Off Air... with Jane and Fi - I've never been able to look at a pigeon the same way again

Episode Date: February 2, 2023

Jane and Fi have been at the Destinations Show at Kensington Olympia to explore all things travel.The film-maker and travel writer Ash Bhardwaj discusses his recent 8,500 km overland trip from the top of Norway to Romania, at a time of increased tensions between Russia and the West.Also they talk pet food and the theme tune dance challenge.If you want to contact the show to ask a question and get involved in the conversation then please email us: [e-mail] Producer: Sameer MeraliTimes Radio Producer: Rosie CutlerPodcast Executive Producer: Ben Mitchell Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome, welcome, welcome aboard. You're listening to this on a Thursday afternoon where if you're a very keen Times Radio listener, you will know that Jane and I have been at Destinations, the UK's largest travel show at Kensington Olympia. But here, Jane, we sound like we're back in the studio. And that's because we are. Because in our life, it's actually Wednesday. And we're doing this now so that we can do it tomorrow. And I really hope that makes sense. It doesn't, but that's the beauty of it.

And obviously we have an entirely appropriate guest for this podcast, don't we? Well, we do because the guest that goes out tomorrow is the one that if you're listening today, we recorded yesterday. That's right. It is. Travel writer and filmmaker Ash Bhardwaj.

And he has travelled all over the world hasn't he Jane I mean really if either you or I ever attempted to say that we were adventurous travellers we would just I wouldn't just pale into insignificance and also what was rather winning about him was at the same time as he was talking to us via various domestic forms of 21st century technology which sort of worked about 70% of the time he was also looking after his absolutely enchanting eight-week-old daughter yeah and he was doing it in a very i can do these two things at once sort of a way but he was doing it really well yeah i've got to say so his daughter was in one of those lovely little baby rockers you know the ones that gently bounce they never gave my kids any joy and there was not a peep out of her no and i don't i i tried back in the day a couple

of times to do interviews and work type things with a baby in tow and they could just tell so they just screeched all the way through which you know i'm afraid i did deploy a dummy um but he didn't even use a dummy but it was quite funny because while we were talking to him so we were doing this on a kind of Zoom-esque type thing, he was gently rocking himself. It reminded me a little bit of the old guys I used to work with in local commercial radio who'd come off pirate ships and could only ever broadcast like this.

Swaying back and forth. Are you sure that's the reason? Are you sure there wasn't something else at play? We're doing it now because we've got these lovely seats. Anyway, he has done an 8,500 kilometre trip recently down what is mostly the western border of Russia. Russia's border with Europe has been of particular interest to him, but he's also trekked through Sudan's Bayouda Desert.

He's gone to base camp at Everest with wounded British soldiers. There's just nothing this man, I want to say young man, he is a young man, isn't he? Yeah. He's younger than us, hasn't done. And he was a really interesting guest to have on. Do you want to do an email before we get to him? Should we go straight to Ash?

Well, let's go straight to Ash because the emails are, well, there are some from abroad. In fact, there are lots from abroad, which we welcome. That's also been very, they've been carefully plucked from our pile of emails. I think they're all from people who are not in the united kingdom that's very thoughtful how very appropriate but we'll do those later yeah so we started by asking ash about his new travel companion she is two months old and she is i'm very much looking forward to bringing her into the travel

world with me uh and taking her off on adventures. Maybe I won't quite be hiking through Kashmir or crossing the Bayou de Desert with her just yet, but she is going to be part of my travel team from now on. Okay, and you have already told Fee and I off air that you are planning quite a long plane journey with her and we'd just like to give you the benefit of our advice if you don't mind. Don't do it, that's the essential bit of advice um do you think seriously it will have any impact on your attitude to travel um i think i'll certainly be more hesitant to do anything that has higher levels of risk um and i think it will also help me travel with greater empathy and compassion to me the whole thing about travel journalism and traveling more generally is that you're encountering new cultures

and new places new ideas and new ways of living there are plenty of people around the world who have different ways of parenting and I think being able to go with my baby to do those things will help help break down small barriers and speak to people about the kind of things you don't normally get to do when you're traveling can you remember when you first got the travel bug where you thought this is absolutely the thing that's going to make the rest of my life tick I really can you know I'm half Indian I was raised by my mum who's English but she made a huge effort to ensure that I spent time with my Indian family so I always had this awareness about the curiosity that lives could

