The Netmums Podcast - S1 Ep82: Mariella Frostrup on the endless judgement of mothers

Episode Date: June 28, 2022

Mariella chats to Wendy about everything from revolutionising education and talking about vulvas in the House of Commons, to her #menopausemandate and her macabre choice of lullabies when her kids were small!

You're listening to Sweat, Snot and Tears brought to you by Netmums. I'm Annie O'Leary and I'm Wendy College and together we talk about all of this week's sweaty, snotty and tearful parenting moments with guests who are far more interesting than we are. On this week's show, one of the surprising things as a parent was just the really simple fact that I thought, you know, that the majority of my efforts in mothering would be in the early years. And instead, what I've discovered, which I think is a truism for most parents, that as your kids get older, you know, certainly in their teens, they actually need you more and they can voice it. You know, they can go, I need you now. Or they can, you know, lie in

your bedroom, kind of with you waiting and waiting and waiting because you know that they're there for a reason. But you know, if you push them, they won't tell you what the reason is. Hello, everybody. I'm still flying solo. I've got no Annie and I'm feeling sad about it. But today's guest is, I think, enough to cheer me up. She's the thinking woman's pinup as far as I'm concerned. She's a badass menopause campaigner and I get the feeling she's probably not to be messed with. Welcome Mariella Frostrup.

Oh, you've set the bar quite high, Wendy, haven't you? Cheer you up. I don't know. I've got to try and cheer myself up. you up as well I'll do my best. We're recording this on a what is according to the Daily Mail the hottest day of the year so we're both broiling in our offices because we can't open the window because of various people mowing lawns outside so bear with us everybody if we start to go a bit mad it's because it's 32 degrees. Now, I wanted to ask you a question we always ask to start off with, because your kids are in their teens. It might be a bit less relevant. Any sweat, snot or tears in your household this morning?

No, actually, it's been pretty tranquil today, but I think that's probably down to the fact that I've been gone for a few days and they tend to be on best behavior for about six hours after I get back. And then it all disintegrates and collapses. I've got one doing GCSEs and one doing A-levels at the moment. So they're pretty preoccupied with that. And I think, you know, so happy to have any kind of care and attention in between their swatting that they're more grateful than usual. God, is that making it super stressful in the household? Like it's bad enough having one kid doing exams, but both, that's pretty hardcore. It certainly got me quite animated about the education system and exactly how and what and why it exists in the shape that it currently does. I'm talking to you in the same week as the Times Education Commission reported back. And I have to say, I kind of went tick, tick, tick to almost everything they said, including the complete

redundancy of that GCS system that has my son doing 26 hours of exams. And, you know, he sort of summed it up the other day when there was sort of snot and tears, if you will, by saying, you know, I've spent the last three weeks cramming, cramming, cramming. And he said, and now this weekend, what I need to do is I need to forget everything that I've crammed in there so I can make space for the next three weeks of the cramming for the next three weeks worth of exams. And in a nutshell, he sort of summed up exactly what you don't want education to be, which is just a sort of, you know, a kind of challenge, a marathon. A memory challenge, a marathon memory challenge. And also a pressure challenge, because, you know, you can remember things,

then you can walk into an exam, you can have a bad day. We all know what it's like having a bad day at work or whatever, where it all suddenly disappears. But also what you're sort of beating out of children in a way is any desire for knowledge for its own sake or pleasure in discovering things about the world. And I just think, you know, it's so sad. And then you've got, you know, my daughter doing A-levels, you know, at the age of 16, as my son is about to have to do now, she had to choose the three subjects that she was interested in. I mean, I still don't know the three subjects that I'm interested in, because I feel like it's in, you know, it's a, life is a big feast, you know, and you can always choose something else and find out about something else. And that's one of the joys of it. And yet we're teaching our kids so early on that they have to

