Off Air... with Jane and Fi - Am I potty-mouthed?

Episode Date: June 1, 2023

Jane is looking for a trucker's tan and a couple of burgers, while Fi is singing a little song about boob separators... They're joined by Ukrainian writer Victoria Belim, to talk about her memoir 'The Rooster House' If you want to contact the show to ask a question and get involved in the conversation then please email us: [e-mail] Assistant Producer: Kate Lee Times Radio Producer: Rosie Cutler Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Now, old potty-mouthed garv, I only said shit, and I only said it once. And I was quoting from the Times magazine. So it's an interesting point though, Jane, isn't it? Because there's loads of stuff that's written in newspapers now and written on the socials that is allowed, that can't be said on radio, because we are governed by extremely tight Ofcom regulations, aren't we? And I am really sorry. I didn't even notice it.

That's the terrible thing. My language is so bad. See, I don't think notice it. That's the terrible thing. My language is so bad. Well, it's interesting. I am... Am I potty-mouthed? I don't think I'm... No, I don't think you are. I don't think either of us are that bad. Oh, no, I'm quite bad. I don't think you are. No, I am quite bad.

My kids say I'm terrible. Well, yeah, in the domestic session. Yeah, especially when I'm driving. Oh, well, that is totally different. It's my own little world. Oh, yeah, in the domestic session. Yeah, especially when I'm driving. Oh, well, that is totally different. It's my own little world. Oh, no. I say what I like. It all comes out. I own the road. And also, this is the time of year where you

can wind down the window of the driver's seat and stick your elbow out. Yes, indeed. Do you do that? Mordor, mordorin'. Do I do it? Molder, moldering. Do I do it? Yeah, on a sunny day. What's not to like? You drive into your local organic butcher's.

You get to get a trucker's tan. Get a trucker's tan and a couple of burgers. Just on the right-hand side. Yeah, just on the right-hand side. Or on the left-hand side if you're listening in Europe. Oh, yes, because we welcome everybody wherever you are in the world. In fact, I actually think that our European listeners need to get a bit of a wiggle on because they're being completely overshot by people listening in the United States, Australia and New Zealand. So we did have a flurry from Europe, but they've all kept quiet lately.

So come on, Europe. Well, in response, this comes from Whitney. I'm a long-time listener from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. And I'm so glad to finally have something to write in about. The song Fee was trying to think of was Boob Separator to the tune of Smooth Operator by Sade. Someone had written in about her purse strap cutting across her well-endowed chest.

I relate all too much and think about this often. You're absolutely right. Boo! Separator! We are very grateful to you because that was preying on my mind as well. Now, we've got a really interesting guest today and it's an author called Victoria Bellum and it's a wonderful family memoir about Ukraine and about family and about the complications of family.

But you'll hear that later. Shall we do some more emails while we anticipate that? Yes, and can we just say a huge thank you, because people have actually done what we've asked them to do, Jane. I find it remarkable when anybody does that anymore. And we've got a lot of very, very brief emails today, which is nice. It's not that we don't like the longer ones, but we stacked up quite a lot of longer ones. Yeah. And we've got some pithy little ones in. Can I take you to task? This is someone who's listening to us in fort worth texas just wondering why it's okay for middle-aged women to talk about beefcake and how well a young man looks in his underwear but it's not okay for middle-aged men to talk about young women in their underwear right regarding a show when fee was still on bank holiday that's right and that is a complaint

about jay mulkerin so that's absolutely fine. I'm completely with our correspondent. Well, I was going to say, you're having too much fun without me. What we were actually talking about was the Manchester City player, Harland, and a very, very distinctive image of him standing in the dressing room. Oh, in his Y-fronts. Yeah. With his arm around the slightly unprepossessing Mr. Noel Gallagher and a friend of Noel's called Scully. Yeah, I've seen that picture too. Have you? Yeah.

Well, there we are. Right, this is an email from a Jane, originally from Wigan, but living in Switzerland at the moment. So there I go, contradicting my earlier remark about nobody emailing from Europe. Jane says, I've been following the emails about men rearranging themselves in public and it reminded me of an incident

at work back in the 90s. I was working in a two-man print and copy shop. Oh, do you remember them? Sorry, say that again. Print and copy shops. Yes, I do. Because nobody had a printer. You had to go to a place to have stuff printed.

Well, in the heyday as well of the internet cafe do you remember those uh were they oh they were places that did have the internet when you didn't no they were places that just had computers and you just considered a computer you'd rent one out wouldn't you for half an hour well i wouldn't because i didn't oh okay anyway jane goes on half the premises were given over to reception and graphics and the other half to the printing on an open plan basis. I manned reception and did some graphics work while my boss did the actual printing. My workplace was seated, but my boss worked standing up.

