7113/19633
Three podcasts in a day is too many. It’s strange that doing podcasts over zoom is so much more exhausting than doing them in the theatre, even when you’re recording in the afternoon and not after my bedtime in the evening. I am sometimes tired after the live RHLSTPs but for the second week running I recorded two Book Clubs on a Tuesday afternoon and it absolutely destroyed me. Then I had to do a zoom meeting and a frame of snooker as well. When I say I had to do the snooker….
We had some tech issues with the first book club record with Sam Knight (who has written a fascinating book called “The Premonitions Bureau”) which made having a conversation quite tricky. And given that’s more or less the point of podcasting that was a bit of a handicap. I didn’t hear a lot of the answers towards the end, but they’re all recorded, so I look forward to listening so I can find out what he said. Is it possible to see the future and more importantly is it useful and what are the implications for time and fate if we can? All interesting stuff, but Sam’s book is as much about the strange decade of the sixties and how we cope with tragedy.
Luckily we had more technical luck with the next chat with TV’s Emma Kennedy and it was a relief to be talking to an author that I could be openly rude to. Emma’s new book “Letter from Brenda” is, I hate to say it, really excellent. And not just because I crop up in it. It feels like a good long time since I’ve seen Emma, but it’s always fun to chat with her and good to see that she has recovered from a recent health scare and looking fitter than ever. She always copies me to be fair.
It is weird how our lives have intersected so often and I am sure there will be some future collaborations to come. I just have a premonition about it. And Emma kept up the spooky theme by revealing how much a medium knew about her life and her mum, so maybe there are more things on Heaven and earth than are dreamt of in my philosophy. As I said to Sam Knight, I am deeply sceptical about all this kind of thing, but there’s a big part of me that really wants it all to be true. That, I suppose, is why this stuff persists. The supernatural will always be part of the human experience, even when we’ve reached a point where the things that we can do have in many ways surpassed the things that we can imagine.
Catie and me played Scrabble to end the day, though I felt so tired that I thought I might actually expire. I still got three bingos though. I’ll still be ace at Scrabble even when I’m dead.
I am sort of on holiday at the moment. I don’t know how it has come to this.
Lots of RHLSTP guests being confirmed. Dick and Dom will be joining me on 13th June at the Phoenix and Kiri and Rachel from All Killa, No Filla are added to the Edinburgh line-up.
Details and ticket links here.
