Off Air... with Jane and Fi - I'm plucking at chest hairs here (with Adele Roberts)

Episode Date: April 10, 2024

"Surprise surprise!" sings Fi in her best Cilla Black voice. Today, Jane and Fi ponder on Tom Dudley's buboes and the dangers of shoddy handwriting. And Fi chats to broadcaster Adele Roberts about her new memoir, 'Personal Best'. Our next book club pick has been announced - A Dutiful Boy by Mohsin Zaidi. If you want to contact the show to ask a question and get involved in the conversation then please email us: [e-mail] Follow us on Instagram! @janeandfi Assistant Producer: Hannah Quinn Times Radio Producer: Rosie Cutler Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

But I will ask if my dad's had any other kids, if you wouldn't mind. Obviously, his time in national service was lively, at least according to him. So who knows? We have got lots of really, really lovely pictures. And Jane likes nothing more than the challenge on the radio of describing photographs. Paint the scene, paint the scene. Oh, I know, I'm no good at this.

That's why you asked me to do it. This is the trug, isn't it? It is, yep. So the picture of the trug comes from Nicola and she sent us a picture of this because she usually listens to us whilst gardening or on a dog walk and she's often to be found gardening or on a dog walk and she's often to be found using her grandma's trunk that's the thing that she's inherited uh it looks lovely

actually and the scene is just beautiful so off you go well it's a bucolic iddle it is that does that work yes did i say it right i just doubted myself when i said it yeah be colic it'll uh it's a it looks like a lovely lawn i'm guessing uh the lawn and i hope i'm not offending you nicola um belonging to a quite substantial home i'm i'm getting home counties vibes and home counties is not a phrase i enjoy but i do think it might be somewhere in the home counties you've got lovely grass uh you've got an exquisite wheelbarrow that appears to have some kind of netting in it and the trug contains is that twine i think it's a not insubstantial amount of twine and a hefty pair of gardening gloves some gardening gloves and i think some shears and you're some wire. So I think that there might be some...

What do you call it when you spread out the branches of a tree against a fence? What is that term? Oh, that's not topiary, is it? Pleaching. I think some pleaching might have gone on. I've never heard of that. What I did do over the weekend was what you might loosely call

some gardening. And I just, it was so satisfying. I just tidied up the garden, filled some gardening sacks with rubbish. Do you ever do that? Just trim everything? I do, yeah. Weed and trim. Well, do you know what?

I'm not going to pretend, actually, because I know that some of the very lovely people who live in our neighbourhood are well aware of the fact that I employ two lady gardeners. Oh, I come and do the garden every couple of months. And they're called two birds. Are they? That's brilliant. And are they good? Oh, they're fantastic, Sarah and Andrea. And so they, yeah, they trim everything and cut everything. I think because my sister's a proper gardener,

like proper, proper gardener, and she makes really beautiful gardens and knows all about planting and that kind of stuff. So I don't know whether you have this with your sister, but because she's so good at gardening, I can't do it. You know, it's like that weird kind of, you know, when you put two magnets against each other and they repel. I just can't do gardening.

So you deliberately can't do gardening. Yes, because it's my sister's thing. No, no, I get that. I do get that. I think, yeah, the sister, sibling, I do think, I obviously don't have a brother, and so I have no idea. What did you know of?

That's a very, very good point. I'm going to Liverpool on Friday. Surprise, surprise! Surprise, surprise! When Cilla Black said that, nobody recognised that as a Liverpool accent. Did they not? No. Cilla had lived in Buckinghamshire for quite some time.

And when she said, surprise, surprise, it wasn't really something that resonated with the people of Merseyside. But I will ask if my dad's had any other kids. If he wouldn't mind. Obviously, his time in national service was lively, at least according to him. So who knows? Oh, my word.

Did he travel abroad? No, he went to Nottinghamshire. Okay. For a moment, though, I thought maybe continental Europe might prove to be a fertile ground for some siblings. I don't think he'd been abroad until long after he got married. My mother was the adventurous one. How far had she got?

In fairness, I think she'd been to Austria. Wow. Listen, the Garvey's intrepid is not an adjective you'd attach to them, in fairness. But you do have, you've got family all across the globe now. I've got cousins hither and thither, yeah. Yeah, okay, that's good. But would you agree that on the whole, when one sibling does something very well, the other one just can't get involved at all.

