Off Air... with Jane and Fi - Imagine Uncle Dave is a bit drunk

Episode Date: December 22, 2022

It's the final day of Jane's solo career in the studio with The Times science editor Tom Whipple filling in the guest presenter's chair.Also, journalist and author Rachel Clarke joins them in the studio to talk through her book about working in the NHS palliative care team - and discusses what she believes needs to be done in order for the current NHS strikes to come to an end. If you want to contact the show to ask a question and get involved in the conversation then please email us: [e-mail] Radio Producer: Rosie CutlerPodcast Executive Producer: Ben Mitchell Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello and welcome to Off Air, the final time it's just Jane and Fi very much back with us from January 2nd which weirdly is a bank holiday I've just discovered. I think I thought it was like the first normal day back at work and everyone would be back with their noses to the grindstone. But in fact, it's only idiotic broadcasters who forgot to check whether or not it was a bank holiday.

And it is a bank holiday, but nevertheless, we'll be putting the effort in for you all on January 2nd. There's a part of me that thinks that by then I'll probably have had enough of celebrating and being around much loved, she said quickly, family members because I'm facing quite a lot of family, which is lovely and genuinely is lovely and of course there's also, I remember doing an interview in another place five or six years ago with a psychologist about

the dynamics of Christmas. And we were talking about people who are annoying in your family at Christmas. And she was offering a series of ways of dealing with the annoying member of the family. And everyone has one. And then she actually said something that I've never forgotten and said, of course, what everyone should remember is that they could be the annoying person. And I thought what and she said yes we've all got to bear in mind that we too have an impact on every single other individual in the room I thought I was absolutely fine a hundred percent of the time

and everybody else was slightly irritating it's really quite really really disturbing to discover that after three slurps of white wine I'm still I'm not making a great deal of sense this is why alcohol and broadcasting of any sort including podcasting really shouldn't mix but in the spirit of the festive season I have been allowed a drink in a plastic cup so my co-presenter on the live times radio show this afternoon was Tom Whipple who is the science editor of the Times. And he went into quite a lot of detail about the fact he doesn't do a lot of editing, but he does do a lot of writing about science. And this is all new to me. So I was fascinated.

I don't know whether anybody else was as gripped by that bit of information as I was. But he was very, very interesting on a whole range of topics. And he picked his favourite story of the year, as every one of my guest co-presenters this week have done. And he went for this artificial intelligence, OpenAI, the chat GPT. We often, at the time, we miss the stories that are important. You know, in 1905, I would, if I'd gone to my news desk and said,

look, there's this German guy, he's come up with this really interesting idea about the speed of light, it's almost impossible to explain. I would have not got it into paper, but that was Einstein's Annas Mirabilis year. And in 2007, if we, I don't, we didn't and wouldn't have splashed on the creation of the iPhone, but I think we can all now look back on that and say that was something that changed absolutely everything.

And I think AI in general is going to do that. And I think this has been a bit of a watershed year. And it's not just chapter GPT. We'll get on that in a sec. But this is the year when AlphaGo, or rather AlphaZero, the DeepMinds AI, which has solved the problem of protein folding to a large degree, which is this thing that...

What is it? Go on. So very quickly, all bodies are powered by proteins. Everything in life is powered by proteins. We know what they're made up of chemically. We don't know what they look like. We don't know their 3D structure. Their 3D structure is the most important thing

that determines what they do. It's a spike on coronavirus. It's the enzymes that make things. And they have found a way to predict the structure using AI. And this is something I think we're going to see feeding into loads of things. It wouldn't surprise me if they eventually win the Nobel Prize. But then you've got ChatGPT. You introduced this earlier by saying,

if you run out of small talk on Christmas Day, talk about ChatG whilst you were doing that I did a bit of a meta thing and I typed into chat GPT give me topics for Christmas small talk with my boring uncle Dave I don't have a boring uncle Dave I have a very exciting uncle Dave actually I don't have an uncle Dave at all yeah all right make that clear it says instantly says here are a few potential sports topics for small talk with your boring Uncle Dave. Favourite Christmas traditions. Ask your uncle about his favourite Christmas traditions and share your own.

