185. Thomasina Miers

0:06Well behaved women rarely make history. Bloody difficult women do.

0:20Thomasina Miers, the restaurateur, food writer and telly star. Thomasina Miers is some hot tamale. born in Cheltenham this blue stocking won MasterChef and celebrated her success by heading down Mejio Way and then opening her restaurant Oaxaca now a big chain in London's Charing Cross she's presented cookery shows on telly you may have seen The Wild Gourmet published many cookery books and her new one The Mexican Table is out now I love interviewing entrepreneurs and foodies so this is this is my dream ticket now, Thomasina, you're my dream guest. You're married with three daughters. You went to my old school, St.

1:03Paul's girls school too. So I just, the first thing that occurred to me when looking at your CV and seeing you at Cheltenham and St. Paul's is going into cookery and cooking and making food a career and a business is not very Paulina. No, not very Paulina at all.

1:24Thomasina Miers:That's why it took me so long. I mean it took me so long to get there because almost the school motto was get out of the kitchen so as you can and get into a proper career it was it was it was kind of as simple as that and so yeah food was not proper career definitely not and so it took me a long time I went straight from school to do a VAT consultancy at Arthur Anderson nine months of VAT on my gap year you know just kind of wondering why I wasn't getting into it and then kind of another eight years after that thinking I must find a career I must find a career and then going down a catwalk with Clarissa Dixon Wright just saying I can't stand why I can't find a career I'm like I'm a little I'm a joke I'm hopeless I'm a failure and her saying well what do you like I said I really love food and cooking she was like well why why the hell aren't you doing that it was just it was so obvious but but food and cooking in those days it's not that long ago that food wasn't so cool you know nowadays any young gun who wants to be an entrepreneur thinks oh start a food truck or i'll do something a food that feels like way more open but even that short time ago you know it was like law accountancy banking you know those were the chosen things what did you do in those say lost years i mean i i had pulled my hair out um gazed at my navel um did you model because you're you a bit i did a bit i did a bit of modeling i mean i did um i did i i was for 18 months a kind of digital strategist in soho square uh it should have been like the coolest it was when martha lane fox was on all the buses and last minute dot com and i couldn't work out why I wasn't more excited by it.

3:11Thomasina Miers:I mean, I was bored, rigid. All these things are going to be taken over by AI, but cooking can't be, can it? Cooking can't be taken by the robots. I know. I mean, it turns out it's such a good thing. Yeah, I say that. I was talking at a Chefs in Schools conference the other day, which is an amazing charity where you put trained chefs into school kitchens. And we are revolutionising school food. It's really exciting. Anyway, I was talking to all these amazing chefs who have been in, you know, some of them been in michelin-style kitchens worked at the ritz and now they're cooking in schools and i was saying to the guys not only are you transforming the food culture of this nation but also you'll never your jobs are now going to be taken by the robots so you're in a good place yeah that's a nice thing so there was clarissa dixon right one of the two fat ladies who who did that who who gave you your light bulb moment but it's also it's such a cliche you say to people do what you love but it took you so long to to realize that and um this may be all wrong but you've said in written that you've had massive food issues in your teens yeah were you were you a bit frightened of working with food because of of your food issues which I'm not sure what they were but if you want to tell us we're here for it um no not because of the food issues So I grew up, my grandmother was a Norman Hartnell model.

4:33Thomasina Miers:My aunt modelled. My mother modelled. My aunt, my other aunt was a model for the Queen. I used to kind of show the Queen different outfits and stuff. So there was this big kind of modelling thing in my background. And then the food thing actually was also compete there. I mean, I started cooking when I was eight. One of my grannies is from Texas. The other one is from South Africa. so they're both coming from countries with actually really strong food cultures so food was always a delicious thing we always ate amazingly i mean my one granny in wales used to cook you know waffles from scratch and her hot ham was epic and you know boboti on another side that's the south african side isn't it yeah that's a kind of meat stew oh it's a kind of meat loaf with kind of studded with nuts and raisins which i kind of love i mean some people can't do that agrodulce I love it.

5:26Thomasina Miers:So so food was always there. So I always loved food. But then in my teens at St. Paul's, where I wasn't that happy, I think I actually was in a modelling competition. So the story is I went for this modelling competition and the prize was two weeks with this big job in the Caribbean is going to be paid really well. And my parents told me eight years later that I actually won the competition but they said she can't go away because it's in the school term and the school won't like it well that's true which was true I was at St Paul's they wouldn't have liked it but I remember I remember that taste of freedom I remember loving doing all the catwalk stuff and then I remember the kind of the bitter disappointment of like no you didn't get it and almost those doors to another exciting world shutting down and I was quite depressed in my teens.