I think it's a healthier way to be than brothers and sisters who all do the same thing. I agree. And you do get families where everyone is a lawyer. Or actors. Or actors. That's even odder, isn't it? I think that's very odd because there's so much...

That's a very febrile measure of success and failure in acting, isn't it? You know, if you get your big break or who's got a bigger film or who's had more lead parts, it seems to be a much more open kind of competition. So I'm always amazed that there are kind of dynasties of actors.

You always think, gosh, who's kind of bending to the younger generation in that family and maybe people aren't well there must be families where everyone's an actor except for the person who's sensibly become a dental hygienist and is happier and is much happier much happier yeah and doing much more important stuff yeah uh this one comes from lisa who says in today's episode you wondered if the wildlife goes crazy with the eclipse, now I love this we were fortunately in the path of totality on our farm here

in North West Vermont picture the scene, we enjoyed the eclipse together with our donkeys in the back of the barn, we enjoyed bird song and woodpeckers pecking away as we drank our sparkling wine and ate our little picnic and fought off the donkeys who were keen to try what we had.

I chided my husband for bringing bug spray with us and as the totality neared and it started to be dusk the bugs came out and we needed the spray. At the same time the peepers, little frogs that make a huge amount of noise started their dusk chorus. During the three minutes of total eclipse, the frogs and all the birds fell silent. The donkeys continued to graze.

I was just doing a period of really impressive silence there. The donkeys continued to graze, unperturbed. The birds started up again, so we conclude that everyone thought briefly it was nightfall and then realised it was a false alarm and went back to their regular lives. Lisa ends by telling us that one of my donkeys ate our paper napkins, but otherwise nobody acted strangely.

I'm charmed that y'all were interested in our celestial event. I listen to y'all every day. I'm just having to say it like that, Lisa, because I think if I tried to go at it as normal, it would just sound odd. But I love the yawl. I'm charmed that you... Can you say it better? I can't. I just think I'd sound such a fool. Okay. Anyway, it's kind of you to bother to elucidate us. Which part of Vermont was that from? That was from northwest Vermont. Well, I'd love to know more just about... Because I'm drawn to the idea of Vermont. Is it mountainous? It's quite rural, isn't it?

Very. And it's quite a sophisticated part of America, am I right? I don't know. I'm plucking at chest hairs there. What comes out of Vermont that you and I would have recognised? This is why we need more information from our correspondent. you and I would have recognised. This is why we need more information from our correspondent. I think it's sometimes where Jack Reacher ends up in a Lee Child's book.

Or it holed up in a motel. Yeah, the plotline is taken into a small town laid out on a simple grid system somewhere in northwest Vermont. I did love that one Lee Child book I read, The Secret, because he was on the programme, wasn't he? He was. Others are available. Oh, about 17,000 others are available. And I hope people enjoyed Anthony Horowitz yesterday.

I went back and listened to that, weirdly. I don't often do that, but sometimes I like to listen to myself. Just one of those weird things. And he could talk, couldn't he? Good grief. He was one of those men, he was basically like Casey Jones steaming and a-rolling, intellectually and semantically. The man just didn't stop.

He didn't, no. I rather felt that he, in the moment, felt better for having displayed all of his political angst out on the table and then immediately regretted it. But that's the joy of live radio. It is. It all comes out. But I felt it was stuff that he needed to say, actually.

And if you haven't heard the interview, his son now works at Downing Street and is the communications kind of honcho, head honcho for Rishi Sunak. So there is a bit of divided loyalty there, isn't there? Because Anthony Horowitz is pissed off with the current Conservative government, but also pissed off with the cynicism

being aimed at the current Conservative government. He's also very proud of his son, as you would be. I think it's interesting when, you know, I've certainly, for good reasons, had lectures from my offspring about my political views and how I'm just simply wrong about various things. It is quite a moment in your life when your children just take you on and just say, no, no, you've just got that wrong. Well, Mulkerran's The Locum Jane and I were talking about exactly that on the last couple of episodes of the podcast. talking about exactly that on the last couple of episodes of the podcast.

