THE ADAM BUXTON PODCAST - EP.190 - IAN McEWAN

Episode Date: October 16, 2022

Adam talks with British writer Ian McEwan about some of the autobiographical experiences that went into his latest novel Lessons, including his school days, parenthood and losing parents. We also talk about the ethical dilemmas presented by Artificial Intelligence, the British philosopher Bryan Magee and what makes Ian laugh.Recorded face to face in London on 8th July, 2022Thanks to Séamus Murphy-Mitchell for production support.Podcast artwork by Helen GreenRELATED LINKSDOZY ROSIE (4K) - 2022 (YOUTUBE)13 minutes of Rosie dozing on a sofa to the sound of piano noodling from the next room.KINETIC RAIN SCULPTURE IN CHANGI AIRPORT, SINGAPORE (YOUTUBE)This installation at Changi Airport Terminal 1, Singapore, was conceived by Art+Com, a German design firm led by Jussi Angesleva, a German-based Finnish artist in 2012. IAN McEWAN'S WEBSITEEVELYN WAUGH AT THE BBC by Mark Brown - 2008 (GUARDIAN)I couldn't find the audio of the interview Ian mentioned at the beginning of our conversation, but this article provides more detail about the encounter in 1953 between Evelyn Waugh and the hosts of the BBC radio programme Frankly SpeakingMERLIN - BIRD IDENTIFICATION APP (THE CORNELL LAB)BEFORE MIDNIGHT - CELINE ARGUMENT SCENE - 2013 (YOUTUBE)PENSÉES BY BRIAN MAGEE Compiled by Jason Cowley. Introduction by Henry Hardy - 2021 (NEW STATESMAN)HERBERT MARCUSE INTERVIEW WITH BRYAN MAGEE - 1977 (YOUTUBE)In this program with world-renowned author and professor Bryan Magee, the late philosopher and radical political theorist Herbert Marcuse explains how the so-called Frankfurt School reevaluated Marxism when world economic crisis failed to destroy capitalism as predicted by Marx. He also analyzes the philosophical roots of the student rebellions of the sixties.IAN McEWAN INTERVIEW: HOW WE READ EACH OTHER (About his novel 'Sweet Tooth' - 2014 (YOUTUBE)IAN McEWAN ON HIS WRITING PROCESS - 2011 (YOUTUBE)STEPHEN PINKER ON GOOD WRITING WITH IAN McEWAN - 2021 (YOUTUBE) 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 you doing, podcats? Adam Buxton here, reporting to you this Sunday afternoon in the middle of October 2022

from a farm track in the east of England, Norfolk County to be precise. And guess who I'm joined by? Dog Iris, say hi. Don't patronise me. Okay, sorry. Anyway, very glad to be joined once again by my best dog friend Rose. She's very well, thank you. and i'm doing fine hope you are too just in the last few days since the previous episode of this podcast went out it's got very golden on the trees and leaves on shit calling captain autumn no cows invading castle buckuckles this week. Although today there was what could be the beginning of a invasion or it might just be a one-off but it was a lot of ladybirds. I think overall it's better than the cows. Certainly the plops are smaller. Anyway let's raise the tone shall we i'll tell you a bit about my guest for podcast number 190 he is the british novelist and screenwriter ian mckeown ian mckeown i said it in a weird way

mckeown facts ian currently age 74 was born in aldershot hamps, but spent large parts of his childhood living in Singapore, Germany and North Africa, Libya to be precise, where his father, a working class Scot who had worked his way up the ranks to become a major in the British Army, was posted. Back in England, after attending a secondary grammar boarding school at the start of the 60s, Ian studied at the University of Sussex, where he received a BA in English Literature in 1970. He got his MA in English Literature down the road from here, at the University of East Anglia. Ian's first novels, The Cement Garden and The Comfort of Strangers, were published towards the end of the 70s, and those novels, which included themes of sexual perversion and murder, earned McEwan the nickname Ian Macabre in some circles. Ian Macabre. But by the 90s, novels like

Black Dogs and the Booker Prize-winning Amsterdam incorporated history, politics and ethical dilemmas, along with minutely observed passages about the interior lives of the protagonists. McEwan writes brilliantly and unsettlingly about the way our minds work, but part of the reason his novels have ended up reaching such a wide audience is that he never loses sight of telling a good story. And several of Ian's novels have been turned into films, including an adaptation of The Cement Garden, starring past podcast guest Charlotte Gainsbourg. There's also film adaptations of On Chesil Beach, starring Saoirse Ronan, Enduring Love, one of my favourite Ian McEwan books, starring Daniel Craig and Rhys E. Ferns.

And, perhaps most successfully, Atonement, an adaptation of a book published in 2001 that was already considered by many to be amongst the greatest British novels ever written. The 2007 film version, directed by Joe Wright, with screenplay by Christopher Hampton and starring Keira Knightley and James McAvoy, was a critical and commercial smash. My conversation with Ian was recorded a few Prime Ministers ago in early July of this year, 2022. We recorded face-to-face in a meeting room where, through the big glass windows, we got a great view of Camden and Hampstead and North London sprawling beneath us on a hazy summer afternoon. us on a hazy summer afternoon. We talked about some of the experiences from his own life of childhood, parenthood, love, loyalty, illness, that he has invested in the story and life of Roland Baines, the main character in his latest novel, Lessons, available now in all good bookshops, not those terrible bookshops.

Lessons is the story of the whole of one man's life, Roland, and the dramas that weave in and out of it, along with global events post-World War II, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Suez Crisis, Chernobyl, the fall of the Berlin Wall, 9-11, Brexit, Covid, themes of poverty, chaotic governments, climate change, racism, immigration, etc. And Lessons explores the ways that these kinds of events and issues, which are usually beyond our control, end up shaping our lives and our memories. shaping our lives and our memories.

A. Buxton is calling it classic McEwan. Good characters, compelling, interweaving narratives, big themes. And you're never far from discovering a good new word with Ian McEwan. He's one of those writers like Cormac McCarthy who's just on top of their vocab. I never realised what the word amanuensis meant before this podcast conversation. I think I'd heard it before, but I assumed it was a sort of poetic muse. Turns out to be more of a secretarial assistant.

What else was in our conversation? Well, I'll say at this point, just in case it's a trigger for anyone listening, that as well as talking a little bit about death, but you're probably used to that by now, pops up a fair bit in this podcast. We also refer to the effects of dementia and Alzheimer's, in case that's something you don't really want to hear about. Although we don't really dwell on it, but just so you're aware. We also spoke about the implications and ethics of AI, another subject that seems to be popping up more and more on the podcast, and a subject that formed the basis of Ian McEwan's sci-fi novel,

I'm going to go ahead and call it a sci-fi novel, Machines Like Me from 2019, novel, I'm going to go ahead and call it a sci-fi novel, Machines Like Me from 2019, in which a young man in an alternate technologically more advanced version of the 1980s suffers the consequences of blithely investing in a sexy robot man that turns out to be superior to him, not just physically and sexily, but intellectually and also ethically. Or is it? But our conversation began with me asking about Ian's attitude to his reviews. Back at the end for some brief waffle and a few links for you.

