Spinning Plates with Sophie Ellis-Bextor - Episode 2: Caitlin Moran

Episode Date: July 13, 2020

This week's guest is the fantastic writer Caitlin Moran, who is mother to two teenage girls aged 16 and 19 with her husband Pete Paphides. Caitlin shares her tips on mooing, talking to your future self and the importance of a room of one's own. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello, I'm Sophia Lispector and welcome to Spinning Plates, the podcast where I speak to busy working women who also happen to be mothers about how they make it work. I'm a singer and I've released seven albums in between having my five sons aged 16 months to 16 years, so I spin a few plates myself. Being a mother can be the most amazing thing but can also be hard to find time for yourself and your own ambitions. I want to be a bit nosy and see how other people balance everything. Welcome to Spinning Plates. Hello, how are you doing? So welcome to my second episode, my second podcast episode. Thanks for all the feedback with the first one. That was really lovely.

And I'm so excited to finally get it up and out in the world because, yeah, it's an exciting, nice project and I'm glad it's finally out there. If you'd ever listen, see what you think. So this week's guest is the wonderful Katlin Moran. We had a lovely, lovely um in an actual pod so it's good to do a podcast in a pod she has a beautiful garden pod she has a beautiful garden uh during lockdown she's um she's made her garden even more insect friendly she said so we were surrounded by constant buzzing of little bees and birds flying over while we were sat there

in her garden pod um we spoke about lots and lots of stuff catelyn and i first met she actually did my first ever interview when i was i think 17 18 something like that um i remember uh we got on really well so i've sort of bumped into her lots of times over the years and it was lovely to talk to her all things uh work and parenthood and she is a fountain of knowledge and wisdom in fact she helped me get through lockdown with an article she wrote for the times all about homeschooling and it basically said don't expect to be good at homeschooling if you never set out to homeschool which I took as um good reason just it's not really homeschool at all uh throughout lockdown so thanks for that catelyn uh what do you need to know about for this interview if you've got small people around

uh small ears won't like there's one mention of what my kids call the sure word uh there is one mention of the rude word for boobs that starts with a t and i think we start off the chat talking quite a lot about alcohol uh it just popped up and it is by no means to women endorsing the large consumption of alcohol at all this is not an advert for booze it just came up in conversation pretty sure i'm supposed to do that kind of responsible disclaimer anyway uh i'm going to stop blabbering now i'm going to go make myself a cup of tea uh while we have a listen and thanks once again for joining me on spinning plates and here's catherine and i talking in the pod enjoy so uh first of all i should probably say where we are because it's a slightly different sound

and we are literally in a pod yes it's a part it's a literal podcast yeah we wanted to make sure i could find a pod and you're the first place that had a pod um this is beautiful we're in your garden your gorgeous garden that you've been tending throughout lockdown yes this has been the thing that's kept me from going nuts i felt so sorry for everyone who doesn't have a garden because when things were stressful in the early days just coming out here and shifting huge amounts of earth from one side of the garden to the other is the kind of sweaty physical stuff that you need to do when the world seems crazy definitely and actually we had that bizarre constant gorgeous weather which felt really odd actually didn't that just unremitting these beautiful hardly any rain

yeah we suddenly we didn't have any work and it was really sunny it was like this isn't britain this isn't my life how do i cope with this and how i cope was with the gardening so yeah you're we're in a garden that i've made insect friendly it's full of things that attract so if you hear us like buzzing in the background that's my 20 000 million bees that have now swarmed on the garden no it's beautiful it's really beautiful and it's funny because with the weather thing that was happening lockdown i don't know if you found this as well but all my usual markers throughout the year so i know what's happening and you know all the things that happen whether

it be work things or planning your holidays or kids in school or whatever the things everything just sort of went and suddenly just had this sort of endless summer holiday type feel yeah but it wasn't obviously really like summer holidays well all the months disappeared as well like it's all just been 2020 hasn't it i know like there's no it's all just kind of in the weeks are just kind of like everything's like a sort of blob sort of every so often punctuated by either garden as well to spring watch for me or yeah all the lion king the week that we were watching the lion king that felt like a distinct week but other than that they've all been the same actually lion king became part of our lockdown because we taught our youngest one mickey who's um he's now just

come up to 18 months we taught him how to say, which is really satisfying on a baby. I recommend it. Yes. Do they all then pick him up and go, hey, it's meant? It has been known to happen, yeah. If you've got a baby, that's what you have to do, isn't it?

Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. Anyone dropped him yet, or have they? Oh, yeah. Of course. He's the fifth one down. Yeah, he's like, he gets the best,

and he gets that sort of carefree attitude. I think with the others the others i might have been a bit more like i don't hold him like that but now i'm just sort of used to the fact that the 11 year old would wake him under his arm and well you know they're quite difficult to break i remember with our fifths and the others debate like kind of like by that point we've all established that it does take quite a lot to even end up in a and e let alone for them to die so we do uh stair tobogganing where you put a child in a washing basket and push it downstairs uh we do a thing called throw you out the window where you just grab a child and go i'm gonna throw you out the window and you kind of hurl them towards the window and catch in the

last minute and now i'm a parent the one that i kind of regret the most in terms of my parents heart health was we would dress um that we had these life-size baby dolls and we would dress them in the youngest child's clothes and then we'd wait till our parents were in the front room watching tv and then we'd drop them out the bedroom window so they just see what looked like their youngest child in its clothes just hurled past the window and land on the ground and we'd scream as it was happening and it took them about isn't that evil now i'm a parent i want to apologize to my parents that was a wrong i know now that was a wrong thing to do but at the time we didn't have a tv and we were just making our own amusement man yeah that's just so fun that level

of shock at the parents is just the best oh they look so scared it was hilarious i'm gonna genuinely do that more than once oh oh frequently and then because that was with the so we'd start we'd invented that for the fifth so by the time we had the eighth that was a very regular occurrence by the end they didn't even look up they'd just just be like, oh, the baby's falling past the window. Fine. Yeah, I'll be that doll again. Yeah. Probably. Yeah, I hope. 90% chance it is.

When I was thinking about yesterday and meeting you today, I stumbled across a YouTube clip with you where you're doing a book tour for How to Build a Girl. And you come out on stage and say, oh, normally on these book tours someone interviews me but i've just found out backstage that no one's interviewing me so i'm going to interview myself so i did occur to me i could probably just tell you roughly what the podcast i've been doing is about and then just i am self-interviewing i'm very aware like i can provide an enormous amount

of content i'm a very chatty person i've already had two cups of coffee and i got my vape on the go but i'm also aware that i will just talk and talk and talk and not stop so you'll see me every so often go okay you have now been talking for seven minutes solidly and you haven't breathed in stop counting just take a breath and let sophie say something so be aware of that dynamic if you need to put a hand up and just go dude okay please that'll be the sign you've delighted me enough this is wonderful but well actually what i liked is um when you started interviewing yourself your your second question was are you good in bed so do you remember that no i don't was this i remember there was was it in america there was one in philadelphia you said you were quite hungover

i was so hungover because i've been in new york the night before yeah i turned up in philadelphia and uh yeah and they just went and i was like so who's the guy who's interviewing me and they were like oh there isn't anyone so i quickly had to i think I put a load of questions in a hat and pulled them out. I can't remember. But yeah, I was in one of those shuddering hangovers. I've noticed, so I'm 45 now. I've noticed, so the next book that I've written that's coming out in September is called More Than a Woman, which is the sequel to How to Be a Woman, which is about middle age.

I was like, we don't talk about middle age and feminism in middle age and how the whole game changes. And one of the things they don't tell you about middle age is that you can't drink anymore. Like, wine becomes your enemy. It will destroy you. And we literally stopped producing the enzymes that we need in our stomach to break down alcohol. So what you thought was a hangover in your 20s and 30s, in your 40s you realise was but a mere bagatelle.

These are things that last three days and it's like you're standing at the top of a multi-storey car park staring down at this hangover going, I'm not going to be be able to get down i'm going to be up here at this level of anxiety and paid for the rest of my life so i'm 41 when does that sort of well have you noticed how are your hangovers i'm generally one of those people gets away with it quite well i think um but i can't obviously i can't i i haven't really had many hangovers recently obviously because of lockdown there's not been that much going on i think the closest we came to was after one of the kitchen discos and we sort of pushed it a bit more with a couple of cocktails and

sat in the garden but no really i don't really get bad hangovers that much are you a wise drinker though will you can you sip on a cocktail for half an hour like a lovely lady and then maybe have a glass of water no i feel like i'm quite reckless really you beast because i'm very much like all aboard the booze train like as soon as i've had one i'm like and now we're on a ship and we go to valhalla and we will not stop till the morning and the idea of stopping seems like the death of all fun so yeah so yeah i've had i've realized you just can't do that when you're in your 40s i think i've married someone more like that um do you find you drink dark spirits and that kind of thing because that's definitely worse, isn't it?

I don't really drink that. Cider is my drink. Oh, there you go. Yeah, it's my working class. My days in Volvo, it would be cider. That's an exciting drink. It's like champagne, but for the pavement. Pavement champagne.

So yeah, cider is my drink of choice. But yeah, if I have more than one of them now, it's hell. So I just, yeah, I generally don't bother now. Cider was definitely the first thing I ever got drunk on when i was a teenager i remember that very well i remember because i didn't get drunk till i was 15 yes and a lot of my friends have been drunk loads of times before that and been drinking and i was always like i'm not drinking and i remember having it and then be like this is amazing it's tasty booze yeah why did i ever not want to do this kitty booze well you came around because you were sort of we were teenagers at the

same time yeah i invented alcoholic lemonade i know how weird is that two dogs and hooch and all that i know and it was like wow they're really facilitating children drinking brit pop is about kids getting drunk and not being disgusting that was a very again a very reckless move on behalf of the alcohol industry really reckless that's so you know what a weird thing to to experience at the same time it's such a sort of standard thing getting your little alco pop have you found that with boozes that once you've been sick on them you can't drink them again because i started off on southern comfort and lemonade and once you've been sick on it particularly if you've been sick through your

nose then you can't go back to that oh yeah definitely then you have to move on and i think that's why when you look in a bar there are so many different drinks yeah and they invent so many literally that just kind of like you just like i've done all of that third of the bar i've been sick on all of those so now i'm into the middle section of the bar show me your rums the same with food though isn't it if you have food poisoning from food you can't eat that again still can't eat salt and vinegar crisps really yeah that was a bad day um with with your lockdown how's it all been what's going on in your life at the moment aside from your beautiful garden you've been here with your girls throughout the whole thing yeah my husband

the girls and the dog always used to have a dog during some kind of national crisis i find because they just have no idea what's going on yeah just like that just everything's great in fact did you see that story about there was a dachshund that they had to take to the vet because it stopped wagging and they were really worried and then they realized that it stopped wagging because its tail had broken because it was so happy that everybody was at home all the time they've been wagging so much its tail broke i didn't even know that was a thing me neither oh but that's how happy dogs are to be with people they just love the guys no it's been i mean to be fair i work from home i'm a writer and i work from home so my life has been literally exactly the same as it was before i just spend all day in my office writing and then i take the dog for a

