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Episode image is a detail of a photo by Charles Adrian.
At what might be the halfway point and more opinionated than usual, Charles Adrian talks about three books he was given by friends in Athens.
You can find out more about the Jacques Lecoq school in Paris on their homepage here.
There is a useful introduction to Our Country’s Good by Timberlake Wertenbaker on the British Library website here.
Correction: according to Charles Adrian’s summary of Pascal’s Wager (around eighteen minutes into this recording), the last quadrant should read: “If I don’t believe in God and God doesn’t exist…”
The discussion of Pascal’s Wager in this episode is, in any case, a little superficial. You can find a better summary on Wikipedia here and a more extended analysis in the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy here.
Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet is discussed in Page One 55.
Books discussed in this episode were previously discussed in Page One 79, Page One 80 and Page One 81.
A transcript of this episode is below.
Episode recorded: 27th July, 2020
Episode released: 1st September, 2020
Book listing:
The Playmaker by Thomas Keneally (Page One 79)
Oscar Et La Dame Rose by Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt (Page One 80)
Selected Poems by C. P. Cavafy (trans. David Connolly) (Page One 81)
Links:
Introduction to Our Country’s Good from the British Library
Episode transcript:
Jingle
You're listening to Page One, the book podcast.
Charles Adrian
Hello and welcome to the 176th Page One. I'm Charles Adrian and this is the 20th Page One In Review.
Now, when I first started making these Page One In Review episodes - I can't remember exactly which episode it was that I talked about this... the... one of the first few episodes - I made a prediction that there were going to be forty Page One In Review episodes altogether. And if that's the case - and I still don't know because I haven't made any of the relevant calculations - we're pretty much halfway through. The halfway point will be somewhere between this episode and the next episode so that... it felt like an exciting moment to mark. And what I was reminded of when I started thinking about that was that, when I was at university, students would have a dinner to mark the midpoint of their university courses. And for most of the students at the university that I attended that would have been about a year and a half in because most courses were three years long. So halfway through what was called Hilary term of their second year they would all gather and have a special dinner which had a name which I have forgotten and haven't looked up and I apologise for that. It was something to do with... [laughing] I think it was something to do with mountain climbing - like getting... you know, getting to the top of the... It might have been called Peak... Peak Dinner or Summit Dinner or... no, neither of those sound right. But I think the idea was you... you know, you climb climb climb and then from this point you just have to go down the other side - you know, coasting down towards your exams. For those of us who were in the modern languages course, our courses were four years long so our midpoint dinner - whatever the name of it was - would have fallen somewhere during the summer vacation after our second year so we never got to have that dinner.
But what I was thinking was: I feel like I ought to celebrate this midpoint, having noticed it, and... So I haven't told you but I've been watching a tomato plant that I've been growing - I didn't plant it but I have been looking after it... I've been feeding it and watering it - and over the last week or so one of the tomatoes on the plant - there are quite a few little green tomatoes - but one of them has been turning the most beautiful red colour and I feel like it's so close to being ready to eat. Every now and then I go outside and just pull at it very gently to see if it'll drop into my hands. I want to pick it at the moment of its optimum ripeness so - which I think will be quite appropriate. It will be the point at which it has reached its summit or peak before descending down into over-ripeness on the other side. I haven't tested it today because it's been a grim rainy day today here in West London so I didn't want to go outside but I... you know, assuming that it stops raining later, I will go outside and give it a little shake and a pull just to see if it comes off. And if it does, that is what I shall eat for my halfway dinner... peak dinner... summit dinner. Wha...? [tuts] I know it had a really good name. Gone out of my head. Well, as I say, my coursemates and I never got to have one.
Right. In this episode I'm talking about three books that were given to me by friends of mine who I met when I trained as an actor in Paris at the Jacques Lecoq school. We trained together between 2002 and 2003 and then a few years later we all met on the island of Santorini in Greece and travelled to Athens together on a very, very stormy night. I remember the rain lashing the ferry that we were on. We [laughing] were very wet. And then when we were in Athens I recorded conversations with... with Alison and Erifili and Vicky. There was also another friend of ours, Kajsa, who was living on Santorini but I think... she did come to Athens with us but I think she didn't stay very long and I didn't get the chance to record an episode with her. But who knows? Maybe one day in the future we will get to talk about books.
