Fly on the (urinal) wall (with Lisa Jewell)

0:00Your heart can tell you a lot about your health. Apple Watch Series 12 measures your heart rate every five seconds with the most advanced heart rate sensing in an Apple Watch. So your vitals app, now with heart rate variability, could tell you when something is off. And your readiness score can let you know when to rest and when to push. Hear the story in every heartbeat with Apple Watch Series 12. For general wellness purposes only, not intended for clinical use or to detect, diagnose, monitor or treat medical conditions. requires iPhone 11 or later. At PwC, we optimize the systems that put your data to work so you can scale your AI from proof of concept to competitive edge and accelerate your tech evolution so you can redefine what's possible.

0:43From blueprint to breakthrough, we take you further with tech so you can outthink, outpace and outperform. PwC, so you can. PwC refers to the PwC network and or one or more of its member firms, each of which is a separate legal entity. Therapy's biggest impact doesn't show up in some dramatic breakthrough. It shows up in the smallest moments. You bite your tongue instead of escalating. You put your phone down instead of firing off that text. You say what you actually mean instead of what would hurt someone else the most. Nobody applauds those moments, but they quietly change your life. That's what growing feels like.

1:22And that's exactly what Grow Therapy is here for. Grow is therapy that works, covered by insurance. Sessions average$21 with insurance and some pay as little as$0 depending on their plan. There are no subscriptions, no long-term commitments. You just pay per session. Grow connects you with thousands of high-quality, licensed therapists across the U.S., offering both virtual and in-person sessions, nights and weekends. You can search by what matters, like insurance, specialty, identity, or availability. And you can book a therapy session in minutes and begin in as little as two days, not the national 48-day average.

2:00See if you could pay as little as$0 for therapy in seconds at growtherapy.com slash ACAST. That's growtherapy.com slash ACAST. growtherapy.com slash ACAST. Availability and coverage vary by state and insurance plan.

2:29Oh yes, you did. You told the nation about your sleep problems. And I think Jane told the nation about her fears about colds and flu. And I told the nation about my flaky foot. I didn't use the flaky foot, babe. The flaky foot's gone. It's come up quite a lot though recently, hasn't it? It more than got its moment. It's flaky no more. Something in the Austrian waters did something very, very good. Welcome aboard. It is a good ship, even fee edition because Jane has headed up to Liverpool. We are going to do our very best to get through what has become, This seems to be a bigger stack than normal of unread emails for a Wednesday, Eve.

3:17Have we just been very slow? I think you looked upon them all with a very, very favourable eye. We had such good quality that you wanted all of them. I've starred too many of them. So there was a fantastic one that came in in the early hours of the morning, which is all about yoghurt. I'm going to start with yoghurt. Greek yoghurt, Trump and cats. it comes in from Stella Hi Fee and Jane a few days ago this popped up out of the blue on YouTube I found it very informative about facts on what is actually in so-called Greek yogurt and how to look for the best makes worth a watch so I clicked on it and it was half an hour of a film called This Is Not Yogurt which in very careful detail I just got sucked into it Eve I thought I'll just watch the beginning and then I might watch the end did you watch the whole thing I did watch the whole thing yeah So it went very carefully through all of the brands of yogurt, detailing which ones were actually proper Greek yogurt and which ones were just faking it.

4:21What did you learn? That if you turn around the tub to the ingredients and it says something like water, cream, agents, milk, then you shouldn't go anywhere near it with a barge pole because included in the term agents might be a thickening agent. We've all met one of those. The poor clients represented by a thickening agent. They're the ones who don't get on traitors. Oh, darling. The thickening agent can be the same type of stuff that's used in wallpaper paste. No. And if it's cream and water, it means that a fermentation process won't have taken place. So you're not getting all of those treats for your gut biome.

5:04Also, this is quite important, really. It's very important. It was a lovely, lovely film. I did realise at the end, And I thought the guy had a very nice voice who was doing the voiceover. And I realised at the end that it was AI because he started mispronouncing things that a normal person, represented by a not-so-thickening agent, would have been told to correct. This is very niche. So you watched this morning a 30-minute AI-narrated yoghurt film. Well, blame Stella. Stella sent it. Well, this is why we're all doomed, isn't it? but basically the high-end supermarkets are providing a very good service if it's greek yogurt and you turn it around and it has got basically milk as the prime ingredient then you're probably okay and the organic ones it has to be organic as well because there's something a bit weird that might have gone into the cow feed of non-organic yogurts i don't want to spend as much time on this topic as I've already spent preparing for this topic because we would probably, if we really went for it, be able to allow a jug of milk to ferment and turn into yoghurt if we kept going too much.

6:21On another topic, I thought of you too and had to laugh when I saw this little book on a second-hand stall, Your Hate and Loves. If you haven't seen it, I can send you the copy. Please don't. You hang on to it because it just looks fantastic. it is well can you read that out or will we not be able to be broadcast across the UAE Hugh Janus thank you Trump cats the lack of wit and wisdom of Donald Trump as told by cats the cat's face is magic is magic really really magic and a bit repulsive yeah so Stella thank Thank you. That was educational and informative. It was Wreathian in what it covered.

