Caitlin Moran: “I Thought My Brain Had Broken” Becoming Hopeful After A Life Of Anxiety

How do we find hope when the world feels increasingly overwhelming? In this episode of Begin Again, Caitlin Moran joins Davina McCall for a funny, moving and hopeful conversation about love, anxiety, feminism, loneliness and finding your way back to joy. Caitlin opens up about experiencing her first panic attack at 13, after revealing her family were living on benefits, and how anxiety became the fuel that drove her extraordinary career. Decades later, she reached breaking point and realised: “I can’t be this scared anymore.” She shares how she finally broke up with anxiety and why she wishes she had done it 30 years earlier. She and Davina also explore the growing crisis facing men, why loneliness and social media are leaving us disconnected, and the simple changes Caitlin believes can help us feel hopeful again, from putting down our phones to reconnecting with our communities. Caitlin also reflects on growing up poor, writing her first novel as a teenager, her 33-year relationship with husband Pete, and the extraordinary night she went clubbing with Lady Gaga. 🌟Like, comment and subscribe for more honest conversations about purpose, resilience, love, loss and beginning again. Follow us here: 📸www.instagram.com/beginagain 🎥https://www.tiktok.com/@beginagainpod ✨Sign up for the Begin Again newsletter for behind-the-scenes access, recommendations and much more: https://linkly.link/2g2xm Follow Caitlin here: https://www.instagram.com/mscaitlinmoran/ Buy ‘How to be Hopeful - A Year of Attempting to Feel Less Awful About the World’ by Caitlin Moran, Ebury Press, £22 Purchase tickets to Caitlin’s book tour here: https://www.gigantic.com/caitlin-moran-tickets We'd love you to share your Get Busy Living stories with us at https://getbusyliving.beginagainshow.com/ (00:00) Intro (01:11) Caitlin's New Book (03:22) The Impact Of "How To Be A Woman" (06:09) Foreseeing The Masculinity Crisis (09:15) Being An Enthusiast vs. A Critic (12:01) Writing About Hope (13:00) The Value Of In-Person Connection (18:56) Monzo GBL Ad (20:27) Developing Anxiety At 13 (24:50) Learning To Write (27:03) The Journey Out Of Poverty (31:57) Her First Publishing Deal (35:14) Monzo 90 Days Ad (36:23) Caitlin's 'How To Be Hopeful' List (43:11) Do This To Improve Your Own Happiness (52:05) Clubbing In Berlin With Lady Gaga (57:37) Finally Getting Over Anxiety (01:02:49) Her 26 Year Marriage (01:08:40) Inclusive Forms Of Feminism Sponsored by: Download Monzo. Monzo Current Accounts are for 16+ and UK residents. Ts&Cs Apply. Join the 'Say Yes Club' and hear more about our events here - https://events.beginagainshow.com/ You could get back less than you invest. Monzo current account required. Monzo investments are for UK residents, 18+. Ts&Cs apply. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:30Speaker 01

  I went out to interview Lady Gaga. Twenty minutes into the interview, she went, "Hey, do you want to go and hang out at a club?" "Yes, I'd like to do that, Lady Gaga." And we entered this full-on Berlin sex club. And then about 2:00 in the morning, she goes...

• 0:40Speaker 02

  Today, I am joined by the incredible Caitlin Moran. Caitlin's got such a profound way of putting words to things that so many women feel, but we don't always know how to say out loud. You are the most amazing author.

• 0:54Speaker 01

  How to Be a Woman was a breath of fresh air. When the book came out, there was a pap shot of Kate Moss lying on the beach, completely naked, with a glass of champagne, reading How to Be a Woman. And I was like, "Yeah, it's that kind of feminism." When I was 13, I had that first burst of anxiety, and I felt like I can do anything: nine books in 10 years, and a sitcom, and a film. And I believe that was all because I was anxious. And then I got to 49, and I realized that I'm going to have to break up with anxiety.

• 1:19Speaker 02

  How did you fight that? But through it all, we talk about hope, because you might not be able to change the world overnight, but you can change your days.

• 1:31Speaker 01

  Find one thing that you make better in your life, and that's the meaning of life.

• 1:35Speaker 02

  And sometimes, that's all you need to do to really begin again.

• 1:41Speaker 02

  Hi.

• 1:42Speaker 01

  Hi.

• 1:44Speaker 02

  I mean, it's so great to have you here, because I've had a massive crush on you forever.

• 1:48Speaker 01

  I'll say.

• 1:48Speaker 02

  And we talked about that on X.

• 1:52Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:53Speaker 02

  Twitter.

• 1:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:53Speaker 02

  X is so weird, isn't it?

• 1:54Speaker 01

  I can't, I'm sorry, I'm just not going to use it. It's like it's government now, I'm sorry.

• 1:57Speaker 02

  And Twitter and tweeting, tweeting was so good.

• 1:59Speaker 01

  We still say tweet, we don't say exing.

• 2:01Speaker 02

  No, exing. Sounds like you're breaking up with someone.

• 2:03Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 2:03Speaker 02

  I'm exing you.

• 2:04Speaker 01

  Which I have done with Twitter, I have now exed X.

• 2:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, I've exed X.

• 2:07Speaker 01

  When actual Nazis turn up, you're like, "This party is not for me, I'm off."

• 2:10Speaker 02

  No, I'm gone.

• 2:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:12Speaker 02

  So, this.

• 2:14Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:15Speaker 02

  Can I just say, you are just the most amazing author, but the way that you can write about stuff that's quite complicated, quite difficult, out in the world, lots of people might be, have very strong opinions about something, but you write with such skill.

• 2:35Speaker 01

  Oh, thank you.

• 2:36Speaker 02

  And in a way that is completely acceptable for everybody.

• 2:41Speaker 01

  Yes, that's what I try and do, that's what takes the energy, yeah.

• 2:44Speaker 02

  That's really brilliant.

• 2:45Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 2:46Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 2:46Speaker 01

  Well, I really believe that, like, I mean, every writer's got different ideas about what they want to do. The two things I want to do is, one, be useful. So I only ever write a book, and the books are usually, something bad has happened to me. And instead of writing a book about something bad has happened to me, which would be a misery memoir, I wait until I've worked out a solution to it, and then that's when I write the book. So here's the bad stuff that happened, and here's the solution I came up with, because I want to be useful. And then the second thing is that I want to be useful and entertaining, because I really strongly believe, if you look at so much academic texts on subjects like feminism or masculinity or mental health, any of the subjects that I've written about, they tend to be in quite dry academic books or quite serious books. And that, to me, feels like that's limiting that information, because most of us don't have time to read. It could be a really clever and brilliant book, but if it's really dry and upsetting

• 3:31Speaker 01

  and technical, most people aren't going to want to read that. And I think as a courtesy to the reader, if you've come up with a clever idea, then you should put in the second load of effort into it, which is to try and make it as light, and as fun, and enjoyable, and gossipy, and kind of, just, it's part of the cure, that you actually enjoy reading the book and learning the information in it. So I'm so glad you said that, that's literally my favorite review ever, thank you.

• 3:52Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, I feel like that about all of your books. I think How to Be a Woman, for me, was such a breath of fresh air, because I am a feminist.

• 4:02Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 4:03Speaker 02

  But I was surrounded by literature around angry feminism and fury, and yours was the first book that spoke my language of like, "Oh, there are some really funny bits to being a feminist." Like, absolutely hilarious.

• 4:18Speaker 01

  And being a woman.

• 4:19Speaker 02

  Yes, and being a woman.

• 4:20Speaker 01

  This is ridiculous.

• 4:21Speaker 02

  This is ridiculous.

• 4:22Speaker 01

  It's wobbly, wobbly, Benny Hill. This is a massive trouble covered, full of pain and surprises. Like, it's a ludicrous thing to be a woman.

• 4:28Speaker 02

  The idea that we were talking about cystitis within three minutes of seeing each other today was a joy.

• 4:32Speaker 01

  Three seconds, yeah.

• 4:32Speaker 02

  Thank you. You know, because we all go through it, and that is why I think we're so lucky to be women.

• 4:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:39Speaker 02

  We are all connected in a very deep way.

• 4:42Speaker 01

  Well, women go deep fast, like, kind of like, just the amount of times I wrote about this in What About Men and the Difference between the way that women and men communicate. And like, they're very different, and in some ways, women communicate better, and in some ways, men communicate better. But the big difference is, I was on a train, and there's a group of women, he didn't know each other, and within three minutes, they were talking about their births, they were talking about their children, they were talking about their parents, like, gone really, really deep. And the men, for the entire three-hour journey, were just talking about the rules of T20 cricket. They had not even asked each of their names by the end, as they finally got off the train, he went forward, went, "Hey, it was really nice to talk to you, what was your name?" He was like, "Steve." Like, the end was the bit where they found out each other's names. The women, within 30 seconds, I could have told you three tables back how many stitches they'd had during that.

• 5:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:21Speaker 01

  Like, I knew everything. So, yeah, we, some people call it oversharing, but I don't think there's any such thing as oversharing. And people call it gossip, but gossip is just women passing on information.

• 5:32Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 5:32Speaker 01

  You know, we're usually the ones that have to sort out a problem, and all that gossip and oversharing is actually us sharing everything that we know, detoxifying it, stopping it from being taboo.

• 5:40Speaker 02

  Well, you're talking about the problems that you've had, you find a solution, and you share it. And when we read books like this, we then talk about the solutions that you have in here, and share it with other people. So it's a brilliant thing.

• 5:54Speaker 01

  That's what it's supposed to be. My favorite thing, when How to Be a Woman came out, I realized that it was a different kind of feminism, that in the same week, someone sent me a picture of all the women in Downton Abbey, all in their period costume, and they were all in a row, reading How to Be a Woman. And then the next day, there was a pap shot of Kate Moss lying on the beach, completely naked, reading How to Be a Woman. And I was like, "Yeah, it's that kind of feminism."

• 6:13Speaker 02

  And it's one we can all get with.

• 6:15Speaker 01

  Well, we all need it. You know, like, kind of, there are problems for both genders. And the thing, the irony is, that kind of, like, feminism is the only thing that we've ever invented that looks at problems specifically of gender. And so, all the problems that it's able to tackle, the tools that it gives us to tackle the problems of being a woman and talk about them and detoxify it, are also the tools that men could use to talk about the problems of masculinity. Like, how do we know that we've got a crisis in masculinity at the moment? And feminism is the only thing that we've invented that would give them the tools to look at their problems, do you?

• 6:40Speaker 02

  Now that you've brought that up, I would like to just touch on that, because you were literally talking about the problems that men were heading for men, like, way before...

• 6:51Speaker 01

  I know.