Holiday travel plans. This would work well. If your uncle is planning a trip for vacation, ask him about it. You could discuss where he's going, what he's looking forward to doing. And it goes on. And then I said, you know, make them more risque.

Imagine Uncle Dave is a bit drunk. And it said, I'm sorry, but I'm unable to fulfill your request for topics for small talk with your Uncle Dave that are more risque in nature. As an artificial intelligence, my programming does not allow me to engage in inappropriate content. Yes, which is interesting. This thing has standards,

which is more than most people around here, let's face it. So at least that is moderately encouraging, I guess, if you yourself have standards. Earlier on, we asked it to talk about quantitative easing but by but in the manner of a pirate now um i've got what it came up with here and i've got to say the pirate bit doesn't work i mean it does start relatively optimistically uh with i matey let's talk about this here quantitative easing but honestly um i don't think it's got that right. So I'm chucking that out.

I think it's got the quantitative easing bit right, maybe not the pirate bit. The pirate bit is absolutely hopeless. Earlier on, you'd asked it to write a short poem wishing the team at Times Radio a happy Christmas after a hard-working year. It came up with a reasonably good poem, well, obviously within nanoseconds.

Then it wrote one in the style of Shakespeare because you asked it to, starting with the line, O time is radio, how thou art a beacon of light in the world that can often seem dark and slight. I don't think William would have been all that chuffed with that line. And then I think the most unsuccessful of all, it wrote a poem praising time's radio, because I asked it to, in the style of Stormzy. And I'm not even going to bother trying to read that out because I will sound an absolute plonker. And I don't think it got that at all. But seriously, isn't this terrifying?

We were talking earlier about the nature of coursework for students and indeed people at school. It's over, isn't it? It is. I mean, you've read this out and the fact is if you say write an essay about pride and prejudice uh you know standard gcse essay question it will do an extremely good job and i think coursework is completely over and that's i mean it's hard to say what the societal impact of this is i think you know the one way of looking at it is how would your ability to do your job change if you had an infinite amount of not very clever but largely competent people you could call on to write things? And that's basically what it can do. And it's going to get better.

It's going to get more plausible. And it's also going to be able to find connections that we can't. Because what it's doing here is it's drawing on a large corpus of text on the internet and essentially imitating it but it's able to see all of this text at once so you can ask it things and it might find connections you'd never see and this is what scientists are so excited about you know science is largely about seeing the existing research standing on the shoulders of giants you know drawing it together and finding these hidden connections and this is a programme to do just that. So it's going to...

I just think it's going to end up being an assistant to humans in ways that we haven't thought of, and certainly some professions... And medicine would be one, I guess. Medicine, but also law, accountancy. You know, the things that I think often lawyers and accountants would think is the dog's body work, I think it's going to go. Those jobs won't exist? I think those jobs won't exist. In what, five years? Possibly. Look,

if you've sold a house recently, you'll know there's these warehouses of conveyancing firms that just do the same job, sitting there, you know, going through the legal niceties, going through the slight exceptions in your case. It's humans doing it at the moment. Yeah, and I think all of that's going to go. Okay. And the business question, who owns it? Who's making the money? This is OpenAI. It is a company. It is worth 20 billion. I think they're probably looking to license it for lots of things. But there's lots of companies doing this. All the big tech firms have their own, some, several AI subsidiaries. And, you know, if you chat to the real tech evangelists, they're saying, well, this is going to take over a lot of work. And, you know, if you chat to the real tech evangelists, they're saying,