7:04Game of Wool, do watch it. This comes in from Susie from Sydney regarding your recent knitting and crocheting discussion. I'm not a knitter, sewer, embroiderer, crocheter or anything remotely crafty, but the show sucked me right in. Watch it, if only to marvel at the creations worn by the host, your lovely Tom Daley. Did you ever graze across that? I never did, but I did get sucked into him posting all his lovely jumpers and wouldn't he sit at the side of the pool after diving and just knit yeah oh that's very sweet well it's very lovely he charmed me with that yeah and very sensible as well because it's a lot of hanging around in diving isn't there and they do their dive and then they get in their hot tub and then they wipe themselves down with a very small flannel i always wondered why we had to see that but apparently we had to see that flannel in tom's case and then he did he he went to do something more successful in his time which probably does speak to the very calming nature of it yeah so on to that so many people have got back to us about adam's sleeping problem so i very much hope that adam is still in the house you've had quite a lot of insomnia in your young life haven't you eve i have i would very much consider myself a bad sleeper.

8:19Do you do the thing where you find it easy to get to sleep but then you wake up? Or? I'm the other way around but I have also had that but mostly it will, it can take me hours. And the reason I think I'm a bad sleeper because on average, even on a good night when I'm getting seven hours, it will still take me about an hour to drift off, if not more. I just cannot lie down and fall asleep. But in bad cases, it's taken, you know, until like 5am or points where I just haven't had any sleep at all. Oh, that's horrible. But it does, it's definitely all that kind of mental rut of you have one bad night's sleep and then the next night gets worse and then it gets even worse okay and have you tried did you try in those dark periods of insomnia any remedies did something work for you so i and i think someone actually suggested this but i was suggested by a doctor when my sleeping pattern got really bad to then take a really drowsy antihistamine and not regularly but just to then get my sleeping pattern would fall back on track um so sometimes if it gets really bad and i'm in the early hours then i'll have a drowsy antihistamine because that really does help but i feel quite groggy and a bit agitated the next day so i don't like to take them but in a pinch i would so i'm i'm glad to hear that that did work a little bit for you are you are you sleeping better at the moment i am sleeping better at the moment um and i always it does help to have a pot of melatonin on the bedside now and again just in case.

9:44I never really understand melatonin. I don't really understand it either, but it does seem to work. Right, well that's all you need to say. That's the usual standard of forensic examination. So I think it does something to your circadian rhythms, doesn't it? That's what I'm always drawn to. We don't allow it to be sold over the counter in this country, do we? No. No. But you've been abroad to get it. Shall we just put it that way? Yes, you have to catch a friend when they go to America or something. Okay, and let's definitely advise people to be doing that because you don't want to buy it off Tintanet.

10:17It could be anything on Tintanet. So let me hand you a couple of emails because people have been so helpful and we might hit on something that works for Adam. This one comes in from Beck who said, I had some issues and after trying and failing with the usual suggestions, my GP put me onto the RE sleep programme. it was and i'm sorry about the cliche life-changing beck never apologize the program you follow gives you a step-by-step practical way to improve your sleep and debunks many myths including sleep hygiene which doesn't work for insomniacs and that we all need eight hours sleep a night it isn't cheap and it does take effort but it was worth it in my opinion they have a free trial period which might be useful hope this helps so this is re dash is that the right one the one that goes in the middle not underneath yeah re dash sleep will take you to that sleep program and i had a quick look around it this morning and it seems entirely sensible it's so difficult to tell from testimonials on websites these days because of course they're not going to put up gary from yoval thought this was shite but the testimonials do seem to attest that it definitely has worked for some people if it's recommended by a gp then i would hope it's got some very good stuff in it what you got i've got one from well the email address is o 'neill um re sleep it's actually been proven according to this email that you should do the craft light knitting during the times that you're awake at night the evidence is there to support this it's ideal as it doesn't overstimulate you but gives you something to do instead of lying awake it's very tempting when you're awake in the middle of the night to reach for your phone because you're a bit bored but that's definitely going to be the thing that's going to stop you from actually getting back to sleep totally so yeah although if you're reaching your for your phone in order to put this podcast on a proven sleep aid to many many people very very true then carry on doing that this comes in from sarah in dublin who says in relation to Adam's email about sleep problems, I advise him to listen to the What's Up Doc podcast with the Van Tullican twins.

12:29They've recently covered this subject with an expert who talks about it being completely normal to have two to three sleep cycles and be awake for an hour or two in between. The best thing to do is not to worry about being awake and trying to get back to sleep. Get up and do something. Reading or puzzles work for me, then I can be back asleep for my second cycle. the podcast expert is very enlightening and reassuring you both might find the answer to a lot of your wellness quandaries in the whatsapp doc podcast that's quite quite enough advertising for other podcasts they are very good actually those two yeah i like them so you never actually got up and did something i've never done that because i feel too determined to try and chase the sleep that is completely eluding me and it hasn't proved completely successful one thing that actually did work for me when it when I had a really bad batch of it but I'm hesitant to say because it sounds exactly like I'm sure if you've had sleep trouble you go and see the doctor this is on the list but actually really really regular exercise did ultimately help me even if I just go for a walk in the evening just I think tiring my body out actually really helped get me into a regular sleeping pattern excellent advice young Eve excellent this comes from Sarah who actually suggests slightly differently that Adam should maybe go for a sleep apnea test.

