Off Air... with Jane and Fi - These enormous knickers are on and they stay on (with Joanne Harris)

Episode Date: May 10, 2023

Another joyous episode and this time Jane and Fi are talking the joys of naked swimming, elasticated clothing and the controversial twirl.Plus, they're joined by bestselling author Joanne Harris, author of ‘Chocolat’, to discuss her new novel ‘Broken Light’ all about middle age, menopause and female anger.If you want to contact the show to ask a question and get involved in the conversation then please email us: [e-mail] Producers: Eve SalusburyTimes Radio Producer: Rosie Cutler Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

what are you screwing up a 10 pound note i was going to give to you i'm keeping hold of it actually you can't crunch no i was going to say it wouldn't um i miss i miss cash well you could always still get some out. You can use it some places. I do get it out. I do always have some with me just in case. Have you yet done that very modern thing of tap and paying for a busker or somebody selling the big issue or somebody like that? Do they take...

They've got tap and pay now. Have they? Wow, I didn't know that. OK. Yep. No, I really didn't know that. But I did notice the last busker I walked past, which would have been at the weekend, they had their guitar case open

and they clearly, I think, put their own change in because it was very specifically kind of laid out along the case. And then he had a big sign saying if you don't have cash don't worry don't worry tap and pay here but it just took one brave person to go up and do it because obviously he couldn't stop all the time during every song to explain how to do the tap and pay it was slightly tricky so so the first person who went up worked it out and then told the next person who came up it was out and then told the next person who came up. It was kind of pass the info along.

But we'll all get the hang of it one day. But we're in a frontier position. How much do you think we'd be in any way successful as buskers? What would our kind of USP? Well you'd have your oboe and I could just introduce you and then leave you to play the oboe while

I took around the hats. No, I think you're on to something, and I think we could do an oboe and maraca combo. It's never been seen before. But who knows, Eurovision, the next semi-final, we might be exposed to something along those lines. Hannah Waddingham, she was new to me because I haven't seen Ted Lasso, but she was all over the Eurovision semi-final last night.

Everybody loves her. And presumably she'll be back on Thursday and on Saturday as well for the big final. Yeah. She was very forceful. We've had quite a few very forceful, statuesque women, haven't we, over the weekend? Yes. Penny Mordaunt. Hannah Mordaunt.

Yeah. Who'd win that fight? Well, obviously Penny's got a sword And Hannah doesn't have one At the moment No But she's got a football club Yeah That's true

I think actually Penny Because I think To be able to stay That still For such a long time I think that gives her an edge A sharp edge With the sword

Anyway Right We've got lots and lots Of lovely emails Can we just say we've got an email special coming up? It's like the old days, isn't it? Oh, yes. It's like the old days, except it's more fun. And we'll have an email special on when will it drop? Friday. Yeah. So we're recording it tomorrow. So if you have sent in an email over the last six months and it's not being read out then you just never

know we're going to have a great big trawl aren't we through the email cash but you've gone straight to one that's entitled naked swimming bring it on well this is from lynn parker who says i too love swimming in the sea and if possible naked as we were talking about how you cannot swim naked without smiling it's one of life's great pleasures and even jane agreed with that then never having been comfortable showing my body in public my technique is to find a quiet spot swim out tread water and then remove my cozy i often did this on family holidays to greece where we'd drive to a deserted beach and i would enjoy the beautiful waters of the Aegean. How much would you like to be in the beautiful waters?

Oh please. I don't want to keep on sounding so negative it's just that sprung spring has not sprung in the UK and it's just still just on the cusp of something happening and by something happening I mean just like 17 Celsius

would be good and if it just stopped bloody raining yeah anyway my vertebrae are damp yeah one time i did this i returned and felt so great and we hadn't seen a soul all morning i stood on the rocks and saluted the sea just as i did this a small boat chugged from behind the headland full of tourists who were videoing the coastline i've often wondered how many people have seen that video. Last year, now at 72 years of age, I tried the same thing in Wales. My cosy slipped off easily enough, but I struggled to get both legs back into the sturdy swimwear. I was eventually successful, but returned to the beach exhausted and with my swimming costume inside out.

