Woman's Hour - Listener Week: Day Four

Episode Date: August 22, 2019

Day Four of Listener Week.One Listener wanted us to talk about how you get over falling out with your best friend. Doreen and Virginia wondered if they're members of the longest running Book Club - which began in 1965. Twenty year old Sophie Taylor got in touch seeking advice for female entrepreneurs like herself. And Wandja Kimani asked us to discuss carving out a life in a community when you find yourself in a minority.Presenter: Jenni Murray Producer: Beverley PurcellGuest; Annabel Fenwick-Elliott Guest; Hilda Burke Guest; Natalie Carter Guest; Melissa Cummings-Quarry Guest; Sophie Taylor Guest; Jo Fairley, Guest; Julie Baker Guest; Wanja Kimani Guest; Rachel Edwards

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. I'm Natalia Melman-Petrozzella, and from the BBC, this is Extreme Peak Danger. The most beautiful mountain in the world. If you die on the mountain, you stay on the mountain. This is the story of what happened when 11 climbers died on one of the world's deadliest mountains, K2, and of the risks we'll take to feel truly alive. If I tell all the details, you won't believe it anymore. Extreme. Peak danger. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello and welcome to the podcast for Thursday the 22nd of August, day four of Listener Week. As the newspapers report on the growth of the silent book club, Doreen wrote to us about what might be the oldest book club begun in 1965. Plenty of talk there about the books. How has it lasted so long? Wanja told us on Instagram about her difficulties as a woman of colour in a rural community. How easy is it to fit in? And Sophie started a business three years ago when she was 17. Jo Fairley, one of the founders of Green and Black's Chocolate,

and Julie Baker of NatWest Bank will offer advice on how to grow your enterprise at a pace you can manage. So often we talk about how important our women friends are to us. We share everything with them, and sometimes they've been our best friends since we were at school. They may occasionally be set aside if a new man comes on the scene, but whilst we rarely assume a romantic relationship will last forever, a best female friend is for life. So what happens when best friends fall out? We're discussing this because we had an email from Jill

who fell out with a friend of 25 years standing nearly two years ago. She's still so upset she didn't want to join us. Well, Hilda Burke is a psychotherapist and the author of The Phone Addiction Workbook. Annabelle Fenwick-Elliott is Senior Content Editor at The Telegraph. She explained how her breakup from a best friend happened. So we were best, best, best friends for about a decade. Boyfriends came and went through both of our lives. But I think it changed sort of really quite abruptly about two years before we split up when she got engaged and seemed to undergo quite a personality transplant.

So there were many things that from that moment leading up to the last straw for me, about two years after that. What was the last straw? So she'd promised to take me to my ex-boyfriend's funeral and I was very upset on that day, as you can imagine. And she bailed at the last minute and didn't take me. And I just thought, that's it.

Have you spoken to each other since? Not once, no. Why was the relationship so important to you? I've always been the sort of person that has one rather than lots of friends. And she was that person we met, as I said, first day of university. And I just got on with her so well. We used to always say no one will have a friendship like ours. We lived together.

We went through breakups together. We went on holiday together. We sort of that decade from your 20s to your 30s is obviously key. And we survived all of it up until the ring went on, apparently. Hilda, how often do you see this kind of breakup happening in a professional capacity? Quite often, Jenny. I mean, I see it from both sides. So one would be the friend

who has lost their best friend, like Annabelle, and feels bereft. But I also see it from the other side, which is people who have been sort of best friended or still sort of cast in the role of best friend, you know, 20, 30 years on. But they don't feel that that role fits them anymore.

They don't feel the same way about the relationship with their friend. They don't maybe want the monogamous element of the friendship, that sort of dedicated best friend. It may no longer, you know, it may no longer suit them. It may be that they still want to maintain a friendship with that person but not to the same sort of degree of intensity so i see it you know in from both sides of of the equation in in in friendship relationships why do you think it's becoming more common if it is for these kind of friendships to break well i think i think as you

said earlier you know a female best friend is for life so i think that whole idea like friends are family i think friendships are becoming more intense particularly for millennials who are settling down later um they're very you know av average users of social media, which, you know, puts them in contact with their friends a lot more often than maybe friends would have been in contact 50 years ago. There might have been close friends might have called each other once a day. But now, you know, close friends will message a couple of times an hour. So there's that kind of level of intimacy and contact that I think previous generations rarely had. So I think, you know, that coupled with the fact that people are settling

