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Thanks to @JGRAMHISTORY who let me know that it's 19 years today since we recorded (possibly the final eps of) That Was Then This Is Now.
Apparently it's TV's Emma Kennedy and my 19th wedding anniversary. No one thought this relationship would last this long and I put its success down to not seeing each other very often and committing bigamy.
Into London again this morning to record my 4th book club in 3 days at the Podcast Room. I've had some amazing guests on this slightly more serious version of the podcast and today was chatting to one of our greatest living novelists Sebastian Faulks about his memoir, Fires Which Burned Brightly. Would I be brave enough to start by the interview by saying I think this collection of essays should be called "My Sortabiography" and if I did would he walk out?
I was and he didn't, though not sure he was that impressed. I asked him to rename it for the paperback. I don't think he will.
Nonetheless it was a good chat. Faulks is a modest and funny man and possibly even more intelligent than me. I think I managed to bluff my way through. He doesn't feel his life was adversely affected by him being sent to boarding school as an 8 year old, though I am not sure he's right. I felt the trauma from him writing about it (in the third person, which is a bit of a hint, like that boy is someone different than this man) and can't imagine sending away my very nearly 8 year old boy. It wouldn't just be trauma for him.
He does seem able to write and talk about very dark human experiences without being too traumatised himself, though we shared our experience of that shadowland that emerges when you have an early morning panic attack, as well as getting stuck in a dream that you wake from only to find you're in another dream, which you wake from only to find you're in another dream and how I worry that I might still be in a dream and could wake up at any moment back in 1999 or 2000 or whenever it was that mine happened (the same week as I started dating Julia Sawalha which really does suggest that it wasn't real). I'd love to be 32 again, but my dream children would never exist and that would be more traumatic (for me) then sending them to boarding school.
We did briefly discuss the kind of medical greaseproof toilet paper that Sebastian had at his school and that my grandparents favoured in their home lavatory. I am at a loss as to why this stuff existed or why anyone would buy it or how you were supposed to use it. It didn't absorb at all, which you'd think would be the very least that toiled paper should do. Perhaps you just had to smear the faecal matter over yourself until it became essentially invisible.This is the UK that Reform want us to return to. Don't let it happen.
Anyway Sebastian didn't want to talk about this too much, but I think this was a good use of my time talking to a renowned author.
The podcast will be out in mid-October.
Antoher RHLSTP Book Club goes up today though, this one with the wonderful Nigel Planer.
It's here. 
