelves housing most of the books recommended to me by a very cursory Google search, and I wandered through the stacks of literature – hundreds of voices just waiting to be heard again, thousands of characters and delicious sentences. I ended up picking up three books: A Single Man (no prizes as to why this caught my eye), Bonsoir Trieste, and The Fly Trap.

Yes. The Fly Trap. A non-fiction account of an entomologist who has spent his life collecting hoverflies. Clearly, my post-breakup brain had decided to flee to the outer-reaches of sanity, and advised that this book would offer me solace and support in my heartache. So I bought a book about collecting flies.

But it’s non-fiction! But it’s about flies and you hate insects! But it will be bullied by the numerous books that reside on your bookshelf as a ‘silly-fly-book’.

Yes, yes, yes….I know. But it’s just so great. It doesn't try to be anything other than a book about a man who loves collecting flies, but it manages to be much more than this. It is peppered with phrases that so elegantly capture life that I’ve started to wonder if I should take up fly catching to improve my own writing. It’s incredibly pure and gentle prose, there is clarity in writing that pretend to be nothing other than what it is, descriptions of long Swedish summer evenings and the flora and fauna that comes along with them.

For me, the book was very calm and insightful, it left me longing for evenings filled with nothing but sitting in nature. And that’s what you have to want – meditations on life that emerge from stories about catching flies and people who have caught flies. Don’t come to this book expecting excitement in any thrilling way, it is an escape that you float into rather than getting sucked into it.  

I have always loved seeing or hearing of people who unapologetically and passionately love what they do with such enthusiasm that you begin to see why they do it – not necessarily their job, but their hobby – and The Fly Trap is full of such enthusiasm, it pours from the pages and calms your heart into truly believing that ‘each to their own’ is something you should live by.

Long Story Short: This book is warm and contemplative and humorous, it draws the readers attention to the beauty of the smallest things in life. I really enjoyed it but if you don’t like loose structure and quiet but thoughtful memoirs then it won’t be for you. Be open minded when you go into this book and you will probably find yourself going back to it again and again, to find answers to things in your life, or just to wistfully dream about nights by a lake catching flies - admittedly this is probably a very niche dream. I told you, pick any topic, someone will have written about it. 

Blanc et Bleu

Surely it can’t just be me who fantasises about wearing a beautiful floaty dress, undone hair, no makeup, and browsing a market on a Sunday morning with a wicker basket full of pretty flowers and baguettes?

Let no one tell you that dreams cannot be realised because I am here to tell you that they can my friend, they certainly can.

If you would like to hear more about the market then stay tuned. This post is about the dress. The perfect dress for strolling aimlessly in small provincial streets in the South of France and popping into the local boulangerie.

Cards on the table, I bought this dress at a low point, post break-up, when I needed to feel like a princess, and so it cost a lot more money than I would willingly admit. However, I do feel like a princess in this dress, so lets pretend I used my princess money to pay for it and not my real money.

You’re about to get an insight into the incredible vocabulary and descriptive skills a degree in English Literature can afford a person: this dress is so pretty it makes me think I am a character in a poem about a lady who lives in a beautiful house with a river running through the garden. It is twirly, the blue dot detail stops it from being too bridal (although I would happily wear this to my wedding, and – given the price – will probably have to), and I think it’s a dress you can wear in the day without it being too formal as well as to a dinner or garden party.

 Thank God, right? Finally a dress that solves all my garden party needs. Too often I have had to turn down a classic garden party because I just feel like there’s something missing from my wardrobe – that perfect outfit with just the right hint of whimsy and a next-door farmers-daughter kind of vibe. Well worry no longer because I have found the solution to that incredibly niche problem. This dress has sold out in most sizes, so here’s a few similar alternatives: one, two, three, four, five.

Also, bonus points because the romantic floaty-ness hides a ‘I’ve eaten the equivalent of a full baguette in market tasters’ belly really well. I’m not ashamed to admit that a large section of my clothes fit into this category, and now another addition finds its home. Totally worth having no money to spend on food and essentials for the next month or so.

A quick glance at some old stone arches, a few last twirls for good measure, and I left the locals to their market shopping and stopped skipping through the square singing Belle (Little Town) from Beauty and the Beast.