down later, it leaves a lot more capacity. I think people have more capacity, particularly women, for friendship in their life than when they were maybe getting married in their mid-twenties and having a couple of kids. People are doing that later, if at all. So I think there is a huge capacity for friendship. And of course, anything that you invest more in, you expect more back from. So expectations are higher. Annabelle, what effect did the split have on your use of social media? Because presumably you had a lot of shared friends um we actually don't have that many mutual friends which is a good thing in this case um all of the friends that we would sort of hang out with together were from university were more her friends always than they than they

were mine um so i don't miss seeing any of those people um i deleted her from social media and i actually deleted two of these mutual friends too just because i didn't want it to come up on my feed um and it was just easier that way so yeah were you so hurt by the breakup yeah you had to get rid of her out of your life absolutely yeah i i knew i had a choice and I made I knew that I had to either that people change and you can't change people that I either had to accept this new iteration of our friendship and whittle my expectations away which I did many many times to the point where it was it was a different friendship but the the funeral was the final straw and I just

thought no this is too much disappointment in my life. And I'm better off without it, really. Hilda, how do you begin to get over the pain of such a breakup? I think in Annabel's case, I mean, it sounds particularly painful because of that moment when you expect your best friend to be at your side, it's a very painful thing to go through, the funeral of a significant ex-partner. So I can really hear the sadness in that story. But I think, you know, it really depends on the scenario.

When you say a breakup, some breakups, friendship breakups, are mutual. Sometimes, you know, friendships just ebb away. But something that is a real, that's a significant rupture. You know, that's quite, I mean, I think what will be interesting to see is as friendships become more, are becoming more sort of important in women's lives and you know maybe people are investing more of the energy that they would have had in a romantic partnership more in friendships you know whether those people will start to come to to sort of um couple therapy you know couple therapy is a kind of broad name any two people can come to couple therapy and work

in in um you know in in that way that you sort of look at the relationship between you so i i i really i would love to work with a kind of a friendship that that has a lot invested in it and and both parties wanted to improve and don't want to leave it even if there has been some you know ruptures i would you know that that's something i don't think it's far off actually because i think i work with a lot of clients who have even if there has been some ruptures, I would, you know, that's something, I don't think it's far off, actually, because I think I work with a lot of clients who have troubling sort of friendships, but are still invested in it.

So I think it will be interesting when that starts to happen. Annabelle, I know you wrote about what happened. What sort of response did you get to what you wrote? I actually got a surprisingly huge response. A lot of people got in touch with me and said the same thing had happened to them. A lot of people said it was after a wedding. But I was most surprised by the number of men who got in touch with me, which never happens when I write about this sort of thing. Usually, so many emailed me and and said this happened to me too but we can't

really talk about it as men. So I thought that was interesting. And these were friendships between men that had been invested in in exactly the same way as you'd invested. And offered very often they had also fallen apart after a marriage. Well Annabelle Fenwick-Elliott and Hilda Burke, thank you both very much indeed for being with us this morning. And we would really like to hear from you about this, whether you're a man or a woman, if it's a male friendship or a female friendship, please let us know if you broke up, why did it happen and how did you recover from it? And thank you both very much for being with us now if you live in any of the united kingdom's big cities you can walk down the street and see dozens of people of different races generally mingling together with no difficulties but what's it like if you're

a person of color and you move into a rural community where yours is the only black face. How do you and your children manage to fit in? Well, that was the question raised by Wanda Kimani, who recently moved to a small town in Cambridgeshire. We're joined by the author, Rachel Edwards, who moved into a village in Oxfordshire 22 years ago. And, of course, by Wanda. Wanda, what's it been like for you to move to a predominantly white part of the country? Good morning Jenny it's been an interesting experience it's come with its difficulties with people kind of making assumptions about my place and my position being there.

So people kind of sometimes assuming that I'm taking something that belongs to the local population. I put that in quotes because who is local? I think there was something that happened in the post office, wasn't there, that made you realise that something might be going on? Yeah, so just last week I was outside the post office and a gentleman was in the queue behind me and he said that he was talking about his name being a local name to the area

and saying that it's dying out generation by generation. And then he just skipped to the fact that social housing is now going to immigrants and then just glanced over at me. And it's, you know, I'm not taking up the space that I should and I deserve to be there just as much as everyone else. Rachel, yours was a long time ago. That's right. 22 years ago.

What was it like for you when you moved in? Well, I feel it was slightly different then. Maybe we were in a more optimistic time back in the 90s, in the late 90s, when I moved from London after university to rural Oxfordshire. And I generally felt very welcome. Of course, I was conspicuous. There's a visible difference that my neighbours didn't have to deal with.

