S3 EP10: Dame Mary Beard

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Podcasts, there are millions of them.

Some might say too many.

I have one already.

I don't have any, because there are enough.

Politics, business, sport, you name it, there's a podcast about it, and they all ask the big questions and cover the hot topics of the day.

But nobody is covering the most important topic of all.

Why is that?

Are they scared?

Too afraid of being censored by the man?

Possibly, but not us.

We're here to ask the only question that matters.

We'll try and say it at the same time, Max.

What did you do yesterday?

What did you do yesterday?

What did you do yesterday?

That's it.

All we're interested in is what the guests got up to yesterday, nothing more.

Day before yesterday, Max?

Nope.

The greatest and most interesting day of your life?

Unless it was yesterday, we don't want to know about it.

I'm Max Rushdon, and I'm David O'Doherty.

Welcome to What Did You Do Yesterday?

Hello, and welcome to today's episode of What Did You Do Yesterday?

And David, our first night of the realm.

We are moving into new territory here.

We are a prestige podcast that has been pretending to not be a prestige podcast with all the constant talk about bathrooms, etc.

And now, oh, this is big.

Yeah, this is serious academia here.

And that's good for me as, you know, the erudite intellectual, I would say.

Oh, that's not fair, is it?

We've established that i know nothing you're incredibly well read

but on paper uh i'm part of the intelligentsia so it was nice to have a someone i could sort of share that was on a common ground with me i would say with dame mary beard so she is

renowned classicist but also broadcaster i mean as a professor she's done her full academic thing and written all these amazing books but i think she more than anyone else has brought the classical world to us

in research.

So the masses.

And actually, for the tape, we've just recorded the episode.

So the episode is part of history now.

So that's good for her.

She's about to launch a podcast called Instant Classics with Charlotte Higgins, I believe.

And they will go through what various people from classical civilization did yesterday.

Nebuchadnezzar.

Did you set an alarm?

Did you set a sundial?

Did you do that?

Well, that's a great episode, isn't it?

I really enjoyed it.

And, you know, there are some bits where we veer into, you know, actually interesting things, which is rare for us.

This is what Dame Mary Beard did yesterday.

Dame Mary Beard, welcome to What Did You Do Yesterday?

It's absolutely delightful to be here.

And I think you might cut the dame, please.

You know, it's a good idea.

Okay, sure, absolutely right.

That's fine.

You're just another normal Joe.

We wanted to find out what a knight of the realm, if their day was the same as just normal people like us.

And already we've cut the dame.

You're happy with just Mary.

And finally, it's so great for me to have another historian on the podcast.

Yeah, I know.

One of the things I did yesterday was check out your CV.

So I know

I know all there isn't to be found on the web.

It's unlikely we'll get to my dissertation on can you build a model of empire by comparing the British in India and the Mughals in India.

Unless you read it yesterday, Mary, we can't really focus on it.

Sadly, sadly.

I just didn't have time.

I didn't have time.

No, I understand.

I'll send you a PDF.

I'll put it in the show notes.

I'll put it in the show notes.

It got a 2-2.

I was more an exam person, you know, Mary.

Anyway, let's get down to business.

What time did you wake up yesterday?

Dame Mary Beard.

Every time you say Dame, I'm going to shut up.

I woke up at 6 o'clock.

Oh, wow.

Hang on.

I got asked the question.

Morning or the evening?

Mary, have you been on a big night out?

Slept for 18 hours.

If only it had been the evening, that would have been something to talk about to you guys.

But I'm afraid it was the morning because I was going to London.

You know how what happens when you set your alarm for 6.30?

You always kind of wake up earlier because you're thinking, is the alarm about to go off?

So I woke up at 6.

I went and had a quick pee and I went back to bed and got up at 6.30.

Okay, good stuff.

And does Mary Beard immediately get the phone from under her pillow and start looking at people?

No,

there is no way.

I have to say,

if I wake up in the middle of the night, I get the phone from under the pillow and I start looking at, sadly, I'm just not a great Instagram person, but I always check to see what emails have come in.

I do a bit of doom scrolling, you know, whatever time of day it is.

I think it's quite nice actually to.

I was sitting in bed, I had the radio on between 6 and 6:30, thinking, I don't have to get up yet, and I could just kind of get through some of those emails and come down and feel that the day had started and I'd done some of the stuff.

Do you listen to talk sport, Mary?

It's totally obvious, isn't it, what I listen to.

I listen to the Lasted Today programme and occasionally get cross.

Who was doing it yesterday?

Was it a good two?

Who was the two on the Today programme yesterday?

Do you know what?

I have no recollection.

I can't even remember who it was this morning.

I can't even remember whether they were men or women.

You know, it's just somehow, it's so much wallpaper that I simply don't recall.

That's what they'll be putting on the adverts on the buses of the Today programme when they so much wallpaper.

I can't remember a thing.

Mick Robinson will be delighted.

Yeah, but it's, I think what's funny about it is there's been a revolution really in the Today programme because you used to think, oh my God, there's a woman presenting.

And that was only about 15 years ago, you know, or, oh, my God, there's two women presenting this morning.

And I think actually it's quite an achievement that you just don't now think about that.

You think, oh, it's the presenter.

Who was it?

I can't remember.

Justin?

I don't know.

So what time is the train?

How long does it take for Mary Beard to really get the brain up and running?

The confession is,

you know, I don't know what you think about the trains to Cambridge, Max, if you ever still come here, but the last four times I've gone to London, the trains have been either cancelled or delayed.

So I was doing a series of interviews yesterday, and we'll come on to that in a minute, but I thought, I'm just not sitting on that train when it's half an hour late.

panicking that I'm not going to get there.

So I was, you know, being such a fretter that they sent a car.

So the car came at 7.30.

Right

time.

That's what happens to you when you're 70 years old and they really want you in London and they think, God, the poor old thing, you know, is she going to manage?

They think, let's send a car.

That's exciting.

I mean, my parents are very much using now the Liverpool Street line when they come to visit because it's a bit slower, but, you know, it's not as busy as the King's Cross one.

I mean, King's Cross one is a good, it does get there.

Well, it's brilliant.

It's absolutely bloody brilliant when it works in 50 minutes.

But the times it doesn't, you sit there thinking, oh no, they're going to be cross.

And what can I do?

Perhaps I could kind of get out at Finsbury Park.

Run from Finsbury Park.

What is Mary BF running through North London like this?

This is extraordinary.

