Test Match Special - View from the Boundary - Joanne Harris

Episode Date: June 26, 2025

Author Joanne Harris speaks to Jonathan Agnew as she tells the story of her career at her first day at a Test match. She reveals some amazing details of the process of writing a novel and her life growing up in Yorkshire.

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Barnsley Bourne. Darren Goff, Dickie Berg, Catherine Siver Brunch came to international prominence with a 1999 novel, Chocolat. That was made into an Oscar-nominated film starring Johnny Depp. Chocolat sold over a million copies in the UK alone. It's been listed as one of the 100 best-selling books of all time. Other works, Strawberry Thief, Five Quarters of the Orange,

a gentleman and players, a novel featuring the metaphor of cricket to explore issues around class and opportunities. A very warm welcome to TMS Commentary Box. Joanne Harris, love it to have you here. It's lovely to be here, thank you. You look very excited. I am. I've never been to a cricket match before. Not a proper one.

A big proper one. Only college cricket matches when I was a student. Yes, well, I know. And what's you making of your experience? You're down in the far end, aren't you? I'm really enjoying it. I'm really enjoying the atmosphere and the sounds and the responses of the crowd. And I've begun almost to understand the rules now.

It takes a bit longer than a morning. I know. I know. I can't remember which author it was who said that cricket was invented to help the British understand the concept of eternity. And beginning to understand why they said that. That's very true. Your husband, Kevin, he's a big cricket fan. He's a huge cricket fan. So the cricket is always on and I'm always aware that it's happening.

And I'm aware of its sounds and its rhythms, but I don't always immediately follow precisely who's scoring what. Because Barnsley's a famous old Yorkshire town, you know, for cricketers. Absolutely, yes. I used to see Dickie Bird around in town. He still owes me a fish supper. He said that, yes, I've moved to Huddersfield. That's 12 miles away from Barnsley.

And he said, oh, she never comes back to Barnsley. If she does, I'm going to buy her a fish supper. That was 15 years ago. I'm still waiting. He still owes me that. I've known Dickie a very long time. I suggested we're waiting longer than 15 years. It's not going to happen, is it?

But Dickie did... I'm gutted. Dickie into his pockets. But it was where Barnsley was where, yeah, Dickie, Michael Parkinson's. Yes, absolutely. Jeff Boycott used to go and play there. It is part of the history and the weft of the town. Yes.

You can feel it. I think you can. Are you sitting here and making sort of mental notes of what you're seeing and hearing? Because it seems to me that someone like you, Joanne, I'll be terrified of being a friend. or someone who spends a lot of time with you or even sits on a bus with you or a train because I think... You could end up in a book.

That notebook's out and you're just jotting little notes down. You could end up in a book, but you probably wouldn't realise it. I think the thing is that you can borrow just one thing from somebody, the colour of their eyes or the way they talk or the way they move or just one thing that they said or some anecdote that they told you and that would end up in the book. But the whole person doesn't usually end up. although I did use to teach at Leeds Grammar School

like half a mile away from here and when I started writing about teaching all the boys I taught assumed that I was writing about them and they weren't wrong either but it was just a little bit here and there that I'd borrow there wasn't any single individual no but I think your fellow teachers might be a bit anxious wouldn't they might well end up in there

especially if you didn't like one of them well you know they may or may not have recognised bits of themselves but no it's that's not how it works for no it's more like casting a play You know, you cast somebody in a role But you're not saying that person is actually that character So that was gentlemen and players, I guess you're talking about there, aren't you? Gentleman and players.