And it started out as a conversation about friendships that span the political divide, which I think we both felt we were less likely to have friendships across the political divide now than perhaps in previous generations. But then we did reference exactly that, that when your children or other people's children turn out to hold really staunch different political beliefs the kind of problems that that might cause in the family well that is the subject of a new novel by john o'farrell it is isn't it we haven't had him on no but he's

booked he is booked he's coming on yeah because um his son turns i think it's his son turns up at home and says mom and dad i've got something to tell you I think it's his son, turns up at home and says, Mum and Dad, I've got something to tell you. They think it's one thing, but it turns out to be that he's a Conservative. Which in John O'Farrell's case, because he was a staunch Labour supporter way back in the days of Tony Blair. By the way, we take all political comers here.

Well, not everybody, but almost all. So if you're thinking of voting, well, just vote, actually, that's the most important thing, isn't it, Fi? Yes, it is. We're talking about PR on the radio show today, which is interesting, because I was only thinking earlier, I've never lived in a constituency with jeopardy. No, me neither. And so I do think it makes a difference. I would love to be in one of the constituencies

that will change hands and will cause a flurry of excitement whenever the election comes round, but I never, ever have. So this is proportional representation, in case you're outside of the UK. We're talking about public relations. Yeah, and actually maybe,

because so many other countries have proportional representation, you've got no need to really know what the term means anymore. But it's just never going to happen in this country is it because uh whichever party it is that gets in has got him because pr doesn't exist yeah so unless the liberal democrats got in uh they you know they're the ones who always lose out and they won't get in because they won't have it we don't have it so. So that's just the pickle, isn't it? That is the pickle.

Yeah. I want to say hello to Debbie because she was the person who sent us the delicious chocolate. Chocolate. I was so excited I couldn't say it. From France. We just couldn't read your writing. It is terrible, Debbie.

I mean, your writing is absolutely terrible, but she knows it. My handwriting lets me down all the time. It's not the first time i've been identified as robbie she says one colleague used to call me rob all the time i also had another embarrassing moment when i sent a gift of champagne with an accompanying note to a client whose husband wanted to know who rob was i'd signed it as deb or so i thought that could thicken a plot, couldn't it? I tell you what, that just shows the dangers of shoddy handwriting. But we don't care, and the chocolate was just lovely and much appreciated. So thank you very much, Deb or Debbie. Jan contacts us to say,

My family member, Tom Dudley, was the first person to die of bubonic plague in Sydney in 1900. Yeah, that was my favourite email of the day really well it doesn't end there and that was much worse so just ponder on that ponder on tom dudley's buboes for a second and then here comes the second bit that was after having survived a prosecution for cannibalism in the uk now you cannot leave it joe at I'm sorry, because we just need to know more. We would like to see some, I was going to say pictures. There might be photographs. I don't want to see those pictures, Fee.

What you do in your own time is up to you. And we would just definitely like more of the story of Tom Dudley. That suggests that the bubonic plague didn't get to Australia until 1900. Would that be right? I don't know. I mean, yes, obviously it wasn't in Australia. Yes, it does suggest that, doesn't it?

So I was just trying to think maybe they could have had the bubonic plague back in the 14th century and it had come back round again but no the first person to die in sydney in 1900 now you could interpret that a different way he could because he could be the first person to die of bubonic plague in sydney in 1900 so just in that year oh i see yes got you or just in sy Sydney. So we definitely need more, please. We definitely do, Jan. And we'd also love other stories of people who've got absolutely disgusting long-deceased relatives.

Because that does sound a good story. Who then went off to Australia. I mean, that's the inference, isn't it? Having survived prosecution for cannibalism in the UK. So he was prosecuted and then um sent out as a as a when australia was viewed as a penal colony yeah um i i'm sorry but that just begs more questions it does so please fill us in uh jane and fee at times dot radio is the place wouldn't it be great if all of those programs very very serious programs jane and fee at times dot radio is the place wouldn't it be great if all of those programs very very serious programs jane that you and i have presented on radio 4 if they had the same

kind of stumbling bumbling confusion of fact aired on a daily basis i obviously didn't hear many of my editions of woman's hour because i can assure you someone just goes, I'm really not sure. What does that mean? I don't really know. Does anyone know? And then the sound of paper shuffling. That is really awful. Anyway, Tamzin is in Thailand

and you are very lucky, Tamzin. She's got an idea for merchandise for Off Air. Reading glasses that are tinted for reading the latest book club book when outside on a sunny day in the usual strengths you can buy at the shops, i.e. plus one, plus 1.5, plus two, etc.

