Turtle Soup as Political Awakening with Heather Parry

Photo by Robin Christian

This month’s book club pick: Carrion Crow by Heather Parry.

Carrion Crow tells the story of Marguerite Périgord, who has been confined to the attic of her Chelsea townhouse for the sake of her wellbeing. At least, that’s what her mother, Cécile, had said.

Food is central in Carrion Crow - we experience Marguerite fixating on the trays of sustenance brought up to her in the attic by Cecile. But as well as these two women, whose stories slowly unravel for the reader in Heather’s hands, there is a third main character present in Carrion Crow too. That character is in fact a book: Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management, the text of which heavily informs the writing – and politics – of the book.

Heather Parry is a writer of fiction and non fiction originally from Rotherham, now living in Glasgow. We spoke via video chat last month and in the first part of our conversation covered the excess, indulgence and feasting of her characters set against confinement, starvation and bodily effluvia, as well as a real life case that informed some of the details of Marguerite’s situation. 

And in the second part Heather shared a more personal angle on her relationship with food - and with class. Something significant happened in Heather’s life - you might have heard of it, or be familiar with it actually!, not to her directly, but connected to her - geographically as well as otherwise, which had a particular impact….so we’ll get into that

Carrion Crow is out now. Find all of the Lecker Book Club reads on my Bookshop.org list. [aff link]

Support Lecker by becoming a paid subscriber on Patreon, Apple Podcasts and now on Substack.

Music is by Blue Dot Sessions.

Find the transcript for this episode after the embed (auto-generated so please excuse any unintentional errors.)

[00:00:00] Heather: So Carrion Crow is the story of Marguerite Périgord. Who has been sent to the attic of her family home in Victorian London by her mother Cecile, in order to prepare for her marriage. So Marguerite wants to marry an older solicitor who doesn't have a lot of money, which in the context of now sounds hilarious.

[00:00:21] Heather: A solicitor being a marriage downwards feels really wild. But her mother doesn't really want her to make this marriage, and their agreement is that Marguerite will go into the attic until her mother feels like she's prepared. But during the course of the book, you find out that Marguerite's idea of her future is not actually quite what she's telling her mother.

And you also find that her mother's experience of life has led her to the position where she will send Marguerite into the attic.

[00:00:52] Lucy: Yeah, it's definitely like a sort of a slow creeping reveal of what the reality actually is and like kind of breadcrumbs to begin with, and then finding out a bit more.

[00:01:02] Heather: Yes.

[00:01:03] Lucy: I wanted to really begin by asking you... so when I sort of got the email about the book the thing that really piqued my interest was the fact that one of the objects that Marguerite has left in the attic with, which I think alongside a, uh, vintage, well obviously not vintage at the time, but a period Singer sewing machine.

[00:01:23] Heather: Yep.

[00:01:24] Lucy: Is Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management, and I was just immediately like, yes, I'm, I'm already interested in this book. this is obviously a very important text. I mean, it still is like, it casts a really long shadow, I would say. But, 1861, I believe it was published. Like

[00:01:40] Heather: Yeah.

[00:01:40] Lucy: really interested in this book

[00:01:42] Heather: Oh, amazing.

[00:01:43] Lucy: it's kind of come up like in my own work around, mostly around kitchens. So, yes, I was like, immediately, how is this gonna fit into the work of fiction? ? You describe it in the book as thous, well, the, it is described in the book by the characters as the thousand pages of prescribed femininity. What is the significance of this book within the story?

[00:02:04] Heather: So, yeah, as you say, she's sent into the attic with a few things, not very many, Singer sewing machine... a copy of Victor Hugo's Works

[00:02:12] Lucy: Okay.

[00:02:13] Heather: Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management.. And yeah. The significance within the narrative of the book is that it kind of becomes a character in its own right.

So you discover that Marguerite has actually been in the attic for longer than you thought at first. And during this time, she's kind of like internalized the book. Like she's read it so aggressively and intensely that she, it becomes Mrs. Beeton's almost like a, a voice in her head or a voice in the attic perhaps is a better way to say that.

And it's kind of a way that she's trying to prove that she's ready to make this marriage, but also it becomes a kind of lens through which you can view her relationship with her mother and her mother's relationship with the family home as a concept as well. But also for me, it was always gonna be a way to talk about the class element of food, which is a thing I'm really, really interested in.

But one of the reasons I wanted... 'cause the book was always built around Mrs. Beeton, like the chapter titles are taken from the book. There's a lot of kind of... what you might term as like found poetry. So like literally lines from the book that are lines within the novel, which you can do when a book is out of copyright, thankfully,

Yeah that was 

[00:03:26] Lucy: a good move of choosing this one.

[00:03:29] Heather: I was so adamant that I was like, I need somebody to tell me that this is okay and I need you to tell me about 20 times. I personally am very, very interested in the book as you are, and when I got a copy for myself and really weirdly, the copy I have is from the year I was born.

Um, 'cause it's been, it is been in print, it was in print up until 2016. I'm not sure. I think it still is, but it's

That's wild, 

[00:03:51] Lucy: isn't it?

[00:03:52] Heather: never, never been out of print. And it sold something like 2 million copies in its first few years, which, you know, at the time was an, I mean still now it would be an enormous success. And I got a copy and I must have had like a thousand lines just taken from it that I just took in isolation.

And I was obsessed with the language. I was obsessed with what she was saying, but I was obsessed also with what this book became to mean for so many people. Like, the reason I'm interested in it is that my mom had a copy on her shelf when I was growing up, and I don't think I ever saw her look into it. I don't think I ever once saw anyone pick that off the shelf, you know?

So it became like this weird kind of totem in the kitchen of something and I wasn't, I wasn't sure what that was. So, yeah, I got a copy for myself and then fell into it, and then I just... Number one, I began to think of what it meant to women before my generation, because for me it's an interesting curiosity, but obviously for women in the 160 years before is a very different item.

But I also began to think of the book itself as a kind of work of fiction because it's, it's, it's very much, you know, about how to have like a proper Victorian household. How, what, you know, it's very much about properness in inverted commas, but at the time. We had this burgeoning wealth because of the empire, right?

We had all this, all this money pouring into the UK from the colonies and off the back of black and brown, predominantly, bodies in the various parts of the world that we colonized. And of course there's no mention of any of this and it's, it is all within the constraints of the kind of four walls of the house, and there's not even.

Like a gesture towards where food comes from or, you know, the,

[00:05:35] Lucy: yeah,

[00:05:36] Heather: are doing, who are doing the work to harvest and grow the food, whether it's in this country or other countries. So I just started to think so much about that and with the class elements of food, you know, already an obsession of mine.