13:50We wake ourselves up as the muscles in the windpipe get floppy and cover the airway. If he falls asleep all over the place, this could be because he's in a sleep deficit. He has classic symptoms. I'm no expert though, just a thought. Claire's having a similar issue with her husband, who says that he's resigned himself to being a bad sleeper, but he won't do anything about it. She's trying to steer him to things like speaking to a doctor magnesium and sleep apps and i think someone else said in the emails that to just suggest adam that he should actually just talk to his friends about it and maybe it is a thing of amongst men opening the discourse up a bit yeah i mean it definitely helps when you share it any problem doesn't it with your female friends i'm just always amazed eve that men haven't grasped this because we still say it so often because that's what we find amongst our men folk that they're finding it difficult to talk and in fact um we watched first dates ireland last night on tv okay because we are quite addicted to first dates in our household and there was a really really lovely guy on there uh who had had some you know probably bad depression he was in i'd say he was in his late 50s and he talked about how once he opened up and said a couple of things to friends everybody else opened up around him and actually he'd ended up doing some really good work in a kind of public forum about male depression and it was really lovely to hear him say that but we did end up on the sofa having a conversation around how often it is that you hear men say I found it difficult to talk and and that that is being heard by people so why hasn't it had the domino effect and i suppose it's pertinent to yesterday's guest as well isn't it harry hardesty it seems weird that we're we've all been saying to men for a long time come and join us on the oversharing couch why not plug into it so i hope it does change hope it does change and actually on the island first dates and it's it's thoroughly entertaining they do a very very good job on that program uh that guy i we had high hopes we had high high hopes for the for the couples did he get a kiss i don't think he got a kiss they both went outside to share a fag it's the start of many a beautiful relationship it's just as good as a kiss i think now a lovely listener has emailed in about your voice eve yes now your radio mums me and the Jane Garvey.

16:28We have said this to you quite often. Beautiful, beautiful voice, but you lose it too often. Yes. And it gives you jip too often. Could you just, on behalf of our very loving and loyal audience, promise everybody that you have had it looked at so it's not going unnoticed because people are worrying about you, my lovely. I have had it looked at. I'm on some sort of list. But no, I will go on record and say that I will push harder. Thank you. Okay, we're all behind you. We all wish the best for you. Shall we talk urinals? Please. Let's. Okay. So Jeanette, frozen shoulder, continues to improve. Thank God for that, Jeanette.

17:08Prompted by your chat about urinals last week, I had to discuss this with my husband. I was particularly perturbed about the splash on the trousers. He tells me that urinals often have an image of a fly for men to aim at. I take back all of my last conversation. about men reaching out. You need a fly to aim your wee at. He doesn't want to piss on a fly. I had to Google this info and this will add to your history of urinals. So here we come. It's a clever behavioural trick designed to give men a target which significantly improves aim, reduces splashing and cuts down on bathroom cleaning costs.

17:47The idea started in the early 1990s at Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport. a maintenance manager realised that when there was a dot or a target to aim at spillage dropped dramatically they chose a fly because it is universally disliked but not scary giving users a satisfying subconscious target to eliminate right do you like to try and think of a fly when you're weeing no we don't well i suppose but also men could go into a stall and sit down couldn't Well, I have just come back from St. Marlowe in France and we went to lots of lovely independent restaurants and cafes. And with that, there was a lot of just single toilets in these kind of like smaller establishments.

18:30I came away with such little faith in men because you just went into every single toilet and it was just covered in urine. And I spent so much of that holiday squatting, kind of wiping at it. The hover. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I don't think they're learning I don't think they are too and I had high hopes I just assumed that once you'd learnt to aim you continued trying to aim it's very odd though isn't it it is you can't want to be in such an unhygienic setting but what's wrong with just clearing up off to yourself yes but that's the huge problem with urinals is you can't really unless you've got a mop and a bucket out those squeegees that goes down so there are some people who get urinals installed in their house aren't they are there yes there's somebody not too far away from home in this podcast uh who had uh yes who had uh urinal installed that must mean he has really terrible aim possibly uh but obviously very good taste in some quarters yes stanley tucci's got nothing on roy can hear i was so coded wasn't it this one comes in from andy hearing in yesterday's podcast about the listener who's stood behind stanley tucci in an airport queue made me realize that i have my own i stood behind a celebrity in an airport queue story i'm hoping a lot of people have this shortly after we were married in 1984 my wife and i took a week's holiday in the algarve the holiday was great the journey home less so after an hour-long coach ride to Farrow Airport.

20:11Is it Farrow or Farrow? I believe it's Farrow. Let's keep both in. Over roads that seemed to have been designed by somebody testing washing machines, I began to feel spectacularly ill. I was to have the following six weeks off work. We don't need that detail, Andy. By the time we reached the airport, my concentration was focused upon not redecorating the departure lounge. My groans were making it fairly obvious to everybody around me. I wasn't having my best day. standing just ahead of us in the queue was the character actor roy canair his wife and their young children i recognized him immediately but asking for an autograph was far from being tough of my priorities roy noticed that i was in a bad way and immediately went into full looking after people mode he found someone to organize a wheelchair assisted my wife with getting me on the aircraft persuaded the cabin crew to move me near the toilets found blankets and even arranged for a wheelchair to be waiting when we landed back at Gamwick.

