Woman's Hour - Hubble astronaut Kathryn Sullivan; Romy Gill cooks spicy chickpeas; Reducing domestic violence

Episode Date: March 3, 2020

Kathryn Sullivan, the first American woman to walk in space, was an astronaut in the team that launched the Hubble Space Telescope on April 25th, 1990. She joins Jane to talk about her experience of being a female astronaut in the '90s, and maintaining and repairing the most productive observatory in history.The UK government is a world-leading investor in research on the prevention of violence against women and girls. Between 2013 and 2019 it has invested £25 million in pilots across 12 countries in Africa and Asia to research ways to prevent it in different contexts – the largest ever study of its kind. ‘What works to prevent violence against women and girls?’ has focused on producing rigorous evidence on a global scale for the first time that can be shared with other governments, donors and civil society organisations to encourage more effective global action. Many of those experts and organisations involved in the research in Africa are meeting in London today to reflect on their findings. Jane talks to a few of those involved about their research, their recommendations and what they hope will happen next.Vogue Williams, TV presenter and influencer talks about being a parent in the public eye and parent shaming. Vogue is married to Spencer Matthews who she met on a reality TV series and they have a one-year old son, Theodore. Where does Vogue draw the line between a willingness to share her family life and standing up for herself if she is judged for her parenting decisions? How much is parent shaming here to stay? Romy Gill’s new book 'Zaika’ celebrates vegan recipes from India. She joins Jane in the studio to cook the perfect Spicy Chickpeas.Presenter - Jane Garvey Producer - Anna Lacey Guest - Kathryn Sullivan Guest - Prabu Deepen Guest - Jessica Horn Guest - Charlotte Watts Guest - Vogue Williams Guest - Romy Gill

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BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hi, this is Jane Garvey. Thank you for downloading the Woman's Hour podcast, Tuesday the 3rd of March 2020. Today we're discussing, well, whether you should ever shame another parent. Be honest, have you ever criticised somebody else's parenting methods? Vogue Williams, TV presenter and influencer, is one of our guests on the programme today when we talk about that. We're also going to be cooking up some spicy chickpeas

in the very friendly company of Romy Gill, who's a chef. You might well know her from the food programme here on Radio 4. She's one of our guests on Woman's Hour this morning. First, though, into space in the company of Catherine Sullivan, the first American woman to walk in space. She was part of the team that launched the Hubble Space Telescope back in 1980. But that wasn't the first time you went into space. That was in 1984, Catherine.

Right. And then Hubble in 1990. Okay. So plenty to talk about. The obvious question is, how do you get to be an astronaut? So you were an oceanographer to start about. The obvious question is, how do you get to be an astronaut? So you were an oceanographer to start with. Yes, my university studies and graduate studies were in geological oceanography, how the seafloor comes about, how seamounts and volcanoes work under the sea, things like that. And how closely connected are, well, oceanography and space travel? Well, in one level, they're quite closely connected, and that is you have to mount a fairly complex expedition

to explore and understand either realm. So I had begun doing oceanographic expeditions my fourth year at university and carried on through graduate school. Loved going out to sea, really enjoyed the jigsaw puzzle, if you will, of planning an expedition and thinking through all

the what-ifs so you could carry on even if the weather turned bad or a bit of equipment broke down. And that's essentially the same discipline, but on steroids, that NASA sort of needed for the job that I was applying for, which was what we called it mission specialist, which means all of the cargo and operations that are the reason the shuttle's going into orbit, plan those out, make sure you're really ready for it. Again, make sure you've thought about a lot of the what-ifs and you can keep everything going. How does it work? Does somebody, it's a little bit like when you're asked to be recruited to the spy services in Britain, you get a little bit of a note in your university pigeonhole or a tap on the shoulder at a cocktail party or something.

How do they recruit for NASA? Yeah, a little more blatantly than that. Okay. Especially back then, this was the first round of selections for this new thing called the Space Shuttle. And at the time it was projected the shuttle would fly very, very frequently. So NASA was wanting to really dramatically expand the number of people in the astronaut corps. They hired Nichelle Nichols, who'd been the actress that played Lieutenant Uhura on Star Trek, and they had her going around encouraging women and people of color, people who'd never been in the astronaut corps before, to throw their hat in the ring.

They put advertisements in many of the scientific trade publications that academics would be looking at. In my own case, I was at graduate school in Canada. You won't be surprised to know I was at graduate school in Canada. You won't be surprised to know NASA did not advertise widely in Canada. But they had caught my brother's attention in California. And when I went home for a Christmas break, he began encouraging me to apply for the program. And when I first thought it was, you know, continue being an oceanographer, but now try to do it from 200 miles away from Earth, I thought that was nonsense. But when I made this connection between the expeditions I already loved to do, and the

kind of expeditionary work, it sounded like NASA was planning with the shuttle, then it started to make some real sense. This is the 1980s, where the space shuttle was taking off relatively frequently. It was something that actually, those of us I was at university at the time, had begun to take for granted until the terrible accident in 1986 involving the Challenger. You'd already been in space at that time. What impact did that have on you? Well, it was, of course, an absolutely devastating moment for all of us. Four of the seven people on that flight were classmates that I had known since 1978. A favorite person from the next class younger to us.

