 Welcome back. The Irish Writers Festival is really peaking now. We're so excited about the next session. All of the sessions have just been a flame with brilliance, with energy, with curiosity. I'm sure you'll all agree that you've had just an amazing run of crazy writing and wild minds combining in unexpected ways. I want to give a really heartfelt thanks to our partner organisations. The Embassy of Ireland and Culture Ireland have helped out immensely and through a fantastic party last night. We're all in love with the Doyle Collection hotels who have hosted our writers in such magnificent style, my new favourite hotel. And of course our lovely friends, Kirch Festival, are you in here? They're buzzing about the place but of course without Kirch Festival we would not have been able to put all of this together. Now, the next session is The Mighty Kit De Waal, The Rodfather. Thank you, Twitter. And my favourite radio voice, please come on stage guys, it's Peter Curran with whom we've all been to bed by which I mean bunk bed. Sorry, did that go a bit weird? Anyway, a massive round of applause please for our fantastic event. Thank you very much. Thank you very much indeed. I jump in there, folks. You're very welcome and so delighted that the British Library, I don't know why I'm doing this standing up this, but it feels improper to sit down without saying this first because the two people we're going to hear from have made such compelling and memorable marks on the cultural and literary landscape in lots of countries. Now I'm hoping this will be a free flowing chat beside an illegal turf fire, but hoping that you'll take the opportunity to join us and ask a few questions. But could you just say it isn't an opportunity to take out that aged script that you stand up and rant at guests on the stage every time? Not to put a damper on it, but it'd be lovely to hear from you, but no preprepared statements of a revolutionary government about to arrive. That would be really lovely of you if you could restrain yourself. Kit The Falls, latest book without warning and only sometimes scenes from an unpredictable childhood, is an amazing work charting, the vivid daydreams and sometimes lurid reality of life in 60s and 70s Birmingham with the Irish mother and the Caribbean father. Roddie Doyle's Life Without Children shows the pandemic allowing his characters to scrape away the years of experience and relationships to expose a lives not lived with some mixed results. Please welcome Roddie Doyle and Kit The Val. So I'm sure we can, between three words, imagine the sort of turf fire, you know, lively but contemplative chat, that sort of thing. It's struck me reading both your books that Ireland, its people, the diaspora, the place has changed so much since you both started writing now. Have you felt yourselves your antenna kind of having to be adjusted and sort of retuned a little bit, Roddie? Yes, yeah, absolutely. I recently did a book with a co-wrote book with a boxer, Kelly Harrington. She won a gold medal for Ireland in the Olympics last year and she happens to be gay. She married, surprisingly enough, a woman in April of this year. We were going through the book and working on doing her biography. We both agreed that the fact that she was gay was probably the least interesting thing about her. Whereas if we'd been writing the book 20 years ago, we may not have mentioned the fact that it would have been up to her to decide, but it might have been something that she wouldn't have been all together confident or comfortable writing about. So, you know, it struck me just so, yeah, times constantly change. I mean, I've been writing now for nearly 40 years and I have to be alert to that all the time, just language attitudes. I can't take for granted, for example, the whole north side, south side divide of the city anymore, Dublin that is. There's a whole west side now that's kind of, from my point of view, unexplored. So, it's always a work in progress, so to speak, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I'm remembering back to the woman who walked into doors that came out in the early 90s or mid-90s, and ever seen as extraordinary, A, that a man, an Irish man should be writing about domestic violence and a woman being brutalised, but also, stylistically, there was a resistance to you breaking out of, I suppose, the film version of Roddy Doyle, as opposed to the literary version. I was deliberate, you know. I've always tried to do something different. I'd always be afraid of being stuck in a rut. Everything has to be a bit of an adventure, not necessarily an ice adventure, but an adventure. Put your mic up when you sit down. What up when I sat down? Well, I keep talking. What was I saying? You were talking about that. Yeah, it was never done then. Very deliberate, and the first three novels were straight lines. They were very linear, and then, well, I wanted to do something else, so I wrote Paddy Clark, and then I'd done that, and I wanted to do something else entirely different. I'd written about an emotionally successful family, and I wanted to write about the next door neighbours. I remember a publisher from a European country saying to me after the woman who walked into doors came out, nobody wants to read this shit. She wasn't my publisher when the next book came out. That's terrible. That was to a greedy attitude, yeah. The structure of the book is on three parallel tracks, her distant past, her recent past and her present, and that was very deliberate, and I remember listening to some guy on the radio saying, I'm not sure if it was deliberate, but the way the book is structured is quite intelligent. Like, I was the monkey at the typewriter, you know? So, yeah. Have you ever had reviewers saying hidden depths to your work? Yes, I've had people say, in fact, I've had the opposite experience where people have said, oh, when she used this sentence, she meant that, and I was going, I didn't actually. It's like a woman's washing up, but the washing up is a metaphor for something. I was going, no, she's just washing up. And they've given me an intelligence I never possessed in writing the book. And saying that, I remember reading the trick to time, and it's amazing evocation of a woman looking back on her sort of lost life and just thinking, you know, is this going to be it? Is it me and my dolls in my shop or, you know, are these mad romantic possibilities I'm thinking of at the moment? And it's felt like a story of ancient Ireland at the time. So just tell us a wee bit about the genesis of that book. I've written about Leon, who was eight, and from my next book, very much like Roddy just said, I just didn't want to