Pushing fruit sellers out of her way like Indiana Jones.

So the privilege of the old lady, you know, she says, I really don't think it's a good idea to go by train.

This is good stuff.

Okay, so it's 6:30.

We're out of bed.

Are we having breakfast?

Are we having coffee?

What are we doing?

We don't have breakfast.

I've got a a very nice little coffee machine well quite big coffee machine and it makes decent cappuccinos so i was pouring two cappuccinos into me doing more email on my laptop downstairs before i went at 7 30.

what coffee machine is this what are we rocking mary it is a very favorite delonghi bean to cup as they call it bean to cup and you press the button which says cappuccino and then a cappuccino comes out the other end

that's what you want isn't it It does what it says on the tin.

It produces cappuccino.

If I could just step in here, my criticism of these machines and the genre of machinery, it's quite loud.

It's a bit too loud for me in the morning.

That's the only downside.

It is loud.

And I think that, you know, if you were to say,

suppose I had the whole barista kit at home,

would I be able to make a better cup of coffee after a bit of practice than what my instant machine does?

The answer to that must be yes.

Yes.

But think of the effort, you know.

You'd have a barista there, Mary, wouldn't you?

You know, now that is luxury far beyond having a driver to take you to London when you're fretting from it.

Can you also send the barista?

It's not surprising that they've never come up with the sort of coffee equivalent of a tease made

because you would simply be woken by the grinding of the beans five minutes before the alarm was about to go off.

That's a very good point.

Thank you.

We'll have to take that out of Dragon's Den, even though we have already invested £2 million of our own money in the coffee maid.

We were hoping you would be the face of it, Mary, you know, and we thought we'd soft-sell it.

Seems like you're not interested.

Okay, so what sort of emails are you getting?

It's all kind of great questions.

Can you come and write a book about this?

It's not people just emailing you saying, what pots do they use in Rome?

Well, look, it's kind of everything, you know, and I'm still on X and quite a lot of those questions come from X you know some of them actually are really really nice you get people who say look I'm in Rome and I'd really like to go and see a site that wasn't so crowded or ever you know sometimes you think oh god do I really have to answer this and you think yeah I do they've they've written to me I go out you know putting my views about Rome about

to the general population of the country you know i can't then say, if they ask me a question, I'm not going to answer it.

You know, that's what I do.

Please do.

Please do make it say, oh, fuck off.

I can't be asked today.

That's what I do.

But sometimes it's really worth it because you say, oh, where are you staying?

And you get a little bit of a, then you say, I'd go there.

And then later in the day, what happens?

You know, you get a selfie they took of themselves and saying, that was the best place I ever been.

And you think, that's worth it.

That really is worth it.

I am intrigued by the idea of, you know, being lost in Rome

contacting Mary Beard.

I need to get to the Colosseum.

I'm at the Trevi Fountain.

Do I go via Circus Maximus?

At that point, I do usually say I think Google Max is better than me.

But if you want a suggestion of what you could see on the way that would be interesting, I'm happy to do that.

What a service.

And just for our listeners, it's still marybeard1 at gmail.com.

The barrier is you've got to find out the email.

Okay, so now we've done our emails.

We've had two coffees.

We're not having any food.

Do you get a text to say your driver is here?

Yeah, that was lovely.

So out I trotted.

It takes two hours to get to London, you know, 7.30 in the morning.

I have to say, I listen to podcasts

most of the way to London.

And what are we listening to?

Because obviously we're a history podcast, I guess, aren't we?

Quite modern history.

We're a very recent history.

Modern history.

Modern history.

Modern history.

Did you listen to us?

There's two things I listened to.

One, I thought, God, I'm going to do their podcast tomorrow.

I better listen to it.

Please tell me it wasn't the Nish Kumar episode.

It wasn't.

I chose Richard Osman, actually.

He's what I chose to listen to.

But then also, I mean, we'll come on to this, but I'm going to be starting a podcast of my own.

And, you know, I listen to some podcasts, but I'm not a kind of real expert in the different varieties.

So before our podcast starting, I've been trying to, you know, do a kind of a bit of a tour of different sorts of podcasts and to see you know what I think works and what I think doesn't and Mary from what I know of you and your work I very much doubt you're going to be doing one of our kind of waffle type podcasts oh you'd be surprised

you'd be surprised but we shall see right

it's not going to be about yesterday that's for sure do we chat to the driver at all is there

Cambridge is very nice and traditional and there's a nice traditional car company and you know the driver and you have a chat about what you've been doing and you know.

Are there three little bottles of still water and a worth as original in the car?

I'm not sure about the word as original but there's three little bottles of still water and I always think I don't think I need this water and maybe I'll just leave it for the next person.

So you know I drank nothing but you can power your phone.

Yes.

kind of counted it as work, you know, I think that I wasn't listening to podcasts, I was doing research on podcasts.

Of course.

You listened to the Osman episode.

What other podcasts did you listen to?

I listened to The Ancients

because I'm doing an ancient podcast.

I wanted to kind of get a see what the competition's like.

What the style was.

Is it rubbish?

Is it terrible?

They're all very good, aren't they?

There he's leaving one-star reviews on Apple podcasts.

Not at all.

You know, happily, you know, many flowers can bloom and there's different sorts.

And,

you know, and I listened to a bit of the the rest is history just to check out what those guys are doing, the blokes.

I don't think that's going to catch on, that one.

I don't think that's a good one.

I know, I mean, you know, they were hoping for you know, an audience of millions.

Was it Mary?

You might know this.

There was a historian who went online and criticised loads of other books.

Was it Orlando Fegus?

It was.

It was.

That's rotten stuff, isn't it?

What it was, was that he went on Amazon and he gave one-star critical reviews.

So I think he'd admitted this.

I think this is not libelous.

I think it was all admitted.

And he apologised, but he gave one star reviews to the rivals.

That's so funny.

What I thought was amazing about that was not that he did it, because I've never done this myself, but I can imagine what it would be like to come home first thing in, you know, not first thing in the morning, come home last thing at night, a bit worse for wear and thinking, getting a laptop out, being a bit disinhibited and you know and doing that what i can't imagine is not getting up first thing the next morning and thinking oh my god and deleting them right i mean i can forgive most people for for saying stupid things online you know because you know who doesn't i just can't understand why if you'd done that you wouldn't delete it that's what's weird But do you, because it's the comedy world, I don't know, it seems that they're a really lovely community.