And then, of course, Krista McAuliffe, the teacher, and Greg Jarvis, an engineer, that were getting these one-time great, remarkable think, certainly to me, I think to all of us, is we knew thousands of things that could go wrong and become really devastating for a shuttle flight. It had never crossed our minds that it would be the solid rocket boosters, those two big firecrackers, that would be the cause of such a disaster. You know, there's no moving parts. It was sort of stardom to go. You know, in two minutes, they're done, and you're off and away. So you spent hours and hours and hours thinking about the risks, thinking about how to counter the risks, thinking about all the what ifs. And that one had essentially never really been on your radar screen. And yet out of the blue, it takes a shuttle out of the sky and kills seven people. And after all that, and it must have had a colossal psychological impact on all of you at NASA,

you went back into space as part of the team that launched the Hubble telescope in 1990. It must have taken enormous courage, it goes without saying. Let's just hear a little bit of audio of the takeoff. Anthony, this is St. Jeff. The valve is closed. We're go. OK, you have a go to proceed. Telescope, auto sequence start. We are go for start. Booster hydraulic power units have started. Sound suppression water system has started.

T-minus 13 seconds. T-minus 10. Go for main engine start. We are go for main engine start. T-minus 6. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, and liftoff of the space shuttle Discovery with the Hubble Space Telescope, our window on the universe. Great line, window on the universe.

So, Hubble, tell me about it. What is it for? Oh, it is the most fabulous looking glass that's ever been pointed towards the stars since Galileo, by far. What is it for? It's for understanding more about how our own solar system works. It's for understanding more about how stars form and galaxies evolve. It's for looking far, far, far back in time to try to understand the origins of the universe. It's for making more precise measurements than were possible before to help understand how rapidly is the universe expanding.

And somewhat unexpectedly, but in the course of its operating life, it became the first telescope to spot evidence of planets circling other stars. Later telescopes that have come along since have now run that number of exoplanets, they're called, outside of our solar system, up into the thousands. This is a really tough question, but I feel compelled to ask it. Where is it? Ah, it's about 330 miles above the Earth. It orbits the Earth, not right at the equator, but tilted to the equator by 28.5 degrees. It does one full circuit around the Earth about every 97 minutes. So it's traveling at 17,500 miles an hour continually. And its location is no accident. It is at that point.

Very much no accident. The tilt to the equator is because of the longitude of the launch site in Florida. You end up at that kind of tilt when you take best advantage of the Earth's rotation. The altitude is because Hubble's very large. It's the size of a U.S. school bus, or here in London, I'd say a double-decker bus cut the top bit off. It's about that size, and it's got big solar wings and things that stick out. So you want it way above the Earth so it's not being affected by Earth's gravity or atmospheric forces. Telescopes need to do three things. They have to see clearly, point precisely and hold very still. So a big telescope like this

you want to get way up out of the atmosphere so that its control system can hold it very still. There are so many questions about this. Let's deal with the cynics question first of all. It's not looking at Earth, so it doesn't have a military capability. It has no military capability. And it is looking out. Yes. I mean, you could steer it, so the lens was pointed towards Earth, but you could not make it move fast enough to get anything other than a gigantic blur if you did that. Okay, so out it gazes, out at the known and unknown universe. And if it was worth something, it should have taught us something about how utterly irrelevant we are.

Has it? Has it improved human behavior at all? Well, there's a long distances in there between learning something and your behavior improving. That's true. But I think Hubble has done something in that vein that's undeniable. Pardon me. It's the only scientific spacecraft I can think of since the dawn of the space program that has bled over into the popular culture in a really massive way. Some of that is down to the beautiful imagery it's returned. And some of it is down to coming along at the time that the computer era and the internet were exploding to what we now know them to be. But I mean, you can hardly turn around anywhere

and not see a Hubble image on someone at one of the talks I gave yesterday had this sweatshirt of Hubble imagery on it. I've seen it on tattoos. I've seen it on socks, on lunchboxes, on the sides of rented trucks. And it's not just that advertisers have picked it up and taken it to those places. But the entrancement of Hubble's findings, you can see in the internet statistics and the search statistics. So from a motivation or inspiration point of view, make us a little more curious, make us pay a little more attention to our place in the universe, what it is and what it's not. But we're nothing. We're literally nothing. To my point, to get such spectacular images more widely dispersed among the public and lift our sights beyond our own navels and realize the scale and the majesty of this universe around us, I think it has done a good bit of that.

