THE ADAM BUXTON PODCAST - EP.168 - PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE

Episode Date: November 9, 2021

Adam talks with American writer, investigative journalist and podcaster Patrick Radden Keefe about his books Empire Of Pain, which tells the story of the wealthy American family behind the opioid crisis, and Say Nothing about the troubles in Northern Ireland.This episode was recorded remotely on July 7th, 2021.Thanks to Séamus Murphy-Mitchell for his work on this episodePodcast artwork by Helen GreenBRYAN GLICK GOFUNDME PAGEKEYBOARD FANTASIES Directed by POSY DIXON - 2019 (KEYBOARD FANTASIES WEBSITE)RELATED LINKSPATRICK RADDEN KEEFE WEBSITEA LOADED GUN by PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE - 2013 (THE NEW YORKER)Patrick's piece about about Amy Bishop, the Harvard Ph.D. who in February, 2010, opened fire at a biology department meeting after being refused tenure at the University of Alabama.WIND OF CHANGE PODCAST - 2020 (CROOKED MEDIA WEBSITE)THE FAMILY THAT BUILT AND EMPIRE OF PAIN by PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE - 2017 (NEW YORKER ARTICLE)Patrick's original piece about the Sackler family.THE OPIOID CRISIS - 2021 (NATIONAL INSTITUTE ON DRUG ABUSE WEBSITE)"BLOWING SMOKE UP YOUR ASS" USED TO BE LITERAL - 2014 (GIZMODO)AUDM APP Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I added one more podcast to the giant podcast bin Now you have plucked that podcast out and started listening I took my microphone and found some human folk Then I recorded all the noises while we spoke My name is Adam Buxton, I'm a man I want you to enjoy this, that's the plan. Hey, how are you doing, podcats? Adam Buxton here on a very beautiful afternoon slash evening.

I mean, it is an afternoon. It's not even, what is it, just gone 4pm at the beginning of the second week of November 2021. But already the sun is nearly down. Look at this though, coming over the brow of the hill, catching the last rays of the sun as it shines through autumnal leaves on the trees, making them look as if they're ablaze with golden fire. Autumn's a pretty good season, isn't it? Let me tell you a bit about my guest for podcast number 168. The American writer and investigative journalist Patrick Radden Keefe. Patfax.

Patrick, currently aged 45, grew up in Massachusetts, USA. He went to college at New York's prestigious Columbia University and received master's degrees from Cambridge and the London School of Economics in the UK and a JD from Yale Law School. They were so impressed with him, they gave him the whole bottle.

JD, like Jack Daniels, you see. But actually it stands for Juris Doctor. Legal stuff, innit? Patrick is currently a staff writer at The New Yorker and has also written for publications including The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine and Slate. But did he ever have anything published in Nuts or Zoo? That's the question. I doubt it. Nevertheless, Patrick is the recipient of awards and fellowships aplenty

for his journalism. And in addition to the stuff he's written for periodicals, he has also written four books. His first, Chatter, was published in 2005 and it's about the shadowy world of covert surveillance and eavesdropping by government security agencies. In his 2009 book, The Snakehead, Patrick told the story of a people smuggling operation run out of New York's Chinatown. Patrick's book book Say Nothing, a true story of murder and memory in Northern Ireland, was published in 2018 and tells the story of the troubles in Northern Ireland by focusing on the disappearance and murder in 1972

of Jean McConville, a mother of ten from Belfast. For some relatively light relief, Patrick made his first foray into podcasting last year, 2020, with the series Wind of Change, in which he investigated the possibility that the 1990 power ballad Wind of Change by German heavy metal band The Scorpions was made in collaboration with the CIA

as a propaganda exercise designed to consolidate public enthusiasm for the collapse of the Soviet Union. We don't actually talk about that series in this conversation, but I really recommend it. A series of eight episodes, roughly 60 minutes each, episodes, roughly 60 minutes each, that is by turns exciting, mysterious and absurd, all beautifully put together. Patrick is very well suited to podcasting, as you'll hear. He's got a great voice and excellent kind of delivery. Wind of Change topped many lists of best podcasts in 2020 and if you haven't heard it yet well lucky you there's a link in the description. It's another flipping jet probably on its way to COP26. I don't know what I'm getting at.

Anyway, as well as producing an award-winning chart-topping podcast, Patrick spent the first lockdowns last year working on his fourth book, Empire of Pain, published earlier this year, 2021. It's the story of the Sackler family and the pharmaceutical business that made them rich. It was the Sackler's company, Purdue Pharma, that created and aggressively marketed the opioid painkiller OxyContin in the late 1990s,

widely believed to be the main driver of the devastating crisis of opioid-related addiction and death that still grips many parts of the US. Empire of Pain charts the rise of the Sackler family dynasty and their response to the opioid crisis in a way that sometimes feels like an episode of succession, fused with moments from The Wire that portrayed the saddest aspects of addiction except of course the stories in Empire of Pain are not fictionalized. My conversation with Patrick was recorded remotely in July of this year 2021 as well as talking about Empire of Pain and the Sackler family we talked about Say Nothing and the challenges of making sense of a complicated

historical figure like Gerry Adams. The subject of how best to move forward from tragic historical events also brought Patrick round to talking about a piece he wrote for the New Yorker in 2013 called A Loaded Gun. I've linked to it in the description. It's about the case of Amy Bishop, a biology professor at the University of Alabama who, in 2010, shot six of her colleagues, killing three of them. 24 years earlier, Amy had also shot and killed her brother, Seth. And in the article, Patrick considers the willingness of her family and local law enforcement to regard the shooting as just a tragic accident rather than an indication that Amy needed serious help. insights from Patrick about the challenges of writing about these kinds of real stories and about characters who are seldom straightforwardly good or bad. Back at the end for a bit more waffle, but right now with Patrick Radden Keefe. Here we go.

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Over the last few months, I've been reading Say Nothing and then Empire of Pain. And I've read several of your long form journalistic pieces in The New Yorker and such. And I have listened to Wind of Change in its entirety. You're a completist. Well, there's more. I'm looking forward to going further back in your back catalogue,

reading Chatter and Snakehead. But it's kind of overwhelming the amount of information that I feel I've consumed. And yet, if I actually have to speak to other people about the books I've been reading, I find it very difficult to then give a good, accurate synopsis. I'm interested in to what degree you're able to retain the information from all the things you've written about. Do you ever have to refresh your memory or is it just in there because you spent so long on each piece? What happens is I absorb a huge amount of material in a usually a fairly concentrated period of time and try and find the story in it and then tell the story. And then once I've told the story, stuff starts to go. So occasionally someone will ask me about something I wrote years ago and I have to, you, and I have to find it and read it again myself.