• 6:51Speaker 02

  It kind of went into the mainstream. I mean, you could see it coming, right?

• 6:55Speaker 01

  I timed it so badly, though. Like, it came out, and everyone was like, like, even sort of liberal, progressive sort of men were just like, "Men don't have problems." Like, kind of, you know, "What is Caitlin Moran going on about? This is such a patronizing book." And then a year later, Adolescence came out, and they were going, "Well, why are teenage boys like this? What has happened in fathering? What has happened in culture?" And I was just sitting there going, "If I brought the book out this year, I would have got some good reviews."

• 7:18Speaker 02

  But that is, it is an amazing book. And also, I think, after How to Be a Woman, a surprising one for you to write. And I was actually very grateful, because as a mother of a son, and as the wife of a very good man, it is very nice to see someone going, "No, we need to keep an eye on this."

• 7:39Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 7:40Speaker 02

  And, you know, we were ladettes, like, "I can do anything a guy can do." But it's like, wouldn't it be lovely for men to have that same thing?

• 7:50Speaker 01

  The reverse.

• 7:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:51Speaker 01

  Which is the thing, when I was sort of doing in, in sort of like, the briefest and most entertaining way that I could possible to explain the difference between men and women now, in the last 150, if you look at women's lives, 150, 200 years ago, we were the legal property of men, first of all, our fathers, then our husbands. We couldn't have our own bank account, we couldn't own property. We could be sent to a mental asylum on the say-so of our husbands, you know, we couldn't start a business. You know, women would have to co-sign and have a joint account with men, even into the 1970s.

• 8:15Speaker 02

  That is insane.

• 8:16Speaker 01

  Marital rape was still legal in 1991.

• 8:18Speaker 02

  No.

• 8:19Speaker 01

  Like, post-D Light.

• 8:20Speaker 02

  Are you joking?

• 8:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, it was still legal to rape your wife in this country in 1991.

• 8:23Speaker 02

  Wait, what did you just say?

• 8:24Speaker 01

  Post-D Light, that's always been my idea of the modern era.

• 8:27Speaker 02

  No, wait, that is such a fucking brilliant reference.

• 8:29Speaker 01

  Right.

• 8:30Speaker 02

  Post-D Light.

• 8:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 8:34Speaker 01

  For me, that's the start of the modern era, yeah.

• 8:36Speaker 02

  But, oh my God, that is...

• 8:38Speaker 01

  Isn't that crazy?

• 8:39Speaker 02

  Mind-blowing.

• 8:39Speaker 01

  Right? But in that stretch of time, women's lives have changed completely. We can now rule businesses, you know, the legislation we've made on sexual assault, we go into space, we own companies, we can rule countries, we can wear what we want, we can smoke cigarettes, we have contraception, we can talk about sex, like, everything. And those were seen as the things of men. Basically, what feminism did is, girls go and take the things of men, take the power, take the fun, take the money, take the responsibility, and here we are. In that same time, men have not taken any of the things of women. And if you look at when we talk about the crisis of masculinity, and the mental health statistics, you know, we know the statistics, you know, the leading cause of death for men in this country under the age of 50 is taking their own lives, 1 in 4 men over the age of 40 say they have no close personal friends. Those are women's skills that you need to take. You need to come and take the things of women there. You need to learn how to talk about your problems, you need to know how to discuss

• 9:24Speaker 01

  your mental health, you need to know how to stop being lonely, and make friendship groups that will support you in the way that women do. But because women are still seen as lesser, taking girls' things would not be seen as a powerful thing, whereas feminism was easier in a way, because of course women want the powerful things of men, they're the winners. But why would men take things from women who are still seen as the losers? So it's that underlying sexism that prevents them.

• 9:45Speaker 02

  So, right, okay, let's talk about labels.

• 9:47Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 9:48Speaker 02

  Because I know you're anti-l labels, I'm anti-l labels. Tell me what you mean by that.

• 9:53Speaker 01

  I think the thing you're most desperate for when you're young is a label. You want someone to come up to you and tell you who you are. And I can, I wrote a piece once that was all the things people had told me that I was, because especially as a teenage girl, you're so open to it. I can remember a boyfriend, he said, oh no, I can remember, it was a pop star, it was Andrew Eldrich from the Sisters of Mercy.

• 10:12Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 10:13Speaker 01

  And he said, "I can tell how intelligent a woman is by the way that she walks." I still remember it now at fifty one, and like me and all my family, we've got, we've all got hypermobility, so we're very loosey goosey.

• 10:22Speaker 02

  Have you?

• 10:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, we all walk like penguins, basically, wind up penguins. And, uh, and I remember reading that and just spending years trying to like walk like a clever lady would, like, kind of like just remembering all these things. So whenever people give you labels, sometimes that's amazing. Like, for instance, when I was a TV critic in my early years, the game is when you become a critic, whether it's rock or pop or TV, um, the kill is seen as the height of your art, to write a savage review of something.

• 10:48Speaker 02

  Oh, oh, okay.

• 10:49Speaker 01

  Those are the critics that are revered. And so like the game is when you start being a critic, you're like, okay, I'm going to be the most vicious one, I'm going to be the nastiest one, I'm going to take this, this TV show or this record down. And I'd done a couple of these and then I bumped into Russell T Davies at a party who wrote Queer as Folk and Doctor Who was one of my heroes.

• 11:03Speaker 02

  I'm going to tell you about Russell T Davies after this.

• 11:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay.

• 11:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:06Speaker 01

  I'm ready to start. And he came up to me and he went, I've read all your stuff, I'm such a fan, but let me tell you who you are. You are an enthusiast. When you write about what you love, that is when your writing sings on the page. And he kissed me on the centre of my head and it was like when Glinda gives the kiss to Dorothy and it protects her all the way through Oz. And I just walked away from that party with these new synapses burning going, he's right, I enjoy writing about things I love more than things I hate. And then that becomes an entire philosophy, because I think particularly in this day and age, everybody's ready to be, everyone can be a critic now, everyone's online and the hottest takes get the most clicks, which mean you get paid the most on certain websites. And the idea of being an enthusiast and a fangirl for humanity, the most important job of a human is to point at something you love and tell other people about it, like pass on the good stuff, like there's not enough of that in the world.

• 11:51Speaker 01

  We have the solution to nearly every problem we have as humans, but there aren't enough people going, this scientist has come up with this solution for global warming, this person has come up with a new way of making solar power efficient. If we have more fangirls pointing at the good stuff, all the good art, all the good people, all the good ideas, that's the kind of emotional economy that I want to live in more, people pointing at good things. We don't need to discuss the bad things. And as humans, you know this, like you meet a lot of famous people, I know a lot of famous people, the first question anyone asks you if they know you meet a lot of famous people is, who's lovely? Who's actually nice? Like, people want to know that, they want to know the good news. The second question they ask you is always, who's an asshole?

• 12:26Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 12:27Speaker 01

  But the first thing people want to know is, who's lovely?

• 12:28Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 12:29Speaker 01

  Who have you met that you really got on with, that really liked that in real life? We have such a deep desire to know good news.

• 12:34Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 12:35Speaker 01

  And the last ten or fifteen years have, has completely flipped that economy. And I think we're, the reason that I wanted to write How to Be Hopeful is I think we have passed peak despair now.

• 12:43Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 12:43Speaker 01

  The conversations that I was having with people and have been having for the last decade or so, everyone's like, this is a particularly terrible time, things are particularly difficult, you know, my children don't want to have children, like when we talk about the future, we presume it's going to be worse, which was not the case when we were growing up.

• 12:57Speaker 02

  No.

• 12:57Speaker 01

  But people can only be in one emotional set for so long. And after a while, basically you just get bored of being full of despair. We can't be any more despairing than we've been, we can't feel any more confused by the chaos and enraged by it. And I think everybody would really like to be hopeful now. That was what I thought when I started writing the book, I'd been on my own hopefulness journey.

• 13:15Speaker 02

  Well, it's, it's, it's the word hopeful.

• 13:17Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 13:18Speaker 02

  Is in the title.

• 13:19Speaker 01

  Let's bring it back, man.

• 13:20Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 13:20Speaker 01

  It's a great word. And Nick Cave has that beautiful quote, that hope is optimism with a broken heart, which I think is such a, such a great quote.

• 13:28Speaker 02

  Oh, God, you've got to text me that later.

• 13:29Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 13:30Speaker 02

  I think we are now relishing, we are at a stage now in humanity, I've never known people want to connect more.

• 13:36Speaker 01

  Yes. Well, you look at the stats on loneliness and that's, again, how crazy that we've invented all these machines that mean that we're theoretically more connected than we ever are. But the problem with, with things like social media and sort of like digital communication is that you presume that that's it. If you're communicating with someone on text or on WhatsApp or, or online or on a website, you think that's the communication. It's not. That, that's, that's the start of your communication, which should then lead to meeting in real life. You have to meet in real life and look each other in the eye. You know, you need to smell each other, you need to get the whole story that isn't just confined by a text, you need to watch people's body language. And we just need to realise that, that you start there, but then it needs to go to the next stage. And, but what we're being told is, no, that's, that is human communication now, just talking

• 14:18Speaker 01

  to people in tiny little chat boxes where you can't see, an emoji is doing so much heavy lifting for what would be a huge amount of complex sort of body language that we'd be picking up on.

• 14:26Speaker 02

  Yes, an emoji instead of body language.

• 14:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:29Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 14:29Speaker 01

  Right? That's not, so we just need to remember that, like, th- this is the tool that takes us to the place where we're not lonely anymore, it's not the thing that in itself prevents loneliness. You, you can face, some of the most lonely times I've ever had in my life is being somewhere where you're just on social media and you're just like, if I could just sit in a room and with someone and not talk, that would be better than this ability to be able to theoretically talk to a million people on Twitter. But this actually feels quite lonely.

• 14:53Speaker 02

  I mean, um, we are seeing more and more that people want to gather in places. We did a coffee rave the other morning.

• 15:00Speaker 01

  Amazing.

• 15:01Speaker 02

  On Begin Again. And four hundred people turned up at like six thirty and it was the most joyful, we're like, oh, we're going to do this more.

• 15:10Speaker 01

  You must.

• 15:10Speaker 02

  People coming on their own.

• 15:12Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 15:12Speaker 02

  Like overnighting the night before, coming to like, it was so happy. And I just thought the power, um, of being around other people and spreading joy, but all the venues, I don't know, um, if you've noticed, but the London venues are just shutting.

• 15:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:31Speaker 02

  At a rate of knots.

• 15:32Speaker 01

  And that, that makes me so, I mean, again, there's so much of this is going to be, hey, we're from the nineties, but I genuinely believe that underage clubbing was the making of me.