go back to writing about children. I wanted to write about someone at the other end of the life. And when I first started writing about Mona, she was, you know, it was a week, a couple of days before her 60th birthday, I was 57 at the time. And the way I imagined just a woman three years or older than me, she was, you know, beige, elasticated, waist, you know, and I started writing, I was like, hang on a minute, she's three years older than me and I'm writing out a woman who's got possibilities. The youth of 60, really. Not the sort of decrepit woman that I'd imagined. I don't know why, because I've just got a very, very strange view of my own youth, possibly. I'm very immature. So I had to recalibrate her and I used like two characters that are in the book, Pestilence and Famine, these two Irish women, and I based them on my grandmother. My grandmother had two sides to her. She was a vinegar-tongue, beachy woman, but full of love as well. And so I just made it into two people. And so Pestilence, who was just a terrible woman, she was just like slicing and wicked and then this lovely other soft sister. And I really wanted it to be, started off as the relationship between those three women and then it extrapolated out to include, you know, the loss of a baby. And also the pub bombings. I wanted to talk about the pub bombings of Birmingham, which was very present in my life as an Irish child, and I can remember the abuse that Irish people got in 1974 in Birmingham. It was not good to be Irish. I mean, my uncles had Irish accents, which they toned down. They stopped going to Irish pubs for the immediate aftermath of the pub bombings. And of course, nobody looks at me and thinks I'm Irish. So I was hearing what English people were saying about Irish people in front of me, because it was okay to say it. And I, you know, I was 14 at the time, and I never said, hang on a minute, I'm Irish. I was a complete coward and didn't sort of say I'm an Irish child. And they'd be talking about the dirty Irish, the liars, the terrorists, bombers, murderers, you know, just terrible things. And I'd just be at school or at a bus stop. And I would just be sort of sitting there going, you know, it was not a good time. And I wanted to address that, what it was like to be Irish in 1974 in Birmingham. And yet that sense of otherness has served you really well. Yes. In terms of just being able to sort of bring these words to life. And your latest book, A Memoir, has a very kind of, I suppose that there's a universality to a child, kind of realising it doesn't have any power at all in the world, but that sort of collision between Irish culture and Caribbean culture, well, a certain type of Caribbean man, I suppose, in your dad. Why did you hold back until now before writing A Memoir like this? I was actually writing a novel and I was approached to write My Memoir. And I just, I couldn't think of anything more boring than writing My Memoir. But after enough flattery and hard cash, I decided to re-evaluate, re-evaluate that. I thought actually maybe there is a story. So I really had to think, I mean, obviously, you know, you write a novel, you're God. You know, if someone needs to die, they die. If something needs to happen, it happens. It's very confining to write a memoir. If you're going to be truthful because you have no one, no one can die. You can't make somebody die if they didn't die in real life. So that was quite a challenge to find a plot because, you know, what is the plot of your own life? You're still alive. Unless you've done something extraordinary, it can be quite boring. Which is why The Memoir finishes when I'm 21. Because my childhood was interesting. I'm quite boring now. You know, I make jam. I knit. I go to Tescos. That's not really interesting. My childhood was interesting because I had no power over it. But at least towards the end of the book, you actually managed to make your job interview. Sound exciting? Yes. So, you know, you served a reader even though you were entering, as you say, that period of dullness that you know. Rodi, I was going to ask you about, you know, this idea that, you know, when you're drawing on sort of source material, I've always wondered now about you going into pubs on your own for a quiet pint and sort of sitting there. You've always wondered. Always. Yeah. I was more and wondering. Oradically wondering. And, yeah, you're one of those guests when you're asked a question. Do you go, what do you mean by that? I just saw the opportunity. I grabbed it. Go on anyway. Can I just interrupt here? There's a scene that you write in Smile. Quite a few scenes, but a particular scene in a pub. And I absolutely, I thought, God, you've nailed it. I read it about three times and I thought, there's nothing much in it. And yet you've been in that pub. You've met those characters. It's so good. It's really good. I admit it, I've been in pubs. I knew it. The writer's artifice has blown apart. I feel so much better. Thank you for giving me the opportunity. So you were going to ask me a question. I was going to ask you just about that idea of just the atmosphere in the pub when Roddy Doyle goes in and sits down and people at the bar go, Jesus, do you think he's thought of anything yet? Have you said anything interesting or been characterful? I'm never interesting in a pub, no. I'm thinking about the other people. Well, in my local, there's a guy who looks a bit like me. To look like me, you have to have a bit of a beard, glasses and no hair. And people very often go up to him and ask him, are you Roddy Doyle? And he tells me, he brings me up today, Sean, who's been asking, none of them have asked me. He looks more like me than I do. So I don't pay him or anything like that. He just happens to be in the place. So that's ground. No, I don't think, I've never, the people, my friends anyway, have never seen themselves in anything I've written. Or if they have, I've always forewarned them and said, you remember the time we did this, I took a kind of fictionalized version. I don't have conversations the way, in the same way I say the two pints guys do. So no, it's all fiction. The atmosphere of the pub, I mean on my last novel, Love, it's kind of a troll through Dublin pubs based on rock solid research. Selfless? Years of, years and years of panclos devotion to my craft. Really? Going home and writing the odd bit. No, it's largely, you know, you reach a point in your life where you look back more than you look forward because there's a lot more there than there is looking forward. The early books are about people striding forward. The later ones are about people looking backwards and trying to account for various things