Middle Raged Podcast – Episode 12 Transcript

This is the transcript for episode 12 – if you’d like to listen to it, rather than read it, all episodes are available on this page.

Hello, and welcome to this Episode 12 of the Middle Raged Podcast with me, Keith A Pearson and my agitated co-host, Adam Eccles.
Good evening.
Good evening.
Here we are, right on time.
Bang on time when we’re supposed to be, which is a new thing.
We don’t even have to apologize this time.
It’s amazing, isn’t it?
Not about that we don’t, but there’s other apologies to make.
But we are punctual this time, so loving it.
This is it.
This is us going forward.
Indeed.
Evening session again.
Unbelievable.
It’s nice and dark.
We’re not morning angry.
Is that the word?
We’ve had it festering all day.
I think you get a better quality of rant at this time of day.
Do you agree?
You got that deep evening rant.
And post-dinner, you’ve also got slight indigestion, just to help things on their way.
Just something else to be pissed off about.
There you go.
There might even be the odd beer flowing around in the oven.
Oh, I see.
That’s why you were so long, isn’t it?
Adam pissed off a minute ago.
He just left me sat here.
I didn’t realize he was off.
Honestly, he was gone so long.
He may as well have gone to the actual pub.
Where’s your nearest pub?
I’m not really sure.
There’s sort of a house which may or may not be also a pub just down the road, but realistically, it’s probably about five miles away.
It’s not a walk home, is it?
God, no.
No, no, no.
Not in this weather.
Let’s not complain about the weather.
Right, so should we kick off with, I think we’ve got some feedback, haven’t we?
Yeah, there’s a bit of information, right?
A bit of follow up as well.
So last time we talked about the horrificness of flavors in Kit Kats especially, right?
And I didn’t realize, but I’ve done some homework investigation since, and it turns out that Kit Kats are indeed available in the flavors you mentioned here in Ireland.
So just in case anyone was upset about that.
In Ireland, yeah, wanting a, what was it, orange or dark mint?
Yeah, dark mint, orange.
I think there’s a white one as well and something like that.
Did your investigation go as far as the Jaffa cake section?
Oh yeah, as well actually, yes, I did.
And there’s cherry, oh, I forgot to take a picture of this, but there’s something called a Joe nut.
You heard of that?
Yes, is this a cross between a Jaffa cake and a dough, basically it’s a Jaffa cake in a doughnut shape, isn’t it?
Doughnut shape, but it just looks like it’s gonna be manky.
What is the fucking point?
If you want a doughnut, have a doughnut.
We’re just repeating ourselves.
We are, yeah.
But what I wanted to say is these things are indeed available in Ireland, despite me not knowing about them, because probably I don’t go down that aisle.
But now we know.
Now we know, right?
People have possibly been ranting about this for months, and we were just unaware of it, because we’ve never ventured down that particular aisle.
So the rot has spread over the Irish Sea, and here we are, yeah.
It’s a sad state of affairs.
There’s one other thing as well, the custard cream, the dear old custard cream.
Somebody at a large, famous supermarket was tasked with reinventing the custard cream, and this was brought to my attention by a colleague.
Hello, Ian.
And the custard cream, they won some kind of innovators award, and what did they do to win this?
They thought, let’s dunk the custard cream in chocolate.
Fuck.
Just, what are you doing?
That’s innovation for you these days, innovation.
I mean, it’s, I don’t know where to begin.
Well firstly, leave the fucking custard cream alone.
Okay, that’s my first point.
And secondly, what’s chocolate bringing to the table?
Yeah, nothing.
That’s ruining the experience.
Like, if you’ve got the custard in the middle, I don’t just, you know, how you even?
It’s enough sweetness.
Yeah, yeah.
It’s just ruined it in my, so yeah.
Innovation, you can keep it.
So the supermarket gave them an innovator of the year award.
Something like that.
To the individual who came up with this.
Yeah.
Unbelievable.
We, you know, let’s just take it.
What else are we going to dunk in chocolate?
Just don’t want to be around there.
Yeah, no.
Idiots.
And there’s one last thing.
Somebody, I think it was Sue actually mentioned that washing machines, I was lamenting the time dilation of washing machines.
And so Sue said she calls them mummy minutes, which I thought was nice and cute.
So yeah, that’s their mummy minute, because they’re like, you know, kids says, can you get me something?
And yeah, in a minute.
Oh, you could also call them spousal minutes, couldn’t you?
I suppose so, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Will you be long?
Couple of minutes.
How long did you last?
Sorry.
I don’t know where that came from.
Should we move swiftly on?
Right.
Yeah.
So also following on from last episode, and now we have a customary apology to make to our lovely benefactor in the last episode.
We called her Evelyn, didn’t we?
Yeah.
Oh, I did.
I don’t know if we both did, but it is indeed actually Evelyn.
Evelyn, right.
Well, I say that, okay?
I haven’t actually had oral quality.
I haven’t had oral qualification of that.
Good to know.
Yeah.
Evelyn did say it’s Evie-Lynn.
So, Evelyn, that’s how it reads to me.
Would you agree?
Yeah.
You know, I’m kind of a bit lost.
Yeah.
It’s open to interpretation, I think.
But okay.
I probably need to check, do we have a refund policy though on the coffees?
No.
I mean, those are drunk, right?
Okay, they’re gone.
They’re spent.
But possibly a pint at some point can be purchased.
Well, I think if I’m ever, next time I find myself in the Republic of Ireland, I will buy Evelyn an actual coffee, maybe even a sticky bun, just as a way of apology.
How about that?
Can’t beat that, can you?
Can’t get better than that, can you?
Yeah, rock and roll.
That’s how sorry we are.
I am.
Okay, so as we don’t actually have any roastings this week, if you’d like to get involved, where do they go?
It’s buymeacoffee.com/middleraged.
Excellent.
Well, there you go.
If you want your roasting, if you actually want your name butchered in every conceivable way, then we’re your guys.
I suppose if you’ve got a name that has a particular pronunciation, maybe include some kind of directions on that because we’re-
Yeah, spell it phonetically because we’re idiots, clearly.
So in lieu of that, I was hoping I could just squeeze in, I’m going to call it a micro rant, if that’s okay.
And it is name related because I hate my name.
And I don’t know what was going through my parents’ minds when they looked at me as an infant, as a baby, a newborn, I thought, yeah, he looks like a Keith.
I don’t get it.
I really, really, really don’t like my name.
It’s so-
it’s not you can do anything with it either.
I mean, it’s just deeply uncool for starters and you can’t just sort of, if your name is, I don’t know, for example, Michael, you can be Mike, you can be Mick, you can be Mickey.
My brother is James.
James, Jamie, Jim, fucking Jim Jiminy, Jim Jim Jeru.
I mean, do you know what I mean?
Yeah.
So you reckon you got the short straw there?
100 percent.
And it just feels like it’s in the same sort of bracket as a Nigel and a Malcolm and a Jeff.
I think we’re all kind of stuck really.
Malk.
Yeah, Malk.
Nidge.
Jeff.
You can’t do fuck with Jeff, can you?
No, not really.
Nigel.
I suppose you could be a Nigel, but I can’t think of any.
I suppose you could just spell it Keith E E F.
K-E-E-F.
What can I say?
Oh my God.
I did.
I have a confession to make.
I did at one point when, if I’d have thought about it, because when I published my first novel, it was only ever going to be one novel.
So I didn’t really think, I thought I’d stick my name on it.
If I’d have known that it was actually going to turn into a career, I’d have chosen, I don’t know, something like Kiefer or something like that, or K.
Andrew Pearson, or anything but my actual name.
Well, okay, there’s time yet.
I mean, Adam’s just a good solid name, isn’t it?
Can’t be messed around with, really?
I suppose not.
