Book Club Meets: The mess of motherhood, with Holly Bourne

0:03Welcome to the Happy Place Book Club Club with me Fern Cotton. Sweets inside popping like corn kernels as they explode inside their wiry cage. Today, So Thrilled for You by Holly Bourne. And there's a moment of stillness in me. The first time I've felt calm in so long. As I take in the view thinking, wow, I've never seen pink smoke before. Soon the flames will claim the pile of duck-patterned wrapping paper, gorge on the coarse wool of the hand-knitted blankets and turn the fallen wall of peonies into a sweet, toxic perfume. I can tell already that everything is lost. My life has already burned down metaphorically, so it makes sense that I've now burned it down literally too.

0:44All I wanted to do was torch it all until there was nothing left but sooty soil, rich with nutrients to grow something new. But I never thought I'd actually do it. I watched the smoke plume out of the cannon, dancing as it eclipses the vista and spirals around in the heat, juxtaposed against the bluest sky. The fire around it ignites instantly, the smoke doubling, trebling, as flames catch and dance in the kindling. The heat slaps my face and wakes me up. I hear myself screaming at what I've done, and I run towards the heat.

1:21Oh my gosh, this book. Okay, this is the plot. Nikki, Lauren, Charlotte and Steffi have been friends since university. Now in their 30s, life is pulling them in different directions. but the girls are reunited when Charlotte organises the baby shower from hell for pregnant Nikki. Tensions are going to be high as these women are forced to confront their own and each other's views about motherhood while also dealing with an actual fire at the baby shower. This is a whodunit. It's a social commentary. It's absolutely bloody brilliant. I loved it so much and that's why it's our Happy Place Book Club read for February.

1:58You loved it too. God, this one got you lot talking on Instagram. Here's a voice note from Lena. So thrilled for you. What a book that was. Mysterious, gripping, but most importantly, it touches on some subjects that we don't often see in books. Common struggles of expectations for women of a certain age. More specifically, those who are mothers, those who don't want to be mothers, those who struggle to conceive. The list just goes on and on. We get to see it more often these days in modern literacy, but the way Holly captured this in an intriguing way around her mystery It was absolutely amazing.

2:32This is Ali. She's clearly a fan of scribbling in the margins of great books like I am too. I loved this book and I devoured it in two days. The depiction of motherhood is so accurate and it's so well-crafted. And at so many points, I wanted to get my highlighter out and just think, oh yes, that and that, because it really tunes into some of those feelings that you don't always talk about, but are so personal, you think, but actually are completely universal. and if we don't talk about them then we won't realise the universality of them. And I also really love the depiction and description of female friendship and how it changes but the solidity of it and how important it is to us is still there even when we're all going in different directions.

3:19Brilliant book. Thank you Ali, you're entirely right. This book is an amazing depiction of the way that female friendship shifts over time as much as it is about being a mum too. I think this chat with Holly is going to resonate with you very strongly. She talks about how she was literally living this friendship motherhood mess in real life and chose to translate all those very real emotions into a thriller. And she explains why if we want the world to be a better kind of place, we really need to be supporting mums. My God, we do. And we talk about how wildly the Instagram Pinterest version of motherhood is very different to the raw reality.