that happened. And I think that's where, why there would be a lot of pubs in what, because the pub is such a vital part of my life when I was younger. And I suppose that environments like that, they tend to sort of trigger random memories, things just kind of burst into... Yeah, not just pubs, everything. You know, I can't go down the road without something sparking off a memory these days. You know, even the bad ones are welcome, really. But the pubs, you know, you were saying as well, you know, there are some pubs in Dublin that seem exactly the same as they were 40 years ago. And of course things have changed so much that there were pubs where a woman couldn't get served and the woman couldn't get served a pint. I remember even when I was going out with my wife at the beginning, it was a place that wouldn't serve her a pint. She could have two... A half on in the ladies' glass? Two of them. Did happily give her a pint in two glasses. You know, I'd have been happy with that arrangement. I think it's kind of quite stylish or whatever. Showing a sense of size. And, you know, the clientele has changed. And of course, you know, I remember being hugely amused and impressed by the outlets in the pubs and like they were about half my age now, I'd say. And I am that outlet now, you know. So the whole, the camera angle shifts and changes. But it's an interesting... It's an interesting world. It's a world that's not replicated anywhere else exactly. No. You know, exactly. So, you know, I'm quite parochial and that all my characters live and work in Dublin, so... I've worked in a... for about four months in a bar in Stony Butter. And the early 80s before it became, you know, sort of she-she clerks to the arms, which I think it's a clerks hotel and he forgot the name of Ulysses for a minute there. But one of the things, that sort of delicious anonymity, whether you're mining your own past or you're sitting down in the blessed quadness as a writer, what happens to you? How do your shape change when you have to spend half the year going round talking to agents like me about why you wrote that? And so forth, do you know what I mean? It's the opposite of that solitary creative space, isn't it? I don't spend half the year wandering around. I spend most of the year on my own. Well, like I have a family in it, but the working days by myself. And that's it most of the time. But I'm quite happy. I'm quite happy answering questions. I like, you know, the excuse to get out and mingle and talk to people is quite welcome, really. A bit bizarre when you're wearing a microphone and there's a couple of dozen people listening to you. But other than that, no, it's quite... I wouldn't do it if I didn't enjoy it, you know. No, no, no. You know, during the lockdown, I was supposed... I did the Vancouver Literary Festival on a Saturday night. And you think, oh, that's cool. He's gone to Vancouver. But no, I went upstairs to my office exactly at the same time the match in the day music was starting. And it was hell, it was horrible, you know. So this is really great, you know. As long as I'm not doing it next weekend, the weekend after the weekend. I don't know if I'm answering your question. Yeah, no, no. It's interesting that you move sort of fluidly between the space. I'd hate to hear myself complaining. You know, giving out. I'd hate to hear myself giving out. Cos why would I be here if I didn't want to be here? So if you hear people giving out about having to do it... Also, it's such a privilege to have... to speak to and hear from people that read your books and buy your books and people have bought a ticket. And, you know, if there are many, many good writers who don't get invited to literary festivals and they would love to. So I think it's a great privilege to be able to be invited and to be able to speak to people about your book as long as, as I say, they don't ask you how wise you are to put something in your book because normally it's not wisdom that's been put in something in your book. And also the questions that you get from the audience they're usually just amazing. You know, things you never thought of and I've had questions asked to me. Someone knows the book better than me. They've said, oh, on page 67, you know, when you said that and you think, Jesus, did I? And it's a shock because someone's ready closer than you ever intended. We were both given outside earlier and we both give outside afterwards. But we're both delighted to be here. Well, yeah, I was going to say, you want to hear what they were saying about you back stage. It might be a good point, actually, to hear a reading. Who would like to give us a shout first? It feels like school now. No, exactly. There's only two people to choose from as well. I'll start. OK. Do you want to set this up for us? I will. I will. So when I was sick, my mother's from Wexford, good Catholic girl, and when I met my dad, when I was six, she became a Jehovah's Witness. Somebody knocked the door, as they do, and my mother fell free hookline and sinker, and our life changed. Mum gets baptised at the big assembly in London and people start to call her sister. She learns all the rules and all the things that she has to do to actually get to paradise. All the studying and preaching and not smoking and not fornicating, nor swearing nor stealing, or even thinking about stealing, and giving a little bit of money if you can afford it and remembering the widow's might if you can't, and making sure that everyone knows you're a Jehovah's Witness because otherwise you are like Peter, my Jesus, his best friend, and grabbing every single opportunity to witness to people, even in the most unusual circumstances, like on the bus or at the park, and answering questions at the kingdom hall by putting your hand up and reading out a scripture, and attending every single meeting no matter what the weather, and deciding whether you want to be wheat or you want to be chaff because the chaff gets blown away and the wheat is not. Women not wearing trousers and men always wearing a suit and tie and never having a beard because that would make them look like a hippie, but a moustache is okay. And women not teaching men but knowing their place in God's order of things. And children remaining virgins until marriage and only marrying another Jehovah's Witness and cutting out any bits of yourself that felt like they were turning you sexual, which is an abomination onto the Lord, and remembering not to talk to anyone who used to be a Jehovah's Witness but got themselves this fellowship. And from now on, if you were in doubt about anything whatsoever, there is a scripture in the Jehovah's Witness special edition of the