But right now with Ian McEwan, here we go. What do you like with your reviews? Do you seek them out? No. My wife reads them. And so I get the general kind of temperature of the thing. But since I've been now doing this for more than 50 years, a bad review, phrases can stick in your mind and make you indignant necessarily and i don't want those phrases i don't want to lend the neural space to them so if i've had a stinker then at least i know that but i don't actually have to carry with me the specifics of it and it's not good and if you're not reading your bad reviews then it's i think bad

faith to not you've got to stay away from your good ones too and that's a bit more difficult of course but that's what i try to do i mean i wrote a novel about climate change called solar and first book of yours i read oh was it yeah And it went down pretty well here and Canada and elsewhere in the English-speaking world, but not in the States. In the States, everything hangs on one review. If you're the front review of the New York Times book review, there was a very long, silly review. I didn't read, but actually in the end, Annalena, my wife wife read me the first sentence she said which said there are some novels that are so bad that they're good and there are also novels that are so good that they're bad and this is the latter oh you got a good but bad one okay so good that it's bad

then it's an occupational hazard and novels are very personal things. You cannot say to a friend or even someone you hardly know, look, don't take this personally, but I think your novel's terrible. It's personal. And so even after doing it this long, it can just lower your mood. So it's useful to just have a longer view of it. I mean, it's worth knowing that things aren't going well but you probably get a sense of that in other ways yeah absolutely you can actually have a sort of negative or mixed press and but have a very engaged engaging

live audience for example the personal contacts often can override your sense and also friends write and fellow writers write a good letter from a fellow writer is worth more than anything i think yeah so is that your policy then with friends if they do something that you think is a bit of a stinker is the understanding that you don't ask directly, what did you think of my thing? No, never ask. You never ask. No. The convention that's grown up, unspoken,

among my generation, writer friends, would be for silence. Yeah. If you didn't like it. But sometimes, isn't the silence pointed and it's just an elephant in the room? Well, you just have to read into it. Okay.

Usually it's not a great. Yeah. I think he's going to take it. But yeah, silence is the only way. Yeah. And then how are you, though, with the whole. I mean, you've had a frustrating morning getting here. Your taxi took you to the wrong place.

Yeah. It's kind of a drag. It's a hot day. Hot day. I felt like Monsieur Hulot, you know, sort of blundering along, trying to read Google Maps in bright sunshine, two pieces of luggage. I can't read close up without glasses. They're in my top pocket.

It's just that, you know, that i felt that however i'm feeling from someone watching me from say this floor you might have seen me down there somewhere i'd be a very comic figure just sort of looking around angrily yeah hating the world hating the sunshine that's the ideal frame of mind for a guest just before they do a podcast and then how are you though with the interviews in general i've you know i've heard you do a few over the years and you're always um measured and polite and you don't lose your shit but do you get angry in interviews and do you get irritated or are you just sort of no zen? No, I don't generally. I mean, the kind of people who like novels, literary novels, are generally the kind of people I get along with.

So I've never found it a problem. I did listen to a BBC interview with Evelyn Waugh, three interviewers, made in 1953. And for anyone who ever thinks they're living in a declining civilisation, this would really cheer them up. The interview was so asinine. Well, Mr Waugh, what are your hobbies? And at no point in an hour interview

did they mention these three stuffy fellows with cut-glass accents. At no point did they mention his work and war got crosser and crosser how would the man on the clapham omnibus respond to your particular take on the world and war just lost it and he stayed polite for so long it's a wonderful drama actually i'm sure it could be it's on the bbc archive or maybe it's the british library archive okay i'll look that up or youtube how not to interview a writer okay but anyway you know how to do it i will delete what are your hobbies and go instead to the book

this is a long book for you right lessons i Lessons I'm talking about? Yeah, it comes in at just under 170,000 words. My longest novel to date before that was Atonement, which is about 140. So yeah. And this has a lot of autobiographical elements. It tells the story of a man's life. It's a kind of doppelganger, central figure, Roland Baines. It's the sort of life I might have led if things had gone differently the autobiography is heavily fictionalised but obviously I do draw a fair bit but the central events in Roland's life

apart from the fall of the Berlin Wall which I just draw my own notebooks for, they're all fictional. So the three major figures, characters, the women in his life, Miriam Cornell, a piano teacher who sexually abuses him and draws him into a relationship while he's still only 14, while at boarding school, his first wife, Elisa, a German,

who suddenly and mysteriously vanishes, leaving him holding a seven-month-old baby. And much later in life, Daphne, who dies of cancer. They're all complete fictional characters. I mean, there are tiny elements of people I've known wrapped into them. But certainly Roland's parents, his background, North Africa, my boarding school, but I stayed at it all the way,

and that's where our lives diverged. I mean, he leaves, as it were, pursued by demons at the age of 16, misses out on a university education and drifts in a way that I could well imagine myself drifting. Really? I mean, you do strike me as someone who's always had quite a clear sense of purpose. And you were, I mean, you were writing in your 20s and getting some success. Yeah, my first book was published in 75. I started writing in 1970s. You were 30 when The Cement Garden was published, I think.

Yeah, I was probably 28 when I started writing, so that would be about right. Yeah. So, I mean, you weren't, I was massively drifting in my 20s. Were you? Yeah. And there was a lot of stuff about Roland that I could definitely relate to. But if I hadn't found writing, Adam, I think I would have drifted, because I didn't really want to be a teacher, and that was the sort of great attractor that would have sucked me in.

I was lucky, too, that from about the age of 17, I was passionate about literature. I thought it was a sort of priesthood. I'm one of those writers with an English teacher who was rather inspirational. Okay, stand on the desk. But at university, by the second year there, I thought of literature as a sort of conversation to which I could join in. And the idea of going off to do a PhD was fading on me very fast. But I didn't want a job. I just knew I didn't want to sign up to a nine to five job with its slow increments of pension arrangements

and so on. In some ways, I am a child of the 60s in that respect. But I give an account in the novel of something that happened to Roland. He's living in North Africa, the Suez crisis happens Colonel Nasser of Egypt nationalises the Suez Canal and the authorities thought that those living in next door Libya British citizens might become objects of hatred for this Arab nationalism that was sweeping through the Middle East at the time. In fact, it didn't.

There was a tiny bit of disturbance. But we were all herded into military camps. My mother, thank goodness, was away in England at the time. My father was too busy to pay much attention to me and I was free for the first time in my life. And I think that had a huge impact on me and I was free for the first time in my life and I think that had a huge impact on me and I've given that to Roland that sense that he could never commit to anything for very long because he so much loved this cherished this memory of complete freedom 10 years old

hanging out in the machine gun nests sitting sitting in the tanks, hanging out with ordinary soldiers who spoke rudely all the time. And that's what you were doing in Tripoli? Yeah, in Tripoli. It was only nine or ten days, but it had such an impact on me. Oh, really? And it was a tiny desert camp,

you know, sandbags, tanks, machine guns, a sort of boy dream really yeah and you were literally left to your own devices yeah with my chums yeah yeah we were in heaven boy heaven but yes some key childhood memories i've freely granted to roland but the essentials um cutting him loose at the age of 16 was very much not my life. After Tripoli, then you're off to boarding school. Yeah. And that is in Suffolk at this slightly unusual public school. Was it even a public school?