walk for an hour with the pandemic with a mask before the pandemic without a mask and that's the only difference really and i like a mask it's i still suffer from adult hormonal acne around my chin so for me the mask has been a godsend i'm just like great i don't have to put foundation on just pop the mask on make my eyes pop that's all i need to bother with so as you've got the mascara on you can uh that no it's been a blessing and how have you so you've got two mascara on, you can, no, it's been a blessing. And have you, so you've got two teenage daughters. Have they been finding everything? Again, I'm so, I mean, all my friends that have got younger kids, like, and I can't even look at you

because you have five and they're all so small. Like, I can't even begin to imagine with homeschooling on top of that. That's brutal. But if you've got two teenagers, like, kind of, they've just been off amusing themselves. They've both been at Brit school, the oldest one doing film,

the youngest one doing music. so the oldest one's just been making films around the house she's done one about um that she's editing now about um trying to have your prom during lockdown which is such a great idea everyone's on zoom trying to have a prom because otherwise they won't have one and the youngest one's recorded a single and an album so they've just kept themselves busy in their rooms it's been heaven that's amazing and i finally taught them how to do housework ah well well done i think i would have found that more of a success than if i'd managed to be good at homeschooling to be honest i think that would have been i would have been very happy with that how's homeschooling been then oh well actually you um really saved me

i think because uh you wrote an article really early on in lockdown about homeschooling and not only did it really help me but I kept sending it to everybody I knew that was stressing about it because you said so many things that made me feel better and actually a lot of it really worked out by the way so well done so hey I was right that's good you were right because um you you basically said a lot of the I started off the homeschooling in earnest yes box files each one you know each child had a box file for their work we had all the laptops set up with all the logins, it was going to be great, we were going to start in the morning, do a little bit, then 15 minute break, then

da da da. Ooh, so wholesome and scheduling. I know, but also probably I was quite terrified because everything had just suddenly gone woomph, you know, you're home now, go for it, good luck. And so it, the wheels probably fell off about maybe day two or three um surprised it was that yeah no looking back our one i would have thought with five well yeah because uh my hardy and the kids found it easy to work um be self-motivated to work my eldest is 16 he didn't he's like he doesn't really like schools he's like great now i don't really have to do it like

are you doing you go yes i don't know he probably wasn't next one down 11 very cross about the whole thing and couldn't really work independently always wanted me to help him work out what was going on where the eight-year-old was just quite freaked out really i think he just thought i don't know really what i'm doing and all my friends are probably doing it so i'd rather not do anything because i feel terrible about you know failing uh and then the four-year-old just wanted to do other stuff play play-doh do fun things and then the baby's just there like wanted wanted to do other stuff play play-doh do fun things and then the baby's just there like once you picked up so i was just like this is untenable really and in your article um you spoke about if you're the sort of parent that's ever sort of slagged off school or

teachers or anything how are they going to expect you to suddenly be like hello i'm your teacher totally when you're just sitting there just going well the curriculum is just a complete construct it doesn't actually teach you how to learn and it's all just balls yeah that's the yeah if you've been one of those rogue parents who's just like hey what even is school like let's just deep that for a minute yeah you're screwed because they're just like well i don't believe in education but i wrote that piece because because my parents home educated us and everyone was so scared of home education i think they thought that it's got to be the box files and the schedules and you've got to do teaching. And what we learned from being home educated

is that most of when you're going to a formal school, it's just crowd management. Like you can, well, my daughter was really ill a couple of years ago, so she had six months off school and we got her two hours of tutoring a week. That was it for six months. And when she went back to school, she was ahead of everybody else in her class

because so much of it is just crowd management and like kind of like you know catering to all the kids in the in the room the actual amount of learning you need to do in a week is minimal and then once you get beyond the idea of lessons like kind of when so when you're home educated you go through this process they call it de-schooling where for the first six months you won't want to do anything you're like i'm free it's a holiday forever hurrah and you don't want to learn anything but then around about six months you just get bored and you want to start learning because kids just want to learn like that's the the young of every creature is just a curiosity machine they just want to poke things with sticks and learn how things work and ask questions and why is the sky

blue and what happens if i go over here and what if i mix this with this they want to learn things and if you just let them get on with it they will just follow their passions yeah they'll soon they won't bother with stuff they don't like but like do you need to bother with stuff you don't like if you hate it when you're eight yeah it's unlikely to be your job in the future yeah so why spend all this time becoming mediocre at something you loathe and which you won't ever do again after the age of 16 when you could just put all of your time and attention into your passions which is probably what you will end up doing as a job if things work out well so yeah so kids will just teach themselves you just have to have the confidence to sit back and go and whenever they come to you and go i'm bored just go well there's some housework that needs doing and then they will

just scuttle off and just and sort themselves out no i literally did do all of that so yeah when they went i'm bored i'm like great well here's some soapy water and here's a cloth and here are the cupboard doors and they would really need doing and one thing you wrote as well is that nothing cures boredom like doing something you're interested in and it's it's true so like the 11 year old has now been making loads of movies yes and and he wants to be a director and he started editing and putting these things and he's passionate about it and i think it without the lockdown thing i don't think he would have got so into it and pushed it so far i mean you don't want to be too like hmm it was a gift because for a lot of people it's been terrible exactly you know economically things are going to be awful but for a lot of

people it has been like we will probably never again hopefully touch wood in human history have a moment where everything is put on pause yeah and everyone is going through the same experience like that's and just all these things that you just realize we'll never have again like we finally walked into the center of london because you couldn't go on public transport so it's 41 000 steps into the center of london and back again to see what it was like in lockdown and just to see it that empty yeah even if tom cruise shoots the world's most expensive film here you'd never be able to empty out london in that way it's extraordinary to see and there were like sparrows nesting on the roof of gucci and like kind of and all the sounds were so different

i was trying to why does london sound different and it was high heels you couldn't hear any heels like kind of you're so used to especially if you're on new bond street or something just hearing the heels yeah all you could hear was bird song and all the people had gone and you realize that a city is two things it's the buildings which in a lockdown you get to appreciate you get to look at them it's such a beautiful thing that people have invented but it's also the people it's like a play it's like a film like they are the actors you're so used to seeing all these dramas and the people who've come down here and who people need to reinvent themselves in the city and with them gone you just see it as like i don't know ancient caves or something like they've emptied out and a lot of the people who've left the city won't come back but those buildings will

be used again like when i came down here in the early 90s it was just after the recession and like the saint pancras hotel had buddleia growing out the roof of it and that's where the spice girls filmed the video for wannabe downstairs it was a wreck and we just thought it's always going to be like this you know back of king's cross was scary and completely empty the old gas works and now there's a whole new city there yeah and the saint pancras hotel has become a gg hotel like we'll empty out we'll have a recession and other people will do things with those buildings and we'll rebuild again so you know it's scary but if you just take the long view on the whole thing and go everything is cyclical people come people go if all the rich people leave london then it will allow people with less money to come in and reinvent it as

something else again yeah no i think you're right it's it's just i suppose it's a similar thing of thought really of just that confidence of just being like just just step back and don't feel you've got to have the urgency of sort of fixing things immediately because it's out of your control so yeah it's out of your control. So it's like being in the sea and when you're surfing, I learned a lot from surfing, like kind of like you can learn to get up on the board. That's a technique. You can learn that. That's a skill. You can become strong. But the other 50 percent of surfing is just waiting for the right wave. You've just got to stand there and wait until there's a wave that you can surf.

There's no point in going, I'm just going to get on my board for every wave because most of them won't take you to the shore. So you just have to learn. You just have to wait for the right moment. You can can't fight the sea so you just have to sit there and wait for times to change yeah no it's it's such a weird extraordinary time i sort of feel like i'm living through history books in a way just i found myself yes catching up with some friends and writing messages back and forth and my little text messages sounded like some sort of back of a postcard thing you know yes lockdown was this but we're slowly emerging into that and like whoa it's like some sort of like historical talk already some really old-fashioned you sounded quite attenborough there slowly we emerged blinking into the sunlight of post-lockdown britain yes i wouldn't credit us with that and i

think also when just to sort of the other side of the coin with the the homeschooling and having all the kids at home whilst yes, yes, there were some brilliant moments with people kind of having to do things because they were bored and thinking, right, I'm going to go. Like my eight-year-old got back into dressing up, which is really cute. He hasn't done that for ages

and he's been different characters all the time. And that's been really good for him. But there's also been extraordinary bits of tension and I'll find Richard and I can be really calm and then suddenly be like, something just set you off because you're all kind of in this like slightly weird, I't know bubbling anxiety i guess that's the other thing to remember for homeschooling like kind of like you you are also dealing with children who are you know to a

great or lesser extent quite traumatized yeah kind of so that so much of it is pastoral care of your children like there's no point in trying to sit down and drill them in maths when they haven't seen their friends for months and then when they watch the news they're talking about thousands of people dying like kind of you just got to sit back and go that the first aid i need to apply here is my child is upset let's just let's just chill and ride this a bit and actually the thing that happened with your daughter when she was off school for six months and having the tutor that was actually something that my mom was talking to me about with the beginning but she was going look you know if one of your kids had broken their legs or glandular

fever or something you wouldn't be sitting there going oh i'm so sorry you're never going to catch up that's the end of that then yeah you just be going look bide your time pass these months get yourself better and then you go back to school but that's the great thing about is allowed us to experience other people's lives like for instance you know people who've got disabled kids like kind of like that will be happening to them all the time so we've all experienced that they're often taking months out of school so we've all got to feel that and the other thing i've really realized because i'm obsessed with middle age for women at the moment because i've just written the book is that most of the stuff that I've written

about in the book is how stuff that happens in the house is invisible we don't tell women's stories when you're young and out and about in a hot mess and racketing around town we have all the stories and all the tv shows and all the movies are about that as soon as you get married and you're at home with kids the door's shut and it's silent we don't really have stories that come from the house and domestica and how you keep a marriage together. There are no movies about how you stay married. There are no movies about raising children. There are no movies about giving birth, which is a mad psychedelic experience. This is just crazy to me.