It just became so, you know, kind of the, the, the structure of the whole novel, the skeleton of the whole novel really.

[00:05:57] Lucy: Okay. This is so interesting. There's so many things I wanna kind of pick up on there, but, um, so I'm really fascinated to say that you, you sort of almost built the book around Mrs. Beaton, because

[00:06:05] Heather: Mm.

[00:06:06] Lucy: I wanted to ask you was whether there were any other domestic texts of this kind that were in the running to kind of fill this role within the book, like be this character.

But I suppose the realistic answer is that there wasn't really another, but there are obviously lots of household manuals that kind of, from that period onwards, like

[00:06:22] Heather: Mm-hmm.

[00:06:23] Lucy: that I feel like that that time onwards to kind of the mid 20th century was like a very rich time of women of a certain like background telling other women how to live. But Mrs. Beeton really is like a sort of law to herself

[00:06:38] Heather: She is.

[00:06:38] Lucy: sense. Like

[00:06:40] Heather: She is an.

[00:06:40] Lucy: really many other authors that could have replaced, replaced her in this way.

[00:06:44] Heather: That's true. But also one of the really interesting things is that she isn't what you assume. You hear the term Mrs. Beeton and you think of a 56-year-old woman who's, you know, raised like 13 children, maybe the wife of like a mill owner or something. You know, real kind of like. Uh, fresh, expansive money, and she's been the head of the domestic side of the household and she's got all this experience, but actually she was 22.

She was, she was so young.

I knew 

[00:07:14] Lucy: there was more to it than what you believed. I think, you know, I'd love to hear, um, if you have more information to share about her background. But I did not know she was actually that young. Oh

[00:07:22] Heather: Yep. In fact, a lot of the work within the book is plagiarized, so it is taken from other previous sources, or she took it from her readers because she actually started out as a domestic columnist writing for her husband's magazines. So she was married to a publisher and not, you know, not a very wealthy publisher who was much older than her.

Just a very canny publisher of the time. And they saw a market for this kind of domestic advice. So yeah, a lot of it ripped off, a little of it kind of invented, I mean she was 28 when she died, I think. Was it 28 or 26?

[00:07:56] Lucy: Oh my

[00:07:57] Heather: Yeah. Yeah. She really, she didn't even make it to 30. She, like, when I think of me at 28, uh, you know, I knew nothing.

I still know nothing.

[00:08:05] Lucy: I certainly could not have told you how to run a household.

[00:08:08] Heather: Well, she also had never done it. Like she didn't, they didn't have the means to do that. She, I think she maybe had like a cook and maybe one other member of staff, but she certainly had never run these grand households that she was talking about. And she... one of the, my favorite things about the Book of Household Management is it's not just recipes, you know, it's about 900 recipes and there's like legal memoranda in the back and then there's the section on like child rearing.

Which is one of, one of the most interesting to me. But she actually had an, I don't know if she'd even had a child by the time

[00:08:42] Lucy: Oh

[00:08:42] Heather: book came out. And then she actually had quite a sad story. I think they, they had a baby and it died.

[00:08:47] Lucy: Oh

[00:08:47] Heather: And then she went on to have, I think two other children, the whole kind of domestic family history is quite sad and quite just... she didn't really know what she was doing, you know, this is the overarching sense I get of her. She was just a kid in a lot of ways, but then

[00:09:03] Lucy: God.

[00:09:04] Heather: so influential and, and the way we think of her is completely wrong, really.

[00:09:10] Lucy: Yeah, because she's sort of, you know, as a figurehead, she's kind of like this oracle

[00:09:15] Heather: Mm-hmm.

[00:09:16] Lucy: know, like you say, this is a book that is, has had such a long history of being in print and clearly has sold so many copies over the years and like, and I think now we view it like, as you say, as a kind of curiosity and you know. For me, I think I've looked at it probably wrongly as like a sign of the times, like if not exactly how people lived, but around like expectations of how people were... should live

[00:09:39] Heather: Mm-hmm.

[00:09:39] Lucy: The bit that I have sort of read most in depth is the bit about like, basically how to structure a household so that... she talks about how the kitchen should be in the basement, which was, you know, very, very common in that time,

[00:09:50] Heather: Mm-hmm.

[00:09:50] Lucy: in staff, in households with staff, because that's where the staff would be, like out of sight. And it wasn't just that they were out of sight, it was that they were out of hearing and that they were out of... smell range of the kitchen because that was considered very improper to be able to smell the food as it was cooking. But it really does put a completely different lens on it, the fact that she had no personal experience of any of those things.

[00:10:12] Heather: Yeah,

[00:10:12] Lucy: yeah, I think it's so fascinating and I think actually like the presence of it in your book, like will really bring, I dunno, maybe like a new, a new set of eyes to this text.

[00:10:22] Heather: There was a really, really great biography of her written by, is it Kathryn Hughes? I think.

[00:10:26] Lucy: Okay. I haven't read that. I'll definitely

[00:10:28] Heather: It's,

[00:10:29] Lucy: my list.

[00:10:29] Heather: I mean 'cause she had quite a short life as well. It's a lot of talking around the context and her husband and her husband's family and all these kind of things. I think we're ready for a kind of reckoning with this because I think you're right as well in that it was kind of about a sign of the times and the fact that she had no experience of her own means it's more likely to be a sign of the times because she was just parroting, you know, the normal expectations of the world around her.

But I think

[00:10:53] Lucy: very true.

[00:10:54] Heather: The parts that are really interesting to me are the ones that, that feel so modern, and a lot of that is in the parenting stuff. So there's a bit that I love to talk about where she is advising against what we would now call co-sleeping, as in like sleeping in the bed with your child and she's advising against it, not because like you might roll over and suffocate your baby, which is a very real thing, and she does mention that, but actually she's saying that you shouldn't be at the beck and call of your child all the time, and that you shouldn't be physically producing, providing for your child when you're trying to rest, and that it is actually so important for you.

And this is not a person who had an experience of having like loads of nannies who would take her child away. You know what I mean? It was just like, no, no, you as a woman are going to need to have your rest. And if you give milk when you are not rested, the milk will be bad as well.

So it'll actually be injurious to both you and your child. And you need to have that separation and you need to have the rejuvenation period, which I think is actually really, really modern and, and hasn't always been the case. This has not always been the advice for women. She actually uses the phrase baby vampire.

About the child, which, which is, is so feminist in a way, you know, like, not that you should think of your child as something that's draining you, but to think of No, no. You need a healthy barrier between you, the physical provider and your child who needs you to be well, to nurture it. Like I, it so struck me so well, and obviously baby vampire is such gothic language.

