Data-backed competitive tiredness (with Caitlin Moran)

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2:29no yes yes we're on greetings everybody welcome to a very very grey but incredibly muggy tuesday morning in london town you can hear rosie on the other side of the desk just having a bit of a fiddle there with the microphone is it in the right place now i think so is it does it sound It sounds absolutely great. So this is Off Air with Jane and Fee, forward slash Eve, forward slash Hannah, forward slash Rosie. In the vending machine, we got Rosie today, which is always a delight. I think I've only done a couple of podcasts with you. I actually don't think we've done one together at all. Have we?

3:10Yes, I'm glad it's stayed in your memory so much. You and I. I think we have. No. Have we not? I've done a couple with Jane. She forced me to make some executive decisions live on air, which I felt quite difficult. And an apology, I think, once. So, no, I don't think so. But I was here last week with you and Jane. Yes. But no, just the two of us. Just the two of us. That's weird. Okay. Well, I'm going to enjoy it. Are you? Yeah, I think so. I know so. Is this my opportunity to ask you lots of difficult questions in front of the microphone and get you to agree to things that I want? Yeah, absolutely.

3:44But I could always edit them out. You could. That's so true. What the listener doesn't know was recorded, could never get upset about. That's our motto. It's our motto, which doesn't work for the live show. Trish comes in on the mental load. We've got an almost inexhaustible supply. We've got a very large supply of emails about the mental load because it's obviously struck a huge chord. And I hope it's been cathartic to write and send those emails. and nobody's felt like it's actually added to their load where it's been that thing that you just keep saying, yeah, I must get around to that. Yep, after I've done the washing, after I've given the kiddies their tea, after I've taken the car, yes, I will do that, I will do that.

4:28I hope nobody felt like that. Trish is incoming from Essex who says, I'm writing to you about the ongoing conversation around the mental load of family life. We often hear how exhausting it is and it can be, but I wanted to share a slightly different perspective. Well, we're here for different perspectives, aren't we, Rosie? We are. For years, I carried our family's mental load completely happily. Maybe I'm a bit of a control freak or maybe I just genuinely loved being involved in every single bit of the minutiae of my kids' lives. We waited too long, traumatic, boring and outing to detail. A long time for them.

5:02So maybe this influenced me possibly. My husband generally worked away from home Monday to Thursday, meaning the weekday running of the household was entirely on me. I did work part-time too as a health visitor and because our time together was so limited i tried to ensure we had minimal household jobs left to do by the weekend happily we could afford a cleaner i wanted our precious two days of family time to be protected it took a lot of invisible organizing but for us it worked beautifully and i'd love to hear your thoughts on whether anybody else actually thrives on managing the madness rather than just drowning in it well trish what a delightful email to receive and thank Thank you for putting a different perspective forward, because I think it's almost it's almost out of fashion to say that you do really, really love the domestic and you love the minutiae.

5:55And sometimes I really feel for women, and sometimes it is men, but more often it's women who make a very deliberate choice to stay at home and perhaps find that they can't celebrate themselves and that choice as much as they would like to. Because maybe an overarching sound is the one of you're not fulfilling your life if that's the choice that you made. and personally I think that's wrong. Who are we to judge what works for anybody else? And you are working part-time, you were working part-time so I don't know how you managed to do that too but let me put this to you as well Trish because I'm quite interested by this.

6:39Do you think that you might have loved it and it might have been easier because you were on your own from Monday to Thursday? So that thing of if the buck's going to stop with me then it just is always going to stop with me and you're never thinking somebody else is in the house and could be doing this chore, why am I doing it? Do you think that might have had something to do with it? I don't know. I don't want to put words into your mouth at all. But when I read that, I thought, ooh, OK, that's quite an interesting one to explore. Sometimes when you do have the run of the place and your partner, whatever variety, has left for a while, I think there is a feeling of relief.

7:22Obviously, we miss them and we welcome them home with a warm shepherd's pie and some fresh bed linen. But there's also kind of like, all right, just do it my way now. So does that make sense? Rosie has an interesting perspective because you are fiancéed to someone who's just out at work all the blooming time. Yeah, all the time. And I actually, a lot of that email resonated with me. I don't have, we don't have children. And I do exactly the same thing, which is his free time is really, really precious. And at the moment he works all weekend, but there have been, the general pattern is that he works kind of Tuesday to Saturday, a lot of double shifts, so he obviously doesn't get home until about midnight.

8:05We should just clarify, he's not a spy, he's a chef. He could be a spy. He could, couldn't he? He'd be the worst spy. He would. um he yeah so i i actually i do quite relish well there's two parts of this sunday we try and keep sunday as a kind of spec you know special when when he's not working a special day so actually i do try and get much as this lady says everything done so we can enjoy that day i want to be cleaning i don't want to be nagging or him nagging me about things we haven't done but I totally agree with you Fee that yes there is that sense that it is easier when when you're on your own and well it's just more linear apart from yeah isn't it yeah and and there isn't that feeling of uh resentment no where you just think well why are they well well have they well why why do they get to sit on the loo for 20 minutes what are they doing in there sitting i think also with with us it feels like i do make an effort though not when we are together not to slip into okay if i was on my own yeah i would just clean up all of dinner and do all of that but if we're together i do have to find actually say to myself you know this isn't this isn't your your job yeah but also i i mean come back to me if i have children but at the moment i love my saturdays and my saturday nights alone i have a really lovely routine i see my friends and then i have one i mean i have friends who work at home with their partners five days a week and then spend all weekend with them and i love my partner very much but that wouldn't work for us so sometimes i think the independence can be nice and if some mental load comes with that it's actually a price i'm yeah definitely and you know what the more that we admit to these things that uh you know perhaps we haven't felt comfortable saying out loud before in case there's judgment around in the air the better we make it for everybody because then then you're bound to somebody listening will go yeah as you know I absolutely love it too and I'm going to say it out loud and then we're just all much happier for it so Trish like I said I don't want to put words into your mouth or make judgment about your life at all but when I read that I just thought a good for you B, excellent that it worked and C, I wonder whether it was just sometimes quite delicious to just be able to do your own thing.