[page turning]
In any case the first book that I want to talk to you about today was given to me by Alison - Alison Windsor - during the 79th Page One. We recorded that in Erifili's apartment in Athens. If you listen to that episode you can hear Erifili in the background. Alison gave me The Playmaker by Thomas Keneally, which was an excellent choice on her part - although I don't think she could have known it - because when I was at school, in my English and Theatre Studies class, we read and studied Our Country's Good which is a play by Timberlake Wertenbaker based on this book, The Playmaker by Thomas Keneally. So it was a... yeah, it was a pleasure to revisit that story and to read Thomas Keneally's version of it.
He writes a very good story. It's a... This is a very readable book. Very engaging. Quite heartbreaking at times. Very enjoyable altogether. What strikes me, thinking about it now, however, is how little... There... There is almost no attempt to grapple with the effect of colonisation on the people who were already living in what we now call Australia. There are a couple of Aboriginal characters in the story but they're very much peripheral characters and seen from the white person's point of view. This is... So I think this is... It seems to me very representative of the founding myth of white Australia. And we subscribe to that myth in... you know, here in the UK every bit as much as white people in Australia do - or have done at least.
It wasn't until I went to visit Alison in Australia - in 2011 I think it was - that I even started to think about the effect of the arrival of these settlers on the... yeah, as I say, the people who live there. I just didn't know anything about the richness and the diversity of the languages that were spoken, the... the civilisation that existed, the very deep and useful knowledge of the land, the complex storytelling that existed and still, obviously, exists to some extent despite the attempts - the very deliberate attempts - by successive governments to try and stamp all of that out. And yes, what occurs to me is that we in the UK - I mean, I'm going to make a gross generalisation here but I'm talking about the... the ‘discourse’, the general state of things - we don't think about that at all. We don't think about what happened in Australia when white people arrived. We don't think about what happened in America when white people arrived.
We, I think - you know, and again, I'm talking about myself and I'm talking about people like me, white people like me - tend to think of those issues as Australian issues and American issues if we think about them at all. But of course, what strikes me - and is so clear in this book, The Playmaker - is that the white people who arrived in Australia, like many, many of the white people who arrived in America, were British. And the colonies that were set up were ruled ultimately from Westminster - from here in the UK - for much of their history. Obviously, there's been a political divergence since independence. But, yeah, we don't... we don't think of those histories as part of our history, I don't think, but of course they are. I think they're very much... What happened in Australia in terms of, as I say, the destruction of civilisation, the destruction of wildlife... and again, I had absolutely no idea of the effect on the environment of the arrival of white settlers, both because of the introduction of agriculture and because of the introduction of animals that were brought - rabbits being the most famous but not the only - and plants that were brought. I had no idea about any of that. And... And all of that is part of our legacy too as British people - especially as white British people, I would say. So that... yeah, that's been an interesting thing for me to reflect on as I... as I look at this book again.
What I think Thomas Keneally does do very well is shine a light on the... the gross legal oppression that poor white people faced in the UK in the eighteenth century - you know, at a time when theft was punishable by execution, which, as you'll see, may... you know, may occasionally be commuted to deportation to what were called ‘the colonies’. And Thomas Keneally... I think he's interested also in hierarchies. The story is about a group of convicts and Marines in, I think, the first colony in... in what, as I say, came to be called Australia, you know, making the best of things in what was for them a very isolated situation the other side of the world from, you know the center of their civilisation, and putting on a play, The Recruiting Officer by George Farquhar, which is talked about as being the first play performed on Australian soil. And within that society - that society of Marines and convicts - you have very strict and very oppressive hierarchies. So, you know, you've got the naval hierarchy that the Marines subscribe to very overtly but you also have the hierarchy which is, you know, Marines on top convicts on the bottom and then, within the convict population, men on top women on the bottom of the heap. And this is... So these kinds of things are explored very vividly in the section that I'm going to read for you now.
So this book is published by Hodder and Stoughton [/staʊtn̩/] - I think that's how you pronounce that. It's a hardback copy of The Playmaker by Thomas Keneally and it's 310 pages long. I'm going to read you from pages 86, 87 and 88. This is just a little section about a boy called Tom Barrett and it tells you a little bit about his history and the way in which he has been treated by the... what we now call the criminal justice system.
There's a paragraph in here that talks about them being tied up in Rio harbour and it says:
Canoes carrying Portuguese traders and black oarsmen made journeys out to the ships to barter...
And, again, reading it now, I want to ask: “Well, who... who were those black oarsmen? What was their status?” But, again, there's no discussion of that.