well, this is going to take over a lot of work, and we're going to have to think about massive redistribution of wealth, because ultimately, it's all going to be concentrated in a few very, very small firms. That was the voice of the erudite and charming Tom Whipple, science editor of The Times. And I had a string of great guest presenters this week. Lucy Fisher, The Times Radio chief political commentator. We had Katie Prescott, who's the Times technology business editor, and Jane Malkerans, who's associate editor of the Times Saturday magazine. And I've really enjoyed spending time with all of them

because they've just brought something just very different to the conversation and to the atmosphere, and I've learned from all of them. So it's been really interesting. So my thanks to them. But I can't emphasise enough that I am looking forward to seeing Wee Fee and finding out what's happened on her holiday so she'll be back after Christmas on that first date of the new year of Off Air which is Monday January the 2nd. Our big guest, the person that Tom Whipple and I spoke to this afternoon for about 20 minutes or so, is Rachel Clarke.

Now, she's a journalist and an author, and she's a palliative care specialist in the NHS. She's had two really, really successful books, Dear Life, which is about palliative care, and Breathtaking, Inside the NHS in a Time of the Pandemic, which is self-explanatory, really. So here is Rachel Clarke telling us what it is she does right now, Inside the NHS in a time of the pandemic, which is self-explanatory, really. So here is Rachel Clark telling us what it is she does right now and actually explaining in some detail what palliative medicine does and why she is so proud to work in it. You cut it fine, don't you? Just walking in here. Very casually, yes.

Yeah, you're really dead casual. It's really nice to see you, Rachel. Tom and I are both going to talk to you, if that's all right. You don't know Tom, but I gather you've communicated on Twitter. He said so. We have indeed. We regularly communicate on Twitter about important matters, such as the fact that vaccines against COVID work, for instance.

COVID's a real disease. Those kinds of matters that are hotly disputed on social media. It is interesting you mention that because I wasn't going to say this, but at the first mention of Tom Whipple's presence in the studio, we got a tweet suggesting that Tom was too on side with the whole idea of vaccines. I know, I mean, it is depressing, isn't it? Can we just, let's get that out there. It is, yeah, yeah, look, it is.

We've, you know, I mean, I dread to think where the world would be without vaccines. We're seeing a hint of that now in China, although they've had vaccines. They've been an astonishing scientific miracle. But I think if you were to predict what would have happened in this pandemic, you know, a future putative pandemic, you'd say you would get a whole bunch of anti-vax stuff you get a lot of conspiracy theories and you get poor journalists being argued with on twitter right okay uh rachel let's talk about you and actually let's start with what you do now and your day job at the hospital tell us about that because palliative care is a frightening concept to a lot of people it's a world that most of us don't know anything about. Why choose it?

Well, people often think it must be an exceptionally depressing branch of medicine. Why would you specialise in a job where you meet people who are dying pretty much every day that I rock up to work? And the answer is, in essence, for me, it's a really intense distillation of what I think all doctors try to do. You go into medicine to try and help people. And helping isn't just about prescribing a drug or performing an operation. It's about the relationship you have with patients you're trying to heal. And that involves relating to patients as human beings, helping them as they confront their fears, their loss of function. And there's no loss greater than having to confront your mortality,

to look at the fact that your time on this earth is coming to an end and navigate your way through those final week's days. And I find in doing that, my job is not about helping people to die. It's about helping people to live as fully, as richly as they possibly can, all the way to the end. And it is astonishing how much courage, decency, good humour, wit, all these incredible qualities people have all the way to the end. And to be a little part of helping patients and their families through the end of their lives is it's the furthest thing from depressing it's it's an absolute privilege. Tom? I mean how do you how

do you end up is that why you chose it or it's I mean it is a fascinating area to end up in when you study medicine. Yes I mean it's really interesting even even today when you're at medical school death is the elephant in the room to a large extent you learn about body parts you do the liver for a few weeks and then you do the heart and then you do the blood and um patients as human beings are often sort of pushed to the edges and what death and dying entails is very definitely pushed to the edges but I found as a medical student it was really obvious to me that although all patients are vulnerable some are more vulnerable than others so maybe people with disabilities with mental health conditions and definitely people with terminal, with mental health conditions, and definitely people with terminal

