Spinning Plates with Sophie Ellis-Bextor - Episode 48: Polly Morgan

Episode Date: November 8, 2021

This week’s guest is artist Polly Morgan. She's a taxidermist and uses animals in her art. At the moment she's making sculptures using stuffed snakes. So, she's an artist who works in a basement where she has a freezer full of dead snakes (!), but she is also a mum to two little boys, Clifford and Bruce. Polly had her boys through IVF after suffering a burst appendix which damaged her fallopian tubes. She talks to me about her journey to getting pregnant, how working makes her a nicer mum and about the practicalities of having her eggs frozen. 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, Podcats. How are you? I am speaking to you from Birmingham. I am here because last night I sang one of my support gigs for Steps who are on tour at the moment. We are three gigs into the tour. So last night in Birmingham, tonight we're in Birmingham again. So stayed up overnight. And as I chat to you, I have a very exciting view

of a huge construction site out of the window of my hotel hotel room where they are using it actually that is quite amazing they're using a huge crane to lower down one of the top levels of what looks like a big car park but it's huge whoa that's actually pretty cool i like seeing things like that i mean overall watching a construction site is not like a hobby of mine I wouldn't want you to think that but I seem to have caught it at quite an exciting moment so that's good and the gigs have been going well uh it's quite a strange one for me because I've sung in arenas before and I've sung gigs on my own before but I think this is the first time I've ever done a sort of solo half hour bit of me singing in an arena and so I'm not with my band on this tour I'm just on my own and I come out just before steps go on and I do half hour and it's just this little stage with a dark curtain behind me because

you know don't want to ruin the surprise of all the amazing staging for Steps. And it is really beautifully put together, their show. And they're having a lot of fun and it's going down brilliantly. The fans have been loving their gigs. But yeah, my job is to warm the crowd up. So I come out and I just feel a bit, I feel a bit teeny tiny. It's a bit like doing an audition because you come out, you're on your own. There's a light in your eyes. You can't really see the crowd very well. And you're just singing your way through some songs thinking, I hope this is going okay. But the Steps fans have been gorgeous, really, really friendly. The Steps gig is really good fun.

And the whole thing is just about having a really lovely, good, fun night out. Which is definitely what's being delivered. So that's been really lovely. Happy days. And I can finally tell you about something that's been taking up a lot of my headspace for the last few months, which is I'm doing a challenge for children in need. So this has just been announced. If you're listening to this podcast on Monday when it comes out, it's just been announced today. I'm now talking to you from the past. This is Saturday, by the way.

I hope Sunday went all right. And yeah, so in just over a week, I will be beginning a 24-hour kitchen disco dance-a-thon. What is that, I hear you ask? Basically, I'm going to the radio theatre in Broadcasting House, just not far from Oxford Circus, and I'm still on a little stage that looks a little bit like a disco kitchen, and I will start dancing at 9.30am on Tuesday morning, and I will not stop. I will not stop, no matter what, until 9.30 on Wednesday morning. I'm going to dance my way

through the day, through the night. I'll be joined with guests either in real life or on Zoom. Plenty of music. Radio 2 will be providing me a soundtrack to last me through the hours. I'm also going to be doing five little spot discos where I'll sing a couple of my songs and a cover. And I'm joined by special guests for that as well. So, you know, it's exciting. But I'm not going to lie, I'm a little bit nervous. And I mean, how do you prepare for that anyway? The sleep deprivation thing, generally speaking, I've got down pat.

But then I've never done it where I'm not allowed to sit down for 24 hours. I think it is going to be tiring, but I think there'll be some fun there too. And I'm planning on varying my moves a lot. And if you like what you see when I'm dancing, or even if you don't, please feel free to put a couple of quid in the tip jar because every bit of money you raise will go straight to BBC Children in Need.

And I've been visiting some of the projects that benefit from Children in Need fundraising. And they are amazing, as you can imagine. I've been everywhere from a children's hospice to community centres, meeting people, talking to the people involved, hearing how the charity has benefited these different uh projects and it's been incredible so yes you can press your red button at any point and have a look at this crazy woman

dancing on her own at the radio theater oh my gosh uh i think the well will run dry pretty quick with the variation of dance moves but hey i'm here for it baby I'm here for it right this week's guest slightly shifting gear now guys so this week's guest is someone that I've wanted to speak to for a really long time because I'm actually a really big fan of what she does her name is Polly Morgan she's an artist her main medium is taxidermy and she incorporates the animals in lots of different ways through her work and she speaks about it much better than I can when we're you know having our chat but her work is really beautiful and arresting and what I really loved about the first time I saw some of her works the first thing I think I saw was, it's like a little, almost like a cheese

dome, sort of a glass dome. And inside was a tiny little funeral table with a dead bird on top and a tiny little chandelier hanging above it. So her taxidermy and her art, they don't necessarily represent the animals alive again. It's not like they're reanimated in fact they're quite often um in extremity they're either they either look like they've just died or they look like they are completely buzzing with vitality and you know you'll get like tiny chicks with their mouths open and it's almost quite a sort of screaming representation of life but there's not not much in the middle where they're just sort of in repose it's not the victorian interpretation of taxidermy where you see them sort of sitting up on little chairs and drinking cups of tea it's much more about life

and of course sometimes death and i just i've always found her work really arresting and really brilliant and it was complete joy to to meet her uh and to speak to her I'd never met her before I'd only spoke to her on email when I bought one of her pictures for my husband for Christmas a few years back and what that was was a tiny little bird called a red pole um that sits on top of a frame and inside the frame is a picture of a nest that is drawn using the ashes that's made from the remains the sort of inside remains of that red pole bird so it's really quite beautiful and it's in our hallway and i'm very very glad to own it and i think yeah i think she's great and her story is really interesting so over to polly now and um yeah and if you're

interested in what happened at the end of the construction site they have now placed they've now placed the top layer of the car park with the massive crane and everybody on the construction site all the little dozers which you'll recognize as the reference to fraggle rock if you're of the same vintage as me so the the guys working on the construction site seem pretty happy with the placement so thumbs up for that and thumbs up for this chat see you on the other side I'm excited to talk to you about lots of things. But also, I think I'm probably quite an unusual person to talk to you in that I have also done some taxidermy. Oh, I didn't know that.

Yeah, I did it with my family. With your children's family? I would have done it with them, but this was quite a while ago. And I said, no, I did it with my... Actually, no, I think I was pregnant with one of them at the time. But yeah, I did it with my brother, my sister, my mum and my husband. And we all... What's the past tense of taxidermy?

Well, I say taxidermied, but I don't think it's a word. I think you still say taxidermy, although it sounds a bit odd. OK, I taxidermy. No, that doesn't work, does it? No, I performed taxidermy. Yeah, I taxidermied a mouse. Oh, not a good thing to start on. Oh, really?

Why would you? Fiddly. I bet it went horrible, didn't it? Some of them were really spectacularly funny. Fiddly, and the bacteria grows very fast on mice, and they tend to do this thing called slipping when the fur just starts to sort of run off the skin because it degrades you still got it oh yeah i'm impressed and the moths haven't eaten it you know what i'm gonna go and grab it i think you need to give an assessment to

my taxidermy skills because i found them quite difficult to do it wouldn't be something i'd recommend starting with although a lot of people do start on mines i guess because they're small i mean hours doing these tiny little so this is my one so uh sitting on a chair reading a book about concise inorganic chemistry kick the heels off what do you think of that it's um i've seen far worse thank you it's not bad, actually. I mean, it's not good either. But it's not bad. It's got a very small, well, I suppose they have got small heads.