10:25And also I am quite interested in that re-greeting of people because I think there's a nice little bit of magic about that, isn't there? When you know that you aren't going to see somebody and then they're going to walk through the door. And actually, the late in life love relationships are often like that because, you know, we've both got kids and our kids are going to come first and we're not going to live together until we're in sheltered housing. But there is definitely an added bit of magic about saying goodbye and then hello again, a lot. There's something so nice about saving things up to tell anyone.

11:01And also, and the flip side of that, which is just sometimes not having to tell somebody or having to listen to somebody tell you endless things. So I'll own that one too. I can be incredibly dull when I get going on what's happened with the pets, as you know. I don't want to inflict that on somebody. It could be an absolute end of days scenario. Body batteries and the mental load comes in from Anonymous. First time email, a long time listener, mainly because I've spent the last four years in a sleep deprived haze with a one year old and a four year old. I wanted to pick up on two of your recent topics, sharing the mental load and sports watchers.

11:41So there you go. like you both i was a bit of a skeptic about sleep trackers but after years of broken sleep i finally bought a garmin is it garmin or gaman garmin i think it's just garmin okay to see what was actually going on it's been a game changer for our marriage my husband and i both have them now and every morning we compare our body battery scores to negotiate the mental load for instance this morning he woke at 4 a.m to hit a work deadline while i was up at 6 a.m after multiple night wakes with our daughter. Normally I would have selflessly allowed him to go back to bed, but a quick check revealed my body battery score was officially lower, so I got to claim the luxury of the lion.

12:22For any couples navigating young kids' busy lives and the constant diplomacy of who is more exhausted, let the algorithms decide. I think that's absolutely brilliant. That is evidence-based delineation of domesticity. I think that is fantastic. Yeah, I think though my friends and I call it the tired Olympics. You know, everyone's having constant competitions with each other about how tired you are. And I'm not sure having data to back that up would be particularly useful. Maybe, yeah, maybe it is. I think it's absolutely brilliant. Yeah, good idea. Yeah, well done. They should try marketing a sports watch based on that because for those of us who just aren't interested in PBs, I think it would make that item a little bit more attractive.

13:11If I'd thought, yes, this can help me in a domestic setting, I would be much more likely to invest in a sports watch. But as it is, I won't be. And I don't do enough pounding for it to make any difference at all. And the swim ones, I'm never sure about them. do people wear them swimming yes so you can get waterproof ones um that track your laps and stuff like that but for me just for me um swimming is is my opportunity to just completely let go of everything and sometimes i really enjoy the fact that i deceive myself in the pool so i'll do some very very slow swimming in the floater lane and i'll say to myself yeah that's 32 lengths.

13:55I'm done now. Then get out. Swimming's a bit of a meditation for me. I'm a strong swimmer but I can't really swim for exercise. I can't go very fast. So I like to go very slow and I wouldn't enjoy it if I was... I wouldn't want to track it or listen to music. Because it would be disappointing wouldn't it? I think if both you and I tracked our laps it would be incredibly disappointing. I did see a man in my local gym with a laptop on the side. Yeah, he was filling out an Excel spreadsheet. on himself and i just thought look if you are training for whatever i just don't think this is the gym for you i think you should be doing that somewhere else you know because i'm three lanes down doing about 0.2 i don't know not even that like yeah you know basically floating floating i was floating yeah yeah and if you get behind somebody fast you can just be in their slip stream you really don't have to move at all rosie there's issues there with the water and the laptop It was all very dangerous to me.

14:50Yes. I just thought, how much, do we really need this data? Do you think that sometimes there's too much data in the world? No, very much so, and you're right. Laptops and poolside. No. No, no, no, no, no. And the changing room? No, no, no, no. Apocalypse now, but probably not. This comes in from Judith, who says, Firstly, I have reassuring news for parents who are pondering their role as their children cut the apron strings. My friend dines out on a tale of a group holiday for singles that he went on last year. One morning, one of their number was exhausted at breakfast, having dealt with her son late into the night.

15:23He had been texting and calling her after a fallout with his girlfriend, and she had been required to provide sympathy and reassurance for several hours. That's not a completely unheard of event, except she was 80 and the son was 53. Mothers of 18-year-olds could have another 35 years of drama to deal with. Do you want, you've just, I think you've got to hope that by 80, the emotional download might be directed somewhere else. But also, lovely to know that you're still the one that they turn to. I don't know. I don't know. My mum's going to be 80 in six years and I think she'll probably still be carrying some of my emotional load.

16:05Okay, and you're the youngest. Yes. Yeah, my mum and dad's children, yeah, I'm the youngest. Yeah. So she is dealing with how old's your eldest sibling? My brother, if I'm... He'll be 47 this year. And is he still very much still phoning her up and asking her things? No, and actually, you know, it's a bit disingenuous of me. I think the emotional load is probably not quite... If I went through something bad, yes, of course, I would call her and ask her. But I wouldn't... I don't think I'm calling her in that sense in the same way. It's really interesting, though, about when and if we manage to make the turn into different relationships with our parents.

16:46Because there are so many opportunities. And, you know, mine at the moment are young adults. And there's a massive opportunity to change gear. They're both in the adult world. I will always be their mum. Actually, slightly going back to what Trish was saying. Personally, I've never felt more connected to the world and everything in it than when I'm helping my kids out. that just ticks a i've just loved that absolutely loved that had no idea that was coming when i had kids but i've really really enjoyed that um but i know now that i've got to turn a corner into us all being in an adult world in a slightly different way and i don't ever ever want to stop being the person they phone for advice but it's different isn't it and and and i sense that they want that corner to be turned as well but the interesting thing is if you don't really turn it by the time you're 80 and 53 you know is there another turn that you can make when you know you're 70 and they're 50 where you're slightly both making the turn into old age i think you're in a driverless car there you're not going anywhere i think if you haven't if you haven't made the initial turn then you just can't make any few ones i mean by that age i don't know it's probably quite a set but you know sometimes you ship in your life you do see uh old much older people so let's just say 80 and 60 bobbing along together because there is another opportunity isn't there to just simply be enjoying the same things in the same kind of life if you are both retired whatever it is that comes around again and you haven't had that for 40 years you haven't been in the same kind of house maybe together on the same time that's true you're you're more just kind of adults friend friends yeah maybe friends is the wrong word but i would say that my relationship with my mum is now a really lovely balance spot where she says to me when she comes to london it's so odd for her because i'm now the one saying oh we're going here we're going no mum come on we're going to this tube and she says you know when you were little my parents lived in london briefly that they were the ones leading me and she said now you're now you're doing it the other way around but we she still offers me advice on washing moth management oh my god can we go there with moth management at the moment what's happened well i had a very difficult moth period over the summer mine have now gone have they well have they and i don't know i'm a bit concerned mine are just flying out i mean they're just okay no actually they're not the house is still up for sale there's no moss at all that's your clothes not your house so that's you'll be taking those with you very much so very much so house is absolutely lovely sticky i've got these sticky sheets recommended by my mother that you kind of hang in your wardrobe and the moss fly into it and never fly it is kind of gross and yeah there's like sheets of them yeah yeah but yeah i have this nice i help her out on things it's i wouldn't say it's so one-sided as it used to be um and who do you think uh provided the impetus for that to change did you even have to think about it did it just change oh it just changed very naturally yeah yeah i think probably as i as i just what kind of goes back to the to the to the house thing what like not your house lovely street great neighbors yes gorgeous um fantastic postcode uh i the mental load of running a household so now I actually feel like I for a long time I was living with flatmates and I was kind of just bobbing along and you know you still home my mother's home still really felt like home but now it doesn't and I have my own home with my own life my own partner that I manage and I think ever since that has kind of come to be that's probably when our relationship ship did start changing so you recognize a similarity in each other that wasn't there before oh absolutely And that's what great relationships are made on full stop.