They all know each other.

David knows all the other comedians.

The broadcasting world, we don't really know each other.

You just sort of hear a bit of their show.

And most of us are bastards and go, God, what their show's rubbish.

Ours has got to be better than theirs.

You never go online and say, God, the show before us is shit.

But do you read other books and go, this is a bit weak, this is a bit flimsy, this one?

I mean, I think that, but I'd never say it.

Yeah, of course.

I mean, partly because...

Why bother?

You know, thinking's one thing.

You know, having a quick chat with your mates of an evening, you know, over a bottle bottle of wine, saying, God, I thought that book was dreadful, that's, you know, also seems to me fine.

But kind of telling the world what you think, that's the only time I do it is because I've written some children's books, is when another retired premiership footballer releases a book

that is so bad that is pure.

I mean, they probably didn't have much to do with the writing of it, but that's the one time I have no problem in going, the world did not need Frank Lampard's latest.

Happily for me, retired premiership footballers don't tend to write books about ancient Rome.

I'm sure it'll come, but they don't.

I have to say, I find the whole celebrity children's book world absolutely extraordinary.

Yeah.

Because people clearly think, because it's for children, it's therefore going to be easy.

And I think this must be the most difficult kind of thing to get right.

You know, you can write 500 pages on ancient Rome, writing 50 pages on ancient Rome for kids.

I just don't even imagine how you'd start to do that.

But if you read Steve McManaman's The Real Caravaggio, it is an incredibly in-depth, he's actually done a lot of research.

Fair play to Macka on that.

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Can I just make a point here?

So being from Dublin and spending some time in England, I'm very surprised that Cambridge is two hours from London.

I imagined it was closer and kind of that was the reason why Cambridge was there.

Is this to do with rush hour?

It's to do with rush hour.

I mean, you know, you do it at one o'clock in the morning and it's an hour and 15 minutes.

It's 45 minutes on the train.

The normal people still get the train.

It's 45 minutes on the train when the train runs on time.

And it is hard.

When it does, you think, that was the right decision to go on the train.

Okay, so we're in London.

Where are we going, Mary?

Well, we're going to do, because I've got this podcast about the ancient world, about the ancient world and how it works in the modern world, etc.

It's called, by the way, Instant Classics, and it's about us and the ancient world and all sorts of things.

You know, you know all about this, don't you?

You have to, and you're very pleased to give it a bit of publicity and talk to some journalists.

So I spent yesterday morning talking about how you do ancient Greece, ancient Rome, myth, theatre, plays, togus, how you do it on a podcast and why it's important.

And

that is great to do, absolutely great to do, but it's kind of exhausting, you know, when you do interview after interview.

And everybody is really nice because I don't know what they're going to say, but they don't actually come and say, look, we're really going to, what we want to do is really hammer you, you know, we think that this, you know, so it's a very pleasant way of spending your morning.

And you mostly...

you don't have that kind of opportunity to to witter on about what you want to witter on without somebody saying, excuse me,

it's my turn to get into this conversation.

So it's very, at that point, it's reaffirming, but it's kind of tiring.

Well, hang on, you must be famished here, Mary.

Have you had anything before you started?

I was very well provided for with a tiny bit of breakfast when I got to the interview location.

What was this?

Like a mini salt?

Some oatmeal kind of stuff with strawberries.

Yes, it was very nice.

Thank you, Holly.

Thank you, Holly.

Mary, I know that, you know, a lot of your work is about the relevance of classics today, and you will be delighted and horrified to know that my housemate here in Edinburgh at the moment is the wonderful Nish Kumar, and Nish and I independently in our shows, which are after each other in the same venue, have jokes about the wanking man in Pompeii.

Oh, right.

There is this skeleton cast

human remains which could be interpreted.

Which a comedian is kind of bound to interpret.

But I'm hoping that on our podcast, we can perhaps take that subject on, you know, once we've got into it and maybe examine the evidence a bit more carefully.

Are you saying he probably wasn't?

Jury's out.

The jury's out.

I see.

Okay.

So how many of these interviews have you got to do?

Did I do?

I did our four yesterday.

Is this sort of recorded or are these print ones?

Who have you got?

Mostly press, but we did another podcast I'm co-presenting this with Charlotte Higgins from The Guardian.

And so we did a podcast kind of setting out our store for another podcast.

Right, and which was the other podcast?

I can tell you this, I think.

It's intelligence squared.

They've not asked us on, if we're being honest.

Don't worry, I'm sure they will one day.

The square root of intelligence has been on several times, however.

They will, they just haven't got around to you guys yet.

They're working through the B team first before they get to the 80.

So you've done four interviews, you've had a tiny bit of oatmeal,

then it's lunch.

And it's lunchtime.

Okay, so we're having a fancy, are we, where are we going to?

Well, me and my kind of co-presenter, we thought, look, we're going to need a bit of a break.

And so got out of Google Maps, found a nice Greek restaurant just nearby and booked a table and it was absolutely brilliant.

I'm a Moussaka chef by trade, so I'm hoping.

And it's quite heavy for lunch, but it's the king king of the Greek dishes.

I'm afraid I had it.

I had, I have to say, I had stuffed vine leaves followed by Moussaka.

And I had some Asertico wine.

A slight brand of Asertico I'd never had before.

It was a bit brown, but jolly nice.

Brown wine.

It had been in clay pots, they said, been in clay pots.

Such is Mary's commitment to the classical world, that everything is served in urns.

That's it.

The

vomitorium takes place.

Of course, we spent absolutely appropriately, Charlotte and I spent most of lunch talking about the Odyssey because one of the things we're going to be doing on this podcast is we're going to have a book club which reads the Odyssey all the way through and talks about it for the next, I don't know, nine months, year, however long it takes us.

So we were kind of getting ourselves into Odyssey Book 2.

Right.

And is Homer's Odyssey a page turner?

Is it every bit as good as Grisham?

You will have to listen to our book club and you will find that it really is a page turner.

And of course, the Christopher Nolan movie is coming up next year.

So I reckon that everybody's going to want to know what the real Odyssey is like.

So that's what we're offering.

I've got some breaking news because I got in the WhatsApp group with my mum and dad to say, have you guys ever met Mary Beard?

Or do you have mutual friends, you know, in the academic circles of Cambridge?

My dad says, sadly not.

Her programmes are brilliant and witty.

Presuming you're a TV fan, no doubt you'll contact her direct.

Love to know her response.