No, you're right. I probably could have used a bit more stuffing. The ears are so difficult. Did you turn them inside out? Do you remember that part or not? So what I remember is making an incision removing all the soft tissue

the body, you must have gone right round the whole body right round the body leaving pores and then you have to take out the skull and you have to clean the inside with certain things and that's Richard's one Richard's one is playing some with he's got some little vinyl

such a funny thing isn't it i think yours is slightly better sorry richard so do i it's all right i prefer an upside face this one i know i'm hammered it's like it's after a night out and he's falling against the record player. He really is. Actually, it's basically us. We've made taxidermy versions of us. I realise mine's got little high heels and his is leaning into a record player after a few too many Negronis. But yes, so we had to treat the inside and then wash the outside with I think like a sort of almost washing up liquid

and then fluff it up with a hairdryer and then begin the process of reintroducing the stability that a spine would normally provide. They don't look very stable. There's a reason why mine's sitting down. But it took three and a half hours to... That's very

quick. Is it? Yeah, it would take longer than that. I mean, if you do it really properly, you should tan the skin over three days, but you can. I think there are... They've actually lasted really well um they must have been very fresh they were very fresh um but i was thinking about it as an art medium because obviously there's tons of craft involved in taxidermy and skill to be able to taxidermy something um but also you've got an element of your art that also might suggest things to you because of the fact that that animal is a something that does it bring something does each animal bring its own thing to what you create yes

definitely i mean i right in the beginning i, thinking about the stuff I first started working on, it was about, I was quite interested in working with animals that were overlooked or at least the animals that we don't consider beautiful anymore because of over familiarity, like rats or pigeons, that kind of thing. So I kind of enjoyed trying to make people look at them afresh, I guess, and to see the beauty in them. And one of the first pieces I made was a rat kind of spilling out of the champagne bowl glass. And the woman who bought that said she hated rats, but she found it really beautiful. So that was quite nice. But then since then, I did start to kind of,

it would be a question of just being donated things because everything dies naturally. So I just work with what I've been donated and kind of like playing around with them, like literally taking the bodies out and looking at them and the colours and the textures. And it's a lot about the juxtaposition of form and colour and texture for me.

So I'm thinking about the work always as a sculpture as opposed to the... I don't really... I'm not interested particularly in the kind of significance an animal might have in terms of its symbolism. Animals come with a lot of baggage. We think foxes are sly and snakes are evil. So I'm always trying to get away from that, remove the work from that as far as I possibly can, which is quite challenging.

You're just saying you're working a lot with snakes now that you don't really like that much when they're alive but well it's not that I'm afraid of them I think quite justifiably when they're alive yes but they are they're incredible creatures I mean and the more I've handled them the more amazing they really are um but they are they were the kind of perfect bridge for me into the new work that I'm doing because it's much more about I see them like as a modelling material really. They're like these long thin tubes I can manipulate and make into different shapes and structures. And I tend to either use pieces of them kind of packed together

to kind of represent flesh or I tuck the heads right away. So you never, I never or very rarely will model the actual head of the snake because i want i kind of want to get away from that visceral reaction we have from them and the kind of snakiness of a snake and i think the head's quite confrontational in a way and i want to see them much more as form and color and texture so snakes have been perfect for doing that no and i can see that absolutely what you mean that when you don't think about them as the symbolism of the animal but you just look literally at the form. And, you know, on the snake, you've got the iridescence of the skin and actually how amazingly constructed.

So much in nature that is just mind blowing that that's how something's evolved and how it exists. And it really is. Yeah. And the strength of it and how it would move and how you can shape it. And just all of our references in pattern and textiles and our own like nail design, all of these things. So much stuff comes from, I mean, it all comes from nature, really. You can kind of trace it all back to that. So I like to kind of juxtapose them with much more contemporary kind of takes on pattern and colour. Yeah, no, I think all of that, I can totally understand that and see the beauty in all of that

It's funny because I was thinking about when I was a child and whenever I was, because like most people people who don't grow up on farms I'd say, my most normal way to interact with any animal that wasn't alive anymore was when it was making food, so you know

you've got the whole chicken and things like this and I was always really encouraged to not be at all squeamish to actually kind of be quite impressed at the the beauty of how things are formed and i've never had any squeamishness about dealing with with you know if i'm making something that has meat in it i'm completely fine with that and fish and all that and if we ever buy a whole fish from the fish manga i'm always you know looking at it and showing the kids. And I've never had any awkwardness with that. Well, I think you kind of inherit those things from parents.

A lot of the time, if you've got the sort of parents who scream at you to back away from a dead animal, if you find it as a child, or they're squeamish themselves about meat, you tend to be kind of really divorced from that. Yeah, you can disassociate, can't you? Yeah. Because I was thinking,

rather than asking you about why you're not squeamish, because actually I think that's, as you say, maybe from a learned thing, are you often surprised by how many people are squeamish? Definitely, yeah. To begin with, I was a bit. Yeah, absolutely. Most people are.

And I never was, not even the first lesson um i mean i am there are certain things i think are completely innate within us like to be repelled by maggots because i guess that's just we're primed to be repelled by maggots because they would indicate rotten flesh and we don't want to eat rotten flesh because we might die and i am disgusted by some of the smells and if the animals have maggots, which sometimes happens. But generally, everything I work with has to be really fresh. So I've just always been way more fascinated and curious about learning about the animal or about the...

I mean, just to get under the skin of something is a real... It sounds weird, but it's a real kind of privilege because we only really see... I don't know the exact percentage of the body that skin forms but let's say 10 15 percent and we never really see what goes on underneath that unless we're medical students and i was never really particularly engaged with science at school because we never got to cut stuff up and never got to like i think you need a tactile experience sometimes or a sensory experience in order to learn stuff i certainly did, I realised I wasn't so good at sitting and just listening to people

talking and writing on blackboards it was only when I actually got to kind of touch and feel and smell and associate some sort of memory with something that I would learn Yeah, and I suppose, like you say of everything being influenced by nature there's a real poetry in all of that as well I think, in terms of the cycle of everything and as you say what's going on beneath the surface and how everything's moving

and does it affect your relationship with your own body when you're exploring that? It's made me want to be more fit definitely I have yeah I've had moments where I remember skinning a fox once it was a young fox fox, an adult, but a young adult, being hit by a car. And it was beautiful. And under the skin, it was just so beautiful. It was so lean and the muscles. Because it was so, so fresh.

The meat was really pink. And I was just really struck by it. Because when you're skinning an older animal, sometimes there's sort of fatty deposits and things are sort of like degrading a little bit and it was just it made me definitely made me think about that about my own like i was about what went on under my skin and like whether i was kind of looking after that part because we spent so long a lot of my work the themes behind my work is a lot to do with veneers and about kind of surface and reality and about

what we how we go about we put uh filters on our faces on social media and all of those sorts of things and it's all about kind of deception really but it makes me it definitely makes me think much more about looking after the kind of reality the body than like not worrying too much about what's going on in the outside which is all just trickery really really. Yeah, that's really interesting. I suppose, especially when you're aware of that sort of percentage of what, that's only such a small part of who we are and what forms us.

It's kind of a shortcut because we're just, we look in the mirror and we think, okay, we look good today. We've done our makeup or our hair and we feel better about it. But it definitely makes me think more about the whole thing, the whole organism yeah and i suppose i was um listening to an interview where you were saying that actually your work is sometimes but

quite rarely about death and just because it involves the dead animals actually not really yeah i would say i mean right in the beginning i definitely didn't i think i didn't do enough to distance the work from death but it wasn't as dead. There's always been this real, certainly in the beginning, maybe less so now, but yeah, I felt like people made this fundamental mistake, all about me, certainly, that I was kind of morbid or I was into death in some way. I mean, I hate death as much as the next person.

I'm terrified of it. But it's a logistical fact the animal has to die in order for me to work on it that's all it's just another material really i can't i'm not going to start skinning live animals so yeah it's i used to say you know you wouldn't say that a charcoal drawing is about death because it's burnt it's dead wood so it's just i I mean, I understand if you're constructing it to look like a dead animal, of course, it's going to come into people's minds.

But it was about a lot more than that and more actually about life, I think, for me. Yeah, it's interesting because some of those ideas probably come from the era when taxidermy is quite associated with, like Victorian times. And that was an era that was very obsessed with the taboo of death that was an era that was very obsessed with the taboo of death and how to handle that and they did the um anthropomorphizing of their

went with taxidermy to make them look like little people it's actually quite peculiar like but you're like mine i know yeah well hopefully i have a bit more of a sense of actually no i suppose they thought they maybe they did think their ones were funny too, the Victorians. Well, yeah, I think, I mean, the most famous one is Walter Potter, and I think there definitely was supposed to be some humour in them and some eccentricity to it, yeah. Yeah, you're right, there's eccentricity, actually. That's a really good word for it.

I mean, when you're doing something like, you know, with Taxi Dummy, do you feel, like, connected in a way to these people that have gone before? This is the line you're following not really no no well because i with i always hesitate whenever i make the distinction between myself and taxidermist and say i'm an artist i feel like i'm being kind of snobby but it's not meant like that at all it's more it's kind of out of respect for them in a way because i think as a taxidermist you spend years trying to make your animal look as lifelike as possible and that that's not what I do. I mean, I chop snakes up in the studio and I use the bits of them to form bigger sculptures.

And so I think it's much more about a full sculpture for me. I do lots of moulding and casting of other objects. So I don't actually know. I'm much more likely to sort of look at other artists and think of myself in the kind of art lineage I think than in taxidermy although I guess I mean I definitely have a place in the taxidermy world and I think it was more that I was looking at taxidermy and I I liked it but at the same time it wasn't being displayed in the way that I would have displayed it this is how I kind of got into it in the first place. I didn't really want to own it particularly.