• 15:39Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 15:40Speaker 01

  Your ability to blag your way into a club or a pub at like, you know, thirteen or fourteen and kind of like be around older people, obviously, you know, we know there's can be a bad side to that, but by and large, everyone of my generation did that, being able to go out and meet people at that young age. But the ID is so, so tight now. My kids had a fake ID, they found it on the ground. And luckily, the face of the woman on it, she had the most generic white woman's face ever. So this, this, if this ID was passed down from like generation to generation of children in their social circle, kind of like, I am now eighteen and have proper ID, now you will get the sacred social.

• 16:14Speaker 02

  You get the sacred.

• 16:15Speaker 01

  You get the, yeah, you get the sacred, uh, ID and stuff. And it was passed on for like a period of ten years.

• 16:19Speaker 02

  Oh, my God, how brilliant.

• 16:21Speaker 01

  But it's important because where else are kids going to go? I hate that thing that like their only options now are, you know, for some people, being at home is not safe or pleasant.

• 16:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:28Speaker 01

  And when you're older, you need to go out anyway. And then the only other places we've got are like shops and shopping malls, but then your value is dictated by how much money you've got in your pocket and how much you can spend.

• 16:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:38Speaker 01

  And the idea of, and all the social media where you could be talking to anyone or anything, and it's not, no one ever said, oh, I feel better now after spending three hours online. Like, kind of, we know, we call it doom scrolling, like, and yet we still do it. But if there was a food called like Doom Cake, or there was a piece of clothing called Doom Pants, we would not still be wearing them.

• 16:57Speaker 02

  Doom Pants?

• 16:58Speaker 01

  Right.

• 16:58Speaker 02

  That's amazing, yeah.

• 16:59Speaker 01

  Do you want to wear my Doom Pants?

• 17:00Speaker 02

  No.

• 17:01Speaker 01

  No, right?

• 17:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 17:02Speaker 01

  But yet still we doom scroll, like, kind of, we know, and it's really weird because there's been public health flaps in the past, like I can remember video nasties, people going, it needs to be banned, uh, hip hop lyrics, you know, hip hop, like rap, it needs to be banned, all these kind of panics about what's happening to our younger generation and it will destroy them. But the difference was with like hip hop or video nasties or whatever, people enjoyed them and it hasn't damaged them. Whereas social media is the first thing where we're going, this is terrible for the young people and we need to ban it. And the young people are going, yeah, I hate it. Like, they, they hate it too.

• 17:29Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, and they're like, I'm completely addicted, I can't put my phone down. I mean, they can see it happening.

• 17:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:34Speaker 02

  And their bedrooms were a safe place, but suddenly they're not safe anymore because the phone is still there.

• 17:41Speaker 01

  It's like a dark version of that bit at the end of Labyrinth starring David Bowie and Jennifer Connelly, where you know when all the Muppets turn up at the end and go, we're still here. And you're like, yeah, your Muppets are in my bedroom, except the Muppets are all just like trolls from Belarusia who are like coming through your bedroom window at four o'clock in the morning. And stuff like, did you read that Sarah Win Williams book about, uh, she used to work at Facebook, Careless People, that's been in the top ten. Anyone who was on the internet in the twenty first century needs to read this book. So she was there. And one, I mean, there's a million awful stories in there, but the one that really upset me the most as a mother of daughters, is that they, uh, realised that if you post a selfie, if a teenage girl posts a selfie and then deletes it within half an hour, it's because she didn't get enough likes and suddenly she's gone, I'm really ugly, like kind of, I'm deleting it, forget that. And they put in a package of information into that so that every single time a teenage girl deleted a selfie because she felt bad, that information would be sent to advertisers

• 18:26Speaker 01

  who could then immediately spam her account with, buy some makeup, here are some diet pills, maybe you should have plastic surgery, and use special, special words like, kind of like disgusted, low self-worth to trigger girls into wanting to buy these products. That, you know, that's in our girls' hands in their room, like thirteen, fourteen, twelve, eleven.

• 18:42Speaker 02

  Wait, that, that book is out now, when did it come out?

• 18:45Speaker 01

  Careless People, came out six months ago.

• 18:46Speaker 02

  Oh, my God, okay.

• 18:48Speaker 01

  Met her, trying to sue her, so she can't talk about it anywhere in public. So she's been appearing silently, um, at literary festivals and she has to sit on a chair and can't say anything because she's not allowed to say anything about the promotion of it. But it's been the top ten for the last six months. It's because everyone is like, okay, if they want to ban this, what's, what's going on in there? You have to read it, I mean, honestly, it's like to know what, what is going on at the top levels. It's, we haven't put our children's health and happiness in the hands of the right people.

• 19:13Speaker 02

  Oh, my God.

• 19:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:16Speaker 02

  Okay, I'm going to digest that from, while I, God, that is so hideous.

• 19:22Speaker 01

  I know. It's really dirty, isn't it?

• 19:24Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 19:24Speaker 01

  It's like psychologically dirty.

• 19:25Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 19:26Speaker 01

  Their kids.

• 19:27Speaker 02

  What's one thing you'd love to be able to say you've done? Well, Monzo sponsoring Begin Again to help us win back some time so we can do more of what we love, like finally doing that thing. I want to know what that thing was for you. Let's have a look, who have we got? Okay, so Lisa says, hi, Davina, I really like the fact that you're learning maths and I totally agree with doing a refresh, I may join you. Oh, thanks, Lisa. But I've actually said yes to doing a parachute jump for cancer research. Yes, Lisa, I've always wanted to do one and as I'm approaching sixty in eighteen months, I thought what better way to leave my fifties on a high, like literally. We've got Alison who says she's always wanted to learn to paddleboard.

• 20:12Speaker 02

  Yes, looks so peaceful, doesn't it, Alison? Nadine, who has always wanted to try painting, she says she's always wanted to try in the past but never had the time to take it seriously. Nadine, now is the time. I am loving all of these stories, it's like we're starting our own little club, you know, the Say Yes Club. And this is exactly the thing that Monzo is here to help with. They put our money to work in the background. Sorted, saved, sent, exactly where it needs to go, so our energy is free to say yes to more things in life. Join the Begin Again Say Yes Club, I'll pop a link in the description. Monzo current accounts are for UK residents aged sixteen plus, Ts and Cs apply.

• 20:56Speaker 02

  So.

• 20:58Speaker 00

  Whenever fall comes back around, it always feels like a fresh start. This year, I've been layering in some styles from the new Lululemon fall drop because the weather is shifting and I find I have to be ready for the entire day and not just one part of it. Lululemon's fall line has some really versatile transitional pieces, so I can just wake up, throw on a matching set, add a jacket or a fleece and head out, knowing that I'll feel comfortable enough to go wherever the day takes me. Check out the new fall arrivals in store and online now at lululemon.com.

• 21:27Speaker 02

  Want to talk to you a bit about, because anxiety is not something that I have, I've worried.

• 21:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:34Speaker 02

  But not in an overwhelming way.

• 21:36Speaker 01

  Well, I was thinking about the theme of this beginning again, and like I would, I would say there were two phases in my life. There were, you know, there's a million bits like, oh, motherhood, whatever. But the two biggest phases in my life were what happened to me when I was thirteen? And then what happened to me three years ago, where I finally had to deal with what happened to me when I was thirteen? So when I was thirteen, I was a very cheerful girl. I've got my diaries from that time. I just absorbed all the musicals with Judy Garland in it. I loved Annie. I loved Anne of Green Gables. I love Little Women and I was like, I will be like those girls. I'm just a cheerful girl. I crack on. And our family had a secret at that point, which is that we were on benefits. We were on disability benefits. My dad had been a fireman. He'd had an accident that developed osteoarthritis. So he was, he was on benefits and we lived on benefits.

• 22:20Speaker 01

  But we were told we must never tell anyone that. First of all, he was a proud man and he didn't want anyone to know. And secondly, he would often have to like go out and mend the car out in the street. Because we couldn't afford to send it to a garage because we were on benefits. So in order to do that, he would like bind himself up with bandages and take so many painkillers. He was just off his face and go and drop the clutch out of the car. And, but we'd, so we must never tell anyone because if people saw a man mending a car, they'd go, you're a benefits cheat. And our benefits would be taken away. It was really drummed into us that at any point we would have our benefits taken away.

• 22:50Speaker 02

  That's quite a lot to carry secrets and as a thirteen year old, isn't it?

• 22:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. But we were, we were all, and we were just like, that's how we will survive. And, and then one day I made friends with an old woman who lived at the other end of the street. Because she had kittens and a biscuit barrel full of chocolate biscuits. She invited me and I was taking my dog for a walk. She invited me and I played with the kittens. Possibly, possibly under the influence of many of the chocolate biscuits, I became very garrulous and chatty. And during the course of that, I mentioned that we were on benefits. And then I left and started walking home and the chocolate sugar buzz lasted about halfway down the street. And then suddenly halfway down the street, I was like, I've told someone our secret. Like she might give us away. If she decides she doesn't like us, if she sees my dad next week, like we could, it could be over. And I was reading a lot of Dickens at the time and I knew about The Poor House.

• 23:40Speaker 01

  And I was like, that's it. I have consigned my family. If this gets out, I will have consigned my family to The Poor House. And in that moment, I'd heard about anxiety before, but no one really had anxiety in Wolverhampton in nineteen eighty five. It was something that, you know, people in Woody Allen movies had. It sounded quite aspirational. It was like bagel. Because we also didn't have.

• 23:57Speaker 02

  I've got anxiety. Yeah. I've got anxiety. I'm going to see my shrink. Like, kind of like, oh, wow. If I move to New York, I can get anxiety.

• 24:04Speaker 01

  So I didn't really know what it meant.

• 24:08Speaker 01

  But this, and it wasn't what I thought it was. I thought anxiety was, would you be a bit worried about something? When you have your first panic attack.

• 24:14Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 24:15Speaker 01

  It feels like you're being poisoned, like something washes through you physically. Your brain starts going faster and faster and faster and faster. So the thoughts are tripping up over themselves. And the thoughts get darker and darker and more like barbed wire. And something is happening in your guts and your, your, your heart rate goes up and it feels like your blood, your veins are full of this black stuff. And you are in a different world, like the, the world changed halfway down that street. And obviously now, years later, I know what's happening. When you have your first panic attack, you, you are suddenly flooded with cortisol and noradrenaline, adrenaline. And those are essentially amphetamines. So you are just flooded with speed. You are literally overdosing on speed. Because you think you are in a dangerous situation and your body must be ready to run.