I have impressions. There's sort of particular things that stick with me. But the tick-tock of the complicated plot mechanics, I couldn't reconstruct for you. Probably six months after writing something, much less six years. And is it like being an actor in that sometimes you hear actors who really immerse themselves in a part talking about the difficulty of making the transition back to their normal lives thereafter? Do you suffer from a similar thing? Yeah, that's a, it's funny, because I'm dealing with that right now. I don't know how many weeks it is since the books come out, but a few months since this most recent books come out. And it takes a while just to disengage from it

and figure out what's next. And I mean, I think the other thing that I really struggle with is that you're writing about people and events, and I think there's an aspiration, and there's some hubris in this, right? But there's an aspiration to tell the definitive version of the story. But of course, events don't stop just because you've told the story. So for me, again and again, the frustration is that I finish and I sort of put my version of it out into the world and then the story keeps going. And so there's that urge you have to follow it and you wish you could amend things and new afterward to the paperback edition ad infinitum forever have you done that

on previous books at all yeah i did it with my first two try to remember with the snake head here's a good example of me forgetting i definitely did with my first book chatter but that was a book that was about wiretapping and government surveillance and so it was a it was a very uh kind of perishable subject to begin with you know you, you publish and the next day, it's out of date. I'm definitely not going to do it with Say Nothing. I'm thinking about doing it with Empire of Pain. Yeah, Empire of Pain is still, I mean, I guess they're both very much ongoing stories. And, you know, I am interested in sort of talking around the business of writing some of these books. But I would like to also ask you some of the questions you've probably been asked hundreds of times at this point as well.

And, you know, feel free to deviate, quibble, get angry, stand up, walk out, start swearing, whatever. stand up walk out start swearing whatever but i'm interested i suppose in what made you want to write another book on the subject of the opioid crisis uh as far as empire of pain is concerned you note in the book and you've said in several interviews that obviously there were a few other books on the subject of both the crisis and the sacklers am, am I right? Oh, yeah, yeah. It's funny, with my last two books, because this was true with Say Nothing as well, I think, honestly, I wanted to write the sort of book that I would want to read. So, you know, you come upon a subject and there's a literature. In the case of The Troubles, it was this vast literature, hundreds and hundreds of books.

But to me, it felt like there was something missing, which was the sort of thing I wanted to do. And it was very similar here where there had been a bunch of books on the opioid crisis. Two of them, I guess three of them had talked about the Sacklers, you know, at some length, but the Sacklers were always kind of a strand in a much bigger tapestry. And I think in some ways, this is my background as a magazine journalist, as a lot of the time, you know, I write these long articles for the New Yorker, I only write three or four of them a year, and a good year. A lot of the time when I listen to the radio, or I read the newspaper, or watch the news on television, my brain is kind of absorbing

these stories that are being worked over by other people in one way or another and trying to sort of say, well, that's not the story. This is the story. You're talking about something which is interesting, but you're not presenting it in what to me would be the, I mean, hear me as a reader, the most compelling way. And so there were these books on the opioid crisis, which were really good books. And you'd get, you know, you'd get a storyline about Purdue Pharma and a storyline about the prosecutors and a storyline about the doctors and a storyline about somebody who was addicted to OxyContin. And all of these are kind of woven together. And for me, I would read these and I

would say, well, wait a second, what about that family? I mean, I would have this instinct to flip forward and skip to the next little section about the Sackler family. And I wanted to know more about them, you know, as a consequence of the fact that they were just one part of the story. There just wasn't as much about them. And to me, that was the most intriguing aspect of it. So, that was part of it was just this idea that I want to know more about them. That's really intriguing. The idea that there's this family, this prominent philanthropic family that owns this pharmaceutical company has made billions of dollars, and yet it somehow hasn't caught up with them. And then associated with that, I sort of wondered why hasn't it caught up?

And I thought part of the reason is because it's almost like if you've ever been to a children's play and there's a bunch of characters on the stage and there's always some hapless child who's been cast as like the tree or you know some very minor role villager number three and they're they're just kind of hiding in the corner and they're on the stage but they're doing their best to be invisible and the spotlight is elsewhere and i sort of came to think of the sacklers a bit like that that they were it's not that people didn't know about them but they had very artfully kind of they're hiding in plain sight yeah sort of stood very still uh-huh extreme stage left and um pretended that they weren't implicated in this stuff and to me there was this question of

what if you did something where the aperture is very tight and it's just focused on the family yes and when do you think of the beginning of the opioid crisis as being like late 90s, early 2000s? Yeah, I mean, I think I would suggest that the big game changer was the introduction of OxyContin in 1996. And it takes a little while before you start to see real signs of widespread abuse and addiction. But what happens in 96 is that suddenly the rate of prescription of these types of drugs goes way, way up. And I think most people at this point would agree that that was what gave rise to the opioid crisis is that you had a type of drug that was fairly narrowly and carefully and cautiously prescribed up to that point. up to that point and then suddenly is just promiscuously prescribed and that that was a big part of what got us to where we are and the fact that it was promiscuously prescribed was the result of an unusually aggressive policy of promotion and marketing to the doctors who were

going to end up prescribing the thing right yeah that's exactly right i mean i think that um the company had a drug that it wanted to turn into a blockbuster yeah and the only way to do that was to help doctors overcome the longstanding inhibitions that they had about prescribing these drugs too widely. Yes. Is morphine kind of the active ingredient? So it's oxycodone, which is a chemical cousin of morphine, stronger than morphine. But also, you know, they're both opioids. They both derive from the opium poppy. So yes. opium poppy so yes right and the sackler family who owned purdue farmer and purdue frederick originally were clever in that they changed the perception of those kinds of very powerful pain-killing medications especially morphine which before they started getting involved were

associated with end-of-life care. So the Sacklers and their company had a previous drug, which was developed in the UK, actually, in Cambridge at Knapp Laboratories, which was a subsidiary that they owned, called MS-Contin. And that was a morphine drug. And it was successful as a painkiller for people, primarily people suffering from cancer. And so the big pivot is when the patent on that drug is running out it's been very successful for them and they're wondering how do what else do we do

what you know how do we replace this and the big pivot is what if you had a painkiller an opioid painkiller that wasn't just for cancer pain there's only so many people who have cancer pain. So how can we de-stigmatize these drugs so that a broader category of patients uses them? And that would be people not just suffering from severe pain, but less severe types of pain and chronic pain and a whole range of different afflictions. The idea basically was, you know, you had something that was considered kind of a nuclear solution. It was the thing you kept on the top shelf and where other remedies failed. You take that off the shelf. You know, it's like the bazooka of painkillers. And their notion was, what if we devised a pill that's, first of all, it's stronger, but that it wouldn't be seen as a remedy of last resort?