Now, printing back then was a dirty business and he wore overalls, which I presume were rather uncomfortable and led to him constantly rearranging himself. The thing is, every time he came to talk to me whilst rearranging himself, as I was seated, my line of vision was spot on and his rearranging drew my eyes to his nether regions. He did this so often that I started to get very nervous and embarrassed every time until finally, one day, I just couldn't stand it anymore and blurted out,

for God's sake, leave your dick alone! I didn't think you were going to read that word. You're filthy. But this is a podcast. Needless to say, he ignored my comment, and in true British style, we just carried on working as if nothing had been said. I often think about this incident, and I chuckle, but actually it wasn't funny at the time,

and I can imagine that it probably wasn't that funny, in all fairness, and I know we've had some titters about this whole subject but actually if you're a young woman in that sort of quite enclosed and very small working environment uh it probably wasn't very pleasant yeah so I'm I'm with Jane there tell us more about living in Switzerland Jane because I always remember my French teacher at school who's a formidable Glaswegian lady, who used to lecture us about how travel was absolutely vital and improved your mind. But she would always say, don't bother going to Switzerland, it's an absolute waste of time.

Oh, my word. So if you are a Swiss resident, is it boring? Or is it actually fantastically beautiful and very efficient with wonderful clocks and chocolate lots of people have emailed in with suggestions for our concerned about bowel cancer listener yeah this is just one from iris who says your listener who's concerned about the cancer would probably like to know that there is a free nhs test that can be done at home it's done by post you can just if you do a really, really quick Google search,

you can find the number that you need to dial to get hold of that test. It's offered to everybody over 50 years of age, Iris thinks. It's called the FIT, the Fecal Immunochemical Test. I think the problem there is that our listener was under 50. Yes, she was. She was in her early 40s. But I'm sure if you called the number, so do a Google search, free NHS test would do it. I'm sure if you called that number, they might be able to point you in the right direction

of either someone who can give you that test for free or a way that you would be able to alert your GP to the fact that you need that test. But so many people have said, don't ignore it. Just keep going until you've got it sorted. Actually, this is quite good advice from Bev, who says, just because it was me who said, just turn up at your GP practice. Bev says, I've seen people turning up at my GP practice and they have always, always been turned away. I guess it's to discourage the others. When I've needed an urgent appointment, particularly for my elderly dad, I write a note to the GP and then drop it in. I usually get a response really quickly. Now that's interesting and I must admit I hadn't thought about that.

But yes, just write a handwritten note and bung it in via the receptionist and then await developments. Perhaps that's the way forward. I mean, there is no doubt about the fact that actually getting an appointment at the GP in Britain at the moment is quite tough. It really is quite difficult. Your listener who's struggling to get an appointment might have better luck, says Jo, if she tells the receptionist why she needs it.

They triage calls, isn't it? Triage calls. So being explicit about her worries about cancer should make a difference. And if she really can't get through on the phone, then writing a letter can work. There you go. Same bit of advice. But it's not easy to say to a receptionist, although I have actually said, look, no, I really do need to see a doctor because it's this. And I think in those circumstances, I've always been helped. So if you can it's this and I think in those circumstances I've always been helped so if you can bear it and I appreciate it's not everybody's idea of a great time just actually

be completely up front with the receptionist they are people of the world they probably are fairly unshockable just tell them this one comes from Fiona who says I was so pleased to hear the compliments about teachers who organize residential trips This was one of my responsibilities for many years when I worked in a primary school. All hail to you, Fiona. Each year, the year sixes would get the chance to go abroad and always had a wonderful time. The behind-the-scenes staff experiences would fill a book.

It's a book that you should write. It really is. Favourite memories include the trip to Paris, where we were met by our coach driver for the week at 4am one May morning with the encouraging greeting, never been to Paris, never wanted to go. He proceeded to moan about the kids

who were very well behaved and the food. Apparently his wife had told him to never eat anything he couldn't pronounce. It was a long week. Then there was the boat trip up the Rhine where the children, many fair-skinned and red-haired, were accosted by a coach party of Korean ladies

dressed head-to-toe in Burberry who wanted photos taken with them. And an interesting trip to the Science Museum in Amsterdam with the unexpected sex exhibition on the top floor. There was some explaining to do on our return to the UK. I think my abiding memory has to be the obsession with the gift shops wherever we went. The bio tapestry has never been viewed at such speed in an effort to get to the promised land of the souvenir emporium and on one trip a child managed to spend all her pocket money in the shop on the ferry before it had left port on an emu puppet whose fur and strings needed to be untangled

on a daily basis on our trip around Normandy oh it's what King Harold would have wanted love listening it's part of my decompression as I drive home from my job as a counsellor at a children's hospice well that is a job and a half Fiona you sound like a woman who has