He seems to think I was asking if he had Mary Beard's number.

But here's an interesting, you'll remember this.

When Cambridge United got to the quarterfinal of the FA Cup against Crystal Palace in 1990,

my dad didn't have a ticket.

And so he rang the club to say, look, I've been going for years.

I haven't got a ticket.

Can you get me in?

And they found him a ticket in the press box.

And he was next to Trevor Brooking.

So Trevor Brooking, former England International, Mary, Justin Gay.

I don't want to insult your intelligence.

You're aware of Trevor Brooking.

But my dad would always take a book to games because football can be Cambridge games, especially boring.

It can be a bit boring.

It can be a bit boring.

And at the time, my dad was reading Plato's Republic.

And so I have a signed copy of Plato's Republic that in the front cover says, good luck with everything, Max, Sir Trevor Brooking.

Oh, God, you know, that's good old Cambridge United days.

I have to say, I haven't been to see Cambridge United play for many a decade, but I used to go with my son when he was young.

Oh, okay.

What era is that?

When was that?

It's around that time.

You know, it was in the 90s.

Wow, the gloried Longball John Beck era.

We'd have been in the Abbey together.

Yeah, we must have been.

I didn't go that often, but I've been to see no football team live more often than I've been to see Cambridge United.

The only other one I've been to see is Shrewsbury Town.

Two greats, two giants of the game.

Absolute giants.

It's a bit of a shame because Cambridge won 2-0 at Bristol Rovers in the Canaba Cup first round last night.

I was very much hoping you say.

And then at five, I got the driver to take me to the Memorial Gown Bristol.

Mary's the only person who has a copy of the book on Stoics that's signed by David Beckham.

Mary, just so you're aware, if you're making more book recommendations for Max, he has two small children and he spent, we believe, a year to read Richard Osmond's Thursday Murder Club book.

So the idea of him settling into Aristophanes or whatever, I think.

I think you could do worse than Tales from the Odyssey.

I wouldn't, I don't know how old they are, Monks, but I wouldn't necessarily try what we're going to do.

It's quite for grown-ups, but there's some jolly good stories.

Right.

He's three and a half in six months.

Well, for three and a half, you know, six months, don't know, but three and a half.

The three and a half year old could take the Cyclops on him.

Yeah, I think so.

He's pretty sure.

You know, he's on to Captain Underpants.

Next job.

Where are the pictures don't worry Ian we're reading the Odyssey all right before you go to bed how many glasses of wine have we had Mary are you a little bit squiffy going into the afternoon what I decided as I got up at sort of six-ish I was allowed I try to avoid drinking at lunchtime you know it's kind of I mean that's about old age isn't it you know used to go out and have a few glasses and then go back to the library in the afternoon

I now can't even imagine how I kept awake and perhaps I didn't always but

I used to think

this is fine so I had well two very large glasses would be the euphemistic

and a moussaka makes it that's a tiring deal it was a tiring and I thought you know what I'm gonna do this was all planned of course I thought I am going to use the car drive back

to have a kip so that when I get back to Cambridge I'll be up and about and can start the day but actually I found it quite hard to go to sleep it must have been the moussaka i suppose you know a bit heavy on the stomach and listen to more podcasts.

I'm slightly disappointed that Mary didn't go on the news agents absolutely loose after half a bottle of brown Greek wine and just really start going off on eras of classical civilization she has no time for.

Ripped into maitless.

Okay, so we're back home.

Back to your front door.

This is nice.

What podcasts have we listened to on the way home, please?

Same ones, you know.

I listened to David Olishoka and and Sarah Church.

Well,

a bit more of the same, really.

I have a question here.

Mary, have you ever gone down the audiobook direction?

I mean, some of your books have been audiobooks.

Would you ever listen to one?

Some of mine, I've read myself.

That is a...

That's a kind of a milestone reading your own book out.

But partly because it takes forever.

And partly when you actually read it out to a microphone, you think, why did I say that?

So it kind of reveals to you.

My recommendation now, though I've never follow it myself, is that before any author's book actually goes finally to press, what they ought to do is they ought to sit down and they ought to read it out to themselves from A to Z.

Are you allowed to, when you're doing the audiobook, put in some caveats going, I don't think that now anymore.

Or, sorry, I would have written that differently, but it's too late now.

I think there were a couple of times when when I just decided unilaterally to alter it

without saying, because I thought, oh, let's make this better.

Max, I know you're the professional journalist here, but I have an actual question for Mary, which will be very unusual for this podcast.

We just joked about reading the Odyssey to your three-month-old.

Mary, did you have...

something read to you though when you were very young that sparked off this whole thing.

I think I did did have the I had the stories from the Odyssey read to me but I don't think I have to confess I don't think it's what sparked it all for me.

What sparked it all for me is something absolutely straightforward and it's a you know it's a moment that I've never forgotten is that we lived up in Shropshire and my mum thought we ought to go and see the capital city when I was five because I'd never been the first, I hadn't hardly been to Shrewsbury.

We were living outside.

So she got a driver, she got a driver.

We went to Shrewsbury and we got I think it was a steam train right I remember the smell of it right it was brilliant and we went from Shrewsbury then it went to Paddington and we had a kind of long weekend in London and my mum insisted that we went to the British Museum I wanted to see the mummies because that's what kind of five-year-olds want to see and she said well yeah we'll go and see the mummies she was a village school teacher so she said we better go and see something about Egyptian everyday life too.

Don't just want dead Egyptians.

We want what they did when they were alive.

And so we went to look at that.

And you guys won't remember because you weren't alive what museums were like in 1960 if you were a kid.

You know, the cases were very high and it, you know, child-friendly, it wasn't.

And she spotted in this case, she says, oh, God, the back of that case, there's a piece of Egyptian bread.

You know, it's three and a half thousand years old.

stuff the mummies I mean you know a piece of bread you know more than three thousand years old that's I really want to see it but it was at the back of the case and I couldn't see and we were a bit encumbered and I was a bit heavy and she couldn't lift me up really at that moment a guy walked past he seemed terribly old but he was probably about 40 I guess and he said was I wanting to see anything in particular and I said yes I want to see that piece of bread at the back of the case and he must have been a curator and he put his hand in his pocket he got keys out he opened the case and he brought out the bread right wow i couldn't touch it but i he put it right in front of my nose and that for me that was the moment you know it was it was kind of time travel it was face to

face to face with a piece of bread that old It'd be great if you just got out some sun pat and just

could have pretended anything.