And but I realize that. And then the arguments about housework and what you see in the systems that you have and the invisible labor and the second shift and all these things that we talk about feminism. But during lockdown, everybody lived the life of a middle aged woman. Everybody was just stuck at home everybody was trying to keep their relationships together everybody was obsessed with housework and cooking and how you just sort of do the stuff that bonds society together so we've all had this experience which i'm hoping that the next wave of feminism is going to address care work you know the people that keep society together these stories that don't happen sort of

that we don't hear about because they're behind closed doors so it's been a brilliant sharing experience we've all stepped into different lives in the last couple of months and that's an incredible experience yeah during that time it's also quite sometimes been quite frighteningly traditional I think and um I think for me I don't have a place at home where I work really all my work has normally been somewhere I go to and I've kept it out the house so at home I'm quite available and I really struggled with not having a space that was my own and I mean obviously as a writer you've been presumably writing and working from home the whole time and so your kids presumably have grown up always knowing that your room is your space yes but what were they like when they were little and you're working well this is I mean Virginia Woolf was on this

120 years ago if if anybody listening hasn't read Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own I massively recommend it I for years didn't read Virginia Woolf because I thought it was going to be very sort of high 19th century stuff it's literally like chatting to a mate I get the same thing with her that I get with Oscar Wilde and Herman Melville who wrote Moby Dick that they are people stuck in the wrong century and they feel like they are writing to

people in the future going I wish I was in the future where it was okay to be a lesbian and to be gay to talk about these things like i am stuck in the wrong century yeah and i'm putting these messages in a bolt to you so it's a brilliantly chatty book about what's the difference between being a man and a woman and working and she's walking around the colleges in cambridge i think it is and she's looking at the men's colleges where they have fine wines and fabulous dinners and these amazing rooms and then she goes back to the one female college where the food is horrible and the wine is shit and like the rooms are tiny and they don't have the best tutors and and she just wants a room of her own a room of one so she's like every woman needs a space

where she can go and shut the door and think yeah because the main thing and particularly if you have children is you don't have more than 10 minutes to be thinking about one thing before you're interrupted and it's the constant interruption and there's this whole thing i've to write about this in the book but like in literature there's this sort of famous thing about when um samuel taylor coleridge was writing um uh uh kublai khan that big epic poem and it's this famous thing that halfway through he was interrupted when a man from porlock knocked at the door and the fever dream was broken and he couldn't write the rest of the poem and like we all sort of mourn the fact that this poem should have been incredible but he was interrupted by this man knocking on the door and this is a huge thing in literature and i'm like the reason

they make such a deal about it in literature it's the only time a straight white man was ever interrupted whilst working like i know every woman will have been interrupted by 50 men from porlock a day usually shouting mom mom where's my shoes yeah coat covered i looked look again they're definitely there oh yeah they are yeah and then that's it your fever dream has broken so the female mind i would love to see scans of it you know that whole thing about women having to multitask it's because we have shattered brains like you can't think on one track for more than five minutes because you are interrupted so our brains are shattered and kind of working on 50 things at the same time yeah can be a bonus you know yeah it can be um in times like this you notice like kind of you know i see that my husband

just has to do one thing beginning to end yes and you can't be interrupted whereas i can you know and i suspect most women will do this if i'm cooking the tea i will be chopping an onion i will be answering an email i'll be looking for curtains on the internet i'll be cancelling a friend on my phone who's going through a divorce i'll be sewing up a hem i'll be like doing my child's shoelaces up you're doing literally 20 things at once i was going to do a thing about this last week i was like if i'm sitting on the toilet i will be cleaning as i'm sitting on the toilet so while you're sitting there doing a wee you can just like oh there's a j-cloth i'll squirt this wipe that while you're sitting there oh there's an empty toilet roll on the floor put that in the bin go online order some more toilet rolls like

kind of you're literally tidying even as you wee no second is wasted i know well that's why i wanted a podcast it's called spinning plates because that's literally how i feel sometimes with all these things just sort of doing all the time and you know I've I have a lot of children and I thought you know I thought oh brilliant you know there'll be more Mary and big family actually you'll have these five individuals and everything they do is really different and all the things they need out of life and all the time you spend and I mean you you grew up in a massive family but you've now only got your two kids yes but I think I think being part of a massive family is really defining I think it's like if you're from a big family you're that's

part of who you are yes your whole life so are there things you've taken from being in a big family that are part of how you've raised your family even though you're I absolutely thought I would have because I loved being from a big family yeah you're the eldest like me as well so baby on the hip quite often literally like kind of from 11 onwards that was like the babies were mine as soon as one was as soon as one was weaned i got it and then my mum would get pregnant again so so yeah so i felt that i knew loads about child care i was very confident about having kids i got pregnant at 24 which is i was 10 years younger than everybody else yeah you're like okay crack on with this i know how to do it and i fully intended i was going to

have five i was like five eight i think it's too many but five i was like i think that seems like a reason where so then i had one child and i was like might narrow that down to three and then i had the second one i was like i'm done because just the physics of it you've only got two hands so when you're crossing a road you've got one child in one hand one child in the other as soon as you've got a third you're trying to stop it from going into the road with your foot yeah and then the fourth you have no feet on the ground you're stopping them with your arms and legs and then five what you're stopping them with your head when they're trying to run out the street like it's the physics don't work man so i loved i mean coming from a big family you do feel like

it's kind of like being famous so there were like eight of us and if we went uptown yeah we had a big old battered volkswagen caravanette and we'd get out the car and everyone would stop and stare like kind of and like you need to sort of call ahead if you're going to go to a cafe because they need to clear half the room like kind of like you you can't a family of 10 you can't anonymously slink through the streets like you are noticeable like people stare at you and people will stay things like but why why are there eight of you and they presumed it was that we were catholic but my parents were just hippies and just sort of liked kids they kind kids they're like babies kind of lost interest once they got to about two

but then that was great because then we'd just go off on our own and we would do things like as soon as a new baby was born mum would come home and be like can we have the baby? and she would obviously go yes you may have this baby

I've just pushed it out it would like a break so we'd take it up the garden and we'd climb up the tree and then we'd pass the baby up the tree to the top branch and put it on the top of the tree like the little the little christmas fairy and that was like we were like you're in kids gang now you're one of us let's just be a little baby at the top of the tree

again memories that i look back on now and go thank god my mother didn't see that she scary and sweet at the same time we were careless i mean we were we were baby droppers that was our main profession for 10 years just dropping babies but that kind of slightly scrappy around the edges thing is sort of thing i quite love about big family actually i like the slight chaos of it and um oh you know i was nodding a lot with what you're saying because uh now that we are yeah parents to five i get i feel like elephants on parade when we go out yes and people are like oh this is going to be interesting if you sit down in a restaurant actually that's one thing about lockdown i loved is not having to worry about taking them out anywhere public yes especially when i've got a little noise one is just you know shouty when they get shouty yeah so mickey's gone

from being like the kind of cute little bubba to now he's like actually no i'm quite assertive and i've got things to say even though i don't have the words for it um so yeah when we go out in a band if we go on holiday or if we're doing anything i feel like we're like that music from uh jungle and just the door another one coming out and another one exactly and another one coming out and also the minor all boys and mostly redhead so you know quite conspicuous noticeable yeah very much the thing i love the most with the big family whenever my family come back together it's the cross-talking like the chaos of it like when i're at the sitcom about our family it was so hard to write what dialogue was actually like in a big family because you gain this amazing

ability you can absolutely be talking to someone listening to what they're saying replying to them but aware of a conversation on the other side of the room especially if someone's slagging you off they think very quietly and you'll be in the middle of the conversation with one sibling in the middle of a sentence and on the same breath turn and just go i did not do that mum was lying that never happened back to the same conversation and you would you can actually talk to 10 people at the same time yeah so i i think that might be one of the reasons why i just talk so much because i'm so used to being in a family where this wouldn't it's not an uninterrupted monologue i would be talking this much but everybody else would be talking this much and i would be responding to what they were saying yeah so

just with one person i swamp you and overwhelm you because i'm used to fighting against seven other people that's what i'm saying it's like a really defining thing if you're part of a big family and i think other people from big families will understand like okay yeah we're all part of this and i think as well in our experience when i had four i felt like a big small family and five tipped me into feeling like a small big family yes that makes sense very much so isn't it well i guess it comes down to cars doesn't it you can just about fit four in like kind of like an estate car if you've got those two rows but five it's time for a van like that's what the other thing i can diagnose people who come from big families because if you're out eating they will eat very

quickly because you're so used to someone just leaning across if you pause for a second going you don't want that sausage then spearing it with a fork and eating it in front of you so we had a system whereby as soon as the food was put on the table and once we had five kids we stopped having a table because we needed dining room for a bedroom so we all just ate on our laps so everyone would come in the front room with their plates and then you would pick your plate up and ostentatiously lick everything on it just going i've licked it so you can't have it and there would be some bold spit people who would like i don't care i'll eat it with spit on anyway but generally that protected your food from 90 of the people in the room just lick it or if you didn't have time to lick everything you just do a general spit on it like that's mine now dare you to have it so i can

always have fun if i go out for dinner with someone who's otherwise very sort of contained and posh and they eat really quickly, I'm like, you come from a big family, don't you? Yes, yes, I do. Have any of your siblings had lots of kids? No, most of them were horrified by my mother's. My mum had a series of absolutely terrible births. She obviously had that very strong thing

of forgetting what each birth was like quite rapidly afterwards because they were all successively more and more awful. So they just watched her coming back from the hospital more and more trashed each time and just went yeah we're not gonna have it so my sister's had one my brother's had one and everybody else has gone don't want kids yes just they probably thought they had billions of grandbabies and actually it's been no no whether the family tree is dwindling quite mightily i'm the majority of its branches right now i'm the breeder everybody just like, nah. It's a waste of time. Yeah, well, I think that's quite common as well. I've got a friend who's one of eight

and all of her and Sidney just had two. They're like, we're not going to go in for that kind of madcap thing. Have your kids said if they want to have a big family, if they delivered a review? My eldest is like, no, he doesn't want any kids. He loves having the babies around and he likes it, but he finds it all a bit exhausting i think he just finds it a bit tiring well it's so counter to your interest when you're 16 like kind of i

mean i left home on my 18th birthday because i just really felt that i had had enough of children at that point i was exactly the same there's actually a lot we've got in common because i left at 18 as well i had young siblings and i just i'm one of six in my family but not all in the same house but the oldest by quite a long way and especially when i started getting into music um i couldn't wait to get out because the home was still very much routiney about the little ones lives and then getting up early and i wanted to lie in and sleep and i wanted to go to gigs and i wanted nobody looking out for when i was home well it was baths for me i'd come back from a gig and those are the days when everybody smoked indoors so you'd come back from a gig sort of laminated in nicotine like your clothes would they'd be stiff

and stink and you'd have to put them through the wash twice for them to not smell the fags because everybody would be smoking so i'd come back stinking and i'd want to have a bath but we had a very sort of clanky boiler and if i'd run a bath they would have woken everyone up and babies would have started crying so i just remember lying there just going i just need to leave home so i can have a bath when i come back from the gig that was was my entire ambition. It wasn't sex and drugs and rock and roll. I just wanted to have a bath. A room of one's own. Yes, again, a bath of one's own.

An en suite of one's own. That was the dream. Yeah, being able to go to the toilet when you wanted and not having to join some kind of queuing system. And also my family had this thing that you had to read on the toilet. We were all big readers. So you had to, before you went to the toilet,

you would have to find your book. So they'd just be like, kind of someone would have their hand on the door of the toilet going, I've reserved that toilet, but they'd be rifling through the book you went to the toilet, you would have to find your book. So they'd just be like, kind of, someone would have their hand on the door of the toilet going, I've reserved that toilet, but they'd be rifling through the bookcase next to the toilet going, but I need to find a book. I can't poo without a book. And you'd be like, just take Robinson Crusoe.