reduce, reduce, funnel vision, you know. So if there is blood, snot and tears in my house, it's about that at the moment, really. I 100% agree. I can still remember now and I'm in my 40s having to remember very key facts about the Balkan wars which I used in the exam and never needed to know after that point and just I had at one point I had three two-hour exams in one day that's it's just like you're 16 how can they do that to you no it's just crazy and then you know so I was trying to be a helpful parent and my daughter's doing um English and she's doing the Handmaid's Tale and um I saw that the Handmaid's Tale was on as an opera at the ENO and I thought how brilliant I'll try and get some tickets for that and you know it'll give her a different

vision of of you know how it can interpreted. And that's got to be useful in the exam because she can show off that knowledge. And she's sort of, she's very pragmatic, my daughter. And she said, look, mum, she said, I'll go, you know, because you want me to and it might be fun. She said, though, I have to say I'm pretty sick of The Handmaid's Tale at the moment. But she said, don't be under any illusions that it's going to be useful in the exam, because in the exam, all they want me to do is quote from the text and show that I've memorized bits of it. She said, they don't want to know about how it can be reinterpreted in different forms. They don't want to know about anything. God, it's depressing, isn't it?

Yeah. And that's, I find, really, really depressing because I just think it's also not just depressing, but very short-sighted. Because in the world that we live in today, you know, one of the things that's going to be, you know, the most imperative skill set really is to be able to shape shift, to change, to move from one area, perhaps even one career to another. And yet we're kind of steadfastly sticking to some old Victorian jobs for life system when it comes to how we educate our kids. And it's so frustrating, I think. I completely agree. How are you finding the joy of teenagers in general? I think I've been really quite lucky. I mean, you know, that's not to say that they're a pleasure on a daily basis. One of the surprising things as a parent was just the really simple fact that

I thought, you know, that the majority of my efforts in mothering would be in the early years. And then I would sort of swan off into this lovely existence where I would get on with my stuff and my kids would get on with theirs and we'd lead these kind of parallel lives. And instead, what I've discovered, which I think is a truism for most parents, that as your kids get older, you know, certainly in their teens, they actually need you more and they can voice it. You know, they can go, I need you now, or they can, you know, lie in your bedroom, kind of with you waiting and waiting and waiting because you know that they're there for a reason. But you know, if you push them,

they won't tell you what the reason is. So you just sort of think, oh, I could really do with getting to sleep because I've got to be up at six tomorrow. But I know that it's coming. And, you know, they always choose to tell you the thing that's going to be most complicated to unpick at midnight. Exactly. And two o'clock in the morning, you're just going, oh, I can't take this anymore.

But trying very hard to seem rational and reasonable and caring and focused. So I think teenagers are difficult. I'm very lucky because I, you know, unlike my own teenage years, they've not really been breakaway teenagers. Hopefully, you know, no parent ever likes to take any credit, but I'm hoping that it might partly be that I feel like we afforded them some degree of independence and therefore they haven't felt that they needed to revolt against us quite as much as I see some friends, kids doing. But, you know, there's always time. And as I say, you know, they're only 16 and 17. So, yeah.

But it's a different kind of demanding, I think, parenting teens in that if you're a mum listening to this and you've got a six-month-old and a three-year-old, that level of demanding, it's a physical demanding and it's an all-encompassing demanding. But then the level of demanding that you're talking about is they need your brain and you have to think really hard before you answer them sometimes because what you say is so pivotal in what they might do. It's a really different type of parenting, isn't it? I agree. And I do think that, you know, with younger kids, it's definitely a sort of physical challenge as well as a mental one, because you're constantly kind of doing damage limitation and trying to support them and keep your eye on them and make sure they're fed well. And, you know,

all of those things. I think with teenagers, there's also subliminal anxiety that we don't acknowledge very often in terms of parenting them, because you're all the time watching for signs, for indications that something's going awry or that, you know, perhaps there's something going on that you're not fully aware of. They're incredibly secretive, you know, so it's like constant decoding. And I do find that when I wake up in the middle of the night, it's generally something to do with them that I'm worrying about of little or major magnitude. It doesn't seem to matter if it still manages to wake you up in the small hours. That could be the sort of combination with being a woman of a certain age as well but um yeah I think very very different challenges

