Spinning Plates with Sophie Ellis-Bextor - Episode 21: Jack Monroe

Episode Date: February 15, 2021

Jack Monroe is a cook, a writer, a campaigner and also a mum to 10 year old Johnny. We talked about Jack's dream job in the fire service, experiences of not having enough to eat as a new mum, what it means to identify as non-binary, and how you should never panic when your child only wants to eat chicken nuggets.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Peloton all-access membership separate. Learn more at onepeloton.ca slash running. Hello, I'm Sophia Lispector and welcome to Spinning Plates, the podcast where I speak to busy working women who also happen to be mothers about how they make it work. I'm a singer and I've released seven albums in between having my five sons aged 16 months to 16 years, so I spin a few plates myself. Being a mother can be the most amazing thing, but can also be hard to find time for yourself and your own ambitions. I want to be a bit nosy and see how other people balance everything. Welcome to Spinning Plates. Hey, podcats. How are you doing? I'm recording this outside my house. My hand is so

cold it's about to fall off. I tried recording this about three or four times inside the house. I kept being interrupted because it turns out I had a lot of children and they just want to come and find me even when I hide myself in the room. So it's quite obvious I want some space. Anyway, how are you? It's been ages. I haven't done a podcast since December. Had a month off and I'm now back with a beautiful selection of people to talk to for this series, third series. series that's exciting thank you so much for uh yeah for being there with me I've missed you actually I've been looking forward to getting on with another series um what's been going on in the meantime same as you probably lockdown blah blah uh not really sure what day of the week it is uh Actually, that's not quite true. I do know it's Valentine's Day, so happy love day to you. And kids are on half term, so you know, all off school.

How is everything going with you? And if you're doing the homeschooling thing, should we just admit defeat and not call it homeschooling? Why did they ever call it homeschooling? It's not homeschooling. As my mum pointed out to me this week, it's emergency education. Doesn't that sound much more apt? If you think you're doing emergency education, oh, hello, buddy. You stop trying to be perfect at it, which is ridiculous anyway. My house, you've seen what my kitchen looks like probably. We don't have a home that looks like a school. And I am not very patient when it comes to teaching, it turns out anyway that's boring we don't talk about that what else been going on I've been writing a bit of a book that's

been fun doing a bit of an autobiography just as and when I can it's been quite fun to delve back to memories I haven't thought of for ages like going back to when I was 16 17 actually it's been quite traumatic but it's fine you've got to read all about it at some point, hopefully. I've been doing a bit of work on the album. Everything's been pretty slow, just toodling along and waiting for spring. I can't wait. Anywho, you don't want to hear about all that. You want to hear about who I'm speaking to this week,

who is a brilliant food chef, cook, blogger, and famously known as the bootstrap cook, Jack Monroe. Now, I was really keen to speak to Jack for a few reasons. I've always found Jack a really intelligent presence in my Twitter feed. And she is someone who identifies as non-binary, which means she does use she, her pronouns, but also they, them. And I think if you've got any kind of questions about how that might work, I think you'll find Jack speaks really, really well about that and about what it's like to raise a kid as a non-binary parent, and also what it's like to raise a kid as a single parent, what it's like to raise a kid with a really good relationship with the father

of your child, and also what it's like to raise your small person in really, really extreme poverty. Jack found themselves redundant after having their first baby and then slowly slipped into just having no money, no resources, extreme anxiety about how to deal with it, shame that goes along with it. Anyway, they speak really, really well about it. So I felt really privileged actually to spend such a long time in their presence because I found them really, really generous with their time and also passionate and super smart and completely charming actually.

I thought Jack was just really lovely. So thanks to Jack and thanks to you for letting me get on with another series. I really love it and I've got some lovely guests this series and my hand is about to fall off with cold. So let's listen to the chat and I'll see you on the other side. Well, I've been really, really looking forward to talking to you because I feel like there's so many things we can talk about.

Just trying to think where to start. Probably start with the here and now how's everything in your life at the moment how's it all going we're about to enter into this lovely another lockdown well I mean just sort of that purgatory phase before going back into lockdown waiting to see what's going to happen like what the world looks like for the next few weeks or however long it lasts so just sort of pensive but trying to you know get all the ducks in a row yeah get some pasta and rice in you know make sure there's some stuff kicking around to do and try to not lose my head about work stuff and just go from there really I think this year's been so tough with with that because I felt actually weirdly very busy this year but I think I've just

I think half of the busyness is just in my head really in terms of just trying to keep my thoughts ordered yeah um and I don't know how you found it with the first lockdown when suddenly you're just at home all the time but I just found it very hard to kind of think clearly about stuff or find space to sort of order my thoughts about what I was trying to get done and what the days should consist of? Yeah, it's suddenly that complete lack of routine. And I mean, I've worked from home as a freelancer for the last seven years, roughly. I lose track of time at roughly seven years. So I've always been quite used to having to structure my own days,

do my own routines. And I've just done, on an Excel spreadsheet, a fit of organisation that you'll learn is extremely rare and like a timetable for my days like so this time I do social media this I check any like orders on my website and you know Instagram and things like that and then the kids were booted out of school and and responsible for their education and suddenly it was like ah so that that lasted all of six days and now i've got to do rocks and biology and long division and and um and we've sort of we're just pulling out the other side of that now i'm just going oh okay so right where's that exile spreadsheet

i did with some sort of timetable in and um I know a lot of people are calling for schools to close now in the second lockdown but I also completely understand why they're not yeah because it's it's so disruptive to children's education yeah I read something the other day that said that year seven children are now about 22 months behind where they should be in their curriculum at some schools like in their like learning where they're where they're at on their learning journeys and I just read that and I was like oh yikes that's a that's a gap isn't it yeah and so your your son he's in year six year six so 11 plus next week and um we're just sort of hanging in going like well the i mean the impact that this year would have had on on his age group on all age groups really but specifically on children in year six who are working towards like their secondary schools and things like that is

just we've just got to suck it up i suppose and, and see where it goes. I know. It is really tough. And I think my 11-year-old was really angry that the schools were staying open for lockdown. He's like, the only good thing about a lockdown is no school for him. So he was just like, I just want to be at home. Mine absolutely loved being at home for six months. And I loved it. We got a really good relationship. We've got a really good relationship we've got a

really good relationship we got stronger and deeper in that time we got to know each other really well in ways that you don't really get to when they're out of the house for seven hours a day and and um and that time was really lovely and I'm really grateful for it but when he when it was announced that schools were reopening he practically ran down the road with his school bag like I'm back I'm going back and I was like yeah it's time yeah yeah yeah I know I think with your lockdown mainly just the two of you then yeah it was that it was the two of us so um it was quite intimate and very um sort of a bit tedious in places, but also quite fun because if I lost sort of half a day's work

because I was hanging around playing Lego with a 10 year old, I just would shunt it off and do it in the evenings instead. But a lot of my support network, my mum was shielding and she does some childcare after school and my admin assistant has a daughter

who was shielding. So the people that would normally be popping in and out and providing like stimulation, childcare assistance, were all sort of suddenly shut away in their houses. It's suddenly like, hang on, my entire social network consists of vulnerable people. So yeah, I haven't worked on making sort of stronger and more resilient friends for this

time around unfortunately there wasn't time to go out and like befriend people to the extent that you'd be like hey come and look after my kid for an hour um but hey it's fine we'll we'll work it out i know we will have to really i don't know it's funny because when i first started recording these conversations i thought i don't really want want every chat to involve lots of talk about lockdown. So initially, I'd always be like, OK, let's get the lockdown chat out the way because it felt like that chapter. But now I think we're all kind of acknowledging probably what we already knew, which is that the impact of this year is going to rumble on for far, far longer,

both in logistics for the here and now, the way these next few months are going to rumble on for far far longer both in you know logistics for the here and now you know the way these next few months are going to pass but also for the future the way it's changed the course of what's been going on so it isn't really something that's just like an aside as much anymore no and and i think especially with um the work that i do i mean i came to prominence in the last recession as somebody who was writing cheap recipes, but also writing about the realities of living on the breadline, looking for work.