illnesses. And I could see in the hospital, these patients sometimes almost being discarded by the profession. And I once encountered a surgical consultant as a medical student who literally turned away from a patient and he was barely out of earshot when he said send her to the palliative dustbin and I couldn't believe that doctors could talk about patients who were so very vulnerable in that way and I think I wanted in part to kind of advocate for those patients who I could see were being overlooked. And also, I think in palliative medicine, the science of medicine meets the humanity of medicine in a really profound way. We all have a terrible diagnosis that we can't escape, which is that

of being mortal. You know, everybody. It's a good way of putting it. Yes. From the moment we're born, and we are all going one way or another to lose everything, everyone we love in the world, but we carry on living despite that with joy and pleasure and beauty. And I find that paradoxical and astonishing and remarkable and I love working in that area. Practically do you have a sense how many of us end up in we're all going to die I mean

I just eloquently put it I'm resigned to that how many of us end up in what is formally called palliative care? Well so palliative medicine is, it's a specialty, a medical specialty for people who need specialist input. So most of us don't need the help of a palliative care team because dying for many people is quite a straightforward business. You know, if you're lucky, you get to die because of this wonderful concept of old age, you're 102 and you die because your body winds down and there's no pain, there's no suffering. If you have a cancer, for example, that causes lots of symptoms like difficult pain, then that's when we might step in to help with the symptoms and also sometimes people have a a huge amount of spiritual or psychological distress

they may be very young or have young children and we'll support patients with that too and it's all about helping people live on their terms as best as they possibly can. Doctors are still pretty bad at assuming they know best what's good for patients. But in palliative medicine, there is only ever one boss in the room and the boss is the patient. And my job is to do things on their terms. Because of your experience in palliative care, you're quite blunt about people who complain about ageing, aren't you? And I really like this about you. I like a lot of things about you, but I particularly like that. Yes.

Old age is a privilege. Yes. I infuriate some of my friends because I turn 50 this year. Oh, Rachel. Oh, amazing. And, you know, I have my full gamut of wrinkles gray hair you know definitely not the size I was 20 years ago or I even you know I've definitely started doing the kind of I want to call it an old man grunt but that would be very sexist we all make noises when we get up I do some old women grunting and not in a good way but I genuinely believe that if I if I dare grumble about those things, that I need to slap myself around the face because those things are a privilege. If you're lucky enough to grumble about your grey

hairs, you've had 50 years of life and you should celebrate that. And I meet patients in their 20s, occasionally in their teens, who are confronting the end of their life with this astonishing gratitude, genuine gratitude for the years they've lived. And if they're capable of doing that, none of us really should feel upset that we don't look like an 18-year-old anymore. Dr. Rachel Clark is our guest this afternoon. It's Jane Garvey and the Times science editor, Tom Whipple. So can we talk about how you became a public figure, Rachel? You're now an author. You were a journalist. You were a junior doctor yourself when the junior doctor's contract was up and well, up for grabs. Is that the right way of putting it? Being renegotiated in 2015 and you became a very well-known person. Yeah, I did reluctantly. But

Jeremy Hunt, for reasons best known to himself, decided that the best way to, you know, improve morale and instill positivity in a junior doctor NHS workforce was to rewrite their terms and conditions of work. So he wanted us to work more weekends, more nights, you know, essentially change our core hours so that they became much, much more antisocial. And I was one of those junior doctors who was already, you know, working crazy hours. And I thought it was astonishingly cynical of our health secretary to pretend that he could actually make the NHS safer at weekends by spreading the junior doctor workforce more thinly over seven days, not five. He wasn't even pretending to offer any more resources. It was all about spreading the juniors more thinly there are of course sorry to interrupt but there are of course some people who say the nhs works