I mean, you can see why I fell into, into these 1100 pages and just got lost. You know, really just became completely obsessed.

[00:12:38] Lucy: Yeah. Absolutely. So, so you say that you, you know, it was kind of a presence in your home. It was there on the shelf. No one looked at it.

[00:12:44] Heather: Mm-hmm.

[00:12:44] Lucy: Did you sort of first come to actually like, open it up and read it yourself?

[00:12:49] Heather: So I actually wrote the book quite a while ago. I wrote it in first lockdown, so almost five years ago.

[00:12:55] Lucy: That's kind of funny given the, uh,

[00:12:58] Heather: yeah.

[00:12:58] Lucy: within the book.

[00:12:59] Heather: Is, it's so a lockdown book when you think about it. Um, so I think I must have, I think maybe when I was about 30, 31, so a couple of years before that, just thinking about food a lot more.

You know, I'm, I'm like a really foodie person. I'm like, he very, I would say a, a very enthusiastic home cook, let's say, but not a person who has any kind of training. But I love cooking and I love eating and I love thinking about food. So just as a natural part of that, you think about your childhood relationship to food, I think, and your family relationship to food.

And I, and again, because I'm like really, really interested in, in the class elements of food, I think partially related to where I'm from.

[00:13:42] Lucy: Hmm.

[00:13:43] Heather: So yeah, I just got to thinking about like where were all my like food markers and where were the food markers for the people who came before me. And I thought a lot about, I lost my grandma, my mom's mom, Eileen, who I really, really loved when I was about, I think 27, 28. So, and you just, all these things bring up those elements that you then want to start to interrogate?

I think so. Yeah. It was around then.

[00:14:07] Lucy: There is so much food in the book,

[00:14:09] Heather: Mm-hmm.

[00:14:09] Lucy: and this is why we're having this conversation on this podcast. so I'm gonna, I guess I should ask you, first of all. So there are, there are lots of kind of lists of food or Marguerite thinking about food and some of that is the, are the trays that her mum is delivering to

[00:14:23] Heather: Mm-hmm.

[00:14:23] Lucy: where she kind of comes up and they have what is often quite a troubling interaction, with these trays.

And the trays aren't really... there's not really a consideration of how long she has to make this last or, but the trays are also like really quite rich and indulgent. Maybe indulgent is the wrong word, but like dishes that are like not just kind of a bowl of soup and some bread. Are the dishes that Marguerite experiences in the attic, are they from Mrs. Beeton?

[00:14:51] Heather: Yes. Yep.

[00:14:53] Lucy: What I assumed was the case. So we have kind of, I wrote one, I think maybe it's the first list. I'm not sure. It was a list that kind of I'd starred in the book. So she receives a cup of white soup, a medium thick slice of jugged hare, a ladle full of ragu of cold neck and mutton, a baked apple dumpling. So how did you go about selecting the dishes that Marguerite eats?

[00:15:15] Heather: I think some of it was... so food in the book, rather than being like a signifier of anything, I like to think of it as like a carrier of meaning in, in the way that it is in in real life. You know? No, no food inherently means one thing or another. What's given its meaning is very often the context in which it's being served, who's serving it, the physicality of the person serving it, the physicality of the person receiving it, the context in which it's being eaten, if it's being eaten alone, you know, all these kind of things.

I wanted to create these lists that were like exotic to the kind of current reader and that like we don't get jugged hare you know, like, although actually we did, my partner and I just went to Paris and there was like, like calf's head on the the menu, and I was like, oh, that's literally, I put it in my book because it feels so alien to me because I have never sat down to eat that kind of thing.

So I wanted the lists to feel uncanny and kind of unusual, but I also wanted them to represent the relationship, the family's relationship to class in the book, which is that Cecile came from a working class background. You know, like a Lancaster family who's... her father really, made his money in soap.

So their access to class was changed. Their class signifier markers of their life were changed because they were kind of new money. And in fact, that's why she made the marriage that she did, because her father wanted to kind of buy into the legitimacy of old money. And her husband's family were old money who needed access to new money basically.

So. Her relationship to food changed very much and her father was kind of, you know, one of these, you should eat kind of cold porridge with salt in it 'cause anything else is an indulgence. Whereas her mother had a slightly different relationship and you know, she likes to smoke behind her husband's back and all these kind of things.

So for Cecile food is a marker of class, but her circumstances changed very rapidly after she'd had her three children, Marguerite of whom was the eldest. So for me, these lists were sealed, desperately clinging onto the class elements of this food, which is why it is so rich. You know why we've got like a egg poached in heavy cream and all these kind of things. She's so desperate for Marguerite to cling onto this idea of class, which is why she doesn't want her to make this marriage.

But the physical, actual circumstances of her life is that she can't provide these all the time. You know, she, they don't have the means, she doesn't have the access to the mothering instinct that you might require to be giving someone, you know, all these kind of things. And I think, you know, her visits to Marguerite become less and less as you go on in the narrative.

And I think part of that is because she also can't stand to look at her. Like she really can't stand to look at what she's kind of become and her role in that. And I do mean that in, in various different ways, not just the kind of physical.

[00:18:18] Lucy: Yeah, totally. What really comes into that as well is, you know, you're experiencing kind of Marguerite's deliveries of these trays, which are become sort of even more so few and far between. And then in contrast to that, so you have the kind of like two alternative, well, the, the two timelines alongside each other, which is Margarite in the Attic, and then the story of Cecile.

So her growing up in this family who, her dad owns a soap factory and the kind of like generation of this new wealth they have, and then her marriage to this, aristocratic, uh, uh, dandy, I suppose. So then you have this real kind of immediate contrast on the page between despite richness of the dishes that Marguerite's receiving, the real like austerity of the amount that she's actually consuming.

And then you have the descriptions of Cecile's kind of experiences of her new life. So you have the banquets that she's going to... so I think it's, I think sort of two banquets that are notable. There's her wedding and then there's one later where she realizes that her wedding wasn't special.

Like they do this all the time. It's just like incredibly excessive and indulgent. And there's this whole thing where her husband's family make turtle soup because that's the thing that is done, but they don't like it and they don't eat it. And rather than give it away, which they do for a short time.

They just, they throw it away. So there's this kind of like ridiculous behavior of this aristocratic family where they have no conception of like food as, like a necessity to live or like, even as like a cultural practice. It's just like for show.

So I guess maybe could you tell us a bit about the, the sort of decision to set those two situations alongside each other and how you went about like building those worlds together?