I used to be called Ads by my parents and family.
I can ask you a question, which if you haven’t been asked this before, I will be absolutely amazed.
But if you were in the market for, say you’re on a dating website and you’re approached, would you be less or equally or uninclined to date someone called Eve?
So I’m not religious in any kind of way, so I wouldn’t really make any odds there.
But no, I’ve never been in a relationship with an Eve.
So when I was 17, I worked in a hotel and got the job.
The waitress was this lovely old lady, probably in her seventies at that point, and I was 17.
Are you gonna tell us some sort of Mrs. Robinson type tale here?
No, I was very innocent, 17 year old.
So she introduced herself.
Hello, I’m Eve.
I’m the waitress.
And she said, oh, hello, I’m Adam.
And she was like, you’re fucking kidding me.
I was like, what?
Oh, I see.
Okay.
No, no, that’s my actual name.
Yeah, so, but yeah.
I mean, it would be, I mean, if your name is Eve and you’d like to have a trial relationship with Adam just for my own amusement, then please do send us a line, get in touch via Twitter, Facebook.
Send pictures.
Yeah, send pictures.
I just think, how long would that remain unfunny for?
Or how long would that remain amusing for?
I would say about two days.
Yeah.
I mean, yeah, it’s, I’m sure it’s happened.
Can you imagine you’re going to dinner parties or something, and PO is Adam and Eve.
Yeah.
I’m quite sure it’s happened, right?
But I know some people called Joseph and Mary.
Do you?
I like that.
Yeah.
Come on, please, tell me, tell me, tell me, tell me.
What’s the name of their firstborn son?
Not Jesus.
I think it’s Jer.
That’s Jer.
If I was Joseph married to Mary, I couldn’t not.
You’d be tempted, wouldn’t you?
Yeah.
Who’s the guy who did Jesus over?
What was his name?
The one who did something.
I can’t remember his name now.
I can’t even get my words out.
Judas.
Judas.
Judas.
That’s it.
I think I’d go with Judas.
Yeah.
Just to be different.
Contribution.
One final point regarding names.
So my daughter, who is possibly as odd as I am, we play this game where we challenge one another to find people on Facebook with what we consider particularly amusing names.
Yeah, right, right.
But the only rule is they have to be of British origin.
Oh, well.
That’s now rotted down a bit, doesn’t it?
Kind of world that we live in now.
You can’t go taking the piss out of Wang King from South Korea.
It’s just frowned upon.
So would you like to know the two leading contenders?
The one each that we’ve chosen.
Well, definitely, yeah.
So Grace’s current contender for the most amusing name that we’ve found on Facebook.
And these are genuine names, OK?
These are actual people on Facebook.
And in both instances, there are multiple people with this name.
So it’s not just sort of random.
Somebody’s put it there.
So Grace has unearthed Timmy Tingle.
Oh, yeah.
OK.
That is…
That’s good, isn’t it?
That was not what I expected.
That is a good one.
Timmy Tingle.
Timmy Tingle.
Yeah.
If you’re listening, Timmy, sorry, but can’t deny it’s not funny.
Timmy Tingle.
I mean, if your name was, if your surname was Tingle, would you, would you call yourself Timmy?
Timmy.
I mean, Tim Tingle, it sounds slightly less comedic, doesn’t it?
Brilliant.
Okay, right.
Let’s see how it stacks up against mine.
Okay.
And mine is Julie Dooley.
There are lots and lots of Julie Dooley’s on Facebook.
How do you spell that?
So it’s J-U-L-I-E, and Dooley is D-O-O-L-I-E.
Oh, okay.
Dooley.
So Julie Dooley.
Brilliant.
Now, let me ask you a question, and dear listeners, please chip in with this, right?
If your name is Julie, and you were going out with a guy called, let’s call him Gary Dooley, right?
Gary Dooley, yeah, solid bloke.
Gonna get married, would you think twice about taking his surname?
I mean, it depends on if she’s up for a laugh.
What, her whole fucking life?
Her whole life, yeah.
Yeah.
Poor, poor Julie Dooley.
Anyway.
Okay, so I’ve got a couple to squeeze in then, right?
Oh, go on, please.
When I was at school, there was a girl called Wendy House.
No.
Yeah.
And when I was at college, there was a kid called Richard Head.
What goes through people’s minds when they’re naming their kids?
Did they just not?
Wendy fucking House.
Yeah, pretty bad.
At no point did anyone within either the parents or the wider family.
Yeah, or the registrar even, like, he taking the piss.
Wendy House and Richard Head.
I mean, come on.
What sort of sheltered existence have you had that you wouldn’t make the association is going to be called Dickhead?
Yeah, brutally, yeah, taking the mick of the…
I would guess.
Did you say he was some of you knew at school?
College, he was a college, yeah.
So, you know, he was 16, 17 at that point.
But yeah, I mean, who knows what…
Is he still suffering at that point?
I mean, yeah, it was printed on, so I was at Chef College, right?
So you had to wear Chef whites, and you had to get your name embroidered.
Really?
Yeah.
Do you know what?
100%.
As soon as I was conscious, I would have gone, my name’s Ricky.
Something like that, yeah.
Yeah, you wouldn’t want…
Yeah, I mean, but even so, it’s…
If your name is Head, I mean, it’s unusual enough as it is, but yeah.
But there’s probably older ones, Bob.
Bob Head.
I was going to go somewhere else then.
Yeah, it’s too early in the evening.
We don’t have the specific certification.
Right.
So maybe we should move on.
I’ve just been censored.
Right.
Well, so this is the Halloween episode, so let’s have a bit of spooky.
Anyway.
Oh, fuck, I forgot.
Yeah, it’s going to come out, what?
When is Halloween?
Oh, yeah.
Monday?
I don’t know.
Is that the level of our Halloween-ness?
Oh, I think that’s plenty, isn’t it?
Okay, yeah, fine.
All right, I don’t want to go overboard.
Don’t want to be too commercialized by the stuff.
Just to round off that last point, if you know anyone with a name that you feel outdoes Timmy Tingle or Julie Dooley, please do let us know via ex-Twitter or Facebook.
I reckon Grace has won that, though, really, Timmy Tingle.
He’s a character from a children’s book.
It does sound like it, doesn’t it?
I reckon he runs around ancient London lighting gaslights.
And looking in little boys’ and girls’ windows.
Yes, to see if they’re going to bed on time or something like that.
Like, yeah, definitely.
Yes, a touch of the Savils about that, isn’t it?
Sorry, Timmy, for your listening.
Yes, anyway, right.
No offence intended.
Should we get on with some ranting?
Yeah, let’s talk about some rants.
All right, so what’s got you go this week?
Well, so…
Can you hear that?
So…
Yes.
That’s not Bjork, is it?
No, no, no.
This is just a nice wind background, right?
Because, that’s enough of that.
My rage point this episode is the ridiculousness of storm naming and weather warnings.
So, this is something that has come to be, I don’t know, in the last few years, really.
I don’t remember this happening in my youth.
No.
But, you know, you get a storm prediction, and it gets a human name.
And I think this is the…
Now, I struggle pronouncing this word, but the anthropomorphism.
Like, anthropomorphism.
Who’s going to argue?
It’s not going to be me, is it?
And everyone else is just there listening, so they’re probably shouting at their device.
No, it sounds good to me.
It’s no worse than Evelyn, is it?
Or Evelyn, so, you know, let’s run with it.
So, yeah, so the anthropomorphism of everything has permeated to weather systems.
And this is, you know, this is just utterly ridiculous, if you ask me, right?
This is poignant, because just last Sunday, there was one here called, was it Ashley?
Yes, it was, Storm Ashley.
Ashley continued on his path into the UK.
Yeah, well, I thought Ashley was a girl’s name, is it not?
I spelt different.