20:48I remember very clearly I was, I probably, I think I've done a lot of things a bit later in life. So for some people, they'd be fully grown adults by this point, but I wasn't. I was probably about 28, 29. And I came home to my mum's and I said, oh, mum, your towels are so lovely. They're so dry and they smell really good. I was like, how do you do that? And she said, well, just do it, Rosie. I just, I clean them and I put the effort into it. And you've got to dry them and you've got to do your laundry. And I mean, I wasn't doing all of that stuff, but I just wasn't, you know, and I think what she was saying is if you want to have a nice life, you've got to make it nice.

21:23And I did. And I think that was actually a real turning point for me. Yeah, do it yourself. Yeah, I wasn't running to my parents to be like, oh, this isn't very nice. Or can you, you know, it's just like, oh no, I just do it. And I did it. And ever since then, I've been, got a great house. Yeah, I bet you have. Not as nice as yours. Thank you. Thank you for asking that. Yeah, I'm going to stop it with the house thing, but it is still available. Judith, I want to give a virtual hug to new mums who've had to listen to the willy-waving tech bros announcing that they're about to destroy humanity. I'm pretty sure there's a big plug somewhere and we can power off.

21:56My firstborn arrived into the BSE crisis and I allowed myself to get very anxious until I listened to the glorious Claire Rayner saying that she got extremely anxious about the Cuban Missile Crisis when her children were small. Existential threats appear from time to time, but the fear of them is really accentuated when you're newly responsible for a tiny baby. It'll be fine. Thirdly, says Judith, I can highly recommend having a gay daughter. It is lovely having an extra daughter-in-law and you've attached a picture of said daughter and wife on their wedding day. They just look absolutely beautiful.

22:35I hope that you all had a terrific day. And Judith signs off by saying I've greatly enjoyed the vigil chat. It's actually been very useful to have it on the TV because I've been doing some very complicated crochet and haven't felt the need to pay attention to it. I have, however, regularly glanced up to shout, will nobody think of the children? And it's very true because nobody, just nobody mentioned the kids. In the opening episode, there was a tiny one in a cot, I mean, tiny one in a cot, and then a grown one who clearly was going to need some advice about secondary school and periods any moment now, and they just went off into the Arctic.

23:09Talked about their mental load once when they were in a life-threatening situation and the kids were never mentioned again. Judith, what a fantastic email. You packed a lot in there. Shall we join Rosie and Bury St Edmonds? Well, I was going to make an awful connection between the words BSE and Bury St Edmonds because when the BSE... What would we call that? Crisis. Crisis, yeah. When that was happening, that was actually bad PR for Bury St Edmonds because BSE is the shortening of Bury St Edmonds. Oh, I didn't make that connection. Well, there you go. Well, people did in the 90s, V. OK. Yeah, and it wasn't good.

23:42I am from Bury St Edmunds, as previously spoken about on this podcast. And so is Charlotte. And she's emailed in to say, as somebody who grew up in Bury St Edmunds, I loved hearing Rosie talk about the town. But please be careful. People keep making it too popular. There is a local food writer who keeps sending Nigella Lawson malt loaf from Worcester. So specific that. Berry's bakery. She insists putting on her Instagram, which inevitably makes getting our hands on their bread impossible. Every time I see it on her stories, I shake my fist and have to get up much earlier to snag myself some of their delicious goods.

24:16Rosie, please keep our lovely town a secret. Well, I shan't, Charlotte, actually, because I love it and I want more people to go there. And I have heard, I still have a lot of friends who live in Bury and they love Worcesters. They love it. It's really, really good. So, but yeah, but look, I live in East London and you have to get up early if you want to go to a bakery. That's just a given. It's an interesting one, isn't it? whether or not you want to share your love of a place with outsiders, which would inevitably mean that those outsiders then become insiders. It's a time-worn, tricky path, that.

24:52Yeah, totally. And look, there are loads of issues with, well, gentrification and the changing of areas, we see it in London all the time. But I will say, I mean, I'm half joking, I know exactly what it's like to have something taken over that you really love, and especially with, you see it a lot more now, don't you, with TikTok and Instagram, places that used to be, you thought were kind of your little thing and then you see them. Yep, they're blown away. They can totally ruin places. So I totally see that. But I do know that Bury has been through some really, really tough times. So if Nigella Lawson's talking about it, I think, yeah, fantastic.

25:28Well, they certainly have been through some tough times, as evidenced by the remains of the fort in the town centre. The monastery. That's it, yes. Yeah, yeah. Thanks, Henry VIII. Yeah. Nancy took a very, very, very large, what shall we call it, moment in the fortress area, and it was one of those times where the poo bags were in the car. I mean, they genuinely were in the car, but it's kind of, oh, no. What did you do? Well, just one of us waited, and the other one went to get poo bags. There wasn't somebody in the vicinity who could offer us a poo bag. Well, on behalf of Bury St Edmunds Road and the Abbey Gardens, I think is what you're saying, we say thank you for that.