But people were interested, you know, as long as you met them halfway and talked about where you were from, what you were doing, and they genuinely wanted to welcome you into the community. I do wonder about now, the climate now, whether that has changed. I felt certainly my certain differences since having moved to Oxford 22 years ago. You'd expect it to be better now. You would. Because we've talked about it so much more. We've thought about it so much more.

Why might it be worse? Well, absolutely. I think that there's a wave of optimism coming through the 90s, and that's how it was. My novel that I wrote in the 90s was called Blended because I thought about blended societies and how we're all moving in that direction. And I still think that's a great hope for the human project, you know. But

I fear personally that since issues like the EU referendum and the political changes that have taken place across Western Europe and wider parts of the globe the attitudes may have changed and that ripples down to the smallest communities where otherness

is less, is more visible. So that has a greater effect on people like Wanda and I who are walking around and people notice the difference. And whereas that might be welcomed with more open arms, I feel there's some touch of hostility maybe creeping in. And it's not the experience of other people as well. Wanda, I know you've got two little girls, one of which is ready to start school. Yes. How are you preparing her for school? So at home we talk positively about all aspects of our being,

whether it's our brownness, being women, being girls, and we celebrate that. And my daughter is very creative, very curious about all the differences and similarities between her and her friends um so so far i've just been kind of reinforcing the positivity of being who she is um but you know going to school that's beyond me and i do worry about kind of assumptions that will be made about her just based on her colour. What conversations have you had with the school about it? So we're having, so the school has been really efficient in kind of the transition between nursery and primary school.

So they've had visits into the school over the summer and they'll be doing a home visit when I will get a chance to kind of talk to her teachers about this. And I would want any issues that come up to be kind of talked about rather than just brushed under the carpet, because that doesn't help anyone. Rachel, you didn't have the problem of sending your children into school, but you were a long time ago the only black girl in the school. I was. What advice can you give to someone who is facing that now well i would first of all say don't be daunted on behalf of your daughter i mean you're right to think about it a great mother to think about that ahead of time i was as jenny said i was literally the only black girl in my school for many years back in the 80s and um i think it helps as a parent if you're engaged and you can you can

gauge for yourself what your child's experiencing but really the best advice i could give would be to empower your daughters as you seem to be doing from an early age so give them confidence don't feel that they have to necessarily foster a sense of victimhood because they'll be the only maybe the only person of color in their class um give them confidence that they will be heard and understood. And also, I think for me, the real tools, the two pillars of my life to date have been love and education. So if you're supporting their education and encouraging them to find themselves and contribute, as well as to absorb information, then you are really supporting them and being active members of the community. And that way, they will shape the conversation in their school and the dialogue as well as being members of it. But I'm sure you're talking to your girls about how they feel and if they have playground issues.

I'm sure you talk to them about that. What do you like about living in a rural community? For me, it's having just this access to really green, open, beautiful spaces. It's a really safe neighbourhood. The facilities at the school are fantastic. So I feel like they do have a lot of opportunities to explore while being there. How did you involve yourself in the local community? Well, there are a number of ways.

So I arrived in rural South Oxfordshire on my own and I was in my early 20s. So I felt for a start that I was preparing myself for people to be curious because, as I say, there's this visible difference. And conspicuousness can be quite an issue if you're feeling very shy or worried about standing out um but i saw that as a positive thing because people said oh yeah what are you doing here where are you living and so on um there are a number of ways really first of all i'd say involve yourself don't underestimate the shires love of people who get stuck in you know involve yourself in activities don't wait to be invited things you know put yourself out there and it's not just the fun days the festivals but also

volunteering if you have time for that i know it's half a two year old children but they're environmental things it doesn't have to be about always about cultural aspects but um i would also say you're you're an artist aren't you you create now creating something adding something to the cultural dialogue is really important. So you can shape the conversation there, maybe invite people to some of your shows and introduce people to some of your ways of thinking as well. I think definitely joining in is very important. Also, using your local amenities to a greater extent than you might do if you're

just in a city so it's really important to local grocer who might be struggling or the butcher don't just get your your shop shop delivery delivered to your house you know maybe go and use the local shops and talk to people because there's a wealth of information use your library very important with young girls and get involved in books and book groups and so on. So there's a plethora of ways really. Just briefly, we were talking about PTAs yesterday, Parent Teacher Associations, and how desperate they are to get people to join and take part.