I don't think I'll be trying it again, which makes me sad because the feeling of the water slipping all over your body is fantastic. Then don't give up. Who cares about your swimwear being inside out? I bet nobody gave you a second glance because unfortunately, over the age of about 45, we as female swimmers are invisible anyway. But I commend you for your dedication to the art of swimming naked. And yeah, don't give up. Please don't give up. And from unrestriction and beautiful freedom, swimming naked in the sea, to tight garments, specifically girdles. I have triggered something in Lorna, who has memories of her medical career.

This is because I mentioned my nana's girdle, which I was occasionally responsible for tightening as quite a young girl. And I have to say, probably a responsibility that shouldn't have fallen to me necessarily. But I was honoured to be asked. And by the way, Mary Esther would be absolutely thrilled to know that she's still being discussed and in podcast form some decades after her death. So if she is listening in some way, she'd be chuffed to hear that she was still very much part of my life. And she is actually. Lorna says, I'm a newly retired doctor.

And your story about girdles vividly, vividly brought back my first years of working. vividly brought back my first years of working. They were in a large Victorian red brick and soot-blackened stone general hospital containing multiple nightingale wards. Now, do you remember these nightingale wards? Because they were a thing. They were very much traditional in most British hospitals because there were rows of metal beds down either side,

as Lorna describes, very high ceilings, and that was for ventilation against infection, enormous arch windows and balconies so you could wheel the patients out onto the balconies but there was very little patient privacy. It was only the 1980s but it sounds much longer ago says Lorna. All the old ladies who must have been born realistically in the early 20th century were very attached to the pink or peach satin laced corsets that they all wore. Usually there was a quick release seam of dozens of hooks and eyes. The corsets did nothing to disguise the girth of these ladies, but getting them out to be examined and

then back in to maintain their dignity added hours to my working day. I am forever grateful for the ease of removal of modern underwear. And she says, oops, you know what I mean. Well, yes, we do know what you mean, but you're absolutely right. Underwear back in those days was really, really rigid and just complicated. And as Lorna says, they're hugely time consuming Whereas now, these enormous knickers, they're just on and they stay on. Right. I don't think we want to dwell on that. No, but you know what I mean. I do know what you mean. There's no effort involved.

I think just the time before which elastic played a major part in clothing terrifies me. So the idea of going about my daily business, everything that I do, from chores in the morning to walking the dog, to coming to work, to sleeping, I am in some kind of elasticated clothing. And we are so much more comfortable as women than we would have been 100 years ago.

Yeah. I think you're right to point to an under-celebrated area of female life, the freedom to wear garments that actually don't constrict you. I know some people love a basque and they can look amazing. Say that again. A basque. What's wrong with that?

What do you call them? No, I just love the pronunciation. I'm not going to make a comparison at all. That's lovely. Okay, thank you very much. Go on then. What? Well, I wanted to mention drones. Oh, okay. Well, I just wanted to give a recommendation which comes from Amy in Manchester, who says a number of times you've pondered whether men talk about the issue of violence against women and girls, and if so, what is said? And I thought you might be interested in the fantastic documentary,

The Feminist on Cell Block Y. Have you heard of that? I haven't. No, OK. So, which at the time of writing can be found on the YouTube. It's set in a Californian prison and covers a programme of workshops run by a group of male prisoners for fellow inmates. There are lectures on subjects such as toxic masculinity and patriarchy

and the course has a strong feminist underpinning. The participants are articulate and insightful and talk openly about their thoughts and feelings. They draw links between how buying into toxic views of what it is to be a man led to their lifestyle choices and prison sentences, and you see them discussing the work of bell hooks, rape culture, their previous conceptions of feminism

and of women as other, how they were parented, etc. It's fascinating and I highly recommend it. That sounds amazing, Amy. That really does sound interesting. So I'm going to go and search for it, The Feminist on Cell Block Y. I might have to wait until after Eurovision,

if that's okay, just because I really want to maintain the joy that Eurovision gives me up okay just because I really want to maintain the joy that Eurovision gives me up until I can enjoy it no longer and then I'll dive straight back into that. But that's such a good recommendation. Do you know what, there are some things that come out of prisons aren't they

in a creative sense. Prison radio is a big thing. Exactly. Which are absolutely superb. Ear Hustle is the podcast That is so good. Which is made by inmates in American jails. And if you've never bothered to listen to that, I'd recommend that too. There's amazing talent in that podcast, actually. Truly amazing.