Based in the school life And also the books that follow that in the series But yes, it was a set in a boys' grammar school Not a million miles away from boys' grammar schools That I may have taught in the past But with different characters But you know, every school has a certain little something in common with every other school. There's a community

there. There are pupils, there is a dynamic in the common room. I mean, when I arrived at Leeds Grammar School, I was one of about four women members of staff, so it was a very masculine environment. It was mostly boys and gentlemen of a certain age. And so I

kind of stood out a bit. And it was just full of stories. It was an amazing place to be because the community and the vibe of it was just made for, turns out, writing a crime novel. So why did you choose that title then necessarily? I mean, was there any sort of cricketing theme to it

or just a notion of what gentlemen and players are in a cricketing sense? Well, yes, there was that. The main character. A cricket ball on the cover of it for a start. And bales. No, I wanted there to be a metaphor for cricket in there. It was partly about class. It was partly about the doors that we find open for us.

And so this idea, this image of the gentleman and players gates at Lords was a very powerful one. Right. The idea that, you know, you could have privilege built into the very entrance of your school, your workplace, the place that you were going to play the game. So there was that too, but there was also something about gender. But yes, mostly it was a class reference. And the character, the main character, who is a Latin master called Mr. Straitly,

who is perpetually on the brink of retirement and never quite gets around to it, is a massive cricket fan. I see, right. But you're right. I mean, the whole notion of the players in the same team will come out of gates maybe 100 yards apart. Absolutely. As they used to do, it does seem remarkable, isn't it?

It does seem remarkable. That was the way the game was played. Although when I was at school, when I went to school, there was a gate marked boys and another one marked girls, which to me has a similar kind of message. You are so different that you have to come in through a different door. That was actually on arriving at school. Actually arriving at school, yes.

Why? I don't know. It was written in stone on the lintel of the gate, and you were not allowed to go in through the boys' entrance, for some reason that I never really understood, because we were all in the same playground. We were in the same school. But it was the idea that there are these distinctions made in society

between boys, girls, gentlemen, players, people with privilege, people without. And it's something I've been writing about ever since. I was going to say, this feature is strong, this sort of statement features strongly in, I mean, you've written so many different genres of books. Does that sort of thing pop up in a particular type of book and not another genre that you're writing about?

Or do what your beliefs appear everywhere, as it were? Can you insert them into every type of book? I think I'm not really the one who determines the genre of a book. That's the publishers, that's the people marketing the book. But I think that if I'm writing about the world, then the world that I see and the world that I experience will find its way into the books in one way. or another. So my opinions don't change. The things that interest me don't change and my

observations of the way people interact. That doesn't change either. So the only thing that really changes is whether it's set in a boys grammar school in the north or a little village in the southwest of France or, you know, in Asgard because I did write quite a lot of books about Norse gods. But they too were communities under pressure with certain dynamics between them and kind of the volatility that you get from a small community that can experience sudden radical change. Yes. Tell me about your life as a writer, because I get terrified without start writing. I mean, that horrible blank screen and the curse are blinking away.

Oh, the black screen is terrible. I detest the idea of not having something to work on, so I usually work on several things at once, so that I never get this moment. What, different books? Yes, absolutely. I've usually got several works in progress. so that I can be working on plan A and when I've finished it

I can jump to something else straight away without thinking, oh my God, when am I going to get another idea? Am I ever going to get another idea? This is terrible. The writer's block type, simply. It's to avoid that fear, that fear of the blank page, which is very pervasive.

I think all writers have it to a certain degree. Yes. But if I've only got one thing to write about and I've got those panicky thoughts, what should I do? Well, don't think too much about the page. Just think about the sentence. Just sentence by sentence.

If you make your objective small, I think too many people sit down and they think, I'm going to write a book. Oh my gosh, it's going to be 500 pages long. Yes. How much have I written today? Only 200 words. It's very intimidating.

That's me. You're talking about me. So sentence by sentence. I wrote a whole book on social media a few years ago, and I wrote it in little tiny sentences with 100. 140 characters apiece and it taught me a lot about a how to best construct a sentence and also how important it is to have a sentence which has its own integrity and music and phrasing and I got better at writing because of social media. It's one of the very few things social media has given me that's a positive.