26:12I really appreciate that you went back to the car. Yeah. It's an odd memory to have at the time. But also I do remember that your Marks and Spencers, we're going very specific, but it will lead us into supermarkets. Your Marks and Spencers is beautiful. It's almost like an art deco building, isn't it? Yeah. Yes. Yes. The thing that I remember about your Marks and Spencers is it's obviously some kind of a list of buildings, so they can't have automatic, automatic doors. They've got great big pool doors on it. It's got a very nice vibe to it. You're saying that there are automatic doors? Well, I used to work in that much.

26:49So it's got an art deco feel to it. Have I been somewhere else? Is it one of my geographical blunders? It definitely doesn't have... It's got automatic doors. I know that for certain. It would have to have an automatic door because I think it would be illegal not to have one. May I ask a question? Yes. About dogs? Yes. I've not got a dog. In Italy, when I was on holiday, when the dogs would do the business that was more liquid form... Yes. ...are we, some of the residents would hose it down with a bottle of water. Yeah. Do people do that? No, not in this country. No, okay. Do you? No, but I think it would be a very good idea because, especially this summer, where it was very, very hot and it didn't rain for months and months and months and months.

27:38The smell on pavements became really, really horrible. I think we don't do it in this country purely because it does rain so much, so everything does tend to get washed away. But yes, I'm frequently embarrassed by Nance because obviously she's a lady, so she doesn't cock a leg on something. So when she has a wee, she just has a wee massively on the pavement. I don't feel great about it. in the very very early days i quite often take a bottle of water out with me but i'll just be honest and say i don't do that anymore uh but also nance is given to a hundred tiny wheeze on a walk now she would if she if if she was in human form uh then you know we'd we'd definitely we'd be addressing the bladder concerns of the middle-aged lady which are very valid uh but she's not so that's a good thing initially that's a very good thing that they're doing yeah i would prefer to see a lady dog than when you see a dog a man dog cock up its leg like that and a whole stream of it i mean that you're right in the summer it is yeah it's putrid isn't it it's horrible yeah and i don't know whether or not male dog we does smell worse than lady dog we but i always think it i think it probably does yeah yeah yeah i wonder if it gets rid of foxes oh well i mean male urine gets rid of foxes doesn't it that's very good points we haven't had foxes in our garden at all for the last couple of months.

29:03And I mean, I almost don't say that because it seems really weird because we've had them such a long time and a lot of them. But I haven't seen a fox all summer. Really? Yes. Yes. And I wonder whether somebody else on the street did phone the fox man that I phoned and then couldn't go through with it because it does seem really weird. That is strange. Unless they all decided, as many residents of East London have had to decide that it's just too expensive and full of hipsters and they've gone to Loughton. Yeah, maybe. Yeah, we're still seeing a few... You're right, actually, now I think about it, not as many.

29:42I actually had a little bit of a chat with one last night because they were going through my recycling. Just poked my head out and said, hey, I can see you. He just looked at me. I think they're quite cute, but I don't have... Yeah, when they come in the house, they're not really... No, no, no, no, no. But that doesn't happen in your house, does it? No, it doesn't. You're absolutely right. Oh, I've got to stop this. national podcast

30:05supermarkets let's go with supermarkets incoming from Stephanie who says new listener in 2026 second time emailer I was listening to Thursday's episode I had to email him when he spoke about the UK versus Australian supermarkets let's have a great big war on supermarkets I would like to add my tangent I've just returned from two weeks in the south of France and I'm compelled to create a new word, supermarket gasm. The Hipermarché in France are a day trip in themselves. I love going into foreign supermarkets. France wins hands down, with the USA in last place. Sorry, US listeners, but your ingredient lists are scary.

30:44They're an absolute joy to the senses. We're back in France. From the aesthetics of the patisserie counter, the smells, the sheer volume of the cheese counter, to the sensory explosion experienced at the deli counter, including around 20 different salads. I think Stephanie is having a very long orgasm whilst writing this. Exquisite ready meals in trays such as paella or boeuf bourguignon which the server weighs into a carton for you and no self-service tills. I did live in Australia for about a year in my 20s but as a skint young traveller I mainly lived on the Aussie version of pot noodle. I don't remember much about the supermarkets there.

31:22I will say that I would love to be in the mindset of your friend, Jane and think that UK supermarkets had something going for them. But my first jaunt to Sainsbury's after France was a truly depressing experience. Too much plastic, too little love and life and the food. Love to you all and thanks what you do. Well, Stephanie, I mean, I think the hypermarché, the hypermarkets of France, they are a day trip. I mean, they literally are a day trip in themselves, often advertised as such from the UK. I don't know whether it's as easy now as Brexit effed that one up to. Well, you don't want to use up too many of your days, do you?

31:54Because when I left the European Union last week, there's a little counter that says you've got this many days left. Yeah. What is it, 90 days? Well, it's 90 days out of 180, isn't it? So you'd have to make a lot of trips to the Ipemarche in Cali. That's true. Yeah. I actually thought, because it was Thursday that we spoke about supermarkets, wasn't it? It was actually the last time we did the podcast. I can't remember. It was, yeah. And I was thinking a lot about what we said, because Jane quite boldly said that she thought the British supermarkets were the best. And actually, I do disagree. I think that the range of things you can get here is amazing.