be very different based on your background and then when I was 17 I was at my local state school and the school actually had a rugby tour going to Australia, New Zealand and the Cook Islands and my mum who was working as a cleaner, we lived in social housing, she got a second job as a cleaner to save up for me to go on that rugby tour, because she said, you don't get opportunities like this very often. And I think you should, you should really have the chance to do this. So I went off on that rugby tour, went to Australia, we played a couple of games there and went to New Zealand. And what really struck me about New Zealand was that unlike many other formerly British colonized nations the indigenous people of New Zealand had a prominence in that state both on the flag with the hucka and rugby and you get off the plane

at Auckland airport and signs are in Maori our coach driver was Maori you know very different to my experience of indigenous culture in Australia and I was just fascinated that there was this place that had many elements that were very similar to British culture the union flag is on the New Zealand flag they play cricket they play rugby but then there's this real difference both in the climate and the landscape and the culture but also this aspect of the indigenous culture there and it just made me fascinated with that intersection of places people current affairs identity and culture and I just I loved it I had such a great time I relished it I relished speaking to people finding out about their lives and that was the inspiration that put me on to travel from then on. Is it fair to say Ash Ash, that in the past, the wrong sort of British people have travelled?

In other words, the privileged, the entitled and those who are bound to see the world in a very particular way. And of course, overwhelmingly male. I wouldn't say they're the wrong people. They were just the people that had the privilege and the access and the ability to do it. And therefore, for those of us learning about those places through their eyes through their experiences we would only have a particular view we'd have the view of people who were wealthy who were generally male and who were white and for me as somebody who comes from a less privileged background and who comes from a mixed ethnic background it does mean I have different experiences when I go to places. You know, going to, returning to New Zealand,

canoeing down the Whanganui River with a Maori guide, he felt much more willing to share his stories of some of the crimes that had been committed against Maori culture and their losses of identity and land because he felt that he had a connection with me me being half Indian and some similar stories happening in India um traveling to Nepal people are much more willing to speak to me rather than my white traveling companions just because they're curious why this brown guy is with this group of people you don't look like an English person normally does so it opens up barriers for me um and other places sometimes it can be more hostile i've not had a huge amount of hostility

but um i i know of stories of friends of mine people of color traveling in russia who suffered quite awful racism and you know if you only have um white men telling those stories women of course it's a very different experience for women travelling in many parts of the world. If you aren't aware of their experiences, then you're not getting a full picture of that place. You're not aware of the opportunities and some of the negative things about that place, which is why I think diversity in travel writing matters. Can we talk about this extraordinary trip that you did along the Russian border, 8,500 kilometres? Why did you want to explore that? And actually, you better put it into the context of recent history, because it's before the invasion of Ukraine, isn't it? Well, yeah, I mean, it's before the enlarged invasion of Ukraine. So Russia first invaded Ukraine in 2014 in the occupation and annexation of Crimea

and then stoking the civil war in Donbass and then actually sending unmarked troops over the border. So that was the first invasion. I had been an officer in the British Army Reserve. I was with a unit called Seven Rifles. And after the occupation of Crimea, Estonia invited other NATO allies to come and help reinforce its defence. We were part of that group and we were doing training in Estonia. It was the first time we became really aware of what had happened in Crimea affecting all of us, affecting Brits directly, me being a reservist, and becoming aware of the stories there around Russian attempts to

stoke civil unrest, around effectively culture wars with people of Russian origin living in Estonia. And I wanted to understand this more in more places, in particular how it was going to affect us. And for me, as someone of a mixed ethnic background, identity has always been an important question to me. So I decided to travel 8,500 kilometers along the Russian European border, starting in Kyrgyzstan and Norway, which is where Norway touches Russia, coming down through Finland, into St. Petersburg, Vyborg, which is on the border with Finland, and then into Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Kaliningrad, Poland, Belarus, and then into Ukraine.

So I went to Chernobyl, went west to Lviv and Ivano-Frankivsk into the mountains, east to Donbass, down to Odessa. And then I also got permission from the Ukrainian authorities to travel into Crimea and finish then in Transnistria and Moldova. And how different were the attitudes of people on the European side of that border as you worked your way down? Because it would be so wrong of us to assume that there is the same feeling of edginess and possibly fear all the way along that border. I think certainly in the places that had been occupied under the Russian and then Soviet Empire, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, they were very aware of the reality of what Russian occupation looks like. And they were aware of Russia's ambitions.