I wasn't really interested in having a cabinet where you mimic the natural environment of the animal, which is just sort of like a three-dimensional photograph to me. I kind of wanted to... I thought as a medium, it was very untapped. If you think about photography or painting and how there's so many different styles, with taxidermy, there wasn't really that.

So it was really like more of a springboard for me to make sculpture. Yeah, exactly. Sculpture is exactly it. So you've now got a three-year-old and a five-year-old, is that right? Yes. And so you were saying before we started recording that you've been working in the basement of your house yes that was that the case before lockdown as well it was actually no it's my it has been my studio since i was pregnant with the first one um oh actually

no since he was born i had a studio during my pregnancy um it's and i say it's the basement it's a great space we live in an old pub so it's a beer cellar and it's not basement. It's a great space. We live in an old pub, so it's the beer cellar. Oh, amazing. And it's not, we haven't really, we've done up lots of the building, but the basement is the last sort of untouched bit, which is very much a beer cellar still. It's like concrete floors, very low hanging ceiling. Luckily, I'm not too tall, but a lot of my visitors whack their heads on pipes and things when they come down.

There's no natural light. It's cold, but it's actually a good space to make a mess because i do make a lot of mess down there with the um mostly with the molding and casting actually but also like sometimes if i'm chopping things up or is it quite a private space or do the kids come down yeah no it's pretty it's good that's the other good thing about it it's got a lockable door at the top i don't normally lock it but they don't really come down i mean it's kind of dirty and cold and dusty and they're one of the older ones a little bit more intrigued um so i'll bring him down sometimes but it's full of really dangerous things as well so i can lock it but they don't really come down I mean it's kind of dirty and cold and dusty and they're one of the older ones a little bit more intrigued um so I'll bring him down sometimes but it's full of really dangerous things as well so I can lock it so it's perfect um and it was meant

to be temporary but then actually it just kind of it's so much easier when you've got young kids and you the idea of like of traveling to and from a studio and losing like precious hour or whatever it might be in uh commuting it just wasn't really feasible so it's been a really useful thing and particularly i was really lucky through the first lockdown when we really weren't allowed to go anywhere it was great because um my boyfriend's an artist too and he'd been traveling a lot before that so suddenly he was grounded which was brilliant for me because it meant he had to like split the child care and we would just take it in turns to work so one of us would have the kids and the So suddenly he was grounded, which was brilliant for me because it meant he had to split the childcare. And we would just take it in turns to work. So one of us would have the kids and the other one would go down.

He works mainly on a computer, but he'd be in the office or I'd be in the basement. So it really came into its own at that point. However, I do love leaving the house because I don't get to do that very often. So I jumped at the opportunity to come here. And how good are you with the sort of discipline of that if you're if you're finding that you're you know we did was it very obvious to you how you still prioritize your need to make work or did you sometimes feel a bit torn with the kids around all the time and do you mean specifically lockdown i suppose a bit of that and also just just having yeah just generally because i know that that's something I struggle with when I'm home. Yeah, it is tricky.

It's been a lot easier since everything's gone back to normal. One of them's in full-time nursery and the other's at school. So I get very specific hours now that I work in. And because I know they're finite, I tend to be quite productive in those hours. Yes. During the whole lockdown, I mean, everything was just like a mess

from the beginning. I was just kind of winging it for the first week or so and then I realised that we had to be really structured about it if it was going to work, so I timetabled everyone and we all had our kind of like, I would be with Clifford at this point and Matt would be doing something with Bruce and we'd have them on our own and then he'd go and work

and then I'd work and it worked really well like that. I think they, you know, kids very conservative they thrive in structure I think so yeah it kind of worked well for us all in the end but um yeah I mean you're always torn about stuff like that aren't you about working from home and I try really hard to make sure that the time that their home that we have together is ours I'm not yet on top of my phone usage. I still find myself staring at that sometimes when they're talking to me and I'd like to do something about that. Yeah, it's quite hard all that, especially if your phone is basically your office. Exactly. Yeah. And there's no one else answering the emails. So you kind of feel like you should check them.

But they're lucky because we both work from home and they see us a lot. If I think about their friends who a lot of whom are in after-school clubs and breakfast clubs and have nannies pick them up and things like that, they probably see a lot more of us than they would, I think, if we were actually going into an office or a studio far away. So I think overall they've got a fairly good deal at the moment. They've loved having you working from home. My kids would love it if I was here like that, working from home.

I think they find it really, even if I'm not in the same room, just reassuring. Exactly. I think just knowing you're around, exactly. Because, I mean, we have the occasional nanny and things coming through and helping out. But the fact that we're there, I think, really helps. You get them up and you put them to bed. Exactly. Yeah, that continuity is really good for small people. They like that a lot and I know that uh the last couple of months when I've been more

working at sort of normal pace um I've had a lot of complaints from my older kids especially about the fact I don't have a job where I'm just not going away as much and not out as much which is quite tough so I've kind of gone back to that I think they had you know 18 months of really that not really applying yeah but I do wonder what it must be like when you've got small kids and you're introducing them to your work when you're an artist and obviously there's a lot of your work that's really conceptual and has it been interesting seeing seeing it through their eyes being introduced to the things that you're sort of fueled by and driven by it. I mean, they're still quite young. The elder one, but having said that,

I think the elder one, I don't like to say this, I don't like to kind of make assumptions on them too quickly about what they're into and what they're not into. However, it seems that the eldest one is going to be more creative than the younger one. He's certainly always been really into drawing and making stuff, and he asks so many questions

about our work. Whereas Bruce, the three-year-old, is totally disinterested in anything really that we do. He's never, I mean, it's so funny. If I think about when Clifford was three, he would ask about the snakes. He would come down and look in the freezers. He would just say things like, wow, this is a really beautiful one you've made here, mum. I don't think Bruce really knows what I get up to at all down there. And he's not interested in any way. But I mean, it's, I think I'm going to go through a period.

This, my prediction is that I'll go through a little sweet spot with them where they think I'm quite cool. And then they'll suddenly realise how weird I am. And they'll be really embarrassed about everything. That's actually more fun than you think though when you get to that point. Oh, really? Then you can embarrass them all about this. I've been reveling in that space for a little while now. I quite like it, if I'm honest.

And actually, broadly speaking, I have a very similar dynamic with my eldest two in that the first one was always a lot more interested in what Richard and I get up to and the next one down. Maybe they're more interested in the older child. Maybe that's it. Yeah, that might be it. They're looking to you

and then the second one's looking to their brother. Yeah, and I think also kids are quite clever at, well, this is just, you know, from what I've seen, they're quite clever at seeing what's gone before and kind of doing the opposite. Yes. Because that's a gap in the market. Yeah, that's definitely been the case of mine.

Yeah, it's interesting. I think it's a sort of instinctive. It's a way of standing out i guess yeah exactly it's like okay has anyone taken up that space yeah yeah that'll be my area um so yeah i think and i've i quite enjoy both aspects of that actually i like the fact that i can have lots of chats with my elders about things and then um yeah i love the fact that kit's completely disinterested in 90% work and i don't think he's even that bothered about a lot of like music in general really but i do think it's very refreshing that yeah it's fun and and also like you're sort of rooting for them in a weird way like okay yeah be your own person that's all good and i think there's the big sort of

headline i think actually is that it's really i like raising a family in a really creative environment because i think it's a nice space like raising a family in a really creative environment because I think it's a nice space to grow up in and your childhood, if kind of anything goes really, so long as you're expressing yourself, it's all good. So I think there's lots of benefits for that that I'm sure your kids will benefit from. You're just kind of bringing in loads of different examples

of ways to live, I think, as well. And they get to see that. Yeah, yeah. We have, we don't go out very much, but we bring people into the house a lot of the time. So we have various people. Sometimes we'll just live with us for a while because we have a spare room.

So people we really like, maybe younger people who might need somewhere to live or maybe we'll do a bit of work in the studio in lieu of rent. We just kind of get them into the house. What other creatives? Artists? Yeah, we've had both.