21:06Isn't that lovely? He simply couldn't have done more for a complete stranger. What struck me just as much was that throughout all of this, he was also being a calm and attentive dad to his own young children. Looking back, I realise now that one of them would have been a six-year-old Rory Kinnear, now one of Britain's In Just About Everything actors. Rory Kinnear was famous for making people laugh, but my lasting memory of him is simply his kindness. Four years later, he was tragically killed falling from a horse whilst filming The Return of the Musketeers, which makes that chance encounter feel even more precious in hindsight.

21:41Andy, thank you very much for that. And it's nice to pass on good stories about celebrities. It's nice to hear people being nice. I wonder, though, about the wisdom of getting on an aircraft when you're feeling that unwell. Well, yeah. Yeah. It is the nightmare situation, isn't it? Yeah, I know what I'd do. if I was definitely not a celebrity standing in the queue behind somebody that ill I would move away and try and board the plane in a different part or actually say are you sure you want to go ahead but I'm sorry you felt so ill Andy because travelling when you're feeling extremely well is a really unpleasant thing to do and I'm glad you got back in one piece I'm just getting memories of Dickie Tummies on flights should we not go there please let's not okay what's been conjured to my mind oh yeah just one one thought though i just i just think that the ratio of toilet to passengers is now very very wrong because back in the day when you flew you wouldn't always have a full plane it was quite rare to have a completely full plane so when we were doing our journeying out to hong kong early 1970s there was never ever a full plane so quite often it would be half empty that's a luxury i know people can't believe it now this is a story that i tell from the ancient times even but there is something different now with the number of passengers on board it is always completely and utterly full and also just you know the amount of drink that's being served it does make people need to wee more and i wonder whether they need to review that they won't because it means that a couple of seats will be taken up with toilets but and it does mean that if you're in the front row, your legs are literally half a metre from the toilet cubicle.

23:32So there's no privacy there. No privacy at all. And well, let's not think of the splashback that's happening in those confined spaces. OK, we've got to move on. This is terrible. We've just got to move on very quickly, especially for people who are trying to get back to sleep. Dawn in Hayworth says, I know you don't really do news as such on your podcast. It's one of the attractions of listening to you both. I'm interested, of course, but I'm sure we don't need to know all the ins and outs of everything, every detail of what's happened from moment to moment every word everybody has said bullet points and facts that's what us mere minions need as for the new pm i'm already sick of hearing his name andy burnham this andy burnham that they're all the same when somebody else is in power full of promises of what they could do etc etc then once they're in well i think you know we'll wait and see more of your general chit chat and day-to-day ramblings please well we're always happy to provide that dawn jane and i do like a bit of our politics and our news though so it will always creep into the podcast just a tiny bit you very much wear two caps we do we do and at the moment uh there is there's quite an excitement about british politics and i was thinking about this coming to work today that there used to be a very natural lull in the summer as soon as the parliamentary big summer recess started i mean it really was a chance in the newsroom to do some other stories and you know we used to joke about that summer glut you know where you would do the biggest hamster in the uk uh you know it was mated with the smallest hamster in the uk it was it was a time to find those in-depth stories and and shine the the true spotlight of journalism upon them i'm the most medium-sized hamster as a result of the big comes from the top star yeah who do you take after um but that's just gone completely because this summer i mean quite often in the summer there's a massive change of leadership you know everybody goes home from parliament fighting and biting and then you come back and there's another prime minister or two on the way and of course this summer we've got a new promise at the beginning of the summer there's not a hope in hell that the big fat hamster mating the tiny hamster is going to get a look in and i just put that out there to you dawn uh we might have to talk about politics from time to time but you can always put us on 1.5 have you been watching android i have not but i know that our tv um expert scott bryan wants to discuss it today when have you stumbled before the word expert because what was i going to call him what were you searching for he's a definitely he's an expert he is an expert scott bryan he's blooming fantastic uh well we should talk about it quite a few people have recommended it and i saw it lurking up there on the iPlayer, but I got stuck into the pit.

26:16Oh God, I can't believe you're doing that. Well, that's probably why you're doing First Dates Ireland as well. Yeah, I had to do exactly that, exactly that. It was very much the calming slice of white bread after a too hot curry. Yeah, the pit is, it asks a lot of you. Blimey. You go home after a full day of work and you put that on. I just don't know what's running through your mind. Well, I thought because Jane had done it, it would be okay i like to use her as a filter yeah and she she said it was absolutely brilliant and it would be okay if i looked away from are you enjoying it well as much as you can there's a there's a massive event that the er has to deal with uh quite late on in the series and and actually i just i did have to switch it off last night because i would have been looking away for the entire 45 minutes of the episode and then there was another episode after that and it was just too much actually way way way too much and they do that thing and of course they have to do it because it's it's tv um where they they solve incredibly complex medical dilemmas just like that in a nanosecond and in an earlier episode there'd be some poor woman had come in and she wasn't in anaphylactic shock uh but she was a bit rigid and her heart rate had gone down nobody could work out why and they're pressing her belly and they were doing you know they do that you know order a scan high it medical jargon they'd done all of that and they couldn't work out what it was and she was just about to conk it and sorry it's just about to conk out and then the doctor decided to check her feet and they checked her feet and there were two tiny pinpricks and she went, Black Widow spider.