And maybe I was very gullible and they were all fakes anyway, but I don't think so.

You know, so I think actually it wasn't great literature that turned me onto the ancient world.

It was this piece of bread.

And okay, it was Egyptian, not Roman, but, you know, same thing.

Wow.

It was the first ever sourdough starter.

And if you leave it for 3,000 years, it does become a great sourdough.

You know, it lasted well.

It had lasted well.

No, David, good question.

Although we can't use that in the episode because it didn't happen yesterday.

It happened again in my head yesterday.

Perfect.

Because I'm always remembering it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Why do I care about this stuff?

The bread.

Okay, so we get to the front door.

We open the front door.

What time are we now?

Three o'clock?

Five o'clock?

About half a three, quarter to four.

Okay.

At that point, I think,

didn't have a kip in the car.

Why not have a kip now?

Oh, yes.

But I don't actually, you know, by this, you know, the moment passes, doesn't it?

You know?

So I spent the rest of the afternoon doing kind of

the sort of chores that sometimes you don't want to do.

I mean, work chores, not cleaning.

You're not grouting the toilet.

Not grouting the toilet, you know.

And

so I'm doing a big event at Kew Gardens

and they wanted me to do a little voiceover for an ad they're doing.

So I thought, look, this is a perfect opportunity to do something like that.

And it took me forever because they'd sent me a text to read and it said, cannot be any longer than 30 seconds.

Right.

The first time I read it, it was 35 seconds.

Oh, yeah.

Oh god, I got to get a bit quicker than that.

It took me about 12 or 13 goes to get this bloody text down to 29.5 seconds.

So that took about half an hour.

Max, what Mary isn't telling us here is it was the wine as much as anything.

You mean maybe I was speaking slower

or just repeating words.

Now let me see Q gardens, the Lovely gardens.

And you know what?

There's this meeting today with, you know, the whole media team at Kew Gardens going, what are we going to do?

She's dribbling.

Oh, I love the gardens.

They're all right.

You know,

we can't use this, but how on earth can we tell Mary?

Mary might have a problem.

What do we do?

Can we tell one of her pets?

I'll tell you what I was doing.

Richard Osman's doing it.

So I was saying, you can talk to me and Tom Holland about ancient Rome and there'll be a TV moment with Richard Osman.

So I hope he's grateful for this.

Have you had sign-off?

Have they said that's great or have they said there was one point when I, as you will remember, I was the voice of Gavascon for many years.

And at one point I was, you know, just doing my Gavascon-y work, you know, Tom and Tim like food on the go, but for Tom, that means heartburn.

And for Tim, that means indigestion.

Sometimes it's the other way around or both.

And I was just doing the read as normal.

And clearly someone walked in and just went, couldn't we have a slightly more educated voice on this?

And they didn't realize I was just sitting there listening.

It's really fun to go, I can't hear you, I can't hear you in here.

So, have you had, have they said that's okay, Mary?

Have you had a kind of time?

I got a thank you, I got a thank you, but I had so because I'd done a previous version, which then they'd changed.

They obviously were cutting down the time.

So, I said, I don't think I can do another take of this.

So, it's kind of this or nothing.

Yes, so that was that.

Personally, I can't wait for Max's audiobook of his 2-2 thesis on

some people say the Mughal Empire was like the British Empire not so bad.

When he sent it to me, I'll send some frank opinions back about whether it would make a good audiobook.

I just didn't write it in time and then I just sort of thought, oh God, I've got to write this thing and it's so many words.

It's too many words.

So I just wrote it off like two books and then I went into like the Indian Institute.

with all the fancy books of Indian history and I just opened loads and found bits that looked like they could fit and then like the appendix was absolute bullshit.

I'd completely made up that I'd read any of these books and I think whoever marked it saw right through it.

Most academics are not stupid.

I discovered that the hard way, Mary.

You know, people think, oh, she's a silly old thing, it'd be easy to pull the wool over her eyes.

Not likely.

My thesis, can I just say, which was on philosophy of music, and was kind of based around this lovely idea, which was, I'd read somewhere that children around the world, when they're mocking each other, go nah, neh, like that minor third sound.

And so someone had written this theory of music based on major scales and minor scales.

Anyway, towards the end of my three books that I read to write this absolute piece of rubbish.

Basically, I'd read something from 10 years after the original source text that had said, yeah, this is all disproven now.

This is the most Western view.

The idea that there's eight notes at a scale, etc.

etc.

So, I effectively had to write an appendix to my thesis debunking the work that I had just done, but it was too late.

And that's a 2-2 as well.

I'll just say, you know, I might have given that a first because, you know, the idea of self-criticism, you know, I've written this, but now let's see it another way.

I think.

Can't I just say for the record, I ended up with a 2-1 after all the exams.

That's important to say.

So petty.

It's petty, you know.

I don't want Mary Beard to think I I got a 2-2 for good.

She'll just leave the podcast.

Mary Beard's just given me a posthumous first on mine.

Many congratulations.

We need a photo of you throwing your mortar board.

You're the one wearing a full mortar board, David, to try and impress Mary.

I don't know why you've done that.

I've referenced it, of course.

Okay, so what time are we at now?

We've not had an voiceover for Kew Gardens.

So we're now kind of about quarter past four.

Then I had a kind of nagging kind of worry because

it was only the day before

that I'd finished, actually kind of, you know, done the last full stop on the last chapter of my next book.

And I'd saved it, sent it off.

And I thought,

should I read that last chapter again?

You know,

I'd been so pleased because I'd been struggling with this chapter for six weeks.

What I was saying was all right, but it, you know, in the end, I just thought this is a bit boring.

It's just a bit boring.

Is that a caveat you do in the audiobook after

when you're?

This might be be a bit

coming up is a bit boring.

I don't like being boring.

I had eventually, you know, the cost of mental agony, really, you know, going to bed and having, you know, there's nothing worse, you guys know this when you're writing a book, there's nothing worse than going to bed with fewer words written than you woke up that morning.

Because what you've done is you've crossed off out, you haven't added.

And, you know, I'd been going through that, you know, so the chapter was getting shorter and shorter by the day.

Then I'd kind of somehow got my act together.

I'd thought, okay, and I'd talked to a few people and they'd be quite helpful.

And right, okay.

And so I'd actually, no, it'd take me about a week, but I'd redone it and finished it.

Final full stop, save, and sent it off.