but equally equally preoccupying I guess. Well you've spoken quite freely about the joys of being a midlife mum and but you had a bit of a struggle to get there didn't you? Um yeah I mean I in which way I had a bit of a struggle, first of all, finding a partner that I felt was going to be a responsible adult. And even if everything fell apart, would play a really proactive and positive role in subsequent children's lives. I think that's the unspoken struggle, to be honest, but everybody has. Yeah, and that took a very long time. And, you know, once I did hit on the man I felt was the right man, I was already 39. And so, you know, getting pregnant was a kind of major priority

and sort of him committing was a major priority. Luckily, he was sort of in the right, even though he's seven years younger than me, he was in the right sort of headspace and wanted to, you know, settle down and have kids sort of straight away, which was amazing and incredibly lucky for me. And then, of course, you know, we had the same struggle that I think a lot of women, you know, trying to have babies or conceive babies in later life have, which was just, you know, not getting pregnant and, you know, it becoming more of it. And I think possibly a lot to do with the pressure lifting because I knew I was doing something proactive about it.

I then got pregnant and then my second child just sort of popped along five months after my first. Complete shock to me. We'd gone on holiday to to Mexico with with my our daughter who was five months five months old at the time and um I probably had a couple of margaritas too many and and that was that and and along came Dan it's so often the story of that second baby just being a oh okay this is happening I didn't realize I was pregnant for probably about three months because I mean it was just the furthest thing from my mind and it was only when when my husband came home for the sort of 15th night in a row and family sat stood in the kitchen devouring tins of oily fish he He went, there's something really weird going on

with you. Oh, see, that's, you're very lucky because I always knew I was pregnant the second I was pregnant because I'd just vomit continuously for the next seven months, basically. So a lot of women have that, don't they? I was, I was really lucky. I loved, I absolutely, I would be pregnant for the rest of my life, given the choice. I absolutely loved it. I just, I felt really kind of fecund and, you know, I had breasts for the first time in my life. You know, it's so funny. I was looking in an old maternity box of maternity dresses the other day because I was just trying

to see if there's anything actually worth keeping, you know, for maybe, you know, me or Molly later or whatever. And it was just so funny because every single one of them was like really low cleavage. And I never wear dresses with a low cleavage because I don't have any cleavage. So I was clearly kind of living the dream when I was pregnant in that way. Brilliant. I had my daughter, my second daughter in my late 30s and was lovingly labelled a geriatric mother by the NHS, which I'm sure you were as well. What do you think of those terms? Older mums are just very much labelled, I believe, and there's still a stigma attached to either end of the parenting spectrum, I think. Do you agree? I think that judgment on women is still at epidemic levels in society, no matter

what they're doing, whether they're having children or not having children, whether they're young mums or older mums, even midlife mums. I think that the endless judgment is something that we're going to look back on and think, how uncivilized was that? So no, I think terms like geriatric mum are a disgrace. But you know, everything about women maturing is pretty negative when you look at how society, you know, views and delivers its verdict on it. So that just feels to me like just one in a million, you know, everyday insults that are levelled at women, you know, as they get older. And it's really not helpful. It's really not positive. And it's no wonder that we, you know, spend an awful lot of our lives worrying incessantly about things that are actually far less consequential, but are made to feel like they're important judgments.

So I wanted to chat to you a little bit. You've had quite a week this week, haven't you and I saw on your Instagram you gleefully proclaimed that you'd said vulva twice in a day in the House of Commons which I salute you for well done tell us a little bit about what you've been doing in your book well gosh where to start I mean I suppose firstly the book which is called Cracking the Menopause was written as a result of me arriving at this kind of liminal passing phase in every woman's life, inescapable, you know, often perfectly manageable, but also very frequently pretty difficult to navigate. And I found myself having been, you know, a pretty strident feminist all my life and pretty aware, I think, of women's issues across the board. I found myself completely ignorant about what was happening to my body, what was happening to me. I went through a couple of years