[00:20:05] Heather: That's a great question. And I have to tell you, the, the turtle soup bit was my favorite bit of the, of the whole book to write, and it remains my favorite bit in the novel.

[00:20:13] Lucy: visceral. I loved it.

[00:20:16] Heather: So I think this always sounds pretentious, but I'm gonna have to say it anyway.

[00:20:21] Lucy: Please.

[00:20:21] Heather: The writing of this book was the most, you know, when people talk about creative flow, when you get into the state, where you kind of... you aren't really even aware of what you're writing to a degree until you stop. And afterwards.

This book was the purest version of that I've ever had. And I thought, I think some of it was lockdown because obviously it was a world in which I could control everything. I could control what all these people were doing, which is very different to our, our reaction to the world at the time, and even ourselves and our physical bodies.

We couldn't control any of that. But part of it was because I think it was just like a really pure exploration of the things that I think and find interesting. And I remember at the end of the day where I'd written the turtle soup bit, reading it back and being like, oh, I don't know, I really dunno where that came from.

And it's because I'd read about turtle Soup. Very interesting. You know, mock turtle soup. Very interesting. Alongside it, and I guess it was a frustration at the way that those who manage to hoard wealth can spill and throw away the things that everybody else needs and.

[00:21:31] Lucy: Yeah.

[00:21:32] Heather: You know, they do allow the more working class people of the area to come and have their like remnants, which is gross in its own way. And then they decide they don't want that because they're all having like massive children. They're having really, really fat well fed babies and they don't like that.

So then they just start pouring it onto the lawns of their house, which is disgusting. But it then gives, you know, it makes the lawn smell all like kind of buttery and beautifully herbed and all these kind of things. For me, that was kind of like very central to the class explorations in the book.

But yeah, the two kind of feasts that they have... number one, just really fun to write, really fun to write because there's a whole bit of, in Mrs. Beeton about like, like menus for a wedding, basically,

[00:22:19] Lucy: Oh my

[00:22:19] Heather: you know.

[00:22:20] Lucy: Yeah.

[00:22:21] Heather: Here's, here's like what you might want to serve if you're having this many people, this many people.

And you know, for Cecile it was her being placed into this new world and she did think it was all shiny. And her relationship with her husband, I actually wanted it to be one that was rooted in pleasure. So like you say, he is kind of a dandy. And they actually have a lot of sex. They have a lot of actually quite enjoyable sex.

And that relationship for her at the beginning is one of all these new sensory pleasures free from guilt, which she didn't have before. And you know, she's been kinda lifted into this class strata where you're just like, enjoy yourself now. Have all this food. We have all this, we have abundance, we have physical abundance, we have sensory abundance.

And then she very, and I think that's, I can, so that's something I can relate to. Everybody wants to have like loads of food and physical pleasure and not have to worry about anything. This is, this is why we are being sold the idea that you can move into that social strata and then it's sours, you know, kinda like a bad apple really, really quickly, in the course of like a few months really.

But then over the course of the next few years, so kind of mirroring that with this meal where she's, she's desperate to be taken into this new society because actually she's kind of confined within the home quite quickly. And then she, she begs to be taken out and by the time she actually gets taken out, she's pregnant anyway, so it's the kind of beginning and end of that for her.

But she wants to exploit this new position she's been given. And actually she goes, and like you said, she, she discovers that her wedding wasn't some kind of grand unique experience. It was just what they do all the time. And she sees the kind of wallpaper coming away from the, from the room of that, if you will.

You know, she sees what's underneath and she feels a very different set of physical and sensory reactions to that. So yeah, that was, the bookmarking is kind of a really key part of Cecile's personality, I guess.

[00:24:21] Lucy: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean the, the sort of like, and, and actually like this is probably a good, like a good segue 'cause you know, we have these like incredibly lavish, um, menus and kind of like the experience of her eating it, but at the same time, like even with it, and this is maybe more so present at the second banquet that she experiences when she is, as you say, pregnant.

And so she is like experiencing her body, like not being able to deal with what she's putting into it essentially. So we have alongside the really sort of rich, luxurious experience of the banquet, like she's physically vomiting, like she can't, and that is very, like, it's a very like visceral description of what happens.

And she's got the kind of staff like helping her. So I suppose that's like a neat way to get into, like a lot of kind of like, I guess body horror is maybe like an accurate description of it. You might view it differently, but, um, particularly for Margarite in the attic, as the reader experience like and, um, quite violently in some senses, like the kind of disintegration of her physical self.

Like, and it almost gets to a point where she's sort of, we lose sight of her as a human being. And she's almost like more of like an animal carcass. Like maybe that's too too far, but it really is like, you know, not hard to read, but, really hard to think about and imagine like somebody going through that kind of physical transformation.

[00:25:48] Heather: Hmm,

[00:25:48] Lucy: was the experience of writing that like alongside this kind of like other element of the book?

[00:25:53] Heather: I don't think I experienced it as intensely as the reader does, I guess because I'm, I'm the one making all the choices, right? So,

[00:26:01] Lucy: Sure.

[00:26:02] Heather: uh, there's so much effluvia. Like various, you know,

[00:26:05] Lucy: much. So much,

[00:26:07] Heather: all the different, orifices of the body are engaged and yeah, everything's, everything that can come out of her will come out of her.

And she's also fascinated by them.

[00:26:17] Lucy: yes.

[00:26:18] Heather: she keeps like a little puck of phlegm and she pushes tonsil stones out of the back of her mouth and stuff.

[00:26:25] Lucy: Yeah.

[00:26:26] Heather: Part of that is just, I'm really fascinated in the body, like all the different processes of it. I find the body to be an incredible thing in a way that we don't appreciate.

I'm of an age where everybody I know has children, and so you get fed all the things on your social media, which is about like the divine feminine and the amazing reproductive system. But actually all of the body's amazing. Like, it's incredible that we, it's incredible that we produce phlegm.

Because it's supposed to protect us. It's supposed to carry bacteria away from our body. Like if you think for a minute about what your spleen does, if you think, you know, if you think about anything, you think about your, the like, you know, X on in your hands, so much of this is your body trying to protect you or attacking itself by accident and.

[00:27:08] Lucy: Hmm.

[00:27:09] Heather: Food is a huge part, like part of how the body maintains and protects itself. And sometimes you do get this expulsion of things because it is trying to, trying to protect you. But I also have to say there was like a really, there was a another massive influence on this book and it was a real case. Of

[00:27:30] Lucy: Uh, wow.

[00:27:32] Heather: In France in, I think it was the early 20th century, whose mother kept her in the attic of the, her mother and her brother kept her in the attic of the family home and her name was Blanche Monnier.