What if it was the first? I mean, their tagline for it was actually, it's the one to start with and the one to stay with. And I guess the thing about morphine was that no one really worried about whether it was addictive or not, because if you're taking morphine in the last weeks or months of your life,

then addiction's probably the least of your problems. But did they realize that it was logical to assume that oxycontin was going to be addictive or do you think that they were genuinely acting out of a sense of altruism to some degree like they thought well look we've made this really strong because we really want to help with people's pain relief and we are marketing it aggressively because we want people to know about it and we think it can help a lot of people. Or do you think that that is just inextricably bound up with a certain kind of greed? I mean, you've really put your finger on one of the trickiest things to evaluate here, which is I think from a distance, when you squint, this looks like a story that's just about greed. But I think that in truth, it's much more complicated. I do think there was some idealism there. I think there was a great deal of kind of reckless disregard. And there was hubris you know i think there was a sense that for thousands of years humans have known that products that derive from the opium poppy have these incredible therapeutic characteristics where they can relieve pain but that there's twinned with that always inescapably are certain dangers the danger of addiction and there was this hubris i think in the company they had developed a um

this time release coating which slowly allows the drug to dissolve into your bloodstream over the course of many hours and they had this hypothesis basically it was just a hypothesis that that would mean that the drug would become less addictive and less prone to abuse. Right. There was no real science behind this. It was a hunch. It was wishful thinking. But it turned into the marketing campaign, basically. And so part of what was so interesting to me is I do think that there was a kind of, they sort of charged ahead with this notion that, you know,

throughout medical history, there's been this kind of paradox associated with the opioids until we came along and we hacked it. You know, now you can get all the benefits of an opioid and none of the downsides. And that was the pitch, you know, which turns out to have been totally fraudulent. But I don't think that what I, you know, I, some people suggest that they kind of got into it wanting to addict hundreds of thousands of people. And I don't think it was that malevolent. And I also don't think it was just pure greed. I think the greed was kind of, there was a cocktail of a bunch of different things.

And I think it was greed and naivete and optimism and hubris and arrogance. and optimism and hubris and arrogance. But I suppose where it does become more suspect is that the checks and balances that should come into effect in that situation, particularly from the FDA, were circumvented, it seems. Yeah, I would say so. I mean, there's a story I tell in the book about this guy named Curtis Wright, who was the main official at the FDA in charge of approving the drug. And he ended up signing off on it in record time, and actually signing off on a bunch of these bogus marketing claims about how safe the drug was, and then leaves government and a year later goes and works

at Purdue Pharma at three times his government salary. So I don't think that that's a particularly promising data point, if what you're trying to evaluate is the rigor of the checks and balances in the system. Is the way that drugs are marketed in the US different from other countries? Do you know? I think so. I think it varies from country to country, obviously. A number of months ago when Oprah did her big interview with Harry and Meghan, I don't know what the viewing options were in the UK, but I do know because I was watching, I was on Twitter at the time, not actually watching the interview, but just on Twitter, that there were a lot of people in the UK who stayed up late to watch this interview live.

And in order to do so, they had to do it on whatever network it is that was airing it, you know, the US network. there was this amazing spontaneous reaction from all of these British viewers who were seeing the ads in between the segments in which, you know, US consumers, as happens on a nightly basis, are just inundated with these slick direct-to-consumer advertisements for all kinds of pharmaceutical products that you've never heard of. And they're kind of comical, right? Because they're sort of overplaying all the upsides. And then there's always a voice that says very quickly, kind of, Soda Boche, you know, side effects may include sudden death, bleeding from your eyeballs, you know, that's just kind of like endless. It goes through it at two times the speed. But there was this amazing reaction, right? Where people were saying, my God, you know,

look at these ads. Can you imagine what it would be like to be exposed to this on a, on a day-to-day basis? And, um, I'm here to tell you that's, uh, that's the way it is here. I, you know, every country is different and, and certainly people in the pharmaceutical business would tell you that in some ways the process of the FDA is considered more cumbersome than it is in some other countries. I mean, it doesn't all cut in one direction. But it is very much the case that pharmaceutical advertising here is just a real juggernaut. Yeah, it is weird. When you go to, I haven't been to the US for a while,

but the last time I was there, I guess, three or four years ago, I had forgotten about those ads and how many of them there are and how, as you say, how extreme they're like. It's like a sketch of a world that's gone crazy. Well, it's just I mean, it is it totally is in the sort of inadvertent humor. I mean, I don't remember if it was Viagra. One of the erectile dysfunction ones, the guy says in the, you know, one of the things he says very quickly at the end, and it's almost inaudible. You have to kind of lean in and make out that he says,

if you're experiencing an erection that lasts longer than six hours, please seek medical help immediately. The idea that anybody would ever put that particular warning out into the world and just play it totally straight, which they do, it's a little absurd. And that's presumably the result of lawyers just sitting around and kind of combing through everything that might make them liable. Sudden blood loss from the head. You know, what are the downside risks here? What about extremely prolonged erection? That's dangerous, isn't it? It's easy. We'll throw a disclaimer in there. Meanwhile, does Purdue Pharma still exist? Or has it been dissolved now?

It does exist. It's in bankruptcy. So the final act of this story, which is, I still have trouble wrapping my mind around is that the you've got all these thousands of lawsuits surrounding the company and the family. But the company eventually declares bankruptcy because it doesn't have any money left. And the reason it doesn't have any money left is that the family took $10 billion out of it. And so you now have this weird situation in which the company's in bankruptcy and everybody's sort of fighting over the scraps. They're fighting over what's left. And then on the sidelines, you have the Sacklers with their 10 plus billion dollars intact that they took out of the company, which is why it's in bankruptcy in the first place.

But as one of which Sackler was it that talked about the most valuable thing being your reputation? Yeah, it was the original patriarch, Isaac Sackler. Yeah. Who said that the, um,

the family name is the most important thing. There you go. So that's one thing they don't have, but I imagine the billions provide some comfort. Yeah, because that way you can use them to wipe your tears away. Have you ever met any of the Sacklers, or did they all refuse to speak to you when you were writing? They all refused. They were very antagonistic from the beginning, with legal threats and just various unpleasantness. But no, I've never met any of them face to face.