I think Ashley, L-E-I-G-H.
I think that’s the female parent.
I may be wrong.
Ashley sounds like a very American girl’s name, like a high school girl’s name.
Yeah, yeah, Ash.
And yeah, so, but yes, Storm Ashley.
I just, why do we need this?
Why, why do we need to give a bunch of wind a name?
Just, so.
I don’t, yeah.
It doesn’t make any sense to me, but so I’ve done some digging, and there seems to be the Met Office of the UK, and Ireland have maybe come together on this.
And they’ve put together a list of names that will be used for future storms.
So that just like, it’s not just like picked at random.
They’ve got these planned out.
So we’ve got-
These bastards got way too much time on their hands.
Yeah, I mean, yeah.
When it’s sunny, they’re just sitting there like, oh, what should we come up with?
But so some of the future names that are going to be given to future storms that haven’t even, you know, blown their first fart yet, right?
Please, please, please, Timmy Tingle.
Timmy Tingle.
Give the whole country a laugh.
Yeah.
Oh, so we’ve got, so we’ve already had Ashley.
So there’s, I don’t know if some of these names may have been used or we’ve got Bert, Storm Burt.
That’s just stupid.
Hugo.
Okay, very middle-class storm, that one.
Yeah.
Poppy, again, that doesn’t-
Storm Poppy.
Yeah, that doesn’t sound like a storm, does it?
It’s too nice.
And there’s some Irish ones, Owen, spelled the weird way, Dara.
Can you do them in an Irish accent?
I bet not, because I’ll probably get lynched.
Kaylee, that’s, you know, Kaylee sounds-
I’m so sorry that I met you.
Yeah.
Do you remember?
There’s quite a few, and I won’t go over all of them, but right, there’s one here, which I just find really ridiculous.
Mavis, Mavis is not a storm.
No, Mavis works in a library or a tearoom.
Exactly, right, or the local shop.
Dinner lady.
Yeah, yeah, she does, Mavis is not a storm.
Not the sexy one either.
No, no.
Yeah, so-
They’re slightly weird names though, aren’t they, in as much as-
See, when they were, we never really had names for the various COVID variants, did we?
I mean, until, I may be wrong, I think they were just called, what were they called?
The various variants.
I have no idea.
They were like, I think they were named after countries of origin, weren’t they?
Yeah, I think that was how they were.
Something variant.
Scientific numbers or something.
So it was COVID-19 and it was, I don’t know, the Danish variant.
Right, right.
But at some point, they came out with Omicron.
That’s the sort of-
Do you remember Omicron?
Yeah, yeah, that sounds like it’s from a, you know, a really terrible movie.
But it sounds sinister, doesn’t it?
And I think, I may be wrong, but it was one of the sort of weaker, sort of tail-end variants, so where it’s sort of blown itself out a bit.
But of all the variants, I thought Omicron sounded the nastiest.
Yeah, yeah, it does.
That sounded like the one that would kill, you know, many, many, many, many people.
And I do wonder why they haven’t gone down that same route with Storms.
COVID Mavis.
Well, why are you…
Something that is actually dangerous.
I mean, you know, these things are pretty potent, aren’t they?
They are a risk to life in some circumstances.
You can’t send out a fucking red warning and then say, Mavis is on her way.
It’s just that…
Is she bringing you a cake?
Yeah.
She’s trundling very slowly.
I don’t think it instills the sense of…
No…
.concern that we should probably have.
Exactly.
Does that make sense?
Exactly, yeah.
And it’s just this sort of…
As I say, this anthropomorphism.
What’s the purpose of that, right?
And I dug into what they think the purpose is.
And it says the UK Met Office Head of Situational Awareness.
What the?
That’s a real job.
Apparently that’s a job, yeah.
The Situational Awareness.
I wonder if he knows what’s going on.
He says, this is the 10th year of us naming storms, and we do it because it works.
What?
How does it…
Can I just throw something in here, right?
Because this is actually just giving me a little bit of inspiration, that at some point we have to have an entire episode dedicated to non-jobs.
Because this is just getting ridiculous.
There are so many of them.
I reckon one episode, we should have some specials or something where we just list.
Yeah, stupid things.
I think somebody else brought up, it was Sue, wasn’t it?
About moving home.
And I think we can all agree that’s a whole episode worth of ranting and raving.
Definitely, yeah.
Sorry, I don’t.
But that’s a non-job.
His head of situational awareness.
Come on, I wonder what the salary is like for that.
I mean, just anyway.
Naming storms helps us to make communication of severe weather easier and provides clarity when people could be impacted by the weather.
I don’t believe, I don’t think that’s true.
That just seems stupid.
Even if it were.
Yeah.
Why would you not just call them alpha?
Yeah.
Go through the alphabet.
Exactly.
Yeah.
I mean, because Mavis just is stupid, right?
Ashley, whatever, right?
Come on.
Why are they even?
They’re such random names, aren’t they?
It’s not as though there’s any, it’s like they’ve opened up a, I don’t know, a book of baby names from 1971 and just stuck a pin in it.
Exactly.
Well, it’s probably that they’ve gone to, you know, some school kids and said, do you want to name a storm?
They’re like, ooh, yeah, yeah, let’s do that.
There’s one, Vivian.
Vivian.
That’s weird.
That one’s been called Vivian since 1974.
Except the storm, obviously.
Kayleigh even.
Anyway, so I think it’s-
That was that girl at school, wasn’t it?
The popular one that somebody fingered behind the bike sheds.
So yeah, the other part of this, names, I think, are really just pointless.
I don’t understand why we need to do that.
You can still communicate that there’s bad weather coming.
Actually, do you remember?
You probably do.
Where’s my note here?
There was a storm in 1987.
You’re going to go Michael Fish, aren’t you?
It was in the south of the UK, and I was at school back then, in good old 1987, and I remember trying to go to school, but there was trees down everywhere.
It was horrific, right?
So apparently, it mostly hit the south of the UK and the north of France.
It was October 15th, 1987, an extra-tropical cyclone bringing hurricane-force winds across south England and northern France.
So wind speeds reached up to 115 miles an hour.
Wow.
Caused widespread destruction.
Remember, there’s a place called Seven Oaks in the UK, isn’t there?
In Kent, yeah.
Yeah.
So I think some of those seven oaks blew down on that storm.
That’s how bad it was.
How many are left?
Don’t know.
Didn’t get that.
If you live in Kent, how many oaks have you got left?
They obviously didn’t rename the town.
No, no, no.
But yeah, so this is one of the most significant storms that the UK have had in living memory, right?
And do you know what it was called?
Please tell me it was Keith.
It’s the, no, it’s just, it’s the Great Storm of 1987.
Oh, okay.
We didn’t need to give it a name like Debbie, Francine or Helene.
But that was a retrospective name, wasn’t it?
Because nobody knew it was going to be the Great Storm of 1987.
Yeah.
I mean, maybe we didn’t have the accurate predictions that…
I mean, was there a mediocre storm of 1986?
A sippid storm of 1983?
Piss poor fart of 1992.
But yeah, I mean, it is possible to have a bad storm and not give it a name, right?
So just bear that in mind, Met Office.
And the other part of my rage point, right, is that I frequently get weather warnings, right?
I live in the middle of nowhere, right?
So it’s not unusual for there to be bad weather.
But we now get seemingly a weather warning because, you know, there’s some rain coming.
You live in Ireland?
Yeah, it’s always raining.
You don’t, and my phone is like, you know, lighten up and there’s a big exclamation point on the weather app and it’s like, oh, there’s an orange rain warning.
What the hell is that?
Do you know what?
The cynic in me thinks that maybe they’re doing this to just try and put us all into a perpetual state of concern about the environment that we’re willing to suck up any type of environmental taxation and other chicanery.
Possibly.