Yes, that's interesting. So you wrote a book of sentences of 140 characters. That's right. I wrote a series of 100 stories in a book called Honeycomb, which is a kind of, they are kind of modern fairy tales in the old style and I started telling these stories on Twitter as it was once and it felt like telling stories aloud to people because there's something very conversational about that kind of social media and I realised that when I started one of these stories people would stop and they would keep scrolling to see when the next bit was

and if I stopped to make a cup of tea they would get impatient and they would go out next and sometimes if something sad happened they would send me pictures of themselves crying and it felt like telling stories to a bunch of people who, in the oral tradition, if you like, old-fashioned folk tales were always told aloud to their audience. And I thought, this is something that I can use. I would like to do this. So I put them in a book and I got it illustrated by the legendary illustrator Charles Vess,

took his time about the whole process. So during that time, I thought, what else can we do? And so the band that I'm in that I've been in since I was 16, and been writing music with since that time. We thought, oh, well, we could put them to music and we could make them into a kind of stage show. So that became story time that we've been messing around with ever since. So, yeah, stories like to travel.

They like to go into illustration, art, dance, theatre, music. And they're just all different methods of distribution. And yet you were a teacher for much of a early part of her life. I was, I was a teacher for 15 years, most of it at LGS. around the corner. So was that frustrating? I mean, was it was the author written all these books and all these different things? Was that not bursting to come out? No, I was already writing when I was a teacher. I wrote three books when I was a teacher, including Chocolat. And I wrote in whatever free time I happen to have, which is good training because I still don't have an awful lot of free time,

so I write in that. I think, you know, when you become a professional author, the things that you have to do that are not writing do tend to kind of eat your life if you're not careful. In the nicest possible way. I mean, I've just finished a four-week tour for my new book, Vian, and I have been writing on trains, in hotel rooms, you know, in little intervals of five, ten minutes the way I used to when I was teaching full-time, because that's how my process works. So you're right, so you don't mind background noise, you don't mind distractions. You can just write in any place, any time? I could completely write here, because the background noise is nice and ambient and warm.

It's not 4 o'clock yet, Johnny. You don't want it over there. Maybe not. It'd get a bit lively then. Right if there was something big going on around me that I had to pay attention to. So, you know, not if there was music playing, for instance, because that would take over the rhythm of the words in my mind because I like to read aloud to myself when I'm working.

So no music. But ambient sounds of people doing what they do is quite nice, actually. To me, it's connective. because writing is effectively a conversation between the author and the public. So to be reminded that the public exists sometimes is quite nice. So coffee shops, railway stations, airports, they're all good places. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I can't write to music that's got lyrics.

I can write to classical music. And just so the words, if you're listening to music and a song, somehow you're thinking of the words of the song. I think so. And it starts to take over the rhythm of the phrase. Yes. And when I'm writing aloud, I kind of think, oh, well, I want to follow the rhythm of this lyric instead. So before you know it, you've had something take over.

So I don't let that happen. No. It's interesting how music plays very much part of your writing. I mean, you do write music as well, but I'm talking more of your literary writing. There's a lot of music in it. I don't use it to work too, but there's often a lot of reference to music in it. A lot of my characters either know music like music or use music to express various feelings. and so sometimes I have, in some of my books I have playlists

where the characters are listening to certain kinds of music and I'm encouraging the reader to do the same because there might be clues in the song that they are listening to. I wrote a book called Blue Eye Boy which was nearly all of it set on social media and every chapter had a song from a playlist which also illustrated some part of the chapter. Right, fascinating.

Let's go to the shock allow then because clearly that was a life-changing moment for you It was, but I didn't realise it at the time. You really didn't. No, not at all. I was just writing. I was just, you know, doing what I'd been doing for 10 years. And I'd had two books published, and they hadn't done particularly well.