got a sense of humour as well as obviously an awful lot of compassion so I hope you're doing okay and you definitely definitely should write the book. Yeah you really should and thank you very much for that email Fiona and we could do with more of these sorts of stories. I love the coach driver he sounds fabulous. My kids both went to a London primary school which offered and I could hardly believe they did this a day trip to Calais just so the kids could all say that they'd been abroad and the coach left at four in the morning from West London and took off at high speed to Dover spent a couple of hours in Calais came back and on both occasions my kids distinguished themselves

by not vomiting but by bringing back some truly horrific items from the gift shop at Calais I've still got one of them which which is a blue dolphin, which balances precariously on a very small metal pole thing, and it wobbles about in a breeze. It's really, it's very French. I mean, it's a real example of the French at their artistic best. Sounds a little bit like a booze cruise. Well, it's a booze cruise, but for 11-year-olds.

I think they were 10 when they went to... Anyway, I just remember thinking, what a fantastic opportunity. And how brilliant are those teachers to just do this? Oh, I know. I just can't imagine... In a day. I need to take a month off. And there's the new thing that a lot of primary schools do

is the residential trip in Year 6, isn't it, in order to prepare kids for a slightly more independent life at secondary school. You see those big coaches heading off for four nights. You just think, oh, my God. But they have such a good time. Well, the kids do, but I think the teachers are shadows of their former selves.

Well, they've got six weeks to get over it afterwards. Right. God's sake. I distanced myself from that comment on account of the fact that my mum was a teacher. That was satire. And she really, really, really is going off you. Right.

Shall I do this one about something that was on the programme today or was that not making sense? No, put it into context. OK, so we talked to, if you've been keeping across the news in this country, there was a debate, very contentious debate as it turned out to be at the

Oxford Union featuring on the one hand Dr Kathleen Stock who was there to talk about the importance of free speech but she is known as a gender critical academic and philosopher. And the union debate was hijacked by some protesters, not least Riz, who we spoke to on the programme today, who had glued their hand to the floor of the Oxford Union in protest

at what they saw was an opportunity for transphobic speech to be aired. Have I got the gist of it and included everybody correctly? Yes and Riz is a student at the university. So this one comes from Rani Davis. Dear Jane and Fi, I feel like sometimes I've taken a crazy pill. I don't understand the logic of gluing one's hand to the floor. The trans rights non-binary activists didn't give specific examples of why Kathleen Stock was dangerous or even how they themselves are in danger. And I appreciate you tried to get the information out of them, but they were struggling to give a specific, which is the real problem here. And this is relevant because Rani is a family therapist in the US

where the trans phenomenon is huge most of the kids i've seen who said they were trans a few years ago have now with maturity decided that they are the gender they were born with had they been given hormone treatment or surgeries as had been suggested by some doctors it could have had serious consequences the fact that she actually it's they uh ron Ronnie, stated no more dead trans kids is the real dog whistle. Suicide is a real issue, but it's complicated. It's caused by hopeless depression and a mental disorder, not as fee astutely noted by one factor in a person's life. I found the activist who glued their hand to the floor unimpressive, uninformed, uneducated and aligned with the victimhood

mentality that makes me worry for our future generations. And then she goes on to say, oh, my God, I just realized I sound like such an old lady right now. I do apologize. And you listen to the program while you're getting ready for work in the morning in California. I get you lady. old lady right now I do apologize and I do think that part of the problem of the the volume and the alarm that is contained within this debate is a belief that the older generation don't understand the younger generation and I would just say for myself and I think and hope for you too that there is an enormous willingness to try and understand. And maybe sometimes part of the problem is that the younger generation just has to be forgiving of a lived experience that has informed us in a different way.

And that's the same throughout history when frontiers are pushed back. But it doesn't mean that it is a mean spirited viewpoint or a stupid viewpoint we just need to talk more about it and do a bit more listening well yeah i mean i absolutely although saying absolutely is just a way of buying time by the way while i formulate my thoughts but um i was saying the other day actually we were having a conversation around the desk in the office about these generational differences and about the verbal battles that my sister and I would fight at our dinner table back home about gay rights back in the 70s and 80s and I don't believe that my parents generation were ever asked to defend their way of thinking in the way that I sometimes feel that our generation have.

I remember I was trying to make myself trying to make it clear. But, you know, I remember my sister and I, because my mum and dad, bless them, you know, they're still alive and they aren't unpleasant people in any way. But they truly believe they didn't know any gay people. We just say, no, but you do. No, but you do. Yeah. It's just that nobody of your generation was able to live their life in the way they wanted to. So, in fact, what your parents knew were unhappy people?