• 24:57Speaker 01

  So by the time we got to the end of the street, my, you know, suddenly filled with this kind of amphetamine, super fast thought, superpower. I was like, okay, we're in danger. I will have to get us out of this. My first plan was that I would sit at the bottom of the stairs every day. The first post would come about seven thirty and the last one would be at two thirty. I presume the first thing that would happen would be a letter would arrive. So I was like, I'll sit at the bottom of the stairs and then I can intercept the post. That was about two months and like I was writing about it in my diary, but in code. And then I was like, and then it's suddenly.

• 25:22Speaker 02

  Writing it in code in case someone read it.

• 25:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. Cause I didn't want to scare anybody else. And then I was like, okay, I actually don't know what I'll do when I open that letter. I need to make money. If I've earned enough money so that by the time they finally get us, I can just go, okay, they're taking our benefits away. But I, I'm now earning more than benefits, like kind of then it will be okay and no one will be angry with me and I will have solved the problem. So I, and the only way that I could think to earn money was what Jo does in Little Women, which is right. Like if you've got some pen and paper, right.

• 25:49Speaker 02

  So what I quickly want to get to is how, because you were taken out of school at eleven to be homeschooled.

• 25:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 25:57Speaker 02

  And you're thirteen at this point. How did you find, because I know for the first year you, you were at home. You kind of, you were all a bit feral.

• 26:05Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 26:05Speaker 02

  But you, how did you find Little Women?

• 26:08Speaker 01

  Oh, so, so our parents never gave us lessons. They weren't those kind of homeschoolers. It was literally, it was, it was child led education. So it was just literally do what you want. So we'd just watch television and ate a huge amount of cheese.

• 26:20Speaker 01

  And I don't regret a single bite of it. It was all really good. But the first time I met Courtney Love, she, I walked into the studio and she went, Caitlin, I used to be as fat as you. The secret is, don't eat cheese. I've not been able to take that advice. I cannot give up cheese. I regret. I don't regret a single bite of cheese I've ever had. But the one thing our parents would do is they would take us to the library at least once a day. Because we all read so fast that often we would, I would read, like I would have read that book in that day and then I'd go back in the afternoon and get another one. So we went to the library every day and I read every book in the library. That was my education, telly and books.

• 26:51Speaker 02

  So you're in the, you're in the library every day.

• 26:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I read everything.

• 26:54Speaker 02

  This is mega.

• 26:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:56Speaker 02

  That your parents did that. What a gift.

• 26:58Speaker 01

  I know. Well, they read too. And like kind of, and often we would have our TVs taken away because we were renting them. We didn't have the money. So that was the only thing that we had was books and they were readers as well. So yes, I went to the library every day and just read. So I knew from books, the, the books, the information that the books gave me was. And writers are kind of pushers, like writers always want other people to be writers. So when people are writing books, they're always going, well, you could write one too, sort of subconsciously. So I very much picked up that information from the books that I was reading. So I started to write. My presumption was because I could read a book in a day, I would be able to write a book in a day. In fact, that not to be the case. It's a long time to write a book. I really had quite a sore hand by the end of the day. So it took me, I think, two and a half years in the end. And then I started sending it off to publishers and the third.

• 27:39Speaker 02

  At this point, you're fifteen.

• 27:40Speaker 01

  Fifteen now, yeah.

• 27:41Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 27:41Speaker 01

  And the third one, I send it to accept it. We could only afford to print out one copy. So I'm going to wait for them to go out and then wait for them to come back.

• 27:47Speaker 02

  Who made you able to accept a no and go back and try again?

• 27:54Speaker 01

  Uh, well, my, my, my crushing poverty and anxiety, El Davina, um, that made me keep going and take notes and go out again. You had no other option, right?

• 28:03Speaker 02

  So you've, you've been very open and I think it's so important to talk about, when you talk about your poverty.

• 28:11Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 28:12Speaker 02

  And the situation that your family were in and how hard life was.

• 28:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:16Speaker 02

  But you saw a way out. And there is a really interesting thing. Again, I talked to Michael so much about it. About leaving and how hard it is sometimes to leave your position.

• 28:30Speaker 01

  Oh, yes.

• 28:31Speaker 02

  In society, because there is kind of a guilt, you feel a bit guilty, but you, you can get shamed by other people. You feel full of shame. Could you just talk me through that journey?

• 28:44Speaker 01

  So travelling up the class system, you mean?

• 28:46Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 28:47Speaker 01

  So it's interesting because then you become, I guess, the sort of the nearest equivalents would be kind of like migrants and immigration and stuff. Or kind of being mixed race from speaking to friends who are, you know, my husband is, that children of immigrants, most of my friends are. In that you're never quite one or the other again. You are, in the end, you realise, okay, I'm both and that's great. But at the beginning, so one of the questions I would repeatedly get asked when I first started writing and had a public profile was, well, what class are you now? Because you know, you are working class, like you're below working class, you're underclass. But now you live in North London and you earn money. So are you middle class now? And this would fox me for a while because I'd be like, I do observe differences between people who were born middle class and people who've travelled through the class system. And so my answer now is to say that I'm culturally working class, but financially middle class.

• 29:30Speaker 02

  Yes. That's a great answer.

• 29:32Speaker 01

  Thank you very much. I came up with that myself. Because the difference is, I mean, it's like being able to talk two languages. One of the things I enjoy most in my columns in The Times, like most readers of The Times tend to be middle class and they're quite wealthy people. And one of the things I really enjoy being able to do is translate what's happening in a working class life or existence and the problems that you face there. And being able to explain it to a middle class audience. And just there's little things like, remember the first office that I ever went and worked in? Someone went, someone started to, it's a lovely woman, but started the conversation by going, where do you ski?

• 30:02Speaker 02

  Not do you.

• 30:03Speaker 01

  Where do you?

• 30:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 30:04Speaker 01

  Because by this point, I got this voice. I'd copied this voice from the middle class people that I, you know, as soon as I have two drinks, I'm just like, right back to Volvo. Like, kind of like, I did not have this voice at all. And like, but people would take the piss out of me. Like, oh, city. It's words, the word city, it's on city. So I adopted this voice on the train, basically on the way down. As I went through rugby, it was like, I will have this media voice. So people presumed I was middle class. And then there's other things like, I noted, like, so for instance, if we're all out eating with a bunch of friends, I will automatically presume there is someone secretly sitting around that table who is worried about how much it's going to cost, but they will not say something. So I will always go, I'm paying for everybody. And that's the thing that you notice from people who are, who have travelled through, who are culturally working class, middle class. We're aware of those things and we take people with us. We put the family on the payroll.

• 30:50Speaker 01

  You know, we are constantly aware that there will be other people who are worried about money at that moment. Things like worrying about how you smell. Like, if you come from a poor house, you'll have the windows closed in winter and your clothes will be on a rack drying. So when you cook chips or fry an onion, your clothes, which will already smell a bit mildewy because it takes a long time for clothes to dry on a rack because you don't have a tumble dryer, will then also smell of food. So then you like the more powerful perfumes and you're trying to cover it up. I, I, you know, I, I, I remember all these things, just worrying about smelling. We couldn't afford deodorant, so I would like go and steal it from Boots. Sorry, Boots in Wolverhampton. I'd probably owe you about fifty quid.

• 31:27Speaker 01

  But those are the, but I, but now I see it, it's one of those cliches where you go, so there's a superpower, but to know about.

• 31:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, it is.

• 31:35Speaker 01

  Well, I think so. If you're a writer, to understand two worlds, yeah.

• 31:37Speaker 02

  And I think if you're a human.

• 31:39Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 31:40Speaker 02

  It's a superpower. But what was been interesting was that I was middle class and then we lost everything.

• 31:47Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 31:47Speaker 02

  And I had a roof over my head and I had food on the table. And so I was lucky.

• 31:53Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 31:53Speaker 02

  Because I know that you sometimes didn't, you weren't sure of that.

• 31:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, we could sometimes run out of food. We all had, I would say, issues around eating because it could just run out. So we would, when the benefits came in once a month, we'd buy, my dad had a card that allowed him to pretend that he ran a small business and could go to the wholesale market and buy fruit and veg really cheap because they wanted us to eat well. So we'd get like a crate of oranges and a crate of apples because there were like eight children and two adults. So we, you know, we had to buy in bulk. But because we knew that the, by the end of the month, there wouldn't be any, we were all a bit like, gorge. So like, you know, when the food came in, you'd be like, you know, we'd eat even if it was uncomfortable because it was like, it's going to run out soon. It was quite a sort of disordered way of eating, I think. Yeah, there were, there were days where all we had left in the house was like flour and water. But, um, yeah, we never actually starved, but it was the constant worry that you might.

• 32:38Speaker 02

  Yes, you might.

• 32:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:40Speaker 02

  I mean, it's the fear, you know, we're talking, we were talking about anxiety and it's fear driven, you know, it's.

• 32:45Speaker 01

  Oh, totally, yeah. Well, just precariousness. It's like, it's quite a flight, isn't it? Like, kind of anxiety is a worry that you are in danger and not being able to eat is one of them. So. But then it meant that I had written this book and then I got a publishing deal. And that was when I learnt the second, uh, big fact about books. First of all, they take more than a day to write. And secondly, you don't get paid for them what I thought you would get paid.

• 33:08Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, I love this. This is so funny because to set, tell everybody how much you thought authors got.

• 33:14Speaker 01

  A million pounds. Like, if you're famous, if you've moved into media, everybody gets paid a million pounds to do everything. Like, when I wrote a sitcom, I was talking to my mother-in-law's neighbour and he went, how much you get paid to write a sitcom? It'd be like a million pounds per episode, right? You're like, no, no one gets paid a million pounds for anything. Like, that's not what happened. So it wasn't a million pounds, it was one thousand eight hundred pounds. And so on that day.

• 33:34Speaker 02

  How am I going to look after my family with that?

• 33:36Speaker 01

  It was literally this.

• 33:37Speaker 02

  What?

• 33:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was literally like, it was simultaneously the best day of my life and then went, yes. And the second sentence, quite bad. So it was like, this is three year plan. It's really, really gone wrong now. How are we going to earn the money? I was really lucky because, uh, by the point, time it was, it was published, I was sixteen, because it's still quite rare for a sixteen year old to publish a book. Uh, Valerie Gro from the Times came to interview me. She'd sort of heard about this and was like, oh, sixteen year olds have written a book. And, uh, she came to interview me to do a feature when the book came out. And after, as soon as we'd finished doing the interview and stuff and she turned the tape recorder off, I was like, look, you, you've come down to Wolverhampton, you're a writer, you live in London. How do you earn money being a writer? Like, this book thing has not worked out. I should have really researched this. How do I do it? And she went, be a columnist. Then you get paid every week. You write a thing every week and go and work for a newspaper. So I was like, okay, I will take that advice and run with it.

• 34:19Speaker 02

  Oh, that is brilliant.