28:19You just think, nobody, no, that's just too much of a leap. It's way too much of a leap. And then she shook her croc and out fell a Black Widow spider. And then they managed to get the antivenom in and she just perked up immediately. It was all in the space of three minutes. It doesn't sound as serious as I thought it was. That is quite comical. But you just think there are many, many things that the NHS is having to deal with, but people's expectations of a miracle solution are now very, very much on the cards, aren't they?

28:50Your heart can tell you a lot about your health. Apple Watch Series 12 measures your heart rate every five seconds with the most advanced heart rate sensing in an Apple Watch. So your vitals app, now with heart rate variability, could tell you when something is off. and your readiness score can let you know when to rest and when to push. Hear the story in every heartbeat with Apple Watch Series 12. For general wellness purposes only, not intended for clinical use or to detect, diagnose, monitor or treat medical conditions, requires iPhone 11 or later. At PwC, we optimize the systems that put your data to work so you can scale your AI from proof of concept to competitive edge and accelerate your tech evolution so you can redefine what's possible.

29:32From blueprint to breakthrough, we take you further with tech. So you can outthink, outpace, and outperform. PwC. So you can. PwC refers to the PwC network and or one or more of its member firms, each of which is a separate legal entity. Therapy's biggest impact doesn't show up in some dramatic breakthrough. It shows up in the smallest moments. You bite your tongue instead of escalating. You put your phone down instead of firing off that text. You say what you actually mean instead of what would hurt someone else the most. Nobody applauds those moments, but they quietly change your life. That's what growing feels like.

30:12And that's exactly what Grow Therapy is here for. Grow is therapy that works, covered by insurance. Sessions average$21 with insurance and some pay as little as$0 depending on their plan. There are no subscriptions, no long-term commitments. You just pay per session. Grow connects you with thousands of high-quality licensed therapists across the U.S., offering both virtual and in-person sessions nights and weekends. You can search by what matters, like insurance, specialty, identity, or availability. And you can book a therapy session in minutes and begin in as little as two days, not the national 48-day average.

30:50See if you could pay as little as$0 for therapy in seconds at growtherapy.com slash ACAST. That's growtherapy.com slash ACAST. growtherapy.com slash ACAST. Availability and coverage vary by state and insurance plan. Now, if you're heading off on holiday this summer, chances are you'll see a copy of a book by our next guest flung onto at least one towel. Lisa Jewell is prolific. She's written 24 novels, including the best-selling thrillers, Then She Was Gone and The Family Upstairs. she's sold more than 15 million books worldwide and her latest one it could have been her is set in a dark corner of Hampstead Heath it centres on a missing woman and a dysfunctional family it went straight to number one in the Sunday Times bestseller chart at the beginning of July and currently sits at number four Jane spoke to Lisa and started by asking whether she pays much attention to reviews and those bestseller charts I care, I do I do I kind of get a sense before the book is even published whether it's going to be liked or not, because there's a lot of advanced stuff that happens these days like NetGalley and Goodreads.

32:03So you already know before it's published whether it's whether it's a turkey or not. So just for people who aren't in the know, copies of the book are circulated to influencers? To influencers. NetGalley is more for readers and librarians and booksellers. and you can get a PDF. You register and then a certain amount of PDFs are sent out to early readers in exchange for them then going onto their social media platforms and talking about it, leaving it a nice review. So I've already like months ahead seen whether I've written a bad book or a good book. So I can kind of relax when the book comes out.

32:38Think, okay, I think it's going to be all right. I think my readers are going to be happy with this one because that is always still of all the things, all the sort of fears and worries I've let go of over the years of my career. That one I will never let go of, and that's disappointing my readers. You don't want that to be. That's always at the, yeah. Okay. This is your, what number book is this? 24. 24. So you're very much in, you've got the hang of things. I think I've got the hang of things. Oh, gosh, you should never say that. No, no, be careful. So this is, I was intrigued by the location because it's set around Hampstead Heath.

33:09Yes. Now, I've never lived in Hampstead. I've visited it. Is it as faintly sinister as you suggest? It's, I'm going to say no. I'm going to say no. I don't live in Hampstead. I live a 30 minute walk from Hampstead. So it's one of my dog walks. So I spend a lot of time in Hampstead Village. And Hampstead Village is very bougie. It's very chichi. There's all sorts of lovely French boutiques and brasseries and bakeries and all the things beginning with B. It's gorgeous. But there are lots of little nooks and crannies and little secret pathways leading to corners of the village you'd never seen before.

33:42It's a big village. So yeah, you do sometimes find yourself heading down a passageway or an alleyway and thinking, wow, anything could happen here because it's also hidden away, tucked away. And the specific area you mentioned, I'd never heard of it, the Vale of Health? The Vale of Health, which some people think is a fictional place name. Is it real? Yes, it's a real place. It's like a hamlet. It's kind of not part of Hampstead Village. You have to go all through the back streets and cross over a busy road and then down a winding lane. And then you suddenly find yourself in another sort of mini village.