Well, no, they didn't. You see, they didn't know any people. They just didn't know anybody. But do you think that's true, though? Of course it isn't! It wasn't true then, course it isn't! It wasn't true then and it isn't true now. So all I'm saying is that I think you're right about the lived experience

and my lived experience is one thing, yours is another and Riz, who is our guest, their experience is something else and who knows what Riz might be thinking in 30 years' time when they've got a bit more in the old locker of human experience. So these generational differences, they're not new. They're really not new. And I think our emailer is absolutely right when they are rather regretful

about being made to feel out of the loop, old-fashioned, old. I mean, I sometimes feel that Kathleen Stock is representative of an older woman, an older female viewpoint. And sometimes in society you feel that no one, quotes, fashionable, wants to ally themselves with the older woman because there's something just not very chic about it all. Yeah, and so I think, you know, Rani has a huge amount to contribute to the debate because, you know,

it's not like you and I who are just reading things and then actually have an absurdly large platform to then take over and ask questions of people in the hope that we're, you know, providing some kind of progress. But Rani is actually working in this field, so really does have something to contribute, whether or not you agree with her. But I just really don't want you to apologise

for sounding like an old lady right now. And isn't it interesting, because this week as well, there was that survey that had come out of Finland in the 18th century. They'd looked at 200 years,'t they of finnish families and they'd found that actually children thrived and survived more when they had a grandmother living with them and that was to do with the passing on of wisdom the actual care being still there within the household and possibly something about an older person in the house having an immune system that the children kind of rubbed up against.

So I know that it's not directly analogous, but having old people listening to them, even if it then just sparks something in you that you want to berate, is still a very good thing to have. And I would hate, hate to lose that. You are a person of value. Have no doubt about that yeah that's really important but also um there was a reference in that conversation that you had with uh Riz about abusing people in the street and absolutely no one should be abused in the street by anybody else no and I you know it's hideous and also i just really do want to hear more um about the

experiences of of trans kids and the prejudice they're on the receiving end of because back to your point about what your parents believe they didn't see that's because it would have been so hard to be on the receiving end of that prejudice that presumably people they knew had decided that they couldn't take that, so they were not going to live their life how they wanted to live it. So we have to stay being able to say all of these things and listen to them.

It is within living memory that people couldn't live as a gay person. They couldn't do it. Let's remember that, Jane. Yes, let's very much remember that. This is from, once again, as I complain about no emailers coming to us from Europe, here's an email from Paris.

Have we had a single email? I've got Luke from Hartlepool coming up. Luke from Hartlepool's coming up. Right. Stand by, Hartlepool. Christine writes from Paris. Lovely to hear from you. She says, I'm just catching up with your Tuesday show

and was in the process of sending you a bluetooth history we've had enough of those now Christine thank you, then your conversation moved on to Melanie Sykes and late diagnosed autism well I'm 63 now and autism was diagnosed during the pandemic while I was living in a 9 square metre

room in Paris which is still my home. Wow. Now, I'm not very good with stats, but that's not big, is it? Not enormous. Nine square metres, no. Your chat then moved to Oxbridge. Well, I didn't go to university at all. Before A-levels at my lovely state school in Kent,

I went straight into the newsroom. I went to Oxford as a mature student at 32. Dyslexia was hinted at, but there was so much more. By the way, says Christine, I don't use a smartphone. It might make sense given that I wrote a book called Artifacts, an archaeologist's year in Silicon Valley. Still available, I'm sure. Make sure you seek it out. MIT Press, apparently. I'm also a BBC contributor, which is more than we are these days, Fiona. Yes, I've discontributed. Christine has taken part in Fouque.

From our own correspondent. Since 2008 and presented documentaries for Radios 3 and 4. She's also a freelancer for The Times. You're a busy bee, Christine, in that lovely room in Paris. She says, I love listening to you in my garret along with the Times. You're a busy bee, Christine, in that lovely room in Paris. She says, I love listening to you in my garret along with the pigeons. Well, you're extremely welcome, Christine, and thank you very much for being part of our

widespread, and it has to be said, slightly dotty family. We very much feel that about it, don't we? We do, yep. Luke from Hartlepool just wanted to corroborate our earlier many listeners who were saying do get back in touch with your doctor.

He went for a private health care test because he's 25 and his bowel movements had changed and he was worried about it. So he went private and he's got a test and he's going to get back in touch because he's not sure that the medication has worked. So you're going to keep pursuing that, Luke, and we're grateful for you adding your weight to that. Can I just say that Sam has been in touch. She went to a school reunion at the same school that I went to. She says Fee was a few years above us.

She visited the... That's another way of saying I'm not as old as Fee. visited the... That's another way of saying I'm not as old as V. There's the Finlay shed that I know for a fact she smoked behind as I stumbled across her then. She's attached a photo. Wouldn't have been me, just someone who looked like me. Hang on, that's such a cliche.