You know, they had a fear, and I think it's a justified one, that Russia would want to return there. And they had seen for themselves Russia's efforts since the end of the Soviet Union to try and disrupt those countries and make life difficult, leveraging ethnic Russian populations in those countries. So in those countries, there was a really clear-eyed understanding of what Russia, particularly under Putin, was really like.

So within those countries, that was something very apparent. In Ukraine, they were at war with Russia. They were fighting Russian troops in the Donbass since 2014. So they had a very clear-eyed view of it as well. I was mostly meeting people who were fairly Europeanized in the sense of they, a lot of them had studied in the UK or Poland, the people that I met. But even those who didn't speak English, who spoke Russian and Belarusian, largely Russian, actually, they didn't have like an enmity towards Europe, but they had a sort of sense that Russia would look after them. And I was very aware of the ongoing efforts within Belarus of Russian ideological infiltration.

When or where during your travels, Ash, have you felt most vulnerable? I felt quite vulnerable hiking through honduras largely because uh there were people came up to us i was doing a i was filming a television series for my friend leveson wood called walking the americas and we walked through honduras from the northern to the southern border and as we entered the uh city of tagusa galpa we were walking along the main road and a lady ran out to us from a food stall and said, you guys, what are you doing? So we're just walking into Tegucigalpa. She said, right, I think you should get in a car now because these guys sit over there on a corner watching you. And I think they'll mug you. They might even kill you. So you should probably get

in a car and drive on. I felt pretty vulnerable doing that. But in terms of general sense of threat, I think when I was in Russia, it was in the run-up to the Football World Cup in 2018, and there'd been a lot of talk about neo-Nazi football hooligans. And I remember being in a bar, and I was about to walk back my hotel and someone said, yeah, yeah, don't go that way. That's where all the skinheads live. So just being aware of those sorts of things. I think as a man, you tend to carry with you the privilege and hubris of feeling less vulnerable than maybe a woman would feel traveling on her own.

And I think that's something that I'm aware of I try to be aware of and I try to put that across in my writing because you know you see people writing like oh it's very safe walking through this area well maybe it's for you is it for everybody else and you know I think those are probably the ones that really stand out to me in that spirit then Ash what percentage of your travel do you think could have been done by a female equivalent? That's a really good question um if I think about the place I've traveled through I think I think Europe generally uh I think I'd be probably better to ask you guys what you think but in general I find Europe a very easy place to travel.

There's less hostility or unfamiliarity with women traveling. In a country like India, it's very easy to travel around. But there are certainly levels of hostility, misogyny and outright violence towards women, particularly Indian women. We've heard the awful stories in places like Delhi. I do know plenty of women friends who have travelled around India safely on their own. It's not somewhere I would say to somebody, you can't do it. I just think that women probably have to have, aren't able to have quite the same freedoms and take the same liberties and complacencies that I would.

freedoms and take the same liberties and complacencies that I would. You know, someone like Australia, New Zealand, Norway, Finland, Sweden, absolutely no trouble I think for women to be traveling around doing many things that they've done, that I've done. Walking through Uganda and Sudan with Lev, many women have done very adventurous expeditions through hostile regions of the world, environmentally hostile regions of the world, I think they would probably find some of the logistics and conversations harder. People will, in many places, will tend to turn to you as the man first, even if you're not the leader of the expedition or the expert.

And I think that's changing as we're starting to improve awareness and see greater equality in society generally. I really like the point that you made about the fetishization very difficult word for me to say sorry about that and of travel this notion that sometimes people are traveling because they want to go oh look at the scene of a tragedy or look at those buildings that were perhaps built by the Nazis, whatever it is. And and I think your episode of your podcast where you go to Chernobyl is a very interesting example of that. What do you think people gain by going to the scene of a terrible disaster? by going to the scene of a terrible disaster? What is it that the traveller can usefully be part of in that kind of equation?