We've had an artist and another the guy's living with us at the moment is an actor and a actor and builder that's very handy

it is you can talk about theatre and you can and I often I will offer free studio space to younger artists that I like for periods of times

and they just because I just really like having company when I'm working so there's just lots of different types of people coming and going and I think that you don't have to foist them on your children but it's just nice that they get to witness that I think definitely no I actually sounds quite similar to my own upbringing as well my mum

would have lodges quite often and I think it's quite healthy to encourage curiosity about other people actually and ask questions and hear about other lives and that's probably why I've ended up doing this podcast so that I get to do it um legitimately so um it's been really I really yeah I think that doesn't leave you actually it's interesting you say you like to work with other people given that that's probably something that's not the normal thing that or is it or is it do you often find there's someone alongside you I mean at the moment I haven't got anyone down there. But no, I mean, I didn't miss it at the beginning at all because I've worked throughout university. In my early 20s, I was working in a bar.

I started as a glass collector and just worked my way up to managing the bar. And then when I graduated, they just offered me this position and I didn't really want to go and work in an office. So I did that for a bit. And that was really, really social. And it was really good for me at that time because I was quite shy when I came to London and it just completely knocked that out of me having to like kick people drunk men out at 2am from a bar it kind of tends to make you a bit more confident and then I um then I just kind of became an artist and suddenly I'd gone from that to just working on

my own and I really I liked it I actually I think as an antidote it was really nice just to be able to be in control of my own time and my own space but then I just got to a point where I suddenly realized that I felt really like I was missing out on you do you miss out a lot on friendships because some of the strongest friendships that you have well most people have have in life, come out of working with people like colleagues. When else do you kind of get a chance to really intimately get to know someone unless you're dating them or they're your family? It doesn't really work that way. And I just didn't have that. I didn't really have a core of people.

I had lots of random friends, some of whom would know each other. And I sort of have got a little group of friends-ish now. Sometimes we'll go on holiday together or we kind of make an effort to hang out but they're all pretty sort of disparate and random and I've had to kind of work on that myself so I realized that I if you want to if you want that you have to kind of make it happen yourself so I I would take interns when I was younger and a bit busier I would um have sometimes I had like three or four interns for busy periods and they were like some of the happiest working times we'd all cook for each other and and there was a real kind of camaraderie about it so now yeah I just have to kind of lure people in somehow

yeah yeah well I can see that like I totally agree with you that whole thing of being able to see everybody every day and get that that camaraderie. And it's actually, you get that momentum as well. It's like an enthusiasm. Because I think when you're an artist and your own cheerleader, I imagine it all falls on your shoulders to be motivated for the next project. Yeah, I guess, but also just making every decision myself,

I find really, really exhausting and boring. And I mean, I still have to do it, but it's still nice if you have someone that you can kind of bounce ideas off at least. And also just working in a vacuum, I don't think it's healthy. You're not really going to progress far. You need to be witnessing someone else maybe working on something else, maybe using different materials. Or somehow all of those things just kind of have, you know, maybe just the tiniest influence that will set you off on a slightly different course.

And I found it really, it's really worked. It's been very productive doing that. Do you think there's quite a lot of mystery for most people about how it is to live as an artist? I don't know, probably. I mean, I do mostly hang out with other artists or people in that kind of world. So it's not something that occurred to me, but it does.

Yeah, I get a lot of questions asked of me when people know. It's, I kind of feel like I'm quite fortunate in that way in that it's like it opens it's like a conversation starter when I talk about what I do like you know maybe the school gates or something people are curious they want to know more whereas if someone tells me they work in like IT or something I just don't know what to say from now on because I maybe not IT I don't know recruitment or something and I'm sure they've got these great jobs and they must be very interesting in their own ways. But I suddenly, I kind of, it more throws a light

on how little I know about stuff like that. So I just, someone said they worked in mergers and acquisitions. And I was like, oh, that sounds amazing. And I just thought it kind of shuts me down. Have you had any good acquisitions recently? Merged, anything fun? Whereas I think if you say, particularly the taxidermy element, but also just as an artist

I think people they're curious they want to see where you work in the space and materials and stuff well I'd imagine there's maybe more curiosity

that most artists would experience when you say the medium you work in definitely the medium and what's the most common response you get

to people who don't know where do you get your animals from almost straight away in a slightly hostile way until I answer and then they kind of soften. Holding onto the dog lead a little bit. Yeah, well, they wait.

They want to know quite how to respond to me depending on my answer. And as soon as I've cleared that up, generally they soften and then they ask. Literally, I used to joke about having a T-shirt printed up with about five bullet points on, just answering all of those questions. One would be, what's the most amazing animal you've ever stuffed?

What would be your kind of ultimate? Would you ever stuff a human? That would always come up quite high. I wouldn't even have thought to ask that. I always get that one. Yeah, there's four or five stock questions which is fine i understand i'm sure i do the same thing to other people yeah well i think yeah and the curiosity is quite fun but i think yeah the idea of like just standing at the school getting a cat wanders past and you're

stroking i know yeah people always do that yeah i get a lot of jokes about people's pay exactly yeah um i'm going back with your, so with your babies, I often ask people what was going on in their life when they had their first baby, but I know that the route to being a mother was a bit more complicated for you. So you found yourself, is it 31 that you had the appendicitis? Well done, you've done a lot of research.

I think I was 31, yeah. I think it was exactly then. Yeah. So was that the point you were also starting to try for a baby? It was just before. No, it was I think it was 32 that I started actually thinking about really trying. But it's something we talked about and we knew was kind of imminent. And then he'd always wanted to be a mum. I had. Yes, I had. and I'd been quite firm with my boyfriend's quite a bit older, he's now 55 and he had a child when he was 23

who's also now a father, he's 31 now, so he's a grandpa and so I had said, I think we'd been together for three or four years when I was about 30 and I'd said, you know, by the way if this is going to continue this is what has to happen.

And he kind of was always a bit like, yeah, soon. But you're quite old, you know, you don't want to be a really old father. So we kind of agreed it would happen quite soon. And then we went on safari to the Serengeti on this trip that I really wanted to do. And then the day after we got back, I got really sick. And I thought I'd got food poisoning because we'd been to a fish market in Zanzibar just before we left. So I stupidly kept telling the doctors in the hospital,

I just got back from Zanzibar, I was at a fish market, and they said, oh, yeah, well, it's very likely to be that then. So they kept sending me home, but it kept getting worse and worse, and I kept going back in, and then I'd get sent back again. And then after a couple of days, my appendix actually burst, and I was really back in and then I'd get sent back again and then after a couple of days my appendix actually burst and I was really ill and I had peritonitis and I was I went into hospital in an ambulance in the end but still it took them a long time it was a bank holiday it was a Friday of a bank holiday which is the worst time I think to be admitted so I didn't even get a scan until the following day and I was like a death's door at

that point oh you're lucky you didn't and then I then, I know, it was very close, I think. I only really realised that looking back, but I was so out of it at the time. Anyway, so they... Actually, it must have been a lot of pain. That's not just...

No, it was... That must have been agony. It was. It was, oh my God. Then I did childbirth, so I don't know. I thought it was the worst pain. Anyway, then,

long story short, after a couple of... I think I started trying for a baby a year after. And we, I stupidly, I didn't make the connection with the appendicitis for ages, but I just wasn't getting pregnant. And I kept going to the doctor and she sort of insisted that I just wasn't trying hard enough. And it was only my friend Kim said to me if did you not think it might be something to do with the appendix and i googled it and first thing that came up was like one of the complications can be uh blocked fallopian tubes wow so i went back to your friend she was great and i know it was brilliant because i've been to the doctor loads of times and she'd

never come up and i'd even mentioned the appendix to her anyway so yes it turned out as soon as i finally got referred i had this thing called hydrosalpines which is when your fallopian tubes are blocked um so i had to have them removed and do ivf to have the children um so yeah and that was what i thought at the time for the first one for clifford i found it the actual ivf part the jabbing yourself with the needles and all the all of that and the and the side effects of the drugs weren't really the problem for me. But it's when you, I mean, anyone who's had IVF and failed will know, but the failure of the rounds is what's really devastating.

And so I failed two. And then on the third one, we ended up doing this thing called genetic screening, where it really, it's just a way of kind of avoiding unnecessary miscarriages basically because a lot of the time you will have a clutch of embryos and some of them will be um abnormal but they won't be able to tell just by looking at them and others aren't so they will put one inside you and then quite often you might test pregnant and then you're just never gonna it's never gonna make a baby so we did that on the second one um turned out that there was i had seven embryos i think and all of them were duds basically it came back that not one of them would have made a baby

so that was that was a real blow but in hindsight a great thing for me because i mean that's that's a potential seven miscarriages that i avoided by doing that. And then the third one, we did it again and we had one good embryo and that was my first son. And then after that, I did another round for Bruce and it was successful the first time. And honestly, doing it again once you have a child is a completely different thing because you just, it's just the difference. I think the main, the really difficult thing when you haven't got children and you're trying for a child is that constant worry that you're never going to be a mother. Once you're a mother, it's more a worry of, like, maybe they won't have a sibling,

which wouldn't have been for me as devastating, I don't think. Yeah, I mean, I suppose that's a very... I know that when my mum was trying to have a baby after my sister, she said she found it really tough because she knew she felt like she knew what she was missing out on and that for her that was as she felt like that would really was really hard but i don't what if she hadn't had another yeah which she didn't in the end yeah she had a lot of miscarriages and didn't end up having that baby but that's what that's what she said to me like right spoke about it. Yeah. But I suppose, yeah, there's a lot to take in from what you've just said.