Put your logo along the frame at the side. It's a good idea. It's not a bad idea at all, is it? But of course, I did have those glasses that changed. My Specsavers glasses that changed when the sun came out and i was so mocked not least by fiona here uh she said i look like mike reed from east enders back in the day um it did but they were so useful anyway i keep them i've got them they're still at home and i am i haven't been deterred i will wear them again The funniest time, Jane, was when we were doing the outside broadcast

for the coronation of the King and it was a very, very dreary day It was terrible It wasn't really sunshiny at all and obviously we had to have lots of publicity pictures taken of us in situ just about to do exciting reporting on the monarch and it was me in my normal glasses

and my Mac because it was absolutely teeming down with raining honestly you look like you're an escaped convict just i know i know we're flying in incognito i do need to work on my um special glasses i think anyway i'm not wearing them today no uh livia loves the show we love you livia i listen with such delight to the anonymous listener who wrote in about the butts of living in Sweden. I was even banging the desk in agreement. Married to a Swede for over 20 years, now divorced,

I got utterly fed up with the Swedes' unrelenting, unapologetic smugness about their country and their way of doing things. That's terrible. A few years in, my ex wanted us to move to Sweden and I said no thank you as i knew i'd feel smothered pretty fast individual swedes are very friendly and welcoming but i agree with your correspondent and the way that she put it was spot on my ex even wanted to take one of our children

sweden with him after the divorce to give him a better life not the other child though go figure anyway when i hear an advert with an exaggerated swedish accent it makes my blood curdle on another topic i was in the city last week and i wondered why there were so many robert dyesses around i thought maybe a junior would be sent out for a desk fan or new kettle but as you say it seems odd to order a garden bench or bird feeder in your lunch hour and that's my point livia i just you know it was that was a good point well made it's the massive full-size barbecue for sale in the Robert Dyess on Fleet Street

that quite often I go past on the bus. I just think, oh, it's going to be a bit difficult to get that home. What Sweden has brought to us, though, not just Abbott, is IKEA, Ikea, I call it. And that is a shop that, for me, I've just got to be honest, I have a special love affair with. I just love it. And my most recent purchase was a dish that I'm using for my lemons.

And it just, it cost, I think it was £4.50 or something. It brings me such pleasure. It sounds laughable. And it's the most middle-aged, ludicrous thing to say. No, I don't think it's ludicrous at all. I think it's a good shop. Yes, I think it's a good shop. Yes, I think it's a brilliant shop. And it has really nudged our old-fashioned love affair with dark furniture and gloomy curtains.

Do you remember the Chuck Out the Chintz advert they had? I do, yeah. Which was just brilliant because it was absolutely, get rid of the tassels, the pom-poms, the frills, the very strange kind of shag pile carpet things in the bathroom and just do it our way and it's transformed our way of decorating our houses those 1970s little things that used to cling to the toilet bowl yeah i mean is that so strange if they could talk what would they say well they would say bubonic plague. Wash me. Yeah, we see you and we do one better.

Just a bit of a comment though, Livia, about that marriage across, it's not continents, is it, but across nationalities. Cultures. I think I'd love to hear other people's experiences of that because I think it's something that at the beginning may be completely um exciting and bedazzling and wonderful and through no kind of fault of you or the marriage or the person or anything else there just seem to be so many people who much further down the line really really

struggle with the feeling that they're not home you know when and it is the elephants returning to the valley thing isn't it and I know that I have a friend who is constantly surprised that their children are of a different nationality to them it's never just become a given or an accepted thing. So I would love to hear more thoughts about that. Yeah, thinking along the same lines, I'm always genuinely impressed by people who move countries. I just think people take it so lightly. And the idea that you can travel across the world and establish a life or a relationship

with someone from a completely different place with a whole different backstory and different sets of experiences and you just make a new life for yourself thousands of miles from home. completely different place with a whole different backstory and different sets of experiences and you just make a new life for yourself thousands of miles from home um whether you're coming to this country or whether you're from this country and you go somewhere else i am in awe of it because i just think it takes such strength and i think we we underplay it such a lot and i'm not surprised that as people age um their longing for home kind of re-establishes itself but i think it's something that you don't

you don't talk about very much because also there are so many other reasons why people's relationships change or may have broken down or you know whatever it is the simple fact that you don't feel that your home enough uh maybe doesn't get quite such a big play so any stories on that or you know if you'd like to completely disagree and your story is a very happy one and you've just been really glad to leave this small, myopic, often rain-filled nation behind and you've never looked back, we'd certainly be interested in those stories too.