Because it’s, I can remember as a child, it fucking raining and raining and raining.
And as you say, the storm of 87 was just, oh, there’s going to be a storm.
Or not, actually, as they predicted.
But now you’re absolutely right.
I have Alexa, almost every week now, she’ll chirp up a weather warning.
And it’s inevitably just, it’s going to rain, or it’s going to be a bit windy.
That’s it.
Or foggy.
What?
Foggy.
I mean, what are you supposed to do with that?
And it’s just, what I think is happening here, right, is that we’ve got the cry wolf factor.
Because, yeah, it is constantly popping up with, oh, it’s going to be a bit rainy or a bit windy.
Like, so what?
Just get on with your life.
What do you expect?
They’re just reporting weather, aren’t they?
Yes.
Essentially in alert format.
Yes.
It’s pointless because these are just normal events that take place, you know, in your life.
Do you know the one that pisses me off the most is thunderstorms?
Right.
I mean, so?
Yeah.
What are you doing with that information?
Are you going to not go outside?
I don’t know.
Don’t go standing on top of a hill and fly a kite.
I mean, literally, that’s the only people that will be going, oh, yeah, that’s useful.
No one else is adjusting their behavior because the thunderstorms, are they?
Or mist or fog?
Yeah.
In places where you don’t often get snow, right?
Which is here, for sure.
It seems like one snowflake and the whole country shuts down.
Just, yeah, it seems bizarre, but when you’re not set up for snow, everyone just freaks out and panics.
You can’t drive, the roads are not gritted or anything.
And yeah, schools are closed.
I mean, nobody would want to suggest that this is heavily driven by people just wanting a day off.
Wow, yeah.
I mean, nobody who works from home or for themselves in any self-employed capacity is shitting the bed because there’s been two mil of snow.
Exactly.
A slight dusting.
Yes.
So last weekend, I was concerned that the wind was so bad that my power might go out, right?
Which happens here a lot.
But it didn’t.
So I didn’t get a day off work.
Yeah, so just, you know, I think that what’s happening is, yeah, we’re going to get the cry wolf.
When there is a really bad thing going to come, you’re going to bleat on about it, and nobody will care because like, well, you said that, you know, you said there was going to be red wind and yellow rain.
And nothing happened.
Snow, whatever.
Yeah, you know, I get on with my life.
But then you get the storms that really do hit, and they’re bad, and you just go out because you need milk, and yeah, eventually it happened.
But has there ever been a storm?
I mean, it’s not that when you saw what happened in Florida recently, that was a storm.
Yeah.
I mean, that was if you went outside, you were literally taking your life in your own hands.
That’s almost suicidal to go outside.
I’ve been out in, I think, many British, Irish storms.
And okay, it’s, you know.
Bit windy, yeah.
Bit windy, bit rainy.
It’s, you know.
Yeah.
I went out the other, I went out the back door on Sunday and I got blown a bit, but you know.
Oh, my God.
We should clip that bit up.
No, I mean, it’s yeah, just calm down.
So I think the nub of this, right, is that the weather, like everything else, has become overly sensationalized.
Catastrophized.
Yeah, right.
Because I mean, I don’t know who makes money off of the weather being bad, but I suppose, you know, people watch the weather more or something and, you know, and they’re all freaking out about it.
Isn’t it like every year, so in about February, no, probably about March, every news outlet will say something about a, oh, what do they call it?
Like a scorching heat wave summer.
Do you know what I mean?
It’s like every year, meteorologists are predicting the hottest summer on record, you know, weeks of scorching temperatures up in the nineties.
And they do this, safe in the knowledge that A, no one will remember and B, that people go, oh, and they’ll share it.
And then they do the same again in September, don’t they?
They go, you know, the UK is going to be blanketed with, you know, two feet of snow.
It’s just, they do it all of the time, just purely for click bait.
Exactly.
That’s what it’s turned into.
I think that’s what the number of this is, right?
You know, the real reason would be, nobody cares, I suppose, if there’s a nameless atmospheric pressure system coming, but if Ashley’s coming to fuck shit up, right?
Then maybe, or that’s something to do.
Ashley’s coming, right?
Well, better.
It’s like giving them celebrity status.
It’s a fucking weather event.
Yeah.
It’s not a sentient thing, and you can’t turn it into one, so stop doing it.
So yeah, just today, I got a rain warning, and then you dig into it.
It’s like heavy and persistent rain, possible impacts, localized flooding, difficult traveling conditions.
It’s just normal rain.
If I listen to every warning that my devices gave me about the weather, I would just stay home.
I think I’ll just stay home.
How long have there been homo sapiens on this planet?
Is it about 300,000 years?
Something like that, yeah.
Isn’t it amazing that for 99.99999% of that time, we’ve managed to survive without this shit?
Yeah, without worrying about the red rain.
The yellow ones, I mean, it’s the yellow ones.
If something really serious is coming in, fine, let us know.
We don’t need the yellow, do we?
That’s just weather.
It’s just superfluous.
Yellow rain, yeah, you don’t have something else.
The orange one, kind of indifferent about that one personally.
Just tell us when it’s red.
Yeah, I mean, but I don’t even know what those color codes, you know, really, I mean, what’s, do you have green, green wind?
I think green would just be, hey, everything’s cool.
Yeah, nice day, 16 degrees.
Yeah, a bit nippy, a bit nippy out.
That would be green, I guess.
I don’t.
I’d better put a card on.
Yeah, I don’t like hot weather, but there’s no warnings about, oh, it’s going to be, you know, the yellow sun.
This is where you’re wrong.
There are red there.
There was, I’m sure we had, we haven’t had a summer for a while, but I’m sure it may have been last year, no, it must have been the year before, because this summer was atrocious, wasn’t it?
So I say it’s atrocious, it suited me down to the ground, it wasn’t a lot of hot weather.
I think last year there was an amber warning for heat.
Was there?
Oh.
Yeah.
So that’s amber now.
Yeah.
We’ve switched to a different medium.
So it’s, yeah, so we’ve got yellow, amber, and red over here.
This is, yeah, smell of it.
Oh, there were traffic lights?
No.
Traffic lights?
Those are green, aren’t they, yeah.
Do you know what they are?
What are the crossings?
Is it?
I don’t know.
One of those things.
No, it’s yellow, yeah, then amber, and then red.
Think of it like a rainbow sort of thing.
Okay, okay.
Yeah.
So yellow realistically is nothing.
I mean, basically, they’ve just put normal weather into yellow, and it just gives them a reason to say, oh, it’s gonna rain later, be prepared, I think is the catchphrase they use.
Be prepared, yeah.
So yeah, be prepared, check out an umbrella.
I don’t know, put some sunscreen on.
Don’t know what else you can do about that, really.
Yeah, just stay in, yeah.
Be prepared.
Orange isn’t really much different, I suppose.
They’re rare, and red, I can’t even remember the red last one, we had a red time.
If you have red sun, I suppose, that’s quite scary.
Yeah, I was just thinking about some sort of doomsday prophecy.
So, yeah, so this is the nub of my thing.
I just, I think it’s all pointless, ridiculous, oversensationalized, unnecessarily anthropomorphized.
And yeah, just, it’s going to have the opposite effect.
It’s going to make people think of a, you know, you’re just crying wolf, and they won’t listen when they need to listen.
So I just think we should stop this.
Stop it.
Yeah, and, you know, get on with your life.
I’m sure, you know, we managed at least 40 years of life without worrying about naming storms.
So, you know, I don’t know.
I don’t know why it works.
I don’t agree with the head of situational awareness.
We should write to him and say, could you situationally away yourself of naming one of your storms after our podcast?
There you go.
We might be more forgiving.
The Middle Raged Storm.
Yeah, doesn’t work, does it?
Keith, Adam?
Yeah.