Might that be an idea? That could be an option. Join the PTAs. Well, Wanda Kimani and Rachel Edwards, thank you both very much indeed and Wanda, the very best of luck and good luck with the girls starting school. And if you go to the Women's Hour website, you'll find an article there about how to talk to children

about race and racism. Now, still to come in today's programme, a plea from a young entrepreneur. Sophie wrote to us for tips about growing her business. How do you expand at a pace you can manage? And the serial, the fourth episode of the country girls lots of people moving around today or coming in and coming out so here we go there's a slightly strange story in this morning's times about the growth of something called the silent book club you go there to read and not to talk about the book,

which is absolutely not what the book club we were told about by Doreen Lavan is like. Doreen actually wrote us, not a tweet, not an email, but a letter, in which she suggested an item about book clubs. Hers in Canterbury, founded in 1965, could well be the oldest in existence. So what is a book club for? Well Natalie Carter and Melissa Cummings Quarry are the founders of the Black Girls Book Club. Virginia Connybear has been a member in Canterbury since 1980 and Doreen was one of the founder members joining in 1966. Doreen, how was the group founded?

It all began with the opening of the University of Kent in Canterbury, which immediately had newsletters and an association of university wives. The wife of a French lecturer at the university, Joan Hampshire, herself a graduate in English from Oxford, got together, put a notice in the newsletter and a group of people immediately got

into each other's houses, chose a book and spoke about it. I actually didn't arrive myself until 67. It was established before I got here. But that's how it began. How surprised are you that it's lasted so long? I don't think I am surprised. People have come and gone.

Some people have left Canterbury and even returned to Canterbury. Canterbury is a fairly static community, I think I could say. It's a very attractive place to live and lots of us have simply not moved away. Virginia, how did you get involved? Well, I got involved at the school gate. I arrived from Oxford with my two young children, went to the local primary school and it wasn't long before a very nice person called Doreen spoke to me and we became friends and before very long she had told me about this group and asked me to join, which was a wonderful way to be introduced to life in Canterbury. Natalie why was yours founded? Well Melissa and I have been best friends since we were 11 and a half and we always shared books

between each other and one day we just thought wouldn't it be amazing to share these books not just between ourselves but with other black women in London. And then Black Girls Book Club was born, and that was it. We just wanted to read amazing stories about black women and share them with other black women. Melissa, you describe it as not your common book club. What do you mean by that? The thing is, someone said we were just a common book club. We weren't that special.

And I thought, how cheeky. Very cheeky. We're more than that. We're not just a book club that, you know, we weren't that special. And I thought, how cheeky. We're more like, very cheeky, we're more than that. We're not just a book club that just meets up and we read. We do things like parties. We've even taken over the House of Parliament. We do so many different things. Film screenings.

You've had guests coming to talk, haven't you? Like Mallory Blackman, who we were speaking to on the programme last week. Yes, and Sarpong, Afua Hirsch. We've had so many. So many amazing people. Yeah, and Angie. We've had so many amazing people. Yeah, and Angie Thomas. We have so many amazing people, so I just thought this idea

that we're just a comic book club, we're just girls who get together, you know, we're just laughing in a room like this in Prosecco, it's so much more than that. So that's our tagline. We're a bit more than what people expect. Yeah.

Doreen, I hardly dare ask you, are you just a common book club? Yes, we're a very common book group. We just meet once a month in each other's houses. We think of a book to read in a couple of months' time and then talk about the book we have read during the past month. We've

never done anything else except we do meet, as I've said, once a month on Monday evenings, just going round to each other's houses. But once a year, we try and have a lunch where we all get together and talk about a book and also have lunch. That is the only difference. We're terribly impressed, Virginia and I,

hearing about the activities of this other lot. More than 500 books, Doreen, I think, have been read. Which books, after all these years, stand out for you? For me, I ought to let Virginia answer this, really. Certainly one, and it's very interesting with your other contributors, that a lot of us, including the founder, who's now very frail and over 90, was Toni Morrison's Beloved.

Oh, we absolutely love that. Oh, these two have just... We absolutely love that. You must have heard them. We want to do that as a tribute to Toni. Oh, if you haven just we absolutely love that you must have heard them we want to do that as a tribute to Tony oh if you haven't read it yet you must

we need to we need to do it I've read it Melissa's yet to read it but we want to read it with the book club so it's just so nice to hear that

it just reinforces that shall I say that needs to be our next book because we'll have listeners who'll come up to us and be like when are you reading Tony

yes okay you've just ordered the rest of your group. OK. That is the next book to read. That is the next book. Thanks, beloved. Virginia, Dorian said you were the best person to answer this question.