And I sort of keep quite a close eye on news, politics, current affairs still. And it's hard not to think that we may be heading into another period of recession and austerity because the sheer amount of money that's been spent on various government initiatives to try to contain and control the fallout from coronavirus means that at some point they're going to have to turn around and have that difficult conversation and say, oh, now we need to claw some of that back. And unlike the first time round

with all the we're all in it together slogans, this time they really do have a mandate to say, well, we're all in it together and start sort of cutting services and payments again. And it's the impact of this year, I think, will easily roll on for years to come. Yeah. I mean, we've already seen with Marcus Rashford and all the,

you know, there's been loads and loads of news stories about children that normally only get access to a good meal when they go to school. Yeah. And it's funny because when you look at the stats for poverty in the UK, and particularly children living in poverty i've i've often spoken to people but i'll say oh you know it's it's a third of children in the uk and they'll react you know so extreme because that's such an alarming amount and then i always kind of get google out and double check that i've said it right because i only think that just sounds way

too many but i think it is something like that yeah and people have a really visceral response to it as well because um because it is so shocking a lot of people's instant reaction is denial no that can't possibly be true no that's not true there are no children in poverty in Britain and you're like well there are because I my child was one of them and I now work with people in poverty and I can tell you horrendous stories of people's realities living in Britain today but it's always been not fascinating but interesting to me that especially online a lot of the discourse is to just instantly shut it down and to try to push that blame back on parents or say oh oh, well, look at what else they're spending their money on

or they must be being frivolous or feckless. And it's like, no, quite simply, there's not enough going in to meet living costs. Nobody deliberately chooses to deprive their children of, like, fundamental needs like heat and shelter and food. I mean, there may be very, very few people that do but they're largely when you are a parent responsible for the well-being of a child you will do anything to ensure the well-being of that child and it's not just food poverty it's food poverty is like

a tiny part of a much larger problem it's it's just poverty and people who are going without food are usually going without an awful lot else as well yeah no i think well yeah no i mean well i suppose it's just such a it's something that you've completely experienced and i think i do think that there's probably a lot of people that have the you know able to speak about this and have the um uh the profile to speak about it are often not the people that necessarily experienced it they're people that might feel it deeply and be you know usually empathetic and want to make fundamental changes but they haven't i was wondering this morning i was thinking what do you think there's something that people who've never experienced poverty,

is there something that you think they'll never quite understand about what that feels like? Yeah, I think the thing that people don't understand and can't until you've lived it is the long-term effects of living in poverty i mean i was i was on benefits and when they were paid um in 2011 12 13 and so it's that was a clear seven years ago now um behind my front door i have quite literally a knee-high stack of unopened post and because i can't open my post anymore because i have to sort of wait until it gets ridiculous and then

i'll get a friend around and we'll sit there and go through it like one item at a time and i can't open my front door unless I know that I'm expecting someone. So I miss a lot of parcels. But luckily, my neighbors are nice and understanding. And they'll text me and be like, I've got a parcel for you. I always check my bank balance before I buy anything at the supermarket. And the other day, I was in the queue at Asda. And I get text alerts to my phone whenever I try to log

into my online banking and I had the wrong mobile phone with me I had my work one rather than my personal one it's a new measure that I've put in to try to separate my life doesn't work um and I was literally panicking in the queue because it said oh we're going to send a text message to this phone and I was suddenly like I don't have it on me I can't check my balance and I was literally panicking in the queue because it said, oh, we're going to send a text message to this phone. And I was suddenly like, I don't have it on me. I can't check my balance. And I was spending £12. And I held my breath the whole time I had my card over the contactless thing and while it was going through.

And I was like, even though I knew I had the money in my account, I knew it was there. But it's just because my card was declined so many times. It's a trauma and it sticks with you. And I've had therapy. I've had all sorts of interventions and various things. I do all the stuff. I meditate and I read the books about being confident and self-empowered.

And it just, it's just something that doesn't go away. And I get letters and tweets and emails from readers who say that they were poor in the 70s and they still don't open their post. And I'm like, oh good, so it just doesn't go away. It's just a thing that you learn to live around rather than just the fear of going without. Well, I suppose as long as you've found the way to deal with it, having your friend come round to go through the post

whenever that lovely day... Once in a while. I do, I mean, I hate opening my post, but obviously I haven't had it in that deep-rooted trauma of just being frightened about what lies within and the bills you can't pay and the threat of people coming round to threaten the roof over your head.

and the bills you can't pay and the threat of people coming around to threaten the roof over your head. And I suppose sometimes when things are really scary and traumatic, it's okay to sort of acknowledge that that's going to be maybe part of your life, but then you've got other things you can do to support yourself out of it.

Not everything has to be fixed, I guess, so long as you're coping in the middle of it, if that makes sense. Yeah, I mean, the bills thing I need to get better at because they are one of the things that if you ignore them, they get larger. It's like, you're not helping yourself here, Jack. So I need to sort of move that from a sort of a twice a year bill opening party to maybe like a monthly one so that things don't get out of hand.

But I'm working on that. I mean, at least they don't go straight in the bin now. So that's, you know, I keep them with an intent to go through them eventually. But yeah, it gets a bit hairy sometimes. Yeah, the bill opening party doesn't sound like much fun. It's generally not. It's generally just a bit like, you get the big recycle bag out

and one of you does the envelopes and the other one puts them in piles. And this is the electric, this is the gas, this is the TV license. And then you go through them and you're like, oh yeah, this is the gas, this is the TV licence, this is the... And then you go through them and you're like, oh, yeah, that's melting up. OK, I'll pay that.

Or, oh, they're getting a bit angry. I should probably prioritise that. Yeah, you sort of prioritise the ones in red and capitals first and then the people who seem quite nice, sadly, the water company have always been really nice to me, so unfortunately they go to the bottom of the pile, which is not a great strategy but it's the one i have i think that i would do the same um so when you first had your your baby um it's johnny isn't it yeah johnny yeah um so when you first had johnny uh what was going on in your life at some you're only 24 when you had him right now yeah i was in the fire service i was um an emergency call handler and which sounds like

you just pick up the phone and be like oh yeah we'll send a fire engine but actually it's a massively complicated job and um one that i still talk about with a lot of affection and um well tell me more what makes it massively complicated What happens? So basically it takes 18 months to achieve what they call competence in the role. And that is like great big fat ring binders full of things that you have to learn. So, for example, if your house is on fire, generally send four fire appliances. But if it's a house with a thatched roof, you've got to send like specialist appliances or up to eight because it's not a thatched roof so you've got to learn the areas of Essex where houses are likely to have thatched roofs or wooden structures and then if it's a postbox like it's one fire

appliance with postbox attached to a building it's two but if it's postbox attached to a building with a thatched roof it's eight if it's a chemical incident you need to find out the and the kind of chemical the risks in the vicinity the wind speed the location whether there are any schools around so something as simple as a jam spillage at tip tree jam factory could actually be 20 fire appliances and calls into the met office and the fire and the police and the ambulance and all sorts and i can still remember all of those attendances off by heart and because when you get that fire call in, you've got 30 seconds to ascertain from somebody who's generally in a state of extreme distress on the other end of the phone,

where it is, the nature of the incident, and whether there are any risks in the vicinity, persons reported, which means people trapped inside or at risk. And you've got 30 seconds to do that, locate the nearest fire appliances that would be suitable for that incident. Call down to the fire station and get them on the way while calming someone down on the end of the fire.

Motorway incidents were the worst. Petrol tankers on their side on the motorway were always like, why did this come through to me? And I loved it, but it was hard. And it required all of your mental faculties at any given time. We did two days, 9 a.m. till 6 p.m., followed by two nights, which was 6 p.m. till 9 a.m. And then you get like three days off and then it starts again.

And so you'd be sitting up at like 2 o'clock in the morning, like wired, waiting for some disaster to strike because you've got a 30- second window to try to resolve it wow so it's um yeah it's like the world's worst quiz show with everything at stake really um so I was doing that and I got pregnant and um I went on maternity leave and when I came back from maternity leave I was quite okay with like all the equality and diversity policies because I headed up the LGBT network and I was like hey can I have some

flexible hours so other people in my job who left at like 4pm or 5.30 in order to accommodate nursery hours I was like oh I'd like some of those I was turned down flat so then I applied for some day work roles installing fire alarms in elderly

people's houses and stuff quite handy with the screwdriver that seems quite cool um and I was my application was withdrawn I wasn't allowed to apply for it and this went on for a couple of months and why did they turn you down with the oh I found all the all the paperwork the other day because I've been doing a bit of a tidy up in my house and I just sat down and read it all and I was just like I'm not being mad this was a completely unjust set of events like I applied for jobs in the media team I applied for like so many to do youth work with like junior fire setters juvenile fire setters and every single one I was just knocked back and knocked back and knocked back I was, I had an exemplary record. I worked hard.

I was good at my job. But I think I was just pegged as trouble. And they were looking to make efficiency savings. And it was probably just easier to get rid of somebody who'd achieved competency and got that pay rise that goes with it than to recruit two more people to fill the role and so i was i resigned um from hospital how old was your baby at this point then he was so this was november 2011 so he was 19 20 months old so really little. Little tiny little sprocket. And even when I resigned, my watch officers and my seniors were really like, they were like, oh, you'll be fine.

You've been in the fire service. People will chew your arm off to employ you. And so I left with that sort of, yeah, do you know what? I've been in a good job, in a uniformed role. I should be all right. And 300 job applications later, I was like, I am not all right. This is going quite badly. And people, there's a narrative that I basically waltzed out of my job

for a life on benefits. And I'm like, no, I loved my job to the point where 10 years later, yeah, 10 years later, I would go back in a heartbeat. And they were recruiting about six months ago and I had to have a real like sit down and think moment of like could I go back would I go back earn exactly the same salary as I do now um and get four days off a week I mean hooray but um it's not for me at the moment but I'd go back in a heartbeat I loved it yeah no I can tell that I can really see the passion for it and I also I I'm dumbfounded

actually that it seemed to have dealt you such a cruel blow with um you know you were clearly trying to adapt trying to diversify trying to use employable skills. I don't understand really why there wasn't more support for you when all you'd done is just had a baby. Ironically, at the time, one of my union reps had said to me, you know, you could probably have a good case for taking this to the press. And I was like, oh, no, I just want a quiet life, actually. It would be really embarrassing to be in the paper. Knowing laugh.