No, it was a state grammar school. Okay. State boarding grammar school. Right. It was an experiment, a kind of experiment that rather fell out of fashion because it was selective, highly selective. So all the kids passed the 11 plus or some IQ test. Wolverston Hall. Wolverston Hall.

Wolverston Hall. It ran for about 40 years. It was operated by the London County Council, which was the GLC's forerunner. Mostly the boys were from working class single parent families there was a smattering of kids army brats like myself then there was a quite a lot of kids from sort of bohemian backgrounds um my closest friend who was still a good friend with. His mother was an actor, and he wanted to be an actor and became one. There were kids whose fathers were ambassadors. So it was a really great class melting pot.

Highly unusual place, only 320 kids. Very keen on music. It was an opera almost every term was very very good at rugby had a savage bullying welsh rugby coach but he got results i mean we were unbeaten in the area and we used to play seven aside at twickenham beautiful grounds lovelyalladian house perched above the river Orwell. And it did have a rather easy manner, but nearly all the teachers were, as I mentioned in the novel, had served in the Second World War.

The shadows of the Second World War, which I was particularly interested in making a part of, Roland's early life, were very, very present there. So it was still in a time when a word of sarcasm could steal a class from a teacher. Everyone took their authority more or less for granted. How did your parents know about that place then? Had friends of theirs sent children? Oh, I think my dad said something like,

Sergeant Smith's boy went there and seems happy there was no secondary school in Libya for me so to get on a DC-3 twin engine plane and fly 2000 miles from home it didn't make me cry

but I sort of folded in on myself rather but slowly in this place just come to i came to love it actually oh yeah yeah lovely teachers relaxed the boys were great there was a fair racial mix never encountered any racism there there was a bit of bullying inevitably children Children can be savage and remorseless, ruthless. But it made a big impact on me. I think the classless kind of feel of it was very, very attractive. And then I went to a very new university, which had wanted to redraw the map of learning. This was Sussex University in 1966.

And Asa Briggs was there, who was my dad's history tutor. Oh, right. Well, I came much later in life to be a friend of Asa. I mean, he was an elevated figure at that time, and I never met him as a student. And so all the teaching was tutorial, either one-on-one or one-on-two. There was a standard English literature degree, but I also did French.

I studied international relations. Wonderful seminar, quantum mechanics for liberal arts know-nothings, it was called. Wow. It was just perfect. That's very modern. And a wonderful physicist teaching it, who just couldn't believe the depths of our ignorance. So Sussex, again, had this rather can-do, classless feel, and I got a much broader education than I would have had had gone to, done a survey course, you know, Chaucer to Eliot,

with Anglo-Saxon thrown in from either in Oxford or Cambridge. So, in a way, it set the tone for my writing, which I always had this interest in science, but also international relations gave me, and history, gave me a whole set of interests that were so missing from my early stories. I mean, they were very dark, very claustrophobic, very perverse. And I finally wrote myself into such a small space

that I took some time off to write a movie with Richard Eyre, who's still a good friend. And we made a movie about... really about the reading of history. It was called The Ploughman's Lunch. I had such a good time, but the space between pitching it to Richard while he was in an interval of, I think he was directing Guys and Dolls at the National Theatre,

and actually being out on location was about four months. And I thought, this is wonderful wonderful this is what i'll do i'll write novels or stories and then sandwich them with movies it never worked like that again it was never so simple my next project was two years with bernardo bertolucci on a movie we never shot oh really what was that going to be it was an adaptation of a Moravia novel called 1934 about a young man who goes to Capri to commit suicide and can't quite work out his reasons for living. Sounds like a hoot.

It was terrible. At one point, Bernardo said, Ian, I think this is a comedy in the style of lubitsch i think you must watch to be or not to be so he went off and watched lubitsch movies and i wrote the rewrote the whole thing and bernardo read it and said no i think he's a tragedy and i realized that what he needed from me was the role of an amanuensis, just writing out his current thoughts, whereas I had all the novelist arrogance. It's a big demotion from being God as a novelist

in your tiny little plot to being a kind of lance corporal in the army of people required to make a movie. So I've always had a very bumpy relationship with screenwriting, loving it, then being disappointed by it, or never quite working out. But are you a movie fan in general? On and off, yeah.

What was the last film that you remember enjoying? Recent film? Recent film, well, I've watched a lot of television filming and i i realized if i was now 25 i'd be writing a series because i find them so absorbing so interesting the cinematography which used to be rather dull on television yeah now i guess because we all have larger screens with better definition so So what sort of series are you watching? So, you know, I thought Le Bureau was one of the greatest things I've watched on TV. Succession I got sucked into.

I mean, all the things that everyone else gets sucked into. I watched that Ethan Hawke movie. It's a trilogy before dawn and after midnight. Oh, yeah, yeah. Maybe it's because I just just finished writing a whole-life novel. I was so interested in the way one could track a life by letting the actors age ten years apart, come back to it, pick them up again in their own lives.

It all fell apart, apparently, in the third one. Yes, I only saw the first one. Oh, the next one is in Paris. Yeah. Shot nine years later. Then there's another one nine years after that, shot in Greece. And the two leads have a row. I mean, it's sort of vaguely scripted row, but it turned out to be a real row.

Oh. And they parted company. So that's Richard Linklater, is it? Yeah. And what was her name? Julie Del's Richard Linklater, is it? Yeah. And what was her name? Julie Delpy. She's terrific, isn't she? Apparently they really fell out.

But the row is one of the best rows I've ever seen scripted or written. I mean, I know that actors love doing rows. There's something, you know, The Archers, for example, is full of them. Yeah. About polytunnels. Yeah, yeah. of them yeah about polytunnels yeah yeah so this one seems so real to me because they're having a little away day that the family has paid for they're going to a nice hotel and they things are a bit scratchy between them but that they make up and they're just about to start making love and the phone rings and it's his son who's in the States with his son by his previous marriage.

And somehow when he comes off the phone, the magic has gone and it spirals downwards. It's just extraordinary. Oh, well, I'll seek it out. Yeah, do. You could skip nearly all of it till that scene. Yeah, I like moments like that in movies. I'm guessing that you're not a Marvel fanatic oh the movies yeah no I'm a bit too much of a realist really yeah yeah uh my wife worked for

Marvel Comics I think it's one of her first jobs before she became a journalist right translating from American to English yeah the dialogue of Spider-Man comics. It's early 70s, mid-70s, somewhere around there. So I do have a connection. Translating from, you said, American to English? English, yes. How does that work? What, they just got rid of any kind of slang? Well, things that an English 11-year-old might not understand.

Oh, OK, like American references. Because it was a child thing at that point. Adults didn't involve themselves in Spider-Man, I don't think. Yes. Unless they had learning difficulties. But now, you know, everyone has learning difficulties. Sure. Before we move on, going back to boarding school,

which is an experience that I had as well, being sent off to boarding school. And it wasn't exactly the same sort of place that you went to, but it was fairly progressive and non-horrible. You know, it was co-ed. So that was a big... Oh, that would have made a big difference. Yeah, massive difference.