Just hurry up. Come on, I'm on a schedule here. And they'd be like, no, I've read Robinson Crusoe. Where's Little House on the Prairie? And you'd just be standing there for ten minutes. Did you just have one loo? Yes. Blimey.

I know. One loo amongst ten people. Yeah, it was brutal. It it was brutal it was really it sounds in a way almost like your childhood was a bit like a long lockdown all the time then if you're all at home all the time then that's what you're doing well that was the yeah i managed i've got so many columns out of my childhood at the beginning of lockdown because like i know they've done that yeah being locked down so like if you're in a very small it's a three-bedroom council house in wolverhampton so we had in the end we had one kid had the dining room one child was under the stairs next to the gas meter with a tower with a curtain across the front of it i've said towel because we used the curtain as a towel because

it was right next to the kitchen so he'd be lying in bed trying to be private and we'd just go just gonna use your curtain as a towel eddie and wipe our hands on it it was just a disease curtain and uh but you learn things like the landing can be a fabulous room of its own if you're pushed enough and you don't have enough space you can like go i'm on the landing's mine now for 20 minutes i'm going to enjoy this fabulous space on my own lying face down on the floor and crying and looking under the sofa you will find beautiful formations of dust and moldy fruits that have been there for ages and it's like if you've been locked at home for a long time and not going out like looking every beautiful coral reef you can try and find the magic in dust and

sort of moldy fruits under the sofa it feels like i've gone on holiday that was fabulous and refreshing thank you so um when you had your your babies what was going on in your work were you always so determined to keep working did your parents work when you were growing up no they're both disabled okay my dad's got osteoarthritis he used to be a fight he was in a band who were almost famous and he always thought they would be famous again so the all of our childhood was him he had written five songs in 1978 and he would re-record them every two years in whatever the most fashionable genre of the time was so we had baggy versions acid house versions versions that were clearly inspired by sting of these same eight songs wow and every two years he'd send them off to all the record companies in london and my job because i'd got a calligraphy

pen for christmas was to write island records kind of the record yeah the address on the jiffy bag and send it off and then six months later he'd get all the rejection notes but we always thought he was going to be famous again we'd leave this council house and we'd live in a fabulous house by the seaside to the point where i carefully learned the names of all of bob geldof's children because i absolutely presumed that within a year we would have moved to london and i would be at school with bob geldof's children and they would be my friends like it was that was how how absolutely certain everyone was that it would happen yeah and it never did so by the time i was 13 it was very obvious that that wasn't going to happen so i was like well i will have to make money yeah so that was when i started writing when I was 13 but I suppose the writing wasn't necessarily about just making

money it's like an escape and a place you could go that was always your space and control like I did and also the first stuff I wrote was about sort of our family and stuff and like when you've everybody's got an opinion about what the family is and everybody's opinion is different you're like well if I write it down then that means I've won yeah that's kind of what storytelling feels like kind of my version will be the truthful version yeah I will win so so yeah it was a way of sort of finding space and having control and being able to sort of be on your own for a bit also at the point where I started writing a novel I could say to my mum I can't know the dishwasher because I'm writing a novel and she had to accept that so that was that was a big move there um so when you heard your kids was it sort of being columnists?

It's before you started writing books again. Yeah, so I'd written a book when I was 16. I'd been a music journalist for a bit at Manor Jamaica. And then I got a column in the Times when I was 18, which I now know was quite unusual. But at the time, I'd just faxed them a column and went, Hi, and they went, Would you like a column? And I said

yes and it was only like 10 years later when someone was asking me how I got into the industry that I told them this story and they went and that's not usually how it works and I was like oh yeah no you're right that is quite unusual so so that was very lucky um and so yeah I was a columnist at the time doing two columns a week so that was easy to fit in I had a week off after I had the first kid and I don't think I had any time off after the second one because I could just breastfeed tits are really flexible particularly if you've got shit tits if you've got perfect lovely tits they're not that flexible so you will have to have the kid in front of you but if you've got knackered old kind of spaniel ear tits which I've always had you can

bend them around corners they're quite hose like so I can kind of tuck the baby they really are they're incredibly flexible they're extendable so you can just tuck the baby under an arm sort of dog leg the tip back round into its mouth and then just type over its head with a laptop so um so that was i gave you know if you think your tits are shit you haven't yet found their purpose they are well i do agree that with breastfeeding it's like an amazing way to be able to do that and multitask on something else so especially if you get those baby with that as well especially if you get those baby bjorn i got these for my brother when he got his kid those baby bjorn carriers that are the most minimal and brilliant you can strap them in facing you and just plug them into it so you can go shopping and the only time it goes wrong

is if someone comes over and goes what a lovely baby i know and then they realize you're feeding yes and they get repelled backwards like literally like a force field like yeah i know that happened to me when mickey was a lot longer and it was like wow i was really powerful i know really just on the pavement they kind of came over like oh yeah literally like they're being pulled backwards on wheels like i withdraw yeah that was pride i didn't mean to look um so yeah when you're writing those surely you need to be able to have that space but what happens when you've got i mean little little ones wanting you all the time i mean you've written so much about feminism did that kind of go alongside becoming a mum or is that something that was borne out from before that or is it i became a feminist watching my parents because they were incredibly sexist so there was eight of us five girls and

three boys and the legend is that they only had so many children because they just wanted a boy so the first three kids were girls then they had my brother but by that point they'd got three girls and they were like well he will be swamped by these girls so we need to make him a brother then they had another two girls and then they finally got a second boy and then the last one was just i don't know just like last last bang on the bang on the drum um so and he was and there was definitely a distinction between girl jobs and boy jobs like girls did the cooking the cleaning they're looking after the kids like sort of everything and the boys just had to empty the bins which is such an easy job yeah that is it's just a job it's not a job it's just a thing you do um and my fury at the age of 11 observing this i was

just like and i didn't know what feminism was i've never heard of it but i was just like this is boys and girls are being treated differently and that is incorrect we have the same dna we're in the same house we're in the same century we have the same parents but boys are being treated differently from girls this is incorrect so when i found jermaine greer and she explained what feminism was because my dad was sort of my dad when he would mention well basically if my mum ever proffered an opinion or criticized him he'd go all right jermaine greer pipe down so my presumption was that feminism was just my mum being an arse uh and when i found out that was slightly more complicated and useful than that

i was like this is useful like this is a good idea this is good for me and in terms of writing even though i had kids i'm really lucky because if you grow up in a house of chaos yeah just having two kids and just having to think about two things a week to write is a cinch like you're just you just sort of i think i think the main mistake that most writers make is that they don't they sit down to write but they're also thinking at the same time you don't sit down and think you've already know what you want to write you've been thinking about it all week yeah it percolates isn't it yes and when so when you sit down to write you're literally just describing the idea yeah and that's where so many people go wrong they sit down they're like right now i'm going to write something what

am i going to write well you're never going to write something it's impossible to think in type at the same time i think no know what you're going to write and then sit down and write it well i think that's the beauty of the the way a brain works actually as well as that if you care about something it is just sort of formulating all the time and i've really learned to trust that that process like no just let it do its thing and by the time i come to do that scary thing or that important thing i've probably done more prep than i realized well there's a brilliant study on this they were talking about so it's so i learned about it when you're writing fiction and you're creating characters and in the in the sort of brain modeling they call it goleming so you could

probably imagine if your mum was here what she'd say but you can sort of imagine what she'd be saying you could write dialogue for her if you had to you've got your mum in your head and it's the same when you create characters you create a character until you know what they would say and that's actually it's not a conscious part of your brain that does that it's your subconscious you create these you know you've got all your friends in your head to the people you know in your head and you know how they react and when you create fictional characters they after a while are free of your conscious thought they're percolating away in your subconscious because you talk to fiction writers all the time and they go yeah i had these characters and around

about chapter five they started doing all this weird stuff that i didn't know about and that is your subconscious has gone and created them and you're not conscious of it at all you can actually create people in your head that's very exciting yeah so this is amazing because then it also ties in very strongly with mental illness it's schizophrenics and psychotics who hear voices that's just what their brain is doing but they've processed in a different way and there's amazing cases of mathematicians in the 18th century who couldn't consciously solve problems but they would talk to other people they had in their heads who would solve these theorems for them and like they they consciously could not do this it was parts of maths that they didn't know about but the

subconscious golems that they'd set up in their head had been doing all this work subconsciously and could then present them with the with the solution so your subconscious is incredibly powerful yeah and if you just tell your subconscious to do something as you were saying like on thursday i'm gonna have to do this thing that i'm a bit scared about subconscious work on this for the next few days by the time you get to thursday your subconscious has gone i've thought about it all i know what to do here's what we're doing now yeah so talking to your head is a really important thing have conversations with yourself you are your head is an army and I think as a woman you get very used to just telling different parts of your brain okay you're going to work on that we need to have a solution by Thursday on Saturday we're doing this so work

out what the best way is to do that and you get to Saturday and your brain's like worked it all out here you go do you I actually have since I was little I actually do talk to myself as well which I think that probably is the other person the colony person it's so important do you i actually have since i was little i actually do talk to myself as well which i think that probably is the other person the colony person it's so important do you talk to your future self as well no no i don't think i talked to my future that would probably be quite handy it's so useful i don't know if i have a future self and this is really important this is the big advice that i give to all women talk to your future self because your future if you start talking to your future self it starts saying to you well i like when i i was when i started talking to my future self like where are you

how old are you my future is i'm 60 i was like where are you she was like i'm living in wales i'm really skinny and tough and i'm carrying a sheep around on my back and like kind of and i can identify 60 different kinds of bats and i grow all my own veg i was like okay so now i know that's where i'm heading towards i liked her she got on with me she was very happy there and I was like okay well that's where I'm walking towards then that's what's happening like kind of oh I like that idea very much it's v useful it's really nice you sort of just before you go to bed 10 minutes before you fall asleep just like imagine your future self it's really interesting yeah I'm definitely going to try that I don't think I spend enough time thinking about future things like that at all um well you've got five very big reasons I was gonna

say I think when you've got little ones as well it's very uh the pace of life is quite fast and you don't really have a lot of time to um think too much about the here and now let alone the what may be and that's really when your kids are little you have to be very present but like that's the thing again i'm just obsessed with middle age at the point where your kids start becoming independent yeah there's this very common thing of women going on you know that whole emptiness thing and so many women get into a depression don't know what to do but if you've been talking to your future self your future self sitting there going the minute the last one leaves this is what we're doing here's the plan and you start looking forward to it you don't have this thing of like being kind of shell-shocked and like i'd never planned what i was going to do when the kids left

yeah because you haven't been talking to your future self but if you're talking to your future self future self's like it's ace they've gone you've got all your spare time it's amazing you're kind of getting there a little bit sooner than a lot of people though because presumably when you had your first baby not a lot of your peers were having i was the youngest by 10 years yeah so you're kind of slightly ahead of the curve if you're already thinking like that because your kids are leaving home but your friends have probably still got kids yeah they've all got single yeah yeah so it's like so yeah i've become middle-aged earlier than you normally would which i'm kind of enjoying it's great it means i get to write the book before everybody else gets there and kind of like give

them the advice before they hit it and um do your girls read your writing and no one wants to read a book where their mum's talking about masturbating i've had to read my mum's sex scenes in her books it's really how was there's one phrase that just I can't get away from where it says something like, he pegged her like wet washing and I can't... The book's really good. Don't be off by that, but it's like... For a daughter to read that is different.