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6:42hey holly hello oh holly i'm so excited to talk to you today because we have been absolutely loving your book so thrilled for you throughout the month of February over at Happy Place Book Club it is amazing normally this is the bit where I would hold up a copy of the book I had I think two or three copies of it here all of which I've given to friends to read so I haven't I haven't got the book on me but it's very well thumbed and I and it's now traveling around the UK somewhere but I just loved it I loved it oh thank you so much thank you that that means so much honestly I just yeah I was telling you just before we started to record like what a fan of you I am so it's this is very surreal and very wonderful thank you the fact that you like it is amazing I loved it I mean it's mutual fan club scenario going on here because I just think you're brilliant and it was so it was one of those books I was really going oh my god this is such a good idea why didn't I come up with this and obviously you're just extremely talented writer and it just I just flew through it I mean for people that haven't read it yet and many of our followers will have but for for those who are thinking about going to get this book now um and reading it it's never too late obviously um the premise is genius it's a it's a sort of whodunit at a baby shower when did this idea pop into your mind it was actually when I was in the very early stages of postpartum after my first child I'm self-employed and therefore my statutory maternity pay was dreadful so my husband's company had just done it so men get the same as women and so he was like we're like well we're gonna do that then and so I technically went back to work two weeks after having a baby through c-section which was as deranged as a reality as it sounds like I thought I was going to be in this feminist utopia and it was just like I can't listen to this and I'm supposed to be writing a book now like what's going on so yeah obviously I took more than two weeks off yeah you know getting to grips with that very very intense transformation of becoming a mother for the first time and my baby really really didn't sleep I bonded with her very well feeding was hell at first but then kind of settled into it although she wouldn't take a bottle so I was having to exclusively breastfeed her but um she just wouldn't sleep and as we know sleep deprivation is a form of torture and I just got quite like mad and because she wouldn't take a bottle and because the only way that she would sleep was like fully attached to my nipple I just had no life I was just sitting in the dark four or five times a day to try and get her to have enough sleep and then the nights which I remember just having that Sunday night feeling every night around 6 p.m I'll be like oh god the night is coming the night is coming how bad is it going to be how bad is it going to be and just basically fell off the face of the earth I didn't see any of my friends I didn't answer work emails and I just remember seeing no way out of this life I remember thinking oh I wonder where she goes to university like if she goes to Edinburgh I'm gonna have to move to Edinburgh and then after breastfeed her in the nightclub toilets in freshers week like I just couldn't and I do remember in my darkest moment thinking I've completely burnt down my life and I'm not talking to my friends I don't even have capacity to tell my friends how much I'm struggling and I'm scared if I told them that I was struggling they might think that I was lucky because some of them are struggling to conceive or my pregnant friends would be like why are you trying to freak me out I'm pregnant don't do this to me or my friends who already were mothers were also struggling or seemed to be completely nailing it and I was too ashamed to admit how much I wasn't nailing it and I just remember I just kept thinking I've burnt down my life it's never coming back it's ash it's it's just awful and I used to always be able to rely on my friendships to get myself through hard times and I'm those friendships seems to have just kind of evaporated through my behavior and that's when yeah I got the idea for this baby shower fire as a metaphor for what happens and this idea of like what if there was this baby shower where something went very wrong and this fire spread and these women who had always been such good friends turned on each other and yeah it was the sort of thing that pulled me through that that time I think I just I remember thinking it was quite a strange idea and I remember pitching it to my editor I was like I want to do a whodunit about an arson committed at a baby shower and I think they were a bit like I think you just need to get some sleep I was like no I think it might be a good idea I think it's crazy but I think I can fill it off and because you know obviously if you're breastfeeding it's a lot of time where you're just stuck and I was able to just plot where everybody was at all the stages of the day and where the head red herrings were and it was just this wonderful kind of escape from the intensity of my life but also quite a cathartic experience because I was writing about how motherhood impacts female friendships and how women kind of stopped communicating with each other and how that can cause resentments and stuff when we really need to be holding on to each other in these times as much as possible but we we really stumble and yeah so that's sorry very long answer to your question no but it's brilliant I mean there's so there's already so much to unpack because I mean there's so much I want to say throughout what you've just spoken about I mean first of all there'll be so many people listening to this going thank fuck Holly has just said all of that because like you say we ostracize ourselves from our friends we feel worried or ashamed or we simply don't have the energy or capacity like you've said to even reach out to people and say I'm having a really shit time and and like you say you know you worry about the judgment of people that can't conceive or having a tougher time conceiving.

12:36And it's so complicated that that period of your life becoming a mum for the first time. And I still don't think we're talking about it in the sort of complex ways that we should be. We either see these sort of Instagram perfect moments of people having babies and doing gender reveals and it all being this perfect thing or I don't know. or it just seems very sort of mumsy and cutesy and twee and it's like wait a minute it's a battlefield it's an absolute slog and at times it's you know all the things that we feel nervous to admit mind-numbingly boring and um and also there's times where you just feel like you're completely out of your depth and you don't know what you're doing but you're not meant to say any of this stuff so I think it's really powerful to have these conversations where we can talk about it being you know really crap and obviously it's different for everybody some people won't have had that experience their babies will sleep very well or they'll feed well or whatever it's different for everyone but there's got to be space for people to be able to say wait a minute that was an extremely full-on period of my life where I lost I mean I think most people would agree that you do lose a sense of who you are you know what who am I apart from this sort of feeding and nurturing machine it's um it's really you know my kids are a bit older now but I can very clearly think back to that time and go oh my god how did we you know how do you get through it it's just it's absolutely bananas and and I think also I love the notion of writing books being pure escapism I mean I've only written one novel but I found it just the most amazing escapism I would so look forward to opening my laptop and thinking where's this gonna go all or you know when my daughter was having a tough time sleeping a few years ago and I would have to sort of lie next to her in bed as she fell asleep which was a terrible habit that I've luckily since broken but I used to use that time to lie there and daydream about what would happen to the protagonist next and how might the plot unfold and it is such an amazing joy to have that escapism I mean you as you've already alluded to you've got these four friends Nikki, Lauren, Charlotte and Steffi who have all got different situations going on, which, you know, really expresses what you've just talked about, those complicated dynamics of judgment and irritation between friends and assumption and all the stuff that can obviously happen in friendship groups.