I know the email referred to Swedes being smug. I don't think people in Britain are smug about Britain on the whole. Or have I just not met enough smug British people? Because I think we laugh at Britain. We do it affectionately and we send it up. But I don't think we celebrate it as though it is truly a wonderful, fabulous place without blemish. I think we laugh at it with affection.

Smug is just the other side of the pompous coin, in which case I think that does fit the bill? I mean, if you think of the classic kind of narcissistic Brit who travelled abroad during the Empire, who pitched up in different countries. That's a whole different story. Saying, our way of doing things. I think you mean spreading civilisation fee.

That's what we did. Civilisation and democracy and administration. I think that's a bit of smug, isn't it? I don't know. I've never felt smugger than this morning. I bought a jar of capers before nine o'clock. Did you? Yeah, I did.

You make me feel a bit queer. Well, I'm just re-establishing my middle class credentials i was there i took the capers home and then i thought god you're such a brat before nine o'clock and a jar of capers in the cupboard i'm not going to judge you because uh there was uh we've got double exams in our house at the moment and there's a lot of stress and work going down and i did find myself making breakfast in bed for one of our exam-ridden inhabitants, which was cheese on toast with kimchi and an oak flat white. OK.

You're worse than me. But can I just say to anybody planning a family, do think about the age gap, because you want to avoid what Fee's going through, which is the A-levels and GCSEs in the same summer. No, I'm... Do you think it's easier? Yes, I'm actually quite grateful for it because we're all on the same rat wheel.

We're just going, you know, we're all going round and round at the same time. I suppose you'd only have it to cut, yeah. So you had a three-year gap. Gap, yeah. So you had one clear summer. Yeah. Okay.

It helped me. I'm So you had one clear summer. Yeah. Okay. It helped me. I'm just thinking of myself as usual. But maybe you're better off just swallowing the medicine. Yeah, but it's like everything, isn't it? I will never know any difference. You won't, love. Nope. Well, I mean, I hope I don't.

No. I don't think I'm still ovulating, Jane. No, no, not that again. God. Who's our guest? Adele Roberts is our guest. She is an award-winning BBC broadcaster, TV personality and DJ.

You might know her from lots of the different shows that she did on Radio 1 Extra. She has got a fantastic anecdote about one particular listener to her show, her early morning breakfast show on Radio 1 Extra towards the end of this interview. Jane and I have met her before and really enjoyed her company. She's a real sparkling

kind of person, isn't she? She's very upbeat, very positive. Well, she went to the same school as me. Well, so she's bound to be. Absolutely bound. What a pedigree. Indeed. She is and I think, I'm so glad that she is talking as loudly and as proudly as she is about what's happened to her.

Because I really do think it's going to make a difference. I agree. So what's happened to her is just really quite shocking. She got bowel cancer diagnosed at stage two, but very close to stage three. And she was so young. So young. And she will tell her story, obviously better than Jane and I could ever do.

But the important thing for you to know is that the book that she has written, which is called Personal Best, from rock bottom to the top of the world, is about a very, very quick journey from having serious surgery for cancer, being told that she would have a stoma possibly for the rest of her life,

and then to go on to decide to run the London Marathon and to complete the London Marathon. This is all within the space of about three years. So that's what the book is about. We went right back to the beginning of her cancer story, though, for this interview, and she started by telling me what her initial symptoms have been. Yeah, thank you for asking that,

because I think I didn't know for a long time there was something wrong. There was something wrong with me in plain sight as well for a lot of the years before my diagnosis, and I just didn't realise. The thing with bowel cancer is it's quite a sneaky form of cancer, and a lot of the symptoms you can explain them away so I started to lose weight but I was running a lot and I felt like I was in the shape of my life so I just thought it was a symptom of getting fitter

um I had a bit of a swollen tummy when I'd eat but I thought that was just me being a bad cook and then the the thing that made me ring the doctors was I started to notice first of all mucus when I go to the toilet and then I started to notice spots of blood and then the thing that made me ring the doctors was I started to notice, first of all, mucus when I go to the toilet. And then I started to notice spots of blood. And then the spots of blood didn't go away. And at first, I didn't want to be a burden to the GP. And I thought, don't ring up because COVID was happening. And I just didn't want to bother them.