32:33And you can get food from every cuisine and random little ingredients, which I think is so good. But actually, when it comes to quality of goods, I think that France and Italy and Spain have it on us, I'm afraid. just the freshness of the produce much less plastic like that lady just um yeah and also they do genuinely especially in france they have much much better toiletries on sale just in the normal toiletries department that pretty marseillaise thing that they do in france they're just lovely lovely lovely products i've gone very specific there rosie but i couldn't tell myself but there's nothing wrong with having a massive international brouhaha about whose supermarkets are the best we've got an international audience i think we would all enjoy this very much indeed and you know what it is the loveliest thing to do isn't it when you arrive in a new destination to just go and lose yourself in the local supermarket i think it just grounds you it's always done way more to kind of tell me where i am in the world that and the local radio station is you know the i think that the combo of those two things just settles you yeah i mean i turned up i love to think about i love to go to you know far-flung places or whatever as i get older i actually love to think about people's day-to-day routines so i am constantly memoraneously asking my partner who is italian um and so what do people eat for lunch and where would you go if you were just if you had a meeting and then i'm asking these really specific questions because i'm so interested in the detail of like okay if you're picking up a birthday card would you come to this specific shop or would you would you just go can you get a birthday card in pam which is one of the local supermarkets i really love that kind of oh how do people just live their day-to-day lives here um and how does it compare to my own and i think supermarkets are really you know if you see something that's by a till you think okay in england they think we want chewing gum by a till but actually in isley you get i mean i don't know kinder or whatever but i like yeah those little details i find really interesting and supermarkets are a great gateway for that do you know what i don't like about the self-service checkouts well actually I don't like anything about self-service checkouts but it has completely changed what is near a till so in our big local supermarket which I will name it's Sainsbury's there is no other option apart from the self-service checkout now which I just don't approve of I really don't but when I go there as well so you've got your big baskets and your small baskets and the thing that is lined up in what is inevitably a very big queue in the small basket section is booze and you just think god that's really changed hasn't it because there was obviously eventually an outcry against the pester power of there always being chocolates by the till but who didn't like it there always be chocolates by the till it was one of life's just great treats wasn't it to think once i get to the till i'll choose a bit of chocolate um so those all went and got replaced by nuts and protein bars and all of that kind of jazz but now i just think wow so we're just gonna pick up a you know four liters of gin as our pesto power now i don't like that at all sainsbury's i just don't like that yeah it's interesting isn't it because i don't really buy i don't drink alcohol during the week so i don't have it at home so if i'm in the supermarket i don't make the journey to that part of the supermarket i just never never go to that so that's exactly who they're aiming yeah so they're thinking all actually especially around christmas i know exactly what you mean i never thought about it before but i i know that's the inspiration and it'll be like oh look you can get this bottle of baileys for a tenner or whatever it is you think oh that's a good deal i want one of those and you buy it and that that seems like the wrong thing to be pushing on people doesn't it i completely yeah that's what i thought the last time i was in i just thought i don't i don't like that because actually we're waiting in such a long queue i probably would pick something up from, you know, whatever it was that was glinting handily at me.

36:27But actually, I don't want to pick up a great big bottle of vodka. No. Right, so we'd love your thoughts about Pesta Power. We'd love your thoughts about international supermarkets. Keep it going on the mental load. And definitely, definitely fess up to us if actually you'd just rather do it on your own.

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39:07this is going to be a real treat if like many many many people you've got to a point in life where you just think oh my gosh why do i feel a little bit gray around the gills all the time am i always going to be so doom laden what can i do about it caitlin moran has written basically a manifesto for the midlife woman based on her own experience and built around the notion that we can find hope in the smallest things and in easy to reach places in our everyday lives and I commend this interview to you. Now where do you find peace and happiness in a world that is constantly threatening to extinguish itself through heat, madmen and AI that has jumped out of its own sandbox?

39:49Is the answer to buy a small holding in Wales, turn your back on it all or might you find solace and contentment closer to home maybe just taking your headphones off for an hour or two, tidying up your hood, finding some stalks to look at. All of this is the subject of Catlin Moran's latest book, How To Be Hopeful. How lovely to see you in the studio. How are you? I'm really good. I mean, a massive spoiler alert for the book, but everything that I tried in the book did work and I feel more happy and optimistic than I ever have in my life. Well, that is fantastic because at the beginning of the book, we don't find you hopeful and optimistic at all.

40:24And you actually say, I'm a dim Pollyanna in a world of wiser Cassandras. and we know that you're not but why were you feeling like that well I've always been an optimistic person that is my nature as I say in the book I will always see the glass half full even after I've rammed my fist in it to raise the water levels but a combination of the menopause which does you know spoiler alert for anybody who's not had it yet feel make you feel fairly suboptimal uh combined with the modern world the 21st century had just left me feeling so constantly anxious and despairing about humanity and the future um and so my first option was uh to look around for inspiration about how you deal with the belief that civilization will fail us in our lifetime.

41:02And I was like, follow the money. All the tech bros are buying apocalypse bunkers in Hawaii and South America. I should just do what they're doing. So I put a deposit down on an isolated farmhouse with its own water supply. I'd also put a deposit down on a forge so I could do my own iron working because I did not want to be caught short of rakes. Should civilization fall, I would forge my own. And then it was explained to me that it was a gigantic, catastrophic money pit that I would not be able to afford. and my children realised there was no Wi-Fi there and they were out. So it was like, oh God, I'm going to have to try and find a way to feel optimistic.

41:33First of all, being a middle-class white woman of the middle classes, I was like, oh, I just need to walk a long salt path and find myself or maybe raise a hare or a baby hawk. The hare crops up quite a lot in your book. What have you got against the hare? No, no, it's being sold as a massive solace in the 21st century. If you feel in any way blue, it's either sertraline or hairs. That's kind of what we do when we feel a bit suboptimal. But yeah, crotch end, would not tolerate a baby hair. So then it was like, OK, I'm just going to do what you always do when there's a problem. I'm going to make a list.

42:02I'm going to make a list of all things that make me anxious that I see as problems and then come up with possible solutions to them. And so I just started this year-long experiment to see if I could feel more hopeful by the end of it. Can we just go back to the small holding that you were thinking of buying? So you were genuinely going to just pack it all in. You were going to take the kids with you. I mean, they must have been, you know. Late teens. and your husband yet to have a dog but you you were all just going to go live on a hillside and they genuinely thought I'm not going to enjoy this but mum says it'll be great I'll go along with it we went along and looked at it I mean the views were absolutely beautiful it was absolutely ravishing but uh but yeah my husband has 60 ,000 records and he noticed there was no room for them and I sort of blithely went it's all on Spotify and he started crying uh and then my kids held up their phones and went there's no wi-fi so we can't even get spotify and at that point they were all out so it would have been my husband is a absolutely wonderful man so he would have come with me but i do not know what would have happened to the kids and at that point i was like even if i feel like i'm going to outlive the fall of civilization in the hills of wales if i'm doing it without my kids uh then what's the point that's going to make me even more anxious so it was like no go home find a way to solve it practically and preferably for under 50 quid because by that point I had blown a lot of money on surveyors fees.