Sean, it was just talking about, we were discussing the Coronation concert and the extraordinary light show. And Sean says, the big things in the sky that you referenced are actually hundreds of individual small drones, V, with a light on each and a computer programme moves them around in the sky. All sorts of people listen to this

Tosh and we're very grateful. Sean casually drops in that he worked on the G7 in St Ives in Cornwall and there was supposed to be a display in Carrow's Bay with all the heads of state duly watching on being enchanted and entranced but the American Secret Service stated that they would need to check every single drone before the display could go ahead. So the event was cancelled as nobody in the British government had the backbone to tell

them to pack the old man off to bed and the rest of us can continue to enjoy the party. Well, I suppose you can see that they might find that a little bit tricky. Presumably that would have been that would have been Biden, wouldn't it, at the G7? Or was that still Trump? Can't remember when that. All I remember about that is that the the young johnson baby was really very small and was wandering along a beach yes it was the biden's it was the biden's yeah definitely was i'm just trying to picture all i can think of is uh carrie had an amazing pink dress on didn't she which turned out to be uh from a rental dress rental agency it was the first time that i'd

ever heard that there was such a thing. Sorry, I've gone off on that. That's so interesting, Sean. How annoying to just not have been able to say, why don't we just pack off the dignitaries, you know, because none of us really care if a drone explodes overhead. Although I suppose you can't really say that, can you?

But what a shame. All the work that went into it. There will have been a lot of work put into that. And just because they selfishly wanted to keep their president safe. But I mean, why, I suppose, are they? Yeah, they are. I mean, they are more globally significant, aren't they, than anybody else attending the G7, I guess.

So that's that. Just got to live with it. Well, I hope you had your own tiny private drone show somewhere else, Sean. And yes, what an interesting job. Can we say hello to our colleagues Stig and Asma? You're going to start reading Asma's book, A Pebble in the Throat, which is the memoir that she's written alongside her mum, which is out, I think, next week, isn't it?

Yes, it is next week. Next Thursday. I know that I've said this before, but I'm just going to say it again I think it's a superb book you and I have known Asma a long time I haven't known her very closely as a friend but we've all you know we all worked together haven't we for 20 years really and I had no idea about uh how much racism she had been on the receiving end of in her early years in Glasgow. And it's a really, really amazing book because the way that she talks about everything

that she's seen and been through is in no way self-pitying or self-aggrandising or kind of over-revelatory. It's just so factual about how her life changed and her personality changed because of what cruel, prejudiced people said to her at school. I think it's just amazing, Jane, and I'm going to look forward to hearing what you think about it too.

Well, I'm definitely going to read it and I will absolutely let you know. It's made me think, just listening to you now, about how very different things were. So asthma is certainly not as old as me but racism uh back in the 70s was very very real and i speak as someone who was white and therefore not the victim of racism but lived amongst it and frankly didn't do anything at all to stop it happening because it was a part of me that was just grateful they weren't picking on me and i suspect that also would have applied to lots of other people in the class. Well I think what struck me as well about Asma's book is the experience of her mum so the memoir is written

between the two of them so they talk about their well her mum talks about her starting life in Pakistan and then coming to Glasgow so you've got two pairs of eyes witnessing the same things. And it's just remarkable. I just really, really, really enjoyed the book. So I heartily recommend that to everybody. Stig's book as well, because it's difficult, isn't it? Sharing a Breakfast Show. They're two very successful published authors now.

I don't want any competition between the two of them. So we had Stig on our programme when you were away with Jane Mulkerins and we enjoyed his book very much too and I just want to say a big thank you to him as well today because he bought us both a twirl. You're all over him. Yes, thanks, Steve. No, I'm not all over him. I wanted to say thank you

because it was a very sweet thing to do. Well, I'm now a twirl convert. It's been quite a couple of weeks for me. Well, I tell you what, you're a twirl turncoat because you've come from slagging it off and not quite being flaky enough to be a flake. I thought it was an insubstantial snack with a funny aftertaste. But I said to you, they've changed the recipe because this is very, very edible now. OK, well, you enjoyed Stig's twirl too. So there we go. That's that's colleagues ticked. Yes, I don't think we can do any more. If anybody else on Times Radio has written a book,

just leave us alone for the time being, will you? Because we're dead busy. We've had a surfeit of it. Shall we introduce today's guest? Yes, today's guest is an interesting woman. She's Joanne Harris. She was, I think, well, she told us a little bit about it off air, actually, that she'd been an accountant, she'd been a teacher, hadn't she?