• 34:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. So then, so then I entered every competition for being a journalist. I also started sending, so I sent it off to Melody Maker, the weekly music press. And they started taking my reviews, which I get paid twenty eight pounds and forty two pence per review, uh, like a child at a gig. The first time I went to a gig, I did, the first gig I ever went to.

• 34:36Speaker 02

  Which one?

• 34:36Speaker 01

  I was being paid to write about, oh, God, I can't remember what they were called.

• 34:40Speaker 02

  A band?

• 34:40Speaker 01

  A band. They were in Wolverhampton. It was whatever was happening in Wolverhampton. And it was the first time I'd seen a mosh pit. So I'd got there two hours early with my pen and paper, ready to take notes. I'd written down the venue information. I was like, you know, I'd say it was the Smashing Pumpkins at Birmingham Edwards. Smashing Pumpkins, Birmingham Edwards, number eight, Birmingham, uh, West Midlands, UK, the universe. Seven fifteen, they are still not on stage. Seven forty five, some people have come on and moved the microphones around and literally writing everything down. Then they finally came on and everybody started going mental, like leaping around and stuff. And I had no idea what this was. I was right down the front, my hat was coming off. And I presumed it was maybe like, you know, like, uh, with the Gap band, you do oops upside your head and everybody rose. I thought, maybe this song has a special dance to it. Like oops upside your head. And everyone jumps around to this song, but then everything will go back to normal.

• 35:25Speaker 01

  Then the second song started, everyone was still doing it. I was in my first mosh pit. I had no idea. So this continued. I retreated to the back with my hat, took my notes from the back. And that was the first gig I ever went to, I was writing about. So it was, and the reviews that I'd sent to Melody Maker, I'd sent two of two cool bands whose records that I'd borrowed from the library, Happy Mondays and Jane's Addiction. But the third one was a review of the motion soundtrack to Annie, because that was my favourite song. I would like to be a rock journalist, please. And I, I particularly liked Tomorrow from the film Annie.

• 35:52Speaker 01

  Please let me have a job. And they were so shocked. I was so weird though, like, yeah, have a job.

• 35:55Speaker 02

  Is that, is that your karaoke song?

• 35:58Speaker 01

  My karaoke song is Edelweiss from Sound of Music.

• 36:00Speaker 02

  Amazing.

• 36:00Speaker 01

  Which I have made people cry for.

• 36:02Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 36:03Speaker 01

  In a bad way, Davina.

• 36:03Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 36:06Speaker 01

  In a really, really bad way. I can't get most of the notes. By the time we get to Bloom and Grow, I'm way outside my range. It's awful.

• 36:14Speaker 02

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• 36:59Speaker 02

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• 37:25Speaker 02

  Whenever fall comes back around, it always feels like a fresh start. This year, I've been layering in some styles from the new Lululemon fall drop because the weather is shifting and I find I have to be ready for the entire day and not just one part of it. Lululemon's fall line has some really versatile transitional pieces. So I can just wake up, throw on a matching set, add a jacket or a fleece and head out, knowing that I'll feel comfortable enough to go wherever the day takes me. Check out the new fall arrivals in store and online now at lululemon.com.

• 37:54Speaker 02

  I'm just going to go back to this book for a second.

• 37:56Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 37:57Speaker 02

  I want to talk about the list.

• 37:58Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 37:59Speaker 02

  I'm going to read you the list. I know you know it. It's your list. You wrote it in the first place, but I'm going to read it to you.

• 38:05Speaker 01

  You'd be astonished how much you forget about a book.

• 38:07Speaker 02

  Oh, really?

• 38:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:08Speaker 02

  I love, I fucking love this list. Okay. Find out a way to wake up without feeling instantly anxious. So you didn't know how to do that when you wrote the list. This was like, this is what I need to do.

• 38:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, because I would wake up, you know that scene in Pulp Fiction where they have to like stab her in the heart with adrenaline pack because she's overdosed? I woke up every morning like this. Because as soon as I woke up, that was just instant anxiety. Like, literally, my stomach would go, like that same whoosh that I got thirteen years old was happening every morning.

• 38:36Speaker 02

  How did you start not waking up with that? Or was that like, is that the rest of the list?

• 38:40Speaker 01

  That's the rest of the.

• 38:40Speaker 02

  Okay, I'm going to keep on reading then. Eat bloody breakfast instead of having codeine under banana.

• 38:46Speaker 01

  Yes, strong truth.

• 38:47Speaker 02

  Well done.

• 38:48Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 38:48Speaker 02

  Improve the neighbourhood.

• 38:50Speaker 01

  Right.

• 38:51Speaker 02

  Right.

• 38:51Speaker 01

  Right.

• 38:52Speaker 02

  I love the way you were talking about picking up rubbish. Talk to me about that.

• 38:56Speaker 01

  Have you got a litter picker?

• 38:57Speaker 02

  No, I'm going to get one though. After, after I heard about that.

• 38:59Speaker 01

  You get me a mosh pit friendly bra.

• 39:01Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 39:01Speaker 01

  I'll get you a litter picker. It changed. So I had spent ten years going, why won't someone do something about this? Our street is so filthy, people are using my front garden as a bin. Who do I vote for? Why won't someone do something about this? Why won't someone do something about it? And I just woke up one day and went, this was the start of my quest. I went, that someone is me. I can see it. It's outside my house. I need to fix it. I am the change that I wish to see. And if you grew up from a generation where you played Pac-Man and you're just going along, you've got like gobble, gobble things up, play, picking up litter in the streets is exactly like playing Pac-Man, but for real life. You walk down the street with your litter picker and you leave behind, in front of you is a filthy street that is disgusting and makes you depressed. And behind you is a perfect serene street that looks like Tokyo. It's like, it's spotless. And it's just, I, you know, now if I'm in a bad mood, my husband will say,

• 39:45Speaker 01

  have you been litter picking recently? And it sounds quite passag, but I'll be like, no, I haven't. He was like, it'll do you good, go and do it. And I literally ring him ten minutes later, you were right.

• 39:52Speaker 02

  You, you said something at the beginning of that that blew my mind, which was, I, I, I am the change I want to see.

• 39:58Speaker 01

  Yes. I've got another quote on my wall that is, I am my own cavalry. I think we often wait. We're like, when are the cavalry coming? When's someone coming to change everything? It's like, no, you are your own cavalry. Like, but one of my mottoes for a really long time has been, when you've complained about something three times, the second time you complained about it, you should have started doing something about it. And it's a really careful line to balance because you don't want to sort of go into that kind of like Thatcherite Norman Tebbit thing of like, kind of like, you know, solve all your problems. There is no such thing as society, but more often than not, it is probably a problem that you could solve and you will feel really good doing it. And the litter was my gateway into changing my life because suddenly instead of feeling powerless and waiting for the government or business or someone great to come and fix things. I was like, no, I could just do this now. That was the start of becoming hopeful.

• 40:42Speaker 02

  I'm looking forward to getting my litter picker. Thank you.

• 40:45Speaker 01

  I'll get you.

• 40:45Speaker 02

  Um, have some kind of small adventures. See new things. Be dazzled by the world. We gain faith in it. See wonderful things that humans have done, but be home in time for tea.

• 40:58Speaker 01

  Right, because again, I think in our age, like if you've been a mother and you've been busy, in your head, you've got this thing of my life hasn't started yet.

• 41:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:07Speaker 01

  Like, once in a bit, I'll have the time, like, on- once this bit of motherhood is over, or once this bit of work is done, something will happen in a, in a while, my proper life will start. I'm just trying to clear all this stuff out of the way, and then I will have my proper life. And then you start getting to fifty and you're like, I'm still waiting. Where are my adventures? And in my head, an adventure would be going on fabulous mini breaks across Europe, or spending six weeks, like, kind of like walking through the Japanese mountains or something. And I was like, well, I can't fit those in. But like, what would give me the same feeling of just doing something a bit different? And like, and it came in conjunction with stopping wearing my headphones, which happened by accident. I'd just lost them. And I realised that if you, we all wear our headphones now. Everybody, it's like an episode of Doctor Who, everyone's walking around with their headphones on, looking at their phones. When I lost my headphones and I started listening to what was happening again,

• 41:52Speaker 01

  suddenly you kind of tap back into the neighbourhood gossip. You suddenly, you, that whole thing of like, you know, people saying, I feel lonely, there is no sense of community anymore. It's because you've got your headphones on. And also when you start reading, particularly in London, there's so much stuff online going, London is a city on the verge of civil war, like, kind of like, you know, people that hate each other, like, it's so violent and scary. It's not. Take your headphones off. And everyone's just going, you can have sausages or chicken for tea. They're on the phone to their mums, they're like playing with the baby at the back of the bus, and like waving their keys at it. Like, you can really quickly fall back in love with humanity again if you take your headphones off and sit in humanity. And then similarly, like, walking in nature, like, the first time I didn't wear my headphones and I sat under a tree when it was raining, I was like, no one else can hear this. Like, this is a couture moment. And like, suddenly it turns into-

• 42:37Speaker 02

  Wait, couture moment?

• 42:38Speaker 01

  No one else is having it.

• 42:39Speaker 02

  Oh, I love that.

• 42:40Speaker 01

  Right? Because if I'm listening to the Beatles, which is what I'd normally be doing, obviously, they're amazing. But millions of people are listening to the Beatles right now. And like, you can listen to that song whenever you want. You take your headphones off, the exact sound of the rain at that moment, and hearing people putting up their umbrellas and calling to each other, and kind of running with their dogs, and, and the smell. It was like, I've been, it feels like the world has really changed in the last ten or fifteen years. And it has in some ways, but the majority of the change that we feel and that makes us feel sad and isolated and hopeless and anxious, is that we've changed the way that we interact with the world. You know, we know what the stats are. Look at your stats on your phone, how many hours you spent on it. We are walking around with our headphones on all the time, we're making eye contact with people. If you go back to living your life as you did fifteen years ago, it's amazing how much things feel like they've kind of gone back to normal.

• 43:24Speaker 01

  You're sort of like, oh yeah, this is how I remember life being. I'm walking down the street and talking to people.

• 43:28Speaker 02

  What's crazy is that for, for young kids, um, they are seeing what life could be like. They haven't been this life.

• 43:37Speaker 01

  They don't remember it.

• 43:37Speaker 02

  They don't remember it. They haven't had it. They've not experienced it.

• 43:41Speaker 01

  What have you seen?

• 43:41Speaker 02

  It's absolutely bonkers.