And I'm wondering what it felt like at the beginning when you found out that the appendicitis had meant that actually getting pregnant naturally was just not an option. That's a really big deal, isn't it? Yeah, I mean, I felt there was a sense of relief to have it confirmed at the beginning. But then, I mean, it's difficult. I don't want to start knocking any of the people involved,

but I was really unlucky. It was like a massive catalogue of failings that kind of got me in that position in the first place. It shouldn't have got to that point at all. And so I started, I did feel quite, I felt, I guess, quite pissed off that I've been kind of let down by lots of people because I I felt like I was and my boyfriend confirmed this he said he witnessed this happening on several occasions I really felt like I was just being treated like a

bit of a hysterical blonde a few times like when I was going that they really just didn't seem to take it seriously enough any of it like when I when I went to the hospital when I was on the phone to NHS direct I was given completely inaccurate advice which the doctor since told me is complete nonsense um so there was lots of things that kind of went wrong so I did feel a little bit cross for a while but I was very galvanized to get on with it um there was the waiting list was really long so that was another blow it was like 10 months and i'd already been waiting long enough yeah and i just so we decided that we'd try and get the money together to do it privately which we did and i've been recommended this place that was supposed to be the place to go

and and that was it was horrible i wouldn't i wouldn't recommend it to anyone it was it was kind of like a it was a bit handmaid's tale the way they kind of lined all the women up in beds and stuck cannulas in their arm it wasn't it was much it was they were very driven by results i think rather than thinking about the human experience um but then the second i found a doctor for the second or third ones who was great um i don't know. I mean, now I look back on it, I think I was so lucky. You do feel it while you're going through it. You feel a bit of a victim, I suppose. I remember reading about a woman who'd had exactly the same experience as me.

And she was suing the NHS because she was now in her 40s and she'd had lots of failed rounds of IVF. And it was exactly the same thing. I mean, word for word,s and she'd had lots of failed rounds of IVF and it was exactly the same thing I mean word for word she she it had burst and lots of complications and I think one of the hospitals had admitted fault um and so I had this like background terror that that would be me in a few years time and that it just actually wouldn't happen and I looked into adoption and adoption is you know anyone who just says oh just adopt I always get so frustrated when I hear it or read that someone if someone's trying for a baby they go why don't you just adopt there's loads of

children out there you need a home a there aren't actually not in this country anyway um and b it's it's a really grueling process in itself and you can't even begin it until you and i think they they make you wait i think it's a year or two years after ivf before they'll even begin to consider you because they say you need to grieve from that process i actually actually didn't know that. No so all of these things kind of become apparent when you look into and then you can potentially adopt from overseas because overseas there are children who need homes but then that's politically fraught because there's a lot of it's all to do with the whether or not you can adopt from certain countries comes down to their relationship with the UK government,

which is always changing. There's like, I think probably in terms of letdowns, it's probably far worse than IVF, actually, I would think. And then, of course, so many children who are adopted have been in the kind of care system for years and you're going to have like a... I felt that if I adopted, I would have to probably give up work because you have to to have like a i felt that if i adopted i would have to probably give up work because you have to love them in a whole different way i think and you have

to look after them really differently so that was a fear as well because i didn't want to give up work um yeah i can understand it well i know as well that even once you start the adoption process that's on average like a couple of years i think yeah you can be turned down you can be turned down yeah you can I've heard faith size a bad story I know a perfectly reasonable woman who was turned down for I don't know I don't understand why you know they come I spoke to a few people I went and had a meeting with this woman

who sort of who advises other people in it now that she's done it and she said you know you have to be prepared they will come and they will like with a fine tooth comb go over your house they will look at the pictures on your walls and if you've got nudes on the walls, they might say that's inappropriate. She said, they found cat poo in my garden and said that, you know, I couldn't possibly allow this to happen with a baby.

She said, A, I didn't even have a baby at that point. And B, you know, my cat had just done a poo. You know, they just come round at 10 o'clock in the evening. So, you know, you don't have to go through anything like that when you have a child conceived naturally. So, yeah, it's tough. But anyway, now what I'm trying to say is I know now that I'm a mother how fortunate I was because I have, I mean,

anyone who's had IVF will probably be in this position. You become like a go-to person for other women going through it. And so anyone who vaguely knew me or who knew someone who knew me would get in touch when they were going through it. Because I was always really keen to talk to and advise people because it's really bewildering when it happens to you. You don't know where to look. There's loads of people kind of selling the whole dream to you. And it's really difficult to know what to do next. And I felt something of an expert of it by the time I finished because I'd done so much reading about it.

something of an expert of it by the time I finished because I'd done so much reading about it and I have met so many women since who have like had barf in fact one friend has she had 17 failed rounds of IVF she did she yeah and she did and she just couldn't stop going and I totally understand that because the only thing that kept me from being in a depression was every I would be depressed after each failed one and then the idea of continuing would be the only the only thing that would kind of lift you out of it would be that sudden decision okay I'm going to do it again and then you could start living again because you had home and she's 17 on she was the 17th she'd, was absolutely her final one. She's now pregnant and she's having her baby on Saturday. I know, so I look at things like, I mean, and I can't tell you how happy.

I mean, I even want to cry just thinking about it. But you become really, really invested in other women going through it. Did you have that person for you when you were going through it? The person you called? I had a few, yeah, I had a few people. I met some amazing women. I sat next to someone at a dinner once so I'd never met before and she was just so she had tried and failed and she'd she'd accepted it and moved on and was really happy in her marriage and she was very cool I think about her a lot I bump into her

sometimes still but she because she was a great example of someone who actually who said okay this is enough and just like and and I don't don't know how you, I would have really struggled to reach that point, I think. She was great. It's a personal thing all around, isn't it? The whole thing of it, your relationship with all of it, with how you think of yourself as a mother before, whether or not you plan to be a mum, what kind of a mum you end up being if you're lucky enough to have kids. And yeah, your relationship with your own fertility um how many children you'd like all of it is so it's so personal and and a lot of it isn't

completely out of our hands and you that's also i mean it's all i mean when it comes to infertility or like problems fertility problems it's totally out of your hands and that's what's so frustrating about it i think because a lot of the women i, I think. Because a lot of the women, I know certainly for me and a lot of the women I spoke to, they're kind of driven, successful people who've kind of put everything in place. They're working really hard. And then there's this one thing

that they just can't make it happen anyway. It doesn't, obviously, you know, if you're lucky enough to be able to get the money to keep going, and that's what it comes down to eventually but you know even to it's not even for those people who've managed to do 17 it's a question of like selling houses and things sometimes but if it i think generally if you keep going you you are much more likely to get there because it is it's like a lucky dip you've got so many eggs and some of them are going to work and some aren't and you have to just keep going back in but at the same time it's also like

gambling because you get really addicted to to the the hope and there is a chance that you could lose hundreds of thousands of pounds and come out without a baby and feeling completely yeah and there's also some people where they've been through the process and then actually i spoke to a woman who her and her husband actually had quite bad postnatal depression after um waiting seven years for their baby and then um because there's lots along the way that's really isolating and you can have lots of people around you that are really good for support but i think there's lots about the process of, you know, whether it's IVF or not, actually. I think just finding yourself responsible for a small human that's very vulnerable is scary. Yeah, and then I think you've had IVF.

There's this weird added thing when the baby arrives. Partly there's an anxiety. I'm sure all new mothers are anxious about their baby. But I feel like it may be slightly heightened because you've spent you spent your whole pregnancy terrified you're going to lose it. And then the baby's here and then you're terrified he's going to get sick or something. Yes. But the other thing is there's this weird sort of added layer of guilt because you just think if you want to go back to work, you know, but I wanted this child so much. You know, I tried so hard.