Are you a religious person? I would say spiritual more than religious in a denominational sense. Do astronauts, you can't generalize, but do you share a sort of interest in spirituality? I mean, you've walked in space. What does that do to your thinking? Yeah, the reactions and engagement across the entire astronaut corps in the US is of course

very diverse, from very devout, excuse me, very devoted to particular denominations to quite agnostic at least. So I think, I do believe, I mean every one of my colleagues I've ever talked to it does, as you were suggesting, it rescales

your sense of place in the universe, what's important and not important in discussions and debates amongst human beings on this little earth. You zoom a little bit further back and, I mean, you can see some political borders on the earth from orbit, but you see them from that vantage point and they look like the silliest little lines that have been drawn in such an arbitrary place. Then if you look at one where you know there are hostilities across that border, you kind of put your head on your chin and say, can you tell me again why we have so much in common of our dependency on this magical little blue ball we live on, so much that ought to be bringing us together. But you ought to manage to draw this line and then

go fight about it. I mean, how can that possibly make sense? I could literally talk to you all day. I find this absolutely fascinating. But you are part of NASA. You'll always be part of NASA. NASA will look after you, presumably psychologically, medically for the rest of your life. They won't actually provide care, but they do give me a physical exam each year because they want to see the statistics. They want to track all of us that had any exposure to spaceflight. So I have enough data to know, does short or long duration spaceflight exposure give you any long-term health effects? Is it there's some indication, for example, these the folks spending longer times on the station now some of them are having significant shifts in their optical nerve in their eyesight that seems to be enduring well we've never seen that before in

short flights okay so let's track that so we we start to know how far how long can human beings be in space and this is an obvious question too and I apologise for it but Mars, will we get there in my lifetime, in the next 50, 60 years, what would you say? I have fairly high confidence humankind will get there. I'm less certain what the nationalities will be of the people who land. Well go on, have a punt. Sadly I'm not thinking the odds of my bunch being there in first place are very long. Well you're're Irish, really, Catherine. So if you say the Irish, we'll get there. Then there are even less odds, aren't there?

Okay, that's probably true. With no offence to our many listeners in Ireland, I should say. Proud to be in O'Sullivan. I'm sure you are. Thank you very much. My pleasure. And your book is called Handprints on Hubble, isn't it? It is.

Yeah, and it's absolutely fascinating. And please do, if you want to talk about what you've heard on the programme today on social media, it's at BBC Women's Hour on Twitter and Instagram. You can email us, of course, via the website. And you're talking at the Oxford Union tonight. This evening, yes. Yeah, I hope that goes well. Thank you. Thank you so much, Jane. girls, a question we've asked often on this programme. Between 2013 and 2019, the British government, and you might not know this, invested £25 million across 12 countries in Africa and Asia to research ways to prevent it. The idea now is to share what works with other governments and organisations. And experts involved in all this are meeting in London today. I've been talking

to Prabhu Deepan, who's the head of gender at the charity Tier Fund, which has worked in the Democratic Republic of Congo. I talked to Jessica Horne, director of programmes at the African Women's Development Fund, and to Professor Charlotte Watts, who's the chief scientific advisor at the Department for International Development. I asked her why invest in this sort of research. Actually, in terms of research investment, it's substantial. And I mean, what that enabled us to do is to assess whether programmes, 15 programmes across 12 countries actually do impact on violence. And what's really powerful is that the results show that violence is preventable. And so what we're doing through that investment is generating on evidence on what works,

and that's evidence that can be used not only in those countries but also used more globally to think about what are the types of intervention that the world needs to invest in to prevent violence. Right, I mean, we need to make very clear, and this programme has an honourable history of recording this, Britain itself still has a problem with violence against women and girls. So there will be people who are listening now who question what right we have,

what expertise do we have to offer the rest of the world? But you're telling me that we can learn from this like everybody else. Exactly. Violence is an issue that women all over the world experience. And what's important about this is the research is looking at, do the programmes that are often developed by organisations in those countries really achieve their aim and impact on violence. So how did you choose the countries? So it was a large consortium where interventions could come forward and organizations come forward and say look we've got a really exciting model can we partner and find out if our interventions having an impact

and so there were partnerships in all of the countries between community organizations often and academics and universities in those countries and they work together to test and see if the interventions okay can you just name some of the countries where you looked at. There were interventions tested in countries like South Africa, Zambia, Uganda, DRC, Nepal. So a wide range of geographies were included in the research. Okay. Prabhu, you were in charge of the campaign, I think, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, looking at what had had a positive impact there. Tell me about the country. I gather that faith leaders were quite important here. Yeah, I mean, in the DRC, about 90% plus people, you know, affiliate themselves with the Christian faith. And, you know, faith institutions run hospitals, you know, schools, you name it,

and everything. And for us, it was really important to understand how does people's interpretation of faith and faith leaders influence social and gender norms that support harmful practices against women, and specifically women in gender inequality. Because, as you know, DRC is what, you know, in most people's mind reference, they say it's the rape capital of the world. And because of the ongoing conflict, people always say that weapon of war narrative for DRC. We also have seen in our research that it's not only rape

related to war that is highly prevalent, but it's intimate partner violence or violence that happened at the domestic space between partners. And we wanted to make sure that if there's a intervention that or a project or activities that could really enable men and women to engage with each other dialogue and use scriptural reflections and scriptural reflections and bring in the religious leaders, that we could really start looking at preventing violence. Right. I mean, some people will be baffled as to how any faith leader could have not intervened before. Why did it take this sort of project to instruct faith leaders

to tell their followers or their congregation that violence of this nature was wrong? I don't think any faith leader was condoning the violence. But they weren't stopping it either? They were intervening or engaging with it, but I don't think it was meaningful enough to prevent because they were still sometimes reinforcing the status quo that, you know, men are superior to women and sometimes using scriptural reflections to reinforce that. And our intervention model with Tearfund called Transforming Masculinities was around how do we really engage using scriptures and, you know,

examples, practical examples from the Bible to challenge that notion that men are superior to women, because we believe that if you are to prevent violence against women and girls, we need to challenge an inequality. We have to challenge the power imbalance at the household, in the community. And for us, religious leaders have been extremely generous in accompanying because TF1's history of working in DRC since 1968, or the last 28 years or so, to come along and be open to listening and engaging with us and finding meaning in this for their own lives.