um five days a week and that you can't get out of hospital at the weekend because there's no consultant around because they're playing i mean this is not me talking necessarily but the consultants are playing golf and there's no way you can get them into the building blah blah blah there is something to be said isn't there for tweaking things so that there is proper seven-day working? Totally. I mean, there obviously is seven-day working already, but there are massive problems at the weekend. It's much harder to get anything done. And that's because the services can't operate in the same way because there aren't enough staff. So we're short of 130,000 staff in the NHS. We desperately need more doctors, more nurses, more of everybody. And that's the

problem. You can't spread a service that's not even funded properly for weekends as it is more thinly and pretend that that's going to make people safer it's just going to improve weekends at the expense of Monday to Friday so I mean I would love a reconfigured seven-day service if we had the money and the staff to do it but we absolutely don't. Okay well Tom and I were discussing earlier the article in the Times today I don't know if you read it by James Kirkup. Yes, I have. I mean, he's a man with a view. He is.

It's headlined, Who Has the Courage to Fix Our Failing NHS? And in short, he says, you've got to stop people getting to hospital. You've got to have fewer hospitals, which he admits himself wouldn't be all that popular if he tried to say that in public. Thirdly, you've got to accept there's nothing wrong with making money out of providing health care. And fourthly, you need more and better managers, which he again acknowledges is not an easy sell. So Rachel, Rachel Clark, over to you. How would you improve the NHS?

Well, what I'm not going to pretend is that it's an either or dichotomy. So usually people say, either you need more money, or you need to reform it maybe privatize it it's it's one or the other it's obviously not it's both it's it's the nhs is not perfect there are lots of things that are wrong with it that we could fix but we can't do that without pumping in more resources at least up front we do not have the staff we've nothing like it. We can't fix the waiting list, the people queuing in their ambulances outside A&E when we don't have enough physical doctors and nurses. And the other massive thing that I would do tomorrow, if I was health secretary, please listen, Steve Barkley, is fund social care.

If we, at the moment, one in eight patients in hospital are there because there isn't a package of care to care for them in the community they don't medically need to be in hospital so if this government could please be brave enough to have a property tax and inheritance tax that funded social care we would instantly improve nhs services okay um i think theresa may tried something like that. Yep. And she wimped out. Well, yeah, well, she was made aware that it wasn't a big winner with the voters. So in a way, we get, it's sort of, we're part of this.

We can't pretend we're not. No, we get the NHS we deserve, the voters deserve. If we are going to fail to elect politicians that take brave, grown-up decisions to make us have a fair health and social care system, if we're not willing to pay for that, we're going to carry on with things falling apart. Just before Tom comes back in, just should say James Kirkup is talking to John Pienaar on Drive on Times Radio at about, what time's he on? Do we know? know anyway between five and um seven tonight I'm just alerting them to see if they can find out when sorry Tom I mean one of the things I find

interesting is people have been talking about social care for ages and it feels like such an easy win and also something you say you know we should fund it from inheritance and however we fund it if it's done properly the idea would be it would overall save money uh because we wouldn't have people stuck in beds that are costing a lot more than the beds they've been in social care are there any other things that are that are easy wins that because you know when you say i'm sure the chancellor's sitting and thinking yes yes if we put in more funds obviously things would get better but i don't have more funds are there other things that could be done that even in a small way might make it work better? There are so many of them, Tom. There are so many. I mean,