But by the time I got back, I thought, maybe I should have just, you know, I've got plenty of time, you know, it's not going to go to press tomorrow, but maybe I ought to have another look at it.

And so what I first did was I read it through.

I made some few changes but I thought

you know I breathed a sigh of relief really because I thought okay that I'm not sure it's perfect but it's fine and it kind of you know the demons went out of my mind a bit at that point.

Okay that's good.

So on the front of the book that you've written you can have a testimonial from yourself.

Not perfect but fine.

What's this book about?

It's about why on earth we're interested in the ancient classical world.

My only fear, Mary, here is because you had given the essay in.

It depends if the lecturer lets you resubmit it because they might drop 10%.

In my experience,

there might be a penalty, but I'll take the penalty.

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Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse, and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest-paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, No, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's gonna tell you the truth.

How do I present this with any class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

AKA Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

What happens then with writing a book is that you've had all this kind of up-to-the-wire stuff,

you know, and then nothing happens for months.

You know, by the time it actually comes out, it was months ago when you were actually writing it.

But anyway, I think we're starting that process now, and so I'm going to forget it.

For the record, I think, although I let it pass when you said, you know what it's like writing a book, guys.

I went, yeah, I have never written a book.

I do write a column every fortnight.

A column.

Well, you know, 950 words.

And I look at the blank laptop laptop and i go i can't do another 900 words so a book is beyond me is the answer and don't give away all the end of your book ancient civilizations is it at least more complicated than this but you know when you get somewhere that's really old and you just think how the hell did they do that then like it's the sort of real basic but that is when you see the i don't know the pantheon or whatever and you go how they do this that many years ago it's partly that i think it's actually

and this i suppose is what you know went back to me encountering the Egyptian bread in the British Museum.

I think there's something about the sheer wonder of it, you know, that this is so many thousand years old and yet it's still here.

Or somebody, you know, a Roman emperor 2,000 years ago wrote this and we can still access it.

And there's all kinds of reasons for being interested in the ancient world.

But for me, it's that kind of mind-blowing, mind-boggling puzzlement, excitement.

I mean, you know, people often think how kind of head-splitting it is to think what being on the surface of Mars would be like.

And I find myself thinking, I think that about ancient Greece or ancient Rome.

How could you ever imagine what it was like?

You know, it is very near in all kinds of ways.

We can still touch it and feel it.

We can look at the bread and we can read the stuff, but it's 2,000 years old.

And we're both so near and so far, and it makes such a difference to us.

And yet, in some ways, doesn't matter at all.

Part of the reason for doing this podcast, I think, is because I don't think anyone really's life is any more interesting than anyone else's, right?

It doesn't matter who you think.

We're all doing the same shit, right?

And when you sort of think back to even Nero or whoever, they're still having to go to the toilet and thinking, what's for breakfast, you know?

And that's part of the familiarity.

you know you go to pompeii and you sit on one of the lavs and you think how many roman bottoms sat here before me etc etc and you know doing the same thing that's sharing and then you think

that's one side of it but they're completely different you know if a roman walked into walked into my house i wouldn't know what to say to them It's like they're from another place.

Chow.

Tried chow, you know, Salway, and they'd look a bit puzzled.

You know, and I think there's this kind of simultaneous similarity, sharedness, and complete difference.

And the thing that kind of often brings it home for me is that nobody in Rome knew what they looked like.

They could occasionally put on, you know, women put on, I'm afraid it sounds very sexist, but it's true, you know, they had a bit of shiny metal and that helped put on their eye makeup.

But they didn't know what they looked like, except in a pool or a bit of polished brass or something.

You think, what on earth would it be like

not to know what you look like?

What would that mean to how you lived your life?

I mean, particularly since Zoom and everything, we spend hours a day looking at ourselves.

Yeah.

And not even looking in the mirror.

We just turn on the Zoom call or what we're doing now.

And

we're always seeing ourselves.

We're seeing us as others see us.

And what would it be not to recognise yourself?

Is that me?

It's those kind of things, which I think,

what difference does that make?

For me, it's kind of it makes a head hurt trying to think about it.

This podcast has never got this interesting, Mary.

That's why there's the silence.

But, you know, some people think, oh, you know, of all these big questions that you have to get your head around about ancient Greece and Rome, like, how did the Roman Empire fall?

You know, I'm quite interested in those questions, but I'm not half as interested in those even bigger questions about what it was like to be somebody then.

Friend of this podcast, amazing surrealist comedian Sam Campbell, came to visit me a few weeks ago and the Romans in their infinite wisdom decided to leave Ireland to our own devices.

But we headed straight to Newgrange, which is it's a 4,500 year old R sort of Stonehenge-y thing where you go into a tunnel and they simulate what happens on the shortest day of the year where basically a laser beam shoots up a corridor?

At which moment I decided it would be funny to wet my finger and stick it in Sam Campbell's ear, which I haven't done since primary school, which I think really added to the moment for him.

But even the idea that these technologies were known and were lost.

New Grange is obviously amazing, and I've not been there, but I did go to Orkney quite recently, and I haven't been before.

And the Neolithic settlements on Orkney, there's a whole culture which I realised I didn't know much about.

I'd always thought about the Neolithic as, you know, let me confess, being some flints and then kind of mock-ups of men in animal things, you know, bashing out stuff.

The idea that you could go to a whole Neolithic village, you know, and there were kind of places to put the crockery and whatever they had and beds.

You know, I think the Romans are far enough away.

But this.

I did think then, and I think you could say the same for New Grange, really, that we always think about the British Isles from the south as if something, you know, culture starts in the south and spreads north.

You know, that's how the Romans came, that's how the Normans came and all that.

Actually, try thinking about it from the west and the north and coming south.

And suddenly you kind of, you've upturned your view of how history works.

Wow.

Right, so you have.

You've done a full stop.

Lesson over.

Lesson over.

Yeah, let's crack on with the day.

Can't use any of that stuff.

No, it was great.

You've finished the book again, and you're delighted you've finished the book again.

It's time for, surely it's time for another glass of wine to say.

No, not quite yet.

I had two more things to do.

But somebody had sent a book proposal and I thought, okay, you know, this is the kind of thing that you fit into these odd hours, right?

So I read the book proposal.

I commented on it and I thought, tick that off.

And then my son, who works on Middle Eastern history, had sent me a recent chapter that he'd written of a book that he's about to write.