Which books stand out for you? Well, we had a bit of discussion about it, of course, and different ones for us. I just have to say at the moment, for our long read in August, we've been reading The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, which is a great deal grander than we usually would attempt. It's a very long book, and it's a quite very serious book. But we range so wide,

modern books, but always within a certain price range. Three Daughters of Eve by Elif Shafak stands out. And then we occasionally read a biography, and A Life of My Own by Claire Tomlin was one of the ones that we really liked. And recently, a very touching sort of autobiography called The Salt Path by Raynor Wynne about a couple who really, their life has

fallen apart and they set off to walk around the Cornish coast with nothing really, and it's a most fascinating reflection on all sorts of things including what homelessness means and you know, such a lot to discuss. I mean that's the criterion, that if there's something to discuss, and we all have very different views, and it's always so fascinating to see how other people take the books that we read. Now, Natalie, having made the ghastly confession that your book club has not yet read Beloved, what books have stood out for you?

We read my personal favourite book, The Colour Purple by Alice Walker. And that was a brilliant, brilliant event. I think that's a classic book that every black woman should read. And reading that with the book club and going through the different stories, the characters, and how the experiences of the main female characters

are so relative to the experiences that people have today. That is the book that stands out for me. And also our first book, Americana. Yeah. What stands out for you, Melissa? I think for me, There Are Eyes Watching God. So that is my favourite book.

And I was really excited to bring it to the book club because a lot of girls hadn't read it. And it is a classic. It's a wonderful book, but it's one that was kind of lost. So it's really important to us that we said, look, we're going to do something you might not have heard of before. Let's just get into it. And it was amazing because it's a real story of kind of like black womanhood, a journey from girlhood to womanhood.

And it was quite nice, I think, as the other ladies were saying, to have people's opinions on it and see how they felt about it and how they reacted to it. And I think it was one of my favourite book clubs. Yeah, it was. Now, obviously, Doreen, the choice of book and the discussion about the book and the sharing of opinions for all of you is very, very important. But how supportive has your group been over 54 years? It's amazing. We are friendly with each other and some of us have our very closest friendships. And that spills over because we all live in this relatively small town and go on knowing each other. So and in those early days, especially when we were all looking after children and husbands and homes, a job, I may say, most of us, if you'd asked at the time, we would have said was one of the most worthwhile and rewarding and interesting jobs that anybody can ever have. We've just gone on.

As I say, people have left, they've come back. Others have joined us. We're certainly not all university wives for a long while ago. And before we get cut off, could I put just one other plea in? Very occasionally, we manage to get the route to read poetry. Yes, well done. Poetry is very important. One other question. I know you're keen to know if you're the oldest book club.

Why does that matter to you? It doesn't. It doesn't matter a bit. But as we started thinking about it, we just thought, we wonder if there are any other groups. And we do know these days there are lots and lots and lots of groups which take all sorts of different forms. But another interesting thing is we suspect the majority of them are for women. Right. We would like to know about any book clubs that are just for men.

And we would also like to know of any book clubs that began before 1965. And Natalie and Melissa, how likely is yours to still be going in 2070? I think, I can imagine, I can imagine me and Natalie like rocking up in our little mini dresses. When you're 90? Yeah, why not? With our glasses of Prosecco, like, has anyone read the book? I can just imagine us doing it. I don't think it'll be as often as we do currently,

but I can imagine once a year, all of the women that have followed us on our journey, I can just imagine saying, look, we've got our brunch. We've been doing it for five years, and can you remember what life was like before Black Girls Book Club? I can't remember. I don't remember life before Black Girls Book Club. Well, good luck.

I hope you are still going in 2070. Melissa Cummings-Quarry, Natalie Carter, Virginia Connybear and Doreen Laven, thank you all very much indeed for being with us this morning. Now, all you need, they say, is one good idea and you can make a huge success in business. But is the good idea really enough? Sophie Taylor sent us an email explaining that she'd started a business selling coffee when she was 17. It did very well locally but then the problems began. How do you expand a business in a way you can really manage it? Well Sophie was particularly concerned

about the barriers faced by young female entrepreneurs. To give advice from their experience, we're joined by Jo Fairley, one of the founders of Green and Black Chocolate, and Julie Baker, Head of Enterprise and Community Banking at NatWest, and, of course, Sophie. Sophie, what was the good idea? So my idea was an iced coffee product made of hazelnut and coconut milk.

So both hazelnut and coconuts are growing food trends within the health industry. And coffee is obviously loved by everyone. So that was my idea. And how did you make it? So I'd always wanted to have my own business. And I really loved coffee. So I got a part-time job in a coffee shop to learn the ropes and I loved their iced coffee. So that's essentially where the idea came from.