To me, yeah. And we didn't really have uniforms. And so it was quite a groovy place. But still, the fact of being separated from my parents and sent away took a while to get over when you were told that this is what was going to happen to you how did you feel about that my memory is that that was the worst part anticipating the separation well this was the 50s and i just thought it was the fabric of reality. I mean, it was as if my parents said, it's going to rain in 10 minutes.

I didn't question it or fight it. I just thought, this is what's happening to me. And I noticed that my mum worked in the YMCA bookshop in downtown Tripoli. And she started bringing home children's books about boarding schools. And it was only much later that I realised that was all part of a plan. So there were a whole series of novels called Jennings. Sure. Jennings and Derbyshire. Yeah, and Derbyshire.

And I think that must have softened me up because I thought I'd quite like to get into a few scrapes, as they were called. Scrapes and japes. Yeah. Also, I craved woodland and deciduous trees and how I might get lost in them. And in fact, there it was.

I was in an absolutely beautiful corner of Suffolk. I very rapidly found an ordnance survey map and found woods and rivers and lakes. No one else was much interested, but I found a friend to come with me. And in many ways, I did live out the dream that I had in my mind in sweltering Tripoli. But I had the same experience as you.

I mean, you can't send a... I mean, I left home at 11. I mean, and stayed away. I mean, three quarters of my life was elsewhere for the next seven years, by which time I was a young adult. And that's kind of... Well, it certainly changes the relationship you have with your parents. Absolutely. And it makes it that much harder to ever have the kind of relationship that many modern parents have, a more friendly, familiar relationship with their children.

Well, I've often pondered this and i think it's a very interesting topic we talk of the 60s in terms of not just sex and drugs and rock and roll but you know the beginnings of the women's movement the second wave of the women's movement the environmental movement and so on but there was one element that's never discussed and i think it's this that the relationship between adults and children changed somewhere between 1967 or 8 and 1973 and 4. Changed fundamentally. In the 50s, one was loved or not loved, depending on the circumstances. But basically you were managed rather than spoken to.

Children weren't listened to or spoken to in the same way. And I remember being on the plane going back to boarding school after my first home holiday. That was when I was tearful, but the plane had to stop in Malta, and this gentleman got on and sat down next to me, and he completely shocked me when he said, once we were established in the air, he said, do you believe in God?

Whoa. No one had ever asked me such a question. Can't do that. And we had an amazing conversation. I'd never even given it much thought. I think I answered as I thought I should, that I did. But as we went on, I loosened up. That all changed, generally, I think, between parents and children.

You get sent to prison for asking a child if they believe in God now. Yes. Or sitting next to a child, you know. So I had stepchildren and then I had sons. so I had stepchildren and then and I had sons and the environment in which they grew up was fundamentally different I saw a rather lovely quotation from a book about psychedelic drugs and it said if you want to know what it's like to take LSD have breakfast with a four-year-old and I thought I know what you mean. There's a bit, what do you prefer?

Like if I've got a bit that I want to quote from the book, is it better if you read it or if I read it? No, you read it. Okay. This is towards the end of the book. In the 50s, many fathers were not much involved with their children, especially their daughters. Embraces, expressions of love were thought too showy, too embarrassing. His own childhood was typical. Smacks, this is Roland, the protagonist, smacks to the legs,

to the bottom were common. Children, however loved beneath it all, were to be managed, not listened to. They were not to be managed, not listened to. They were not to be engaged with in serious conversation. They were not beings in their own right, for they were just passing through, transient proto-humans, endlessly, year after year, in the graceless act of becoming. That was how it was. That was the culture. At the time, it thought itself too soft. A hundred years before, the duty of a parent had been to break a child's will with a beating. Roland thought that those in his own country who itched to get back to these times,

the 18 or 1950s, should think harder. And that really struck a chord and made me think about the difference between my attitude to bringing up my children i have three children uh-huh um they are between 13 and 20 now and the difference between my attitude and my dad's attitude so he was quite old when he had children right so he very much had that kind of attitude that is described there and the bit that i just read yeah i think we both missed out i mean i would have i don't boast about this but i would have liked my father to have been a bit like me as a father uh-huh or my children as fathers my sons of fathers are very close to their children and they constantly engage

in conversations with them i think that's a social revolution it's a profound one and a positive one oh definitely not everything's getting worse yes i mean i think of that ian jury song reasons to be cheerful and i keep, I must make my own list, you know, because I spend so much time talking with friends about the world falling apart that we do need a Reasons to be Cheerful kind of portmanteau, a little list. We need to concentrate on those. And also, you know, we're talking climate change and the Ukraine war and the state of American politics and culture and our own government and so on.

All legitimate matters of concern. But there can be patterns of things happening under your feet that you're not actually paying attention to. So attention in that sense becomes really important that you're at least open to positive developments because i think cultural pessimism is now so strong and i notice it talking to people in their mid-20s it's not just the old who are very tempted to feel you you're coming to the end of your life so you think the world is coming to the end of its life it's a very tempting piece of projection which needs to be resisted but to hear it from the young is startling it bothers me

a lot yeah i wonder if though kind of their cultural language is one of pessimism and it's in the culture you know everything's post-apocalyptic uh everything's like well we're fucked that's just let's party yeah yeah did you though when you had children did you were you thinking consciously about okay what's my tactic going to be what's my relationship with these people going to be or did it just unfold naturally it was just instinctive that you would be more conversational more sort of friendly than perhaps your parents had been with you no it just followed and it unfolded i mean anyone who's watched a child especially a child you're close to and a child you love erupt into language it seemed to me at the time how could you resist suddenly when a baby goes from single words and pointing

to start joining words up and then verbs appear and whole sentences, such is the nature of human generative grammar that a three-year-old could say something that no one has ever said before, ever. I mean, that possibility is right before you. I remember being with one of my stepdaughters. She must have been about three, very bright, and we were observing some ants in the garden, busily going in and out of their nest.

She said, I know why ants have very small brains. She must have been four to be saying that, actually, not three. And I said, why do they have small brains? She said, they've only got two thoughts. And I said, oh, what are the two thoughts? She said, in and out. And there were those ants going in and out of the nest. I only remember this because I instantly wrote it down like a doting parent.

Yeah. In a notebook. It makes it sound quite nice. Yeah. Sometimes it would be nice to have just two thoughts. Yeah. Yeah, but you'd have to have a very small brain to fit them. I think I could manage that.