And did it intensify your personal dislike of them when you were reading about them? And did you feel you had to keep that in check when you were writing? Oh, boy, what a great question. So, I mean, a few things. It's a book that has a quite strong point of view, I think. But to go back to that idea of wanting to write the kind of book that I would want to read, I'm not a big one for screeds. I'm interested in human complication and ambiguity.

I'm interested in why people make the decisions they make. The thing I'm probably interested in above all else is what are the stories that people tell themselves about the decisions that they make so i really the issue of tone was the thing i wrestled with more than anything writing the book because um i think if i allowed my own uh i think i had to play it cool there is a register of writing particularly these days i think writing about plutocrats, where you kind of dial the outrage up to 11, and readers often love that,

but that wasn't the sort of thing I wanted to do. I'd much prefer to kind of present you with these anecdotes and some of the really absurd stuff and do it in as deadpan a manner as possible and let the reader respond to it. You know, was I personally outraged? Yeah, of course. I think it would be impossible not to be. What was really strange was as I got into it, you know, even though none of them talked to me, I had access to tens of thousands of pages of documents. I interviewed, you know, more than 200 people. There's a lot of

their own language in, in the book. So it's, you know, depositions that family members gave or affidavits that they wrote or personal emails that they wrote. I had a WhatsApp log that a bunch of family members exchanged, a lot of private communications that were leaked to me. And so the thing that was interesting for me with that is the closer I got to them, I really started on the outside, but you get closer and closer and closer. And then eventually it's like, you've got the email that, you know, David Sackler sends to his mother and father, right? I mean, these, these very private, there's an email that Mortimer Sackler sends to this therapist, this, you know, kind of like life coach guy that he's going back and forth

with. Can I just ask, how did those get to you, though? So a lot of stuff came out in litigation. Right. And part of, you know, the fun of it for me is, you'd get in the context of the litigation, you'd get all these attachments and these exhibits and so forth. And daily newspaper journalists just weren't pouring over. A lot of the time, there'd be something that technically is public record. There were moments where I discovered something and I thought, oh, this is amazing. Actually, that WhatsApp blog is a good example. And then it got written about in the press. And of course, it doesn't really matter. I can still write about it in the book, but I knew I wouldn't be breaking that news to the world. There were

other amazing things where I just thought, oh, God, I hope nobody finds this. And then there was a third category of things where people leaked to me, people who know the family and have worked with them. The deeper I got, the kind of closer I got to them. It was literally as if I would have to kind of build new sub basements into my own cynicism. You know, i kept thinking we'd reached the floor we'd reached bedrock and then uh i'd you know i'd get some new raft of emails and and and by god it's worse yeah there are so many things that make you just think oh come on guys yeah Get it together. Have some sense of how, even if it's not fair, how the world sees you and why they might see you that way or how your actions may come across. Even if you strongly disagree with the conclusions people have come to, like address some of them. Like which Sackler was it who had the very kind of florid

Monty Python-esque way of talking and swearing in his college years yeah yeah yeah that was uh yeah Raymond's son Richard yeah so he's obviously kind of a over-the-top outrageous character already I got these letters that he wrote in college to somebody. And I still have them. They were given to me. And it's just funny because he went to Columbia University, and that's where I went to college. Oh, yeah. And he lived in a dorm.

It wasn't one of the ones I lived in, but it's a dorm where I used to spend a lot of time. And it's a typical kind of college dorm. But what's funny is these letters are written on this kind of beautiful, engraved letterhead for richard sackler which which for the address you know names this dorm it just seems like such a bizarre i mean even in the 1960s it does seem a bit strange right to get um to get this quite grandiose letterhead and then which of the sacklers was it who ended up making films about the prison system? That's Madeline Sackler.

Madeline. And when you were starting to tell the story of her kind of activism, I suppose, is how she saw it, making documentaries about the inequities of the U.S. prison system, iniquities of the US prison system, I sort of initially felt for her and felt like, oh, you know, she's kind of an innocent bystander. You can't pick your parents. She's been caught up in this story. She never directly endorsed or had anything to do with the marketing of OxyContin creation of any of those things. And actually she's trying to use her platform to do some good. But then she seems so tone deaf when it comes to people actually wanting her to respond to questions about what her family have done.

She just feels offended by the idea that she should engage with it somehow. And that's at odds with the way that she's approaching these films. I'm not interested in caricatures. And I think reasonable people can differ about a Madeline Sackler, a third generation Sackler who never sat on the company's board. What a lot of the third generation Sackler says, it has nothing to do with me. And from the outside, I think my one reservation about that would be, if you're worth tens and perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars, and the money comes from the company, and indeed from the sale of OxyContin, and the company has pled guilty to criminal charges twice, and stands accused of having started this crisis, it just seems

descriptively wrong to suggest that it has nothing to do with you. You can be the beneficiary of a bad thing without being the author of the bad thing yourself. So I think her story is in part interesting to me because I think she does good and interesting work. But she has this blind spot, which is that she doesn't seem capable really or interested in any way explaining her connection with the family. Yeah. I mean, that makes me think of two big themes that I wanted to sort of ask you a bit about. Maybe I'll just say both of them at this point. We can see where we go. One of which is a theme that pops up in Say Nothing as well. The idea of collective denial and how people manage uncomfortable aspects of their own personal history or even just the history of the society that they're a part of.

Again, a conversation that we're all to question all sorts of things about the society that they've grown up in. You know, the stakes are high. To what extent society and history is made by people who don't really function in the same way as the rest of us who are just trying to get on with each other and be polite and be somewhat truthful and somewhat moral. Let's talk, though, about the whole idea of collective denial and maybe move a little bit into talking about the troubles and Northern Ireland, which you write about and say nothing. Did you ever read The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro? I haven't read that one. That's a whole collective denial allegory. Oh, I must read it.

Yeah, it's good. It's kind of medieval England, and there's some mythical creatures wandering around, but he really brilliantly establishes this unsettling mood where something has happened in their relatively recent history, some kind of bloody conflict, terrible things have happened. And now, how do they move on? What is the process of making reparations?

Is it sometimes better just to bury everything literally and metaphorically and just go, all right, look, let's really try hard not to repeat that thing. Right. But we've got to just move on because the more we talk about it, the more we're just going to open up the wounds again. I must read it. Those are the themes I find most interesting. So I will read it.