I think the utility of it, if you're going to look at it from very pragmatic terms, is raising awareness about the hubris of what humans can do and the risk i mean you mentioned about buildings that might be built by the nazis another thing that i think is interesting is the way british travelers in particular fetishize colonial architecture like beautiful colonial buildings ignoring the fact that those buildings are a literal embodiment of the extraction of resources often built on the back of enslaved peoples so we can look at them and with the proper

understanding of context in history we can have more nuanced understandings of the world looking at colonial architecture particularly we can say beautiful things can sometimes come about as a product of awful behavior now that's not to say that legitimizes either of those things more to say that we need to look beyond the mask of beauty and things being aesthetically pleasing and understanding does this hide something awful or malign and i think understanding that context that can be be useful. For me, going to Chernobyl, I found Chernobyl a fascinating place because it covers so many things that I'm interested empire. It had occupied this region and it had treated the people there awfully. It had allowed this accident to happen and didn't really take responsibility for them.

The Soviet Union did go and clean it up. But understanding what that meant for how Ukrainians feel about the Soviet Union and therefore Russia, I think was quite an indicative thing. So if you view it in that context, I think that can be interesting. I mean, Chernobyl, that area is fascinating.

It shows what can happen when humans leave an area. As a product of the Chernobyl disaster, humans have not been really able to denature, farm, or do anything to that region. We've seen how well wildlife has actually been able to return to that area. There's lots of wolves, lots of other species you don't find in other parts of Europe. That can be an interesting insight.

What about the relatively recent notion of the midlife gap year, Ash? Have you got any tips for middle-aged people? And I'm going on, I'm taking a flyer here and guessing that quite a few of our listeners might be around that period of their lives. Is there a starter trip that you could do that's a relatively safe one, relatively uncomplicated, but has enough adventure in it to say when you get back, you can bore your friends at the book club? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I as a single country to travel to i think

new zealand is one of the most wonderful places to travel particularly scrape beneath the surface and start to get an insight into that um the Maori culture there's some amazing things you can do then gain you access to it if you get off the beaten track and don't just go to queenstown and do bungee jumps you can actually have a really fascinating time there. Australia's doing a very good job as well of raising the prominence of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in their country, First Nation tourism. Despite what I was saying earlier on about some of the risks,

I wouldn't even call them risks when we were talking about the idea of travelling on your own and so on, I think India is an incredibly rewarding place to travel. I think it is a place where you, there's very few places in the world where you can go to and immediately, despite the development, despite the urbanization and westernization in many ways of the place, you can still get in touch with something very different. The sense of a world and a culture that doesn't only value materialism and capital gain.

There's definitely that aspect in India. And that contrast is also very interesting. Nepal is a wonderful place to travel. Again, through the work of people like Nims Perja, raising the prominence of Nepalese mountaineers, you can travel there and do some amazing things with Nepalese guides who can bring you into their culture and show you the depth of Nepal. My favorite country to travel to in the last 10 years is Ukraine. Not an easy place to travel to, not an advisable place to travel to at the moment. But that is also a place that I think shows what happens when people are given their freedom as they

throw off the legacy of Sovietism and then after 2014, throwing off Russian interference. It's a country that really discovered itself. And it's an amazingly rich place with diversity of landscape, safe travel, when there's not a war on, an incredible variety of culture across the nation. Can we end with a quick fire round where you can only say, you can only give one word answers to these would that be all right for you ash let's do it here we go uh place that you couldn't wait to leave oh gosh can we come back to that one so i can think about yes we certainly can yeah place you really wanted to stay forever new zealand best ever view

can i ask if you travel with a modium i don't travel with a mode oh no i do i do i always carry a first aid pack and i within that there are lights and there's a modium in there always uh favorite view um i'm gonna have to return to new zealand again there's a modium in there always. Favourite view? I'm going to have to return to New Zealand again. There's a place called Lookout Point that looks out over the Southern Alps in the Maatuketaki River and you can see Mount Aspiring. It's incredible. Place that changed you? India.