Should I be leaving them for a day or an hour or should I be going and having a night on my own somewhere? You start to feel this weird or if you're finding it really overwhelming and stressful or maybe if you have depression you kind of feel extra guilty like you you've tried so hard and now you're kind of you're struggling with it you don't ever want to complain about anything yeah I think that's absolutely the case and I think I think that's probably why I like having this conversation with lots of different people because I think those themes run through most mothers' minds. You know, there's just part and parcel of it and I find chatting to people about it really helpful

because I think it was probably in part motivated by my own guilt and how I've tried to balance doing the thing that I love but also feeling like I'm a good mum because I think on my you know on my deathbed the thing I would like is my legacy is just being a good parent would be number one on the list I think um did you find your relationship with your work did change once you were a mother yeah um it did definitely but I I think to begin with definitely it really helped um I'd had I'd had this really protracted period of like I guess I call it like artist's block where I just I wasn't really happy with the work that I was making and I felt I just couldn't really find a

way out of the work that I'd been doing into the work that I wanted to be making um and it was maybe it was sort of tied in with the fertility thing I don the work that I wanted to be making um and it was maybe it was sort of tied in with the fertility thing I don't I because I continued to work through all of that but I think it was a bit joyless um particularly as it wasn't the thing that I wanted the most which was to be a mother and but then yeah once I did have a child, I did find after three months, we had a part-time nanny and I would work maybe three short days a week. And I just felt it was just so nice to having had that length of time not working. Maybe I just needed a break from it all.

But also I think it's when you've got this very limited time, you don't really mess around I think I've spent too much time thinking and not enough doing for a period maybe and I just thought well I've only got this long so I better just crack on with something and that really helped and um that was a that was in the beginning but then I did definitely I found I had a it's definitely there was a quiet period of my work with when the children were young, which was fine. And I very much chose that at the beginning.

I thought, well, now is the time I'm going to be a mother. I'm not going to stop working altogether, but I don't care as much about that and about the success I may be having. And so I started to turn a few things down. I stopped really going out socially much. And it was all fine to begin with but then you suddenly realize that because you've done all of that people are kind of forgetting who you are and you're not getting the requests to do things as much as you used to and you start to actually

miss that a little bit and once it's gone it's kind of harder to start to kind of get that going again so I did make a very kind of conscious decision to just get on with the work and to get to my second son into full-time child care as soon as I could so that I could actually I put on a show during lockdown and it was really important that I did that even though it was the worst possible time in the end to do it because I mean I'd have all these people saying oh it's amazing with all this extra time I'm learning a language what are you doing with the extra time so well I've got half the What are you doing with the extra time? Well, I've got half the time I had before because the children are at home the whole time.

But somehow I did do it and it went really well. And it kind of it just springboarded loads of other stuff that's happened as a consequence. And I feel like I'm getting back into that now. But it's just peaks and troughs. You know, I think you just have to accept that that's the way it is. i like you i think that very whenever i'm feeling really frustrated about it i stop and think come but what is more important they're growing up really quickly i'm going to look back on this time and do i want to have just thought that i was in the studio the whole time or do i want to think that i was there with them because all of that stuff can come back again i can do

that later yeah and i suppose you know so long as you're getting enough of what you need to feel like you in the equation as well. I think it's really important to still, I do think being a little bit selfish about it is quite good. Well, you're just a better mum as a result, I think. I'm so much nicer to them when I've had a day at work. I am. Over the holidays, I worked very little

and I was mostly with them for the six-week summer break. And by the end of it, I was getting so ratty with them and, like, shrieky. And I just thought, God, I'm not being very kind to them I just need a couple of hours and so every now and then if I got the chance I'd take a couple of hours just to go and like catch up on emails and things and I'd come back and I'd be sitting down and playing with them again and you know they appreciate them definitely one thing I did want to touch on actually when I was reading an article you about when you were going through IVF and I think you made a really a point that really resonated with me about the forums online where women are

talking about pregnancy yeah and how a lot of it is quite infantilized in terms of the language and little emoticons and stuff yeah and I was laughing because you were saying there's lots of anachronisms like they said bd baby dance which is having sex which is outrageous saying there's lots of anachronisms, like they said. BD, baby dons, which is having sex. Which is outrageous. But there's loads of them, aren't there? I remember, is it DH, like darling husband? DH, yeah, and then DS, darling son, DD, darling daughter, everything. But then, I mean, and then any kind of miscarriages

would be kind of talked about with like a little angel with wings. And wishing you baby dust and all of that.'d be sprinkling baby dust on you yeah that was the other one i do wonder where that comes from actually that way that i've because i've noticed that when the times when i've ventured towards those forums maybe when i've been thinking about another baby or i've been in the early stage of pregnancy i want to check something seems you know normal yeah and you find yourself you find yourself reading them a lot yeah they can be very helpful when you want to find out... And also sometimes you're thinking,

I want to know what happened next to that person. Did they end up having the baby? What happened? But, yeah, there is a lot of it that's done in this very sort of soft, childlike language. And I don't know what that's about, really. I wonder if it's protecting yourself a little bit? Yeah, possibly, or... Or not wanting to offend other people, maybe?

Yeah, I think it's partly that. Like, they want to make sure that they're always... I mean, there's a lot of kindness between these women, and I think it's great. There's a lot of support. Some people on there clearly really are probably lacking support elsewhere, and a lot of them do. You notice that they're checking in on people

and saying, how are you and how's it going? So they've got a really... And I didn't't post on them but i used to read them loads because i've got a lot of information out of it so they were very helpful i didn't really want to knock them but i did think like what what where's the kind of straightforward discussion about this and i think this might have changed a bit since i wrote about that but i found that so i would go into these ivf waiting rooms and we were all in the same boat and then there's also and you sort of you'd think there should be and there was sometimes you'd notice a couple of people that sort of buddied up but you think really we should all be kind of here supporting each other talking about this and yet everyone would just be like looking at their phones

I would be googling like you know what happens when you've got this blood count well whatever it might be and just reading about it rather than like looking up and talking to anyone around me there was also a weird sort of sense almost of like I think there was like a strange competitive thing because some of us we knew that some of us in the room would get pregnant and some of us wouldn't yeah so there was that strange almost kind of furtive looks up at each other and I just found the whole situation really strange the first time around, actually. Because then you'd go online and you'd get all this really cosy language between women.

And yet in reality, we were all sitting side by side, completely ignoring each other. Maybe a worry as well, if you talk about it openly, that it's going to somehow sort of tempt fate. It's going to go wrong, yeah. Or it could just be the fact that the kind of women who post on those forums, you know, like to talk, because I wouldn't have spoken like that,

and I never posted, so it could just have been that. Weighed in with your grown-up language. Exactly. You've been chased off. Are you the sort of mother you thought you would be? Do you think? It's quite hard to know sometimes. That's an interesting question.

I never really thought about that. I think I'm a little bit, slightly better than I thought I would be maybe. But not... It's hard to know. Yeah, that's tricky. The reason I'm saying that is because I've got an older sister who's like the model mother.

She had children in her 20s. She's got three children. She took quite a long period away from work and she's never had any nannies. I'm not knocking women who have nannies, but she chose to do everything. And she did everything and she did it really well well and she would sit and she would make things with them and do cards and i just look at her and think she's like an alien species to me i have no idea how she gets how she can do that because i'd spend five minutes with her kids and have to go and lie

down i found it so exhausting so i did always think we're so different and we'll do it really really differently but i think i was underestimating the fact that when they're your children you do get a lot more pleasure out of doing those things with them than you would if you were teaching other people in the nursery or something she is still definitely an infinitely more patient and present mother than I have been but I have definitely found so much joy in like I used to look at the baby groups and things I'd walk into galleries and there'd be women sitting on a mat with toys and babies doing stuff and I think oh god I couldn't do that or I'd go or the whole NCT thing I think I don't know if I can do that and I did all of it and I loved it and I you know I've got a group of great friends

that I made out of NCT we still text mean, literally every day we probably text each other now. And that was over five years ago. And I went and I did all of those gallery type things. And when you sit on a mat with your baby and you kind of interact with them. And I just didn't appreciate how different it is when you've got this little person of your own. And you suddenly, it's like you kind of have this superpower to kind of jump in their body and see things through their eyes and it's really that's a lovely way to put it actually you sort of feel reborn I think that's and that's what I I really felt sad about when I was unsure

if I could have children although I knew I would have somehow I was gonna I would have adopted I would have done something in the end to have a child because I desperately wanted to kind of you just want to share the world with someone else desperately and it's really yeah it's kind of like having it's an amazing kind of renewal it's like shedding your skin halfway through life and being able to just appreciate the joy of stuff again that you you know I think I was a bit jaded and that's completely gone now oh that's lovely I mean did you have a childhood that's at all similar to the childhood they're having? No, no, it was quite pretty different, actually. It was in the country. It was, we had a, well,

we do, we take them to the country a lot, actually. So they have their moments there where they're really free running kind of wild outside and that so that definitely has some parallels uh but no i went to a little village school which had 25 people in the entire school whereas cliff has got more people than that in his entire in his class we didn't have many people coming and going through my parents didn't get on very well so they weren't you know i didn't have that kind of happy marriage as a model. I know it was really different, actually. Yeah, it's interesting when you realize that the things you've picked up and the things you just sort of change for them. I mean, I do think one day I always think we will move to the country at some point, maybe in time for secondary school, probably just at the point when they want to be in the city.