where I was just crippled by anxiety, terrible, terrible anxiety and insomnia. And the two sort of seemed to go in toxic partnership. I'd wake up in the middle of the night and then the anxiety would start and I wouldn't be able to go back to sleep. And I really thought I was going mad because there was nothing particular in my life at the time that would have provoked either of those things as far as I was concerned. And so I just didn't understand at all. And it took me a couple of years to get a diagnosis, you know, and I went through all kinds of, you know, blood tests that told me I was perimenopausal, postmenopausal, not menopausal at all. You know, I've subsequently discovered those blood tests are almost entirely

useless to predict because of the fact that, you know, you are going through a period of incredible hormonal disturbance. So the likelihood of a blood test on Monday telling you the same thing as a blood test on Friday is extremely unlikely. myriad things that we don't know, that aren't in common parlance when it comes to menopause and perimenopause in particular. So I decided that I wanted to find out more. And I figured if I was going to invest the time in finding out more, I might as well share it with as many people as possible to kind of cut to the quick for other women. Because it just seemed extraordinary that at this point in the 21st century, we would all be so unaware of this period of perimenopause and menopause. So I set about writing it with a good friend younger than me, Alice Melly, but who's a health journalist, so was very well qualified to go on this journey with me.

And who ended up having the shortest menopause in the history of the universe because of the fact that we'd done so much work into finding out about it that she sort of started feeling symptoms on a Monday. And two weeks later was at her GP going, give me the hormones. She was really lucky in that she had a GP who kind of understood that HRT is not the end of the world, but rather the beginning of a support system for many women and gave her the HRT and that was the end of her menopause. Anyway, so we wrote the book. And in the process of writing the book, we discovered really that the situation was even worse than we imagined. And that women in perimenopause, first of all, perimenopause wasn't being recognized at all. And that is the period of up to 10 years before your actual menopause, which just means a year after your last period. And we discovered that perimenopause wasn't really being dealt with at

all. And that is the period when most of the damage is done by this catastrophic decrease in hormones that women experience. And a lot of that damage is secret damage. I found out after my two years of anxiety, but probably six years of perimenopause, that I was osteopedic, which is just on the cusp of osteoporosis. And, you know, that is a really dangerous condition that costs the NHS millions of pounds a year from people suffering from it. And yet it's something that can be easily prevented. You know, as soon as I started taking estrogen supplements in terms of the HRT, it went away, you know, and that's the good news. It's something that's reversible if you catch it in time, which I was lucky enough to have happen, but also heart conditions, all kinds of things that are exacerbated by the symptoms that are a

result of perimenopause. So because of all of those, what felt like gross injustices and the fact that women's health was under threat and the fact that this survey came out in the early 2000s that said that HRT had a direct link to breast cancer and was, you know, causally impactive on that. We just had to carry on campaigning. So it wasn't enough to sort of put out the book. But we then wanted to see really seismic change in the training that's offered GPs for menopause, and more importantly, for there to be menopause-trained expert health practitioners in every doctor surgery across the land. And that doesn't mean it has to be a GP. And I know GPs are very hard-pressed, but this is a phase that will affect

every single woman. That's 50% of the population. And for it to be treated like some minority interest, health concern is a crime against womankind. So, you know, for there to be nurses, for example, trained to recognize the symptoms, that would be a huge step in the right direction. And, you know, HRT, it's not drugs. It's supplementation of hormones that you're losing. And the controversy around it really is misplaced. And yet another, I feel, you know, example of society's judgment of women

and decision that society dictates what happens with women's bodies, rather than we be allowed to make our own choices based on facts that we can then digest because we're perfectly capable of making choices and make our own decisions about going forward. It's very similar in many ways to, we talk a lot at Netrunners about the report that basically got the MMR a bad name for no reason whatsoever. And it's these very small studies that somehow pick up traction with the press and then they become seen as the truth. Well, they pick up traction with the press because bad news travels fast. And, you know, the survey that I'm talking about to do with HRT basically hit headlines across the world before it had even been approved by the medical practitioners who were involved in the survey, who felt that the survey was focused on far too small a group, far too old a group because it was women in their 60s. So obviously, for many women, that's 20 years after they really need to be on HRT. And basically, it was wrong in so many aspects. But the fact of the matter is that, you know, MMR works or HRT doesn't equal