I mean, they had what we now call a cult audience, which means they were largely unread. I haven't quite found my voice. And I was very good at pastiching other people. So I'd written a horror novel, a vampire novel. And then I'd written a sort of literary ghost story. And both of them were not quite interesting. in my voice. One of them was kind of cribbed from Wilkie Collins and the other one was cribbed from Mary Shelley and I was just coming into what it was that I wanted to do and write

about and then I wrote this, this manuscript and I thought, oh, I'm kind of getting there with this. But by then nobody wanted to publish me because none of my books had done well enough for me to be a really great prospect for a publisher. So my agent sent this manuscript off to the States to another sub-agent and said, well, look, does she have a chance of breaking America because, you know, breaking America was what it was about in those days? And the sub-agent came back and said, oh, God, no, she can write, but it's all about the wrong kind of thing and, you know, what is this thing about food that she's writing? Why is there so much food in there? A recession about food. And why are there so many old people in there? You know, why doesn't she

just have a nice young couple having sex or something? Because, you know, I don't know what she's trying to do. So I went back and I thought, okay, this kind of thing isn't going to sell. And then I went off and wrote chocolate, which was just full of food and was, and did just all the things that I'd been told wouldn't be commercial. But I had such a good time doing it. Yes. And I thought, oh, actually this is my voice, isn't it? How did you start, how did you even begin to sit down with the notion of this single mother and daughter going off the little, little French village and setting up, you know, in the chocolate in the shop there.

Where was that sort of, I don't know, dreamy idea even come from from within? Well, obviously you have a French connection. My mother's friend. So I have a lot of French family and a lot of stories have come to me from my French family.

So there were some of that and there were some of my memories of going to France at a child at Easter and seeing the chocolate shops there and the big ceremonies. Which are lovely, aren't they? Yeah, gorgeous. And the enormous Mardi Gras ceremonies

that they had with the great, the chard and the, the Papier-Maché de Grustette, the enormous kind of figurines and the majorettes and this kind of thing. And I'd just taken a school trip to France. And so I was being reminded of all this as I was taking the trip and watching the boys doing what they were doing. But of course, I was also a teacher at Leeds Grammar School. And that was a very patriarchal community. And I was a young woman in that community.

And so I wrote about a young woman who enters a very patriarchal community in France and picks a fight with effectively the person in power who is the village priest and has an opposition with him and later on I thought oh actually this is why I wrote it that way because I was in a quite similar position at Leeds Grammar School

I was the one who didn't quite fit and so I took that small community that I inhabited with its different characters and I kind of just transferred it gently to the southwest of France and it's funny how easily it managed to do that and there were some characters that I did borrow from members of staff at LGS

we had one physics teacher called Mr Frye who's now dead but he was an adorable man and the boys loved him and because I didn't think this book would sell I didn't think too hard about you know hiding the identity of people who I borrowed from so Mr Fry ended up in Chocolat with his dog Charlie and then later when the book had done so well

and the film was about to come out and 2,000 LGS boys were saying who's going to play Mr Frye Miss I realized that if I'd really wanted to hide his identity I should have changed the name of the dog Oh no, it's alright A bit of a giveaway So I had to apologise

And I said oh well I'm sorry This is why all the boys are talking to about this book And by the way it's going to be a movie And then when the movie came out We went to the one movie theatre in Headingley that would allow Mr Fry to take the dog and we watched the film and every time his character came on

he would go and the dog would whine and I said oh no this isn't going well at all and so we finally stumbled out into the sun and I looked at him and I said well Mr Frye what did you think and he looked at me and said oh Mrs Harris they've made me so tall that was all that was it he was happy otherwise was it

he was very happy indeed so I when I wrote gentlemen and players I dedicated that book to him. Oh, nice. As a kind of apology for having embarrassed him terribly because he was a very modest gentleman and he didn't really enjoy the attention, but he got quite a lot of it. Yeah, and when you're writing a book like Chocolat,

are you writing entirely chronologically and do you know where it's going from the start? Do you see, right, here we go. I know where this is going to go and you just write the book or is it sort of meandering off and developing as it goes? It does depend on the book. with Chocolat it was quite linear and quite easy in that respect

I just had these two voices these two character voices in opposition with each other and it was quite a gentle evolution of plot and I knew how it was going to end I don't always know sometimes particularly if I'm writing a thriller and there are lots of twists and reversals

I deliberately try not to think too far ahead because I would like some of those things to surprise me really? If they do then they will probably surprise the audience Yes. So you can write a book like a thriller and not know how it's going to end. Sometimes that's the exciting thing about it.