And then she very casually, while she was a teacher, wrote a book that sold a million copies called Chocolat, hugely successful. And of course, it became a film as well with Juliette Binoche. So she's had all sorts of success, Joanne Harris. She's also the chair of the Society of Authors. And in that role, I think it's fair to say there has been a degree of controversy,

which we do discuss towards the end of this interview. But her new book is called Broken Light, and it's about a menopausal woman called Bernie Moon, somebody who's really not had much choice about doing anything other than putting other people front and centre of her life. In other words, she's never really come first, not even in her own life. But in Broken Light, she comes out of the shadows and unleashes magical powers. So we started by asking her about her central character in Broken Light, Bernie Moon. Well, Bernie Moon is quite forgettable in a lot of ways. She's very ordinary.

She's led a quiet life, which is mostly devoted to her slightly disappointing husband and her even more disappointing son. She was unpopular at school. She had one friend there who she's not stayed in touch with. And she's quite a sad character. And she's a bit of a loner. She works in a bookshop. And she doesn't really have much of a life at all and is approaching menopause

with a lot of the distressing menopause symptoms that we're just hearing about now in the last few years in public conversations. And she has an attendant problem, which is that she has also developed a superpower. And this book is a kind of a little nod to Stephen King's Carrie, in a way, I guess, because Carrie gets her superpowers at puberty, which is an objectively terrible time to give anybody superpowers and particularly you know teenage girl they're full of drama of course it ends terribly badly but what if Carrie had instead got her superpowers with menopausal

hormones instead of puberty and so that that is the premise of my story I was trying to remember the very end of Carrie do you remember the end Carrie? I wouldn't have been able to remember the end of Carrie because it was too frightening to get even more than halfway through. I remember just a bucket of blood being tipped over somebody's head at the end of Carrie. Is that the right film? Absolutely, it's terrible. She is invited to the prom. That's it.

She has a wonderful evening, but her enemies are lying in wait for her. Tip a bucket of blood onto her head instead of the glitter that she expected to get for being crowned prom queen and she quite rightly explodes sets everybody on fire and self immolates basically it's a very sad story and and not not one that i wanted to to recreate so my my carry is much quieter than that. And her superpowers are much quieter than Carrie's. Still effective, though, aren't they? Well, yes, I think, you know, superpowers don't have to be aggressive. They don't have to be about setting people on fire.

All they have to be is different. Can we just talk a little bit about the murder? There is a murder in Broken Light of a woman called Jo Perry. And she was out running and she was wearing a sweatshirt that's marked feminist killjoy across it. And it's really interesting. There's a part in Broken Light where we see what people are saying about this on social media. And it's so true to life. It really made my stomach churn reading the comments

because they're all comments you know would be made, largely by men saying things like, well, what was she out running for what was she doing at night what was she doing yes yes i i know it's a terribly sad thing and and in fact because i was writing this book against the background of partly the sarah everard murder and also some other murders that didn't get quite as much publicity as that one. I was able to find quite a lot of fairly authentic stuff online on Twitter, some of which I've adapted and semi-quoted. And so these are all basically things that people really said, horrible though they might be. And they reflect a kind of victim blaming mentality, I think, that means that when something happens to a woman woman the first question

that's asked is was it her fault and you know what's really upsetting Joanne is that some of those comments are made by women too and it's still incredibly topical at the case of E. Jean Carroll today I was looking online at the comments that people are making and some people and some women are all saying not all are well, why doesn't she remember? She doesn't remember the date. Why doesn't she remember? If that had happened to me, I'd have remembered. Why is that still front and centre of some people's minds?