43:19Right. Do you ever think that actually looking back on it, that could have been a great thing to do? I genuinely wake up every morning now since I got. So in between the sale falling through and the beginning of this book, I also was an intervention was formed by my friends and they went, my love, you need HRT. You are so clearly menopausal. I will take my HRT patch off and stick it on your face to see if this changes your view and your mood of the world. So, yeah, I got diagnosed as being menopausal and got the drugs. And so then I became a lot more stable and I was ready to begin my quest. OK, so we find you in Crouch End becoming the kind of David Sedaris of Crouch End.

43:57Tell us about that. Very specifically inspired by David Sedaris claiming, which I think actually probably he was exaggerating. I mean, as writers, we all do this often. He claimed that he would do 34 ,000 steps a day picking up litter in his local area. He's moved to the UK. And before I looked into the fact that that would take all day, I believe this. But I was like, I'm inspired. I will do what David Starris does. I will go litter picking because I'd spent the last 10 years going. My house is on the way to a railway station and the front garden is basically a ruddy bin. It's just full of empty vapes and buzzball cans.

44:27And I just spent 10 years going, someone should do something about this. David Cameron should do something about this. Someone should do something about this. And then suddenly wake up one morning and realise, oh, it's me. I'm the someone that should do something about this. And aside from the incredible satisfaction of cleaning up a street, if you are a child of the 80s and used to play Pac-Man, where you're kind of going around gobbling up cookies for prizes. Gobbling up the rubbish and putting it in your bin bag makes you feel like you're in a real-life computer game. It's like it's not a noble and altruistic thing to do.

44:54It's genuinely enjoyable. And plus the local information that you learn is incredible. I can tell exactly who's had a party in Fensbury Park the night before. I just sort of look at the evidence like an archaeologist. Like, oh, there's two discarded phone chargers, three empty vapes, a couple of empty tampon packets and three bottles of blush rose egg. The girls have had a big night out tonight. I love the evidence and the archaeology of the rubbish The interesting thing about that was that nobody stopped to say good on you for doing it you became a kind of invisible angel of the neighbourhood A very peevish and invisible angel I genuinely, I mean it wasn't my primary motivation but I did think by day three people would be coming up and just sort of gasping a little and just going, gosh you're so inspiring Can I recommend you for the OBE?

45:36Literally this I did think and I did imagine that that having inspired enough people that within three or four weeks that I would go into a more sort of oversight managerial role, sort of sitting on a fence, watching young strapping men kind of like picking up the rubbish for me, inspired by my nobleness. That did not happen. People just started to think I was a bit weird. But it's that broken windows theory. There were so many hedges that were just so terminally stuffed with rubbish that other people would just literally think it was a big green bin. And once I started clearing those out, people stopped putting rubbish back in them.

46:05So it's just been a permanent change in the local neighbourhood, which greatly pleases me. This is all part of your manifesto to just within your normal life and within the normal kind of view that you had from your house to be able to change your world to become more hopeful. Well, it's the thing I want to take back control of the phrase take back control, like kind of like there are more things that you can do in your life. I think that the main sort of thesis of the book, as I realised I was going through this quest, was that once I added up how much time I spent watching and consuming terrible global news events and then analysis of terrible global news events was around about 18 hours a week.

46:37and then on top of that how much time I was spending on social media complaining about these terrible global news events often up to 20 hours a week once I removed all of that from my life I suddenly had two whole free days in which to actually go and do stuff that makes a difference and you know when I used to be on Twitter slash X I will still call it Twitter I had a million followers my feed was taught as a GCSE subject in modern communication and I had the ego to believe that this was the new modern way that you can change the world suddenly we invented this amazing way But you didn't have to actually go and do anything or raise any money or talk to anyone.

47:09You could simply be witty and droll and progressive and fabulous on social media. And that would solve all the world's problems. And after 10 years on social media, I had to be very honest about it and go, no, you know what? The old ways that we used to make the world good are actually the best. I'm going to go and donate blood. I'm going to go and pick up litter. I'm going to go and support the wildlife in my local area by rewilding my garden. I'm going to take my headphones off and actually listen to people's conversations and allow myself to fall back in love with the world again. I'll mentor people I'll raise money for charities I'll read history books and yeah I guess it's a bit of a kind of back to the past sort of way of going these are this is probably the reason why we feel anxious and hopeless now we think we can change the world by sending out the best tweet in the world and actually how we were changing the world 20 years ago is much more effective 20 years ago as well the news was a different thing we had a different relationship status with the news didn't we yes well I think if you think of yourself as like an intelligence kind of progressive person we all believe that we have a duty to read the news the worst people are the people who go oh i never read the news and i never vote you can't change anything and that sort of good people read the news and are politically active but the thing is that with consuming the news is once i started analyzing it you you don't see all the news you only see the bad news we know there's that saying in the newsroom if it bleeds it leads so kind of like in any one day on the planet and amazing millions of things are happening and incredible medical progresses you know pieces being brokered kind of people are getting together and coming with incredible solutions to these things but because they're long slow stories they're very hard to convey in a news bulletin so we tend to see the dramatic thing if someone goes into a school and shoots it up immediately that's a headline there's an image for that but the survivors that are taking to a hospital in that hospital the day before a surgeon on a normal day will save the lives of 30 people and the day before he saved 50 people but that will never be a news headline so there was this sentence that i read that suddenly just changed my view which is um uh stop looking for triggers and start looking for glimmers which sounds slightly kind of wellnessy and women on instagram holding a big mug with both hands but we're so used to going online picking up our phones looking at the tv and being bombarded with bad news that we're almost addicted to it we keep wanting that huge adrenaline hit well we do and it's been proven hasn't it that uh it's exactly that it is an addiction to trauma erupting in our head so the news is never going to get quieter or happier ever again because the sickness of it is what sells unless you decide to change the way that you consume news so once you start looking for glimmers you're just kind of like you know i will only allow myself to watch 20 minutes of terrible headlines before i go to other news sources and go and find new news stories read the new scientists and see what new inventions they found and remind myself that there are actually still more good people than bad people there are more miracles than there are disasters but you just have to decide that you are going to take control of your algorithm take control of your hours and decide that you are going to look for these good things rather than being constantly shocked by the bad i'm very uh obviously i completely agree with you but i'm interested in whether or not you ever have a day where you slip where you just actually your brain had been so wired to the trauma of it that you go oh actually i'm gonna look at 100 i mean it was the anniversary of 9-11 last week and i re-watched the incredible documentary one day in america which is like a minute by minute breakdown with incredible footage and stuff and it's like five episodes and i was up till three o 'clock in the morning sort of surfing that adrenaline thing and then the next day i woke up remembering just how incredibly traumatic that time was and how much it's changed the world since then and then i purposely made myself go and find much less publicized documentaries about what happened in the wake of that all the rebuilding efforts that there were i don't know if you remember but like downtown manhattan everyone was like no one will ever work there again no one will ever live there again all the businesses moved out it was like new york is over and of course we go back to new york now and it has been rebuilt and that was because more good people than bad people came along and went we'll rebuild it we believe in this we're going to make it better all the community efforts all the charities all the all the consciousness raising that happened in the wake of that is to me a far bigger story event in the end than 9-11 because what we're always looking at society is all about rupture and repair and we tend to only see the ruptures and what I'm now seeking out is the repair and there are always far more people engaged in repair than there are rupture do you think that you would have had the capacity to do all of that as a younger woman no because I was at that point still very very anxious I had had there's a huge chapter in the book where I sort of after having done all these practical things and changing my days and definitely feeling an improvement I finally had to tackle the end of level baddie which was my lifelong and well since I was 13 anxiety disorder I had my first panic attack at the age of 13 and I was very continually anxious like doing something like this two years ago writing this in my diary it would have sat on my calendar like a big squat black toad and every time I thought about coming into the studio, not because of you, but just because of my terrible anxiety, I would have filled with dread.