Well, maybe there will be, or has been, I don’t know.
I would like my name to be used for something more cataclysmic, like a comet.
Do you know when there’s some horrible, serious illness and it’s got a name, somebody’s name?
I’m always like, if I discovered some weird illness, I don’t want it to be named after me.
You’ve got the Eccles.
You’ve got Eccles disease.
Oh, Christ.
That sounds bad, doesn’t it?
Terrible case of the Eccles.
Yeah.
Touch of it.
Especially if it was an STI.
I mean, God.
Oh, Christ.
Yeah.
She’s got the Eccles.
Why do we need to name things after people?
I just, you know, there’s lots of other options for naming things, you know.
To be a bit more creative.
Latin.
I think the whole Latin thing was probably okay, wasn’t it?
Because we didn’t have to bother ourselves with any of that.
Confusing and complicated.
Tuck it all away.
Forget about it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Right.
So that’s me.
My storm has burnt out, and now it’s a nice, calm…
Plane sailing now, the clouds have passed.
This is the calm after the storm.
That’s it.
It’s not, though, is it?
Was that you winding again?
Yeah.
Just a little bit of wind.
It was more of a guff than a gust.
It’s, you know, it’s a nice…
Halloween storm.
Enough of that.
Right.
Oh, okay.
So, my rage this week is…
Let me start.
So, do you know that trope that we all carry around in our pockets, a device which has more processing and computing power than the collective Apollo space mission?
Oh, yeah.
You’ve heard that trope.
Oh, absolutely.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, essentially, what that is basically saying is that it’s an indicator, very simple indicator of how technology has advanced so massively since the sort of 70s.
Yes.
60s, 70s.
And if you think about it, I mean, indeed, we have advanced in many, many ways.
Medicine, tech, science, all sorts of things.
The one thing that we have not advanced, in fact, we can argue we’ve progressed in is transportation.
And I’m talking specifically of the transportation of humans.
Right.
So when I was a kid, I presumed, so we’re talking seven or eight.
Yeah, that sort of age.
So we’re going back to sort of middish 70s sort of thing.
I thought by now that we would be teleporting.
I thought, genuinely, you’d be able to push a button and then just plug in your destination, push a button and you could go to, I don’t know, you could have a night out in Las Vegas and be tucked up in bed by midnight.
That’s what I thought.
Right.
Makes sense.
Cause, you know, Star Trek, they were doing it in the 60s.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, you know, that was what I expected.
What I’ve actually got is last week, where it took me 26 minutes to drive 1.2 miles.
26 minutes.
And I live in a village in the arse end of Surrey.
Okay.
So it’s not like I live in central bloody London, but it is now, the traffic is so bad around here that it’s just getting anywhere is…
It’s unbearable.
I mean, it would have been, and this comes to the point, it would have been quicker to walk.
I mean, literally would have been quicker to walk or to use a horse and cart.
Right.
So we’ve actually regressed to the point where we are no more advanced than our medieval ancestors when it comes to travel.
That’s quite depressing, isn’t it?
It is.
Now, when you expand this, so just getting from A to B on the roads, that’s bad enough.
But then you look, so the year that you and I were born, the sort of early 70s, right?
You could get on a plane and take off in London and land in New York three hours later.
Oh, on the Concorde.
Yeah.
Today, 50-something years on, that flight, same flight, same distance, will take you, give or take, eight hours.
Yeah, I know.
Oh, don’t get me.
So…
Here we go.
Wound you up.
So what pisses me off most about air travel isn’t even, I mean, yes, it’s terribly slow, like when you’re going on a long flight over the Atlantic, especially, right?
But it’s not even that.
It’s all of the peripheral bollocks.
So, you know, you have to…
This is probably going to be a separate episode at some point as well.
But definitely, right?
I live about 70 minutes drive away from the airport.
Geographically, how far is that?
Distance-wise?
I think it’s about 50 or 60 kilometers, something like that.
Okay.
Speak English, man.
This is the UK.
40 miles or something?
Something like that.
I can’t remember exactly.
But it takes me an hour and a bit to get there, right?
And that’s if I can go from Shannon.
If I have to go from Dublin, well, that’s a whole different ballgame, right?
Five hours.
But you have to get to the airport.
They want you there two hours before your flight.
Parking?
Yeah, you have to.
It’s no easy feat, is it?
Do you know, just another aside, I once flew from Heathrow to Ireland and before I lived here, but long, long time ago, right?
But I made the mistake of parking at Heathrow.
It took me longer to get from the car park to the terminal building than the actual flight to Ireland.
Why doesn’t that surprise me?
So yeah, it’s all of this peripheral.
So you think, okay, well, the flight is eight hours, right?
That’s bad enough, but you need to be there two hours before.
It takes an hour and a bit to get there.
And then when you land, so I flew to Chicago recently, it took me an hour and a half to get from the Chicago, to departing from the plane, to get to where the rental car place was.
You know, cause it’s a massive…
90 minutes.
Massive, massive airport.
You don’t really know where you’re going.
You have to walk miles and miles carrying bags.
And then there’s, you have to go up and down lifts, which are badly signed.
Then you have to get on a little train that goes all the way over to where the car place is.
So like it’s a whole adventure just to go and get your bloody car.
And that’s before you’ve gone anywhere.
So we’re now at, what is that?
At like 10.
Four hours on top of the actual journey time.
You’ve got to be looking at four hours.
Yeah, at least.
A couple of hours either side.
At least.
And, you know, so now you’re up to 12.
12 fucking hours and people-
And that doesn’t include you getting from the airport to wherever you’re actually going.
Your actual ultimate destination is the airport.
I’m assuming there’s some onward travel as well.
Exactly.
So I’ve also done, I do a lot of travel for work, and I have to go to Poland sometimes, or even some places in, not in Amsterdam, but places in Holland.
It just takes me 12 hours door-to-door to go to those places.
Like, can you just think, like, why?
Because the actual flight might be an hour and a half, two hours max.
But yeah, it’s all the peripheral shite, and that’s what kills.
I saw an advert, an online advert the other day for weekend breaks, long weekend, in fact it said long weekend breaks to New York from $3.99 per person.
I was thinking, what’s up with a fucking psychopath goes on a long weekend break to New York.
I mean, that’s, you wouldn’t even get out of jet lag, period.
No, I mean, that would be horrific.
You would just go turn up after 12 hours of actual travel.
You would then, your body clock would be shot for two days.
And then you do it all over again.
And you’ve been absolutely wrecked by the Tuesday.
Yeah.
It’s going to be a red eye on the way back as well, always.
Of course it is.
You’re going to feel like absolute death for about a week.
Yeah.
Because no matter what you do, it’s very hard, I find, at least, to sleep on a plane.
Just can’t do it and sit there, you know, reading or something.
But yeah, I went to China once.
Oh my God, that took like eight days or something on a plane.
It was like 12 hours, I think, Heathrow to Shanghai, something like that.
But you know, when you’ve watched a movie, read a book, watched another movie, gone up and gone through a piss and stuff, and you come back and there’s still eight hours left on the fucking GPS.
Like, oh man.
Can I just intersect another rage point here?
Have you ever listened to a podcast where one of the co-hosts has inadvertently knocked his microphone and not realized?
Quite often, yeah.
Have you done that?
Maybe.
I didn’t hear that.
I was hoping nobody would notice.
I thought, oh, if Adam does notice halfway through and he doesn’t realize what I’ve actually done, he’s going to be flipping because he’ll be thinking there’s something wrong with the sound, and really it was user error.
Sounds OK.
I can clean that up in post.
OK.
There you go.
The perfect crime.
Apart from the fact I actually admitted it.
Sorry, where were we?
Just flights and times and travel.
It’s horrible, isn’t it?
So this brings me on to the point that I recall back in around 2010, 2010, 2009, something like that.