And I look back now, ten years later, and I go, do you think it's too late to run that hot scoop? I also think that in the past ten years the fire service has changed they've got I mean when I was in the top seven ranks of officer so the chief assistant chiefs deputy chiefs senior divisional officers they were all men and I'm not sure if that's still true in Essex but I know that there are a lot more women in management roles in the fire service now. And I think that what happened to me a decade ago would probably not happen, or I'd hope it wouldn't happen to women today. But it is such a male-oriented environment.

The women who have babies are usually the firefighters' wives. You don't really hear about them, do you? Yeah, that's true. I mean, it was at the point, it was 2010 when when i had my son they didn't even have a maternity uniform i was just given bigger uniform i was like this is a bit rubbish isn't it so every couple of weeks as i got like fatter i'll get sent down to like stores workshop which is like a warehouse at the end of the in the middle of nowhere like toddle down to be measured for like bigger trousers and you'd end up like because obviously bigger trousers aren't a

great solution for maternity wear i just end up with these little like stick legs in these like massive thigh trousers being like i look preposterous this is not like in keeping with like keeping a smart and starched uniform literally looked like sort of like a big clown yeah and to be honest you feel kind of like well i felt like i feel kind of quite absurd in the shape of me when i'm heavily pregnant anyway so let alone having to wear such a really large like baggy trousers it's literally like the shoulders of my shirt so like halfway down my elbows. And because it was back when we had epaulets on our shoulders,

and then your epaulets would be in the wrong place, and you'd just be like... Yeah, take me seriously. I mean, you know, small beer in the whole sort of first world problems thing, but also it is a uniformed organisation, and they do pride themselves on a smart appearance and looking presentable.

And when you literally just look like you're playing dress-up in your dad's uniform, it's just like, I feel a bit silly. Yeah, and also with all these things, of course, yeah, as you say, it's not like it is a first world problem. But at the same time, the subtext of that is, oh, well, we weren't really expecting to see anyone wearing our clothes when you're pregnant. So that's kind of what makes you makes you feel like you know and then something as yeah as a fundamentalist fire department you think that that would be something

they'd be like used to dealing with all the time yeah um do you did it make you feel i mean how did you feel about being pregnant do you always think you were going to have a baby do you always want to be a mom no no no my parents were foster carers. So my childhood, like from the age of four, was like a revolving door of children in various degrees of trauma that I would befriend and then they'd disappear. Some of them came for a week, some of them came for 13 years. And so I was very wary of the idea of having kids

because I was genuinely terrified because really the only children I'd ever come across had been children who were quite distressed, children who'd had very difficult lives, children who'd had varying degrees of difficulty. And so I always thought it wasn't for me because I also, my mum's very unwell and she's been severely disabled for as long as I can remember.

But she did the majority of the care work for the children from home. She's an absolute hero. But I would also help with that quite a lot. I kind of thought I'd raised enough kids. By the time I left home, I was like, I have co-parented 100 children. I'm good for this. And then I got pregnant.

Bit of an accident, but a very happy one. I knew instantly from finding out that I was pregnant that I wanted to keep my baby. I was quite surprised by it, but I knew. And luckily, my son's father and i were very good friends we've always been very good friends and he was supportive from the off he was like look whatever you want to do i'll i'll support you so we've always had a nice co-parenting relationship there was no question of us getting together i'd just come out as a lesbian quite funnily about two weeks before I then came out as a pregnant lesbian um and not in a relationship with my son's father um and

we've just sort of mucked in and got on with it yeah and I've it's been quite I was originally I was initially terrified I was like I'm gonna be terrible at this I don't I don't I don't have a clue but it's been fine it's all been pretty fine yeah no i did actually read a really lovely article where you were speaking about your your son's dad and it sounded really lovely i mean i was just thinking it's i think do you think the fact that you had the stability of that you know knowing how that dynamic was going to work between the two of you as parents and knowing that you always, you know, you wanted to be that baby's mum, whoever was coming on their way.

Did that help keep a sort of sense of grounded when everything else was shifting and turning in terms of your work and options? Yeah, definitely. I read an article in The Guardian yesterday, actually, that was about sort of the rise of, they didn't call it share-enting, they called it something else, but about people who... I've never heard that term, share-enting, before.

About people who are deciding to have babies with a friend instead of waiting for a romantic partner. And I showed it to my son's father and I was like, we were ten years early with this, and then we both had a good old laugh about it. But I think that because we have always maintained an honest and brutally honest friendship with one another and because there's never been any jealousy of sort of new partners or anything like that but we've just we're just very good friends who are raising a child together in the best way that we

know how and it's worked really well for us and we're kind of when um johnny got to nine we were like we're halfway there halfway there we've not we've not had any major rows or any rows that i can think of we do the old go into each other's houses and have a coffee at handover and a catch-up and he works in a bakery so this is great he was brings like yum yums and donuts and stuff and then you've done it pretty pretty well you know we're doing all right who'd have thought that like we we were just we we were just kids yeah having a kid yeah he's really well adjusted and happy and and we both get on all right and that's nice. You must really see the results now in Johnny.

He's hit double figures of all that love and stability that's been poured in along the way. I do think kids have got that. I mean, I suppose you said about the foster kids, that would have given you such a stark reminder over and over of how fundamental, no matter what is going on in the world, if your home life has got that stability of the people in it feeling you know loved safe happy those those sort of linchpins of like childhood they can cope with so so much if you just they just feel safe at night and that they're loved yeah and that's something that i

really learned from my parents growing up. And it took me having my own child for it to really sink in. It's that one thing, well, my parents are good at many things, but one thing that they are fundamentally brilliant at is providing a completely welcoming environment. So kids would turn up at our front door in the middle of the night with like a carrier bag with a couple of, like, items in. And my parents would pop as their bed up

or, like, clear a bedroom for them and be like, this is your space, we'll go and we'll get you, like, some new clothes in the morning, we'll take shopping. There was always space at the dining table for one more. And even now, as an adult, I go round my parents' house and I just feel cocooned in like love and like comfort and warmth and stability and you would see the difference in children who would come to us sort of frightened and wary and sometimes feral through no fault of their own

and with investment and love and stability and security and a quiet and nurturing environment, you would literally watch kids blossom. And sometimes they returned to their parents because they would just have a temporary situation that needed sourcing out or needed a little bit of help or assistance or support with sometimes they wouldn't but the the turnaround rate of just investment and nurture is something that has always stayed with me that there's nothing i don't think that there's very much that you can't sort of get through

without love and compassion and kindness and security. And that makes for a slight wrinkle in my own story because when I found myself dirt poor and hungry and cold, I couldn't and didn't go to my parents because I knew that they would drop everything to help me out and I knew that my sort of they were they're not well off despite what people on the internet might say um they're just ordinary people my mum was a nurse before she was medically retired my dad dad was a fireman. And they would have bent over backwards to have helped me out, and I didn't want to put that on them.

And I was ashamed as well that I'd been brought up in such a wonderful environment with two absolutely brilliant parents and that I'd still managed to fuck it all up. And for a very long time, I just kind of kept up appearances, put my best coat on, kept my house flat as clean as I could and just kind of got on with it. And it was when I went to the food bank for the first time, one of the volunteers there was a woman who went to church with my mum

and she recognised me and I recognised her and we didn't say anything to each other. But I went home and I was like, I've got to tell my parents before she does because I didn't want them judging my mum and my dad and being like, how has their daughter ended up in this position? So I went home and I told them. I was like, I'm in a bit of a bad way.

I'm falling on some temporary hard times. And they turned up with, like, carrier bags full of food. And they were like, why didn't you say anything? They were furious with me for not saying anything. And I was just a bit embarrassed. I just thought if I kept quiet, we'd go away. So how long had that been the situation by the time your parents found out? About a year.

That's a long time to carry that weight. To just keep your head down and be like, maybe if I just keep applying for jobs, maybe this week it'll be different. Maybe this week my luck will change. That must have been so lonely for you. Yeah, it was. It was very isolating. I was quite involved in local politics um at the time because of nothing else to do so I would go to council

meetings I'd write about them but and I had some good friends from those times who wouldn't really mind coming around and sitting with their coats on in a freezing cold flat not even getting offered a cup of tea but even even that sort of dwindles because you know after a while it's it it becomes difficult for it became difficult for me to ask people to come around because i had the polar opposite of what my parents had had a sort of a cold and unwelcoming sterile and generally untidy environment. But I'm still friends with some of the people who really cared back then and still continue to. But you isolate yourself because you become embarrassed about your situation and ashamed when you can't go to the pub with your friends anymore

because you can't buy a pint and you're always the one in the corner that everyone else is buying drinks or after a while it just just weighs on you just think god i'm just a burden to everyone i'm just going to tuck myself away and is it quite easy to do that is it really do you think it is quite easy to sort of fall off the radar yeah very easy to fall off the radar um and a lot of people do and especially i've seen a lot of people in lockdown have just you know they've just disappeared they just go under the radar we we all just tuck ourselves away and i think it's endemic of the society that we live in now yeah um is that we you know how many of us know the names of our neighbours or would know if they were in trouble or needed help?