Did that actually happen? That people smoked behind a shed? We did. It was literally the bike shed. And it was quite funny actually. So Finlay was literally the bike shed and it was quite funny actually so finley was the sixth form house and uh there was it was a boarding school i was a day girl at a boarding school i wouldn't recommend that anybody um uh and the day girls in finley we had a shed that we were allowed to go and use and you may be imagining you know one of those lovely sheds like some people in

west east kensington have at the bottom of their gardens now a studio room it literally wasn't it was just a shed so we took it at its word and we just smoked behind it well it's a fire hazard it was a fire hazard for us and very much a health hazard and i'd just say kids really really really don't do it it took about 30 years to give up smoking, Jane. I know. Yeah. And genuinely. No, just don't. It's horrible. And I don't mean it's horrible.

I mean, the addiction just sounds. I mean, I'm still taking, you know, I'm still sucking on my little lozenges in my mid-50s. But other hot news. The drama attic is now a physics lab. Whoop, whoop. Nobody looked any different at the reunion. And too many people have burnt out by

30 and we're too embarrassed to say so at first whole other discussion there well get back in touch with that what does that mean burnt out at 30 well i don't know that's what we need to know more about yeah and also the marvelous mrs rankin had died and i would just like to say really really sincerely she was the best teacher i ever had and I've thought of her so often since leaving school. She was just bloody wonderful. She taught classics. She knew her subject. She treated us like adults.

She was always beautifully turned out in a tweed skirt and a silk shirt. She was a really properly eccentric woman, but in a really lovely way, not in a kind of self-aggrandizing way. And I'm really sad to hear that she's died but I think she had a huge effect on every pupil who passed through her classroom and I'd just like to say you know thank you actually she was just terrific I don't think we can say thank you enough to those teachers who actually made a difference. Oh, I agree. They're not brilliantly well paid and they do some amazing things.

So if you are a teacher, you deserve your long holiday, OK? You're just trying to grab it back, aren't you? You're being so rude about the holidays. I was doing satire earlier. Everybody understood that. Right, do you want to go into our guest? No, no, you do it. I've lost a piece of paper.

Can I borrow yours? Oh, can we just say that you're going to be spending the weekend reading Cozy Crime. I'm... Which, by the way, is a concept we can discuss,

can't we? Yes. Because I'm not really sure if I'm going to have cozy. Do you want to be murdered cozily? Yes, please. Oh, yes.

Please do it cozily. Preferably by a reverend. So, Doctor... No, he's not a doctor. Killing me softly with evensong. There you go. The Reverend Richard Coles has written number two in his crime series. And darling, darling Dickie is going to come in and tell us all about it next week.

And I'm reading Judy Murray's book. Right, okay. 15 love. The Rooster House struck fear into our next guest. It's a building in Potlava in Ukraine which housed the secret police and the roosters, it refers to, as sculptures on the front of the building above the

doorway. Many, many local people would walk a different route to avoid passing by the house. Such was its reputation. And it's a vital part of Victoria Bellum's memoir. Now, she's a Ukrainian writer. She was born in Ukraine, but left with her family to go and live in America when she was young. And she didn't really return to her native country for three decades. But as she started to watch the invasion, the first invasion by Russia in 2014, she decided that she felt a bit powerless and unsettled and she wanted to go back to Ukraine, not least because she wanted to try and trace her great uncle, Nikodim, who had vanished in the 1930s.

So the resulting book is a tribute to four generations of her family. book is a tribute to four generations of her family. It's part memoir, it's part mystery in a way and investigative journalism and history of her country. Her father was Russian, her mother is Ukrainian. So we began by asking her to describe herself. You know, that's a very interesting question. And for me, throughout my adolescence, actually, in my early childhood, it was always very difficult to find a word to describe myself. So I moved to the States, United States when I was 15. And suddenly, that was the first time I really had to define where I was from. And for most people, Ukraine was kind of this blank space, you know, they couldn't connect or associate anything with it. So I would always say that I was Russian, or else I would give a big geography and history lecture.

But really, that just even to say I'm Russian, or I'm Ukrainian, that just really hides so much about my identity that was built in the family that's very multinational, multicultural, where national or ethnic identity was not something important. My family is definitely well split between Russian and Ukrainian, mother's father's side, but there are also family members from Azerbaijan, Belarus, Armenia. And I grew up in that atmosphere where it seemed like I could define myself in terms of what I, my aspirations, my dreams, rather than where I was from. It was only when I left Ukraine that I realized, well, actually, where are you from is a very important question and people want a one word answer. Your book starts with you describing the relationship that you had with Vladimir.