breast cancer is not a story. It's not a headline. And, and, and, and that's the trouble, you know, that so much of this stuff is really the result of a kind of voracious media that love a bad news headline. But, you know, in fairness to the media, if you're given a headline that, that, that, that's as shocking as the one that came out about HRT, of course, you're going to, you're going to go ahead with it. And, you know, I'm surprised that there hasn't been a class action taken against the Women's Health Institute for declaring this. I mean, Yale University have subsequently done a study that says that 50,000 women died unnecessarily as a result of being frightened off HRT. A whole generation of women just stopped

taking HRT. And, you know, that is a conservative estimate of the women who died. And then think of all the women who didn't die, but suffered, you know, unnecessary health conditions as a result. And you just realize the injustice of it. So that's why we were in Parliament. We're in Parliament to launch Menopause Mandate, which is a sort of a coalition that we've set up of all of the people and groups that have been, you know, airing and sharing their views in the menopause arena, thinking that, you know, in the words of Joe Cox, or to paraphrase the late Joe Cox, together we are better and also far more powerful. And we're campaigning for, as I said, for there to be a menopause trained health practitioner in every GP surgery across the land, but more importantly, perhaps in a way for there to be affordable HRT for women, because, you know,

at the moment, it's a socio economic decision. And the shortage aside, there is a huge swathe of the population who are making choices about whether to put food on the table, or take the HRT, which is ultimately going to keep them healthy and also make life manageable. And that is not a choice that women should have to be making. You know, we are 50% of the population. We pay absolutely our fair share of money to the NHS. We pay our tax. You know, there is no reason why we should be discriminated against

when it comes to a period of time that's going to have an impact on every woman's life. Oh, we've got a way to go, haven't we? And then on the same day, as we launched the menopause mandate in the morning, there was this kind of double exciting whammy, if you can put whammy and exciting in the same sentence, where the Speaker at the House of Commons, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, announced that the House of Commons, Lindsay Hoyle, announced that the House of Commons was to be a menopause friendly workplace. And that's very much the work of Wellness for Women, another significant charity that have got a thousand workplaces now to sign up for making workplaces menopause friendly, which, you know, means not a lot tangibly. It means, you know, maybe a fan being allowed on your desk or, you know, opening the window. But what it means most importantly is that your workplace is a place where you can actually broach the subject

of the menopause and talk to people about it and have the recognition. And therefore, you'll get the understanding. You know, if you can go, I didn't sleep at Wink last night. Is it okay if I work from home this morning? I mean, women work so hard in so many different environments and flexibly most of the time because they're trying to manage so many things that it's absolutely fair and right that they should be able to work flexibly during menopause in order to get their work done, which they do brilliantly, and also manage what are often very debilitating symptoms. I'm going to totally change the subject now and go on to something else that I think we probably both feel pretty strongly about. And it's one of the things that comes up on the Netmums forum a lot is parents who are struggling with what to do with their kids and the Internet and gaming and devices and social media.

And I have a feeling you might have quite a strong take on this. Well, unfortunately, I'm just opinionated, which is just quite annoying, I think, for my own family, at least. No, maybe annoying for your kids, but brilliant for the rest of us. Well, first of all, I think that whilst the internet is a brilliant invention, and when you look at how it brings the world, you know, even if we just talk about children, you know, if you look at how it connects young kids in African schools to access knowledge from, you know, first world, you know, nations with incredible education resources and, you know, it brings the world to people who might otherwise be marginalized and struggle. I think it's

incredible. But I also think that the impact it's had on this generation of children, particularly because all of us were sort of internet virgins, and certainly smartphone virgins in the period, if you've got teenagers now that your children were growing up. And I think that we have, in a way, we've, you know, we're so protective of them in day-to-day life. You know, what time will you be home? I'll pick you up from there. Don't walk down that street on your own. I'm going to be, you know, let me know, text me when you're, you know, all of those things.