And I learned about this case by just falling down an internet hole when I was falling down my Mrs. Beeton hole at the same time, because I've been wanting to write something about mother-daughter relationships and the violence that is sometimes inherent within them in both directions, because I think that is a, a thing that people really experience a lot more than we talk about.

And I think people find it very taboo issue because nobody wants to badmouth mothers and also nobody wants to badmouth daughters, but we're just, they're just another human relationship like any other. So I'd been, you know, trying to find stories that kind of, you know, reflected that as inspiration. And yeah, Blanche Monnier was kept in the attic of the home for a long time.

Very similar time period to what we explore in the book without giving too many spoilers. But there's a picture of her when they found her

[00:28:35] Lucy: Oh my

[00:28:36] Heather: and I found this incredibly affecting. And there's descriptions of what had happened to her psychologically as well. And I then just became so fascinated at what would happen to a person

[00:28:52] Lucy: Hmm.

[00:28:52] Heather: extreme.

Period of isolation physically, but also mentally. And of course the two are so related. Think about when you're stressed and how you feel that physically in your body, not just kind of in illness, but in butterflies or excitement. These two things are so interconnected for me. And then I was like, well, what would happen to you if you were stuck in the attic?

You would of course become so fast... what else do you have to... they don't have phones, they don't have internet. She has a bunch of books that she's read a thousand times. She has some letters. She has a sewing machine that she doesn't really like to use and kind of can't because it's kind of beyond her for whatever reason.

So, of course, you turn on your body, your body's the thing that's changing all the time, and it's the, like the things that she wants in life, which are to build this family and to make this marriage and to, you know, have sex with the person that she really is actually leaning towards rather than her fiance.

They're all such embodied experiences and she's being robbed of that. So then it made total sense to me that she would turn inwards and her fascination would be with her body and what it could do, and all the kind of gross and visceral versions of that, as well as the kind of pleasurable ones.

[00:29:59] Lucy: Yeah. I, oh my God, I, yeah, I, that's so wild about the real case. 

[00:30:03] Heather: I kept it really like surface with that because just learning the basic facts of the case were enough to me to, to then take away. Whereas I feel like now the book is out, I can actually go and read about her.

[00:30:14] Lucy: Because you didn't want it to be too close to

[00:30:16] Heather: Yes. Yeah.

[00:30:18] Lucy: I get that. Yeah. And I mean, without giving too much away as well, because I never want, um, sort of the episodes of Duran books to be too spoilery because I think a lot of people do listen before they've, they've read it. It is really interesting, the kind of like sense of imprisonment that is present in so many aspects of the book, not just with Marguerite being in the attic. Like obviously Cecile is very constrained by her environment as well

[00:30:41] Heather: Mm-hmm.

[00:30:41] Lucy: ways. And then also the kind of like the way that, like around like heteronormativity or like expectations around Yeah.

Expecting women especially to have this certain kind of life. it's almost like there, there's all these parallel prisons really.

[00:30:56] Heather: Mm-hmm.

[00:30:56] Lucy: And yeah, not wanting to give too much away as well, but that was, that was so interesting. The kind of reveal of like what Margarite, how Margarite really sees her future

[00:31:05] Heather: Mm.

[00:31:05] Lucy: fascinating.

[00:31:06] Heather: I love the phrase parallel prisons. Hmm. That's a great book title.

[00:31:12] Lucy: And you know, like what, in terms of your personal experience, where did your education around cooking and food come from when you were growing up?

[00:31:23] Heather: So we were always a big baking family. So like, my mom's a, my mom's a baker, she makes a lot of cakes, and I'm talking like cakes. I'm not talking like patisserie. You know what I mean? We're talking kinda like

[00:31:37] Lucy: It's very

[00:31:37] Heather: very

[00:31:37] Lucy: that it's become even like a possibility that we would make that at home.

[00:31:41] Heather: exactly.

[00:31:41] Lucy: would make that at home. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:31:44] Heather: So, yeah, I mean, like my grandma had six kids. Every week of our, my childhood. She made a lemon drizzle cake or a coffee cake for her children's parts of the family. So we always had that growing up. But my family's relationship with food is very different to mine. So

[00:32:00] Lucy: Hmm.

[00:32:01] Heather: if you think about it, my mom was born in, when we still had rationing.

[00:32:05] Lucy: Hmm.

[00:32:06] Heather: my mom was born in 1951 and for what, five more years? They still had rationing and she was one of six. So in their family, I think it was very much about just like, is there just feeding calories into, into the children? Just eat, just eat this. It's not, it doesn't matter what it comes from, it doesn't matter what quality it is, just eat it.

So we grew up with that kind of very, I don't wanna say utilitarian, but the, the main thing was have you been fed?

[00:32:31] Lucy: Yeah. Sort of functional, I guess. So,

[00:32:33] Heather: Yeah, functional

[00:32:34] Lucy: that. Yeah,

[00:32:35] Heather: and without a lot of kind of influence from outside food cultures as well. You know, it's very British. It was very, you know, roast dinner on a Sunday, apple crumble, not knocking in apple crumble, by the way.

Absolutely love it.

[00:32:47] Lucy: no, absolutely not.

[00:32:48] Heather: Just the greatest comfort food. But we didn't, like, I don't think I had pasta until I went to university.

[00:32:53] Lucy: Sure.

[00:32:54] Heather: makes me sound like kind of tiny Tim, but I just don't think, we didn't eat that. My mom doesn't eat rice, you know, we like all this kind of stuff. Going to university it was a bit of a trip.

Seeing, seeing how other people, how other people ate. And then when I was 21, I moved to Canada for a year.

[00:33:11] Lucy: Oh wow. Okay.

[00:33:13] Heather: and then in Canada I went vegetarian. I was very interested in, in learning to cook and doing all these things, but it was kind of, I had to learn everything from scratch.

[00:33:23] Lucy: Yeah.

[00:33:23] Heather: And then I lived in Australia and then I came back to Canada and I went vegan in Canada and I was vegan for 12 years.

[00:33:31] Lucy: Oh my God. Wow.

[00:33:32] Heather: And then after Canada, I moved to Latin America for three years. So I lived in Panama City and completely different food culture, all these different kind of things. I just found like I really loved cooking and it became, it was very much, um, like a love language for me. Like I love cooking for people, but I also love cooking for myself. I'm not one of those people who won't make myself a three course meal if I'm on my own. I absolutely will.

[00:33:57] Lucy: Love that.

[00:33:57] Heather: So, yeah, it was very interesting that my brother is also like a really keen cook. Like he makes like incredible Indian food. You know, they make their own like naans and flatbreads and all these kind of things, but it was, yeah.