6:21Thomasina Miers:I struggled really, really with depression. I was actually diagnosed with bipolar in my early 20s at the same time as my twin brother getting diagnosed with schizophrenia. So I obviously had issues and I think food became this, I think the modelling shutting down and then the moods, you know, the kind of low moods, food became this kind of bomb. And so, yeah, I then developed massive food issues which then took kind of a decade to kind of get over so were you always on a diet i i was yo-yoing i was binging i was doing all sorts of things but but and just obsessed you know just thinking about food all the time the noise which so many women and i think men now too will recognize i i feel so many people have issues with food because we are lamborg i mean in every shelf on every place you go into is bad food we're kind of lambasted with pictures of the perfect body the perfect look it's almost impossible not to have some issue with food in this except weirdly because I had all those issues and then because then when I realized that food was the one thing I loved doing and I went to cooking school at Ballymaloo the more I cooked and the more I started taking the pleasure again in food it was kind of this amazing tonic and cure because once you free yourself of the guilt of like basically now I eat anything I want and I you know unless I've gone through a really bad patch I'm very overtired and I've just been eating donuts for three weeks you know that doesn't feel so great then but basically I eat whatever I want and I mean I run around a lot too I'm like a Labrador I've got lots of energy but but but the more you enjoy food I remember this girlfriend from school living with us for a bit and she always set the table and she always because I used to do this thing where I'd eat from the fridge which many people recognize you know you just open the fridge and you start eating from it or you just you're standing up you're you're shoveling it in it's not really you're not really enjoying it you're feeding something else but once I started realizing that all the people I was cooking with all the chefs and they were really loving it and the more I loved it the more I the issues just kind of dropped away and so and the business of setting the table I've read this Adrian Gill AA Gill the late food writer yeah you have to sit at a table not read not look at your phone and concentrate and just you know be present be present and respect the food well i i my attitude to food is quasi religious i mean i am a naturalist naturist i'm not the naked one don't mind nakedness but i i i love i love the world i love the planet i love the trees i love nature and we will get into your global activism and environmentalism too but so food comes from the food comes from the earth like the farmers the amount of work anyone who's tried to grow tomatoes in their back garden they all give up and buy them and carrots it's difficult right and so and there's something about the respect i also love the pleasure like i've had my got my book out i had my um book launch the other day it's the tube strike going on and i got home yesterday right well it's tuesday i was very stressed i had to go into work to prep now And normally when I go into prep food, there's a lot of chefs on the hand.

9:56Thomasina Miers:And yeah, I work, but there's also a lot of help. Monday or Tuesday, whenever it was, there wasn't that much on the hand because the chefs were having a nightmare getting in. So there's two no-shows. And so my exec chef and I are busting a gut to prep for apparently 200 people for the book launch, not knowing if anyone was going to show up, should we have cancelled. I got home really in a bit of a kind of, you know, head in a bit of a mess. not hang around and then i had to feed the kids and i should say you've got three daughters and you're married to an investment banker and you you live in west london i live in west london he's a he's a fund manager but yes sorry but no no no it's fine charming man well anyway i open the fridge and there's like three leaks and i think to myself i'm just gonna make leek quiche my granny used to make this mega leek quiche you made a quiche after work my father makes the best pastry ever and i'm good at pastry jeremy lee's got an amazing pastry with lard in i had lard in the fridge so i did a butter and lard pastry shoved it in the fridge while it was resting i fried some leeks i got some marjoram from the garden um i grated loads of cheese odds and sods we sat down to this lard on and leek yum quiche for supper the kids were just like this is heaven it took about an hour and a half by the time it got out of the oven my mood was completely lifted I kind of righted myself by the ritual of just chopping some onions you know shoving some flour feeding your family feeding my family feeding myself but also feeding myself with the ritual of just being in the moment I had a long list of to do I had all sorts of kind of ish you know stuff to do for my book tour I just put it all aside and I said I'm just going to make a quiche and it is it's amazing so that being present whether it's laying the table or definitely not looking at your phone while you're eating the habit of not gobbling all down it's in itself a cure and you've also said in other interviews that you have been not only being diagnosed with bipolar but also with adhd does cooking help with that too i think it's amazing for i mean adhd you know whether you call it a superpower or just something you have to deal with it the hyper focus bit is pretty amazing I mean you know my lovely husband was mansplaining me the other day about reading the back of an instruction I was like I can focus you know I've written seven cookbooks like it's not like I can't actually so that you know there is this on instructions at all no I mean they're boring right I mean so but yeah the the ADHD makes me I think in a kitchen I'm really good like I'm really good at kind of well you've come for dinner I can like I can chat to guests and I can have like different pots going on and that stuff I'm good at and I think that's probably why a lot of chefs probably do have ADHD because you're quite good at multitasking can I just at this point interrupt Thomasina to say she had 10 people for dinner um one was a sort of nine month pregnant woman as we would be as we she gave us drinks with mark and then you made a mole of pumpkin seeds and you baked a fish and you did something else and then we had a pudding and what your i loved it when you say this is a cheat pudding okay what was the cheat pudding it was like match crunched had i poached some plums what was it it was a Really simple.