34:16where I think it's about 60 houses. There's no shops or restaurants or bars down there. It's just houses. And it is called the Vale of Health. It's where the Londoners went in the 1800s to escape from the plague. So, yes, that's what it was named for. And it's just very, very quiet. There's not a lot of traffic. You don't really see people walking around. And there's all these beautiful little houses. I have to look through the windows and sort of wonder who lives there. But yeah, the house in this book was actually based on a house I hadn't realised existed because I thought it was a private driveway at the end of the Vale of Health.

34:52And one day I walked a little bit further with the dog and I thought, oh, I actually can walk down here. And then I found this house that looked like the last house at the end of the world. It was just completely kind of separated and surrounded by the heath, completely surrounded by the heath on all sides with this huge garden. And I immediately thought that's that's going to have to be a setting for my next book. Well, because it's just really sinister. Yes, sinister. And apologies to the people who live in the house. I'm sure there's nothing sinister going on there at all. Well, we can't rule it out.

35:20You can never rule it out. Actually, for people outside London, they won't believe that an area as bucolic as this does exist so close to this throbbing centre of a city. You're a 10-minute walk from a tube station. You're a 25-minute walk from Camden Town. You're just absolutely in the heart of London. And this was something when I was on my American tour and talking to American readers, I did spend quite a lot of time at each talk trying to explain it to them, because I know that if you read that, your mind is immediately going to go to the English countryside. And you're going to have mentally left London because it doesn't sound like London, but it is very much in the heart of London.

35:58So many of your books are about what goes on behind the, I was going to say the net curtains, but the kind of very superficial respectability of seemingly wealthy, contained, respectable households. And this is no exception. Yes, absolutely. So this is essentially this book. There's a lot going on in this book, as there always is in my books. But essentially, this is about the family who live in this house and they're called the Blacks and their father, mother, daughter, son, probably on the surface look like a very respectable family. But I went into this book knowing I wanted to write about the most dysfunctional family I could possibly come up with.

36:42There is so much dysfunction in this family, but it's all hidden behind this facade, as you say, of this lovely Hampstead cottage. and the mother, Annie Black, she spends half her life in Brent Cross buying towels from John Lewis. The father always wears a blazer and a handkerchief tucked in his, you know, he works at John Lewis on Oxford Street. Nothing to see here. Yeah, nothing to see here, but so much to see here because that's absolutely what I wanted to explore with this is that sort of the darkness that could hide behind that respectability and it's super dark. No, it is. And there has been a lot of talk recently about the incredible number of very successful books that feature on, feature dead women, center around dead women.

37:29And your books do often feature women in peril. Yes. Women in jeopardy. Yeah. Does it worry you? No. Tell me why it doesn't. Um, number one, I never set out to write a book thinking like rubbing my hands thinking, oh, I can't wait to write about another missing girl or, or an imprisoned teenage female or a dead woman. I, you know, that's not how I operate. I quite often don't know who the victim is going to be or what's actually happened until I get very far into the book. Um, number two, not all my books are like that. Um, I just finished writing my 25th novel. There's no dead women. There's no women in peril.

38:10All the women in my book are pretty safe. Are there any men in peril? Yes, there's a terribly, terribly physically mutilated man at the beginning of my novel. 25th book. The 25th book. And I didn't set out, I didn't think, oh gosh, I've written enough books recently about women in peril. I should write about a man who's had a horrible time instead. It was just a story that I wanted to tell and that was how I wanted to tell the story. and I do think that this story is a little bit sort of, it's not what it seems because I study the Sunday Times bestsellers forensically every single week. I'm so curious about what books make it into that chart and what books don't.

38:48And why. And why. And some weeks you'll find that eight out of the ten books in the Sunday Times bestsellers are romances. Sometimes it could be a whole group of like non-genre sort of semi-literary kind of book club reads. It just absolutely depends on the, you know, the ebb and flow and the movement of the publishing market, the way publishers publish book, the way readers read book, the way booksellers market books. And I just think this was a particular week where, yes, it probably does look a bit like that's all we do is talk about dead women and write about dead women and read about dead women.

39:22But I just don't think it is. But I mean, obviously, there's another bigger social point to be made about this, which is I've seen a lot of commentary around the fact that maybe the enjoyment in this trope is that this isn't what happens in the real world. That women get hurt, women get, you know, abused and they're not necessarily ever shown justice. Whereas in a book, you know, yes, it's all resolved. and there is something wonderful about that. But I don't think it's as big of an issue as might be suggested by the headlines at the moment. Okay, and we should always bear in mind that actually more men are murdered than women.

39:59Absolutely. More men are beaten up, more men are hurt. By other men. By other men, absolutely. The issue is male violence, isn't it? Yes, which is what my 25th novel is about. Okay, right. Well, let's not bother about the 25th. We're talking about the 24th. You do in this book talk about clowns. Now, a lot of people have got a phobia about clowns, haven't they? Is that why you decided? Because I find clowns faintly creepy. Yeah. Do you? I find them faintly creepy. And I realised I'd taken a bit of a gamble by not only including a... He's not a spooky clown. He's a very sad and tragic clown. But I realised that I was possibly putting an obstacle in the way of some readers wanting to read the book because I know that it is a serious phobia that some people have.