This is not giving a curriculum or a text or a Bible study and saying, preach this. This is saying, can you, are you willing to be on this journey by yourself for your family, your church, your community, but also in your congregations? And I think that that's why the results are phenomenal, because we are not only accompanying men and women through these dialogues, but also this is being reinforced positively. The sermons that they hear on Sundays are now uplifting and reinforcing these positive values that you're trying to promote. By the very nature of the problem, Jessica, it's a tough one to tackle, isn't it?

I mean, there are millions of people potentially impacted by these sorts of appalling activities. Where do you start? Good question. I mean, like at minimum, one in three women experience physical or sexual violence in their lifetime. And that means directly, which means that indirectly, we're all affected. So the scale is global, and the scale is everywhere. So I think when we're talking about how to intervene, we have to go back to the root causes. So and as we know, the root cause is that fundamental idea that women don't have value, right? It's about power and transforming power relations. I think what's really exciting for me, I'm an activist and I'm an activist funder. And I work in an institution that funds African women's rights, activism, funds feminist work all across the African continent. So these are the women who have pushed and prodded and demanded and litigated and forced this agenda into public minds, into the media, onto legal and policy tables.

For us, what's exciting about this evidence is that it's showing that not only is it time that there's a general public interest to actually take concrete action, but that it is also possible to transform this demand for a no into something that actually happens. But to do that, I think what a lot of the evidence is showing is that we have to tackle that underlying issue of the fact that women are not respected. We all live, everybody in the whole world lives in societies that are patriarchal, which means that they're run according to the needs and collective interests of men, and they privilege men's interests over women, and they condone violence.

And so it's this act of social transformation of literally changing how we think and feel about each other, and which is the work. So that's why it takes investment, it takes thought. It had felt intractable, and I think what's really promising about the What Works evidence is it shows that it's not, that actually we are able to both change how people think and feel, but the only power you have is within your own domestic setting. Your life is likely to be hopeless. You're not likely to get anywhere or achieve anything. How on earth do you say to that man, stop hitting your wife? Because, you know, everybody's life will improve if you do. I'm struggling to get into exactly how you send that message. Do you see what I'm asking? I do, but I think it's important to remember that violence exists everywhere in the UK.

Privileged men. Oh, of course. Privileged men are abusers. So I think that it's not so much about hopelessness or needing to assert power. I mean, it is ultimately about men needing to assert power. But, you know, there are a lot of poor men who are not abusive. Of course.

So I think it really is about thinking about social norms, about how we really think and feel about each other as men and women and changing that. And I think that there's, you know, there's a level of, of course, addressing the direct poverty, which is sometimes a stressor and is is can be stressful for men if they feel that, you know, socially they're supposed to be the breadwinner and they can't put food on the table. That can be something that leads to men feeling like, you know, they don't have power and they want to assert it. But it's also, and so there have been interventions done in the What Works that actually are about addressing that and increasing the economic power of both women and men in relationships to try and change that. But it's the broader social norm that also has to change. Again, there are some men who are abusive and some who aren't. If you're in a social context where the media, where religious leaders, where your mum and dad, where, you know, your friends, your mates are telling you, yes,

it's appropriate. Oh, if your wife comes home and, you know, she's done something irritating, it's fine to hit her, you know, as a social idea, you're more likely than to think that that is a condonable action. So I feel like it's this combination of factors we have to address. Yes, the sense of not being able and the sense of not being able to be a man is one thing. And so addressing that economically, but also, again, it's a social idea. We have to transform how people are thinking and feeling about being men and women and valorizing the idea that, of course, to treat people with respect is the way to be a respectful human being. Tell me exactly how you know, Charlotte, when you've achieved success. And what's powerful about the research that UK Aid supported was that what it did is compare the levels of violence that women were experiencing in communities that received... But this is self-reported, is it?