13:22Puddings can be really simple. Yeah. But you're right about the ADHD because when I did a cookery show, a competition on the BBC for Home Cook, it was called. Essentially, you have to be ADHD to get to make a three course meal in 45 minutes. You've got to do so many things at once and monitor so many different things. Get one thing going, do that, you know. and so make do you think there's any chance that your adhd was actually caused by cooking

13:53Thomasina Miers:caused by cooking i don't know so interestingly it is so interesting this it's funny even talking about adhd because some people are almost allergic to it because it's so in the news and people are like oh you know another person we're all on the spectrum of course we're all on the spectrum but what's really interesting is when i was diagnosed which was only because i wanted my kids to be diagnosed which is so common now that you get your kids diagnosed and then it's like ah because you know it turns out my sister's autistic my mother's probably a bit autistic you know whatever but I think that everyone really is on the spectrum I mean everyone's on the spectrum definitely my family are all on the spectrum but um the bipolar stuff is really interesting because the person who diagnosed me with ADHD said it could have just been it could have just bipolar you know so it is really interesting and I guess they're learning about it but I definitely was not great at studying for exams um and you know there are stuff I'm really good at and there's stuff I'm just not which is two hours sitting in a seat you know and talking about something I'm not that interested about you know forget it we've got to do more work we've got to you've left to St Paul's you've had eight years in the wilderness you've you've had your light bulb moment which is cookery is that when you went to Mexico to learn about Mexican food?

15:15Well first I went to Ballymalieu.

15:17Thomasina Miers:Of course you did the cookery school in Ireland. I did the cookery school in Ireland so I'd been to Mexico after Arthur Anson they gave me a chunk of money so I went traveling and I went to Mexico and I didn't even think about what you ate in Mexico I mean I think like everyone else probably I just thought Tex-Mex and I arrived there and my school friend knew this very cool family in Mexico City whose son was an architect they knew Mick Jagger she was an amazing cook and we ate such incredible food in their house in the first week of Mexico and so I then ate around the country and I just thought this food was incredible and when I went back to London I noticed to my surprise because even 30 years ago you know you could eat Polish or Ethiopian or Afghani food there was food from everywhere and yet I couldn't find any of the food that I tried on this trip so I kind of thought that's that's interesting then I guess I forgot it I had the eight years in the wilderness when I went to Bali and Malou Doreen Allen who is the alma of Balimelu, an incredible woman, definitely got ADHD.

16:27Thomasina Miers:She knew a family in Oaxaca. She was one of the only people in the Western Hemisphere that I'd met who knew that Mexican food was really quite special because it was this crazy culinary secret no one knew. And so I guess she had, she reopened that curiosity and still there was no good Mexican food. So after Balimelu, I remember calling up Sam Hart, who's this incredible restaurateur. He had spent some time in Mexico. And I remember he had this amazing little restaurant. I mean, he's got Barifina. Is this Moro? Is it Moro? Yeah, Sam and Sam. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, not Moro. No, Barifina. Oh, yeah, yeah.

17:06Thomasina Miers:Barifina. And so I said to him, look, I want to get in some kitchens. I was thinking about Barcelona. Do you know anyone there? Because he had this amazing Spanish restaurant. And he said, no, but a friend of mine is about to open a big restaurant, a cocktail bar in Mexico City. and they're definitely looking for people so i flew out um i had by the way done one shift at the river cafe um as a front of house it was amazing it was amazing but i was a waitress because i still didn't really have the guts to be a full full-on chef still with that awful some poor liner can't be a chef you shouldn't use your brain all that kind of crap anyway flew out to Mexico open a cocktail bar lived in Mexico for a year that was a ball that was like that was great a lot of tequila swilling a lot of traveling a lot of trying to unpick you know 160 varieties of chilies why do you use a guajillo here or an ancho there what is a mole how do you make a mole and what's amazing now having just got back from six months living there again last year is that the food has come on so massively in mexico it's developed and it's so modern now so that molets when i lived there 20 years ago the molets of oaxaca had 52 ingredients it was very complicated and you needed four chefs and a weekend to make one whereas now these contemporary restaurants in mexico city are making really simple molets of like so molets are sauce but the one i made you was a pumpkin seed mole, a pipian.