All other readers can enjoy that sexy scene, but has it ruined washing for you? Can you peg out washing? Do you feel aroused when you peg out washing? Do you think about your mum and you're for you can you peg out washing do you feel aroused when you peg out washing do you think about your mum and you're aroused when you peg out washing how dark does this get i just decided to stop pegging washing i don't i don't want to confront any of this mum i've bought a tumble dryer it's nothing personal i expect to future me and she doesn't want to look at it either it has six year old me i'm still not pegging up washing it will never

happen pegs are ruined it's kind of annoying because obviously i wrote a lot about the difficult teenage years in my books and they're sort of teenage girls when i especially subject for about 10 years so when the girls started going through problems that i'd written about in books i'd start giving them advice and i go well i've tackled this kind of more eloquently on page 122 of how to build a girl you might want to read that and they'd be like no and i tested them on the fifth book the dedication is it says to my two girls if you read this come to me and i will tell you the pin number of my credit card and you can buy whatever you want and that was published in 2017 and they've still not come to me so that's absolute proof they're not reading this stuff my little test it was like yep they're still not they're still not come true on that on that one

and how do you find them in teenagers because teenagers get quite a bad rap i think but oh god i i just think this gen i mean there's stuff that our generations had to learn just stuff about intersectionality racism sexism homophobia kind of lgbt issues and stuff that like if you were brought up as a good liberal you were like no i get these things i'm not a baddie i'm on your side like i want to help with these things but we've had to learn so much of it yeah whereas they just have it in their bones yeah kind of that conversation has been there from day one so like kind of they will be teaching me stuff that i'm like but i'm a liberal i don't need to be taught this stuff and they're like no this is how we talk about these things now this is how you

need to look at these things which has been really useful and they're just so good and hard working and anxious and like their lives look so difficult ahead of them like i'm so on their side i don't understand this whole ragging on the younger generation like kind of they're just you know i'm always on the side of teenagers anyway like kind of for women particularly it's interesting because whatever the problems are of teenage girls in any decade it tells you what the problems are that feminism need to address because if you're transitioning from a generally genderless child to a full-grown adult woman the things that teenage girls find difficult or are scared of tells you what the problems are of being an adult woman now and we don't at the moment make being a full-grown woman look like an appealing job

and if you look at the instances of mental health and self-harm and eating disorders and things where girls are trying to remain childlike and not become adult women yeah that tells you there's something very toxic about being an adult woman which you can observe everywhere like there's no woman in the world that hasn't come in for massive backlash and criticism and cancellation at some point however good you are whatever you try to do you will have been then regretted by the right for being fat or strident or a bitch or unsympathetic and by the left for not being progressive enough or making mistake or kind of you know not sort of addressing everything all the time and so you know there's no i was recently i was writing a column and i was trying to think of a woman who everyone loves and agrees he's great

and has a happy life and is just kind of your goals i can't think of anyone there's no shorthand for a woman that just you know there's no female david attenborough where you just go everyone loves him he's great you wouldn't criticize david attenborough would be sad when he dies there's no one like that other than the queen who i think doesn't count because you just inherit your job um um that's that tells us there's something wrong about sort of you know these are the works of feminism that i sort of apply myself to because girls being an adult woman is amazing yeah it's hard yeah but it's incredible i wouldn't want to be a boy i wouldn't want to be a man so one of the things we need to do is go how do we make teenage girls not be scared to become women to want to join our ranks to want to do these things

to join the fight to have their joy um so these are the these are the things that i sort of think we need to tackle at the moment because otherwise it just isn't fun to be a teenage girl yeah no i think there's a lot to unpick really because um I mean even the fact that feminism is still a thing is so disappointing right you know that's been the dialogue since I was a teenager and it's still the same sort of conversation really although you see things progress I was thinking about you yesterday because I knew you were coming today and just thinking about some of the shit that you got when you first got famous I remember I interviewed you at the time and like yeah you're my first actual interview was I really yeah how was I was I gentle and kind we had lots of fun uh we tried to steal champagne from a bar do you remember that sounds about right yeah um no I remember having fun it was really fun

um but yeah it's crazy and there's actually been a few things that have kind of mirrored because you got introduced to what you do for a living now when you were 16 and started working at Melody Maker and at 16 I met a Melody Maker journalist who introduced me to the guy I started a band with um so I think we both kind of have a similar start into the we were in the same place and I remember some of the stuff that was written about you like kind of they would go on about the shape of your head oh all the time rhombus head yeah they'd said that people at school called me rhombus face I'd never had a nickname at school wasn't true, but it didn't matter that it wasn't true because it had been written, I think, you know, a bloke.

And then they thought that was really funny. So that just went on and on. And you were a 16-year-old girl being bullied for the shape of your face. And it was because you were just staggeringly beautiful and they didn't know how to cope with it. Very generous, but it's definitely not true. It is true. We know the people who were being written about in the music press generally.

They were just blokes in anoraks like you were this beautiful clever funny 16 year old girl and they were just it was bullying like kind of it was really unpleasant and you wouldn't get that now i don't think you're right i don't think you would or if you did there are so many feminist blogs and so many female writers now yeah call out who would call you have that called out and they would defend you yeah you've got an army as a woman there's still so many things that feminism needs to do but because feminism it's not an official thing i keep explaining this to people who don't sort of maybe get it like feminism isn't an official thing there's no god of feminism there's no books there's no rules that's carry a card or anything it's an idea we all had yeah we all chip in yeah and like now because of social

media which has many bad sides but the good side is if anything bad happens to a woman, there are millions of women who will step forward and go, no, don't do this, look at what you're doing here, question yourself, I will defend her. But it was the, you know, I was just thinking about those times and how difficult it was because the film that I've done, How to Build a Girl That's Out, is about when I was a teenage music journalist

and I joined the dark side for a bit. I turned up like, hurrah for music! I'm a fan! And then I was told that it was gauche to be a fan like that's not how you should write about music we're here to destroy people and to take the piss it was very much the tone of the time there wasn't it all writing was like it was awful like really brutal but it was bullying i look back now like bands would be chosen and like kind of depending if you were one of the bands that was chosen as a lesser band yeah

you could be brutal yeah you could like a band like ned's atomic dustbin you could be as horrible as you want the levelers well i know that actually in the in the thing i saw where you interviewed yourself you talked about but probably one of your lower points of writing where you said you did you pretended you did a sort of eulogy at ned's atomic dustbin's funeral i was the priest as a review yeah as the review the review of the album i mean it's really funny i didn't even listen to the album i'm not in those atomic dust in those days you didn't even have to listen to the record to review it so i just it was just like you just write eight andrews and then just been i pretended i was the priest at their funeral

i was throwing earth onto their dead faces just going well what a waste your life was why did you even bother sorry i know it's so familiar though as a tone because at that time as well there was so there's the music press were really really cruel they were the people that are supposed to be the fans picking you up but that was the place where it was like coming at you with knives and then for looking outwards for being a young woman it was the time of things like the girly show and all the lads mags and all this kind of thing where to be empowered it was supposed to be showing your boobs for blokes and being totally cool with it and if you're going to be equal to boys it was being equal to the sort of lad side of boys

drinking loads of pints well you became a ladette a ladette yeah in terms of language is incredibly interesting so if you were a girl that wanted to drink and have sex and go and have fun and tell jokes there was no word for a girl who was like that they had to take a boy word yeah and call you ladette like those were not seen as female attributes you were becoming male to do that and just the restriction of that when you're a teenager and also i remember very much the sort of persona that i constructed was i was a swash buckling dame i was abroad because if i'd gone in there as the innocent 16 year old in pigtails that i was i would have got crushed and i knew that on some subconscious level but you know if you present as like i was a virgin when i started at melody maker but i turned up as this kind of sexually

knowing kind of like dame that was really the mood at the time as well i mean i would do exactly the same thing at 16 of just like i was reading more magazine and i was like this is where i'm supposed to be heading you know i'm supposed to know about all these positions and be extraordinary at all that stuff because that means I'll be respected or score points or whatever I'm supposed to be. It was almost like a... I can remember watching Twin Peaks and the scene where Sherilyn Fenn...

Ties a cherry stalk in a knot with her friend. And I was like, I'll have to know how to do that. I will. It's actually quite easy. It's so easy. I've got a piece of piss. But she's auditioning to be... First, OK, let's break this scene down.

First of all, she's auditioning to be a prostitute at the local brothel. The fact that this astonishingly beautiful teenager would have to audition, I don't think there's, like, how... No, no. You don't need a rigorous testing process here. She will get custom.

It's fine. Cheryl and Fen isn't on some kind of, like, refusals list. She's not on the subs bench. And secondly, every girl I know thought, that's a thing I'll have to learn. At some point someone will want me to tie a cherry stalk in a knot with my tongue and my career and my future life maybe my marriage will depend on this it's and like you know the lists of all the blowjob

techniques that you have to learn and all this kind of stuff and you will have to have anal sex and all this kind of stuff and you're just like this seems like a very big to-do list how about just a snuggle yeah like kind of i think i was doing exactly the same thing of trying to build that armor and i was really quite brittle about things i'm very black and white and i i love that and that's rubbish and if you like that band you're an idiot and i remember i had to grow out of so much stuff and so many ways of being when people say now oh i met you when you were 18 i i'm waiting for them to say and you were horrible yes i feel like i must have been pretty horrible but what you have

to do and it's a really common thing like so the whole notion of cool is you know leather jacket shades cigarette monosyllabic like yeah no like kind of it's cynicism yeah i've seen it all i've seen the world you can't shock me and that is something you do when you're very innocent and inexperienced and you put on the armor of cynicism to make yourself seem worldly and for a certain amount of time that will be useful to you because it does protect you to a certain extent like you know i've seen everything you can't impress me leave me alone but there comes a point very quickly where the armor just becomes like a cage you are trapped in it you can't grow in it and you can't dance in it you can't be joyful you can't you can't have

the balls to just go i like this no i'm a fan i had to keep it secret for three years that i loved crowded house more than any other band when i was at melody maker and that was finally how i met my husband because we we were both on tube one night he went can i tell you a big secret and in the 90s if a man was going to tell you a secret it could get quite dark and i was like yeah all right go on he went i really like crowded house and i went i do too oh and he was like should we go home watch the live dvd it's like yeah and now we're married but that was like those were the big secrets that you kept yeah you loved beautiful things that you were a fan that you were an enthusiast but it's such a relief isn't it when you let go of all that and you realize that being cool is so overrated and not even a real thing actually it's a very thin