40:46Like you say, faintly creepy, don't like them, look at a picture of a clown, think, ooh, not for me. The phobia is so serious. I don't think you'd put a clown on the cover, would you? No. No. No, no. And so I have been, another thing I've been doing while I've been out on the road talking about this book at numerous events is to try and downplay the whole clown aspect. Oh, sorry, I brought it up. No, absolutely. I think it's good because some people listening might have heard rumours about there being a clown in the book and being put off reading it. The clown is, he's a young boy and it's a coping mechanism.

41:22He's had a very traumatic childhood and it's a persona that he uses to protect himself from the world. And he's not like a Stephen King sort of clown. OK, few. Few. Yeah. Now, as a child, I know that you read avidly. Yeah. And it's so difficult to get today's youngsters to engage in something that certainly I, I just when I started reading, I just have never stopped. Yeah. But there was that breakthrough book, which for me was the Enoch Blyton book, The Ship of Adventure, saying that carefully. What was yours? was? Oh, I genuinely can't remember. It would have been Ina Blyton. I know that. It probably was a magic faraway tree.

42:04It's such a cliche, but I mean, gosh, what a way to engage childish brains. A tree that you'd keep climbing up and every time you get a bit further, there's a whole different world to explore. She gets a real going over old Ina, doesn't she? But for so many people of my age and your age, she was the gateway drug to a lifelong obsession. Oh, absolutely. Without a shadow of a doubt um and the other thing i remember from my childhood which i didn't realize until i was an adult but these angela banner books the anton b books uh she she was um i think a linguist or something to do with childhood language yeah and she wrote those books so that children could teach themselves to read which i never realized but they were a huge part of my childhood as well was sitting in the library without my mother having to supervise me just looking at these Ant and Bee books.

42:53So as a reader, that was a massively important thing. And in your family, do the younger members read? So I have a 19 and 23 year old daughter. They were voracious readers as children, both being read to. In fact, my oldest daughter was read to by my husband until she was 13 and reading, self-reading. My youngest daughter read all the shopaholic novels when she was seven. Sophie Kinsella. Yes. She was seven years old. She read all of them in about two weeks. and then they did what I did when I was a teenager. I just stopped reading at about the age of 13. I read all the Agatha Christie books in the library, realised I'd read all the Agatha Christie books in the library, felt my addiction sort of like run out, and then just got into music and other things instead, and didn't come back to reading until I was 21.

43:41And my older daughter has just come back to reading, not maybe as voraciously as I was reading in my 20s, but she's got back to it. The little one, not quite yet. But it made me a little bit sad when they stopped reading in their teens. But I remembered it was the same for me. And I just assumed they'd come back to it. Now you and I can't remember, I'm sorry, I can't remember which one of your daughters, the elder or the younger. The elder is Amelie. Is Amelie. And you and Amelie gave an interview to the Sunday Times. Yes. The Relative Values interview where members of a family talk about their relationship.

44:16And it was really sweet about that was that Amelie has just realised who you are. which you know it's rather it is it's rather touching isn't it because you were her mom you still are but she hadn't realized that you were actually you know you were Lisa Jewell yeah you still are there was this wonderful moment on TikTok where she was at the um the races at um although I can't remember the name of the races in Leeds right um and there was a young girl going around doing um interviews with people for her TikTok channel asking who their most famous contact on their phone was and she came up to amelie and uh amelie said my mom and this girl said oh who is your mom and amelie said she's a writer thinking well this girl's never going to have heard of lisa jewel and then the girl said what's her name and she said lisa jewel and yes the girl had never heard of lisa jewel but then she put this up on her tiktok channel and it went viral because other people had because it crossed over into book talk which is a massive massive social media community and all us writers are just so very, very grateful to the existence of BookTok because they do so much heavy work for the publishing industry.

45:24With younger readers. With younger readers, absolutely with younger readers. And I don't think I'd have the profile I have at the moment if it wasn't for BookTok. And yes, so it went viral. And I think that was a moment for Amelie of just like, ah, so I think she just probably pictured all my readers being like old ladies with white hair. And I don't think it occurred to her. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. In that interview, you also talk about Amelie's epilepsy diagnosis. Now, it's still a condition that isn't, it's not much discussed or widely understood, is it? It really, really isn't. I remember being a student at the age of about 18 or 19 and seeing a fellow student having a seizure in the canteen.

46:08and it was all just a bit dramatic and a bit gross and a bit like oh let's all turn away I don't like the look of that that's horrible but that was my understanding of what it was didn't go any further than that I don't know I didn't know what caused it or what the outcome was for people who have it and so we went on a journey from nowhere you know we had with and with no understanding of what it was into a much deeper understanding and I think the worst thing that any person who's diagnosed with epilepsy or the parent of a child who's diagnosed with epilepsy is when they give you the SUDEP talk and SUDEP stands for sudden unexplained death due to epilepsy.

46:43And this is a thing that can happen at any point to your child. They can just go to bed one night and not wake up, which is, I mean, obviously you've got fears for your child in so many different ways when they're out in the world. The mistakes that they might make and the bad decisions they might make that could lead them to doing something stupid. but to know that it's sort of inbuilt, it's there. And there's nothing you can do about it. There's nothing you can do about it. She's on medication, which is fantastic. It does keep them at bay, but it's still, it's all about a threshold. There's an epilepsy threshold.