18:38Thomasina Miers:So pumpkin seeds full of magnesium, full of protein. You know, these enriched sauces that are packed with all the nutrients. I was just listening to them, those lovely twin doctors who were the podcast on the BBC. And they were all talking about magnesium. I was thinking pumpkin seeds, magnesium, protein. So all these things we want to have, all these superfoods, Mexican food, the original, it's just packed with all this goodness, but also flavour. So that's fun. when did Masterchef come in between Mexico and you opening Oaxaca was that was it then that was after Mexico so I got back uh I remember entering and Greg going Greg Wallace yeah Greg was like I made a mole and I served it with grouse on like the quarter finals and uh how did that go down with of course a mole is perfect for game birds it's absolutely perfect they serve a lot of the It's quite fruity.

19:32Thomasina Miers:So obviously they're different ones. They're green ones, they're light ones, they're heavy ones. The more complex Oaxacan ones, the darker ones, are brilliant with things like game birds because they'll have a kind of dried fruit, like a raisin or an apricot, with a kind of lovely dried, rich chilies and then some charred onions and garlic and tomatoes. And so you get this wonderful complex balance of flavours, which is very good with a kind of gamey turkey. So Grouse was like epic for that. but he was like what's this sauce on grouse I what how do I know if it's good or not I was like Greg does it taste good like if it tastes good then it's good that's all you need to know was it do you think he was a good judge of food and quality and all and and all those things I mean was he well in the earlier so I was the first one of that series and you won MasterChef that series I did win that series and I remember putting shredded basil in a rice pudding we We were in a field.

20:28Thomasina Miers:I had like, you know, 10 ingredients. We had to feed the army. I was trying to like be... This was field kitchen time. Field kitchen. I was thinking on my feet and I thought, well, I'll put the basil in the rice pudding that can give it a lovely scent. And Greg was like, basil in rice pudding? What are you doing? It was a different era of food. It was a completely different era when, you know, food has come on so far since then. So it's extraordinary. I've got to ask, did you ever see anything off colour from Greg when you were on MasterChef? No, I mean, his jokes, smutty jokes. But, you know, yeah, that's all I saw.

21:03But also, you were the winner. So, you know,

21:09then you shot to fame because you're this gorgeous, tall, enthusiastic, passionate person with green eyes. And you've won MasterChef. And then you became a highly successful restaurateur. you opened your first Oaxaca presumably because you visited the woman in Oaxaca and you fell in love with the food of Oaxaca.

21:30Thomasina Miers:I fell in love with Oaxaca I mean the food in Oaxaca is just just extraordinary and the markets I mean the ingredients in those markets the wild herbs and the leaves. How do you get them over here to open in Charing Cross? So we decided I mean our food today is completely different from the food when we first opened. Okay. When we opened no one knew anything about mexican food so i felt we had to start off on a quite simple you know people asking for fajitas and stuff like that so we started off quite simply and i was adamant that we were not going to be shipping in cheeses and fresh fresh herbs from mexico because that was not really too expensive to not very eco not very eco not very eco so i was going to use british meats you know everything we started off was organic um we were going to use seasonal ingredients we were going to have quite a lot of um quite a lot of vegetables on our menu i quite like the idea that if we were going to have organic meats and we'd have some you know it was going to be for everyone in mexico good foods for all so i wanted it to be quite egalitarian not too expensive um and so so that's how we started nowadays our food is so much more sophisticated because suddenly there are other mexican restaurants people know more so it's allowed us to really develop a menu and you know I mean coming now our food is just extraordinary it's so exciting I mean I had a macadamia nut mole and I'm in my book launch with this amazing roast dish we had these amazing like fresh fish tacos with um some kind of uh sesame seeds uh jalapeno dressing it was delicious I mean it's it's just fun and do you invent some of the dishes yes I spent my whole time inventing dishes it's really fun so you're not completely derivative from sort of the Mexican cuisine as it is you can you've made your own Mexican cuisine well I think I mean you know where do any recipes where's art come from where's music come from there's always a an inspiration but funnily enough so Mexican Tables the book that's just come out that was very much inspired by my six months living in Mexico last year I was I was suddenly desperate for the kids to know Mexico they grew up speaking Spanish at home so I was like great let's go so we all moved to Mexico last year fixed six months and so I wrote this book really as a kind of toolbox for people in this country to try and unpack this simpler more modern thinking around Mexican food so it's based around ingredients that we know every day which are actually Mexican so tomatoes are Mexican chilies are mexican chocolates mexican um nuts and seeds to enrich it so it's it's arranged by that but in the been the act of creating all these recipes and some of them were inspired by food festivals i cooked in an ensanada or stages i've done in restaurants in mexico city or things i'd eaten in vera cruz or merida definitely lots of inspiration but then you try and make them your own and then you try and make them for the kitchen so the domestic kitchen because I feel like recipes, it's all very well having a Noma cookbook, but am I going to write it if it's got eight sub-batches?