Sometimes that's the thing that keeps it alive. And I might have a number of key scenes planned out or I might have an ending but not how we get to the ending. Yes. Like a sort of bridge which builds itself as you run across it. Or sometimes I'm literally, you know, writing into the dark and hoping that the light at the end of the tunnel

isn't an oncoming train or something. But no, it's different with every single book. Is that sort of eureka moment when you're well into the book when you go, ah, that's how it's going to go? Sometimes that happens, or sometimes it's not so much in a eureka moment as a, oh gosh, oh really, oh wow, how am I going to do this moment because something reveals itself and I have to go back and try to see if I can make it possible.

Usually it's something about a character. A character will reveal some part of themselves and I think, oh, well, oh, this is important, I didn't know this, how am I going to roll with it? But no, I think some level of uncertainty is quite important in my process because it keeps the story alive. Yeah. It's an extraordinary thing to actually have character. You say the character reveals him or herself by doing something. But you're creating it.

It's not the character. It's you. I am creating it, but I'm also getting to know a stranger. I think you can do both those things at once. And I think part of the thing about characterisation is that if you want your characterisation, to come alive. You have to treat them like a living person. You have to try to get to know them as you would a living person. So you can know superficial things about them at the beginning. You can know certain important things about them if you're writing from their point of view.

But they should be revealing themselves to you little by little throughout the book or throughout the series of books if that character returns. Yeah. It's been like writing a soap opera, isn't it? You'd be brilliant at that. Well, I mean, I don't know. I've never written a soap opera. That's about the one thing you haven't done. That's absolutely one thing I've not done. But it is very much soap operas are filled with characters that people get to love and they want to follow them and they want to know what happens to them.

And, you know, like all stories, I think, if you don't care about the character, why would you read the story? And of course, Chocolat developed, so it's what, to a trilogy, didn't it? It's actually got five books in it now. Five now, cracky. The new one is a prequel to Chocolat, so it is the lead character of Jan Rochey before she becomes the character we know in Chocolat. but I've taken her right up to almost 25 years in real time

because I have been writing about her gradually in jumps. So when I was writing Chocolat, I was the mother of a small child. So I wrote her as the mother of a small child. And then later with the lollipop shoes, I wrote her as the mother of a young adolescent, and then the mother of an older adolescent. Then the mother of a child who has left home and another one who is about to leave home.

So I've taken all the stages of motherhood as a couple. as I've experienced them, and I've given those experiences to Fiann. And she is not me by any means, but we certainly share that, and we've probably got closer to each other in terms of characterisation because of it. It's extraordinary. And you've been able to do this simply through the success of that first book. I've been very lucky. That book which I didn't expect to be successful has been.

It brought me a lot of readers. And then the books I wrote after, which were not connected to Chocolat, got me a lot of readers too. It seemed that I was a bit afraid of writing a follow-up to Chocolat initially because I thought, well... The pressure there, isn't it? Expectation. What if I get it wrong? Also, what if I never get the chance to write anything specially different?