But. So. In any case, here we go from page 86:
This Tom Barrett was only a youth, but the fliest of all fly boys. He had been condemned to death and reprieved twice already - first when, barely more than a child, he stole jewellery and clothing from a London spinster. He had, like Sideway, then being found wandering the West Country in the weeks after the convict mutiny aboard the transport Mercury in Torbay. He was tried with Robert Sideway and others at Exeter for the crime of return from transportation. There, for a second time in his scarcely sixteen years, he had been sentenced to death. When the sentence was commuted, Tom went to the hold of the hulk Dunkirk in Plymouth Harbour and at last sailed on the Charlotte.
Even so, up to the point of his transportation, Tom Barrett's criminal career had shown little of style to distinguish it from that of a hundred others aboard Charlotte and Friendship. Where he got his style from, his criminal flashness and repute, was from an incident on board Charlotte while the convict fleet was tied up in Rio Harbour.
Canoes carrying Portuguese traders and black oarsmen made journeys out to the ships to barter, and the convicts who had money of their own, deposited with the master of the ship or a member of the crew for safekeeping, were allowed to buy food and delicacies. This was considered - by old-fashioned officers like Robbie Ross - a dangerous and faddish innovation of H.E.'s.
H.E., incidentally, stands for His Excellency, who is in charge... he's the person in charge of the colony. He's the Crown's representative in the colony in Australia.
But Surgeon White approved the merchandise the traders had for sale - oranges, plantains, cantaloupes, limes and fancy breads.
The trade went on, on each of the convict transports, in the standard barricaded exercise yard aft of the main mast. The barricades stood three feet high and were topped with spikes. Behind them the convicts could stretch in the sunlight and have a sight of the green slopes of the city of Rio, the Sugarloaf and the palace square.
One of the Portuguese merchants approached a Marine officer and complained to him about a quarter dollar a convict had paid him for bread. It was counterfeit. You could tell by scraping it with a knife that it had a large proportion of pewter in it.
The quarter dollar was traced back to Tom Barrett. A search of his bedspace in the convict hold showed he owned a bag full of them, manufactured of chunks of pewter, marine belt buckles and buttons, and the occasional gold coin thrown into the brew. The coins were competently minted using a metal mould Tom had acquired before leaving England.
Everyone - officers and convicts on other ships - had been astonished that Tom had been able to build in the convict hold the fires necessary to forge metal coins. It did not really take anyone long to conclude that he had got both the freedom to build a fire and the ingredients for his coins by pimping between the Marines and the thirty or so women convicts in the forrard section of Charlotte. In the convict view, by forging aboard ship, Tom had done honour to his canting crew and to the gods of criminality. He wore with easy carelessness the style of a man likely to hang young.
The time for that - it seemed - had arrived. In the Sydney Cove version of a new earth, where the new earth looked inhospitable to European grain and the London criminals proved inept at farming, the only certain supply of food could come from what was in the storehouse. No one knew if England, having shipped them to the dark, unredeemed side of things, would remember to send them the staples of life, or if these were sent, whether the ships that carried them could come safely to them. For it was understood even by the brutal convict mind that few sailors could manage to bring a flotilla the distance H.E. and his Scottish navigator, Johnny Hunter, had brought them.
Under these conditions, H.E. had to define the stealing of food on any large scale as the equivalent of murder, and to make it a capital offence. Harry understood this: that now Barrett - still less than twenty - was facing his third and inescapable death sentence.
This was, of course, a much worse come-uppance for Harry Brewer than it was for Tom Barrett.
I don't remember why it was a worse come-uppance for Harry Brewer than Tom Barrett but there you go. I think that gives you a very good sense of the book and of the situation among the Marines and convicts who went out to Sydney in the late eighteenth century.
[page turning]
The second book that I want to talk to you about today was given to me by Erifili Stefanidou. We had this conversation on the [laughing] slopes of Mount Parnitha - or, in fact, I think very near the top, very near the crest, or the peak, or the summit, or whatever word it is that is used for that dinner that I was talking about earlier, of Mount Parnitha, which is just outside Athens. We went up there, I think, on the Saturday before Easter - the day before Easter - and had a wonderful day up on the mountain. A storm raged around us - storms are very much a theme of today's [laughing] episode. And... And then we came down in the evening - I think partly at my insistence - to take part in the Easter parades. I don't remember exactly what it is that is carried around but something is taken out of the churches in a particular part of Athens - and I imagine it happens all over Greece - and these huge parades go around the streets in circular routes and back to the churches where they came from. And, oh it was just... it was gorgeous. And then when the parade arrives back at the church candles are lit and suddenly there are lights everywhere. Yeah, that was just lovely.