Roland, in the book, is abandoned by his wife just after they've had a child. So Roland is left a bit dazed, just getting on with the routines of caring for an infant. And there's a moment when he is sat with the baby sleeping on his chest in a rocking chair that I think every parent of a young child can relate to and remember. You're probably knackered and a little bit pissed off, but also incredibly relieved that they're asleep and then you're very in love with them and it's an amazing feeling to have that creature on your body like that resting on your body and you say of roland he was the baby's bed and his god the long letting go

could be the essence of parenthood and from here was impossible to conceive yeah that long letting go is something that you realize is going to happen i didn't even think i mean i don't maybe i didn't think hard enough about it all but uh there's no time to think about it yeah there is this point and that you know the bit you just read um is that point where there is no moment in that child's life that you don't know everything about. And I say either there or slightly later than all those. Soon you'll get to the point where you'll meet your son or daughter for dinner and you'll have a conversation about politics and what's going on

and then you'll have a hug and then you'll go off and he or she will go off. Impossible to conceive when you've got a seven month old sleep on your chest um and i speak elsewhere of in the novel of the double helix of labor and love i mean they are so intertwined that the fatigue, sometimes the boredom, the repetition, as well as the moments of pure delight. So novels are, I think, very good spaces in which that whole relationship to children and change through time

can be examined. And that's one of the reasons why I wanted to write A Whole Life in All. It's not just about Roland going from 10-year-old in an army camp to 70-plus, trying to get through the lockdown, but falling in love with a granddaughter. But the children around him changing too. And that point which your children know more than you do. And for us who've traversed

the analog to the digital age know that point in which you turn to someone a third of your age you say will you please just sort this out for me again it's quite a challenging moment you know that you you know less than your children you're meant to be a god. You're no longer a god. You've had it. There's worse moments, though, right? I mean, it's quite nice in a way. You sort of... Yeah, there's pride in that.

There's pride, and I felt relief as well. I thought, maybe they'll be fine. They know a lot more than I do in all sorts of ways. Yeah. And if I trust them, if I trust that they have a working instinct for self-preservation and they aren't just kamikaze lunatics then they'll probably be okay and i don't i can relax a tiny bit about the extent to which i'm screwing everything up with them you know what i mean except a kamikaze lunatic could still come and sort out the app that you can't get to work

before they go off on their kamikaze mission but still I agree one of the striking moments and again I wanted to write about this in lessons is not when

children are children but when they're transitioning into adulthood. And you realise that it's not only that they were dependent on you, you were dependent on them. So Lawrence, Roland's son, has gone off sort of hiking and training around Europe, and his dad's cooked him lunch. Well, there was no arrangement for lunch, and actually his son wants to go, doesn't even come home until two o'clock the next morning.

And Roland has to keep up appearances and not be phased by it. And it's, oh, well, good luck with dinner or whatever, have a nice time. But he's somewhat smitten. And the experience of having your teenage children leave home for university or for a job or whatever it is especially the first time it happens it matters less the second time i think the first time it happens you do have that empty nesting abandoned lover feel you know because suddenly the world that's about to be explored by them is more important to them than you are and that's a useful blow to your self-esteem you've got to adjust in a big way to that there's also an anticipation of mortality there, though, isn't there?

From the parent's point of view, it's like, okay, it's that phase now. There's that and the loss of your own parent. Again, these are all commonplaces, but they are so powerfully felt by us. So I think particularly for men and fathers and women and mothers, when your same-sex parent dies, you feel that the ground between you and the grave is suddenly there's no one standing in the way.

You're in the home straight to the grave. And you expect your parents to die because the only alternative is you pre-decease them. You expect your parents to die, because the only alternative is you pre-decease them. But still, it's a moment of extraordinary ambivalence, because when the path is clear to your own grave, there's a bit of elation in there too. Like suddenly you're orphaned, but you're orphaned at the age of 40 or 50, whatever it is, and you're a little more in control of your own fate, even though there's all the sorrow of a lost friend, parent, whatever.

So I take some time over the death of Roland's parents to examine that sort of moment, that feeling. Roland's mother, like my mother, died of a kind of Alzheimer-like disease, a slow death in which the death has already happened before the body is gone. So that's a slow goodbye as the brain just sort of folds in on itself and less and less is understood. Whereas a sudden death, heart attack, stroke, whatever, which is what happened with my father and Roland's father, a crucial moment for me was going to see the body in a funeral parlour.

When I write about that, give all that to Roland, I just had a banal sense sitting there just of absence. Not that I was in the presence of my father, I was in the absence of my father. And felt absent myself, I felt nothing. I thought I need to get away from this place and this empty shell in order to feel something. But I did feel a sort of lingering sense.

I ought to sort of show some feeling because the rather nice funeral parlour attendant was expecting me to. I just couldn't do it. He was wanting me to sit there for half an hour. I sat there for a minute, maybe two. Yeah, I never understood the, or at least I never felt that attachment

to the body and caring about what's going to happen to the body. And it's like, it's so obvious that the thing you cared about is no longer there. I leaned over and kissed my father for the last time and then realized it was also the first time. Aha. And again, I gave that to Roland.

The forehead was even colder than the rest. Yeah. It's a moment, again, a commonplace, but these commonplace moments in individual lives, as felt, are really worthy of patient examination because we're all going to have to go through them and then with your mother though what's how does that work then when you're with someone who's got dementia or alzheimer's who, you know, they're still alive, their body's still there, but so many of the essential parts of them are dissolving.

At each visit, there's less of them. There's less, the consciousness is like a closing door. Many of us would have experienced the moment, the first time that your parent no longer recognises you or anyone. So it's a series of losses. So the death actually means less. Yeah. Far less.

So it's a slow, I was going to say slow torture. It's not quite a torture, but it's a slow, painful extraction of a whole person from from the realm of consciousness and uh and very very sad i guess for a lot of people that is got to be one of the more um terrifying prospects but you do feel as if in 10, 20 years, things will be very different. Just when you... I always think about AIDS because I grew up during the first wave of the AIDS crisis and how completely insoluble that seemed

and how distant the prospect of any kind of cure or way of managing it seemed and it was distant too it took a long time didn't it and even then the solutions came in bits i mean but they do come and and you do think like well most of these things are are going to be solved at some point at some point it's usually much longer than we i mean do you remember when the human genome project was delivered at the beginning of this century the press the expectation of everyone was well now there's going to be genetic medicine and everything's going to be turned around and you're going to be able to grow a spare ear or heart what we discover is you know it's infinitely more complex but still very

exciting i mean to be involved in that work and a similar thing changing topic with ai that i've heard you talk about before as as uh someone who feels frustrated by the pace of progress in that area. I mean, I got interested in AI when I was sent by a magazine to interview a professor of robotics at Edinburgh, and this would have been about 1976. And AI just languished for years, partly because the hardware was just clumsy, slow. But the learning process was just how complex our own brains are.

We do not have anything remotely like one kilogram little ball with the processing power of a human brain i mean in the visual capacities alone you know vast amount of processing just to give us this sense not only of detecting light but of inhabiting our own visual field it's a sort of miracle extraordinary but it's slowly happening um But it's not imminent. Like when you read articles from people saying, why isn't everyone freaking out about AI? You get the impression that in 10 years, the world's going to be transformed and we will have to be dealing with,

are these sentient beings? What's happened to our jobs? And all this kind of stuff. That's still a way off. It's a way off but still we now have face recognition the opportunities for crowd control in China have been demonstrated

I now have an app on my phone that listens to all the birds singing in the garden and just listens Yes. In a few seconds Which is your one? I've got Choppomatic Oh no, this is from cornell oh you've got a fancy one yeah i'm sorry to tell you but it's free cornell is the probably the world's best university for ornithology if anyone wants to go to a university and study it so that's

an extraordinary thing to me just to see you know i hold it up as i did a couple of days ago and i get blackbird pigeon uh black cap bull finch green finch blue tit i mean just all come up and it can tell them apart yeah but yes we're a long way from having um you know an affair with a sentient, seeming... Sexy robot. Sexy robot. Man or woman. But it will happen at some point. Assuming that progress continues in the way that it has done for the last couple of hundred years, technological progress, at some point that will happen.