51:51And this morning I would have woken up and just been shaking. It would have been awful. Now I feel very calm. But that was because I tackled the fact that I was addicted to my anxiety. There's an amazing book by Owen O 'Kane called Addicted to Anxiety. And he says of all the addictions, it's the hardest one to break because anxious people think they're being clever. They're like, my anxiety is protecting me from danger. If I'm constantly hypervigilant, if I'm constantly imagining the worst, I'll be prepared for it. But there's that saying that if you're anxious you suffer twice you suffer all the time you're anxious and then when the bad thing happens you get the same amount of anxiety and suffering that everybody else gets so it was breaking that belief that I was being clever to be anxious how can you better help a cortisol kid and I will leave you to explain that term yourself who is suffering from exactly that kind of anxiety at the moment because there are millions yes so cortisol kids so these this is what I call I can spot a fellow so so when i understood what anxiety is so anxiety is your adrenal gland producing amphetamines cortisol and noradrenaline and it does that when your your body thinks you're in a life or death situation when you're in danger and it gives you a superpower like it's basically amphetamines it's what nazis were injected with in order to fight battles in russia and so when you're flooded with adrenaline you become super strong you become much cleverer you can work all night it feels like a superpower and it becomes very addictive and i can spot other people who have got that dose of cortisol and adrenaline at a really early age from across the room.

53:15And we see now that the diagnoses of people with anxiety disorders has gone through the roof. It's doubled before the pandemic and it's doubled again, and particularly for young people. And a lot of the language around anxiety, I started to get quite angry about. And I don't usually get angry because people are talked about as anxious people. Like that's your diagnosis and you'll be anxious forever. And here's some medication, but you're an anxious person. We've identified you. But there is no such thing as an anxious person. We're not born anxious. something will have happened that temporarily made us anxious and then we got stuck in that mode and we need to be taught to row back out of it and to just unpick the information it's supposed to be a transitionary state you're supposed to be flooded with these super chemicals in order to change something in your life that then makes you feel safe again and that's the primary thing when we talk about anxiety for someone who's never had it we think anxiety is like woody allen just being i have anxiety and i need a bagel anxiety is terror it is existential dread like you are you don't feel ever feel safe and so it's once you identify the fact that that is what is happening chemically and you need to start unpicking that so for me the first the first step in that was finally going to the doctor and explaining what was happening and he was like here are beta blockers they will literally stop your adrenal gland producing adrenaline and once you stop when your body produces adrenaline it's just a physical sensation and then your monkey brain goes why am i feeling this sensation and it starts going because you're a bad person because the world is on fire because people hate you because you screwed up your work yesterday if you don't have that initial flush of adrenaline your brain doesn't then start giving you these anxious thoughts so you just cut the whole cycle dead so you start with beta blockers and my body now cannot remember how to have a panic attack and I never thought I'd be able to say that I sometimes prod myself like oh do you want to do you want to have a panic attack now going you could have oh you're live on radio do you want to have a panic attack three years ago I would have started having a panic attack now my body has literally forgotten it you can you can being an anxious person is a temporary state and on the other side of it you can go back to feeling safe again.

55:04Well, I think everything that you've said will make so many people who are listening feel hopeful. You've gone down a treat with our Times Radio listeners, but you always do, Katninson. Oh, thanks, guys. Thanks for the love. Thanks for not making any actions. You do say that we all need a good standard day, which is a great way of putting it. To find contentment in the normality of life is an absolute blessing isn't it well this was prompted by uh talking to a very senior mental health professor professional that i know and she was talking about the terrifying influx of young people who are just feeling depressed and anxious and she said she always asks them two questions when they come into her office the first one is how is your mental health today on a scale of one to ten and they'll go nine it's bad and then a second question is what have you done today to help your mental health at which point they almost always look a bit mortified or embarrassed and go yeah I didn't do any of the things you're supposed to do I haven't gone for a walk, I haven't seen friends I haven't tried to commune with something bigger than myself and something beautiful, I haven't eaten the right food and I have spent all day on my phone and so the chapter how to have a perfect day for many people everything in there is really obvious, it's you know first of all don't start your day by doom scrolling the night before until 3 o 'clock in the morning it's extraordinary to me that people still doom scroll it's called doom scrolling, if there were doom knickers we would not wear them, if there were doom cakes we would not eat them but we still doom scroll so it starts the night before get the right amount of sleep and then it just goes minute by minute through a day that a standard ordinary day in which nothing is magnificent it's not you know it's not super chievy day but just the beauty of a normal day is one of the greatest privileges that we have you know we talk about this being a terrible time to be a human being but in this country we aren't being bombed we're not going through a blitz there is no great plague we're not going through great depression things aren't amazing but we have the normal problems of you know an advanced industrial society that will be solved by infrastructure and conversations we're not going through a cataclysm at the moment and so to just to just take a moment and go everything is okay now and there's a really important study that i found they interviewed 80 000 americans and asked them two questions the first one was did your country have a good year last year and the majority said no our country had a really bad year and the second question was did you have a bad year to which the majority of americans went actually yeah my year was fine and one of the reasons why I wanted to write a book called How to Be Hopeful is I think it's become impolite for people to say that they're okay at the moment.