It was the first place I travelled on my own. It was a place where I started to get an understanding of my heritage and it's a place where I really saw how different lives could be and are you any good on a holiday a family holiday not traveling not a venture just a holiday do you know I had I had my first holiday that I paid for that wasn't either an adventure filming or a press trip uh just over the summer the first holiday I've had in years and my wife and I went on a baby moon awful term before our baby Lyra was born and we went to Greece um we had the most wonderful time we went over to Naxos and it was absolutely gorgeous okay and could you just you know enjoy it could you

just can you lie on a sun lounger just soak it all up read a nice airport novel have a drink maybe at 11 30 you know just crack on with it all see I did all of those things and I absolutely loved it. There was a part of me that kept saying, should we go and have a look at Mount Olympus? And Dre said, I'm six months pregnant, we're not walking up Mount Olympus. Okay, let's go and sit on this on Landry. That was travel writer and filmmaker and podcaster Ash Bhardwaj

and he'll be talking at Destinations this coming weekend. Yes, and you can pop down if you're in the kensington olympia area um i seem to remember that kensington olympia was where don't they have they have like a show there all the time don't they yeah i think it's best known for the beer festival there's the beer festival and then there's the there's one there's a kind of adult entertainment festival well i, I don't know about that. I only went past on the number nine boss. I don't know anything about it. There's always something going on.

But there's going to be a big, shiny new development down there. I can't remember exactly what it is, but it's a massive kind of entertainment thing that's going to open up at Kensington Olympia at some point in the next decade. Thrilling to those of us who live in the West London area. Not a blinding bit of news to anybody in the rest of the world. Anyway, I thought he was very interesting. I

really admire him for going on a baby moon, which I think are they becoming increasingly common, the idea that before the reality of parenthood hits you, you can just chill out as you'll never be able to chill out again. Well, it seems to be a sensible thing to do. It probably is a really good idea. We went to Marrakesh when I was pregnant with my first kid. Marrakesh, yeah. And it was... Actually, we'd booked it before I was pregnant.

Marrakesh is a wonderful place, evocative of many things, incredibly busy, you know, at turns alarming and enjoyable a dreadful dreadful place to go if you're pregnant i was going to say possibly not ideal i have been though i wasn't pregnant and all of the smells just made me feel incredibly unwell all the time and you know i was feeling unwell all the time anyway so that didn't help at one stage we went to a special evening out in this i mean really beautiful absolutely beautiful restaurant but the only thing they served was pigeon just pigeon six ways and just the busyness of all of the souks it was just just terrible, actually. It wasn't a baby moon at all.

So I would just pop that in as a little bit of advice. I think Ash was right to just go somewhere a bit quieter. He went to Greece, which I thought was a good idea. Southport is also a great location for a baby moon. Or maybe don't go anywhere. Or maybe just stay at home and just read and listen to classical music. I've never been able to look at a pigeon in the same way again.

But I couldn't eat the pigeon, can I just say. What was the kid's cartoon when, certainly when I was growing up, Catch the Pigeon? Catch the Pigeon? Oh, no, I don't remember that. OK, right. Well, it was very good. I think it was Wacky Races.

Anyway, I have eaten pigeon and there's not a lot on the bird. There's not a lot to get to. It's a lot of effort, a lot of bones for very little meat. Just before we leave all of the things that Ash was talking about, would you go on a tour of somewhere like Chernobyl? Gosh, that's... I was thinking about this. Does it differ from visiting something like the 9-11 memorial?

Well, I have visited the 9-11 memorial. I haven't, so what's that like? It's incredibly, it's extraordinary because Manhattan is a very compact place, actually. And I think 9-11 was such a massive event with so much loss of life you expect the memorial to be bigger actually I'm not the only person to say that and it's not that it's not bigger but I think you're just expecting something different and also you are bound to be visiting the site at the same time as people who were affected by it yes so i've i felt it was important

to go there because i was in manhattan for quite a while uh and i really did i feel i mean i'm glad i went because it ash is right it it gives a different perspective to your understanding of something and it does connect you to it if you weren't connected to it before which is a good thing but i felt embarrassed to be there because I know that I was standing next to people who'd lost their loved ones and they were there for a completely different far far deeper reason but I wonder it reminds me a bit not a direct comparison I went on I'm sure I've mentioned it before I know I have on one of those uh charity red-nose trips to Ghana. And I was staying in a really nice hotel.

I was only there for two nights, maybe three nights, I think it was. And then we went to the slums during the day. And I did some interviews and the whole thing was deeply peculiar. It isn't a direct comparison, but I do... And, you know, Ash mentions when he was in Honduras, I think he said Honduras, and the woman came out and warned them to go back and steer. I mean, will that woman in Honduras

ever do any of her own travelling to anywhere? I mean, logically speaking, she won't, will she? So we privileged folk are visiting the rest of the world and we know they can't come to visit us it's not true of New York of course but I don't know the whole business of travel I think it's fascinating

I'm not expressing it very well but I think there is a politics about travel isn't there definitely very much so and it's not something everyone can do but I like what Ash said about going to trouble because I was a bit cynical about it, actually. I thought, I'm not sure about that.

