Fortunately… with Fi and Jane: Comfrey and Kestrels with Maggie O’Farrell Radio 4
Fi Glover and Jane Garvey are both well-known presenters who get on in a jokey way.
There’s a distinctly cosy feel of old friends about this podcast... time to take a soft sofa and order an Americano with hot milk and a cinnamon biscuit.
But it was writer Maggie O’Farrell who stole the show.
O’Farrell is an amazing writer and one whom we can also claim as one of our own - she is originally from here.
She won the Women’s Prize for Fiction this year with her latest novel, Hamnet, about Shakespeare’s son who died aged eleven years old.
“Shocked and thrilled” was how she described the news in September that she had won the prize.
It was an in-between lockdown time, so she celebrated with her children and a cake.
She had been sweeping up cat’s pee that day. Winning a major prize sounded a little surreal.
She swerved away from writing Hamnet - she wrote three other books in between – as she felt she had to wait until her own son was well past the age of eleven himself… not that there was a huge risk of the Black Death claiming him, she told Fi and Jane.
She said that Hamlet, the play, is clearly infused with the enormous grief Shakespeare felt.
And she went many extra miles upon mile to get inside the heads of the women she writes about and that Elizabethan world.
In order to write Hamnet, she learned to fly a kestrel.
She’s no gardener, but she also planted an Elizabethan physic garden complete with comfrey, sage, rosemary, thyme… the healing herbs that women had for medicine back then.
The joy of a podcast is the room within it to delve deep and talk widely. This one has such a lovely relaxed feel.
I’ve ordered her book three times over for friends this Christmas … listen and you might too.