Bible that can tell you how to behave and what to do. Play your cards right, keep the rules, and you will live forever. Of course it's important to remember that Jehovah made us with free will. Maybe you don't want to keep the rules. Maybe you know other games that don't involve the Bible. If that's the case and you don't want to live forever, there is also something waiting for you. For the liars and thieves and people who watch top of the pops instead of going to the meeting and people who accept birthday cards and people who want to have sex with their boyfriend or girlfriend or boyfriend and girlfriend and people who think him sound nice and anyone who is a Catholic or Muslim or Sikh, Christodelfian, Methodist, Baptist, Mormon, Seventh-day Adventist, Church of England, Hindu, Jew, Atheist, Scientologist, Buddhist, or just plumb not interested, there is a terrible death waiting for them. They will die at Armageddon when God brings his righteous judgement on all the evil people in the world with earthquakes and floods and fires and death and destruction. There is not long to wait. No, the end will come in 1975. That was wonderful. It makes the Christian brothers seem like lightweights. Just off the bank of it, do you think maybe that thing about the very sort of vivid and cuteness of exclusion you felt not being able to join in school assembly hymns and stuff like that, it sounds maybe a crude correlation but did that make your imagination as a future writer explode? Definitely. I wouldn't have said so. I didn't know at the time but obviously I've read the Bible maybe ten times. There's great stories in the Bible that play of good and evil. Being an outsider and observing because very much as a Jehovah's Witness you have to be an outsider. Very, very often you're told to be no part of the world. So you observe and you observe a lot and then you're getting all these stories David and Goliath, Daniel and the Lion, all of those stuff and I think it does help you to be to have your imagination and it helps you to be a writer although I loathed it at the time. I didn't think, oh this would be great just like, I wanted birthdays and Christmas like all children and never got them. Yeah, it's wonderful. I mean wonderfully described, however horrific. I'm glad the yawning chasms in the paving stones didn't open and swallow you. Absolutely. It's quite an opening to kids book. It's worthy of a Hollywood thriller or a supernatural and sci-fi one. Roddy, from that particular world kit of folks, you're going to take this somewhere different. Yeah, I was writing a novel when the first lockdown occurred and once we got the hang of it in the house I was in England actually when it started when the lockdown in Ireland started and when I got home I felt a bit like typhoid Mary I thought I was going to bring this pestilence into the house and my wife had been telling me about social distancing and the two-meter divide and I didn't know whether you were supposed to do that in the house as well. I really was late, do you know what I mean? Late, but when I got the hang of it I took out a novel I'd been working on and I realised it was completely redundant because the present day didn't exist anymore. So I was a bit lost, you know. So I started writing a short story based on a moment and then I thought a month later there's a different moment now because we've got into our stride a bit and then throughout the first year of the pandemic I was writing stories because I didn't trust the longer form, you know? So they're all in this book here. That's really interesting. Well, lack of permanence, the insecurity. Cutting short notes. Yeah, yeah. I had a novel coming out and it was pushed back. I had three theatrical productions that were postponed or cancelled. My whole life, now I don't mean my whole life, I mean I was still living, breathing, walking two kilometres and walking home and you know. So life was going on grand and I was still working but if you like, I had a map of me here and that map of the next couple of years had just gone, disappeared, you know. A couple of phone calls in the space of a week and bang, Jesus. So I started writing the stories and it was great to have, because the creative energy was there but I didn't know what to do with it. My stories were my way back in, so to speak. So this is called The Funeral. Lovely. I'm just going to read a few pages. Out loud as well. I thought I would. The last days had been hard. The last day, the day of The Funeral had been very hard. The Irish do funerals well, they say. Death doesn't frighten the Irish. They know all the right words. He was a legend, a saint she was, a saint. He did great things for this place. I'm sorry for your troubles. I used to love meeting her. He'd be missed around the town. They know how to sing, they know how to get drunk. They know how to stay polite for the day. If there's a genius, if there's a national flair it's in the ability to get rat arsed and remain civil and cute to let go and hold back, to wait. Except for one fucking Egypt. Bob was awake. There hadn't been a proper funeral and he hadn't been at it. He wasn't the fucking Egypt that was someone else. His wife, Nell, was asleep beside him. He was in his own bed. It shouldn't have surprised him. He'd been nowhere but home for months but it did surprise him. He listened to her breathing, the slight lovely snore. He found his phone where he always left it under the pillow, under the edge, nearest his side of the bed. He'd slept all night. There was daylight across the ceiling. The traffic was missing. There wasn't a hangover. He'd earned one. He remembered that. He'd been drinking for days. But he felt great, free somehow and clear. In his lungs, in his head. He'd get up quietly. He'd make the coffee. He'd scramble eggs. He'd stick on the radio. He'd take in the news. Precise bits of COVID-19. The stats, the new language. He'd get back into the life. He was drunk. Still drunk. Lightly drunk. Ballet dancer drunk. He was at the bottom of the stairs before he knew he'd been on the stairs. The descent had been effortless. More than that, miraculous. Forgotten, weightless. He checked the man in the dressing gown. It was him. He looked back up the stairs. He'd come all that way. His sore shoulder wasn't sore. The pinched nerve had gone away. He was in the kitchen. He threw open the fridge door. There were one, two. There were seven cartons of milk. There were tomatoes. There was half a lemon. There were eggs. There was a box. There were eggs in the box. Five eggs. He was up and running. His phone hopped on the counter. He grabbed it. Afraid it would jump onto into the gas under the pot that he'd