It's strange because I can't, I can't root it in, in a family interest in these particular things. I guess they just fed us so well that we then went away and was like, Hmm, food is an enormous part of my life. Now. How can I interrogate that and learn around it?

[00:34:28] Lucy: I think that, yeah, I really like how you've put that because I think sometimes there can be this, a bit of a trope about like the, you know, the kind of the gram the grandmother cooking. And I actually think for lots of people it's just a lot more nuanced than that. And like, obviously the world has changed so much.

Like, like you say, I mean, yeah, my, my parents also grew up with rationing. They were born at a really similar time to your mum and, and that just like, that's gonna shape hugely how

[00:34:51] Heather: Hmm.

[00:34:51] Lucy: at home for your own children.

[00:34:53] Heather: I dunno if you, you have this with your parents as well. It's given my parents like a re like really weird food hangups. So like, my, the, obviously my mom won't eat rice apart from she loves rice pudding as in like homemade rice pudding. And my mom and my auntie both won't eat mashed potato unless it's on top of a shepherd's pie,

[00:35:13] Lucy: Is that

[00:35:13] Heather: case.

[00:35:14] Lucy: they had powdered?

[00:35:15] Heather: It's because they had like smash, basically. And it's so interesting from a psychological perspective to be like, but you're eating mashed potato on top of this pie. And they're like, no. And you're like, but I mean factually you are so.

[00:35:29] Lucy: it is. It is inarguable.

[00:35:31] Heather: It is like I've seen you mash that potato. Like we've, we've all experienced this reality, but Sure.

So then you think about, I guess that kind of stuff leads you to think about the psychology of food as well and everything that affects how you see it. 'cause that is a class issue as well, and that is,

[00:35:49] Lucy: Yeah. Absolutely.

[00:35:51] Heather: an economic issue. It's a household issue. Like you don't just learn those weird things and the fact that it's both of them, you know.

[00:35:59] Lucy: Yeah.

[00:35:59] Heather: I guess, but I guess another way to look at that is like, my parents raised me to be intensely curious and, and to believe that I could learn anything. So even though I didn't get the kind of, you know, minutia of cooking from them, it's their fault that I currently have like baguettes proving in the next room.

Because I was like, I don't see why I couldn't make baguettes. You know? And it turns out you can.

[00:36:24] Lucy: Yeah, totally, totally.

Well let's come back to class

[00:36:28] Heather: Mm-hmm.

[00:36:29] Lucy: we've talked about a lot and, you know, both within the context of the book and within your own kind of experience of food. Um, me a bit more why you're so interested in how, in how significant classes, in terms of our kind of like food tastes and experiences.

[00:36:49] Heather: So I'm from Rotherham, which is, , a town between Sheffield and Doncaster. You know, former mining town, former steel town. The industry's been kind of largely taken away by Thatcher in the eighties.

[00:37:02] Lucy: Mm-hmm.

[00:37:02] Heather: and kind of replaced by, you know, like call centers and retail parks and

[00:37:07] Lucy: Yeah.

[00:37:07] Heather: else.

I'm from Teesside 

[00:37:08] Lucy: so it's a very, it's a very similar picture. Yeah.

[00:37:11] Heather: Yeah. So.

Growing up there, you are seen in a very particular way as well. Do you remember a Jamie Oliver TV show about school dinners?

[00:37:25] Lucy: I, I not only remember it, but I feel like it is a... I dunno if watershed moment is the right phrase, but I feel like it's a, it's a thing that gets

[00:37:34] Heather: Mm-hmm.

[00:37:34] Lucy: a lot in pop popular culture, possibly because Jamie Oliver is such like a ubiquitous and continuing presence in all of our lives, whether we like it or not.

[00:37:42] Heather: Do you remember an episode? Where they closed the school gates of the school at lunchtime, so the kids couldn't go and get the fast food. So the parents of the children came and brought the fast food and passed it through the gates to them.

[00:37:55] Lucy: I do remember

[00:37:56] Heather: A canon episode, I would say. So that was my high school,

[00:38:01] Lucy: Oh my God,

[00:38:02] Heather: and I wasn't there at the time.

I was already at university in Manchester.

[00:38:06] Lucy: right.

[00:38:06] Heather: But obviously it was like a huge, you know, a huge cultural moment and all the tabloids talking about these awful mothers and,

[00:38:14] Lucy: Passing the,

[00:38:15] Heather: know, the, the narrative was... why can't these stupid people understand that this much better educated middle class man from the south is just trying to make their children's lives better?

[00:38:29] Lucy: Yeah.

[00:38:30] Heather: And at the time because of, you know, I used to have a really, really strong South Yorkshire accent and I lost it because people think of you in a certain way when you have one. Also, literally can't understand you when you go abroad.

[00:38:42] Lucy: yeah,

[00:38:42] Heather: Like literally couldn't understand me. I, and because I'd moved away from there, I was like, this is awful. This is everything that's wrong with where I'm from.

And then as I've gotten older, I was like, hang on,

[00:38:56] Lucy: Oh my God.

[00:38:58] Heather: who was this, who gave that person the right to come in and literally sever a connection that these teenagers had to the community around the school?

[00:39:10] Lucy: Yeah.

[00:39:11] Heather: at the bottom of the Great Drive from the high school, there was a fish and chip shop, and there was a sweet shop, and there was a sandwich shop called Chubby's.

For better and worse, it was called Chubby's. And the food that everyone was getting was from one of those places because there's nothing else around there. So fish and chip shop, the people knew all the kids. The sweet shop, you would go after school, the sandwich shop, you would just be getting like a ham bread, cake, um, like a, that's a very OC term, like a ham roll, like, you know, like a bap basically.

[00:39:43] Lucy: okay. We can stick to the regional, you know? That's fine. There's so much bread roll discourse in like the food environment. We can, we can stick to the proper name

[00:39:51] Heather: I feel like, again, bread cake is one of those words that you grow up saying, and then you say it to someone even in Manchester and they're like, what are you talking about? What is that word? So like a, yeah, like a, like a ham and cheese roll or something. These foods aren't inherently bad, actually. There's nothing wrong with a cheese sandwich.

It's, you know,

[00:40:07] Lucy: no food is inherently bad. I think this

[00:40:10] Heather: right.

[00:40:10] Lucy: we need to like reconcile within ourselves. There is no like morality within food.

[00:40:15] Heather: Exactly, but what there is a morality in is forcing people to eat a thing that you've decided they eat regardless of whether or not they enjoy it. So I think about that and I'm thinking it's not just Jamie, it's like the head of the school who allowed him to do this. They were like, we've decided that you need to eat better, which is not inherently a negative thing to try and give, you know, improve nutrition, very important.