Drag them off. So there will be parallels but um but no i often look at them and think why your childhood's so different to mine you know you're living in the city you're a city child and you have all of these different people coming and going and you know i'm not saying it's any better or worse really but it's different it'd be interesting to see how it affects them yeah and um before i let you go when when they have friends come over their friends curious to look in the freezers in your basement? Because I would definitely want to do that if my friend had.

Well, actually, it's quite funny because I did during... Well, when we weren't... The school's relaxing a bit about letting us in inside the school gates and things, but during that period when they were back at school but we weren't allowed in, they did this... They had a day about, what was it called? It was like Jobs People Do Day or something

where they all got to dress up as different jobs. And I had a last minute kind of panic about what he was going to be. So we just threw loads of paint over his clothes and he went in as an artist. And then they asked if any parents would like to do a Zoom call to the class and talk about their job. So he always wants me to do all of this stuff. And I'd missed out on school trips and stuff.

So I said, yeah, I'll do that for your class. And the teacher was quite excited because she said, oh, this is going to be quite a fun one because you've got a studio and everything. And we can maybe can we see the studio? And I said, yeah, it's fine. Anyway, I came last, I think, in the day. And the kids were all really bored and tired because they were like four years old. So they were all like they kept getting up off the mat and running around. She kept saying,

I'm so sorry, Polly, I'm really sorry. They're just a bit tired. But she was going, will you sit down? She was trying to talk to you about her work. And I just wasn't engaging them at all. And I said, who wants to look in my freezer? And they all went like, yeah! I was like, no, who wants to see some dead snakes?

And they went crazy. So at that point, they all just sat down like that. And she said, right, sit down who wants to see some dead snakes and they went crazy so at that point they all just sat down like that she said right sit down you can see some dead snakes and they all just sat glued to the carpet staring at the screen while i took them through the freezer and pulled things out and they still like they run up to me now and go like how can we see your dead snakes again and one of them he's only had one kid back since then actually and yeah as i was about to take run him home i said you want to have a quick look downstairs so i did take him down there yeah so hopefully like i say i'm gonna i'll enter into a cool period for a couple of years and then and then it'll be like can you just lock the basement please hide all your work when my friends come around i don't know

i was thinking about like i was because i think i saw something where you're saying sometimes you've got a few people that do just sort of randomly send you animals that might be suitable for your work and sometimes they can't arrive without warning. And like here, if people open my packages by accident, they'll get some like random sequined ice skating costume from me, but they open your package, mum, someone sent you a rabbit.

Yeah, I even had one guy once sent me a live snake once. Oh, by accident? I don't think it was by accident. He was a very odd guy. I think he was like playing weird games. I don't know. But he said it was. But I did then, I looked into the snake,

which was a harmless snake called a hognose. And they do play dead a lot, apparently. So it's possible that he just wasn't paying much attention and he slung it in this Tupperware. But I didn't open it. It was this intern I had at the time. She opened it and it started moving and she completely freaked out, poor thing.

Yeah, that's... We're always alerted. The dogs would always run to the package, so I'd always be alerted about a dead animal by my sniffer dogs. Ah, very smart. Helpful canines. Oh, cool. So you said you like to learn through tactile means.

Is that something you introduce with your kids too? Have they participated in that with you? Well, I've just noticed that kids, they are so sensory, aren't they? I mean, one of their favourite toys is always slime, all of that stuff that they just love. Like, I often interject when they, I'm always yelling at them at supper times and I have to stand back sometimes and think, oh, just let them smash the jelly all over the counter. You know, they're obviously really enjoying it. Just this morning, my son Bruce wouldn't eat any breakfast. I ended up giving him a biscuit

because I was desperate for him to eat something. And I turn around, he just smashed the whole thing into a big pile of crumbs and he was just like really delightedly making a little kind of pyramid out of them. And it's like that is the way they learn. They're like little scientists, aren't they? I mean, they're constantly conducting experiments all the time. And I have to keep reminding myself that because it's not the way they learn. They're like little scientists, aren't they? I mean, they're constantly conducting experiments all the time.

And I have to keep reminding myself that because it's not really mess to them. They're just learning. So yes, I will absolutely encourage that in terms of like work and play. And I want to, I will completely sit down with them and skin an animal at some point if they will. I've got a feeling, Cliff is kind of very,

he's very clean and neat and he likes to wear suits. um i've got a feeling he might find it a bit messy he'd be keen he really loves to please me and to do things that i do so i think he'll do it as long as he's got a pair of rubber gloves or something and i think bruce would probably just end up smearing himself with blood that's quite an image a suited person in little gloves age five yeah yeah bloodstained one but i think um i think actually being not squeamish about the circle of life is brilliant i'm really glad i was raised that way it's actually a really nice to not freak out about it because it is something that surrounds us it's just a helpful tool isn't it when you're growing up i think you can't um you're gonna get growing up? I think you can't...

You're going to get a real shock otherwise. You can't avoid it forever. Yeah, exactly. I'd be up for doing some more taxidermy. I'd love to come over and... Bring the kids. Yeah, exactly. Another family day.

With a rabbit this time. That sounds perfect. I'd honestly be up for that. Yeah. I do think my kids think I'm quite odd with a lot of the stuff that's in the house. They don't really bat an eyelid after a while they just accept everything, that's what I love about children

they just don't I honestly think there was a period when Clifford thought that everyone had snakes in the freezer that's just normal life to you of course, you wouldn't even question it good names by the way Clifford and Bruce, brilliant names Bruce started as a joke

and then we learned to love it we were trying to think of the least we were saying now what's the least likely name to become fashionable soon that we're because like all of the other ones that we liked had obviously been taken thousands of times and then I remember we were just like we were winding each other up laughing with us Kenneth was another one I liked and then I said what about Bruce and Matt was like oh my god we can't can't call him Bruce. Can you imagine a baby called Bruce? And I was like, actually, I can. He went, yeah, I love it. That's wonderful.

And I looked up, because they've had the Office of National Statistics have done kids' names recently. Yeah, where you can see the percentage of... Yeah, and I put it... Actually, Bruce isn't doing too badly. I think there was about 30 last year. Really? Clifford?

That's quite a lot. Two. Two Cliff about 30 last year. Really? Clifford, two. Two Cliffords? So he's almost dropped off entirely, which I'm quite pleased about, secretly. I know, I've actually done that. And the one I did the best on, I think, was Ray. There's just hardly any little kids called Ray. And I love the fact it's such an old man name.

But it's lovely when you think of a ray of sun. It's a lovely word. It is, it is, yeah. You get involved in it. What are all your five then? You've got Kit, Ray, Mickey. Yeah, you've done it in odd order, so I hope I missed that. Jessie and Sonny.

Yeah, so Sonny, Kit, Ray, Jessie, Mickey. I think we had that at some point on the list. Yeah. Sorry, say that again. So Sonny, who's 17. Kit, who's 12. Who I just met. Yeah, who you just met.

Nine-year-old Ray, five-year-old Jessie, and two-year-old Mickey. Wow, five boys. That's amazing. Yeah, it's funny. It really is. Well, just five, actually. It's quite amazing. I know, five of anything.

I know. Was it always a plan to have that many kids? No, I don't think I did. I sometimes feel like I just would have had one, in a way. One or lots. Yeah, it's funny as well now though this I know this sounds quite eccentric of me but I sort of feel like I can't really remember how I got to this point because I was sort of in the flow I think and they'd always get to about two and I'd think oh one more I mean when I had my third I literally asked the consultant on the day I gave birth if it would be

okay to have another one maybe wow because I've had all c-sections as well so I was worried about that maybe they might say no three is done okay and then I didn't realize there was any kind of limit on that actually no I don't think that well like maybe they used to be and then when I was having my fourth I was very I kept saying this is my last baby definitely and then I got about halfway through the pregnancy I was was like, maybe not. And then I had Jess, and then about, when he was about 18 months, I just got really, really broody. I don't really feel like I knew what broody was until...