And we almost rely on people to come out and come forward and ask rather than notice and nudge and offer. Yeah, well, I suppose also there's almost a... I don't think it's taboo exactly, but I think, you know, if you've got a hunch or an instinct, you don't want to embarrass someone, you don't want to cross the line. You know, most people can probably only count on two hands of people whose lives you know really, really well. You know, you actually kind of can envisage what they're going home to,

what their life is like behind closed doors. A lot of other people you fill in the gaps. Yeah. And if you're thinking someone's struggling, you might not think you're the welcome person. No, and it's very difficult to offer as well because when I went to a, like, a Sure Start Children's Centre on a Wednesday, it was a group called moto mothers on

their own um and we would get lunch so you'd have to go and enforced socialization for an hour and we'd all be there basically making small talk waiting for the lunch and um it was like simple like a pasta bake or baked potatoes or tuna or whatever. And one of the volunteers there, or work paid staff, I've never thought to inquire which, had noticed that I would help wash up and be scooping leftovers into tupperwares and bags and stuff to take home. And she offered me a food bank referral form. And I was like, no, no, i don't need that i just can't

bear waste um and this went on for a couple of weeks and she was like honestly if you need the help it's there and i was like no no my parents were foster carers i've seen what happens to children of parents who say they're not coping i'm i'm fine thank you and it took about six attempts for her to, I mean, God bless her, she continued to ask because a lot of people would just give up and be like, okay, so I'll do them. But she was adamant. She was like, you've been coming to this group for months. You've very rapidly lost a lot of weight.

You don't look very well. You're exhausted. You're taking food home. Just take this form. And I was like, okay. Yeah. In the end, I was finally like, okay, do you know what? Yes, actually, I'm in a really crappy way.

Yeah. Thanks for noticing. Yeah. But a lot of people don't have that intervention or don't have that person who notices or sees them regularly enough. This is the regular contact as well, isn't't that because people do just tuck themselves away and part of that is fear of oh if i admit that i'm not coping will they take my children away yeah no i didn't i didn't even think of that correlation until you said it of course you've also seen children who've

had to temporarily leave their homes and then and and also the home that they get taken to is a home that you can see provides a lot of the things you weren't able to provide yeah so so maybe as well that might have been part of the reason you don't want to contact your parents as well because it's it felt like they were the solution to the problem you were having in a way which you don't necessarily want to confront if you're not able to do it for yourself yeah i just kept hoping that every day my luck would change that something would happen that something new would like new jobs would come up on the job centre website or I'd get accepted for an interview or you know yeah and every day it was that maybe today will be the day

and you just think I've just got to get through another day i've just got to get through another day like this just one more day yeah and and that's it it was the it's the it was the one day at a time ethos before i ever knew that was a thing it's just that it's just just for today yeah but there were a lot of those days there were yeah the impact of them on your physical mental well-being is enormous. And how old was Johnny at this time then? So he was 20 months when I left the fire service. And when I re-entered full-time employment, he was late 2013, three and a half. Yeah, so really little boy as well yeah luckily he doesn't really

remember anything because he was too young to remember which leads to some funny conversations in our house sometimes um but he knows because he's read my books so he's read the excerpts of like i mean they're just recipe books but they contain like extracts from my life at the time yeah um so he's aware yeah but he doesn't he doesn't seem to have any actual memories of it which i'm very grateful for yeah well i suppose you get kind of mixed bear with that sometimes when he probably has no understanding of the things that you've had to think so hard about oh yes oh yes we've had those conversations the amount of times i've had to buy it back that we used to live on 10 pounds

a week but um but yeah it's fine it's just a kid being a kid isn't it oh yeah i know and actually conversely you know when they are that little um and things are going on that are heavy and adult and not very nice, the fact that they're completely oblivious is also a really good tonic, isn't it, to what's going on? It's lovely. Yeah. So when did you start writing your blog then? I started writing in 2012. Okay, so he's about two.

And it was a local councillor had been on the front page of the paper saying that druggies, drunks and single mums are ruining the town. And I remember this really clearly. My dad was giving me a lift somewhere, and we drove past a petrol station, and I saw it on the billboard outside the petrol station. And I was like, Dad, stop the car. And he was like, OK.

I was like, have you got, like, 50p? He was like, yeah. I was like, need to go and get a paper. He was like, OK. So I told, have you got, like, 50p? He was like, yeah. I was like, need to go and get a paper. He was like, OK. So I told him it was a petrol station, got a paper, and sat there absolutely fuming, like, reading it in my dad's car, like, absolutely raging. And I wasn't that into local politics at the time.

I'd done some bits. A local market had closed down, a York Road market, and the traders had been given a few days to get out. They'd been trading for decades and people had lost their jobs overnight. And I got a bit involved with that and did some photographs of the traders and the market when it had shut down. But that moment with that counsellor on the front page of the paper, I just sat there and I burned with absolute rage

because I was like, and I started to write a letter to the paper. It was an absolutely furious letter about how, you know, single mothers were actually putting our pittances back into the local economy because we couldn't go anywhere. So yes, we congregate in the high street with our buggies, but we're spending our money in local coffee shops and in the charity shops on the high street

and in the children's wear shops. We are a circular economy. We're putting what little we have back into the high street, not going off to the big stores and spending it online. We're literally keeping it going. Yeah. Like, how dare they? And the letter was so long and so furious

that the Echo printed it over three days. They basically serialised it. Oh, they did though? They did print the whole thing? Yeah, they printed it. And one of my friends got in touch with me and said, oh, have you thought about writing a blog? And I was like, what?

So I'm a very late adopter of all tech. And I was like, oh, what? And he was like, it's like a little online diary. And I thought, do you know what? I will actually, I will do this. Because I'm, I was just, there was nobody who looked like me, sounded like me, had a life like mine that sat on that council,

that understood those issues and i was like i want to go and look at these people who are shutting the children's centres shutting the libraries denigrating our high streets putting up the parking charges slagging us off and see who they are what they look like yes what kind of lives they've led like how dare they yeah so i would go along to every council meeting it's just me and a local reporter sitting in the gallery most days sitting like looking at them all it took me ages to work out who was who and that lot with the tories and that lot was the labour party and this disparate band of lib dems and independents over here and okay so these they were baddies and they were the goodies

and they were well-meaning but you know didn't you do can you work it all out and then you'd learn who was in charge of children and learning and who was in charge of various portfolios and and I will write about it and I look back now I've still got those first essays and they're so like bloody and tribal and like colors to the mast, absolutely raging. But that was me at the time. I had a lot at stake. I had dogs in that race.

I was absolutely furious. Well, also, sometimes anger is a really good thing. I think we sometimes... Yeah. But also staying angry about the things that matter. Yeah. It's important, actually. And I think sometimes we can be quite quick to demonize that emotion of anger we can think it's not helpful or um something we've kind of sort of

gotta learn how to keep tidy but actually i think anger is a really important emotion when it comes to fighting for that when you see something's not just not fair not right when you feel marginalized or silenced anger is really important yeah and if you don't stoke like keep that fire where you can see it it tends to come out somewhere else anyway yeah so i think you know seeing it acknowledging it and sometimes putting another log on it it's quite quite good actually yeah i think um some of the most popular things that i've written on my site, I actually had a bit of a reckoning about this a few weeks ago because I was going through my blog posts,

which are 95% recipes, and I put them in order of most viewed and shared to give to my admin assistant for the ones to put into social media and things like that. And I was like, oh, focus on these, but also some of these down here that didn't really get the love that they deserved and of the top 20 17 of them were political essays really and of those probably 15 of them were written in an absolute rage and i think that when i'm when, I struggle to write sometimes unless I am viscerally fired up about something.

And sometimes I will read something or come across something or something will happen and I'll just know that's my whole day gone because I'm going to go to my computer and I'm going to write about it. And I just go, no, I won't be able to do anything until I have purged this from inside me. And yeah, I find it quite cathartic. I think other people find it quite cathartic to read as well and to have put into words a lot of the maelstrom of crap

that we're all processing. And just to be able to identify with someone's absolute fury and go yeah that's how I feel about that and and and you validated that made it okay to be that angry I try to direct the anger into okay now you're really mad about this here are some things you can sign here are some things you can donate here are some things you can do rather than just leave people fired up and then put them back out into the world as little like spinning tops of like fury but i don't always manage to do that sometimes it's quite um do you just light the rockets and let them go yeah but look at what you're talking about with all that went on when someone rings up and says there's a fire i think you're quite good at directing what needs to happen to extinguish or so now i'm going around lighting them

lighting the fire and then sending the resources yeah but there's lots of things that are on the table at the moment i mean that's you know why i was excited to speak to you because i think i think it's really important to stay so plugged in. And I think, you know, as a country, there's so much that needs to be addressed in terms of how everything's apportioned and who's visible. And it must be really exciting for you to think that that counsellor that said that ridiculous, offensive thing about single mothers,

at that time they were the one with the platform and you were just someone who just saw it. But now your platform has superseded that. And that's all achieved by you articulating what you felt. And that's the power of that. That is a powerful tool. And, you know, I think your writing is brilliant. Thank you.

And I love reading it. But actually I also think there's a... It's funny because I know that with your Twitter and with, you know, you saying the top 17 articles being these fiery ones, but there's also this other flip in your writing, which is when you write your recipes, they're so warm and affectionate.