There was talk of something, this revolutionary new transportation system called the Hyperloop.
Have you heard of it?
Yes.
Elon’s thing, isn’t it?
Well, I think it was even before Elon Musk.
And essentially, if you don’t know what it is, it was like, imagine the London Tube, but with less vagrants.
We don’t know that.
Because that was the plan, I suppose, but you never know who’s going to end up down there, too.
It’s nice and warm.
Werewolves.
So, imagine the tube system, but it’s a vacuum, and then the trains actually run on a single rail, it’s like a monorail, propelled by magnets, magnets in force.
Because obviously, it’s in a near vacuum, I think it’s a complete vacuum, but a near vacuum, so you’ve got minimal friction, powered by magnets, and go ridiculously fast, like up to 800 miles an hour, I think they were suggesting at one point.
That’s more than the speed of sound, isn’t it?
I can’t remember.
Well, now you imagine it, I think, no, I don’t think it is quite there.
I don’t think so.
I think that would be problematic.
If you had a sonic boom going off in a thing, that would be, I don’t know.
In a vacuum, so you wouldn’t, interesting.
Shockwave, though, wouldn’t there?
Might be, shit your pants for sure.
So let’s assume that it was going to be about 100 miles an hour.
So that would mean you’d be able to get on in London, take you to get to Paris, 20 minutes.
Oh yeah, now we’re talking.
Now we’re talking.
Barcelona, 50 minutes, and Rome, 65 minutes.
So a shade over an hour.
And New York, four hours.
Right.
And because these things wouldn’t be like, you wouldn’t have all the shit that you have in an airport, would you?
Like a train station, essentially.
Well, security probably, but even so, yeah.
What freaks me out, though, is what if it stops in the middle and you’re trapped in a capsule with no air?
Just game over there, isn’t it?
Well, when you compare that to flying, though, I mean, you could make that same argument about flying, because that’s batshit crazy when you think about it.
You’re in some ridiculously thin aluminium tube, 35,000 feet in the air.
600 miles an hour, yeah.
Yeah, I mean, that’s fairly bonkers.
So I don’t think, the whole thing just seemed more civilised, but instead, by comparison, this is what we have.
So that was in 2010.
What we have in 2024, is I live 32 miles from London.
The train journey takes 55 minutes.
What?
So on average, that train’s journey, what, 35 miles an hour, I guess?
Because it probably stops, does it?
Stops at five minutes.
So London to Paris, Eurostar, two hours and 16 minutes, but you have to go into central London because you can’t go from Stratford or anywhere else anymore.
So that’s a ball ache in itself, isn’t it?
You’ve got to slip across London.
At least an hour and a half to get to start your journey.
Yeah, and then there’s the French side, they’re going to be on strike.
So that’s, yeah.
And then there’s the cost.
I mean, taking a train in this country is obscenely expensive.
Yes, yeah.
So I researched to get to Manchester recently.
And it was 120 quid on the train, returned 70 by plane from Southampton.
Southampton’s a lot more civilized than Heathrow, because driving, car park’s not far from the terminal, it was quite small.
But 70 quid on a plane and 120 on a train.
What?
Where is the logic in that?
That’s ridiculous.
So not only is transportation now incredibly slow, comparatively speaking, it’s stupidly expensive, and it’s just shit, isn’t it?
I mean, really, there was a third one that escaped me, so I’m just going to say it’s shit.
The UK train station, right, is where there might be a knackered vending machine.
Yes, selling bovveral.
Yeah, and it probably smells of piss just everywhere for no apparent reason.
This is compared with where you’ve got in proper Europe, mainland Europe, that’s the word.
Yes.
Where there’s beautiful railway stations like Antwerp.
You’ve been there?
Yeah.
Lovely railway, it’s a beautiful building, and the trains are all bang on time, and even in the Netherlands, it’s a totally different, and it’s reasonably priced as well.
I think there’s some European countries where the public transport is even free, because they just want you to use it.
That’s Luxembourg, I think, isn’t it?
Which in fairness is a diddly little country of tens of thousands of people live there, isn’t it?
But you know, that’s a benefit, right?
If you know that you don’t need a car because you can just get on the transport, which is reliable, doesn’t stink of piss, and is either cheap or free, then you’re going to use that, aren’t you?
So, yeah, it’s…
And the more people that use it, the more money it makes, the more there is to invest.
But if you, you know, particularly with people, more people working from home these days, so therefore passenger numbers must be way down.
So the logical thing that they do is go, well, we must put the prices up.
So therefore, when you’re looking at it, I don’t think there is a more expensive way to travel in the UK than the train.
If you’re looking at it on a pound per mile basis, it’s got to be the most expensive way to travel.
Wow.
Which surely flies in the face of all of the environmental things that we’re trying to do.
Because I would rather, if I had to go to Manchester, I would much, much rather get on a train so I can sit and work for a couple of hours.
Yeah, yeah.
Makes sense.
As opposed to drive.
Yes.
But when you factor in the cost of petrol, even if it goes up a bit, it is still probably, and wear and tear on the car, et cetera.
I suspect it’s probably something like one-fifth the cost of going, and particularly if you’re talking about you’re going on this more than one person travel.
So if you’re going with a partner, two of you, it’s 240 quid on the train.
It’s not costing you any extra in the car, is it?
Drive to the station and then pay for parking.
Yeah?
So, it is frustrating.
What sort of system do we, why has transportation just gone backwards so badly?
I mean, do you remember British Rail, don’t you?
I do, yeah.
Now, I don’t remember.
Maybe it’s because I’m looking back with rose-tinted glasses or whatever.
I don’t ever remember being, A, this expensive or B, this crap.
I mean, maybe the actual trains themselves, the carriages were a bit ropey.
Those old slam-door things.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And obviously people could smoke on trains instead.
Yeah, yeah.
I remember that.
I don’t genuinely remember them being this expensive.
Yeah, it does seem unnaturally overpriced.
There’s 120, like, one out of it.
I suppose it’s all been sold off to different companies, isn’t it?
That’s what happened.
Yeah.
Stupid, stupid, stupid idea.
It’s like selling off water companies.
I mean, whatever your political view, and I think there is polling that suggests this, and not to get political, because we don’t do politics.
But I think the vast majority of people would say, in a country, that things that you have to use, like water, like trains, where there is a monopoly, they should not be given to private companies.
We should let our incompetent governments run them.
Because they’re so good at it.
So they too can hire, what was it again?
A director of…
Oh yeah, the situational awareness.
Situational awareness for National Rail or whatever it may be.
Maybe there is one.
You know, he’s like, yeah, I know what’s going on.
There’s a situation and I’m aware of it.
Next, I’m fucking off home.
And my final point on this, and this is the one that I know is going to particularly appeal to you because all these smug AV drivers, people have been out and bought their electric vehicles, right?
With all manner of wizardry, technology and some now that have almost full autonomous capabilities.
So you’ve got all of that.
You’re still sat in that same queue of traffic that’s going nowhere as someone who’s driving around in a 40 year old shit box.
That is true, right?
But I got stuck in traffic in Cork a while back.
And my God, traffic in Cork is just fucking ridiculous, right?
It probably took an hour and a half to go about two miles across the city.
Is that normal?
Or is it just a bad day?
I think it’s normal now.
I don’t know what happened.
I remember driving around in Ireland and it not being that shit.
But something has happened.
I suppose we’ve got more people.
And now-
Well, it’s the one thing you can’t odds, isn’t it?
I suppose you can build more hospitals, more schools.
Roads, though.
Roads are bastards to build because they have to go somewhere.
And there’s normally stuff where they need to go.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But anyway, so I was stuck in traffic in my lovely EV.
But you know what?
It wasn’t chugging away, outputting smoke the whole time.