Well, I think that, you know, we live in a patriarchy. The patriarchy gives us certain narratives about what a woman's behaviour is supposed to be. And internalised misogyny is a thing. I think it's very easy to buy into some of these narratives without realising that actually what you're serving is not in your best interests to serve. And yeah, I mean, unfortunately, the world that we live in

has a tendency to look at victims sometimes in quite a negative light and to judge them in ways that really are not appropriate. A victim is a victim. Would you have been able to write this book a good few years ago or is there something around the more open conversation about the menopause which meant it was easier to cast the protagonist in that particular part of her life? I don't think I would have been able

to write it 10 years ago because, well, I think some of it has been partly at least informed by events and also personal experience. I wouldn't have written about the menopause without having been through the menopause and having known something about the physicality of the symptoms and also the attitudes of people like doctors, some of the things that surprised me when I was going through menopause about, you know, I gave Bernie an episode where she goes to her doctor and explains her symptoms and he says, I guess you're menopausal. And she says, well, is there something we can do about it? And he says, well, yeah, I could prescribe you HRT, but maybe we should just let nature take its course. This is exactly what my GP said to me.

And I thought, well, you know, if there was something that could have helped, why didn't you offer it? But I think sometimes that there is still, you know, a little bit of shame and a little bit of judgment attached to these things that are completely natural. Right. Yes. Attached to what? Just getting older, because that's all it is. Getting older and having physical symptoms that other people may find distasteful or disgusting or upsetting or unappealing or unfeminine or all the things that we're frightened into not being as young women

because, you know, that might be the end of the world that some random guy on Twitter might not find as attractive. I know you use the term flashes and not flushes. I do, yes. And it's quite interesting because I don't have hot flushes or flashes anymore, thanks to the wonders of HRT. And I always felt they were more of a flash than a flush. But a lot of British people have taken exception and said, oh, you should be saying flush, not flash. Well, I'm a bit disappointed in them in that that way because anybody who knows me and who knows my books should really have asked themselves the question

why did she choose that word or tell us why because i think you know a hot flush is something that we understand it is something to do with the physicality of going through menopause but bernie's hot flashes are something slightly different yeah they are what herald this ability to penetrate somebody else's mind, particularly the mind of a predator. And so they are flashes of fiery intuition, if you like. Again, it's a kind of play on carry, but it is also specifically not just a menopausal symptom. It is an episode of psychic connection, if you like. And I wanted to make a distinction between those two things, which is why I

chose that that word. What do you hope a much younger reader will enjoy about the book because some people have said that the current conversation about the menopause which you know we in our generation I think find incredibly helpful bordering on glorious sometimes could actually be making younger women fearful of an inevitability, a point in their life that might be all right or it might be horrendous. Yeah, I mean, I understand that completely. And we are still having conversations about it, which make it better than not having conversations about it.

It is nothing to be feared. And I think as we normalise conversations around it, it will be a good thing and it will be less of a kind of lurking monster. And I think that's certainly a good thing. But I think young readers will perhaps identify with other characters in here because it's a book that has a number of women from different generations, different backgrounds. I deliberately wanted it to span the experiences of as many diverse women as I could think of because I think too often we have this idea that there is a sort of bit of a monoculture of the way women are represented in some kinds of fiction and I wanted to to challenge

that a bit and so one of the the main characters Bernie's close friend is Iris, who is only 22 and who is as different to Bernie and her experience as you could possibly imagine. And I wanted to give Bernie a friend from a different generation for that reason, so that, you know, so it wasn't just ladies of a certain age getting together and discussing the menopause. Will it be filmed, do you think? Because I wonder who you'd like to play, both Bernie and Iris. Oh, I would love it to be filmed. I don't know. You know, I would love to see Olivia Colman play Bernie. Yes, good pick.

As for Iris, well, you know, I think a young, unknown actress who can play, at the same time, vulnerable, but also strangely bulshy and psychopathic I think is a great part for somebody to be discovered in yeah also you get to have cool pink hair which I've always rather fancied having myself and so I gave it to Iris instead um Joanne I think we've established that your book is a book about women it's largely I'm going to say, for women, but there are important male characters. And I wonder whether you, do you feel sorry for men and their place in the world and how women are challenging it? I just want to quote something from Woody, who's not a very likeable man, who's in your book.