cheap unpleasant experience yeah like it doesn't lead to anything like kind of you don't meet friends being cool you know you don't have the best nights out of your life being cool the all the best nights of your life are where you're just a joyful idiot just so true just talking and dancing and singing and falling over and going let's steal a boat yeah yeah no it's so true it's it's such an important important change that happens and you're so relieved when you're at the other side of it, actually. And then I think when you have teenagers, you just have to... It's not the same, but you have to let them do all the same sort of arc in their own way

because it's still part of what growing up is all about. Well, you really need to have grown out of being cool by the time you get teenagers because I thought, I'm like, well you know i'm a clever can-do lady i understand a lot about psychology and stuff so when my kids are teenagers and they have problems i'm going to be i'm going to be i'm going to be a cool but not a cool mom but a cool mom i'm going to get this shit i'm going to help them out we're going to have these great talks that is not what your teenagers want they want you to be just a lovely idiot you just need to be a fluffy like a lovely dairy cow called daisy and you just need to moo at them

like if they come to you with a problem and you're like we'll do this and do that no no no they'll get angry with you they'll be just like you just think i'm stupid you're always telling me what to do you rule my life you're like but you came to me with a problem when i gave you a solution surely that was what was happening here and they're too young to understand they're just like i hate you and they slam the door whereas when they come to you with a problem and you turn all of your brain off and going oh that sounds shit oh i see really upset what are you gonna do bab then they start coming up with solutions but you have to just pretend to be stupid like when they come up with a solution you're like that's so clever i never thought of that and just trundle off again and they're like oh mum's such a lovable idiot and you're like i'm not i'm so clever i pretended to be stupid

i wonder if that role is easier when with women anyway because we're not as bothered about i don't know the shift of being from a sort of younger man to a dad man i think for us it's maybe you're not shrugging as much yourself off if you say i'm not cool yes no totally yeah i mean it's hard i mean once you've pushed a baby out you can't really ever pretend you're not shrugging as much yourself off if you say I'm not cool. Yes, no, totally. Yeah, I mean, it's hard. I mean, once you've pushed a baby out, you can't really ever pretend you're cool again. It's not a cool experience. No.

I was mooing through that as well. They told me to be quiet. I was doing my moos. Yeah, they were like, shh. I thought you were allowed to be noisy. They were like, you're putting, apparently my moo was very penetrating. I was putting off other women in other wards from my mooing.

They were like, shh. Did you find it hard when you were sort of, you know, raising a family to how your, you know, desire as a feminist to sort of weave those things together? Because there's a lot of very traditional expectations, even now, I think, on the roles that are at home. I'm enormously lucky in that my husband was the first proper feminist that I met.

Like, he wrote a piece about, I remember in the 90s, back to the 90s, but I remember in the 90s like everybody had Brazilians. It was like, it was that sort of, that was the sort of first boom of online porn so everybody had to be waxed. And he wrote a piece for Time Out, he has a columnist there and about just sort of like why? Like kind of let's just talk about how great PVK can be. Like kind of save yourself some money Save yourself some money. And it was hugely controversial at the time. No one was talking about that. It was all just lads, lads, lads, lads. And that was the first time I thought,

oh my God, this is interesting. Talking about why we think women should be a certain way and questioning it is really, really useful. Look at the fuss that it's caused. I like this. So I'm very lucky that I've got a feminist who's just as interested in cooking and cleaning and kind of running a tight household he's got all these little systems we argue about how to best load the dishwasher but that's universal

that's normal yeah so there's no point in putting a pan in a dishwasher because in the space a pan takes up in a dishwasher you can put 10 plates pan takes one second to wash just wash the pan and put 10 plates in there that's saving you time that's a battle that's raged for 20 years that's like this he's not ceding on that well weirdly i go from both sides of it sometimes i'm the one who washes out the pan and other times i'd rather put the you know the pan the dishwasher and just be lazy what if it's a crusty pan what kind of pan are we talking uh if it's really quite i quite like the fact that the dishwasher will make it all the crustiness soften and then I can clean it easily. Yes, now that is true.

I use it as a sort of deep soak type thing. Yes, and it is satisfying to just... I mean, it is like a cupboard that you put all your problems in and you walk away from it. There is something very beautiful about it. But yeah, I think if the government are ever going to do anything, they do need to... If they put out official guidelines for loading a dishwasher...

Yeah, it would be helpful. It would be down to every family to disagree with them, but at least you'd have a base point where you go well this is what science has said i need science to say this british science needs to lead the way and actually tell you okay you should load a dishwasher um do you think you would be a different kind of household if you were raising boys i think about this a lot yeah yeah it's an interesting one isn't it because i think about it obviously i've only got one gender as well well i observed that when the kids were younger all the mums with girls had an easier time because girls would just go off and play on their own with their dollies and they'll just play

together whereas boys have to be taken out you have to do things with them yeah it's like dogs or something so i also observed that all the mums that had uh girls would gender the mums the mums that had boys would be thinner than the mums with girls because they just have to be out playing football with them they would the mums with boys because they just have to be out playing football with them the mums with boys had jeans and they would go and play football with them even if they hated it, the mums with girls could wear a dress put on a stone and just watch them playing games

and I was like, I'm glad I have girls but when you get to teenage years, I think that's where you have to do the spade work with girls because it's so complicated being a girl boys are like dogs, girls are like cats so boys just come home and they're like I just played football with my friends and girls will come back and go stacy said this and then honey said that and kitty's having a party she hasn't invited me but her other friends

invited me and then i heard like kind of polly slagging off someone else and then there's this whole thing here and then blossom sent me a dm but i don't know what it means and it's this spider's web of girl intrigue and hurt and status and secrets and sort of working out who you are that is a full-time job for the first couple of years it's really hard because to work out how to be a girl and this is why most of my books are called how to be a woman how to build a girl it's such an act of construction yeah a woman in a way that boys i think it is a lesser act um so those years are intense a friend of mine quit her job at the Times when her kids hit their teenage years and my kids are still really young.

And I was like, why are you quitting? She was like, well, that's where it gets hard with the teenage years. And I was like, don't tell me that. I'm in potty training. I thought the teenage years were easy. They can make their own breakfast. Surely that's where it gets good. And she's like, no, that's where you have to be there. I agree, actually. They come home and if they can't tell you then why they're upset, they will just bury it for two weeks and it becomes a problem. You've just got to be there all the time with teenagers. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And they think they don't want you but they need you a lot. They really do, yeah. And it's like for my teenager, like bringing him down from his room and spending time with him and just making it so that he, I sort of have to keep checking in on him really. Because if he left, he'd just be in his room all the time and I could probably not really see him except to like put some food around the door something a slice of ham under the door exactly we'd eat this written on it

yeah yeah you have to be right and also the thing that you have to learn is saying like what are you thinking that will make a teenager angry often because they often don't know what they're thinking i know they just feel something. And to talk about emotions, you can't often have a head-on conversation. You need to be off doing something together. You need to go for a drive. You need to be doing some gardening together or cooking together. And then they can just, while they're busy with something else, they can talk about how they feel. But asking them what they think, it often ends really badly because they don't know and they get angry and they're really aware.

I think it's so unfair that as a teenager teenager you know that your parents are older than you and know more stuff than you because you're you know that they're constantly looking at you and kind of pitting you a bit and sort of going yeah i remember being young and confused like you like kind of it's the imbalance is really unfair yeah it's very difficult to negotiate so you need to be doing something where you feel equal yes you need to be doing a thing together so they feel equal and they can talk about their food and i think you're right but not always feeling you need to solve every problem sometimes things just need to be aired and talked about and let them say what how they feel and just sort of going acknowledging that that's hard rather than

actually going well what can we do and how can we solve that and let's book you into this and do that and the biggest mistake i made in my in my teenage parenting of teenagers was i come from a family where if you have a problem you either solve it straight away or you just ignore the feelings and you just make a joke and you sing that you just you jolly yourself out of your mood you just don't have moods because there was no room to have moods with that amount of children in the house and I kept trying to jolly my kids out of their moods and that became really destructive you just I was scared of them being sad I didn't want them to be sad I was like I will make a joke we will do something we'll go somewhere i'll buy you a thing don't be sad and that's the signal to a child is well my sadness is scary like i know if i can't talk about my sadness needs to be a secret

and that's where it can go really really wrong so it took me a while to learn to not be scared of sadness which i was i don't just sit and go you're sad i'm not scared of it sit here tell me how you feel you can cry you can be angry angry me it's fine i'm not scared i'm just here but that that was a difficult year learning that that was sort of that was something i hadn't read anywhere so put all that in a new book as well don't be scared of sadness yeah sit with your kids when they're sad and go it's fine but then also the way that things are talked about keeps changing because now the advice for parents about those things is to say there's nothing wrong with the feeling knowledge the feeling it's the behavior you can change but the feelings right but i don't think that was always no you know things keep changing don't they about was there any psychology when we were growing up

like it was no i don't think so no i don't feel it was when we were around tonight when we were little no and i i mean i think there's also i don't know if you do this as well but when i learn something new about about raising the kids i'll think oh no i've been getting it wrong all this time and why didn't i try that and it's like a constantly evolving i've got reactive thing well by the time they're raising their kids i'm sure our understanding of psychology will be so much greater than it is now that's just the way that human beings work yeah there's so many things that we still don't understand and that they will they will understand and we will seem like primitive people yeah yeah um and i'm quite looking forward to just being able to sort of finally hand it over to younger generation go yep you are totally wiser than me you crack on i'm

going to sit here and knit and cackle looking forward to my hag years where i just sit there knitting surrounded by chickens going with the sheep on your back with the sheep on my back chickens around yes um yeah the thing i want to ask you is how how do you think you encourage feminist boys because obviously in my house I'm the only example of a woman they have yes and sometimes I my reaction normally is to be to be really very very capable I think well if they see that I'm very strong and very capable that's surely that's a great example of a woman in their life but then I think but actually maybe that just will make them think that when I'm I'm always the one that can solve everything and they can just sort of loll about

and not tidy up the mess or any more than taking the bins out so I've written so when I wrote how to be a woman and then became Britain's fourth most famous feminist in North London for 2011 only uh whenever I would do live shows the third question I would get asked in any q a was but what about men what about boys and i'd be like i'm all about women i am team tits i have just been 10 years thinking about this like i just what about men they'll figure out it'd be the ultimate irony of feminism would it not if having sorted out women women then had to sort out men like they just have to sort this out themselves but the more i've thought about it like the the core definition of feminism is believing in the social personal political and economic equality of the sexes yeah and once you and obviously my first thing was like okay how are women unequal within this but there are ways that men are unequal in gender as well so because that's the patriarchy it's like about gender roles

yeah so and feminism has tackled the inequalities of women so i went on twitter two years ago and just went lovely men of twitter like kind of we're always talking about the problems that women have what about the problems that men have and i thought it'd be like a couple of hours and be sort of fairly interesting it went on for a week wow i got tens of thousands of replies it became a news story in newspapers across the world because what was uncovered was that the gender inequalities that particularly for the younger generation so you hear men saying things like feminism's gone too far it's easier to be a young woman than it is to be a young man now women are doing better in education women do better in employment