Can you tell us a little bit more about who he is and why you chose to start the book talking about his view of nationality? about his view of nationality? Vladimir is my father's older brother. And like my father, he was also born in Ukraine. But he always defined himself more as Russian, ethnically Russian, and he always felt conscious of that. And in many sense, I started the book with that conversation with that conflict that I had with Vladimir, because for me, his stance was so shocking and was so, actually, it was so counter to how I was brought up to think about belonging, about nationality, about identity. His was very static view, mind was, about nationality, about identity. His was a very static view. Mind was very flexible and very malleable.

And there's something that was very also important for me is that Vladimir is the only remaining link to my father's side of the family. So in many ways, he's a very impressive person. He suffered through many hardships throughout his life. He is very smart. He's very resilient and just inspiring person in many ways. And suddenly that's when in 2014, I discovered he holds ideas and political beliefs that absolutely just shocked me. And I could not even make sense of why he was thinking about things the way he was. And so your uncle was very much supporting Russia, talking about the freedom of the air in Russia and the strong man that Putin had become. And this is where you find yourself wanting to dig deeper into your Ukrainian roots. Where were you actually living and what was happening in your life by then? That was the year I, well, 2013 was the year I moved to Brussels from the United States.

And so it was also a time when I was changing many things in my life, was going through this big change. And when the first protest started happening in Ukraine, in Kiev, it took me by surprise. But of course, when Crimea was annexed, when the conflict really started heating up in the Donbass region, that really was such a traumatic period for me. suddenly everything I held for granted became questioned. My whole equilibrium, the whole balance of my ideas, my perceptions was shaken. And so naturally it would turn to people whom I respected for support. And that's when I discovered that Vladimir was not there to support me at all. In fact, everything that he would say to me would just end up being quite hurtful and painful. And that was really the first lesson for me that even in one family, people can have very different diverse opinions. And they may not be conscious of each other's feelings or care about them.

Why Tobias is not living in Ukraine now? He's been living in Israel since the 1990s. So quite a lot of your family had moved abroad, hadn't they? And you find yourself in Brussels in 2014. You decide, actually, that you want to go in the opposite direction, you want to go back to Ukraine. I thought some of the things that you said about how you were feeling at that point were really interesting, Victoria. You say mourning a place is even more difficult than mourning a person. And seeing our familiar landmark sink into violence, we grieve for ourselves as we were and we question

what we've become. Tell us what it's like, if we can spool forward a bit and we'll come back to the story of your family, to see places that you loved absolutely obliterated. It's, you definitely see so much, we vest so much of ourselves in places that have meaning for us. They become part of our, you know, of our own personal landscape, personal history. And when we lose that, it's more than, you know, losing a house or losing material possessions. It's really losing part of your identity, part of your sense of self. And that sense of place is really part of our sense of selves. When I first experienced it in 2014, when I was watching this terrible footage from Kiev, all these blood splattered streets,

all the places that I knew, loved, where I spent many happy moments. To me, it was just such a shock that I really think of my life as being split before and after. And even though the invasion of 2022 is much more brutal, is much more direct, but I feel like I came to it already prepared. In 2014, it's like I lost my innocence, in a sense, and experiencing that violence of the places, in the places that I loved. You're listening to Off Air with Jane and Fi, and our guest on this edition is Victoria Bellum. Victoria was telling us about how she felt

she had really lost her innocence in the conflict of 2014. So we asked her how much notice she thought the West had taken of that invasion at the time. In fact, that's a great observation. The reason I even decided I wanted to write the book was because of that. I felt like Ukraine was not being heard. I would go to these think tanks, conferences on Ukraine that were happening around Brussels, and often there would be no Ukrainian experts, or there are some Russian experts suddenly who became overnight Ukraine expert explaining the situation. Do you think that that's because the

West almost believed what the Russian authorities were saying, that Crimea was ethnically Russian and therefore they did have some right to be there. Russian propaganda was extremely strong, extremely powerful, and the West was absolutely unprepared to what was happening. So that messaging, political propaganda messaging, just went for the weakest links. And we really bought it, you know, just all of it. And so, so much time was spent trying to untangle this, like whether this is true or that isn't true or a lie. Whereas in the way propaganda works, specifically the Russian model of propaganda, it does not matter whether a statement is true or a statement is false. What matters is that you do not know which is which. And it's just to create this information fog.

And suddenly everything becomes questioned. So while that was happening, all these discussions were happening, Ukraine was sinking further and further into violence and observing it being in Brussels, to me, it was really heart-wrenching. So you decide to leave Brussels and go back to Ukraine. Tell us about the Rooster House and why that's so significant and what turns into quite an almost a mystery book about searching for lost family members. In some sense, the Rooster House. Well, the Rooster House is just a colloquial name for the former KGB headquarters in Poltava,

the town where my mother's side of the family originates from. And it's this beautiful building. It's flanked by two big sirens, but colloquially they're called Sroosters. And because no one wants to mention the name KGB, the place becomes known as the Srooster House, or in Ukrainian, quite literally, the House of Little Roosters. It's just as if by calling it by such like a pet name, you kind of diminish the horror that it holds and symbolizes. So people would have been tortured and killed in that building? Yes.