• 43:42Speaker 01

  Have you seen the stats, though? Like, so many, like, sixty-nine percent of people on social media don't post on it. And I, I have lost count of the young people I know now who've just bought brick phones. They're like, we were told we needed to be on social media, we didn't have profiles for our jobs. People are going to check out who you are, you don't exist if you're not on social media. And they've just, we gave it ten years and it hasn't worked. You know, the jobs are being taken away. We're not progressing, we're not buying houses. I think it might be a lie that I need to be on social media. And they're all buying brick phones and suddenly going, I'm going to put on a club night. Like, I'm going to actually go and see my friends. Like, I'm going to do things in the real world, like, kind of where at no moment will something I've said suddenly go viral and ruin my life.

• 44:19Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 44:19Speaker 01

  Or no picture that I've posted online will be haunting me in ten years' time, and people I don't know can be talking to me at three o'clock in the morning. Like, I just think we're starting to realise that that is not working for us.

• 44:29Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 44:30Speaker 01

  Like, I think social media, point one, the first iteration is kind of over. And there might be a better one in the future.

• 44:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:36Speaker 01

  But this one, no one likes it.

• 44:39Speaker 02

  No.

• 44:39Speaker 01

  That's the big news. No one likes it.

• 44:41Speaker 02

  Um, feel like I'm doing something useful. And then you say, noble. Yes, for humanity. Now, why, what, I mean, I kind of, you know, we know what noble means, but what, what does it mean to you?

• 44:52Speaker 01

  Well, there's this thing called, I always forget what the word is, but there's this thing called the hierarchy of need.

• 44:56Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 44:57Speaker 01

  And so the first one is you need to be safe. You need like a roof over your head and you need food. So that's the first one. And then it goes up the hierarchy. And so you need to have, uh, you need to have done something that is inspiring in that day. You need to, in some way, uh, connect with something bigger, whether that be nature or culture. Um, and the, the top of it is that you need to make sure that you've done something for other people. And it's amazing how often I talk to someone who feels really bad, and like their life is bad, and that they don't have enough. And they go, how can I fix this problem? And I go, you do have needs and we'll address those as well, but have you ever tried doing something for someone else first? It's amazing how that actually makes you feel better than doing something for yourself sometimes. Like, it's, it's the magic source that kind of like, because then you, seeing someone else's happiness, especially if you're having problems with registering happiness

• 45:42Speaker 01

  yourself, if you've got anhedonia, where you're not feeling any emotions anymore.

• 45:45Speaker 02

  What's that?

• 45:46Speaker 01

  So that's a big thing that, uh, people started talking about after lockdown, that because anhedonia is where you have no emotions. So you're not depressed particularly, you're not particularly anxious.

• 45:56Speaker 02

  That, I know.

• 45:56Speaker 01

  But you're also not joyful. You just have turned off all your emotions, usually after a traumatic event. And the, the rise in people, uh, uh, being, uh, sort of diagnosed with anhedonia really sort of took off after lockdown. So being in that emotional state, so sometimes it's really hard to make yourself happy if you shut down all your emotions. But the quickest way to feel your own happiness is to see it in the face of someone else.

• 46:16Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 46:16Speaker 01

  That's a short circuit that gets you back in contact with your emotions again. So just, I, it's, I always never want to sound pious, but you know, but when you're, when you reconnect with those old truths, like, if you want to make yourself happy, make someone else happy, is-

• 46:30Speaker 02

  Okay, so invent a way, oh, this one, this is big for me. So invent a way to keep up with news that doesn't shag my mental health.

• 46:39Speaker 01

  And that, so with news, I think also as well, this is a conversation about, so the kind of, in my social circle, definitely, generally, we are all left-wing progressive people who believe and will frequently say, one of the downsides of living in the modern era is that most people do not know that much about politics and how it works. And if people were more informed about how politics worked, and were more abreast of the news, they would be able to make more informed choices when they vote. It is kind of your moral duty as a liberal left-wing person to consume as much news as possible. And that's a very big part of the reason why I was very anxious, because once I started to deep what news is, so news is bad news, generally. Like, there was that thing in newsrooms where they go, if it bleeds, it leads.

• 47:21Speaker 01

  So, for instance, if someone went into a hospital and shot up ten people and they died, that's worldwide headlines. But of course, in that same hospital the day before, one surgeon might have saved the lives of thirty people, and did it the day before and the day before. But that will never be news headlines, because it's slow and good, and there's no single image. It's not incident, it's a baseline reality. And there's that saying that you can hear the axe hit the tree, but you can't hear the forest grow. And that's generally what our news coverage is. We don't see the everyday progresses and good things that are happening and everything that's working. We only hear about what doesn't work. And thirty years ago, there was a news reader called Nicholas Witchell, who suggested that we have a certain amount of good news on it, on the, on the broadcasts every day. He was like, people need to have some positive news. What is working?

• 48:04Speaker 01

  What legislation has worked? Where have wars stopped? Where have things improved? And all the bad boys of news were like, that's soppy. Uh, one of the quotes, which I think was from Jeremy Paxman, was, even if it makes our viewers want to open a vein, they need to see that news. But we can see that people's consumption of news has massively dropped, because

• 48:20Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 48:20Speaker 01

  people don't want to watch news that makes them open a vein. And so then they go and search for other news.

• 48:25Speaker 02

  And what I think is interesting, I think that, that we used to get and finally,

• 48:28Speaker 01

  Right.

• 48:29Speaker 02

  but it was, it was banal.

• 48:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was a dark skateboard.

• 48:32Speaker 02

  And actually, what I want, I mean, I follow lots of accounts now of like, great things that are happening around the world. There are some amazing Oh. things to do with the climate, to do with energy, to do with love, to do with like, so many beautiful things that we don't hear about, that would be great and finally is on the news.

• 48:51Speaker 01

  Well, not also the, the fact that the news is then followed by the sport. I can remember Yoko Ono saying thirty years ago, just kind of like, why is it the news and then the sport? Why isn't it then culture? Why are we not knowing if someone has written an incredible poem or a beautiful song? Why is it always football? Like, kind of like questioning what it is that you get and then what the effect is.

• 49:07Speaker 02

  Did Yoko Ono say that?

• 49:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:08Speaker 02

  That's fascinating.

• 49:09Speaker 01

  Good on Yoko. Yeah. So once I finally got over, I was like, am I allowed, as a liberal progressive woman who works in the media, to stop watching as much news as I do? Can I become less informed? What would happen if I did that, if I forgo my ferocious news consumption? And the plan I came up with was that I would only read the papers on Sunday, the weekend papers, because often something that's happening on Monday, where everyone's going, why have you not posted about this? Where's your solution to what's happening in the Sudan? By Wednesday, someone, you know, some governments have talked to each other, and by Sunday, it's like, oh yeah, they seem to be finding it away. So I was being alerted incorrectly that I need to do something about Sudan on Monday, because, you know, the governments and the UN have sorted it out by the weekend. And secondly, local news is something, like, until very recently, all we would ever have really consumed would be local news. What was happening in our village and like two villages away,

• 49:53Speaker 01

  that's kind of what humans are built to be able to understand. You know, we'd hear every so often if Napoleon was on the march again in Europe, but generally by and large, local news is what we're built to understand. And local news isn't just bad news. You know, they'll, you know, my local paper will have, you know, murders and stabbings and, you know, terrible things that have happened. But it also has good news. It goes, this girl has gone to university. Here's a girl that's cut off all her hair and given it to cancer research. A new bakery has opened. Here is a new cycle lane. And first of all, you get a spread of news, good and bad. You see progress, you see things changing and happening. And, and secondly, it's, that's the news that affects your actual life. Like, the amount of people that I know that are really drowning in the amount of news that they read and current affairs, and are like, everything's terrible. Like, I, I feel so awful about this. But how, like, without being unfeeling, and you must, you know,

• 50:37Speaker 01

  campaign and send money to charities that are helping people and stuff, but you making yourself genuinely mentally ill, worrying about things that are happening in other countries, is it actually affecting you? Because for you to now become so ill and so withdrawn from your old life, that, that your friends are concerned about you, is really a weird kind of narcissism? It's empathy that turns into narcissism?

• 50:57Speaker 02

  Honestly, you talk so much sense.

• 50:59Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 51:00Speaker 02

  It is amazing. It's, I love listening to you.

• 51:03Speaker 01

  Oh, thank you. But I'm, I'm so happy to be here.

• 51:06Speaker 02

  Oh, it's just, but it's mega. Feel part of something like a community, but without any way being part of a community, as this triggers massive social anxiety.

• 51:17Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 51:17Speaker 02

  Now, that's quite interesting. Explain what you mean by that.

• 51:20Speaker 01

  So I, I don't like being part of our community. I'm one of those slightly misanthropic people who's a bit like- Oh, I don't wanna be part of a gang or like, kind of like, corralled into things or I think we've all seen community WhatsApps.

• 51:35Speaker 02

  Like enforced.

• 51:37Speaker 01

  Yes. And also those kind of power plays that happen when you're in kind of one of those community WhatsApps, like on your street or someone who's doing a street party and it starts off all cheerful and then someone's bitching about someone else and then someone's making a bid to take it over and it all just gets a bit political and stuff like.

• 51:50Speaker 02

  It's not community.

• 51:50Speaker 01

  Those kind of communities tend to be a bit toxic, whereas being part of a community by like, you know, with the litter picking, you know, the amount of conversation, you know, I'm making things better. I can do it when I want to. No one's my boss. No one's critiquing what I'm doing and I'm having really lovely conversations.

• 52:03Speaker 02

  And you're not having to toe a party line either.

• 52:05Speaker 01

  And also a lot of people are really socially anxious, like one of the bad things about being home educated is you almost, I can tell someone who's been home educated at a party, because we're hovering at the edges.

• 52:14Speaker 02

  Have you?

• 52:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're hovering at the edges of a party. We're having to drink quite heavily and quite quickly in order to feel relaxed. Um, and we don't quite know how to make small talk because we never had to make small talk because we just were with our siblings. So you never learn to kind of go into a room and make small talk in like a cantist school, cantina in the playground, because we just spent all our time with people who've essentially got the same face as us. So.

• 52:33Speaker 02

  How did you make friends outside of school then?

• 52:35Speaker 01

  By drinking very heavily and sitting at the edges of parties.

• 52:40Speaker 01

  Um, well, that was when I became a journalist, the whole idea of interviewing people, I really, I saw that. The PRs for the bands saw it as me spending an hour with Evan Dando from the Lemonheads and then me writing a feature.

• 52:51Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 52:52Speaker 01

  I saw it as a chance for Evan Dando to find out what a great person I was and then go, we should really be friends. And I kind of thought that was what an interview was. So I would go back and listen to the first couple of interviews that I did and turn it on and it would just be me, he'd be starting to say something really heartfelt and personal. I'd go, that's really funny you said that, because something like that happened to me. Anyway, let me tell you about me for 10 minutes, so you get to know how great I am. Um, so yes, those interviews are not very good.