another, it's not as easy as social care, but you could fix it. An easy win would be to go back to the setup that we had even 10 years ago in hospitals where doctors worked in little teams you had a medical firm you had a consultant a senior doctor and then a little group of juniors you work together you were a team you supported each other you you had a really strong sense of camaraderie a bit like a little not platoon what's a tiny bit of an army called? Squadron, whatever, you know, little group of soldiers. And it was incredibly meaningful and important, this sort of sense of solidarity and team spirit. And now junior doctors are shift workers. They clock in, clock out. They see a different consultant, a different senior every single day. And all those bonds of trust and mutual support have gone. If we could change that, go back to the system that I was lucky enough to enjoy when I started out as a doctor, it would transform morale, medical education. It would make junior doctors who now are quitting the NHS and choosing to become a floating locum doctor who isn't even a part of the NHS anymore. It would bring them back into the fold and it would boost morale incredibly. And God, I would love to see that happen. I should say, I said with such confidence that James Kirkup was definitely going to be on between five and seven. He's actually on after seven. So it just proves me right. Ten past seven he's on, to be absolutely clear. James Kirkup will talk John Pienaar through

his plans for fixing the NHS. Make sure you're listening to that, Rachel. I hope he's listened to me too. I bet he has. He wouldn't dare not to. So that's ten past seven tonight here on Times Radio. You have been to Ukraine recently. Yes. And I was really interested. He wouldn't dare not to. So that's ten past seven tonight here on Times Radio. You have been to Ukraine recently. Yes. And I was really interested. You went in the autumn of this year? In October, yes. So, I mean, what were you doing? So I went out with Henry Marsh, the author, former neurosurgeon.

We both went out to teach palliative care to local doctors and medical students. There's a massive problem with the provision of healthcare across the board, obviously in Ukraine, but especially end of life care. And we went out to try and give some practical training. Unfortunately, managed to be literally arriving in Kiev on a night train as Putin started bombing the city. He was missile strikes on Kiev. So we spent pretty much 24 hours in a bomb shelter and had to cut our trip short. But I did have a few days working in a hospice with local palliative care doctors. And the incredible thing for me was seeing what war is really truly like for the civilian population of this European country who are just like us. So to begin with,

we were in the west of the country on the border with Poland, many, many hundreds of miles away from the front line. And people had said, Lviv, the city where we were, it's just like a normal Western European capital. You won't feel as though you're in a country at war. And that couldn't have been more wrong. In the city, there were coffins of young soldiers arriving, having been brought back from the front to their home city. And we watched literally hundreds of civilians on the pavement get down on their knees to sort of pay homage to these fallen dead soldiers. It was astonishing. And everybody I spoke to almost within minutes would start to cry. And would say Putin wants all of us dead he

wants to obliterate Ukraine and they were living with this daily knowledge that the second most powerful country in the world wanted to obliterate them and it was just heartbreaking to see and we're going to go back we're going yes early next year right is it safe for you to do that um not necessarily i say we're going to go back we'll obviously be assessing the risks at the time but we are going to set up a charity to raise funds to provide better palliative care for people who are dying in Ukraine, because goodness knows they need it. Yes, I mean, isn't it, it's to my shame, I suppose it's just an area of life I hadn't considered. But of course, people are still terminally ill in Ukraine,

along with everything else that goes on. Exactly. And patients who are terminally ill with cancer, they're being shipped from cities like Kharkiv hundreds of miles away from the front line to hospices that already have precious little resources because they literally can't get any care where they are in the east and the upheaval millions of people displaced has just disrupted every part of of normal medical care in inverted commas. So what are you now in the nicest possible way? Are you a doctor or are you a writer or are you still, you're still a journalist, aren't you, at heart? I can sense that. Well, I think my real job in my head is being a doctor and everything else I do is not my real job. Although for me, writing about medicine and speaking, talking about, for example,

palliative care, I see it as an extension of my medicine. I genuinely believe that. I think if you can talk, for instance, about death and dying, sort of promote a public conversation about these things that are taboo subjects that we find really hard often to talk about, then that is helpful and that might benefit members of the public who are listening who one day may have a terminal diagnosis or may be caring for someone who does. And I like to believe that everything I try and say in public is in some way helping and promoting health in the widest sense. Obviously, not all doctors would feel the same way. They wouldn't agree with that. But when I write about any aspect of medicine, whether it's COVID vaccines or palliative care or do not