Honestly, I can read them like bedtime stories. Thank you. It reminds me a bit of Nigel Slater. I used to have that by my bed as well like um earlier I was reading one about um deviled eggs oh yes those yeah but how lovely I mean your writing's really gorgeous it's not just the recipe it's the environment and how you're going to eat it and all the things that it conjured up and associated within that recipe that's my favourite kind of cookery writing. Thank you.

Food writers, we get a lot of stick for all the rambling intros that we do, but there is actually a genuine reason behind it, and it's come in quite handy. You can't copyright a recipe because recipe, well, for various reasons, but a list of ingredients is almost impossible to copyright. I didn't actually know that. So I deliberately use very, well, not deliberately,

it's just the way that I write, but I've kept it in my very, like, florid and, like, storytelling language, because if somebody does copy my work it's immediately extremely obvious and I've had a couple of incidents over the years where quite high profile um people and organizations have just lifted and dropped my text into something of theirs and um and my readers will send it to me in droves they're like that, that's yours. And I'm like, it is. Because the way that I write is very specific. So now I don't hold back.

Before I used to be like, oh, this is a bit long. This intro is a bit long. God, the intro for those anchovy deviled eggs. It was actually an entire story and stuff. It was around to 1,500 words for that whole recipe. I write articles half that length. 1500 words for that whole recipe it's like i write articles half that length um but if you if you don't want to read the big intro about the you know about the jilly cooper books and the and the kiss and heels and the and all and all of those things then you can just skip to the recipe it's

not but that that big wall of text is a copyright um is a is a way of protecting your creative content and your identity no i didn't know that that's why my um recipe instructions are always the way that they are partly because i want to be a friend in the kitchen standing over your shoulder giving you the little signs reminding you when to get your knives out and you know that it's okay to leave the dishes but also because um because it makes it harder for people to nick your work but you've always written like that haven't you yeah i've always i've got no filter whatsoever i always ramble and sometimes you can tell the recipes that um were in my early books that suddenly i had a

panic towards the end of my deadline and was like oh god i've got to fill some spaces because they're really like perfunctory like chop this do this do that do this because I was literally sitting there like banging them out going oh god I need to fit another one in the pasta chapter and it was like there's it's still a really great recipe but I didn't have time to sit and engage with the storytelling element of it I was suddenly like chop onion put in pan but. They have their uses as well. And for you and your little boy, has food always been a source of, because I feel like there's a lot of love in all that. I feel like it's affection and warmth.

I mean, did you grow up in a house where there was cooking and was it like that? And you said about your parents saying there's always room at the table for an extra person. Yeah, my mum was from Northern Ireland and she was one of nine children. And from what I can gather, she did a lot of the cooking in the household. And my dad was Greek Cypriot and his dad, my granddad, was an immigrant from Cyprus.

And he came over and through various other ventures, ended up running a small restaurant in the town centre. ventures ended up running a small restaurant in the town center and um my dad sort of grew up hanging around the kitchens in there or going after school and like hanging around so my childhood food was always a fusion of like mashed boiled potatoes with like coal cannon and stuff like that or and bacon and liver and onions or like moussaka and stuffed vinyls and capepia and, you know, chef dailies. So it's sort of always comforting, always big, always a lot of it.

Always quite simple as well. So both of my parents can cook. They have a roast dinner every Sunday, religiously. I think the only time as a child I didn't have a roast dinner every Sunday religiously I think the only time as a child I didn't have a roast on a Sunday my mum was seriously ill in hospital and after that whenever she was in hospital we had a roast

but I remember it being as kids we were all like there's no roast something is seriously wrong I can't remember what we did have but it definitely wasn't a roast dinner. But the house was basically like this hushed kind of, there's no roast dinner, where's the roast dinner?

So, yeah, I grew up with good, simple comfort food through my childhood. And whenever I go back to my parents now, sort of for lunch or for dinner, I always make sure I deliberately time it around a meal time yeah sounds smart now they come to me which is kind of like no you're you're still supposed to feed me I'm still your I'm still your offspring um so yeah I grew up with parents who could cook and they they did a good job yeah and you did your did your son and you like a lot of the recipes that they sort of infused with things that he likes and things that he'd want to try again and yeah he went through he he was a really good eater and then he went through that phase about eight where suddenly everything was beige everything wanted to

be beige he picked green things out of his food he pushed vegetables to the side of his plate and i was absolutely despairing i was like you've eaten curry since you're 18 months old you have you will you can identify every kind of bean pulse and legume what is what is going on and i thought i can't fight it i've just got to it's obviously not about food because i know that you like all those things it's some kind of assertiveness creating your own identity thing so i just leaned into it i was like fine you want nuggets and peas every meal you know nuggets and peas every meal you want mac and cheese with sausages on top okay but have some mixed frozen veg in it too and i just relaxed and rode it out and i was like fine well just went on for about a year oh that's a long time that is a long time

nuggets but yeah nuggets and the only greens who would have me like broccoli or peas carrots and cucumber. And I was like, OK, well, we can still get you five a day. And even if it's the same five every day, fine. And I started to gradually reintroduce things after, well, after it was probably about a year. And I would make like lasagna, but sneak mushrooms and things in there and then make them bigger and bigger until he was like oh wait this is a mushroom and I'm like yeah you've been eating it for the last three months so this you can't tell me you don't like it and now he's he's great again he's

back to being great still got a couple of things he won't touch with a barge pole but we're through the other side of that and I think that a lot of kids go through that I get a lot of messages from parents who are like oh my son suddenly won't eat any vegetables i'm like relax mine did exactly the same just just go with it once you stop turning it into a battle then eventually they get bored yeah but if it's a battle of wills and assertion it's not one you're gonna win yeah it's just you do not underestimate the stubbornness of children but also what i didn't understand until i became a parent is how fundamentally emotionally satisfying is seeing your small person eat well it like it's almost like it releases a

hormone or something when i watch like even like the little one if he eats well you're just like it's a good day and if they don eat, it just sort of puts you on edge if they haven't eaten properly. I mean, it must just be the Greek-Irish hybrid of feed or in me. But I'm constantly like, have you eaten enough? Have you had enough? Have you had enough? Was your dinner big enough? Do you want some dessert? I'm just like, just chill out.

When he's hungry, he asks you for a snack. He's a fully functioning, functioning yeah assertive human being he's not you don't need to be flapping over him going do you want some bread and butter with your dinner like it's it's fine if he's still hungry he will say something does he make himself anything yet yeah he loves making toasties in the toasty maker um he tried to make me pancakes for my birthday. I pretended they were delicious. But I think we both knew that they were slightly... He didn't follow my recipe, that's all I'm going to say. But the thought was there and drowned in enough syrup,

they softened up, so fine, it was cool. And, yeah, so he does toasties. We've had a pancake attempt. He helps me in the kitchen we've got a vegetable dicer that sounds very fancy but I've got arthritis in my hands so in the winter they're not as dexterous as they

normally are so it's like a tenner and it's you just put a veg in and you slam the lid down and it cubes it to perfect cubes fancy sounds brilliant fantastic and he cubes it to perfect cubes that actually sounds brilliant it's a fantastic and um he loves it he's obsessed with it because he's just it's so like it's a put that on the desk and hit it as hard as you can yeah he loves watching the veg fall through and it

all be like perfectly diced up so he did like a whole bag of onions for the other day i was standing there with these big dame edna onion glasses on that one of my friends gave me as a joke present on christmas so these big yellow like crystallized glasses and um just smashing onions up in it and i was like this is very useful this is a useful enthusiasm for you to have so it's going getting all the veg out the fridge go do the carrots do this do the cucumber do it and i've got a fridge for like nicely diced vegetables ready to use i'm gonna get invest in a dice oh i'll send you one i've got loads of them because i road tested them to find the best one for arthritic hands so you can have the second best one if you like i'll gladly accept only because the second best one um has been very

enthusiastically used and it's got like a chip out of the locking mechanism otherwise i'd send you that but it requires some careful handling these days so when your little boy was growing up obviously he's actually i mean unwittingly he's actually led quite an unusual childhood but is he very aware of that the sort of differences because I mean you know you'd be a single mum all the experience you've had with poverty you know coming out as a lesbian not that long before you actually announced you're having a baby um you know it's it's not um it's not what's perceived as like the traditional upbringing no and it's um it's it has its moments um so i've had to explain to him sometimes that you know that it's you don't do things like shout out in school that your mum's famous because then

people ask questions that we don't particularly want to answer and and um and also it looks a bit braggy and and also i wouldn't describe myself as famous I just write some stuff for some newspapers sometimes and pop up on telly messing up recipes it's you know it's not not exactly a like a a big deal um but he had he's just very excitable and he loves sort of the little nuggets of my life that he gets to not being on the periphery of when he was younger i think it was half term i ended up having to take him to itv because i was cooking on this morning a good few years ago and i went back into the green room and um he was like riding around on mo farah's shoulders i was like i want to ride around on

my shoulders it's literally like my father like, I want to ride around on Mo Farah's shoulders. It's literally like Mo Farah like horsying him around the dressing room. You picked good shoulders. I know, it's like. Faster, Mo. And I was too shy to ask for a photo, but a few weeks later we were watching the, like, you know, the running thing on the telly,

and Johnny just had like a moment of recognition. I was like yes yeah that yeah that man that guy and sometimes he'll sit there and he'll treats me like a journalist sometimes saying who's the most famous person you've ever met and i'm like, quite a difficult one to answer. I'll be like, Brian May? And then he'll go away and he'll look up Brian May. And he'll be like, oh, he was in Queen Nanny. Joy really loves him. You've met him.