So. In any case, earlier in the day, Eri and I recorded our conversation, which was the 80th Page One, and Erifili gave me Oscar Et La Dame Rose, which is a French novel by Eric Emmanuel Schmitt. This... And, actually, wow! Okay. Lots of connections. This book was also turned into a play - which I didn't see but it was apparently a very successful play, certainly in Paris for the time that I was living in Paris. It just seemed to run and run. I was always seeing adverts for it. This... The book is a series of letters written by Oscar, who is this young boy who is dying of cancer, and he writes these letters to God at the suggestion of the Dame Rose, the Pink Lady, who he calls Mamie Rose, which I suppose is the equivalent of Granny Rose.
I don't... I don't know how I feel about this book. It has something of the flavour of Pascal's Wager. So Pascal is a writer that I studied during my French degree and one of the most famous passages that he wrote is a section in which he tries to persuade people logically to believe in God and he posits four possibilities. So you can draw this as a grid - and people often use this grid: So you have two possibilities across the top - God exists, God doesn't exist - and two possibilities down the side - I believe in God, I don't believe in God. And if I believe in God and God exists then great, wonderful, I go to heaven, everything's wonderful. If I believe in God and God doesn't exist... well, I just die, I haven't lost anything. If I don't believe in God and God exists... oh dear I go to hell. And if I don't believe in God and God exists... well, you know, nothing happens. And that's supposed to be very, very persuasive. I don't find it very persuasive. I feel like there's an awful lot that is left off that in terms of the suffering that can come as a result of established religion. And I say that as someone who is gay and brought up Christian and struggled with that a lot and carry a lot of pain as a result of that. And that's not... you know, I... not every Christian is antagonistic towards gay people but the institution of the church in its many forms has traditionally been antagonistic towards gay people. And certainly the Church of England, which I was a member of until I was about nineteen or twenty, was at that time antagonistic towards gay people.
So I... yes, I have a lot of anger about that but I also feel like that's something that's missed off your... you know, Pascal's chart. And it's missed off here as well. Mamie Rose suggests that Oscar should write to God and Oscar says: “Look, I've been let down by so many people. I don't want to be let down by God as well.” And she says: “Well, just, you know, give it a try. You never know. And if he exists, it'll all work out all right.” I... [laughs] I mean, I don't... I... I don't know. I think, yes, he probably gets a lot of benefit from writing these letters. And it's, yeah, it's... it's a very sad book but it's also... Yeah, I'm going to be quite down on this book. It's... It's cloying and sentimental in a way that feels particularly French to me. Again, [laughing] not all French culture partakes of this sentimentality but there is a particular strain of French culture which revels in it and I don't enjoy it very much at all. So, yeah, there's a kind of cutesiness to Oscar's, you know, agreeing to write to God which I just... I find that deeply uncomfortable.
And it's partly, of course, because it's an adult portrayal of this brave, precocious, loving, dying child. You know, I can't get away from the fact that Eric Emmanuel Schmitt is a grown man and he's... you know, he's writing the voice of Oscar, who is this brave, naive soul who is only a force for good in the world. So there you go. It's not without its good points but, I... yeah, it's not my favourite book in the world.
But I'm going to read... so it's the passage leading up to the section where Mamie Rose suggests that Oscar starts writing to God. And this is a rather lovely section and very poignant and it really does ask the question of what do you tell a child who is dying and how much damage can you do by trying to protect them from that knowledge? I'm going to read it in French and then give you some kind of translation, I think. So this is... It's published by Albin Michel and it is 100 pages long in this paperback edition.
L'atmosphère se détériore. J'en ai parlé à mon copain Bacon. En fait il s'appelle pas Bacon, mais Yves, mais nous on l'a appelé Bacon parce que ça lui va beaucoup mieux, vu qu'il est un grand brûlé.
- Bacon, j'ai l'impression que le médecins ne m'aiment plus, je les déprime.
- Tu parles, Crâne d'Œuf! Les médecins, c'est inusable. Ils ont toujours plein d'idées d'opérations à te faire. Moi, j'ai calculé qu'ils m'en ont promis au moins six.