I knew they had a lot going on. And then it became so regular that I thought, stop being silly, ring up and speak to somebody. And that was the main thing. And presumably you also think I'm a young woman and I am fit and I am still functioning. So your brain wants to tell you that everything's OK. That's a very natural thing, isn't it? Absolutely. And I think that I was very naive as well. And it seemed to me that cancer was something that would happen to other people.

You don't realise it can happen to you, especially like you say, when you feel like you're fit and maybe you're younger than people definitely that get affected by bowel cancer. And even my GP said when she examined me, I don't think it's cancer, but I'm going to give you the test just in case. And it's such a simple test, isn't it? If somebody tells you to do the test or you're sent the test don't be put off by the test you you just you need to have a poo take a little bit of it it could save your life couldn't it?

Absolutely and you can do it in the privacy of your own home as well and if you think about it we all go to the toilet every single day so it's always a chance to just spot those symptoms and like you say don't fear the symptoms fear not telling somebody unfortunately bowel cancer is the second biggest cancer killer in the UK and that's because people don't get diagnosed early enough because they worry about the symptoms or they feel embarrassed so when you were diagnosed I was really interested in your reaction Adele because you're in the room I think you had two nurses there with you and Mr Barn who was your consultant your first reaction was to say to him is it my fault yeah it was I was I was so shocked when I first heard the words you've got cancer because I wasn't expecting him to say that my My first question was, am I going to die? And then the second one, is it my fault?

I just felt this overwhelming shame. I thought it must be something I've done to myself. I don't know why I thought that, but again, I think that's maybe why deep down I didn't ring anybody because I thought I'd been doing something wrong. What would that wrong be? Yeah, it's a really good question I think just not looking after myself I think I mentioned in the book about going through grief and it took me a long time to

get out of that grief and part of the process of grieving was not doing self-care not caring about myself I think I was punishing myself and so I thought that I'd been abusing my body or I'd not been eating the right things or I'd been foolish and I'd not been looking out for the symptoms so you got your treatment very quickly and you know what we we should just take a moment say all hail the NHS I'm sure that you want to do that yeah definitely they were fabulous uh the moment that they knew it was cancer and that it was stage two, very nearly stage three, but stage two, they were like, right, let's get you into hospital and let's sort it out. How much did you know about what would then happen to your body? Not much, to be honest. I tried to have no spoilers because I was going through so much. Once I'd been told I had cancer, I just thought, right, compartmentalise and just get through each day. So I tried not to worry myself and scare myself. I just thought, you're in this now, what's going to happen is going to happen. The NHS are going to help you as much as they can. So just deal day by day.

So I just wanted the operation as soon as possible to take the tumour out. And I thought, if I need chemo after that, I'll deal with it. If I get told I need chemo, and if I need a stoma to help me recover from the surgery that I'll deal with it if I get told I need chemo and if I need a stoma to help me recover from the surgery I'll deal with that if I get one. So I'm assuming that an awful lot of people listening to this would have that level of non-knowledge I don't want to call it ignorance at all about a stoma and so much of the book is just unbelievably helpful and detailed about what a stoma is and what living with a stoma is like so where should we start with a stoma i think your description of what it actually is is so important because some of your body your internal organs that we never really want to see they are on the outside aren't they yeah and i didn't know that was possible i was like how can someone be alive if a section of their intestine has come through their stomach wall and is now on the outside of

their body and again all hail the nhs and medicine like it's a medical marvel and it's something that once it heals it's just basically you go out you go to the toilet out the front rather than the back that's it really okay tell us about tell us a bit more about the the stoma though because it must be a very weird sensation, you know, waking up, coming around from such an enormous operation. And you know that you've got this thing that you have to learn how to take care of it. You have to learn that it's with you all the time. It is something outside your body. You chose to give it a name. Mine's called Audrey. When I first told the stoma nurses I was going to call her Audrey,