And I'll be like, yeah. And then sometimes he'll come out with various other questions like that. It's quite nice because i'm not a like name dropper my friends are all fairly like ordinary people with like you know refreshingly like wonderful lives and um and i don't sit there sort of talking about those things around the dinner table because it's it's just a bit gauche it's quite nice to have a little 10 year old that i can secretly brag to sometimes and be like oh yeah so guess what i'm doing today oh i think it's just a bit gauche. It's quite nice to have a little 10-year-old that I can secretly brag to sometimes and be like, oh, yeah, so guess what I'm doing today.

Oh, I think it's nice he's interested. My kids don't really seem that, they don't really ask me any questions about what I do. But not that long ago, I did a programme that I was, it wasn't something I could go into many details about while I was filming it. And the kids didn't ask me a single thing. And I was like, God, this just shows you how no one ever really asks me anything turns out it turns out

like really uh very easy to be private um but I think it's sweet but I guess the two of you are kind of you know there's so much about um you know how he was what he was born into all the things you experience they they actually become like the bedrock of your relationship and I bet you've had to have lots of conversations about lots of things obviously in a way that's appropriate to him but about things that aren't necessarily the same conversations that are going on in every house but I think it's so healthy and brilliant to keep those all that dialogue open and now you kind of can have that I mean you're always going to be his mum but you can have that openness yeah it's great when they get to the age where they're like little people you can have chats with there was quite a long period where he would repeatedly

ask me why daddy couldn't live with us and initially i was like well we don't have the room like daddy's got two other children daddy's got a wife. We were like, you know, it's not, it wouldn't. And then I was like, the way that my mind works, I was like, maybe it would work. Maybe we could just all amalgamate into this, like, commune and, like, co-parent each other, and then it would all be really great. And then his relationship didn't work out,

and it all got a bit more complicated. And then Johnny really ramped it up he was like so can daddy come and live with us now it's like all right we need to have a chat mommy and daddy are very good friends and we've done a very good job bringing you up but mommy loves girls and so you might have noticed that mummy's partners have all been women. That's because mummy dates women. So mummy and daddy aren't going to get married because that would be dishonest and probably not work out so well for either of us. But, you know, we're always going to be very good friends and he's always welcome around for a cup of tea

and comes to sports day and stuff. And that's great stop asking now and yeah once we'd had that chat it was fine then he tried to set me up with some mums from school for a while and then i was like they probably don't go out with women and also yeah he would come home telling me enthusiastically about his friends whose mums were really nice i'm actually really cool with it being just us you know i'm totally totally fine with it i know it's a bit boring for you when i have to take zoom calls in my office on my own with the door shut for 20 minutes here and there but you know you can you can totally live without having another adult kicking around to entertain you 24 7 but i bet you that do you have a lot of your like lesbian

friends that think the way that it's worked out for you with your son is pretty amazing and they'd like to have had something similar yeah I've got friends who were who have been who were initially um sort of skeptical um possibly of my child rearing abilities but now that I've sort of managed to get through an entire decade without any serious harm, they really admire and, like, appreciate sort of how it's turned out. And it was... I mean, it's... I see some of my friends who've... and the convoluted routes they've had to take

in order to have their own children, and I'm like, it's pretty lucky, actually, just sort of you know just not nothing about my life in the last 10 years has been conventional but a lot of it's been a lot of fun and it all seems to sort of all the dust has settled and it's all quite nice yeah no I know it does sound really lovely well it's just lovely to hear a story that does have a single two single parents but no massive drama actually i think that's probably the bit that's unusual with that most unusual thing because normally involves a big drama or heartbreak no there's been no no big who are and um i i i got on really well with his dad. His dad passed away a couple of years ago. But we used to work together.

He used to work in a coffee shop and gave me one of my first ever jobs. And when I was struggling and it finally all came out that I'd been struggling, he absolutely bollocked me. He was like, and why didn't you come to me asking me for a job? I was like, I couldn't, I just couldn't. But I still

get on really well with his mum and he gets on really well with my parents and we're just you know we're just it's nice yeah that is really nice I think that's lovely and I think kids are really I say this a lot to my friends if they're ever going through anything I don't know where their situations change or something that's upsetting I I say kids are actually, they can obviously feel the sadness of things, but they don't, they're not sentimental. I don't think kids ever reflect on a life they thought they'd be living or a sort of parallel life that should have been going on. That's not really where they're at.

They do kind of react to the here and now, which is, I find, really reassuring. So, you know, you haven't got to worry too much about that they're quite sort of pragmatic generally about that kind of thing yeah definitely and very resilient and adaptable as well they're very sort of chilled generally yeah quite chilled does it kind of surprise you sometimes that you've kind of become something of a spokesperson for all these things that used to be so private to you yeah absolutely um i've had to learn really i mean i've i have adhd which means that i um quite frequently have no filter and can go at things with alarming enthusiasm only to then find they don't work out for me which means that um

over the years i've thrown my hat into some rings and been like oh yes i'm gonna be vegan now was what is one of a is quite a um good example and um actually because of the arthritis that didn't work out so well for me i need fish and like omega-3s and stuff for my joints and um i've stuck to it for two two solid years but i was deteriorating so it's not for everyone and i had to do this like slight climb down and be like i'm eating sardines again and um people were really disappointed in me because i'd gone at it with such gusto and such like public enthusiasm but i think that i i never asked for my life to be lived in public and everything that I do I do with like puppyish good intentions I'm just like oh I'm really excited about this I want to share it

and then when it goes wrong I'm like I fluffed that up but I'll share it and I've had to learn to kind of keep things in a bit now not not because I don't want to share them because i always want to share things but because of the way that people can weaponize mistakes or yeah or cock-ups or kind of the culture we live in and it's it's made me quite fearful of being so open but at the same time i've had um a good friend of mine is um a lot more well known than i am and i said to him well how do you manage to keep so much of yourself out of the public eye he was like i don't put my every waking thought on twitter jack so well you know well that's not really an option for me it just comes out of my fingers sometimes i don't even know what i'm thinking until i'm looking at it back on my

own screen like it's a way of for me to process thoughts and information and reach out and communicate with people and and especially in periods when you're a single parent you're on your own and the evening it's dark and lonely and it's a nice way to be like hey people send me some pictures of your dog that's um longhand for i'm sad make me happy again um and it's quite hard when I've spent the last ten years basically spilling my guts all over the internet for connection and communication, commiseration, support, to go around and try to sweep them all back up again

and stuff them back inside myself. There's too many. They stretch too far. There's too much of me out there now for me to suddenly decide to lock it all away yeah but you don't need to because actually it clearly makes you feel better and the communication in that community is actually also really a really good thing and actually I think I think most people are not the comment section on the daily mail I think most people don't think in those terms and are a lot better at dealing with a 360 of someone

than we give most people credit for, if that makes sense. I think because of the fact that we can access those very black and white opinions, those are the voices that have our ear for a second. But actually, i don't really know people that think like that in real life most conversations i have with my friends or even people who think differently to me where it's a lot broader and there's a lot less heat in those yeah even when we have debates about things yeah definitely and i think it's i think it's a lot

healthier i used to read everything because I'd be like, I'm keeping myself grounded. I'm keeping an ear to the ground. I'm seeing what people are saying about me. I'm looking for perceptions. I'm seeing if there's anything I need to change about myself, anything I need to explain. I got so caught up in it.

And eventually I was like, people who like me are going to view the things that I do and the things that I say as confirmation bias as to reasons why they like me. People who dislike me are going to view the things that I do and the things that I say as confirmation bias as to reasons why they like me. Yeah, that's actually really wise. People who dislike me are going to view the things that I say and the things that I view

as confirmation bias to reinforce the reasons why they dislike me. Do either of these... Should either of these influence or change the way that I live my life? No. No.

So we just carry on, bumbling along like a little puppy, getting excited shouting about things that excite me like anchovy deviled eggs or irk me like child poverty and um just bumbling along and i'm a lot i'm a lot happier now that i don't go looking for the terrible things that people say about me to reinforce my own negative self-esteem and i just get on with it occasionally something will flash up that's libelous or just generally outrageous and i'll have a pause and i'll be like can i be bothered and usually it's no no no no no i'm just gonna get on with my day

slightly irked but one time you were bothered and I won't mention the person's name because I would not dare give space to someone who I can't stand, but there was a comment that was put on Twitter that ended up in a court case. Yes. Which you won. And how was it to go through that? 18 months of hell.