It's really good on that, I think. But it's such a, I mean, it really ties me in knots, that whole thing. I mean, part of the reason I'm interested in these questions is because I think they're so hard. It's funny thinking about the way in which you continue to reflect on a project. There was a formulation that I never quite cracked. It never crystallized in my mind when I was working on Say Nothing, but then the book came out and I had a million conversations about it. And I realized that I think there's a sense in Northern Ireland and in some quarters in Northern Ireland, and nobody ever puts it

explicitly, but I think there's a kind of implicit sense that some people have that silence may be the price of peace. That the only way to move into the future in a peaceful way and preserve the brittle peace in the North is to not address the past. I think that's probably a more widely held assumption in different countries and contexts, you know, thinking about crimes in history, traumatic moments in history. I think, you know, it can be at a national level, it can be at a family level, that there may be some

terrible thing that happened. And the only way that people can see to moving on together is to kind of collectively erase it. But all those types of questions are really fascinating to me. And I don't pretend to know the answer. And I don't think there is one answer. But the one thing I'm fairly certain of, particularly in the Northern Ireland context, but I think this would be true anywhere, is that the past comes back. I wrote a story, which in some ways prefigured a lot of this stuff for The New Yorker, about a woman named Amy Bishop, who was a professor at the University of Alabama. And in 2010, she walked into a faculty meeting and pulled out a gun and shot a bunch of her

colleagues. And it was an unusual case. It's very rare for there to be a female mass shooter in the States. Mass shooters are a dime a dozen, but female mass shooters, that's a news story. She was a, you know, she had gotten her PhD at Harvard and she was up for tenure and didn't get tenure. And so that there was a whole kind of way of looking at the story, which was, is tenure a matter of life or death? But what was interesting to me was that after this horrific massacre, it emerged that when she was much younger and a college student, she had shot and killed her younger brother in their hometown. She killed him with a shotgun. There was only one witness.

It was their mother. So the mother has two kids and she comes home one day and she sees one of them shoot the other. And when the police came, the mother said, I saw the whole thing. It was an accident. And the police in this small town, which happens to be not far from where I grew up, I think chose to look the other way. They basically thought, you know, this poor mother, she's lost one child. You don't want her to lose the other. We're all going to buy this story, which didn't make a ton of sense about how the shooting was an accident. So, you know, Amy Bishop, who's just shot her brother, she never gets any counseling, no therapy.

Nobody ever looks too closely at the facts of this. She just moves on with her life. And much, much later in 2010, she shoots all these colleagues. And I think there's a metaphor in there somewhere. You know, I think the idea that you kind of collectively try and erase something, particularly something involving violence, there can be a folly to it as comforting as it is in the near term. I think it can be quite dangerous in the long term. I think it can be quite dangerous in the long term. Yeah. But it's so hard, isn't it? Because especially in a situation like that, I read that piece and found it very moving. But, you know, for the parents, what kind of sense are you supposed to make of life after something like that has happened?

Yeah. Presumably, you have to just block big chunks of it out. Otherwise, you wouldn't really be able to carry on from day to day, would you? I think that's right. And I think the, there was a friend of the family who described the whole thing as a Greek tragedy to me when I was working on that piece. And I do think there is that sense of the kind of compounding horror, and I don't know how you make sense of it. I'll tell you one thing about that piece, which, which if you've read it, is so just devastating. In the piece, I tell the story about how at a certain point, Amy Bishop has a child.

And she names her son Seth. And nobody in her life knew that she had had this brother who she had killed. And her brother's name was Seth. And so there's this oddity of the idea that she's raising this son. She ended up having several other children as well, but that she has this son who's named after her dead brother, but nobody in her life as an adult even knew about the brother and made the connection. Uh, so a couple of months ago, um, Seth Bishop was shot and killed. Oh no. In Alabama. Yeah. Yeah. Um, but there is this kind of sense of, I mean, I don't, and I think of the, Oh, really.

Yeah. I mean, again, this is a hard thing as a journalist, right? Because you don't because there I am going into their house and they're inviting me in and there's a level of intimacy and trust and yet at the same time you know i i need to be somewhat ruthless in terms of my my assessment of what i'm seeing so when the couple is talking to me about amy had had this moment which was clearly a suicide attempt where she she cut her wrists and um one of them says oh no she was just testing the knife to see how sharp it was you know we were cutting pumpkins and she was testing the knife to see how sharp it was what do you do with that right because as a as a i'm afraid as a as an empathetic human being you want to allow them to maintain that myth but as a, I feel as though all my imperatives are, I'm afraid, exactly the opposite.

Yeah. Oh, man, there's so many. I could talk to you about every single aspect of these things for the rest of the podcast. But the other thing I was thinking about was this idea of people like the Sacklers who don't respond to certain situations the way that most of us think they ought to or most of us imagine that we might and those there seem to be a lot of those people in power, either as part of wealthy families or as leaders of governments. And obviously, one of those wrestling with his role in the conflict and specifically in the disappearance and the murder of Jean McConville, who is the central

figure. I mean, you're basically telling the story of the troubles in Northern Ireland by focusing on this disappearance. Jean McConville, a mother of 10 in 1970s Belfast, who was vanished at a certain point, and then it turned out that she had been murdered. And her body was discovered when? In 2014 or thereabouts? No, was it earlier than that? It was earlier than that. It was 2003 it was discovered.

But yeah, a massive part of the story is this figure of Jerry Adams. And did your opinion of him change considerably in the course of writing that book? I don't know that my opinion changed per se. Walter Benjamin said this thing that I always think about, where he talked about how there are certain, he was talking about objects, Benjamin said this thing that I always think about where he talked about how there are certain, he was talking about objects, but he said there are certain objects where the longer you stare at them, the greater the distance from which they seem to stare back at you. I kind of feel that way about Adams. He's so inscrutable. And he was inscrutable at the beginning and only got more so. And it's funny because Adams is such a divisive figure that there are people who read the book and feel that I'm too generous

to him. And then others who read the book and feel that I'm insufficiently generous to him. And I think he's someone who's kind of, he's sort of easy to see as a caricature in one direction or another if you squint. if you look hard at him all those ambiguities and contradictions start to surface and become undeniable and so i did think at first that he would talk to me i thought there was a chance um yeah but the fact that he didn't doesn't seem especially surprising you know i mean jerry Jerry Adams doesn't seem to be the kind of person who feels the need to share or... Unburden himself. Yeah, exactly. Unburden himself. interesting about denial, right, is that it's collective at the level of a society or a family

or a town, but it also happens on an individual level. So if you talk to people about Adams, one of the big questions that often comes up is people wonder is, you know, Adams has written a bunch of books and there are these kind of treacly, heavily fictionalized accounts of this and that. And the question is always, does he have some explosive memoir in which he tells all and says, actually, I was in the IRA. And here's how it all went down. That'll be published posthumously. And I'm not holding out hope because I honestly think if Jerry Adams keeps a diary, I think he lies to the diary.