It was just sat there silently using almost-
Still burning electric though, isn’t it?
No, not really.
When you’re not moving, it doesn’t use anything at all.
You must have heating or stereo.
It uses almost nothing.
That’s aging us, isn’t it?
Stereo.
Tape deck must use a bit of juice.
Barely.
I could probably sit in traffic for like 20 hours and not really-
Oh, come to Surrey.
That’s a school run.
Nice.
And also then, my car senses when the car in front moves and it just nudges along behind it, so I don’t have to do anything.
Okay.
But you’re still in traffic.
You’re taking the same amount of time to do that journey as the person behind you in the shit box.
That’s kind of my point, I guess.
Yeah.
Fair enough.
We are advancing rapidly with technology to the point where cars are virtually able to drive themselves.
In fact, I say virtually, they can do, can’t they?
Well, I wouldn’t actually trust it to do the whole driving.
But yeah, you’re getting there.
Yeah.
But we don’t actually have the roads.
No.
And it’s not really a solvable problem, is it?
I mean, imagine the cost of drilling a tunnel from, you know, from London to New York.
Yeah.
I guess the only thing is down the line, the only way I can see this being solved is where people don’t own cars.
And you have an app and essentially there’s a fleet of autonomous vehicles.
Yeah.
I don’t like that idea.
That just turn up at your door, but there’s so many of them and the system’s so slick that it will arrive at your door within two minutes.
And you hop in, go where you want to go, get out and then you repeat.
So things like going to the shops or to the gym or those sort of lots of short journeys, you wouldn’t need a car, really.
That’s the only way I can see out of this.
If you live in a city or even a built up area, I suppose that might work, but where I am, that’s not going to work.
The cows don’t need it.
Or the other option is that governments just tax everyone off the roads because they can, I suppose that’s possibly the other way.
That’s what they’re going to do probably, right?
I mean, you can’t drive in London anymore, can you?
Well, you can if you’ve got some money, but yeah, there’s the congestion zone and then there’s ULED zone and they’re launching them all over the country in different cities, these ULED zones.
And they’re spreading out as well.
So the London one now goes down into Ken and bits of Surrey.
I think it’s almost the entirety of everything within the M25 now.
So you’re living in this sort of semi-rural town, small town in Ken, and then suddenly you’re having to pay the London ULAS charge just to chuck across town in your 30-year-old shit box.
Yeah, that’s not good, is it?
No, but that’s, I suppose, the way they’re looking at it.
Well, if we can get more people off the roads, then we can’t make more roads, so we need to reduce the amount of cars.
Yeah, but then you need to have, you can’t have one, you need to have the transports, it’s the buses or the trains or whatever, and they need to not stink of piss, and they need to run on time.
You know, go to Antwerp and look at what they did there, and then come back and make a plan, because…
It seems to be that they do one thing without actually having the other thing in place.
It’s like, yeah, and I think we can all agree with like a greener planet and a better environment.
I think everyone’s involved with that, but sort it out properly.
Don’t give away the national infrastructure.
Okay, that’s the first thing.
Secondly, don’t make it so expensive to drive that people have to then go to trains that are equally stupidly expensive.
And, you know, slow and unreliable and 55 minutes to do a 32-mile journey, come on.
That is crazy.
Anyway, that’s right, so I’m going to stop ranting because I’m going to go down a rabbit hole here and it’s feeling like a political one.
We don’t do politics, so we’re going to leave that one there.
You make a good point.
Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to go somewhere without it taking seven hours?
100 percent.
Beer?
Yeah.
See you in 28 hours.
Yeah.
Right, so should we talk about, you’ve got a happy ending for us this week.
Well, a little bit, yeah.
So continuing my last episode, sort of vague, Mental Health for Blokes theme, where last time I cleaned my desk, I think.
My desk is still nice and clean, by the way.
That’s nice.
Just loving that.
What’s the adage, the mantra?
Tidy desk, tidy mind, something like that.
Yes, that’s it.
So, yes, it’s slightly working.
But today, I was at my day job and everyone was being an asshole.
And I was like, you know what?
I’m going for a walk.
And so I walked away from the computer.
And this is probably ridiculous, right?
Probably people have worked this out a long time ago and do it.
But I usually just sit at my desk all day and I have a million meetings and 10 billion emails in between, right?
And I just don’t get time.
I sometimes get to 4 o’clock and I realize I haven’t had breakfast yet, you know, so it’s chaotic, right?
But today I was like, you know what?
It’s not worth it.
And I live near a beach and I just won’t.
It was a nice day.
It’s not anymore.
It’s piss and rain now, right?
But I got a rain warning.
But earlier today, it was a lovely day.
And I went for a walk down to the little beach near me and just sat there for 10 minutes and walked back.
And it was lovely to just get the head clear.
So that’s my happy ending, is I went for a nice walk.
Because I don’t normally think to do that, right?
And I think maybe if you’re really crazy busy, you know, in your life and work and whatever, it’s just sometimes you just have to say, I’m going to walk away for a minute, and I’m not going to take my work phone or anything and just be disconnected and chill and let the, you know, let the sea air breeze across.
So, it’s nice.
I think, yeah, you’re very lucky that you got a beach.
I think a lot of people would love to just go and stand on a beach for even just 10 minutes.
Just take some deep breaths and go, actually go nothing, just don’t think of anything.
And just shut down.
The stinky seaweed was a bit of a put off.
You had to ruin it, didn’t you?
You had to ruin it.
Well, because of Ashley, right, recently, all of the seaweed just churned up on the beach.
So, it was a little bit stinky, but it’s still nice.
But anyway, yeah, but yeah, you do.
You’re right.
It is nice to have a beach and I have one.
So, might as well use it, right?
I was the only person there, literally, just to leave the empty.
That’s my kind of beach.
Yeah.
Yeah, it’s lovely.
So, well, we were saying, or fair, weren’t we, that if everyone that had, how can we put this, issues with their mental health.
If doctors said, right, I prescribe a one-hour walk somewhere quiet, we’re not necessarily quiet, but just a walk somewhere away from traffic, at least, for an hour, every day for 14 days.
How many of those people would actually come back if they did that full-hour walk every day for 14 days?
How many would actually feel better just by doing that one thing?
Yeah, I think it would, rather than, you know, people talk about mindfulness and meditation again, right?
These are words that scare the bejesus out of me, right?
So I shy away from that.
But, you know, going for a walk, there’s nothing wrong with that.
That’s just what normal people do, right?
Yeah.
So it’s disconnecting, isn’t it?
And I know that sounds a wanky thing to say, but it is unplugging, getting away from the constant pixel, flashing pixels and beeps and God knows what else of our digital worlds and just being, you might have to clip this up because it’s possibly going to be the wankiest thing I’ve ever said on a podcast, but connecting with the outside, you know, just stuff.
Yeah.
Just non-organic stuff.
It’s just, yeah, I think it’s great.
And it gives you a good opportunity just to process stuff without distractions going on.
It’s, yeah, I personally, I’d highly recommend it.
Yeah.
I mean, probably most people do it already, right?
They do.
Yeah.
Most people have been walking for probably 300,000 years, I guess.
But welcome to Adam Eccles, late to the party.
But good to have you here.
I normally sit on my ass all day.
You see, that’s the problem, right?
So, yeah, so get out and walk.
But you don’t have to make it wanky.
So that’s, no, you don’t have to do any of that stuff.
That’s, that’s not obligatory.
Just, just, just walk.
I mean, literally just walk.
Yeah.
That’s all you got to do.
Yeah.
I wouldn’t.
I would even suggest don’t, because the temptation is to put some headphones in earbuds.
No, I didn’t do that.
Yeah.
No, I did.
I used to.
And then I found I was just bringing the rage with me.
I would listen to the podcast and they would make me angry.
