We do a lot of that these days—catching up. Friends, colleagues, family members we haven’t seen for a while. For me, this is now starting to spill over into a new phase, that of meeting up with people I’ve met on Zoom, who are now available for coffee in a local cafe. My favourite kind of outing.
This week, I’ve also been trying to catch up with some actual exercise, as I’ve been a bit under the weather, sticking close to home. So when I set off for a walk the other day, I thought I’d try an experimental way of writing this week’s episode. Usually, I sit at the computer and start typing, discovering who is saying what to whom and why as I go. This time, I wrapped up warm, headed outside, took out my phone, opened up the voice recorder app, and started talking to myself, as if I were Helen. My plan was to transcribe anything useful that came up, and create the episode from that.
I arrived back home with about 25 minutes of recording, footsteps, traffic and all. As I listened to it, I thought “why not?” Why not just Helen walking and talking to herself. Some of her ruminations, I’ll admit, were more interesting than others, and it was too long. So I’ve spent time editing it down, cutting out the noisiest traffic. Hopefully it contains enough of interest to hold your attention for the 15 minutes it ended up!