• 53:16Speaker 02

  Were you friends with Evan Dando?

• 53:17Speaker 01

  No, we once walked around Kensington Park for about two hours feeding some ducks. And he was very sad and then he sat down and played his guitar and I sang along with him very badly.

• 53:26Speaker 02

  Wait, he sat down and played your guitar?

• 53:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. That was very sweet. I know. Interviews aren't like that now, although they are sometimes. Like when I went to interview Lady Gaga, the only time ever in my history of thinking that someone would be my friend when I interviewed them, happened when it was Lady Gaga, which was the most unexpected one. So at the height of her fame.

• 53:44Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 53:45Speaker 01

  I went out to interview her and I was horrible, I'd missed my plane, I was horribly late, I thought she'd be furious and would give me five minutes. And instead, 20 minutes into the interview, she went, hey, you're really cool. What are you doing after this interview? Like, kind of, do you wanna go and hang out at a club when I've done my gig? And I was like, I would very much, yes, like to do that, Lady Gaga. So she finished the gig, which was amazing. And then she came up, she was still in her stage gear, so she was in like bra pants, fishnet tights and an Alexander McQueen cape. And we got into a blacked out SUV, drove through the streets of Berlin, went down the street where the doors closed behind us and entered this club that was unlike anything I've ever seen. At this point, I'm 32 and a mother of two. And I'm with her British PR, who's just this gonky indie boy who's my friend. And we look in the, in this club and like,

• 54:27Speaker 01

  I mean, I don't know what language and images I can give you, but it's, it's a full on Berlin sex club. So there's like bathtubs and chains and kind of.

• 54:34Speaker 02

  Amazing.

• 54:35Speaker 01

  Like a lot of business going on, the men are having their time. And me, I turned to her PR and went, oh my God, you can smoke in here. Everyone's smoking indoors. This is the only thing we noticed. It's like, you can light up in here. Wow, Berlin's so free and easy. Literally brought out the cell cut, smoking away and stuff as everyone was kind of like.

• 54:51Speaker 02

  And you're with the Gaga.

• 54:53Speaker 01

  And again, if you go out with a famous person, what happens is they go and sit in a VIP booth and their people go and get the drinks and you're kind of VIP booth all night. Gaga is not like that. Gaga walks up to the bar, turns around to the entire club and goes, what's everyone having? Gets in a round for everyone, then reaches into her bra and brings that fistful of euros and puts them on the table to pay for it. And then just spends the whole night getting, we, we just got very drunk. We were going twos on a fag. At one point she's lying with her head in my lap and I'm sort of putting the cigarette in her mouth, we're just really hanging. And then about two in the morning, she goes, do you wanna come to the toilet with me? And I was like, well, this must be drugs. I have not done drugs for 20 years. I don't even know what the drugs are now, how to take them, but I'm here and it's a story and it's Gaga, I will go to the toilet. So we go to the VIP toilet and she closes and locks the door and I'm like, oh God, what am I gonna do?

• 55:38Speaker 01

  And she goes, I noticed you're wearing a jumpsuit with a zip down the back and they're really hard to unzip on your own and I presumed you would need a wee right now, so I just thought I'd unzip your jumpsuit for you. And I was like, that is so lovely.

• 55:49Speaker 02

  That's so thoughtful.

• 55:50Speaker 01

  But also very awkward, because then obviously she unzip me and then I have to like take it down, just in a bra, do a wee while talking to her, eye contact, eye contact. And then we got to the end and I needed to wipe and I reached around for the toilet paper, keeping eye contact. And she simply reached the other side where there was a pile of fluffy towels and handed me one and was like, wipe with this. And I was like, wow, this is what it's like to be a megastar. You wipe your fanny on a special fluffy towel. Then she sat on the toilet and she just simply hoicked her tights and guss it to one side and weaved through them. And then I passed her a towel. I'm like, I've learnt the ways of the VIP toilet. And she went, no, no, no, no, just gonna shake my lettuce. She just shook her lettuce.

• 56:26Speaker 02

  Can I just say something? I, I, I love Lady Gaga. But that has made me adore her.

• 56:34Speaker 01

  You and her would get on like a house on fire.

• 56:37Speaker 02

  A woman.

• 56:38Speaker 01

  I know.

• 56:39Speaker 02

  Well, duh.

• 56:40Speaker 01

  To keep tabs on my bladder, to work out when I needed a wee.

• 56:43Speaker 02

  She is everything.

• 56:44Speaker 01

  Right. She's just played to like 50,000 Little Monsters and then she's got, also got tabs on my bladder. I love telling my Lady Gaga story.

• 56:50Speaker 02

  A woman. Okay, last one. Stop dreading winter. This is a really interesting one because I do that.

• 56:58Speaker 01

  Really?

• 56:59Speaker 02

  Yes. I am, please give me some vitamin D.

• 57:03Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 57:03Speaker 02

  Sunshine. Um, I need a long day. I can't stand the getting dark at three.

• 57:10Speaker 01

  Well, also winter's sexist if you're a woman, like, kind of like, you know, we know generally, you know, we are constantly being told it is not safe to go out when it's dark. So you suddenly.

• 57:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, right.

• 57:18Speaker 02

  Do you know what I did?

• 57:20Speaker 01

  Go on.

• 57:20Speaker 02

  When we went through, I mean, a phase, we're always scared of walking in the dark, but, um, I think it was at its peak, basically. And I walked down behind a woman and I was like, I'm just letting you know that I'm a woman and I'm walking behind you and you're safe. She turned around and she looked and she went, thanks so much. Anyway, she wrote me a letter.

• 57:43Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 57:44Speaker 02

  And she said, I, I work at a shelter.

• 57:46Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 57:47Speaker 02

  And I was like, oh God, I didn't, you know, I didn't know that. But she said, thanks. And I told the girls about that and we're all gonna do that for the one. And I thought, oh God, this is what we were talking about, one person.

• 57:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:58Speaker 02

  You know, you're talking about community. I felt like, I'm not, not picking up litter, but that was something that I felt good about. Like, because she told me she appreciated it afterwards. And then she's told other people to go do it. So.

• 58:10Speaker 01

  This is the best thing about humans, like, kind of like, you know, you can't change the world, but everyone could change one tiny thing. Like, something we've been complaining about and we come up with a solution to it. And then you tell someone and tell someone and suddenly just one normal person has come up with one little solution to one tiny thing. And then someone else comes up with a solution to another tiny thing. And suddenly, you, you know, humanity and culture and what we do in society is like a patchwork quilt. We can all sew one tiny little square, come up with one little solution and patch it all together. And just the power of just coming up with one solution and, and spreading it is like, that's the ultimate point of being a human. Find one tiny problem. If you've solved one tiny problem in your life and leave the world fractionally better than when you found it, when you were born. Your job is done.

• 58:50Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 58:50Speaker 01

  And when you start, when people go, you know, what is the meaning of life? Why are we here? It's that. Find one thing that you make better in your life and that, that's the meaning of life.

• 58:57Speaker 02

  I mean, you've helped a lot of people with your books and also with your television. Um, just by being you, I think. But when you talk about hope and being hopeful, this book, did it help you in the end? Are you feeling, are you in a better place? Did it work?

• 59:18Speaker 01

  Well, this is where, again, with my powers of ADHD, having said an hour ago, there were two times in my life where I began again. The first one, I was, I was 13 and I had that first burst of anxiety. And that, I call it my best bad friend in the book, because it does, if you are anxious, I was, I was proud of my anxiety. I felt superior in my anxiety. I was like, I wake up every morning and I have that, oh, but then I'm full of amphetamines and terror and that means I can work really fast. Like, I can do anything. Like, I can, I can work, give me this, you know, nine books in 10 years and a sitcom and a film and like stand up tours and all these things in two columns a week. I believe that was all because I was anxious. So I was like, well, I, I embrace my anxiety.

• 59:59Speaker 01

  And also, I think the smart people are anxious because it just makes you get on and do things and we're hypervigilant, we're aware of how precarious things are. So we're keeping ourselves and our friends and our family safe with our hyper productivity. And I've found a brilliant method for doing this. And then I got to 49 and I'd never known what, really what anxiety was. And it's, so, so the adrenaline is made in your adrenal gland, which is just above your kidneys. It's a tiny little kind of like triangular gland that looks like a little cap that they would wear in the French Revolution. And I became aware of it because it had clearly burnt out. Like, I was just so constantly flooded with adrenaline. I was like, my skin was haggard, my guts were, I'm not gonna tell you about my toilet troubles, Davina, but they were mighty. Like, if you're constantly flooded with adrenaline, it's not a good news down there.

• 1:00:42Speaker 01

  And I was just like, I can't, I can't be this scared anymore. Like, I am gonna have to change. I'm going to have to break up with anxiety. And I went and talked to my husband and my family and I went, look, I think I'm gonna become much more stupid now because I believe the anxiety makes me smart. I think I'm gonna earn a lot less money because that's what keeps me hyper productive. So we're gonna be a lot poorer. But mummy can't be anxious anymore. I'm, I'm going to stop this. So I went and talked to my doctor and told him my problems. He immediately was aghast that I had not come and talked to him years before and been given beta blockers, which will immediately stop you producing adrenaline. So as soon as you wake up and feel that first, oh, you take a beta blocker. You don't feel, I was, I was like, it's not gonna make me wiggy. It's not like taking a Valium or anything, is it? He was like, no, it just literally stops you producing adrenaline.

• 1:01:26Speaker 01

  So I would take one, forget I'd taken it. And then 10 minutes later to be like, oh, I feel calm and normal and safe. I didn't realise how unsafe the anxiety actually made me, because if you're constantly producing adrenaline, your body is saying you're in danger. And while you keep letting it do that and you don't address it, you go, yeah, you are in danger. Keep producing that amphetamine. Soon as I stopped it, I felt physically and mentally and emotionally safe. And I am embarrassed to tell you how quickly I stopped being anxious. It took two weeks. And the thing I realised, I realised two things. First of all, that when that anxiety came, it was a good friend to me. I don't think I would have made it out of Wolverhampton and got the job and the, the life that I've got without it. But.

• 1:02:10Speaker 01

  That was like my industrial era, like kind of that's when you're like burning like coal and fuel and oil to get out. When we when we invented factories, they burnt on dirty fuels. Yes. But you can't run on those dirty fuels forever. At some point, you need to convert to something cleaner, like solar. And taking anxiety out is like removing the dirty fossil fuels and running on something cleaner and lighter. And secondly, I became really angry about everything that I was reading around anxiety, because if we look at the rates of that diagnosis for anxiety disorders, it's gone through the roof. Yeah. And you hear people calling themselves, and even professionals referring to people as anxious people. And there is no such thing as an anxious person. Yes. We're not born anxious. At some point, something happens that makes us anxious, but it's supposed to be a transitionary state. You're supposed to move, you're supposed to use the message and the anxiety, learn something from it, change your life, and then go back to being normal again.