they thought it was after Audrey Hepburn, but Audrey wishes. It's actually after the very naughty monster plant out of Little Shop of Horrors. I don't know if you've seen that film or that musical, but that's kind of what Audrey looks like, like a Venus flytrap. She's very cheeky and very naughty. How do you learn to live with a stoma? Yeah, do you know, I understand when people find it difficult if they get one you do go through a grieving process you

you grieve for the body that you had before definitely but I think my grief was quite quick in in those terms because again I wasn't really I didn't have much self-confidence I didn't really like my body and it wasn't until I went through the surgery for the cancer that I realised how incredible the body is. And this has been keeping me alive. It's been fighting cancer and it's been keeping me alive. And I got a massive sense of appreciation for myself. Can you tell us a bit more about that?

Because that's quite extraordinary. Yeah, when I woke up, my first thought was, thank God I'm alive. And then secondly, it was to ring my girlfriend, Kate, and just check in with my family and just tell them all I'd made it because I don't take anything for granted. So I knew that I might not wake up. And then I remembered that they told me that I might have a stoma. So I pulled back the covers and had a little look down.

And I was like, oh, I've got a stoma. There's a little bag. I was like, wow. But at the time, because I just had surgery I was really sore and I couldn't even sit up to look at it properly so I just like took some sly pictures with my phone so I had to wait until the day after to be fit enough to go over to the toilet and have a really good look in the mirror and um yeah for some reason it just looked beautiful to me and I think it was just because I don't know whether it's the medication from the from the operation but I just saw myself and I thought this is the girl that's going to come back from what she's been through. Was there a little bit

of you that also just wanted to embrace the challenge of it because there's so much that comes through in the book about how you just as a person are somebody who likes to rise to a challenge yeah I've learned that from my mum and dad they've both had very tough lives um they've not had it easy and I think I've seen them time and time again get back up every time they've been knocked over and and that's the way I choose to deal with things and so you're right in in some way I understand that difficult times can be very painful but I understand that pain is where the growth happens and I just wanted to let people who read this book know that that when you're hurting that's when you're winning but there's a huge gap Adele between

wanting to rise to the challenge and deciding that you want to run the London Marathon with a stoma so soon actually after your operation. Why did you want to do that? That is a great question and the main reason was rejection I think. I tried as much as I could not to let the cancer win. I know that there's a lot out of my control when it comes to cancer. Cancer could come back at any time. I know that I'm lucky every day that I'm cancer-free. But I just wanted to stick it to cancer.

When I first found out, I was shocked. Then I was really upset. And then I got angry. I was like, no, you're not going to ruin my life. So I always had this thing in my head that I would try and at least do a little walk every single day to be my little rebellion to cancer. And so that walk turned into a little bit of a jog and then it eventually turned into the marathon.

But I think the main knockback that I got that you'll read about in the book is getting rejected from a TV programme and the rejection came from having a medical and the medical team said I wasn't fit enough to do it and I felt like cancer had won in that moment because I really wanted to be able to take part in the show to hopefully help other people with stomas

to show what's possible. That hope was taken away from me and I think that really hurt me. Yeah, there is so much stigma around stoma, you know that so much more than than many other people but do you sense that that is changing and do you acknowledge how much somebody like you is a part of that change thank you for your hope so um from recently taking part in dancing on ice the thing that kept me going every week was the, sorry, the messages

and the letters that I get from people of all different ages, from kids to older people just saying thank you, thank you for showing people that there's nothing wrong with us and we can do things too. Yeah, absolutely, because I think when you first get a stoma and this happened to me, people don't mean to do it but they almost tell you what you can't do and I just didn't want that to be my experience I wanted to know what was possible because the stoma gave me my life back. I don't want to give away too many of the stories in the book Adele because uh you know well we shouldn't do that this is the game that we're playing isn't it but one of the ones that I wouldn't mind you just alluding to because I think it is so helpful is the story of Scott Mills, Audrey and a bag of sugar. Could you tell us that?