24:44Thomasina Miers:I want recipes to be doable because I'm a working mother. I want people to actually cook them. But then our new menus in Oaxaca coming out in six weeks are going to be full of the recipes from the book, which are the recipes from the country. It's just fun. I mean, food's just fun. And delicious. And delicious, yeah. There are lots of women in food now, But when you started, I mean, I think we've mentioned some of them, Darina Allen, Sam, the Sam of Morrow. And of course, we've got Angela Hartnett, I ate in her new Cafe Murano this week. Delicious, isn't it? You, Sally Clark, who's done this podcast.

25:24I mean, did you feel like you were kind of groundbreaking when you opened your own business? I mean, that was a big risk for a young woman to take, especially Mexican food, a big restaurant in Charing Cross and a young woman who hadn't done a business before. So how difficult was that? I mean, I was terrified.

25:48Thomasina Miers:I mean, I remember just living with a kind of permanent pit of fear in my stomach. but St Paul's as a school it does equip you with a sense that you can just go for things just try anything and I think you don't really think about I mean if you ever thought through the actual real challenges of anything you do you probably would do nothing so I don't think I really thought about it I mean we try to find a smaller restaurant but in those days it was very hard to be backed by anyone and this this this kind of basement restaurant in Covent Garden was the only site after a year of looking where landlord would take us seriously it was an old Irish pub no one had been in it for ages we were like scrubbing the sick off the floors it was it was it was literally the only site we could find it just happened to be vast so that was um that was not by choice um and then I think you know I don't think it even occurred to me that I was a woman you know I just I it never even occurred to me that there was any difference between men and women until when I got married people started asking me questions about and and then getting pregnant and having babies well I don't know I guess like who's going to do what well I guess who's cooking the dinner and you know stuff like that and then and then when you have a baby then suddenly you're like oh wow you know it is different and and just and I guess when you start working babies and being a businesswoman yeah yeah yeah is that I mean it's a lot it's a lot you know the juggle is is is is massive which is why you probably don't see that many chefs female chefs who last that long because you know I went into it as my own boss I didn't do the traditional working up my way through the kitchen which definitely equipped me with imposter syndrome and I wish I'd spent more time learning you know I still try and go back into kitchens you know Jeremy Lee sometimes has me I've done Ballymaloo but you know when I meet some of these guys who've done three years in Chez Panisse or two years in Madrid or you know I think gosh that level of knowledge must be so exciting and of course I'm still learning and I try and get into kitchens when I'm impossible like cook with other chefs but um which other chefs do you admire I god which other chefs I mean I love I love this new um coterie of young chefs who are making social media work for them like tom straker uh tom straker's got amazing chef uh jesse jenkins is incredible another day in paradise uh ben lippett extraordinary food they've all come from kitchens and at a certain stage i thought right i'm having a break from these crazy hours i'm gonna do something my way and they've made a success for them you know i think that's brilliant jeremy lee is a cook i could cook with forever he's just brilliant um i'm not i'm not a kind of I'm not mad about michelin very oh god I can't bear fussy food I am a maternal cook I believe in produce ingredients um and that food should be just approachable I really think I think about food culture you know all of us should eat better food there should be a green gross on every high street paying zero percent business rates the one simple way the government could get us all eating better is access to fresh vegetables why there aren't green grocers on every high street such a good idea i mean it's obvious can you set out briefly your your food philosophy that takes in the environmental waste and the environmental damage of the food industry obviously it's nothing like fashion no i see most of high street fashion is landfill yes and but food is is an essential clothing is you know slightly below food so you know i know you've got a you think you can eat meat sustainably we should all be eating more fresh fruit and vegetables and more local food so just give it to us i mean i'd definitely be up for food's our job there is no um the government does have no department for food which is crazy when you think of the cost of the nhs we're spending on diet related disease which is also causing long-term sickness which is causing massive welfare i'm the expense of our diets runs into it's about 324 billion pounds a year if we were all on diets of fresh fruit and vegetables it would cost about 90 billion which is a third of the cost of the bad diet treating obesity and all the comorbidities we're spending the nhs are now talking about spending a fortune on these diet pills which actually if they just got people on diets of real foods that half of those problems would just disappear and vanish so um food is also responsible for a third of greenhouse gas emissions globally so how we are how we eat is pivotal to how the planet is it's pivotal to biodiversity i mean we we talk about our rivers and and the water companies polluting our rivers 40 percent of river pollution is down to the chicken farms so yes we are omnivores we should eat meat but we should be eating a hell of a lot more fresh fruit and vegetables.