put there for the eggs. He lifted the pot, dropped the pot, singed the sleeve of his dressing gown. Boy, he was drunk. He could smell the cotton if it was cotton. He could smell something else. Something important. Hair. He'd singed the hair on the back of his hand. He turned off the gas. He checked again. He turned it off. It was the fucking Egypt. The name on the screen. Bob, that you. The fucking Egypt. The fucking Egypt he'd never have to see or listen to again. Ever. The fucking Egypt he'd pinned to the wall of the church the day before. Only yesterday in the rain. But he wasn't sure about that detail. He didn't remember rain. He put his hand on the dressing gown on his chest. It wasn't wet. He didn't wear the dressing gown to the funeral. There'd been no rain. And he'd pinned no one to the wall of a church. There'd been no church. He was making up something that hadn't happened. There'd been a funeral, but he hadn't been there. Don't call me again, he said now, into the phone. He put the phone back on the counter. He looked at the singed hair. He held it up to the light coming through the window. There was no real light. It was dark out. But there had been daylight upstairs at the gaps at the curtains and across the ceiling. That was why he'd got up. That was why he was in the kitchen. He looked at his watch. It was five o'clock, ten past five. He looked at his phone. It was ten past five there too. He'd been asleep for three hours. He was still in yesterday. Still drunk, still not at the funeral. His mother was still dead. Fucking hell. Fantastic. There is certainly a theme of people re-evaluating, seizing the moment to possibly let go to live the life that they might not have. Not wishing to attach work to the person who created it too much. But what effect did it have on you personally, the pandemic? It was a pain in the arse. Why? It was a pain in the arse. Why? You know, at one level it was kind of it's new life in a way. It was life lived in a way that I've never lived it before. So that is interesting in a way. It was an absurdity to it that once we got over the or at least I got over the notion of I remember taking very seriously the idea that a significant proportion of us were going to die. And once that became less of a certainty, if you like, the absurdity of it became almost enjoyable for a while. The second lockdown I found really really difficult personally January, February only last year. Really hard. In part because the days were so short also in part because felt so isolated. I phoned somebody and it was the most extraordinary thing. I realised oh you can do that and I phoned a fella I hadn't seen in a good while. He lived in Belfast and we had a chat for about 40 minutes and had the biggest impact on me. It was incredible. So I had forgotten, you know, and he was saying yeah I had forgotten you could just do that as well. And it wasn't a zoom, you know, you don't have to look interested or you know. I actually had the sound down on Italian was watching football while I spoke to him. It was great. So little things and big things. So the whole assortment of stuff. You know a lot of living, a lot of observed stuff. I do think Ireland carried it very well, you know, about the government. We do have a government in Ireland that I can recommend that you should read about. Liberal democracy. States men and states women I believe they're called? Yes, yeah, yeah. We're in a thing called the EU as well. It's brilliant. I really look at it. The dreams of a mad man. Just sit back and do nothing. So yeah, I think in terms of government it was very difficult actually to, I don't like the ideology of the current government but I actually had to admire the way they carried themselves during those early months and how they spoke and how there was a certain sense of unity and a certain fairness about it all. Reluctantly I had to admit that they're doing okay. I don't know if it's a moment of growing up at my age or whether it was actually the case that they were doing okay. Clearly there was a lot of unexpected living. And little things that are in the stories, the sounds that we could hear that we hadn't heard before and then all these dogs. Did you get a lot of dogs? All these dogs and people training the dogs to be dogs out in the back garden. And kids there all day. I live on quite a busy street. But I could feel I was Clint Eastwood walking up the middle of the street. It was great. Just striding. Striding as I can manage. Downhill Grand. Not so much striding uphill. But up the middle of the street in the knowledge that nothing was going to come behind. We're waiting for the click of a winch. Another thing in the book. The first time we realised there were two of the kids in the house and we served my wife for the first lockdown and we realised we could order a takeaway. Takeaway deliveries are now a vital thing. When the takeaway was delivered and the guy notified that the takeaway was out on the step and he was at the gate and came out and waved. Thank you. You know, it was only a fucking party on the step. Thank you, thank you. As if, you know, we'd been in the Arctic and he was a Saint Bernard dog. So, you know, it wasn't without its humour. And I want, you know, another thing. I remember my daughters that I watched the Great British Bake Off for the first time. I knew it existed but I'd never watched it. But because she was at home and the three of us watched it together and my daughter said I used to watch it like I watched Matcha today. Don't drop it for fuck! Take it out! Take it out! So, yeah. There was a lot of living I think in 10 years. So enough to keep me going for a while. One of the stories, the nurse here is incredible in life without children again, I suppose the nurses in this country are about to walk out for the first time in over 100 years and are still being painted as being greedy for some reason. But it's a very kind of it's a wonderful vivid corrective to the sort of life that people were living when they weren't selling PPE to their friends and then ending up on reality TV shows for 400 grand. But from the point of view of a writer who's putting together a collection what makes you think right that's it, it is now complete this collection of stories is done. It's just a gut feeling really, you know. I was writing the last one is called The Five Lambs and it's set in the first days of the pandemic but I wrote it a year later and it was incredibly hard to go back that year. If you asked me to set something in 1980 I wouldn't even have to research it I'd be in there immediately, you know it's still in my head. But I asked me to set something a year and a half ago incredibly hard