I don't think that there is that kind of interior sense of self-awareness or not of a sort that he would ever share in any way. Maybe I'll be wrong. I hope to be proven wrong. He also played a pivotal role in bringing the worst of it to an end as part of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. So what are you supposed to do with that? Like, what are you supposed to do with the guy who stirred up a lot of this in the first place? Well, maybe not stirred it up, but certainly helped to maintain it and justify it. and justify it. Sure. And then there were many people who felt that he'd just, you know, given in to the British by helping to get the Good Friday Agreement in place.

But maybe history, both good and bad, is always going to be made by these kinds of figures. Yeah. The thing that is so, I think, frustrating for people who want to know what to make of something and who want to kind of plot history as a story about good guys and bad guys, particularly if there's any sort of partisan, you know, are you a Republican? Are you a unionist? You know, where do your loyalties lie? These types of things. I think what's so frustrating about Adams is that you kind of need all the complexities. So Adams is this guy who lies to everyone. You know, the big lie is I was never in the IRA, but there's a lot of little

lies along the way. He lies to everyone. But without those lies, he might not have been able to do what he did with the peace process. He might not have been able to do what he did with the peace process. He might not have been able to play the role that he played. It ended up being quite important, I think, to have this kind of zone of deniability for people like Bill Clinton and Tony Blair to be able to say, oh, well, Jerry, you know, we're not negotiating with terrorists. We're negotiating with Jerry. And Jerry's this other thing. And similarly, I mean, he sold out his comrades, right? People like Dolores Price and Brendan Hughes, these characters in my book, felt so aggrieved and so sold out by him.

And yet at the same time, I think I say in the book that it's, you know, I end up in this kind of conflicted place where emotionally I resonate much more strongly with Dolores and Brendan. But politically, I resonate much more strongly with Dolores and Brendan. But politically, I resonate much more strongly with Jerry Adams. I think he turned a corner, he was able to kind of see around the corner, see that the armed conflict could not go on forever, see that this had to end. And at the point where he realized it had to end and end in a political settlement, then the question becomes, how do I maintain my grip on the Republican movement such that I can be a credible person at the table and help sort of steer them to peace without losing them altogether? And I think if he had told them all on day one what the ultimate destination would have been, he might have lost them. So the lies actually become, the lies and the betrayal, you know, might actually be

necessary ingredients for the piece. And I agree with you that it takes a special kind of personality to be able to do that. In his situation, I think I would probably be paralyzed by a sense of loyalty to the people I had come so far with. Oh man, it's such a fascinating book. Did you stress quite a bit going into it, about how you were going to set the tone for that one, writing about one of the most bitter and divisive conflicts of modern history? I mean, no, I did worry. I mean, I worried about the existing literature and being a because what I do is I kind of parachute into these worlds. There are a lot of journalists and historians who just they write about the the troubles again and again and again. That's what

they do. And that's not me. And so some of it is just a question of, can I do this in a way that feels sufficiently rigorous that it'll, you know, it's never going to satisfy everyone, but that it'll be a real legitimate contribution. And then can I do it? And it was very important for me to write a book that was accessible to non-specialists. And so part of it for me was I want to write something that will be, will have integrity and will do justice to these events. And I want to put the work in so that it's, it feels rigorous, but also will be totally approachable to an outsider. In terms of tone, the biggest thing I struggled with, to be honest with you, which is a, it's not something I've talked about too much with regard

to the book. Part of what was really interesting to me was if you're 17, 18, 19, 20 years old, and you joined the IRA, why do you do it? You know, there's a sense of historical injustice, but there's also camaraderie and romance and glamour and fun. And that's a tricky thing as a writer, because I felt as though in the first third of the book, I needed to convey that to you, the reader, you needed to understand that there was glamour in it and fun, but how do I do that without glamorizing it? How do I, you know, I'm not doing my job. If I sort of sit back in judgment of these people and say, well, it was terrible what they were doing, you know, look at these maniacs that that's not

helpful. I don't think to anyone. And I also think it's kind of, I don't think it captures who they were because I think most of them weren't maniacs. I mean, I think they made choices that might be different from the choices you or I would make, but they were rational political choices of us of a sort. So the question is, how do you capture the thrill of a prison break without glamorizing it, without trivializing it. And the answer for me was you see the victims, you never go very far before you're reminded of the victims. You know, when you hear about the bombing campaign, I tell you all about Bloody Friday and you hear about innocent people who go out to the shops and get maimed in this bombing but then also that you see the hangover that the whole last third of the book is about the the real devastating repercussions

of this for everyone involved absolutely and you do it very well i'm going to blow some smoke up your ass blow away i think i sort of said before your writing is just always impressively clear, unshow-offy, while being exciting and moving and humane. You're really a great storyteller, but very lucid. And it struck me, especially with Say Nothing, that I found myself thinking, this is kind of old-fashioned, isn't't it like you're scrupulously even-handed and you resist the temptation to judge or advertise your own position on a subject i mean it's very nice for you to say i i i think it's a weird one because there are certain it's funny the sackler book is very much a book about moral clarity you You kind of know where I stand. Yeah, more so than say nothing,

I would say. Yes. Yeah, absolutely. I tend to think that the troubles is, I think the troubles is one of those subjects. And I often gravitate to these subjects where if you think it's simple, you're not thinking about it hard enough. If you have a kind of, well, it's straightforward, you know, these people do this and these people do that. And I know where my allegiances lie. You're not actually thinking about it in a serious way. You're not looking at all of the facts. And so I had thought that the book would kind of, I've been very surprised by the book's success. I had thought it would fall between two stools. I thought that the audience for books about the troubles was chiefly an audience of people who wanted its

kind of biases reaffirmed in one direction or another. And so I thought nobody was going to read the book. And I was delighted to find that there are a lot of people who actually, I think, feel more ambivalence and were more interested in kind of reading an account that felt as though it encapsulated and actually embraced some of these ambiguities. And the funny thing is, you know, there are people who loathe the book. But what's fun is that for every nasty email I get from somebody who says, this is all I get, Jerry Adams exercise, you know, this book is terribly anti IRA. I get an email from some unionist who says, you're trying to humanize these terrorists. How can you possibly give such an account of their own? So they, in my mind, they kind of cancel each other out, you know. for whom all the big questions have been answered.