- Peut-être que tu les inspires.
- Faut croire.
- Mais pourquoi ils ne me disent pas tout simplement que je vais mourir?
Là, Bacon, il a fait comme tout le monde à l'hôpital: il est devenu sourd. Si tu dis « mourir » dans un hôpital, personne n'entend. Tu peux être sûr qu'il va y avoir un trou d'air et que l'on va parler d'autre chose. J'ai fait le test avec tout le monde. Sauf avec Mamie Rose.
Alors ce matin, j'ai voulu voir si, elle aussi, elle devenait dure de la feuille à ce moment-là.
- Mamie-Rose, j'ai l'impression que personne ne me dit que je vais mourir.
Elle me regarde. Est-ce qu'elle va réagir comme les autres? S'il te plaît, l'Etrangleuse du Languedoc, résiste et conserve tes oreilles!
- Pourquoi veux-tu qu'on te le dise si tu le sais, Oscar!
Ouf, elle a entendu.
- J'ai l'impression, Mamie-Rose, qu'on a inventé un autre hôpital que celui qui existe vraiment. On fait comme si on ne venait à l'hôpital que pour guérir. Alors qu'on y vient aussi pour mourir.
- Tu as raison, Oscar. Et je crois qu'on fait la même erreur pour la vie. Nous oublions que la vie est fragile, friable, éphémère. Nous faisons tous semblant d'être immortels.
- Elle est ratée, mon opération, Mamie-Rose?
Mamie-Rose n'a pas répondu. C'était sa manière à elle de dire oui. Quand elle a été sûre que j'avais compris, elle s'est approchée et m'a demandé, sur un ton suppliant:
- Je ne t'ai rien dit, bien sûr. Tu me le jures?
- Juré.
So, basically, he says:
The atmosphere's getting worse. I talked to my friend Bacon. He's not actually called Bacon but Yves, but we call him Bacon because that suits him much better. Because he's... I don't know what... “un grand brûlé”... I don't know what that means.
“Bacon, I think that the medicines [sic] don't like me anymore. I depress them.”
And then he says... “Crâne d'Œuf”? I suppose: “Egghead...” Yeah: “You think, Egghead? The me... The doctors are...” I don't know... something… “They're always full of ideas of operations to do. I've worked out that they've promised me at least six.”
And then Oscar says: “Perhaps you inspire them.”
And Bacon says: “Yeah, you think!”
And then Oscar says: “But why don't they just tell me that I'm going to die?”
And there Bacon did like everyone does at the hospital: he became deaf. If you say “die” in a hospital, nobody hears. You can be sure that there will be a hole... an air hole... a gap in the air and then people will talk about other things. I've run this test with everyone except with Mamie Rose. So this morning I wanted to see if she would also... I don't know what “dure de la... devenir dure de la feuille” means but basically... “do like everybody else” in that moment.
“Mamie Rose, I have the impression that no one's telling me that I'm going to die.”
She looked at me. Is she going to react like everyone else? Please, Strangler of Languedoc - I think that's what she's... she's told him some story about being the Strangler of Languedoc - resist and keep your ears.
And she says: “Why do you want people to tell you if you know it, Oscar?”
Ouf, she heard me.
“I have the impression, Mamie Rose, that another hospital has been invented than this one which really exists. People behave as if you only come to hospital to get better. While, in fact, you also come here to die.”
“You're right, Oscar. And I think we make the same mistake for life in general. We forget that life is fragile, breakable, ephemeral. We all pretend that we're immortal.”
“Did my operation fail? Mamie-Rose?”
Mamie-Rose didn't reply. It was her way of saying yes. When she was sure that I had understood, she came closer and asked me: “I... I didn't say anything to you, of course. Swear it?”
”Swear it.”
There you go. Yeah, again, kind of, further to my earlier rant about religion there's an interesting contradiction in here where... So she tells Oscar all kinds of nonsense about herself and her life, and when she starts talking about God he says to her: “Look, people are always lying to me.” You know, it's a big [laughing] theme of the book, obviously. They won't tell him that he's dying. But they also... He says: “They also... you know, they tell me about Father Christmas - they ask me to believe in Father Christmas - and Father Christmas isn't real and I can't deal with that any more.” And I think that's very interesting because a certain amount of knowing fiction is useful and, you know, great and I entirely support it. But when you start to talk about belief in God there's very often a... a different quality attached to that. God is the - you know, for many, many people - the ultimate reality. Obviously, a lot of people talk about God in terms of stories and in terms of metaphor - that God is a metaphor for something else - and I'm... I'm more receptive to that. But I... yeah, I find it very difficult to hear in, kind of, you know, two breaths a little boy saying “Don't lie to me any more” and then, you know, his mentor saying “Why not try believing in God?” Okay. That's probably quite a controversial thing to have said.