But instead of being like, we're going to make food so lovely, you'll want to eat it, they were like, no, no, we're just gonna lock you in the school. We can entrap you away from these places, these really small businesses with local people who know your name and feed you your packet of chips. And also, what a horrible way to give teenagers an awful food.

[00:41:01] Lucy: Right.

[00:41:02] Heather: Know, like terrible. Like I imagine, you know, there must have been like 12-year-old girls at that school being like, if I ever eat a chip again, I am gonna be the worst person who's lived. And God combined with the awful like tabloid narrative around women's bodies in the nineties, I'm not saying it's perfect now, but God, it was awful.

[00:41:19] Lucy: It was bad. Yeah,

[00:41:21] Heather: If I think about what that must've done and then the whole world, the whole country looking at you and being like, look at these awful working class idiots, basically, it just made me actually really, really angry

[00:41:32] Lucy: yeah.

[00:41:33] Heather: because there is nothing elemental, you know? There's nothing kind of in your particular food that makes it bad or good.

You might say, if you eat fish and chips every day, every lunch for a school day, that's not really giving you the nutrition you need to be working at your most optimal, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But also, sometimes you're really tired and you're really hungry and you want a massive plate of fish and chips.

And actually that's

[00:41:57] Lucy: Yeah.

[00:41:58] Heather: totally fine. For some kids, it was like the biggest treat they'd have, you know, like. Or, or just a shared experience. Let, let's go and get a plate of chips and share it with your best friend. Like these are the joys of life, you know? And the way you learn to balance these with what makes you feel good and what you know, spurs you on and makes you feel energetic is through experiencing them.

You can't have someone come and say, no, no, I'm gonna put literally a gate between you

[00:42:22] Lucy: Yeah.

[00:42:23] Heather: of these things. And then he established like a ministry of food in Rotherham as well. And then that was kind of abandoned. Rotherham is a place that is so, has been so discussed in this country's media for various different, terrible reasons.

And very often people are not giving a voice. It's just people speaking about them. And this isn't a unique experience. This is an experience that a lot of people in kind of post-industrial towns and villages know very well, especially politically. You're just kind of assigned to, well, they think this and it's like, well, no, or they're just racist, or these things.

And it's always more nuanced and that people have different views and there's political influences and economic things that, you know, change people's views on a place and their response to it and all these kind of things. And it was just like, wow, just food was just one thing around which the whole kind of community was made was diminished really. And I've only got madder and madder about that, as I've gotten older.

[00:43:27] Lucy: Yeah.

[00:43:27] Heather: so yeah, that's kind of, but then you, but then you see how the tabloid treats, how the tabloids treat food. And I'm, I,

[00:43:36] Lucy: this all day.

[00:43:38] Heather: uh, the idea that kind of kale was like an upper middle class signifier is wild To me it's ca,

[00:43:45] Lucy: literally cabbage.

[00:43:46] Heather: it's cabbage.

Like in Scotland we have the, the concept of the kale yard being like, you know, very traditional a thing. You can just grow. It just grows anywhere. It grows, it grows so naturally.

[00:43:57] Lucy: Yeah.

[00:43:58] Heather: I think you'll be fascinated by kale yards,

[00:44:00] Lucy: I

[00:44:00] Heather: but like, it's one of the things we can grow in this country. It's a thing you can grow in your garden.

It's abundant, it holds up really well in a stew, you know, as opposed to like spinach or something. Why is it middle class? It's cheap, so cheap, so abundant, so available to anyone who wants to grow it. And yet it's become like, well, if you're a kale eating, you know, middle class person, and what does that actually do?

It draws a line. So it means that if you are not that you think you can't have it. And that also diminishes people who don't fall within that class category. What I

find most frustrating all about this is it's intended to cause division

[00:44:42] Lucy: Yeah.

[00:44:44] Heather: the working class, and I mean the working class in its broadest term, to mean people who make their money out of labor as opposed to the capitalist class who make their money out of capital interests and owning the means of production, which means that anyone who's kind of like working in middle class, uh, fighting amongst each other all the time over who's middle class, who's working class, what does this signify mean about you? Are you rich if you make 50 grand a year? Whereas this kind of multimillionaires, billionaires over here raking in the profits from everybody.

Using that money to pay for political influence by which they changed the laws of this country, which further entres their PO

[00:45:24] Lucy: them.

[00:45:25] Heather: And we are arguing over whether kale is middle class or not. It's, when you think of it like that, it's, it is enraging in a way that you can never not see it. Right. So that's why I'm fascinated by it.

[00:45:38] Lucy: Oh my God, honestly, so much to unpack. I could, I could stay here and talk to you about this all day, but I think like sort of in particular, yes. And I think we see this kind of narrative around food continue all the time. So like this whole thing around UPFs now is like, I think we could trace, we could trace it back to the conversation around Jamie school dinners.

[00:45:54] Heather: Mm-hmm.

[00:45:55] Lucy: know, it's this idea that it, yes. Okay. So there's nuance here. There is a problem with nutrition in this country, there is a problem with people having access to healthy food, whatever you take that to mean or culturally appropriate food that will keep you full and that you'll enjoy, like people don't necessarily have access to the funds, the geographical location, the time to make that food, that is a very real issue.

[00:46:21] Heather: Mm.

[00:46:21] Lucy: none of the work that is being done around this addresses that, in my opinion. Like

[00:46:25] Heather: Mm-hmm.

[00:46:26] Lucy: just makes people feel bad for making the choices that they do for whatever reasons that they need to.

[00:46:30] Heather: Mm-hmm.

[00:46:31] Lucy: That show really kind of summed up our whole attitude towards that. And I don't know that it's got that much better, which is wild 'cause it was a long time ago. I mean, I can't remember what year it happened, like maybe you did, but if you were at uni, it must, I think we're a very similar age, so I think that would've been like mid 2000.

So

[00:46:47] Heather: Yeah.

[00:46:49] Lucy: coming up to

[00:46:50] Heather: Oh my God. Yeah. It must, I think it might have been 2004.

[00:46:54] Lucy: Okay. So yeah, so that is

[00:46:55] Heather: Yeah.

[00:46:56] Lucy: and I just, you know, like I, this idea of like someone being kind of parachuted in, whether that's through policy or through like very literally a TV crew arriving on the door of a school in an area where I imagine Jamie Oliver had never been,

[00:47:10] Heather: Mm-hmm.

[00:47:10] Lucy: um.