But when it comes to the World Wide Web, we've basically abandoned them to the wilderness. Round them up and let them go, basically. Yeah. And, you know, I think that that's been very much down to our own lack of understanding of the dangers that lie out there, as well as the positivity and the advantages. I don't think any parent really comprehended how invasive social media would be and the impact that would have in terms of escalating bullying, escalating all of the anxieties that you go through as a teenager, you know, and being a teenager ain't easy as it is. But to have all of that sort of amplified by social media and, you know, that sense of,

you know, you're either involved in it or excluded from it. And no teenager wants to be excluded from their tribe. You know, I think is very, very difficult. But then and perhaps even more importantly, in a way, I think the way that it's sexualized kids way before they have any understanding of the information that they're taking in, the way that pornography has been the sex education that most of our kids have received, to be quite honest, because none of us were able to preempt, you know, their access to sexual activity online with the sort of information that we wouldn't have been giving at eight years old, 20 years ago,

but now is absolutely fundamentally necessary in order for children to develop healthy attitudes about sex, about their own bodies, about, you know, what, what, what, what, you know, proper physical, what, what, what, what good positive physical relationships are and what negative positive, you know, and what negative sexual relationships are. I mean, all of that, I think we've left our kids sort of scrabbling through and we're only now waking up to the impact that that's had. And, you know, when you look at everyone's invited, hashtag everyone's invited, you know, and everything that was revealed on there after the terrible murder of Sarah Everard, I think an awful lot of parents

like me were absolutely dumbfounded by the extent to which our kids were living a scary sexual life in schools without any of us being aware of it. And we really need to row back on that and make some changes, I think, in terms of how we educate kids, how we approach teaching them about sex education. I mean, I don't think you can pull it back, you know, the horse has bolted. So what we have to do is take responsibility for, I'm trying to get rid of a wasp, that's why I'm swatting away, is take responsibility for the fact that they're growing up in a different world. And maybe some of the things that we're sort of embarrassed and uncomfortable about are things we have to you know step up to the plate with and and and and be a bit braver how have you handled that with your kids the kind of social you've got teenagers

have you handled their access to it well not particularly well I mean I entirely put myself into the that that this generation of of parents and and of children who've grown up really with all of this access being a bit of an experiment and not really understanding the extent to which it's all pervasive. I mean, I think my kids have benefited from the fact that I am so gobby and that, you know, I grew up in a fairly sort of open, you know, 70s, sexually, you know, sexually revolutionized household, you know, and all of the bad things that came with that, as well as the good. You know, my parents split up at eight and, you know, there was, you know, a lot of sexual activity going on between adults in our lives all over the place. And no, it was never really particularly explained. But we were a very open family. And so I think a lot of that has carried on with me.

You know, I remember my kids asking me about, you know, taking drugs when I was, I don't know, they must have been, well, they were still, they must have been 10 and 12, 10 and 11, you know, when we were driving to school one morning. And as usual, I went with the too much information route, you know, which I then admitted in some Daily Mail interview. And it was a top headline saying, you know, I tell my children about cocaine or whatever. But I think that all of those things actually, you know, so long as you're not giving, you know, that was too much information for them at the time. If I just said I'd taken drugs, that probably would have been enough. I think I went a bit far, but then they said, what kind of drugs? And so I sort of thought, well, I'll just answer them honestly. But I think the same is true when it comes to sex you know and in fact in many cases you need to

preempt it with children nowadays well I was about to say that because I have got two daughters and one of my daughters I know already she's only six and she will absolutely just ask the questions outright she's not the one I'm worried about so much as the shy one who is mortified when she's watching telly if anybody kisses in front of us and mum and dad are there she's the one I'm going to have to kind of I'll have to approach her because she's never going to ask that much I know already but also I think the thing is that even um even if they are inquisitive uh or are shy and reticent about it, unless we preempt it, it's not us, but the internet that's going to be informing them about sex. And it won't be because they're asking questions. It'll be because some other kid in their class goes,