I guess so. But it will happen in ways that surprise us, just as the internet. Even when we had the internet up and running in, say, 2002, we couldn't predict social media, I mean, the uses to which a technology might take us. We couldn't predict the invasion of social media into politics, for example. I don't remember anyone forecasting that. And yet we're making this, you know,

collectively we make this future that we surprise ourselves with. So I imagine that AI will be rather like that. It'll shock us. It'll come from some other direction. It won't be some au pair who's, you know, robot that's making your early morning coffee. It'll be someone knows

something about you and i think already we're getting there just by your internet use yes ads uh targeted ads will become sentient somehow and yeah we will surprise ourselves and probably well and nastily all at the same time as with the internet i was trying to think like with technological progress in general and the idea that it's important that we anticipate you know we don't know how long it's going to take for us to get to the point where there are kind of sentient technological life forms but assuming that it might happen shouldn't we be thinking now about whether those should even be created because there are so many ethical problems with that with playing god and and you know you in in machines like me your book you you deal with a

lot of these questions you have these adam and eve robots that have been created and they are indistinguishable from human beings in almost every way once they've acquired their personalities. And then they start getting depressed and they start switching themselves off. And then there's all the stuff about how do we treat these people, these creatures. And so we should be thinking about that now. We should have think tanks and groups of people sitting around and figuring out the ethics of creating these life forms, essentially. But is that realistic? creating these life forms essentially but is that realistic is it realistic to think that you would ever talk through the ethical problems with something like that and everyone would just shake hands and say okay we're not going to do this because there's too many problems with it

i think it's already happening just at the sort of prosaic level of self-driving cars, for example, in which the software, the hardware, could take decisions much faster than a driver could. So the moral issue becomes, what do you value most, the person on the pavement or the life of the driver? Suppose if the car had to make an instant decision, either head-on collision with a truck or swerve to the pavement and take out a crocodile of schoolchildren to keep the driver alive.

There was a very large, about two or three years ago now, study, global study, asking people from different parts of the world who were the most valuable human beings. study asking people from different parts of the world who were the most valuable human beings and across the United States and Europe the most valuable human beings

almost universally stated were children interesting in China old people were rated as the most valuable human beings. So you might have to have different software.

Depending on what country you're in. Yeah, if your Tesla is in Beijing, then, you know, children watch out. But I think these moral issues, you know, future, there's a department in Oxford called the Department for the Study of the Future. No longer called Futurology because it got such a bad name for itself, getting everything wrong. You know, everyone driving around in cars that zipped along at 500 feet. Yeah, jetpacks, et cetera. As in Blade Runner.

Yeah. Especially in Blade Runner 2. What an oppression that would be to... I mean, I already think the idea of Amazon delivering books by drones will just lower the ceiling of our lives. I mean, already we live with contrails, and we marvel when there were so few of them. Yes.

During the pandemic or during the Icelandic volcano, we had our skies back. the Icelandic volcano. We had our skies back. We will just cry for our skies if they're swarming with drones. Just to get, you know, a copy of

my book to someone two hours quicker. Well, I'll be for that bit. Sure. Has there ever been a time when people put the brakes on a scientific or technological innovation because of ethical concerns? No, that's, I think, well, no, I think we have had various attempts. There are Geneva Conventions, for example, on warfare, constantly broken, but I think that it has restrained people to certain points.

I think that genetic interventions with human embryos has been pretty well restrained uh-huh there was that chinese scientist who got sacked by the chinese authorities who was messing around with a human embryo even though it was to make it immune to certain congenital diseases it It was across the line. Of course, that was a press release. We don't actually know what's actually happening. So who knows how it's going to unfold. But yes, reasons to be cheerful remain important.

What was some of the, because I love science fiction and I love especially the genre of AI movies. Yeah, me too. science fiction and i love uh especially the the genre of ai movies yeah i was i was i was wondering if they were optioning machines like me for yeah it has been optioned i mean more than once actually um so i you know um but i've said i won't write the screenplay um so it's sort of out of my hands yeah i think I've got an executive producer role, so I hope that some ideas will get going with that. When Machines Like Me came out, I gave an interview with Wired,

and they asked me the obvious question, but I wasn't ready for it. I hadn't thought about it. They said, is this a science fiction novel? And I just impulsively said, no, it's a literary novel. And there was a sort of one of those minor Twitter storms in which I was banished to hell for a week. Then it moved on to some other victim.

Why, what had you done wrong, just saying it's not science fiction? I said, oh, no, what I said was, what really bores me about science fiction is intergalactic warfare. OK. What I then should have gone on to say is what does interest me about science fiction is the impact of technology on civilisation. Yeah, yeah.

Starting, really, with Brave New World, I think we'd have to include Orwell's 1984. I mean, there are televisions there that you're not allowed to turn off, which would, for me, be one of the outer circle of hell. But that discussion of... So within the context of a realist novel, how we live now, dealing with technology, which we haven't chosen,

but is impacting our lives at every level, so that now to lose your phone, for example, your mobile phone phone is a sort of minor disaster feels like you're losing a part of yourself yeah it's bigger than losing a wallet your keys yeah we're all three at once of course as you get older you get good at losing all three at once and machines like me from that point is definitely certainly is science fiction yes i have read and i'm always interested in ways in which i mean there's now a vast literature of about climate change and

i suppose we call it climate change because it's the consequence of our technologies that we're having to deal with the burning of fossil fuels the substitution of animal power by steam power and then electricity and so on, and then oil, coal, overloading our atmosphere with CO2. To me, that is the ultimate science fiction novel. So they're very difficult to do. You either show the post-apocalyptic world and it's a desert,

which is sort of no hope, kind of like Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Fascinating book. I mean, its bleakness just almost cheers one up. It's so bleak. You meet yourself coming the other way in bleakness. way in bleakness um or it's pitched in some other kind of more hopeful sense that it hasn't quite happened we haven't yet got the full blast of the disaster but can we head it off i was asked to write a short story recently that would be optimistic about the future. And I thought it was such a challenge

that I then wrote the story. So it stretches between roughly now and halfway through the next century. And the task was to describe the ways in which things get better. So I thought, first, they have to get a whole lot worse. which things get better so i thought first they have to get a whole lot worse but one of the ways we dodged the bullet of climate change is that we had a few local exchanges of tactical nuclear weapons that put up so much dust in the atmosphere that it gave us an extra 20 years to deal with the problem. Oh, and genetically altered dogs that thrive on plastic.

So, you know, all the rubbish in the household. Already there are bacteria that they've altered to eat plastic. Oh, I thought you were going to say already there are dogs that love to eat rubbish. I know that's true. oh well they eat rubbish anyway um and i thought yeah well you think a dog can eat almost anything why not you know those plastic milk bottles yeah absolutely plastic bags there are nutrients in there somewhere chili flavored bin liners yeah all of that but part of it was just a kind of comedy in which I was trying to convince myself of things that aren't going to happen.