Oh, 18 months. 18 months of lawyers' meetings, 18 months of having to... In fact, I threw those trial folders away last week, finally, having moved house with them several times. Yeah, it's just toxic, isn't it? Six thick, thick lever arch files of death threats, rape threats, hateful things that I had to colour code with post-it notes um so it was like pink for rape

threats purple for death threats orange for something else um and I moved those with me and everywhere I went they would come and they would take up an entire like bottom bookcase and I decided to finally let them go about a week ago at the same time as I went through my phone and deleted the entire folder of screenshots because generally the only thing I would screenshot would be abuse. And I would do that as a hangover from the libel trial because it might come in handy because so much of the evidence for that trial was deleted,

some of it by me because I didn't want to look at it anymore so I deleted bits because I didn't want to continually be tagged in conversations about it but it was emphasized to me the importance of keeping all the evidence so I would automatically if I read something hateful about myself I'd screenshot it just in case I'd ever need it and I realized that I was carrying around literally in my hand 13,000 examples of extreme abuse and lies about me that were taking up space that could be taken up with happy pictures of my son or goofy pictures of my cat or pictures of my recipes or nice things people say and I deleted that it crashed my phone trying to delete the entire folder at one in one go so to then do them like a few hundred at a time and I threw away the trial folder and I panicked afterwards

I was like oh god I've got rid of all that evidence and I was like no I feel lighter and I feel better and I'm just going to sit with this for a moment and I'm not going to do it again because what other people... I use that trial as a benchmark for when somebody really does overstep the mark. And I go, still got Mark, the lawyer, on that trial's number on speed dial on my phone and every now and then I'll text

him something and be like is this worth it it'll be like another 18 months like mental breakdown losing work blah blah he's like I would represent you in a heartbeat he was like but ask yourself if it's worth it like sit with it for 24 hours and I've never I've never done it because I just think I've got back into a place now where I'm in my groove I'm doing the thing that I love I'm doing like low-cost recipes I've found my little storytelling arc again doing the occasional commercial partnership with people whose like values align with my own and I go I don't want to put myself through that again don't want to really be the person that sues people at the drop of a hat on twitter um not at the moment no just want to carry on in my like puppyish jolly little groove

I don't think anyone's gonna take you on again though are they come on it's a double-edged sword because I get a lot less nonsense written about me in papers now, mainly because once you've had a successful litigation, people are quite cautious about writing things that may or may not be true or could be contentious or you could even just kick off about. But it also means that I slightly struggle to get um like pr stuff for my books because the british media tends to basically only take the rough with the smooth they'll write nice things about you if they can follow it up with a slight bit of scandal or if they can keep

their readers interested in you by going saints Saint, sinner, Saint, sinner. And it's really obvious, like Bait and Switch, but because they now can't do the sinner bits, they generally are a bit like, oh, no, we don't only want to write puff pieces, actually do your own marketing. But it hasn't harmed me in any way. I still get interviews and stuff like that, but it does mean that every odd little Twitter spat I have,

I now don't have to worry about it being written up in some piece of gutter press. Being like, oh, sweary rant. Yes, yes, have we met? Well, I mean, obviously I've got no idea what that must have felt like to go through that lengthy process. But from the outside looking in, I definitely was cheering at the end of it. Thank you.

I mean, that took a lot of guts, I think, actually. And also it was completely right that the individual was told that's not okay. It's not something to pay fast and loose with. And I think way too much gets... I mean, you've fought your battle now, but there'll be other people that need to take and loose with and I think way too much gets I mean you've fought your battle now but there'll be other people that need to take on similar things I think just to kind of I hear from them every week

I've become something of a quiet go-to for people who are like I've had this run in and I'm like I can put you in touch with people or I can just glance over it I have to say that Mark gets sent a lot of work from my Twitter inbox.

And I just quietly match people up with, or I'll say, and I always say, you have to be prepared that once you take it on, you can't back out. Because if you back out of a pro bono legal case, you are then fully liable for all the fees accrued so far. So people say, oh oh it's so brave of you to pursue it to the end it's like no no it wasn't i tried to get out and then i was told

that i'd be liable for about 300 grand and i had about 40 quid on my bank account at the time so i went well we're seeing this through to the bloody end aren't we um yeah you have to keep a sense of humor about it as well i'm sure definitely and it's a good sign that if you and your legal representative are still on very good terms you know you're obviously kept on the right side of things

yeah he's a great man he's a good laugh and he's an excellent cook as well he's Jewish so he's always sending me recipes for like blackers

and like various breads you know there's a bit of a running theme here with the people in your life being good cooks yeah I try to collect them

yeah it's very smart keep the priorities in the right place um something else that I noticed you've become a bit of a spokesperson for is um being transgender and I am this is a call I have this is something I get really um that's really close to my heart actually um because I I've from the moment i had my first baby uh a boy and then continued to give birth to boys i've been fascinated by the expectations that are placed on gender and it's made me think about what's happened in my own life that i might have unwittingly as well sometimes conformed to without really realizing and i think it's such a brilliant time for i've read a really great quote about actually saying that this is a good

opportunity to be emancipated from the sort of binary way that we see gender i mean did you notice when you had your baby that it was something you thought about when you had him or was it not really something you thought about pregnancy was really confusing for me because i'd um i didn't know the term non-binary but i knew from sort of my late teens that i didn't quite fit into a box of the neat little female box and i know a lot of a lot of women feel that they don't and it's quite difficult to pin down what that neat little box even is without reinforcing gender stereotypes but I I didn't want to be I was very clear that I didn't want to be a boy but I was I veered towards

androgynous um in my dress and in my mannerisms i changed my name from a very like fluffy feminine um name to jack because i wanted something that was um sort of not gender specific although people argue with me that jack is a boy's name i'm like well it's clearly not because it's my name i'm not a boy um and um and then i fell pregnant with my son and pregnancy brought with it a lot of changes to my body and I was a bit, I loved being pregnant, I really enjoyed it, sort of from a fascinated point of view. I was growing a life inside me that was like, but my body changed and became a lot more feminine

and I couldn't sort of escape into the sort of androgynous places that I'd previously been because I was very clearly a heavily pregnant woman. And it took a while for me to sort of come back out of that and remember who I am because I just immersed myself in in parenthood instead and just was like this this body it gave me this life like how dare I sort of despise it or not be grateful for it and um I did and um I and you get to a point with raising children where you kind of start to piece back who you are outside of being a mother. And I do identify as non-binary,

and I've got good friends in the transgender community who've been really supportive with that and who've been really helpful with that and who've been really helpful in helping me navigate that but it comes under a lot of criticism and people say oh it's not a real thing or by insisting on being non-binary you're reinforcing gender stereotypes and etc etc and i just kind of think it's just it's just not really anyone else's business and i think that when i came out i don't think there were any other um uk public figures who were non-binary yeah i know that there was ruby rose in the states and miley cyrus

um so it was treated as a huge deal by the press and I only came out because a former friend had threatened to out me and was like oh I've got these photos of you all dragged up dressed as a man and I wish I'd had the sort of courage at the time to have been like do you want us? I've always been quite clear that whenever somebody's tried to courage at the time to have been like do you what else um yeah maybe you wanted to own it actually

yeah i want i want i've always been quite clear that whenever somebody's tried to scoop me on my own life i'd get in first and sort of own the narrative so that it's not reaction it's not reactionary it's always sort of no but also it's a good conversation to have because it is it is a pretty vital thing I think to get get these conversations I mean of course you might not decide you wanted to be the person to front that but actually I really wasn't because I was also I was also quite um I was still working it out yeah and it's quite hard to like be the public face of something yeah when it's such a diverse umbrella that you can't possibly speak for represent or even understand everybody else's experiences under that umbrella

yeah um do you think that's almost part of the thing that people get squeamish about when they're having the chats is that they're wary of well firstly terminology the language is highly sensitive but also to a lot of people very new words to be speaking but also the idea of trying to speak generally about something that's as you say so bespoke and personal is really hard to navigate as well yeah and i also think that because of the the hostility that the trans community have been under from the mainstream press for the last few years yeah and really really have it's absolutely shocking um it makes people less less um amenable to coming forward and telling their stories because why would you yeah open yourself yourself up to all of those accusations and criticism, especially trans women?

I mean, the hate and vitriol and bigotry that trans women get from certain areas of our press is atrocious and I don't even know why I'm being coy about it. It's the Times and the Sunday Times and certain columnists there and their rhetoric about trans women has is horrendous yeah i know i tried to break it down sometimes i don't really understand i don't understand the emotion of it i just i just it's a lot of it has been um traced back to like far-right fundamental US supposedly Christian groups, are pouring loads of money into these UK anti-trans women campaigns.

And you're like, do you really think they're going to stop at trans people once these groups of basically religious fundamentalists have got their claws into trans women's rights? Do you think they're not going to stop into trans women's rights do you think they're not going to stop at gay people's rights or abortion rights or anything else they're not yeah they they're using the bogeyman to get in and and then they're gonna well i suppose also if we're taking it away from those very very far right extremist groups if it's more just the conversations that that are being had and I've had this chat with like really close friends of mine where we think the same about so many

things but on this just aren't quite lining up which has been quite surprising to me also something where I'm like okay well let I don't again I feel like I have to be careful because I don't want to offend anybody that is so sensitive. And what causes you to feel the way you feel can be born out of all manner of things and all manner of experiences. And for a lot of women that have spoken feeling uncomfortable about trans women's rights, it's often something they trace back to something very traumatic in their own lives.