57:25It's become impolite to say I am hopeful and everything is okay. It's seen as having privilege or being smug and we really need, if not for ourselves, for our children to be more honest about the fact that some days aren't brilliant but most days are actually okay and we must not start talking about the future. Our children are listening. If we just keep saying everything is doomed then no wonder we have an anxious generation of children we are constantly being asked to give our reaction to things that are happening in the world and you're a columnist and a writer so it's part of your job to have a reaction to things in the world uh today's topic of conversation uh has been sydney sweeney taking her clothes off for a gambling ad for sport would you like to have an opinion about that oh sydney sweeney i wonder if she's now got it because you see this happen and it's a phenomenon that I talk about in the book about what happens on social media.

58:15Once you become famous for one thing, once you've done, you could have been talking about a million subjects online, Eurovision Song Contest and dogs and breakfasts. Once you have one tweet that goes viral on a subject, everyone's like, that's it, you're my hero. That's the tweet. So you're encouraged to do another post on that subject and another and another until six months down the line. Suddenly that's all you post about. And I think Sydney Sweeney is like a victim of that kind of phenomenon because she's become so controversial for poking feminists and kind of like, you know, doing things that seem contrary to kind of like most feminist thinking that like now she's doubling down on it time and time again and it's really hard to break out of that loop so i have a more sympathetic overview of what's happening with her because she's just stuck in a system that seems to be working for her i wish we'd spend as much time talking about the gambling industry being so heavily involved in sport i find it baffling that gambling adverts are allowed on television and so many good sort of like people in the public eye who was who was so right on and progressive in so many subjects advertising gambling when we know how destructive it is to working class communities like i did find it absolutely extraordinary that there isn't a bit more shame involved in being involved in that harry redknapp eyes on you um so just before we go i'm going to send back to you a list of birds in your garden i loved reading this blue tits great tits wrens blackbirds wood pigeons magpies chaffinches parakeets jays red wings dunnocks it looks like a more boring sparrow okay sparrows black caps chif chaffs gold crests red starts lesser spotted woodpeckers and i think there are more to come well the peregrine falcon you've missed out my piece de resistance having rewilded my garden how have you managed to get all of those birds i went to the rewilding um project at nep and it blew my mind because i had my my garden as most people's are so nature to new did that i'd literally take into googling late at night on amazon can i buy sparrows turns out you can't capitalism has failed us so then i googled how do I get sparrows and it was just a dazzling revelation if you build a nature place they will come so I went to the rewilding project and nep and you know they've got stalks there that have nested for the first time since 1522 and beavers and 10 percent of the nightingale population and incredible dawn choruses I can't do that in crotch end but all the two things that you need to do in any garden is put in a water source the tiniest pond just a washing up tub and just put in more bushes and trees where the birds can hide the birds need a bad place to live and the transformation has been extraordinary.

1:00:32I want to grow the grass long because you need to have the insects have somewhere to grow their eggs because once you've got the insects then the birds will come and just I realised that the kind of dopamine hit that I used to get on social media as someone with ADHD I've now completely replaced that with the dopamine hit that I get when I see a new bird in the garden and without being on a platform that is owned by someone terrible and where I'm constantly being asked to die in a grease fire just like bird watching has 100 % replaced being on social media in my life and I feel all the better for it.

1:00:58can you acknowledge though that it absolutely made you it was it was very the thing is it was a different thing then it was amazing and you i tell this to young people and they can't believe it like twitter at the beginning the the joke about twitter was it was too nice everybody was lovely like you know someone loses a teddy bear in welling garden city and by midday john prescott the deputy prime minister had written a poem about the bear and it was the 2010 it was the best it was the new sort of generation of feminists all went on there because we forget how awful the early noughties were for women it was all upskirting and jessica simpson being fat when she was a size eight and social media then was the first place that women could talk unmediated without needing a column or being on tv and that was that wave of feminism that was still riding now but then it changed and it became really vulnerable to outside influences and and and bad actor governments like you know the uk government have said we are at cyber war with russia and if anybody wants to just google bot farm footage people are putting millions if not billions of pounds into these rooms that are filled with thousands of laptops and phones that all seem to be genuine accounts by people so next time you're on social media and you think you're fighting the good fight and you're in tears going this person is attacking me it's almost certainly not a person it is a bot that is being paid for by a hostile foreign government which is why i have left yes it is truly terrifying your book is the complete opposite it's called how to be hopeful it's by katlin moran you're on a book tour at the moment yes i am i think nearly all the nights are sold out but um edinburgh next week i think we've still got tickets for we do signings we do hugs we do chats it's all enormous fun how lovely thank you very much indeed for coming in oh my pleasure thank you very nice to see you here katlyn moran and her book on hope is out now and i should just plug the times if you want to go on the times plus page on the website you might still be able to get a ticket for hugo rifkin in conversation with ms moran which is a Times Plus event running this week.

1:02:51We'd love all of your thoughts. We remain Jane and Fee at Times.radio. Is it me and you tomorrow? Am I pressing a different number in the wonderful vending machine of younger producers? What a question. Yeah, I don't know. Shall we just see how it goes? I think young Evelyn is back tomorrow. Is she? A note of incredulity is injected into my voice there. If she's still got a job, she'll be back tomorrow. Eve? Eve who? Jane Garvey's still on holiday. Yes, she's on holiday until next week. But yeah, I think Eve is back. Oh, I can't remember. Join us, whoever it is. It'll be absolutely wonderful. And I look forward to speaking to you then.

1:03:30Goodbye.

1:03:48Congratulations. You've staggered somehow to the end of another Off Air with Jane and Fee. Thank you. If you'd like to hear us do this live, and we do do it live every day, Monday to Thursday, 2 till 4 on Times Radio. The jeopardy is off the scale. And if you listen to this, you'll understand exactly why that's the case. So you can get the radio online on DAB or on the free Times Radio app. Off Air is produced by Eve Salisbury and the executive producer is Rosie Cutler.

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