But people were often put off by the unhealthy factors. So I just started making my own recipe, incorporating the ice, incorporating the nut milks to give it a bit of a healthier touch to it. And that's really how it all started and how far how far did the business go um so i started selling in cafes um and then i done a competition which was the young national entrepreneur of the year competition and i came second in um and then yes i was selling cafes the issue was I was getting up in the morning going around to all the cafes making them up and they would sell out by midday so I thought okay this isn't going to be able to expand any further I need to get it into bottles and that was going to be my way forward however it turned out to be a lot more difficult than I initially thought. Why? I mean what efforts

did you make to take it further in bottles and why did it not work um so it's something that I'm still in the process of doing um the particular um nut milks cause manufacturing it's a bit difficult with manufacturing um so that's a standstill that I'm at the moment um essentially when you try and get into retail, a lot of retailers will only buy a couple of cases, which can sometimes be something like 24 bottles. You have to buy a minimum order quantity from your manufacturer in order for them to make any money. But a lot of retailers won't buy the amount that you need in order for it to work, essentially. Jo, what was it like when you started? It's a familiar story.

It's a very familiar story. But we, although we never made chocolate ourselves, but I think that the key for Sophie is to get this next stage of getting somebody to make stuff for you. There's a great temptation, you know, in chocolate you can't really do that, but there's a great temptation when people start a food business to do it themselves. And all their effort goes into the making of it. And actually, you want a manufacturer who's an expert at doing

that, who can take care of all of those headaches and worry if the hazelnuts aren't up to scratch or whatever. And then Sophie, in this case, can focus on the PR and the marketing and the selling. And really that was what I did. I didn't have to worry about the manufacturing because that is a huge thing in itself. I channeled all my energies into getting the chocolate, green and blacks, out there, into getting it to press, getting it to restaurants, etc. In order to get somebody to manufacture it, you need some money. You do.

With which to pay them. Yeah. How do you get the money? Well, the great advantage of going into business in 2019 versus 1991 is that crowdfunding is now, you know, a very viable way to raise money and for smaller companies kickstarter and similar organizations will allow you to put a pitch online you do your you do your business plan you get your budget together you can put your pitch online with a little film about what it is you want to do and you can raise five thousand ten thousand without having to give away equity in your company. Perhaps you give them some kind of thank you in the form of iced coffee or a T-shirt or whatever.

And you can also use it, I think, as a kind of filter. How good is this idea? If it's good enough to raise £5,000 or £10,000, the chances are you're going to be able to sell that to a much wider audience. If you can't raise the five or ten thousand perhaps you need to look at the proposition julie as a banker what do you make of the idea of crowdfunding well actually and i was telling joe this earlier we've

recently launched something called back her business and we've partnered with a crowdfunding platform crowdfunder and what this is, following the Rose Review, we're looking at ways of supporting and encouraging more females into entrepreneurship. And I'll talk a little bit more about the Rose Review in a moment. But we felt it was important. One, to help females set up in business. So we have a million pound fund, which is a grant fund. But actually, to get up to £5,000 worth of grant funding, you have to crowdfund a minimum of £5,000, if not more.

But what is really important, we've found, and we're actually doing the rounds going around the country at the moment, is helping the entrepreneurs and those that want to set up in business learn how to crowdfund and how to make the most of promoting their business ideas so they can get to that next stage so so that's where we're at at the moment why didn't you go to the bank and just say i've got a really good idea give me money well the issue that i have found previously and i sort of do find now is it's brilliant if i had all this investment but where i obviously i'm starting out as a young person i haven't had lots of years of experience in a certain industry and I don't necessarily have that guidance so if I had the money would I necessarily know where to put it in order for it to be used effectively

and in terms of investment if I did have that investment that's a lot of liability because you've got that investor and again it's just knowing how to effectively use that money without any sort of guidance or mentorship so that was always a fear. Jo you've got the money how do you know how to use it? Well I think that something that is very commonplace in business is that you have someone like Sophie who's incredibly creative she's got all the ideas she's created a great product that's not necessarily the same person that is going to be good for strategy and operations and all the kind of nuts and bolts. And if in a perfect world, I would come up with some kind

of dating system like Tinder for businesses, where you would have the creative person and then you'd have somebody who was really good at accounts or the, you know, the backroom stuff. You might not have an idea in their head, but actually wants to get in business. And I think that Sophie needs to find somebody to handhold her through that process of putting together a business plan, looking at different scenarios, etc. But she should not in any way beat herself up about the fact that she doesn't have that natural ability because I certainly don't. And many, many entrepreneurs don't have that other really kind of more solid business side to their abilities. Julie, it's interesting that only 20% of business owners are female. Why is there a relatively low number when there are so many of us? We are 50, is it 51?

51%? 52%? No, but yeah, well, I think you're right. I think we're getting there. So you're absolutely right. And that is one of the reasons why Alison Rose, who's the deputy CEO of NetWest and the CEO of NetWest Commercial and Private Bank, was asked by Robert Jenrick last year to undertake the roads review, which was research into what are those barriers. And we didn't do new research.