They're happy with their version of how it goes and they don't really want to engage with anything else. But I think the success of the book shows that there are so many people who still value at least an attempt to be more objective and to engage with the complexity of things. But sometimes in my more kind of gr grumpy conservative oh things are standards are slipping moments i think that there's a kind of emotionalism that is now such an integral part of the media that it's becoming difficult to get that i'll give you an example, right? One of my favorite podcasts is the New

York Times Daily podcast, Your Ex-Employers. Of course, yeah. I really enjoy it. Michael Barbaro. I think it's pretty excellent on the whole, but I noticed that they, and it's probably not just the Daily by any means that has this tone, but there's this kind of conversational tone that I know that they're sort of striving for something that's less formal and newsy but a lot of the time the various hosts of the episodes will respond to a startling piece of information from someone they're interviewing by saying wow they'll just go wow and so you sort of think what how has wow crept into news conversations about the news or journalism you know in a journalistic context oh i don't know the one that barbar does often maybe even more frequently huh yeah well he's got his whole selection of noises yeah huh hmm but isn't

so here's so i would cobble with you here all right go on in the sense that i think that the i agree with i think the first thing you were saying which is that there's a the kind of emotionalism and a tendency to sort of have a thesis statement in journalistic coverage to kind of throw your lot in with, you know, with one side or another. And I think what's frustrating for me about those types of pieces is that often I feel like they're taking, the writer is taking for granted that I, you know, we all know that X, Y, and Z. And often I'm sort of like, well, I'm not sure that I know that. I'm not convinced of that. And if you want to convince me, then convince me, but don't

take it for granted. The thing about the daily that i find interesting and i to me this is all about podcasting is that it's the idea is you're supposed to be kind of you're getting a sense of the process that happens behind it's almost like a to use an antiquated term it's like a dvd commentary right like i used to love that you'd get a Criterion Collection DVD of some film you love. And then if you want, you can watch the whole movie on silent with Steven Soderbergh, you know, talking at you in monologue about what was happening the day they shot that scene and why he chose to use this particular lens for this shot. And I think of the daily is like that, at least in principle. Like, wow, is a bit of a tick. And I think of the daily as like that, at least in principle.

Like, wow is a bit of a tick. But I do think there's something to kind of being reminded of the journalistic process, you know? Sure. I guess it's a factor of, you know, I mean, it's not new. News as entertainment has always been a kind of slightly uncomfortable thing. Totally. slightly uncomfortable thing totally and oh but i but listen in print there's all kinds of things that i do that are right explicitly deliberately yeah they're techniques for keeping people engaged yeah techniques of entertainment um suspense you know withholding information

sort of scene work where you're setting a scene and you're trying to make it as vivid as possible i i don't believe in doing that stuff willy-nilly unless there's a point. I mean, there's a, and I think it has to, you want it to have some integrity. And it's very important for me that you not fudge the details, which unfortunately, you know, people often do. I think there's that kind of tendency. If I tell you that mixing improvised explosives in the early 1970s in belfast that the explosives smelled of marzipan there's an end note that will tell you that that how i found that out and that's like a hard one detail and the whole book is an accumulation of those hard one details i do think there are people who cheat and kind of embellish or embroider a little bit in order to give it more of a sense of

place i think it's totally healthy and and legit to import the techniques of fiction but at the point where you start fictionalizing you've you've crossed the line yes absolutely by the way do you know the origin of the phrase blowing smoke up your ass no it was a thing they used to do in the late 1700s. Doctors literally blew tobacco smoke up people's rectums. Why? I mean, presumably not to flatter them. I don't think so. Maybe they started doing it after a while.

But initially, I think they did it to resuscitate people who were otherwise presumed dead. It was one of the things they used to do. Wow. Smoke was blown up the rectum by inserting a tube. I'm now looking at the internet. This tube was connected to a fumigator and a bellows, which, when compressed, forced smoke into the rectum. Sometimes a more direct route to the lungs was taken

by forcing the smoke into the nose and mouth. Yeah, it's interesting that a device was used. I had always, in my mind's eye eye to the degree that i ever pictured it and i i assure you i i didn't when you used the phrase uh a little while ago i had sort of you know thought of it as a more immediate you know kind of blowing smoke rings you know sure yeah kind of situation i always just now i always just picture someone just quite you've got to really blow it to get it up the ass there. But the idea, I think, was that the nicotine and the tobacco was thought to stimulate the heart to beat stronger and faster, thus encouraging respiration. I see.

I feel duly resuscitated for what it's worth. Yeah, okay, good. Wait, this is an advert for Squarespace. Every time I visit your website, I see success. Yes, success. The way that you look at the world makes the world want to say yes. It looks very professional. I love browsing your videos and pics and I don't want to stop.

And I'd like to access your members area and spend in your shop. These are the kinds of comments people will say about your website if you build it with Squarespace. Just visit squarespace.com slash buxton for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, because you will want to launch, use the offer code BUXTON to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. So put the smile of success on your face with Squarespace. Yes. Continue. continue hey welcome back

podcats that was patrick radden keith there talking to me and getting some smoke blown up his ass hope you enjoyed that i can't recommend his books enough. I think I probably did that already throughout the course of the conversation, so I won't go on about it too much more.

But there's links in the description of the podcast to various bits and pieces, should you wish to explore further. I really recommend that piece, A Loaded Gun, about Amy Bishop, the mass shooter there that Patrick was talking about. I've read a lot of his other journalistic pieces, especially for The New Yorker. And actually, I was going to tell you that I've been getting some good value out of an app I downloaded just last week. So it might be one of those things that I enjoy for a week and then I move on. You know what I mean?

So sometimes I hesitate to give recommendations for things before they've bedded in properly. But this does feel like one that I will carry on using. What is it, buckles? Why don't you shut up and just tell us what it is? All right, whoa! It's called Audum, A-U-D-M. Probably one of the worst names for anything that I've come across for a long time. And it was recommended on the New York Times podcast. Anyway, they sometimes do an episode on a Sunday where it'll just be someone reading a long-form article from the New Yorker or from the New York Times or something. And that's what this app does.

It enables you to listen to kind of audiobook versions of notable pieces or interesting pieces from not just the New York Times but the New Yorker and Rolling Stone I think maybe other publications too but they're really good so you can listen to the piece being read, sometimes by the author, sometimes just by an actor. And if you want to, you can also follow along with the text that runs underneath and scrolls while the piece is being read. So I got into it by searching for pieces by Patrick Radden Keefe. for pieces by Patrick Radden Keefe and the first one I listened to was called Winning which was all about Mark Burnett who produced The Apprentice in America and who basically played a significant part in turning Donald Trump into someone who people thought would make a terrific president. Really good, interesting piece.