Self-reported by women, though. And they were asked very direct questions about, have you been slapped? Have you been punched? Have you been kicked? And then what the research does is compare the levels of violence amongst women who've received the intervention or the communities that received the intervention and those that haven't. So it's the most robust form of evidence that we can get and what that evidence does show from many of the interventions that were tested was that women's experience of violence was significantly reduced. But what happens when the programme ends or when the faith leader changes and the money is pulled out? So there is ongoing work

now to support a second phase of programming. That funding will be to do further research and also to scale up some of the proven interventions that work. What are the elements of that that you might want to scale up, you might want to include in school curricula, in health services, those sorts of things. What would you say about that, Jessica? Yeah, I just want to say from an African perspective that we appreciate the solidarity. I mean, again, this is a global problem. And some of the methodologies, some of the approaches that are being shown in DRC or in other places could be used in the UK. I mean, the gendered power dynamics are similar everywhere, to be honest with you. So I think that there's one, I mean, some of the lessons learned there can be taken back. Also, I think that the British government is showing their

leadership and more governments need to get involved and to invest. Prabha, from you, just one rock solid example of attitudes changing, something you've witnessed. Yeah, I mean, one of the stories that during one of the trainings that I was doing, you know, just always comes back to me is this man named Bura, who's a religious leader. And during the second day of the training, we talk about, can you ask your spouse if there was one thing that you can change? What would that be? And so this man comes back the next morning. He's in tears.

And he says, you know, she said, my wife asked me, why are you asking me this now? 14 years we have been married and you have never for a single day asked me if there's one thing that you can change about you and and this is the power of the story and i think this is a conversation between men and women this is the power that you are talking about some of these men this is the only space that they have power but they're not benefiting from it so it is we are really accompanying them in this process to see how can you work in your own household with your wife, yourself and your children to transform that so that both of you can have a life that's life of dignity and without violence. That's the voice of Prabhu Deban, who's from Tear Fund.

And you also heard from Jessica Horne from the African Women's Development Fund and from Charlotte Watts. She's chief scientific advisor to the Department for International Development. On Friday of this week, Jenny is going to be live at Doing Woman's Hour at the Women of the World Festival in London. That's at the South Bank Centre. That's going to be interesting. The festival is something we often mention on Woman's Hour, actually, but I'm very conscious that if you're not in London, you may very well not have been to it, not have been able to go to it. It's a three-day event which celebrates the achievements of women and girls all over the world in both science

and art, the arts I should say. And it's quite a thing actually, the Women of the World Festival. It's the tenth version of it this year and Jenny live with Women's Hour on Friday morning from ten. Now parent shaming, if you're honest with yourself, you've probably done it

within the last 24 hours. You may not have spoken it out loud, but you may have certainly made a judgment about somebody else's parenting. Vogue Williams is here, TV presenter, influencer. You are an influencer, aren't you? I'm an influencer, yeah. My least favourite word, but I'll take it.

Well, for the benefit of some of our older audience, what is an influencer? I suppose a lot of my work is on Instagram, so I would promote different products on instagram okay and you get you get money for it you get paid yeah yeah okay you get paid it's nice i'm sure i'd love to get paid it's quite a thing um your spouse is spencer matthews a name that may be known to too many people um and he was in made in chelsea the reality show yeah and you actually met each other on another reality show.

But it was the jump. That was the skiing one. Yeah. And in the end, you didn't jump, did you? In the end, no. I did my knee in. I'm quite convinced I would have won it. But I let Spencer have that one.

Well, it's easy to say. He won. He won. OK. But you would have won if you'd been allowed to take part. I would definitely have beaten him, yes, if my knee had been all right. Now, I think it's fair to say, and I don't think you'll object to this, you are immersed in reality telly, aren't you?

This is how you and your husband earn your living, and also Instagram stuff as well. And you are very much out there as a family unit. It's pretty public, isn't it? Yeah, I think as well with our personal lives, a lot of it is obviously on TV, a lot of it is on Instagram, but then a lot of it is hidden as well. lot of it is on Instagram but then a lot of it is hidden as well

so you kind of put out there what you want to put out there but em I would definitely think that we have more than probably you out there but it's kind of just it comes with the territory

and it's especially since having a baby I can't help myself because I do put things on Instagram and then I see Theodore doing something I think it's so cute

and I'm like oh I'll put that up and I've got a nice little group of people actually on Instagram that follow me. How many followers have you got on Instagram? I actually don't know the exact number. Over 700,000 anyway. Yeah. So, I mean, in terms of marketing, you're a great place for a product to be, aren't you? Yeah.

I mean, the great thing about Instagram, and I think if influencers are honest, it's a great thing to work at because it seems like it would be quite an easy job, but it's not because you have to go from concept with a brand and you have to think about what you're going to do and the best way to sell their product to make it look the best. And I'm lucky that I get to pick and choose who I work with because I really only like to work with brands that I think are amazing and that I absolutely love. And it's a good job to have. Theodore is a part of this though he doesn't have any say in it because he's only 18 months old is it all going to stop when he's old enough to have an opinion? Oh I mean if he didn't want to be honest of course it would definitely stop but I think that the world we're living in is changing and I just think that a lot of our lives are online and a lot of people choose to be like that.