and they're right i think it is easier to be one because we invented feminism we've invented this network that allows that whatever problem you have you can go out there and talk about it and women will help you men have not invented this network they don't talk about their problems so when they were asked this it was the first time they talked about it so they'll talk about things like um some of them would just seem silly but you're like oh no that's interesting they're like i can't dress sexy for my girlfriend or wife like my wife can like put on something really beautiful and i know she's in the mood and it makes me fancy her but if i want to look attractive for my wife what can i do all there is is like those comedy posing pouches from Ann Summers that say like

beware the beast or it's like of an elephant and at first I was like lol lol lol that's quite funny yeah but then it was like if you flip reversed it and like the only if Ann Summers was selling things for women that just made your genitals seem amusing or like a beast we'd be horrified right like kind of like that's just I mean to be honest i would quite like it if my pants said beast on it but still it's like the variety of stuff so men can't make themselves attractive like kind of they would talk about the clothes just going it's so boring to be a man all you everything you wear is like gray or beige or black like kind of women i know that it can often be a burden for a woman to open up a wardrobe and go who have i got to be today yeah but we can

choose from a variety we can be a different person every day of the week like today we're business like today we're like a lovely mum today it's a picnic today we're a beautiful dairy maid today we're glamorous men just open the wardrobe every day it's like i'm simon i will put on some trousers yeah which i think is why they're so into fancy dress parties like it's the only chance they get to express themselves yeah and experiment with being someone else there's a spaces to being a man whereas a woman gets to be a million different things that's great for a man then it got really sad it was the men were saying things like if i'm out in a playground and i see a child fall over and hurt itself i can't go and help it because men are threatening i will have to look around and find a woman another man going there

was a 13 year old girl got locked out of her house and she was walking up and down my street crying i couldn't go and help her i had to get my girlfriend because men are threatening and then you think about this if you're a boy like when you're a boy child you can go and help another child as soon as you get to 13 14 your voice breaks you get a bit taller and then you throw color into it as well if you're black or brown you're suddenly a threat yeah to be seen as a weapon like kind of and humans want to help each other that is absolutely innate to being a human but boys can't do that they're seen as a threat and i suddenly realized well there is such a thing as female privilege because whatever the things i fear in life i know no one's ever been scared of

me no i know that my my 16 year old thinks about that a lot he's very he's not the sort of uh traditional football playing boy he's quite sensitive and empathetic and he's not not into those like the sporty all this sort of traditional boy things is not really where he found himself and he really struggles a lot with that idea of the sort of toxic masculinity and being seen as a threat he's had it where you know old women have said on the bus you know are you supposed to be out and hoodies and all this kind of thing and he's found it really unnerving it's it and that's just a terrible thing to tell a human being like kind of like that's you know that that crushes a part of your spirit and so you're saying toxic masculinity so many people misunderstand the phrase is toxic or the patriarchy they think

it means all men they're like kind of you're saying all men are toxic to be a man it's not at all it's the aspects of what you're supposed to be as a man that are crushing you yeah as much as the ideas of what a woman is supposed to be a crushing us exactly and what you need to do and so all these things that men were listing i sort of looked at them and it was like these are all the things that you that are making your life difficult are ways that you're supposed to be a man and the solution to all of these is to take female attributes to be able to talk about your emotions to be able to dress up to be able to help to be seen as gentle and non-caring women have taken all the things of men that we want that's how we've become more powerful in the last century

we wear trousers we can talk about sex we have jobs we get education we you know we're in space we can rule countries we have taken all the male attributes that we thought were powerful and desirable men have not taken any of the female attributes of being you know the main carer for children to be able to express yourself to help people and the reason they've done that is because women are still seen as lesser we could take the male things because that made us more powerful men don't want to come and take the female things because we're the losers yeah and that's why when men say feminism has gone too far it's like well no it can't because every time women succeed more and are loved more and more powerful and successful and we raise the whole image of women the more easy it's going to be for you to take these female attributes that

you so desperately desire and are making you unhappy yeah that you say are ruining your life so feminism can never go too far every time a woman succeeds yeah you're you're raising the stock of women and allowing men to be able to go yeah i'd like to be like you know for men to be able to say yeah my big hero is beyonce my big hero is michelle obama my hero is greta thunberg yeah every time you say that you're saving men who can take those attributes and put them in their lives and not be crushed by this toxic masculinity so so i ended up writing i thought at the beginning of it another book about feminism but more than half of it's about men now just kind of um the way we raise boys where we fail in that where society fails in that what would make men happier because if feminism

is about equality between the sexes you've got to do both feminism is only doing half the job if it only addresses women yeah and you know women shouldn't have to do that only do if you've got the time but that is something very urgent now yeah and i think we need to be able to show men how to do that because i don't think they know how to do it well i think this is something that hopefully more more and more people will realize about every only thing that's always coming up in as a sort of social conservation conversation whether it be about homophobia or racism or important feminists it's it's the conversation has to have two places it's not enough to go well that's brilliant those feminists over there doing doing their thing brilliant totally all of

us make the change or or it doesn't really work and you can't hide it and that's why sort of like there's a sort of the there are the more um uh the sort of angry and more niche feminists who are like you know a man can't say he's a feminist or like kind of you need to know that you have to do all these things to be a feminist you can't hide the feminism in a tiny place that you can't hide it in a place that only the cool people can get to it or the people who know all the rules this is a this is an idea that is for everyone and is about everyone so you can't put all these strictures and rules to it and hide it and go, you can only talk about feminism if you know these things or you are this person.

It has to be for everyone. It only works if we all do it. Like, there's no point in 10% of the people being brilliant, perfect, strident feminists and then telling no one else is a proper feminist. Feminism only works if everybody believes in it. There's no point in you being a strident feminist, but 90% of the world thinking that feminism is rubbish and that women can't do stuff yeah and you have to spread it that's it you've got to spread this brilliant joyful idea the good news is yeah that women are amazing and we can help

men yes um tell as many people as you can that's the rumor this week feminism is amazing tell as many people as you can well i suppose that is something that's changed a lot since we were teenagers that now um it's definitely not seen in the same way feminism is it well i remember were you around for riot girl were you a little bit too young for that the sort of punk riot girl thing so courtney love and hole and stuff because at the time that was the big sort of feminist movement and it was all it was kathleen that was basically just i started going going out probably around so you would have seen the fashion effects of it so it'd be girls in like 90s and dot martin i did one of my first gigs in a slip yeah that was a real look at the

time wasn't it now i'm like i actually still own it and i'm like i can't believe i went out in that but you could get dressed for a night out for 50p yeah yeah petty coat done yeah i know i know um and easy to wash and you can crinkle it up and fit it in a handbag but that was that feminism then everyone was going well if you're a feminist you should be into right girl but they only wrote about it in fanzines that you could only get from cool record shops in Seattle. And it was like, well, this is a brilliant movement and there's some great music coming out of it, but you can't hide the feminism in a fanzine.

Like, you've got to put it in the press. Like, the girls who really need this are on horrible council estates in Wolverhampton. They're not going to go and buy your fanzine in Seattle. Like, you know, spread the news, man. Let everybody in. So, yeah, that's why populist feminism, I think, is the only feminism that works, really. You've just got know spread the news man let everybody in um so yeah that's that's why populist feminism i think is the only feminism that works really you just got to spread that news

you know it's funny because when i was doing this the idea of the podcast i think you know i want to speak to to working women who are also raising a family about the balance and then people have said to me sometimes oh wouldn't it be interesting to talk to so you're going to do some dads as well and i was like no i think it does have to be women because because if you speak to um a same-sex couple of two men the chances are that the conversation that might be asked of them is about who's the who's the mum role and the dad role they'll be there'll be an option as if they've had to be you know be able to make choices and obviously that doesn't mean they're not being judged there's definitely a conversation to be had but when it comes to to this and talking about working mothers it's quite specific i think totally and it's so inculcated like that's another chapter

i've written in the book it's like why when my teenage brother came to live with me and i thought before he moved in that he would be helping around the house because that's what i'd done as a teenager like we had two kids he'd be helping me the housework and he didn't he just played his xbox and he's really good at maths and that's what he was doing and i was like why is he not helping and then i was like okay now i get it like when it was a boyfriend or husband i didn't get it because i wasn't there for their childhood i was there for his childhood i had women's magazines next to my bed and women's magazines are full of tips about everything how to run a household how to raise a child how to campaign against fgm how to give a blow job how to get stains out of a

curtain literally everything and the women's magazines are in a section that's called women's lifestyle you are taught in these magazines that cover everything how to have a life with style high standards how to buy the best sofa how to buy the best coat hangers men their section in the magazine shops is men's interests and all their magazines will be about one thing it's about music or fishing or gaming or maths or anything and then so men are encouraged from day one there's no general interest magazine for a teenage boy where you learn about how to run a house and have sex and talk to people and campaign you just get your gaming magazine or your fishing magazine and you just learn one thing yeah and so

like when my teenage brother came to live with me i was like well he can't i can't understand his maths when he's talking about it i don't see it i don't understand that system that's what he's learned he doesn't see the system of this house it's equally a different system he doesn't see how a kitchen gets tidy how a child is taught to say please and thank you kind of you know how we would buy new blinds like kind of why the lighting in this front room is really nice because we don't turn on the big overhead light we just use the nice side lamps Women have been taught to see that and notice that and run a household from day one to be good at everything. Men are taught to specialise from day one in one thing and that's how they succeed. So they literally don't see it. And

then when people move, when a heterosexual man and woman move in together, women are like, now we'll make a fabulous house. Whereas the man will be like, I will get a good chair that I can game in and I will have an amazing stereo and a brilliant record collection and I'll learn how to cook a curry. And it's just a different thing. And that's where the clash comes to people who've been raised in completely different systems, completely different ways of saying the world. And they can't see the value in what you're doing at all because they've never been taught it. And that's what the clash is. never been taught it yeah and that's what the clash is and the only solution is to have a massive whiteboard in the kitchen where when you're walking around the house seeing all these things

you just write down what needs doing on a whiteboard and you know split them in half so i don't have to think about it because otherwise you were just walking around all the time with a massive to-do list in your head yeah yeah now for instance in your house do you have the stairs system yes of course things at the bottom of the stairs need to be taken to the top yeah does anyone else in your house get that system no i think you tweeted about this actually and i was like no that doesn't happen at all and people just walk straight past it but i never go up or downstairs without something in my hand literally this there's always something that needs to go somewhere literally this yeah but i will watch children and men step over this pile of stuff richard puts things in the middle

of the stairs as well which is really annoying that's just dangerous that's a trip hazard yes health and safety needs to be in there no i like the stair system it works right i grew up with a but it works for us we know that but no one else sees it it's invisible it's like ultraviolet light so much of what gets done in the house we've got uv goggles on we see what needs doing yeah like like there was a handle broken off the door in the dining room and like kind of i was like i'm not gonna do anything about it i'm not gonna do anything about it just sitting there getting angry and angry okay it's six months now it's no one noticed you had to put a knife in the hole and turn it to open the door because the handle had fallen off and people just went on