[page turning]
The third book that I want to talk to you about today is not at all controversial in my eyes. This was given to me by Vicky Sachpazi - or Vasiliki to give her her full name, Vasiliki Sachpazi - during the 81st Page One. We sat down in the open air outside the Money Museum in Athens to have that conversation and she gave me Selected Poems by C. P. Cavafy. And these... yeah, these are gorgeous. This is a... an Alora edition of the poems and it's 91 pages long excluding the various chronologies.
A lot of these poems are just gorgeously horny poems about young men enjoying each other and they... I think they contain... yeah, a, kind of, yearning for a guilt-free existence. I think there's a certain amount of guilt attached to his homosexual longings. Christian church I'm looking at you. And... and then there are other poems which are about place and belonging and so on. And this... So... And the one that I want to read to you is Ithaca. This one is about... I mean, it, kind of... it echoes what Mamie Rose says, actually, in the passage I read to you from Oscar Et La Dame Rose. I read him as saying: Enjoy the life you're living as you live it, be present in your life, enjoy the moments as they pass. It's very easy for us to be waiting for something to happen and, of course, things are happening all the time.
And this... So Vicky talked about this poem when we recorded our conversation but I asked her to read the first poem in the collection, which is The City - which is the poem that Lawrence Durrell references when he talks about Cavafy in his Alexandria Quartet. But I... yeah, I wish now that I had asked Vicky to read Ithaca because it would have been lovely to hear what it sounds like in Greek. I'm going to read you the English version, which is on pages 25 and 27:
ITHACA
As you set out bound for Ithaca,
hope that the journey is a long one,
full of adventures, full of learning.
Of the Laestrygonians and Cyclopes,
of wrathful Poseidon have no fear,
you'll never meet suchlike on your journey,
if your thoughts remain lofty, if noble
sentiment grips your body and spirit.
You'll never encounter raging Poseidon,
Laestrygonians and Cyclopes,
unless you bear them in your soul,
unless your soul sets them before you.
Hope that the journey is a long one.
That the summer morns be many
when with what delight, what joy
you enter harbours hitherto unseen;
that you stop at Phoenician markets,
and acquire fine merchandise,
nacre and coral, amber and ebony,
and all kinds of heady perfumes,
as many heady perfumes as you can;
that you visit many Egyptian cities,
to learn and learn from the erudite.
Always keep Ithaca in mind.
To arrive there is your destination.
But in no way rush the voyage.
Better for it to last many years;
and for you to berth on the isle an old man,
rich with all you gained on the journey,
without expecting Ithaca to give you riches.
Ithaca gave you the wonderful voyage.
Without her you would not have set out on your way.
Yet she has nothing more to give you.
And though you may find her wanting, Ithaca has not deceived you.
Wise as you've become, with so much experience,
already you'll have understood what these Ithacas mean.
Oh I love that. I... yeah, I think that's so nice. I haven't reread this book in full since reading it originally after Vicky gave it to me but it feels like this is a book that should stay on the shelf for days when I just need a little glimpse into something beautiful. There are... Yeah, there are some gorgeous poems in here. Yeah. So.
Okay. I have a feeling that, even edited, this episode is going to be mega-long because I allowed myself to talk about all kinds of contentious issues - contentious but important issues in my opinion. I'm becoming really very opinionated. I mean, I've always been opinionated but I tend to suppress that [laughing] side of myself when I'm making these podcasts. I am unloosing the bag of opinions that I hold in the same way that... who was it on Odysseus's ship that opened the bag of winds that scattered them, that caused the journey to Ithaca to be so long? I can't remember. I'd have to look up the story.
Okay. Anyway. Yeah. Thank you so much for listening to this and, as always, for accompanying me through these episodes. Yeah. In the next episode we are almost certainly heading down the other side of this mountain that I have set myself to climb. Yeah. Thanks. Bye.
Jingle
Thank you for listening to Page One. For more information about the podcast, please go to pageonepodcast.com.
[Initial transcription by https://otter.ai]