Other people choose not to have their child online. And that's fair enough as well. But for us, it kind of was never a decision that we sat down and spoke about. It just kind of came naturally. I mean, Spencer's not really online very much. He actually hates anything to do with Instagram, funnily enough. So Theodore doesn't really feature on his just mine okay yeah um the whole business of shaming and by shaming i guess we are talking fundamentally about judging other people's parenting skills or methods yeah

i i do i own up to the fact that i think we all do it. I'm a parent. I'm as average a parent, frankly, as any other parent. But what really gets you about the whole parent shaming business? I think it's just the amount of it and for absolutely everything you do. And it's my own fault for putting anything on Instagram with Theodore because you do have people that just can't help themselves. But I mean, if I put up a picture of him in his car seat, which I just don't do anymore because it's just, that's inviting trouble. You'll have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of messages saying that

he shouldn't be sitting forward, he shouldn't be doing this, his headrest isn't high. There's like relentless things that people will shame you about. And I know that I can be guilty of it too, but like not to the, people just really get pernickety about it I mean I put up a picture of him the other day we were sitting having his his lunch and there was a big dollop of ketchup on his plate

now I was sharing the chips with him so I was eating the ketchup too but my god the amount of people that mailed me over the ketchup really? the sheer quantity of the ketchup or the fact that it was there at all?

Just the fact that there was ketchup there. Yeah. Has anybody knowingly ever fed any child under the age of 25 without putting a load of ketchup on the side of the plate? I confess I certainly haven't. I love a bit of ketchup.

How much time do some of these people have in their lives that they've got that moment to have a go at you for feeding a child ketchup? I think it just it's um it it kind of stems from the whole trolling vibe as well people feel like that they need to have an opinion on absolutely everything where i will happily look at people's

stories and 99.9 percent of the time say nothing or else if i was going to say something it would be something positive because i just wouldn't really want to put any negativity out there but i think that people kind of see it as a way to just oh it's so easy just to send this and then it's gone you forget about it and people especially with other people's parenting styles love doing that but I even found when I became a parent just the amount of unwarranted advice that you're being given. And I know people are probably trying to be kind, but myself personally, I try not to give any new parent any advice unless they ask for it. Because you know yourself, really. Yeah. Well, tantrums. You haven't quite got to that stage yet, though, have you?

He went through a little minute of them. There'll be more than a minute along in a moment. I know. I know well he's he's really coming into his own now where he's deciding what he wants to do and like we've had to move his snack press

because he'll just go over and take stuff out of it and he just his snack what? he has a snack oh press we say press in Ireland you say cupboard here

you've got a snack a snack cupboard a snack cupboard but like one section is his little bits that he might have and he has access to this he doesn't anymore

we've had to we've had to put that at a higher level but you do you do acknowledge that if a child misbehaves in public I remember my

elder daughter having a massive massive event at Gatwick Airport over some cheerleaders pom-poms I mean it was unbelievable

and it drew a crowd and I even though nobody directly, verbally assaulted me, they were all judging my inability. Oh, you can see their judgy eyes. That happened to me on a flight once. That was the only time I ever cried on a flight

and I have to say we fly all the time. But God, he had a meltdown on a flight before we'd even taken off. And I could literally see a man putting his fingers in his ears and tutting and I just felt like, do know how hard this is for me and then the airhouse desk came up after all these people like turning around in their seats and kind of having a look like what was the problem then the airhouse desk came up and I just burst into tears I was like I'm so burst this is a generalization but it is often men who appear to react that way and I always want to turn

around to them and say oh sorry were sorry, were you never a baby? Sorry, I didn't realise. You were born 47. Oh, OK, fine. But it's just, they clearly weren't. Men hate it, though. I sat beside a man before and he tutted and said, I always get stuck beside the baby.

And I was like, well, excuse us. He might not want to sit beside you either. And then eventually he moved, which I was quite happy about. The arrows just moved him. But I just thought, that is so rude. We haven't even sat down. Well stay with us Bo because we're going to talk chickpeas now and you've been tasting I'm not sure whether this is permitted in the current environment but you've been tasting some of the spices. Chef Romy Gill is with us. Hi Romy good morning to you. Now you're here to talk about your new vegan recipe book which is called Zyka that's

right isn't it? Zyka yes. Yeah now tell me about Zyka. Zyka means flavour it's a book that is actually a love letter to my mum she passed away last year so I wanted to kind of make do a book with the recipes that I grew up eating so it's got it's about my childhood my memories with my friends with my sister with my brother and my dad's amazing cook as well so i wanted to do that and also give something i wanted to share something that um a taste of how i grew up eating and also you know india is naturally a plant-based country we eat meat but we also eat a lot of you know vegetables lentil pulses is meat is a necessity here but not in India we'll eat something and we'll also have vegetables and we'll have meat on the side so I wanted to do to write a book that was really close

to my heart. Right and vegans are very much a thing at the moment people are really experimenting in Britain in a way that they've never done before chickpeas used to be I mean they actually I gather have really increased in price because so many Western consumers are now eating huge amounts of chickpeas. But you do the old school dried ones, don't you? I do. But also I have two daughters. They're teenagers. I keep 10 chickpeas and that's what we are doing. And it's easy to do that. But we are very, very lucky now. The hodmodods grow in this country. Now, what are hodmodods?

Hodmodods. And they grow chickpeas, beans, pulses in this country, which is great. I think if we can grow chickpeas in this country, why not? You know, why not? And they're fantastic people. And they're small producers. And all the chefs love them. Yeah, they are really good chickpeas. I would have been very scornful 15 years ago.