And you write of him, it's the feminists. They're the ones who've ruined things. Before that, he thinks there were certainties. Men and women knew where they stood. Men were the providers, the protectors, the heroes. Women wore frocks and respected themselves. And back in those glory days, if you were an average white man, frankly, things were simpler for those men. And they're harder for them now, aren't they? Perhaps they were simpler, but I'm not sure that necessarily means they were better. Sometimes simplicity is reductive. And also sometimes it eclipses other people and gives them a worse life.

I think if you're living in a patriarchy, really nobody benefits that much. I don't think anyone benefits from making other people feel unhappy or marginalised. And the reason that I wrote Woody the way I did, and he is objectively quite an awful human being, but I also wanted people to understand where he was coming from and understand that although he does some quite dreadful things and says some quite dreadful things, he is not happy under the system that exists.

And the system is a system created by men to serve men, and it really doesn't. It doesn't serve anybody. And so the is a system created by men to serve men. And it really doesn't. It doesn't serve anybody. And so that the men here are not the villains and the women are not the heroes. It's much more complicated than that. And I hope that I've tried to make everybody fully human rather than just representative of a type. Now, you've mentioned Twitter, I think, and you're active on Twitter, aren't you? You're active on Twitter aren't you you're somebody who talks to people on Twitter you've shared you've been through breast cancer and

you've shared your experience of that on Twitter you're actually rather a public author not every author is as public as you are. No it sort of worked that way I think you know because I was a teacher for 15 years and and I had a staff room that I would sometimes go to during lessons or between lessons and grab a cup of tea and talk for 30 seconds to someone before dashing off again. I think Twitter, in a way, has become my staff room. And it gives me my news a lot of the time, connects me to people that I wouldn't normally see very often. And I've met a lot of people on Twitter who I've later worked with. I wrote a musical with Howard Goodall because of something that started on Twitter. You know, I scripted the Wombles movie for Mike

Batt because of something that happened on Twitter. And few of us can say that, Joanne. All sorts of funny things have happened to me because of Twitter. And it connects me, I think, you know, because I live in the North and I spend much of my life in a shed. It's quite nice to have a connection with people, particularly with lockdown. It was a bit of a lifeline, actually. So in your capacity as the chair of the Society of Authors, you got into, well, you tell me because I'm not sure Twitter spat is quite the right term for what happened, but you were involved in an exchange of views or you face an accusation that you hadn't defended JK Rowling very vehemently or very vociferously after she'd faced death threats what do you want to say about all that well I

haven't said anything about that on Twitter and I'm not going to not even for clicks or the kind of clicks that I'm expected to look for on Twitter I have said absolutely nothing negative about JK Rowling. And I think that anybody getting death threats is absolutely unacceptable. And I've said that too. That has absolutely nothing to do with my role of the Society of Authors, because my Twitter account is a personal account. So, you know, people who have conflated those things are really just people of bad faith who haven't really wanted to examine what they were talking about. of course i mean say something i think it's fair to say joanne there's nothing the patriarchy likes more than a ding dong between two middle-aged women absolutely i think women attacking each other is exactly what the patriarchy wants which is why i'm not going to

bad mouth a colleague or make any differences of opinion a way of allowing people of bad faith to keep the status quo going rather than examine the problems with it. So no, I think this is something that we see all the time. I think any feminist looking at feminists attacking each other needs to say, who does this benefit? It benefits the patriarchy. And actually, I say quite a lot about this in the book too, about, you know, women needing to understand each other's experience and pull together and be friends, because, I mean, one of the things in the original Carrie is the woman-on-woman nastiness in there

that I wanted to remove from that story, because it's a very male trope. Where do you think we are on the journey to both sides of the arguments about trans rights at the moment? If you were to take a long view, where are we right now? I don't know. And I think just the fact that you've said both sides of the argument implies that it's a binary discussion. I don't think it is. I think that the experience that people have is so personal that it's unfair to ask anybody to comment about a whole group of people, even if they could. And I don't think it's useful.