here, take a look at this. And the next thing they're going to see two adults doing something that they don't have really any understanding of. And frankly, the majority of pornography does not reflect healthy sexual relationships. You know, for the most part, it reflects, you know, abuse against women. And, you know, at the very best, unlikely sexual situations with, you know,

unlikely bodies, you know, unlikely bodies, you know, that really has not very much to do with female pleasure. So I think, you know, particularly when it comes to our daughters, but also, in fact, I don't mean particularly when it comes to our daughters, because I think equally with our sons, it's just imperative that we get in there first and say, look, you're going to end up watching pornography at some point. You know, what I want you to know is that these are people generally in unfortunate circumstances forced to embark on acting sex. It's got nothing to do with real life. It's as fake as anything you'll see in a movie. And, you know, what we should talk about is when you have sex, who you have sex with, how you have sex, how important it is that it's something that you understand and that gives you pleasure. It's not just like a sport.

And, you know, all of those things, I think, have to be addressed and unfortunately preempted. Because nowadays, you know, at the age of eight, those are the things that they're already watching on kids, you know, phones and laptops at school. And, you know, we're just not really, you know, accepting it. And I understand why or addressing it. You know, it's a horrific thought. Oh, God, it's as a mother of a 10 year old. It's utterly horrific. Yeah. Now I'm going from one to completely ridiculous I've got a question about what's for tea Mariella and who's cooking to be quite honest um today having had this rather insane week that kind of spanned Monday in Parliament until 11 o'clock and yesterday

at the Founders Forum which is a gathering of the world's top tech entrepreneurs, where I made my live show from in Oxfordshire and then got back at kind of midnight last night. So when I say a full on week, a full on week, I decided to treat us all by a trip to a little local wine bar down the road where we're going to sit and have food cooked by somebody else. But for the most part, I'm really lucky. And my husband takes the weight of cooking in our house and is far more often the person rustling together supper than I am. He's much better at kind of looking in the fridge and going, oh, we've got that, that that and that I'll put that together into that um whereas I'm much more of a sort of I need a recipe and I like to pre-plan and I've got all the stuff so on a rustle together day it's definitely not me and he and he's he's

brilliant and I can moan about him in all kinds of other domestic um scenarios but on the food front I really am blessed. And I have to say, I'm so grateful for it because since I had kids, I used to love cooking. I don't understand. I used to have 10 people come and stay with me regularly on a weekend at this house I rented in Sussex when I was young, free and single.

And I would put together, I mean, amazing meals. People still talk about the meals, but I don't remember them. And I certainly don't remember where I got the wherewithal to do that. But after I had kids, it just became such a chore, you know, and it was just this thing that you had to put food on the table three times a day and it had to be nutritious food and you had to plan it and make sure you had the stuff in the cupboard. And I

think it really beat the joy of cooking out of me. And I'm hoping it's something that will come back. I think it does for a lot of parents, actually, because it's that you have to plan it, then you have to buy it, then you have to cook it. Often you then have to wrangle with them to eat it and then you have to clean it up and you do that three times it was my biggest thing in lockdown I was like shit I've got to feed everybody again every time I got rid of a meal there was another meal yeah and I think you're definitely not alone in that's exactly the same in our house though for once I felt like I actually had the time that it wasn't just another thing heaped on top of a pile of other things. You know, I'm one

of those people, spoilt people who can say that the first lockdown, I mean, not the subsequent ones, but the first lockdown was for me, really one of the most pleasant periods in my life, because I still had my very pleasant half hour a week show on Radio 4, which I was able to make from home. I was still writing my column for The Observer. Both jobs were a total pleasure with not a lot of stress involved in them at all. And then I was at home every day with these kids that, you know, I never have had so much exposure to in the whole time that, you know, that since I had them. So I loved it, you know, and we've got a house in the country where we live and, you know, so we were able to go for walks and, you know, all of it actually felt like an incredible treat. Obviously after