language we now take for granted that we didn't at the time antigen tests again social distancing things that became so normal to use just they weren't there so I had to kind of take several hundred words out of my vocabulary and go right back only 12 months and start the story again and I thought well the way the story is going this is the last one so it is the last one so I knew it was done, you know. Right. When I was writing the others another would pop up but when I was writing this one no more popped up. So that seemed like a good enough reason to stop rather than torture myself waiting for another one that wasn't going to happen. Yeah. Kim dare I ask on the fact of the pandemic on someone who'd had a very busy professional life not as a writer but beforehand was it? It was a joy to have done. So I lived with my son I did then, lived with my son who was 22 and he's full of energy and he was a killer for him because he was out with his friends out drinking football and all of a sudden he's at home with his mum and he's bored stiff. I loved it obviously because I trapped him in the house and I got him all to himself and he had no girlfriend or anything and he was like prowling round and oh I can't do anything. So we ended up doing, you know Amazon which I hate for many reasons was a godsend I was just ordering some jigsaws and he was like a jigsaw, fucking hell mum. I said no it will be good because he's never done a jigsaw in his life and we were doing jigsaws of classic cars which is his obsession and so it was really lovely to get I'd never have had that time with him otherwise it was just lovely to sit and do a jigsaw and of course as anyone with children knows especially with certain boys I think if you're doing something else you can talk about really important things I couldn't say tell me about how you feel about something but if we're doing this and there's no eye contact I was getting all this information about what he thought about life about any difficulties he was having so I just loved it he didn't know he was talking he didn't know I was interrogating him and I just got all the information which was fantastic he knows now we got very close I also did a big with the BBC a big digital festival online book festival that had 107,000 people visiting which was great and obviously I just got these they did all the production and I just did the Arl interview him, him, her it was great it was you know picking cherry picking the things that I wanted to do so I didn't find it hard and at the same time just like Roddy says you're very aware that people are dying and that it's it was nice for me I love who I lived with I like my home I had enough to eat I didn't have to go out of the house if I didn't want to very privileged experience of lockdown I was healthy, my children were healthy for some people and you were watching it every single day it was you know nurses going to work as you say now these people were putting their lives on the line going to work and dying and now that they want a reasonable if not small pay rise it's you know you can see in the sun which is a piece of shit newspaper slagging them off you know slagging off the people that were saving our lives not a year ago bin men, rail workers, postal workers these people that were I was too scared to go out they're going out nurses have to pay for car parking ridiculous, ridiculous fees you know it's like save our lives one week now get your purse out because the pandemic's over the short memories of the government because it's not people it's the government who have used and abused people's goodness it infuriates me beyond it sort of suits that kind of constant churn though and you know it suits short memory suits those who want to get away with stuff as well be they governments or audience trying to think of a question to ask authors I did point out at the start that we would love to hear from you so if you've got a question for Kit or Roddy just stick your hand up and we'll get a microphone to you but start at the back and work our way forward which is the yes just top right over there here we go yeah we're just coming to you now it's a question for Kit and it goes back to what you were saying earlier about your experience of witnessing the anti-Irish backlash in the mid 1970s I grew up in Birmingham in an Irish family and experienced it at first hand and when you try and put a frame of reference on that with retrospect you see well maybe something good could have come from it that you know people would have got more reflective and less reactionary but then I saw what's happened in the 21st century post 9 11 and I can't help but have the feeling we've learned nothing because what you do see is just the actions of a tiny number of people conflated with an entire community or faith group so do you have a similarly kind of unhelpfully bleak analysis or do you think there is something more positive here that maybe there was something in what happened then cos I've just got that slightly doom-laden feeling that what have witnessed happening to Muslim people in the 21st century just replicates what happened to Irish people in the 70s Yes, I think it's exactly right that the correlation between how people spoke about Irish people and how they speak about Muslims exactly the same tiny group of people doing a very specific political act and it's the whole nation it's everybody and I think I'm seeing the same thing now about migrants, about asylum seekers people that are crossing the very dangerous waters to come to England or elsewhere in the world and of course within that group there might be one or two undesirable people but it's being used as a political weaponry to say oh no one should come, they're all you know, illegal immigrants terrorists whatever and I think we've learnt nothing at all except the political expediency of vilifying an entire group of people because of one or two people that might be doing something we agree with or not agree with Did you want to ask a question there's a woman just behind you, you had your hand up would you like to ask a question By an appealing to that the fact that you have so many people claiming in Irish passport and I think particularly with the troubles of you know Ireland before the Good Friday Agreement I was just wondering if you had thoughts on nostalgia in sort of the new generation of Irish or Irish diaspora cultures I think, I know that me and my brothers and sisters had an Irish passport before Brexit, what did make me laugh with Brexit was the people that were desperately looking for an Irish grandmother or whatever because it was so everyone wants now to find that Irish grandmother so that