So what, you can just wander around? So you can. You're given a Geiger counter in the same way that if you went to the, you know, the Natural History Museum, you can rent out an audio guide and your Geiger counter will tell you. Ping-pong. Yeah, which, you know, is really...

I would find that incredibly strange, and I'll just leave. But I appreciated what he said, actually, about just seeing something that happened that lives almost in our imagination, I think, as much as in our reality now, you know, because it was such a long time ago. But to see it and realise what men and women have done to the planet and what can then happen afterwards is probably a good thing.

Yes, we can talk forever about who travels where, how they get there, whether or not they should go. And what they come back with. And what they come back with, yes, because it's no good if we are changed by visiting India, but we're changed in some ways. I haven't been to India, but I imagine you'd be changed in some ways by seeing glimpses of absolute abject poverty. And those people, you've used them in a way to have a new... Is India changed by you visiting it?

Well, it was very much changed by too many British people visiting it in the first place. So there's that too. That's what I mean about the politics and the economics of travel. There are some very difficult questions to answer. None of which we should be even asking as we're promoting a travel show at Kensington Olympia. No, but people travel for good reasons. Yes, some of them do.

Yeah, right. God knows how much of this you'll be able to use. Let's do some emails. Dear Fee and Jane, I live and work in Madrid and most of my friends live elsewhere, so I love that your podcast keeps me company four times a week. I usually listen to it once I get home from work and start to prepare dinner or the next day's packed lunch

alone in the kitchen for my two grumpy teenagers. I remember the theme tune received some critique in the beginning and you're absolutely right, Paulina. I also found it extremely annoying after listening to your previous podcast with no such upbeat tunes. But then I decided to dance to it and release my tensions from being slouched over my computer all day at the office. I tried to move every bit of my rigid Scandinavian body, especially my arms and hips. The little few second dance before you start and at the end of your programme puts me in a good mood. And I think my hips have even begun to move a tiny bit too.

Sometimes if I listen to your podcast on my commute, I sashay down the street for a few beats. But I don't think anybody notices by my wildly swaying hips amongst the elegant Madrelinas. I posted tonight's kitchen dance on Twitter as a dance challenge to your listeners and have you seen that Jane? I have seen it and Paulina has nothing to, she's a good dancer. It is fantastic. She's a fantastic mover. And I was incredibly jealous of your ability. So pat yourself right on the back because you're so sinewy. I imagine you're easily able to do that. It'd be something I'd struggle with.

But also I rather like the fact it seems to sum up the kind of loose-limbed, not entirely prepared nature of the podcast. I think it speaks to, to use a terrible term that everyone uses too much at the moment, the essence of what this is all about so you can find it if you go on to twitter this is at p stalberg s-t-a-h-l-b-e-r-g or you could find it if you just search jane garvey one or fifi glover and if you too would like to do a dance to the theme tune we'd absolutely love to see it. I think our theme tune has grown on,

it's certainly grown on me. And I think it's grown on a few people listening because there is a different mood here. We are a little bit jauntier, aren't we? We're allowed to be. I think we're fast paced. Well, no, I think that's no, you've gone now you've gone way too far. I'd almost rather listen to me talking about the politics of travel than have you claim that we're fast paced. I wouldn't. Well, touche. Touche. Get me. Josie is in New Zealand. It's sultry and 27 degrees in Auckland. Oh, lucky you. She's making, how do I pronounce this? Keviche? Keviche? For dinner? Kviche. What is it?