And he said, oh, it doesn't matter when you comment on but i'd really love to know what you think so he's the one who we used to go to cambridge united together of course yeah was it about that was it about after john beck and trying to play when john beck trying to play passing straddle lower league football didn't come into it very much and about an extraordinary dissident journalist living between cairo and paris uh in the 19th century and so i read that or i read part of it and i kind of wrote to him and i thought right okay any good well i think he's good but i'm his mum no true true yeah and I corrected some of the, you know, what I thought were the infelicities of style.

And, you know, and he's got a very good eye for the subject.

He's just, he's just written a great book about fake ears and the occult in the early 20th century.

Just to be clear, that's fake ears, not fake ears, just in case.

Fakirs.

F-A-K-I-R-S.

Holy men of the electromagnetic age, as he puts it, right?

It will never cease to intrigue me how the apple does not fall far from the tree for Mary, yet Max's father, this eminent medic, has spawned this guy who waffles on about football.

The apple has fallen so far from the tree that people wonder whether someone might have kicked the apple down the road.

I see that point, but my son thinks the apple has fallen a very long way from the tree.

Because he thinks I work on all those boring old Greeks and Romans.

He is working on the culture of the Arabic world.

He teaches Arabic.

He's interested in theatre of the early 20th century,

Arabic feminism, and all that.

And he thinks it is a million miles from the Greeks and Rome.

Okay, sorry.

I apologise to everybody.

If you were here, that's what he'd say.

Okay, so you do his book.

You've done your book.

You've done his book.

Then there's the question,

you know, I had these two large glasses of wine.

Am I going to...

Crack on.

Am I going to crack on?

And what we have at home, because I've been trying to be a bit abstemious recently just because I think it's good to take time off yeah but we've got some of those you know those little bottles of wine you can buy in supermarkets which are kind of one big glass yeah yeah I sometimes get them we started to buy them because there's something terrible sorry this program is going to make me sound like a complete alkyne I promise you far from it you get 17 of those bottles and you pour them into a bucket and then you go out you go apple bobbing and then you pour it in and put it on your cup you know what I mean there's something if you think oh I'll just open a bottle of wine, I'll just have a glass and put it back in the fridge.

It's terribly easy to say, oh, I'll just have another glass.

Sure.

Whereas if you open one of those little, they're often not very nice, so that also helps.

Yes.

But you kind of think, right, that's what I'm going to have.

It's a screw cap.

I'm opening it, throwing it away, and that's it.

So that's what I did.

I thought, that's right.

Just one tiny Jacob's creek.

That does the job.

I've already did the job.

Yeah, have you having any dinner, Mary?

Yeah, we had Moussaka earlier.

This is the kind of marital dilemma, isn't it?

You know, I'd gone and had a great Greek lunch, lunch, and the husband had sat here and had a bit of cold pork or something.

I don't know.

So he's kind of up for supper, and I think the last thing I need

is another meal, right?

So we compromise.

We compromise when there's still kind of an inch of wine in this little bottle.

We compromise on cooking the asparagus that we'd bought.

And so he has a very large plate of asparagus and I have kind of two spears.

That's not enough.

If I've not had a big lunch, just a plate of asparagus.

I don't think you've compromised enough there, Mary.

Well, I also let him get out some cheese.

It's very nice cheese and he had some cheese, bread and cheese.

What cheese was it?

Was it just a normal cheese?

What was it?

It was Baron Bigo, you know, the British Brie.

Really nice.

Wow.

So he had a bit of that and some asparagus and

packed up with the bread, you know, so that, you know, he felt full.

Good.

Now I'm really hoping you then both get the projector down and watch Fast and Furious 8.

I'll tell you what I did.

I then thought, oh, God, I've got this podcast tomorrow.

By this stage, it is,

must be 8 o'clock, right?

It's got this podcast.

It's going to be, what did I do yesterday?

Am I going to remember?

So I sat down for a quarter of an hour and I wrote down in my little notebook what I'd done so that when you said, what did you then do,

I had it, right?

If anybody else is thinking of appearing on this program, I fully recommend me writing down everything you did so you don't forget it.

I thought you were going to say that you had panicked that there was insufficient content, so you'd robbed a car or something like that.

You do think, is there enough here?

You know, is there enough?

I'd also been assured that it should be true, right?

So you will notice that I have, you know, the true kind of boredom of the last half of my day has, I hope, come out, you know, and I have not, I've not invented a car chase or anything like that very bearded a car chase go on by the one-way system of cambridge i'm in for it beards and a chariot

i've been totally honest and you can you know you can see what the life of a retired academic is like it is you know sitting down with their laptop you know reading people's book proposals but i felt very pleased because i thought otherwise i'm going to get up in the morning and i'm going to think what did i do when i got back right so i wrote it down

then i thought you know and i'm afraid afraid we're quickly coming to the end of my day.

I got up at six, remember?

Yes.

And it was really hot yesterday.

And I thought, what do I do now?

You know, you can't go to bed at half past eight, right?

You know, can you?

Oh, you can.

Mary, you're talking to a man here because Napoleon-like, he can sleep in a drawer at any given moment.

What the husband said, because, you know, our house is, you know, an old house and it's not terribly sunny.

And so it's not that hot, but it's still, you know, you think, you know, I feel a bit sort of debilitated in our bedroom we've got one of those old colonial style fans in the ceiling of our bedroom it is amazing you know it is amazing you know and you instantly you put it on full blast cool air appears to come from nowhere so he said why don't you go and work on the bed you know why don't you go because then you could have the fan on it would be this debate has taken you know in the way that marital debates are quite slow you know we're pressing quarter to nine probably probably.

It's 1 a.m.

It's pressing quarter to nine.

Okay, that's what I'll do.

I'll be really nice.

And it was, I put on the bed, I took my laptop.

Mary, is there not a time when you just kick back?

It's...

Well, that was the lunch.

I mean, okay, we were talking about the Odyssey, but it was the two very large glasses of brown I said to go.

Okay.

That for me is kicking back.

Maybe you have better ways of doing it, David.

That's for me.

Right?

Yeah, okay.

And, you know, people are always wanting you to be on their podcasts and things.

And so you have to do the prep.

Question, Mary.

Do you have enough cushions?

Because I find working on the bed because I'm not quite perfect angle and looking down a bit.

It's not ideal.

And you want to be right under the colonial fan, right?

What I do is both the husband and I have two pillows on the bed.

So if I do that,

what I do is I put one pillow underneath the laptop and an extra one behind my back.