they can get an EU passport The shame has been lifted but there always has been certainly in America as well nostalgia for Ireland and people say oh I'm Irish 18 generations ago I don't think there's anything particularly wrong with that as long as it is not a serious thing because you know it's I don't think there's anything wrong with saying I'm Irish and having that nostalgia but it is also slightly fake and you can't expect Ireland to be the way your ancestors left it in the late 19th century or 20 years ago either but it's far more progressive country than this country now far more it's new it's forward-thinking it's inclusive of course there's things wrong with Ireland of course there is but my god comparing to the government of this country and what's happening it's it's atrocious I went to see the banshee in the show a couple of weeks ago and really liked it but it's interesting the coverage of that almost the the Irishness of it was sort of talked about in the press here that's kind of beautiful isolation all those seascapes and the knitwear to die for the knitwear of those guys and then they got to the kind of corrosive repress society but I have to be careful here because I've been promised a jumper so I really have to be careful here about what is I thought that film was brilliant just brilliant every moment of it I thought it was brilliant it's the grief of friendship isn't it you know I like bruised his first film was a friendship coming together the same two men coming together and the possibilities and this one was a much more difficult to ask because it's never really explained why and there's a lot of depression there's all sorts of stuff I think they all achieved it was a brilliant film I thought it was I wanted to brand it at least so I didn't say look he was kind of lovable and bruised any chance of softening up this mysterious misanthropic creature somebody close to me said did you have to cut off all his fingers but anyway I've been promised a jumper of course we mustn't jeopardise that no no Jesus no so I won't say anything okay hang on I was working from the back so yes there's somebody up there wanted to ask a question just we'll get a mic over to you there go ahead this one's for Kit but first of all can I just say it's what a privilege to have an esteemed broadcaster interviewing two esteemed writers I'll bless your heart I have socialised with Peter so I should put that in as a not on never seen him before but Kit in terms of the of competing heritage that you have a marketing friend of mine once described if all nationalities were a brand the Irish brand would be the strongest in the world so in that context I mean do the other heritages affect your writing despite the blinding light of Irish heritage great question so West Indians, Caribbean's and Irish people are so alike there's so much synergy between the cultures between the place of women within the cultures as I experienced them slightly different now but at the time so I had two grandmothers I had Irish Nana who was just called Nana and then I had Black Nana and the two women they hated each other they were horrified that their children had married outside of their race horrified they both believed we were neither fish nor fowl told us regularly oh god the children, the children they neither one thing or the other and they just hated England both of them and they were the same woman in different skin we could see that everything they said about their culture everything they said about their view of the world was very very very similar so it's not as much of a difference as people think I think maybe English to Irish is much more of a leap but English to West Indian it was very very normal really because there wasn't a great difference in food I would say West Indian food slightly better but other one difficult question but I wonder is it overplaying it to say that there's an element of both being colonised by the English completely I mean the where England sat in both of those communities was identical colonised, oppressed unappreciated both of those communities were held the same place the phrase no blacks no dogs, no Irish there were two of my parents and we didn't have a dog both of my parents were sent to the same areas of Birmingham you could only live in certain areas and so obviously mixed race children are going to result but both children both nations were herded by the English into very very small pockets of the country you realise of course that Irish people are still trying to parlay that into the same type of racism as people of colour have experienced we just have to open our mouths before people dislike us we're not hated on sight it was really anti Irish sentiment as I experienced was brutal but again you could walk down the road and not necessarily experience it because if you're black and you walk down the road it's written on your face on your skin certainly if you lost your accent in the 70s you could have a slightly easier time but it wasn't that easy to lose your accent either no yes just down here let's chat with a hug thanks my question is for Kate I just finished your memoir really enjoyed it I thought it was fantastic now curiosity basically I've heard you refer to yourself twice as an Irish and black writer as opposed to an Irish and Caribbean writer I was just curious about that and also I'm very curious about being a petition of petition dissent in Birmingham what was the impact of the Caribbean diaspora in Handsworth when your life at that time and today when I was probably up until 12 I was very in the Irish community and because my mother had nine brothers and sisters the Irish community around us was very strong I would have described myself completely as an Irish child then I sort of got a black I found Bob Marley actually is what how it happened and he really awakened in me a very great sense of me being a black West Indian petition person and I think I became much more aware of being black from 14 probably till to 20 where I wouldn't say I rejected being Irish that would be impossible but I really explored the racism oppression I learned a lot about my Caribbean history about the diaspora about being African I certainly was very very immersed in Rastafarian culture went to live in Handsworth and it's only afterwards I found a way to integrate both of those identities until that time and also of course if you were petition in you know part of the Caribbean community was petition all of my friends were Jamaican and I was really exploring Jamaican heritage not petition heritage which is very different but my dad was quite tight-lipped about his history so it was a long journey to integrate both