That building was definitely quite frightening. And even to me as a child, and even frankly, as an adult, I always would shudder whenever I walked past that building. So without giving away too much about what's in the book, because it would be wrong of us to tell the ending, you go and search for a particular family member. Why would there be a significance and connection to the Rooster House for anybody in your family? in your family? When I discovered the mystery of the missing family member, someone who disappeared, to me, that was very shocking that someone could be obliterated from family history, from our narrative so easily. No one in the family wanted to talk about him. No one knew anything, or they claimed they did not know anything. And it was all covered with this

fear. And to me, the Rooster House really embodied that fear. And it embodied more than just the fear of family members. It embodied the whole fear that was propagated and instilled in people during the Soviet era. And even though Stalinist eras long gone, Soviet Union collapsed, but the fear that's embodied by the Rooster House remains. That's something that comes across very strongly, that history is just ever present. People have long, long memories, memories apparently in the DNA, in their very soul. And I just, I mean, you can tell me what you think do you think we have the same issues here because looking at your book it struck me that Britain is a much I don't know a cozier less complicated place in in many ways I think the Soviet past in in just not in Ukraine but in many countries of

the former Soviet Union it just that period really left very deep wounds. Because first of all, it erode national histories, it recreated histories, in some sense, it created whole countries, whole nations where none existed before. I don't think here, in much of Western Europe, we had such a big social experiment on such a grand scale. And the issue in Ukraine that still remains an issue and why I think the Soviet past is a subject that could not be forgotten, that really needs to be addressed again and again, is that past is very complicated, very traumatic, and it's still unprocessed. People still do not have the shared idea of history. People in different parts of the country remember history in different ways. And sometimes they cannot talk to each other because, you know, because of these Soviet policies, they simply don't have the same context. Do you think that it is exactly that sense of chaos in such a recent history that has enabled Ukraine for the most part?

And I take your point, you know, across the country, people don't hold the same beliefs. But there seems to be a certainty and a strength about their victory that has taken the world by surprise. Ukrainian identity is really grounded in that idea of taking care of the land, protecting one's land. It's been throughout its whole existence as a nation. And for instance, on some small level, when something that I describe in the book, the theme that keeps coming back, the theme of a garden. I describe in the book, the theme that keeps coming back, the theme of a garden. My grandmother, she was absolutely devoted to her garden at the expense of everything else, her health, relationship with family members. But that idea that was sacred, just the land needs to be protected. The land needs to be taken care of. And I feel in the current, over the past years, we have seen Ukrainians have been protecting their land as well as they could. And the idea being this is what we must do. This is our mission. And of course, feeling that we're being victimized,

we're being attacked by someone who's a neighbor. Do you think, I don't want to be downbeat about this, but with the possibility of President Trump, for example, being reelected, do you think Ukraine can win? I still think Ukraine can win regardless, because the war also gives a really changed society in many profound ways. I've seen how people came together, how communities came together, and that gives me hope. Hope against, you know, against all odds. When you see the images, though, of so many cities really raised to the ground, can you imagine a time in future generations, because it might not be in your lifetime, where those can genuinely have

been rebuilt? I can imagine it because it happened. It happened after Second World War, for instance, when so many Ukrainian cities were completely erased. And my grandmother, she's no longer alive, but she would be able to tell stories of Kharkiv, because Kharkiv was rebuilt during her lifetime. And it's a city on eastern Ukraine, probably one of the largest cities closer to the Russian border. And also the city that's now been destroyed quite significantly. But I've seen so much of Ukrainian culture in general as being very resilient and as surviving such terrible, terrible times. And that gives me hope.

And do you think that it is your ancestors' love of their gardens and your grandmother's love of her orchard and things in nature that actually pushed you to your current job? Well, you've got several jobs, haven't you? But one of them is writing about scent, isn't it? He's writing about perfume. Yes, my, well, my Russian grandmother, she also was a herbal healer. So she knew how to use herbs and different plant extracts to make medicine. And so all these scent memories, likewise, really influenced my interest in aromas in this whole like olfactory landscape. And does that ever seem like a fanciful thing to do, especially now you've dug back into your past and realized so much about Ukraine and about your connection to Ukraine and some of the darkness in that country too? I think in some sense depends what you do with it.