Anyway, I've listened to quite a few bits on Audem. And it is good. Why the hell did they call it Audem? I guess it's audio, what? Audio magazine? I hate it. I think it's stupid. I want it changed.

But I like the app. Although, it is a paid app. I think you can try it's stupid. I want it changed. But I like the app. Although, it is a paid app. I think you can try it for free. But after a while, you have to subscribe. Thanks very much, though, to Patrick Radden Keefe for talking to me. Really appreciated it. And as I said in the intro, check out Wind of Change if you haven't listened to it already. One of the best podcast series that I've listened to.

What else? Another recommendation for you. This time for a music documentary. Nice left field music documentary. And it's called Keyboard Fantasies. It was made a couple of years ago, in fact, and directed by Posey Dixon. I met Posey once years and years ago when I did the, I hosted the YouTube Awards in 2013. That's a very small and ignominious chapter in the buckles story but posy was very nice and she was one of the people working on that anyway she is

now a filmmaker and she directed this documentary keyboard fantasies which they were beginning to start showing at festivals just before the pandemic hit. So now they are starting that process again. And I wanted to give a shout out because I watched it last year and really enjoyed it. Here's the synopsis from the Keyboard Fantasies website, which I've put a link to in the description. As a sci-fi-obsessed woman living in near isolation, Beverly Glenn Copeland, who began publicly identifying as a trans man in 2002, wrote and self-released Keyboard Fantasies in Huntsville, Ontario, back in 1986.

Recorded in an Atari-powered home studio with equipment including a Yamaha DX7 and a Roland TR-707, for you gear nerds, I thought I'd give those a shout out, the cassette that Beverly recorded featured seven tracks of a curious folk electronica hybrid, a sound realized far before its time. I would describe it as containing elements that remind me of sort of ambient music, Brian Eno, Harold Budd, that kind of thing, relaxing, tuneful, mellowllow but crossed with video game music it's got a slightly sort of naive almost childlike quality to it it's slightly jazzy back to the blurb three decades on the musician now glenn copeland began to receive emails from people across the world thanking him for the music they'd recently discovered. Courtesy of a rare record collector in Japan,

a reissue of Keyboard Fantasies and subsequent plays by Fortet, Caribou and more, helped the music finally connect with an audience two generations down the line. The documentary Keyboard Fantasies sees Glenn Copeland commit his life and music to the screen for the first time. It's an intimate coming-of-age story, spinning pain and the suffering of prejudice into rhythm, hope and joy. Half-hour-old visual history, half-DIY tour video, the film provides a vehicle for our newly appointed queer elder david sedaris wouldn't

approve of that terminology to connect with youth around the globe a timely lullaby to soothe those souls struggling to make sense of the world so that's the blurb a buckles calls it a tender portrait of a sweet soul and the power of music made on the margins to connect in surprising and delightful ways. Keyboard Fantasies. There's a link in the description to the website for the film where you can also watch the official trailer and find out where you can see the whole film. So watch the official trailer and find out where you can see the whole film. I was just about to upload the podcast when I got an email from Posey, the director, and I just wanted to include this. She says, I'm doing a fundraiser for a member of our team, film distributor Brian Glick, who got struck down by a brutal, rare spine tumor earlier this year and is in need of cash to pay their medical bills in America. I'm giving away my copy of the incredibly rare original Keyboard Fantasies cassette tape, the one that features in the movie, to one person who donates to their GoFundMe page.

There is a link at the top of the description, or, you know, near the top of the description or you know near the top of the description of this podcast for a chance to win simply follow the link donate what you can and leave your name and the code keyboard fantasies in the notes and i'll draw one name to win the tape in early december so there you go if you are able to donate to help Brian. Then please do so by following the link. Right. Back to my outside outro ramble.

Before I say my thank yous and goodbyes. I wanted to say a couple of thank yous to more kind people that I met on my travels this week. I was up in Scotland. In Aberdeen. And then Inverness, doing book shows, which were good fun. Thanks for coming along if you did. And I had some problems with my Brompton, though. Kept on getting flat tyres.

And eventually I needed to just find a bag that I could fit it in so I could carry it more easily because it wasn't possible to wheel it with the flat tire anyway boring story I have a carry case for the Brompton but I didn't have it with me so I just needed to find something that was sufficiently capacious. And I was wandering around in Aberdeen, feeling a bit post-COVID-y and spaced out and stressed. Going into shops trying to find big bags. Anyway, I went into an outlet of Cotswolds Out supply shop, you know, and they were so nice to me there in the Aberdeen outlet of Cotswolds in, I think, was it called Union Square right next to the station, the shopping mall. They were just so helpful and kind. And eventually I found a bag that did the job and hey it was just nice and great exactly at the right moment and then when I got back to London I was heading over to King's Cross to get the train back to Norwich and I stopped off

at the Brompton shop to buy inner tubes only to have the tyre burst on me again for the third or fourth time. Turned out, this is a good story, isn't it? About Brompton wheels. Turned out that there was a problem with the tape, the protective tape on the inside of the wheel, and there was a little jaggy bit of metal that was poking through the tape. And bursting my inner tube every time. Anyway, so when I got back to Norwich. I went into a branch of Evans Cycles. In the town centre.

Opposite Warhammer. And again, they were so great. The guy's name who helped me was Alfie. Thanks, Alfie. Don't know if he listens to this podcast. Don't think he does. But Alfie totally sorted me out. Identified the problem

changed the tyre for me putting a new tyre on a rear wheel of a Brompton can sometimes be a frustrating and challenging task anyway he did it for me in a matter of seconds and it was really great oh a couple of deer in the field up there. Rosie spotted them and she's giving chase. Rosie, don't give chase.

The sun's almost down. We've got to go home. I don't care. I'm ignoring you. Rosie, come back here. Rosie. Oh, she's coming back. Thank you so much to Seamus Murphy Mitchell for production support and his excellent work on this episode and for making me aware of Patrick

Radden Keefe in the first place. Thanks to Becca Tashinsky for additional production support. Helen Green does the artwork for this podcast. Thanks, Helen. Thanks to ACAST for all their help. But thanks most of all to you. Once again, you have listened to the whole of the podcast. And that's nice. Don't think I don't appreciate it, because I do. Whether you want it or not, here's a hug. Hug with a hum. Till next time, we share the same our old space. Take care. I love you. Bye! Bye. Subscribe. Like and subscribe. Subscribe.

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