47:19Anybody can have a seizure, but with epilepsy, the threshold is much, much lower. So it'd be much more easily triggered. And some people with epilepsy have incredibly low thresholds and they're the ones who have multiple seizures a day. Amelie's threshold is a little bit higher, which means it can be managed through medication. But the threshold does lower through life. So she's constantly going to be having to be re-prescribed a higher and higher and higher dose of this medication. At the moment, it doesn't have any side effects. But at some point, it might be such a high dose that it does have side effects.

47:55So and she can't just she has to take two. They're like two massive horse pills twice a day. If she forgets them, she will have a seizure. It's as simple as that. It's as simple as that. She will have a seizure if she forgets to take her medication, which is a massive thing when you're going off travelling and backpacking and all wanting to stay out at somebody's house and thinking, well, I can't stay out at somebody's house because my meds are at home. And so, yeah, there's an awful lot packed into it. And also the awful, awful humiliation of having a seizure in public. You know, the fear of having a seizure in public.

48:24It's a horrible thing to live under. I would say that Amelie is much more pragmatic about all this than I am. Because you're her mum. Just because I do think it's important. How should the rest of us, what should we do if we do see somebody having a seizure? OK, time it. That is number one thing is as much as your brain is going to be spinning, you're going to be thinking, oh, no, what's happening? Start timing it because most epileptic seizures should resolve themselves within five minutes. And in that case, the brain will reset. And that's another thing to be aware of. It takes an awful long time after a seizure for the person who's had the seizure to come back around to themselves.

49:01It's like unplugging a computer and then plugging it back in and waiting for all the windows and programs to come back on. They won't know who they are. They won't know what's happened. But it'll take it'll take a while. But if it goes over five minutes, you call an ambulance because then then it's turning into a very serious medical crisis. Should you move them or touch them? You should get them on their side because obviously there's a possibility of vomiting. so get them onto their side if you know how to do a recovery position that's always a good idea to do the recovery position but the most important thing is time it and make sure it doesn't go over five minutes if that person is still fitting after five minutes call an ambulance because that is a medical emergency which could end in death yeah i mean i do think i'm really glad you've had the opportunity to say that because i think there is still this i don't know this kind of ancient fear around epilepsy isn't there yeah never really lost that yes because it is that person is is no longer functioning in the real world they've gone they've gone somewhere else and their body is out of their control their mind is out of their control and that's a very terrifying thing to watch um and obviously horrible thing for the person to experience but they're not seeing it in the same way but yeah it is um it's good to look out for those things and to not be not to be so put off in the moment by what you're physically seeing that you can't think straight You are someone who is, I mean, you're phenomenally successful at your chosen profession.

50:26What is your ambition now? Because I mean, I'm always very jealous of writers because it's an amazing thing to be able to do because you are a company for people. You're, well, you're an adventure. People love going on an adventure with your books. What do you want to do next? That's such an amazing question. And it's something that I'm giving a lot of sort of behind the scenes thought to in quiet moments of where do I go next? Because I feel like if there was a bingo card for things that a writer would like to achieve in their career, I'm pretty much at full house. I'm not sure what else there is to do.

51:05Obviously, I want all writers write forever. I don't think I've ever heard of a writer just retiring. Just giving up. Yeah. Possibly slow it down a bit. You're a book a year person. Yes. And being a book a year is fabulous. Particularly now my children are grown. I have nothing else to do. I'm not a person with all sorts of hobbies and other ways of filling my time. This is the only thing I have to do apart from walking the dog. So yes, being a book a year, a writer is fantastic, but it's not just the writing of the book. It's when you are a big, high profile writer, Yeah, you can do things. When you're a big cheese with your imprint and you're one of their main titles of the year, everything kind of revolves around you to a certain extent, which is amazing.

51:54It really, really is amazing. But it's a lot of pressure and it's every year and you have to just show up for it every year. And of course, all writers are introverts. We're all introverts. I'm a homebody. I just want to be at home with my dog. But you're constantly having to put yourself out there and do all the things that you have to do to support the publication of your book because your publishers are putting so much into the publication of your book and you're very aware of that. And so it's like... Well, without being too... I mean, you keep people in work. Well, yes. There is that element of being a hugely successful writer.

52:30Absolutely. So no, it's very much a teamwork thing. It's very much they're working their socks off and throwing all the money at everything and I'm working my socks off in order to support what they're doing on the other side. and you both have to do that you can't neither of you can slack off so um so not that I want my publishers to stop working so hard for me but I I'm trying to imagine a time where that might just naturally so maybe it's a book every other year yes maybe like two books and then a year off too but I don't know we'll we'll find our way through it but I think it will naturally just sort of start to slow down it has to I don't know of any writer who who has kind of carried on into their 60s and 70s still at this sort of frenetic, like high octane level of publishing every single year.

53:18Well, you might be the exception. I might be the exception. We'll see. Lisa Jewell in conversation with Jane Garvey. We return tomorrow. Jane and Fee at times.radio. Love to hear from you. Keep your emails coming in. And if you're listening to this in the middle of the night, sleep tight.

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