Because I will get kind of channeled into just writing about those characters and it will become a brand and I won't be able to explore anything else. So I deliberately went and said to my publishers, right, you're not getting any more Chocola stories, that's it, that's done. I'm going to write a historical novel. I'm going to write a crime novel. going to write some short stories. I'm going to do this. And I found that my readers followed me to those places. It was a very, it was an experiment. Does a publisher happy with that initially? They were very happy that the public followed me. They were very unhappy that I wasn't going to toe the line and just do something that they could sell very easily. I've always been a bit of

a difficult author in that respect, I think, because I'm difficult to quantify. Am I a crime writer? I'm I a literary novelist? Am I a fantasy writer? I mean, I really honestly don't understand why I have to sit in just one pigeonhole. But it's, I mean, objectively much easier to sell books that way. It's just not the way I write books. I don't mean to be annoying about it.

It's just the way I do it. So I went off and had these adventures and I found that my public were really happy to follow me down all these different rabbit holes. And then after that, I realized, you know, I am now allowed to go back to Shokalab without feeling track. And I could say something different because I hate the idea of writing the same book twice. So I had to give it some space, give the characters some space, bring new life experience to the table before I could revisit those characters.

So I could say something new about them. Yeah. I'm thinking of walking into Waterstones and saying, I want a joint Harris book, please. And thinking of all different sections that you're going to be in. I mean, where would we... I think I've got my own section. You must have, because you've just kind of, you've been most of them. Yeah, I definitely have my own section in the Big Waterstones on Piccadilly.

I just have a shelf that is Joanne Harris, and my books are just on there. Really? But, you know, sometimes the fantasy novels will pop up under fantasy. Sometimes they'll just pop up under mainstream literary fiction. The historical stuff will be... Yeah, it's difficult. But usually, I mean, people who follow what I do will find out what I do because they will go on my website and they will check on there.

They'll follow me and subscribe to my newsletter, or they will follow me on social media. I'm now on blue sky a lot more often than I am on Twitter, and they will find out about stuff there. And then they will decide. And the people who particularly are hoping for a crime thriller will look forward to that, and the people who really want the next in the Chocolas series

will look forward to that. Some of them will just follow wherever I go, which is nice. I feel uniquely privileged that that's happened. What's it like when your most successful book and the one that made you become a film? What's the process? I mean, do you have any control over what that film's going to look like at all?

Not a huge amount of control, no. The rights to that book were sold very, very early before the book was even out. So nobody knew who I was. And it said, you know, rights are acquired in the same way that people buy shares in companies hoping that the shares will accrue. so it was a cheap share and the scout who bought them for the producer

was probably hoovered up about a hundred options for very little money and you know that just because something's been optioned it won't necessarily happen you know on spec it takes about 15 years for something to make it into a movie and only one in a hundred ever makes it so it's a lottery ticket it's not a lottery win

and my friend the author Chris Fowler who at the time was running a company promoting films. He said, oh well, you know, it's nice for you that you've got this option, but don't get too excited because it'll probably not happen. The only time you need to really pay attention is if you're there at the premiere watching the credits role. So I believed him. And I thought, okay, well, fine. And then a year later, I got a call from Juliet Binoch saying, oh, I've been cast in your movie. And I thought, oh, is something happening? And then Chris wrote me a letter and he said, oh, I think your film is happening, you know, because I'm going to

be the company promoting it and I've already got the poster and so you know I kind of held my breath until I was there at the premiere watching the credits roll but I didn't really believe in it until it had happened and by that time I had been on on set and met the cast and all these other things but I know that things can fall through even at that late time so I thought oh it's just too quick it's just happened too quickly it can't possibly really happen and then I was at the premier watching the credits going oh my god it's happened I had a kind of massive panic attack and inhaled too much popcorn and practically had to get trollied off. It was a lovely experience.