And then it's fine.

I recommend it.

You need to elevate the laptop.

Yeah, I've actually put my laptop for this episode on a few history books and a Robert Harris novel.

I mean, that sort of history isn't.

Really?

Which one?

Ah, Conclave.

Oh, God, I think that is really good.

Is it a good one?

Yeah, and the film was very good, too.

I'm not going to say which is better, but both are well worth a look.

I just thought that would help.

That sort of, you know, the laptop would feel the historical vibes.

Okay, so what are we working on now this is an endless never stop working mary well now

what's changed really in the life of the academic over the last 10 years particularly i think since covid but before is that almost everything that you want to read in academic journals you can get on your laptop Sure.

You used to have to go to the library.

You say, I'll get up early and I'll go to the library and I'll look that up.

Blow the dust off an old.

That's right.

Blow the dust off.

You think no one's read this for a long time, et cetera, Blow the dust as well.

That is the revolution for me.

You know, you can think, you know, I've got to read some of those boring old articles about the second book of the Odyssey, which is what I'm thinking about at the moment.

And I just do it.

I just click on them and there they are.

But there's a, I'm afraid there is a kind of nasty follow-up this story.

I think, right, okay, it's going to be good.

I'm going to get through this.

I'll save them in my little file on my laptop so I've got them, you know, safe and I can come back to them.

So I start doing that.

I think I'm getting on quite well, actually.

But then I don't remember very much until kind of the 10 o'clock news is playing on the radio because I've put the radio and my husband is wanting his pillows back.

I've just dropped off, you know, and it's 10 o'clock.

Love it.

And this is kind of granny bedtime.

I mean, I can't imagine 30 years ago the idea of saying that I'd sort of dropped off at 10.

You know, I would have been so embarrassed.

Look, I put Ian Rushton to bed at quarter to seven last night and I'm lying in the bed next to him and I definitely dropped off at seven.

So dropping off at ten is not a crime, Mary, in my eyes.

It's a dream.

That's what it is.

So, you know, and I think, well, that was the day then, you know.

And that's it.

And that's it.

So I'm afraid, guys, that's all you get because

as far as truth goes, there's, you know, unless I were to get, you know, really economical with it, there's nothing else else i could say that i did got up in the middle of the night and went and had a pee you know i don't know whether that was before or after midnight because i did it

mary left out the six episodes of love island she watched on her phone throughout the day

the secret is out well mary thank you so much for coming on i hope you enjoyed it well i did and i was i thought to start with this doesn't sound like my kind of podcast really

once i'd listened i just thought it's quite a clever idea.

It is quite a clever idea because it's hard to lie.

You know, if you interview people, you know, the temptation to embroider in just a straight interview to make yourself look a bit better than you are.

And also, you won't get more sort of aggressive.

It's two frosts you've got here.

So, you know, we are going to get the truth.

It's one is Frost and one is Tom Cruise and a few good men going, you can't handle the truth.

So between us, we will, the truth will always out.

This is, I think, the success of this podcast, Mary, and why we're so grateful for you being here.

But also, I think it's important because in 3,000 years' time, when this civilization is almost entirely lost, what if this podcast is the only thing that remains and some child like the young Mary Beard, this is their piece of bread when they try to imagine what this life was like.

I was going to say that, Tom, I hope you're archiving it.

You know, give it to the Bodleian or something like this because this is fantastic historical material.

One day in my life.

There it is.

That's the quote.

That's the quote.

That is the quote.

Thank you so much, Mary.

Thanks for coming on.

Thanks, Mary.

Pleasure.

So there we are, David.

And what was that quote at the end?

I mean, you've just heard, heard, listeners have just heard it.

She gave me a first.

She gave you a first.

That's all I could get for.

This is an amazing moment of history or something like that.

Whatever she said, can we remember what she said?

Strap that on the podcast.

That's great.

That was really interesting.

That bit where she was just talking about, you know, people not being able to see themselves in ancient Rome and, you know, how people existed and stuff.

It's really...

And the mentality is what we are doing too.

The origin story, which I know you didn't approve of because it didn't happen yesterday, I felt good.

That was good journalism from me as well.

Well done, David.

Yeah.

Give yourself a bat on the back.

Did you want some affirmation?

You're doing a really good job, David.

Well done.

Keep it up.

But thank you to Dame Mary Beard.

Yeah, listen to her podcast, Instant Classics.

I mean, even though we are both doing history podcasts, I don't think either step on each other's toes.

There,

we'll do our best.

If she gets Tom Rosenthal on, then stay in your lane, Beard.

That's what we'll say.

very sad that she doesn't know mum it's just amazed that my parents don't know you know she's got some mutual friends somewhere mum will know when mum gets back in touch we'll find out um but if you'd like to get in touch with the podcast here's how

To get in touch with the show, you can email us at what did you do yesterday pod at gmail.com.

Follow us on Instagram at yesterdaypod.

And please subscribe and leave a review if you liked it on your preferred podcast platform.

And if you didn't, please don't.

And there we are, thanks, David.

In it for life, we're branching out.

It's an exciting time, isn't it?

Not only is everything showbiz, everything is history.

Everything is history, everything is showbiz.

What we hope is we carry the people that only want to hear about shit with us to these different fields.

In it for life.

Thank you very much, Max.

Thanks, David.

Olivia loves a challenge.

It's why she lifts heavy weights

and likes complicated recipes.

But for booking her trip to Paris, Olivia chose the easy way with Expedia.

She bundled her flight with a hotel to save more.

Of course, she still climbed all 674 steps to the top of the Eiffel Tower.

You were made to take the easy route.

We were made to easily package your trip.

Expedia, made to travel.

Flight-inclusive packages are at all protected.

Hello, Max Rushton here.

You might remember me from Series 9, Episode 2 of Parenting Hell.

I'm here to tell you about Dog by the Bakery Door, the debut children's book by author Jamie Bruce.

Dog by the Bakery Door is a charming story of the magical things a little boy sees on a normal trip to get a coffee with his mum.

Perfect for newborns, three-year-olds, six-year-olds, all children.

Just Google Dog by the Bakery Door.

Here's a review from my three-year-old son.

Dog by the Bakery Door.

I have this book.

Full disclosure, the author might be his mother and my wife, but even more more reason to buy it.

She is to live with us and a baby 24/7, has sacrificed her career for mine while also being an amazing mum to two boys.

Thank you, goodbye.