sides of my identity it's quite an interesting journey to have thank you that's a fantastic question yes if somebody up here had a question yep go ahead I just wonder about the idea of you were obviously really strongly encouraged to write a memoir kit fairly simple question it's a kind of golden age of memoir because there's a lot of memoir publishing going on particularly in the 2020s and maybe as a kind of slight barb to Roddy has memoir perhaps usurped the novel I think there are some excellent memoirs out there one I would recommend is by Edo Lachlin called The Last Good Funeral of the Year that's like very similar pandemic he's experienced the pandemic another one is did you hear Mammy died which is so good so funny audio books great version of both of them both of Gabriel Burns volumes of his autobiography fantastic I love biographies and I've read some of people I don't like just to hear what they say so I think it's a great form I don't think it'll ever usurp the novel myself I just I love fiction really do Roddy would you would you come across as lovable if you were to write your autobiography no don't I'm not interested in being lovable to be honest with you no yeah I'm currently reading Bob Mortimer's autobiography because I wanted to laugh when I knew if I read it even just thinking about Bob Mortimer would make me laugh and actually I just laugh and laugh at it so I think there's great essays and collections of essays out there there's some brilliant stuff coming from Ireland but I don't think one is going to usurp the other I think it's a bit like you know say go back 10 years and you go to the BBC website the football page and your team has just bought messy and you think fucking hell we bought messy and then half an hour later they bought Ronaldo so you have both of them probably would have ended in tears but nevertheless you got the novel and the memoir so I'm going to escape but no I don't feel I don't think one pushes the other aside it's like television and radio because when television came out they said that was going to be the death of radio and it isn't the radio is strong as strong as ever it was if not stronger so it's just different things different ways of getting information I think they're all great I love books of essays and some great particularly female essays coming out they've been here this weekend there's been other really good sessions apart from this one apparently somebody up there yes somebody up there had their hand up or was it just an art phone nose scratch yes just here thank you very much I was reflecting on what you were saying about the post brexit rush for Irish passports because I was quite the opposite I was probably one of the few people who after brexit actually ran just for whatever reason got a British passport well I still could but I also received several marriage proposals but I was actually thinking on another point which was one that you were talking about about the Irish experience of death or the way that the Irish deal with death and I've definitely always felt growing up in Donegal that there was a kind of an obsession with death almost skirted around it and you know the sort of language that people use to talk about a death and they go from house to house and everyone would be talking about it the same death and it was terrible and I wanted to ask where you think that kind of real intrigue or I don't know if obsession is the right word with death comes from Ireland if it's something that came from the experience of famine death or preceded that relationship that people have I'll just stop you there because we do have another session right off the back of us so a quick word about death from Kit and Roddy just I feel fine at the moment but I think it's a kind of an acceptance that life is finite and death is something there are people in Ireland who much prefer funerals to weddings I'm one of them personally and it's not because I'm morbid but I think it's an acceptance that life ends and I think whether that goes back to famine times I don't know I'm sure people knew they died before then and they know they died since and I suppose as well it's one of the ways you cope because the island went from 8 million before the famine to 2 million by the turn of the century and that's still a trauma so how do people who are traumatising what do you do you laugh you fight, you laugh all these things and I think funerals all this stuff bubbles through at funerals and it's great at an Irish funeral I've been to funerals elsewhere but there's nothing like a hug at an Irish funeral and how important numbers are so funerals I think was probably one of the worst aspects of lockdown and it was necessary but when nobody was allowed to go to funerals luckily nobody too close to me died during that time but it would have been gut wrenching not to have been able to go not to have been able to do the tiny bit of adding to the numbers so I think you might have used the word obsession I wouldn't call it obsession I think it's part of the if a country can have a psyche it's part of the national psyche it's not a bad one either once more weight is thrown into funerals than weddings that's a healthy society in my opinion and the dancing is always better never danced at a funeral funny enough that was one of the reasons why churches insisted on bodies being kept in the church overnight eventually because at old wakes like two or three hundred years ago they used to actually get the body up and dance with them but the only person in the room might be confident to dance with it's a good idea it's a good idea to dance with the dead anyway we really have to wrap up but did you want to have a quick word on that the only thing I would say again it's one of the similarities between the Irish and the Caribbean community in the Caribbean community there are professional mourners women who will go from it doesn't matter you don't have to know anybody you turn up you're treated with respect there's a lot of food, there's joy you know the sorrow obviously but there's singing at the graveside beautiful singing at the graveside and it's much more a celebration of life you know I've been to English funerals that are very very very serious and Dara and Caribbean funerals are not there's food, there's good times it's a celebration of life and that's again another similarity between the Caribbean and the Irish communities and actually the person that's gone actually comes to life in the laughter in the memory in the exchange of people that are gathered in their name folks we'll have to wrap it up there thanks so much for your lovely questions and a big thank you to Roddie Doyle and Kit De Vaill