But part of it was, I thought, actually, this is a necessary exercise. How do we address the ways in which we're going to get away with, you know? I mean, here I am in your studio looking sort of north northeast and already i see something quite utopian about it look how many trees there are london is supposedly one of the greenest cities in the world yeah like from the point of view of actual trees i'm not talking about their yeah environmental yeah sure without those rather ugly blocks in the foreground we're looking at a rather wonderful conception of how people might live alongside trees and water and it is extraordinary sometimes to contemplate you know you have

six seven eight nine million people living in more or less one place and they're not all killing each other all the time mostly Mostly they don't. Mostly we rub along. Even in Paris, you can stop a complete stranger and ask the way and not always get spat on for your terrible French. Yeah, exactly. Did you ever like Brian McGee, the philosopher? Yes, I was a friend of his. Were you really?

Yeah, we had regular lunches. I was very, very fond of Brian. I only found out about him last year because they published a load of what they called his pensée in the New Statesman. And I'd never known about him before. I sort of dimly remembered him when I looked at him on YouTube

interviewing Herbert Marcuse. known about him before i sort of dimly remembered him when i looked at him on youtube interviewing herbert marcus and uh i thought oh yeah i think i remember this guy from when i was growing up you know it was one of those things you'd skip past when you're looking for cartoons but did you read that collection of all his little aphorisms i think i have they were collected into a book so yes yeah i'm familiar with them. They were great. He led a very interesting life. You know, he was a Labour MP, then he was a television personality, then he wrote philosophy books. Also, he led the most interesting, rootless life

in that he had an apartment in North Oxford, but he spent an enormous part of his year just moving from various nicely funded foundations that wanted thinkers to come and just be there and work for a month

or two sometimes he'd be somewhere north of Hamburg then he'd be somewhere in Santa Fe and then he'd be back in Oxford for three weeks and then he'd be somewhere north of Hamburg, then he'd be somewhere in Santa Fe, and then he'd be back in Oxford for three weeks, and then he'd be off again to somewhere in Surrey. He loved the college life, but his colleges were global. Much love. And he had this very old-fashioned, extremely attractive,

high-pitched sort of way of speaking, sort of earnest and focused, wonderful listener, sort of exquisitely courteous in conversation, intensely curious about others, always interviewing you, as it were. Aha. Well, he's...

I'm very, very fond of Brian McGee. His conversations with people like Marcuse and... Yes. Noam Chomsky, Iris Murdoch, you can find a lot of them on YouTube these days. And they are from end of the 70s, early 80s, a time when TV could still accommodate those long-form conversations.

And that's all it was. There was no cutting away to an animation or anything like that. Well, you're the inheritor of that. Yes, the podcast world. Yeah, exactly. Anyway, it was really fun finding out about him. There was some of his pensées that I really loved. They're almost like lyrics from songs or something.

Have you got one there? I've got a few to throw at you. Adults are burnt out children. That's a good one. Work gives meaning to your life, however unimportant the work. Only a depressive knows true joy. That's a big one.

Yeah. My friend, the philosopher Galen Strawson, sent me one this morning it was a remark by um betty davis which was old age is not for sissies yes uh i wrote back and said she could equally have said old age is only for sissies pain is unbearable music yes Brian McGee here's one that I didn't really understand and I was going to ask you how you interpreted it charm is a mode of submission yes I think I understand what he means by that that charm is a way of making your interlocutor feel a little more empowered so you have to be less empowered uh-huh and they like you for that okay okay right oh it's nice to be

reminded of brian yeah well i'm hoping um that people will will seek him out really the most courteous civilised man. He knew everything about Wagner. In fact, he knew everything, seemed to know everything about everything. Yeah. I asked him at one lunch, maybe five years ago,

I said, what do you regret most about old age? And he thought for a bit, and he said, sex. And I said, are you missing having sex? And he said, no, it's not that. What I miss is, he said, was not feeling any sexual impulse at all. Not even frustrated sexual impulse or whatever, but just it's gone, the impulse, the desire.

And it was such a large part of my life, he said, that it's like a hole, you know, it can't be filled with something else. It's like a word you can't remember. So that's all ahead of us. Not everyone loses their sexual appetite, though, do they? I think when you're, I don't know i should we shall find out yeah larkin famously says at the end of a barn um what are the things that you like about your older self things that you're the 30 year old version of you didn't know didn't know about what my 30 year old self didn't know about was that there's a good chance in your

old age that you will have a surprising love affair with a grandchild and it's an explosion of love that you just were not counting on so you have to put that on your reasons to be cheerful You have to put that on your reasons to be cheerful list. Which is why the book really bows out with a nine-year-old German girl saying hier lang, this way, leading her grandfather across the room to dinner. So certainly that. I think the growth of a certain kind of tolerance and patience surprised me, actually. People who might have irritated me intensely once no longer do quite the same way.

Yes, a widening of tolerance for all kinds. And that surprises me. Yeah, it's usually the opposite way for a lot of people. With old people, I don't know. Well, there is the temptation to be sort of grumpy and cross, as you found me on the pavement outside King's Cross, walking towards you, having been dumped a mile away. But those are just passing moments that don't sit in the memory much.

And, of course, the other sad thing, a much sadder thing, is the death of friends, contemporaries, and dealing with that kind of absence too. Really old people that I've known talk of a kind of loneliness, that they're the last ones standing among their generation. People in their mid-90s,

the only people they know are much younger than themselves. And that must be particularly trying. Yeah, you've got to have a good hearing aid. That's what I realised when my dad was in his 90s. What was that you said? Yeah. Well, as I understand it, as we get older, Yeah. Well, as I understand it, as we get older, there is just inevitable falling away of detecting the higher frequencies.

So when you hear old people say, the thing about the young these days, they're always mumbling. Yeah, yeah. It's because you're not hearing the whole range. Surely there's got to be something that can be done to get hearing aids really good, because it was such an important part of isolating my dad when he was old. Yeah. And he didn't want to get hearing aids because he couldn't be bothered. They were so annoying and the sound was so crap. Yeah.

Same with my father. He was very intolerant of anything like that. And the problem, I mean, my hearing remains fairly good, but the problem is that we tend to confuse deaf people with stupid people. My friend David Lodge has written hilariously about the ways in which stupidity and deafness get conflated. He wrote a novel called Deaf Sentence, which I thought was a rather nice title. But yeah, that's just, but I mean, there's a whole, I mean, the list of afflict afflictions of old age there's very little to be said for it yes very little how about uh and finally what makes you laugh these days do you ever watch comedy i can't picture you watching like stand-up

comedy specials on netflix no our friends make me laugh. Live anecdotes from friends make me laugh much more than someone who's being paid to make me laugh. Right, okay. It's rare. It's true, actually. Here's another bit of the downgrade. One laughs less easily. My dad despised comedians. He would just say, comediansians he really didn't like comedy

but i think the hardest i've laughed in the last 10 years was when i was i was with my son and daughter-in-law and we were all just trying out cross-country skiing i mean we could all ski but we'd never done and these narrow yeah, and your heel rises up. We were all finding it really difficult to turn on these things. But anyway, my son and I came down a... You wouldn't even hardly consider it a slope if you were on skis. And my daughter-in-law came down third, completely out of control in just the way we had been,

and hit a bump and landed in a tree, like a cartoon figure. Wow. Hanging from a branch. And even now, it makes me laugh to think of it. So life, those, because she was unharmed and there was a sort of moment when. Could have been way worse.