Not so much now. You can have them in salads. They make great curries as well, don't they? They do. Go on, sorry. You're doing spicy chickpeas. The recipe, by the way, will be on the website, bbc.co.uk slash womanshour.

Carry on, Romy. So with the leftover chickpeas, what I'm making, you can also add some tahini and a little bit of lemon juice and make it into hummus. And also leftover salad. If you have salad leaves at home you can do that as well so i think indian food is so versatile you can add like cumin it's such a versatile spice you can add in any any kind of dishes and it works so well it's one of

the beautiful spices but my spice is the punch for and i love absolutely love it now this one i hadn't heard of this is a mix though of various others isn it? So it's not a Chinese spice mix. It's a whole spice mix, which has got cumin, nigella seeds, mustard seeds, fennel seeds, and fenugreek seeds. So it's the bitterness, the sweetness, the pungentness, the warmness, all different spices. And they work really well.

So we use that in chutneys, a lot in chutneys and pickles in India, and fermenting as well. So it's one of those spices that I actually go to with so many different things. Now, the chickpea dish you're making today, would you serve it with rice or is it just on its own? So you can serve it with rice, but the best trick is what my daughters love is pita bread. Oh, yeah. Make it into half, make it like a pocket and fill it with that.

So they love that or like a wrap. So or just on its own or with the chapati and even like sometimes i've done you know toasted it and made it and put the chickpeas in it like a toasty right a little bit of cheese delicious and vogue you are is it coriander resistant you don't like coriander i don't love coriander no um there's none of those spices oh this is great i know it is some in my pocket as well from when I ate them. Yeah, I pretended I didn't notice that, actually. I couldn't find a bin. This is an influencer with a load of stolen spices in our pocket, we need to say.

We were chatting earlier, Romy. You are also, and you said this very sort of lightly, as though it's something everybody does, you're a marathon runner. I do a lot of marathons. You know, sadly, last year when mum passing away, a lot of things happened and I was eating, you know just comfort eating but i i have done five marathons and 40 half marathons so i've done loads of money 40 half marathons i raised a lot of money for different charities i think it's really good you can um give back to the you know different charities you will also um

yeah have you ever done a marathon no never and never, and I never, ever will. OK, fair enough. Too hard. The Ready, Steady, Cook is now also... Yay! Yes, there's the enthusiasm. It's part of your repertoire, Ready, Steady, Cook. And it's back. I noticed the first edition was last night, BBC One, Hoppers 4, ideal for students, Breakfast Telly.

They'll love that, won't they? I think, you know, when I moved to this country, you know, in 1993, it started in 94. And I used to watch it. I just wanted to be on the... With Ainsley. Yes, also sit on the, you know, people come and watch you do the red pepper, green pepper. And I just wanted to do that. And two years later, be on the show as a talent. It's just fantastic. And Ryland and all the chefs are amazing. We have some fantastic chefs around. And we have no egos, no hierarchy. We just had fun.

You know, we have that competitiveness because we wanted to create something for the contestants. But at the same time, we are kind of a family, you know, really good family. Oh, but please, that's a bit saccharine. The Reggie Steddy Cook family with Ryland. It's really good. And Ryland, do you know what? I tell you, I've worked with so many people. good family oh but please that's a bit saccharine the registered family with really i'm riding do you know what i tell you i've worked with so many people like rylan is is the kindest funniest i i

tell you he's a great guy yeah well you hadn't met me until this morning romey so you might want to assess your top 10 of sugar's favorites uh in fact you were telling me that you are in is it wednesday's edition of ready steady cook and there are a couple of partially sighted contestants. Yes. Yeah. It's just, you know, the gadgets that guy had with a little bit of how, where the oven is or where the knife is.

He had little gadgets and it's so fascinating to see what he can do. It's brilliant. And then Aha Heart Melted with the guide dog came at the end. It's so fantastic. It's so beautiful. We had some wonderful contestants. They've worked really hard to get different kinds of contestants.

Good. And I think the time we are living, it's very important. And it's fantastic to have that. I'm glad to hear that. That does sound very positive. Now, you did have a restaurant. The restaurant has closed, but I gather you are determined to get back into the restaurant business. I am. My lease was up, so I closed the restaurant. But I really want to get back and open my restaurant. I just miss the cooking. I enjoy cooking. I love feeding people. And that's what my heart is.

At the moment, I haven't had time to think about it. So I'm like, I'm feeding you guys today. Yeah, well, that's good. That's an amazing thing. But when you have young children, I know your children are in their teens now, running a restaurant, it's a really big ask, isn't it? It is. You know, you have to cater for everyone nowadays because people have lots of different kinds of, you know, you want vegan, you want vegetarian, gluten-free, dairy-free.

You know, we don't eat this, we don't eat that. So you have to cater for everybody. You have to make everyone happy. And walking through those doors, even if you're having water, you're paying the VAT on it, you know? You have to understand there are so many hidden costs for the restaurants.