No, I actually don't think I do know what broody is still now. I don't really get it when I'm around other babies. It wasn't just like I want, it wasn't like just a desire. It was like my brain kept turning all thoughts towards baby it was very it was actually quite annoying if I'm honest because I felt like you had to cure it shut it up silence it by getting pregnant a little bit I sort of spoke about it a bit um I was mainly met with you know probably not a great idea from like most of the family but i could see a little

chink in the armor for richard i thought i'm gonna just push on that yes um and uh yeah i thought i just would like one more and now my brain is being quite because it's like the same age where there's normally another one. Wow, okay, so there's an age where you're vulnerable, basically. Yeah, definitely. And also, the kids start talking about it a lot. So my 12-year-old is very insistent. He's like, one more.

Really? He's got no idea how biology works. He said to me, can you just have one more? Wow, that's sweet. That's really nice that a 12-year-old would want another one. I would have thought that was the kind of age

where he was a bit overcoming it. No, he's really into it. And he said, I said, Kit, I'm already 42. I wouldn't be able to have another baby until I was 43. And he was like, well, he was going, I said, how long do you think it takes to make a baby? He said, nine months. I said, exactly.

It's just going to take a while, no matter what. So I'm going to be a bit older, I think. And he's like, well, I mean, you had Jessie in November. And I was like, no, you can have a baby in any month of the year, but I can't choose that it's November coming coming up because that's just not how it works there's a lot actually a fundamental um lack of grasp of what actually goes on i mean when i told him about the last baby i said i'm having a baby and he said so did you have secX last night. I was like, nine months ago.

And he went, why didn't you tell me? I said, three months ago, why won't you tell me? I said, Kit, we just had sex.

I was like, Kit, you do not want the kind of childhood where your mother tells you every time your parents do it. Like, just trust me on that. That is not what you want.

So I suppose he thinks every time you have sex, you get pregnant. Exactly. Exactly. God, I couldn't even think about it. I remember the second one, it was more a a case of i definitely want to have another child

at some point i should probably get going because of the ivf i thought so that's and then it just worked so that was great but now the thing is we've got this weird situation where we have one when i did ivf for bruce we did um we did genetic screening again and this round was just a really successful round and we had two this time that came through the screening so we've got one frozen so i've got this really weird situation where even though i think if i had never had fertility problems i would have gone for two kids i feel like i've got a third or not i just paid for the storage for another year the other day and uh once they've reached day five, when they freeze them, they've already got a sex, a hair colour, an eye colour.

All of those things are determined. So to not give it a chance, to me, feels like having an abortion. And I'm 41, so I feel kind of, I'm feeling a bit like, oh, I'm quite old, I have another child now. But I feel like at some point I'm absolutely going to have to give it a chance. And the lucky thing for me is it's the embryo of a 36-year-old, so I could even, I mean, I'm not going to do this, but you could do it when you're 50 and it doesn't make a difference

because it's the age of the embryo, not the womb, that's important. Isn't that amazing? I know it is, but I feel like I have to make my mind up on that really soon. Oh, that's like a whole other... I really did not feel ready. I mean, wow,uce is such a handful it's taken until he's three i think to even i have started thinking okay i now that they're kind of playing together a bit more and not trying to kill each other that's a whole i can't even imagine having that they probably help a little bit too right

do they they help the older kids must help a bit when you've got a baby like at least you don't no they're really one you can't leave the room because you might kill it. You can at least say, just make sure the baby doesn't fall down the stairs. Yeah, there's definitely a bit of that that goes on. I think for me, it's more like I can't imagine what it must feel like to have. It's not just because sometimes you get that kind of idea of someone. You know, is there another baby out there that could join another kid that could join the family? But actually knowing that the first process has happened.

Well, that's the problem because I would have to make a decision and you know women do this all the time and some women ivf was semi went quite well for me in terms of what how many embryos produced but some women produce loads of embryos and they have like six or seven frozen so it's kind of they just have to decide to you just switch it off basically and they and they the embryos die at that point but yeah but i think the fact that it's just one as well if it was three then i i'd almost find it easier to just get because i'm definitely not gonna have three more kids whereas one more just feels like and also because it's bruce's twin they were created on the same day wow and it was completely random which one was put in first

which is kind of amazing. And then I will always feel guilty that I gave one of them life and not the other one. Yeah. So, yeah, it's a very weird thing. I mean, I know someone with two children both created, well, there must be hundreds of people like this. Two children, one's older than the other,

but it's entirely down to chance which one they've put in that day. Who's the eldest and who's the youngest i mean there's enough there's enough of a kind of miraculous nature to what i know to conception anyway anyway that's like a whole extra yeah layer but completely brilliant and also the stories that you know will come out of it all and the generations that come i mean it's just it's wonderful what an amazing i love that about family the whole the way the cards fall and that ends up being so so part of what makes us and so defining but actually so much of it is just this really everybody's got like their own little wiggly route to where they ended up well thank you for complimenting my wonky taxidermist very generous was very generous of you. No, I feel like I wasn't complimentary enough.

I'm sorry. No, you were. Extremely good first effort. It was literally... Way better than mine. ...exactly the level of compliment. Probably slightly above, actually. So when you said that mice aren't a good thing to start on,

what would you have suggested as a good starter animal? Probably a rabbit. Rabbit? That's huge. Yeah, but you can pull a rabbit's skin off very quickly whereas you have to go very carefully with a mouse and their skins are very tough you're less likely to tear it okay learn something new every day yeah try that next time okay next up rabbit Thank you so much, Polly. What a brilliant, brilliant chat. And just if you're someone that's listening

that is going through IVF or know someone that they care about that's going through IVF, I just want to spend lots and send lots and lots of love and support your way because I know what a big, big deal that is. and thank you to Polly for speaking so openly about it because I think it's very easy to feel so so alone in that process and she's right there's a lot of women that don't really speak about it too much because you don't kind of want to jinx it also it's

probably very hard to articulate just how much it's taken over your life when other people are not experiencing the same thing as you but actually in my house um when I was a teenager my step-mom went through a few rounds of IVF and I could see firsthand what a huge deal it was and obviously I've had some very close friends of mine go through it and in fact one of them's going through it as we speak so yes just sending lots and lots and lots of love and support your way. And I hope you're feeling good about everything and that you've got good people around you. Because, yeah, it's a lot. And also, I love the idea of Polly having her kids bring over mates to go and see the dead snakes in the freezer.

It makes me feel a little bit less weird about my house, which is filled with loads of rubbishy stuff and bits and bobs to look at and the occasional dead animal maybe that's been stuffed by you know me and their dad actually you know what I don't think my kids have ever shown our little taxidermy mice to any of their mates maybe I should start bringing that up conversation starter you know do your friends want to see our taxidermy yeah I'll try that out next week anyway uh may I just leave it in your mind about my kitchen disco dance-a-thon for next week I know I'm now banging on about it but it would just be really amazing if you could just support me in any way so yeah I think it's going to be really motivating when I start actually raising tons of

money for children in need so I'd love you to be a part of that. If you'd be so kind, it would really mean a lot to me. Or maybe even if you just message me with a really good dance move that will take some pressure off my lower back during my 24 hour challenge, that'd be cool too. And come and join me. You can find me on the red button. I believe it's on BBC Sounds for the entirety, or you can listen back to part of it on BBC sounds as well and you know what I'm supposed to do from today is I'm supposed to stop drinking caffeine because apparently if I have a week off caffeine that'll mean when I drink caffeine next week it's going to have much more impact but I don't really want to stop drinking caffeine I really like it what I'm thinking I might do is stop coffee from today because that's the big one, isn't it? I don't know if you drink coffee, but I have one a day and I really look

forward to it. So I might stop drinking coffee from now and then I might go decaf tea maybe from like tomorrow or the next day, just sort of wean myself down a little bit. I love my tea, but then decaf's all right, isn't it it maybe i won't really notice it that much because it'll taste the same no i'll definitely notice it i love caffeine anyway i would like it to have an impact when i drink it next week so i guess it's worth the sacrifice maybe i'm supposed to be doing core exercise as well but not so much i'm gonna find out a lot about myself aren't i when i'm 16 hours in and everything on my body hurts. Anyway, don't worry about it. They don't call it a challenge for nothing.

Next week's guest, there's two people it might be. So I'm not going to say anything because I've got myself tied in knots with that before. And in the meantime, I'm still on tour with Steps, where I'm after this week. I've got Manchester this week and Aberdeen, I believe. Lots of other fun stuff. So I'll see you here next week or I'll see you on the road somewhere

or you'll find me on the red button. Basically, if you want me, you know where to find me. All right, in the meantime, have an amazing week. Love you lots. Bye-bye. Thank you. you