• 1:02:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. And this is where we're talking about, like, again, going in a perfect circle back to the beginning, why labels often make me feel really scratchy. I would feel very unhappy if a thirteen year old was told, you are an anxious person, and we will now put you on medication, and we will not address that, but you're just an anxious person, take this medication forever. Instead of saying, you're a normal person who's suffering from some anxiety, and we're going to get you over to the other side of it. And so I've become quite evangelical about this now. Whenever I do live shows, I'm like, when I start talking about, I think I can recognise other anxious people. I call them cortisol kids. Anybody who at a young age had that first rush of cortisol, and they're still hypervigilant thirty years later, and I can spot them a mile off. So on a gig, I'll go, who's anxious? And they put their hands up, and I'm like, okay, I saw you, I knew. And I'm like, I've

• 1:03:37Speaker 01

  got some news for you. This doesn't have to be the rest of your life. Like, you know, no one was more anxious than me. Like, there were gigs where thirty seconds before I was supposed to be on stage, I was lying face down behind the safety curtain, like hyperventilating, just going, and then the curtain would start to go up, and I'd be like, right, up on, and no one would know. I was so cheerful and relaxed. I was fine being on stage, but there was just the bit before you go on stage, you're like, what if it goes wrong? What if I say the wrong thing? What if someone hates me? I didn't even know what I was scared of. And having removed the anxiety from my body, I now, everything feels so much easier. I wish I'd done it thirty years earlier. But maybe it wasn't the right time. Maybe you needed to do something in those thirty years that showed. Yeah. I want to talk to you about Peter. Yes.

• 1:04:21Speaker 01

  Pete, and how you met, because I love this idea that he, when you were writing a column, wrote you. Yes. A sort of like fan letter. Oh, this is also Richard Curtis. Yeah, it is perfectly Richard Curtis. It's really Richard Curtis. And and when you wrote the article, tell, tell everybody. So. My mindset. So I was entering lots of writing competitions, and I won the Observer's Young Reporter of the Year competition, and they gave me a column for the duration of the summer holidays. And the first column I wrote was, and the the purpose was absolutely distinct in my mind. I was like, this is my first piece in the national newspaper. I'm going to write a piece that makes someone fall in love with me. So I'm going to write a piece describing

• 1:05:05Speaker 01

  going uptown and sitting on the piece of grass outside St Peter's Cathedral, and watching boys going by. And I'm going to describe the kind of boys I like, and my writing is going to be so brilliant and funny and tender and fabulous, that anyone who reads it will fall in love with me. But you manifested. I manifested. I manifested a man. I manifested. But the man. I know. I Peterfested. My Pete. Peterfested. And so he was going out, he was, he was in the death throes of his relationship with his then girlfriend at the time, and he read this piece in the Observer, and he read it out down the phone to her, going, isn't this a brilliant piece of writing? And she said, you're going to go out with her. You're going to break up with me and go out with her. And he was like, well, I've never even met her. She manifested. I know. She. Yeah, well, women are smart, right? They know. I don't think he realised, but she did. That is so. But how long was it before you actually met?

• 1:05:50Speaker 01

  It was about six months later, and we went to, we both interviewed the same bands. I was interviewing them for the Times, and he was interviewing them for Melody Maker. And so we met sort of, you know, sort of in the holding bit, waiting to go and interview the bands. And then, when I'd finished the interview, the interview had really run over, and I was still living in Wolverhampton with my parents at the time. And I was like, I got on the, he was like, I'll take you to Euston Station. And halfway on that tube journey, because it was in Hammersmith, I realised I was going to miss my train. So I just said to him, uh, this sounds really weird, but like, I'm going to miss my train, can I stay at your house? And he went, yeah, but you just need to know a big secret about me. And at that point, obviously, you're worrying and going, is he a murderer? Yeah. It's the secret. I am a murderer. Yeah, I've got bodies under the floorboards, but are you okay with that? And at that point, I would have said yes, because I had no other option. [laughing]

• 1:06:34Speaker 01

  And and he went, I really love, and I'm going, putting dental skin on your face? Crowded House. And I went, I love Crowded House too. And that was a secret, because at Melody Maker, it was only about cool bands. And if either of us had ever admitted that at the cool rock mag that we loved Crowded House, who were too melodic. That would have been the end. It would have been the end. So I was like, I love them too. So then we started singing their songs to each other, and we went back and listened to them. And by about two o'clock in the morning, I was like, why won't this man kiss me? This is so rude. I am here, why won't he kiss me? And he left the room, and I was like, he's going to get himself ready for some sex here. And he said he came back, and he'd brought his toothbrush and some toothpaste, and his nightwear, which was a Victorian style wee wee winkie nightgown. And he went,

• 1:07:19Speaker 01

  don't laugh at it, my mum bought it me. You wear this, you sleep in my bed, I'm going to sleep on the sofa. And in the morning, he'd gone, but he'd gone round the corner and had bought a carton of Tropicana orange juice, the classy kind, not from a concentrate, and a croissant, which I had never seen before. Never seen a croissant. Technology. How old were you? Seventeen. Amazing. I didn't know pastry technology had made layers. I had no idea you can make it in a semicircular shape. And then we started going out with each other for about three or four months. And then I was offered the opportunity to present a TV show on Channel Four, a late night music show that was the sort of summer replacement to The Word. With Terry. With, I co-presented it with Johnny Vaughan. Johnny Vaughan, that was it. I was going to say Terry Christian, but it was Johnny Vaughan, wasn't it? Yeah, he was on The Word. And Pete came up to me and just sort of went, the sort

• 1:08:03Speaker 01

  of day before we started filming it, and he went, look, you're seventeen, you're about to be really famous. I love you, but you're about to go through a huge experience, and you shouldn't be going out with someone. You're going to meet loads of people. Like, you should go out there, like, date, like, kind of like, go and have your adventure, go be famous. And if you still want me, you know, I'll always be your friend. But if you still want me at the end of that, then I'll just be here, like. Who does that? I know. Who actually does that? And you know, he, like, he was so right to do that. Totally this, totally this. I went on a, you know, when you first get famous, you do go a bit mad, and you just do turn into a bit of an arsehole. I would have been a terrible person to go out with. So I went and dated for two years, and went out with some terrible people. And then when I finally broke up with my horrible boyfriend, I just

• 1:08:47Speaker 01

  sort of turned back up on his door and went, okay, I've done my dating, I've done my, I've done my adventuring, can I come back with you? But he was clever, because he knew nobody would be as lovely as him. I know. And that's the power of a man who appears to be fluffy and gentle and kind in a beta, but is secretly an alpha in disguise. He was a very, very confident man. He just sat there and waited. So attractive. So attractive. And that's thirty-three years. Pete.

• 1:09:11Speaker 01

  Well done. Very good. How long have you been together? Thirty-three years. Thirty-three years. Yeah. And the way you talk about him, it's still, he's the one person, I was trying to, like, I never think about him. It seems really weird. When I was trying to explain this to him, he went, this sounds really bad. I was like, and everyone else, I'm trying to figure them out all the time. I have conversations with them in my head, like, I'm trying to figure them out and everything. And I dream about them. And you are the only person I never dream about, and I never think about you, because I don't have to work anything out about you. Just when I'm with you. You know. It's just perfect. You never worry? No. You know. Yeah. You've got the knowing. Well, that's the Crowded House lyric that we sang at each other was, it's not the girl you think you are. And it goes, and Neil Finn's singing about a man, and

• 1:09:55Speaker 01

  you're going, he'll be no trouble. And like, kind of, and that's, he is no trouble. He has, he is no trouble. He's, he's all calmness and sweetness. I'm just so, and I don't think, you know, for all my feminism, I do not think I would have been able to do what I've done without being with him. This is what I loved about How to Be a Woman, is that you appealed to my sense of feminism, in that it's an inclusive thing. Oh, yes. It's not exclusive of men. I just want to be given the same opportunities and be paid the same amount of money as you, and have a fair, you know, go at life, but with you. Yes. Like, alongside you. Well, that was the whole thing, sort of, when I was trying to work out how I was going to conclude the book, having written all these things about being a woman, I was

• 1:10:39Speaker 01

  like, you know, it's, it's all about, even though there are problems with being a woman and problems with being a man, we're all just people. Like, if I'm not particularly, I'm not pro-women particularly, or anti-men. Yes. I just thumbs up for the. For humans. Piece. Yeah, let's be great people together, all together. I just want, I want to be a great human being, and I want men to be as great as us, and for us all to have the same opportunities as possible. But I'm very, I was amazed when I sold the book to my publishers, and they were like, How to Be a Woman, we better hope a lot of women buy this, because no man will ever buy it. And after the first two weeks, I started getting all these stories from them, who were like, reading it on the tube, but hidden behind like a copy of Exchange and Mart or Autotrader, because they knew that they have people going, How to Be a Woman, why are you reading that? But they were like, which kind of blew my mind, they were like, we're reading it like a Haynes manual. Yes. Like, you're explaining it brilliantly to me. Like, I don't, like, the big one

• 1:11:24Speaker 01

  they would always go is, the chapter where you go, I've got nothing to wear, where you go, what do women really mean when they say I've got nothing to wear? And what we, and he's like, she's got a wardrobe full of clothes, she's got loads to wear. And it's like, no, she's got nothing to wear for who she's got to be today. Today, she's got to go from the school gates to a really powerful meeting and then a party. And we've got to be two or three people in the way that we dress that day. So when she's opening her wardrobe, she's going, I have no one, I have no clothes, I have nothing to wear for the person, I, specific person I've got to be today. Whereas men don't really have that problem, because they just get up. They go, they're the same stuff. And they put their trousers on, and they leave. Yeah. So it's like, so that's, you know, so that's, so they were just reading the stuff, going, now I finally understand what my wife means when she's saying that, and the floor is covered with clothes. And they just read it like a manual in the same way that you'd read the manual for a Ford Gear, which I found very pleasing.

• 1:12:08Speaker 01

  I, I want to thank you, from the bottom of my heart, just for everything that you've bought all of us. Do. Every book that you've written, every column that you write, for speaking our language, for educating us, for showing us funny things and moving things, or putting it in a way that we can digest. I'm really grateful for you. Don't make me cry. No, I really mean it. I just want to say thank you. Caitlin Moran, everybody. Oh, my God, you're going to have to come back for part two. I'm ready for it. We need part two. So just in case you missed this episode here, if you loved this episode, I know you're going to love that.

• 1:12:58Speaker 00

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