And to be able to sustain that as a woman or anybody, it's really difficult in the industry, you know? That was the fantastic Romy Gill. She's such an enthusiast. Those chickpeas, I hardly need to tell you actually, they were absolutely delicious. Really, really flavoursome. And I did mean it. I just don't think I'd had a chickpea until about a decade ago. Can't get enough of the things now.

And it's fascinating to hear that you can grow them in Britain as well. So let's hope that really takes off and we have our own chickpea industry. Now, to your thoughts on today's programme. Really good mix of guests, I thought. Variety is the spice of life and we certainly have variety on Woman's Hour today. Ellis says, I just wanted to say how much I enjoyed that interview with Catherine Sullivan.

I lived in the US for a while as a fairly geeky child in the 80s when I was fascinated with space Sullivan. I lived in the US for a while as a fairly geeky child in the 80s when I was fascinated with space travel. I intended on becoming an astronaut myself and I wrote a letter to Catherine and she sent a personal reply of encouragement and advice and a signed photograph with the message, Reach for the Stars.

I still have that letter today. I'm now a teacher, so I didn't end up pursuing my original goal. But it was so wonderful to hear her speak. And it reminded me of my childhood dreams. Ellis, that is absolutely fantastic. And I've been lucky enough to interview, I think, three astronauts, including Britain's first astronaut, Helen Sharman. And they are all remarkable people. And what is remarkable about them is that they don't really realise how remarkable they are all remarkable people. And what is remarkable about them

is that they don't really realise how remarkable they are. These are just incredible human beings with such raw courage and, of course, incredible intellects as well. They are truly amazing, and it's always a privilege to get their perspective on everything. Now, Vogue Williams was talking about parenting and parent shaming. Sarah says, I'm not a parent, but in my head, I'm critical of other dog owners. Letting the dog jump up and telling it off when it muddies the clothes, feeding from the table and yet telling it off

for begging. Consistency is key for dogs and probably, says Kate, for children too. Richard, late last summer I intervened when I saw a mum loudly swearing at her daughter in our supermarket while other shoppers simply ignored them. My intervention was met with a torrent of abuse towards me instead. Would I step in again? Yes, without a doubt. From Cassie, parent shaming is terrible and it's rife on social media. I received abuse from a woman because I chose not to terminate my pregnancy when I found out my son had had an arachnoid cyst. Totally unnecessary. Well, it certainly is. I mean, that's, Cassie, I'm so sorry. That is absolutely horrendous. How dare she? From Alyssa, my friend is on a flight from America with their three month old baby. The father, who's actually a nurse, was walking his son up and down trying to soothe him when one of the American air hostesses came up and said, speaking as a mother, you're agitating that baby.

Can you believe it? Talk about parent shaming, says Alyssa. From Kate, do you think people are staring and tutting or are people staring and sympathising but don't know how to help? At my five-year-old's sports class this week, there was a sibling who screamed for the whole hour. The mum tried to talk him round, tried ignoring him, tried distracting him, but there was no stopping the toddler. All the other parents were discussing his behaviour and being a bit judgmental, but none of us have the answer to make him stop, so we didn't try to help. At the end, most parents walked off, but I gave the mum a hug and asked if she was all right first. It was horrible because nobody wants to listen to a screaming toddler, theirs or anybody else's. We were all stressed out at the end of this session. But what should we have done to help?

You know, Kate, I think that's really interesting. And you're quite right to raise that point. What should you have done? What can you do? I always like to think that I am giving a sympathetic stare of support and saying, but without saying it, that I've been there as well and yes it is really humiliating and embarrassing when your children misbehave in public but maybe people think I am judging when I'm staring we need to get that right don't we um quite a few of you talking about whether or not you should make your children's lives public and Georgina says I find I definitely post less pics of the children now, but I like it when a Facebook memory pops up. I do use it as a way of documenting their lives.

11 year old wants to be a YouTuber and the seven and the five year old are still happy for me to post pics. But I'm definitely more wary about doing so now. Yeah, I'd be really interested on doing an item on that, actually, and picking up your thoughts on whether you stop posting images of your children when they're, frankly, able to tell you they don't want it to happen. After all, they're not your property, they're individuals, and they're going to be having their own professional lives in the years ahead, which... And so they don't necessarily want their potty training years documented.

I've said this before, but if you end up as the Home Secretary, do you want images of your toddler years out there? Quite possibly not. Right, Jenny is here tomorrow with the programme and the podcast. Amongst other things, she'll be talking about a contemporary production of the revenge tragedy, Women Beware Women. That's tomorrow. BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. the revenge tragedy, Women Beware Women. That's tomorrow. Gandhi, Margaret Thatcher, John Lennon, and detonate fact bombs around their reputations.

It's stuff you don't want to know, but you really do want to know. At the end of a lively debate, my panel of esteemed guests, read, banging, comedians, all have to vote evil or genius. There's no grey area. This is cancel culture turned into an innovative format. Subscribe to Evil Genius on BBC Sounds now. And the deeper I dig, the more questions I unearth. How long has she been doing this? What does she have to gain from this? From CBC and the BBC World Service, The Con, Caitlin's Baby. It's a long story, settle in.

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