Oh you set that up really well. Scott Mills and the bag of sugar. so yeah this is um you'll find if you are ever the owner of a stoma that gut reaction is real and if you get really excited or really nervous or you feel things deeply your stoma reacts uh well mine does anyway and i was very anxious about scott mills leaving radio one that also coincided with me getting to do my first ever show on Radio 2. It was the same day. I needed, I wanted to be at the party to say farewell to Scott Mills, who'd spent 28 glorious years at Radio 1. He's someone that I really look up to and I love deeply. I was also super excited at the thought of being on Radio 2. And that combination made my stoma go wild. And I don't know how much more I can say, but basically, I nearly had to go to hospital if it wasn't for a bag of sugar.

So the bag of sugar is just a kind of trick that you can use to soak up when things go really badly. Yeah, really badly. Yeah. And your stoma can turn into a monster. We don't know what kind of cancer it is that the Princess of Wales, Catherine, is suffering from. And neither do we want to speculate about it at all. But as a young woman who has been dealt a massive blow and has had to tell everybody about her treatment, I wonder what your thoughts about her have been yeah I've been thinking about Catherine and William um both of them have been incredible to me um they were kind enough to write to me when I first got ill were they yeah yeah um

I know this sounds like a complete lie but i promise you it's true when um prince william used to work on the air ambulance he used to listen to radio one and the show that i used to present the early breakfast show and apparently well he told me he used to text in all the time but with a different name i think we thought he was wayne the trucker but i'm not sure if that was actually him but uh yeah he used to text all the time so he used to listen to my show so when i got ill he was kind enough to get in touch just to say um good luck and then he wrote again once I was cancer free to say that him and Catherine were really happy that I was feeling better and they just also know the importance of speaking about what you're going through if you can

and the fact that Catherine has been so to me courageous to share what she's been through. And like you say, respect her privacy and don't speculate, but to see somebody like Catherine lets people know it can affect anyone at any time. And so I think that she will be helping so many people around the UK not feel alone. Can you tell us a little bit about your hopes for the future and your plans for the future and what you would like to happen yeah I just want to be able to get to five years cancer-free that is my main goal now um I'm two years cancer-free if I can make it to five that will be my biggest achievement that's all I'm focusing on and in the meantime I think spend more time with my family and just try and enjoy my life I feel like I've

got a second chance at life and I don't want to waste it. Well, it's really lovely to see you, Adele. Thank you very much indeed. And I think the book's remarkable in its honesty and in its detail, actually. It answers so many of the questions that I think people are too afraid to ask of somebody

who's been through what you've been through. So, you know, all hail to you for doing it. Adele Roberts talking about her journey through surgery for bowel cancer and treatment for it and talking about Audrey her stoma. I really agree with what you said before the interview Jane that I think Adele might not realise yet quite how impactful her story has been and is going to be because being very visible about having a stoma so the front cover of the book is her in running training gear where you can clearly see Audrey poking out from the top of her running shorts it's one of those bodily taboos that really hasn't been tackled i don't think by anybody as publicly before and certainly for the younger generation which adele is yeah it used to be one of the things that people really

did whisper about um you know gynecological things were not much discussed but if anything this was in a category i mean all on its own and if you did know somebody who had a bag, you would refer... Do you remember all the rumours about the late Queen Mother? Yeah. Well, actually, about so many people. Yeah, other celebrities. And in fact, I don't think it was true in the case of the Queen Mother. But anyway, it was laughed at.

That was ignorant and it was shameful, actually, in retrospect. And I am incredibly impressed that a young woman like Adele is out there with it and just saying, you know, this has happened to me. And actually, if you look at the figures, it's increasingly common in younger people. Yeah, it might happen to you. And it might well happen to you. So learn about it and appreciate that you can live a good life

and a brave and i mean running a marathon please i mean i cannot imagine anything worse or harder some of my friends have done it and you know i i don't know i couldn't even walk the course jane i'm not sure i could i really i'm not sure i could i don't think I could so all hail to Adele and if you want to buy her new book it's called Personal Best from rock bottom to the top of the world yeah huge respect uh and admiration for Adele and we wish her the very best not just for the book but with everything that she does in the future I would love to hear from you particularly if you have gone and done it, married someone who's not British.

No, I cannot think why. Anyway, I bloody can. Anyway, janeandfee at times.radio. If you've made a life with someone who's probably not familiar with jam roly-poly or spotted dick, just can't imagine what that might be like, let us know.

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