Of course, if you’re listening to the Middle Raged Podcast.
This is cathartic as well, right?
It is.
It’s therapeutic.
So I’d say take us with you, but leave the rest behind.
You don’t want those fuckers getting in your head.
And you don’t have to record your workout or gamify it, or fucking measure the distance.
Doesn’t matter how many steps you take.
Just do it, because you can.
You’ve done them.
Whether you measure them or not, they are done.
Yeah.
Because I think that makes it all…
That takes away the niceness of it.
It just turns it back into, well, I’ve got to do, I’ve got to do me steps.
Yeah, yeah.
Fuck that.
You don’t.
You just have to walk for a bit, until you don’t want to.
Simple.
Anyway, happy ending.
Excellent.
My happy ending is that the audio book of my latest novel, No Easy Deeds, is imminently going to land on Audible and, what’s that stupid Apple site called where they sell audio books?
Oh, just Apple Books, I think.
Apple Books.
No, it’s not the book one.
I think it’s the iTunes.
Oh, yeah.
Okay.
Is that where Apple do their book things?
But yeah.
Yeah, so that’s all been wrapped up.
And unfortunately, the process once Amazon get their grubby mitts on the finished product is, oh, it’s slower than a train from Manchester to…
Aberdeen.
Yeah, it’s painstaking.
And there’s nothing I could do about that.
But I’m just happy that I’ve signed the thing off and it’s gone, because it’s, as you will know, reviewing an audio book.
As good as the narrator is, there’s always going to be one or two little hiccups in there.
So you have to listen to the whole thing.
Normally by the point that you listen to it, you’ve already read it 10, 15 times.
You’ve probably listened to it two or three times.
You are sick of it.
So having to listen back to it carefully is excruciating.
Yeah, that’s not the best.
So I was very relieved that that process is out of the way.
I’m absolutely chuffed with the finished product.
Again, Adam and I were talking off air about how hard narration actually is.
I’ve done it again.
My microphone, why does it keep doing that?
I think my little office is haunted.
Why does that keep happening?
Sorry, ladies and gentlemen.
Where was that?
Yeah, so anyone that can narrate a book for 11, 12 hours, I mean, Jesus, it’s full credit to them.
It’s a lot of work, isn’t it?
Yeah.
Yeah, and it’s acting and not just reading.
That’s what a lot of people forget, right?
When you’re doing an audio book properly, nicely, it’s an acting role and you’re playing every character as well.
And remembering to do the different accents and voices, it’s just…
I was saying to Adam that I had to do a little bit at the end, like three paragraphs of text, like an author’s note.
And I balled it up seven or eight times consecutively.
It took forever just to do three paragraphs.
And all I was doing was reading text.
There was no accents, no voices, no intonation necessarily.
It was abysmal.
But it just gave me a whole new level of respect for anyone who can professionally narrate.
Absolutely.
Good.
So looking forward to that.
We don’t know exactly when it will land.
We are thinking it will land on Halloween.
Oh, brilliant.
When is Halloween?
31st, isn’t it?
I think so, yes.
It will land on Halloween.
Excellent.
I didn’t know when Halloween was.
I don’t know why I forgot that.
Right.
Well, that’s something to look forward to.
Excellent.
Indeed.
So by the time that we have the next episode, I’ll be able to report back and be able to buy it.
So there we go.
Whatever people do with audiobooks, I don’t know.
Buy credits and stuff.
Credit and get it.
I shall have one credit left by then, so I’ll be using that to have a listen.
Well, at least someone’s going to buy it.
That’s good to know.
And on that note, I think that’s done.
We’ve gone long again, and I hope we haven’t pushed our luck with your valuable time, or we’ve given you value for money.
And by value for money, I mean, if you were to go to buymeacoffee.com/middleraged and buy us a coffee, and in return, we will give you a gentle roasting, and we may even get your name right.
That’s right.
Oh, one other thing.
It’s somebody’s birthday coming up, isn’t it?
So yes, there is indeed well-remembered avid reader of our mutual novels and a listener to this podcast.
And we’re going out on a limb here, aren’t we?
Because we said that we wouldn’t go down this particular route where we become 1980s disc jockeys.
But I think if anyone is deserving of a birthday shout-out, we’re going to call it that.
That would be the lovely Denise, and Denise knows who Denise is.
One would hope Denise knows who Denise is.
And I also hope that we’re pronouncing Denise right, because surely that can’t be any other thing, can it?
It’s got to be Denise.
Denise?
Denies?
Denies?
No, probably Denise.
Another apology will be forthcoming.
But Denise is hitting the big 5-0 on Monday.
Do you have any advice as a chap already well into his 50s?
That was just this year that I did that.
Well, you’re into your 50s.
We can both say that we’re in our 50s now.
So we’re basically on a par.
We’re on the same level.
When I was, you know, when you were young, 40s, I reckon 40s you can get away with, right?
But 50s, that sounds like your proper old, doesn’t it?
Well, do you know what the saying is?
40s is the old age of youth, and 50s is the youth of old age.
Didn’t know that one.
Fucking depressing.
Oh, Christ.
I mean, essentially, 50s is the same as 40s.
Just, I think you just got creakier joints and you’re in a lower tolerance of everything.
Zero tolerance for stupid shit.
That’s about the only difference.
If you’ve noticed anything, listeners, about 50s that we may share on the next episode, then yeah, unless it’s some sort of weird bodily thing.
No, I don’t want to know.
Keep that to yourself.
If you have to use a bag.
Oh God.
Or a towelette.
We don’t want to know.
Anything that happens below the waist.
Yeah, no, keep that.
Actually, no, just anything.
We’re talking more lifestyle type stuff.
So, you’re aware of Saga.
Icelandic stories.
Pardon?
Is that Icelandic stories?
No, Saga is a big company over here, and they started off selling, I think they used to sell stair lifts or…
They used to do sort of stuff for old people.
Like they’d send a catalog round.
You know some of these things that you’d use to pick up a piece of litter off the floor, like a grabber.
I don’t think you can call them grabbers anymore.
But I think that’s how they started.
But essentially they just become connected with old people.
But then they started branching out into holidays and insurance and all sorts of stuff.
So it’s a big, big, big, big company now.
But I always thought it was for old people.
But 50, 50, that’s the age you need to be to start taking advantage of the saga stuff.
So you’re going to be getting the, what’s it called, the hearing aids and all that sort of stuff.
Just basically constant reminders that your body is failing you.
Nice.
Yeah, and there’s probably funeral plans and all that sort of shit.
Buy your plot now.
Why would you want to waste your money now?
I know, I don’t get that at all.
Some people do buy-
You’re not going to give a fuck, are you?
Chuck me in a ditch and cover me with tarpaulin.
I don’t care.
I’ll be dead.
Exactly.
I said to people, just chuck me in the sea because I’m not fucking paying for all that crap.
Certainly not when I’m alive.
I’m not going to take money I can spend when I’m alive to enjoy.
This is what I don’t-
Because they’re not cheap, are they?
No, no.
We’re supposed to have a happy ending, and we’ve actually ended up on funerals.
If anything’s going to sum up our general style, that would be it.
We’ve taken a happy thing, and we’ve made it about death.
Oh dear.
Okay.
Moving to where she went.
There we are.
We hope you have a lovely time, Denise, even though your 50th is on a Monday, which has got to be the shittest day to have a significant birthday, I reckon.
Take solace in the fact that it’s a bank holiday here in Ireland, and I won’t be doing any work.
There we are.
If you head off to Ireland, I’m sure Adam will keep you entertained for the day.
Custard creams.
Custard creams.
Right.
That’s us done.
Thank you very much for staying with us till well into an hour and 20 something.
Lovely.
And we will see you for episode 13 in exactly two weeks time.
There you go.
See you then.
Bye bye.