15:03But, you know, really enhanced and heightened with babies being born or not being born and baby showers. Who would you say was the most enjoyable character to write? Who did you think, oh, I can't wait to make her do this or make her do that? I really liked writing Charlotte, who's the character who is struggling to have a baby and has basically thrown this very Instagram content, Pinterest board, insane baby. Her dream baby shower, she's given it to her friend as a way of going, I let this go. I'm just gonna you know I'm not gonna be able to have this and Nikki's like this is like my worst nightmare that I can see what Charlotte's doing and Charlotte's somebody who's very different from me in that she's obviously very organized it's like super organized you know really detail orientated very you know well put together and I'm not like that and I remember being really proud of myself when I was plotting this book that I had made a spreadsheet for the very first time and if you're an author you get to dodge that part of adult life quite often you just deal with words I have an accountant and she's like I literally don't understand how you've got this so wrong still um and I remember because I because it is a whodunit and I had to plot where everybody was and because it's set in real time over one day and um I remember showing it to my husband's like look I made a spreadsheet I was so proud of myself and he was like you've drawn it on paper with a pencil like you've not even used a ruler to create like the columns I just literally like this is very me hence why I'm laughing I've never done a spreadsheet I wouldn't I wouldn't know is there software for that sort of I've never done it I've got no idea really sophisticated stuff I think you can build maths into like it's just not where I'm how I would be like you with a pen pen and paper and like where and yeah I'm not an organized person I kind of joke that I use all my functionality as a human being to create books and because it is this weird as you know writing a novel yourself like this mad mental marathon with yourself that requires huge discipline huge commitment all this sort of stuff and I kind of like I channel it all into being a novelist and like the rest of my life is just I'm almost dysfunctional and luckily I've married a dysfunctional person who can just sort of a trail of destruction I'm like I wrote a book and it's just like the laundry's not been done for you know and stuff so it was really fun to inhabit Charlotte's brain and then when I was trying to like find her I was re-watching girls for the first time and Shoshana loved yeah and I think I'd like a lot of Shoshana in there and I just I really love very neurotic women I think they're very honest there's something very nice about them and I do really like and also Charlotte is somebody who loves Instagram loves the content loves the hashtag and I think lots of people can be very eye-rolly about that but she kind of sticks up for herself a lot through the book kind of going you always whinge when I ask for a picture and then afterwards you're like do you mind sending the pictures like she's the one in the group who is bringing everyone together and documenting and making these things and so I loved writing her as she suddenly unravels throughout the day and starts you know just going completely berserk like that was very fun to write like I think there's like a chapter that opens for like everything is melting everything is fucking melting it's just her story is so painful but I loved being in her head because it was it's quite different for being in my head oh it's so genius because I think you know whether we're like Charlotte or not and I'm not like that at all you know I'm not attention to detail I'm you know I like being creative and I'm probably more similar to you in terms of I do leave a bit of trail of destruction when I'm on a bit of a creative flow if I'm writing or painting and and it's not attention to detail and italics and everything looking perfect with little labels at all but I think most of us even if we're not like that feel this immense pressure to either be getting things perfectly right for everything you know and I think we can obviously blame social media to an extent that our homes have to be perfect and our kids have to be well turned out and we're meant to look perfect and we're meant to behave perfectly and it's this whole weird it's almost like we've gone backwards this kind of like we're gonna be a good girl and everything's gonna be good and perfect and right and I've really struggled with that over the years and I think at times I've wasted years and years trying to make everyone else feel better and for everyone to only see the good bits of me and to appear together and whatever and and I'm really over it and I'm definitely Charlotte unravelling towards the second half of the book where I'm just like I can't do this anymore it's just all and I'm so not like that none of us are you know naturally like that I think often when we're like Charlotte trying to control everything to the nth degree it's because we feel so chaotic inside and And we're trying to get hold on to the reins tightly to get some sort of control over the absolute chaos.