Could have been worse. So there was huge relief in the laughter. Yeah, yeah. Such moments do still entertain me very much. Yeah. But I guess that's the misfortune of others. Yeah. When you shouldn't laugh too hard.

Because there is funny stuff in your books. And the, I mentioned I, the first book of yours i read was solar and there's that scene on the skidoo when right yeah the scientist protagonist believes that he's taken away in sub-zero temperatures which he's been advised not to do gets on this skidoo and then well also his penis has glued itself to his hip. Yeah. So because he's a scientist, he remembers that the freezing point of brandy in his hip flask is much lower than water.

So he pours the brandy over the appropriate spot and thinks he's got away with it. But back on the skidoo, with a wind coming towards him at sort of minus 30. And then he feels something slip down his inside leg, something that he's almost certain is a part of himself and thinks he's lost it. It's frozen off. It's all over.

I was on a skidoo and it was well within the Arctic Circle but while I was on the skidoo I thought, God, this could so easily happen, so it became very tempting to write it as if it did and of course when he gets to where he's going and gets undressed and he's ready for the

ultimate horror, you find it was his lip salve stick that had fallen down his trouser leg and he was actually intact it was this frozen knob no it was still there it hadn't snapped off and the americans didn't like that i can't no they didn't like that no you can't please everyone 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. 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. Calling Captain Orton. Hey, welcome back, podcats. Rosie has just been standing in the same spot while I've been wandering around doing my intro. She got so far up the track, and then, as if there was some border that I wasn't aware of, she just stopped and didn't want to go any further.

She is an absolute mystery dog. Are you okay, dog? There's something going on with you, isn't there? But I'm not exactly sure what it is. I don't know if... Well, the fields have been ploughed around here recently. Maybe they ploughed up some bad spirits. In which case, fair enough, I don't blame you. I don't like bad spirits either. She's waited very patiently for me to do everything I need to do. And now she's

looking around waiting for me to walk back towards the house with her. Which I'm happy to do, Rosie, but I have to do this outro. Are you going to be able to hang in for that, Doglog? I love you. What's going on with you, Dogtanion? Ah, well. We're all getting a bit old and cranky, I guess. So, that was Ian McEwan,own obviously and i'm very grateful to ian and ian's people there's a few links in the description of today's podcast that you might find interesting there is a link to the bird identification app that ian mentioned merlin developed by people at the cornell lab

not too many birds today now that i come to think of it where is techno bird i don't know if techno bird hangs out at this time of year or maybe the birds have also been driven off by the evil spirits that rosie's worried about it's all kicking off here at Castle Buckles. Links. What other links? There is a link to most of that argument scene from before midnight between Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke. It is a good scene. There is a link to the article from the New Statesman

about Brian McGee and his pensée compiled by Jason Cowley with an introduction by Henry Hardy and I've linked straight to the New Statesman site so I'm not sure if that's behind a paywall I'm a subscriber so it works for me anyway apologies if you can't see it. And also, on the subject of Brian McGee, there's the Herbert Marcuse or Marcuse interview

on YouTube there from 1977. If you fancy some old white guys talking about Marxism. Who doesn't like that? What else have we got? Steven Pinker and Ian McEwan talking about good writing. Sort of quite a lot of grammar Nazi stuff in there. Which I always find fairly entertaining. 2021.

They're not being grammar Nazis. Or at least not all the time, but they're talking sort of around the subject. And that, I think, is probably sort of it for the links. Oh no, except further up the link list are a couple of videos that I hope you will find relaxing and useful in these stressful times. There is a video that my brother showed me. I saw Uncle Dave yesterday. And we were talking about public art in airports.

I was talking about the amazing clock they have at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam that has a big, circular, opaque face. And behind it you can see, slightly blurrily, a man who is there drawing the hands of the clock onto the glass from inside. hands of the clock onto the glass from inside and he wipes them off each time the hands change position every minute it's kind of amazing it's not a real guy obviously i don't think it's a piece of video but it's really great I like things like that and there is an amazing kinetic rain sculpture that I hadn't seen before in Singapore by ArtPlusCom a German design firm led by Jussi Angerslaever it's these metallic droplets all suspended and attached to little motors that are making them rise and fall

in incredible computerized patterns and uh like when you first start watching it if you do watch it on youtube it looks a tiny bit blah but then it gets very non-blah quite fast and yeah kind of relaxing but Rosie is now standing because I've gone I've taken another turn that is not directly heading home Rosie you're being sort of unfriendly all right well head. I was saying, the other video that I hope you'll find relaxing is Dozy Rosie, that I promised you a few weeks back. And actually, it was uploaded a week or so ago, but it wasn't in 4K. And I had been crapping on about how high-res this video was. So they re-uploaded it this week.

And when I say they, that is Little Dot, the company that is currently making episodes of the podcast available on my YouTube channel and also putting out clips of some of the conversations I've had over the years. And anyway, they kindly uploaded for me the video I shot a few weeks ago of Rosie curled up and having a nice snooze on a sofa in Castle Buckles while my son Nat noodles away on the piano in the next room kind of improvised ambient jazz noodling. And the overall effect, I hope you will find, is relaxing. It lasts just under 13 minutes and nothing happens.

I thought it would be a nice antidote to the frankly excessive levels of energy and excitement to be found elsewhere on YouTube. I read some of the comments. All very nice. Thank you if you left a comment. People are nice to dogs though, aren't they? They really like dogs. You have to be a real baddie to troll dogs, I reckon, don't you think? But there was one comment on the re-uploaded version of Dozy Rosie that made me laugh, which was from a guy who put just three words, each one with a full stop.

Fastest unsubscribe ever. I thought, OK, you didn't need to tell me that, but that's okay. Fair enough. Cheerio. He'd only just subscribed and the first video up was a 13 minute 4k epic of a Whippet Poodle cross dozing on my mum's old sofa. Party time! Hello! Fact-checking Santa here. The YouTube comment that Adam just mentioned

is actually easiest unsubscribe ever. Not fastest unsubscribe ever. Slightly changes the nuance there, I think. There were probably other factual inaccuracies in the episode, but that's the one that I decided to correct. OK, that's it for this week, podcats.

Thank you very much for coming back. Thank you very much indeed to Seamus Murphy Mitchell for his work on this episode much appreciated thank you Seamus thanks to Helen Green she does the artwork for this podcast I love it and thanks to ACAST as ever for their ongoing help and support with the podcast keeping the show on the road. Thanks very much to you. Thank you very much. Mid-autumn hug. Yay.

Great to see you. Hope all's reasonably well with you. Take care. And I love you. Bye! It's nice to have fun with me, Bumzah. Like and subscribe. Like and subscribe. Like and subscribe. Please like and subscribe. Give me a little smile and a thumbs up.

It's nice to have fun with me, Bumzah. Give me a little smile and a thumbs up. It's nice to have fun with me, Bumzah. Please like and subscribe. Like and subscribe. Please like and subscribe. Like and subscribe. Thank you.