30:54Thomasina Miers:We need access to them because there's no access to them if you live in a food desert. If you're living on a lower income, you're probably living in a deprived area. You cannot have access to fresh fruit and vegetables. Plus, there are about a million people in this country who don't even have access to fridges. So how on earth are they supposed to cook? So they're dependent on long-life ultra-processed food, which is going to kill them. Which is going to kill them, which all the food banks are long-life ultra-processed foods. So none of it makes sense. And then food lies governmentally between DEFRA, which is, you know, Department of Rural Affairs, between the NHS.

31:27Thomasina Miers:And meanwhile, you've got big food, these big food companies, spending millions and millions on lobbying the government. No, of course we don't need regulation. No, we'll regulate ourselves. It doesn't work. But if you just put a trained chef into a school kitchen, like which Chefs in Schools is doing, you can prove that you can feed people on fresh fruit and vegetables. Children love food. this kind of myth that children won't eat fresh fruit and vegetables is such a joke if you make them delicious they will hoover them up which is what we're proving and it is cheaper often than the ultra processed diet to produce because a chef is nimble if the price of tomatoes rockets up they choose red peppers instead or they choose broccoli or you know they're good at what they do and so what we actually need is more training of people who've got the skills to cook good food we need fresh fruit vegetables on every high street and then those problems just disappear the NHS suddenly doesn't have the burden of long-term sickness and diabetes disease sorry to interrupt why that additionally can't the chefs the trained chefs that go into schools to cook with fresh fruit and vegetables why can't they at the same time teach the children they are that's what they are good they are in our schools all of them they are food educators so they are the heroes of the school the kids love them they're like icons in the schools and they teach them how to cook so we are changing food culture can i go and be one i'd love to do that they are amazing jobs actually they are not though i'm not trained but then i didn't even complete my journalism training so i shouldn't i know you're a good cook the way you leapt in and helped with the puddings when you came for dinner you obviously well i came second in bbc celebrity best home cook i've been to your house for dinner you're a great cook well i'm not bad i'm a good plain cook sadly we've got to um we're running out of time so i've got to ask you when has been your most difficult time or when have you had to be most difficult thomas cina myers uh i think asking for pay rises you have to be quite difficult seth if you're surrounded by men and you have to ask for a pay rise it's weird you're treated differently they don't you know women asking for pay rises is uncomfortable women being pushy about money no one really likes it women don't like it men don't like it it's a hard you're kind of between a rock and a hard face so it's a kind of tactful when did you have to you've been your own boss most of your career you have to whenever even if you're no boss you know you've got shareholders you've got you know there are all sorts of places where you have to kind of you have to know your worth and it's annoying to have to prove it all the time you've also got to recognize your own worth which is you know it takes a long time to get there you know i'm nearly 50 you know i feel like more confident i've ever been but that's following decades of not being very confident so you've got to learn your own worth feel positive about your own worth and then ask for it so yeah that's kind of got to be pretty tricky then um yeah i mean we have to be tricky all over the place don't we but as you get older you don't mind it so much it's almost fun i'm loving that we've ended on such a positive note and just to say my 50s were my best decade so the best is yet to come thomasina myers thank you very much for being this week's difficult woman thanks for having me

34:55thank you so much for listening to another episode of my difficult women podcast Don't forget to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts to make sure the latest episode is ready to go every Friday afternoon. And next week, we're doing Kate Fall, now Baroness Fall, who used to be David Cameron's gatekeeper. Bye.