[00:47:11] Heather: No. Why would he?

[00:47:12] Lucy: Like, and being like, this is what you should be eating. And you know, we see that constantly like repeated across culture and across media. And, and this is, you know, there is a really direct link with kind of like the Mrs. Beetons

[00:47:27] Heather: Mm-hmm.

[00:47:27] Lucy: this like domestic education history.

[00:47:32] Heather: It's the removal of the economic question.

If you think about the Jamie question and like why Rotherham was chosen and if you look into the kind of, um, the poverty statistics in Rotherham throughout, I will say the new labor period as well,

[00:47:46] Lucy: is it. It's, it's, it's, it's complicated.

[00:47:49] Heather: it's complicated because.

No party has really ever addressed this because we don't, because we don't think about the people in these places.

[00:47:57] Lucy: as well. Yeah.

[00:47:58] Heather: Yeah. And you can really look at poverty statistics and nutritional statistics from these areas for the last kind of 20 years, and they've really not improved.

[00:48:05] Lucy: Yeah.

[00:48:06] Heather: And why is that? Why isn't a mother feeding her kids great food at home? Because she can't afford to.

[00:48:13] Lucy: Yeah.

[00:48:14] Heather: is the way to achieve that is to change policy around access to good food ingredients and like vegetables and fruits and, you know, high quality like beans and pastas and things like this. It's not. A middle class man coming in and going, if only these idiots could learn that, like a piece of smoked mackerel is really nice.

Like, no, no. You need to change the economic circumstances of the people that live in these areas and you need to change food standards and you need things like, um, I get really frustrated that questions around farming suddenly become questions around like landowners, which is a part of that conversation.

But also, you know, like my uncle is a farmer and he does not own land. He works the land

[00:48:57] Lucy: right.

[00:48:58] Heather: he is in his, what, mid, mid seventies now. And he has, you know, it really affects your body and you don't have a massive private pension.

[00:49:09] Lucy: Yeah.

[00:49:10] Heather: to work, but it's very, very hard to make a living doing those jobs increasingly because of.

[00:49:15] Lucy: supermarkets.

[00:49:17] Heather: yes, but we never ever talk about these. You have Jeremy Clarkson's face on the front of a newspaper instead, and he's writing all these op-eds.

[00:49:26] Lucy: really polarizing debate where it

[00:49:27] Heather: Mm-hmm.

[00:49:28] Lucy: as a class thing,

[00:49:29] Heather: Mm-hmm.

[00:49:30] Lucy: you say, there is so much more nuance there that, you know, tenant farmers are a thing that have existed in this country for a long time.

Um, actually, yeah. Just to come back really quickly, that an aspect of the, that you mentioned that I'd never considered before with the school dentist thing. The fact that what the kids were buying, like the food that they were buying. them to the local community, and that was small businesses.

You

[00:49:53] Heather: Mm.

[00:49:53] Lucy: that connection with the school kids just so much more like poignant when you consider the partnerships that Jamie Oliver has done,

[00:50:01] Heather: Mm-hmm.

[00:50:02] Lucy: largely with Sainsbury's, you know, a big like multinational, essentially

[00:50:07] Heather: Mm-hmm.

[00:50:08] Lucy: supermarket chain.

Course, he doesn't want them to shop there

[00:50:11] Heather: Exactly, and we, we didn't have like a, a Tesco Express or a Burys Express, but we, we drove to an Asda to do the food shop when I was a kid. It wasn't like you could just go around the corner and find like a supermarket. When I was a, a real young kid on the main, on the main street of where I lived, which is Ash, part of, and there was a fruit and ve shop.

And in fact we had. Like an actual fruit and veg shop where you took a paper bag and you put your apples in and they weighed it and they knew you and you'd buy a little cheeky sweet, even though your mom told you not to. You know, those kind of things. And that you knew the person who'd run it because his family had run it.

Or there was a, a fruit and veg van that used to come round, you know, with the kind of traditional or the boxes in the open side of the van, and his name was Jack Staves. And everybody knew the staves family and all this kind of stuff. Or we had a milkman that came round on an electric vehicle.

[00:51:02] Lucy: Yeah.

[00:51:03] Heather: All that's removed.

All that's gone.

[00:51:06] Lucy: I mean, I feel like getting milks delivered is now a middle class signifier,

[00:51:09] Heather: Which is wild. It's so wild. I tried to see if we could get muck delivered here, but uh, we actually can't. 'cause I live in a tenement and,

[00:51:17] Lucy: Uh,

[00:51:18] Heather: know,

[00:51:18] Lucy: Yeah,

[00:51:19] Heather: goes to certain areas and things, but that is such a different, my childhood, which was only, you know, 30 years ago.

[00:51:25] Lucy: Yeah.

[00:51:26] Heather: a different experience in the access to not only the quality of the food, but who provides it for you, which is a much more community centered experience than we have now where everybody is just expected to go to the nearest express supermarket round the corner, which is vastly overpriced unless you have one of their cards, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

You know, like. These are the things, these are the things we should be talking about, and when we're having conversations around these things, it shouldn't be Jeremy Clarkson. It should be a 75-year-old lifetime farmer who's never owned land in his whole life.

[00:51:59] Lucy: Yeah.

[00:52:00] Heather: about how these things have affected him and how the industry needs to change to better everyone, but we never have those.

[00:52:08] Lucy: No. No. Well, maybe one day, but

[00:52:11] Heather: Maybe

[00:52:11] Lucy: if I feel hugely optimistic about it. But,

[00:52:14] Heather: we need to, we need to find an optimistic note to end on.

[00:52:17] Lucy: I know and well, I think, I guess to to end it, you know, and and it is sort of interesting 'cause it feels like in some sense we've come a long way from the book, but also not at all, like

[00:52:26] Heather: Hmm.

[00:52:27] Lucy: context.

And kind of your experiences and your politics and your feelings are so relevant to how this book was written, even though it's obviously, obviously at a completely different time and situation.

[00:52:39] Heather: Mm-hmm.

[00:52:40] Lucy: yeah, it's very relevant and I think that's really important when we consider historical fiction.

[00:52:44] Heather: Mm-hmm.

[00:52:45] Lucy: think about the sort of present day circumstances that might interest the author in that sort of. Sort of reality. Um,

[00:52:51] Heather: Yeah.

[00:52:52] Lucy: Well, thank you very much for the book. I, like I said to you before we start recording, I enjoyed it greatly. I really plowed through it and I'd recommend it to anyone. So yeah, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

[00:53:02] Heather: Oh, thank you so much for having me, and I hope we've not made it sound too much like a political, uh, treaties. It is actually a story.