20:12So I love that she unravels. And I think most of us in those times where we're trying to keep everything together and, you know, remembering things for the kids or work or whatever, that actually inside we're just wanting to go and like freak out. So I'm I'm so glad that she had that moment of just sort of losing the plot and and everybody going, Christ, what the hell's going on here? that's not like her at all it was it was so it was so much fun to read that also just in my brain rewinding back really interesting you talking about you know the art of writing a novel which is the most bizarre process and like you say having this intense discipline and this mental marathon that you've got to run it's such a strange process because you do all of that without any guarantee and that's quite rare with most things in life I think if you you know whatever your job is you're working towards a goal and you're doing it because you know there's going to be a pretty certain outcome and and that's you know if you're everything from a teacher to a plumber to whatever there's you know there's you can you can kind of say there's a 90 outcome come that this will happen at the end.

21:27With writing a novel, the risk is huge, absolutely huge. You could spend two years writing and editing a book, spend hours of your day obsessing about it and plotting everything for it to totally, well, first of all, you've got to get it published. But if you're lucky enough to get published, it could still go completely under the radar. No one could be bothered about it. And that is a risk that you have to knowingly take on right at the start when you're initiating that idea how much do you think about that during the process because I think you know I certainly couldn't think about that too much with mine so I would have given up at the first hurdle or just thought fuck this and walked away how much do you worry about that risk or think about it um I'd probably say like all the time it's just like brilliant I mean it's it's my full-time job now so I was a journalist for years before and because this job is so unsafe and like the kind of saying in publishing is like you're only as good as your last book and it's so I'm in such a privileged position there for about seven eight years now it's all I've done which I just feel like every year I get away with it I feel like I'm getting away with it and lots of me and my author friends have conversations like who's safe is there any author out there who feels safe and we've kind of narrowed it down to like Stephen King like maybe Maggie O 'Farrell you know people who just have these followings and it is just this very precarious way to make a living and as you said like input in doesn't equal you know output and some of the books that I feel have been my for me like my biggest proudest achievements are the books that have not landed or not sold as well and some few books not this one but if there's been a few books that have done really well and I'm like really that one and it's just completely yeah not up to me if it's you know because there's so much cultural zeitgeist involved and or you know a book about the same thing has just come out five months before yours and done much better so you're it is you know you kind of get lost in the slipstream and because it's how I have to pay my mortgage it that noise is in my head a lot and then I can and then I get worried that that will impact what I produce and I do think if you have that thing in your head like is this gonna sell are people gonna like it is it as good as your last book like everyone at the moment is reading like dragon sex books this isn't a dragon sex book like maybe you should write dragon sex books and then you can afford the extension like all this stuff and you've just got I think I've had to train myself to tune it out and I tried to come back like some solid things which is one I'm like you write because it's so good for you to write it's how you make sense of your life as you and also it's that distraction as you said when you were writing your novel to have that other world that's sort of running parallel to yours that you can kind of travel to in your head is how I've coped with my life and I remember just I once had this awful dentist situation happen and I had to have all this reconstructive surgery on my face and every Saturday I was having like three hours of dental surgery I remember just in my head going okay so what's gonna happen in chapter four and just like completely disassociated but in a healthy disassociation I also whenever I finished a book I have learned something about myself I've processed a part of my life that's not to say that there are autobiographies but there's been something in that book that I needed to understand so I'm like nothing's lost from that and if it then if it does get published meet meeting readers who have felt changed or dislodged or seen or understood or emboldened because they needed that too so I try to hold on to that yeah it is and then also I always tell any person who's trying to get published or who's written a book or doesn't know whether to finish and or is scared that it will come to nothing I do think there's something incredibly powerful about making something from nothing there is a permanence there and I do think if you're a woman in particular considering our voices through history and our experiences have been radically marginalized it's a massive act of resistance to fill a page with your words with your story if you're a woman and that's just even if you're a woman that alone if you're a woman of color a woman of disability all these sorts of things and so I'm like you are making something from nothing that will be left behind and my bit of advice to anyone is always print off your book even if it never gets published get it through the printer and put it on the table and look and go I did that if I died tomorrow somebody will be able to pick this up it's I've left something behind I've tried to make sense of the world in my unique way because of my unique story and nobody can ever take creation away from you in terms of what it gives you and what it actually permanently leaves behind in terms of you're actually taking up space you've taken up you've filled these empty bits of wood with your words and that's where I go to when I start worrying that I need to start writing high fantasy dragon sex books to pay the mortgage I'm like no no don't don't go there don't we there's there's enough of those out there