It was a hell of a ride. Were you happy with it though? I mean, was it your book? It was not exactly my book, but it was about 70% there, which was really good because a lot of the time the book is unrecognizable because, you know, things get cut. And they went to a lot of iterations of the script before they got to the script they had. And initially they were going to set it in the States. you know, in the sort of late 1800s,

and they were going to have Whoopi Goldberg in it. And I thought, wow, they're going to make it a race fable. That's going to be so different. Interesting, but maybe not my book. And then they said, oh, well, we've given up on that one because we couldn't get Whoopi, but now we're going to set it in the present day in New York with Gwyneth Paltrow. And I thought, wow, like anyone's going to believe that Gwyneth Paltrow eats chocolate. But at the time, you know, she was the big,

a Mac's property. And then they came back and they said, oh, well, no, we've got Juliette Binoche. Who was the name that I had been pressing every single time I did an interview. I said, oh, I imagine this movie with Juliet Bionish in it, and of course, the fact that that happened was just synchronicity. It didn't

come from me. It came from her. She read the book. She liked the book. She found that they were casting. She went and asked for the part and she got it. But I thought, wow, okay, they've got the right actress. They've got, you know, they've brought it back to Europe. They've got a mostly European cast.

So, yeah, I'm in there. I feel that I'm connected to this. But even if I hadn't been, you know, even if it had been something so far out of my writing that I hadn't recognized it, it wouldn't have changed the book at all. No, no. I've learned a new word today,

when I started researching, Joan. Synesthesia. Now, this seems an extraordinary thing. You can explain what it is, but basically you, smell colours. That's right, yes. I mean, synesthesia basically is when

the modules of the brain that are supposed to govern the sensors slightly intersect in one way or another, and so it can present in all sorts of ways. In my way, I do smell colours. So your mic shield, which is orange. It's sort of orange, it smells of a sort of coffee colour.

You are literally, you are literally, I mean, we are two yards apart. I'm literally smelling the colour of your colour. as coffee. If I shut my eyes, I know that nobody has got coffee in the room, so I know that it's the colour that I'm smelling and not actual coffee back there. So there's that, but people with synesthesia have all sorts of overlaps, and I know people who see music as colours or shapes, see numbers as colours, or days of the week as colours. There was a programme on TV some years ago where there was a man who basically tasted names, and it was called, I think it was

called Derek's smells of, Derek tastes of earwax, something like that. First not. There's a poor guy who had a friend called Derek, but every time he thought or heard his name he could taste earwax, that was just terrible. So, yeah, I mean, I've had this all my life. Yes. But I've only realised

that it was a condition that not everybody shared when I saw that program. It was normal to you. I thought it was oh, I thought everybody smelled colours. I just thought that was a normal. And so my mother used to have a red apron which I referred to as the chocolate apron and nobody knew why.

And I thought, why does nobody know? It's obvious it smells of chocolate, but that's just because red smells of chocolate to me, but I've found out that that's actually not the case with everybody else. And a lot of people have this? Are you become aware of more and more people? I have become aware of more and more people having it. I think it's a relatively rare phenomenon,

but actually you look into the artist community and the writer community, there are, I think, a lot more in that community. A creative world. I think it helps. creativity. I mean, some people find it a bit debilitating and find that they, you know, I was, I was talking to Helena Pega the other night. They're a beautiful opera singer, musician. And she has synesthesia, and she was talking about how sounds evoke colours to her. And sometimes if she's in a crowd, the colours are just too much. And it becomes overwhelming. I've known people

who actually had to stay indoors because of this, because they just couldn't be around the distractions that their synesthesia gave them. But I think most people find it creative and enhancing to their creativity. How's that smelling out there? Oh, they're smelling pretty good. I mean, I don't smell green grass as a colour. I don't have a synesthetic response to that.

Yeah, moan grass smells beautiful. Mown grass smells lovely and I can smell that. But that to me is a neutral so it doesn't have a strong sense of smell outside its real smell and the sky is a neutral too. so you know I'm not smelling those colours the crowd itself is so diverse that I don't get a dominant smell from that

if anything the pink strip the advertising strip on there has a colour which is a sort of gassy vanilla smell but it's not huge it's not overwhelming it's not the whole room that smells of it so you know everything is fairly neutral and toned down also the light isn't especially bright and I mostly get these things in brighter brighter light they become much more overwhelming

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