LRN No.27: 📕🎂
Plus: Paloma Faith is my warm up act
This newsletter is a year old. Happy Birthday to the Little Red Notebook.
A lot has happened over the last 12 months. I have filled up 13 real little red A6 notebooks with my very bad handwriting. My BBC Radio 4 documentary series, The Gift, was broadcast (we’ve just started work on Series Two). I have eaten meals with pronatalists and maligned cheer moms in Pennsylvania, seen cadavers being virtually sliced in Plymouth and met the surgeon who burned his initials onto his patients’ livers. I’ve got to work with some of my heroes.
And, ever since The Price of Life was published, I’ve been touring this beautiful country of ours so I can talk to people about it. Next stop is Camp Bestival in Dorset. I am on the Library Stage - right after Paloma Faith, believe it or not - on Saturday 27th June.
But writing this newsletter for a year has been an experience in itself. I have learned:
that I can write short things, and write them quickly
that I have wise readers who email me thoughtful replies, and point out my spelling errors when I’ve written too quickly
that timing matters.
There have been many posts I’ve wanted to write but didn’t, because of timing. Sometimes, it’s because writing every two weeks means stories get too old. (I wanted to write about Johann Hari when all the fuss over the errors in his Ozempic book erupted, and how people will listen to someone who tells a good story even when that story is made up - but by the time it was time for another LRN, the Hari story was history.)
Other times, it’s because I haven’t quite found the right time for it. (I want to write about being a failed rock star, and why I think ghosting is despicable, and the time I was a captain of a University Challenge team in an episode that was filmed but will never be broadcast.) There are plenty more stories that remain in the real notebook, waiting to go in the virtual one.
My most read post over the past year was about having Jewish genes without being very Jewish or knowing much about Israel. This is going to change - well, half change - because I’m going to Israel tomorrow on a reporting trip. Cross your fingers for me.
Things that have caught my eyes and ears:
Finally picked up Seventeen, Joe Gibson’s memoir of being groomed by a teacher more than twice his age, and couldn’t put it down. As a fellow nineties kid, I can’t quite believe the world I grew up in
Wanted to like but really hated the schlocky Netflix documentary series on serial sperm donor Jonathan Jacob Meijer
Loved Tavares Strachan’s exuberant exhibition at the Hayward Gallery
Felt incredibly honoured to be a judge on the Week Junior Book Awards, in the STEM category. The future is bright if kids are reading the extraordinary books on the shortlist
Happy Birthday.