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Go to shopify.com slash retail to upgrade your selling today shopify.com retail what a brilliant idea to encourage anyone that's writing anything from poetry to fiction to non-fiction to print that thing out you know I feel deeply passionate about that in lots of ways without really having had the awareness of it until you just said it you know sometimes I get this insane urge where I have to paint something and and there is part of that is the feeling of there's nothing and then by the end of the day there's this thing and and I feel more proud of that than I would anything that might be more publicly celebrated or or sort of you know in a more mainstream way celebrated that to me is I am as high as a kite and I think you know it's a that's a quicker process than writing a book obviously but I do have it with any of the books that I've written where you can hold it at the end and and you know you and like you say you're leaving it behind it is sort of a radical act of rebellion in some way and also yeah I guess it just makes you feel like um because we know everything's so ephemeral and you know we're not going to be here one day that we're sort of leaving little imprints of ourselves I feel really on a visceral level I feel that's so so important and again with my brain jumping hopscotch from subject to subject you said something about five minutes ago that won't leave my brain what do you think you have learned about yourself from writing this book from these four brilliant ladies I think what I've learned reading from this book is that the baby years can completely demolish the most important friendships that you have because child rearing is so intensive you know you can't just go for lunch that's when the kid naps etc etc because things are so divisive so triggering so emotionally painful so filled with societal judgments all these things that actually normally female friendships can hold you through that it's something about motherhood where we can't and this book's all about what I've learned is we need to hold on to each other and I do think you come out the other side of the baby is and as I kind of been meeting other people when I've been writing this book who have got teenagers and you know or you know they're like you do you do you do so it's to hold on to each other and I think maybe I'm a bit biased because I'm a mum myself and I was writing this book when I was very newly postpartum but towards the end of the book the book's all about letting all these women have their experiences shared and they're able to share talk about what it is to be them and for their friends to hold space for that but I think the kind of the other sort of theme towards the end of the book is how we need to protect mums and because I'm somebody who reads about this sort of stuff all the time and really interested in mental health like the more you look into if we want to save the world from a mental health perspective we want to make sure people grow up not having problems we need to make sure that parents are supported to be as responsive and caring and as present with their children as they can be like if you want the world to be better like support mums like let them have space for how hard it is try to make it easier for them like be with them because that is what will make the world a better happier place and so you think that towards the end of the book I don't want to give too many spoilers but you know they really give Lauren what she needs to get back on track and that was so moving writing that and I think I was like I just need everyone to give me a hug because everyone's hugging the baby and I was falling apart and I was just like we need to see the mums as well as the babies and you know just be like are you okay to the mum rather than like oh are they walking are they crawling it's just like are you functioning are you all right like yeah and um so those are the sort of two things like hold on to your friends and like mothers need need us yeah without a doubt and also like like you say to it's so easy in friendship groups for there to be this tension because of people having babies people not or judgments made and it's all misogyny that's led us to that sort of weird competitive judgmental mindset that I don't think naturally we we want to be in at all but we've sort of been forced into it somehow and you know I guess like when we had Gabor Mate on the podcast yonks ago now he he sort of touched on this theme of women being the shock absorbers of society and that's why you know we disproportionately got autoimmune diseases and and all of these other physical manifestations because we're not supported and we don't feel there's space to be able to say hey this is really hard i'm struggling no matter what your circumstances without somebody else coming back with what you're lucky to have a kid or whatever you know we've got to give all mums the space to say this is fucking hard and I'm really struggling and there's bits of it that I'm not enjoying and I feel like a failure and all the stuff that's going on in our heads we need to have the space to say out loud I think it's really important and your book certainly got me thinking about that and also I mean I should have said this right at the start I loved this book and I loved Charlotte too because I hate baby showers I can't bear them I absolutely cannot stand them I went to a couple before I had my own kids and I what the fuck is this why are we