With the help of McKinsey's, we actually looked at 50 reports that have been, if you like, reported on over the last five years and actually condensed that information, spoke to 150 key influencers. We did deep dives on the five best countries out there like Canada, the States, Netherlands, Sweden, Australia, to actually come up with these barriers, which won't be of a surprise for everybody. And I'll quickly go through them now. The first one, of course, is funding, which we've already talked about this morning. And at every stage of that entrepreneurial journey from startup right up to when they're getting the investment and looking at VCs, women receive less funding than men. So we're looking

at interventions and recommendations on how we can support that. Why do women receive less funding than men? Well, interesting, because I had a conversation with somebody this week from Startup Loan Company, and I would certainly recommend Sophie, when she's looking for funding, also look at Startup Loan Company. And because 38% of startup loans are now going to women, which is tremendous, and that is really bucking the trend compared to other stats out there. How seriously do you feel you've been taken, as an entrepreneur not seriously at all I think when I obviously I started when I was 17 so I think I always thought oh because I'm young I'm gonna people aren't gonna take me seriously they're gonna think I don't have like certain knowledge um but at the end of the day I'm a young person I'm trying to do something good essentially um so I just thought I'd have to

deal with it um and then when I was at a networking event I asked a question to a panel of men and they were all venture capital um investors um and I can't explain the exact feeling I think this is why a lot of maybe women that do experience discrimination um in business don't really say because you can't you can't really put your finger on it but the way he looked down I mean he sort of laughed at my question I felt very overlooked um and I felt that in that moment I thought it's not just because I'm young it's also because I'm female um and yeah how common do you reckon that is Judy do you know I'm sat here and I'm sure Joe is as well feeling really quite angry that that you had to experience that but unfortunately um that

isn't the first time i've heard that and that is what we're looking to change and so certainly with the interventions what the part um a big part of it is supporting young enthusiastic entrepreneurs like yourself um with introducing them to the right networks introducing them to the right mentors and sponsors and and we're working at the moment in the north of England with the LEPs and growth hubs, where we're looking at linking, and it's with an app, through artificial intelligence, the mentee and the mentor. So there's lots of ways that we can support. But what would be really useful for somebody like

yourself as well, would be to network and probably spend a little bit of time in an accelerator hub or support hub. So you get that business support around you. Yes. So there's lots of accelerator hubs around the country and we're fortunate enough to have 12. We have up to eight businesses in any one time. Any business can apply to go in there, but you get mentored. You get help with your business planning you get helped connecting to bigger businesses and you get help with your pitch

and it all that help support and information actually gives you the confidence um and a much much stronger networks joe after all this um high-flying talk, I'm a little embarrassed to say, what's all this about high heels? So Sophie was saying that she puts high heels on to go to a business meeting because she feels she'll be taken more seriously. And I will say that so do I. I don't know why it is that I feel more confident in high heels. But all I know is that for many years, I've been lucky enough to go to the Women of the Year lunch. And there is at the bottom of the stairs, what I call the reshoeing area, where everybody from QCs to politicians to former prime ministers are standing there changing their shoes. So this is very common. And I think it is something to do

with the fact that if you're standing up with a man, you don't necessarily want to be looking at his lapel. You want to be looking him in the eye. But if we can just go back to mentorship for a minute, I think the most positive thing that Sophie could do would be to mentorship is to find somebody who has really direct experience in Sophie's case of manufacturing a product which has kind of you know works with nuts probably because there are all sorts of issues with that but has a same sort of shelf life who's been there done that and I'm the t-shirt because somebody from another world can sit and pat her on the hand and say it's going to be okay but but they can't necessarily say they, you know, share that insider wisdom. Jo Fairley, Julie Baker, Sophie Taylor, best of luck with your business. Absolutely. I'm sure you're going to be inundated with calls after this.

I was talking to Jo Fairley, Sophie Taylor and Julie Baker. Lots of emails and tweets from you, particularly about best friends and breaking up someone who didn't want to be named said I've been friends with someone didn't want to be named for 40 years done our early teens she's had other great friends throughout one was her bridesmaid but I think she's no longer keen on continuing I'm in recovery from PTSD and consequently the last few years have been frankly financially poor I think my lack of enthusiasm for holidays suggested recently have been seen as rejection but they were my shame no longer having a good career and thus no money of my own.