with that people just months i was like but this is a thing that could be solved and i refused to do it yeah in the end obviously we had a huge row and he went off and ended it but like that's the uv goggles yeah i'm raised to go around go in you know all like when you've got kids you're thinking in the future you're walking down the street with a kid and you know there's a dog that barks at number 19 your kid is scared of it so you cross the road here yeah and you know that in half an hour they'll be hungry so you've got a snack with you and you've got a spare set of all of that stuff you're living in the future you're constantly scanning like the whole stitching time saves nine thing is a woman's thing you go that's a problem now and if i solve it now it will be five times less expensive than if i solve it in six months

time you're not taught to scan a life like that as a boy and that's the big difference so that's why you mustn't be capable in the house basically sophie is what i'm saying because you're scanning while you're scanning all that they're not going to see it you need to put the goggles on them well that's what i like as well about when i have these conversations i turn my phone off and i'm just gone and like last week when i sort of came back to doing doing my chats and uh when i turned my phone back on someone had asked a question about which kid needs to go to school and i was like you just had to figure it out because i was here and my phone was off and that's nice every woman i know has this fantasy that they will this was pre-covid

to be fair when hospitals became scary and dangerous but before covid19 happened every middle-aged woman i know has had the fantasy of having to go to hospital for a week yeah not for anything serious maybe just like a really clean break on a leg where you just had to be in hospital for a week they wouldn't let you use phones because it interfered with the scanners they bring you food on a tray and you just lie there for a week and do nothing. Like every middle-aged woman I know, like more than going on a spa weekend, just a week in hospital with a broken leg,

that'd be amazing. Well, I recently fell off my bike and I hit my head and I had like three or four days of being at home, so I'm in my pyjamas and taking it easy and I watched A Place in the Sun and it was honestly one of my favourite afternoons of the whole of the last three months.

I just watched people walking around little apartments in portugal and thinking about whether they'd buy it and they're all pretty ugly apartments and i just loved it so much i'm so happy i'm escaped to the country i'm like okay so i'm sort of i'm very specialist now at only wales herefordshire and gloucestershire not interested anywhere else well that's where your future lives exactly you gotta start getting your eye in scanning right and it's great when it's an episode from like 10 years ago and they're being a bit fussy. It's like a house for £230,000. It's not very big.

I'm like, I'm from the future. You will get fuck all for £230,000 in the future. Buy it now. That's an investment. Don't be so fussy, Jan. Buy that house. What do you think we would think of you as a mum? Like pre-baby you, what would you think?

Would you be happy with your mother? What I thought I'd be like? Yeah. yeah no I think I would be very impressed I mean I just presumed that I would keep working that my kids would be the main thing I wanted just for my kids to be funny I think that just takes you a long way like I definitely because funny is hugely underrated in many ways because funny means that you've got cleverness left over to play I think being funny is brilliant and I'm always unnerved by serious children i have to say it's so weird in there i mean god bless them and i respect them and they'll probably go on and i know but i'm so glad they're doing that with their kids so that my kids can be doffed totally it gets you so far and also like

when you're talking about serious things if you can be funny you're far more likely to make your point if you can make it like it's one thing I keep telling sort of young people on the internet, like when they're really passionate about a subject or like an injustice and they're angry about it. And I'm like, if you tweet and communicate in anger, people just hear the emotion and they're going to come back at you with anger. No one's going to listen to what you're saying.

And you are quite right to be really fucked off about racism or homophobia or sexism. But all that's going to happen is people are going to hear your anger and they're going to come back at you with anger and you're going to get burnt and unhappy yeah if you can make your point with some kind of humor yeah first of all people will respond with humor and you have a great conversation you make friends and secondly people retweet it if you're funny like it will spread further you will spread your information hidden hidden within your joke is the information you wish to spread that's how you spread it observe in nature how trees

reproduces they make delicious fruits with the seeds hidden inside and then the bird takes the delicious fruit and shits out the seed somewhere else that's what humor is it's the juicy apple around the seed of your truth that the birds of the internet will shit across the country if you hide it in delicious fruits yeah i mean sometimes i've realized it's funny because you do every family has their sort of own atmosphere and things that have been brought out and the things that get celebrated in our house being funny or doing silly dances or songs is always the thing that gets attention yes so it's a real performance house yeah and so sometimes you know you you're very keen to have kids aren't you where

they're like oh it's so great how you're confident and bold and yeah you do question things and every once in a while you're like oh my god they've all got bloody opinions and they're all like jazz hands about stuff and calm down and get done off that table also the worst bit about raising funny kids is the agonizing six months to a year where kids are learning to be funny and they know the rhythm of a joke yes they don't understand how jokes work so they would be like knock knock who's there pastor pastor who pastor flushed down the toilet yeah you're like okay it's the rhythm of a joke you've understood yeah the format of the joke but you've not understood actually got a purpose yes and like but you have to laugh yeah and that that was that for me that was the hardest of all the illnesses and everything that's ever happened the six months

where they're learning to be funny was the hardest bit of parenthood fake laughter i'm not very good at fake laughter i'd be like they'd be like you didn't find that funny did you mum no i definitely did you didn't no no i didn't learn to be funny i'm trying to think what i think the hardest bit i've found was certainly recently is that when they get very um sort of fixated on talking about something and so a lot of my work over the time with projects i would call it rather than work during lockdown i'm trying to get things done we'd have one of them sort of circling constantly with a sort of dialogue and then do you know they're gonna do this and then this character did that and do you know this and it would just seem to be going on and on and on and i'd be thinking i don't know

what we're talking about and at the end i'd sort of be like so is this all something you dreamt no i said it was a film or something like oh god stop just stop talking to me about then you don't want to crush them but please I'm not interested but there does come a point you are like I will have to crush you a bit now you do feel like a mother lion just putting its paw on a tiny head this is fascinating but can you just go out the door and shut it on your way out please try zooming grandma she has time she will be fascinated by this like when i was watching the youtube thing i was telling you about where you were interviewing yourself yeah at the same time my four-year-old sat next to me going mummy try and guess what chocolate i bought today that we haven't had for a really

long time it's round you have to try and guess it and you wouldn't start going on it wasn't a roller it wasn't buttons it wasn't it turned out to be a tonics tea cake and at the end of the bed my eight-year-old was dressing in a mermaid's tail and white gloves and asking me about the lines and the gloves and if that still meant he could be a magician and i was trying to watch this this talk you were giving and i was like this is completely untenable it's i just think the room of one's own idea is a really good i fantasize about that it doesn't have to be a hospital bed i just settle for a little corner somewhere i think if you ever have to explain motherhood to someone i was like what i've wanted to do in this 16 and 19 now is just in one day

open up a note on my iphone and write down everything they asked me everything i had to do from them uh and everything they said at me every time i had to respond to them in some way every time i was interrupted just do it as one list for one day just so i could finally work out where my day had gone and the thing is that you're so busy dealing with that shit you don't have time to write that list and that if you want to know how busy you are as a parent that is it that you don't have time to write down why you're so busy no and you get to the end of every day you're just like why have i not done half the things i was going to do and often you can't remember it's like no just like it all i remember is just just been this miasma of bullshit from about half past six that's probably why you got sent to your gardening because

then it's like a proper it had a had a shape to the task and then it happened and things get completed and the brilliant thing about a garden is like you because one of the great things about getting older is you have a real understanding of time like you can stand there in march and go if i plant that now in september that corner's going to look amazing and that's incredibly satisfying whereas it's so much longer with kids you plant an idea here about them being a good person and then you have to wait till 2025 for it to seed whereas in a garden within the space of a year everything that you want is satisfied and it's um and also they hate gardening so it's the one place i can if they come out and

they bother me i'm like i will talk to you about this but can you help me double dig this border and they disappear again it's like all right you can sort it out on your own they can they can oh well it's been so nice talking to you Do you remember that chat when you were interviewing yourself? I know I keep banging on about it, but it did make me laugh out loud. I can't remember anything. I can remember the horror ten minutes before I went on stage. Because I was already thinking, he's going to have to spoon feed me through this one because I am so ill.

No, you managed to talk for, I think it's an hour. But when you asked yourself if you were good in bed, you said, I'm really good in bed. I'm a really good lay. Except for one time where you'd said, you'd said, give it some welly. You said we had to stop and just look down at where the good sex had been and just leave it there.

Oh, it was so... I've written about this in the book as well. I've written, like, you realise when you've been in a relationship for a long time that when you say, I love you, it means loads of different things. you can say if i say i love you when i'm hungover it means i hope i wasn't a disgrace last night do you still love me and when you ring someone from a hotel and go i love you you want them to say what you mean is i want you

to say you're working so hard and we miss you like i love you very rarely means i love you and the most difficult i love you to decode is when you're having sex because i will equally say i love you when i want you to come straight away I'm done this is it we're finished or this is amazing carry on forever it's so difficult and dangerous to say I love you during sex it could mean one of any one of a million things it's just best not to say it so then I substitute to give it some welly I can tell anybody who's listening that if they're thinking of saying that during sex it's not it's not useful. It's about as sexy as the little pants that look like an elephant.

Yeah, the beast inside. If you've got the sex to stop, if you're having chafing issues, and you've got the sex to stop, just say, give it some money, it will end. Give it some money. Oh, Marnie, what's your podcast called? My is called spinning plates it's on every platform it is on every platform kit oh actually i don't know if it is on youtube uh you can find it on things like spotify acast uh apple things are you thinking of having a lesson kit yeah oh thanks um that is kit my 10 year old uh oh no you're not 10 are you kit you're 11

i'm just recording the outro yeah i realized in my intro to the interview catlin i forgot to say the noise in the background was kit listening to some clips on youtube just before bedtime uh so yeah we're both sat in the bedroom aren't we kit yeah um it's just kit and i and the cat rizzo she's quite old now uh i'll show you in a minute kit kit seems to suddenly be very keen to get access to my podcast um he's very interested in what working mothers think about life anyway thank you for listening i hope you enjoy the chat with Catlin. I think something she said actually really,

I think is very true, where she said that through humour, you can get people to listen to you. And if there's ever an example of that, it's Catlin, isn't there? I mean, she's always someone where as a writer or as a reader, she's really grabbed my attention. And I've pressed her book, How To Be A Woman,

into the hands of many of my friends as a sort of birthday present or Christmas present if you haven't read it read it and I can't wait to read More Than a Woman which is out in September and she's also got a movie coming out at the moment too so lots and lots of things happening in Camp Moran oh and her daughter um has brought out her first ever um single as well that she recorded during lockdown and her other daughter did the video for it and I'll find a clever way to do a link to that because it's a really beautiful

song so yeah lots of exciting things lots of creativity what a clever artistic family anywho back to saying thank you to you thanks for listening I'll see you again next week. And lots of love in the meantime.

And as Kit was asking, yeah, you can find my podcast everywhere. You found it. Clever you. All the best. Bye. I'm not afraid of the dark you