pretending to sniff shit out of a nappy which is melted chocolate what what are we what are we doing this is insane and I I'm when I got pregnant I was like I'm not having one and then my friend said can we just all go and get our nails done and at least we'll just all be together and I was like yeah but I don't want to see a soiled nappy I don't want you measuring my bump I don't want to I don't want to design a baby grow we'll get our nails done and I'm going home so the the way that you properly dived into all of those very strange things that happen at a baby shower were just it's absolutely ideal they're so far removed from what the reality of having a baby is yeah and um I do think marking rights of passage are important and I do think you shouldn't just get a party if you have a baby and that's why the child free character it's like why did nobody come to my agency launching their bathroom yeah yeah yeah I do think marking these passages of time but like what a baby shower is everyone's wearing pastels and it's all very sanitized and it's just so far away from the grotty gritty mess of early postpartum where you're like shedding the womb lining into a nappy for two weeks and you stink of vomit and spale milk and the kid has like got poo all up the wall and you know and then you've been given this like pale pink blanket you know you're like it's just so it's just so sanitized conception of motherhood because motherhood is yeah like such biological messy battlefield it's just so so odd and and also like it's just so they're so it's that's so flattening and I think that's why the book as well is called like so thrilled for you because that's something you never say out loud it's something you only type under somebody's instagram notification and it's and the book does sort of look about how you get set up to fail how much worse it is to be a mum and to go through matronins because you see what it's like online and nobody's posting pictures of like the poo stained walls or you know it's it's just and nobody's having face-to-face conversations anymore they're just going so filled for you and feeling a bit leaving a little heart like and then getting on with their day rather than going are you okay like I've just seen the room do you want me to come over and help tidy up or hold the baby while you have a shower because your hair looks really greasy like we just what we show the world online compared to reality is just the gap so massive and I think that's why we then make ourselves feel even worse because I do think you reach for social media when you're in those because it's just something you can do over your baby's head isn't it when you're yeah yeah it's not so much worse because I was like how is her living room that tidy like how how is her hair she's got a blow dry like I haven't washed my hair for five days it's and then I felt even worse but that was the only space I had to do anything for myself was to feel connected to the world was to go on Instagram and then I'd feel like what is going on in their house why am I yeah I don't think that goes on forever you know I still feel it now and I know how social media works like we all do and I'm you know I enjoy engaging with it but I can still go oh my god you know this person's kids doing four clubs every night after school and you know and they're you know competent reader or whatever it is and then you start comparing it's like what are we doing we've all completely lost the plot but I just think it's genius the title's genius the setup's genius it's just the characters are amazing it's just fucking fantastic plot I absolutely loved it and flew through the book as I know many of our Happy Place Book Club followers will be doing either already have read the book or will be doing after listening to this and um yeah thank you for writing such a bloody enjoyable book and thank you so much for being on the podcast thank you holly thank you so much for having me and yeah did you guess who started the fire no no which i was glad of because i'm i love an agatha christie and i've always thought i've i've nailed this one guys never do never do and without giving away anything no i did not see that coming so good thank you do you know what i loved what holly said about how filling a page with your words is an act of resistance as a woman how true how brilliant when women's voices have been so unheard or silenced in the past.

39:14What a cool way of looking at it. I just love it. Thank you, Holly, you brilliant female. So thrilled for you was our book club pick for Feb. And now in March, we're reading Broken Country by Claire Leslie Hall. Let me tell you a bit about it. Beth was 17 when she first met Gabriel. And over an intense summer, he made her think and feel differently. Understandably, she thought it was the start of her great love story. But then Gabriel left and it was Frank who picked up the pieces. So what's going to happen when Gabriel comes back? Everything Beth thinks she knows about who she is is about to crumble.

39:49Is this a possibility for a second chance at first love? If you want to read along with us, which I really hope you do, come and join the chat on Instagram. We're at Happy Place Book Club. And then you'll be able to hear from Claire here on the show in just a few weeks time too. alright until next time a massive thanks again to Holly to the producer Anushka Tate at Happy Play Studios and to you because you're brilliant

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