I think social media has polarised an awful lot of thinking and has simplified and reduced conversations to a question of sides. It isn't a football match. This is society. We live in a society which is changing. We need to be inclusive. We need to stick together. We need to look at the experience of marginalised people without fear. And that's it, really. I don't think anybody should be asked to speak

on behalf of an amorphous group of people because I don't even think those groups of people exist. That is the author Joanne Harris. Joanne Harris, if you pronounce it, I don't know which way you pronounce it. I made a bit of a meal of it the first time. She is half French, so she may use it in that way. I don't know. So we ended by talking about her.

And I think it's been quite controversial, that business with her at the Society of Authors. I am very much aware, as soon as you start saying the Twitter row, Society of Authors, you disappear down a quite wonky and to some people completely irrelevant area of discussion that has no impact on their daily life whatsoever. But nevertheless, there were a lot of people who loved the notion of Joanne Harris and J.K. Rowling having a row. That's indisputable. Yeah, and I completely take her point that there shouldn't be

one side says this and one side says that when you're talking about people's lives transgender people's lives but it boils down to that too simplistically and that's where most people can actually have the conversation and hold the arguments in their head is one person's thinking that the other person's thinking something different. And I, you know, she has a far greater wisdom and experience of transgender issues than I do, possibly than you do. So she can see that bit in the middle

and all the nuances within it. But I don't know. I wonder how we're going to get to a better understanding. I think both those positions seem so entrenched now. It seems to get louder and louder. There's a big ding dong about the Oxford Union, isn't there? Well, yes, because they're having Kathleen Stock to talk to them. I mean, I always think stories about the Oxford Union punch above their weight because most of us didn't go to Oxford, don't really know what it is. They do, but you made the very good point today

that why it matters at the Oxford Union, and for people who are listening and thinking, oh, I've got to go and Google Kathleen Stockett, she's a professor who was at the University of Sussex who very firmly believes that your biological identity is your gender identity. And she left, well, she says she very much had to leave the University of Sussex. I think

she did have to leave because trans groups didn't like what she was saying at all so she's been no-platformed quite a lot over the last couple of years but she's speaking at the Oxford Union but your brilliant point was the reason why it matters Jane is because so many of the people at the Oxford Union by dint of the fact that they're there at the moment, will be the future power makers. So nearly every member of the Conservative cabinet, not now, but about 10 years ago, was a member or president of the Oxford Union.

So they go on to have far more power and influence than, dare I say it, even your eye. What? So that's why it really matters doesn't it yes yes it does matter i i think i'm i don't want to be sort of you know all anti-woke because as you know i'm a crop-haired head-banging feminist feminist and have been for some time um but the fact that there's the reason that the oxford union and kathleen stock were in the newspapers today was that um students had been counselling if they were in any way discombobulated

by what Kathleen Stock had to say. And actually, interestingly, one of the students who was quoted mentioned that they'd had a porn performer speak to them a couple of weeks ago and nobody had been offered counselling on that occasion. You know, we could go on and on forever. I mean, if I was offered counselling every time I came across someone with the audacity to disagree with me, I'd be, as you know,

I'd be locked in a room having permanent counselling. You would. You'd be there 23 hours a day. I completely agree. And also, if you think you're going to be offended by something, just don't go. Really seriously, just don't go. Well, that's a good tip. You don't have to. Stay in and do some work, you students.

Can I just say, just before we we go that I know in the past we have promised that we will try and be much more sensitive actually about the whole trans argument at the moment and actually to hear more voices of people with lived experience so we are still on the case about that and I think actually that's the only way

to solve the polarised problem isn't it? It's just to hear more stories because not, you know, it's not a one size fits all thing, is it? No, people's stories are what, I was going to say this, what makes the world go round. Well, that's actually gravitational force. What? You see, you're disagreeing with me and now I need counselling. Sort it out! Oh dear, don't be offended by off-air it out don't do it oh dear don't be offended

by off air please don't be and join us again at the same time tomorrow kids that's it from us I'm going to take these folks to their next home

oh she's robbing from the office that's disgusting well done for getting to the end of another episode of off air with jane garvey and fee glover our times radio producer is rosie Cutler and the podcast executive producer is Henry Tribe. And don't forget, there is even more of us every afternoon on Times Radio. It's Monday to Thursday, three till five. You can pop us on when you're pottering around the house or heading out in the car on the school run or running a bank. Thank you for joining us and we hope you can join us again on Off Air very soon. Don be so silly money good bank i know lady listener