Usually not something perpetrated by a trans woman, though. I have never heard lives um usually not something perpetrated by a trans woman though i have never heard an example of it being perpetrated by a trans woman however that doesn't take away from the fact that it's like something that's you know emotional for them so i just i cannot understand where where the threat of the trans women is for me i only see vulnerability in a group that needs to be supported yeah not threat like and i can't get beyond that to kind of when we're having the chats um and you can intellectualize these things but somewhere out there is you know maybe a young trans teenager who's feeling really frightened and that's the person we've got to think about yeah it's um it's it's a conversation that has just become increasingly hostile and and

incendiary and what people forget is that this isn't a sort of an argument to be played out in columnists of broadsheet newspapers. This is vulnerable groups of people who simply want to live their lives in ways that aren't harming anyone. Yeah, exactly. I don't actually think Twitter's the right form for it either. I definitely don't. And I think that

the best thing that we can do is really is to just not give those groups air time and just sort of take the oxygen off the fire and just support trans women

and it's not it doesn't need to be a binary thing. You don't need to be, say, you either support trans women or women who are survivors of violence who may have reasons, their own reasons for being wary about, you know, about allowing people sort people into their spaces who they may perceive as a threat completely unreasonably. It's not an either-or.

You don't have to... Everything just feels so polarised nowadays and there's nothing to be gained from throwing those walls up and folding your arms and going, oh, I don't agree with you so I'm not going to talk to you or i'm just going to call your names on the internet or i just think that there's there are real human people in in the being caught in the firing lines of all these words that are being thrown around yeah and they're people who just want to get on with their lives oh yeah i couldn't agree more i couldn't agree more and i totally agree as well about the

the whole thing of the thing i mean i saw it so clearly with what happened with brexit whether you would leave or remain everybody thought they were right and everybody thought the other people were wrong and that that can only lead to trouble can't it you've got to look for um you know the common ground i i spoke um not long ago to gina miller who um took the government to court over leaving um initiating brexit unconstitutionally and she said she now goes around talking to people that voted leave areas she'll sit into you know local town hall and have a talk there and she says she gets a lot of abuse but she always tries to say to people look if we said all the things that are the same about us we'd fill several sides of a4 and there's probably half a side of a4 about things we don't

agree on and i think it just takes being calm what's done is done we've got to move forward with things look for a better life for everybody everybody's got to feel they've got their their area the place they can go to for support for help for communication for community and build build the bridges it's so dangerous not to I think ostracizing and isolating people especially based on what you think they are or who you think they are is a really dangerous precedent to set and it's something that is just exacerbated by social media and I can't see a way for it getting better unless we all make a conscious effort to be better in all of our communications and all of the things that we do. Yeah, I think you're right.

I think the perspective is as well. You've got to see the social media for what it is really and keep it in that place because there's lots about all that stuff that's really great as well. Oh, yeah, the connection, the dog pictures, the communication, the community, being able to reach out. And information. I like the fact that news travels fast

and you can get access to all of it and it feels a lot more democratic in that way. And also finding people that, you know, if you do feel like you're alone and someone else is in a very similar situation but miles away you can actually make that connection that's that's really positive i mean i suppose with if i suppose the only question i want to ask about the non-binary just from my own understanding really is if is it does it feel like it is comes out of a response

to how society and things are structured about the perception of a gender? Or is it nothing really? Is it much more personal than that? It's just something that I've always felt. I'd always been tomboyish, but it was more than the tomboyish element. It was a real deep and private desire to be more male so i would sneak out of the house wearing my brother's clothes under my own clothes and then i'd take my clothes off and then i'd feel ashamed and embarrassed and then i'd hide his clothes that i'd borrowed and like stuff them in the bathroom cupboard or whatever um it's for me it's just been a i don't i i have

had some very traumatic experiences in my life that are that may not have happened would not have happened if i had been born a boy and i understand the academia behind the whole maybe I'm rejecting my gender because of the life experiences I've had that have been an indirect result of being born female, but also just it's just who I am. It's just who I am it's just how I am I just I just feel it's it's it's less a sense of dysphoria about my body and my appearance and more the sense of euphoria when what I see in the mirror aligns with the penny drop moment of this is what I'm supposed to look like this is who I am and

for me that is being largely androgynous and um you know I quite like it when sort of short-sighted old dears say oh you're a nice young man in the supermarket I'm like thanks also you don't necessarily have to everybody is shaped to a certain extent by the life events that happen but also i'm sure you've seen it with your little boy and i see it with my kids the kernel of who you are and how you feel about things and where you place the importance significance how you respond it's sort of there from the get-go i think so yes there can be key life events and milestones that kind of push you in one direction or another or highlight or you know um moderate but by and large i kind of feel like the person you are is there from when you're when you're born in a way it's a nature nurture balance i feel like a

lot of it is just who you are and you probably see that with johnny yeah definitely um johnny is a boy boy he's a prophet and i've and you know it's funny when people um accuse parents of parents of trans trans children of like pushing an agenda on their kids and i'm like it's impossible to push an agenda on you can't get them to eat vegetables yeah exactly get them to eat peas let alone stick a dress on if they don't want to i mean it's it's the people who say that generally don't have children because they are the most willful and self-actualizing and self-assured little human beings that they could ever hope to be. Absolutely.

All you can do as a parent is give them space to grow into who they are, encourage them to be themselves and love them and support them. And as long as you're doing all those things, you're going to do okay. I totally agree with you. Lots of furious nodding going on my side of the table. Just a last question for you. You said at the beginning of this that if you could, the job you had at the fire station, manning the phones,

is something you still go back to, but with all the stuff that's going on and your writing and all the things you care about and the place you found yourself in with the place that you can put your wisdom out there for the world. Is that really something you would do or is it actually kind of where you're supposed to be a bit more now? I kind of feel like I could do both

in the way that I often feel like... You do get four days off a week with the other two. Yeah, four days that my watch officer used to... Because when I was in the fire service, I also did other things like worked in a bar and worked in a nightclub and she would always be like you're supposed to spend two of those four days off sleeping I'd be like yes yes yes yes yes I know I know um so I do slightly fantasize that I could do both um but in the same way that I quite frequently take on more than I can chew and then end up working till 2am being like why am I like this um I quite like where I am at the moment I

no one is more surprised than I am that I'm still going I thought my first book would be a one-hit wonder and then I'd be back on a supermarket checkout or something you know doing and I'd have been I'd have been very happy with that um I'm also realistic enough to know that the gig gig economy and being a freelancer and being a writer is increasingly precarious and I may have to go back and get a real job at some point but for as long as this like mad little roller coaster will support me I think it kind of helps that I still live fairly frugally and you know that I can eke out one commercial contract to like pay my salary for a period of months and be like right okay this is this is good um that i'll just you know i'll

keep going for as long as there's a there's a need there's a vacancy for what i do and as much as over the last couple of weeks twitter has been filled up with people going oh well it's really easy to cook a meal for 20p it's really easy to boil an egg for 12p or whatever and nobody seems to be chomping at the bit to step into my shoes um no I think you've carved out a place that's all your own I think your roller coaster is going to keep going if somebody could just you know cover holiday, that would be nice. Because I haven't had any of that for quite some time. And I've just learned to take Sundays off and I love them.

It's great. The first time in years, I'm like, this is so good. Like my house is reasonably tidy. My washing is done. This is fantastic. But yeah, holidays are yet to happen. But if I could just find someone who could ape my rambly writing style and get a bit angry on Twitter in my absence for a few weeks a year,

I'd quite like the time off. Good luck with that. You have to put it back into that spreadsheet that you started back in March. So, how brilliant was that? So that's me and Jack. And we recorded that. Oh golly, when was it? It must have been back in the end of October, November time.

Whenever you were allowed to have people around if you were doing work things. And then happily, Jack stayed for lunch and I had to, it's the first time I've ever had to cook for someone who's also had a cookbook out. And it went well, thank goodness. It's a little bit intimidating that, isn't it? If you know someone's really good at cooking, but I went for it anyway. And actually it was really nice. You probably didn't really need to know that. So who am I

going to have next week week I think next week I'm going to put out the one the chat I have with Jess Phillips Jess Phillips is the Labour MP for Birmingham and uh yeah she's completely brilliant as well I've always really found her such a um I suppose exactly how I was hoping politicians would be when i was growing up you know passionate uh really um what's the word sorry i'm so cold my brain is using up really connected with the constituency um really switched on with what's needed in that area and uh sort of a bit fierce and fun and smart anyway that's next week but this week thank you to you all for your ears um i'm going to go inside now and uh try to stave off the frostbite which

is attempting to get a hold of my right hand as i record this um but thank you so much it's good to see you again uh thanks for lending me your ears. And look after yourselves. It's supposed to be a bit warmer this week. So hopefully if I have to lock myself out of the house in order to talk to you, I will not be so cold. All right. Lots of love. Speak to you soon. Bye. Thank you. I'm going to go. your level, embrace it. Journey starts when you say so. If you've got five minutes or 50, Peloton

Tread has workouts you can work in. Or bring your classes with you for outdoor runs, walks, and hikes led by expert instructors on the Peloton app. Call yourself a runner. Peloton all-access membership separate. Learn more at onepeloton.ca slash running.