resuscitate orders. It's the same thing. I'm writing in print the same thing that I might say to a patient or to a family. And it's all about trying to support and help patients. That was the very brilliant and interesting Rachel Clarke talking about her working life as both a writer and a specialist in palliative care. And of course, she was discussing some of her solutions for the many challenges the NHS is facing right now. Let's do some quick shout outs. Nancy is in Massachusetts wishing you a Merry Christmas, Jane. Missing fee this week, but I have enjoyed your solo week. Yes, that's good of you, Nancy, to say so. But actually, the plain fact is it's better with the other woman around. We have to be honest about that. Happy holidays to your Times team as well, says Nancy, and enjoy your time off.

Thank you, Nancy. I hope you're having a good festive season as well. I will enjoy time off. It's funny, isn't it? Because Christmas is stressful in the build up. And then people, when I was younger, I used to hate that week between Christmas and New Year but latterly I've really begun to value it it's just such a nice cozy time if you're lucky enough to have a pleasant place to spend time in and you can just the pressure's off you've done everything that's expected of you really and you can just indulge yourself a bit so yeah I am looking forward to having that time Nancy thank you very much Sarah says I'm looking forward to having that time, Nancy. Thank you very much. Sarah says, I'm dreading Christmas. Oh, no. My domineering sister insisted we had to be at my mum's because who knows, it might be her last. Much to my mother's surprise, may I add. OK, right. I fear my medical

dietary requirements will be ignored and they'll choose a meal to cater for my sister's non-medical, non-diet. Right, Sarah, thoughts and prayers. I think there's a certain amount of digging in required at every family event, particularly at this time of year. I do feel for you. My sister and I are very close in lots of ways. In fact, she's just been staying with me for a couple of days. And, you know, but there are tensions.'s absolutely no there's no we're different people we've got different attitudes to things

however in my experience no one is more loyal at a time of crisis than your sister so um sarah i hope you have a good time and give my best to your mom and even your sibling as well russell says um i'm a big fan of you from the other place. I've been self-employed and working from home for the past five years, so the radio has always been by my side. But this month I took a full-time job working in radio here in Ireland. That means I can't listen to the two live hours every day. My God, I mean, just change the job, Russell.

But he says, thank goodness for the podcast. My Christmas got turned upside down a bit from normal. My parents, both in their mid to late 60s, decided about a fortnight ago to hell with tradition and decided to spend Christmas in Spain instead of dealing with the stress and strain here. I've hosted them and my family before for Christmas, and it gave me a first-hand experience of everything our parents do to make the festive season a happy time. So I actually don't blame them wanting to jet off somewhere. They're having a fantastic time and I'm so glad their decision to change things is working out so well. I'm so lucky to have my partner's family able to host and feed me this year and actually it'll be great to spend a relaxing Christmas day with him without having to split apart for the

whole day. Oh, well, that sounds good, Russell. So actually, you found a good solution to the problem of your parents deciding they've done their time and they're going to the Costa del Sol and to hell with the whole family. God, that's actually quite good advice from your parents. I'm slightly jealous, if I'm honest.

I wonder if they've got room for another one in their hotel in Spain or whatever it might be. Russell, take care. Hope your job in Irish radio is going well and have a really good festive season. Thank you all for taking the time to download Off Air and become a part of it. We're really grateful. I know Fee would say exactly the same if she were here. And you'll hear her dance at Tones again on January 2nd. But until then, I hope you all have a really happy and peaceful Christmas. And thank you so much for taking the time to listen to this

now you've been listening to Off Air with me Jane Garvey our Times Radio producer is Rosie Cutler and the podcast executive producer is Ben Mitchell but he's obviously working from home because I haven't clapped eyes on him for weeks you can listen to us on the free Times Radio app or download every episode from wherever else you get your podcasts. And don't forget, if you like what you've heard, then you can listen live Monday to Thursday, three till five on Times Radio. And I hope you can join me on Off Air later. Thanks for listening.