Kviche. Then she says it's too hot to cook anything. What is it? It's when you marinate fish or another raw meat just in lemon juice, isn't it? Could you marinate a pigeon? Oh, don't go back to the pigeon. Anyway, Josie has enjoyed the interview with Sarah Polley,

who's the director of Women Talking. She said it was a good interview and actually we do recommend that film Women Talking it's one of those films that I'm not sure it's on terribly wide release I've noticed that it's available certainly in London but not at terrifically useful times

and not in that many venues so do seek it out though because it's well worth well worth a watch. Talking of women and what we have to put up with, until I switched from journalism to law, I didn't realise just how toxic it was for many women in law companies, especially. And Josie wants to draw our attention to a truly magnificent woman actually called Anne Olivarius. She speaks truth to power, great talent. I think she'd be good on your show. She does have a small social media presence, which I always leap on when she posts. So there's a name

that you might well want to seek out if you're interested in law and women and women's employment rights in particular. And thank you very much to Annana who has sent a very thoughtful email about pet food and because i've upset anna because i mentioned the other day that barbara's gone a bit gourmet barbara is a kitten and she i have been feeding her the tiny tins of gourmet food that cost twice as much and anna's not thrilled at this because she doesn't think that they contain the right mix of ingredients to be perfect i read the email with interest i have i've if i'm honest i never looked at what's in cat food should i have done i've always assumed very much the same things are in cat food just in different kind of uh uh what's the right word quantities thank you yes thank you darling uh and and i i get that the

more expensive ones should have a better provenance about them well you would imagine so but um you know it's a little bit like you know when you buy a ready meal um or indeed a moisturizer i'm convinced they're all just made in the same great big tub somewhere in an industrial estate, somewhere possibly in the Midlands, I'm going to say. And they've got one tub that's full of moisturiser and one tub that's full of beef stew. I love the Midlands. So, no, listen, I owe so much to the Midlands,

not least my honorary doctorate from the University of Birmingham. And indeed, never mind. And so I'm not entirely sure about what might be in pet food. What I did, what I could certainly bring to this particular conversational party is that my daughter did start her digestive journey off on very sensitive cat kibble. But she's lately begun to explore a whole new world and the other day my youngest daughter who is a bit of a her but she's a student she

popped upstairs having decided to make a tuna sandwich for lunch and left a load of mashed up tuna in a small bowl on the side in the kitchen when she came downstairs guess whose big tabby head was wedged in the bowl of tuna? Which I just told her, just get Dora's head out of the bowl, dust it down, and it'll be absolutely fine in your body. Really? And did she do that? Of course I didn't say that, because I'm an incredibly caring parent. I'm a little like our guest, Ash Barwaj. I care about my daughter. Of course I didn't let her eat that chewing.

Well, Anna, I take your point and I'm going to investigate all of this a little bit further. I mean, I have to also admit that Nancy, the enormous greyhound, absolute love of my life... Does she eat cat food? No, she gets a ridonkulously special dog food. She's quite a sensitive puppet too. Oh, isn't she?

I know. We live in a world of sensitive pets. Well, I tell you what, with greyhounds, you don't want to abuse their intestines too much because their wind is tragic. So if she's not on quite an expensive dog food... Honestly, there are some days you can't really get into the house. The smell is so bad.

Has she ever tried tripe? Well, that was the problem. I was feeding her a dog food that had tripe in it, and it was just dreadful. Oh, that was the issue. Because I remember back, we had a border collie when I was growing up, Jenny. And when my mum, my mum used to love tripe, and nobody else in the family liked it. So every now and again, she would cook tripe just for her and the dog. And I can remember the smell.

I mean, tripe is a vile product. It's challenging. But my mum grew up in Liverpool during the war and tripe was something that people did eat and liked, apparently. Mum, I think she still does like tripe. But the dog used to absolutely love it. Well, I think Nancy loved it, but the smell. No, didn't love her entrails.

And her digestive system didn't get on with it. Well, hopefully this has put everybody on the rocky road to booking a holiday. Which I think was our original intention, although I'm not absolutely certain anymore what our intention was. I think we've managed to be offensive, probably... Meandering. Yep, a little bit xenophobic, and definitely just rather, me, rather unpleasant towards the end.

So I apologise for all of that, and it'll be much, much better next week. Jane and Fee at times.radio. You can be a part of this. I mean, whether you'd want to be or not is the really big question. You have been listening to Off Air with Jane Garvey and Fee Glover.

Our Times Radio producer is Rosie Cutler and the podcast executive producer is Ben Mitchell. Now you can listen to us on the free Times Radio app or you can download every episode from wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget that if you like what you heard and thought, hey, I want to listen to this but live, then you can Monday to Thursday, three till five on Times Radio. Embrace the live radio jeopardy. Thank you for listening and hope you can join us off air very soon. Goodbye.