At some point, I've worked with farmers in places like Indonesia or Malaysia trying to revive crops that are maybe not economically interesting, but quite important. And there are actually quite many interesting projects that also involve scents that don't have to be about a bottle of perfume, something that's sold for quite a lot of money. But the idea of scents to me is quite important. I mean, it's something that brings back the past. That brings back the past. It's something, actually something I thought about when I found my great-grandmother's handbag that she kept throughout the war. were a bottle of perfume, a small, tiny piece of lipstick, and a number of letters written to her by her children or her relatives, her husband.

And those are the things she kept throughout the war. And I remember I was asking her, did you wear this lipstick or perfume? She said, no, no, I would never wear them, but I would take a bottle, open it and sniff it. And just it made me think like life was normal again. So the surname you use is one of your great grandmother's birth names. It's Asya. It's her last name and it's the last name she picked for herself.

And it's one of your Ukrainian maternal great grandmothers. Yes. And you and Vladimir are back in touch. Yes, yes, we are. And I've accepted that his political beliefs will always differ from mine. We now both realize that. We now skirt political issues and we do not talk about it. And he's still in Israel?

Yes, he's still in Israel. Well, I mean, that's every family for you, isn't it? You learn the bits of furniture to walk around. Yes. Victoria Bellum and her book is called The Rooster House, a Ukrainian family memoir. I would really recommend that. I came to it with so much ignorance about the history of Ukraine. And she manages to pack all of that in with an explanation of where the country is now. And it's just a really interesting story about family secrets as well. What you put in the drawer, you shut it and you think you can keep it shut and you can't.

We are, as British people, quite, well well we're very lucky aren't we we really are because actually i mean my parents for example have a memory of the second world war but they were very young but we said but as a net we've never been invaded in living memory not for hundreds of years we just don't have that that visceral awareness of tragedy on the sort of scale that uk people, and not just Ukrainian people, have. I just think it's a very different experience. We are such... There's a really... Who was the

observation that the last British Prime Minister who... Was it on our programme this week? The last British Prime Minister who'd known conflict or fought in a conflict was James Callaghan. Right, so and he was Prime Minister in the 1970s. Yeah he stopped Margaret Thatcher so 1979 he stopped being Prime Minister. Since then no Prime Minister has fought

in a war or had any any understanding of what that might actually be like and I do think that's quite a significant change isn't it? Yes hugely And also Ukraine has had some things enforced on it, like the deliberate famine imposed by Stalin on the country that just beg a belief. That state intervention outside of your own state, which they're still living with, obviously now. Now, the only reason I pricked up my ears there with Stalin because I'm listening to Robert Harris's book Archangel

as my audio book for my commute. You know, the one that takes me ages to do whereas you get home within 20 minutes. So I'm listening to Robert Harris. Archangel is about Stalin's diaries. And I've learnt such a lot about Russian Soviet history from that which I really did not know. Anyway, for some reason it did make me laugh

that Victoria Bellum, who was a lovely person but she was on her way to the Hay Festival. Do you remember that? I do remember that. But also it's just the contrast between everything in that family story and now she's going to be sitting around in the leisure lounge at the Hay Literary Festival. It's a very different world out there, isn't it? Well, it is, yeah.

I mean, there are an awful lot of people who are just waiting to finish their bircher muesli before heading off to the next session Yes, you are so right and I was telling Jane Malkerians earlier in the week that that was the time we were driven by the lady who'd lost part of her finger

in a jousting accident and do you remember the guy who said he'd been in the army, but he didn't really mean the army, he meant... SAS. SAS. Yeah, but he drove so fast, that was terrifying, wasn't it? He drove very fast. He said, at one point he talked to us about,

it did make me laugh, the importance of comms. Comms, yes, I remember comms. Listen, Derek. He did it while speaking into his cuff. Security detail, security detail, coming in, Garvey and Glover coming in. There's nothing we don't know about Coms. We're in the Coms business ourselves. And one day we'll retell again the story of our coach journey home.

No, I thought that was really, you were in a very dark place. Right, OK. The issue for Fiona on that day was we criss-crossed the English-Welsh border about six times on a rail replacement bus. And it did feel at one point as though London would be a destination you would never see again.

Anyway, enough of our troubles. You've probably got your own. I hope the weekend's all right. We'll be back on Monday. It's Jane and Fee at Times.Radio. And honestly, we do love hearing from you so keep the emails coming yes oh you've gone a little bit emotional you know i don't give a toss Well done for getting to the end of another episode of Off Air with Jane Garvey and Fee Glover. Our Times Radio producer is Rosie Cutler

and the podcast executive producer is Henry Tribe. And don't forget, there is even more of us every afternoon on Times Radio. It's Monday to Thursday, three till five. You can pop us on when you're pottering around the house or heading out in the car on the school run

or running a bank. Thank you for joining us and we hope you can join us again on Off Air very soon. Don't be so silly. Running a bank? I know, ladies. A lady listener.

I'm sorry.