that it changed and became a bit more difficult. Yeah. So what's next for Mariella? I know you said next week is a chilled week, but in the grander scheme of things, what are you going to get up to? at least. Although I could say lots of kind of negative things about the stress of doing this three hour live show four days a week. It's a long time. It's a really long time. But you know what? It's fascinating. And I get to cover things that I'm passionate about. And I get to learn about things that I didn't know I was passionate about. And I get to, you know, shape the program, you know, and have done from the very beginning. And, you know, interestingly, we're getting an awful lot of female listeners, which I'm absolutely thrilled about, because, you know, a lot of the time current affairs programs tend to be more male listener dominated,

but ours isn't. And I like to think it's because it's got a kind of smorgasbord of stuff that doesn't feel entirely kind of testosterone-fueled, macho news delivery. And so I kind of love doing it. I think there's another book in me, maybe, about happiness. I think that's another thing we'd quite like to crack. So I might embark on that quite shortly. And yeah, I'm really animated now about education. I just think we've got to have a system that's more fit for purpose for the 21st century. And I'd really like to kind of dig in and get my hands dirty with that. And of

course, although we have great goals for menopause mandate, we haven't quite achieved them yet. So there's still quite a bit of pushing to go on that as well. And then, you know, getting my little girl off to uni, which is going to be very strange indeed. And my son through the next two years till his A-levels. So yeah, quite a lot on, really. Well, my very last question for you this morning is one that my co-host Annie made up, and I blame her because it's a staffed question, but she's not here, so I've got to ask it to you instead. Imagine your kids are young again and they can't sleep and you're tucking them into bed and sing us your lullaby. I'm definitely not singing a note for you.

Oh, Mariella. I can't sing a note. People go on about me having that famously sexy voice, but I used to really try and avoid singing to my kids because I didn't want it to somehow, you know, by osmosis, turn them into terrible singers. Unfortunately, I think my son is never going to be in the school choir. But my daughter is the most beautiful singing voice and I wish she was here to sing it for you but it would be um a song that my mum used to sing for me and which I have stumbled through uh you know sometimes which is called Mary Hamilton and it's this really tragic tale of uh one of Mary Stewart's handmaidens who ends up um uh having I mean it doesn't talk about sex obviously but you know ends up having, I mean, it doesn't talk about sex, obviously,

but, you know, ends up becoming pregnant by the highest duke of them all, i.e. Mary Stewart's husband. It's not very lullaby. I know. And she ends up going to Glasgow town to, yeah, be put to death. But it's such a brilliant song. I would be also more likely, though, to read them a poem. And it might be like Tam O'Shanta by Robbie Burns, which is just the most epic story, again, that my mum used to recite for me. But and also if on a more calm night, because Tam O'Shanta,

again, it's got a lot of kind of excitement in it, you know, witches and warlocks dancing around a fire and, you know, a man trying to make his way home and being kind of seduced by the cutty sark, the woman in the cut slip. But it's just a brilliant, brilliant story. But I think on a bad night when they really needed, you know, just comfort, it would be the owl and the pussycat, which is just my favourite ever. The owl and the pussycat went to sea in a beautiful pea green boat. They took with them honey and plenty of money wrapped up in a five pound note. It's not plenty of money, actually. There you go. I've forgotten the word. Isn't that terrible? Brain fog.

I thought it was plenty of money as well. How could they say they took with them honey and plenty of money wrapped up in a, why would it be wrapped up in a five-part bog note? I'm going to have to go and read that now because I've always said plenty of money too. Oh, well, there we are. Yeah, maybe I was right. Maybe I was wrong. But anyway, that was what would be what I would be reciting.

Maybe I would have a copy of the book to hand to make up for those moments of brain fog. Oh, well, I don't think we'll have scarred them with the wrong words to the owl and the pussycat. I think we're OK. Thank you so much for your time this morning. It's been lovely to talk to you. It was a pleasure. Thank you very much for asking me. I love net mums, by the way. I think, you know, all of the campaigning you do is just so incredibly impressive and you're such a kind of vocal force for good and getting women's voices heard, kind of imperative that you're there. We love our netmums. They're just brilliant. Thank you ever so much, Mariella. Pleasure. Thank you very much.