Emily said, Last September, my oldest friend and best friend of 33 years purposefully ended our friendship in spectacular and devastating fashion. Via a series of awful emails, she accused me of a long list of terrible failings as a friend and of doing and saying things about our wider friendship group, all school friends of 30 years, which I hadn't done. As a result, our friendship is over and our wider circle has been torn apart. I'm devastated and still spend large amounts of time thinking about what's happened. I don't think she's sad at all. In fact,

posts on social media suggest she feels liberated by what she's done. Andrew said, like your guest, I met my best friend on the first day of university in 1997, and we've been extremely close ever since. Our relationship is special and unique amongst my friendships, to me, in that we have conversations I simply wouldn't have with anyone else, even my partner or sister. But ten years ago, she moved abroad, and despite Skype and her visits back to the UK, our relationship isn't and can't be the same as it was. Angela said I lost my friend of 15 years after she decided my husband was a better option than hers.

The deception ripped me into a shadow of myself. It took years of therapy and self-determination to move on with my life but still now 20 years later I've never let myself become or found a best friend. In many ways the loss of that friendship was more destructive to me than the loss of my partner. And Karen also said I lost my best friend when she began a relationship with my ex-husband and still thought we could remain friends. We have not made up. Emma said what about those of us who don't have a best friend? I have lots of good long-term friends but no one particularly I could call a best friend. I often feel excluded when I hear others talking about what they've done with their bestie. And then Tiff said my best

friend and I are still close thanks to WhatsApp voice messages. She lives in a different country, so we just now and again leave each other voice messages. It works great as it's less codependent and pressurised, but still personal. We love listening to our messages. We've endured many changes in the modern life that past friendships wouldn't have weathered. On the question of women of colour in rural areas, Neelam said, As a professional British Indian couple,

we've always lived in white, rural or small towns without any issues. Now living in a very small Welsh village and loving it. How you present yourself and behave is so important. And then Ruth said, I'm white British and I moved to a rural Cambridgeshire village in 2000. People were a bit hostile to me because I was different. My opposite neighbours had never been further than 17 miles from the village. The fens are insular due to the topography and lack of moving away. And then on book clubs.

Alex said, I felt I had to write to you today after listening to your piece on book clubs. I was a founding member of a silent book club in South London, mainly made up of working mothers with young children. We held it every other Tuesday evening at a local wine bar. The idea was that in the first hour you could sit in peace and quiet and read whatever book you wanted, usually with a glass of wine. For the second hour we put our books down and chatted, either about what we were reading or more often about everything else that was going on in our lives. As a group of young, working mums, this was such a valuable time to be able to unwind and socialise. There was no pressure to have finished a book you could read anything.

Natasha said, My husband was jealous of how much I loved my all-female book club. He set up an all-male club. He enjoys it very much and they were very supportive towards him after a serious illness this year. I would say the biggest difference between our groups are wine versus beer consumption. The level of snacks, we favour platters of vegetables and dips while they consume a lot of potato-based products. They also have very strict marking criteria for each book and produce a spreadsheet each time. And then Catherine, on the age of book clubs, said,

Having just listened to the contribution about book clubs, I have to tell you that my mother started one in 1957 while we were living in Donegal. I have vivid memories of it all. I used to read these books covertly, unbeknown to my mother, as they were deemed unsuitable for a 15-year-old. By the way, loving the country girls as much as ever. And Anne said, I belong to the 1924 Book Club in Edinburgh. As its name suggests, it was founded in 1924 by the wives of Church of Scotland ministers

living on the south side of the city. It's still in existence and meets monthly between October and May. Its membership is still female. And then finally on female entrepreneurs, Sarah said I'm a woman entrepreneur and I think to

buck the trend, we need to include in our education system what the skills are to run or start a business. Now tomorrow Jane will be talking about the housing crisis and the problems that some older people have

when it comes to living in private rented housing. And also mothers and sons. Trish wonders why people seem to find it odd that she and her adult son get on so well. Now that they're both adults, they're also good friends. That's Jane. Tomorrow, two minutes past 10. Bye bye. I'm Sheila Dillon. And before you go, I wanted to tell you about the Food Programme podcast, The Place for Hungry Minds. In our latest episode I sit down to talk

to Jamie Oliver. We used to go and pick Sorrel and Rocket on roundabouts and I'm like yeah but Gennaro it's kind of a lot of exhaust fumes around here Gennaro. Lead! Lead Gennaro! Not good! It was wonderful to hear that Jamie Oliver,

master of Italian cooking, actually only encountered olive oil in his late teens. My geography teacher, Mr Saga, said that I was deaf. In Essex,

the only place to get olive oil was Boots. So, subscribe to the Food Programme on BBC Sounds. I started like warning everybody. Every doula that I know. It was fake. No pregnancy. 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. Available now.